Damian Carrington — The willful idiocy of alleged ‘global temperature decline’ is based on a mirage

The landmark new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is crystal clear: human action is warming the planet and we’re heading for big trouble if carbon emissions are not slashed. As Prof Tim Palmer, at the University of Oxford put it: “The report is further reinforcement that there is an unequivocal risk of dangerous climate change.”

Yet before the ink is even dry critics are trying to obscure this stark message behind a mirage: thesupposed halt in global warming over the last 15 years. This willful idiocy is based on the fact that air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have more or less plateaued since the record hot year in 1998

What critics choose to ignore is that of all the extra heat being trapped by our greenhouse gas emissions – equivalent to four Hiroshima nuclear bombs every second – just 1% ends up warming the air. By choosing to focus on air temperatures critics are ignoring 99% of the problem.

The Raw Story
The willful idiocy of alleged ‘global temperature decline’ is based on a mirage
Damian Carrington, The Guardian