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)
“Theories for the pause include ..” every dam excuse they can think off whilst ignoring the basic one that you got it wrong in the first place . Which would hardly be a surprise given their dealing with chaotic events for which even in the short term prediction is unreliable .
…and look here who’s on the board of trustees of Thomson Reuters as well…
http://thomsonreuters.com/about/trust_principles/trustee_directors/
… Pascal Lamy, ultra globalist…
Still keen on the “news” from this “trustworthy” organisation?…
Why Tickell is missing on this list I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t maintain his homepage and has disappeared. Well, they got Lamy as replacement it seems.
@ur momisugly Kev-in-Uk says:
April 16, 2013 at 10:28 am
I’m not saying the facts have not been there to be seen by those who want to. Or that it the implications of these are obscure.
But for virtually everyone in the street, these do not register. And “big oil” – or “big anything” that can be made to sound vaguely ominous and indifferent to Virtue and the average person and his neighbour – are of course behind the non-believers.
The MSM finally notices ‘the pause’
I will only be happy when they start questioning ‘the cause’
Somewhat related, in that the Guardian is still going on full bore CAGW KIRIBATI IS DROWNING, http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/gallery/2013/apr/16/kiribati-end-game-climate-change-in-pictures?CMP=twt_gu might be well worth a full rebuttal yet again by Willis or another with real life understanding and knowledge of coral atoll islands. Yes, there have been articles posted here before on this issue, but the photos in the guardian would be great headers leading in to the rebuttal of each of the points the photos captions suggest.
@ur momisugly Ian W says:
April 16, 2013 at 9:48 am
It occurred to me to Google also “Canada deaths from cold” which turns up no stats concerning excess deaths due to cold weather (on the first page at least). I can only conclude it is a non-issue here. The only time there is any concern about people being killed from winter cold is during cold snaps when the odd drunk student gets disoriented and lost, or sadly, a street person fails to make it in from the cold due to mental issues. Fuel poverty exists but deaths from lack of heating is either not widespread or it is not on the national radar. I suspect that the former is the case.
@ur momisugly DirkH says:
April 16, 2013 at 10:08 am
I don’t know what the relationship is between Tickell and the Huxleys is, but for me, if someone wants a vision of dystopia based on “scientific” principles, I have never read better – or more plausible – than Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. It even comes complete with Savages living attuned to simple nature – how prescient is that?
“Scientists are struggling to explain a slowdown in climate change that has exposed gaps in their understanding”
Understanding??? What understanding?
Three possible explanations from Roy Spencer:
1) the real climate system is not as sensitive to increasing CO2 as the models are programmed to be (my preferred explanation)
2) the extra surface heating from more CO2 has been diluted more than expected by increased mixing with cooler, deeper ocean waters (Trenberth’s explanation)
3) increased manmade aerosol pollution is causing a cooling influence, partly mitigating the manmade CO2 warming
Read more at:
Global Warming Slowdown: The View from Space
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/04/global-warming-slowdown-the-view-from-space/
Wait, just a minute, late news, the UK has just had its hottest three days this year – snow has melted and people have been seen WITHOUT coats on!! We’re doomed I tell you.
“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*”
_________________________________________
“Today more [insert affected persons who was in work for AGW] were laid off due to lack of support from [insert your governing body] and the funding pulled by [your local conservative party’s name.]
{Switch to Person involved in layouff} “It just hurts us so bad that they can take this mistake in the weather and use it to cut important scientific research. This will just hurt us more when the warming returns and we are not prepared for it. In the meantime I will not be able to support my family.”
In 20 years they will all joke about the time when we ‘all’ believed in Global Warming while at the same time following a similar gris-gris. Except for a few of us. Again. 🙂
Rinse. Repeat.
I wonder what the next WUWT will cover…
I hope someone writes about the epidemiology of this “Dam Failure”. Highly honored, feted, rewarded glorious personages sporting Nobel Prizes real and surrogate … get rock star status in the gloom and doom science. Governments, Hollywood stars, every single university and research organization in the world flocks to their side…. then climategate, the cracking began and became louder as hurricanes quieted, real sea-level rise slowed, thermometers became suspect, windmills started to hurt economies, people, bats and birds, Antarctic ice expanded, climate sensitivity began to decline, some tentative “gee the sun might be a bigger player” speculations came from unexpected sources … 10 years of no warming goes by with only a few of the annointed whispering of this travesty in private emails, the span stretches to 15 years- a voice at the Doha Climate Conference shouts it out and the fear-locked silence on praying climate hockey team members is broken. Illuminati start scurrying around briefly with explanations, looking in the deep oceans, the smoke, etc. and then IPCC’s Pachauri, Hansen and others see the jig is up (Hansen even had to retire under the strain). Scientists begin to waffle, turnabout, a final blizzard of hockey stick papers come out to try to flood the AR5 deadline…and then one CAGW newspaper, then two and then a bunch break ranks. There will be more and there will be suspense on who will come out and who will morph and who will “Paul Erlichicize” his career and become a crusader for the other side. This is unbelievable!
Gary Pearse says:
April 16, 2013 at 11:25 am
I hope someone writes about the epidemiology of this “Dam Failure”
Gary , I believe you just did , and remarkably well I might add !
““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.
”
That’s the bit I like too… since they don’t actually understand the mechanics of ANY of it, they can’t say WHY the ocean would suddenly start absorbing more heat than before, but it’s the only explaination that they can think of (that doesn’t make them totally wrong.)
@RockyRoad says:
…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.
Actually, CO2 is causing massive Global Warming as we speak – but it’s not going to show up in the data that skeptics examine – because they’re only looking at the data to find something wrong with it. CO2 has been working on this warming for 20 years, and isn’t going to disrupt its activities and provide data to amateurs who haven’t even had a peer reviewed paper published….
Hey Dodgy, I understand your annoyance!
“Actually, CO2 is causing massive Global Warming as we speak – but it’s not going to show up in the data that skeptics examine – because they’re only looking at the data to find something wrong with it.”
How inconsiderate is that? Amateurs like me and all the others here (tax payers all) who obviously don’t even deserve to tie your shoe laces up, trying to look at the data and test it. What a bummer when its already been peer reviewed by the professionals. And to top it all someone goes and sells a load of crap thermometers which show no discernible warming this century when the models have declared otherwise.
Life just isn’t fair to you pros is it?
I am trying to think of the word for when something that was happening now no longer is. Not “slowdown”, or “pause”, or a “hiatus” or “rest”. It’ll come to me.
Robert L says:
…I hope someone writes about the epidemiology of this “Dam Failure”
Gary , I believe you just did , and remarkably well I might add !..
One thing he forgot to mention was the existence of a few brave souls who saw the scam for what it was immediately, and fought it unaided and alone for many years. John Daly and Steve McIntyre are two of these names – there are probably some more, and they should NOT be forgotten…
I did not have time to complete my comment as I had to attend to a student.
It would be an interesting exercise to correlate national rates of excess deaths among the poor and elderly due to fuel poverty arising from misguided global warming policies. Ontario’s electrical energy rates are set to skyrocket once again due to the smug, self-righteous and [self-snip] Liberal government. Fortunately most Ontarians use natural gas for our heating, so hopefully not too many people will fall victims. Probably this is a bigger issue in the Old World, especially where modern insulation is a novelty and temperatures in recent decades have been more benign than recently.
On the other hand, what a great way to get rid of the excess useless population!/sarc
“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.”
Really Terry??
You have a very poor understanding of the scientific method. First of all, a “pause” of this duration was NEVER predicted by ANY of the models, hence, all of the models are demonstrably faulty.
More importantly, a “model” is not a true scientific experiment in and of itself. A model CAN be USEFUL in evaluating an hypothesis, IF AND ONLY IF the model is a reasonably good REPRESENTATION OF REALITY. Obviously, the climate models are not a good representation of what is actually going on in the Earth’s climate system. The climate models do not fully incorporate all of the variables in the system, since the modelers DON”T EVEN UNDERSTAND all of the variables and how they interact! If you don’t have at least a reasonable approximation of what all of the system variables are, and how they ALL interact, your model CANNOT be accurate.
Finally, you don’t test MODELS under the scientific method, you test HYPOTHESES USING THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD. A model is not an hypothesis, a model is an abstraction of reality which attempts to model the system being hypothesized about. As such, model output CANNOT be treated as “data”.
1. Form an hypothesis
2. Design a repeatable experiment to test your hypothesis
3. Gather experimental data
4. Analyze the data in a way which other scientists can follow and duplicate
5. Make conclusions based upon the analyzed data
6 Determine whether your hypothesis is tentatively supported or must be reworked or outright rejected.
That, in basic form, is how the scientific method works. The ONLY way a model actually works as a reasonable test of your hypothesis is IF (and ONLY IF) you can demonstrate that the model is a reasonable approximation of the actual reality-based system being modeled. If the model is a poor approximation of reality, the output of the model (although perhaps interesting) is ultimately meaningless.
This is where the AGW Cult has gotten things TERRIBLY wrong… they assumed that their models were a wonderful approximation of the real climate system, and it is turning out that their models are actually not a very good approximation of the real climate system, and so the output of most of the models is garbage, because the design of the models is at best incomplete, and at worst, utter garbage to begin with. The first error that was made was that they created this THING called “Global Average Temperature” and assumed that it actually had some reality-based meaning (which it does not). Secondly, they designed many of the models with the express purpose of “proving” their hypothesis, which caused bias in the models designs right from the beginning. From there, things just went progressively further downhill.
PeterB in Indianapolis:
It looks as though you missed my response to RockyRoad. The models do not “predict” but rather “project.” As they do not predict, their predictions cannot be proved faulty.
From the Reuters article:
“Weak economic growth and the pause in warming is undermining governments’ willingness to make a rapid billion-dollar shift from fossil fuels. Almost 200 governments have agreed to work out a plan by the
end of 2015 to combat global warming.”
Critical reading test: What is missing from this paragraph?
“…willingness to make a rapid billion-dollar shift from fossil fuels.” SHIFT TO WHAT? There IS no viable replacement that is politically, economically, or energy equivalent.
It is good news! My favorite vid is by Phelim McAleer at the Copenhagen climate conference, asking activists how they travelled there http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Y4InWXmERU and I think that is what made lots of otherwise neutral people skeptics, the hypocrisy coming from climate activists.
jc says:
April 16, 2013 at 10:55 am
“@ur momisugly DirkH says:
April 16, 2013 at 10:08 am
I don’t know what the relationship is between Tickell and the Huxleys is, but for me, if someone wants a vision of dystopia based on “scientific” principles, I have never read better – or more plausible – than Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. It even comes complete with Savages living attuned to simple nature – how prescient is that?”
Aldous Huxley’s brother Julian Huxley was the founder of the WWF. The family knows a thing or two about depopulating landscapes and forcing people to live as savages.
Once the Economist bailed out, it was no longer safe to hew to a crumbling official line: the sand beneath the structure was washing out on the tide. To mash a few shoreline metaphors.
“Finally, you don’t test MODELS under the scientific method, you test HYPOTHESES USING THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD. A model is not an hypothesis, a model is an abstraction of reality which attempts to model the system being hypothesized about. As such, model output CANNOT be treated as “data”.”
Very well said. I am thrilled that PeterB in Indianapolis has arrived to explain that scientific hypotheses and models are very different things. The distinction and all that it implies must be learned by all who are interested in the use of models in climate science and who doubt that mainstream climate science, as practiced today, qualifies as science.
Terry Oldberg says:
April 16, 2013 at 9:30 am
Models are not scientific theories. Models are reproductions of systems of objects that scientific theories are about. Models cannot be used for prediction. If you think otherwise, please explain.
Theo Goodwin:
The term “model” is polysemic, that is, it has several meanings. That it is polysemic has a dire consequence when this word is used in making an argument about the methodology of a study and the word changes meaning in the middle of this argument. The consequence is for an equivocation fallacy to be created. In making arguments about the methodologies of their studies, climatologists habitually use the equivocation fallacy. Through this usage, climatologists reach logically improper conclusions about the methodologies of their studies.
The possibility of building the equivocation fallacy into an argument can be headed off through disambiguation of the language in which this argument is written. Under one disambiguation of the language in which arguments about the methodologies of studies are written, the English word “model” is reserved for an algorithm that makes a predictive inference while the French word “modele” is reserved for an algorithm that makes no predictive inference. In the disambiguated language, a model makes predictions but a modele makes none of them. A modele makes projections but a model make none of them. This useage makes a “model” similar to a scientific theory, as you point out.
Each entity which, in AR4, is called a “model” is a modele. It can be shown that modeles are unsuitable for the purpose of regulating the climate and thus that the $200 billion study of global warming has failed.