Published by on 03 Jun 2008 at 04:54 pm
Is the planet still warming?
Paul MacRae, March 9, 2008
If the temperature data since 2001 is correct, climate change is clearly not due primarily to carbon dioxide levels.
Has global warming stopped? That’s the title of an article published in December in The New Statesman by respected British science journalist David Whitehouse.
“Surely not,” writes Whitehouse. “What heresy is this? Haven’t we been told that the science of global warming is settled beyond doubt and that all that’s left to the so-called skeptics is the odd errant glacier that refuses to melt?”
Yet an end to the warming, at least temporarily, is what the climate data since about 2001 shows. The average temperature of the Northern Hemisphere has been warming only slightly or flat-lined. Average temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere are falling. And the average of the two temperatures is flat–no warming for the past seven years.
Readers can check the data for themselves at the British Meteorological Office website or Anthony Watts’ site. The data not only shows flatlined warming, but a temperature plunge in the past year (see Figure 1).
The planet isn’t warming
The various official climate bodies, such as the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, aren’t saying much, if anything, about this non-warming trend, and no wonder. It’s a very inconvenient truth for those who believe that carbon dioxide, and especially human-caused carbon dioxide, is the main cause of global warming.
No warming is very inconvenient because carbon dioxide levels are still rising steadily; as seen in Figure 2 below in green, they make a 45-degree line. And if carbon dioxide is the principal cause of global warming, as environmental crusaders like Al Gore tell us, then the planet should be warming, period.
But if the planet isn’t warming, even temporarily (and seven to ten years of not warming is a bit more than a statistical blip), then something else besides CO2 must be the main driver of both the warming and cooling of our planet.
Figure 2 shows carbon dioxide levels (green) and temperatures (blue) since 1979 shown together. Does it look like carbon dioxide is the main driver of temperature change?
That CO2 isn’t the culprit is almost certain since carbon dioxide represents barely .04 per cent of atmospheric gases, or about 400 parts per million. That’s the equivalent of 40 people in a 100,000-seat sports stadium. Meanwhile, the human-generated portion of total carbon emissions each year is only about three per cent of that (Environment Canada’s website puts human-caused carbon dioxide at a mere two per cent). The rest — 97 per cent — comes from natural sources like decaying vegetation, volcanoes, and the oceans.
That means the human contribution to carbon dioxide per year is about 12 parts per million. In a stadium holding 100,000 cheering people, that would be one person. It’s unlikely you’d be able to pick out the “signal”-that’s the climatologists’ term for the anthropogenic CO2 contribution to warming -from one voice in such a throng.
How an increase in carbon dioxide that tiny could be causing the warming we saw from the 1970s to the start of the 21st century is hard to imagine. In fact, it’s absurd. Yet, that’s what we’re told is gospel truth by the global-warming believers.
Flatline warming an inconvenient truth
This flat-lined warming is also an inconvenient truth for those who’ve demonized global-warming skeptics. Normally in scientific debate there is a belief that other theories are in error, but a mutual respect for differing points of view. This has not been the case on the global warming issue. Those skeptical of the human-caused global warming “consensus” have been attacked as “immoral,” “irresponsible,” “scientifically illiterate” and even “dangerous.” Worse, they have labeled as “deniers,” and therefore on a par with Holocaust deniers.
In other words, the issue of global warming has gone beyond science into the realm of ideology and even religion. For many warming supporters, the idea that humans are causing climate change has taken the place of Original Sin, and human-caused warming has become a dogma impervious to facts.
It’s very possible that over the next century the climate will warm up again, and cool again, and warm again. That’s what climate does–it changes, sometimes rapidly. In the last 200 years the climate has gone from cold in the 1800s to very warm up to the 1940s, to cold up to the 1980s, to warm from the 1980s on. The earlier fluctuations can’t have been caused by humans; nor, it seems, is the most recent shift to warming and now, apparently, cooling.
That we may be entering another spell of cold for the next decade or two isn’t good news, though: History shows that cold times are tough times for human beings, while warm times are better.
Even worse: our planet has been in an ice age for the past two and a half million years. The cold, glacial times go on for 80,000 years or so, while the warm, interglacial periods, like the one we’re in, last a mere 10,000-20,000 years. We’re past the mid-point of our interglacial.
In other words, carbon dioxide emissions aren’t humanity’s enemy; if the temperature data since 2001 is correct, warming is clearly not due primarily to carbon dioxide levels. Nor is technological civilization our enemy, nor is global warming itself, however caused. The latest climate figures hint that our most ancient and deadly enemy — two-kilometre-high mountains of ice — may be returning. A new Ice Age — that’s the doomsday to worry about, not warming.
Gilles-L.Caisse on 15 Jun 2008 at 10:02 pm #
When I was in school, I was thought that it was warming that generated CO2, not the opposite.
And that tropical forests were generating more CO2 than transforming it into oxygen, which would disqualify them as the planet’s ultimate lungs.
Benson on 06 Sep 2009 at 2:19 pm #
You know, the debate going on about global warming made my mind spin.
Both sides wanted to pull me in, and there were irrefutable evidence on both sides. They all sounded good.
All of you should read “State of Fear” by michael chrichton.
Richard Lock on 24 Nov 2009 at 11:12 am #
Hers a link to information I found at the NASA website. When looking at overall global temperatures and removing the 1998 spike which was caused by El Nino there is a strong warming trend from 1999 to 2008. Also the warming trend over the last 50 years (about 0.13° C or 0.23° F per decade) is nearly twice that for the last 100 years.
http://climate.nasa.gov/news/index.cfm?FuseAction=ShowNews&NewsID=175
Paul MacRae on 26 Nov 2009 at 4:30 pm #
Richard,
I find the same frustration with this kind of argument that, I guess, global warming believers feel when skeptics like myself challenge them on whether warming is human-caused or not. It is true that the record shows warming or cooling depending on when you start the series. If you start in 2001, you get no warming, on average. If you start earlier, you get warming.
The key thing, for me, is that not one of the IPCC models predicted the current non-warming, even though they must have been aware at the very least of the alternating cooling and warming of the Pacific and Atlantic currents, and perhaps the reduction of solar activity, too. Why don’t the models show cooling, then? They do, actually, but only if the anthropogenic influence is removed. In other words, the models are overestimating the human influence, which is what most skeptics believe. We don’t believe that warming has stopped–we’re in an interglacial, after all, which means overall the planet is warming. And thank heavens it is; the alternative is cooling. Warming doesn’t mean humans are principally at fault, although we may be contributing slightly.
As for the NASA figures: this site is run by James Hansen, and the Goddard temperature figures are consistently higher than the other three climate auditing institutes (UAH, RSS and Hadley). I don’t think Hansen is a trustworthy guide to what’s happening with the climate, given his extreme political position on the topic.
Even RealClimate has admitted that the planet hasn’t warmed, on average, for the past 10 years. But you can find definitive proof, I think, in the East Anglia University CRU emails. What they are about is non-warming (or, as Stephen Schneider calls it, 10 years of “stasis”), and how they can keep the public from finding out (“hide the decline”).
The emails also reveal a pattern of trying to suppress alternative points of view (if the AGW view is correct, there’s no need to suppress other points of view–they will be obviously wrong) and of fixing the data to show warming. There’s no reason to believe Goddard isn’t doing the same–it’s all the same gang (Schneider, Mann, Trenberth, etc.).
I could be wrong, of course, but at least I’m not deliberately trying to deceive the public….
Paul
Larry L. Olson on 16 Mar 2010 at 3:36 pm #
My study on planetary gravitational interactions accounts for 81% of the “unexplained” heat input to the earth. You may want to give it a look.
Bill Grant on 01 Jul 2010 at 5:20 pm #
Hi
I am a scientist. It appears to me that you are not objective. You are trying to ‘prove’ your thesis, and are cherry-picking data (e.g. showing temperature data for North America and not global temperature, when there has been localised abnormally cool conditions going against the global trends; repeating the myth that additional greenhouse gases will not absorb any more heat; and rerunning may other theories that have been tested and found to not explain warming as well as the AGW thesis.). According to your logic, there was ‘cooling’ during the early 1990s (similar to now – there were some cooler years and people who don’t understand statistics – like yourself – could have claimed a cooling trend). Answer this – how much ‘cooler’ is Earth today compared to 1910, 1920, 1930, 1940, 1950, 1960, 1970, 1980 and 1990?
I hope you are right about AGW, but to imply that there is ‘no evidence’ is frankly deceptive and shows a lack of impartiality. As I see it: Greenhouse gases cause warming. Increasing these will result in some warming and some climate change. There is risk that doubling or trebling pre-industrial levels will result in catastrophic climate change. Prudent risk management is to show caution until we better understand how much impact there will be. Short term ‘cooling’/slowing in the warming trend during a period of very low solar/sun spot activity and increased dimming smog throughout China, India, SE Asia does not ‘disprove’ the risk.
You want to sell a book – and you will not let logic get in the way. But for the sake of the future don’t try to claim an objectivity.
Paul MacRae on 02 Jul 2010 at 11:30 am #
Bill,
Actually, events have overtaken this post, which was written in 2008. Since then we’ve learned, via no less a source than Phil Jones, former head of the Climatic Research Unit of East Anglia University, that there has been no “statistically significant” warming since 1998, and some cooling since 2002 (although he says it’s not statistically significant–apparently, for Jones, nothing but warming can be statistically significant).
A gadget on the NOAA website shows cooling, on average, in the continental U.S. since 1997 (see http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/na.html). In general, temperatures in the U.S. mirror global temperatures, in part because the U.S. has the best temperature record. The temperature claims in this post, however, are not for the U.S., as you state, but the global record as recorded by the Hadley institute (HADCRUT).
In other words, there’s been no warming, on average in 12 years. During this whole time, the public has been bludgeoned with fears about warming—the 2007 IPCC report even declared that the warming in the 21st century was “unequivocal”— when no warming has occurred.
You are right that the planet is cooling because of a lack of solar activity and, although you don’t mention it, a cooling of the Pacific Ocean is also involved. In other words, natural variation has overwhelmed carbon dioxide (and definitely overwhelmed anthropogenic carbon dioxide) as a source of temperature change. When the solar activity returns, and the PDO goes into its warm cycle, the planet will warm again. No humans need apply.
On a decadal scale, the earth was a bit warmer than today during the 1930s, and the 21st century is slightly cooler than the 1990s.
As for carbon dioxide saturation (the myth you mention): even alarmist climatologist William Ruddiman (and many others) acknowledges that the warming effect of additional carbon dioxide decreases logarithmically. So, Ruddiman has written: “Earth’s temperature reacts strongly to small changes in CO2 values at the lower end of the range (less than 200 ppm), but changes much less at the high end of the range (greater than 800 ppm).”
We are well past the point where additional carbon dioxide will cause more than minimal additional warming, perhaps a degree or two Celsius, not more. Which is pretty much what the current climate record is telling us (no warming, despite additional CO2). I’d say it’s illogical to argue that we are facing “oblivion” if we add more CO2. Other factors are far more important.