There are two ways to measure the Earth's temperature; you can either
take a lot of surface measurements, try to correct for errors, then feed
them into a computer model which may or may not reflect reality, or you
can just launch satellites and measure it. The CAG (Computer Aided Guess)
systems do, indeed, say that the temperature has increased and is
increasing.
But what happens when you stop guessing and actually measure it?
>From http://wwwssl.msfc.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/essd12mar97_1.htm:
>Dr. Roy W. Spencer (NASA Marshall Space Flight Center) and Dr. John
>Christy (The University of Alabama in Huntsville) have used the Microwave >Sounding Units (MSUs) flying aboard NOAA's TIROS-N weather satellites to
>construct a continuous record of lower tropospheric (from the surface to
>about 4 miles) temperatures since the first MSU was launched in late 1978.
>The lower tropospheric temperature trend has been calculated to be -0.04
>degrees C/decade.
So there you have it; the temperature of the atmosphere is decreasing by
0.04 degrees per decade. This isn't a guess, it's an actual measurement,
and matches measurements taken in situ by balloon. As a programmer and
physicist measurements give me a warm fuzzy feeling that computer-aided
guesses just can't match.
Now this is not to say that there aren't other effects (e.g. oceans,
high-level atmosphere) which the atmosphere measurements are missing,
or that the temperature hasn't risen in the past (though it's odd that
most of the supposed greenhouse-gas increase occured before most of
the greenhouse gases were released). But it seems like good evidence
that we are heading for an ice age, not greenhouse warming.
Mark