Great. Now how is Al Gore going to make billions off that carbon credit snake oil he’s been selling?
At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average.
Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth’s average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.Ironically, climate change appears to have stalled in the run-up to the upcoming world summit in the Danish capital, where thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, business leaders and environmental activists plan to negotiate a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Billions of euros are at stake in the negotiations.
The planet’s temperature curve rose sharply for almost 30 years, as global temperatures increased by an average of 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.25 degrees Fahrenheit) from the 1970s to the late 1990s. “At present, however, the warming is taking a break,” confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany’s best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. “There can be no argument about that,” he says. “We have to face that fact.”
Even though the temperature standstill probably has no effect on the long-term warming trend, it does raise doubts about the predictive value of climate models, and it is also a political issue. For months, climate change skeptics have been gloating over the findings on their Internet forums. This has prompted many a climatologist to treat the temperature data in public with a sense of shame, thereby damaging their own credibility.
You know, you can almost smell the disappointment in this article. It’s like they’re thinking, “Well &%$, there goes our excuse for the destruction of the American economy and the imposition of all the massive taxes and intrusive regulations we had planned.”
Three things sort of leapt out at me from the article.
1) Obviously, there really has been a ten-year, ah, alteration in the “warming trend,” just like the “climate change sceptics” have been saying all along. It’s so obvious, even the people with the vested interest in tubthumping for global warming are having to admit it. This rather makes all those pseudo-scientific types out there, such as Peter Sinclair at “Climate Crock of the Week,” look like the ill-informed dunderheads that they, in fact, are. The evidence also seems to be shaping up in support of decadal oscillation theories for cyclical climate fluctuation, which right now is my personal horse in the race.
2) AGW-supporting climatologists are finally admitting that computer-generated models are not as good as actual data. The problem for them, of course, is that the actual data don’t support their theories, so they’ve been trying to do just about everything they could think of to get around having to use them.
Which brings us to,
3) There is an obvious bias in the way that a good number of climatologists approach this issue. Specifically, it is apparent that they want really, really badly for AGW to be true, and that affects the way they treat the information we have. For instance, there is the assumption that temperatures should just keep going up, despite evidence to the contrary that suggests that temperatures fluctuate – and not in accord with average CO2 levels. This, then, accounts for the “puzzlement” felt by these scientists – which would not be felt if they simply let the data do the leading, instead of trying vainly to force it into the hockey-stick shaped mold that they want it to go into.
Why? Probably a number of reasons. Many of these scientists, especially the European ones, are ideologically sold out to the environmentalist movement. For these, it truly is a matter of holy writ, and for them, the idea that temperatures aren’t indefinitely rising because of man’s wicked and abominable use of the internal combustion engine is akin to a Muslim being told that the Qur’an is full of errors and inconsistencies, and that Allah is a moon god. If these guys weren’t against weapons too, they’d probably be cutting our heads off.
For others, it’s all about the money. Let’s be honest here – “Big Oil” isn’t the only one with a dog in this race. It is common knowledge that university research which “happens” to find evidence for AGW tends to lead to more grant money to further investigate this problem. Conversely, projects that don’t support the politicians desire to use AGW as a springboard to the destruction of economies and the curtailment of freedoms are liable to find their funding dried up.
And then there’s the billions that people like Al Gore and his bankrollers stand to make if they can convince everyone of the need to use “carbon credits.” As an aside, I foresee “carbon credits” becoming a sumptuary phenomenon in the future, helping to widen the gap between those companies and individuals at the top who can afford to “offset” their carbon production at the expense of the ever-growing mass of serfs at the bottom who can’t, since they lost their jobs, etc. In essence, AGW is a route to the destruction of the middle class – that group of people that nobility, pretended or otherwise, has always despised.
Speaking of Al Gore, I know this is kind of old news now, but this is the guy who claimed a couple of days ago that the interior of the Earth is several million degrees. Memo to Al – if that were the case, we’d all be plasma. That, friends, is the quality of scientific mind that is driving the AGW hysteria. No wonder Peter Sinclair (oh, did I mention that he’s not a scientist, but an independent film maker?) is so popular with this crowd.
Tags: Global Warming, Science
