Sunday, March 23, 2008

What? No global warming catastrophe?

Christopher Pearson in The Australian, followed by my comments below the star line.

Pearson begins - - -

Catastrophic predictions of global warming usually conjure with the notion of a tipping point, a point of no return.

Last Monday - on ABC Radio National, of all places - there was a tipping point of a different kind in the debate on climate change.

It was a remarkable interview involving the co-host of Counterpoint, Michael Duffy and Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. Anyone in public life who takes a position on the greenhouse gas hypothesis will ignore it at their peril.

Duffy asked Marohasy: "Is the Earth still warming?"

She replied: "No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you'd expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years."

Duffy: "Is this a matter of any controversy?"

Marohasy: "Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued ... This is not what you'd expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you'd expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up ... So (it's) very unexpected, not something that's being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it's very significant."

Duffy: It's not only that it's not discussed. We never hear it, do we? Whenever there's any sort of weather event that can be linked into the global warming orthodoxy, it's put on the front page. But a fact like that, which is that global warming stopped a decade ago, is virtually never reported, which is extraordinary.(emphasis added)

If Marohasy is anywhere near right about the impending collapse of the global warming paradigm, life will suddenly become a whole lot more interesting.
A great many founts of authority, from the Royal Society to the UN, most heads of government along with countless captains of industry, learned professors, commentators and journalists will be profoundly embarrassed. Let us hope it is a prolonged and chastening experience.

With catastrophe off the agenda, for most people the fog of millennial gloom will lift, at least until attention turns to the prospect of the next ice age. ….

The rest of Pearson's article is here.

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Comments:

How many times in the last few years have you been told the question of global warming caused by carbon emissions “has been settled.”

Scientists have reached “a consensus” on global warming, right?

Time is running out. The U. N. must step in immediately and manage the problem.

You recall the U. N. don’t you? Yes, that's right, the organization that managed the Oil for Food Program Gen. Tommy Franks correctly called Saddam Hussain’s Oil for Palaces Program.

A big thank you to Christopher Pearson and The Australian for providing an informative article containing critically important, but grossly underreported, scientific information and a very thoughtful discussion of same.

2 comments:

mac said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Insufficiently Sensitive said...

A great many founts of authority, from the Royal Society to the UN, most heads of government along with countless captains of industry, learned professors, commentators and journalists will be profoundly embarrassed. Let us hope it is a prolonged and chastening experience.


How the mighty have fallen. Well, the UN was never mighty, except in the annals of gaseous dispute and opposition to the US. Reflecting on the Royal Society in particular, the group which long ago added immensely to the sum of accurate human knowlege of science. You know, by repeatable, verifiable physical inquiries into the behavior of materials and organisms and forces, combined with an intense skepticism toward ANY assertion until it was proven beyond a doubt - by scientific methods, NOT political.

That Society has now fallen to the position of a religion, or more explicitly, a cult. It has abolished that skepticism, and decreed that global warming is established law, based on majority votes of politicized 'scientists' whose grants would greatly suffer in case said warming were not, in fact, a verifiable trend (by earth's timespans, rather than by the attention span of a TV special). It has pronounced those opposing that decree to be heretics, to be scourged from public discussion.

In case some scientists maintain that forbidden skepticism toward Al Gore's pet cause, the Royal Society has recommended that they be stripped of their research grants, for two reasons. One, to divert the grants to the faithful, and two, for fear the heretics might turn up some real evidence that manmade GW is trivial by comparison with natural temperature fluctuations.

For instance, like the evidence which The Australian has brought to our attention.