Awarmists Admit No Recent Warming

Power Stations Cool the Planet*

China’s emissions,

awarmists say, are cooling

the globe on the whole.

It it obvious

what we must do for the Earth:

we should burn more coal.

*  see “Global warming lull down to China’s coal growth”, by the BBC’s Richard Black:

The lull in global warming from 1998 to 2008 was mainly caused by a sharp rise in China’s coal use, a study suggests.  [...]
But the new study, in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concludes that smog from the extra coal acted to mask greenhouse warming.  [...]
Although burning the coal produced more warming carbon dioxide, it also put more tiny sulphate aerosol particles into the atmosphere which cool the planet by reflecting solar energy back into space.

From what the awarmist aerosols say, there are only two conclusions from their latest concession: either there has been no warming forced by anthropogenic carbon dioxide for a decade, meaning (by their own terms) that coal-burning power stations are not responsible for global warming, wherefore they should not be scrapped by our Government or there was no warming for a decade because of emissions from power stations, meaning that coal-burning power stations prevent global warming, wherefore they should not be scrapped by our Government.  Either way, we have no need of a tax on carbon dioxide.  See also “Sic et Non:  Unsettled Science”.
All this doubt from the believers constitutes another example of what we might call the Gaia Paradox:  those (like the very silly Prof. Tim Flannery or many of the Greens) who believe most in the goddess Gaia—the planet as one, divine, living being—are the very people who assign to her the least power to look after herself.

UPDATE I:  See Luboš Motl’s “Did Chinese coal cause the cooling since 1998?” at The Reference Frame:

So [Kaufmann et al.] wrote a paper that explains everything.  And because crackpot papers that explain everything and indirectly confirm the consensus of ideologues and brainwashed simpletons are politically correct (especially if the authors are surfer dudes), this stuff was instantly published by Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences, a journal that does [its] best to reject all papers from genuine scientists such as Richard Lindzen.

UPDATE II:  See as well “Global Warming?  Little Ice Age?  The Only Certainty Is that We’re Paying for the Hysteria of Our Politicians”, by Christopher Booker, in The Daily Mail:

Whatever happens now, whether it [be] hot or cold, whether we get heatwaves or record snowfalls, floods or droughts, sooner or later we hear those familiar little voices piping up to tell us that the blame for all these ‘extreme weather events’ still lies on ‘disruption’ to the climate caused by the sinful activities of mankind.

They’re all at it—from the environmental activists of Greenpeace, the WWF and their allies in the BBC and the Met Office, to those thousands of scientists across the world who have received billions in funding from governments investing in climate change research and prevention—all still battling to keep in being the greatest scare story in the history of the world.

The truth is that it becomes ever more obvious that none of them really has a clue as to what is responsible for the changes in our climate.  They can’t even tell us what global temperatures will be next month or next year, let alone what they will be in 100 years’ time, as they like to pretend their computer models can predict.†  But the really terrifying thing about all this is that our politicians have become so locked into the scare story that there is not yet the slightest sign they are prepared to notice the reality now crowding in on them on every side—that global warming is by no means a certainty.

†  this, unfortunately, is a fallacious but common argument.  Of one thousand healthy young people, for example, epidemiologists cannot guess with much likelihood of success which of them will die in the next year; but, with a fair degree of certainty, they can predict what proportion of the thousand will die from coronary disease and various cancers over the course of decades.  Climate models, so far, have been practically worthless, mainly because climate is chaotic and non-linear with far too many unknown variables; but the lack of predictive utility is not proven by their inability to make accurate short-term forecasts.

UPDATE III (8 July):  See Warren Meyer’s “Return of ‘the Plug’.”

UPDATE IV (18 July):

Or Maybe Not

Just out, a new paper
(from Not A Space Agency)
asks, “What would they know?”

Vernier et al.
write, “Don’t blame the Chinese, but
the odd volcano.”^‡

‡  I paraphrase.  See “New NASA paper contradicts Kaufmann et al., saying it’s volcanoes, not China Coal”, by Anthony Watts at WUWT.