The BBC posted a surprising story this past weekend that has skeptics cheering and alarmists hopping mad.
Here’s the opener:
This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.
The headline?
What happened to global warming?
By Paul Hudson
Climate correspondent, BBC News
This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.
But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.
And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.
So what on Earth is going on?
Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man’s influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.
They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is. But what is the evidence for this?
During the last few decades of the 20th Century, our planet did warm quickly.
Sceptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy from the Sun increasing. After all 98% of the Earth’s warmth comes from the Sun.
But research conducted two years ago, and published by the Royal Society, seemed to rule out solar influences.
The scientists’ main approach was simple: to look at solar output and cosmic ray intensity over the last 30-40 years, and compare those trends with the graph for global average surface temperature.
And the results were clear. “Warming in the last 20 to 40 years can’t have been caused by solar activity,” said Dr Piers Forster from Leeds University, a leading contributor to this year’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
But one solar scientist Piers Corbyn from Weatheraction, a company specialising in long range weather forecasting, disagrees.
He claims that solar charged particles impact us far more than is currently accepted, so much so he says that they are almost entirely responsible for what happens to global temperatures.
He is so excited by what he has discovered that he plans to tell the international scientific community at a conference in London at the end of the month.
If proved correct, this could revolutionise the whole subject.
Read the complete story here at the BBC
Sorry, just listened to some wonk [UK definition] with an eco-PhD in head self-insertion from the Tyndall centre on a mainstream BBC Radio 2 talk show present his pre-prepared prattle. Two pre-arranged phone-in sceptics then gave their opinion on pre-selected sceptic views, to which the wonk was allowed to answer with the usual pat replies unchallenged. The two sceptics will now be spending a day with the wonk who is to show them the error of their ways. A future show will report their miraculous change in attitude, no doubt.
Desperate, pass the sick bag please. Monbiot at the Guardian seems to have retreated to the Welsh hills for a break too. He now seems more concerned with ruining the livelihoods of local fisherman in his own back yard. Steve M’s depth charge and Copenhagen disinterest must have holed the good-ship climate change below the waterline, there’s a lot of remedial caulking and regrouping going on it seems. The subversion opinion polls must be showing a shift in the ‘wrong’ direction I guess.
Still, this BBC headline is encouraging. Despite all the usual hyperbole, the BBC is a state broadcaster and knows on which side its bread is buttered. A big slimming axe is likely to come down on the BBC soon and it knows it. The current government lost the plot long ago, there’s an election around the corner and its New Labour apparatchiks are perhaps beginning to find themselves ignored or are already in retreat if not taking flight.
Reality may be setting in again after a decade in the third way dreamscape, a good sign for much else besides climate change. Early days yet though.
Pete (02:07:53) :
Very interesting Pete! Thanks for filling us in on who Paul Hudson is.
Ric Werme (05:17:01) :
“The stage set for a US Time magazine cover with the headline “Is Global Warming Dead?” What would go on the cover? The blank Sun? the recent unpleasantness in the plains and northwest?”
I don’t know about Time Magazine but Real Climate uses on its homepage a picture of the earth from space along with a raging sun at or near solar maximum. Pretty ironic for the AGW crowd who’s first commandment says that the sun has nothing to do with global warming (sorry – climate change).
Gene Nemetz (06:37:39) :
Ronaldo (01:09:57) :
The Daily Telegraph has picked up the story this morning.
Could you provide the link? 🙂
You will find it here.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/search/?queryText=Climate+change+&Search=Search
Dodgy Geezer (05:43:01) :
This story is setting Piers Corbyn up to be the hero if global warming is proven wrong!!
The cream rises to the top.
I’m confused.
The BBC is saying that the science is not settled? But the BBC climate pages are full of articles stating that the science is definitely settled, and that anyone who doubts this is a crackpot.
Both these positions cannot be right. And, whichever is wrong, as a public service broadcaster the BBC will have to explain why it was/is distributing untruths….
If the BBC are correct now, someone should be complaining to the BBC governors about the last 10 years of their output.
It´s all about Copenhaguen. After Copenhaguen all global warmers will surely meet in an island of the southern seas, where they will fly in their private jets, to celebrate their victory, and rest.
The title of this post should be…
BBC: “What happened to global warming?”
Without direct titles people will not always read them.
Stoic (07:03:00) :
This is the direct link :
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/globalwarming/6300329/Sceptics-welcome-BBC-report-on-global-cooling.html
Piers Corbyn from Weatheraction, a company specialising in long range weather forecasting, said: “It is interesting the BBC is prepared to tolerate him (Hudson) writing these things.
“It is a surprise – a welcome one – that the BBC has put it as bluntly as they have. More often than not they (the BBC) put forward the brainwashing views of CO2-driven, man-made climate change.
“Possibly some people in the BBC have worked out that the whole shooting match will collapse and they had better be ahead of the game.”
The BBC’s amazing U-turn on climate change :
I think the BBC wanted to slip this one out quietly, but a Matt Drudge link put paid to that.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100013173/the-bbcs-amazing-u-turn-on-climate-change/
BBC’s surreptitious U-turn on global warming is most popular item on its website
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100013179/bbcs-surreptitious-u-turn-on-global-warming-is-most-viewed-item-on-its-website/
Why is the BBC consistently confused with Paul Hudson?
I eagerly await Piers Corbyn’s press release on the 28th of this month, when he will as I understand it be enlightening everyone who wants to listen with aspects of his Solar Weather Technique. After all did his early September forecast not indicate a severe storm in the Pacific in or around the Philipines?
Personally, I actually believe in global warming, & climate change, & global cooling, you cannot have one without the other following it! It’s sort of what the Earth does really, rotten old planet.
Vincent (04:48:07) :
“After all, 98% of the Earth’s warmth comes from the sun?”
Where does the other 2% come from? Any ideas?
I suspect this remaining 2% is generated internally from a considerable amount of extremely warm air arising out of the UN, the IPCC, the WMO, the EU, the EPA, GISS, The Royal Society, the Met Office, government ministers, & assorted half-baked scientifically illiterate overpaid slimeball grubby politicians with their fingers in the pie feathering their own nests at taxpayers expense! I could be mistaken though. However if we were to capture this wonderful heat source we could perhaps generate electricity from it, & if we kept them all in a locked room in Copenhagen (although what the Danes have done to deserve such a travesty I know not) the CO2 would be sequestered automatically!
Serious question, do we know how much the IPCC has actually cost us all over the last 15 years?
Gene Nemetz (06:37:39)
Stoic (07:03:00)
Thanks to Stoic for the link to Telegraph article.
I read the brief article on page 2 of the paper copy this morning.
I love the smell of BBC u-turns in the morning…..
A new ‘Old’ Idea;
OR
The other limit of the ‘Hysterical Absurdian Syndrome’.
Lets tax everyone to reduce global cooling caused by oxidising fossile fuels.
(Science to be determined).
Ban the recycling of natural organic substances from carbonacious solid form, to gassified form.
(Environmental impact studys Pending).
Rely primarily upon solar (it varies so infinitely little), thermal energy to provide human habitability requirements between the equator and north/south of 45 degrees latitudes.
(Technology in developement stage)
Ban human habitation north/south of 45 degrees latitudes due to potential environmental life threatening risks.
(UN Resolution #xxxxx__ mandating population redistribution still in debate).
* * * *
Thought I might as well explore the potential for the BBC’s next big thing!
I will claim there will not be a U-turn in opinion. The next crisis will be ramped up and this one will get ignored. It had so many features attached like punitive social justice for people that actually earn money. How can we punish big corporations for sending plastic water bottles to the trash. we can of course attack wealthy and big corporations as a cause of dirty rivers and streams. There has to be a target of hate. There has to be a problem Then they can save the planet by “promissing” a solution.
Building up a scare generates a lot of viewers. Now, debunking the scare will also generate a lot of viewers. The higher the viewership, the more money is made from advertisements. Follow the money.
For those who doubted BBC bias on Climate Change matters see
“The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus [on anthropogenic climate change].”
From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel, Page 40
http://ccgi.newbery1.plus.com/blog/?p=109
Now would be a very good time to remember Julian Simon, of blessed memory.
The last scare we had, in the 80s, was that the Earth’s resources would all be used up. You remember ‘Peak Oil’?
It was Julian Simon who claimed that resources, far from being used up, would actually become more abundent with improved technology. He believed that humanity would progress and improve living standards generally as time went by. The lead doomsayer (read Hansen or Gore) at the time was one Paul Eherlich, who claimed that the world would collapse in riots as prices soared. Simon bet him that, instead of soaring, they would actually come down, and, famously won his bet.
Being proven right, however, didn’t seem to have much effect on humanity. A WIRED commentary http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffsimon_pr.html notes:
“All of [Ehrlich’s] grim predictions had been decisively overturned by events. Ehrlich was wrong about higher natural resource prices, about “famines of unbelievable proportions” occurring by 1975, about “hundreds of millions of people starving to death” in the 1970s and ’80s, about the world “entering a genuine age of scarcity.” In 1990, for his having promoted “greater public understanding of environmental problems,” Ehrlich received a MacArthur Foundation Genius Award.” [Simon] always found it somewhat peculiar that neither the Science piece nor his public wager with Ehrlich nor anything else that he did, said, or wrote seemed to make much of a dent on the world at large. For some reason he could never comprehend, people were inclined to believe the very worst about anything and everything; they were immune to contrary evidence just as if they’d been medically vaccinated against the force of fact. Furthermore, there seemed to be a bizarre reverse-Cassandra effect operating in the universe: whereas the mythical Cassandra spoke the awful truth and was not believed, these days “experts” spoke awful falsehoods, and they were believed. Repeatedly being wrong actually seemed to be an advantage, conferring some sort of puzzling magic glow upon the speaker…”
So I predict that, when the Global Warming scare is over, Gore and Hansen will still receive prizes for being environmental activists, while Steve McIntyre will go to his grave unrecognised….
BBC of course lives on license fees. The above still applies as there is a strong movement afoot to take a lot of that license fee and distribute it to stations who don’t get any of it now. Why? Because these other stations are being viewed more, and the BBC less. If BBC can get the viewership to move back in a good sized way, then less money will be taken from them and given to others.
What happened to 1934?
“The warmest year on record is now 1934, as opposed to 1998. This according to corrected records released by NASA.”
I did some digging into the background of Paul Hudson. He has a first class science degree in geophysics from Newcastle University. That’s an improvement on the dreaded Harrabin, who has no scientific training at all. But now the less good part – he’s definite;ly another warmist. He recently wrote a book called That’s the Forecast, published by Great Northern in the UK, which the blurb states:
“At the other extreme the book ends on a serious note, Paul explaining in succinct and readable way the likely consequences of the present climate change. He makes a personal plea: ” We will reach a point in the not to distant future when we have no control over our ever warming climate with its enormous implications for mankind. I don’t know about you, but I really don’t want to take that sort of risk with our future. This is why we must try and curb carbon dioxide emissions as a matter of urgency”.”
This comes as music to my ears.
For the last 3 years I have been trying to get answers out of BBC DG Mark Thompson about the blatant BBC bias in reporting climate change.
For the last 3 years I got no-where…that is until I engaged the assistance of my MP, Nick Harvey.
This resulted in my coming by a BBC document in which the amazing statement was made that the BBC Trust and Board of Management had commissioned a report entitled ; “From Seesaw to Wagon Wheel-Safeguarding Impartiality in the 21st Century”, published in June 2007……’
I quote from this report: ‘There may be now a broad scientific consensus that climate change is definitely happening and that it is at least predominantly man-made… the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus’.
So, if you weren’t singing from the BBC hymn sheet, you weren’t singing at all!
Until now, that is…. hung by their own petard?…..light at the end of the tunnel?
Vincent (04:48:07) :
“After all, 98% of the Earth’s warmth comes from the sun?”
Where does the other 2% come from? Any ideas?
Earth’s molten core?