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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Rank stupidity.
On Thursday I rode from home to a beautiful scenic route around Wiltshire, 256 miles on my Ducati. One 5 min fuel stop and the evocative purr of my V twin.
By 2040, I’ll be retired from biking, something I took up after a 37 yr break and now achieve at police skill level.
Yet another freedom grabbed.
Time for the great British public to wake up and throw out the Unaparty.
Ducati? Oh mate, I drooled over them in matlock bath!
The ferrari of motor bikes
Not going to happen I’m afraid. The coming labour government will make this lot look like a golden age.
They just might wake up the dumb public that if you vote for a uni-party, don’t expect much change.
Perhaps the next government should be made to feel the same way about the electorate.
All of this Pretend to Save the Planet Politics comes from the school of thought that says “The lifestyles of the affluent middle classes is unsustainable”. ——-The UN in conjunction with all of the western world’s politicians, with the possible exception of Trump have decided that our standard of living is too high. Ofcourse they will never tell you that to your face. It is all shrouded and cloaked in talk of the environment and preventing temperature rises, reducing emissions of dangerous greenhouses gasses de da de da. But it mostly has nothing to do with any of that. Those are simply plausible excuses. It is very easy to convince 90% of the public that the climate is changing for the worse as it is so variable from season to season, year to year, decade to decade and over longer periods of time that it seems to be the truth. ——-Until you look at data that is. But how many of the public go to the trouble of looking at any data? When people are busy with work and family life it is so much easier to just switch on the 6 O’Clock news and believe in all of the global warming stuff. ——-But as we all should know, believing things gets you into a whole lot of bother. Believing things allows you to be very easily manipulated, and right now we are all being manipulated and coerced into a lower standard of living based on endless propaganda about a climate crisis for which no real empirical evidence exists. —————Wakey wakey people.
It comes from the geopolitical consideration that we don’t have oil anymore and can’t get rich from it, so no one else will.
They don’t care enough about the middle classes ro make them poorer or richer. They care about themselves and their power, which is rapidly flowing away from the west to other parts of the world.
Very true. And our lower standard of living will affect economic growth in a negative way, ensuring the country remains a basket case
I love my motorcycles, the petrol engine snarl is a big part of the attraction as well as an aid to being noticed by other road users. ‘Sorry mate I didn’t see you’ is a common excuse after a collision. I want to be heard – within reason; I keep the baffles in the exhaust out of consideration.
I get roughly 120 miles on a tank and my weekend rides can be 200+ miles if I’m exploring. Tanking up is instant, I don’t want to wait for batteries to charge. Nor do I want a whisper quiet machine. I imagine many bikers feel as I do.
The thing is, most bikers take care of their beloved machines. There are many 30+ year old models still going strong. The second hand market is similarly strong. This ban would prop up the secondary market. I plan to keep my bikes in good shape for many years to come, and would consider getting a new one before the ban comes in.
By 2040 I’ll be pretty old, but I’ll be a cantankerous old git if they try and take my bikes away from me.
I saw an episode of Till death Do Us Part last night, we need more Alf Garnets & Victor Meldrew’s. There was an article on DS about the Victor’s of this World and what they would make of post 2020.
Thinking about a Multistrada…. Love my Versys but… N+1 innit
Do it, why wait? Versys is a fine machine, but does it set your heart aflutter?
What’s with the solitary downticker? Is it the same person having a grump on every post? These are innocuous musings on something we enjoy.
Did you not enjoy your sunny Sunday? I did. Does that upset you?
Mine’s the V2S, a swiss army knife. Assuming you’re 6′ ish, you’ll love it.
Here’s a vehicle made for one of those Just Stop Oil protests.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ooiZeYmYjE
Fiat S76 1911 28.4 litre. Start up and driving Sounds.’The Beast’
Why are the ruling classes such a bunch of joyless bug gers? Gradually taking away folk’s simple pleasures piece by spiteful piece …
They will be taking the keys to my Jaguar XJ8 (4 litres, ta very much) and Honda CB600 motorcycle from my cold dead hands. They’ll be coming for my longbow next.
That is one of my favourite cars the Jaguar X300/308. I have had the 3.2 in the past and the six cylinder 4L X300 that was also LPG. Since the cost of Lockdown crisis I have been more sensible with a Toyota 2.2 diesel.
The last of the proper Jaguars for me. Wonderful cars!
”They’ll be coming for my longbow next.”
I would rather hope that your Longbow will be coming for them.
Into my seventies now but I can still just about manage a 60lb pull English longbow and have somehow collected quite a few arrows over the years. I stand ready to protect the homestead against all comers! (Now where did I leave my walking stick?)
They destroy everything they touch.
An order will have to go through Parliament I think. An ideal time for questions about battery fires.
Msny people keep bicycles, mopeds and motor bikes in their house or integral garage. Fires which occur are catastrophic. there are rules about storing petrol and the design of garages to ensure that in the very unlikely circumstance of petrol leaking in a garage it does not enter a home.
where is the equivalent protection for bikes and their batteries. I noticed my son charging his bike battery on his kitchen worktop. Ugggh.
This means that I will have to get one and continue riding until this idiotic decision is struck down.
Chaaaaaaaaaaarge! And I don’t mean plug anything in.
They’ll have to prise my bike out of my dead hands.
But I suspect the ban on manufacture won’t actually happen. There’ll be a lot more serious things for them to focus on by that time, methinks. Like personal security.
And there’s no way on God’s earth it’s happening here in France. School kids ride 50ccs to school every day. And the biking community is strong and organised: they are sticking it to the authorities regarding the recent introduction of a requirement for motorbikes to have MOTs.
The nature of the folks in power is to be deeply suspicious of people on motorbikes.
The whole climate shenanigans are as far from science as you can get barring voodoo.
This sentence for example: “But while cars and taxis accounted for 57% of the U.K.’s transport-related carbon emissions in 2021″
Carbon emissions? I thought Carbon Dioxide was supposed to be the villain, but Carbon?
Here is what Wikipedia has to say about this ‘dreadful’ element:
Carbon is the 15th most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, and the fourth most abundant element in the universe by mass after hydrogen, helium, and oxygen. Carbon’s abundance, its unique diversity of organic compounds, and its unusual ability to form polymers at the temperatures commonly encountered on Earth, enables this element to serve as a common element of all known life. It is the second most abundant element in the human body by mass (about 18.5%) after oxygen.
And Brittanica
…Although widely distributed in nature, carbon is not particularly plentiful—it makes up only about 0.025 percent of Earth’s crust—yet it forms more compounds than all the other elements combined.
… A natural sequence of chemical reactions called the carbon cycle—involving conversion of atmospheric carbon dioxide to carbohydrates by photosynthesis in plants, the consumption of these carbohydrates by animals and oxidation of them through metabolism to produce carbon dioxide and other products, and the return of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere—is one of the most important of all biological processes.
Nearly all governments rave on about Carbon Neutral and Net Zero and de-carbonising the economy, but reading the description of Carbon above what lunatic thinks Carbon is bad. And just in case someone brings up the Greenhouse affect; the Earth’s atmosphere is not encased in glass or any other kind of physical restriction. In addition the atmosphere is not made up of cubes of air as described by computer climate models. And for good measure, below are some graphs showing how atmospheric CO2 is publicised and what a graph with the correct scale looks like.
With correct graphic
They love to mess about with the axes. It’s quite easy to make a tiny blip seem mountainous. And why not crop the time series to hide that inconvenient contradiction of the narrative?
We saw everyone in govt and msm doing this during coof too.
The UK Government also funded a group to come up with the ‘excellent’ aspirations in the graphic below. Pol Pot’s Year Zero comes to mind.
You know, I wouldn’t fight for this country (ie, foe the UK government) if it went to war with another country. I would however definitely fight for my country, and be prepared to die for my country, in a civil war *AGAINST* this government.
The government of this country is the enemy, alongside the quangos, the civil service, the Progressive Left and the rest of The Blob
That is the point I making to these commentators on the telly, never mind about Russia & China when we have a fifth column working to reduce our freedoms at ant given opportunity. If they are (all of a sudden for some reason) so worried about China for security reasons, why don’t they take a closer look at Jeremy Hunt’s Chinese Communist wife FFS!
And why don’t people take a closer look at Donald Drumpf’s Slovenian Communist porn star wife, whose father was in the Communist Party of her native Slovenia.
I would forgive her, she is hot after all!
“Sales of New Petrol Motorcycles Set to Be Banned From 2040”
MY ARSE!
SUZUKI GS 1000 chain drive!
Good god, it stood up on end! Twist!
Coming out of Matlock bath one time, in the early 80s, on my ap50 ,a Martin special came tearing past a police speed trap on the a6 at god knows what speed, and the BMW police bike just wheeled himself back in again!
No chance!, That bike just disappeared!
Determined bunch of psychopaths aren’t they
No need to fight this alone. Time to join the Motorcycle Action Group, who still hold an annual ride in honour of Fred Hill.
I think I can hear the Hell’s Angels reviving up – should be fun.