Article: So much for 'settled science'

LORNE GUNTER

You may have heard earlier this month that global warming is now likely to take a break for a decade or more. There will be no more warming until 2015, perhaps later.

Climate scientist Noel Keenlyside, leading a team from Germany’s Leibniz Institute of Marine Science and the Max Planck Institute of Meteorology, for the first time entered verifiable data on ocean circulation cycles into one of the U.N.’s climate supercomputers, and the machine spit out a projection that there will be no more warming for the foreseeable future.

Of course, Mr. Keenlyside — long a defender of the man-made global warming theory — was quick to add that after 2015 (or perhaps 2020), warming would resume with a vengeance.

Climate alarmists the world over were quick to add that they had known all along there would be periods when the Earth’s climate would cool even as the overall trend was toward dangerous climate change.

Sorry, but that is just so much backfill.

There may have been the odd global-warming scientist in the past decade who allowed that warming would pause periodically in its otherwise relentless upward march, but he or she was a rarity.

If anything, the opposite is true: Almost no climate scientist who backed the alarmism ever expected warming would take anything like a 10 or 15-year hiatus.

Last year, in its oft-quoted report on global warming, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicted a 0.3-degree C rise in temperature in the coming decade — not a cooling or even just temperature stability.

In its previous report in 2001, the IPCC prominently displaced the so called temperature “hockey stick” that purported to show temperature pretty much plateauing for the thousand years before 1900, then taking off in the 20th Century in a smooth upward line. No 10-year dips backwards were foreseen.

It is drummed into us, ad nauseum, that the IPCC represents 2,500 scientists who together embrace a “consensus” that man-made global warming is a “scientific fact;” and as recently as last year, they didn’t see this cooling coming. So the alarmists can’t weasel out of this by claiming they knew all along such anomalies would occur.

This is not something any alarmist predicted, and it showed up in none of the UN’s computer projections until Mr. Keenlyside et al. were finally able to enter detailed data into their climate model on past ocean current behaviour.

Less well-known is that global temperatures have already been falling for a decade. All of which means, that by 2015 or 2020, when warming is expected to resume, we will have had nearly 20 years of fairly steady cooling.

Less well-known is that global temperatures have already been falling for a decade. All of which means, that by 2015 or 2020, when warming is expected to resume, we will have had nearly 20 years of fairly steady cooling.

Saints of the new climate religion, such as Al Gore, have stated that eight of the 10 years since 1998 are the warmest on record. Even if that were true, none has been as warm as 1998, which means the trend of the past decade has been downward, not upward.

Last year, for instance, saw a drop in the global average temperature of nearly 0.7 degrees C (the largest single-year movement up or down since global temperature averages have been calculated). Despite advanced predictions that 2007 would be the warmest year on record, made by such UN associates as Britain’s Hadley Centre, a government climate research agency, 2007 was the coolest year since at least 1993.

According to the U.S. National Climatic Data Center, the average temperature of the global land surface in January 2008 was below the 20th-Century mean for the first time since 1982.

Also in January, Southern Hemisphere sea ice coverage was at its greatest summer level (January is summer in the Southern Hemisphere) in the past 30 years.

Neither the 3,000 temperature buoys that float throughout the world’s oceans nor the eight NASA satellites that float above our atmosphere have recorded appreciable warming in the past six to eight years.

Even Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, reluctantly admitted to Reuters in January that there has been no warming so far in the 21st Century.

Does this prove that global warming isn’t happening, that we can all go back to idling our SUVs 24/7? No. But it should introduce doubt into the claim that the science of global warming is “settled.”

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Lorne Gunter, "So much for 'settled science'." National Post, (Canada) May 21, 2008.

Reprinted with permission of the National Post.

THE AUTHOR

Lorne Gunter is a regular columnist with The Edmonton Journal, and frequent contributor to the National Post, National Report, and other publications.

Copyright © 2008 National Post