While most people do not read The Australian, I do on a regular basis. The attached article by Lord Monckton effectively demolishes an alarmist article that The Australian published recently.
Michael Steketee, writing in The Australian in January 2011, echoed the BBC (whose journalists’ pension fund is heavily weighted towards “green” “investments”) and other climate-extremist vested interests in claiming that 2010 was the warmest year on record worldwide. Mr. Steketee’s short article makes two dozen questionable assertions, which either require heavy qualification or are downright false.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/09/monckton-skewers-steketee/#more-31240
I share Lord Monckton’s view that global warming has been progressing and continues to progress as it has since the Earth emerged from the last ice age. Perhaps the pattern will change over the long term, but that change will most likely be dictated by celestial events such as changing intensity of the sun, a variation in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, or the arrival of a large asteroid.
I also share his opinion that human attempts to alter weather and climate are not effective. Instead, any investment should be directed to adapting to the effects of climate change when they occur and dealing with the know variability of weather that does occur over time. In western Canada for example, we should be prepared to deal with variations in weather patterns that could deliver cooler / colder than normal weather, wetter than normal weather, dryer than normal weather, warmer/hotter than normal weather, and more frequent extreme weather events such as heavy rain, hail, wind or winter snow storms. I will even go out on a limb and suggest that we should perhaps be prepared to deal with more normal than normal weather patterns.
I read a similar headline in today’s paper that last year was the hottest on record. Sounds very dramatic but we have to remember that the record only goes back about 150 years or so when countries started recording land temperatures with conventional thermometers. Frontier has a nifty little charticle from 2007 which discusses this. To give some context, here are a few lines:
•If the thickness of a sheet of paper is .10 millimetre, 100 pages would be approximately 1 centimetre thick. Assuming paper records began in the middle 1800s, and that each year represents a sheet of paper, that would give us a small pile of about 150 pages or 1.5 cm. of paper.
•The geological age of the Earth—4.55 billion years—would represent a stack of paper that is about 45.5 kilometres high.
•It is misleading to refer to temperatures recorded in the first 1.5 cm. of a paper pile that is 45.5 km. high and call them the hottest temperatures in history.
You can see that charticle by clicking here – http://www.fcpp.org/publication.php/1673