The MSM finally notices 'the pause'

Reuters_GW_slowdown

Theories for the pause include that deep oceans have taken up more heat with the result that the surface is cooler than expected, that industrial pollution in Asia or clouds are blocking the sun, or that greenhouse gases trap less heat than previously believed.

The change may be a result of an observed decline in heat-trapping water vapor in the high atmosphere, for unknown reasons. It could be a combination of factors or some as yet unknown natural variations, scientists say.

“The climate system is not quite so simple as people thought,” said Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish statistician and author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist” who estimates that moderate warming will be beneficial for crop growth and human health.

“My own confidence in the data has gone down in the past five years,” said Richard Tol, an expert in climate change and professor of economics at the University of Sussex in England.

Full article here: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/04/16/us-climate-slowdown-idUSBRE93F0AJ20130416

See also: Fireworks in the EU Parliament over “the pause” in global warming

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This article is a bit of a turnabout for Alister Doyle, who has run a series of mostly unquestioning articles promoting AGW in the past. Now if only Seth Borenstein at AP can begin to start questioning, we could see real journalism on display.

h/t to Joe D’Aleo

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April 16, 2013 7:36 am

The first step is to realize you have a problem.

April 16, 2013 7:36 am

By the time various governments stop FUNDING ‘Global Warming research’ (You’ll have to imagine me saying that in a trance-like voice) the media will have come all the way around to raging over every penny spent, and probably blaming conservatives for the whole thing. *sigh*

Danj
April 16, 2013 7:41 am

“Theories for the pause include that deep oceans have taken up more heat with the result that the surface is cooler than expected, that industrial pollution in Asia or clouds are blocking the sun, or that greenhouse gases trap less heat than previously believed.”
Think they’d ‘fess up to their models being wrong? NAH…. impossible!

RobW
April 16, 2013 7:47 am

This would be funny if it weren’t so damn asinine.
http://business.financialpost.com/2013/04/12/ontario-court-light-is-a-contaminant/

Pat
April 16, 2013 7:54 am

This is all wonderful to see. For many there is still time to back away gracefully before being caught in the inevitable stampede and being made to look foolish.
Of course, for those heavily invested in Mann-made Global Warming, there is no retreat. Only more frenzied attempts to justify the inverse of observed fact. For that cabal, there will never be any admission of failure, no mea culpa.
Should the Earth find itself in a mini-ice age in a decade or two there will still be insistence that it is being driven by a massive anthropogenic carbon heat-pump deep in the Marianas Trench and the persistent cold is just another example of extreme weather, not climate. They were right all along, see?

Jeff Alberts
April 16, 2013 7:54 am

It’s not a “slowdown in Climate Change”, it IS climate change (no capitals). It’s what climate does, goes up, then down, then up, then down, etc, ad infinitum. Nothing we’ve ever seen tells us it should be static, or only trend in one direction.

Dodgy Geezer
April 16, 2013 7:57 am

Stages sheep go through after following a bad leader:
1 – Every decision of this leader is perfect – anyone who doesn’t think so is insane, and should be locked away…
2 – Some of the leader’s decisions have been called into question – this is why they are right…
3 – Recent decisions by the leader have prompted some discussion..
4 – We always said that this leader was a failure…
Read Charles MacKay for more descriptions of the idiotic situations people humans get into by following the latest fashions in belief…

April 16, 2013 7:58 am

Here is the thing. I think most skeptics on this site would agree. AGW may be happening. However the relationship to CO2 is tenuous and has rather than been treated as a POSSIBLE link been focus of the transformation of increased heat readings. The thing that I hate is that there has been a reactionary and almost zealotry response to this information to the point of excluding thought and attempts to reconcile ambiguous data. I am called a denier and flat earther, simply because I question the dogma. Never denying the possible link between the two but rather suggesting that based on current evidence there is little reason to be come militant against CO2 especially when there are SO MANY benefits to an increase in CO2 so long as it does not cause catastrophe.
That is the other thing that bothers me a great deal. A warmed earth ( so long as it is not catastrophic ) is not a bad thing either. It means less energy consumption for a vast majority of the world and longer growing seasons and even a slightly elevated water cycle ( or at least it should though you never know with these things). All of which is beneficial to us as a human race.
I do not know why the media has become the drum major for the cause of Global Warming. But then I do not understand the vehemence that it has for several things. Politics among others. We do not know what is happening in the atmosphere very well, we have not been objectively studying it so we simply do not know. It may well take another 100 years to really understand the effects of industrialization and changed land use practices and the effect it has on the environment.
Could AGW be real? Of course it can. Should we shut down progress because of it? Absolutely not. The fastest way to wealth is energy production.

Andrew
April 16, 2013 8:02 am

“Theories for the pause include that deep oceans have taken up more heat”
So, heat from a cooler atmosphere is causing heating in another object which was already warmer than the atmosphere … righttttt.
Has the heat hiding in the oceans got its eyes shut while it counts to 1,000,000? Did you see the big white rabbit? Purleeeeeeeze. I claim my Nobel prize (they started it).

arthur4563
April 16, 2013 8:03 am

The media/Hollywood has never understood science – these folks are all liberal arts majors. To these yokels a scientist wears a white lab coat and is in a science lab eternally looking into a microscope. And always telling the absolute truth as in “Yes, that radiation has caused these giant mutant spiders.”

Doug
April 16, 2013 8:05 am

“Global warming advocates, who claim to be scientists, struggle to explain warming slowdown”. There, fixed that for them.

Steve Hill from Ky
April 16, 2013 8:09 am

Does Al have to give it all back now? LOL

TeeWee
April 16, 2013 8:10 am

The Alarmists just can come to the realisation that their hypothaesis was wrong.

stan stendera
April 16, 2013 8:10 am

Somewhere some investigative reporter is thinking: If I could get the goods on climate scientist fraud I would be rich and famous. Once they really start looking there will be an tsunimi [sp] of articles debunking AGW. When it starts it will bury Mikey Mann. Probably more then one is thinking the same way. I can’t wait.

William Abbott
April 16, 2013 8:12 am

The facts are what they are. You can’t ignore them forever… or explain them away. WUWT has cataloged a mountain of evidence and the evidence forces honest men to re-evaluate the conclusions they drew. But it does take a lot of evidence to push a man into admitting he was wrong. We all look for evidence to support and reinforce our conclusions – we see what we expect to see – its always an uphill push to persuade someone they are mistaken.

arthur4563
April 16, 2013 8:12 am

All of the certainty about global warming rests on the simple concept of carbon dioxide as an
all-powerful greenhouse gas that controls Earth’s temps. Show that concept as faulty and the
whole AGW house of cards comes tumbling down.

DonS
April 16, 2013 8:15 am

Seth Borenstein and “real journalism” in the same sentence? Shirley you jest.

April 16, 2013 8:15 am

Agree with Jeff Alberts.
Climate change is happening, because global warming is over. We have started to cool globally. All major data sets measuring the average global air- and sea temperatures, including my own, now show that we have started cooling down for the past 11 years (which is the equivalent time of one full solar cycle).
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/to:2013/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/to:2013/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2002/to:2013/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2002/to:2013/trend/plot/rss/from:2002/to:2013/plot/rss/from:2002/to:2013/trend/plot/gistemp/from:2002/to:2013/plot/gistemp/from:2002/to:2013/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2002/to:2013/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2002/to:2013/trend
My results show that earth is most likely on an 88 year A-C wave, the so-called Gleissberg solar/weather cycle, with 44 years of warming followed by 44 years of cooling. My own data set, where I have been monitoring global maximum temperatures, proves that all warming in the past was almost entirely due to natural reasons and that global cooling will now accelerate further. I expect more La Nina’s occurring due to less energy going in the oceans. In my opinion, it will only be 4-5 years before this cooling effect will be felt by just about everyone in the whole world.
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
Indeed it is this global cooling that is generally causing more rain, more snow and cooler weather, globally, on average, whilst some places might get less precipitation.
(Namely, assuming equal amounts of water vapour in the air, remember that when water vapour in the atmosphere cools more, you get more clouds and more precipitation, at lower latitudes and less at the higher latitudes).
As the farmers in Anchorage (Alaska) have noted,
http://www.adn.com/2012/07/13/2541345/its-the-coldest-july-on-record.html
the cold weather is so bad there that they do not get much of any harvests. And it seems NOBODY is telling them there that it is not going to get any better. Kimberley (in South Africa) is another example where cooling has been quite significant in the past decade.
The results of my investigations suggest that this global cooling will last until ca. 2038. Also, it looks to me that earth’s energy stores are depleted now and that means that average temperatures will probably fall by as much as what the maxima are falling now. I estimate this is about -0.3K in the next 8 years and a further -0.2 or -0.3K from 2020 until 2036. By that time we will be back to where we were in 1950 or 1951, more or less, when global warming started, roughly…
Those that point to melting ice and glaciers, as “proof” that it is (still) warming, and not cooling, should remember that there is a lag from energy-in (maxima) and energy-out. Counting back 88 years i.e. 2012-88= we are in 1924. Now look at some eye witness reports of the ice back then?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/03/16/you-ask-i-provide-november-2nd-1922-arctic-ocean-getting-warm-seals-vanish-and-icebergs-melt/
Sounds familiar? Back then, they had seen that the arctic ice melt was due to the warmer Gulf Stream waters. But by 1945 all that ‘lost” ice had frozen back.
I therefore predict that all lost arctic ice will come back, from 2015-2035 as also happened from 1925-1945.
There are now many results from skeptical scientists that support my position and results, e.g.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/11/19/cooling-in-the-near-future/
http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/
http://www.rocketscientistsjournal.com/2006/10/co2_acquittal.html
http://www.landscheidt.info/
The sad story is, that where the world should prepare itself for climate change due to (natural) global cooling, for example, by initiating more agricultural schemes at lower latitudes (FOOD!), and providing more protection against more precipitation at certain places (FLOODS!), the media and the powers-that-be are twiddling with their thumbs, not listening to the real scientists, i.e. those not making any money and nice journeys out of the gravy train that “global warming” has become.
So here we are, it is 2013, and nobody is addressing the real problems that we face due to the change in climate and the coming cold.
Henry

Editor
April 16, 2013 8:15 am

denniswingo says: “The first step is to realize you have a problem.”
Unfortunately, many in the climate science community still argue that there has been no slowdown, so they do not accept that they have a problem.

DesertYote
April 16, 2013 8:16 am

“… said Richard Tol, an expert in climate change and professor of economics …”
Oy!

April 16, 2013 8:16 am

A novice gambler tosses a coin and gets three heads in a row – confident they can predict the toss of the coin, they get tails on the next throw. So they:
a) Deny that it was tails because their model must be right
b) Try to work out why their model failed to predict the tails.
c) have a bit of common sense?
The simple fact is like the example above, the vast majority of change in temperature is clearly natural in origin. It is called random variation, because it is random and it cannot (easily) be predicted by their models.
But their logic is like the gambler … NO IT IS WORSE THAN THE GAMBLER ABOVE the gambler above was examining the evidence as it came in and when the reality did not match their expectation … they were forced to face this fact.
Global warming “scientists”, not only didn’t follow the evidence, the evidence proved they were incapable of predicting the climate in the 1970s yet despite the clear evidence to the contrary they deluded themselves using HINDCASTS of the data until these deluded individuals convinced themselves there was meaning in what everyone must now realise is nothing but natural variation WITH CLIMATE SCIENTISTS HAVE TWICE PROVEN INCAPABLE OF EITHER UNDERSTANDING OR PREDICTING.
But like the hopeless gamblers they are, they carry on with the delusion that they can somehow find a way to predict natural random climate variation.

RMB
April 16, 2013 8:22 am

The answer to their problem is dead simple, surface tension blocks heat transfer. Try heating water from above. Thats why there is no backup heat to save their bacon, only radiation enters the ocean.

Richard
April 16, 2013 8:24 am

If they would have followed the scientific method this embarrassment of the scientific community would not have occurred.

April 16, 2013 8:26 am

Silly Reuters. Everybody knows that all the heat has gone to the earth’s core to make it a million degrees. Nobel Prize winner Al Gore says so, and Dave Letterman believes him. The silliest thing, however, is that Reuters is allowing comments.

RHS
April 16, 2013 8:26 am

Begin Sarc – But last year was the Hottest Eveh on less than two percent of the earth’s surface (the US) – End sarc

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