The Daily Sceptic has a piece linking to this article today. In essence, Worddata.info, one of those sites assembling publicly available data, has produced regional temperature trend graphs using only data from stations in continuous operation since their chosen start date, 1950. As one can easily see, this is scientifically a lot more valid than trying to extrapolate back from the readings of newer stations, and so on. The graphs are below the fold. Before reading on, have a look and see what the charts tell you.
Well I don’t know about you, but my first observation is that average temperature trends vary quite a lot across the world. To me, there seems overall to be a small dip, or in one case a stasis, corresponding to the global cooling scare in the 1970s, followed by a rise. But most interestingly, in most regions this rise slowed or reversed, around a decade ago. In the USA, there has scarcely been a trend since 1980 (suggesting that any rise there may be due to new stations in increasingly urban areas, post-measurement adjustments and so on).
So these results, I would think, tend to confirm the HADCRUT satellite data that has shown a worldwide pause, or actually a slight decrease, in temperature over the last eight years. The Sceptic article, naturally enough, majors on the way this contradicts the climate alarmism that is rampant in our press, media, and government policy. Apart from anything else, increasing temperature cannot be causing more extreme weather events if the temperature is not actually increasing, even if the “extreme weather” trend were real (which it is not, according to the IPCC).
This matters a lot when we see the current meltdown of the world’s energy infrastructure through fanatical implementation of renewables (to lower temperature) causing mass poverty and even starvation across the globe. It matters to Evangelicals seeking truth too (see my recent blog). But what I want to comment on here is the Worlddata commentary on this graphic, which is immediately below it on their webpage:
The graphs show the average daily temperatures. It can be seen quite clearly that there has been a sharp increase in temperatures worldwide since the 1980s. Particularly noticeable are the developments in Europe, North America and Asia, where there are considerable temperature increases. In the countries of Oceania, the temperature increase is strikingly strong, especially in the last few years. Antarctica is not listed here due to a lack of consistent data series.
Does it not strike you as weird that they completely ignore the recent downward trend, as if demonstrating that there was a period of warming is proof that it is man-made and is continuing. Bear in mind that the downturn has lasted longer than the the uptick had when people began to announce climate doom. If a decade trend was significant in 1990, it is significant now.
Now, I can think of two reasons for this “Don’t believe your lying eyes – believe us” message. The first is that acceptance of anthropogenic climate change is so entrenched that they are actually blind to their own data. This possibility would be supported by the header of the page, which reads:
Global warming in recent decades, however, has been caused to a considerable extent by human beings. Normally, a global temperature rise of two degrees lasts several thousand years. For such an increase, human beings did not even need a whole century. More drastic warming has become apparent in the last two decades alone.
There are several dubious assumptions in that. But judging by its very dogmatism, to accept the reality of a significant fall in temperature across much of the world, when the purported cause – man-made increases in CO2 levels from fossil fuels – has been relentlessly increasing would be a clear abandonment of the whole theory. Three decades (only) of rising temperatures followed by an entire decade of falling temperatures is not compatible with an ever-worsening human activity: it suggests a cycle of some sort.
The second possibility is that Worlddata is trying to smuggle the truth across to its audience without falling foul of the cancel-culture surrounding climatology. It would be akin to those scientific papers that clearly undermine one of these mainstream myths whilst averting the risk of their research being pulled by inserting the obligatory paragraph that climate change is a looming crisis, that mRNA vaccines are safe and effective, or that Neodarwinian natural selection is, of course, axiomatic.
The trouble, if the second strategy were the case, is the first reason I suggested. Human beings governed by an uncritical religious belief (note the qualification uncritical) are often incapable of seeing evidence that contradicts the narrative. That is to say, if Worlddata secretly understand the significance of their data, they are overestimating its power to change minds when they toe the line in the verbal content, because it is the latter that will usually be believed.
Here’s an example of such ideological blindness (and its encounter with critical religious thought) that I may have cited in the past. When I was at Cambridge, a bunch of us Christians organised an open-air free gospel concert, featuring the best acts of the burgeoning Jesus people scene including Graham Kendrick and my own guitar hero, Gordon Giltrap (who later abandoned the faith, sadly, for very comprehensible reasons if you read his biography).
Anyway, as one of the other acts set up, a local alcoholic down-and-out found his way onstage and started singing some ribald song into the mic. The band’s guitarist, with whatever motive of anger or anxiety for the equipment, grappled with him and actually pushed him off-stage, by which fall he broke his arm. I saw the whole event clearly, but it was very difficult not to go along with most of the other (Christian) onlookers in saying that the guy had simply fallen, rather than being pushed. People simply couldn’t believe that a believer – especially a “famous” one – would act that way. I suspect the guitarist couldn’t believe it himself, after the event: sin often surprises us thus. I soon took myself to task and decided that truth was better than plausibility, but it took conscious effort and earned me some pushback. Incidentally, it ended well as the concert organiser took the tramp into his own home while he recovered.
Leaving aside Worlddata’s motives, religious or otherwise, the piece on global warming as a whole is a prime example of the ubiquitous modern practice of persuasion by barefaced lies. Graphic evidence triggers us emotionally, and we often don’t notice that it contradicts the story we are being told by the very same source.
A couple of other examples: the Washington Post has an article about the bodies of Russian soldiers fleeing the battlefield being videoed by Ukrainians as they advance. The problem is that the video the WP must have used for the article (there are no mainstream reporters permitted in the war-zone) is available, and clearly shows a wrecked convoy of civilian vehicles and bodies on a road unsuitable for military traffic. Someone has massacred non-combatants fleeing from the Ukrainian advance towards Russian-occupied territory. Retreating soldiers have other things on their mind than shelling those who, from their actions, are clearly their allies, so logic says the “liberating” Ukrainians, who are the heroes of the Washington Post article, are being lauded for their war-crimes.
An even worse example is in today’s Daily Mail, which has graphic images of admitted Donbas civilians admittedly murdered by the advancing Ukrainian forces. These war-crimes are justified as being perpetrated against “collaborators” and in revenge for purported Russian war-crimes. The overall message is that if plucky heroic Ukrainians are forced into such unpleasantness agisnt evil people, the Russians must really have been committing unthinkable atrocities. And so MSM gets to blame even clear admissions of Ukrainian war-crimes on the Russians. The worst thing is how many of the commenters swallow that narrative whole.
I’ve said before that if Moscow were destroyed in a nuclear strike tomorrow, many people would swear it was a Russian false flag to discredit NATO. It would be nice to think that presenting radar evidence of the missiles’ flight path from a NATO base would refute the claim, but experience shows it wouldn’t. It would simply be the evidence of how devious and cunning the Russians were.
And so you see in what sense mainstream informers are engaged in a Holy War, whether on foreign adventures or climate change: the evidence of the eyes counts for little compared to the Inner Light of the Soul.
