ScareWatch
“Coolest year for a decade means
more ‘global warming’ to come”
by
Christopher Monckton
December 7, 2008
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“Coolest year for a decade means
more ‘global warming’ to come”
The scare: In early December 2008, The Guardian, the newspaper of Britain’s
public-sector elite, finally admitted to its readers that “global warming” has been
replaced by global cooling, saying that 2008 would be the “coolest year of the
decade”, one-seventh of a degree Celsius below the average for the past ten
years. However, the paper said, “Cooler temperature is not evidence that ‘global
warming’ is slowing.” The paper quoted Dr. Peter Stott, the “manager of
understanding and attributing climate change” at the Met Office, as saying, “If
we are going to understand climate change we need to look at long-term trends.”
The paper also quoted Professor Myles Allen of Oxford University as saying that
“climate skeptics would over interpret the figure,” which, he said, would have
“felt like a warm year” in the 1980s: “2008 would have been a scorcher in
Charles Dickens’ time.” The paper concluded that 2008 would be “the tenthhottest year on record”, and cited Keenlyside et al. (2008) to the effect that there
would be no new record year for global temperatures until 2015, when
temperatures would “begin to accelerate” again.
The truth: The artfully-constructed story in The Guardian carefully failed to
put the recent global cooling into perspective. For instance, the paper talks of
2008 as “the tenth-hottest year on record”, but does not tell readers that the
record began only in 1880. Nor does it draw attention to the fact that the rise in
temperatures during the first 100 years of the instrumental record cannot have
had anything much to do with anthropogenic “global warming”, because the
population and activities of humankind were insufficient to make an appreciable
difference.
2
For 600m years, it was
7 °C warmer than today
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The Guardian is careful not to put recent temperature trends into the long-term
perspective recommended by Dr. Stott (who was the UK Government’s star
witness in its unsuccessful attempt to defend the accuracy of Al Gore’s climate
movie: the judge concluded that “the Armageddon scenario that he depicts is not
based on any scientific view”. Throughout most of the past half billion years,
global temperatures were 7 degrees C (12.5 F) warmer than the present.
4 interglacials were ~3 °C
warmer than the present
CO2
Petit et al., 1999
Temperature
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3
It was also warmer than today in each of the past four interglacial periods – the
temperature chart in Al Gore’s movie actually shows this, but the audience is
carefully misdirected so as not to appreciate its significance. Gore says that
whenever CO2 concentration increased the planet warmed, but in fact the
reverse was true: whenever the planet warmed, atmospheric CO2 concentrations
increased 800-2800 years later (Petit et al., 1999).
“Warming” in geological perspective
-- 30 °C
RM
Today's temperature
Last
Ice
Age
Younger
Dryas
cooling
-- 35 °C
-- 40 °C
Holocene optimum
300
years'
"warming"
Current interglacial period
-- 45 °C
Adapted from Curry & Clow (1997)
15,000
10,000
5,000 years BP
16
0
For most of the 10,000 years of the present interglacial period, global
temperatures were warmer than the present, notably in the Bronze Age climate
optimum, when the weather was warmer than today for 2,000 years; and in the
Roman and Mediaeval warm periods. Attempts by the UN’s climate panel, the
IPCC, to reverse its original finding that the Middle Ages were warmer than now
have been thoroughly discredited in the scientific literature: hundreds of peerreviewed papers by approaching 1,000 scientists demonstrate that the
Mediaeval warm period was real; global; and warmer than today.
4
Bronze Age, Roman era,
Middle Ages: warmer too
From Dansgaard et al. (1969)
and Schonweise (1995)
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The Guardian is also careful not to tell its readers that global temperatures have
been rising for 300 years since the end of the 70-year Maunder Minimum,
during which there were almost no sunspots on the Sun, intense global cooling
resulted, and the rivers Thames (in London) and Hudson (in New York)
regularly froze over during the winters.
The Sun has been raising
temperature for 300 years
Hathaway et al. (2004)
18
5
From the end of the Maunder Minimum to the end of the 70-year solar Grand
Maximum in 1998, solar activity climbed steadily (Hathaway, 2004), and global
temperatures also climbed (Akasofu, 2008). Indeed, the Central England
Temperature Record, the world’s oldest instrumental temperature dataset,
shows temperatures climbing by 2.2 degrees C (3.5 F) in a third of a century
from 1700-1735, a rate of increase at least eight times the mean warming rate of
the 20th century.
Temperature rose 2.2 ºC
in the 35 years 1700-1735
Central England Temperature Series
(Archibald, 2007)
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The Guardian is among many news media that have followed the UN’s climate
panel in pretending that the 25 years’ warming that stopped in 1998 occurred at
an unprecedented rate. In fact it was identical to the rate observed twice
previously in the 20th century. Both the previous periods of rapid warming had
occurred before we could have had any real influence on climate.
6
Parallel
warmings:
Identical slopes
33
The Guardian rightly says that the very cold period at the beginning of 2008 was
probably caused chiefly by an exceptional La Nina Southern Oscillation – a
cyclical change in ocean currents throughout the world that causes a few
months’ cooling every three or four years. However, The Guardian was wrong to
say the cold weather was not exceptional. Globally, the winter was the coldest in
20 years: in the US and China, the coldest for 50 years.
7
No net warming since 1980
29
On one measure (the University of Alabama at Huntsville’s global satellitetemperature dataset), 2008 will be no warmer than 1980, 28 years ago. Why?
Because throughout the past seven years, during which The Guardian has been
one of the most extreme of the alarmist news media reporting on the imagined
“threat” from climate change, all measures show the world has been cooling.
8
03
04
05
06
7 years’ global cooling
-----------------------------
07
2008
NASA GISS
RSS MSU
UAH AMSU
HadCRUt3
30
The Guardian is also incorrect to suggest that recent temperature trends are
following the path predicted by the UN’s climate panel and the climate models
on which it relies. Only one year after the UN published its forecast of how
temperatures would inexorably rise as a result of “global warming”,
temperatures have in fact plummeted.
9
IPCC
Reality
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Though much of this drop in temperatures will probably soon be reversed
following the end of the La Nina event, during 2008 the Pacific Decadal
Oscillation, another influential system of ocean currents, switched from its 30year warming phase to its cooling phase. Also, the Sun has been unusually
inactive in the past three years, with more than 400 sunspot-free days. These
two circumstances presage at least a slowing in the warming rate so recently but
erroneously predicted by the IPCC.
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The fall in temperatures for seven years, and the failure of temperatures to show
any statistically-significant increase for 13 (or perhaps 28) years, raise serious
concern about the reliability of the IPCC’s projections of a rapid warming rate in
response to recent increases in carbon dioxide concentration. As matters now
stand, global temperatures have not risen above the 300-year warming trend. It
is difficult, therefore, to detect an anthropogenic signal in the global temperature
record at all.
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C
A : Hansen: CO2 stabilized
B : Hansen: likely outturn
C : Hansen 1988: worst case
D : IPCC (1990) projection
E : NCDC anomalies
F : NCDC trend
G : McKitrick curve
H : McKitrick trend
D
E
C
1.4
B 1.2
1.0
F
0.8
A
0.6
H
G
o
0.4
0.2
1990
2000
2010
27
2020
The IPCC has already had to reduce its projected warming rate compared with the
exaggerated forecast it had issued in 1990 (yellow trend-line). However, the outturn (red
trend-line) is well below even the revised forecast. And the outturn itself is exaggerated,
because the compilers of the global-temperature datasets make inadequate allowance for
urbanization and consequent contamination of the temperature trend (McKitrick, 2007:
dark red trend-line).
The real-world temperature trend has now been very far below the IPCC’s
projections for a long enough period to demonstrate that the official estimates of
how much the temperature may increase as a result of CO2 enrichment of the
atmosphere must be exaggerations. This is no great surprise: both the 1990 and
1995 reports of the UN’s climate panel had concluded that there was no
discernible human influence on global temperature trends, though the 1995
report was rewritten after the scientists had finalized it, so that the published
version stated the opposite.
As Glenn Beck wryly commented on his radio show on 6 December 2008 in
response to the scare story in The Guardian, “Don't look at the cooling trend--just remember that the temperatures are going to really heat up in 2015! It's fun
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to watch the ‘global warming’ alarmists deflect every little detail that comes out
showing global warming isn't as bad as they say it is---you know, inconvenient
small facts like the global temps have cooled in the last decade – not warmed.”
End of scare.
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