I have said before that Science owes a debt to some of the more widely believed junk science distributors. There is a perfect example of it today.

Those who think Climate Change is a hoax, will frequently expound on the global cooling myth. The myth runs something along these lines. The planet has stopped warming up. It was not as hot this year as last year, etc. I can give you links to a dozen sites that expound this myth. One of them is run by a non Meteorologist, who somehow retains an AMS Seal. (Not a CBM though). I do wonder how long the AMS will put up with that. Do not look for the links here, I am not about to give them any publicity.

When these myths reach a point that they are commonly repeated, someone will do some detailed research to show just how silly it is. In this case, the paper is being published in Geophysical Research Letters, a peer reviewed publication of the AGU.

I wrote about this recently. Making this kind of claim, is the same as claiming that Winter is returning, when an April cool snap arrives! It’s plain silly, and no one ,with any knowledge of Science would think any different. Unfortunately, there has been a dearth of decent Science education, over the last 25 years in America, and the Piper is wanting to be paid.

David Easterling  (NOAA National Climactic Data Center), and Michael Wehner  (Lawrence Berkely Nat. Labs.), Looked at the temperature record of the last 100 years along with the forecasts by the best Climate simulation into the future. The found that even though we have warmed .7C in the last century, and are likely to warm 4C in the next, we still have periods where the global temp. holds steady, or even drops. This is a natural variability. CO2 is not the only thing that controls this planet’s temperature! (El Nino’s make us warm, and La Nina’s tend to cool us, as just one example)

We will get an occasional cool snap, but there is little doubt, that a hot Summer is coming, if greenhouse gases are allowed to keep rising at the current staggering rate.

This will likely do little to change the minds of those who avidly follow these junk science sites. They long since quit believing in any science that tells them something they do not want to hear. Fortunately, Science doesn’t work that way.

Later,

dan