An emerging truth

Dee Ranged

Well done Melanie!

Graeme

Wonderful post Melanie as ever. Do a Websearch on global Warming on the Planet Mars and see what you come up with. Should we tell the Martians not to drive SUV's ?

Commondog

Al Gore.
Hapless fool or wicked malcontent?

Roland Lucas

That's remarkable - any one element of it. Those tracking the BBC's coverage would 'know' that the planet was pressure cooking due to the success of capitalism and rich individuals not paying enough tax. So, businesses got the risible climate change levy and we all got to pay more tax.

Meanwhile HM Treasury host solar induced global cooling while the BBC are still gunning for The Great Global Warming Swindle and Svensmark via Sloan and Wolfendale.

It's all too much, certainly enough to leave BBC environment analysts in a spin.

One key question: when do the tax rebates start?

stanley Jerusalem

Hee Hee Hee!
First the Millenium Bug now Global Warming.
What's next folks?
Milk for school kids?

Jirapa

We are all carbon sinners, so we must be rich, including the poor - presumably this is why the 10% lowest tax band has been abolished 'for the greater good of the planet'.

We are all expected to bow down to the new Green Religion or the likes of Jo Abbess will be on our case, calling us deniers and heretics. The language of intolerant zealotry applied to junk science makes for a heady combination.

Green information pollution: don't inhale or swallow it.

Simon

Jo gets whats she wants from the Beeb because she makes the 'right' noises, no matter how unhinged they seem to any rational person. Yet any engineer, statistician, economist or any rational intelligent person who queries the state of the current science are heartily ignored because they dont fit the ever movable 'climatologist' box.

What's the betting that the Beeb will start being a bit more careful and Google who they're capitulating to in future.

BTW the Glenn Beck link doesnt seem to work

http://youtube.com/watch?v=216v5AoQcFQ

George Steiner

After all the laughing has stopped at the global warming enthusiasts, spare a thought for a serious subject. How much energy will the western world need for the comming cooling, to maintain ourselves in the comfort we are acustomed to, grow the food we will need. Just to mention a couple of minor issues. When the numbers will be in you will have a shock. The next laughing stoch will be the wind turbine brigades and similarly ineffective diversions.

Michael B

I can see the BBC's marketing campaign now: "Improvisational and Ad Hoc News," or "Choose your News," or "News Tailored to your Ideological Needs, In Ten Minutes of Less."

Trumpeter Lanfried

Very embarrassing for the BBC. Serves them right. Journalists should report the facts, not the authorised, politically correct, version of the facts.

KB

Some of the various revisions have been recorded by News Sniffer: http://www.newssniffer.co.uk/articles/112075/diff/0/1

Stray Dingo

True Test of commitment will be to see how all the lefties that have been jumping on the Green Bandwagon will quickly change their tunes when temperatures swing back and we head into a Global Cooling period....will they turn their heating off I wonder? Just think of the carbon they could reduce by wearing a few extra jumpers

Peter

Quote and data mining. Same tactics as evolution deniers. Oh! Melanie's one of those too.

There was a weak El Nino, and a strong, prolonged La Nina. Confusing weather with climate doesn't add to the argument and confirms that 'opinion formers' wihg no scientific training shouldn't mess around in this most complicated of sciences.

Thinkster

Two issues here: a) The term should be climate change, not global warming. We ARE polluting the planet (& children's lungs) by burning coal and oil. And their other bi-products are equally nasty. So we should seek an alternative either way. b) An excellent documentary on BBC2 a year or so ago listed a slowdown in the gulf stream as a serious threat that could be triggered by global warming - leading to the cooler temperatures Melanie refers to, but eventually, on a far more dramatic scale. Remember folks, Britain is on the same latitude as Canada. See this from 2003: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2003/jan/11/environment.science

Gary

Wow. Good stuff here. Thanks.
Panic is starting to set in among the alarmists. They almost had me when they said I was going to be a cannibal in a few years, but I resisted.

alan stoddart

‘Analysts predict a 40 percent rise in electricity prices as a result of the government's energy suppression policies. British manufacturers foresee having to put thousands out of work as they lose out in competitiveness to overseas suppliers. The Times's economics editor has written that the environmentalists pushing these policies "are like the medieval monks who favored self-flagellation as the road to virtue. For a Government to enshrine such thinking in policy is truly perverse." ‘

This is a story concerning Sir David King when he was the government’s chief scientific advisor on a visit to Russia:

Four years ago Dr. Andrei Ilarionov, then chief economic adviser to Vladimir Putin, decided to
cross check the advice coming to him from the Russian Academy of Sciences on the subject of global
warming. Its members had opined that it would not be significant and would pose no threat. To this end,
and here I quote from an impeccable source, “he looked around for the sappiest, laziest, most acquiescent,
most true-believing government in the world, and settled upon the UK..”

“Sir David King, not realizing he had been ambushed,
launched into his usual exaggerated, alarmist presentation (he actually knows remarkably little about the
science of climate, and makes an ass of himself every time he opens his mouth on the subject). The six
sceptics heard him politely until one of them, who told me the story, could contain himself no longer. When
Sir David said that the snows of Kilimanjaro were melting because of “global warming”, my informant
pointed out that, in the 30 years since satellite monitoring of the summit had begun, temperature had at no
instant risen above –1.6°C, and had averaged –7°C (Molg et al., 2003); that the region around the
mountain had cooled throughout the period (Cullen, 2006); that the recession of the glacier had begun in
the 1880s, long before any anthropogenic influence (Robinson, Robinson & Soon, 2007); and that the
reason for the long-established recession of the Furtwangler glacier at the summit was ablation caused by
the desiccation of the atmosphere owing to the regional cooling. It had nothing to do with global
warming.”

“Sir David King, embarrassed at having been caught out, said he had never been so insulted
in all his life. He flounced out of the meeting, followed by the rest of the British delegation. To Dr.
Ilarionov, two conclusions were evident: first, that the supporters of the “consensus” position had based
their argument on known scientific falsehoods and were accordingly unable to argue against the well informed
sceptics; secondly, that, as he put it at the time, the British Government were behaving like oldstyle
imperialists. The breakdown in relations between the UK and Russia began at that moment.”

Herbert Thornton

Melanie and other writers make me feel that though they generally follow these God-given guidelines, they do not always do so -

The New 10 Commandments

1. The Planet is heating up but we can stop it by raising taxes.

2. Islam is dedicated to peace and non-violence.

3. The more immigration, the better.

4. British Membership of the EEC is a Good Thing.

5. The BNP are evil.

6. Political Correctness makes all our lives better.

7. Most of the world's problems are caused by America.

8. Serbs and Russians are all very wicked.

9. The BBC is always truthful and unbiased.

10. Those who disagree with any of the foregoing are bigots.

field

A couple of months ago there were quite a few science groupies here finger-wagging and clucking about Melanie's irresponsibility in not believing everything the global warming lobby say.

Are they still as self-righteously smug as before?

One of Melanie's other interests, the fate of Saddam's WMDs, is also coming to the fore in the next few days I believe. We'll see whether the tide is turning on that as well. It seems there is documentary evidence about the transfer to Syria. We shall see.

Frank Pulley

Congrats to the blog techie who managed to get the paragraph function working, but Alan Stoddart – how did you manage also to produce bold and italics in your comment?

Stanislav Koblinski

NewsSniffer is excellent for keeping track of the BBC's 'stealth edits'.

Here are the 4 versions of "Global temperatures 'to decrease'". There's a problem at the moment with NewsSniffer's search so I can't find the versions of "Global warming 'dips this year'"

http://www.newssniffer.co.uk/articles/112075/diff/0/1

Rob

This is what happends when a news organisation becomes too heavily invested in a politcal point of view. It is no longer a respected news outlet but is rightly derided as propaganda organ paid for by the British public.

Norm. UK

What is it about the BIG CON??? What are we not being told? Well at most I've got 20 years left in me which I hope to spend in Florida, that's if it doesn't disappear under the sea.

Stephen Fox

Melanie, you have brought together a number of different strands in this matter, in your usual eloquent way.
There is an argument that can be made to the effect that since energy dependency on the Middle East, Russia, Venezuela and the like is a serious problem, the global warming hysteria might have a positive function. It is said that the ball was set rolling by Margaret Thatcher, for that reason.
I think that the loss of lucidity, and the barely concealed, millenarian 'self-flagellation' referred to above completely outweigh these benefits. It is just pathetic, and how weird and unfortunate that conserving energy and using less Arab oil should now be unappealing purely by their association with these idiots. The insistence that 'the debate is over', and that 'consensus' has been reached culminates in sceptics being labelled 'deniers', with obvious overtones of Holocaust denial. An example of this occurs in the comments following the post in the Daily Tech that Melanie links to. Some AGW fanatics want 'deniers' charged with the 'future murder' of hundreds of thousands of people.
The last few years seem to have brought a ever wider panoply of such delirium, of pointers to the awful disintegration of our culture, so visible in so many ways. The growing awareness of the overwrought reaction to what are almost certainly normal variations in our climate, and the likelihood of that reaction being refuted by the weather itself only provoke me to wonder what political and economic damage will already have been done, and what the next soppiness will consist of.

Alan Caruba

Want to know more about global cooling? Then visit www.iceagenow.com that documents the reality, anecdotally and citing scientific studies. Bundle up, we are at the end of the Interglacial Period of warmth.

Houston

I was reading an interview with a prominent Yale scientist on global warming about a month ago. The interviewer asked for comments on just a few of the criticisms of climate skeptics. The Yale prof basically lied in his responses. His bio at the end of the article mentioned that he was a member of an environmental group. Most warming proponents seem to have an agenda and it is not scientific, it is environmentalism.

Silicon Valley Bill

Here's a conundrum ... 30+ years ago climate alarmists were talking about an impending ice age ... now they are talking about global warming ... sooner or later one of these positions will come true ... so does this mean that all those fear mongers will always be right if given enough time to pass? Straddle BOTH SIDES of the fence and NO SCIENCE will be necessary!

Peter

I have followed, but not got involved in this 'til now as it honestly seemed like an April Fool, but since it has got as far as Nature (still 'moderating' my input yesterday, I hope not BBC-style) and here feel the urge to weigh in.

Depending on where you read, the BBC has either not commented, or seen merit in brevity to the point of being a tad terse.

I have had my eyebrow cocked over this since the first 'outing' a few days ago, if only having seen the extent of the exchanges, the speed of replies, the response time of the changes... and that this whole tidy bundle went up verbatim courtesy, I presume, of the proud heroine.

But is there any confirmation yet, preferably from Mr. Harrabin, that this exchange - as shared on many blogs verbatim - is in fact what went down?

The facts of the original vs. subsequent posts are already beyond doubt, sadly, for public trust in news reporting and editorial standards when 'passionate agendas' are at involved. I can live with the original and still think the weather is acting damn strange, so it doesn't need 'clarifying' for me. Just another piece in the jigsaw.

But if proven, I fear the work of those of a more balanced viewpoint just got heaps harder in advocating that if things are as bad as some are saying (I don't take phrases like 'The most serious threat to mankind...' from major international public figures lightly) then some mitigating actions should be embraced, when such activities between protagonists like a minor activist and major medium end up splattered around like this.

The more you seek to suppress inconvenient views (even, or especially if they are possibly ready to be found wanting), the more you will make them attractive. The best action, surely, is to share, and debate, openly. It is a concern that highly significant data is subject to the interpretation and vetting of such a limited number of persons of questionable analytical qualifications in a huge, objective-by-charter media outlet. Who else, beyond Mr. Harrabin, decides what is or is not put up, changed or removed? And what science training and ethical objectivity is in place to guide them on 'our' behalves? Especially if so easily swayed by a lone voice with a different take?

I freely confess I don't know yet what is going on with Probably Man-Worsened Negative Climate Change, but in making judgments I certainly don't feel too on board with the notion that what I am getting fed is being pre-adjusted by such as my national broadcaster... to help with my understanding in a 'better' direction.

I will be very interested in how this plays... or possibly fizzles out. But whatever happens, if as described I suspect it will lurk as a rather potent card should the reporting of significant state-backed media ever be cited in support of contentious science issues.

David In So Cal

Melanie: You make this fun. Great idea posting this article twice with the two time stamps. Quite clever. One gets the point without even having to read the article.

I enjoy your blogs immensely.

GNO

I'm surprised no one has put forward the argument that says the global cooling is a direct consequence of global warming!

Oh, and any news on the ozone layer that was depleting at an alarming rate only a couple of years ago?

I thought we all ought to have been fried by now!

Slexander

Why do I get the impression that the Alarmist and carbonists are worried. The people are surely not so gullible as to believe some of the alarmist claims of late: the end of beer, the end of koalas, the end of polar bears, malaria, dengue fever . the list seems almost endless and the BBC plays an important part in this program of propaganda.

SJR

No one has ever suggested that global warming is expected to go up year on year. There have always been fluctuations. It is the trends that very strongly point to the accelerated warming, in the pattern described by the scientifically peer reviewed hockey stick graph.

Nick Kaplan

Thinkster; you state that Global Warming should be renamed ‘Climate Change’ in order to argue that Melanie’s evidence of recent temperature reductions should count as evidence in favour of the environmentalist’s case, not against it. There is a very serious problem with such an argument. Karl Popper, perhaps the most significant philosopher of science, argued that a legitimate scientific hypothesis must be falsifiable as no hypothesis can ever be proven absolutely given the nature of the problem of induction (i.e. that we cannot reason from some to all in logically valid terms). The problem here is that your claim is not falsifiable, there is no evidence that could be given against your hypothesis of ‘Climate Change’ unless temperatures were stagnant which has never before occurred in the millions of years for which we have ice core data for. If we do take the Global ‘Warming’ hypothesis, which is the issue most are arguing about, then evidence of cooling must be seen as evidence against, it is not conclusive evidence but it is important. We should not be surprised by such data as geological records about ice-ages have shown we are currently/ were recently at the peak of a period of natural warming in accordance with other ice-age cycles. It should therefore be no surprise that recent years have seen high temperatures and subsequent evidence of cooling, which in all likelihood indicates we have now entered the overdue period of temperature decline after this peak. Your argument about the golf stream is (accidently?) misleading . The documentary, which I too watched, suggested that if the golf-stream were to be cut off it would lead to the next ice age. The link between this and GW was that the melting of the ice caps would dilute the oceans with the resulting effect of breaking the golf stream, which requires certain salt levels, thus leading to global cooling. However, recently published evidence by NASA has shown that over the last decade the ice-caps have grown not decreased in size, hence falsifying the hypothesis that GW is the cause of this cooling.

Harry

Melanie’s superb forensic efforts on drawing so much of this stuff together have been nicely complemented by the satire of Richard Littlejohn, who despite his pub chat persona, has followed every nuance of this debate and lampooned the way this wretched Government has worked out the whole caboodle can be exploited to bully people into paying more taxes.

There’s also a new book by Nigel Lawson on the subject. He wrote a wonderful essay on Saturday just gone

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=557374&in_page_id=1770

What struck me most about it was this passage:

“There may be a political explanation for this. With the collapse of Marxism and, to all intents and purposes, of other forms of socialism too, those who dislike capitalism and its foremost exemplar, the United States, with equal passion, have been obliged to find a new creed.

“For many of them, green is the new red. And those who wish to order us how to run our lives, faced with the uncomfortable evidence that economic prosperity is more likely to be achieved by less government intervention rather than more, naturally welcome the emergence of a new licence to intrude, to interfere, to tax and to regulate: all in the great cause of saving the planet from the alleged horrors of global warming.

“But there is something much more fundamental at work. I suspect that it is no accident that it is in Europe that eco-fundamentalism in general and global warming absolutism in particular has found its most fertile soil. For it is Europe that has become the most secular society in the world, where the traditional religions have the weakest hold.”

I have to say that I think this underpins so much of the anti-American spiteful thinking that goes on in Britain today and that it extends beyond so-called “global warming” and into other subjects like the War on Saddam.

So many fools were so comprehensively humiliated, they couldn’t just say: “We were wrong about Marxism”, they just ploughed on regardless trying to use America as a smokescreen for their own shallow delusions. All that malevolent energy had to go somewhere and America has been a lightning rod for their sanctimonious idiocy.

When George Bush wouldn’t sign at Kyoto – oh, the hullabaloo we were subjected to: “America this, America that. George Bush is the source of all the world’s evil, yaddah, yaddah, yaddah.”

Will these people with a chip on their shoulders the size of an ice cap ever belt up?

Sempronius

Here's a gripe about the Millennium Bug and Climate Change. Quite often now I see MMGW mentioned in the same breath as the Millennium Bug (i.e. a great impending disaster that never happened and made a lot of money for a lot of people). The Millennium Bug and the Global Warming carry-on are/were not the same kind of thing.

The Millennium Bug was an engineering problem. Every computer programmer in the world knew it was there (because you could see it in the actual program code), every programmer knew it needed to be fixed and it was very easy to fix. We just had to be very sure that everything was fixed. And we did, and nothing bad happened. The fact that some nutters decided to spin the Millennium Bug as "the end of the world" was nothing to do with the IT industry (though we did get paid very nicely thankyou at the time).

Now, global warming is different. We keep being told that disaster is about to strike, and computer models that purport to demonstrate this.

Here's the thing about models: how good they are depends on what they are made of. If the Venus de Milo was made out of cow dung it would still be a pile of poo. Similarly, computer models of climate change depend on the data the model is based on. If the data says temperatures are going up, it is easy to get a model to say that we're all going to fry. Similarly if we build a model based on temperatures going down, we can predict a new ice age (as was being done forty odd years ago). The point is how you select your data, which is a subjective process. If you pick data based on the last few years - no global warming; the last few decades - we're going to fry; the last few millennia - nothing to shout about.

Scientists need to be accountable for their assumptions. This is not an engineering problem and there are no certainties.

Stephen Fox

Nick Kaplan
excellent comment, but I think you mean 'Gulf stream'. I for one would like the golf stream to be cut off, thank god no more hushed reverential burbling from the likes of John Inverdale, Peter Alliss etc. Sadly, I fear that is as unlikely as Catastrophic Worbal Gloming. Or whatever it is...

Stuart

@SJR

Thanks for reminding me of the hockey stick graph and showing your faith in its validity because it was "scientifically peer reviewed".

I hope you won't object to me pointing out that the skeptic Steve McIntyre strongly criticized this graph at the time it was issued in 1998 and when it played a large part on the first page of the 2001 IPCC report (some cynics thought it was only designed to remove the Medieval Warming Period from the History books).

And largely thanks to McIntyre’s persistence, in 2006 the National Academy of Science in America agreed with his criticism, basically saying that the graph was virtually useless before the year 1600, er, after the Medieval Warming Period. Therefore making the claims about current unprecedented or "accelerated" warming look a lot less certain. Since you appreciate peer review I hope this will come as good news to you.

Also in the latest IPCC report the Hockey stick is buried away on page 400 odd, with notes admitting its criticisms and flaws, but that wasn't picked up by Mr Harrabin either ;)

Jonny Mac

I'm a big fan of Melanie on most issues but she is just flat-out wrong on this. On the one hand you have scientific experts, and opposing them are right wing commentators. I know who I trust on a scientific issue such as this. DON'T CONFUSE WEATHER AND CLIMATE! Melanie lost my respect on this point when she referred in a previous article/post to the global warming 'conspiracy'. You know when someone invokes a conspiracy that the argument's been lost.

Brian Williams

Hi, the URL for the Glenn Beck show does not work - it looks truncated.

mikiwud

Now the doubt has been sown to the masses who mostly only believe what the read and have only been shown one side,KEEP IT UP!
Some more links to try if you are interested in finding the truth:-
www.icecap.us
www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org
www.junkscience.com
A similar propaganda campain was raised against DDT (you can eat it with no effects) causing it to be banned thus millions of deaths from malaria.It is now off the banned list but the history is not widely published.
This and other parallels are shown on junk science web site.

Richard Morgan

Shame that this version you speak of isn't newssnifer. I guess we will have to take your word for it.

http://tinyurl.com/5kk6mn

ExPat

@ Jonny Mac

"DON'T CONFUSE WEATHER AND CLIMATE"

Why not? The warmists are pretty quick to blame any decent sized tornado/hurricane/heatwave/cold snap etc on AGW. Katrina for one, though there are dozens of other examples. You're quite right to say the two should not be confused but AGW proponents have a long history of doing so.

Actually I can't see precisely what weather events Melanie Phillips mentioned that prompted your remark. Seem's mostly to be about dodgy reporting on the subject in general and in the British media in particular. Where it get's a mention it's several years worth of data - true, too short to draw many conclusions (though again, I doubt that'd stop warmists if the sign were reversed) but hardly just weather.

SJR

In reply to Stuart: The medieval warm period was only noted in a limited portion of the northern hemisphere.

grant watt

We will wait with baited for our Left Wing ABC to report on .
this.

It will no doubt come as a great disappointment to our Gore worshipping Prime Minister, Kyoto Kev Rudd. who was with you recently giving you and the Queen the benefit of his vast experience as a Mandarin speaking diplomat.

alan stoddart

In 2006 Lowell Ponte — an influential think-tank figure with the International Research Technology Corp. — published a book called The Cooling: Has the Next Ice Age Already Begun? Can we Survive It? It was written at the apex of a frightening climate trend. Here’s Ponte in Chapter One:

In 2005, the U.S. National Academy of Science issued . . . a warning by some of the world’s most prestigious, cautious scientists that an Ice Age is beginning in the near future. The tone of the report was one of repressed alarm. A study completed in 2001 by Drs. S. I. Rasool and S. H. Schneider of NASA’s Goddard Institute estimates that man’s potential to pollute . . . could increase the atmosphere’s opacity by 400 percent. That would reduce sunlight enough, say the scientists, to drop the Earth’s surface temperature by 3.4 degrees C, which would almost certainly bring on an Ice Age. (The consequences) will hamper world food production as weather gets progressively worse. The damage this can cause is already apparent in global food shortages and the recent deaths of more than 400,000 people in Africa and Asia. If global famine arises, we can expect world war.

Sorry but that was actually from the 1970's global cooling scare. The below is more recent from Fred Krupp, global warming alarmist:

The scientific consensus is that inaction will change the earth within a few decades into a place unlike any ever inhabited by humans. Business as usual will open the door to catastrophe: flooding and dislocation of millions of people; chronic drought and mass malnourishment in Africa; wildfires, deadly heat waves, and coastal destruction; the extinction of half the world’s living species.

See http://planetgore.nationalreview.com/

DBCJohn

The physics of global warming are beyond my comprehension but if the climate is cooling why are ice-caps and glaciers shrinking?

Stuart

SJR
April 10th, 2008 3:49pm
In reply to Stuart: The medieval warm period was only noted in a limited portion of the northern hemisphere.

I admire your forthright statement of fact and apparent certainty.

Is this certainty based on checking every contemporary historical record in the world at the time? Or is it based on proxy measurements?

Sorry, but I still have to let the demon of skepticism creep in my mind and ask you why you are so certain. I mean for example the 1990 IPCC report showed a graph with a large medieval warm period. I realize that the techniques for measurement can improve over time but it also true that the political climate can change over time as well; it is easy to see precedents where it can be very painless to allow "confirmation bias" to take over. This can even happen to scientists.

For example it does seem that certain activists feel it is axiomatic that you must get rid of the inconvenient MWP as it strengthens the case for the current alarmism. And so voila! that is what the Hockey Stick did in 1998.

However, after dogged criticism from skeptics who weren't so certain of its "emergent truth" it was finally brought to the critical scrutiny of the NAS panel in 2006 (a body very sympathetic to the AGW consensus) and was criticized for its unwarranted claims of certainty.

So we still don't know for certain that our current warm period (which has now plateaued) is unprecedented.

When science is clearly driven by these kinds of human political needs, we need even greater self awareness to guard against self-delusion. Jo seems to demonstrate a worrying tendency not to be able to do this.

Charles Smith

The troposphere graph linked in Ms. Phillips's article shows a long term upward trend. It also shows that the temperature of the troposphere has varied in the past, having periods of both increase and decline. The periods of decline (1988-9; 1995-6; 1999-2000, for example) were all periods during which there were La Niña episodes, and the current cooling is also associated with a La Niña episode. And as DBCJohn points out, the ice caps are shrinking.

SJR

@ Stuart. No one is sure about things such as medieval warmng only being North Europe etc. though the last 400 years of the Hockeystick curve are still pretty informative. Nor am I or you certain of human induced global warming, or not.

There are too many complexities and unknowns for me or anyone to be certain.

My first post was just to point out that lots of pople seem to be getting excited because the temperature of the Earth has not been a record every year for the last eight or so.

This typifies the sort of uninformed stuff that people readily post.

More than for any other reason, I am happy to go along with the peer reviewed consensus because the people who disagree with it rarely come along with anything that is convincing.

DBCJohn

Following on from Charles Smith's clear and concise comment:
To me the graph cited shows a general trend of increasing tempreture with a drop for the most recent data. It also shows previous periods of lower tempreture followed by an upward trend. Is it therefore sensible to assume that the current decrease will be maintained?

Also I would have thought it in the interests of the government and industry to demonstrate that MMGW does not take place (I assume that for economic reasons they do not want restrictions on energy production, manufacturing industries, fuel use, foreign travel, car use etc.) so why would they conspire to hide or pervert evidence against MMGW?

Please note that I am neutral but genuinly interested (and confused) on this matter and am not trying to score points.

Somebody's Mum

Well, whatever's happening, it is still worthwhile insulating our homes and workplaces and using efficient means to heat and light them, as fuel costs are likely to rise and rise and the fossil fuel supply isn't infinite.

Roland Lucas

To SJR: the MWP was not limited to a part of the northern hemisphere.

Evidence for the Existence of the Medieval Warm Period in China:
Abstract: "it can be estimated that the annual mean temperature in south Henan Province in the thirteenth century was 0.9–1.0°C higher than at present."
http://www.springerlink.com/content/gh98230822m7g01l/

Evidence for a ‘Medieval Warm Period’ in a 1,100 year tree-ring reconstruction of summer temperatures in New Zealand:
Abstract: "This record is the longest yet produced for New Zealand and shows clear evidence for persistent above-average temperatures within the interval commonly assigned to the MWP."
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2002/2001GL014580.shtml

Environmental change in eastern Greenland during the last 1300 years: evidence from foraminifera and lithofacies in Nansen Fjord
Abstract: "The evidence suggests that the climate in the region of Nansen Fjord was warmer and more stable than today during a 'Medieval Warm Period' between c. AD 730 to 1100"
http://hol.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/6/2/179

There's more but space here is limited. MWP was global.

As to the Hockey Stick artefact I'm surprised this is still cropping up, the IPCC have buried it as mentioned already.
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/index.php/2006/10/23/tropical-seas-sink-hockey-stick/

To Charles Smith: the ice caps (plural) are not shrinking. Joughin and Tulaczyk (2002) found antarctic ice increasing at a rate of 27 billion tonnes/year, a result repeated later by Wingham et al (2006). Only part of a peninsula less than 5% by area is warming, which is hardly surprising for a peninsula extending out into the warmer southern ocean.

As for the arctic, temperature swings and ice mass changes on relatively short geological timeacales are common and natural. This is taken from a letter written by the President of the Royal Society to the Admiralty suggesting an expedition to investigate climate change:

"A considerable change of climate, inexplicable at present to us, must have taken place in the Circumpolar Regions, by which the severity of the cold that has for centuries past enclosed the seas in the high northern latitudes in an impenetrable barrier of ice has been, during the last two years, greatly abated."

"2000 square leagues of ice with which the Greenland Seas between the latitudes of 74° and 80°N have been hitherto covered, has in the last two years, entirely disappeared."

"The floods, which have the whole summer inundated all those parts of Germany where rivers have their sources in snowy mountains, afford ample proof that new sources of warmth have been opened."

The letter was written in 1817.
(Royal Society, London, Nov. 20, 1817. Minutes of Council, Vol. 8. pp.149-153.)

As long as the mistake of Wrong Way Flanagan is learnt, we should be OK.

Matthias

Annother nice example that the debate is far from over, simply stick to the dogma and pressure those who "misbehave" will not work forever. ... I hope.

Roland Lucas

Missed a couple: ENSO first.

The current La Nina began mid-2007. Such episodes typically last for up to two years. No warming this century and cooling from 2002 is not simply la Nina.

Such climate cooling was not predicted by the hopelessly inadequate climate models either, yet we have international energy strategies and fiscal policies based upon them. Time for the monopoly position of the UN IPCC spin machine to end.

If their expensive and politically inspired (hotty headline grabber scenario A1F1 was added 'at the request of a few governments') computer games told me it was daylight, I'd always look out the window to make sure.

On to modest troposphere warming then cooling...a slight warming trend doesn't lead to the conclusion that mankind is to blame, correlation isn't cause and effect but we are invited to mislead ourselves that way.

We now have no warming this century and cooling for five years alongside rising carbon dioxide emissions and levels, though the level looks to drop soon (Mauna Loa).

The data is telling us that an already warm atmosphere has more degrees of freedom than the models incorporate and can transmit energy to space at a faster rate than envisaged.

It's happening, but the modellers plough on, the tax take increases and the restrictions and controls spread. Who needs the data to agree when your political patronage is so solid and the pressure groups shout so loud to a gullible guilt sodden audience with so little astronomy or geology education?

Mike

An animation on the BBC story alteration is available here.

BBC before and after
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/04/09/bbc-before-and-after/
To stop the animation press the “Esc” key; to restart it press the “F5” key.

The original story which the Ministry Of Truth doesn’t want you to see is still available via Yahoo Cache but make a copy quickly before it times out like copies in Google and Live.

Global warming ‘dips this year’
http://216.109.125.130/search/cache?ei=UTF-8&p=%22Global+warming+%27dips+this+year%27%22&fr=ush-news&u=reddit.com/goto%3Frss%3Dtrue%26id%3Dt3_6ellk&w=%22global+warming+dips+this+year%22&d=Nxe2VvH_QkkL&icp=1&.intl=us

David Archibald

Melanie, I submitted that paper of mine to HM Treasury when there was a call for input for the Stern review. It has been updated and expanded for the climate conference in New York last month and is available on the Lavoisier website at: http://www.lavoisier.com.au/papers/articles/ArchibaldMarch2008.pdf

The start of Solar Cycle 24 is delayed with the consequence that next decade will be a lot colder. Another good read is my address to the AGM of the Lavoisier Society last October: http://www.lavoisier.com.au/papers/articles/ArchibaldLavoisierAGM.pdf

There is a good passage from Henry V in relation to those pushing AGW, that they would sell:

His princes and peers to servitude
His subjects to oppression and contempt
And his whole kingdom into desolation

adamsmith1922

See this on a submission to NZ Government Emissions Trading Bill
http://adamsmith.wordpress.com/2008/04/11/337/

stanley Jerusalem

Somebody's Mum - You are absolutely right. The GW Bandwagon has produced some worthwhile results. Principally an awareness of what we are doing to our immediate environment and the obvious steps we may take to ameliorate that situation.
Carbon Footprint awareness, on the other hand, has as much hope of influencing us as NASDAQ does to the average Eastenders' watcher in Befnal Green.[Oops! Racist? - never mind, that's where I come from, innit?]
I suppose the Millenium Bug got people tidying their desks too.
B.T.W. at the risk of boring the other two scientists out there I would exhort you all to look at "MAUNDERS MINIMUM" on Google.
It really does put today's panic into some sort of perspective.

Bitless Clueless than Author

Little knowledge is a dangerous thing!!!

stanley Jerusalem

Bitless Clueless, etc. etc. How right YOU are -
" A little LEARNING is a dangerous thing"
Good job I went to a decent Grammar School, innit?
[Grocers]

Ian C

So the sum of all this is that the data on which the alarmist case is made is almost certainly fundamentally flawed. First, the infamous hockey stick which writes the Mediaeval Warm Period (MWP) out of the data, which then leads to both misinterpretation of the ice core data and thus the opposite conclusions are drawn to that which should have been; then tree rings are shown to be unreliable evidence because they are more sensitive to precipitation than Co2, yet this data was used as justification for writing out the MWP as irrelevant by the alarmists; and now we have the data re-writing itself as it is itself re-written - because we learn it wasn't data in the first place, but estimated data, which in turn was based upon subsequent temperature data, with estimates of the gaps in that data. A sketch-writer could write a series on this and keep us all entertained for a very long time! And now we're all going to freeze. Welcome to the world of politics getting mixed up with science. It wouldn't happen without liberal democracy in charge!

Jirapa

Note to Bitless. Dangerous false knowledge isn't a little thing. This amended doggerel is a suitable epitaph for the tombs of climate modellers.

Modellers know that through the low level of scientific understanding (LOSU) regarding solar irradiance forcing, and their ignorance over solar modulated CRF forcing (very low LOSU and omitted from of AR4 SPM - but Svensmark is on the case untouched by the efforts of Sloan and Wolfendale) together with the IPCC wrongly ignoring temperature inflating errors in the groundstation database as per McKitrick) means they can insert non-existent man-made warming to fill the gaps in our recent history of very modest warming...and then claim success for this approach!

The knowledge that politicians can be led by the nose if there's an ideological nosebag stuck out in front of myopic vision.

The knowledge of the general public's apathy and their susceptibility to guilt trips via the vehicle of junk science.

This is all dangerous knowledge for all of us.

Meanwhile more heads are sticking up over the parapet into the danger zone:

http://www.bellinghamherald.com/102/story/375112.html

Finally thanks to Dr Archibald for the information and update.

Dean C

either way, enjoy the resource wars and damage to the economy as oil continues to run out. 9 out of 10 calories you eat is dependent on the stuff.

Jirapa

Energy security? With 60 years of controlled fusion reseach, you get the impression that politicians are positively underwhelmed at the prospect. Just think of the lack of expedient opportunistic political capital that controlled fusion would bring.

Anyway, imiting energy considerations to one planet is short-sighted while we have the resources and imperative to open up our closed system.

Of more immediate concern is the total lack of planning by our so-called 'leaders' for an imminently cool future. They're drunk on imaginary importance after attending so many save-the-planet-from-overheating junkets...flying to each destination, staying in the best hotels, eating the finest foods. At our expense, of course.

Sam

Great, let's forget about new technologies and cleaner fuels, we'll carry on burning fossil fuels at ever increasing rates. The amount of CO2 and CH4 in the atmosphere have no bearing on the climate as the experts like Melanie Phillips have now spoken!!

Oh, hang on a minute!! What happens when fossil fuels run out? They are a finite resource if you people hadn't realised. I tell you what will happen - people like Melanie Phillips will be the first to complain that we hadn't invested in new technologies and new fuel sources. It is absolute hipocracy.

Just face it, people are greedy and want to consume as much as possible and once they're dead it's someone else's problem.

Wotan

I wonder when the BBC will discuss all this on Today or Newsnight? Was that a pink thing with wings passing my window?

Jirapa

Climate change in the same breath as greed and consumption, sounds like our man (as was) at the IPCC, Houghton, who believed that emissions reductions would save the planet from mankind's 'greed and indifference'.

So here we have the politics of high taxation (HM Treasury collects nearly £40 billion per year in ecotaxes), lifestyle totalitarianism as typified by the anti-4x4 brigade, and quasi-religious behaviour, all in one neat package. No wonder science got forced out.

Peter Martin

Before rushing out to celebrate the end of the global warming problem, you might just want to take a closer look at Melanie Philips's claim that "The total amount of cooling ranges from 0.65C up to 0.75C -- a value large enough to wipe out most of the warming recorded over the past 100 years". I would suggest that Melanie has taken the figure for Jan 2007 which was unusually warm at +.63 degrees C above the mid 20th century average and the Jan 2008 figure of +0.05 deg C above average. Subtract one from the other and 'hey presto' 40 years of global warming has vanished.

Can we all play this game? If so, I would like to point out that by March 2008 the figure had jumped back to +0.67; or a 0.62 deg C rise in two months. That works out at 3.7 degrees C of annual global warming.

I don't think those polar bears are out of danger quite yet.

smallheathen

"SJR
April 10th, 2008 7:33pm

@ Stuart. No one is sure about things such as medieval warmng only being North Europe etc. though the last 400 years of the Hockeystick curve are still pretty informative."

Isn't the Hockeystick analogy based on an ICE hockey stick, which has NO curve??

mikiwud

co2science.org
Check this site for Medieval Warm Period.It was Global.
Also check out the Roman Warm Period.

Arthur Lincoln

"We ARE polluting the planet (& children's lungs) by burning coal and oil." (Thinkster
April 10th, 2008 12:27am)

As a young boy in the fifties all heating was by coal. In the autumn and winter months we experienced SMOG. The streets smelled just like the engine sheds at the railway station and light colored clothing was often spattered with sooty deposits. Amazingly I cannot remember anyone of my pals at school suffering from Asthma or bronchitis. We have now had 'clean' air for over forty years and the number of asthmatic schoolchildren is ever increasing.

Roland Lucas

Another problem lies ahead with politicians getting a bit dizzy counting all the taxes available when worshipping at the green altar, with one eye on the EU setting our energy policy by diktat.

Owen Paterson MP got some figures from the government regarding the 7000 windymills we'll be getting over the next 20 years.

The tax subsidy to make these white elephants economically viable to the energy companies is £25 billion, in the form of Renewables Obligation Certificates.

The cost of merely connecting the things to the grid comes in at just over £10 billion. At a cost of £1.5 million installed for a 2MW windymill, they're not cheap either. That's another £10 billion that the energy companies will be looking to recoup somehow.

Decommissioning - not much 'government' thought given to that, but bits of turbines are apparently classed as hazardous waste, and what goes up must come down. A conservative with a small c estimate of the total cost would be 10% of installed capital outlay so £1 billion.

Even without inflation or government under-estimating the costs, hat's more than £46 billion over 20 years, or £100 per year on every household energy bill, which many are struggling to meet even now. All in the name of man-made global warming.

Then we remember it's going to get colder not warmer.

Charles Smith

@ Arthur Lincoln

Yes, my mother (then a young adult) remembers the London smogs - they used to creep under the doors like thick smoke. According to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smog) the smog of 1952 killed 4000 people within 4 days, and a further 8000 in the months that followed.

Are you saying that smog is harmless?!

Jirapa

Charles Smith & Arthur Lincoln, and anyone else interested, have a look at Section C5, p44, of the following report:

http://www.londonshealth.gov.uk/pdf/lhs/transport.pdf

Malcolm Fewtrell

The MMGW "theories" have been dangerously touted as "inevitable truth" for far too long now. The sad fact is that the war on CO2 is now taking priority over efforts to reduce other man-made pollutants proven to be harmful to health and the environment.

The environmental lobby, and other left groups, are very good at coordination in order to get their message across to Joe Public. It is hardly surprising that at the height of an economic boom, the MMGW message resonates with the masses who are feeling a little bit guilty. And of course there needs to be “consensus” as, in an increasingly disconnected society, we all want to belong to something.

Government support of such follies is to be expected as our collective guilt provides a “painless” opportunity for increased taxation, thus allowing Governmental waste and inefficiency to continue.

It would be quite right for opposition to this carbon-hysteria to take the form of multi-organisation coordination, fight fire with fire! Oh the irony!

We need to keep presenting demonstrable facts (instead of supposition) to the big players in the eco-lobby, challenging them to respond.

I also feel that in respect of the BBC reporting of the WMO story and subsequent changes to the story which radically altered the message, formal complaints should be made. Information on how to do so can be found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints

Dave R

Jo Abbess is making the climate changers look like the STASI.

Charles Smith

@ Jirapa

I've looked at the report (published nearly a decade ago) as you suggested: asthma had become more common, and levels of pollution were going down.

But I don't understand what your point is.

cap'n jack

The flaw in this interpretation is in drawing conclusions about long term climate change over a relatively short period of 13 months. Particularly when a large portion of that cooling occured over one month (January 2008). Only over a period of years to decades can you confidently discern climate trends. Otherwise, you run the danger of mistaking weather for climate.
Have a look at the updated graphs the temperature jump over the last two months is surprisingly high. What is the significance? Probably the danger of reading too much significance in short term temperature change. Daily Tech proclaimed 2007 wiped out a century of warming. By that logic, you could say the last two months reinstated 75 years worth of warming.

Tim D

‘If the Treasury thinks it is worth putting up on its website a paper forecasting global cooling, why is the British government adopting policies, including green taxes and intrusive lifestyle prescriptiveness, to deal with precisely the opposite eventuality?’
The HM Treasury doesn’t forrecast any such cooling. This paper was one of several dozen UNSOLICITED responses to the Stern Report, they posted all of them; in the interests of transparency I guess.
This one is by David Archibald an Australian geologist who writes for the Lavoisier Group; I guess you know they receive funding from the coal and oil industry.

The BBC report by Roger Harrabin…
It helps if people understand the EL Nino/La Nina phenomena.

The Mail website article on this same La Nina was headed ‘2008: The year the world will cool down.’
The TimesOnLine headline was: ‘La Nina threatens to wreck world’s weather’
The Telegraph’s was: ‘Blame the soggy summer on La Nina’
The USA’s media are focusing on how La Nina years usually have more hurricanes.
Put “La Nina” into Google news and you’ll get many more media reports on the current La Nina. Use quote marks.

Global warming stopped in 1998? According to NASA figures 2005 is now the hottest year globally, unless you include part years in which case it's 2007.
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20080116/
The six warmest years are now in descending order: 2005, 2007 and 1998 (tied), 2002, 2003 and 2006.
http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/news/story.html?id=fcabc522-e567-4183-8288-c5cb34bcc5b3&k=17837

Leslie

Tim,you should have read the comments below that Ottawa Citizen
article,and you would have found this:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/08/14/nasa_weather_error/

charles smith

Leslie's right - the Register's article is quite interesting. So I've reproduced part of it here, from the link given by Leslie above.

QUOTE

Or more accurately, after 1999, the data wasn't being fractionally adjusted to compensate for the time of day or location from where the data was being gathered. McIntyre emailed his discovery to NASA's Goddard Institute, which prompted the data review.
The data correction reduced the mean US temperature by about 0.15 ºC for the years 2000 through 2006, for an average of 0.66 ºC. The news was a delight to global warming naysayers — such as the conservative blogger Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters —who claimed it refutes a key tenet of the global warming "myth" advanced by Al Gore that nine of the ten warmest years in history have occurred since 1995. They also claim the lack of coverage on the mistake indicates a liberal media cover-up.
The new top 10 hottest years in the US are: 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938 and 1939.
Global warming skeptics point out that now four of the country's 10 warmest years were in the 1930s.
NASA officials, however, have called the changes trivial to spotting a global warming trend. The US covers only a small fraction of the globe, and the resulting change to the world's mean temperature is on the order of one-thousandth of a degree. NASA climate modeler Gavin Schmidt points out that longer term US averages have not changed rank. The years 2002-2006 were still warmer than 1924-1930. In the global mean, 2005 remains the warmest.
Never-the-less, we welcome back the returning champion of hot, 1934. This little firecracker was the height of the American dust bowl. Boy was it hot.
How hot was it?
It was so hot, swimming pools caught fire. It was so hot, people poured coffee on their laps to cool down. It was so hot, musicians were snorting ice cubes. It was so hot, catastrophic dust storms caused major ecological and agricultural damage that left over 500,000 Americans homeless. It was so...*ahem* oh. Yeah, that last one was kind of a bummer...

END QUOTE

Tim D

Hi Leslie & Charles,
The claim that 1934 was the hottest year only applies to temperatures in the continental USA, not globally. And as Register admits it was the height of the Dust Bowl years. There’s a link to an explanation as to the cause of the dust bowl here. Essentially a combination of unusual La Nina and jet stream conditions. http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2004/0319dustbowl.html

Global warming stopped? I’m still not convinced. If global warming has ceased, how come records are still being broken?
In 2007 many European countries had their warmest January on record. January temperatures in The Netherlands were the highest since measurements were first taken in 1706. England had the warmest April in 348 years of record-keeping there, breaking the record set in 1865 by more than 0.6°C. Then England had its wettest the wettest May to July period since records began in 1766, due to a low jet stream over NW Europe. Spring 2007 also featured the highest temperatures ever recorded by the Swiss Weather Service.
Temperature records for summer heat were broken in south-eastern Europe (Bosnia, Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Greece) in June and July. On 23 July, temperatures reached 45°C in Bulgaria, setting a new record.
In Australia 2007 was the warmest year on record in the Murray Darling Basin & South Australia, New South Wales and Victoria. The Australian annual mean temperature for 2007 was 6th warmest on record (0.67°C above normal). There was intense heat wave that engulfed western and central Russia in May, breaking several temperature records. In Moscow, temperatures on the 28th reached 32.8°C, the highest temperature recorded in May since 1891. (1890/91 saw a very intense El Nino, drought and famine killed millions worldwide, including in the Ukraine.)
In the U.S.A in August more than 100 all-time temperature records were tied or broken either for the highest reading or the warmest low temperature at night. A further 8,000 new heat records were set or tied for specific August dates.
Japan in 06/07 had one of the warmest winters on record and downtown Tokyo went without snow for the first time in 130 years; thermometers in August reached 40.9°C, the highest temperature ever recorded in Japan.
An extreme heat wave affected the South Asian countries of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal & the People's Republic of China. The Pakistani meteorological department registered a new record maximum temperature of 52 °C.
The Arctic continued to warm, leading to the opening of the Canadian Northwest Passage for the first time in recorded history. On Aug. 17, 2007 the National Snow and Ice Data Centre reported there was less sea ice in the Arctic since records began.

There was a short El Nino beginning in summer 2006 but it had faded to neutral conditions by Feb `07; so that can’t be credited for the above.
Solar intensity in 2007 was slightly lower than average because 2007 was a minimum in the 11-year solar sunspot cycle, so that can’t be credited either.
So, if global warming has ceased, how come records are still being broken?

And is the UK Treasury sitting on an official document forecasting imminent cooling? Well, no it isn’t.
It turns out to be by a known sceptic who posted it in as an unsolicited response to the Stern Report, as did several dozen other people and organisations. I remain open minded, but ‘X-File’ type claims such as that one keep me deeply ‘sceptical’.

Charles Smith

Sorry: I forgot to say that The Register's article clearly pours water on the notion that global warming isn't happening.

The sad thing is that the kind of evidence that those sceptical of global warming would accept is incontrovertible evidence. Sad because once such evidence (and I would be hugely grateful if one of the sceptics here could give me an idea of what such evidence would have to be) exists, it will be too late to solve the problems that have arisen as a consequence of global warming.

And I still fail to see what's so abhorrent about wanting to do less damage to the planet's natural resources, and about sharing those resources more equably among humanity.