Propaganda Alert: The World is Not Cooling!

I'm sure you've heard the recent claims made by Climate Change skeptics that much of the data and arguments pointing towards global warming are little more than bulk conspiracy theories. The BBC ran an article a month ago by Paul Hudson, asking "What happened to global warming?" It makes the declaration that "the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998" in the past decade and further states that skeptics believe "there are so many other natural causes for warming and cooling, that even if man is warming the planet, it is a small part compared with nature."

While it is true that global temperatures reached a high point in 1998, it is not true that temperatures across the planet have been in decline since. Given the controversy, a re-analysis of the existing data led by the US NOAA's (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency) climate data center was conducted and no statistically significant cooling trend was found. An AP story quotes the agency as stating:

"The last 10 years are the warmest 10-year period of the modern record," said NOAA climate monitoring chief Deke Arndt. "Even if you analyze the trend during [the skeptics] 10 years, the trend is actually positive, which means warming."

Furthermore, in relation to ocean temperatures, NOAA asserts that of the 10 hottest years recorded, "eight have occurred since 2000, and after this year it will be nine because this year is on track to be the sixth-warmest on record."

What skeptics have done is what they always done: manipulate the truth. Depending on the starting year of their so-called ten year interval and the robustness of the data set, one can get one of three different outcomes: temperatures trending upwards, constant, or downwards. So which one is correct? According to David Peterson, a retired Duke University statistics professor, the methodology used by the skeptics to claim a downward cooling trend is "not scientifically legitimate." AP quotes Ben Santer, a climate scientist at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Lab, who calls their efforts, "a concerted strategy to obfuscate and generate confusion in the minds of the public and policymakers" prior to the international climate talks in Copenhagen this December.

People need to stop listening to these hucksters who are peddling refuted arguments prettied up with bogus statistical data for political gain. These are not trivial matters. For example:

• Heat waves in Europe in 2003 caused nearly 40,000 people to die.
• Global warming is more than a third to blame for a major drop in rainfall, that includes a decade-long drought in Australia and a lengthy dry spell in the United States, according to researcher Peter Baines of Melbourne University in Australia.
• Forest fires that have decimated parts of Australia, the Mediterranean, and Western North America in the past few years have been linked to a "positive feedback loop" caused by increased global temperatures.
• Glaciers across the world continue to melt at an unprecedented rate. Many of the world's most populous regions including India, China, and nations along the Andes are highly dependant on these bodies for water utlized in agriculture. Displacement of these massive bodies of ice has also been predicted by geologists to lead to an increasing number of earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanic eruptions in unexpected places.

A world that is less stable and less able to sustain human habitation, is simply a world with less humans.

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I have additional blog entries about recent public opinions shifts in America on Climate Change (here) and a brief discussion on scientific research confirming CO2 concentrations and global temperature increases (here).