Our Earth cools slowly while professor babbles
Aug 3rd, 2008 by Rick Arms
Written by Andrew Bolt, Melbourne Herald Sun
THERE was one bizarre flaw in Professor Barry Brook’s column on this page on.
He sent us his salvo to prove I was wrong last week when I showed you seven graphs and said they proved the world wasn’t warming as global warming preachers had promised.
I was wrong, that is, to say that the world hadn’t warmed since 1998 and had slowly cooled since 2002, or maybe wrong to say it might matter.
And I was wrong to say the seas had fallen for two years, sea ice had grown, and the weather had not got wilder.
So the flaw in Brook’s response?
He didn’t dispute a single one of my graphs except for one - and even that he got completely wrong.
He didn’t address once the central argument - that the world simply isn’t heating as climate change theory says it should when man’s gases are increasing every day.
Yes, it may start warming again, even though snow this week fell in Queensland, but can man’s gases really be to blame?
Long on mockery and short on facts, the reply of the head of Adelaide University’s research institute for climate change and sustainability made me once again wonder.
If even a global warming professor can’t prove his case, or even address the facts, why on earth should the rest of us turn off the lights? What madness is this?
Brook’s argument was perhaps best summed up by this astonishing claim: “Climate scientists don’t use temperature charts to ‘prove’ global warming.”
Don’t bother showing me the world isn’t warming. I trust the theory that says it must.
So what did Brook fill up his column with, if it wasn’t with counter-claims that the world was indeed heating, or even that its failure to heat since 1998 was an insignificant blip?
Well, with this argument: “Andrew impishly asks: So, dude, where’s my global warming? I might as easily respond with the question: So, mate, what’s propping temperatures up?”
Like Christians who say that if you can’t explain the Big Bang, then God is the answer, Brook says if I can’t fully explain the slight degree warming last century, I should believe man’s gases must be to blame.
That’s illogical.
It also ignores new research suggesting that driving global temperature is a mix of largely natural factors, including solar activity and decadal changes to flows of warm water in the Pacific.
But what makes Brook’s argument even weaker is that it comes in reply to a column that shows 10 years of no warming seems to challenge Brook’s own theory.
Global warming theory is that the 25 years of warming to around 1998 was almost all caused by man’s greenhouse gases, and the more gases we pump out, the more the world must warm.
Well, we’ve kept pumping out more gases faster than ever - 3 per cent more every year so far this century, thanks mainly to booming China and India - and here’s the odd thing. The world hasn’t warmed for a decade.
That contradicts the predictions of the influential International Panel on Climate Change, as well as of Professor James Hansen, Al Gore’s climate change guru. (To see how their predictions failed to match the real weather, see my blog for graphs.)
Of course, natural factors may be suppressing a man-caused warming for now, and Brook has said elsewhere that “all hell is about to break loose” from 2009. We’ll see, Barry.
But the point remains that all the models were supposed to have factored in such natural variables, yet couldn’t predict the world’s temperature a few years out while claiming to predict frighteningly high temperatures as far out as 2100.
So the question isn’t why I won’t put faith in the man-made global warming theory, but why Brook still does.
But on Brook rambled, demanding to know: “If global warming has stopped, why was the most recent decade 0.86C hotter than the same decade from 100 years before . . .?”
Er, Barry, I’ve never denied this decade is warmer. The debate is instead why the warming has since 1998 stopped - or paused - and what that means for your theory. Discuss.
Oh, and Barry? Remember how you attacked just one of my seven graphs - the one from the University of Colorado showing sea levels falling over almost two years (not one)?
“Andrew also claims that the seas have stopped rising because of a dip in 2007. But he left out the standard inverse barometer correction - with this the blip then vanishes.”
False, Barry. In fact, the University of Colorado adds: “The inverted barometer does not have much apparent effect on the global mean sea level because the ocean as a whole is not compressible.” And check the corrected graph on its site and you’ll find the blip is still there.
Which suggests this remains one more bit of real-world data that challenges Brook’s theory that man’s ever-rising emissions must produce ever-rising warming.
Normally when the facts change, a theory must, too. Can Brook explain why these facts don’t change his?
