Peter Boyer is apparently a disciple of Al Gore – one of the many who has been trained to give that famous slide show about the imminent climate crisis. Anyway, he is also a columnist for The Mercury – Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers in Tasmania. Today, in a piece entitled ‘Misleading opinion fed by misunderstood data’ he writes:
“Jennifer Marohasy told ABC Counterpoint listeners that NASA data showed Earth’s surface temperature was trending down from a high in 1998, revealing serious flaws in greenhouse theory.
If confidence and clear expression were all that counted in the climate debate, Dr Marohasy would be a winner. Listeners unfamiliar with the data she talked about may have felt she was right.
But alas, the evidence says otherwise.
Present and past global average surface temperatures are derived from painstaking assessment of countless readings all over the planet, on land and sea, together with satellite observations, corrected for local aberrations such as the urban heat island effect.”
Accompanied by a graph showing the last 120 years temperature trend Mr Boyer went on to suggest that the world is still warming.
Of course the world has been mostly warming over the last 120 years, but over the last 10 years global temperatures have not been trending up, as predicted by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, despite a continual increase in carbon dioxide emissions.

The last decade of global temperatures from Satellite (UAH MSU lower troposphere) (blue) and land and ocean variance adjusted surface (Hadley CRU T3v) (rose) plotted with Scripps monthly CO2 from Mauna Loa (green) by Joe D’Aleo – former Chief Meteorologist at Weather Services International Corporation and Senior Editor of “Dr. Dewpoint” for WSI’s popular Intellicast.com website.

Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD has worked in industry and government. She is currently researching a novel technique for long-range weather forecasting funded by the B. Macfie Family Foundation.