FALSE ALARM: Why Almost Everything We’ve Been Told About Global Warming is Misleading, Exaggerated, or Plain Wrong

In 2008, IPCC president Rajendra Pachauri told an audience in Australia:  “We’re at a stage where warming is taking place at a much faster rate [than before].” Globe and Mail columnist Geoffrey Simpson wrote in 2009: “Climate-warming predictions of three or four years ago are already out of date. New science suggests an even faster warming than had been thought possible.” [italics added in both cases]

This week (Nov. 25, 2010), Vicky Pope of the British Meteorological Office announced: “There’s a very clear warming trend but it’s not as rapid as it was before.” [italics added] She said that while the average temperature had been rising at about 0.16 degrees per decade since the 1970s, the rate through the 2000s had been from 0.05 to 0.13 degrees.

The figure of 0.05 to 0.13° Celsius is also suspect. The figures from the Met Office’s Hadley Institute show nothing of the kind (see Figure 1).

Figure 1: HadCrut temperatures 2000-2010

The increase shown here is about .01°C. Extrapolated over the rest of the century, the temperature increase (aka “global warming” or “climate disruption”) would be .1°C, or one-sixth the .6°C increase claimed for the 20th century.

As part of her announcement, Pope also said the Met Office is planning to review the way it reports temperatures. It seems the temperature record isn’t showing the warming the Met expects and wants, so it’s planning to move the goal-posts, as it were, by arbitrarily raising the temperatures for the past decade.

There’s an easier way to go: Accept that the HadCrut temperatures are correct, or as correct as humanly possible, and that the last decade hasn’t warmed as predicted by the anthropogenci global warming hypothesis. Real scientists accept the facts when the facts don’t match the hypothesis; they don’t change their measurement of the data to conform to the hypothesis….

… As the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, James Hansen’s personal fiefdom, does with its figures. Figure 2 is GISS’s estimate of temperatures over the past decade. The figures are clearly inflated (the technical term is “adjusted”) to match the hypothesis of increased, “accelerated” warming. In other words, the Met Office admits warming hasn’t accelerated, while exaggerating (“adjusting”) the tiny bit of warming that its thermometers said did occur, while GISS wildly exaggerates to get accelerated warming. Neither can be trusted.

Figure 2: GISS temperatures 2000-2010

Two recent posts (here and here) have dealt with a comment by sTeve on my blog on NOAA’s claim that the temperature had increased by .2° Celsius in the past decade. As I showed, this claim is based on one of the four climate monitoring agencies, the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, headed by arch-warming alarmist James Hansen and therefore so politicized as to be of little credibility. The other three agencies, as I’ve written, show little (“statistically insignificant”, to quote Climatic Research Unit head Phil Jones) warming since 1998.

This lack of warming for the decade was not predicted by the IPCC’s climate models, yet if the models were correct the past decade would have warmed by the suggested .2°C. This failure suggests that natural factors, particularly the oceans and sun are more powerful than human activities in causing warming, or in not causing warming. This should not be a surprise, given that the sun and oceans have always been the main causes of climate change-are at least, they were until alarmist climatology came into being. Continue Reading »