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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Lloyd Martin Hendaye says: “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?”
When they are arrested for resorting to violent acts in the death throes of warmism.
@John R Walker says:
April 16, 2013 at 8:53 am
I notice in the Reuters report you link to, Royal Dutch Shell is specified as lobbying for a much higher CO2 price. The reality of who is actually behind all this and why is being gradually shown.
Contrary to popular opinion, comparison of the projected to the observed values of the independent variable of a model is not what one does in testing this model under the scientific method. Instead, one compares the predicted to the observed relative frequencies of the outcomes of observed events in the underlying statistical population. Thus, the much ballyhooed “pause” is irrelevant.
Oh my, those are some mighty flimsy straws they grasp at. Funny to watch them flail about though.
Look at all that scary water vapor in the photo they used.
Tol is quoted as saying “My own confidence in the data has gone down in the past five years.”
I wonder if he was slightly misquoted, and that he actually meant that his confidence in the model outputs have gone down — these, to a reporter, might be a form of data? Or is he really questioning data — does he think temps have actually gone up? Or something else?
Steve Hill from Ky says:
April 16, 2013 at 8:09 am
Does Al have to give it all back now? LOL
Can we charge him (Al) with crimes against humanity and fraud?
One thing fur sure is that you won’t see Micheal Moore with a bull horn in front of Algore’s mansion demanding the money back!
“Now if only Seth Borenstein at AP can begin to start questioning, we could see real journalism on display.”
And the flying pigs will wear ice skates to do touch-&goes in a frozen Hell. Borenstein is a classic example of what David Codrea calls “authorized urinalists”.
RMB says: “The answer to their problem is dead simple, surface tension blocks heat transfer
henry@jorgekafkar and RMB
actually the cooling is caused by more UV being back radiated TOA to space
so less UV is getting into the oceans.
subsequent to this the differential between 0 and 90 degrees becoming bgger,
you get more clouds at lower latitudes and less at higher latitudes
hence the cooling is amplified by less insolation at lower latitudes…
he that has an ear listens/// and understands.
Well there are groups that do NOT want CAGW to be shown as false – these are the politicians using it to obtain more taxes and ‘governance’ and those who have their snouts in the subsidies trough rolled out by those politicians.
Apparently, UK was only saved from power cuts in the last weeks by an oil fired power station that is due like many others this year to be phased out. UK has just over 4000 windmills placed on 360 plus subsidy farms. UK also experienced 20- 30 THOUSAND deaths from cold due to energy poverty due to the subsidies being farmed. (google UK deaths from cold) So every time you see a windmill in UK that windmill represents around 6 people who died of cold in energy poverty just last winter. By this time next year it will be 12 dead people per windmill as energy prices and subsidy farmers’ profits are going up faster than they can build wimdmills.
So it really is about time someone in the mainstream media looked at this. Ten times more people dying from energy poverty than are killed on the roads in UK is not an academic argument on core top statistics or widths of tree rings – or do we need to wait another 5 years before the people profiting handsomely from CAGW grudgingly admit it is actually getting colder?
.
Terry Oldberg says:
April 16, 2013 at 9:30 am
Really, Terry? You state the obvious then counter it with a false claim. The “pause” IS one big thing the models didn’t predict. Hence, a failure of a modeled outcome and no amount of statistical sophistry can excuse that away. I repeat–none of the models predicted this observed event; this “pause” falsifies models that didn’t predict it and is very relevant.
RockyRoad:
I take issue with your claim that the models did not predict the “pause.” These models do not, in the normal sense of the word “predict.” They “project.” While climatologists commonly conflate the two words, they have differing meanings. Predictions are what would be needed to regulate the climate. The climate models do not make them.
pat says:
April 16, 2013 at 9:03 am
The hockey stick is not hitting goals now.
Sorry Pat but you are wrong, wrong, wrong. They are hitting goals, thet are all own goals, that’s all. 🙂
The process of deconstructing this has begun. It cannot be stopped now.
As others have mentioned above, this step, of allowing orthodoxy to appear less than complete and sacrosanct, is required.
From here on, such reports will become increasingly “balanced”. Personally, I give it to the early part of next year for virtually all reports to contain some “balance”. After that, repudiation will become more and more normal through to the end of next year.
The danger now is that those with reason to hide, whether “scientists” or other, will be allowed to crawl under a rock. There is no justification for it on the grounds of “pragmatism”, through thinking that it is necessary to placate to more easily change perceptions. This is inevitable anyway.
To allow this crawling away would be an offense to humanity. Never forget, there are many, many dead from this. To not have justice for these deaths and other destruction is to treat them as detritus, rubbish, garbage, and is to become the things that must be defeated and held to account.
Every day, across the world, someone dies directly because of this. They have been killed.
@jorge
The duty warmist, jorgekafkazar, puts down an OP with:
“Utterly false. The models are all based on essentially the same logarithmic forcing equation.”
Interesting. If the climate fantasists’ models correctly handle that variable, please list, in descending order of importance, why the models remain unfit for purpose.
The wikipedia really does not want you to find out but Crispin Tickell, offspring of the infamous Huxley aristocracy, ur globalist and archwarmist advisor to Maggie Thatcher, is still a trustee of Thomson Reuters.
Crispin himself tells you:
http://www.crispintickell.com/page109.html
So don’t you expect Thomson Reuters to ever become unwarmist.
This is why they tried to “Chicken Little” in all of the Draconian Carbon changes. They knew in their hearts that even after torturing the data as much as they did, the warming they could manufacture was only modest.
Imagine where we would all be if the US, China, Russia and India had all agreed to the Kyoto Protocol and Global Carbon (CO2) levels had actually decreased over the last fifteen years. These charlatans would be screaming from the rooftops about how the warming had stopped and they had saved the planet.
Sometimes inaction is the best course of action.
Phil’s Dad says:
April 16, 2013 at 8:52 am
“As far as I can tell the CAGW have not changed their minds about anything.”
It doesn’t matter what they think. In fact the more visibly they insist on this the better.
“Studies” will continue to proliferate. If what is referred to on WUWT is indicative, they will come thick and fast in their final ejaculations, and be increasingly implausible – if that is possible compared to some recent attempts at imitating erudition.
These of course will need to be dismembered. The purveyors of these need to be treated with the derision, scorn, ridicule and contempt which they invite. And this should form a part of the public reporting of these things.
This can play out in one of two ways. The stars of AGW will claim to have discovered, in their brilliant and independent way, all the things that skeptical scientists have been saying for over 20 years, without mentioning or citing them a single time. They will then take credit for fixing our understanding of climate change and accept Nobel prizes, whether any are awarded or not. OR The world will acknowledge the skeptical scientists for being right all along and grant them the honor and respect they deserve.
My heart hopes for the latter, but my brain says the former is more likely.
Mike Haseler says:
April 16, 2013 at 8:34 am
…
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” .
…
The problem has little if anything to do with “science,” which contrary to your assertion is quite comfortable with “not knowing.” It has everything to do with the “operators” and the society within which the work takes place. For over a century the operator’s practicing science have in large part been motivated by the dominance of theory over empirical observation, and that in turn has been most strongly manifested within physics. For many sciences the commonplace social injunction has been to work harder and to grow up and be “like physics.” Can’t happen. Field reality is mathematically complex – “soft” in the “hard” vs. “soft” science parlance. It doesn’t matter whether that field reality data is biological, climatological, geological, sociological, or economic either. Anyone asserting certainty without qualification in any of those fields is trying to sound like a “grown up” – a physicist, who, at least in calm, fair weather, at STP, can tell you to the microsecond how soon you will hit the ground, if you fall out of a tree at a given height and don’t hit any branches on the way down.
Humans are pretty much set on a “lazy” approach to understanding anything. It’s one reason why so many of us listen to priests, politicians and “experts”. It’s also why priests, politicians and “experts” hope to be able to trust “peer reviewed” sources. We like to hope that someone else – “the elders” – knows best. “Experts” protect us from having to peer out into the dark on our own and try to decide what those sounds out there mean. So, we have the MSM reporters depending on factoids dribbled from what the “experts” say because it sounds important, even if its as unlikely as Hanson or Mann screaming that the sky is falling. For most of us the appearance of setting any course into the unknown seems better than drifting backward into it – hind sight is nearly perfect in that we at least know what happened even if not why, while foresight is guess work. Charlatans from card readers to climatologists and shamans assure you they can foretell the future. The future however, once it is safely in the past, always assures us that they were simply guessing.
Andrew says:
April 16, 2013 at 9:52 am
“@jorge
The duty warmist, jorgekafkazar, puts down an OP with:”
Barkin up the wrong tree. Jorge just states a fact.
The models probably even have the CO2 effect right. Where they fail is most prominently by inventing the never-observed-in-nature positive water vapor feedback. And a lot of other reasons…
““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.
1) How is he an expert (economist) in climate change? Would he be an expert 5 years ago and less so now after finding out that he has been wrong all along?
2) What knowledge and information does he bring to bear that reduces his confidence in the DATA? Turn yourself to having less or no confidence in the models, or are model runs your “data”?
3) You should give your money back you received for educating students at U of Sussex in UK.
@ur momisugly Mike Haseler says:
April 16, 2013 at 8:54 am
Novel way of looking at it. And a working model that has some use.
Your reference or wondering about effects of any collapse brought on or exaggerated by this over gearing, I think does open up the whole inter-connectedness of this to view. It is much wider than just a specific “scientific” question or structures built directly on that.
I think it is hard to find any institutional or cultural norm that is unaffected by this either on a practical level, or on the level of what constitutes a desirable way of looking at things, expectations in implementation and, mainly, values.
And when this goes down, through what you refer to as gearing, the whole lot will go down.
…and as Crispin Tickell, trustee of Thomson Reuters, is an offspring of the Huxley dynasty, this…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Henry_Huxley#Mental_problems_in_the_family
…could indicate that warmism could indeed be linked to a hereditary weakness of the mind…
jc says:
April 16, 2013 at 9:29 am
”I notice in the Reuters report you link to, Royal Dutch Shell is specified as lobbying for a much higher CO2 price. The reality of who is actually behind all this and why is being gradually shown”
But this has been known all along! If you owned an oilfield – with a limited ‘content’, would you let it be sold cheap or try desperately to get the oil price UP?? It is not rocket science to see that Big Oil is behind a lot of the scaremongering. And, as for the likes of Shell and BP, etc, putting money into renewables or alternative energy – why would they do that? – probably to control it’s pace of development and ‘release’ into the world and ideally to maintain a monopoly on THAT too!!
Fortunately, there is less chance of that future company type control these days due to the internet, developing countries (china, etc) – which is why governments, via taxes, wanted to get in on the act – but it really doesn’t matter who holds the reins – we will continue to get stuffed in the future!!
AGW is a social creation not science.
A school book for kids about scientific method is enough to demolish any of AGW claims.
No one can claim to know such a complex system with hundreds of inputs and an unknown number that we don’t even know about.