To end this debate, we should accept there is global warming. If Liberals and Conservative can agree on this premise, then we can have a healthy debate. For the past 50 years, global temperatures had risen by about 1 degree Celsius. However, in the past 10 years, the world average temperatures was absolutely flat, suggesting that temperatures have remained constant. Therefore, global warming has stopped. In addition, since carbon dioxide emissions hasn't decreased, there must be other contributing factor why the world average temperature remained flat. It was suggested the urbanization around the weather station could have caused a “urban heat island effect” where increasing urbanization around weather stations was causing the temperature increases recorded over the past 50 years.
In order to play fire with fire, conservatives should accept the liberal argument and tear each layer off (rhetoric) to expose their stupidity.
(Express) IT'S one of the hottest feuds in science - climate chance zealots insist that we're still destroying the planet but now another scientist has warned the cast-iron evidence just isn't there.
FOR a minute there it seemed the global warming debate had finally been resolved.
While for years scientists and sceptics have raged against each other on the crucial topic, new research hailed “the most definitive study into temperature data gathered by weather stations over the past half-century” seemed to come to an authoritative conclusion.
Global warming IS real it said, strengthening the need for us all to reduce carbon emissions and boost efforts to try to save the planet.
And this research was headed by a physicist who had previously been a sceptic of global warming and an outspoken critic of the science underpinning it, lending the results even greater credibility.
Prof Richard Muller had spent two years trying to discover if the mainstream scientists were wrong but concluded they were right. Temperatures are rising and his results, he concluded, “proved you should not be a sceptic, at least not any longer”. Case closed.
But is it? Not according to Prof Judith Curry, a member of Prof Muller’s team, who claims the same findings have shown that global warming has stopped – plunging the rest of us into a quandary of what and who to believe.
Prof Muller, of Berkeley University in California, and Prof Curry, who chairs the Department Of Earth And Atmospheric Sciences at America’s Georgia Institute of Technology, were part of the BEST project that carried out analysis of more than 1.6 billion temperature recordings collected from more than 39,000 weather stations around the world.
Prof Muller appeared on Radio 4’s Today Programme last Friday where he described how BEST’s findings showed that since the Fifties global temperatures had risen by about 1 degree Celsius, a figure which is in line with estimates from Nasa and the Met Office.
When asked whether the rate had stopped over the last 10 years he said they had not. “We see no evidence of it having slowed down,” he replied and a graph issued by the BEST project suggests a continuing and steep increase.
But this last point is one which Prof Curry has furiously rebuttted. In a serious clash of scientific experts Prof Curry has accused Prof Muller of trying to “hide the decline in rates of global warming”.
She says that BEST’s research actually shows that there has been no increase in world temperatures for 13 years.
A report published by the Global Warming Foundation, which is based on BEST’s findings, includes a graph of world average temperatures over the past 10 years and it is absolutely flat, suggesting that temperatures have remained constant.
This issue is crucial because the levels of carbon dioxide in the air have continued to rise rapidly over the last decade and if temperatures have remained constant during that period it would suggest there is no direct link between carbon gas emissions and global warming.
Prof Muller has made it clear that the BEST study was not conducted in order to gauge the causes of global warming, saying the study “made no assessment on how much of this is due to humans and how much is natural”.
He and his scientists – who also included this year’s physics Nobel winner Saul Perlmutter – set out purely to determine once and for all whether climate change had occurred.
The group had been suspicious of previous results which confirmed a rise in global temperatures , believing that their work may have been skewed by the “urban heat island effect” where increasing urbanisation around weather stations was causing the temperature increases recorded over the past 50 years.
Indeed she says this global warming standstill since the end of the Nineties – which has been completely unexpected – has wide-reaching consequences for the causes of climate change and has already led many climate scientists to start looking at alternative factors that may have contributed to global warming, other than carbon gas emissions. In particular she has mentioned the influence of clouds, natural temperature cycles and solar radiation.
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