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
==========================================================
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
Related articles
- Is the media waking up on global warming? ‘Tic, tic, tic. The sleeping MSM is stirring. Headlines no one could imagine seeing a few years ago are popping up on a regular basis. The backdown is beginning’ (climatedepot.com)
- Nature mag forced to admit warming has stopped: New Climate Deniers say ‘the ocean ate my global warming’ (junkscience.com)
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Took ’em ten years, give or take, but I guess late is better than never.
“Theories for the pause include the fact that the entire theory is based on shoddy science and even shoddier computer simulations.”
There, fixed that…..
I think there is supposed to be a trademark symbol ™ on the ‘Climate scientists’ phrase just below the word Reuters.
TM did not work. Back to school!
denniswingo says: The first step is to realize you have a problem.
Their problem is that they have a total inability to grasp the concept that some things cannot be predicted. We engineers formalise this in the concept of “noise” and e.g. we talk about concepts such as “signal to noise”. So, we can lump all the things we don’t know into this concept of “noise”
In contrast science is so totally arrogant that it doesn’t have a concept of “not knowing” – there is no formal way in science to say “we don’t know” .
And how many times have we heard the phrase “something must have caused the rise in global temperatures”. But because they have no concept of “we don’t know”, they have no way to answer the question without grasping as scientific straws.
So, we get this absurd charade of them saying:
“because we don’t know anything else that caused the temperature rise … it must be CO2”.
Their single biggest failing is that they lack a formal concept of “not knowing” so they are forced to make ridiculous assertions when engineers have a much superior way of answer the question:
“what caused the rise” … “We don’t know” … or using formal terminology “natural variation”.
If you still don’t understand this … thing about “not knowing” as the scientific equivalent of “zero” in maths. It is as if Scientists are still in the dark ages with a system of knowledge that cannot recognise “nothingness”.
I like how the article attributes the start of Climate Change theory to Svante Arrhenius. From his wiki page – Arrhenius clearly believed that a warmer world would be a positive change.
What is missing from his page is that eventually, he changed his mind.
I guess with enough study, the MSM will change, wait, never mind, they will always be spoon fed…
Isn’t it nice how easy it is to become a real journalist. From hack to real journalist in one article. Mr. Watts you forgot the word kudos.
RMB you are a trip. You keep banging away, ignored by all as simply mistaken, but now it is something else. You have some sort of compulsion, maybe you should look into this. I told you what was happening, the warmed water on the surface immediately evaporates. Run your hair dryer for 20 minutes, you may notice that the water level has gone down!
Tell you what, put a few drops of laundry soap (“surfactant”) in there first, eliminate almost all surface tension, it will make you feel better…
“Now if only Seth Borenstein at AP can begin to start questioning, we could see real journalism on display.”
An oracular comment. Could mean that Borenstein senses the herd turning and adjusts to stay with the herd.
Lawrence Solomon finds Climate changing for global warming journalists
He listsNewly skeptical AGW media
Please email him additions as journalists begin the migration from lemmings to conscientious citizens.
@RobW says:
April 16, 2013 at 7:47 am
All good. When such levels of absurdity are reached and made public, people, no matter how keen to believe, are forced to a point where they have to ask of themselves: can I accept this as making sense and still be a functional human?
Since this and other “considered adjudications” whether by court or government department are the direct result of acceptance of a particular viewpoint being established as a truth, they cannot be separated out from it.
So even those who would equivocate and talk of misinterpretation, misapplication, or just mistake, have a big hole opened up in their heads.
Anyone who can “ride through this” after knowing about it, removes themselves from normal human expectations and will increasingly be seen as an outlier, a pariah.
Of course those negatively effected by this event will suffer in the manner normal to the exercise of the tyranny of the inadequate.
As far as I can tell the CAGW have not changed their minds about anything. All they are now doing is looking for reasons why their models are still right, despite the evidence to the contrary.
European Union politicians rejected a plan to prop up the world’s biggest carbon market on Tuesday, sending it plunging to a new record low and raising questions about its survival.
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/04/16/us-eu-ets-vote-idUKBRE93F0NT20130416
I can’t believe Godfrey Bloom MEP did this all by himself… Now some journalists are going to have to eat some more humble pie…
denniswingo says:
April 16, 2013 at 7:36 am
The first step is to realize you have a problem.
———————————–
It appears that most of the scientists intimately involved don’t realize the problem is scientific. Most look at the problem as potentially derailing the gravy train although the personal humiliation of having their theories and models refuted will obviously play a part. The politicians look at it as a threat to their power, which is another kind of gravy train. It’s beginning to appear that an enormous shift is required in research methods and assumptions. Paleocliimatology needs to be reined in. As McIntyre has said for years, an engineering grade study by the most trusted observers and participants in the field and related fields needs to be conducted by the US government and indeed all capable nation-states on behalf of their citizens. People are beginning to understand that they are possibly being screwed by their governments. If a period of cooling sets in, the incompetence and rashness of the principal scientists will be confirmed. They will be left standing naked and helpless in the cold.
Innocent Innocent says: Here is the thing. I think most skeptics on this site would agree. AGW may be happening. However the relationship to CO2 is tenuous
Agree with all you said. But suddenly had this idea of “intellectual gearing”. In finance, the gearing ratio of a company is the ratio of debt equity to assets. The higher the gearing ratio … the further their “reach” but more likely the company will go under.
Likewise intellectual “gearing” could be defined as the ratio of speculative inference to the evidence. And just as the high gearing of banks … looked good at the time … but caused a worldwide collapse in the financial markets, so the intellectual gearing seen in climate “science” … way have looked good when it was providing the answers and attention they wanted … but now it has all gone peared shaped their high gearing makes it almost inevitable that this subject is in for a monstrous fall like the banks.
I suppose the only real question (if the banking analogy holds) is how many other institutions are going to be exposed to have taken the same high risks an massively overgeared their subjects and will now be taken down by climate “science”
That so called scientists who are running the AGW nonsense don’t know the basics is unbelievable…all they ever do is waffle on about “our models etc”…
It’s simple enough…if we were suffering AGW then we would be trapping the heat…specifically in the Tropical Troposphere…but no evidence. The modellers over-allow for positive feedback loops and apparently disregard the negatives which cause cooling. And if that is not bad enough they are unaware that CO2’s ability to create heat is logarithmic. Thus whatever temp fig you come up with for a doubling it will not double again…you will get a diminishing return. Pretty basic stuff.
This after a full quarter-century of terminally obnoxious, strident gloom-and-doom (recall Warmists’ “No Pressure” video, an eco-terrorist’s delight). As what point does common sense begin to re-assert itself, and more especially– at what point do death-eating Luddite sociopaths begin to realize that their Cargo Cult will be held accountable?
@stan stendera says:
April 16, 2013 at 8:10 am
I agree. Or at lest I HOPE that there is, somewhere, a number of individuals who have a minimum of inquisitiveness in their nature, and they can get backing from editors and administrators. There is scant evidence that such people actually exist in the MSM even though it is the primary requirement, with it being almost exclusively the domain of The Regurgitater and The Opinionator.
Even if there are none, there must be significant numbers who want to project a false dignity of purpose, and most reliably, those who can smell the possibility of fame and fortune.
The hockey stick is not hitting goals now.
Based on some of their past arguments, I’m waiting to hear the excuse that CO2 is just getting lazy–or that it became fearful of the sequester and decided not to perform properly.
(Maybe I shouldn’t give them excuses.)
RMB says: “The answer to their problem is dead simple, surface tension blocks heat transfer.”
I’ve asked you before to provide a relevant equation or a link to a journal article that establishes the truth of this. But no. You continue to assert this non-fact here and other places without a shred of proof. There must be more productive ways to expend your effort.
The answer to the question of proof is very simple, try heating water from above. The agw theory says that we emit co2 and the sun’s rays heat the co2 and the heat from the co2 comes in contact with the ocean. The heat then causes increased evaporation and according to Trenberth is absorbed by the ocean and stored. I decided to try and heat water from above. I applied heat from a heat gun 450degsC fan forced to the surface of water. After 5mins there appeared to be no sign of the water heating so I stopped and checked. The water remained stone cold. The heat was being totally rejected by something and my conclusion was that the most likely explanation was surface tension. Remember that surface tension is demonstrated by placing a paper clip on water and observing that despite not being shaped like a vessel and having measurable weight it is supported by the surface tension. Heat has no weight.
The irony of the situation is that if you want to heat water from above the only way to do it is to float a vessel on the surface and apply the heat source to the vessel, the vessel cancels the surface tension underneath and allows heat to flow.
What thismeans is that the oceans only accepts energy via the sun’s rays, physical heat is blocked by surface tension and therefore there is no backup heat in the ocean so when the sun’s activity drops as it is doing now this planet gets cold.
Shorter version : “fiddlesticks”.
I guess that is why they are now trying to get the indoctrination taught in school: http://blogs.kqed.org/mindshift/2013/04/some-ask-whats-the-value-of-common-core-state-standards/
@Theo Goodwin says:
April 16, 2013 at 8:40 am
It is most certainly a herd. As anyone who has worked with herds knows, when there is a breakaway, with the rest of the herd constrained, unless very quickly stymied, the rest follow. It cannot be stopped.
The constraints are there; with the Mail, Economist, and this, the breakaway has happened. There is nothing anyone can do about it now.
james griffin says: “The modellers…are unaware that CO2′s ability to create heat is logarithmic.”
Utterly false. The models are all based on essentially the same logarithmic forcing equation.