Global pause, plateau or cooling – or, if you are reading the political climate narrative in mainstream media, are we heading for almost immediate climate Thermogeddon? Earlier this year, we published a graph showing satellite temperature measurements since the start of the latest pause up to March 2022. It indicated a global cooling trend of 0.14°C a century. Another five months on and the near eight-year pause continues, as does the almost unchanged cooling trend. Since the high point back in 1998, global warming has run out of steam. A pause from that date to about 2012 has now been followed by the latest eight year hiatus, with just a two-year period of mild warming in between.
Not a lot of cooling, it might reasonably be noted, and we are still operating within a fair margin of error. But measuring climate change is about trends, not making fanciful, one-off claims that human activity causes Pakistan’s flooding during the monsoon season or causes summer heatwaves. The current temperature trend could be heading downwards, and if it continues the scientific arguments for Net Zero simply disappear. That of course is why you will never see the above graph in the mainstream media.
You probably will not see the above one either, even though it’s compiled from Met Office figures. This graph plots the average temperature of the U.K. going back to 1880. The temperature trend is not dissimilar to most territories within the populated northern hemisphere. There has been a little warming over the last two decades, mainly around a very strong El Niño natural oscillation in 2015-16. But the curve is clearly flattening. In fact, according to Met Office figures, the 2010s were actually colder in the U.K. than the 2000s. In the past, the average temperature rose by about 0.4°C from 1910 to 1945, fell after that date by about 0.25°C to 1970, and then showed a rise over the next 30 years of around 0.7°C. The slowdown set in around the start of the millennium. Throughout these periods, carbon dioxide continued to rise in the atmosphere.
Is it possible from data and trends such as this to reasonably conclude that humans control the climate and are causing untold damage? Damage, of course, that can only be remedied by imposing a command-and-control Net Zero agenda? One looks in vain in the recent temperature record for any obvious link between rising or falling numbers and higher CO2 emissions. Similar disappointment is to be found when attempts are made throughout most of the historical and paleoclimatic record.
Before he died, the Earth Sciences Professor Bob Carter said it was remarkable that given the expenditure of time and effort since 1990, no summed human effect on the climate had ever been identified or measured. “Therefore the human signal most probably lies buried in the variability and noise of the natural climate system,” he said. The Daily Sceptic has published extensively on past climate changes, showing periods when abrupt movements occurred over very short time periods. Professor Carter notes that compared with the ancient climate record, “temperatures during the last 20th Century were neither particularly high nor particularly fast-changing”. The warming within the 20th Century fell “well within” the natural rates of Holocene warming, as shown by high quality ice core records, according to Carter. A warmer or cooler planet than today’s is far from unusual: “Nature recognises nothing ‘ideal’ about mid-20th Century temperatures,” he added.
It is difficult to promote a climate scare with plateauing temperatures, so most of the effort has been switched to catastrophising natural disasters and single event ‘extreme’ weather events. But much of the narrative is fuelled by the often adjusted and modelled surface datasets that show higher recent warming than those produced by the satellites. Since 2013, the Met Office has made two adjustments to its HadCRUT global dataset, adding 30% more warming to recent temperatures. The 1998-2012 pause is no longer visible in the latest HadCRUT5, despite the Met Office writing about it in 2013. In his essay, Professor Carter drew attention to the measurable effect humans have on local climate caused by building towns and cities that absorb radiant heat from the Sun. The local warming is known as the urban heat effect and it is evident in many of the rising temperatures reported by surface datasets.
It came to light recently that a specialist dataset, designed to remove all urban heat distortions, has been compiled by the American weather service NOAA. The U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) shows little evidence of a warming trend between 2005 and May 2022. When NOAA set up the 114 station project in 2005, it noted that it was aiming for “superior accuracy and continuity in places that land use will not likely impact during the next five decades”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, NOAA never mentions USCRN in any of its monthly or yearly public climate reports these days.
Of course, a surface dataset that has been given a little extra warming, and is corrupted by the urban heat effect, can continue to be used to proclaim continuing record temperatures. This feeds into what seem like increasingly desperate attempts to convince people that climate modelled claims of a 3-4°C rise by the end of the century is likely, absent Net Zero. The recent warm summer over large parts of Europe was of course mana from heaven for the climate alarmists. It was undoubtedly hot and records might have been broken. But just how hot was it in recent historical terms? There was a high temperature of over 40°C recorded at RAF Coningsby, set yards from the runways used by a squadron of after-burning Typhoon fighter jets. And it was replicated at Heathrow, another airport, as well as at a weather station just yards from one of the largest tropical greenhouses in the world at Kew.
But individual temperatures, however high or low, are not evidence of long-term changes in the climate. Paul Homewood has compiled this graph from the longest continuous temperature record in the world – the Central England Temperature Series.
According to Homewood’s reckoning, it was much hotter in 1976 than 2022. Indeed it was hotter in 1826 and 2018, and this summer was no hotter than 1995 and 2006.
If we look back in the paleoclimatic record we would be bound to find countless summers that were hotter than 2022. Something to consider when you next see ‘ever’ tacked onto a media report promoting another climate scare.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Co2 alarmism is the bastard child of eugenics. As with eugenics the ruling class will not reject it as folly until it has demonstrably killed many innocent ppl, only this time through freezing them to death. Co2 is the gas that enables photosynthesis, absorbs infra red logarithmically, makes up only 0.04% of atmospheric gas, was around 15 TIMES current concentrations during the Cambrian and is definitely not earth’s control knob.
Unfortunately the “Knobs” are seeking to use it to control us all….
They really are, the ruling class are barely numerate and have most vacuous ideas of anyone, but full of their own virtue.
Well from their point of view they’ve had to come up with something since very few have another faith which can be used for that purpose now.
For info and perspective:
Atmospheric CO2, currently 421 parts per million (ppm) currently.
Two people sleeping in a bedroom, 1,400 ppm.
Four people in a car (ventilation on) up to 6,000 ppm.
Plant extinction 180ppm.
Would love to know who voted this entirely factual statement down?
BBC customers
Bozo was a control knob I think. At one time.
Carrie Antoinette controls his knob
The point is to keep the proletariat alarmed at all times about something. When the masses are worrying about something they are ignoring what is really going on. These constant attacks by the government and its agencies on our lives has to be met head on – together we are stronger than they are.
Gosh! The RSS graph looks cyclic… just like chaotic, dynamic, non-linear natural variations tend to be.
And… on the UK Met Office graph the slope from 1890 to 1950 is near the same as 1960 to 2020. Could the same thing be the underlying cause – not Man – for both?
But not so fast with the cooling trend. We are dealing with special heat energy here, able to evade all measuring instruments and hide itself in the deep oceans without passing through the upper layer and warming it.
This is obviously the work of Big Oil trying to deceive us.
It’s proven a bit difficult to position polar orbital satellites next to airport tarmacs and car parks.
This article is 100% on target. The globalist mercantile class, aka the world economic forum, supported by their corrupt ‘scientists’ poodles (too many of whom have infiltrated our great universities and other of our once-great institutions) will grab at any issue that can be propagandise so as to portray it as ‘global’, and so promoted as an existential global catastorphe. Anything that can be propagandised in order to lead ‘naturally’ to the totalitarian world order they are so desperately scrambling to achieve. Fortunately more and more of our fellow citizens are waking up to the horrific future they seek to impose on humanity.
Great article. Repeated adjustments to the surface temperature records haven’t only increased the warming trend (usually by cooling the past). They have more importantly aimed to eliminate the variation in 20th century temperatures (not so difficult when ‘global average’ is a metric so nebulous you can leverage averages any way you like to get it to say anything you like). This helps the records match the curve of the increase in CO2 as well as output of models tuned to reflect the shape of the CO2 increase, in a case of ‘if the data doesn’t agree with your hypothesis, just tinker with the data’. Adjustments are made to the source GHCN data, and then by agencies like the Hadley Centre and NASA Goddard Institute who compile this data for their own records.
“…If you look at the attached plot you will see that the land also shows the 1940s warming blip (as I’m sure you know). So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say 0.15 deg C, then this would be significant for the global mean—but we’d still have to explain the land blip…”
—Dr. Tom Wigley, University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, on adjusting global temperature data, disclosed Climategate e-mail to Phil Jones, Sep. 28, 2008
What other branch of science could so easy get away with continually adjusting previously, accurately collected data to fit a hypothesis, even adjusting recent adjustments when they begin to stray off course?
Ah yes. Climategate. The emails that were released that showed exactly how ‘scientific’ (and how honest) Phil Jones and his merry team were.
But “nothing to see here” and “all out of context, move along…” to such an extent that no less than three “public enquiries” were needed to liberally apply the whitewash. Including the “scientific” one headed by Lord Oxborough, whose occupation it was to promote Big Wind, which met with the “scientists” for no more than a perfunctory chat and deliberately avoided asking the obvious key question: – “Did you destroy the emails that you were asked to delete?”
Strange.
And who can forget that immediately after the leak, our new King Charles III, then cancelled all engagements and drove straight to the Climate “Research” Establishment to wipe away those “scientists'” little tears.
Good comment but, please, less of the silly titles: you mean that dim-witted, uber-privileged Chic Windsor guy.
“…you will never see the above graph in the mainstream media”.
I have been trying recently to remember to use the term ‘legacy media’ because, to me at least, it sounds more insulting.
Another excellent piece, thank you very much Chris. I hope you won’t mind if I take issue with you on one small point. You say “… the scientific evidence for Net Zero will simply disappear.” There never has been, nor will there ever be, any scientific evidence for Net Zero. It’s all based on opinions. And as we all know, opinions are like arseholes; everybody has one.
To most people, that second graph is PRECISELY what the warmists point to, why use it? It’s misleading. 1) It massively exaggerates temperatures because it’s only shows the very top part of the data, not 0-100. 2) The period from 1880 to now is NOTHING in the big scheme of things, 500 or 1000 years would make more sense. 3) Recent data is taken from a smaller number of weather stations and guess what, they’re all close to heat sinks like massive airports, cities, uni campuses. 4) There is ZERO mention of higher temperatures caused by city power use, not just heating but air con systems which didn’t exist 50 years ago. Someone should highlight the MASSIVE storm of 1287 on the south coast of England which left previously seaside towns landlocked miles INLAND so the nonsense about ‘rising tides’ is shattered depending where you look. And look at high water marks in Tudor period shipyards, eg Chichester, barely changed at all.