Climategate 2: Keeping the Faith in Warming Religion in Spite of the Data

Anthony Watts is keeping everyone up-to-date on the latest disclosures here.

So far, my 'favorite' Climategate 2 email is the one where the pro-global warming clique is discussing the lack of warming during the previous eleven years and the increasing number of forecasts that the lack of warming (or even cooling) would continue. This email is from Phil Jones:

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Phil Jones [mailto:p.jones@uea.ac.uk]
>Sent: 05 January 2009 16:18
>To: Johns, Tim; Folland, Chris
>Cc: Smith, Doug; Johns, Tim
>Subject: Re: FW: Temperatures in 2009
>
>
>   Tim, Chris,
>     I hope you're not right about the lack of warming lasting
>   till about 2020. I'd rather hoped to see the earlier Met Office
>   press release with Doug's paper that said something like -
>   half the years to 2014 would exceed the warmest year currently on 
> record, 1998!
>     Still a way to go before 2014.
>
>     I seem to be getting an email a week from skeptics saying
>   where's the warming gone. I know the warming is on the decadal
>   scale, but it would be nice to wear their smug grins away.

So, let me get this straight: Global warming is a "catastrophe" for the humanity, yet Jones wants it to happen so he can "wear their smug grins away." I guess it never occurs to the clique that there might be something wrong with their hypothesis.

If he was unhappy with temperature trends in 2009 when the above email was written, Dr. Jones must really be glum these days. I've added an arrow pointing to the world temperatures when the email was written. Dr. Jones works for the Hadley Center's Climate Research Unit in Great Britain. The graph below was constructed from their data. It shows no warming since Jones wrote his email lamenting the lack of warming.

Neither Jones, the IPCC, nor the IPCC's models forecast this 13 years and counting without warming.

The Wall Street Journal chimes in with wise commentary about the 'religion' of "global warming:

Consider the case of global warming, another system of doomsaying prophecy and faith in things unseen.

As with religion, it is presided over by a caste of spectacularly unattractive people pretending to an obscure form of knowledge that promises to make the seas retreat and the winds abate. As with religion, it comes with an elaborate list of virtues, vices and indulgences. As with religion, its claims are often non-falsifiable, hence the convenience of the term "climate change" when thermometers don't oblige the expected trend lines. As with religion, it is harsh toward skeptics, heretics and other "deniers." And as with religion, it is susceptible to the earthly temptations of money, power, politics, arrogance and deceit...

Meanwhile, the world marches on. On Sunday, 2,232 days will have elapsed since a category 3 hurricane made landfall in the U.S., the longest period in more than a century that the U.S. has been spared a devastating storm. Great religions are wise enough to avoid marking down the exact date when the world comes to an end. Not so for the foolish religions. Expect Mayan cosmology to take a hit to its reputation when the world doesn't end on Dec. 21, 2012. Expect likewise when global warming turns out to be neither catastrophic nor irreversible come 2017.

You can read the entire editorial here.

And, if you have any doubt that global warming has morphed from science to religion, take a look at this.

That's why turning off lightbulbs is important. To turn off the light when you leave a room is an act of piety just as much as lighting a candle in church. It has no measurable effect on the crisis at all in itself. It doesn't even have a notable effect on your own electricity bill, and if it ever does, the world economy will be in a dreadful mess. But it is a token of seriousness. It is, if you like, a gesture of faith.

Sheesh.

In the rest of science, when data substantially conflicts with a hypothesis, the hypothesis is said to be "falsified." Given the lack of warming, the lack of major storms, the lack of increase of sea level rise, etc., I believe it is time to withdraw the catastrophic global warming hypothesis and rethink the paradigms of climate science.