Refuting Bad Arguments: Climate Change Skepticism

We’ve seen articles like these being misused by climate change skeptics:

This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.

But it is true. For the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.

And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.

So what on Earth is going on?

Climate change sceptics, who passionately and consistently argue that man’s influence on our climate is overstated, say they saw it coming.

They argue that there are natural cycles, over which we have no control, that dictate how warm the planet is. But what is the evidence for this?

During the last few decades of the 20th Century, our planet did warm quickly.

Sceptics argue that the warming we observed was down to the energy from the Sun increasing. After all 98% of the Earth’s warmth comes from the Sun.

But research conducted two years ago, and published by the Royal Society, seemed to rule out solar influences.

But let’s focus on the argument that the recent years have been colder and that we’ve been cooling since 1998.

Let’s look at this argument applied to my blog visits by months.

Oh, we see a downward trend, right? It is true that August, September, October and November 2008 were my largest visitor months, by far. I’ve yet to get back to that level of readership (reason: I blogged about the Olympics and the US General Election).

But I’d argue (from the evidence) that, on the whole, my readership has gone up with time:

Note the steady uptrend (the last data point is for the first 9 days of October, 2009)

Real life data is messy and has local ups and downs. But one can usually detect a long term trend.

Now look at the overall trend; yes, you can see the lone spike in 1998, then a drop, then back up again (from New Scientist Magazine)

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