Climate deniers – and most of Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s hand-picked business advisors – love to repeat the myth that global warming paused in the late 1990s, and hasn’t moved since.
That claim is based on an outlying statistic – the super hot year in 1998 that was boosted by the last major El Nino event. It’s a bit like suggesting that because a football player scored four goals in one match, but only three in another, he’s suddenly out of form.
Other graphs have shown that, on a decadal trend, warming has clearly continued, but we like this one that shows the moving average of global surface temperatures.
It comes from UBS analyst David Leitch, and he explains why he put it together:
“We feel that financial markets are more familiar with percentages than with absolute numbers. The data shows the 20 year moving average at about 4 per cent above the 20th century average. For the last few months it’s about 5.5 per cent above the average. For the month of May 2014 the land/sea temperature was the warmest May on record, and the Jan-May average the 5th warmest.”
That’s important. There is growing evidence that the financial community, those that control the destiny of trillions of dollars of capital, are waking up to the risks of directing those funds to carbon intensive projects and investments, when there are clean alternatives.
It’s a critical divergence. And that makes policy making by governments on the basis that the curve if flat, or falling, as Tony Abbott’s principal business advisor (and most of his other advisors) likes to insist, irresponsible and foolish.
