I have seen several articles discussing the possibility that global warming has peaked around 1998. I say possibility because if you understand the scientific method, the concept of uncertainty in measurement and read the information on climate change at Junk Science.com, you can easily understand that the precision of the measurement of a global temperature in ancient times is so poor that we cannot determine if warming has or is actually occurring. In other words, the level of noise in the measurements is larger than the degree of change that we are trying to measure.
The salient facts are these. First, the accepted global average temperature statistics used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show that no ground-based warming has occurred since 1998. Oddly, this eight-year-long temperature stasis has occurred despite an increase over the same period of 15 parts per million (or 4 per cent) in atmospheric CO2.
Second, lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 per cent).
Third, there are strong indications from solar studies that Earth's current temperature stasis will be followed by climatic cooling over the next few decades.
To base public policy on such questionable data is outright scandalous. And if the IPCC measurements are correct than there is no problem anyway so wither way we do not need to spend the money.
Australia does not ask the World Bank to set its annual budget and neither should it allow the notoriously alarmist IPCC to set its climate policy.So once again the effect of misguided liberal policies is the redistribution of wealth at the ultimate expense of the poor.
In one of the more expensive ironies of history, the expenditure of more than $US50 billion ($60 billion) on research into global warming since 1990 has failed to demonstrate any human-caused climate trend, let alone a dangerous one.
Yet that expenditure will pale into insignificance compared with the squandering of money that is going to accompany the introduction of a carbon trading or taxation system.
The costs of thus expiating comfortable middle class angst are, of course, going to be imposed preferentially upon the poor and underprivileged.
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