Global Warming - stops

See this article published in December 2007 on a similar vein to my own ramblings - but this time from the distinguished source of an ex-science editor of the BBC. Spookily you have to have left the BBC to be able to say this kind of thing..... and certainly I cannot find hair nor hide of this editorial line at the BBC. Now there's a thing.

I help by taking a snapshot below....

..... but as we digest these apocalyptic comments, read the recent IPCC’s Synthesis report that says climate change could become irreversible. Witness the drama at Bali as news emerges that something is not quite right in the global warming camp.....

..... here it starts getting messy and, perhaps, a little inconvenient for some. Looking at the global temperatures as used by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the UK’s Met Office and the IPCC (and indeed Al Gore) it’s apparent that there has been a sharp rise since about 1980.

The period 1980-98 was one of rapid warming – a temperature increase of about 0.5 degrees C (CO2 rose from 340ppm to 370ppm). But since then the global temperature has been flat (whilst the CO2 has relentlessly risen from 370ppm to 380ppm). This means that the global temperature today is about 0.3 deg less than it would have been had the rapid increase continued.

For the past decade the world has not warmed. Global warming has stopped. It’s not a viewpoint or a sceptic’s inaccuracy. It’s an observational fact. Clearly the world of the past 30 years is warmer than the previous decades and there is abundant evidence (in the northern hemisphere at least) that the world is responding to those elevated temperatures. But the evidence shows that global warming as such has ceased.

The explanation for the standstill has been attributed to aerosols in the atmosphere produced as a by-product of greenhouse gas emission and volcanic activity. They would have the effect of reflecting some of the incidental sunlight into space thereby reducing the greenhouse effect. Such an explanation was proposed to account for the global cooling observed between 1940 and 1978.

But things cannot be that simple......

David Whitehosue was BBC Science Correspondent 1988–1998, Science Editor BBC News Online 1998–2006 and the 2004 European Internet Journalist of the Year. He has a doctorate in astrophysics

Employment and Immigration (again)

For those still awake on the subject, you may remember a question was asked of the Labour Government. A simple question. Of the new 2m+ jobs quoted since 1997, how many have been taken by incumbent citizens?

Of which the first answer was a material majority, the remaining 800,000 taken by immigrants. However, red faces all round when Jackie Smith had to apologise on 30th October when 800,000 was revised to 1.1m.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7068291.stm

But the slightly non-mainstream "daily politics" didnt think this was the end of the story...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/the_daily_politics/7069140.stm

who pointed out quite rightly that 1.5m+ may well be defined as immigrants as the Labour figures suggested that someone who enterered the country in, say, 2002 and was given citizenship was not an immigrant (!)

Since then, the newly set-up UK statistics comission has quietly gone about dismantling most of the New Labour new figures. To no great fanfare in the pre-Christmas rush they said this;


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The government previously claimed that just 800,000 of 2.7 million jobs available to all ages had gone to foreign citizens. Employment minister Caroline Flint then apologised for this and revised the 800,000 figure to 1.1 million - still less than half the total number of jobs.

By using conflicting methods of estimating employment and population levels, only counting foreign citizens as migrants, and including jobs taken by retired people, the government gave a clouded view of the picture.

http://www.statscom.org.uk/uploads/files/other/foreign%20workers%20briefing%20note%20Dec%202007.pdf

Let me summarise their findings which take into account all people arriving after 1997;

The figures... tell a clear story. Of a total increase in employment between 1997 and 2007 of about 2.1 million (counting all over 16s)... the actual proportion of the employment increase accounted for by foreigners/migrants is over 80%.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


So there we have it. When New Labour tell the general public that they have created 2m+ jobs during their 10-year tenure, bet your mortgage that the average listener doesnt expect that between 8-9 out of 10 were taken by people new to the country. And remember that this government, with the full weight of the public service behind them, managed to get the question wrong. Twice.

Incompetence? Maybe, but perhaps the real answer wasnt all that pleasant and Labour - as often in the past - hoped to get away with a convenient lie and avoid an inconvenient truth. The truth that through a sustained decade of global economic growth we have managed to entrench more than 5m british nationals in a situation of welfare-supported unemployment and the only material way we have grown employment is via immigration.

New Deal? Not flash, just Gordon? British jobs for British workers?

And now that the going is getting tough. What now then Gordon?

All in Bali as the temperature Falls

Well, the tax-funded jamboree that was the climate conference in Bali inevitably drew the required scare stories all coincidentally launched just as the conference hit. We have the artic icecaps to melt away enitrely, this time by 2013 (which isn't far away chaps), various species exctinction and general doom-laden stuff all capped off with "its getting warmer even faster than we expected" - a statement we can now generally wheel out every time the IPPC mulit-multi-million dollar event runs into town. The new graphs point upwards, you have to strain the neck to see the peaks - mostly kicking around the +5 to +7 degrees centigrade by the far off 2100. Certainly no room for pauses in these graphs, its up, up, up and away. A quite noticeable 0.05 to 0.07 degrees per year. Every year. Year after year.

And now in 2008. So that will be up, up, up and away then? Up by 0.07? No. Up by 0.05? No. Up at all?

Err. No.

Up on last year? No
Up on 2006? 2005? 2004? 2003? 2002? No.

In fact lower than the last 6 years.

And the decadal average increase continues to mosy along at the pace it has been doing since the switch in temperature direction in the 1970's. Of course, that increase wont kill half the planet and doesnt justify the $2bn spend per annum that is now at stake for those at the IPCC, setting aside the literal trillion dollar stakes at play in the lobbyists for grants in new age fuels (see ethanol effect on worldwide grain prices - some people are making a lot of money).

Obviously undeterred by this somewhat contradictory and irritating fact;

The Hadley Centre's head of climate prediction, Vicky Pope, who is at the Bali talks, said the data

"confirmed the need for swift action to combat further rises in global temperatures because of human behaviour."

"What we are seeing is a confirmation of the warming trend seen by the IPCC reports,"

said Micael Jarraud overseer of the 'landmark' IPCC assessment.

And, well they would, would't they? Not exactly a career-enhancing approach to say much else really. Not when you are surrounded by an audience that erupts into cheering and standing ovations when Al Gore makes a speech. That'll be all the hard-headed fact-based scientists then?

I will leave this subject at the start of 2008 with wise words from professor Patrick J. Michaels, much reviled head of environmental science at the University of Virginia.

"... the resultant exaggerations become tiresome, and life goes on. Decades of doom-saying about Global Warming collide with decades of prosperity. People notice and increasingly disregard science and scientists, a process that has already invaded several aspects of our lives. This is the ultimate tragedy that this predictable distortion of global warming causes: a society that can no longer rely on the wisdom of science can only be governed by irrationality and fear."