Excuses for Lack of Global Warming

By Jonathan David Carson

"What Happened to Global Warming?" asks Science, the flagship publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in its October 2, 2009, issue, before immediately answering, "Scientists Say Just Wait a Bit." By a "bit," AAAS means a "few years."

The "blogosphere," it seems, "has been having a field day with global warming's apparent decade-long stagnation." The world is supposed to sign a global warming agreement in a few years less than a bit, in Copenhagen in December, to be exact, but "What's the point, bloggers ask?"

So global warming skeptics are "bloggers." Here are a few of these bloggers:

·        S. Fred Singer--first Director of the National Weather Satellite Service and Professor Emeritus of Environmental Science at the University of Virginia

·        Dr. David Bromwich--President of the International Commission on Polar Meteorology

·        Prof. Hendrik Tennekes--Director of Research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute

·        Dr. Christopher Landsea--past Chairman of the American Meteorological Society's Committee on Tropical Meteorology and Tropical Cyclones

·        Dr. Antonino Zichichi--one of the world's foremost physicists, former president of the European Physical Society

·        Prof. Freeman Dyson-- another of the world's foremost physicists

·        Prof. Tom V. Segalstad--head of the Geological Museum, University of Oslo

·        Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu--founding director of the International Arctic Research Center

·        Dr. Claude Allegre--member, United States National Academy of Sciences and French Academy of Science

·        Dr. Richard Lindzen--Professor of Meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and member of the National Research Council Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate

·        Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov--head of the space research laboratory of the Russian Academy of Science's Pulkovo Observatory and of the International Space Station's Astrometria Project

·        Dr. Richard Tol--principal researcher at the Institute for Environmental Studies at Vrije Universiteit and Adjunct Professor at the Center for Integrated Study of the Human Dimensions of Global Change at Carnegie Mellon University

·        Dr. Sami Solanki--director and scientific member at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany

·        Dr. Eigils Friis-Christensen--director of the Danish National Space Centre, Vice-President of the International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy

·        Dr. Edward Wegman--former Chairman of the Committee on Applied and Theoretical Statistics of the National Academy of Sciences

For a less incomplete list of bloggers, see The Deniers by Lawrence Solomon. Another list can be found here. A list of 31,000 scientist-bloggers can be found here.

"Climate researchers" do not deign to answer back in the blogosphere, according to AAAS, preferring instead to reply "in their preferred venue, the peer-reviewed literature": "The pause in warming is real enough, but it's just temporary, they are argue from their analyses. A natural swing in climate to the cool side has been holding greenhouse warming back, and such swings don't last forever."

After pretending that global warming skeptics are bloggers, not scientists, and that their home is the blogosphere, not the peer-reviewed literature, AAAS attributes the more-than-decade-long failure of the globe to warm to a "natural swing in climate." In other words, when the climate warms, it is as a result of anthropogenic causes, but when it cools or fails to warm, it is as a result of natural causes. Increases of temperature are human-caused. Decreases are nature-caused.

Skeptics have been saying for decades that the warming from about 1978 to 1998, which was after all only 0.40C, was probably due to natural causes; now AAAS says that the flat or downward trend since 1998 is due to natural causes, which had nothing to do with the rise between 1978 and 1998. They told us that the temperature of the earth would continue to rise, and when it did not, they said, see, our critics were wrong.

People who argue this way are not scientists, but lawyers with a bad case.