https://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/files/080718%20oped%20bolt%20global%20cooling.pdf
These are the seven graphs that should make you ask: What? Has
global warming now stopped?
Look for yourself. They show that the world
hasn't warmed for a decade, and has even cooled for several years.
Sea
ice now isn't melting, but spreading. The seas have not just stopped rising, but
started to fall.
Nor is the weather getting wilder. Cyclones, as well as
tornadoes and hurricanes, aren't increasing and the rain in Australia hasn't
stopped falling.
What's more, the slight warming we saw over the century
until 1998 still makes the world no hotter today than it was 1000 years
ago.
In fact, it's even a bit cooler. So, dude, where's my global
warming?
These graphs should in fact be good news for the Government and
all the other warming preachers who warned we were doomed by our gases, which
were heating the world to hell.
Now Prime Minister Kevin Rudd can at last
stop sweating about the warming terrors he told us were coming - the horrific
droughts, the dengue fever, the malaria, the devastation to our land and
economy.
And he can announce that, hey, emergency over for now. His
emissions trading scheme will go into deep freeze while he checks this good
news.
As for his promise this week to make your power bills go up $200 a
year to stop global warming? His promise to make even food more expensive? To
put gassy companies out of business, and their workers out of a
job?
Cancel all that. As you were, soldier. Good news has come from the
front.
But now you can see why these graphs terrify Rudd, who has never
admitted to a single fact they contain.
You think he dares admit he
panicked you for no good reason? Wasted countless millions of
dollars?
Yet the facts are stark: The world simply isn't warming as he
and his pet scientists said.
That's why 31,000 other scientists,
including world figures such as physicist Prof Freeman Dyson, atmospheric
physicist Prof Richard Lindzen and climate scientist Prof Fred Singer, issued a
joint letter last month warning governments not to jump on board the global
warming bandwagon.
"There is no convincing scientific evidence that human
release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or
will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the earth's
atmosphere and disruption of the earth's climate."
That's why Ivar
Glaever, who won a Nobel Prize for Physics, this month declared "I am a
sceptic", because "we don't really know what the actual effect on the climate
is".
And it's why the American Physical Society this month said "there is
a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not
agree with the (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) conclusion that
anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible
for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial
Revolution."
So let me go through my seven graphs that help to explain
why even Nobel Prize winners question what Rudd keeps claiming -- that man is
warming the world, and dangerously.
The main graph is from the Hadley
Centre of Britain's Meteorological Office and one of the four bodies measuring
world temperature.
As you see, since 1998 -- an unusually warm year
thanks to the "El Nino" pool of warmer water in the Pacific -- the world's
temperature dropped back to a steady plateau, followed by a few years of
cooling.
The second graph confirms both the halt in warming, and then
cooling. It's from another of those four bodies, the University of Alabama in
Huntsville, which monitors the troposphere -- from the ground to 12km
altitude.
Only one of the four, in fact, claims temperatures are still
rising. That's NASA, whose program is run by Dr James Hanson, Al Gore's global
warming adviser and a controversial catastrophist whose team's reworking of data
has been heavily criticised for exaggerating any heating.
But before I go
on, a caveat: This recent cooling doesn't disprove the theory that man is
warming the world.
Ten years is too short to be sure of a trend. Natural
factors may for now be countering the effect of our gases.
Then again,
the theory that man has warmed the world is based on a rise in temperature over
a period that's not much longer -- from just 1975 to 1998.
And the
computer climate models that scientists use to predict catastrophic warming a
century from now somehow never predicted a cooling that's happening right
now.
And these are the models Rudd is betting on with our jobs and
cash.
The third graph shows another surprise those models never
predicted: the seas have stopped rising.
The waters have crept up for at
least 150 years, since the world started to thaw from the Little Ice Age, and
well before any likely man-made warming.
But the climate models predicted
that a big rise in emissions from all those cars, power plants and factories
since World War II would cause an equally big rise in the seas, swelling them as
much as 59cm by 2100.
This wasn't scary enough for alarmists like Al
Gore, though, who claimed whole cities could in fact be drowned under 6m of
ocean.
But the satellites that have checked sea levels since 1992 find
the seas have instead fallen over the past two years. Again, this could be a
blip. But it isn't what the models predicted.
The fourth graph seems to
confirm a cooling. Forget media scares about a melting North Pole; sea ice has
grown so fast in the southern hemisphere there is now more ice in the world than
is usual, says the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration.
Graph five punctures another scare. No, global warming
hasn't given us more cyclones - or more tornadoes or hurricanes anywhere. Nor is
their proof that cyclones are getting worse, says the American Meteorological
Society.
And warming hasn't stopped our rain, either, despite media hype
about a "one-in-a-100 year drought". See the Bureau of Meteorology records in
graph six. It's just bad luck that the fickle rain now tends to fall where it's
not needed most.
And, please, can we drop that old fiction that the world
was never warmer? It's a false claim made popular by a 2001 report of the IPCC,
the United Nations' climate group, which ran a graph, shaped like a hockey
stick, claiming there was no warming for millennia until humans last century
gassed up their world.
In fact, that "hockey stick" is now discredited,
and last year Dr Craig Loehle, of the US National Council for Air and Stream
Improvement, argued that using tree rings to work out past temperatures was
clearly unreliable.
He instead produced a graph - No. 7 - of past
temperatures using all other accepted proxies.
You see his results (which
for statistical reasons stop at 1935): they show humans lived through a medieval
period that was warmer than even today. This was a period that historical
accounts confirm was so warm that Greenland farmers grew crops on
land
now under snow, and British ones grew grapes.
But I repeat: the world may
yet warm again, and soon, although scientists at Leibnitz Institute and Max
Planck Institute last month predicted it won't for at least another decade. If
at all, say solar experts worried by a lack of sun spots.
But even if
none of my graphs disproves the theory that man is causing dangerous warming,
they should at least make you pause.
They should at least make you open
to other theories of climate change, like that of Dr Henrik Svensmark, head of
Denmark's Centre for Sun-Climate Research, who thinks changes in cosmic rays,
which affect clouds, may explain much of the recent warming. And now the
cooling, too.
But, above all, when that man with the sandwich board comes
tugging at your sleeve again, shouting, "Quick, help me save the world - or
die", hang on to your wallet, friend.
Give that urger my seven graphs
instead, and ask him how many more years of no warming will it take before he
admits it really is too soon to panic.
Discuss this
with other readers on Andrew's blog: blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/