Global warming: Don’t believe your eyes
According to the World Meteorological Organization, the U.N.’s weather bureau, this year will be much colder than recent years due to a La Nina effect building in the Pacific Ocean.
But, the WMO’s chief hastens to add, that doesn’t mean global warming is slowing down.
The WMO secretary-general, Michel Jarraud, told the BBC this week that while La Nina ensures a chilly year, the decade from 1998-2007 is still the warmest “ever” and this year’s average temperature will be well above the average for the past 100 years.
Of course, the fact that we’re only 4 months into the year does not deter Jarraud’s prediction. Nor does it give him any pause that for the past 10 years the temperature trend has been flat and many scientists expect this century to see long-term cooling.
Jarraud is highly selective in his facts, pointing out that since the start of the 20th century, average global temperatures have risen 0.74 degrees Celsius (a smidge over 1 degree Fahrenheit), but ignoring that if one were to measure from a different point, the results can be staggeringly different.
In January, NASA announced that it had corrected an error in its data that resulted in a “minor” adjustment to the temperatures from 2000-2006. NASA’s James Hansen (you may have read his name in the hundreds of articles about how he has been “silenced” by the Bush Administration) pooh-poohed the adjustment as insignificant. A few days later, NASA trumpeted a finding that 2007 was tied for the second hottest year on record, and it reiterated previous assertions that a majority of the 10 hottest years have occurred since 1990.
However, other scientists have pointed out that NASA’s mostly ignored “minor” downward adjustment of 0.15 degrees Celsius has serious repercussions: 1934, not 1998, is the hottest year on record; the third hottest year on record was 1921, not 2006; three of the five hottest years on record occurred before 1940; six of the top 10 hottest years occurred prior to 90 percent of the growth of “greenhouse” emissions.
The biggest upshot is that the revised data put a torpedo through the global warming boat’s hull. It has been a key point of dogma among the Algorites that the majority of the 10 hottest years on record occurred since 1990, which the revised data show is untrue. (By the way, you can credit the correction to the eagle eyes of Steven McIntyre, who was the first to establish that the “hockeystick” graph used by Al Gore and others to show warming trends was constructed from faulty data.)
According to Jarraud, who apparently is unaware of the NASA data corrections: “La Nina is part of what we call ‘variability’. There has always been and there will always be cooler and warmer years, but what is important for climate change is that the trend is up; the climate on average is warming even if there is a temporary cooling because of La Nina.”
The revised top 10 hottest years, from 1 to 10, are: 1934, 1998, 1921, 2006, 1931, 1999, 1953, 1990, 1938, 1939. Yet, according to the WMO, which we are expected to believe knows what it’s talking about, “the trend is up.”
Well, something definitely is up, but it isn’t the temperature, and it isn’t science. “Variability” in the lingo of the alarmists is clearly code for inconvenient truths that disprove the dogma.
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I love when somebody just shoots down this whole “Global Warming” crud. We all know there is a thin called climate change. It happened before during and after the ice ages. It warmed up and it cooled down and warmed up again. I did a report on this for college. I presented enough evidence that I even made the teacher rethink her stance on Al Gores Greenhouse gas emissions. Want to see it?
Sounds interesting. I’d like to read that.
Comment by Bryant — April 10, 2008 @ 8:22 am