Copenhagen climate change summit:What you have not been told about global warming - the five missing facts

Copenhagen climate change summit:What you have not been told about global warming - the five missing facts
Last updated at 4:50 PM on 12th December 2009
Comments (20) Add to My Stories Dr David Whitehouse is an author, scientist and adviser to the Global Warming Policy Foundation. For many years he was a BBC science correspondent. Here he explains how global warming data cannot prove the claims of climate change campaigners...

Pick up almost any popular book written about global warming and, more often than not, it will say things like, 'as the world gets ever warmer,' or 'as global warming accelerates.' But the reality is not like that.
It is disturbing that so many involved in the debate don’t know what the actual observations of the Earth’s temperature show.
Sculptor Mark Coreth works on his life-size ice carving of a polar bear in Trafalgar Square in London. It will melt to symbolise global warming. However, Dr Whitehouse has argues that temperature data has been skewed
What I tell you now are the missing scientific facts based on the Met Office’s own data. They do not depend upon a standpoint as warming advocate or doubter. The 'ground truth' of global warming may surprise you.
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Yes, climate change is real but Copenhagen is the wrong way to go about tackling it, argues professor Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia
All the latest from the Copenhagen Climate Conference

We’ve had proper measurements of the Earth’s temperature for about 150 years. They show that the Victorian Age (specifically between 1850 - 1910) was cold, about 0.5 deg C below the 1961 - 90 average, or about a degree colder than today.

Then things started to change. The world warmed between 1910 and 1940 due to natural effects, thought to be part of the recovery from the so-called Little Ice Age in the 17th century. The IPCC says mankind’s influence didn’t show itself until the latter half of the last century.
MISSING FACE 1: The vast majority of the world’s warming in the past century occurred before 1940 and is entirely natural.

Between 1940 - 1980 there was little change. For reasons we don’t fully understand the world’s temperature hovered around average.

It was around 1980 that the current warm spell - the one that is causing all the controversy and debate - began. For less than 20 years the world warmed. By 1990 it was 0.2 deg C above average and scientists were not sure if it was significant. But it continued rising for another few years until the mid-90’s when a strong natural warming event called El Nino intervened and probably made 1998 the warmest ever year.
MISSING FACT 2: The whole question about global warming rests on less than 20 years of the world getting warmer.

Then it seemed to stop warming. For several years it was a controversial suggestion, but it has now become statistically significant. Recently, the Journal Science said the pause in global temperatures is real. The UK Met Office Hadley Centre has also confirmed that in the past ten years the HadCRUT3 temperature data shows no increase whatsoever.
Activists from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) present a performance where they try to resuscitate Planet Earth in Copenhagen. But Dr Whitehouse said data showed the world hadn't got any warmer this century
MISSING FACT 3: The world hasn’t got any warmer this century.

We live in the warmest decade, no one doubts that, and this explains why the world’s warmest years are clustered during that period. Look at the order of the warmest years and you will see they are jumbled up and sit well within each others errors of measurement. There is no upward trend, just a plateau.

MISSING FACT 4: During the past 70 years the number of actual years when the world got warmer than the previous year is less than 20, i.e. only 28 per cent of the time.

The Earth currently stands at a shade less than 0.4 deg above the 1961 - 90 average, i.e. not as high above the average as the Victorian Era was below it.

Global carbon dioxide concentrations have been likely to be rising since the Industrial Revolution but it is only since about 1960 that we have measurements when it has increased steadily in concentration from about 3 ten-thousandths to 4 ten-thousandths of the volume of the atmosphere.

The well-known greenhouse effect will cause the world to warm as CO2 levels increase but that is not the whole story. The basic theory does not predict the warming observed. Scientists have to augment the theory with so-called feedback mechanisms to make it work.

MISSING FACT 5: Since carbon dioxide measurements began 50 years ago there have been less than 20 years when both CO2 and temperature were increasing together.

Whilst it is true that no climate computer model predicted the past decade’s standstill, they have been used with hindsight to explain it. Natural cycles, oceanic cooling and solar influences, are to blame it is suggested.

The Met Office expects the warming to resume swiftly.

Will it? Only time will tell.