OGLE B
Looks like some one agrees with you Famine:
There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2006/04/09/do0907.xml&sSheet=/news/2006/04/09/ixworld.html
The guy is from the UK though, so.....
JK
Judge for yourself:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/
I could understand it if that article was a tongue in cheek joke aimed at extreme environmentalists and their "one hurricanes proves global warming" mindset, but that article peddles what it puts forward as thoughtful objective analysis. It is far from that. It is plagued with more deception, logical incoherency and general scientific ignorance than the environmentalists put forward.
Take the first paragraph:
Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase. In response to these facts, a global warming devotee will chuckle and say "how silly to judge climate change over such a short period".
That is a strawman. The error this opinion article makes has nothing to do with "judging climate change" over a short period. The error is to pretend 1998 is a normal year rather than the el nino year it was. If you account for that anonomly then indeed temperatures
have been increasing since 1998.
This is precisely why he chooses 1998 as the year to start the trend. It was no accident that he picked this specific 8 year trend. He omitted to mention that without 1998 being so extreme the trend is warming. Maybe he just didn't know right?
Well according to this page
http://timlambert.org/2005/05/bobcarter3/:
Last year, global warming denialist Bob Carter wrote a Tech Central Station article where he claimed that satellite measurements "show little or no long-term trend of temperature change."
I emailed him to point that the satellites actually showed significant warming. He replied that this didnt count because: "this trend is most likely produced by the single exceptionally warm 1998 El Nino year."
Yet in the next breath, the same person will assure you that the 28-year-long period of warming which occurred between 1970 and 1998 constitutes a dangerous (and man-made) warming.
The "same person" is totally justified in pointing out that a 28-year-long period of warming between 1970 and 1998. Whether this is "man-made" or "dangerous" has nothing to do with the authors analogy which is simply about a trend. If the author of this opinion article can show the 28-year long trend is only the result of a single year, like his own was, then he might have a point. But he can't, and he doesn't.
Tosh. Our devotee will also pass by the curious additional facts that a period of similar warming occurred between 1918 and 1940, well prior to the greatest phase of world industrialisation, and that cooling occurred between 1940 and 1965, at precisely the time that human emissions were increasing at their greatest rate.
pretending that these periods are being ignored or "passed by". Even a quick reading in to this matter will show that the current hypothesis is that "global dimming" due to increased aerosol pollution caused a cooling effect. Between 1940 and 1980 this cooling countered warming. Since aerosol levels have dropped it no longer does.
Does something not strike you as odd here? That industrial carbon dioxide is not the primary cause of earth's recent decadal-scale temperature changes doesn't seem at all odd to many thousands of independent scientists. They have long appreciated - ever since the early 1990s, when the global warming bandwagon first started to roll behind the gravy train of the UN Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - that such short-term climate fluctuations are chiefly of natural origin.
The same "thousands of scientists already know" argument that creationists use.
The problem here is not that of climate change per se, but rather that of the sophisticated scientific brainwashing that has been inflicted on the public, bureaucrats and politicians alike. Governments generally choose not to receive policy advice on climate from independent scientists. Rather, they seek guidance from their own self-interested science bureaucracies and senior advisers, or from the IPCC itself. No matter how accurate it may be, cautious and politically non-correct science advice is not welcomed in Westminster, and nor is it widely reported.
Exactly the same flavor of rhetoric the creationists make - that that governments only take advice on what to teach in schools from their own self-interested science bureaucracies (in grant funded colleges all over the land). No matter how accurate evolution may be, critics are not welcomed they argue.
Perhaps the reason "independant" critics are so independant is because their knowledge of the science is not up to scratch to be employed. Anyhow I recall the US government did take science advice from "independant" author micheal crichton. Certainly the author provides no way to distinguish this situation from being any different than the creationist-evolution issue.
First, most government scientists are gagged from making public comment on contentious issues, their employing organisations instead making use of public relations experts to craft carefully tailored, frisbee-science press releases. Second, scientists are under intense pressure to conform with the prevailing paradigm of climate alarmism if they wish to receive funding for their research. Third, members of the Establishment have spoken declamatory words on the issue, and the kingdom's subjects are expected to listen.
Exactly the same arguments creationists make. The plot thickens...
