Yeah, I think it’s a huge deal due to glaciers melting world-wide, tides rising in Bangaladesh and the actic seas staying ice-free.

Just on an advent-side-note. We have looked to Copenhagen for a treaty by the powerless ‘powerfull’, now it’s time to look to Bethlehem for the powerfull ‘powerless’.

The CO2 emissions are to be compared to a football field. If yo considedr the collection of Carbon Dioxide it would measure about 2 square inches of area on a whole football field. Do you also realize that all trees need CO2 to produce oxygen for us. This is a farce by large porportions. Who is going to benifit from this. Private enterprie of course. Not us. Where is the control if the rich can buy credits for emissions. This will not solve the problem, it just places the burden of those that can’t afford to buy the credits. Why didn’t they meet by conference call anyhow. They prfobably blew enough CO@ or carbon emissions just getting there. A closed circuit conference would have been much more appropriate. We live very close to your hero Al Gore. You should see his huge indoor spas and pools. All heated and that is just a tip of the iceberg. Isn’t that appropriate. Sorry, lets pray and talk the person in charge of this beautiful World. He is listening and hoping we will stand up and be countged for what is right for Seniors, kids and Citizens of the United States of America.

While I do believe the world (and specifically the Church) must reconsider and reform our relationship to and treatment of Creation, I am left wondering about the current talks on climate change. It is not a matter of being convinced one way or another, but rather that I find the opposing claims & counter-claims to inspire skepticism of both “sides” (recognizing, of course, there are more than simple 2 positions at stake). It is frustrating and disheartening to be in this position of such polarized uncertainty.
That being said, be it man-made or natural, the climate shifts we are seeing are negatively impact many communities around the world. In both its direct impact and indirect fueling of other circumstances (i.e. Sudan), action needs to be taken. While I think the governments of the world must be involved, I have little faith in their capacity to make meaningful change where it is needed. Rather, we need to see grass-roots movement on a global scale to start seeing a change.
All this to say that my silence on the topic of Copenhagan is reflective of the (slightly altered) saying: If you don’t have anything hopeful to say, don’t say anything at all.
Peace,
Jamie

There is no scientific evidence in support of anthropogenic global warming. And we have seen that the supposed ‘science’ that we have been given has been altered and/or fabricated. To be involved in this current discussion is to participate in politics, not creationism.
Although I believe that we are to care for God’s creation, the current debate – especially the debacle in Copenhagen this week (it failed on many fronts) – does not help us care for creation. This level of ‘greenism’ is about power and money and has become its own god for many.

Rising CO2 levels is wrong?
Glaciers disappearing is an illusion?
Lower historic levels of Arctic ice is a conspiracy?
Snows if Kilimanjaro going extinct no big deal?
Himalayan glaciers vanishing and soon failing to send fresh water to millions who depend upon them no problem?
Who specifically is financially benefiting from this “conspiracy”?
Lord, have mercy!

My, Scot, do you really want to ask that here?
The topic of climate change is perhaps rivaled only by evolution in its ability to generate more heat than light on Christian blogs. Come to think of it, there seems to be a lot of overlap between those in the church denying the scientific evidence for human-caused climate change and those denying the evidence for common descent. Maybe all part of the same culture war.
I also wonder if asking this blog Do you think the climate shifts are man-made or simply the cycles of nature? is sort of like asking a bunch of climate scientists what they think is the best metaphor for the Atonement.
One outfit I respect a lot among Christian organizations for creation care is the John Ray Initiative in the UK (www.jri.org.uk). They have a 2009 briefing paper from the eminent Christian scientist Dr. John Houghton that describes the issues (both what is happening and possibilities for dealing with it) on an accessible level. I would commend it highly to readers of this blog:
http://www.jri.org.uk/brief/Briefing_14_3rd_edition.pdf
If we could get past the question of whether humans are changing Earth’s climate (which is pretty well settled, despite uncertainty about how big and how fast the change will be), we could discuss the really important questions that Copenhagen made some small efforts at dealing with:
1) Given the problem, how should resources be allocated between trying to slow down the change (emissions reduction) and mitigating the effects of the change that is coming to some extent no matter what we do?
2) How should the burden of emissions reduction and mitigation expenses be allocated justly across the world?
Those are both questions where we need more than just the science (and where accepting the science need not mean endorsing the proposed responses of Al Gore or whoever). At that point one gets into public policy, economics, development and poverty, and issues of justice across the world where Christian voices should be vital.
Of course as the essay from Dean Ohlman you linked to yesterday pointed out, we can and should help a little bit individually and as groups, for example by curbing our wasteful lifestyles.

I agree with :mic. I’m a meteorologist, and I work with computer models daily. While the two aren’t the same the basic principles are the same and the same short falls for forecasting are applicable. I’m also suspect of the way the temperature data was chosen and the non-openness of the sharing of the data, etc.
HOWEVER, I think we treat the Earth that God gave us to maintain is appalling. Cleaner energy should be a goal, and changing people’s idea away from consumerism is a must. The current Green movement is still based on power and money.

I am very happy to see the comments already made … so that I don’t have to try to make them. Thanks to Jamie and :mic and Jeff!
Of one thing I am certain: the “science” is definitely NOT settled concerning the earth’s cycles of warming and cooling. I personally find it a reach to say that the impact of human activity reaches the dimensions suggested. Another version of man as the center of the universe? I think perhaps….
Be responsible, yes, for our environment. But get your science and economics and politics properly identified and contextualized. This whole topic, as currently presented, smacks of simplism to me.

You didn’t hear much about Copenhagen because most everyone knew it was DOA.
Besides Climategate, which casts doubt on all global warming data, there are billions of people who live from hand to mouth, and they aren’t going to let the West tell them they have to starve to sooth our environmentalists’ consciences.

Scot,
If I opened up this question where I work, a good evangelical Christian ministry where Dean Ohlman also works, I’d be surprised if not more than 95% and counting of the workers there, would completely discount global warming itself, and certainly together with the notion that human beings have any serious cause to any possible warming trend. And when you have one leading Christian group (as Bob Robinson at his blog points out) even suggesting that carbon emissions may be a good thing, plus there is the idea that the earth is resiliant, and that we can dump on it, and it will do just fine….
It’s an uphill battle at best. I take the position that the science is solid for seeing climate changing and fairly well certain of human impact. We just don’t know how much. That heavy emissions are problematical on the environment is evident in other ways, so I would think it best to err on the side of caution and work at lowering and ending our dependence on carbon energy sources.

- False/Misleading information
- Croneyism
- Condescension
- …
Ironically, the same reason so many people find the church [lower-case "c" intentional] repulsive.

What do you think? Do you think we are facing an unprecedented crisis? Do you think the climate shifts are man-made or simply the cycles of nature?
I do believe – along with folks like Bill McKibben and others – that we are facing an unprecedented crisis that has been caused by unchecked, irrational industrial development by rich nations. This development has been at the expense of poorer nations (spearheaded, I might add, by the United States’ hunger for power and oil). Of course, anyone paying attention to the coverage of the Copenhagen summit would realize that the “accords” reached there are simply paper tigers – all talk, no concrete action. Democracy Now! has been the only major news organization to cover the mass exclusion of civilian interest groups, the silencing of the voices of the Global South by rich nations from the Global North and the excesses shared among many of the heads of state present at the summit. The reason no bloggers have talked about it so far may be that there’s nothing really “new” coming out of these talks – except maybe an even more brazen attempt on the part of rich nations to deny their responsibilities in causing and perpetuating the damages of global climate change at the expense of poorer populations.
But that’s just my two-cents.

Ted @11
Your last paragraph almost sounds as though you agree with Tony Blair’s statement that we should address anthropogenic climate change ‘even if the science is wrong.’ I’m not trying to put words in your mouth, but that is the sense that I get from it.
Perhaps you are establishing a false premise with your opening lines, to deny anthropogenic global warming does not mean that we cannot treat creation responsibly. There are many who care for the earth who also do not accept the premise that human activity is altering the ebb and flow of an ever-changing environment. Instead, the position that is trying to get through is that this level of ‘going green’ is NOT making our environment ‘better’ by these standards.
Now that the data has been exposed as fraudulent, it is quite problematic to press the issue. This is what helped make the Copenhagen summit such a failed debacle. Statements such as Tony Blair’s (along with many others, including the President’s own remarks) reveal the true nature of this movement – it is not about science or the environment, it is about power and money. And it is built entirely on one of the greatest hoaxes ever passed off to the world.
You assert that humans are definitely altering the planet, we just don’t know how much. Then how would you know that we are impacting it at all? That makes no sense, and it certainly wouldn’t be passed off as science (at least, what science once was). Over the past ten years the earth has been shown to be in a cooling pattern, yet worldwide emissions have increased significantly. Are we so certain that our human ‘achievements’ have the power to undo the created order?
Care for the earth is part of the mandate given to all humanity. But anthropogenic global warming is not about caring for the earth, as the movement has had to rely on fictitious data to gain its support. So, opposition to this position is not that we are looking to treat the earth like a garbage can . . . it is about realizing what is and is not affecting the earth, identifying when humans are subduing creation and when creation is put in a position to subdue humanity.

I should clarify, in case it was not clear: while I am not sure if I am convinced of the evidence that the climate change we are seeing (and I DO believe we are seeing climate change) is man-made or not, I do believe it is very likely that it is. My comment was more an expression of frustration at how untrustworthy “sources” are on both sides of the issue.
Further, while I believe we DO need political and economic strategies to address these issues, I believe that as Christians, the biggest issue is not an advocacy or activism position, but rather a failure to have a meaningful theology of Creation (and by “meaningful” I mean a theology that impacts the way we live and relate to each other and Creation).
Peace,
Jamie

bacck in the 1950′s nikita kruschev stated that there was no need to go to war with america as communism would defeat us thru environmental issues. i believe that 9is what is behind global warming push. somebody prove me wrong. explain the dust bowl in oklahoma or the ice age. john

Scot,
The so-called greenhouse effect is required by basic physics ? the infrared absorption properties of CO2, the physics of radiant energy transfer, etc. This is knowledge that is part of general physics; it has not been ?invented? just to explain the idea of global warming. Rather global warming was predicted over a century ago when the infrared properties of greenhouse gases were first discovered. Scientists? certainty of the physics of the greenhouse effect is similar to that of RJS some time back when she posted about the certainty of the several billion year age of the earth.
The ?greenhouse effect? explains why Venus, which is further away from the sun than Mercury, and which has a much higher albedo than Mercury, nevertheless has a higher surface temperature than Mercury. It explains why the earth, which is basically the same distance from the sun as its moon, has a moderate and livable temperature whereas the moon is much colder. And the greenhouse properties of CO2 play an essential role in understanding the temperature history of the earth, all the way back to the origin of the planet.
Richard Alley, one of the premier climatologists in the country, recently gave a lecture on the relationship between CO2 and earth?s temperature to the American Geophysical Union. This is available at the AGU website for any readers who are interested in it. http://www.agu.org/meetings/fm09/lectures/lecture_videos/A23A.shtml
Most of the objections to the notion of global warming that one sees in the popular media, and in some of the comments to his post and previous discussion of the topic, are nonsense scientifically. Refutations of these objections are readily available; however they are ignored by the “skeptics”, who continue to recycle them as if their points have not been answered.
For example, comment #2 repeats the oft heard assertion that CO2 consists of such a small fraction of the atmosphere (380 parts per million, to be precise) that it is unimaginable that it can have an effect on the climate. Only a little reflection should show that such a notion is nonsense — if the absolute percentage of a substance were the sole determinant of its effect on a system, then none of us should object 380 parts per million of strychnine in our morning coffee. Of course substances contribute disproportionately to their concentration in nature all the time (How much salt do you put on your broccoli? Probably no more than a few hundred parts per million, so why bother? You obviously are imagining that it is having an effect). In fact we determine in the laboratory that the current atmospheric concentration of CO2 is sufficient to make the troposphere (lower atmosphere) opaque to infrared radiation in the absorption region of CO2. Measurements of radiation looking up from the ground, and measurements of atmospheric radiation looking down from space are completely consistent with what is expected from the presence of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Furthermore, such observations have been made long enough now that the effects of human caused CO2 increases in the concentrations are detectable in comparisons of satellite data taken recently with data taken thirty years ago.
Several comments, including those from :mic, refer to the climate data as being fraudulent. This is a misrepresentation by those who have no interest in the objective truth about global warming (although I assume that :mic is merely repeating what he has heard from what he regards as a credible source). Climate data are available from many, many independent sources. The CRU data at the location where the emails were hacked is only one data set, and this data could be thrown out and the conclusions would remain the same. To claim the climate researchers are engaged in a massive fraud ? for whatever reason ? while neglecting the special interests who are funding the ?climate skeptics?, few of whom are engaged in anything approaching fundamental science, is to forgo any shred of objectivity oneself.
In 2005 NASA climate documents were edited, by a Bush administration college dropout no less, to remove or suppress sections of the documents that were objectionable to the administration and its friends in the industry. Earlier this year the New York Times broke a story about how the Global Climate Coalition, which was actually an organization funded by the energy industry, in 1995 suppressed statements from scientists from within the petroleum industry to the effect that the science behind human induced climate change was sound. Why do we not take these events as evidence of fraud and misrepresentation propagated by those who are ?skeptical?, who are making such a big deal over the hacked emails?
Often the fact that the earth experiences natural climate cycles is used to induce doubt about the conclusions of climate scientists about global warming (see #9). It?s almost as if the climate scientists suddenly noticed a few years ago that the glaciers were retreating, and have been running around ever since fabricating models and doing calculations to explain glacial retreat. Meanwhile everyone else, aware that climate has cyclically changed in the past and that this is nothing new, are waiting for them to slap their foreheads exclaiming, ?Oh my gosh, we never thought of that!?.
The reality is that we know about these climate cycles now in the detail we do precisely because of the efforts of these same climate scientists who do the research and teach us about them. Understanding the physics behind these cycles, and particularly the consistent role of CO2 in the physics, is an essential part of the climate science story and how we are now faced with anthropogenic global warming. To parrot back to the climate science community the existence of these climate cycles, and to assert simplistically that it invalidates or calls into question the rest of their conclusions is not only to willfully ignore the balance of their work, but it is even insulting. I for one am not all surprised at the tone of some of the hacked emails. The fact that this tactic succeeds as well as it does says much that is discouraging about the scientific illiteracy of our society and the media establishment upon which we depend.

ron @17
I appreciate the detailed response to my earlier posts, and would like to make just a few clarifying statements. First, I am not disputing the greenhouse effect as it is a necessary and common occurrence within our climate. This is about the discussion of anthropogenic global warming as discussed in Copenhagen, which does not discuss the greenhouse effect as though it were separable from human production and livelihood. The greenhouse effect is part of many factors which continue to elude human thought and/or computer analysis in our understanding of the world. (In other words, we are dealing with a creation so complex that we can’t understand all of it; this is why weathermen can’t really tell us if it’s going to rain tomorrow or not.)
Second, you mention: ” . . . although I assume that :mic is merely repeating what he has heard from what he regards as a credible source.” By this you probably imply that I get my information from conservative media (i.e., Rush or Hannity or Beck or Fox) and therefore cannot be trusted. Your statement implies that I do not have the capacity to think for myself, nor have I had the opportunity to see the ‘real’ facts and understand them. This type of argumentation is simply a version of a straw man which is unfair to the concerns that I raise. Although I admit that I am not a climatologist, scientist, physicist or such, I am a thinker and am able to research and reason on my own. What I think of the world is not dictated to me by any media source. Along with my concerns I raise some philosophical and biblical issues, and I do not assume that one is not qualified to speak intelligently about philosophy or biblical theology unless they are experts in that field. (Although, there are days . . .)
Third, you are quick to denounce the Bush administration, which NOBODY was talking about before your post. My guess is that you either think that diminishing Bush somehow discredits me or that you are simply guilty of what you accuse me of – repeating something you heard somewhere else. I have not heard anyone appeal to the Bush administration in any of my discussions on anthropogenic global warming, so there would be no reason to go there (with a derogatory remark about their ‘lack of education’), and I am curious why. Perhaps this is part of the answer to my question of whether or not this issue is steeped in politics.
Fourth, I agree that it is NOT new knowledge that the earth has always been in climate change. But here you speak as though all ‘scientists’ already knew that and dismissed it, whereas all of the little laity are just discovering it. But what about the number of scientists who have been speaking out about anthropogenic global warming for years? Are they just wrong because they’re not the good ones? (Even though many of them are top experts in their respective fields.) This statement appeals to the notion that a ‘consensus’ has been reached on this issue. Consensus and science are incompatible, if there is not sustainable and definitive proof, it is not accurate no matter how many people (or which people) say it is.
The hacked emails are out and they demonstrate the leading center for this study has tampered with their evidence to create a crisis that does not exist. We have seen a global cooling trend while the amount of CO2 emissions have risen. Aside from a small number of people who lecture here and there (and hither and yon), there simply is not data which supports this idea. If so, we would have it paraded in front of us even in the face of climategate . . . rather than this ‘it is right because it is happening’ argument which has become tiring.
In the end, I believe God’s ability to sustain his creation is greater than our human capacity to take it away from him.

The hacked emails are out and they demonstrate the leading center for this study has tampered with their evidence to create a crisis that does not exist.
This is a misleading statement. The stolen emails do demonstrate the foibles of some human scientists, and I certainly won’t defend all their behavior. But there are two important things that get left out of the discussion when these emails are invoked:
1) In the end, despite some scientists suggesting some unethical behavior, no evidence was suppressed. There was discussion of trying to keep a couple of papers out of the last IPCC evaluation … but the papers ended up being included anyway. There was discussion of a “trick” (a common informal term among scientists that does not equate to fraud) to de-emphasize some data that didn’t fit with other evidence, but these these other data have not been suppressed and are openly discussed in climate science.
2) The things these emails calls into question are just a drop in the bucket compared to the overall weight of evidence. For example, I don’t think they negate anything in the paper I recommended above from Sir John Houghton.
I realized yesterday that there is a close analogy to the way the anti-AGW propaganda machine (Heartland Institute, etc.) is using these hacked emails. There is a book Icons of Evolution by Jonathan Wells (the Moonie who is the main biologist for the Discovery Institute). In it, Wells brings up specific examples of scientific misconduct in the name of evolution. Some, like the Piltdown Man hoax and the fudged embryonic drawings of the German biologist Haeckel, are truly misconduct, while for others (like the peppered moth) Wells misrepresents things. But the strategy is to sow distrust about the whole scientific enterprise by picking out a few examples of bad behavior, hoping that readers will be fooled into dismissing the other 99% of the evidence that is not tainted and that supports the conclusion (common descent) that Wells does not like. The hacked emails are now being used in a similar way.

One more comment and then I’ll abandon this near-dead thread.
:mic #18 said:
In the end, I believe God’s ability to sustain his creation is greater than our human capacity to take it away from him.
Such a statement would seem to say that we need not worry about pollution or creation care in general because God won’t allow us to mess up his creation. I’m sure :mic isn’t advocating that extreme (which has been clearly demonstrated false on smaller scales, such as the species humans have driven to extinction).
Of course the statement about God’s ability is true, but the question is whether God will exercise that ability, or whether God will allow us (and the planet over which we have been granted stewardship) to suffer the consequences of our actions.
When I hear suggestions that God would not allow such a thing as human-caused global warming, with the attendant suffering, to happen, it reminds me of how ancient Israel presumed that God would never allow their land to be taken away (no matter how unfaithful they were). Then along come the Assyrians and Babylonians, and suddenly Israel has to deal with the realization that God has not saved them in the way they thought He would.

AHH @20
I’ve said my piece, so I’ll only add this: I have already addressed this concern above. Please refer to my initial statements regarding our need to care for God’s creation. It is not diminished by the uncovering of this hoax.

:mic
I don’t think that this is a hoax – although I am not convinced of all of the details.
I think we need to work it through carefully – because I think that God will allow us to destroy ourselves – just as he will allow us to commit murder and drop atom bombs. The idea that it is impossible because God cares for his creation doesn’t seem right – and the consequences are rather severe if it isn’t right.
We will come back to the topic (well I will certainly post on it) but only when I can ask a well defined question for conversation.

My apologies go to anyone in the Jesus Creed community who feels compelled to read this. I intended it to be a brief response to :mic (#18); unfortunately it is not brief.
?The greenhouse effect is part of many factors which continue to elude human thought and/or computer analysis in our understanding of the world.?
If this is meant in the sense that the relative influences of the greenhouse effect and other ?many factors? cannot be substantially sorted out, then it is simply not true. For example, for the causes of recent warming of the atmosphere, we can rule out solar variability on not one but two bases: first, the known variation in energy output of the sun is insufficient, by about an order of magnitude, to explain observed long term (multi-decadal) temperature changes on the earth. Second, the sun is currently in a low relatively low output phase, yet the last ten years are the warmest in the instrumental record. As with any consideration of scientific measurements and scientific theory, there are uncertainties due to limitations in the data available, or due to our ability to take into account all physical effects. But within climate science there is enough known physics and data (a vast amount actually) that allows us quantitatively to rule out some things as being impossible or of negligible importance. It is not a field where one phenomenon is as likely to affect the climate as another. On such considerations, the greenhouse effect is consistent with observed temperature increases; recent variation in solar activity is not.
?? you probably imply that I get my information from conservative media.? Not at all. The arguments to which I (admittedly energetically) object are all over the place in the media. They might be critiqued in some outlets like MSNBC or Huffington Post; however, they are given much more credibility, at least implicitly through lack of substantial criticism, in mainstream outlets like New York Times and the Washington Post. To name one name, George Will appears to have carte blanche to cart out hackneyed arguments (e.g., scientists in the 70s said the earth was cooling, so how can we trust them now?) time and time again by the Washington Post, with very little pushback from other external commentators in WaPo, and none as far as I can tell from inside WaPo.
?? you are quick to denounce the Bush administration, which NOBODY was talking about before your post.? Sorry about that; perhaps I should have used the words ?previous administration?. The point I wanted to make was that if the CRU emails represent fraud on the part of the climate science community (and in my view they most emphatically do not) there also have been from the other point of view examples of less than ethical efforts to repress climate science — I attempted to give two, one from politics and one from business — and that the emphasis given in the public sphere to these was nothing like that given to the hacked emails (personal opinion, of course). The event in the Bush administration was a target of opportunity ? although surely you would agree that in this area his administration is a rich target? ?
I do not understand the ?fourth? paragraph, I?m afraid. All of us learn about past climate cycles from climate scientists who discover such things in the first place. Necessarily their analysis of climate physics must take this history into account and be consistent with it, otherwise what?s the point? Perhaps the most important thing that a multi-decadal or multi-millenial climate model must do is reverse ?predict? the climate of the past. The model may be faulty anyway, but if it cannot do this backwards ?prediction?, then it is to be less trusted than models that do. My point was that anyone who thinks that the existence of past climate cycles invalidates the work of climate scientists is quite likely to missing some key and obvious points about the science? Put another way, objecting to the conclusion of climate scientist because there have been climate cycles in the past with no regard for how the climate scientists have taken these cycles into account, is to implicitly say they are guilty of ignoring a real big elephant in their room, and are obviously insanely incompetent. But maybe I was (and am still) being a bit to snarky ?
?? global cooling trend?. The notion of a cooling trend, at least as far as a ?slowing? or ?reversal? of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is, to say the least, scientifically unjustified. AGW says the global thermal energy content of the earth environment is steadily increasing because of the human enhancement of the greenhouse effect. In a quite, non-chaotic environment, the global average temperature would steadily, uniformly increase as a consequence of this uniform increase in thermal energy content of the earth. However, while the global average temperature is measured at numerous stations around the world, the measurement spacing is not uniform ? there are more measurements on land than on the sea, and even fewer in the polar regions where the effects of AGW are the most rapid and intense. Also relatively little monitoring is done of the ocean depths, where the vast majority of the thermal energy buildup is stored. As a consequence the global average temperature so determined is a very noisy number ? that is, the temperature difference between successive years, either higher or lower, can be many times greater than any change we would reasonably expect to be due to AGW effects. There are two consequences to this fact. One is that the global warming signal can only be definitively detected by looking at data over a time interval that is long enough for the cumulative effects of AGW to be significant with respect to the chaotic background. There are very sound physical reasons for this interval to be at least 20 years, perhaps longer. Indeed, if one analyzes the temperature records for the last century over any such interval, such a signal is in the data. Second, in a chaotic system, there will, inevitably be years in which the global average temperature is anomalously high (or low). This might be analogous to throwing snake-eyes three times in a row in a dice game ? not a frequent event, but one to be expected on occasion. Years following a statistically unusual hot year are almost all bound to be cooler, and if one looks at the ?trend? following such a year is necessarily down, or ?cooler?.
The year 1998, famously, was such a year, leading to claims of the decade since as one of ?cooling?. But in the context of the noisy temperature record the proper question to ask is, were the years in the decade following 1998 warmer or cooler than the decade previous? The answer is they were warmer. Furthermore, much of the discussion of the ?cooling? of the last decade is based on selective use of one temperature data set (that of the Hadley Centre, where the emails were hacked –http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/comparison.html )
versus another (the NASA Goddard records http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif ). These two global temperature records use different sampling techniques, and as a consequence while they both show long term increases in temperature consistent with AGW, the details of their records are different, including the records of temperature extremes. Both data sets are consistent with the statements I made above; however, in the Hadley data the year 1998 is more prominent than in the NASA data and a straight ?fit? to the Hadley data since that year produces a slightly negative slope. This is not the case for the NASA data. Nevertheless, those who speak of global cooling, when they actually cite data, almost universally refer to the Hadley data of the last decade, with no reference to qualifications that should properly accompany such an argument. Scientifically, the most likely explanation for the data used by those advocating ?global cooling? over the last decade is that they are cherry picking noise.