Ahhh, those stubborn facts...it's now been two decades+ that the public has been warned about the existing dangerous and rapidly accelerating global temperatures...a warming that was supposed to produce catastrophic doomsday climate changes...except it hasn't happened, which the gold-standard of global surface temperatures document.....
Has two-decades worth of cumulative CO2 growth in the atmosphere caused the "experts'" predicted dangerous and rapidly accelerating global warming?
That's the straight-forward question.
And the straight-forward answer is?
Well, despite all that CO2 growth, global warming has slowed to a creep on the Earth's surface, and in the atmosphere, global warming has flat-lined.
Using the IPCC's gold-standard global surface dataset (the UK's HadCRUT4), this chart plots the cumulative growth in temperature along with NOAA's reported cumulative growth in atmospheric CO2 levels (ppm).
For CO2 (grey curve), there is a clear and consistent upward growth of CO2 levels - unrelenting would be an apt description. In contrast, global temperatures are all over the map, with highs and low being constantly...er, variable.
The end results over the 20 years ending August 2014 are fairly obvious:
- The visual relationship between CO2 and global temperatures appears to be very weak; in fact, statistically the r2 is 0.19, which can be interpreted as being close to a zilch relationship.
- Per both the 2nd order fitted trend (blue curve) and the 36-month moving average (red curve), the deceleration of the global warming trend and a plateauing can easily be seen.
- Over the 20 years, there have been exceptional warm(-est!) months/years, often followed by exceptional cool months/years.
- And since September 1994, the exhibited warming trend amounts to a measly increase of a non-doomsday +0.38°C by year 2050AD.
How easy is it to say, three times quickly?: catastrophe-climate-doomsday-cult-is-discredited.
So, does all the above empirical evidence mean that human CO2 has no impact on global temperatures? Nope. Does it mean the world will no longer warm? Does it mean humans don't have an impact on continuous natural climate change? Nope. Does it mean that the world should quit trying to be energy and carbon efficient? Not at all.
What it does mean, though, is that the public and the policymakers were greatly deceived by the "consensus" science and computer models that loudly declared (and btw, still do) imminent disasters and doomsday global warming.
As the current climate conditions now indicate a slow, creeping climate change scenario, it provides policymakers and the public the luxury of time to continue moving to a more carbon-efficient economy, thus improving the environment without needlessly sacrificing quality of life and living standards.
In summary, it's another case of those stubborn facts: the empirical evidence does not lie; but computer models and "experts" do.
Traditional global, regional and historical temperature charts depicting those stubborn facts of climate science.
Note: Download HC4 and CO2 datasets. Excel used to make calculations, trends and chart. The chart covers 240 monthly records, starting with Sept. 1994. For this graph, both the temperature and CO2 datapoints were set to zero; then the cumulative changes for both were plotted each month - does not affect linear trends when done this way.