CLIPPING: Gunter: Sorry Al Gore, you're probably wrong

Monday, March 8, 2010

Global Warming: Gore Vs. Gunter

There's no crisis -- the only thing heating up is the debate

Lorne Gunter, National Post

If you are driving a car (say an unrepaired Toyota) and it suddenly
surges up to very high speeds, then runs out of gas, it may be true
that the first 100 metres after the tank goes dry are the fastest 100
metres the car has ever travelled. It does not follow, though, that
the car is still accelerating dangerously. Or at all.

In their attempt to repair the recent damage to their climate-change
cause, environmentalists -- such as former U.S. Vice-President Al
Gore, whose defence of the climate-change theory appears opposite --
have begun pointing out that the last decade was "the hottest decade
since modern records have been kept."

"What is important," Mr. Gore writes, is not the errors and
manipulations recently uncovered in the work of the UN and leading
climate scientist, but rather "that the overwhelming consensus on
global warming remains unchanged."

To both claims, I say, "So what?" Since 1998, we haven't seen things
heating up. One of the four main sources of worldwide temperatures
(NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies) claims 2005 was hotter --
slightly-- than 1998. But the point is, the trend over the last 12
years been roughly flat. The earth is not getting warmer, at least not
significantly. Global warming has paused.

So think of the climate like our runaway car. Temperatures rose
rapidly from 1979. Yet after 1998, the climb seems to have run out of
gas. It's been warm since, but it is no longer getting warmer rapidly,
if at all.

So what if 2000-2009 was the hottest decade since modern records began
being kept 150 years ago? That could just be a hangover from the
warming between the late 1970s and the mid-1990s. Before our speeding
sedan began to slow, it was still moving along at a pretty good clip,
too, despite having no more fuel.

As for Mr. Gore's claim that the "overwhelming consensus" among
scientists continues to support his alarmist view of future climate,
it bears remembering that scientific truth is never determined by a
show of hands. If it were, the sun would revolve around the Earth,
which would be flat.

Less facetiously (and more importantly), Mr. Gore's vaunted consensus
has cracks in it that were not there before the release last November
of thousands of damning emails and computer files from the Climate
Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Britain and
the discovery since December of more than a score of embarrassing
misstatements in the 2007 assessment report of the UN's
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- the holy book of
the current global-warming religion.

Last month, for instance, Phil Jones, the British climate professor at
the heart of the "Climategate" email scandal, told the BBC there had
been no significant

warming since 1995. He insisted the warming since then had been almost
significant. And he added that the warming from 1979 to today had been
statistically significant at a 95% confidence level. But the important
admission in his interview was that for the past 15 years there has
been only a slight warming, within the margin of statistical error.

If you had known for the past 15 years that global warming was on
hiatus, would you have been as worried about climate change as you
were? Would you have supported politicians promising to make
elaborate, expensive changes in our way of life to avert dangerous
warming?

Mr. Jones, while maintaining a "100%" belief in the warming theory,
also conceded that the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) from about 900 to
1300 may have been warmer than today. While this may sound like
hair-splitting, this concession is extremely important, because if
there was a time before SUVs and coal-fired power plants and carbon
footprints that was warmer than today, that makes the rise of
temperatures in the past century potentially unremarkable.

And it makes it potentially a natural phenomenon.

For the past decade or more, climate-change alarmists have tried to
deny the existence of the Medieval Warm Period (which used to be known
as the Medieval Optimal before it became politically incorrect to
think of a warm climate as desirable). Grapes grew in southern
England. Norse settlers established farms in Greenland. And the
plagues and territorial wars driven by scarcity that marked the Late
Middle Ages were centuries in the future -centuries notable for their
coldness during the Little Ice Age (1300 to 1850).

This drive to erase the MWP from climate history is what led

to the infamous "hockey stick" graph that is so central to the UN's
claims that our current warm period is to be feared. Scientists such
as Mr. Jones know that if they can establish that there was no other
warm era in the past 1,000 years -- if global temperatures were mild
and stable for the first 900 years and only shot up in the past 100
years as human production of carbon dioxide has increased -- then
industrialization can be blamed for threatening a climate apocalypse
and the UN (and smart, activist scientists such as those at the CRU
and IPCC) will have to be called in to help Al Gore save the planet by
directing us all how to live.

"Droughts are getting longer and deeper," Mr. Gore insists. And they
may be. But they were long and deep in the late 17th and early 18th
centuries, too. And one thing that era had in common with this one was
a lack of solar activity. Sun spots then, as now, were at a minimum.
Perhaps solar calmness, not atmospheric CO2, has something to do with
droughts.

The former vice-president also clings to the belief that global
warming will lead to more intense storms -hurricanes, tornadoes,
torrential rains and so on -even though the links between severe
storms and global warming, like the links between global warming and
Himalayan glacier melt, Amazon deforestation, sea-level rise, African
crop declines and Arctic ice melt, have been debunked, or at the very
least called into doubt.

For instance, according to the U.S. Storm Prediction Center, last
month had the fewest tornadoes (one weak one in California) of any
February since records have been kept. Last August was the first month
in nearly a century without any recorded sun spots. And since 2005,
when Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, there has been just one
major hurricane (Category 4 or higher) to hit the U.S. Indeed, there
are fewer hurricanes now that at any time since the 1960s.

None of this, nor the recent lack of additional warming , was
predicted by the computer models the UN relies on for its forecasts of
devastating future climate change which calls into question the
ability of these models -in which Mr. Gore puts so much faith -to
predict climate changes, good or bad, over the next century.

Honey bees aren't dying off because of global warming; they're dying
off because of a tiny mite that has plagued hives for decades. Polar
bears aren't dying off for lack of food to eat or ice to cling to.
They aren't dying off, period.

And the devastating melt of Arctic ice in 2007? Turns out the ice did
not melt "in place." According to a recent study by scientists at
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, wind pushed more
Arctic ice than usual out into the Atlantic that year where it melted
simply because that ocean is warmer than its Arctic counterpart. Not
because the Arctic is warming rapidly.

Could this wind shunting have been caused by global warming? Sure. But
it just as easily could have other, natural causes.

The point is, there is no consensus on climate science. There never
has been. By flinging names like "deniers" at skeptical scientists,
barring them from IPCC deliberations, preventing them from seeing the
warmers' raw climate data and keeping them from having their papers
peer reviewed, activists like Mr. Gore and the scientists who agree
with them have created an artificial consensus.

While that may be good politics, it is very bad science.

lgunter@shaw.ca

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