TEMPERATURES GO UP, TEMPERATURES GO DOWN:

The Disappearing Science of Global Warming (Peter Ferrara, 2.17.10, American Spectator)

As a result of this unscientific behavior, the only reliable temperature record now is the one produced by U.S. weather satellites measuring global atmospheric temperatures. Such satellites have only been in operation since 1979, but show no increase in global temperature trends until the unrelated El Nino spike of 1998, with temperatures declining back down since then. By April of this year, that decline had completely offset the 1998 spike, with temperatures back to where they were in 1980. In recent months, another El Nino effect may be causing increased temperatures, but El Nino effects are a normal, temporary, temperature pattern not related to global warming.

Even the distorted surface temperature record was not consistent with man-caused global warming. That record still showed declining temperatures from 1940 until the late 1970s, despite all the burning of fossil fuels during that time, prompting media alarms about a returning ice age. U.S. temperatures by then were little different than in 1900. Heartland Institute President Joe Bast recently summarized, "Earlier this year, the onset of global cooling in 2000 was recognized by all leading scientists and could no longer be kept hidden by the mainstream media. Some scientists forecast two more decades of cooling before any warming returns."

In a shocking recent BBC interview, even CRU director and IPCC temperature guru Phil Jones admits that there has been no global warming over the last decade, and that he doesn't believe "the vast majority of climate scientists think" the debate on climate change is over. Most importantly, he confesses that even the increase in surface temperatures in the record, such as it is, for 1975 to 1998, which is the foundation for IPCC global warming claims, is not unprecedented. He admits that the record shows similar and not statistically significant warming for 1910 to 1940 and 1860 to 1880. That means the ballyhooed warming from 1975 to 1998, for which we have been asked to repeal the industrial revolution, is not outside the range of natural variability.