The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, in question time yesterday noted the major outcomes from our report ‘The Copenhagen Diagnosis‘. You can read it in Hansard here. If you read the Hansard, while the Prime Minister was reading out some of our findings, there were interjections from Dennis Jensen MP who scaringly has a science background! Anyway, Jensen shouts out twice ‘there is cooling.. the trend is cooling’ to the Prime Minister. I responded to similar ideological claims from Andrew Bolt earlier in the year - click here to have a read over at Graham Readfearns blog at the Courier Mail. Aside from answering these claims, there is a very important question Jensen shoudl clarify : If you believe your expert claim that the world is cooling, then why are the glaciers, Arctic sea-ice, Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheets all melting rapidly? Doesn’t sound scientifically possible does it? It’s because this notion of cooling is completely false. I’ll let you be the judge.
This is taken from our report about the ‘global cooling’ claims - I have edited the full version for brevity you can see full response in report.
Has global warming recently slowed down or paused?
No. There is no indication in the data of a slowdown or pause in the human-caused climatic warming trend. Since 1985 the world has warmed on average about 0.5°C (see Figure above). This is entirely consistent with the climatic warming trend of ~0.2 °C per decade predicted by IPCC, plus superimposed short-term variability (see Figure above). The latter has always been – and will always be – present in the climate system. Most of these short-term variations are due to internal oscillations like El Niño – Southern Oscillation, solar variability (predominantly the 11-year Schwabe cycle) and volcanic eruptions (which, like Pinatubo in 1991, can cause a cooling lasting a few years).
Global cooling has not occurred even over the past ten years, contrary to claims promoted by lobby groups and picked up in some media. In the NASA global temperature data, the past ten 10-year trends (i.e. 1990-1999, 1991-2000 and so on) have all been between 0.17 and 0.34 °C warming per decade, close to or above the expected anthropogenic trend, with the most recent one (1999-2008) equal to 0.19 °C per decade.
It is perhaps noteworthy that despite the extremely low brightness of the sun over the past three years (see Figure 5 in report); temperature records have been broken during this time. For example, March 2008 saw the warmest global land temperature of any March ever measured in the instrumental record. June and August 2009 saw the warmest land and ocean temperatures in the Southern Hemisphere ever recorded for those months. The global ocean surface temperatures in 2009 broke all previous records for three consecutive months: June, July and August. Every single year of this century (2001-2008) has been among the top ten warmest years since instrumental records began.
Nice post. I am so tired of the global cooling claim when the data clearly shows otherwise.