Britain's Guardian newspaper whines that the "deliberately contrarian" tone of tabloid newspapers has "damaged public perception of climate change," poor lambs.
Little wonder the volume of "deliberately contrarian" writing is rising, since as global temperatures simply refuse to follow the course the warmists' models say they should, the "mainstream warmist" position is looking increasingly indefensible. And the "deliberately contrarian" position isn't just confined to the tabloids. Even scientific journal Nature is now publishing peer-reviewed articles suggesting that despite global warming models predicting catastrophic warming, we're unlikely to see any increases in average global temperature until at lest 2015. The Telegraph (a broadsheet)summarises the uncomfortable news:
Global warming will stop until at least 2015 because of natural variations in the climate, scientists have said... This would mean that the 0.3°C global average temperature rise which has been predicted for the next decade by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change may not happen, according to the paper published in the scientific journal Nature.
For years skeptics have been pointing out that there's just no way the warmists' models can account for every variable in the global climate, and until they can the model's results are just so much hot air. This adjustment is the result of adding several new variables that were previously ignored, including "how the oceans behave over decades," "the strength of the Gulf Stream and the El Nino cyclical warming event in the Pacific," and "the giant ocean "conveyor belt" known as the meridional overturning circulation (MOC), which brings warm water north into the North East Atlantic." All fairily important one would have thought.
Defending the warmists' long-term models, Hadley Centre scientist Richard Wood said that "climate predictions for a decade ahead would always be to some extent uncertain." To say nothing of climate predictions for a century, or for government action based wholly and solely on these "uncertain" models.
To put the present result in context, if these new papers are correct it will mean there will have been no warming from 1998 to 2015, a period of seventeen years. So much for catastrophe.
In fact, rather than showing catastrophe, the record would show that since the 'coming ice age scare' finished in 1979, when modern warmism began, the globe will have warmed for nineteen years (from 1979 to 1998),and then plateaued for seventeen or so. Hardly catastrophic. And hardly a strong endorsement of either the global warming models, or the still unproven causal link between CO2 and global temperature.
Looks like those models are no more reliable than your average TV weather forecast.
Perhaps those endorsing measures to throttle industrial civilisation on the basis only of the unreliable weather forecasts of the IPCC might use this hiatus to reconsider the headlong rush into poverty and food riots for which they are already responsible. Perhaps they'll resile from talking up dramatic sea-level rises on the bask of their horrifying models -- from strangling the use of coastal land and all their talk about the millions of "climate refugees" from low-lying islands (of which the world is still waiting to see the first such refugee) .
Perhaps those who've joined the warmist chorus out of ignorance -- not because they know anything more than anyone else, but only to show their friends they 'care about the planet'-- could just keep quiet for a little while. Perhaps those who've been scaring the crap out of impressionable and illiterate young kids with their 'we're all gonna die' litany could just shut the fuck up for a while, so that kids can realise this is a great world in which to live rather than the place of irrational disaster-prone madness that warmists would have us believe.
And as NZ Climate Science Coalition convenor Owen McShane points out:
These findings make two important points. The first is that natural climate variation means that there will be no warming until 2015. This is wonderful news, because it gives us lots of time to stop and think before we leap. NO more biofuels and ruminant follies.
The next point is that all the climate models failed to predict this — until now! That means that all the climate models have grossly underestimated natural variation and they are all must be regarded with extreme suspicion.
Therefore we need a Royal Commission to look at the whole thing before we completely destroy our economy for something that may not exist and is certainly not imminent.
Definitely time for a tea break.
I'm not so sure about the Royal Commission, but the fact remains that to destroy your economy on the basis of extremely flawed extremely long-range weather forecasts is just insane. (And as Climate Debate Daily reports, "An insider exchange between climate modelers reveals the extent to which they are themselves leery of attributing predictive power to their models ...continue » Click on "EXPAND ALL.")
Time for that cup of tea, I'd say, if not a complete lay down.
PS: Why not go join the legion of voters at Kiwiblog and go vote in the poll on the left-hand side for "Global Warming is a hoax and there is no evidence for it ." It's currently leading the pack.
UPDATE: "Can global warming’s vested interests close the deal on greenhouse gas regulation before the public wises up to their scam?" asks Steven Milloy of the Junk Science site:
When NASA’s James Hansen sounded the alarm in Congress 20 years ago, he predicted that rising concentrations of atmospheric carbon dioxide, or CO2, would drive global temperatures higher by 0.34 degrees Celsius during the 1990s. But surface temperatures increased during that decade by only 0.11 degrees Celsius and lower atmosphere temperatures actually decreased.
Global temperatures remain well below an El Nino-driven 1998 spike despite ever-increasing atmospheric CO2. Global warming hysterics purport that manmade emissions of CO2 are the primary driver of global climate and that controlling emissions will favorably affect climate. While this is obviously not so since it virtually supposes that without human activity climate change would not occur, it nevertheless remains their viewpoint.
The Nature study, however, reasserts Mother Nature in her rightful place as our climate dominatrix. Although there is no evidence that manmade CO2 emissions play any detectable role in climate change, the very idea that Mother Nature may cool the planet despite humanity’s furious output of greenhouse gases should be even worse for the climate alarmists’ way of thinking.
It would mean that greenhouse gas emissions are actually beneficial, since without them, Mother Nature’s cooling could be quite damaging.
He concludes:
The bottom line of global warming—and that is why so many are behind it—is that its many vested interests are on the verge of a financial and political bonanza, something that scientific facts and climatic realities are likely only to spoil.
So when global temperature doesn’t behave as predicted, excuses and explanations must be found to prevent the almost-mature golden goose from being roasted for dinner.
The spin on the Nature study provided by its authors to the New York Times is that, “We’re learning that [natural] climate variability is important and can mask the effects of human-induced global change. In the end this gives more confidence in the long-term projections.”
The attempted logic here is that even though the alarmists have been wrong in the past—been there, done that—their failure somehow sets them up for more certain future success.
We look past this logical fallacy at our own peril. I can’t wait for their Orwellian pronouncement that global cooling is the new global warming.
Labels: Global Warming, James Hansen
