Never mind

Fortunately, there are plenty of voices countering the AGW (anthropogenic global warming) alarmists. It's an interesting theory, but as formulated so far it doesn't holdup to scientific scrutiny. Some of the same limits of understanding exit that existed when I surveyed the literature 30 years ago. This latest correction to the recent temperature record doesn't help their cause:

According to the new data published by NASA, 1998 is no longer the hottest year ever. 1934 is. Four of the top 10 years of US CONUS high temperature deviations are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999). Several years (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004) fell well down the leaderboard, behind even 1900.

In other words: Four of the top ten are in the 1930’s, before mainstream scientists believe humans had any discernible impact on temperatures.

Much of the evidence cited by AGW proponents is much weaker than they realize. Perhaps I'll touch upon that in a future post. As for Mr. Gore's claim of scientific consensus, he should know better:

What most people don't know is that real science is a giant debating society, filled with skeptics. It is only mature science that is stable and agreed-upon. But mature science comes only after centuries of cumulative evidence, and constant, heated debate. It took 20 centuries after the planets were observed in the night sky, before Newton and Copernicus settled the nature of the solar system. Einstein's Relativity Theory happened three centuries afterwards, and even in his own lifetime, part of Einstein's universe was overthrown by Quantum Mechanics, which Einstein fought all his life. (He was wrong on that).

Climate science is a new kid on the block. It's woefully immature, as shown by the admission in this week's ScienceMag that current climate models have only now attempted to account for natural variation. But how can we tell how much of the observed variation is due to "man-caused global warming" if we don't know how much is due to natural variation? We can't.

This is still very immature science. It's only Reuters and its ideological ilk who feel sure they know the answers. And they aren't interested in real science.