DR Salinger in replying (
Greenhouse gases, warming world and Norse Greenland - Gisborne herald 4th June) to my opinion piece (
Pull ecofascists from corridors of power - Gisborne Herald 4th June) does a splendid job of demonstrating how global warming believers twist the facts to fit the theory.
I do not deny that we have had global warming. I do not deny that the decade 2000 to 2010 was a warm one, or that it was warmer than the 1990s. The 1990s were a period of warming. The next decade has shown a relatively constant temperature at the elevated level that was reached in the 1990s. It therefore must have a higher average than the previous decade.
Omitted in Dr Salinger’s piece, but mentioned in his presentation, is the fact that the Pinatubo eruption lowered the 1990s temperature from what it would have been. That may have accounted for a large part of the difference between the temperatures of the 1990s and 2000s.
It is interesting and noteworthy that Dr Salinger did not challenge my claim that the last decade has recorded temperatures lower than the IPCC had projected. He can’t. His former mentor, Prof. Phil Jones of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, has conceded that there has been no significant warming since 1995.
On sea level rises, Dr Salinger gives no rebuttal to my cited reference but merely brings out the IPCC mantra with no references. My reference clearly shows that the raw satellite data shows no rise and that the rise only occurs on “corrected” data. But these “corrections” are not specified.