[Back in December 2007, Dr David Whitehouse, who was for many years a science correspondent and then science editor at the BBC, wrote a very controversial article for the New Statesman entitled ‘Has Global Warming Stopped?’. This sparked a heated blog debate that accumulated some 3000 comments before the New Statesman closed it and the discussion then transferred to Harmless Sky. A further 7000 comments have been posted since then.
This is an update to that article and was written in response to a report by the BBC’s David Shukman which can be found here. It’s worth looking at this before reading on, and also noting that David Whithouse’s article pre-dates Paul Hudson’s What happened to global warming? story on the BBC website]
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It took quite a while for the fact that global annual average temperatures haven’t altered for a decade to become accepted by mainstream science, even if there are many who still doubt that it is either happening or important. Likewise one must also be glad that the media is catching up. Especially glad because it is the BBC.
One should take encouragement from the broadcast version of the Met ffice’s “Four degrees of warming ‘likely'” in that when referring to the recent temperature standstill it says that scientists have questioned it. The report did not call these questioners sceptics. Lets hope this nomenclature is applied consistently in the future by the organisation that said in 2005 that the science was settled.
However, the report did let a scientist get away with a biased interpretation of why the standstill has occurred, or rather bypassing the problematic nature of its existence. Dr Myles Allen said that one should look at the figures that are relevant, that is decade to decade changes. He said that temperatures are rising exactly as predicted as long as 30 years ago.
Well, I will leave the comment about as long as 30 years ago for your perusal in the context of climatic variations.
Dr Allen is wrong. The latest spell of warming began about 1980 following 40 years of standstill (still not adequately explained) and 90 prior years of warming. His decade to decade change is a less than two decade spell of warming, to the mid 1990’s, during which the warming increased at a rate much faster than the IPCC estimated the CO2 effect could account for. Since then there has been no change although of course it is warmer than it was in the 70s. This is another example of scientific double standards. The recent standstill is, of course, natural variability, the recent rise is, of course, man-made. It couldn’t possibly be the other way around? (Computer models can explain the recent trends, or more accurately, it is possible to select a few models that do from amongst the many that do not.)
Let’s look at decade-to-decade variability. In the past 15 decades it has warmed in 10 of them and stayed static in 5. But 8 of those decades were pre-1940 when we are told that man-made climate change had not taken effect. Since it has taken effect – a review of papers suggests a consensus of 1950 as a starting point – there have been 4 decades of standstill and 2 of warming. The recent warm decade is also no further above the mean global temperature than the cold Victorian age was below it.
It is alarming that the argument is moving away from real-world data and its inconvenience. The computer models point decades ahead and cannot be refuted. The UK Met Office says that global warming will resume 2009-2014, other scientists disagree. But even if the Met Office is proven wrong in its 2009-2014 forecast then it can still look to future decades and say it’s easier to predict 50 years ahead than 5!
The IPPC’s next assessment is due in 2014, but since the last one did not take into account the overwhelming major aspect of climate change of our time – the recent standstill – a more urgent review is needed.
[Dr Whitehouse’s comments were originally addressed to Benny Peiser of CCNet and I am posting them here with David’s kind permission. Another article by David Whitehouse, dealing with the controversy at the New Statesman, and particularly with the reaction of its environment columnist Mark Lynas, will be posted here shortly.]
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