ScareWatch“Coolest year for a decade meansmore ‘global warming’ to come”

by

Christopher Monckton

December 7, 2008

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“Coolest year for a decade meansmore ‘global warming’ to come”

The scare: In early December 2008, The Guardian, the newspaper of Britain’spublic-sector elite, finally admitted to its readers that “global warming” has beenreplaced by global cooling, saying that 2008 would be the “coolest year of thedecade”, one-seventh of a degree Celsius below the average for the past tenyears. However, the paper said, “Cooler temperature is not evidence that ‘globalwarming’ is slowing.” The paper quoted Dr. Peter Stott, the “manager ofunderstanding and attributing climate change” at the Met Office, as saying, “Ifwe are going to understand climate change we need to look at long-term trends.”The paper also quoted Professor Myles Allen of Oxford University as saying that“climate skeptics would over interpret the figure,” which, he said, would have“felt like a warm year” in the 1980s: “2008 would have been a scorcher inCharles Dickens’ time.” The paper concluded that 2008 would be “the tenth-hottest year on record”, and cited Keenlyside et al. (2008) to the effect that therewould be no new record year for global temperatures until 2015, whentemperatures would “begin to accelerate” again.

The truth: The artfully-constructed story in The Guardian carefully failed toput the recent global cooling into perspective. For instance, the paper talks of2008 as “the tenth-hottest year on record”, but does not tell readers that therecord began only in 1880. Nor does it draw attention to the fact that the rise intemperatures during the first 100 years of the instrumental record cannot havehad anything much to do with anthropogenic “global warming”, because thepopulation and activities of humankind were insufficient to make an appreciabledifference.

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For 600m years, it was7 °C warmer than today

The Guardian is careful not to put recent temperature trends into the long-termperspective recommended by Dr. Stott (who was the UK Government’s starwitness in its unsuccessful attempt to defend the accuracy of Al Gore’s climatemovie: the judge concluded that “the Armageddon scenario that he depicts is notbased on any scientific view”. Throughout most of the past half billion years,global temperatures were 7 degrees C (12.5 F) warmer than the present.

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4 interglacials were ~3 °Cwarmer than the present

CO2

Petit et al., 1999

Temperature

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It was also warmer than today in each of the past four interglacial periods – thetemperature chart in Al Gore’s movie actually shows this, but the audience iscarefully misdirected so as not to appreciate its significance. Gore says thatwhenever CO2 concentration increased the planet warmed, but in fact thereverse was true: whenever the planet warmed, atmospheric CO2 concentrationsincreased 800-2800 years later (Petit et al., 1999).

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“Warming” in geological perspective

Current interglacial period

Holocene optimum

MR

300years'

"warming"

Today's temperature

YoungerDryascooling

LastIceAge

15,000 5,000 years BP 010,000

Adapted from Curry & Clow (1997)

-- 45 °C

-- 40 °C

-- 35 °C

-- 30 °C

For most of the 10,000 years of the present interglacial period, globaltemperatures were warmer than the present, notably in the Bronze Age climateoptimum, when the weather was warmer than today for 2,000 years; and in theRoman and Mediaeval warm periods. Attempts by the UN’s climate panel, theIPCC, to reverse its original finding that the Middle Ages were warmer than nowhave been thoroughly discredited in the scientific literature: hundreds of peer-reviewed papers by approaching 1,000 scientists demonstrate that theMediaeval warm period was real; global; and warmer than today.

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Bronze Age, Roman era,Middle Ages: warmer too

From Dansgaard et al. (1969)and Schonweise (1995)

The Guardian is also careful not to tell its readers that global temperatures havebeen rising for 300 years since the end of the 70-year Maunder Minimum,during which there were almost no sunspots on the Sun, intense global coolingresulted, and the rivers Thames (in London) and Hudson (in New York)regularly froze over during the winters.

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The Sun has been raisingtemperature for 300 years

Hathaway et al. (2004)

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From the end of the Maunder Minimum to the end of the 70-year solar GrandMaximum in 1998, solar activity climbed steadily (Hathaway, 2004), and globaltemperatures also climbed (Akasofu, 2008). Indeed, the Central EnglandTemperature Record, the world’s oldest instrumental temperature dataset,shows temperatures climbing by 2.2 degrees C (3.5 F) in a third of a centuryfrom 1700-1735, a rate of increase at least eight times the mean warming rate ofthe 20th century.

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Temperature rose 2.2 ºCin the 35 years 1700-1735

Central England Temperature Series(Archibald, 2007)

The Guardian is among many news media that have followed the UN’s climatepanel in pretending that the 25 years’ warming that stopped in 1998 occurred atan unprecedented rate. In fact it was identical to the rate observed twicepreviously in the 20th century. Both the previous periods of rapid warming hadoccurred before we could have had any real influence on climate.

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Identical slopes

Parallelwarmings:

The Guardian rightly says that the very cold period at the beginning of 2008 wasprobably caused chiefly by an exceptional La Nina Southern Oscillation – acyclical change in ocean currents throughout the world that causes a fewmonths’ cooling every three or four years. However, The Guardian was wrong tosay the cold weather was not exceptional. Globally, the winter was the coldest in20 years: in the US and China, the coldest for 50 years.

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No net warming since 1980

On one measure (the University of Alabama at Huntsville’s global satellite-temperature dataset), 2008 will be no warmer than 1980, 28 years ago. Why?Because throughout the past seven years, during which The Guardian has beenone of the most extreme of the alarmist news media reporting on the imagined“threat” from climate change, all measures show the world has been cooling.

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-------- NASA GISS-------- RSS MSU-------- UAH AMSU-------- HadCRUt3

7 years’ global cooling03 04 05 06 07 2008

The Guardian is also incorrect to suggest that recent temperature trends arefollowing the path predicted by the UN’s climate panel and the climate modelson which it relies. Only one year after the UN published its forecast of howtemperatures would inexorably rise as a result of “global warming”,temperatures have in fact plummeted.

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Reality

IPCC

Though much of this drop in temperatures will probably soon be reversedfollowing the end of the La Nina event, during 2008 the Pacific DecadalOscillation, another influential system of ocean currents, switched from its 30-year warming phase to its cooling phase. Also, the Sun has been unusuallyinactive in the past three years, with more than 400 sunspot-free days. Thesetwo circumstances presage at least a slowing in the warming rate so recently buterroneously predicted by the IPCC.

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The fall in temperatures for seven years, and the failure of temperatures to showany statistically-significant increase for 13 (or perhaps 28) years, raise seriousconcern about the reliability of the IPCC’s projections of a rapid warming rate inresponse to recent increases in carbon dioxide concentration. As matters nowstand, global temperatures have not risen above the 300-year warming trend. Itis difficult, therefore, to detect an anthropogenic signal in the global temperaturerecord at all.

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o

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1.0

1.2

1.4C

1990 2000 2010 2020

A: Hansen: CO2 stabilizedB : Hansen: likely outturnC : Hansen 1988: worst caseD : IPCC (1990) projectionE : NCDC anomaliesF: NCDC trendG : McKitrick curveH : McKitrick trend

A

B

C

E

G

D

F

H

The IPCC has already had to reduce its projected warming rate compared with theexaggerated forecast it had issued in 1990 (yellow trend-line). However, the outturn (redtrend-line) is well below even the revised forecast. And the outturn itself is exaggerated,because the compilers of the global-temperature datasets make inadequate allowance forurbanization and consequent contamination of the temperature trend (McKitrick, 2007:dark red trend-line).

The real-world temperature trend has now been very far below the IPCC’sprojections for a long enough period to demonstrate that the official estimates ofhow much the temperature may increase as a result of CO2 enrichment of theatmosphere must be exaggerations. This is no great surprise: both the 1990 and1995 reports of the UN’s climate panel had concluded that there was nodiscernible human influence on global temperature trends, though the 1995report was rewritten after the scientists had finalized it, so that the publishedversion stated the opposite.

As Glenn Beck wryly commented on his radio show on 6 December 2008 inresponse to the scare story in The Guardian, “Don't look at the cooling trend---just remember that the temperatures are going to really heat up in 2015! It's fun

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to watch the ‘global warming’ alarmists deflect every little detail that comes outshowing global warming isn't as bad as they say it is---you know, inconvenientsmall facts like the global temps have cooled in the last decade – not warmed.”End of scare.

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