In an article published in November 2007, Christopher Booker wrote in the Telegraph that the coverage of climate trends “carefully ignores the latest US satellite figures showing temperatures having fallen since 1998, declining in 2007 to a 1983 level - not to mention the newly revised figures for US surface temperatures showing that the 1930s had four of the 10 warmest years of the past century, with the hottest year of all being not 1998, as was previously claimed, but 1934.”

And in a blog on USA Today this week, Doyle Rice quoted an article in Natural Geoscience which claims that only about half of the warming that occurred during a natural climate change 55 million years ago can be explained by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Further:

Right from childhood, in school and outside, we are told that the climate is changing, to ominous effects. Industry is pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, leading to the greenhouse effect and a general rise in global temperatures. There are several problems with this premise. One, it assumes that carbon dioxide is the sole contributor to global warming. Second, it takes climate to be a calculable entity that can be estimated by ever-complex models. As events in the real world keep reminding us, the only thing that can be said with certainty is that there is no certainty to the way the world moves.

As governments meet again in Copenhagen later this year and argue about the levels of emissions they must accept for the world to be a safer place for our future generations, perhaps we must probe and question whether there is really a need for carbon dioxide emissions to be cut. What if developing countries like India agreed to a compromise formula under which they cut their emissions against some quid pro quo with the West, and in the end of it all, some new model said a completely new agent is responsible for global warming?

Will we then go looking for new Kyotos and Copenhagens like chickens with their heads cut off?