Is Gobal Cooling a Continuing Threat?

What happened to the 'warmest year on record': The truth is global warming has halted

By David Rose

Last updated at 4:17 PM on 5th December 2010





A year ago tomorrow, just before the opening of the UN Copenhagen world climate summit, the British Meteorological Office issued a confident prediction. The mean world temperature for 2010, it announced, 'is expected to be 14.58C, the warmest on record' - a deeply worrying 0.58C above the 19611990 average.



World temperatures, it went on, were locked inexorably into an everrising trend: 'Our experimental decadal forecast confirms previous indications that about half the years 2010-2019 will be warmer than the warmest year observed so far - 1998.'



Met Office officials openly boasted that they hoped by their statements to persuade the Copenhagen gathering to impose new and stringent carbon emission limits - an ambition that was not to be met.

Winter's icy grip: Drivers and pedestrians battle through blizzards in Kent last week



Last week, halfway through yet another giant, 15,000delegate UN climate jamboree, being held this time in the tropical splendour of Cancun in Mexico, the Met Office was at it again. Never mind that Britain, just as it was last winter and the winter before, was deep in the grip of a cold snap, which has seen some temperatures plummet to minus 20C, and that here 2010 has been the coolest year since 1996.


Globally, it insisted, 2010 was still on course to be the warmest or second warmest year since current records began.


But buried amid the details of those two Met Office statements 12 months apart lies a remarkable climbdown that has huge implications - not just for the Met Office, but for debate over climate change as a whole.


Read carefully with other official data, they conceal a truth that for some, to paraphrase former US VicePresident Al Gore, is really inconvenient: for the past 15 years, global warming has stopped.


This isn't meant to be happening. Climate science orthodoxy, as promulgated by bodies such as the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU), says that temperatures have risen and will continue to rise in step with increasing CO2 in the atmosphere, and make no mistake, with the rapid industrialisation of China and India, CO2 levels have kept on going up.


According to the IPCC and its computer models, without enormous emission cuts the world is set to get between two and six degrees warmer during the 21st Century, with catastrophic consequences. Last week at Cancun, in an attempt to influence richer countries to agree to give £20billion immediately to poorer ones to offset the results of warming, the US-based International Food Policy Research Institute warned that global temperatures would be 6.5 degrees higher by 2100, leading to rocketing food prices and a decline in production.

Grip of winter: A woman and girl sit under a tree on a bench in South Weald Park, Brentwood, Essex, this week



The maths isn't complicated. If the planet were going to be six degrees hotter by the century's end, it should be getting warmer by 0.6 degrees each decade; if two degrees, then by 0.2 degrees every ten years. Fortunately, it isn't.



Actually, with the exception of 1998 - a 'blip' year when temperatures spiked because of a strong 'El Nino' effect (the cyclical warming of the southern Pacific that affects weather around the world) - the data on the Met Office's and CRU's own websites show that global temperatures have been flat, not for ten, but for the past 15 years.



They go up a bit, then down a bit, but those small rises and falls amount to less than their measuring system's acknowledged margin of error. They have no statistical significance and reveal no evidence of any trend at all.



When the Met Office issued its December 2009 preThere-diction, it was clearly expecting an even bigger El Nino spike than happened in 1998 - one so big that it would have dragged up the decade's average. But though it was still successfully trying to influence media headlines during Cancun last week by saying that 2010 might yet end up as the warmest year, the small print reveals the Met Office climbdown.



Last year it predicted that the 2010 average would be 14.58C. Last week, this had been reduced to 14.52C.



That may not sound like much. But when one considers that by the Met Office's own account, the total rise in world temperatures since the 1850s has been less than 0.8 degrees, it is quite a big deal. Above all, it means the trend stays flat.



Meanwhile, according to an analysis yesterday by David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, 2010 had only two unusually warm months, March and April, when El Nino was at its peak. The data from October to the end of the year suggests that when the final figure is computed, 2010 will not be the warmest year at all, but at most the third warmest, behind both 1998 and 2005.


There is no dispute that the world got a little warmer over some of the 20th Century. (Between 1940 and the early Seventies, temperatures actually fell.)



But little by little, the supposedly settled scientific ' consensus' that the temperature rise is unprecedented, that it is set to continue to disastrous levels, and that it is all the fault of human beings, is starting to fray.



Earlier this year, a paper by Michael Mann - for years a leading light in the IPCC, and the author of the infamous 'hockey stick graph' showing flat temperatures for 2,000 years until the recent dizzying increase - made an extraordinary admission: that, as his critics had always claimed, there had indeed been a ' medieval warm period' around 1000 AD, when the world may well have been hotter than it is now.



Other research is beginning to show that cyclical changes in water vapour - a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide - may account for much of the 20th Century warming.



Even Phil Jones, the CRU director at the centre of last year's 'Climategate' leaked email scandal, was forced to admit in a littlenoticed BBC online interview that there has been 'no statistically significant warming' since 1995.



One of those leaked emails, dated October 2009, was from Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the US government's National Centre for Atmospheric Research and the IPCC's lead author on climate change science in its monumental 2002 and 2007 reports.



He wrote: 'The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can't.'


After the leak, Trenberth claimed he still believed the world was warming because of CO2, and that the 'travesty' was not the 'pause' but science's failure to explain it.



The question now emerging for climate scientists and policymakers alike is very simple. Just how long does a pause have to be before the thesis that the world is getting hotter because of human activity starts to collapse?

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BRITAIN IS FREEZING TO DEATH

A driver struggles to unearth a snowbound car in Epsom, Surrey.

Sunday December 5,2010

By Tracey Boles and Lucy Johnston

MIDDLE class families are among millions of Britons who cannot afford to heat their homes this winter, as elderly ride on buses all day to stay in the warm.

After a week of snow and freezing temperatures a shocking picture has emerged of the bleak months ahead for 5.5 million households.

Pensioners, who are among those most vulnerable to the cold, are resorting to extraordinary measures to keep warm.

Many have been using their free travel passes to spend the day riding on buses while others are seeking refuge from the cold in libraries and shopping centres.

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Dot Gibson, spokeswoman for pressure group the National Pensioners’ Convention, said: “Now that we have one of the coldest winters, older people are going to have to make the unenviable decision whether or not to put the heating on. The Government should guarantee that they won’t cut the winter fuel allowance.”

The death toll from the big freeze rose to seven yesterday. They included two men who were killed in a crash on the M62 in Humberside and two teenage girls who died when their car collided with a Royal Mail van in Cumbria.

The winter death toll is set to rise steeply as official figures show that nine elderly people died every hour because of cold-related illnesses last year. The number of deaths linked to cold over the four months of last *winter reached nearly 28,000.

Charities claim this country has the highest winter death rate in northern Europe, worse than colder nations such as Finland and Sweden.

About half of the people forced to spend over 10 per cent of their income on energy bills – the official definition of fuel poverty – are aged over 60. But working families also face a tough time meeting the cost of keeping the central heating turned on as fuel prices continue to rise.

Ann Robinson, director of consumer policy at price comparison service uswitch.com, said: “Middle-class households are now in fuel poverty.”

National Energy Action estimates that 5.5 million households will have plunged into fuel poverty by early next year due to price rises.

This is up 400,000 on the group’s last estimate and represents 21 per cent of the UK’s 26 million households.

The last official figures, for 2008, showed there were 4.5 million fuel-poor households in the UK. On Friday, British Gas will raise prices for eight million customers. Millions more customers of Scottish & Southern Energy and *ScottishPower have already been hit by price rises.

Last winter 70 per cent of household were forced to cut down or ration their energy use because of cost.

Uswitch’s Ms Robinson, who advised Tony Blair’s government on energy policy, warned: “Winter price hikes will simply force even more people down this route.”

Energy minister Greg Barker admitted last week that the system to deal with fuel poverty was “completely broken” and said he was “very worried” by the NEA figures.

Charity Age UK estimates that nearly a third of pensioners have resorted to extreme measures to keep warm. The National Pensioners’ Convention has described the situation as “Dickensian”.

Widow Rita Young, from Thorny, near Peterborough was struggling to stay warm last week. Mrs Young, 75, said: “I’ve worked all my life. It doesn’t feel fair.

“People my age don’t want to put hats and scarves on in their homes, but there’s nothing we can do about it. I sit in a blanket put on a hat and sometimes go to bed at 7.30 in the evening.”

Last week Lillian Jenkinson, 80, and William Wilson, 84, were found dead in the gardens of their homes 70 miles apart in Cumbria. Both are thought to have lain *undetected in sub-zero temperatures for hours.

On Thursday a driver who stopped to help a stranded motorist in the Yorkshire Dales was killed when he was struck by another vehicle.

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An unparalleled heat wave in eastern Europe, coupled with intense droughts and fires around Moscow, put Earth's temperatures in the headlines this summer. Likewise, a string of exceptionally warm days in July in the eastern United States strained power grids, forced nursing home evacuations, and slowed transit systems. Both high-profile events reinvigorated questions about humanity's role in climate change.

But, from a global perspective, how warm was the summer exactly? How did the summer's temperatures compare with previous years? And was global warming the "cause" of the unusual heat waves? Scientists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City, led by GISS's director, James Hansen, have analyzed summer temperatures and released an update on the GISS website that addresses all of these questions.

Globally, June through August, according to the GISS analysis, was the fourth-warmest summer period in GISS's 131-year-temperature record. The same months during 2009, in contrast, were the second warmest on record. The slightly cooler 2010 summer temperatures were primarily the result of a moderate La Niña (cooler than normal temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean) replacing a moderate El Niño (warmer than normal temperatures in the equatorial Pacific Ocean).
As part of their analysis, Hansen and colleagues released a series of graphs that help explain why perceptions of global temperatures vary — often erroneously — from season to season and year to year. For example, unusually warm summer temperatures in the United States and eastern Europe created the impression of global warming run amuck in those regions this summer, while last winter's unusually cool temperatures created the opposite impression. A more global view, as shown below for 2009 and 2010, makes clear that extrapolating global trends based on the experience of one or two regions can be misleading.

"Unfortunately, it is common for the public to take the most recent local seasonal temperature anomaly as indicative of long-term climate trends," Hansen notes. "[We hope] these global temperature anomaly maps may help people understand that the temperature anomaly in one place in one season has limited relevance to global trends."

Last winter, for example, unusually cool temperatures in much of the United States caused many Americans to wonder why temperatures seemed to be plummeting, and whether the Earth could actually be experiencing global warming in the face of such frigid temperatures. A more global view, seen in the lower left of the four graphs above, shows that global warming trends had hardly abated. In fact, despite the cool temperatures in the United States, last winter was the second-warmest on record.

Meanwhile, the global seasonal temperatures for the spring of 2010 — March, April, and May — was the warmest on GISS's record. Does that mean that 2010 will shape up to be the warmest on record? Since the warmest year on GISS's record — 2005 — experienced especially high temperatures during the last four calendar months of the year, it's not yet clear how 2010 will stack up.

"It is likely that the 2005 or 2010 calendar year means will turn out to be sufficiently close that it will be difficult to say which year was warmer, and results of our analysis may differ from those of other groups," Hansen notes. "What is clear, though, is that the warmest 12-month period in the GISS analysis was reached in mid-2010."

The Russian heat wave was highly unusual. Its intensity exceeded anything scientists have seen in the temperature record since widespread global temperature measurements became available in the 1880s. Indeed, a leading Russian meteorologist asserted that the country had not experienced such an intense heat wave in the last 1,000 years. And a prominent meteorologist with Weather Underground estimated such an event may occur as infrequently as once every 15,000 years.

In the face of such a rare event, there's much debate and discussion about whether global warming can "cause" such extreme weather events. The answer — both no and yes — is not a simple one.

Weather in a given region occurs in such a complex and unstable environment, driven by such a multitude of factors, that no single weather event can be pinned solely on climate change. In that sense, it's correct to say that the Moscow heat wave was not caused by climate change.

However, if one frames the question slightly differently: "Would an event like the Moscow heat wave have occurred if carbon dioxide levels had remained at pre-industrial levels," the answer, Hansen asserts, is clear: "Almost certainly not."

The frequency of extreme warm anomalies increases disproportionately as global temperature rises. "Were global temperature not increasing, the chance of an extreme heat wave such as the one Moscow experienced, though not impossible, would be small," Hansen says.

For GISS's full analysis, please visit: data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp

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JWP said:

You cant take our records and seriously think that they have any statistical significance.

If we had records for the last 10 or 100 thousand years they might have meaning.

Its like we are at one point on a race track and we measure the speed of a car going past us at the end of a straight. We might think we know the average speed but the reality is we know next to nothing.

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