Just when it looked like we were all going to fry in the oven of global warming comes a scientist to say that global temperatures have stopped climbing.
Since 1998 global temperatures have actually dropped a tad, according to climate scientist Bob Carter in the Daily Telegraph. What of that, you say? Temperatures increased in the 28 years previous to 1998.
That’s very true. But then there was global cooling from 1940 to 1965.
The problem, Carter asserts, is that there is not much independent climate science being reported.
Governments generally choose not to receive policy advice on climate from independent scientists. Rather, they seek guidance from their own self-interested science bureaucracies and senior advisers, or from the IPCC itself. No matter how accurate it may be, cautious and politically non-correct science advice is not welcomed in Westminster, and nor is it widely reported.
And many climate skeptics feel too intimidated to speak out.
The essence of the issue is this. Climate changes naturally all the time, partly in predictable cycles, and partly in unpredictable shorter rhythms and rapid episodic shifts, some of the causes of which remain unknown. We are fortunate that our modern societies have developed during the last 10,000 years of benignly warm, interglacial climate. But for more than 90 per cent of the last two million years, the climate has been colder, and generally much colder, than today. The reality of the climate record is that a sudden natural cooling is far more to be feared, and will do infinitely more social and economic damage, than the late 20th century phase of gentle warming.
The problem is that, as Daniel B. Botkin writes in Discordant Harmonies, contrary to the idea of a harmonious steady-state environment, “Nature changes over essentially all time scales.” And we don’t know why.
We do know that over the last few million years the world has usually been a lot colder than it is right now.
And you can take that to the bank.
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