While most people do not read The Australian, I do on a regular basis. The attached article by Lord Monckton effectively demolishes an alarmist article that The Australian published recently.
Michael Steketee, writing in The Australian in January 2011, echoed the BBC (whose journalists’ pension fund is heavily weighted towards “green” “investments”) and other climate-extremist vested interests in claiming that 2010 was the warmest year on record worldwide. Mr. Steketee’s short article makes two dozen questionable assertions, which either require heavy qualification or are downright false.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/09/monckton-skewers-steketee/#more-31240
I share Lord Monckton’s view that global warming has been progressing and continues to progress as it has since the Earth emerged from the last ice age. Perhaps the pattern will change over the long term, but that change will most likely be dictated by celestial events such as changing intensity of the sun, a variation in the Earth’s orbit around the sun, or the arrival of a large asteroid.
I also share his opinion that human attempts to alter weather and climate are not effective. Instead, any investment should be directed to adapting to the effects of climate change when they occur and dealing with the know variability of weather that does occur over time. In western Canada for example, we should be prepared to deal with variations in weather patterns that could deliver cooler / colder than normal weather, wetter than normal weather, dryer than normal weather, warmer/hotter than normal weather, and more frequent extreme weather events such as heavy rain, hail, wind or winter snow storms. I will even go out on a limb and suggest that we should perhaps be prepared to deal with more normal than normal weather patterns.
