The REALLY inconvenient truths about global warming. Last week we explosively revealed a 16-year 'pause' in rising temperatures - triggering a bitter debate. You decide what the real facts are...
Q: Is the world warming or not?
A: The Hadcrut 4 figures that show a ‘pause’ in warming lasting nearly 16 years are drawn from more than 3,000 measuring stations on land and at sea. Hadcrut 4 is one of several similar global databases that reveal the same thing: that since January 1997 there has been no statistically significant warming of the Earth’s surface.
Between 1980 and the end of 1996, the planet warmed at a rate close to 0.2 degrees per decade. Since then, says the Met Office, the trend has been a much lower 0.03 degrees per decade.
However, world average temperature measurements are subject to an error of plus or minus 0.1 degrees, while any attempt to calculate a trend for the period 1997-2012 has an in-built statistical error of plus or minus 0.4 degrees. The claim that there has been any statistically significant warming for the past 16 years is therefore unsustainable....
Q: But isn’t the world still much warmer than at any time in recorded history?
A: Ever since it was published on the cover of the IPCC’s Third Assessment report in 2001, the ‘hockey stick’ graph showing stable or declining temperatures since the year 1000, followed by a steep rise in the 20th Century, has been controversial. There were no thermometers in 1000, so scientists use ‘proxy’ data from items such as tree rings, lake sediments and ice cores.
The hockey stick authors have also been accused of eliminating the ‘medieval warm period’ (MWP) at the end of the first millennium.
Two new separate peer-reviewed studies, published in prestigious academic journals last week, reinstated it. The first study, led by Bo Christiansen of the Danish Meteorological Institute, concluded: ‘The level of warmth during the peak of the MWP in the second half of the 10th Century, equalled or slightly exceeded the mid-20th Century warming.’
There was also a pronounced warming period in Roman times....
