There is a good global warming dissent piece by Paul Driessen at the Washington Times.
My general take on the global warming issue has been as follows: 1) I have accepted that global temperatures are indeed rising; 2) I accepted that human activity is a significant cause of current warming trends; 3) I don't think we can know much about how severe the consequences will be or even whether they will be bad; and 4) short of the collapse of the Chinese and Indian economies, I am sure we can't do anything to significantly modify the human influences.
A story has broken very quietly that brings into question the first two opinions. Here is Lorne Gunter writing in the Canadian National Post:
Last week, NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies -- whose temperature records are a key component of the global-warming claim (and whose director, James Hansen, is a sort of godfather of global-warming alarmism) -- quietly corrected an error in its data set that had made recent temperatures seem warmer than they really were...
What, exactly, does the adjusted data tell us? It tells us that a lot of the claims about recent warming trends are wrong, at least with regard to temperatures in the US.
The hottest year since 1880 becomes 1934 instead of 1998, which is now just second; 1921 is third.
Four of the 10 hottest years were in the 1930s, only three in the past decade. Claiming that man-made carbon dioxide has caused the natural disasters of recent years makes as much sense as claiming fossil-fuel burning caused the Great Depression.
The 15 hottest years since 1880 are spread over seven decades. Eight occurred before atmospheric carbon dioxide began its recent rise; seven occurred afterwards.
In other words, there is no discernible trend, no obvious warming of late.
Now, I would like to see a revised chart, but so far I haven't found one. You can find the corrected raw data by year at the NASA website. The summary above is correct. So far, US temperatures are not significantly warmer than they have been over the past century. It is true that every year between 1997 and 2006 has seen temperatures above the annual mean for the 1880-2006 period. But every year between 1938 and 1947, except 1945 was also above the annual mean.
Is the world experiencing an accelerated warming trend? Probably. The last ten years show robust warming according to the corrected numbers. But the overall numbers don't suggest anything alarming yet. It would be nice if the MSM would flesh this out for us, but global warming politics always trumps global warming science. In the meantime you have to rely on blogs like this one.
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