According to satellite data released this month by Remote Sensing Systems (RSS), which provides data used by NASA, NOAA, and the National Science Foundation, the global mean surface temperature has not risen for 18 consecutive years. This extends the so-called “pause” in global warming to a new record, one not predicted by the climate models of the United Nations’ International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). See the raw RSS data here, supporting data from the National Space Science & Technology Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville here, and stories about this fact here and here.
The following statements from climate science and policy experts at The Heartland Institute – a free-market think tank – may be used for attribution. For more comments, refer to the contact information below. To book a Heartland guest on your program, please contact Director of Communications Jim Lakely at [email protected] and 312/377-4000 or (cell) 312/731-9364.
“To the world’s climate alarmists, atmospheric carbon dioxide is a dangerous trace gas, and for years, they have been insisting its increase will raise global temperatures and wreak havoc upon Earth’s climate and biosphere. Yet, despite a 9 percent increase in CO2 over the past 18 years, there has been no rise in global temperature. Think about that. Over this time period the air’s CO2 content has risen some 40 parts per million, which represents fully one-third the total global CO2 increase since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, yet contrary to model projections, planetary temperatures have failed to rise.
“It’s time for global warming die-hards to face the facts. Stop denying the models have got global temperature projections wrong. Stop denying CO2 has a lower climate sensitivity than you have been claiming. Stop denying the societal benefits of continued fossil fuel use. It’s not too late to make a course correction and support sound science.”
Craig D. Idso
Senior Fellow, Environment
The Heartland Institute
Co-editor, Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change
www.nipccreport.org
[email protected]
312/377-4000
“The ongoing 18 years without any warming strongly contradict alarmist predictions of global warming doom-and-gloom. According to nearly all of the United Nations’ computer models, this lack of warming could not occur. The real-world climate proves the alarmist computer models overstate the warming properties of carbon dioxide. Even when Earth resumes its modest warming, which it likely will at some point in the next couple of decades, the pace of warming will continue to be quite modest and beneficial to human welfare and global ecosystems.”
James M. Taylor
Senior fellow for Environmental Policy
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
727/215-3192
“The EPA claimed that carbon dioxide emissions are pollutants that endangers human health, even though carbon dioxide is necessary for life on this planet. Green plants need carbon dioxide for photosynthesis to create the food plants and animals need to survive.
“The EPA stated that it based its finding on three lines of evidence. These lines of evidence do not exist, or no longer exist. They are: (1) a distinct human fingerprint in the atmosphere over the tropics; (2) late 20th century warming was unusual; and (3) climate models predict that human-caused warming would become dangerous to humans in the 21st century. No one, including the National Academy of Sciences, has been able to find the distinct human fingerprint except those who falsely claim such a warming is uniquely human-caused.
“Late 20th century warming stopped about 18 years ago. Climate models cannot explain why, even though, according to the White House, federal expenditures on climate science and programs to fight global warming/climate change amount to about $22.5 billion a year. There is no scientific reason to assume significant warming will occur in the future from human carbon dioxide emission.
“The EPA and the Obama administration have embarked on a program of eliminating electricity generation from even the most efficient and cleanest modern coal-fired power plants, without carbon capture and storage – a technology untested for general application. All this is based on a perceived threat to human health that cannot be shown to exist. It is past time to stop the madness of wasting great sums of money on EPA’s imaginary threat to human health.”
Kenneth Haapala
Executive Vice President
Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP)
[email protected]
312-377-4000
“The global warming scare is driven by computerized climate model forecasts of the future. If the models are unreliable, then there is little basis for concern, since real-world observations show that the climate change of the past century falls well within natural variability. In 2008, the NOAA ‘State of the Climate’ report specified exactly what observations would indicate whether the models are reliable or not: Fifteen years of no warming. In 2009, climate scientist Phil Jones agreed, telling a colleague in one of the leaked Climategate emails: ‘Bottom line: the “no upward trend” has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’
“Having just passed 18 years with no warming, the criteria, as set by alarmists themselves, is now satisfied. The global warming scare is over.”
Tom Harris
Executive Director
International Climate Science Coalition
Policy Advisor, Energy and Environment
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
312/377-4000
“Eighteen years of no warming. That means this year’s high school graduates were raised to believe in and fear something that stopped happening before they were born. We’ve had as many years of relatively steady temperatures as we had actual years of warming since the ice age panic of the 1970s. Growing Antarctic ice sheets, increased greening of the earth, more walruses and polar bears than at any time since the beginning of the 20th century, fewer hurricanes and tornadoes, only a modest sea level rise, longer life spans and better overall health … if these are the terrors of global warming, I’ll have more please.
“Every one of the climate models missed the lull. You’ve got to ask yourself, ‘Are you going to believe what the modelers tell you, or are you going to believe your “lying eyes,” which in this case is the actual measured temperature data?’ I’ll take hard data over faulty models any day.”
H. Sterling Burnett
Research Fellow, Environment & Energy Policy
The Heartland Institute
Managing Editor, Environment & Climate News
[email protected]
800/859-1154
“The celebration of 18 years with no global warming – despite the fastest increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide in a millennia (2 ppm per year) – shows that the fear of using our abundant, economical, and geographically distributed fossil fuels is nonsense.
“Due to consternation among climate alarmists, 52 explanations have been produced to date for the pause in global warming – most claiming heat is hidden somewhere in the ocean. These claims are fiction, as was the claim by a British meteorologist in 2001 that children today, in 2014, would never witness snow.
“Let the U.S. go forward and create the millions of jobs and trillions of dollars of revenue by being the energy supplier of the world with coal, oil, and natural gas. Abundant, cheap energy for poor nations can help eliminate poverty and health problems like the current Ebola outbreak.”
James H. Rust
Professor of nuclear engineering (Ret.), Georgia Tech
Policy Advisor,
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
312/377-4000
“As the global temperature standstill hits 18 years beyond what the models predicted the climate activists are left with more than 50 excuses to explain why temperatures are not rising.
“The ‘pause’ reveals that it is scientifically obvious that carbon dioxide is not the overriding driver of the climate. The global warming movement has morphed into a coalition of ‘climate cause deniers.’ They deny the hundreds of causes and variables of climate change and pretend CO2 is the ‘control knob’ overriding all the others.”
Marc Morano
Publisher
Climate Depot
[email protected]
312/377-4000
“Yes there has been no warming for 18 years, but The New York Times has just reactivated it’s environmental global warming/climate change coverage team to increase coverage of what they regard as the most serious issue of our time. At the Times Web site, where it announced this new climate team, I posted this comment:
‘There has not been any significant man-made global warming in the past, there is none now, and there is no reason to expect any in the future. The computer models that predicted the warming have failed to verify. There has been no warming in 18 years. The ice at the poles is stable. The polar bears are increasing. The oceans are not rising. The march in New York was a political event dominated by communists and socialists who are using climate change as a devise to raise anti-capitalism hell. This is a great distortion of science with a political agenda driven by huge federal tax dollar research grants. I strongly urge the reporter group at the Times to break the really big story and research and see it through: Global warming/climate change has become a politically driven folly without any verified scientific basis. The evidence to support what I have said is there for the looking. Start with the Nongovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the work of Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace, and go from there. It can be the investigative story of your lifetimes. Go for it.’
“The facts are on the side of the skeptics, but the media remains totally committed to the ’97 percent consensus’ lie.”
John Coleman
Meteorologist
Policy Advisor, Environment
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
312/377-4000
“For years now, urban organic activists have been marketing the organic industry as the solution to everything that supposedly ails our environment. But the fact of the matter is that organic farmers use more fossil fuels per-acre and per-bushel of food produced because they’re forced to rely on tillage for weed control instead of herbicides. Hence, organic farmers emit more CO2 per-acre and per-bushel which, according to global-warming activists, was supposed to have resulted in atmospheric global warming.
“But here we are in 2014 and there has been no global warming for the past 18 years. Fortunately, as any farmer, organic or otherwise, will tell you, CO2 is good for crops and hence good for the planet and good for humankind. Farmers would love it if Earth’s atmosphere would warm, as promised. But until such time as the planet starts cooperating with the activists, they’re all just happy to continue farming the way each of them chooses to – knowing that however much CO2 they emit, it could never possibly have an appreciable effect on the planet.”
Mischa Popoff
Policy Advisor
The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
312/377-4000
“One would think that, after 18 years in which there has been no increase in the average global temperature as predicted by the IPCC and every other environmental organization, they might be inclined to concede that global warming is not happening. When the endless computer models that predicted warming turned out to be wrong, you might think that the news media would report this extraordinary result. When Hollywood actors, economists, and others with no background in science continue to proclaim global warming, we can feel confident to dismiss them.
“But the worst of this 18-year anniversary of the lack of warming is the fact we have a president, a secretary of state, and others in the Obama administration who continue not only to proclaim warming – now called climate change – but suggesting that it is the greatest threat to the nation and the world. The absurdity of this should hold them up to ridicule, but these pronouncements are published without criticism.
“The current cooling cycle Earth is experiencing will continue for many years to come, and its cause is nothing more mysterious than our Sun – which is, itself, in a natural cycle of lower radiation. As always, nature, not man, will have the last word.”
Alan Caruba
Founder, The National Anxiety Center
Policy Advisor, The Heartland Institute
[email protected]
312/377-4000
The Heartland Institute is a 30-year-old national nonprofit organization headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. For more information, visit our Web site or call 312/377-4000.
Dr. Idso is the founder, former president, and currently chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change.
Kenneth Haapala is president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), compiler of The Week That Was newsletter, and a contributor to the NIPCC reports.
Tom Harris is executive director of the International Climate Science Coalition
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
Professor of Nuclear Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology (ret.), Climate Change and Energy
Marc Morano is the publisher of the award-winning ClimateDepot.com, a global warming and eco-news center founded in 2009. Morano was named one of only five “criminals against humanity, against planet Earth itself” in 2009 by the eco-magazine Grist.
John Coleman founded The Weather Channel and was the original weathercaster on ABC’s “Good Morning America” with David Hartman and Joan Lunden. He retired in 2014 after more than 60 years in broadcasting. Coleman passed away on January 20, 2018.
Mischa Popoff is the author of the critically-acclaimed book, Is it Organic? He earned a B.A. from the University of Saskatchewan where he specialized in the history of nitrogen for fertilizer and warfare.
Alan Caruba – who passed away on June 16, 2015 – was a writer by profession and host of several Web sites and blogs, including Warning Signs, The National Anxiety Center, Caruba Editorial Services, and Bookviews by Alan Caruba.
