Friday, April 04, 2008

No Global Warming for the Last Decade?

Now THIS is an interesting story on the BBC Science/Nature website. It's headlined GLOBAL TEMPERATURES TO DECREASE. It starts...

Global temperatures this year will be lower than in 2007 due to the cooling effect of the La Nina current in the Pacific, UN meteorologists have said. The World Meteorological Organization's secretary-general, Michel Jarraud, told the BBC it was likely that La Nina would continue into the summer. This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory. But experts have also forecast a record high temperature within five years.

Let's think about that. We've had rammed down our throats over the past few years that global temperatures are relentlessly on the increase. Now we're told that they haven't risen for a decade! If I understand the scientific point correctly, El Nino warmed the world in the years up to 1998, but now La Nina is cooling it. The article continues...

A minority of scientists question whether this means global warming has peaked and argue the Earth has proved more resilient to greenhouse gases than predicted. But Mr Jarraud insisted this was not the case and noted that 2008 temperatures would still be well above average for the century.
Now, this article proves nothing. But imagine if the reverse were true - that instead of there being no warming for the last decade, the climate had warmed by one degree. This wouldn;t be stuck away in the Science/Nature section of the BBC website - it would be the subject of a 5 minute feature on the Ten O'clock News.


49 comments:

Scipio said...

Bugger - I just brought a Prius!

Was the report's author Jeremy Clarkson?

Anonymous said...

Global warming is now religous matter - not a scientific one, so that explains the absence of wide coverage.

Remember the IPCC is a self-selecting organisation, so you would hardly expect to find dissenters there.

Anonymous said...

I think this WAS a feature on the 10 o'clock news last night...

Anonymous said...

I have been saying this for years (although perhaps not quite so .. er .. eloquently as Devil's Kitchen and co). Nonetheless it actually does feel warmer everywhere, but I put this down to trees being chopped down, thereby reducing the shade they provide, and buildings and concrete replacing them. None of which has anything to do with solar activity or the normal Gulf Stream activities...

asquith said...

I really cannot be arsed to join in the inevitable argument that will ensue. I'll go and ride my bike instead.

Anonymous said...

Ah yes, the religion of Gore, a cynical way to make us feel guilty and pay more more taxes.

Anonymous said...

Who to believe? The IPCC? Nearly every scientist who says that climate change is a problem? Or... Iain Dale, the dogmatic political commentator?

I'm going to stick with the scientists on this one.

Anonymous said...

From the BBC News report “Experts at the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre for forecasting in Exeter said the world could expect another record temperature within five years or less, probably associated with another episode of El Nino.”

Maybe, but in December 2003 Dr Phil Jones of the CRU told the BBC that “Globally, I expect the five years from 2006 to 2010 will be about a tenth of a degree warmer than 2001 to 2005.” For this prediction to be realised, temperatures would need to rise VERY SOON (not in ‘five years or less’) - and stay there.

Anonymous said...

As you said, "this article proves nothing".

Incidentally I picked up this story last night... I think from a 5 minute piece on the Ten O'Clock News!

Jonny Wright said...

You know, government ministers don't actually get to personally keep the income from environmental taxes, right? They have to spend them on the public ...

If man-made climate change is a big conspiracy to squeeze more taxes out of us, it's a colossal, complex, international, high-risk strategy. The governments of most countries have teamed up with most scientists in a vast conspiracy to squeeze extra tax revenue out of their own nations without any of the hapless citizens noticing.

If only world leaders could be equally successful at getting together unanimously to eliminate nuclear weapons, people trafficking and global poverty!

Anonymous said...

There is a point missing in your posting. El Nino and El Nina effects are *superimposed* on the underlying warming trend. El Nino events push warming, El Nina depresses it. The world can be undergoing a warming trend, but a strong El Nina will give one or two years where temperature trends down.

Did you also spot the article that the solar activity link to global warming (a favourite of the anthropogenic naysayers) has been essentially disproved?

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2008/312/3

BTW The BBC headline has changed to the more correct 'Global warming 'dips this year''.

Anonymous said...

If global warming is really happening, why is it so bloody cold here in Scotland? Last summer there wasn't a single day when it was warm enough to sit outside. Ten days ago we had a snowstorm. Spring still hasn't arrived. Yet we keep on being told that the climate will soon resemble that of Bordeaux. Bring it on, say I!

Anonymous said...

Iain
This WAS a 2.30 feature on the Ten last night.
So your point is?

Anonymous said...

Iain, you are an idiot.

neil craig said...

Indeed Iain. The interesting thing here is not that there has been no warming for a decade, this was already accepted, but that the BBC are actually reporting it.

Probabnly because the last few months have not only not been warmer but have been cooler & that the sunspot cycle, which is almost certainly the real driver, has been worryingly quiet lately. The odds are that we are facing cooling (indeed a couple of Russian scientists bet $10,000 on this a couple of years ago) & that it will have absloutely nothing to do with human action.

Look to see a number of politicians "clarifying" their previous statements, the complete replacement of the term "global warming" by "climate change"(already well advanced, & assurances that we must pay higher taxes & endure more regulation to stop the ice age (again).

Jonny you are right about the catastrophic warming scam being a high risk strategy. The fact is however undeniable that the catastrophic warming isn't happening as advertised & merely saying "they just wouldn't do that" doesn't change reality.

Environmental taxes ARE used to increase state power & I strongly suspect all the other problems you mention could be solved if they actually wanted to

Anonymous said...

Until...in some hundreds of millions of years...the Sun gives up and proves the GW crowd absolutely & crispy-correct...we would be well advised to consider more important things.
GW is an extension of PC, which is playing an enormous part in the final demise of The Septic Isle. It is the biggest scam ever. Clever, yes, but total oppression in the form of swingeing punitive taxation based on misinterpreted data & fear.
Oh!...and who thinks that the untold millions of Chinese & Indians are more concerned with their carbon footprint than the acquisition of their first car? ROTFFL.
The 70s 'global cooling' panic has been forgotten...We were luckier then in that no-one came up with the idea of taxing us for it! Well, the PC ponces aren't making that mistake twice.

Anonymous said...

As others have pointed out, this WAS on the BBC's main news bulletin last night, complete with pretty graphics. It was quite a long item too. I didn't time it but it seemed like a good 3 or 4 minutes.

The consensus of scientific opinion remains that global warming is real. There is, however, a minority view that the planet is more resilient than we think and that it will recover. I don't know which is right. However, given the choice, I would prefer higher taxes on environmentally damaging activities provided they are balanced by lower taxes elsewhere. Of course, I would prefer no tax at all, but that's another matter! And I accept that a lot of "green" taxation misses the target.

Anonymous said...

Nino Nana - Isn't she a newsreader?

Not that Nick Wood said...

There's a great idea for a film here somewhere. I know, we could call it "An inconvenient Truth!"

Anonymous said...

TREND, Iain. TREND!

Anonymous said...

icowboy @ 12.32 PM. If global temperatures have not risen for a decade how is the BBC headline "[Global warming] dips this year" more correct? Sounds grossly misleading to me.

Put not your faith in experts. Remember the guys who persuaded us to spend millions and millions averting the Y2K computer disaster? Which never happened?

Anonymous said...

Anonymous said...

Iain, you are an idiot.

April 04, 2008 12:54 PM

And there, in a nutshell, is the entire AGW proponents' strategy.
They have no answer to "the science" which disproves their misanthropic theory, so they hurl ad hominems.
Their house of cards is collapsing faster than one of Brown's eco-towns.

Anonymous said...

One of the problems is that politicians are not very good at science - so they don't know what are the relevant questions to ask in order to form an opinion as to whether the claims of the quango IPCC are really worthy of consideration.

I find it difficult to get any IPCC supporter to explain, using their computer models, the climate changes over the last 20,000 years. Yet this is an important validating step in a genuine scientific analysis of the climate.

Daily Referendum said...

The BBC used a graph showing temperature change during the last century. The problem is that their graph stated in 1940. The reason? the temperature in the 1930's was actually higher than the 1990's. But that wouldn't fit with all the climate change waffle they spout would it?

Devil's Kitchen said...

"This would mean global temperatures have not risen since 1998, prompting some to question climate change theory."

There was also a severe drop in temperature since 1998; the world is not even as warm as it was in 1998.

DK

Anonymous said...

"Remember the guys who persuaded us to spend millions and millions averting the Y2K computer disaster? Which never happened?"

Erm, would that be because we spent millions trying to avert it?

As for calling Iain an idiot. Well it's not very nice, but I don't think it's anything to do with his views on global climate change. The point of Iain's post was he couldn't imagine such a story appearing on the Ten. But it did. Last night.
*waves* Iain are you going to update your original post?

Yak40 said...

Nearly every scientist who says that climate change is a problem?

Myth number one.

It's all political now, scientists who disagree lose their jobs, lose their research funding etc as money grabbing scientifically illiterate hypocrites like Al Gore swan around the world in their Learjets.

It's about wealth transfer to the third world... follow the money.

Anonymous said...

I am waiting for someone to pop up and explain that global cooling is a worrying symptom of global warming.

Anonymous said...

isn't it time we had a new scam? Like global shrinkage (stop drinking water, because the world is shrinking?); global freezing? Global overpopulation/ under-population?; global poisoning (excessive use of hormones in food, heavy metals in the food-chain)?; global heightism (increasing height of people on protein diets is frightening small Blearite people)?

Johnny Norfolk said...

Do you rember the hole in the ozone layer that was going to bring in the end of the world.

Whats happened to that then. ?

Same as climate change, when I was a young man it used to be called weather.

Anonymous said...

"...noted that 2008 temperatures would still be well above average for the century."

Which century? If it is the XXI, then the temperatures have not risen for its entire length (all 8+ years of it). I suppose what they wanted to say was "for the last century", "for a century" or "for the XX century".

Sorry for the pedantic note, but not only is AGW bullshit, but its proponents also seem to have a difficulty in making precise statements.

Anonymous said...

"I am waiting for someone to pop up and explain that global cooling is a worrying symptom of global warming."

If you like - there are sharp and puzzling cooling episodes within each of the earth's last warming cycles. It's probably to do with what happens to global average temperatures when a big chunk of ice melts. But it might not be.

Anonymous said...

Shades of the "Millenium Bug". All that FUD and f* all. I wonder what the next scare story will be!!

Anonymous said...

Careful Iain. The GW crowd are a bit touchy at the moment - what with the lack of hurricanes last couple of years.

Anonymous said...

Remember mad cow disease? Millions were going to die. Well, by now half of us should have sprouted horns and be staggering around mooing. But to date, only Gordon Brown seems to have been affected.

Anonymous said...

dave @ 3.25 PM. In answer to my point about the YK2 non-event you ask, 'Would that be because we spent millions trying to avert it?'

No. It was because the experts got it wrong. The millions were spent because no one had the courage to say, 'This is dodgy science and we are not persuaded.' And let's not forget - a lot of people made a lot of money out of YK2.

Anonymous said...

the bloody scientists have been fiddling the figures for years to create the trend if you look at the raw figures temp has not altered at all.
Its all a big con people!!

Adrian Windisch said...

Its sad that from the comments here few (including Mr Dale) have much understanding of science. Even skeptics agree that average temperatures are increasing, they argue about the cause. This doesn't mean the temperature goes up a set amount every year, but the average trend is up.

Id love to know what the conspiracy is meant to be, who benefits from climate change? We know who benefits from business as usual.

Andrew said...

James O'Malley 11.55 and loads of other posters all seems to think that scientists are in agreement over climate change. That's nonsense. The only agreement is that the climate isn't static. There is certainly no consensus on anthropogenic global warming, and the evidence is moving rapidly away from supporting AGW. Witness the Manhattan Declaration last month signed by many genuine scientists (i.e. not the apparatchiks of the IPCC) which says inter alia "that there is no convincing evidence that CO2 emissions from modern industrial activity has in the past, is now, or will in the future cause catastrophic climate change". Iain, your general thrust is right - the media don't report things that run counter to their narrative, which at present is that we're all doomed unless 4x4 owners are publicly flogged (or worse).

The Creator said...

The answer is here:

http://thedailybrute.blogspot.com/2008/04/headline-of-genius.html

Easy really.

Anonymous said...

Frederick Davies said...
"Which century? If it is the XXI, then the temperatures have not risen for its entire length (all 8+ years of it). I suppose what they wanted to say was "for the last century", "for a century" or "for the XX century".

Sorry for the pedantic note, but not only is AGW bullshit, but its proponents also seem to have a difficulty in making precise statements."

The BBC are not quoting Jarruad verbatim. If you read the BBC feature it is clear that it is the past 100 years.

Stephen Morris said...

I took the trouble to look up the data, see here for a good graph http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.svg

1998 was an exceptionally hot year and within natural variance, it can't be used as a benchmark.

Every year since 2001 has been hotter than every year before 2001, with the single expection of 1998.

There is about 1/5 degree warming each decade. The annual temparatures vary around the norm by about the same amount, 1/5 of a degree.

To remove this random noise you need to look at average temperatures over a decade, rather than a year. The average in the 2000's is about 1/5 of a degree above the 1990's and so on for previous decades. So the trend is very much up and in line with global warming theory.

If you just look at annual temperatures over a year you will just see the noise rather than the trend.

Anonymous said...

Stephen [1.31 am], your link doesn't work. It has been truncated.

THIS should work.

If people (including Iain) look at it then they might withdraw some of their ill-informed comments.

Anonymous said...

If the IPCC contained some individuals that disagreed with its (predictable) pronouncements then I would take more notice of their deliberations.

However they do not. Indeed, the chance of them ever doing so must equal the chance of the Conclave of Cardinals electing a Protestant to the Papacy.

neil craig said...

Anon 2.33 asks what the next scare is going to be.

"Obesity is as seriousa threat as climate change" Alan Johnstone

I think he is right.

Adrian asks cui bono from the warming scare.

Governments which want to regulate us, governments which want to tax us (ie all of them) and the various "green" scaremongering organisations, including those he has declared himself a member of, whose donations, subsidies & often government paid jobs depend on keeping the fear level high.

He also claims to know who benefits from not pushing it. I would be very interested if he would explain exactly who would in the end really benefit from taking no action, in the event it were not a scam. Canadians living hundreds of feet above sea level are the only ones who come to mind.

Andrew said...

Neil Craig 2.55 asks who benefits if we take no action over climate change. Easy! We all do - we don't waste our resources pursuing pointless policies. For instance, for a minute proportion of cost of Kyoto we could eliminate malaria, or provide drinking water for sub-Saharan Africa, or loads of other things. It is not a no-cost option to introduce unnecessary changes which reduce economic growth. The main cost is, however, borne by the poor, as always.

Anonymous said...

The scientific consensus is (a) that global warming is real, (b) that CO2 contributes to warming and (c) that human emissions of CO2 have increased massively in the 2nd half of the 20th century. What is disputed is (a) that man's CO2 was the main driver of warming and (b) that the century's 0.6 deg C warming is cause for alarm. Note (from aardvark's link above) that the 1860-1879 warming was steeper and the 1910-1940 warming greater than the 1975-2000 warming. Yet man's CO2 emissions only took off after 1940. The 1941-1974 cooling is another difficulty as will be the current cooling if it continues.

Anonymous said...

asquith said...

"I really cannot be arsed to join in the inevitable argument that will ensue."

Yet just the other day you started talking about it assuming that everyone else would be as credulous a true believer as yourself. When you discovered opposition you ran away saying that you would be happy to talk about it as soon as the topic was raised by Iain.

Hypocrite.

Anonymous said...

Jonny Wright said...

"The governments of most countries have teamed up with most scientists"

Wrong. It's just a few oddball scientists and a host of 'environmentalists' i.e. lefty-fascist propagandists.