A new study reported in Nature magazine makes the large claim that final proof has been established for man-made global warming. As the Times reports, the study by Seattle scientists -- funded by the US government -- is said to demolish the chief argument by global warming sceptics:

'The discovery resolves one of the most contentious anomalies in climate science, which has often been invoked by the Bush Administration to question whether man-made global warming is happening. While it is generally accepted that surface temperatures are increasing by an average of 0.17C (0.31F) per decade, satellites have been unable to detect a parallel trend in the troposphere — the lowest level of the atmosphere, extending 7.5 miles above the ground, in which most weather occurs. This lack of tropospheric warming has long puzzled scientists, as it is predicted by all the major models of climate change. It has also been seized on by a small but vocal minority of scientists, who have used it to raise doubts about whether global temperatures are rising at all.

'The enigma, however, has been explained by a team led by Qiang Fu, of the University of Washington in Seattle. His research reveals that the troposphere is warming almost precisely as the models predict it should: by about 0.2C (0.4F) per decade. Satellites have not previously detected the trend as they have been confused by colder temperatures in the atmospheric layer above. The findings, details of which are published today in the journal Nature, provide one of the final pieces of proof that global warming is taking place, and that it is a human-induced phenomenon. Sceptics have often argued that if temperatures are rising at all, this is down to natural variation in the climate as the world emerges from a “little Ice Age”. The tropospheric trend, however, is precisely what scientists would expect to see if man-made emissions of greenhouse gases were causing it to heat up.'

It is instructive that only now is it being admitted what the climate warming proponents have previously totally ignored -- that the warming detected in surface temperatures has not been replicated in the, er, climate. Even if the Seattle findings are correct, however, this still does not prove that man-made carbon dioxide emissions are the culprit; nor does it negate the point about inevitable warming having taken place after the end of the Little Ice Age. The unsustainable leap of logic from the simple calculation made in Seattle to the absurd claim that this demolishes the powerful sceptic arguments suggests that once again an ideological agenda is at work here rather than cool scientific objectivity.

And anyway, are the Seattle findings correct? Dr Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama, a former NASA scientist who won the American Meteorological Society award for his work on measuring atmospheric temperature, has totally demolished the Nature paper -- and called into question Nature's whole process of peer review. Dr Spencer says that his own key measurement of atmospheric temperature -- made with Dr John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science -- always took on board the very statistical anomaly the Seattle scientists claimed to have discovered: that warming in the troposphere, measured by 'channel 2', would be partly cancelled out by cooling in the higher stratosphere, measured by 'channel 4':

'Enter the new Nature study. The authors, noticing that channel 4 measures the extreme upper portion of the layer that channel 2 measures (see Fig. 1), decided to use the MSU channel 4 to remove the stratospheric influence on MSU channel 2. At first, this sounds like a reasonable approach. We also tried this thirteen years ago. But we quickly realized that in order for two channels to be combined in a physically meaningful way, they must have a large percentage of overlap. As can be seen in Fig. 1, there is very little overlap between these two channels. When a weighted difference is computed between the two channels in an attempt to measure just the tropospheric temperature, an unavoidable problem surfaces: a large amount of negative weight appears in the stratosphere. What this means physically is that any attempt to correct the tropospheric channel in this fashion leads to a misinterpretation of stratospheric cooling as tropospheric warming. It would be possible for their method to work (through serendipity) if the temperature trends from the upper troposphere to the lower stratosphere were constant with height, but they are not. In this instance, the negative (shaded) area for the Fu et al. weighting function in Fig. 1 would be cancelled out by its positive area above about 200 millibars. Unfortunately, weather balloon evidence suggests the trends change from warming to strong cooling over this altitude range.'

The reason such an error could be published in a scientific journal, says Dr Spencer, is that such studies are no longer sent out to the scientists most suitable to review them:

'This kind of mistake would not get published with adequate peer review of manuscripts submitted for publication. But in recent years, a curious thing has happened. The popular science magazines, Science and Nature, have seemingly stopped sending John Christy and me papers whose conclusions differ from our satellite data analysis. This is in spite of the fact that we are (arguably) the most qualified people in the field to review them. This is the second time in nine months that these journals have let papers be published in the satellite temperature monitoring field that had easily identifiable errors in their methodology.

I will admit to being uneasy about airing scientific dirty laundry in an op-ed. But as long as these popular science journals insist on putting news value ahead of science, then I have little choice. The damage has already been done. A paper claiming to falsify our satellite temperature record has been published in the "peer reviewed" literature, and the resulting news reports will never be taken back. This is one reason increasing numbers of scientists regard Science and Nature as "gray" scientific literature.'

Let's see how many papers now report Dr Spencer's grave allegations.