Let’s start the New Year as we mean to go on: by dancing joyfully and triumphantly on the grave of man-made global warming.
Climate change is over. It’s a busted flush. The alarmists now have all the credibility of bewildered Harold Camping followers shivering on a mountaintop the morning after the night before, looking all shifty and embarrassed as they realise the Rapture their models so confidently promised just ain’t going to happen…
If you still doubt this, here are three recent pieces which should put your mind at rest.
The first – modestly titled The Most Comprehensive Assault On Global Warming Ever – was written by a US physics professor called Mike van Biezen. It lists ten of the reasons (though there are many more) why man-made global warming theory no longer has any credibility. They are:
1.Temperature records from around the world do not support the assumption that today’s temperatures are unusual
2. Satellite temperature data does not support the assumption that temperatures are rising rapidly
3. Current temperatures are always compared to the temperatures of the 1980’s, but for many parts of the world the 1980’s was the coldest decade of the last 100+ years
4. The world experienced a significant cooling trend between 1940 and 1980
5.Urban heat island effect skews the temperature data of a significant number of weather stations
6. There is a natural inverse relationship between global temperatures and atmospheric CO2levels
7. The CO2 cannot, from a scientific perspective, be the cause of significant global temperature changes
8. There have been many periods during our recent history that a warmer climate was prevalent long before the industrial revolution
9.Glaciers have been melting for more than 150 years
10. “Data adjustment” is used to continue the perception of global warming
Then there are two pieces on what, for me, is the single most persuasive argument against man-made global warming theory: the (considerably more dramatic) fluctuations of climate long before mankind was in any position to influence it.
Here are the key points of an essay on the subject by Ed Hoskins:
Our current beneficial, warm Holocene interglacial has been the enabler of mankind’s civilisation for the last 10,000 years. The congenial climate of the Holocene epoch spans from mankind’s earliest farming to the scientific and technological advances of the last 100 years.
However all the Northern Hemisphere Ice Core records from Greenland show:
- the last millennium 1000AD – 2000AD has been the coldest millennium of the entire Holocene interglacial.
- each of the notable high points in the Holocene temperature record, (Holocene Climate Optimum – Minoan – Roman – Medieval – Modern), have been progressively colder than the previous high point.
- for its first 7-8000 years the early Holocene, including its high point “climate optimum”, had virtually flat temperatures, an average drop of only ~0.007 ¬∞C per millennium.
- but the more recent Holocene, since a “tipping point” at ~1000BC, has seen a temperature diminution at more than 20 times that earlier rate at about 0.14 ¬∞C per millennium.
- the Holocene interglacial is already 10 – 11,000 years old and judging from the length of previous interglacials the Holocene epoch should be drawing to its close: in this century, the next century or this millennium.
- the beneficial warming at the end of the 20th century to the Modern high point has been responsible the “Great Man-made Global Warming Scare”.
- eventually this late 20th century temperature blip will come to be seen as just noise in the system in the longer term progress of comparatively rapid cooling over the last 3000+ years.
- other published Greenland Ice Core records as well as GISP2, (NGRIP1, GRIP) corroborate this finding. They also exhibit the same pattern of a prolonged relatively stable early Holocene period followed by a subsequent much more rapid decline in the more recent past.
When considering the scale of temperature changes that alarmists anticipate because of Man-made Global Warming and their view of the disastrous effects of additional Man-made Carbon Dioxide emissions in this century, it is useful to look at climate change from a longer term, century by century and even on a millennial perspective.
The much vaunted and much feared “fatal” tipping point of +2¬∞C would only bring Global temperatures close to the level of the very congenial climate of “the Roman warm period”.
If it were possible to reach the “horrendous” level of +4¬∞C postulated by Warmists, that extreme level of warming would still only bring temperatures to about the level of the previous Eemian maximum, a warm and abundant epoch, when hippopotami thrived in the Rhine delta.
Finally, a study by another amateur enthusiast, JWR Whitfield, examining the relationship between CO2 and climate on an even longer term scale (400,000 years plus).
This represents a fairly recent development in our understanding of climate. Back in 1998, for example, when Michael Mann et al presented their hugely influential paper “Observed Climate Variability & Change”, the ice-core data available to scientists went back only 100,000 years (thus covering only one of the planet’s glaciation periods). Since then, thanks to two enlarged time scale Antarctica ice cores ‚Äì Vostok and Epica ‚Äì we can go back much further, covering at least four Glacial (cold) and Interglacial (warm) periods.
Two key things become clear from this data. The first is that, on a longer-term scale, Earth’s climate has fluctuated far more dramatically than the puny and inconsequential 0.8 degrees C rise in global mean temperature we’ve experienced since 1850. And the second is that rises and falls in CO2 lag rises and falls in temperature: that is, it’s temperature which pushes CO2 levels, not the other way round.
Whitfield goes on to examine the influence of the sun and of the oceans on climate which, he demonstrates, is much stronger than the small-to-non-existent influence of the trace gas CO2.
Not that any of this stuff is new, of course. But it’s useful information to keep handy every time you come upon another of those of smug, sanctimonious types who has been taught by the New York Times, the Guardian, the BBC, HuffPo or whoever that “deniers” are motivated solely by money or ideology and have no scientific arguments to support their case.
