Cracks in the Global Warming Foundation

The IPCC (the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) issued its latest report on climate change in 2007. That report has been used as the foundation for the global movement that has been advocating the adoption of very drastic policy measures by governments around the world to restrict greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, discussion of what international measures to adopt to address the findings of the 2007 IPCC report (formally called the Fourth Assessment Report) was the primary purpose of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference held in December 2009.

Proposed restrictions to address the climate change problems identified by the IPCC have been considered by many national governments, including the US, in recent years. These proposed requirements have included establishing Cap (the emissions) and Trade (for greenhouse gas credits) systems, shifting billions of dollars of wealth from developed nations to developing nations to allow them to adapt to the potentially dangerous effects of man-made climate change and other requirements that might be more sensible, such as improved energy efficiency standards and increased use of clean energy sources.

The widely quoted basic finding in the 2007 IPCC report that is cited as the reason such urgent global action is needed says that:

"Eleven of the last twelve years (1995–2006) rank among the 12 warmest years in the instrumental record of global surface temperature (since 1850)."
IPCC, 2007: Summary for Policymakers. In: Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis.

The temperature data used for this conclusion comes from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK. Here's the temperature graph used by the IPCC, as recently updated on the CRU website (http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/) to include 2008:


The head of the CRU was Professor Phil Jones, until he temporarily stepped aside in December 2009 when a University inquiry began into e-mails he exchanged with other climate scientists around the world over many years that were disclosed late last year and created the controversy now known as "Climategate".

In a BBC interview on February 13, 2010, Professor Jones made the following statements:

"....the warming rates for [the following] 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other. Here are the trends ..... for each period:

Period.......... Length.......... Trend (Degrees C per decade)

1860-1880... 21 years ........................... 0.163
1910-1940.... 31 .................................... 0.15
1975-1998.... 24 ................................... 0.166
1975-2009... 35 .................................... 0.161

BBC: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?

Jones: Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods." http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm

In other words, Professor Jones has now stated that two periods of 20 to 30 years since 1850 had warming trends that are not significantly different from the trend of the years 1975 to 2009. Furthermore, the warming trend from 1975 to 2009 is slightly cooler (0.161 C) than the period of 1975 to 1998 (0.166 C). For that reason, he reluctantly agreed that there has been "no statistically-significant global warming" since 1995! The only reason that he hesitated in his agreement to that statement is that the period of time since 1995 (14 years) is not long enough to create a 95% significance level.

These statements by Professor Jones, made just days ago, completely contradict the crucial IPCC conclusion of 2007 regarding recent years being the warmest on record since 1850 that has been repeated over and over again as the sound scientifically based foundation for policy proposals that could have potentially cost governments around the world billions of dollars, significantly hampered business operations everywhere and drastically impacted individuals' lives around the globe.

In addition, another one of the most prominent climate change scientists, Professor Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute in Germany's Kiel University, who has been a leading member of the IPCC for years and developed key methods for measuring ocean temperatures 3,000 feet beneath the surface where cooling and warming cycles start, predicted a new cooling trend in a paper published in 2008.

In an interview in January 2010 with the UK's Daily Mail, Professor Latif said "A significant share of the warming we saw from 1980 to 2000 and at earlier periods in the 20th Century was due to these [cooling and warming] cycles [beneath the surface of the oceans].... They have now gone into reverse, so winters like this one will become much more likely. Summers will also probably be cooler, and all this may well last two decades or longer.... The extreme retreats that we have seen in glaciers and sea ice will come to a halt. For the time being, global warming has paused, and there may well be some cooling." Read more on this: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1242011/DAVID-ROSE-The-mini-ice-age-starts-here.html#ixzz0fwFXbyzH

Professors Jones and Latif are certainly not climate change skeptics. They have been two very important members of the IPCC scientific team for many years. In fact, they are two of the most important scientists in charge of gathering and reporting the global land and sea temperatures that are used by the IPCC and others in the Church of Climatology to argue that we are in an unprecedented period of global warming caused by human activity that is responsible for dangerous emissions of carbon greenhouse gases.

It is very clear from the recent statements made by Professors Jones and Latif that the science supporting the so-called "Inconvenient Truth" of man-made global climate change is most certainly NOT SETTLED, as so often claimed by Al Gore and his followers!

To the contrary, two of the IPCC scientists responsible for reporting the global temperature data on which the IPCC conclusions are based have now said that there currently is NO GLOBAL WARMING (regardless of the extent of any man-made carbon gas emissions). One of these, Professor Jones, says that there has been no significant warming since 1995. The other, Professor Latif, says that there is likely to be global cooling for decades.

If key scientists on the IPCC team have come to these conclusions from the very data used by the IPCC, on what data is the iconic hockey stick graph shown above based? Is it the fantasy of an environmentally brainwashed Gore worshipping graphic artist? It certainly cannot be based on well-settled world class science since the IPCC scientists responsible for analyzing the global temperature data on which the climate science is purported to be based have now contradicted the 2007 conclusions of the IPCC. Sphere: Related Content