Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
continue but would accelerate, given the unprecedented growth of global carbon dioxide
emissions, as China's coalbased economy has grown by leaps and bounds, there has
been no further warming at all. To be precise, the latest report of the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a deeply flawed body whose nonscientist chairman is a
committed climate alarmist, reckons that global warming has latterly been occurring at the
rate of—wait for it—0.05°Cs per decade, plus or minus 0.1°C. Their figures, not mine. In
other words, the observed rate of warming is less than the margin of error.
And that margin of error, it must be said, is implausibly small. After all, calculating
mean global temperature from the records of weather stations and maritime observations
around the world, of varying quality, is a pretty heroic task in the first place. Not to
mention the fact that there is a considerable difference between daytime and night-time
temperatures. In any event, to produce a figure accurate to hundredths of a degree is
palpably absurd.
The lessons of the unpredicted fifteen-year global temperature standstill (or hiatus as
the IPCC calls it) are clear. In the first place, the so-called Integrated Assessment Models
whichtheclimatesciencecommunityusestopredicttheglobaltemperatureincreasewhich
is likely to occur over the next 100 years are almost certainly mistaken, in that climate
sensitivityisalmostcertainlysignificantlylessthantheyoncethought,andthusthemodels
exaggerate the likely temperature rise over the next hundred years.
But the need for a rethink does not stop there. As the noted climate scientist Professor
JudithCurry,chairoftheSchoolofEarthandAtmosphericSciencesattheGeorgiaInstitute
of Technology, recently observed in written testimony to the US Senate:
Anthropogenic global warming is a proposed theory whose basic mechanism is well understood, but whose magnitude is
highlyuncertain.ThegrowingevidencethatclimatemodelsaretoosensitivetoCO
2
hasimplicationsfortheattributionof
late-twentieth-centurywarmingandprojectionsof21st-centuryclimate.Iftherecentwarminghiatusiscausedbynatural
variability, then this raises the question as to what extent the warming between 1975 and 2000 can also be explained by
natural climate variability.
2
It is true that most members of the climate science establishment are reluctant to accept
this,andarguethatthemissingheathas,forthetimebeing,goneintothe(verycold)ocean
depths only to be released later. This is, however, highly conjectural. Assessing the mean
global temperature of the ocean depths is—unsurprisingly—even less reliable, by a long
way, than the surface temperature record. And in any event most scientists reckon that it
will take thousands of years for this 'missing heat' to be released to the surface.
In short, the CO
2
effect on the earth's temperature is probably less than was previously
thought, and other things—that is, natural variability and possibly solar influences—are
relatively more significant than has hitherto been assumed.
