Today's (OK, it was last Friday's but I missed it then) global warming news

Read this. Read all of it. The scientist (David Evans) who has been responsible for measuring Australia's compliance with the Kyoto protocols says that there is "no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None."

I DEVOTED six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia's compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector.

FullCAM models carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soils and agricultural products, using inputs such as climate data, plant physiology and satellite data. I've been following the global warming debate closely for years.

When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.

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There has not been a public debate about the causes of global warming and most of the public and our decision makers are not aware of the most basic salient facts:

1. The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.

Each possible cause of global warming has a different pattern of where in the planet the warming occurs first and the most. The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics. We have been measuring the atmosphere for decades using radiosondes: weather balloons with thermometers that radio back the temperature as the balloon ascends through the atmosphere. They show no hot spot. Whatsoever.

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2. There is no evidence to support the idea that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None. There is plenty of evidence that global warming has occurred, and theory suggests that carbon emissions should raise temperatures (though by how much is hotly disputed) but there are no observations by anyone that implicate carbon emissions as a significant cause of the recent global warming.

3. The satellites that measure the world's temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year (to the temperature of 1980).

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4. The new ice cores show that in the past six global warmings over the past half a million years, the temperature rises occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rise in atmospheric carbon. Which says something important about which was cause and which was effect.

Read it all. The "consensus" is a lie. The evidence supporting anthropogenic climate change is scant, at best.

And Al Gore's a lying demagogue. I have not been able to sit through his entire movie, but I've seen a few minutes of it. The very first thing that jumps out when he puts up the atmospheric carbon vs. temperature chart is that the temperature changes first. And everything I've read suggests that that makes sense - the oceans are carbon "sinks" - when they cool, they capture it, when they warm, they release it. Which means, of course, that the carbon in the atmosphere is not what is causing the oceans to warm or cool. And he stands up there and says it is and people applaud and no one calls him on it.

Anyway, this is a great piece, and I encourage everyone to read it...