Over at Climate Skeptic: Practically A Summary of this Blog you can find a list of Roger Cohen’s list of extremely inconvenient truths:
At this point there is little doubt that the IPCC position is seriously flawed in its central position that humanity is responsible for most of the observed warming of the last third of the 20th century, and in its projections for effects in the 21st century. Here are five key reasons for this:
- The recorded temperature rise is neither exceptional nor persistent. For example, the earth has not warmed since around 1997 and may in fact be in a cooling trend. Also, in particular, the Arctic and contiguous 48 states are at about the same temperature as they were in the 1930s. Also in particular the rate of global warming in the early 20th century was as great as the last third of the century, and no one seriously ascribes the early century increase to greenhouse gas emissions.
Click through to read the rest, and bookmark Climate Skeptic while you’re at it.
I instinctively react against any site that mentions that temperatures haven’t risen since 1997, because that was ‘one of those years’ that on their own mean nothing, whether they’re high or low. A couple of examples demonstrate what I mean. The first is simply that the world has warmed since both 1996 and 1998, which should tell you something about the representativeness of 1997.
The second is using their point about warming in the early 20th century. If you start from 1900 then temperatures actually fell slightly in the first third of the century, compared to the last third’s rise of around half a degree Celsius. But if you start from 1902 then they rose. (see http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/bb/Instrumental_Temperature_Record.svg for source). Picking a single date is the sort of sloppy science they claim to be against.
I suggest you spend some time reading the site, Paul, rather than relying on my excerpt of a statement quoted on the site.
If you actually look at the whole century of data, you see that the majority of the (slight) warming occurred before the majority of the CO2 emissions, and that the Earth cooled (slightly) from the end of WW2 to the mid 70s.
You might try buying a used copy of State of Fear by Michael Crichton off Amazon. Even if you think the story is hokey, the book is worth obtaining just for the footnotes.
Laura – I’ve read the site pretty well for quite some time, thanks. It often makes some good points, though depressingly often when I dig into those points I find that it makes the sort of mistakes it likes to accuse climate scientists of making. But if it wants to be a serious participant in the debate rather than a right-wing agenda-monkey, why use cheap tricks like cherry-picking dates?
For what it’s worth I don’t want climate change to be real, and would be delighted if climate predictions were proven to be flawed. I still think developing alternative sources of energy is important, and conservation is important (I find doing things to excess can be fun, but that doesn’t hold for things like leaving lights on!), but I don’t like hair-shirts and self-flagellation in climate matters any more than in anything else.
Be delighted then – they’re already proven to be flawed. Sometimes by outright lying, as in Mann’s disgraceful shenanigans.