This article originally appeared on heartland.org.
Climate Change Weekly #141
According to Professor John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama/Huntsville, October 1 marked the 18th anniversary of no warming as measured by Earth’s climate satellite system. Despite a continued and marked rise in emissions and atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, Earth’s temperature has plateaued for the past 18 years.
Christy told CNS News, “That’s basically a fact. There’s not much to comment on.”
Christy and former NASA scientist Roy Spencer compiled raw temperature data collected from 14 instruments aboard various weather satellites. The data show no warming. While all of the climate models used by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicted steeply rising temperatures over the past two decades, the data show they were wrong.
The gap between the data and the model projections shows scientists have a very limited understanding of the complexity of the climate system and the factors that affect climate changes. And because the model projections were all wrong in one direction – all projecting ongoing, increasing warming – the assumptions were biased toward predicting warming.
Christy says it is “a fool’s errand” to base government policies affecting millions of Americans and billions of people around the world on these badly flawed models.
CNS News quotes Christy saying:
Our ignorance is simply enormous when it comes to the climate system, and our understanding is certainly not strong and solid enough to make policy about climate because we don’t even know what it’s going to do, so how can we make a policy that says ‘I want to make the climate do something’ when we don’t know what makes the climate do what it does?
A policy is supposed to have a goal. Well, if you don’t know how the system works, that means you don’t know how to make it go toward that goal. And that’s certainly the case now, since none of the climate models are able to tell us what the future is going to be. They’ve certainly failed in the past. And so the policy is really a fool’s errand at this point.
The satellite temperature measurements mean an entire class of teens have graduated high school, during a period of alarmist-induced climate hysteria, having experienced no measurable global warming during their lifetimes.
