| on Jul 18, 2008, 01:21 PM E.S.T.
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THESE are the seven graphs that should make the Rudd Government feel sick.
These are the seven graphs that should make you ask: What? Has global warming now stopped?
Look for yourself. They show that the world hasn't warmed for a decade, and has even cooled for several years.
Sea ice now isn't melting, but spreading. The seas have not just stopped rising, but started to fall.
Nor is the weather getting wilder. Cyclones, as well as tornadoes
and hurricanes, aren't increasing and the rain in Australia hasn't
stopped falling.
What's more, the slight warming we saw over the century until 1998
still makes the world no hotter today than it was 1000 years ago.
In fact, it's even a bit cooler. So, dude, where's my global warming?
These graphs should in fact be good news for the Government and all
the other warming preachers who warned we were doomed by our gases,
which were heating the world to hell.
Now Prime Minister Kevin Rudd can at last stop sweating about the
warming terrors he told us were coming - the horrific droughts, the
dengue fever, the malaria, the devastation to our land and economy.
And he can announce that, hey, emergency over for now. His emissions
trading scheme will go into deep freeze while he checks this good news.
As for his promise this week to make your power bills go up $200 a
year to stop global warming? His promise to make even food more
expensive? To put gassy companies out of business, and their workers
out of a job?
Cancel all that. As you were, soldier. Good news has come from the front.
But now you can see why these graphs terrify Rudd, who has never admitted to a single fact they contain.
You think he dares admit he panicked you for no good reason? Wasted countless millions of dollars?
Yet the facts are stark: The world simply isn't warming as he and his pet scientists said.
That's why 31,000 other scientists, including world figures such as
physicist Prof Freeman Dyson, atmospheric physicist Prof Richard
Lindzen and climate scientist Prof Fred Singer, issued a joint letter
last month warning governments not to jump on board the global warming
bandwagon.
"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of
carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will,
in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the earth's
atmosphere and disruption of the earth's climate."
That's why Ivar Glaever, who won a Nobel Prize for Physics, this
month declared "I am a sceptic", because "we don't really know what the
actual effect on the climate is".
And it's why the American Physical Society
this month said "there is a considerable presence within the scientific
community of people who do not agree with the (Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change) conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very
probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that
has occurred since the Industrial Revolution."
So let me go through my seven graphs that help to explain why even
Nobel Prize winners question what Rudd keeps claiming -- that man is
warming the world, and dangerously.
The main graph is from the Hadley Centre of Britain's Meteorological
Office and one of the four bodies measuring world temperature.
As you see, since 1998 -- an unusually warm year thanks to the "El
Nino" pool of warmer water in the Pacific -- the world's temperature
dropped back to a steady plateau, followed by a few years of cooling.
The second graph confirms both the halt in warming, and then
cooling. It's from another of those four bodies, the University of
Alabama in Huntsville, which monitors the troposphere -- from the
ground to 12km altitude.
Only one of the four, in fact, claims temperatures are still rising.
That's NASA, whose program is run by Dr James Hanson, Al Gore's global
warming adviser and a controversial catastrophist whose team's
reworking of data has been heavily criticised for exaggerating any
heating.
But before I go on, a caveat: This recent cooling doesn't disprove the theory that man is warming the world.
Ten years is too short to be sure of a trend. Natural factors may for now be countering the effect of our gases.
Then again, the theory that man has warmed the world is based on a
rise in temperature over a period that's not much longer -- from just
1975 to 1998.
And the computer climate models that scientists use to predict
catastrophic warming a century from now somehow never predicted a
cooling that's happening right now.
And these are the models Rudd is betting on with our jobs and cash.
The third graph shows another surprise those models never predicted: the seas have stopped rising.
The waters have crept up for at least 150 years, since the world
started to thaw from the Little Ice Age, and well before any likely
man-made warming.
But the climate models predicted that a big rise in emissions from
all those cars, power plants and factories since World War II would
cause an equally big rise in the seas, swelling them as much as 59cm by
2100.
This wasn't scary enough for alarmists like Al Gore, though, who
claimed whole cities could in fact be drowned under 6m of ocean.
But the satellites that have checked sea levels since 1992 find the
seas have instead fallen over the past two years. Again, this could be
a blip. But it isn't what the models predicted.
The fourth graph seems to confirm a cooling. Forget media scares
about a melting North Pole; sea ice has grown so fast in the southern
hemisphere there is now more ice in the world than is usual, says the
US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Graph five punctures another scare. No, global warming hasn't given
us more cyclones - or more tornadoes or hurricanes anywhere. Nor is
their proof that cyclones are getting worse, says the American
Meteorological Society.
And warming hasn't stopped our rain, either, despite media hype
about a "one-in-a-100 year drought". See the Bureau of Meteorology
records in graph six. It's just bad luck that the fickle rain now tends
to fall where it's not needed most.
And, please, can we drop that old fiction that the world was never
warmer? It's a false claim made popular by a 2001 report of the IPCC,
the United Nations' climate group, which ran a graph, shaped like a
hockey stick, claiming there was no warming for millennia until humans
last century gassed up their world.
In fact, that "hockey stick" is now discredited, and last year Dr
Craig Loehle, of the US National Council for Air and Stream
Improvement, argued that using tree rings to work out past temperatures
was clearly unreliable.
He instead produced a graph - No. 7 - of past temperatures using all other accepted proxies.
You see his results (which for statistical reasons stop at 1935):
they show humans lived through a medieval period that was warmer than
even today. This was a period that historical accounts confirm was so
warm that Greenland farmers grew crops on
land now under snow, and British ones grew grapes.
But I repeat: the world may yet warm again, and soon, although
scientists at Leibnitz Institute and Max Planck Institute last month
predicted it won't for at least another decade. If at all, say solar
experts worried by a lack of sun spots.
But even if none of my graphs disproves the theory that man is causing dangerous warming, they should at least make you pause.
They should at least make you open to other theories of climate
change, like that of Dr Henrik Svensmark, head of Denmark's Centre for
Sun-Climate Research, who thinks changes in cosmic rays, which affect
clouds, may explain much of the recent warming. And now the cooling,
too.
But, above all, when that man with the sandwich board comes tugging
at your sleeve again, shouting, "Quick, help me save the world - or
die", hang on to your wallet, friend.
Give that urger my seven graphs instead, and ask him how many more
years of no warming will it take before he admits it really is too soon
to panic. Source
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