DavidWhitehouse.com
Isn't it curious. Isn't the self-correcting nature of science wonderful to
behold?
Not long ago anyone who looked at the global annual temperature data and
disrespectfully pointed out that it might actually be significant that the
world hasn't become warmer since 1998, was dismissed as foolish and accused
of seeing what they wanted to see in the data.
Then if they had the affrontery to point out that that even the UK's Met Office agreed that the annual data between 2001-7 was an impeccable flat line they were told they were completely wrong as such things were obviously only year-on-year variability (as an unscientific environmental 'activist' dammed my speculations in the New Statesman about the same topic whilst at the same time implying I was lying).
Ten years is too short a period to tell what is going on, they said, conveniently forgetting, if they ever knew, that the IPCC itself was established after less than ten years of global warming data. It seems that ten years is enough to be significant if the data says the right thing!
Then some righteous journalists rushed to get the 'truth' out about the flat line because, as they said, 'sceptics' were already using it to ask questions.
Strange then, that over the past few weeks we have seen from many sources people tryin to explain this 'year-on-year' statistical variability by tangible physical effects although so far such are straining to explain the data.
The impeccable flat line in global average temperatures since 2001 we were told earlier this year by the Met Office will continue throughout 2008 because of the cooling effect of La Nina. Now we are told in a Nature paper that the cooling effect of the Atlantic will extend this flat line, and possibly even point it downwards between now and 2015. They say the Pacific will stay unchanged though as we saw on CCNet yesterday there are other scientists who say that the Pacific will get colder over the same period.
So much for those TV commentators who several years ago pontificated that the 'science is settled.'
Also curious is that over the next decade man-made global warming will be
cancelled out by natural cycles. It's nice that Mother Nature (not the
journal) is helping us this way but it does beg the question as to whether
the man-made effect was all that significant if it can be nullified this
way. What else could this unsettled science find to cool us down? Then there
are speculations about the effect of the downturn in solar activity.
In Medieval times if a hypothesis, such as the heliocentric idea, disagreed
with the consensus, then it was interpreted as being a convenient
mathematical trick taken only to 'preserve the appearances' and not an
indication of physical reality.
Who today, I wonder, will history judge as preserving the appearances?