Paul MacRae is a Canadian writer, journalist and more recently a university professor. He is working on a book entitled "False Alarm: Why Almost Everything We've Been Told About Global Warming is Misleading, Exaggerated, or Plain Wrong". He admits "I can't claim to be an expert on climate science. But, as a former journalist, I do claim an ability to know when the public is being told partial truths or falsehoods."
On his website MacRae writes "Britain's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research is in a spot of bother at the moment. On the one hand, the Hadley Centre is a firm believer in the hypothesis that humans are the main cause of global warming and that we're heading toward catastrophe. It even devotes several of its web pages to waving a nagging finger at those foolish enough or unprincipled enough to believe otherwise. On the other hand, the Hadley Centre, as part of the British Meteorological Office and one of the world's foremost climate-monitoring sites, is also churning out data showing that the planet isn't warming at the moment, and hasn't for the past 10 years or so. Clearly, increasing human carbon emissions aren't causing the warming that was expected.
What to do? As principled scientists, the Hadley staff can't cook the books so the temperature figures fit the hypothesis, although at least one other major climate centre is doing its best to keep its figures matching the hypothesis. On the other hand, if the general public got the idea that maybe the planet wasn't warming after all, despite what it's been told so often, the people might rebel against punitive carbon taxes and go back to their materialist-loving ways.
The Hadley Centre's solution is a combination of spin-doctoring and let's hope nobody notices. You find the spin in its finger-wagging admonitions that we mustn't take this non-warming trend at all seriously. Just temporary. Planet's still warming. Move along; nothing to see here."
The Hadley Centre, you may remember, was founded by Margaret Thatcher when she and Crispin Tickell, British ambassador to the United Nations, invented global warming in the early 80s. If this seems far-fetched, read this.
So, in its webpage on Climate Facts, the Hadley Centre say: "There is indisputable evidence from observations that the Earth is warming." OK. Not in the last ten years, but let's not nit-pick.
They go on: "Concentrations of CO2, created largely by the burning of fossil fuels, are now much higher, and increasing at a much faster rate, than at any time in the last 600,000 years. Because CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the increased concentrations have contributed to the recent warming and probably most of the warming over the last 50 years".
But lower down the same page they tell us: "Earth's climate is complex and influenced by many things, particularly changes in its orbit, volcanic eruptions, and changes in the energy emitted from the Sun. It is well known that the world has experienced warm or cold periods in the past without any interference from humans".
So humans are causing most of the warming at the moment, but didn't cause it in the past. The warming in the past just happened all by itself. Right.
The site goes on: "In recent ice ages, natural changes in the climate, such as those due to orbit changes, led to cooling of the climate system. This caused a fall in CO2 concentrations which weakened the greenhouse effect and amplified the cooling. Now the link between temperature and CO2 is working in the opposite direction. Human-induced increases in CO2 are driving the greenhouse effect and amplifying the recent warming".
So even though they tell us the planet is warming naturally, which would naturally tend to increase CO2 levels anyway, human-emitted CO2 is "driving" the greenhouse effect? This is amazing when you consider that human-added concentrations of CO2 are only about five per cent of natural carbon emissions every year, the rest coming from rotting vegetation, volcanoes, outgassing from the oceans and so on. And also amazing because 90 to 95 per cent of the greenhouse effect is produced by water vapor, not CO2. But perhaps the water vapour is our fault as well?
So for the Hadley Centre, five per cent of a trace gas like carbon dioxide (CO2 is 380 parts per million in the atmosphere, to which human emissions add about 10 parts per million every five years) is "driving" the greenhouse gas system. I don't think so.
In the 1850s the planet came out of more than 400 years of cooling known as the Little Ice Age. Before that was the Medieval Warm Period (900-1350) when global temperatures were a degree or two higher than today. Temperatures were warmer about 2,000 years ago (the Roman Warm Period) and about 3,500 years ago (the Minoan Warm Period) so natural warming seems to occur every 1,000 years or so. The current warming, 1,000 years after the Medieval Warm Period, is right on time.
There's a great deal more detail on Paul MacRae's website - The GOS has simplified it mainly so he could understand it himself. If you are (a) a brainbox, (b) obsessive, (c) just plain nosy, you may care to look at these sites too …
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/05/goddard_nasa_thermometer/print.html
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/myths/2.html
http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/02/19/january-2008-4-sources-say-globally-cooler-in-the-past-12-months/
The GOS says: I see that some newspapers, particularly the Guardian, have started to look forward to the death of Lady Thatcher. This premature interest was sparked off by the debate about whether she would merit a state funeral or not. Frankly, I couldn't give a toss what sort of funeral she has, so long as we're sure she's properly dead.
Isn't it odd, though, that of all the things she did when in power, the one that looks like outlasting her and, indeed, forming a fitting monument to her memory, is not the destruction of the miners' unions or the defeat of Argentina in the Falklands but this monumental hysteria about global warming, which started as a crude bluff to ensure that she wasn't upstaged by all those men on the UN Security Council, and ended as a full-fledged religion complete with a bible (the works of the IPCC), prophets (Al Gore and George Moonbat), faith (faith being the ability to believe in something you can't see and can't prove), heaven (the world studded with wind farms and the working classes penned in the ghettoes where they belong, deprived of their mobility), hell (where all those of us who don't believe will end up) and the usual blind hysteria requiring no scientific or logical grounding because we know we're right and we're going to stop anyone saying we aren't.
I hope she's proud. Actually she probably isn't - she may have been an evil old harridan but stupid she was not.
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