Thursday 5 September 2013

Peak #AGW [updated]

Yes folks, we’re not just at peak coverage of global warming/climate change/extreme-weather-event coverage, we’re already over the peak and down the other side.

2000-2013_climate_coverage

Not just down the main trend line, but if you look closely the last two spikes in coverage were not talking up the global warming “narrative,” but puncturing its phoney balloon.

Of course, that won’t stop the Pacific political leaders and leaderenes currently gathering in the Marshall Islands issuing a “communiqué” abhorring what modern industrial civilisation is doing to the climate (which, last time I checked, was delivering sixteen years of stable temperatures only marginally higher than the 1930s (two decades before modern industrial civilisation really began in earnest), and what the climate is allegedly doing to the Marshall Islands, Kiribati and Tuvalu (which is part of what nature and a growing population has always done to the “floating islands” that are low-lying coral atolls).

But smiling and waving is what these gatherings is really about, right. And at least they also expressed long overdue support for Fiji replacing, with something better, the race-based constitution that has long hamstrung the place.

UPDATE:  Not just less coverage, but increasingly skeptical coverage

A partial list includes: The New York Times, the BBC, NPR, The Economist, ClimateCentral and ....

  • Daily Mail, October 2012
    "We agree with Mr. Rose that there has only been a very small amount of warming in the 21st Century." - UK MetOffice
  • NASA Global Temperature Update, January 2013
    "The 5-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade, which we interpret as a combination of natural variability and a slowdown in the growth rate of the net climate forcing." - James Hansen, NASA
  • The Australian, February 2013
    "The UN's [IPCC] climate change chief has acknowledged a 17-year pause in global temperature rises, confirmed recently by Britain's Met Office..." -IPCC Head Rajendra Pachauri
  • Minnesota Daily, April 2013
    "Global warming forecasts have the difficulty that one can’t find much actual global warming in present day weather observations." - Physicist Robert Laughlin, Stanford University
  • Der Spiegel Online, June 2013
    "In fact, the increase over the last 15 years was just 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.11 degrees Fahrenheit) -- a value very close to zero. This is a serious scientific problem..." - Meteorologist Hans von Storch
  • The Independent , July 2013
    image“Some people call it a slow-down, some call it a hiatus, some people call it a pause. The global average surface temperature has not increased substantially over the last 10 to 15 years,” - Scientist Rowan Sutton, Reading University

The latest sighting of MSM skepticism is in, of all places, The Guardian, whose editorial writer this week conceded against type:

There is a serious debate about why observed temperatures have not kept pace with computer-modelled predictions.

Ya think?

[Hat tip c3 Headlines]

3 comments:

Dinther said...

I just read statements from John Key but I can't help but think he is saying the same in his own weasel words.

"NZ won't do more"
"Investments in science are made"
"Happy to agree climate change is important"

What I read is: "You are all fucked in the head and we let science speak. Till them fuck off"

I just wish he would say that.

Peter Cresswell said...

Instead he says, "Take my Emissions Trading Scam, and fuck off."

Anonymous said...

You earlier wrote that there was no such thing as mental illness. Have you ever seen Jim Salinger still claiming "the science is settled; we're all doomed"
Peter