Can this be true?

A report at Reuters, which somehow has not reached the BBC as far as I can tell.

World temperatures did not rise from 1998 to 2008, while manmade emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuel grew by nearly a third, various data show.

The researchers from Boston and Harvard Universities and Finland’s University of Turku said pollution, and specifically sulphur emissions, from coal-fueled growth in Asia was responsible for the cooling effect.

Is  this right?  That in the last ten years there was no global warming? 

Yet here in the UK we have had night after night of “news” reports, running as if they were news, telling us in alarming terms that the world was doomed, showing pictures of melting ice-floes (in summer!) It subsided quite a bit after the scandal of forged data at the University of East Anglia.  The guilty men were found innocent by their peers — funny that — but the mud stuck.  There was no getting around the fact that they concealed the data, and that it took a hacker to reveal that they did so intentionally and in words capable of the worst interpretation.  But the idea of warming still lingers.

Now I don’t have a view on the technical issues.  And doubtless readers of this blog have various views on the political platforms that depend on pro- and anti-global warming stuff.  This is not a blog about climate change or global warming, and I don’t propose to address that.

What concerns me is the information access issue.  The real issue for me here, if the report is true, is the honesty issue, the poisoning of the public with a lie whose consequences — lightbulbs, ‘green’ taxes — affect everyone directly.  Whatever our opinions, we all need accurate data, honestly reported. 

But if this report is true — and I have no means of knowing — then we have all been subjected to a deliberate campaign of lies and evasions that would make Goebbels gasp with admiration. 

For how could people NOT know that the world was not getting warmer?  I wouldn’t know; but there are people whose job it is to know.  The money exacted from me in taxes goes to pay their salaries.

This is deeply troubling on so many levels.  We rely on a more or less free system of mass communication.  To watch it be corrupted in this way raises the obvious question: what else are we not being told?  What else is being distorted.

If the answer is “a lot”, then what do we do?  We don’t want to become the sort of lunatic obsessed with conspiracies.

Perhaps the answer is to read widely.  Watch Russia Today.  Watch al-Jazeera.  And so on?

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8 thoughts on “Can this be true?

  1. The root problem was falsification of data by certain researchers in order to fit their theory, and then research protocols that institutionalized falsification as simply an “adjustment” to get the results “right”. The systematic nature of the falsification and its breadth was truly an epic failure of scientists to follow the scientific method.

    But of course a lot of non-scientists were driving and going along with the theory, refusing to use their own observations or anyone else’s, and totally submitting themselves to the approved “narrative”. Somehow, nobody ever gets that shrill and gung ho about real problems.

  2. As an archaeologist, I am aware that climate [and temperature] have fluctuated considerably over thousands of years – without any help from humanity. When I studied Geology in the late 1970’s, it was felt we were entering another ice age, something far more concerning to Northern Europe than a temperature rise.

  3. I remember the predicted ice age from the 70’s also.

    It is interesting that the BBC has continued to ignore the report. Had it reported the opposite, I feel that it would have been headline news.

    UPDATE: Finally found a mention on Ceefax buried in the science section. The standard of reporting was very poor and very misleading. Again, it isn’t a question of whether we believe in global warming; it’s about censorship of information.

  4. “…nobody ever gets that shrill and gung ho about real problems.” Exactly right. I’m prepared to accept global warming, and favor reducing pollution, but their behavior hasn’t been that of honest researchers.

    Re news sources, I’d like to have a better spread of these. Besides the usual US sources and the BBC, I’ve followed Al Jazeera, and lately Russia Today, having read about it just above. What other English-language sources might be good?

  5. Yes, the way that no dissent to the dogma of global warming is allowed has always worried me. I can’t think of a real problem, accepted by all, that needs intimidation of opposing opinion.

    I’m not sure about further sources. But the wider the better.

  6. Roger,

    This information is not new, and has been known and tracked for well over a decade. What is new is that the main stream media is reporting it; that is a surprise.

    The information is hardly secret, however, and has been well known to geologists, meteorologists and oceanographers. If you want the latest climate data as well as commentary and debate on their significance as well as on media histeria, reaction, and ignorance, I suggest you follow Anthony Watts’ excellent, informative, though somewhat wonkish blog, “Watts up with that” (sic).

  7. I don’t think that I can follow the debate in any detail. It is the suppression of debate that troubles me. When people started using terms like “climate change denier”, that rang all kinds of warning bells in my head. What we need is openness and honesty.

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