Take a close look at the chart. It shows the warming (or cooling) per century growth rate at the end of each decade. Notice how the reddish bars keep shrinking after the decade ending 1919, with the shortest bar being in the hottest decade evaaar, the decade just ended in 2009. Of course, the chart does have that one outlier bar ending in 1999 - doesn't that bar just seem way out of place? (It should.) What's going on in this chart? Well, read on..... (click on image to enlarge)
First, the easy stuff. The green line represents the decadal growth in atmospheric ppm levels of CO2 as a percentage by decade (the right axis). So, for the decade ending in 1999, CO2 ppm increased by some 4.25% over the 1989 CO2 level. For the decade ending 2009, CO2 increased another 5.2%. Definitely, since the end of WWII, CO2 levels are growing at a healthy pace.
What about that global warming, though? With those hefty increases in CO2, the global temperatures should be skyrocketing into the realms of the never-before-witnessed phenomenon of the terrifying "climate tipping point" that, ya' know, those climate alarmists and the MSM parrots keep screeching about. We've all heard from the climate alarmist scientists that global warming is "accelerating" but is it really?
As expected, global temperatures have been increasing in a sporadic fashion since the end of the Little Ice Age during the 1800's. This is a normal warming reaction that happens after every cooling period. At some point, the global warming is going to fade as the world reaches an equilibrium point coming out of the big chill, which the above chart actually provides evidence of.
At end of 1919, that decade saw temperatures increasing at a 1.96°C per century trend. At the end of the following decades, that global warming per century trend kept dropping, with the exception of the decade ending in 1999 when all of a sudden there was a huge jump. Was that large jump in the per century warming rate finally due to the CO2 increase as advertised by alarmists? Nope. That jump was entirely due to the Super El Niño.
The Super El Niño of 1997-1998 caused a huge spike in global temperatures that was only temporary in nature, but long enough to impact the entire decade's per century warming rate. If the years 1997 and 1998 instead had temperatures that equaled the average of the other eight years of the decade, the decade-ending per century trend would have produced a bar on the chart about the same size as the decades ending 1989 and 2009. Those two Super El Niño years literally breathed new life into the global warming catastrophe movement, and enriched Al Gore, despite the warming being entirely due to a natural, ocean oscillation phenomenon.
Despite all the hand-wringing, hot rhetoric, and impending doom talk, natural global warming looks to be in a dying phase regardless of the amount of human CO2 emissions. The decade ending in 2009 may have been the "hottest" since WWII, but the global warming underlying trend is one of deceleration, not acceleration, as this chart reveals. As some global warming scientists have recently admitted, global cooling could well be our near term future, with a few El Niños thrown in providing some very welcome "hot" years.
Other modern temperature charts. Historical charts here. Climate history postings here.
