Miliband vs The Flat Earthers
When I appeared on the Jeremy Vine programme on Wednesday a number of callers disputed my interpretation of the science of climate change. I said the evidence of cause and effect was unambiguous. A number of emails after the programme also disputed the facts and I promised to provide links via my blog to the science. ..
Strangely he doesn't link to this...
World Climate Report which brings to our attention a peer- reviewed paper in a serious scientific publication untainted by any special interest:
The authors place the recent warming into an interesting perspective noting “the global warming observed during the latest 150 years is just a short episode in the geologic history. The current global warming is most likely a combined effect of increased solar and tectonic activities and cannot be attributed to the increased anthropogenic impact on the atmosphere. Humans may be responsible for less than 0.01°C (of approximately 0.56°C (1°F) total average atmospheric heating during the last century)”. Holy cow, can you imagine the letters and e-mails they must have received in response to that conclusion? They even show that over the last 3,000 years, the earth has cooled, or if you look just at the last 1,000 years, the earth has been cooling as well (the earth was in the Medieval Warm Period 1,000 years ago).
Their conclusions with respect to potential policy will more than raise some eyebrows as well as they write “Any attempts to mitigate undesirable climatic changes using restrictive regulations are condemned to failure, because the global natural forces are at least 4–5 orders of magnitude greater than available human controls.” They show that the climatic effects of the Kyoto Protocol would be negligible, leading them to state “Thus, the Kyoto Protocol is a good example of how to achieve the minimum results with the maximum efforts (and sacrifices). Impact of available human controls will be negligible in comparison with the global forces of nature. Thus, the attempts to alter the occurring global climatic changes (and drastic measures prescribed by the Kyoto Protocol) have to be abandoned as meaningless and harmful.”
Our World Climate Reports uncover and present interesting results we find in the peer-reviewed professional scientific journals, and as we have seen over and over, there are many absolutely amazing papers published regularly in outstanding journals. The global warming crusade would denounce this paper as outrageous, but it survived rigorous peer-review, the editor elected to publish it, and like it or not, this paper is part of the serious science literature. Dismissing the paper is made more difficult given the affiliation of the authors and the prestige of the journal.
The debate on climate change is never boring, the debate is full of surprises, and anyone claiming the debate is over is simply dismissing a significant number of papers that appear regularly in the major journals.
Reference:
Khilyuk, L.F., and G. V. Chilingar. 2006. On global forces of nature driving the Earth’s climate. Are humans involved? Environmental Geology, 50, 899–910.
Hat Tip to The Devil for the Miliband quote