The latest “interpretation
of someone else’s interpretation”, together with obligatory barrage of
abuse, from James “saviour of Western
civilisation” Delingpole talks
of the “anonymous leaker” who
publicised the emails known as Climategate and Climategate II. He is lauded as “the man who saved the world”. And this
post, together with more from the denial lobby, is not an accident.
As ever when bad news about the climate emerges from
mainstream scientific circles, there has to be rebuttal and distraction. Del
Boy is on “look over there” duty, while his hero Anthony Watts has roped in Don Easterbrook, a
professor emeritus (but not in climatology) who believes climate change not to
be man made to
do the rebuttal. This is because there has been a double helping of that
bad news.
First came the
revelation in the deeply subversive Guardian
that the latest annual rise in the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere had
been the second largest on record, at 2.67 parts per million (ppm). The highest
ppm annual increase had been 2.93 in 1998, and preliminary data suggests a rise
of 3.26 ppm between February 2012 and February 2013.
And the measurements are not taken round the back of the
nearest large airport, but at the Mauna Loa Observatory on Hawaii. This is part
of the series of observations contributing to what is known as the Keeling Curve, after
Charles Keeling, who first made the observations and the link to the amount
of fossil fuel being burned. He was, not that the denial lobby will tell you
this, a registered Republican.
Along with the carbon dioxide figures has come the report of
a peer reviewed study in Science magazine, “A
Reconstruction of Regional and Global Temperature for the Past 11,300 Years”,
which has concluded that “Surface
temperature reconstructions of the past 1500 years suggest that recent warming
is unprecedented in that time”. Easterbrook, who is peer reviewed only by
Anthony Watts’ cheering, disagrees.
Why such a rapid and emphatic rebuttal has been made becomes
obvious when you look at the match of reconstructed and projected temperatures
from the study: on the 11,000 year timescale, the
present and estimated rise in temperatures looks truly frightening, the
line on the graph heading almost directly upward. Small wonder the climate
change denial lobby has been so vociferous this week.
But what is clear from both news items is that
concentrations of carbon dioxide, the rise in which has been linked to fossil
fuel burning, are at record levels, while another climate reconstruction has
effectively validated the “hockey stick”
and thus showed Michael
Mann to be right and Anthony Watts
and his pals to be, once again, plain flat wrong. Climate change is real, it’s
here, and should concern everyone.
It will not just pack
up and go away when James Delingpole sneers at it.
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