It’s Not Cool…

This entry is part 2 of 8 in the series Global Warming

The Daily Mail yesterday repeated the myth that the planet has been cooling since 1998.

The trouble with ‘man-made climate change’ is that it isn’t based on settled science, despite what the alarmists and their allies at the BBC would have us believe.
There is a welter of countervailing evidence that, far from warming up to boiling point, the Earth is actually getting cooler and the ice caps thicker.

Countervailing is a new word to me. It means…

  1. To act against with equal force; counteract.
  2. To compensate for; offset.

That suggests that the evidence for global cooling has equal validity to that for global warming. It doesn’t. As NASA’s satellites revealed earlier this year, 1998 is only the second hottest year on record (equal with 2007), with 2005 being the current record holder. Even if it were true, one or two cooler years does not indicate (by definition) a trend. They are just isolated cases and as you all know, if your sample size is too small then your conclusions may be unreliable.

global air temperature a
Global Air Temperature

New Scientist magazine uses a nice analogy.

Imagine two people standing at the South Pole, one dressed in full Antarctic gear and the other wearing not much at all. Now imagine that you’re looking through one of those infrared thermal imagers that show how hot things are. Which person will look warmest – and which will be frozen solid after a few hours?

The answer, of course, is that the near-naked person will appear hotter: but because they are losing heat fast, they will freeze long before the person dressed more appropriately for the weather.

The point is that you have to look beyond the surface to understand how a body’s temperature will change over time – and that’s as true of planets as it is of warm-blooded bipeds.

Whilst it is unreasonable to expect every journalist to be an expert on climate change, they must accept some responsibility for their own ignorance. If they are not sufficiently knowledgeable to comment, and can’t use Google, then they ought not to be spreading untruths.