Has global warming stopped?

Hmm.

This article from the New Statesman[*1] (via FuturePundit[*2] ) says maybe so:

The period 1980-98 was one of rapid warming – a temperature increase of about 0.5 degrees C (CO2 rose from 340ppm to 370ppm). But since then the global temperature has been flat (whilst the CO2 has relentlessly risen from 370ppm to 380ppm). This means that the global temperature today is about 0.3 deg less than it would have been had the rapid increase continued.

For the past decade the world has not warmed. Global warming has stopped. It’s not a viewpoint or a sceptic’s inaccuracy. It’s an observational fact. Clearly the world of the past 30 years is warmer than the previous decades and there is abundant evidence (in the northern hemisphere at least) that the world is responding to those elevated temperatures. But the evidence shows that global warming as such has ceased.

The explanation for the standstill has been attributed to aerosols in the atmosphere produced as a by-product of greenhouse gas emission and volcanic activity. They would have the effect of reflecting some of the incidental sunlight into space thereby reducing the greenhouse effect. Such an explanation was proposed to account for the global cooling observed between 1940 and 1978.

But things cannot be that simple. The fact that the global temperature has remained unchanged for a decade requires that the quantity of reflecting aerosols dumped put in our atmosphere must be increasing year on year at precisely the exact rate needed to offset the accumulating carbon dioxide that wants to drive the temperature higher. This precise balance seems highly unlikely. Other explanations have been proposed such as the ocean cooling effect of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation or the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.

So, who is this Climate Change Denier, this know-nothing heretic who’s trying to rain on Al Gore’s parade?

David Whitehouse.  Who’s he?

David Whitehouse was BBC Science Correspondent 1988–1998, Science Editor BBC News Online 1998–2006 and the 2004 European Internet Journalist of the Year. He has a doctorate in astrophysics and is the author of The Sun: A Biography (John Wiley, 2005).] His website is www.davidwhitehouse.com[*3]

Meanwhile, at Power and Control[*4] , M. Simon reminds us that:

Science is based on doubt.

Religion is based on faith.

Prompted by the discussion at The Volokh Conspiracy[*5] .

Then there is scientism[*6] which amounts to faith in science. We know is not a scientific position, because science never knows anything. All science can say is “this is the best answer we have so far”.

More doubt, less faith about anthropogenic climate change, please.  The only thing that’s been proven so far is that politicians make bad scientists.