People send me stuff, today it was this “editors picks” from John Micklethwait, editor of The Economist. After years of being pro-warming, I was shocked to see this headline as a “pick”. It seems a change in editorial position may be afoot.
The article is quite blunt, and quite interesting for its details, here is the introduction:
OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”
Temperatures fluctuate over short periods, but this lack of new warming is a surprise. Ed Hawkins, of the University of Reading, in Britain, points out that surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range of projections derived from 20 climate models (see chart 1). If they remain flat, they will fall outside the models’ range within a few years.
The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now. It does not mean global warming is a delusion. Flat though they are, temperatures in the first decade of the 21st century remain almost 1°C above their level in the first decade of the 20th. But the puzzle does need explaining.
The mismatch might mean that—for some unexplained reason—there has been a temporary lag between more carbon dioxide and higher temperatures in 2000-10. Or it might be that the 1990s, when temperatures were rising fast, was the anomalous period. Or, as an increasing body of research is suggesting, it may be that the climate is responding to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in ways that had not been properly understood before. This possibility, if true, could have profound significance both for climate science and for environmental and social policy.
…
Clouds of uncertainty
This also means the case for saying the climate is less sensitive to CO₂ emissions than previously believed cannot rest on models alone. There must be other explanations—and, as it happens, there are: individual climatic influences and feedback loops that amplify (and sometimes moderate) climate change.
…
That last paragraph meshes very well with recent publications about lower climate sensitivity, which they reference.
Read the entire article here: http://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21574461-climate-may-be-heating-up-less-response-greenhouse-gas-emissions
While we are on the subject of sensitivity, they mention the recent paper by Nic Lewis who writes:
It even cites a paper that I’ve recently had accepted for publication, and which I think will at least get a mention in AR5 WG1.
They also have an editorial which says:
All in all, I think this is tremendous progress. Kudos to The Economist for embracing this maxim:
When my information changes, I alter my conclusions. What do you do, sir?
h/t to Nic Lewis and Dr. Roger Pielke Sr.
cui bono says:
There is hardly ever any attribution in the Economist.
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the names are changes to protect the guilty
“The mismatch might mean that—for some unexplained reason—there has been a temporary lag between more carbon dioxide and higher temperatures in 2000-10”
This will be the next line of retreat: DAGW is in remission but the patient still won’t recover. It’s sure to come back! The last 15 years are just a hiatus or pause in an inexorable long-term warming trend.
This interpretation just isn’t supported by the facts. The 20th century episode is over – gone – terminated. Any movement in the current flat tend will be a new episode, whatever the direction. See http://www.quadrant.org.au/blogs/doomed-planet/2013/03/the-science-is-settled-no-warming
The failure of climate models is far worse than depicted by these guys using the CMIP5. What they always do is “update” the models with feedbacks that are thrown in to best replicate how the climate is actually changing. That’s not running a closed system that has any demonstrable skill in predicting climate. Just look how bad Hansen’s first forecasts were that he made when he testified before the US Senate in 1988:
http://waysandmeans.house.gov/media/pdf/111/ctest.pdf
See page 7 of this document. According to Hansen, we are supposed to be a full 1.25 degC above the thirty year mean instead of hovering around + .2 degC. To cover up this colossal train wreck, hack sites like climateskeptics.com used Hansen’s “best case scenario” GISSC and claimed it was his forecast today, when in reality version A and B are what he forecasted. The version they tried to claim was his forecast was based upon a drastic cut in CO2 emissions that never occurred. The order of the day by these clowns continues to be cover-up and deceit so that politicians can use the lies to tax and regulate.
Chuck Wiese
Mereorologist
Again, from the article:
“A rise of around 3°C could be extremely damaging. The IPCC’s earlier assessment said such a rise could mean that more areas would be affected by drought; that up to 30% of species could be at greater risk of extinction; that most corals would face significant biodiversity losses; and that there would be likely increases of intense tropical cyclones and much higher sea levels.”
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Say whaaaaa?
cn
“Or, as an increasing body of research is suggesting…
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anti-global warming blogs, articles, etc are getting a lot more traffic and a larger audience…
Climate modeler James Annan on climate sensitivity:
” Interestingly, one of them stated quite openly in a meeting I attended a few years ago that he deliberately lied in these sort of elicitation exercises (i.e. exaggerating the probability of high sensitivity) in order to help motivate political action.”
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/2/1/james-annan-on-climate-sensitivity.html
cui bono says:
March 27, 2013 at 6:04 pm
…..The rest of us can laugh all the way to, er, any country that doesn’t steal our money to fund bank bailouts.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
If you find one let me know, I want to retire….
Not even a mention that the theory itself; rising CO-2 = high temperature rather than the other way might be wrong. Even though the premise is not supported by ice cores which shows a lag of C02 behind temp rise by hundreds of years. Actually “CO2 is irrelevant!!!” to quote the Piers Corbyn. Incredible. I quit reading the Economist when it became quite clear they hadn’t a clue in the run up to the Lehman business. They never saw it coming. Not much of a handle on the economy. Der Spiegel is a much better magazine
Many folks cannot distinguish between “climate” and “weather”! In 2000,
it was all clear: The climate was warming…leads to weather warming.
Now in 2013:
The climate continues its warming [Trenberth will certainly find the missing heat],
which makes the weather cooling…..just ask the Mannians: Only obstinate sceptics
do not understand this simple logic: Cooling by warming….every refrigerator works
this way…should be clear to everybody……
If I was The Economist editor, I would have been getting rather concerned that the glaring disparity, between my ‘scientific’ opinion and the freezing discomfort of my readers as they commute their way to work through the miserable English gloom, might start to impact on the publication’s sales.
The Economist’s professed stock in trade is its ‘authority’, on all subjects, but it has been starting to look a little bit silly on this one.
Personally, I found that very little of its content actually turned out to be authoritative about events in which I was actually involved, and so I eventually gave up my subscription, because I didn’t believe them any more.
And in this case, everybody is actually involved in the events, most notably their UK readership, who will be starting to think: “This global warming-barbecue summer-never see snow again business is crap..”, as they ruin their shoes, trudging through the filthy grey sludge of Urban English snow, to sit in a freezing waiting room on a station where their train has been cancelled by ice on the conductor rail.
You can only play King Canute for so long.
Dere’s smoke cummin’ out da machine! Gard dam’it
This article has gone viral. I’m now having simultaneous arguments with alarmists on 3 blogs, and it’s 2am in the UK and bloody freezing!
Where’s the Climate Sceptic Rapid Response Team when needed? 🙂
Sorry I got the site wrong that promotes hack science in my post above.. It is skepticalscience.com NOT climateskeptics. Skepticalscience.com is run by John Cook and has been caught using deceptive tactics to distort climate data.
Gail Combs says:
March 27, 2013 at 4:59 pm
Paul Westhaver says:
March 27, 2013 at 4:05 pm
“People don’t change.
The agenda of these jerks was wealth redistribution…”..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Given the Cyprus financial mess. (The Russian oligarchy who were the target of the haircut managed to spirit away their deposits via branch banks including one in the UK. info from 2 days ago and today ) I imagine the economic types really want to use anything as a diversion.
S&P has put Deutsche Bank on Ratings Watch and the Bernanke was doing a real dance around the question of can a ‘Haircut’ happen to US depositors. It was hard to find anything that was not a video but I did find a transcript HERE The Bernanke mutters something about no haircuts for depositors unless there is a run on American banks. Oh and the The ‘big five’- Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, hope to establish a new bank taking the place of the IMF and World Bank BRICS plan new 50bn bank to rival World Bank and IMF
So with all that happening in the financial world, I am sure those pulling the strings at the Economist are looking for any and all diversions. ‘Breaking News’ on climate of this sort is a good one since it hits the same group who are awake enough to question what is happening in the banking scene. So yea, the timing is rather ‘useful’”
The “Big Five”… SOUTH AFRICA!! Since when? Oh and you missed out Rothschild! Surely you couldn’t have forgotten ROTHSCHILD? Big shareholders in “The Economist>”
David Jojnes says:
March 27, 2013 at 7:58 pm
Article said South Africa just joined: Here is another article: http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/27/us-brics-summit-idUSBRE92Q0UE20130327
Thanks for the mention that the Rothschild’s are owners of the Economists. In the USA it is the JP Morgan clan who owns the media not that it matters since they are all interconnected.
Checkout Chiefio’s blog on the Cyprus situation.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/κύπρος-κυπριακή-δημοκρατία-cyprus/
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2013/03/21/fixing-cyprus-a-modest-suggestion/
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2013/03/27/sp-puts-deutsche-bank-on-ratings-watch/
The Economist disappoints. – gavin.
“Ed Hawkins, of the University of Reading, in Britain, points out that surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range of projections derived from 20 climate models (see chart 1). If they remain flat, they will fall outside the models’ range within a few years.”
According to the graph shown, they will be outside the models’ range in a few weeks or months not a few years.
This is a step in the right direction. I,m hoping that between this year and the next that President Obama will have to show a change in his tune on climate change.
Global average temperature, as imagined by the Met Office, is already below the lowest Hansen scenario, which assumed no increase in CO2 concentration after AD 2000. Carbon dioxide, as imagined by NASA, has puffed ever higher, so Hansen, NASA GISS (as adjusted, ie cooked), NOAA, HadCru & company chalk up one massive FAIL.
It seems that a dam has broken and everyone is talking about natural variability and natural regularities. Not long ago Trenberth denied the very relevance of the same when he called for a reversal of the Null Hypothesis. The breaking of this dam is the end of “the consensus” in what has passed for climate science.
To become a genuine science, climate science must account for natural variability and it must take as it primary goal the description of natural regularities. That description will be in the form of hypotheses, universally quantified general statements, that are well confirmed in experience. Claims about “global warming/climate change” take on significance only when presented against the background of an empirical science that comprehends natural variability.
Enough talk of temperatures flattening out. That’s only the best the data tinkerers can do, to hide the decline, and it is still not so. Just ask anybody in England this year, or Queensland last year, if temps have leveled off The hell they have, and the fall in tyhem is accelerating..
Die Welt in Germany and Jyllandsposten in Denmark has also featured sceptical articles lately. Reason is finally winning.
A little while ago there was a similar moment in the Cholesterol theory. Business Week published an article summarizing the contradictions in the evidence, and in particular pointed out that adding cholesterol lowering compounds to statins actually raised death and morbidity rates. This was really a clear sign that it had now arrived in the mainstream media that the world was more complicated than we had thought. This is is a similar moment in climate.
Perfekt says:
March 27, 2013 at 11:26 pm
“Die Welt in Germany and Jyllandsposten in Denmark has also featured sceptical articles lately. Reason is finally winning.”
Well I would say the Bilderberger steering committee has declared the CO2AGW media campaign over. Probably they need their journalists now to try to distract the EU slaves from the Euro-omnishambles.
They have reached their goals anyway through the subsidy pumping wind turbines and solar panels. Now, throw the useful idiot climate scientists to the masses so they can be torn to pieces; as a distraction.
climatereason says:
March 27, 2013 at 3:44 pm
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The UK has seen a drop of some 0.5degC this century! The UK’s response to temperature changes is dampened since it is a small island surrounded by water and due to the their thermal capacity they dampen the speed of change. The UK temperature anomaly is now broadly what it was in 1940.
CET is the most extensive thermometer record. Probably one of the most interesting tasks that could be undertaken is to re-evaluate CET with a view to getting a proper handle on station changes/drop outs and their effect, and on UHI and any temperature distortion brought about by UHI. It would also be a good idea to get a proper handle on error margins.
It would be interessing to isolate the best quality rural stations and look at their raw data to see what they say by way of comparator.