Wondering where the warming went?

Cameras mounted beneath satellites photograph the tops of clouds. We see the results nightly on TV weather forecasts. But the isobaric charts are only snapshots of what is happening now - there is no camera invented that can photograph something going to happen in three months time.

Absence of technology is why meteorologists and climatologists scorn longrange predictions beyond a week. They claim weather is randomly changing day by day. If randomness is weather science, it is impossible for warnings of temperatures in decades ahead to be valid. A kettle can only get hot due to some constant heat source.

So is there a thermometer than can measure the temperature of the whole globe at once? No. How about the temperatures of the globe a century from now? Again, no.

An Associated Press report from 1986 said NASA predicts that global warming will cause the extinction of the human race “in a few decades.” That timing is now up and we are still here, all 7 billion of us. NASA are still demanding carbon taxes be imposed to save the planet but it is apparent they exaggerate scientific data to justify their political crusade.

We were told atmospheric heating would affect all life on the planet, making species extinct, raising sealevels and causing destructive weather. No one has yet actually seen the sea level rise, although tiny Pacific atolls are sinking due to seismic activity. These atolls sit astride volcanoes, which is how they got there in the first place.

A glance out the window reveals no imminent catastrophe, no widespread species extinction, no sudden massive changes in sea height and no increased droughts and floods. Airports are not clogged with the ‘thousands of environmental refugees' who were predicted to flee their homelands.

But life is more than where we live. All the living space encompassed by the continents we occupy represents only 1% of the biosphere. The oceans contain upwards of 99% of the world's biosphere, that is, the spaces and places where life exists. The ocean thus contains almost all of life; and this, the world's largest living space remains out of reach of human contact or influence.

And just how big is the sea? Big enough to contain the largest mountain range, the Mid Atlantic Ridge, ten times longer than the Andes. Beneath the Denmark Strait between Greenland and Iceland is the world's largest waterfall. The world's largest mountain is Mauna Kea in Hawaii, mostly covered by ocean. It dwarfs Everest by over a kilometer. The sea is big.

One cannot heat water from above, because heat goes up and not down. The whole 360 million square km of the ocean has not heated just because cars on the land emit exhausts. Even if all the metropolitan land was set on fire at once, it would make no difference to life in mid-ocean. The reason is that the sea is a good insulator, which is why it warms the land at night and keeps it cool by day.

Neither do numbers of trees or rain forests affect world weather one iota. Rain comes from the ocean and almost all of it falls back into the ocean. Daily underwater earthquakes and volcanoes generate deep sea currents which work to the surface and generate winds and waves. Chunks of land are the exceptions, not the ruling surfaces of the planet.

But somewhere along the way the vast ocean got left out of the global warming equation. That the part thought to be warming was mainly near heat sources in cities where humans live, gave rise to the assumption the whole planet was warming. It is like having a spot on your contact lens and concluding the whole world has a black spot covering it because it is wherever you look.

Climatologists realised they had omitted the ocean, and tried to remedy it. With lucrative research grants they tried to find some possible way heat from industry could affect the sea. They returned empty-handed. Sea surface temperatures didn’t increase by enough to account for the missing heat that greenhouse gas emissions should have trapped in the Earth’s climate system.

Funding will quickly dry up unless it is nourished by alarmism. Climatologists then turned their thoughts to ocean acidification, but salt water is 100% alkaline. Bummer. They then claimed increasing numbers of storms would mean higher seas which would drown the land, but found that higher seas deposit more sand higher up the beach which pushes the tide further out

It is now a climate of fear for alarmists because fewer people are listening. Even President Obama's staunch allies at the New York Times recognize the feverish climate fervour behind green-grab gambits has been overheated. They reported on June 6, “The rise in surface temperature of Earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that. A warming lull has occurred although atmospheric greenhouse gases have accumulated.”

Reporter Justin Gillis admitted that the lack of provable temperature increase highlights important gaps in our knowledge of the climate system, whereby the lack of warming “is a bit of a mystery to climate scientists.” And in the June 2012 issue of the journal "Nature", Mark Maslin and Patrick Austin wrote “the problem is now not with the climate, but with the public image of climate scientists”.

The theoretical climate models upon which crisis claims are entirely based can’t be trusted. Claims of consensus attributing an unproven crisis to human CO2 emissions no longer have legitimacy. An emerging compromise designed to placate sceptics suggests that we are still exiting from the last Ice age so perhaps warming imperceptibly.

This is at last getting closer to the truth. In 200-300 years time we may start heading towards the next ice age. The cooler sun is already showing beginnings of this trend. This will be regardless of carbon taxes.


Ken Ring of www.predictweather.com is author of Weather Almanac for NZ for 2013