Climate of suspicion

The Guardian newspaper, on 7th June 2008, has an article about how the declining global temperatures over the last 10 years do not disprove global warming. It says,

The deniers of global warming are about to latch on to a new argument. The world is cooling. And they are right - well, slightly.

In any case, we can expect the deniers to make the most of this opportunity to pour cold water on the whole climate change narrative. No year has yet been hotter than 1998, they will say. True: it was a huge El Niño year. Now we are on the way back down, they will say. Nonsense. The underlying trend remains upwards; and as every decade passes, natural cycles can do less and less to counter the growing human influence on temperature.

By late next decade, natural warming will once again combine with man-made warming to push temperature rise into overdrive. The surge that we saw through the 1980s and 1990s will resume with a vengeance. That could be the moment that climate change passes a point of no return, when ice sheets start to collapse and parched rainforests and soils dump their carbon into the air, accelerating warming.

Global warming “deniers”, being placed in the same bracket as holocaust deniers, would point to the facts, not the theories or fanciful computer models, to make their arguments. How long will it be before the next ice age is here I wonder?