Or, to ask another obvious question, “Could we be wrong about global warming?”, as even USA Today’s blogs are beginning to ask:
Could the best climate models — the ones used to predict global warming — all be wrong?
Maybe so, says a new study published online today in the journal Nature Geoscience. The report found that only about half of the warming that occurred during a natural climate change 55 million years ago can be explained by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What caused the remainder of the warming is a mystery.
“In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record,” says oceanographer Gerald Dickens, study co-author and professor of Earth Science at Rice University in Houston. “There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models.”
During the warming period, known as the “Palaeocene-Eocene thermal maximum” (PETM), for unknown reasons, the amount of carbon in Earth’s atmosphere rose rapidly. This makes the PETM one of the best ancient climate analogues for present-day Earth.
As the levels of carbon increased, global surface temperatures also rose dramatically during the PETM. Average temperatures worldwide rose by around 13 degrees in the relatively short geological span of about 10,000 years.
The conclusion, Dickens said, is that something other than carbon dioxide caused much of this ancient warming. “Some feedback loop or other processes that aren’t accounted for in these models — the same ones used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for current best estimates of 21st century warming — caused a substantial portion of the warming that occurred during the PETM.”
In their most recent assessment report in 2007, the IPCC predicted the Earth would warm by anywhere from 2 to 11 degrees by the end of the century due to increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused by human industrial activity.
Basically, what he’s saying is that even though there’ve been increases in CO2 in the past, the correlation between temperature and carbon that pro-global warming scientists think ought to be there isn’t. Something else besides carbon content in the earth’s atmosphere accounts for a goodly share of climate change. So, not only is global warming theory not an accurate predictor of future climate behaviour (as the current cooling trend which has been going on since 1979 shows), but it doesn’t even backtest accurately either. I.e. the models used for climate change are wrong. That’s what happens when you substitute wishful thinking and the need to support the environmentalist agenda in place of, well, actual science.
Maybe this is why thousands of scientists in the relevant fields of study have basically came out and said that anthropogenic global warming is “not supported by the scientific evidence”?
It’s time to revisit the notion, first advanced by some Japanese scientists decades ago, that climate change has more to do with solar activity than anything else. And yes, that really is as much of a “Duh” proposition as it seems to the average observer who uses a little common sense.
BTW, it’s got to be at least a tiny bit disconcerting to the AGW-fanatics that an official blog associated with a MSM outlet like USA Today is feeling forced to begin to allow question of the “theory.”
* – C’mon people, this is a family blog!
