A BBC news article found at  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7329799.stm affirms that climate scientists expect that global temperatures will continue to be COOLER in 2008, largely under the influence of La Nina in the Western Pacific, the weather system that periodically alternates with El Nino.  El Nino warmed the earth in 1998, causing high global temperatures that, in the US, were still BELOW the temperatures in 1934!  Thus, the temperature record for the last 10 years has been DOWNWARD or at most level, NOT rising.  Not that you would know this from the hype that is constant in the news media and Congress.  

From all real evidence, global warming has DISAPPEARED since 1998.  But that does not stop the liberals who prefer to live in a fantasy world in which we are constantly in jeopardy from end-of-the-world scenarios, and the liberals can portray themselves a heroes by rescuing us from our own sins.  Gore-bull warming gives liberals the power they have always wanted to have total control over how we heat and cool our homes, how we make the electrical power for our factories, offices and homes, and how we power our transportation.  Basically, they will exercise complete, totalitarian control over the economy, the dream of every communist.  And there are plenty of ways for large businesses to make a profit from the whole fiasco (as ENRON was planning to do, making a killing from the carbon emissions trading market, before it collapsed in scandal).  Gore-bull warming is just too good an idea for increasing the power of the people who are already rich and powerful to let reality and real science get in the way of it.  

Basically, what the defenders of global warming theory don’t want to talk about is that the magnitude of global warming in the course of a decade, from 1998 to 2008, is so SMALL that it is drowned out by the “noise” of other temperature and climatic variations, none of which have anything to do with CO2 levels or the activities of mankind.  They also avoid talking about the fact that the peak high temperature in 1998 was just as much a transitory or periodic phenomenon, due to El Nino, as the drop in 2008 due to La Nina!  That point IS acknowledged in the little video explanation of El Nino and La Nina in the original article online.  

 

When they try to use the average temperatures from just the last 40 years, they are intentionally obfuscating the fact that average temperatures experienced a big drop from 1935 to 1975, and that 1934 was just as high or, in the US, higher than 1998.  In other words, over the course of 65 years, from 1934 to 1998, the net temperature increase above 1934 is NEGATIVE.  We have then had NO net warming since 1998, and continue to be BELOW the average temperature for 1934, despite the near doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere since then.  The warming up to 1934 was clearly NOT caused by the CO2 emissions over the last 75 years.  In those 75 years, we had 40 years of average temperatures FALLING even while CO2 was rising, and then 20 years of average temperatures rising, but now we have had ten years of average temperatures being level or falling while CO2 continues to rise.  Again, NO net increase in temperature in 75 years, despite a doubling in CO2.  

 

How do you get a scientific correlation out of that?  Even if CO2 is assumed to operate as the proponents of global warming think it does, something ELSE is going on in the atmosphere that has CAPPED temperature increases for 75 years!  The global warming enthusiasts have NO explanation for that.  They offer a mechanism for temperatures going UP but have none for why they went DOWN and have now leveled off.  

 

Whatever the cooling mechanism is, it is clearly stronger than CO2 warming.  This is like scientists attributing everything to the force of gravity without knowing anything about electromagnetism.  The only explanation for cooling that has been proposed is that sulfate particles emitted by coal fired power plants cooled off the earth, MORE than the CO2 emissions warmed it, and that the cooling slacked off due to the establishment of air pollution controls in the 1970s!  Thank you, EPA, for drowning Miami (in 2500).   

 

If that is true, perhaps the explanation for the lack of warming since 1998 is the increased particulates from coal fired power plants in China, where they are building new major plants every WEEK.  China’s “bad” environmental ethic may be saving the world from global warming!  Since it is China that bears the brunt of the health effects of the particulates, while we all benefit from the cooling, we should encourage them to keep doing this.  

 

The main point we should take away from this information is that any man-made global warming is actually so insignificant that it is NOT an imminent crisis requiring drastic injury to the way we make the energy that civilization depends on.  

 

That was also true with the bogeymen of “acid rain” (which turned out to be a very minor, local problem) and the “ozone hole” (again, a problem that only happens over Antarctica in the early spring, does not move to lower latitudes, and disappears completely by summer).  According to the UN IPCC, the overreaction to these minor issues actually contributes mightily to global warming, through stopping sulfate emissions and substituting refrigerants that are thousands of times stronger than CO2 at trapping heat.  They obviously do NOT understand enough about global climate to predict what other environmental mischief we might CREATE by our efforts to cut CO2 emissions by 80%.  No one is getting grants to research those unintended effects.  We are just stumbling forward, confident we know everything there is to know about climate, when the simple temperature record shows our best scientists are moronically ignorant about what is going on right now.  You can darn well bet that NONE of the climate models in use in 1998 (right after the 1997 Kyoto Protocol was issued) predicted that temperatures would FALL!  The have all been proved wrong.  Thus, the claim in the article that temperatures are going to experience a drastic rise “real soon now” have absolutely no scientific credibility.  The models being used to make those forecasts did NOT predict the last 10 years drop.  Why should they be trusted to predict the next ten years?