May I thank you in return for the discussion which I do not find tedious but rather necessary in helping to rid the RSA of a pernicious untruth which, promoted by a not-quite-dead government, is steadily destroying the fabric of our British economy. Let us stick to support of the Arts and Industry and drop the insidious “green” political infiltration which is creeping in to a formerly respectable, open-mnided and learned society.

A petition is not peer reviewed science. Fred Singer is, indeed a climate scientist, but his views are not generally supported by the mass of his peers, though they have been supported by some US TV weathermen. As I said earlier, there is not a single significant scientific body worldwide which dissents with the IPCC thesis.

Thanks for the discussion, but it would probably be better to draw a halt to this discussion now lest we become tedious.

This contrasts with the predictions of models used by the UN-IPCC which predicted increase in carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere (correct) matched by a concomitant increase in global average temperature (incorrect). Since CO2 did increase but global temperature fell back to the average, then CO2 is not the cause of any previously-observed warming. Scientists now predominantly associate such rises & falls of global temperature with the cyclic solar activity which incidentally explains the Roman and Medieval warm periods, the Little Ice Age and so on back for many thousands of years.

I am sure that the New Scientist and other popular science mags contain commissioned articles debunking the many climate-change myths but the fundamental satellite temperature observations stated above have not been “explained”. Since we are trading references, a good, readable account of the current scientific view is given by Roger Helmer MEP in a May 2009 report of the Bruges Group to the European Parliament entitled “Cool Thinking on Climate Change: Why the EU’s climate alarmism is both mistaken and dangerous”.

For a more detailed analysis of where the UN-IPCC went wrong and a reworking of its data to reach correct conclusions, it is still difficult to better “Nature, not Human Activity, rules the Climate” by climatologist Dr Fred S. Singer and his collaborators dated March 2008. Having considered the evidence, 31072 American scientists, including several Nobel Prize winners, signed the Oregon Petition in May 2008 which stated inter alia that:-

“There is no convincing scientific evidence than human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gas is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate”

Concerning the vaunted melting of the Arctic and those “endangered” polar bears whose numbers have increased from an estimated 6000 to at least 50000 since the shooting them from aircraft was banned in the 1960s, the Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis May 4 2009 of the National Snow and Ice Data Center stated:-

“Arctic sea ice extent declined quite slowly in April; as a result, total ice extent is now close to the mean extent for the reference period (1979 to 2000)”.

NASA figures for mean global temperature 2008-9 have recently been published and again show a slight fall. Predicted figures for major hurricanes, expected by IPCC commentators to cause widespread devastation have actually indicated a benign period or relative tranquillity. You can obtain data from Lloyds and other global insurer sites

Sadly there is such quasi-religious fervour, combined with opportunist industrial acceptance of hefty subsidies on offer from gullible politicians together with the ludicrous trading of carbon credits, that the warmist juggernaut is going to be difficult to halt. However I believe that it is not the function of a learned society like the RSA to fuel the flames of our own economy’s funeral pyre.

Because if you use those years the data shows something rather different. If you’re serious about your argument, don’t start by basing your data on an anomalous year.

For that matter, the data from 1998-2008 doesn’t even show that global temperatures have been falling since the temperature spike year of 1998. You might be interested in this New Scientist article debunking the myth.

Since 2007, there has not been a single major scientific body worldwide that dissents with the IPCC thesis that global warming is a) happening, and b) manmade.