Other voices on climate change

“In his latest book, Heaven and Earth, Australian geologist Ian Plimer sets out the “missing science” of climate change and challenges the assumption that the world’s warming is down to human activity. Far from heating up to dangerous levels, the planet is in a lull in an ice age that began 37 million years ago, he says.

“True, the climate is changing within these cyclical parameters, but less dramatically than it has at other times in Earth’s history and with none of the catastrophic consequences talked up by the doom-and-gloom merchants. “There is always change going on,” he says. “I don’t dispute that. The extent and origin of it are another matter.”

“Plimer puts forward the case, in 485 closely argued pages, that far too much emphasis has been given to the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide in the scientific modelling of climate change.”

For the rest of this article by Jamie Walker from The Australian, click here.

“Just as the great bull run that could-have-no-end, ended, another unthinkably big bubble quivers. Technical indicators are quietly being tripped that suggest the bull run in global temperatures that started in the late 1970s may be toying with a reversal. Could another large human institution dependent on complex models be headed for it’s ‘Lehman Bros’ moment?

“Will the climate keep hotting up, or are the latest downside breaks an indication of cool times to come? Billions in profits are at stake, as well as higher energy costs, thousands of careers, and really great junkets, but two groups of technical analysts come to very different conclusions. Who is right? And who will bail out the bureaucrats?”

For the whole article by Joanne Nova and David Evans, click here.

Anthropogenic global warming believers are notoriously debate-shy, and with good reason. They almost always lose. However, below is an excerpt from the transcript of a debate between skeptic Christopher Monckton and De Smog Blog editor Richard Littlemore (who, later, actually admits he was defeated, although not with good grace). For the full transcript, click here.

An excerpt:

Monckton

Now the temperature record is like this; the temperature went up very fast between about 1906 and 1940. Indeed in the 1920s and 1930s it went up very fast indeed. From 1940 until about 1975, it fell a little. From 1975 until 1998 it went up quite a lot — about 0.5 Celsius overall over the 50 years you are asking about. And that is of course preceded by a 0.5 degree Celsius increase long before humankind could have had anything to do with it in the first 50 years of the twentieth century.

So yes there has been an increase, however that increase has been going on at a rate on average of about 0.5 Celsius per century for 300 years, during 250 of which we could not possibly have had anything to do with it. And now that temperatures have been falling for the last seven years and falling at a rate of about 0.4 degrees Celsius per century according to the Hadley Center’s records, or per decade I should say, the overall effect is that there has been no increase in the long-run warming rate over the past 300 years. There has been no particular change in the second half of the twentieth century.

Littlemore

I don’t know where you’re getting a lot of this. But if your listeners would like to Google, climate or um, global warming, um, or go to Wikipedia and look up global warming, they can get a nice graph from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — a pretty reputable organization — that will show you some of the ups and downs that have been mooted here. But from 1950 until now, if you put a ruler on the curve it goes up at about a 45 degree angle. Eleven of the hottest years in recorded history occurred in the last 13 years. How that can be characterized as anything other than a considerable increase. … I mean it’s not just 11 of the hottest years in recorded history. According to some very good climate reconstructions going back at least 1,000 years, we’re talking about the hottest decade in 1,000 years at least.

Monckton

Well no, we’re not. The ‘hockey stick’ graph that is purported to abolish the Medieval Warm Period was based on bristlecone pine reconstructions from tree rings using a process which the UN climate panel had itself said ought not to be used. If you take out the bristlecone pine record and use all the other datasets you find that, just as history confirms, there was a Medieval Warm Period during which temperatures were considerably higher than they are now.

Indeed, in the 10,000 years of the present interglacial period between ice ages, the temperature has been warmer than today about two-thirds of the time. And in each of the previous four or five interglacial periods, which occur every 125,000 years, the temperature has been up to 5 degrees Celsius warmer than it is today, and humankind cannot have had anything to do with it. What is more, the Sun has been more active and for longer over the last 70 years than at almost any previous similar period over the past 11,400 years since the end of the last ice age.

Links to transcripts or videos several debates between skeptics and warmists can be found by clicking here.

“The IPCC blames human emissions of carbon dioxide for the last warming. But by general consensus human emissions of carbon dioxide have only been large enough to be significant since 1940—yet the warming trend was in place for well over a century before that. And there was a cooling period from 1940 to 1975, despite human emissions of carbon dioxide. And there has been no warming since 2001, despite record human emissions of carbon dioxide.

“There is no actual evidence that carbon dioxide emissions are causing global warming. Note that computer models are just concatenations of calculations you could do on a hand-held calculator, so they are theoretical and cannot be part of any evidence. Although the models contain some well-established science, they also contain a myriad of implicit and explicit assumptions, guesses, and gross approximations—mistakes in any of which can invalidate the model outputs.”

To read the rest of this article on the JoNova.com site, click here.