By Joanne Nova
The world has not warmed since 2001. Team-AGW reply #1: In the last decade we’ve had six (or seven or eight) of the top ten hottest years ever recorded. Skeptics Say: True, but it doesn’t mean much. Clusters and longer trends are all that’s left when you can’t say ‘2009, or 2008, or 2007 was the hottest…’ The kicker is that the world has been warming since the Little Ice Age of the 1700’s, long before SUV’s. And records only started around 100 years ago. That’s not long. (See the Akasofu graph.) Plus, many records were set by ground based stations, and a lot of these can’t be trusted. The Urban Heat Island effect means thermometers in cities are really measuring parking-lot-warming, or the-air-conditioner-effect, not global warming. Satellites have circled the planet 24 hours a day for 30 years recording temperatures continuously. If temperatures were still rising, they would see it. AGW reply #2: This flat patch is just natural variation. Skeptics say: “Natural variation” is caused by something. And it’s more important than carbon dioxide, because it is overpowering any CO2 warming. Even if the temperatures start going up again, the flat trend for seven years tells us the models are missing something big.Conclusion: This doesn’t prove global warming is over, but it proves carbon dioxide is not the main driver. Something else is causing temperatures to change, something the computer models don’t include.
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