March of the Idiots
I was just watching the News at Ten, and a report on global warming suggested that 2007 was predicted to be 'the hottest year in the history of the world' - Hamilton keeps an open mind about anthropogenic global warming, and certainly distrusts the Bush/Clarkson school of head-in-the-sanding, but he suspects that whoever wrote the report didn't have a clue what he was talking about.
7 comments:
can you please qualify that lampooning for the laymen out here...?
On the contrary, I think whoever wrote the report knew exactly what they were talking about. The global average temperature is on the up and up, so guessing that 2007 will surpass 2005 as the hottest year ever is perfectly reasonable.
http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/img/climate/research/2005/ann/global-blended-temp-pg.gif
2007 may be the hottest year since records began, but it is unlikely to surpass the Medieval Warm Period, and will certainly fall short of the Holocene Climatic Optimum only 5 or 6 thousand years ago, which was still very cold compared to other points in the earth's deep past.
I agree with Hamilton - Well worth downloading the 'The Great Global Warming Swindle' video from channel four's 4od service which mentions this point about recent climatic periods of warmth. The arguments of the documentary are summarised here http://www.channel4.com/science/
microsites/G/great_global_warming_swindle/
arguments.html. Still probably good reason to want to minimise CO2 consumption in the form of minimising oil consumption to reduce Western dependency on the Middle East and Russia. However, I have great concerns, with preventing poor countries from adhering to stringent controls on co2 and preventing them from developing (whether or not rising CO2 is in someway causing global warming)
We've already topped the Medieval Warm Period, and anyway there is a lot of debate as to whether or not the MWP and the 'Little Ice Age' that followed it were actually global temperature changes, or merely local to Europe or the northern hemisphere. Similarly, it is now accepted that during the so-called 'Holocene Climatic Optimum' it was only warmer than the present day in summer in the northern hemisphere. Two NOAA articles on these two periods:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/medieval.html
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/globalwarming/holocene.html
Why should we encourage developping nations to crippple themselves with targets based on shakey science, when Russia would like nothing more than for the world to heat up a little bit. Siberia would become one of the most fertile areas on the globe.
not sure heating siberia is such a good idea.
http://www.heatisonline.org/contentserver/objecthandlers/index.cfm?ID=5969&Method=Full&PageCall=&Title=CO2%20in%20Siberian%20Permafrost%20is%20Double%20Earlier%20Estimates%20&Cache=False
Post a Comment