temperaturstigningen kom før CO2 stigning

First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN didn't do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels.

The Antarctic, which holds 90 per cent of the world's ice and nearly all its 160,000 glaciers, has cooled and gained ice-mass in the past 30 years, reversing a 6,000-year melting trend. Data from 6,000 boreholes worldwide show global temperatures were higher in the Middle Ages than now. And the snows of Kilimanjaro are vanishing not because summit temperature is rising (it isn't) but because post-colonial deforestation has dried the air. Al Gore please note.

In some places it was also warmer than now in the Bronze Age and in Roman times. It wasn't CO2 that caused those warm periods. It was the sun. So the UN adjusted the maths and all but extinguished the sun's role in today's warming. Here's how:

In the climate change debate, one figure is real. The Sunday Telegraph's website registered more than 127,000 hits in response to last week's article revealing that the UN had minimised the sun's role in changing past and present climate, persisted in proven errors and used unsound data, questionable graphs and meretricious maths to exaggerate future warming threefold.

The views of 200 readers who emailed me are in the link above. About a third are scientists, including well-known climatologists and a physicist who confirmed my calculations. Some advise governments.

Nearly all condemn the "consensus". Most feel that instead of apologising, the UN has misled them, especially by using the defective "hockey-stick" temperature graph.

Here's how an apology is done. Last week I said that James Hansen had told the United States Congress that sea level would rise several feet by 2000, but it was the US Senate, and by 2100; I added a tautologous "per second" to "watts per square metre"; and I mentioned the perhaps apocryphal Arctic voyage of Chen Ho. Sorry.

Sir Nicholas Stern's report on climate-change economics says the world must spend 1 per cent of GDP from now on to avert disaster. The current draft of the UN's 2007 report says up to 5 per cent. Sir Nick's team tell me: "We are confident that the UN will publish a range for costs next year in which ours will be centrally placed." So some quiet high-level co-ordination is going on. The oddest thing about Stern's curious report was its timing. Publication of the UN's next major science assessment is only months ahead. Why not wait and base the economics on that?

Sat lidt på spidsen: hvis man mener at co2 har en effekt som drivhusgas, så må man også acceptere at det er en medvirkende årsag til den igang værende temperaturstigning der som helhed er på jorden

The last 3 million years have been characterized by cycles of glacials and interglacials within a gradually deepening ice age.

Kosmos skrev:
Endelig må man vel - som lægmand - spørge, hvor megen lid man kan fæste til angivelser vedr. temperaturer og atmosfærisk CO2-indhold, der går 500 mio. år tilbage i tiden!?

Kosmos skrev:
- men det synes ikke helt at stemme overens med den sidste graf ['An Overall View'], der tilsyneladende viser nogenlunde samme nutidige temperaturniveau som for 3 mio. år siden!? {Det forekommer mig også en anelse kryptisk, hvad der præcis menes med udtrykket "a gradually deepening ice age"(?)}