An excellent article from David Evans, a prominent green house defector to skepticism. A quick bio:

Dr David Evans worked for the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 to 2005, building the carbon accounting model that Australia uses to track carbon in its biosphere for the purposes of the Kyoto Protocol. He is a mathematician and engineer, with six university degrees including a PhD from Stanford University.

Those credentials are good enough for me. Evans notes in the following article that the science of climate change has, well, changed since the UN IPCC first touted human induced global warming back in 1998.

First, the new ice cores shows that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says that the carbon rises could not have either started or ended the temperature rises, and that there are more powerful forces on global temperatures than atmospheric carbon levels.

Second, there is now no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None. There is plenty of evidence that global warming has occurred, and theory suggests that carbon emissions should raise temperatures (though by how much is hotly disputed), but there are no observations by anyone that implicate carbon emissions as a significant cause of the recent global warming.

Third, the satellites that measure the world’s temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, that 1998 was the warmest recent year, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the last year (to the temperature of 1980).

Fourth, we looked for the greenhouse signature and could not find it. Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the atmosphere the warming occurs first. The signature of increased greenhouse warming is a hotspot 10 km up in the atmosphere over the tropics.

The hotspot is central to our understanding – if there is no hotspot then either there is no significant increased greenhouse warming, or we don’t understand greenhouse and all our climate models are rubbish anyway.

We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes—weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hotspot whatsoever.

Maybe its time the politicians and their socialist and activist mates caught up with the latest findings.