For many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco. Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).
Yes, you did read that right. And also, yes, this eight-year period of temperature stasis did coincide with society’s continued power station and SUV-inspired pumping of yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
Due to some unaccountable oversight, Carter did not include a graph of global average temperature from CRU. Let me show you what it looks like:
It’s obvious to anyone who looks at the graph that temperatures have not been static for the past eight years, but have continued to increase steadily. The only way you could contrive a decreasing trend is if you just looked at the two years 1998 and 2005 (the warmest and second warmest years ever recorded in the CRU data) and ignored everything else. Is that an appropriate way to do things? Not according to one Bob Carter. In 2004 he wrote a Tech Central Station article where he claimed that satellite measurements
show little or no long-term trend of temperature change.
I emailed him to point that the satellites actually showed significant warming. He replied that this didn’t count because:
this trend is most likely produced by the single exceptionally warm 1998 El Nino year.
Meanwhile, Steve McIntyre seems to have no problem with Carter’s misleading claim, because he linked approvingly to Carter’s column.
(My thanks to Wayne Sanderson for sending me the link.)