| In fact the Economist noted in 2013 that “The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, ‘the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.’” Thus, while anthropogenic CO2 emissions are the highest they’ve ever been, and growing rapidly, Earth’s temperature has been in a 9 – 17 year Pause. And the only period of warming that anthropogenic CO2 emissions could have had a significant influence on, 1975 – 1998, is “similar and not statistically significantly different from” the periods of 1860-1880 and 1910-1940 when there is no evidence of anthropogenic CO2 emission influence. As such one could argue that “Global Warming” due to anthropogenic Carbon Dioxide emissions may not have begun, that Earth’s sensitivity to CO2 may be low, that natural processes may be large enough to outweigh the effects of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and/or that preparing for a period of rapid and catastrophic Global Warming, when there is no observational evidence that it is in fact occurring, may be a historic folly. |
