Complaint to Ofcom Regarding “The Great Global Warming Swindle”

The scientist largely responsible for measuring the temperature in the earth’s atmosphere is Professor John Christy. In 1981 he was awarded NASA’s medal for exceptional scientific achievement; and in 1996 he received a special award from the American Meteorological Society for fundamentally advancing our ability to monitor climate. He was a lead author on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or IPCC.

There are two ways to take the temperature in the earth’s atmosphere – satellites and weather balloons.

What we’ve found consistently is that in a great part of the planet the bulk of the atmosphere is not warming as much as we see at the surface in this region; and that’s a real head-scratcher for us, because the theory is pretty straightforward, and the theory says that if the surface warms, the upper atmosphere should warm rapidly. The rise in temperature of that part of the atmosphere is not very dramatic at all, and really does not match the theory that climate models are expressing at this point.

One of the problems that is plaguing the models is that they predict that as you go up through the atmosphere – except in the polar regions – that the rate of warming increases; and it’s quite clear from two datasets – not just satellite data, which everybody talks about, but from weather balloon data – that you don’t see that effect; in fact it looks like the surface temperatures are warming slightly more than the upper air temperatures. [Laughs]. That’s a big difference.

That data gives you a handle on the fact that what you’re seeing is warming that probably is not due to greenhouse gasses.

That is, the observations do not show an increase with altitude – in fact most observations show a slight decrease in the rate of warming with altitude: so in a sense you can say the hypothesis of man-made global warming is falsified by the evidence.

So the recent warming of the earth happened in the wrong place and the wrong time. Most of the warming took place in the early part of the 20th century, and occurred mostly at the earth’s surface – the very opposite of what should have happened according to the theory of man-made global warming.