Holes in Global-Warming Theory Put Mitigation Effort at Risk

Iraq's looking good, economy's solid and now this? E-gad all that hysteria on the left and no place to go...

Has global warming stopped? The Earth's temperatures have held steady since 2001, says a veteran science writer, a pattern that raises questions about the intense efforts under way to stem the impact of greenhouse gases.

What is indisputable, says David Whitehouse on the Web site of the New Statesman, a generally left-leaning British weekly, is that the amount of gases such as carbon dioxide in the Earth's atmosphere has been increasing steadily for decades as humans burn more fossil fuels. Scientists believe those gases absorb outgoing infrared radiation from the Earth's surface, causing heat to be retained. In principle, that produces the greenhouse effect that is the fundamental theory behind global warming.

The world's temperatures rose sharply from 1980 to 1998 but have leveled off since then, according to Mr. Whitehouse's reading of U.S. and United Kingdom government statistics. In other words, he says, global warming has ceased.

While scientists have proposed a variety of theories for the recent plateau in temperature, those explanations are inadequate, says Mr. Whitehouse, who spent 18 years covering the sciences at the British Broadcasting Corporation and holds a doctorate in astrophysics. The working hypothesis of global warming remains a good one, says Mr. Whitehouse, but it doesn't fully explain what is occurring in the Earth's atmosphere. "Something else is happening and it is vital that we find out what" or risk wasting billions of dollars on the wrong solutions.