After hackers violated the law and the privacy of UK climate researchers by publishing their private conversations, various right-wing websites have used the occasion to declare that global warming is a hoax and that global cooling is the reality. A typical example comes from David Duke’s White Civil Rights website, which declares:
Hacker Blows the Whistle on Global Warming Researchers
Two times within the last 100 years, there have been periods of Global Cooling. During the first time in the 1970s, Newsweek noticed the cooling period and put an alarmist article on their cover about the earth temperature plunging. The UK Daily Telegraph reports that “There IS a problem with global warming… it stopped in 1998?. That’s right Global temperatures have dropped since 1998 even though we have more factories and people than ever. Some cities like Seattle have had a noticeable increase in winter snowfall in recent years. It’s hard not to notice iced-up roads since a normal winter in Seattle won’t have any.
The Global Warming Theory claims that man-made pollution is causing a significant increase in CO2 in the upper atmosphere which is causing the earth’s temperature to climb. This theory assumes that the sun is not significantly varying its heat output. Well, the two periods of Global Cooling in the 1970s and over the last eleven years are proof that the sun can easily overwhelm the effect of pollution that man puts out, even with the earth’s population nearing seven billion people.
Some of the Global Warming crowd have tried to substitute “Global Climate Change” for Global Warming, but few intelligent people take that seriously. Alex Jones recently caught Al Gore photo-shopping several hurricanes from years ago in an implicitly recent picture of the world. Al Gore’s little bit of trickery however has been overshadowed by a hacker, who obtained some internal e-mails from so-called Global Warming researchers, who privately discuss whether they should hide certain information from the public.
This is classic distraction chaff from the White Ring — excuse me, Right Wing. Typical is the “UK Telegraph reports…” line. The UK Telegraph reported no such thing; a quick check reveals that the UK Telegraph published an op-ed opinion column back in 2006 which made the claim, a claim that is demonstrably false. As I’ve discussed earlier, the notion of “global warming over the last 11 years” is simply untrue unless you pick temperature measurements at two very particular time periods, ignore everything else in between, everything else before and everything else afterward. The claim of global cooling in the 1970s can only arrived at through the same methods. It’s intellectually dishonest to call these periods of global cooling. The overwhelming trend in the data over all these time periods is one of global warming.
The overwhelming trend in the data is why, although Washington Post’s display of UK climate researchers’ conversations is pretty tame stuff to begin with, it doesn’t matter. Even if the UK climate researchers were actively engaged in a conspiracy to hide crucial data that would disprove their global warming theory (and what I’ve seen doesn’t show that), it doesn’t matter because the collection of global temperature data is massive, comes from multiple sources, and lies far beyond the control of an evil cabal of British academics. Even the most nefarious and dastardly scientific fraudster could not make the data trend point in the opposite direction because their fraudulent data would quickly be contradicted by other scientific data. That’s what makes the finding of global warming scientifically strong. Publicly available data from multiple collection points over long periods of time show clear global warming.
Let’s consider, for instance, the National Climatic Data Center, part of the United States’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which the last time I checked is not in the thrall of the climatology department of the University of East Anglia. The NCDC has publicly released and regularly updates mean ocean and land temperature trend data from ICOADS (the International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere data set) and GHCN (the Global Historical Climate Network data set). Each data set collects information from thousands of points around the world. The following is a chart displaying average monthly global ocean temperature “anomalies” (deviations in degrees Celsius from the 1901-2000 20th Century average):
And here’s a chart displaying average monthly global land temperature anomalies (again, from the 1901-2000 20th Century average):
That’s global warming for you right there, folks. Whatever someone might or might not have said in stolen e-mail conversations with people at the University of East Anglia does not change the inescapable trend of global warming.
The skeptics are getting excited about some emails but let us look at what we have besides a few emails:
1) UAH, RSS, and GISS show warming also
2) Rapidly warming Arctic
3) Rapidly decreasing sea ice extent
4) Rapidly thinning sea ice
5) Rising ocean heat content
6) Cooling stratosphere
7) Net increase in downwelling LW
8 ) Net decreasing TOA LW emission
9) Increased species migrations/extinctions
10) Increased severe weather occurrences
11) Glacier mass loss and retreats increasing
12) Rising sea levels
13) Rapidly rising human emissions of GHGs that have not been seen in millions of years.
14) etc., etc., etc.
Skeptics need to keep some perspective. These things listed above do not read emails.
They will suffer along with the rest of us, regardless of their stance, denial, or feelings about climate change – it’s here, it’s real, get used to it.