| on Aug 8, 2008, 11:35 AM E.S.T.
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 The scare: In an official press release of the Royal
Society, Britain’s oldest taxpayer-funded body, Martin Rees, its
president, is quoted as saying: “The science of climate change is
complex; however the weight of scientific evidence shows that ‘global
warming’ caused by human actions is happening now …”
The truth: The weight of scientific evidence shows
that “global warming” began 300 years ago, at the end of an unusually
prolonged period of comparative solar inactivity known as the Maunder
Minimum, and has continued since then at a near-uniform 1 F per
century. Throughout most of that long period of warming, we were not
numerous enough or industrially active enough to have made any impact
on mean global surface temperatures whatsoever (Akasofu, 2007). The
last year which set a record for mean global surface temperature was
1998, when an exceptional but not unprecedented El Nino Southern
Oscillation caused a sharp spike in global temperatures as stored heat
was released from the world’s oceans to the atmosphere. Note that the
instrumental temperature record began only in 1880; and, given the
long-run rising trend in global temperatures, higher temperatures at
the end of the period of record are scarcely surprising.
Since 1998 no new annual temperature record has been set. Since late
2001, linear-regression trends for all four of the major
global-temperature datasets have been downward (Figure 1). The drop in
temperature between January 2007 and January 2008 was the greatest
since instrumental records began in 1880. Whatever else is happening in
the climate, “global warming” is not “happening now” and has not been
happening for a decade. No new annual global-temperature record is
expected until 2015 (Keenlyside et al., 2008). Not one of the computer
models predicted this long period of global cooling. In the month of
June 2008, exactly 20 years after James Hansen’s forecast to Congress
that global temperatures would rise sharply, global temperatures were
actually cooler than they had been when he made the forecast in June
1988.
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