Putting the Chill on Global Warming

Here is another nail in the coffin for those who contend earth is still warming.

Here is my frequently-referred-to graph of world temperatures from the Hadley Center (note: a pro-global warming institution):

World temperatures since 1995.

Many of the global warming zealots dispute the warming has stopped. That, in spite of the data from the Hadley Center and other pro-GW institutions. In December, there were numerous stories (one example here, Google for many more) that global warming is "accelerating" -- simply rubbish.

As you know, I'm the first to state that scientific results must be reproducible by other scientists. So, if I and many other atmospheric scientists are correct that indeed global warming has stopped, then the glaciers would have stopped melting, right?

Guess what? The melting stopped ten years ago!

The world's greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice over the last decade, new research shows.

The discovery has stunned scientists, who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed each year and not being replaced by new snowfall.

The study is the first to survey all the world's icecaps and glaciers and was made possible by the use of satellite data. Overall, the contribution of melting ice outside the two largest caps – Greenland and Antarctica – is much less then previously estimated, with the lack of ice loss in the Himalayas and the other high peaks of Asia responsible for most of the discrepancy.

Bristol University glaciologist Prof Jonathan Bamber, who was not part of the research team, said: "The very unexpected result was the negligible mass loss from high mountain Asia, which is not significantly different from zero."

So, the glaciers are not melting. World atmospheric temperatures peaked in 1998 and have been flat to down since. Ocean heat content, accurately available since 2003 (deployment of the Argo probes) is flat.

Even more important, when determining whether the Gore/IPCC catastrophic global warming theory is accurate, is comparing the forecasts to the data. Well, here is the Hansen/IPCC forecast of ocean heat content (red) line versus actual:

Courtesy Bob Tisdale via WattsUpWithThat

Since ocean heat content is the most important metric of the earth's temperature (because the oceans can hold so much more heat than the atmosphere), the fact that heat content diverges more and more from the forecast certainly tends to falsify the hypothesis of catastrophic global warming, accelerating global warming, and an immediate "climate crisis."

I'm hardly the only scientist that has noticed the overwhelming evidence that global warming has stopped. We learned three days ago that Dr. Fritz Vahrenholt, one of Germany's most zealous pro-global warming advocates, has switched positions.

In an interview with SPIEGEL, he argues that the official United Nations forecasts on the severity of climate change are overstated and supported by weak science...

He wants to break a taboo. "The climate catastrophe is not occurring," he writes in his book "Die Kalte Sonne" (The Cold Sun), published by Hoffmann and Campe, which will be in bookstores next week.

I have no doubt other high level defections from the "cause" will occur in 2012.

Now, try to find a U.S. mainstream media outlet that is reporting any of this. 

The media in general, and science reporters in particular, are doing their readers and viewers a tremendous disservice through their propagandizing and self-described mission of "advancing the narrative" of global warming.

Since journalism awards often go to people who "break" big stories, I'd like to suggest to some enterprising journalist a way to win a major award: Report on the now overwhelming evidence the earth has stopped warming. It is perfectly okay with me to qualify it by saying something like "scientists disagree whether the earth will resume warming, cool, or if temperatures will stay the same going forward." That would be accurate and fair.

 It would be a pleasant, and welcome, change if the media would accurately report this story.