Very occasionally I have posted here about the on-going confusion over mean global temperatures and the arguments on either side of the divide. These posts often get more comments than those on my books, which says something about how people view this most contentious of issues.
Recently I posted a comment on a fellow writer's blog ( The Scribbling Sea Serpent ) that mentioned my point-of-view on this, and got a response from a suitably anonymous person who clearly knew nothing about science, decrying my "denier" cult and blabbering on about the scientific consensus on global warming.
Today, across much of the media, it has been revealed that the rise in global mean temperatures over the last two decades has been: nothing. Data corrections via the Met Office and others have meant that all previous scaremongering predictions have not only failed to materialise, but have now been revised down. Our planet is indeed warming, but the slowing trend observed completely flies in the face of the endlessly repeated mantra that Carbon Dioxide output, which is still rising, is driving temperature change. It isn't. No matter which way the data is observed, human activity cannot be the principle driving force behind our planet's warming trend.
Millions of people have continuously ranted about the scientific "concensus", and all they've achieved is to reveal how little they know about science. There is never a "concensus" in science: there was once a concensus that the sun must be made of coal, its heat derived from gravitational collapse. Close, but no cigar. If our brightest minds had simply relied on "concensus" back then, we wouldn't have learned very much about our world today.
Science is all about the data, about continually revising that data and ignoring our own bias. The latest data crushes the decades of scaremongering by people like Al Gore and the IPCC. Should we sit back and relax? No, of course not. Climate change is real, and something's definitely happening. But next time you hear somebody say that they know all about the scientific concensus, just ignore them. Data is all that matters, and all proper scientific theories are subject to new data that can bring them down if their predictions can be found experimentally invalid. Anthropogenic global-warming is a scientific theory that has been found invalid. I can only hope that the political world, instead of worrying about the fall out from admitting such a catalogue of error, will allow research to move on and root out the real cause of our changing climate, or simply prove that observed temperature changes are within normal global parameters....
Of course, further data could reveal new information that reverses these new discoveries: however, the latest models suggest that warming has peaked, for want of a better description, and that the trend represents a cycle of rising and falling temperatures. Perhaps the latest rise has been influenced by human activity, but not enough to alter the cycle itself? Who knows. Only time, and better data, will tell us. Saying that there is a "concensus", or that the science is "settled", will never tell us anything.
For those who would like a more detailed write-up of why climate science has revealed the lack of anthropogenic warming, from a qualified scientist, then please read the following link:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/18/a-climate-of-scepticism/#more-77781
The recent news reports are easily found on Google etc.
