Debunking Global Warming

Here’s a question for Mythbusters.  Is the world getting warmer or cooler?   Scientists will tell you yes… or no, depending on which way they want to twist the statisitics.

It’s getting cooler if you look back 1000 years – but not if you try a bit harder and go back to the time of Christ.  Arctic temperatures are now higher than at any time in the last 2,000 years, research reveals.

Changes to the Earth’s orbit drove centuries of cooling, but temperatures rose fast in the last 100 years as human greenhouse gas emissions rose.

Scientists took evidence from ice cores, tree rings and lake sediments.

Writing in the journal Science, they say this confirms that the Arctic is very sensitive both to changes in solar heating and to greenhouse warming.

The 23 sites sampled were good enough to provide a decade-by-decade picture of temperatures across the region.

The result is a “hockey stick”-like curve in which the last decade – 1998-2008 – stands out as the warmest in the entire series.

“The most pervasive signal in the reconstruction, the most prominent trend, is the overall cooling that took place for the first 1,900 years [of the record],” said study leader Darrell Kaufman from Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, US.

“The 20th Century stands out in strong contrast to the cooling that should have continued.

The last half-century was the warmest of the 2,000-year temperature record, and the last 10 years have been especially dramatic,” he told BBC News.

On average, the region cooled at a rate of 0.2C per millennium until about 1900. Since then, it has warmed by about 1.2C.

Much debate on climate change has centred on the Mediaeval Warm Period, or Mediaeval Climate Anomaly – a period about 1,000 years ago when, historical records suggest, Vikings colonised Greenland and may have grown grapes in Newfoundland.

The new analysis shows that temperatures were indeed warmer in this region 1,000 years ago than they were 100 years ago – but not as warm as they are now, or 1,000 years previously.   But that is not the answer scientists want us to hear.  So we go back further, ignore the fact that climate is cyclical and we are in fact still emerging from the last ice age…. And press the panic button.

Global Warming

It’s raining again.  Rain doesn’t do today’s rather feisty weather justice.  It is pouring buckets, cats and dogs, accompanied by lightning bolts and deafening  thunder claps.  I simply daren’t go outside and take the dog for a walk.  An unusual year this – it seems to have been raining every day since Wimbledon – yet it was bone-dry during the oft-rain sodden tennis event. 

 

Yet during Wimbledon, when the weather was actually rather nice – the government got concerned.  A hot weather warning was issued.  Obviously not enough people were dropping dead from Swine Flu to be concerned about – so they were worried about some sunny weather instead.

 

I must be one of the few people in the world that doesn’t really belive in global warning.  I still believe in the phrase ‘nice summer’s day for example.  And I like to sit outside with a drink at the end of the day – despite the hidden dangers lurking in all that sunshine.

 

You see to my mind the eco-terrorists that think me changing my light bulbs will make a better world are missing a few salient points.  Now granted, if any of them were born in 1976 – but there were a good few summer’s days that year too.  In fact it was bone dry for months on end.  Even Test matches went on for 5 days with no interruptions for the rain.  Yet nobody bleated about global warming, no government minister read stupid platitudes from an autocue.  We simply made the most of the hot weather, safe in the knowledge that we wouldn’t see another year like it for years.

 

We. Still haven’t of course.  In point of fact, ever since somebody invented global warming, carbon footprints, ozone layer holes etc – our summers have gone largely cold and distinctly damp.  Which is all down to global warming of course.

 

There was an interesting photo in the Times yesterday.  The village of Lynmouth in North Devon had been hit by a freak storm of biblical proportions.  Nine inches of rain fell in 24 hours.  Over 100 buildings were destroyed.  34 cars were washed out to sea from roads that had become raging torrents.  420 people were made homeless – and a staggering 34 people lost their lives.  It happened in August 1952.

 

The eco-warriors are simply busting for some such tragedy to strike again – or a hurricane to sweep in and turn Sevenoaks into Oneoaks as happened so memorably in 1987.

 

The funny thing is it WILL happen.  Britain is a temperate island that occasionally has violent storms.  The very worst one on record occurred in November 1703 – even I don’t remember that one.  But global warming was not to blame – it is simply a fact of nature.

There is no such thing as average rainfall and average sunshine.  The are simply convenient statistics.  So it is nonsense to take random events and extrapolate a bleak future.

 

Sure Britain and the world is warming up.  It has been for a few hundred thousand years since the last ice age.  But Britain now is colder than it was in Roman times.  So if you wanted too – you could claim with statistical back up that we are actually suffering global cooling.  And all those flatulent cows, gas-guzzling cars, Indian and Chinese power stations are doing us a big favour.