Even by his own high standards, Geoffrey Lean's latest piece in the Telegraph, is quite extraordinarily daft, a silly piece, from a silly journalist, for the silly season.
Global warming, climate sceptics keep saying, has stopped for the last 16 years or so...The sceptics base their claim on just one measurement of warming, the temperature of air near the earth's surface , whose increase has indeed slowed down recently, though it has not stopped growing.
This is of course drivel. Sceptics do not base this claim on only one measurement. Satellite measurements of the troposphere show the pause just as the surface temperatures do. Global sea ice levels remain above their long-term average. And the pause is clearly visible in the current graph from GISSTEMP, the only record that has been alleged to still show a positive trend this century.
Lean then goes on to say that sea surface temperatures around the UK have gone up by, erm, 1.6% (although I'm not sure if he is working in Kelvin or Centigrade!) and goes on to say that this is affecting fish ranges:
Cod and haddock, for example, are now rarely found wild in British waters. They are being replaced by warmer water species like sea bass, hake, gurnard, red mullet and anchovies, while John Dory – once only found off Cornwall – has spread through the North Sea up to Scotland. Diets, however, have yet to change to match.
Do you think the cod and haddock thing might be something to do with overfishing? And what about the warm-water species thing? This paper shows a considerable John Dory catch off the Hebrides in the mid-1990s (see Fig 2). Red mullet are found halfway to Iceland. And while we are about it, it's also worth pointing out that top-of-the-ocean temperatures are another climate series that shows a pause, whether you find such records convincing or not.
And newspaper owners wonder why they are going out of business.
