Global Warming, Quantified

The Left uses global warming hysteria as a pretext to bring about its desired “fundamental transformation” of Western society. Usually lost in the blizzard of dire predictions is hard data about how much the Earth has actually warmed, whether due to CO2 or not. In this regard, the only data that are global, reliable and transparent are the tropospheric satellite measurements that are maintained by the University of Alabama Huntsville.

The satellite data only go back to 1979, but that is now getting to be a considerable length of time, 42 years. This graph from Dr. Roy Spencer’s web site tracks the global average lower tropospheric temperature anomaly on a running, centered 13-month average basis.

Over the 42-year period, global average temperature has increased at a rate of 0.13 degree Centigrade per decade. At that rate, it would take 80 years for average temperature to rise one degree. That is much less than the forecasts produced by alarmist climate models.

The failure of reality to match alarmists’ projections has been recognized for some time. In 2009, in a moment of honesty–privately, off the record–alarmist scientist Kevin Trenberth wrote, “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” Since then, the lack of warming, in comparison with the models promoted by Leftists, has continued.

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