While 2005-2007 were years of record warmth, the overall trend since 2001 averages out to a nice flat line.¹ But while we could see this flat line continue, or even drop down into a period of cooling, you should not doubt that global warming is real, and is caused by us. It might take 30 years to show up again, but when it does, even though we do not know why things are cooling now, we are sure the warming will be “explosive.”²

Or, we could accept that what we really had was not “global warming” but “solar warming,” which affected Mars and Jupiter as well, and that as the sun’s activity level has dropped, so too has our temperature. Or we could accept that we really do not have all that much ability to influence our planet’s climate yet, and that the correlation of green house gases the last few decades did not equal causation. We could be honest and admit that we do not know all that much about climatology, not much more than we know about the weather next week.

But then we would have to admit that all this hype and all this worry, and all of the billions of dollars going into trying to stave off what is, under global warming theory, irreversible, is wrong headed.

We cannot do that. Why, some people make careers out of scaring the rest of us with how evil we are, and how much we are hurting the planet! They would be out of a job!

The quote¹ actually says

• science != consensus
• politics == consensus
• science == ∃ X such that ((X == investigator) && (X == “correct”); where (”correct” == “results are verifiable in reference to the real world”))

The problem is that skepticism does not reign throughout much of science. Rather, dogmatism reigns. Anyone who dissents is silenced. If the environment we have today existed, Einstein would not have been able to publish, he upset too many careers. But back then the science journals were not as tightly controlled as they are now, and it was more possible then for a radical idea to get published.

It is then asked, “what does it mean to say in reference to the real world.”² A valid question. What is meant here is that results have to bear out, taking relativity for an example again, we can see that the data fits better than Newtonian physics. However, Global Warming doesn’t account for a great deal of the data out there. Relativity fits the real world. Global warming is questionable at best.

Why is Jupiter getting warmer near the equator?¹ I thought all climate change was due to humans. It is not even worth considering whether nor not whatever is warming Jupiter might also be affecting Earth.

“This does not mean that we should never take action to prevent evil, or should sit back and wait for God to do something. It does mean that we should not panic, or become needlessly anxious, or jump to rash conclusions, which may cause more harm than good.” – Melinda Selmys¹

The “This” above refers to Christ’s command that we be not afraid.

It appears that not all Y2k bugs have been fixed; one was found in NASA’s handling of raw climate data.¹ After the corrected figures² have been released, it turns out that 1934, and not 1998, is the warmest year on record. Why a Y2k bug would have changed the readings for 1998 I am unsure. It is very puzzling, but the new data linked to does in fact seem to state that. Still, I wonder if the author is not misinterpreting something (though I would of course love to be able to state that our warmest years were so far back).

UPDATE: 2007-08-17: As I watch the confused reporting on this, I see very little worth linking to. Still, it seems to be that this was not a Y2k bug, though the fact that there was a bug of some sort, and that it has been corrected, is not challenged. Many are also being very quick to challenge the idea that the ranking of various years matters at all.

Global warming is real. We have not seen it in much of the recent data¹, the ice at the antarctic is increasing², and other parts of the southern hemisphere are getting colder also,³ but it is real. Scientists everywhere assure us of this fact.

Not only is it real, but it is our fault. It does not matter that some of the data from Mars indicates that Mars might be warming also.⁴ This does not matter; the greenhouse gases we produce must be the cause.

That is why even though scientists are now sure that their models underestimated the role of various natural weather variations, and that a new model that tries to take them into better account predicts no warming for at least another 2 years, we can be sure that after that things will get really bad.⁵ We should trust this model, even though none of the previous ones have been all that accurate.

This incredible explanation is why I have taken the time to recap some of the highlights of the last year or so of following this issue. While scientists have tried to refute the role of the sun in the Earth’s climate (an article I regrettably lost the link to before I had a chance to write about it), they have ignored (so far as I have seen following only the public news) the data points I have listed here. It seems to me that what we do not know about climate far eclipses what we do know about it, and that any gloom and doom projection should be taken with a large grain of salt.

Particularly when it is saying, in essence, “we know we have been claiming it will get warmer for years now. It has not really gotten any warmer, but just keep paying us, it will any year now.”

Looking at the effect of brown clouds over the Indian Ocean, a group of United States researchers have managed to explain the fact that glaciers in the Himalayas are melting without resorting to blaming any and all warming on carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases.¹ They claim the warming is caused by the pollution put out from burning wood and fossil fuels. The answer to both of these problems is to improve the power generation in Asia, and the general standard of living.

Johannesburg, South Africa has its first confirmed snowfall in more than 25 years¹. While the city normally gets cold, with an average minimum of 4.7 degrees Celsius in June, this is the first snow they have had since 1981. The capital, Pretoria, had its first snow since 1968, an even longer period.

Meanwhile, Australian citrus farmers are worried that their fruit might have suffered frost damage after experiencing their coldest June day ever.² These data points fit well with earlier news stories that it is getting colder in the Antarctic.³

The sun not only varies in brightness, it also has a major impact on how much cosmic radiation reaches the earth. Between the two, it is the primary cause of change in our climate.¹ This article focuses on a series of mud cores from Canada, but also has a number of references to scholarly journals.

The Pittsburgh Tribute-Review reports that there is reason to doubt the temperature recordings from NOAA.¹ According to the article, a former meteorologist is spot-checking the quality of the NOAA weather stations across the country. So far only a few of the 1,221 stations have been checked, so much work remains to be done. Still, at least some disturbing news has been found. At least a few of these stations are no longer in isolated rural areas. Though they are intended to “be 100 feet from buildings, not placed on hot concrete, etc,”² some are in close proximity to air conditioning exhaust vents, cell phone towers, and parking lots. This would seriously compromise the data, because of the highly localized nature of the temperature in such areas. It does not take a rocket scientist to realize that the air around an exhaust vent might be experiencing a warming trend after all.