http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23411799-7583,00.html

Climate facts to warm to

Christopher Pearson | March 22, 2008

CATASTROPHIC predictions of global warming usually conjure with the
notion of a tipping point, a point of no return.

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."

Duffy: "It's not only that it's not discussed. We never hear it, do we?
Whenever there's any sort of weather event that can be linked into the
global warming orthodoxy, it's put on the front page. But a fact like
that, which is that global warming stopped a decade ago, is virtually
never reported, which is extraordinary."

Duffy then turned to the question of how the proponents of the
greenhouse gas hypothesis deal with data that doesn't support their
case. "People like Kevin Rudd and Ross Garnaut are speaking as though
the Earth is still warming at an alarming rate, but what is the argument
from the other side? What would people associated with the IPCC say to
explain the (temperature) dip?"

Marohasy: "Well, the head of the IPCC has suggested natural factors are
compensating for the increasing carbon dioxide levels and I guess, to
some extent, that's what sceptics have been saying for some time: that,
yes, carbon dioxide will give you some warming but there are a whole lot
of other factors that may compensate or that may augment the warming
from elevated levels of carbon dioxide.

"There's been a lot of talk about the impact of the sun and that maybe
we're going to go through or are entering a period of less intense solar
activity and this could be contributing to the current cooling."

Duffy: "Can you tell us about NASA's Aqua satellite, because I
understand some of the data we're now getting is quite important in our
understanding of how climate works?"

Marohasy: "That's right. The satellite was only launched in 2002 and it
enabled the collection of data, not just on temperature but also on
cloud formation and water vapour. What all the climate models suggest is
that, when you've got warming from additional carbon dioxide, this will
result in increased water vapour, so you're going to get a positive
feedback. That's what the models have been indicating. What this great
data from the NASA Aqua satellite ... (is) actually showing is just the
opposite, that with a little bit of warming, weather processes are
compensating, so they're actually limiting the greenhouse effect and
you're getting a negative rather than a positive feedback."

Duffy: "The climate is actually, in one way anyway, more robust than was
assumed in the climate models?"

Marohasy: "That's right ... These findings actually aren't being
disputed by the meteorological community. They're having trouble
digesting the findings, they're acknowledging the findings, they're
acknowledging that the data from NASA's Aqua satellite is not how the
models predict, and I think they're about to recognise that the models
really do need to be overhauled and that when they are overhauled they
will probably show greatly reduced future warming projected as a
consequence of carbon dioxide."

Duffy: "From what you're saying, it sounds like the implications of this
could beconsiderable ..."

Marohasy: "That's right, very much so. The policy implications are
enormous. The meteorological community at the moment is really just
coming to terms with the output from this NASA Aqua satellite and
(climate scientist) Roy Spencer's interpretation of them. His work is
published, his work is accepted, but I think people are still in shock
at this point."

If Marohasy is anywhere near right about the impending collapse of the
global warming paradigm, life will suddenly become a whole lot more
interesting.

A great many founts of authority, from the Royal Society to the UN, most
heads of government along with countless captains of industry, learned
professors, commentators and journalists will be profoundly embarrassed.
Let us hope it is a prolonged and chastening experience.

With catastrophe off the agenda, for most people the fog of millennial
gloom will lift, at least until attention turns to the prospect of the
next ice age. Among the better educated, the sceptical cast of mind that
is the basis of empiricism will once again be back in fashion. The
delusion that by recycling and catching public transport we can help
save the planet will quickly come to be seen for the childish nonsense
it was all along.

The poorest Indians and Chinese will be left in peace to work their way
towards prosperity, without being badgered about the size of their
carbon footprint, a concept that for most of us will soon be one with
Nineveh and Tyre, clean forgotten in six months.

The scores of town planners in Australia building empires out of
regulating what can and can't be built on low-lying shorelines will have
to come to terms with the fact inundation no longer impends and find
something more plausible to do. The same is true of the bureaucrats
planning to accommodate "climate refugees".

Penny Wong's climate mega-portfolio will suddenly be as ephemeral as the
ministries for the year 2000 that state governments used to entrust to
junior ministers. Malcolm Turnbull will have to reinvent himself at vast
speed as a climate change sceptic and the Prime Minister will have to
kiss goodbye what he likes to call the great moral issue and policy
challenge of our times.

It will all be vastly entertaining to watch.

THE Age published an essay with an environmental theme by Ian McEwan on
March 8 and its stablemate, The Sydney Morning Herald, also carried a
slightly longer version of the same piece.

The Australian's Cut & Paste column two days later reproduced a telling
paragraph from the Herald's version, which suggested that McEwan was a
climate change sceptic and which The Age had excised. He was expanding
on the proposition that "we need not only reliable data but their
expression in the rigorous use of statistics".

What The Age decided to spare its readers was the following:
"Well-meaning intellectual movements, from communism to
post-structuralism, have a poor history of absorbing inconvenient fact
or challenges to fundamental precepts. We should not ignore or suppress
good indicators on the environment, though they have become extremely
rare now. It is tempting to the layman to embrace with enthusiasm the
latest bleak scenario because it fits the darkness of our soul, the
prevailing cultural pessimism. The imagination, as Wallace Stevens once
said, is always at the end of an era. But we should be asking, or
expecting others to ask, for the provenance of the data, the assumptions
fed into the computer model, the response of the peer review community,
and so on. Pessimism is intellectually delicious, even thrilling, but
the matter before us is too serious for mere self-pleasuring. It would
be self-defeating if the environmental movement degenerated into a
religion of gloomy faith. (Faith, ungrounded certainty, is no virtue.)"

The missing sentences do not appear anywhere else in The Age's version
of the essay. The attribution reads: "Copyright Ian McEwan 2008" and
there is no acknowledgment of editing by The Age.

Why did the paper decide to offer its readers McEwan lite? Was he, I
wonder, consulted on the matter? And isn't there a nice irony that The
Age chose to delete the line about ideologues not being very good at
"absorbing inconvenient fact"?