If suddenly there were no more global warming...

...life will suddenly become a whole lot more interesting.

A great many founts of authority, from the Royal Society to the UN, most heads of government along with countless captains of industry, learned professors, commentators and journalists will be profoundly embarrassed. Let us hope it is a prolonged and chastening experience.

With catastrophe off the agenda, for most people the fog of millennial gloom will lift, at least until attention turns to the prospect of the next ice age. Among the better educated, the sceptical cast of mind that is the basis of empiricism will once again be back in fashion. The delusion that by recycling and catching public transport we can help save the planet will quickly come to be seen for the childish nonsense it was all along.

The poorest Indians and Chinese will be left in peace to work their way towards prosperity, without being badgered about the size of their carbon footprint, a concept that for most of us will soon be one with Nineveh and Tyre, clean forgotten in six months.

The scores of town planners in Australia building empires out of regulating what can and can't be built on low-lying shorelines will have to come to terms with the fact inundation no longer impends and find something more plausible to do. The same is true of the bureaucrats planning to accommodate "climate refugees".

Penny Wong's climate mega-portfolio will suddenly be as ephemeral as the ministries for the year 2000 that state governments used to entrust to junior ministers. Malcolm Turnbull will have to reinvent himself at vast speed as a climate change sceptic and the Prime Minister will have to kiss goodbye what he likes to call the great moral issue and policy challenge of our times.

It will all be vastly entertaining to watch.

Condemned to an existence of boredom and unrequited schadenfreude is one Christopher Pearson, a writer at The Australian. Detect any frustration-betraying bitterness? I guess global warming just keeps bumping into his world-view.

So what has inspired his flight of fancy, this babbling brook of consciousness, this denialist delight?

Jennifer Marohasy has. She bears news of an "impending collapse of the global warming paradigm" in an ABC Radio National discussion with the similarly excited Michael Duffy.

Duffy: "Can you tell us about NASA's Aqua satellite, because I understand some of the data we're now getting is quite important in our understanding of how climate works?"

Marohasy: "That's right. The satellite was only launched in 2002 and it enabled the collection of data, not just on temperature but also on cloud formation and water vapour. What all the climate models suggest is that, when you've got warming from additional carbon dioxide, this will result in increased water vapour, so you're going to get a positive feedback. That's what the models have been indicating. What this great data from the NASA Aqua satellite ... (is) actually showing is just the opposite, that with a little bit of warming, weather processes are compensating, so they're actually limiting the greenhouse effect and you're getting a negative rather than a positive feedback."

Duffy: "The climate is actually, in one way anyway, more robust than was assumed in the climate models?"

Marohasy: "That's right ... These findings actually aren't being disputed by the meteorological community. They're having trouble digesting the findings, they're acknowledging the findings, they're acknowledging that the data from NASA's Aqua satellite is not how the models predict, and I think they're about to recognise that the models really do need to be overhauled and that when they are overhauled they will probably show greatly reduced future warming projected as a consequence of carbon dioxide."

Duffy: "From what you're saying, it sounds like the implications of this could beconsiderable ..."

Marohasy: "That's right, very much so. The policy implications are enormous. The meteorological community at the moment is really just coming to terms with the output from this NASA Aqua satellite and (climate scientist) Roy Spencer's interpretation of them. His work is published, his work is accepted, but I think people are still in shock at this point."

Hmmm, The new NASA Aqua Satellite data, as interpreted by fossil-fuels favourite, Dr Roy Spencer. I expect we'll hear a lot of this from the shills, Bolt; Ackerman; Blair; Devine; and, Albrechton, et al., and it should be interesting to see them construct their narrative. I'll Global Warming Watch this one.

Roy Spencer was the fellow who put out a paper showing satellite data was not correlating with the climate data, and showed cooling. For years and years there was this incongruent satellite data. Then the paper was reviewed by Science Magazine in 2005, whereupon they found that Christy and Spencer had failed to take proper account of satellite drift, which produced a spurious cooling trend to their dataset.

Update
Is there a smell of freshly laid astroturfi? Yahoo7 Answers already have the question up, posed by an eric c

Update 2
Glitch, long-time reader, typically a pleasant chap (but yes, one of those skeptics) is positively rubbing his hands with glee.

LOL, this is just wonderful.... Such VERY BAD good news for the enviro-socialists...

The plot thickens. Someone thunks global warming theory has been debunked, and this is bringing on the long-promised Raptures for the AGW Skeptics. Am I witnessing Deliverance for The Doubtful Loyal?

I checked the headlines, and Reuters. Nothing.

It'll come. It's lurking out there in the gloom, ready to break the water. I'm starting to feel very Old Man Of The Sea-ish. I'm baitin' up big.

Update 3
Spencer's bio at the fossil-fuel funded Marshall Institute site tells us: He currently is the U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer (AMSR-E) on NASA's Aqua satellite.

It also says: Dr. Spencer is the recipient of NASA's Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement and the American Meteorological Society's Special Award for his satellite-based temperature monitoring work.

In 1996, from what I can tell. The paper was debunked in 2005. That bio needs updating.

Think I'll check out Realclimate, or Deltoid. See what they have to say.


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