Al Gore must be a very, very unhappy man.
The New York Times published a piece Monday evening to appear in Tuesday's paper that exposed the really inconvenient truth that despite a rapid rise in carbon dioxide the past fifteen years, global warming has plateaued (emphasis added):
The rise in the surface temperature of earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that. And that lull in warming has occurred even as greenhouse gases have accumulated in the atmosphere at a record pace.
The slowdown is a bit of a mystery to climate scientists. True, the basic theory that predicts a warming of the planet in response to human emissions does not suggest that warming should be smooth and continuous. To the contrary, in a climate system still dominated by natural variability, there is every reason to think the warming will proceed in fits and starts.
But given how much is riding on the scientific forecast, the practitioners of climate science would like to understand exactly what is going on. They admit that they do not, even though some potential mechanisms of the slowdown have been suggested. The situation highlights important gaps in our knowledge of the climate system, some of which cannot be closed until we get better measurements from high in space and from deep in the ocean.
Let's look at what I've bolded to understand some reasons why the whole theory of anthropogenic global warming is just that - a theory that not only hasn't been proven despite claims by its adherents, but really isn't based in science at all.
"The slowdown is a bit of a mystery to climate scientists." Readers are advised that much of the theory is based on the work of computer models which continue to be proved wrong. The believers in this theory in their zeal to prove it constructed models that took a very small amount of historical climate data in the grand scheme of things, created a correlation to atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, and tried to predict what temperatures would do in the future as CO2 continued to rise.
Beyond the inherent failing of these models was the lack of understanding that correlation does not imply causality. But far more important is the belief by many skeptical scientists that atmospheric carbon dioxide increases as a result of rising temperatures and not the other way around.
This confirms the next bold "the practitioners of climate science would like to understand exactly what is going on. They admit that they do not."
There's a lot that's funny about these two sentences because for decades these people have been telling us that they understand everything about climate science and it's the skeptics that are denying it. Now when the weather doesn't do what they predicted, they suddenly admit they don't understand what's happening.
The reality is nobody does. Climate is very complicated, and it's amazingly arrogant of anyone - or group of people - to claim that they've answered all of its questions.
Within the ranks of the skeptics, there are many theories about what is responsible for the warming the planet has seen in the past 160 years. Their major agreement has been that giving so much weight to manmade carbon dioxide increases ignores many of the more natural variations that likely play a far larger role.
"[I]mportant gaps in our knowledge of the climate system." Indeed there are. This is a major argument of the skeptics. Yet despite such gaps, the alarmists believe they can predict the future. Pretty absurd, isn't it?
And these gaps "cannot be closed until we get better measurements from high in space and from deep in the ocean."
This is another point the skeptics make: many of the measurements in the past, particularly prior to satellite usage in 1979, are rather unreliable, as is data collected from the various weather stations around the world. Yet the alarmists took this data and used it to predict the future while asking countries to implement significant programs harmful to their economies in order to solve a problem that may actually not exist.
Fortunately for the United States, Republicans have been able to prevent the implementation of cap-and-trade.
We can only hope that more media outlets will bring this global warming plateau to light making it less and less likely Congress will ever go along with such a scheme.
