As we mentioned in our series on Prof. Quing-Bin Lu’s remarkable challenge to the notion of CO2 as the crucial man-made warming gas last week, the “forcings” from the halo-GHGs he thinks are far more important (“forcings” being how insiders refer to things they think are forcing temperatures upward) start leveling off after 2000. According to his CRE model, Lu explains, the slowing down and reversal of global warming as their influence wanes should occur first in high latitude regions (i.e. towards the poles). To test this notion, Lu had compiled post-1965 land surface temperature and snow cover data from large areas in the Northern Hemisphere. And real science isn’t done by a show of hands but by a show of data.
These two charts show, on the left, temperatures in the northern hemisphere “extra-tropics” (that is, regions outside the tropics, extending from 30N to 90N) excluding Russia and Alaska, and on the right temperatures in Canada, the contiguous USA and Greenland. And yes, the leveling off after 2000 is clearly visible:
Lu argues in another paper that Russia and Alaska still show warming for geographic reasons. It’s not because of GHGs, he says, but because they have long coastlines and are experiencing the after-effects of an interval of ice-loss along their coasts. But inland Russian weather stations do show the leveling off.
Northern Hemisphere and North American snow cover extent also fit the pattern. To the perplexity of alarmists long convinced children won’t know what snow is, it’s increasing throughout the hemisphere (left side graph) and in North America in particular (right side graph):
After declining sharply from the 1960s through at least 1990, and despite the rapid increase in CO2, snow cover stopped falling and has been either stable or trending slightly upward. Lu also notes a post-2000 leveling off in the Central England Temperature series and the Antarctic, and mentions though he doesn’t show the same pattern in Northern Europe (Sweden, Norway, Finland, UK, Ireland and Iceland) and North Asia.
It's just one theory, of course. But it shows sufficient promise that surely someone somewhere is curious about testing it. And here’s one good way they could try. In another paper Lu shows the comparison of models for global average temperatures after 1950:
The red line is the 3-year moving average graph of global average temperatures after removing the effects of volcanoes and El Nino events, and the blue line is the same with Russia and Alaska removed. The black dashed line is the projected warming from the standard CO2 model while the green line is the projected warming from the CRE model based only on halo-GHGs and cosmic rays. The CRE model predicts there will be no warming, and even some cooling, over the next 20 years.
It’s too early now to decide which model wins the reality prize, but by 2030 we should know one way or the other. Unless of course “climate scientists” just refuse to look, at the hypothesis or the data.