US and Europe Downplay Inconvenient Climate Data

It looks like the science isn’t settled. Leaked documents obtained by the Associated Press show that the U.S. government and several European governments tried to get climate scientists to downplay the lack of global warming over the past 15 years.

The highly anticipated United Nations report on global warming is expected to affirm the link between human activity and global warming, but scientists are still having trouble explaining away the lull in rising global temperatures over the past 15 years despite rapidly rising greenhouse gas levels.

The lull in global warming has been noted by skeptics to show the flaws behind the science and the theory that human activities, primarily through burning fossil fuels, causes global temperatures to rise.

This has some governments worried, reports the AP, as documents show that the U.S. government along with some European nations tried to convince the report’s authors to downplay the lack of warming over the past 15 years.

The AP reports that “Germany called for the reference to the slowdown to be deleted, saying a time span of 10-15 years was misleading in the context of climate change, which is measured over decades and centuries.”

“The U.S. also urged the authors to include the ‘leading hypothesis’ that the reduction in warming is linked to more heat being transferred to the deep ocean,” the AP noted. “Belgium objected to using 1998 as a starting year for any statistics. …Using 1999 or 2000 as a starting year would yield a more upward-pointing curve. Hungary worried the report would provide ammunition for skeptics.”

Concern by governments over the lull in warming comes ahead of the deadline the world has set for reaching a global climate agreement in 2015. This report would serve as the scientific underpinning of such an agreement.

“This is the culmination of four years’ work by hundreds of scientists, where governments get a chance to ensure the summary for policymakers is clear and concise in a dialogue with the scientists who wrote it, and have the opportunity to raise any topics they think should be highlighted,” Jonathan Lynn, a spokesman for the UN’s climate authority, told the AP.

Read More: The Daily Caller

No Real Global Warming for 20 years. Now What?

 

Research by Ed Hawkins of University of Reading shows surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range projections derived from 20 climate models and if they remain flat, they will fall outside the models' range within a few years.

"The global temperature standstill shows that climate models are diverging from observations," says David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

"If we have not passed it already, we are on the threshold of global observations becoming incompatible with the consensus theory of climate change," he says.

Whitehouse argues that whatever has happened to make temperatures remain constant requires an explanation because the pause in temperature rise has occurred despite a sharp increase in global carbon emissions.

The Economist says the world has added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010, about one-quarter of all the carbon dioxide put there by humans since 1750. This mismatch between rising greenhouse gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now, The Economist article says.

"But it does not mean global warming is a delusion."

Read More: The Australian