Senator James Inhofe's Blog: the Greatest Hoax Perpetrated on the American People

onApr 30, 2008 @ 19:58 PDT

Stop the presses! Senator James Inhofe‘s Environmental and Public Works (EPW) Committee press blog is breathlessly reporting (in big font, of course) that – wait for it – climate change is going to stop!

BREAKING NEWS:
Global Warming Will ‘Stop’, New Peer-Reviewed Study Says
Global Warming Takes a Break for Nearly 20 Years?

Today’s UK Telegraph reports: “Global warming will stop until at least 2015 because of natural variations in the climate, scientists have said. Researchers studying long-term changes in sea temperatures said they now expect a “lull” for up to a decade while natural variations in climate cancel out the increases caused by man-made greenhouse gas emissions. The average temperature of the sea around Europe and North America is expected to cool slightly over the decade while the tropical Pacific remains unchanged…

Well, that’s very interesting… but what’s really interesting is the next paragraph, which Inhofe’s blogger brigade conveniently missed:

However, the effect of rising fossil fuel emissions will mean that warming will accelerate again after 2015 when natural trends in the oceans veer back towards warming, according to the computer model.

And only several sentences later:

[One of the study‘s authors] stressed that the results were just the initial findings from a new computer model of how the oceans behave over decades and it would be wholly misleading to infer that global warming, in the sense of the enhanced greenhouse effect from increased carbon emissions, had gone away.

Either Inhofe’s bloggers only see what they want to see, or their mouse buttons don’t work very well, because if they’d looked at the other hits they got for their daily “global warming” Google news search, they would have found another article about the study, which explicitly says :

Climate experts have long warned, though, that warming is unlikely to be a gradual trend, but a movement in stops and starts.

[…]

The authors of the new study stress that they do not dispute the IPCC‘s figures. “Just to make things clear, we are not stating that anthropogenic [man-made] climate change won’t be as bad as previously thought,” said Mojib Latif, a professor at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Kiel, northern Germany.

So, for Inhofe, his bloggers, and their pals in the deniosphere: hold your horses. You don’t even have to “read the fine print”. Just read beyond the first paragraph or two of an article to see that science is not on your side, despite your desperate hopes.

And to the Heartland Institute and similar “think” tanks: please don’t bother putting the authors of the new study on your next “scientific” manifesto. They’re not on your side, either.