Oh Dear….
You see those little lines up there? the blue one goes down the green one is flat. Well those are the trends of the satellite temperature measurements for the last couple of decades.
CO2 up, temperature flat or declining.
The nest time a Canadian politician talks about cap and trade or carbon taxes ask him (or her) when was the last time the worldwide satellite temperature gauges showed any warming.
Bet they won’t answer. Because they don’t know and it’s our job to tell them.
I used to write about climate a lot but when things got busy stopped.
When I did write I tended to suggest that a) the models were uncertain, b) natural variability was a much bigger deal than the warmists admitted, c) things like the Sun, the PDO and the vagaries of the Atlantic Ocean might have had something to do with the warming to 1998. I was certainly willing to concede that humans made some contribution to any warming which might have occurred but I suggested that it was unlikely to be just the CO2 emitting side of human activity. Finally, I suggested that the less significant CO2 was in the scheme of things the less it should signify in policy. In other words, I didn’t think the various carbon dioxide reduction schemes were worth the money.
The warmists, two or three years ago, denied each and every one of these ideas. The warmist position was that the Earth was warming fast and that man made CO2 was the only possible cause of such warming. They cited the IPCC Fourth Report to support their assertions and suggested that anything less was not peer reviewed and thus worthless.
and then, well and then came the pause. And with the pause the realization that the models and reality were gradually drifting apart. And with that drift there arose the need to explain where the heat in the models could be hiding and why it was hiding there.
The scientific immaturity of climate science was on full display as no less than 38 separate and often contradictory explanations for the pause were put forward. Many of which would have been heresy only a couple of years before.
As the explanations have been launched we’ve seen the curious spectacle of grown scientists coming up with enough cooling to overwhelm the observed warming all together. And many of these explanations involve the Sun, ocean currents, clouds and a host of other variables which we were assured could not have any effect on climate just a few short years ago.
It turns out that, in general, the climate science community has been exaggerating the precision of its models and the robustness of its physics. In the face of the unpredicted pause they have had to admit that maybe Nature and not Man might be responsible for at least a bit of the warming which has, well, disappeared.
The one thing which has become absolutely clear: the IPCC science and the policy recommendations based up on it are ungrounded in any serious, measurable, predictable science at all. There is no current theory of climate which implicates CO2 exclusively. And there is a great deal of uncertainty as to what the temperature’s sensitivity to CO2 actually is.
All of which means that any economic or energy policy based upon the theory that CO2 will create extreme climate change needs to be discarded at once before any more money is wasted.
Back in 2007 – in a post I cannot find anymore – I suggested that the wheels were falling off the global warming bus.
The absence of warming for the past 17 years has pretty much put paid to the ideas that a) global warming is an imminent problem, b) that the models “climate science” has relied upon are anything other than bogus, c) that CO2 has a control knob function so far as temperature is concerned.
Back in 2007 if you suggested that global warming might, possibly, have an explanation other than CO2 the flying monkeys of climate change – and John Cross – would descend upon you with shrill cries of heresy and “The IPCC says”. And it is important to remember that the IPCC concluded that having looked at all the variables the only possible explanation for observed warming was the increase in CO2. To suggest the Sun or natural variability was to “deny the science”.
Which makes today’s article in Nature all the more delicious:
From the “settled science” department. It seems even Dr. Kevin Trenberth is now admitting to the cyclic influences of the AMO and PDO on global climate. Neither “carbon” nor “carbon dioxide” is mentioned in this article that cites Trenberth as saying: “The 1997 to ’98 El Niño event was a trigger for the changes in the Pacific, and I think that’s very probably the beginning of the hiatus,” watts up with that
Realistically, the warmists will try to have it both ways: CO2 will still be a warming threat but natural variability, cycles, that sort of thing, can be used to explain the “hiatus”. My ten year old can find the logical fallacy in that position.
Now, once natural variability has been admitted as even a partial explanation, the entire edifice of climate is open to question. For example: perhaps the surface temperature record has been incorrectly adjusted. Perhaps there is more to the Urban Heat Island effect than was originally supposed. Perhaps the sensitivity of temperature to CO2 is close to 1 degree per doubling than to 4.
When a theory goes wrong it goes wrong in every particular. You can’t pick and choose. If natural variability is implicated in the observed hiatus then it is also implicated in the observed warming which preceded the pause (if pause it is.) The models do not include the oceanic cycles and, if those cycles matter as Trenberth now suggests they do, the models must be junked and begun again from scratch.
Ultimately, the implication of the Nature article is that, on the evidence, the null hypotheses, namely that CO2 is not significantly responsible for increases in temperature, has survived the worst climate science can do.
The policy implications are extraordinary. Essentially, the world is spending a billion dollars a day to reduce the emission of a substance which, on the evidence, has little or nothing to do with climate change.
That should stop. Now.
Jay Currie 