Global Warming on the Rocks

When it comes to evidence of global warming, who are you going to believe, your professors or the facts?

“While it is common these days for politicians, journalists, and other observers to say the climate is warming ‘faster than expected,’ the data show that, over the past two decades, warming has actually slowed down to a pace well below most model projections,” economist Ross McKitrick writes in a study published by the Canadian Fraser Institute last October. “Depending on the data set used, there has been no statistically significant temperature change for the past 15 to 20 years.”

“Yet atmospheric GHG [Green House Gas] levels have increased rapidly over this interval, and there is now a widening discrepancy between most climate model projections and observed temperatures.” McKitrick is a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute as well as a professor at the University of Guelph.

“While a pause in warming is not itself inconsistent with a continuing long term trend, there is no precedent for such a large and continuing gap between models and observations,” McKitrick writes. “Some climatologists have argued that within another few years at most, if the pause continues, it will lead inescapably to the conclusion that climate models are oversensitive to GHGs.”

Related Topics