Arrested Global Warming, Or Where Has All The Heat Gone? Long Time Passing

Two Australian biologists have spoken aloud what global warming alarmists would prefer that no one noticed - the earth is cooling.

Last Monday - on ABC Radio National, of all places - there was a tipping point of a different kind in the debate on climate change. It was a remarkable interview involving the co-host of Counterpoint, Michael Duffy and Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. Anyone in public life who takes a position on the greenhouse gas hypothesis will ignore it at their peril.

Duffy asked Marohasy: "Is the Earth stillwarming?"

She replied: "No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you'd expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years."

Duffy: "Is this a matter of any controversy?"

Marohasy: "Actually, no. The head of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) has actually acknowledged it. He talks about the apparent plateau in temperatures so far this century. So he recognises that in this century, over the past eight years, temperatures have plateaued ... This is not what you'd expect, as I said, because if carbon dioxide is driving temperature then you'd expect that, given carbon dioxide levels have been continuing to increase, temperatures should be going up ... So (it's) very unexpected, not something that's being discussed. It should be being discussed, though, because it's very significant."

Of course, data is needed, and there's plenty. 3000 buoys around the world have discovered no evidence of global warming in the Earth's oceans and direct measurements of tropospheric temperatures have shown that the earth is cooling.

I suppose that someday, we'll be laughing ironically at Al Gore's Nobel Prize the same way we snicker at Yasir Arafat's.

Update: This would all be a great disappointment to this guy.

As environmental engineer Geoffrey Schladow launched this week into his startling new findings about the potentially dire consequences of global warming at Lake Tahoe, a member of the audience gasped.

"That was the correct response," said Schladow, who directs the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center.

The news about one of California's recreational jewels was grim. According to a study by Schladow and other Davis researchers, a warming trend already under way could shut down the deep churning of oxygen and nutrients that supports life in the lake – in just 11 years.

That, in turn, could trigger a wave of ecological disruptions from a "dead zone" at the bottom to unprecedented algae blooms near the surface, changing the clear, predominantly cobalt blue lake to murky green.

Schladow characterized such a change as "a really scary thing."