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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solves a problem to access those large fees – and another benefit, our lecturers will be able to promote democracy to China’s up and comi…. – LOL – maybe not
It is amazing how our oh-so-careful universties can adjust their principles when money is involved.
Keeping Blairs education industry going. When my son was looking at going to uni I said no Mickey Mouse courses and no Micky Mouse Universities. (He studied Chemical Engineering at a Russell group uni).
Universities have become (more so) holding bays for the young, who self fund 3 years before going into the job market, to do a job they could of started at 16. (I was talking to somebody in the village and the grass was being cut. The person said it was his grandson cutting the grass and he had a Phd in Psychology).
there’s a growing industry in behaviour science
Indeed – we can be assured that those taking STEM courses will be free from undue influence, and deal only in a truth based on scientific method. That has been so obvius over the last 18 months. We need more versed in the critical thinking of a science and technology dominated culture.
The issue is less simple, and – as always ‘Follow the Money’ is the guide. Chinese students are BIG money, and offending the Chinese is not the road to wealth.
Why are we using our limited training capacity as an export product?
If we wish to train Chinese students, open branches in China.
But as our democratic rights are being swiftly eroded by our once Conservative government to bring about an enforced communist type regime, how useful those students will be over here to advertise the benefits of communism! What a clever ploy. The Imperial College will be delighted. I bet only the most zealous are permitted to come.
“communist type regime”
It’s just the natural (if unforseen by addicts) trajectory of the Tory addiction to capital accumulation at the expense of anything else, not the con of ‘communism’ used as a front for the same.
Some British private schools (which are increasingly abandoning the British middle class in favour of the more lucrative global elite) are indeed opening branches in China.
Let me get this straight. 2 years ago a virus escaped from China and arrived in several countries at a time corresponding to the arrival of Chinese students to universities across the world. Since then we have had universities stopping face to face tuition, because of this virus. Now we have those same universities bussing in students from that same country.
Yep…but God forbid you want a week on the Costas!
PUB’s Three Notice Process To Stop Schools Vaxxing Children
By popular and urgent demand, here lies PUB’s three notice process to deal with the clear and present threat that UK schools will be offering the experimental COVID-19 ‘vaccines’ to 12-17 year olds next month, following the JCVI’s recent u-turn on its 15/07/2021 assessment that the risk outweighed the benefits of vaxxing anybody under 18.
https://www.thebernician.net/pubs-three-notice-process-to-stop-schools-vaxxing-children/
Chinese students are welcome. Chinese politics can fuck off. The UK is not a fucking COMMUNIST country. And the politicians who are committing treason by importing Chinese Communist Party policy like lockdown and vaxpass and credit scores etc, well please fuck off to China and live your fucking dream there you dirty traitorous pieces of filth. These scumbags better pay for these crimes.
CCP and Tory Party = different guises in differing contexts for grabbing the boodle and the power. Simple.
Academia hand in glove with the Chinese Communist Party. Bought and laid for.
Meanwhile, the CCP exploits the Chinese peoplemas slave labour and kills Christians.
How many of these ‘students’ are CCP operatives? What about stealing our IPR?
None of this matters, only the need for Vice Chancellors to top up their obscene salaries and promote their woke agendas.
It’s known as unregulated ‘global capitalism’ – favoured by both the Tories and Labour since 1980 and that ludicrous figure with the handbag.
And the university most closely linked with China is… yes, Imperial.
Hello Mr.Ferguson
How does Ferguson manage ordering from a chinese menu?
…I’ll have 200,000 Number 54,000’s please.
Are you sure?
Of course I am! My computer model says so.
Okay. Do you want wafers with that?
Course I don’t want f’ing wafers…… (copyright Monty Python)
Daughter of a friend of mine, in New Zealand, was a student recruitment officer and flew in and out of China, recruiting, on behalf of the Catholic school she worked for. She’s been NZ bound for a while now so not sure what is going to happen there.
A friendly reminder to British students: You’re forced to wear face masks etc because it is conjectured that it will help with attracting and maintaining a sizable number of these guys who are much more important than you because more money is (reportedly) to be made of that.
Aren’t Chinese people in the uk quite successful compared to other groups eg white working class boys and BME? Yet another means of infiltration and turning the indigenous population into second class citizens?
There were a lot of Chinese students at my university 20 years ago. I have absolutely no idea how they passed anything though as none of them could speak a word of intelligible English. I don’t mean that to sound small-minded, I’m all for studying abroad but I can’t imagine doing it without a decent grasp of the language. I just kinda assumed that the Uni didn’t mind when they were paying so much. It was super annoying to have to attempt to work with any of them on anything that wasn’t in the universal language of maths though.
Well, lots of valuable products are made in China these days – including the students, with related cash flow for the universities. Not necessarily beneficial to our local people, though.
Get the CCP sleepers topped up
Fascinating. So universities are able to organise chartered flights for their Chinese students.. but large food organisations in the country cannot organise drivers to deliver food to Uk shops. Yes, this makes complete sense.
And the wealth of China comes from energy generated largely by coal with a sizable amount of nuclear and environmentally disruptive Hydro. It’s a funny old world and will be even funnier if the Taliban turn up at COP26. How will the XR supporting and woke universities square any of this?
When we are constantly under economic and security threats from the Chinese, we import this vast army of Chinese students with obvious non-west allegiance, just to earn a buck? Are we utterly barking mad?
Just another way the East is winning and we are losing. When it becomes all about money this happens.
World peace may be great, we’ll never know it. Why is it bad to recognise that we have enemies.
So they fly in Chinese students who then have to sit in the rooms remotely accessing courses? They could do that from China.
The treatment of students during the government’s pandemic shows that universities are not “centres of learning”. The insistence on mask wearing proves that.