Climate scientists hiding truth, claims a team member of October 20th report which claimed to finally prove global warming is continuing its relentless upward trend, according to Daily Mail 30th October 2011. Released by Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures (BEST) project team, the October 20th report came with the assertion it had put an end to climate sceptics’ belief the world was no longer warming.
Now one of the research team, Prof Judith Curry, of Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences Georgia Institute of Technology says that any claims the report has proven climate sceptics wrong are a “huge mistake”. In an interview with the Mail on Sunday she said: “There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped. To say that there is, detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate”.
The BEST project was set up to find a more accurate way of working out changes in world temperatures by using readings from around 39,000 land based weather stations, without including temperatures from the oceans. Oceans warm more slowly and the research team suggested that including sea temperatures in the data was the reason for an apparent cessation in global warming over the last decade. A graph issued by BEST of temperatures from 1800 onwards does appear to show a relentless increase in temperature from 1800 onwards, with an acceleration in the rate of warming from 1975 onwards. However, Prof. Curry commented about their results: “This is ‘hide the decline’ stuff. Our data show the pause, just as the other sets of data do. Muller is hiding the decline. To say this is the end of scepticism is misleading, as is the statement that warming hasn’t paused. It is also misleading to say, as he has, that the issue of heat islands has been settled”. The reference to “hiding the decline” refers to a comment in one of the notorious Climategate e-mails.
Editorial Comment: The data from the BEST project is available on the Internet and The Global Warming Policy Foundation has used this data to graph the temperatures since the turn of the century, but you can check for yourself that the graph shows there is no overall rise in temperatures since the year 2000, although carbon dioxide levels are still rising. So if the BEST project researchers were hoping to counter claims that global warming has ceased in spite of increasing carbon dioxide levels, then they have failed. A careful look at their own graph shows the warming trend began in the early 1970s ceased around the turn of the century, and temperatures have been fairly level for the last decade. This is consistent with other data already published in the scientific literature, but generally ignored by environmentalists and politicians. See “What Happened To Global Warming?” Science, vol. 326, p28, 2 October 2009, and BBC News 9 October 2009.
This growing disconnection between temperature and carbon dioxide not only supports the predictions we have made in our publications over the past decade it is a reminder there are other forces at work in the earth’s climate, such as the sun, ocean currents and clouds, and we should be studying these. Unfortunately for politicians, these forces cannot by controlled by man-made laws or taxes, so if we humble ourselves to admit the God who created the climate actually can control it, we will be far better off. (Ref. Climate, weather, meteorology)
Evidence News 2 November 2011