"No Statistically Significant Warming" . . .

Global Warming has been the subject of debate again in the OD, first with an editorial by Mr. Domenico, "We need a discussion on global warming," followed by a rebuttal by Mr. Schuster, "Throwing cold water on global warming."

Now come's this article from David Rose in the UK Mail Online: What happened to the 'warmest year on record': The truth is global warming has halted.

There is no dispute that the world got a little warmer over some of the 20th Century. (Between 1940 and the early Seventies, temperatures actually fell.)

But little by little, the supposedly settled scientific ' consensus' that the temperature rise is unprecedented, that it is set to continue to disastrous levels, and that it is all the fault of human beings, is starting to fray.

Earlier this year, a paper by Michael Mann - for years a leading light in the IPCC, and the author of the infamous 'hockey stick graph' showing flat temperatures for 2,000 years until the recent dizzying increase - made an extraordinary admission: that, as his critics had always claimed, there had indeed been a ' medieval warm period' around 1000 AD, when the world may well have been hotter than it is now.

Other research is beginning to show that cyclical changes in water vapour - a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide - may account for much of the 20th Century warming.

Even Phil Jones, the CRU director at the centre of last year's 'Climategate' leaked email scandal, was forced to admit in a littlenoticed BBC online interview that there has been 'no statistically significant warming' since 1995.

The idea that humans have a significant impact on climate is based on computer modeling that has produced erroneous results . . . The models did not account for the Medieval Warm Period before, and cannot account for the pause in global warming now, even as CO2 levels continue to climb. The "warmists" tend to dismiss incongruous data as a "local" effect or come up with other excuses why we should ignore such data such as the progression in temperature is "non-linear." The public does not want excuses -- the public wants correct results.  Ignoring data, rather than modifying one's thesis to account for it,  is a very un-scientific approach.

The fact is, if the models cannot account for well-known past conditions, and cannot account for present conditions, then they are not substantive evidence upon which policy-making may be legally based.

Per David Rose:

The question now emerging for climate scientists and policymakers alike is very simple. Just how long does a pause have to be before the thesis that the world is getting hotter because of human activity starts to collapse?