Friday, 18 July 2008
More Bad News For Global Warming Enthusiasts
The man made global warming theory continues to unravel. The latest convert is Australian David Evans. He was the scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model for measuring Australia's compliance to the Kyoto Protocol.
When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.
The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.
But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"
David points to three reasons he has changed his mind on the topic.
- There is no greenhouse signature. If global warming were occurring there would be a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the temperature there for decades and have not found a hot spot. Since there is no hot spot greenhouse gasses can't be the cause of global warming.
- The current warming trend ended in 2001 and the last year saw an drop of about one degree Fahrenheit.
- New ice cores show that temperature increases preceded rises in atmospheric carbon during the last six warming cycles over the last 500,000 years. Which is cause and which is effect?
Hate to bust your bubble global warming environmentalists, but the facts are starting to get in the way of your dogma. I guess you are going to have to find a new reason why we need to implement socialism and destroy capitalism. It was a nice try, but sometimes the truth just gets in the way.
