While the climate debate rages on, one thing remains certain; World leaders are being pushed to take action now.
As world leaders and climate change proponents gather in Copenhagen, Denmark starting December 7, debate will rage on about what to do about the earth’s changing climate. A global cap on carbon output and trillions of dollars for under-developed nations will be at stake, but climate change proponents are not real confident a global agreement will be reached. As reported in Newseek:
Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for climactic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed…might create problems far greater than those they solve.
Part of that pessimism may be because the earth has stopped warming. According to data attributed to the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit located in Britain, the world’s leading climate research center, the planet’s temperature rose sharply (0.7 degrees celsius) from the 1970s through the 1990s. Since the 1990s the earth has stopped warming. From Spiegel online:
“At present, however, the warming is taking a break,” confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany’s best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. “There can be no argument about that,” he says. “We have to face that fact.”
Part of this pessimism may stem from the fact that there is still debate about whether or not climate change is taking place and whether or not it is caused by mankind. Britain’s Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research released their latest calculations of global average temperatures. Their findings indicate that the earth has not warmed by .02 degrees celsius between 1999 and 2008 as assumed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but instead only 0.07 degrees celsius. Then the British experts go on to report that when you adjust the temperatures for naturally occurring El Niño and La Niña, then the temperature change is reduced to 0.0 degrees celsius. This is important because the summit in Copenhagen will be driven by the numbers assumed by the United Nations panel.
Part of this pessimism may come from Climategate, or the what is being called the “the worst scientific scandal of our generation.” Thousands of emails and documents were hacked from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit which show that leading climate change scientists have acknowledged that their own data collection is inadequate, that they altered data to prove their theories, and worked to suppress scientific opinions which differed from their own. Excerpts from the hacked emails:
From Phil Jones (head of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit):
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.
From Kevin Trenberth (Head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research):
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. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.
From Phil Jones (witholding of data):
The skeptics seem to be building up a head of steam here! … The IPCC comes in for a lot of stick. Leave it to you to delete as appropriate! Cheers Phil
PS I’m getting hassled by a couple of people to release the CRU station temperature data. Don’t any of you three tell anybody that the UK has a Freedom of Information Act !
As a result of the released emails and documents, a request for the raw temperature data was made under the United Kingdom’s Freedom of Information Act. Clearly, having this raw data available for the scientific community around the world to be able to study would go a long way to proving climate change theories. Unfortunately, once the request was formally made, the scientists at the University of East Anglia had to confess that much of the raw data upon which their predictions are based were thrown away. This means the only data still available are the figures adjusted for variables by climate change scientists.
Climate change science is not cut and dry, which is why using adjusted data makes theories and predictions so cloudy. In 2007, NASA 
recalculated its data and found that 1934, not 1998 as had been reported, was the hottest year on record. NASA later changed their data again, and now 1998 and 2006 are back in first place for hottest year, with 1934 dropping to third in the standings. Don’t worry, if the past is any indication, there is plenty of time left in the season for 1934 to catch the new leaders. What data did NASA use to change the data more than once? According to the Washington Times, “NASA has refused for two years to provide information under the Freedom of Information Act that would show how the agency has shaped its climate data and would explain why the agency has repeatedly had to correct its data going as far back as the 1930s.”
What does all this mean? It may mean that after 100 years of debating climate change, sometimes global warming and sometimes global cooling, scientists still aren’t sure what is going on with our planet. The internet and instant news sources, as well as money, has allowed the current climate change push to gain steam. The debate doesn’t mean that climate change is or isn’t occurring, it just means that there are very intelligent, reasonable people on both sides of the aisle. Check out the web site Climate Debate Daily for a comprehensive guide to the debate.
If you followed the link to the report in Newsweek cited above, then you read how climate change scientists were urging governments around the world to stockpile food to prepare for widespread food shortages caused by the upcoming ice age. The article was published by Newsweek in 1975 to report on the impending disastrous results of the upcoming ice age. Time Magazine had published a similar article in 1974. Read both articles as they could have been written this year, only substituting today’s global warming for the past’s global cooling. From the Time Magazine article:
Man, too, may be somewhat responsible for the cooling trend. The University of Wisconsin’s Reid A. Bryson and other climatologists suggest that dust and other particles released into the atmosphere as a result of farming and fuel burning may be blocking more and more sunlight from reaching and heating the surface of the earth.
While the climate debate rages on, one thing remains certain; World leaders are being pushed to take action now.
