“2012 was the hottest year on record in the U.S. It’s a big story that provides the media with leverage to claim that the evidence that man’s activities are heating the planet keeps piling up. But does it?”
“2012 was the hottest year on record in the U.S. It’s a big story that provides the media with leverage to claim that the evidence that man’s activities are heating the planet keeps piling up. But does it?”
Does anyone remember when the problem was methane gas? Then they found out the culprits were swamps and giant manure piles at the feedlots. Maybe someone else will find out the culprits in this gig are actually malfunctioning trees (not sucking up enough CO2), and melting glaciers…..
The NOAA data on CO2 shows 2 distinct trends: and annual cycle and a monotomic increase. Since 1996 the mean CO2 levels have grown from about 360 ppm to about 395 ppm, http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/#mlo_full
about a 10% increase. You would expect an increase that dramatic to lead to an easily measurable “greenhouse warming” if there was any validity to the AGW hypothesis.
To paraphrase the late Clara Peller, “Where’s the heat?”
Well, we’ve known for about ten years that the global trend flattened around 1996 or 1998. The “global trend” itself is a fishy metric, but it’s the best metric we have.
The real key is this: human CO2 production has remained on an upward swing and atmospheric CO2 has continued to rise, but temperatures have flattened or begun to dip. Since the AGW theory was >CO2 yields >T, and since >CO2 has not yielded >T, the hypothesis fails. Clearly other factors are far more important than human production of greenhouse gases.
The real environmentalists — like climate scientists, a small subset of those claiming the title — have been recognizing this over the last few years. The nanny-bullies will always claim that human sin causes all ills and that they know how to control human sin. Which is all the more amusing because so many nanny-staters are also anti-organized-religion.