From the current The Week That Was, the invaluable compilation of climate-related information from the Science and Environmental Policy Project:

Led by John Christy, the Earth System Science Center, The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), has 40 years of direct measurement of atmospheric temperature trends, yet the IPCC and others cling to surface measurements with very poor global coverage, with data contaminated by the urban heat-island effect. The IPCC ignores atmospheric data, where the greenhouse effect occurs. Based on their 40-years’ worth of worldwide data, the UAH group has estimated, in a published paper, that a doubling of carbon dioxide (CO2) will result in an increase in temperatures of about 1.1 degree C or 2 degrees F. As discussed in the previous two TWTWs, physicist William van Wijngaarden and his colleagues, using measurements of the effects of greenhouse gases without the effects of clouds, have found that a doubling of CO2 (from 400 parts per million to 800 parts per million), Methane (CH4), Nitrous Oxide (N2O) with a 6% increase in the dominant greenhouse gas, water vapor, will result in an increase in temperatures of about 1 to 1.5 degree C or 2 to 3 degrees F. The lowest value the IPCC projects is 1.5 degree C, which is the highest value of what van Wijngaarden projects. The highest value of the IPCC is 4.5 degrees C, far higher than van Wijngaarden.

One of the huge problems with global warming hysteria is that it is based on a combination of unverified models and surface temperature data that has been “adjusted” to fit the left’s climate narrative.

The work of van Wijngaarden is based on libraries compiled by Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics Atomic and Molecular Physics, the updating of which is discussed in a recent paper published in the Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer. Unlike data from some groups, the data are not a secret and can be explored using the internet and a laptop computer.

Liberals attach a mystical and often contradictory power to global warming. Here in Minnesota, we are having a rainy Summer. Climate change! Somewhere else, they are experiencing a drought. Climate change! And “climate change” (regardless of whether the climate has actually changed in any relevant way) is commonly invoked to explain any negative phenomenon–but not, of course, anything good.

Dilbert comments. Click to enlarge: