Inconvenient Truths for Al Gore – Episode 3: Warming Rate

“And in recent years the rate of increase has been accelerating." (AIT, 72)

That’s just plain wrong.

Over the last 30 years, the warming rate has been remarkably constant—about 0.17 degrees Celsius per decade. And for 25 years before that, the world was actually cooling!

It’s also worth noting that most computer climate models predict that, once warming from greenhouse gas emissions starts, it continues at a constant rate, not an accelerating rate.

So we have a constant warming rate of 0.17 degrees Celsius per decade, and we have a majority of computer models predicting a constant rate of warming.

What this implies is that even if CO2 emissions are responsible for all the warming of the past 30 years—a big if—we may reasonably expect about 1.7 degrees Celsius of warming over the next hundred years.

Should we be alarmed about that? No. People experience far more dramatic climate change when they retire and move from Albany to Miami, or Chicago to Phoenix.

The actual rate of warming is modest and non-accelerating. A better title for a documentary about global warming would be: “Apocalypse Not!”