Earth Equity News

Case Against Climate Change Discredited by Study. By Steve Connor, London Independent, May 29, 2008. "A difference in the way British and American ships measured the temperature of the ocean during the 1940s may explain why the world appeared to undergo a period of sudden cooling immediately after the Second World War. Scientists believe they can now explain an anomaly in the global temperature record for the twentieth century, which has been used by climate change sceptics to undermine the link between rising temperatures and increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide... Sceptics have argued it supports the idea that rising temperatures have more to do with increased solar activity -- sunspots -- than increasing levels of man-made carbon dioxide exacerbating the greenhouse effect... Taking into account the difference in the way of measuring sea-surface temperatures, and the sudden increase in the proportion of British ships taking the measurements after the war, the result was an artificial lowering of the global average temperature by about 0.2C... The study, published in the journal Nature, found that the global average temperatures in the late 1940s stayed roughly the same rather than falling... A similar problem could be occurring now with the move from ship-borne measurements to those from unmanned buoys, which tend to produce slightly lower records. This could explain why global average temperatures in recent years have levelled off."