Another Inconvenient Truth?

Personally I did think that this year (2008) was colder than recent years and we had snow in the UK in October for the first time in over 70 years. It now transpires that this anecdotal observation has been confirmed by observation data which show that 2008 is the coldest year so far this century and barely above the 1960 - 1990 average.


I have always been on the skeptical wing of this issue not least because I remember the scare stories of the early 70's about an impending ice age and the havoc that would bring. many of the scientists behind that scare seamlessly moved to global warming as soon as the temperature readings went against the theory. Sir Crispin Tickell is a good example of this. His seminal 1977 book "Climate Change and World Affairs" warned of an impending climate crisis due to a cooling climate, it was edited and re-released in 1986 but this time warned of the consequences of a warming world.

The world warmed in the early part of the 20th century from 1900 to about 1940, this was despite the fact that industrial development was in its infancy and man-made carbon dioxide emissions were on a negligible scale. Then quite unexpectedly temperatures began to fall in the 1940s and continued to fall for some 35 years despite the world experiencing its most intensive economic boom in recorded history. This fact led directly to the dire warnings of a global freeze in the late 60s and early 70s. Then, again quite unexpectedly, temperature trends altered again and began to rise again. Enter anthropogenic global warming as the clear and present danger.

Is is a coincidence that the most recent shift in global temperature trends was 35 years or so ago, and the one before was 35 years or so before that, and the one before was about 35 years before that... you get the idea?

Now I know that one swallow does not make a spring but it is still interesting to observe that none of the computer models used to create the IPCC's most recent assessment predicted and period when temperatures would actually fall in the way we are currently observing. You may resonably say thet these models are too unsophisticated to predict such a variation and I would respond by saying that they were so unsophisticated that we were not proposing to "bet the farm" on measures such as Kyoto and the even crazier EU proposals.

Regardless of the side of this debate you may find yourself I hope you will join me in wishing that this is indeed a sign that the direst predictions of the effects of AGW have been overstated and we are not in fact facing a human induced climate Armageddon. As a human you must hope for that surely?

If 2008 does indeed prove to be the year that the theory of anthropogenic global warming was disproved the only thing we need worry about in terms of global warming is the glow from the red faces of all the scientists, media pundits and politicians who promoted the scare on the back of what was proven to be the flimsiest of evidence.