World may not be warming, say scientists was, Re: Zeker, ' ...our children and grandchildren are going to bear de consequenties of our discisions today', but ...

[Henk Elegeert]

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Op 15 februari 2010 17:58 heeft Henk Elegeert <hmje at home.nl> het
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/environment/article7026317.ece
"
>From The Sunday Times
February 14, 2010
World may not be warming, say scientists
Jonathan Leake

The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists
casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising
inexorably because of human pollution.

In its last assessment the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) said the evidence that the world was warming was “unequivocal”.

It warned that greenhouse gases had already heated the world by 0.7C
and that there could be 5C-6C more warming by 2100, with devastating
impacts on humanity and wildlife. However, new research, including
work by British scientists, is casting doubt on such claims. Some even
suggest the world may not be warming much at all.

“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global
change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the
University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.

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The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the
thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used
to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.

These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by
factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases,
being moved from site to site.

Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in
three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of
California and Alabama.

“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets
show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually
caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land
development.”

The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of
economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the
panel to review its last report.

The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since
published a research paper questioning its methods.

“We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the
IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from
industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large
warming bias,” he said.

Such warnings are supported by a study of US weather stations
co-written by Anthony Watts, an American meteorologist and climate
change sceptic.

His study, which has not been peer reviewed, is illustrated with
photographs of weather stations in locations where their readings are
distorted by heat-generating equipment.

Some are next to air- conditioning units or are on waste treatment
plants. One of the most infamous shows a weather station next to a
waste incinerator.

Watts has also found examples overseas, such as the weather station at
Rome airport, which catches the hot exhaust fumes emitted by taxiing
jets.

In Britain, a weather station at Manchester airport was built when the
surrounding land was mainly fields but is now surrounded by
heat-generating buildings.

Terry Mills, professor of applied statistics and econometrics at
Loughborough University, looked at the same data as the IPCC. He found
that the warming trend it reported over the past 30 years or so was
just as likely to be due to random fluctuations as to the impacts of
greenhouse gases. Mills’s findings are to be published in Climatic
Change, an environmental journal.

“The earth has gone through warming spells like these at least twice
before in the last 1,000 years,” he said.

Kevin Trenberth, a lead author of the chapter of the IPCC report that
deals with the observed temperature changes, said he accepted there
were problems with the global thermometer record but these had been
accounted for in the final report.

“It’s not just temperature rises that tell us the world is warming,”
he said. “We also have physical changes like the fact that sea levels
have risen around five inches since 1972, the Arctic icecap has
declined by 40% and snow cover in the northern hemisphere has
declined.”

The European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts has recently
issued a new set of global temperature readings covering the past 30
years, with thermometer readings augmented by satellite data.

Dr Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office, said:
“This new set of data confirms the trend towards rising global
temperatures and suggest that, if anything, the world is warming even
more quickly than we had thought.”

Surface temperature records: policy driven deception? - a report by
Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts
http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/surface_temp.pdf
"

...

Henk Elegeert

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