Anonymous public comment

These are the seven graphs that should make you ask: What? Has global warming now stopped? (see attached) And why should we regulate CO2 if it is not causing a problem. Look for yourself. They show that the world hasn't warmed for a decade, and has even cooled for several years. Sea ice now isn't melting, but spreading. The seas have not just stopped rising, but started to fall. Nor is the weather getting wilder. Cyclones, as well as tornadoes and hurricanes, aren't increasing and the rain in Australia hasn't stopped falling. What's more, the slight warming we saw over the century until 1998 still makes the world no hotter today than it was 1000 years ago. In fact, it's even a bit cooler. So, dude, where's the global warming? These graphs should in fact be good news for the Government and all the other warming preachers who warned we were doomed by our gases, which were heating the world to hell. The facts are stark: The world simply isn't warming as Al Gore and his pet scientists said. That's why 31,000 other scientists, including world figures such as physicist Prof Freeman Dyson, atmospheric physicist Prof Richard Lindzen and climate scientist Prof Fred Singer, issued a joint letter last month warning governments not to jump on board the global warming bandwagon. "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the earth's atmosphere and disruption of the earth's climate." That's why Ivar Glaever, who won a Nobel Prize for Physics, this month declared "I am a sceptic", because "we don't really know what the actual effect on the climate is". And it's why the American Physical Society this month said "there is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution." So let me go through my seven graphs that help to explain why even Nobel Prize winners question what Rudd keeps claiming -- that man is warming the world, and dangerously. The main graph is from the Hadley Centre of Britain's Meteorological Office and one of the four bodies measuring world temperature. As you see, since 1998 -- an unusually warm year thanks to the "El Nino" pool of warmer water in the Pacific -- the world's temperature dropped back to a steady plateau, followed by a few years of cooling. The second graph confirms both the halt in warming, and then cooling. It's from another of those four bodies, the University of Alabama in Huntsville, which monitors the troposphere -- from the ground to 12km altitude. Only one of the four, in fact, claims temperatures are still rising. That's NASA, whose program is run by Dr James Hanson, Al Gore's global warming adviser and a controversial catastrophist whose team's reworking of data has been heavily criticised for exaggerating any heating. But before I go on, a caveat: This recent cooling doesn't disprove the theory that man is warming the world. Ten years is too short to be sure of a trend. Natural factors may for now be countering the effect of our gases. Then again, the theory that man has warmed the world is based on a rise in temperature over a period that's not much longer -- from just 1975 to 1998. And the computer climate models that scientists use to predict catastrophic warming a century from now somehow never predicted a cooling that's happening right now. And these are the models the government is betting on with our jobs and cash. The third graph shows another surprise those models never predicted: the seas have stopped rising. The waters have crept up for at least 150 years, since the world started to thaw from the Little Ice Age, and well before any likely man-made warming. But the climate models predicted that a big rise in emissions from all those cars, power plants and factories since World War II would cause an equally big rise in the seas, swelling them as much as 59cm by 2100. This wasn't scary enough for alarmists like Al Gore, though, who claimed whole cities could in fact be drowned under 6m of ocean. But the satellites that have checked sea levels since 1992 find the seas have instead fallen over the past two years. Again, this could be a blip. But it isn't what the models predicted. The fourth graph seems to confirm a cooling. Forget media scares about a melting North Pole; sea ice has grown so fast in the southern hemisphere there is now more ice in the world than is usual, says the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Graph five punctures another scare. No, global warming hasn't given us more cyclones - or more tornadoes or hurricanes anywhere. Nor is their proof that cyclones are getting worse, says the American Meteorological Society. And warming hasn't stopped rain, either, despite media hype about a "one-in-a-100 year drought". See the Bureau of Meteorology records in graph six. It's just bad luck that the fickle rain now tends to fall where it's not needed most. And, please, can we drop that old fiction that the world was never warmer? It's a false claim made popular by a 2001 report of the IPCC, the United Nations' climate group, which ran a graph, shaped like a hockey stick, claiming there was no warming for millennia until humans last century gassed up their world. In fact, that "hockey stick" is now discredited, and last year Dr Craig Loehle, of the US National Council for Air and Stream Improvement, argued that using tree rings to work out past temperatures was clearly unreliable. He instead produced a graph - No. 7 - of past temperatures using all other accepted proxies. You see his results (which for statistical reasons stop at 1935): they show humans lived through a medieval period that was warmer than even today. This was a period that historical accounts confirm was so warm that Greenland farmers grew crops on land now under snow, and British ones grew grapes. But I repeat: the world may yet warm again, and soon, although scientists at Leibnitz Institute and Max Planck Institute last month predicted it won't for at least another decade. If at all, say solar experts worried by a lack of sun spots. But even if none of my graphs disproves the theory that man is causing dangerous warming, they should at least make you pause. They should at least make you open to other theories of climate change, like that of Dr Henrik Svensmark, head of Denmark's Centre for Sun-Climate Research, who thinks changes in cosmic rays, which affect clouds, may explain much of the recent warming. And now the cooling, too. But, above all, when that man with the sandwich board comes tugging at your sleeve again, shouting, "Quick, help me save the world - or die", hang on to your wallet, friend. Give that urger my seven graphs instead, and ask him how many more years of no warming will it take before he admits it really is too soon to panic.