UPDATE#2 I finally found a graph from Professor Akasofu that goes with the text of his essay below. I’ve added it above. You can read more about Akasofu’s views on climate in this PDF document here. (Warning: LARGE 50 megabyte file, long download) The two previous graphs used are in links below.
UPDATE: Originally I posted a graph from Roger Pielke Jr. see here via Lucia at the Blackboard because it was somewhat related and I wanted to give her some traffic. As luck would have it, few people followed the link to see what it was all about, preferring to question the graph in the context of the article below. So, I’ve replaced it with one from another article of hers that should not generate as many questions. Or will it? 😉 – Anthony
THE IPCC’S FAILURE OF PREDICTING THE TEMPERATURE CHANGE DURING THE FIRST DECADE
Syun Akasofu
International Arctic Research Center
University of Alaska Fairbanks
Fairbanks, AK 99775-7340
The global average temperature stopped increasing after 2000 against the IPCC’s prediction of continued rapid increase. It is a plain fact and does not require any pretext. Their failure stems from the fact that the IPCC emphasized the greenhouse effect of CO2 by slighting the natural causes of temperature changes.
The changes of the global average temperature during the last century and the first decade of the present century can mostly be explained by two natural causes, a linear increase which began in about 1800 and the multi-decadal oscillation superposed on the linear increase. There is not much need for introducing the CO2 effect in the temperature changes. The linear increase is the recovery (warming) from the Little Ice Age (LIA), which the earth experienced from about 1400 to 1800.
The halting of the temperature rise during the first decade of the present century can naturally be explained by the fact that the linear increase has been overwhelmed by the superposed multi-decadal oscillation which peaked in about 2000.*
This situation is very similar to the multi-decadal temperature decrease from 1940 to 1975 after the rise from 1910 to 1940 (in spite of the fact that CO2 increased rapidly after 1946); it was predicted at that time that a new Big Ice Age was on its way.
The IPCC seems to imply that the halting is a temporary one. However, they cannot give the reason. Several recent trends, including the phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), the halting of sea level increase, and the cooling of the Arctic Ocean, indicate that the halting is likely to be due to the multi-decadal change.
The high temperatures predicted by the IPCC in 2100 (+2~6°C) are simply an extension of the observed increase from 1975 to 2000, which was caused mainly by the multi-decadal oscillation. The Global Climate Models (GCMs) are programmed to reproduce the observed increase from 1975 to 2000 in terms of the CO2 effect and to extend the reproduced curve to 2100.
It is advised that the IPCC recognize at least the failure of their prediction even during the first decade of the present century; a prediction is supposed to become less accurate for the longer future.
For details, see http://people.iarc.uaf.edu/~sakasofu
* The linear increase has a rate of ~ +0.5°C/100 years, while the multi-decadal oscillation has an amplitude of ~0.2°C and period of ~ 50-60 years, thus the change in 10 years is about ~ -0.07°C from the peak, while the linear change is about ~ +0.05°C.
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Robert Austin (18:21:01) :
My statement isn’t gratuitious since it’s a simple statement of fact! I didn’t say that the climate senstivity is 3 oC, but that the scientific evidence indicates a climate sensitivty of the order of 3 oC.
I don’t think there’s much doubt about that. A few months ago this subject was comprehensively reviewed in Nature Geoscience with dozens of analyses discussed [***]. The evidence supports a climate sensitivty of around 3 oC, with very little likelihood that it’s below 2 oC. The upper limit is rather less well constrained.
Discussion of the climate sensitivity was entirely germane to my response to Smokey who was asking about heat still to come (“in the pipeline”!). It’s also germane to one of my criticisms of Akasofu’s notion of a “linear recovery” from the LIA. If we’re still in the linear phase of a relaxation from whatever forcing caused the LIA then (according to Akasofu) the Earth must respond very slowly indeed from forcings, and this indicates that the climate sensitivity to enhanced CO2 must be high (likely higher than the top value of the 95% confidence limit of 4.5 oC). I don’t think the climate sensitivity is as high as Akasofu considers it (by implication) to be….in any case the evidence doesn’t support Akasofu’s analysis.
btw, I don’t consider myself to be a “proponent” of AGW. I’m a proponent of good science and honest and competent appraisal of evidence. If the evidence were to support the interpretation that CO2 isn’t a greeenhouse gas and that it doesn’t have a significant effect on the Earth’s equilibrium temperature then that would be fine. I’m curious about the nature of the evidence that supports alternative views and that’s why I occasionally stop by here!
[***]Knutti R and Hegerl GC (2008) The equilibrium sensitivity of the Earth’s temperature to radiation changes Nature Geoscience 1, 735-743.
Abstract: The Earth’s climate is changing rapidly as a result of anthropogenic carbon emissions, and damaging impacts are expected to increase with warming. To prevent these and limit long-term global surface warming to, for example, 2 degrees C, a level of stabilization or of peak atmospheric CO2 concentrations needs to be set. Climate sensitivity, the global equilibrium surface warming after a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration, can help with the translation of atmospheric CO2 levels to warming. Various observations favour a climate sensitivity value of about 3 degrees C, with a likely range of about 2-4.5 degrees C. However, the physics of the response and uncertainties in forcing lead to fundamental difficulties in ruling out higher values. The quest to determine climate sensitivity has now been going on for decades, with disturbingly little progress in narrowing the large uncertainty range. However, in the process, fascinating new insights into the climate system and into policy aspects regarding mitigation have been gained. The well-constrained lower limit of climate sensitivity and the transient rate of warming already provide useful information for policy makers. But the upper limit of climate sensitivity will be more difficult to quantify.
“Not quite sure what you mean. Obviously, if one wants to assess the effects of ocean oscillations on global temperature, then one really needs to consider the oceans en masse.”
Is this not comparing two different things? You use anomalies for temperature, gathered from multiple sites, but net the oceans? Wouldn’t it make more sense to include Pacific anomalies with data gathered from that area?
The Earth’s climate is changing rapidly as a result of anthropogenic carbon emissions
But it isn’t. All we’ve got it urban climates changing and much of everything else is within the range of natural climate variability.
All the fearful far-fetched stories about birds migrating, ocean acidification, ice pack melting etc are just bad reporting from politically motivated journalists, bad scientific conclusions based on faulty methods, lack of understanding of natural variability, or short term observations where the researchers have jumped to premature conclusions.
I liken them to End Times prophecies that were made by people who didn’t understand the world they lived in or/and had ulterior motives behind their words.
foiavon,
If the oceans are no longer warming, then we have already reached the equilibrium temperature response from the increased GHG forcing which has occurred to date.
Considering the fact there does not seem to be water vapour feedback as well, a low sensitivity would be expected.
GHG forcing operates at the speed of light and speed of quantum physics. The greenhouse effect is just a 12 hour delay (give or take a few minutes and give or take the seasonal changes) in the time it takes photons from the Sun to escape into space. (It might actually be a 36 hour delay, but the same point is still made).
If those photons are not being absorbed into the ocean, then yesterday’s photons have already left the Earth and equilibrium is already here. Increased CO2 just meant it took an average 12 hours 1 minute for the photons to escape rather than the 12 hours it took before.
The sensitivity therefore is lower than the article you linked to and most likely around 1.0C to 1.5C and there is no long-term equilibrium to come.
Maybe somebody should start using a “time delay calculation” to constrain the sensitivity estimates.
Just Want Truth… (23:25:58) :
Akasofu is asserting without evidence that the warming of the last 100-odd years is the result of a natural “linear” “recovery from the LIA” (and overlaid by the effects of natural fluctuations). He doesn’t give any evidence for that assertion, nor does he make any effort to explain what the nature/mechanisms of this “linear recovery” is.
He hasn’t published this work (it’s essentially unpublishable as an unsupported notion). He has deposited a long account on his web pages. Inspection of this doesn’t give us any clues as to scientific support for a “natural linear recovery”, or its mechanism(s). On the contrary Akasofu merely asserts that one should naturally assume such a thing:
Akasofu (p 23): “It is natural to assume by glancing at Figure 1a that there was, as a first approximation, an almost linear increase in the natural temperature of 0.5°C/100 years from 1880.”
and:
“It is not the purpose of this note to attempt an accurate estimate of the gradient of the linear change or explore causes of natural changes.”
Other than that he presents a lot of local temperature reconstructions
Ohioholic (09:05:06) :
It’s the same isn’t it Ohioholic? For assessing the global temperature change you use a compilation of anomalies gathered from around the world to construct a quantitation of global scale change.
Likwise if one is interested in the effects of ocean oscillations on the global temperature record, it makes sense to sample all of the oceans, and not base interpretations on a single ocean basin.
Isn’t that obvious? Of course there is a difference in that the temperatures are assessing a response (global surface temperature changes), whereas the ocean oscillation analysis is assessing a potential contribution to the global surface temperature change. The point is that if there is a redistribution of ocean heat due to changes in ocean circulation such that one ocean basin warms a bit while another cools, one needs to decide whether we’re interested in global scale or local effects. There may be no nett contribution to global surface temperature, even if analysing only one basin (the warmed one, say) might inadvertently lead us to a different interpretation.
Olimpus Mons (08:35:59) :
Scientific publishing isn’t a free ride OM! One has to have a valid analysis supported by the evidence you present. There are lots of papers that don’t get published because they’re simply not good enough. All scientists have papers rejected. In general, one get’s over ones anger/annoyance/dissapointment, and puts the hard work in to address the criticisms of the referees, or one rewrites the paper and sends it to a somewhat “lesser” journal. In general one doesn’t whine about it on the web!
Dessler’s paper was pretty good I thought. They had analysed 5 years of satellite tropospheric and temperature data to assess short term changes in humidity as a result of short term changes in temperature. It has a good set of data over a five year period, the analyses are valid, justifiable and self-consistent, and the interpretations supported by the data.
I don’t know about the other paper you’re discussing.
MikeEE (05:58:35) :
The evidence indicates that the natural orbital cycles are expected to give us a very long Holocene. So no next ice age for 20000 years or more:
J Imbrie, J Z Imbrie (1980). “Modeling the Climatic Response to Orbital Variations”. Science 207 (1980/02/29): 943–953.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/207/4434/943
Berger A, Loutre MF (2002). “Climate: An exceptionally long interglacial ahead?”. Science 297 (5585): 1287–1288.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/297/5585/1287
Jeremy Thomas (07:44:41) :
thanks- so Monkton’s graph shows the HADCRU temps.
Did he say why he shifted the baseline? (I still can’t open the paper).
Maybe there is a good reason for him doing that, but I can’t come up with one.
It seems to me like a rather dumb thing to do- it only sows confusion!
Chris V.:
Since you can’t open the paper, this is probably what you were referring to in shifting baselines:
click
vs:
click
The reason, of course, is that the first CO2 graph is so scary when it goes up at almost a 45° angle. It’s alarming!
Chris V. (22:24:46)
This is my last post on the subject. If you would like to interpret that as victory over a Neanderthal opponent, feel free. There is no point trying to refute a blizzard of straw-man arguments presented in a sophomoric manner. I’m going to leave you with one little last thought. You wrote:
“ALL proxies have to be calibrated against modern temperatures in some way, so your criticism is equally valid for those proxy reconstructions that show a MWP that is warmer than today. If you think that the modern temperature record is significantly flawed, then you have to throw out all the proxy temperature reconstructions.”
I am frankly skeptical that any temperature “signal” of .1, .5. or even a whole degree can be teased out of proxy data. One does not need to compare numeric values. Think ordinally rather than numerically. I know that the MWP was warmer than today (whether the modern instrumental temperature record is flawed or not) because ancient tree lines are much higher than they are today and entire settlements are being excavated out of sites that were under the ice not too long ago. These, too, are proxies, but they are based on direct empirical observation rather than statistical manipulation and models. I’ve read the Huang paper. It’s interesting but unconvincing. If I’m unconvinced because I’m too ignorant to evaluate quality data, I guess I’ll just have to live with it.
In case nobody noticed, I have located the correct graph for Akasofu’s essay as well as the original paper where it appears. His paper’s PDF was so large that it refused to load until I had upgraded my Adobe reader. His graph appears in the PDF, but seemed to be well hidden from search engines (perhaps due to size) and with the double whammy of PDF reader failure and no good pointers from search engines, it took me awhile to find it.
The original essay was sent to me by email from an interested acquaintance, but contained no graph. Word to the wise. Always bundle your graphs and test essay in the same document.
– Anthony
“Isn’t that obvious? Of course there is a difference in that the temperatures are assessing a response (global surface temperature changes), whereas the ocean oscillation analysis is assessing a potential contribution to the global surface temperature change. The point is that if there is a redistribution of ocean heat due to changes in ocean circulation such that one ocean basin warms a bit while another cools, one needs to decide whether we’re interested in global scale or local effects. There may be no nett contribution to global surface temperature, even if analysing only one basin (the warmed one, say) might inadvertently lead us to a different interpretation.”
Perhaps, if you are after a global temperature, this is true. But, I had thought that you yourself dismissed the notion of a global mean as silly. Summer in one part of the world is winter in another. On the same day, you can break a record for heat and a record for cold. Wouldn’t the ocean temps contribute differently in these two scenarios? So, the ocean can contribute one way to one anomaly, and one way to another. Knowing that, I don’t understand why you wouldn’t attribute the ocean anomaly to it’s respective temperature anomaly and go from there.
Anthony, that new graph is much more illustrative of the point. I understand the original reason for posting the other graph, I have friends also. This one hammers the point much better, though, much less confusing.
foinavon (08:51:57) :
Perhaps I has a little snarky in calling your 3 degree clmate sensitivity as gratuitous but it does seem to be part of your boilerplate text. On the other hand, your prolific postings recently probably require some boiler plate text so as to prevent carpal tunnel syndrome.
I perused the Knutti R and Hegerl article that you referenced. It seems to be the old radiative balance equation leading to the feedback factor being adduced from climate models being trained to replicate recent historical climate. Then they delve into into trying to tease out greenhouse forcing from paleoclimate data. A substantial limitations section and finally the “obligatory” policy implications section.
While the article may lay out the “consensus” amongst climate scientists as to the range of climate sensitivity to doubling of CO2, there is nothing here that moves this agreed sensitivity range beyond the hypothesis stage.
The real problem is that scientists are being stampeded into coming up with hard answers while the science is in its infancy.
You say that you are not an AGW proponent but you seem to be a loyal and uncritical defender of the “majority consensus” so you appear to be a proponent to us. Then again, maybe you are just playing devil’s advocate, just to keep us on our toes. Anyway, I enjoy your posts even if I don’t always agree with them.
Dr. Akasofu’s graph posted by Anthony reminded me of Leebert’s graph: click
The IPCC’s wildly overstated projections are based on smoke and mirrors and do not withstand scrutiny.
rephelan:
You’re a faster learner than I was.
foinavon (10:08:48)
Perhaps you didn’t read the abstracts (I don’t have a membership so I can’t get the papers). Clearly, this isn’t settled. The first paper you link says the current 6,000 year cooling trend will continue for another 23,000 years and the other thinks the warm trend — and over time warm is a rarity — MAY continue for another 50,000 years.
I think you’ve oversold the certainty by a wide margin.
All in all, that’s kind of scary … much more so that having the climate warm by a couple of degrees…maybe not for me or my children, but for humankind.
MikeEE
Robert Austin (11:11:59) :
Fair enough Robert. I have to say your easy dismissal of Knutti and Hegerl (“the old radiative balance equation”) reminds me of my father’s dismissal of football (“a load of guys chasing a ball”). The radiative balance equation(s) do have the merits of a sound physical basis and pretty good physical and empirical support.
I actually find the paleodata pretty convincing. There’s a clear relationship between paleotemperature and paleoCO2 levels right through the last near 500 million years ….glaciations seem to be linked to greenhouse gas concentration thresholds…..major catastrophic warmings linked to extinctions are rather closely linked to tectonic events resulting in large greenhouse gas releases…and so on…To my mind there’s abundant evidence that supports these interpretations.
So clearly CO2 does have an influence on the Earth’s equilibrium temperature; the question is how much. And if we’re going to address that question we may as well address the evidence.
Anyway, I’m not trying to convince anyone. But I find it interesting occasionally to engage with contrary opinion and to assess its evidence. I have to say it often seems to be rather contrived. After all on this thread we have Dr. Akasofu asserting (without evidence) that the Earth has undergone a slow natural temperature recovery from the LIA that is still in it’s linear phase, indicating an extremely slow response of the climate system to changes in forcings, and Bill Illis [(09:20:28), and apols for referring to you in third person Bill], asserting that the oceans equilbrate with enhanced greenhouse forcing in 12 hours.
Clearly these are entirely incompatible assertions, and neither is compatible with real world evidence. If we’re going to address these issues I personally think we should engage with the evidence, even if we don’t like it very much!
OK foinavon me boy, why don’t you point out that “clear relationship” over the past 500 million years for us: click
MikeEE (12:15:58) :
foinavon (10:08:48)
That’s not quite right Mike. The Imbrie and Imbrie analysis of 1980 consider that the next glaciation won’t appear for at least 25000 years (it’s a bit of a dense paper, and it seems they postulate a cold period in around 25000 years but the next glaciation won’t be until around 55000 years from now). The “cooling trend” refers to the very slow cooling that started around 6-7000 years ago.
That analysis is reasonably well supported by more recent analyses. T. S. Ledley [Geophys. Res. Lett. 22, 2745 (1995)] calculate we have another 60000-70000 years of Holocene……J. Oerlemans and C. J. Van der Veen [Ice Sheets and Climate (Reidel, Dordrecht, Netherlands, 1984)] calculate the Holocene interglacial lasting another 50000 years…the Berger and Loutre summary I linked to describes evidence supporting a Holocene lasting another 50,000-odd years….and so on…
so there does seem to be a reasonable unanimity in the calculations based on the known orbital properties of the earth which underlies the glacial-interglacial cycles…the Holocene has get several tens of 1000’s of years to go.
The paleoclimate temperatures are better explained by a CO2 sensitivity between 1.0C to 1.5C per doubling.
http://img440.imageshack.us/img440/3291/co2tempgeotnc8.png
Here is another explanations of the paleoclimate.
These are the continental positions of the 4 major ice ages in last 620 million years.
Snowball Earth – 620 million years ago
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/1/15/SnowballGeography.gif
Ordovician Ice Age – 440 million years ago
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/9b/MiddleOrdovicianGlobal.jpg
Carboniferous Ice Age – 300 million years ago.
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~rcb7/300moll.jpg
Last Glacial Maximum
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~rcb7/Pleistmoll.jpg
How about a really hot period like the Permian hothouse climate. Can you imagine what the temps were like at the equator of Pangea. How much desert do you think formed in the mid-latitudes? (Note that literally the entire Siberian craton in northwest of this graph turned into one big volcano 251 million years ago which probably lead to the Permian extinction.)
http://www.scotese.com/images/255.jpg
Smokey (13:06:59) :
That graph you’ve linked to is a poor example of an assessment of the relationship between Earth temperature and CO2 levels. In fact there isn’t any CO2 data there at all. The “CO2” graph is a model (RA Berner’s) of CO2 calculated according to knowledge of weathering rates, continental locations and so on. It’s a very nice model. But if we want to assess what the true relationships are between CO2 and earth temperature in the deep past, we should be looking at real proxy CO2 data.
Oddly, although whoever created that graphic, has cited Pagani et al, s/he hasn’t actually included Pagani’s proxy CO2 data….likewise s/he has erased the uncertainty ranges from Berner’s model, and left out the actual CO2 values. So, for example, Berner’s model determines a value for atmospheric CO2 in the range 2500 – 10,000 ppm at 500 MYA.
One should be skeptical of that sort of thing Smokey.
And there is a more essential problem with the analysis you’ve shown. Where are the data points? This is an obvious consideration in assessing the relationships between temperature and greenhouse gas concentrations, wouldn’t you say? One can only really assess this where there are contemporaneous paleo proxies for temperature and CO2. What one cannot do is to take the data from proxies that may be many millions of years apart and just draw straight lines between them, and then infer that all of the intervening values have been defined.
Where contemporaneous paleoCO2 and paleotemp proxies are available, there is quite a strong relationship between paleoCO2 and paleotemperature. Much of the data up to around 2005 is reviewed by Royer:
D.L. Royer (2006) “CO2-forced climate thresholds during the Phanerozoic” Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta 70, 5665-5675.
In the last few years, a large number of additional studies have strengthened this relationship:
R.E. Carne, J.M. Eiler, J. Veizer et al (2007) “Coupling of surface temperatures and atmospheric CO2 concentrations during the Palaeozoic era” Nature 449, 198-202
W. M. Kurschner et al (2008) “The impact of Miocene atmospheric carbon dioxide fluctuations on climate and the evolution of the terrestrial ecosystem” Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 105, 499-453.
D. L. Royer (2008) “Linkages between CO2, climate, and evolution in deep time” Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 105, 407-408
Zachos JC (2008) “An early Cenozoic perspective on greenhouse warming and carbon-cycle dynamics” Nature 451, 279-283.
Doney SC et al (2007) “Carbon and climate system coupling on timescales from the Precambrian to the Anthropocene” Ann. Rev. Environ. Resources 32, 31-66.
Horton DE et al (2007) “Orbital and CO2 forcing of late Paleozoic continental ice sheets” Geophys. Res. Lett. L19708 (Oct. 11 2007).
B. J. Fletcher et al. (2008) “Atmospheric carbon dioxide linked with Mesozoic and early Cenozoic climate change” Nature Geoscience 1, 43-48.
…and etc.
Anthony:
I noticed and am grateful. I’m also grateful for your suggestion to upgrade the Acrobat Reader. I thought I had the latest, but after the download said “done”, the paper wouldn’t display. I’ve got it now, but Lord, I hate technology.
foinavon:
I haven’t seen you address the topic of the post. IPCC models are wrong, observed data doesn’t indicate the exponential increase seen from IPCC models. In fact, with the MDO thrown onto the trendline, it looks pretty reasonable. Wattsupwiththat?
Sure, Dr. Akasofu hasn’t stated what the mechanism for recovering from the LIA was, so perhaps you could enlighten us as to what that mechanism is? If not, will you then contend that we are still in the LIA, since there is no explainable mechanism to end it?
foinavon as usual tries to re-frame the argument. Recall that his original unsupported claim was that there is “a clear relationship between paleotemperature and paleoCO2 levels right through the last near 500 million years.” The fact that it isn’t true doesn’t matter to Mr. foinavon.
foinavon now claims that the “graph you’ve linked to is a poor example of an assessment of the relationship between Earth temperature and CO2 levels. In fact there isn’t any CO2 data there at all.”
Not really foinavon.
The chart was extracted from data provided in a peer-reviewed publication reported in the journal Science, to which I subscribed for over twenty years. But for the sake of argument, let’s pretend foinavon is right, and not just being an obstructionist.
In that case, here is another chart that generally tracks the same ebb and flow of CO2 over the same general 500 MM year time span: click
Just as over short time spans, there is no cause and effect between rising CO2 levels and subsequent rising temperatures over long time spans.
Will still another CO2 chart convince everyone that rising CO2 does not cause, and never has caused, runaway global warming — or even triggered steeply rising planetary temperatures?
The answer is that such a chart will only convince those with an open mind. But those suffering from cognitive dissonance [CD] have, by definition, tightly closed minds. Since their minds are already made up, any facts contrary to their beliefs are dismissed out of hand, while being argued incessantly. This is in contrast to skeptics, who simply say, in effect: “show me,” or “prove your assertion.” A belief system is not necessary to be a skeptic.
On the other hand, those afflicted with CD have their egos inextricably intertwined with their personal belief system. Thus, they can not admit that their beliefs are wrong, no matter how many contrary facts are presented, without damaging or destroying their egos.
Many proponents of the AGW/CO2 hypothesis have begun to display signs of cognitive dissonance. As evidence accumulates that their hypothesis is wrong, they have simply become more adamant in their denial of reality. Any contrary facts presented only bring on incessant argument, and a constant re-framing of the original argument to suit the needs of their beliefs.
The famed psychologist Leon Festinger, who developed the original concept of cognitive dissonance, conducted numerous studies of the phenomenon. People became afflicted with cognitive dissonance because their belief system had become a central part of their identity; and therefore, of their very self. Any facts that were found to be contrary to their personal belief system were seen as an attack upon the self.
That explains why people suffering from CD are so resistant to any outside information that is contrary to their beliefs — even when that outside information has a completely rational basis, and their own belief system does not.
Festinger’s book, When Prophecy Fails, relates the account of a group of doomsday believers predicting the world’s imminent demise — even going so far as giving the particular date the world would end.
When the world didn’t end on the expected date, the true believers did not admit that they might have been wrong about their hypothesis. Instead, they became more, not less, convinced that they were right. They became even louder and more intense, and they proselytized even more aggressively following the failure of their world view.
Rather than admit that their doomsday hypothesis [e.g.: global warming] was wrong, they re-framed their argument [e.g.: climate change], and simply re-set the date the world was to end.
No matter what reality shows the rest of us, those afflicted with CD will become more and more extreme and illogical in the defense of their failed hypothesis. Because they can not admit that they were wrong. As CO2 rises while the uncooperative planet cools, those suffering from cognitive dissonance simply dig in their heels and become ever more adamant that their falsified beliefs are correct, and that the world is wrong.
In this instance, since global warming didn’t accelerate as predicted, we are now being told that global warming causes global cooling; that an enormous amount of hidden, undetectable heat is being held in some ill-defined “pipeline,” waiting to spring out at a mysterious, undefined “tipping point,” and trigger runaway global warming.
The fact is that spokespersons for the AGW/CO2 hypothesis would be traitors to the human race because of their profligate waste of resources if the AGW/CO2 hypothesis was correct [Al Gore’s five mansions; the IPCC’s partying on wine, brie and lobster in Bali, etc.]. But that conundrum is not real to those afflicted by CD. They don’t give it a second thought, because the gross waste of resources and the partying of others doesn’t directly affect their personal egos. CD sufferers simply have a blind spot when that type of behavior is pointed out.
To paraphrase George Orwell, those suffering from cognitive dissonance accept that black is white, down is up, evil is good — and global warming is causing global cooling. And they will never admit that they are wrong about their beliefs.