|  Off to the left is a reconstruction of the global mean temperature from the last 2000 years. It incorporates a time of warmer than average global average temperatures called the Medieval Warm Period, and then a period of cooler-than-average temperatures called the little Ice Age. The Little Ice Age is followed up by what we commonly know as the Industrial Revolution, which meant pumping billions of tons of carbon dioxide -- whose heat-trapping properties we've very familiar with -- into the atmosphere.
I've done this as an important aid in understanding the latest ravings from Henry Payne, resident Detroit News crackpot conspiracy mongerer and curator of the eponymous Museum for Half-Formed Thoughts. His point, such that it is, is that while the American media -- most notably the hated New York Times -- has played up the fact that 2012 was the hottest year on record in the United States, that the media conveniently ignored that it was not the hottest year on record in the United Kingdom. As the England weather indicates, the Times is cherry-picking weather facts to advance its climate agenda. In fact, as the Times less sensationalistic cousin, the London Telegraph reports, GLOBAL temperatures have stopped rising in defiance of the Left's fevered predictions. "A new scientific model has revised previous figures for the next five years downwards by around a fifth," reports the paper. "This figure is little higher than the 0.40C recorded in 1998, the warmest year in the Met Office Hadley Centre's 160-year record " suggesting global warming will have stalled in the intervening two-decade period." Oh.
Oh, indeed. By the way, if you follow the embedded link to the report in the London Telegraph, you'll note that Henry Payne stopped a paragraph too soon. If he'd continued copying and pasting, this is what he would have included. However, it is thought that factors such as ocean current patterns may be behind the slowdown and scientists say the “variability” in climate change does not alter the long-term trend of rising temperatures.
In other words, it's not cooling. Scientists hypothesize that a feedback involving ocean currents is slowing growth in the global mean temperatures. What's still true is that the planet's atmosphere is currently warmer than it has at any point in the last 2,000 years. |
