Watch the Web for Climate Change Truths; Global Warming Could Be Over
By Christopher Booker
The Telegraph (UK)
May 3, 2008
A notable stories of recent months should have been the evidence pouring in from all sides to cast doubts on the idea that the world is inexorably heating up. The proponents of man-made global warming have become so rattled by how the forecasts of their computer models are being contradicted by the data that some are rushing to modify the thesis.
So a German study, published by Nature last week, claimed that, while the world is definitely warming, it may cool down until 2015 “while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions”.
A little vignette of the media’s one-sided view was given by recent events on Snowdon, the highest mountain in southern Britain. Each year between 2003 and 2007, the retreat of its winter snow cover inspired reports citing this as evidence of global warming.
A polar bear mother and her two cubs in Wapusk National Park on the shore of Hudson Bay near Churchill, Manitoba. A scientific group that advises the government on endangered species has decided that polar bears don’t yet need more protection.(AP Photo/The Canadian Press,Jonathan Hayward)
In 2004 scientists from the University of Bangor made headlines with the prediction that Snowdon might lose its snowcap altogether by 2020. In 2007 a Welsh MP, Lembit Opik, was saying “it is shocking to think that in just 14 years snow on this mountain could be nothing but a distant memory”.
Last November, viewing photographs of a snowless Snowdon at an exhibition in Cardiff, the Welsh environment minister, Jane Davidson, said “we must act now to reduce the greenhouse gases that cause climate change”.
Yet virtually no coverage has been given to the abnormally deep spring snow which prevented the completion of a new building on Snowdon’s summit for more than a month, and nearly made it miss the deadline for £4.2 million of EU funding. (Brussels eventually extended the deadline to next autumn.)
Two weeks ago, as North America emerged from its coldest and snowiest winter for decades, the US National Climate Data Center, run by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a statement that snow cover in January on the Eurasian land mass had been the most extensive ever recorded, and that in the US March had been only the 63rd warmest since records began in 1895.
While global warming enthusiasts might take cheer from the NOAA’s claim that “average global land temperature” in March was “the warmest on record”, this was in striking contrast to a graph published last week on the Climate Audit website by Steve McIntyre.
Tracking satellite data for the tropical troposphere, it showed March temperatures plunging to one of their lowest points in 30 years.
Mr McIntyre is the computer expert who exposed the infamous “hockey stick” graph - that icon of warmist orthodoxy which showed global temperatures soaring recently to their highest level for 1,000 years. He showed that the computer model that produced this graph had been so designed that it would have conjured even random numbers from a telephone directory into the shape of a hockey stick).
On April 24 the World Wildife Fund (WWF), another body keen to keep the warmist flag flying, published a study warning that Arctic sea ice was melting so fast that it may soon reach a “tipping point” where “irreversible change” takes place. This was based on last September’s data, showing ice cover having shrunk over six months from 13 million square kilometres to just 3 million.
What the WWF omitted to mention was that by March the ice had recovered to 14 million sq km (see the website Cryosphere Today), and that ice-cover around the Bering Strait and Alaska that month was at its highest level ever recorded. (At the same time Antarctic sea ice-cover was also at its highest-ever level, 30 per cent above normal).
The most dramatic evidence, however, emerged last week with an announcement by Nasa’s …
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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2008/05/04/do0405.xml
Tags: politics, news, environment, pollution, Polar Bears, global warming, greenhouse gas, ice
May 5, 2008 at 4:42 pm
If the author had bothered to read all the way through the recent German report, he would have seen that it predicted a temporary slow-down in global warming through 2015… followed by a continuation of the warming trend.
Wake up, world! Population growth from 1 Billion people a hundred years ago to 10 Billion people in the near future is putting immense pressure on the planet. We consume, waste and pollute at rates that are shameful. Anyone with a reasonable ability to observe the natural world can see the consequences we have already incurred, and the trend we are perpetuating.