From the Wall Street Journal. (H/T Levin)

Excerpt:

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: “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.” But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.

And:

Although the number of publicly dissenting scientists is growing, many young scientists furtively say that while they also have serious doubts about the global-warming message, they are afraid to speak up for fear of not being promoted—or worse. They have good reason to worry. In 2003, Dr. Chris de Freitas, the editor of the journal Climate Research, dared to publish a peer-reviewed article with the politically incorrect (but factually correct) conclusion that the recent warming is not unusual in the context of climate changes over the past thousand years. The international warming establishment quickly mounted a determined campaign to have Dr. de Freitas removed from his editorial job and fired from his university position. Fortunately, Dr. de Freitas was able to keep his university job.

This is not the way science is supposed to work, but we have seen it before—for example, in the frightening period when Trofim Lysenko hijacked biology in the Soviet Union. Soviet biologists who revealed that they believed in genes, which Lysenko maintained were a bourgeois fiction, were fired from their jobs. Many were sent to the gulag and some were condemned to death.

Why is there so much passion about global warming, and why has the issue become so vexing that the American Physical Society, from which Dr. Giaever resigned a few months ago, refused the seemingly reasonable request by many of its members to remove the word “incontrovertible” from its description of a scientific issue? There are several reasons, but a good place to start is the old question “cui bono?” Or the modern update, “Follow the money.”

Alarmism over climate is of great benefit to many, providing government funding for academic research and a reason for government bureaucracies to grow. Alarmism also offers an excuse for governments to raise taxes, taxpayer-funded subsidies for businesses that understand how to work the political system, and a lure for big donations to charitable foundations promising to save the planet. Lysenko and his team lived very well, and they fiercely defended their dogma and the privileges it brought them.

Read the whole thing! This is a must-read.

UPDATE: My friend Neil Simpson has found another recent study showing that there has been no significant global warming for 15 years – and the numbers come from the British Met Office, and the University of East Anglia (home of Climategate).

Related stories

• New study : Earth’s climate is not as sensitive to carbon dioxide as IPCC claims
• Climategate 2.0: Leaked e-mails show scientists intended to deceive public
• NASA admits that their data is worse than CRU Climate-gate data
• 19 points that undermine the claims of global warming alarmists
• UN IPCC global warming alarmism based on student essay and magazine article
• How the UN’s IPCC cites non-scientific claims from the World Wildlife Fund
• Chairman of UN’s IPCC used bogus claims to grab global warming cash
• Britain to be hit by coldest winter in 100 years
• Does global warming increase the frequency of hurricanes?
• Canadian government finds polar bear population up 163% since mid-1980s
• Polar bear populations are not decreasing now
• Russian economists accuse CRU of cherry-picking Russian temperature data
• UK Daily Mail summarizes the Climategate scandal
• Armed guard prevents questions on Climategate at UN conference
• Australian climate data also adjusted to hide the decline
• What does Climategate really prove about global warming?
• Comparison of hockey stick graph data to a larger data set in the same area
• Oceans are not warming now
• Polar ice caps are not melting now

ECM sent me this article from the Economist concerning some recent research that was published in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Science.

Excerpt:

Climate science is famously complicated, but one useful number to keep in mind is “climate sensitivity”. This measures the amount of warming that can eventually be expected to follow a doubling in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its most recent summary of the science behind its predictions, published in 2007, estimated that, in present conditions, a doubling of CO2 would cause warming of about 3°C, with uncertainty of about a degree and a half in either direction.

[…]But a paper published in this week’s Science, by Andreas Schmittner of Oregon State University, suggests it is not. In Dr Schmittner’s analysis, the climate is less sensitive to carbon dioxide than was feared.

Existing studies of climate sensitivity mostly rely on data gathered from weather stations, which go back to roughly 1850. Dr Schmittner takes a different approach. His data come from the peak of the most recent ice age, between 19,000 and 23,000 years ago. His group is not the first to use such data (ice cores, fossils, marine sediments and the like) to probe the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide. But their paper is the most thorough. Previous attempts had considered only small regions of the globe. He has compiled enough information to make a credible stab at recreating the climate of the entire planet.

[…]The group’s most likely figure for climate sensitivity is 2.3°C, which is more than half a degree lower than the consensus figure, with a 66% probability that it lies between 1.7° and 2.6°C. More importantly, these results suggest an upper limit for climate sensitivity of around 3.2°C.

I think that it is a good thing for the reputation of scientists that articles like this can be published at all. I have lost a lot of confidence in government-funded science lately, especially when the conclusion of the government-funded research supports the need for more government and high taxes.

In case you missed my recent post on the newly-release Climategate e-mails, then you should read that to see how biased climate scientists can be.

Here are the latest surface temperature measurements.