No Global Warming for the Last 16 Years

Yes, this was linked on Drudge, but we can’t resist blogging about it.

It seems there has been no global warming for the last 16 years (actually, just a bit less than 16).

The global warming proponents at Britain’s Met Office have responded to this, claiming that you can show warming if you choose the proper end points of the series. Lop off the first couple of years, and the trend is upward. And indeed, if you go backward to 1980, the trend is clearly upward.

But if global warming is real, we should not have had a decade and a half of temperatures with no warming trend.

Proponents usually fall back to claiming that there is a “consensus” among climate scientists about global warming. But whole groups of scientists have been wrong before, and they are particular likely to be wrong when large government grants are at stake. They are particularly likely to be wrong when their political ideology inclines to a particular view. And they are just as prone to group think as any other segment of society.

The graph tells the story. Is it possible that warming will resume? Of course. And it’s quite possible the earth will become colder, as it has after each previous warm spell.

The money quote in the Daily Mail article comes from British Energy Minister, John Hayes, who said that, for the UK:

. . . the high-flown theories of bourgeois Left-wing academics will not override the interests of ordinary people who need fuel for heat, light and transport – energy policies, you might say, for the many, not the few.

That does go to the dirty little secret of the warmists: they are elitists who resent the affluence of the masses.