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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Terry Oldberg:
I again ask:
What is the “statistical population” which you say is needed for the AGW predictions (e.g. as presented by the IPCC) to exist?
Richard
@ur momisugly Terry Oldberg says:
April 19, 2013 at 3:43 pm
I expressed no opinion as to the meaning of that term or any term, the application of that or any term, scientific or social conventions of any sort, the nature or integrity of any argument you might want to develop or assert, or anything at all to do with climate.
I am not at all encouraged that your response has been in entirety dedicated to issues of no relevance whatsoever to what I said. This does not reflect well on the potential value of any argument you may wish to advance.
I submitted my comment after having observed that you were involved in an exchange where the clarity of purpose had been lost. In the expectation that certain protocols – dictated by LOGIC – would thereby be reinstated thus allowing a further development of both arguments allowing a resolution.
This appears to have been overly ambitious.
To repeat the obvious, any term used in developing any argument must be precisely understood.
Utilizing them, whilst refusing to clarify meaning, whether claiming them as premise or conclusion, renders any argument meaningless.
jc:
I disagree.
Terry Oldberg:
Quad Erat Demonstrandum
Richard
@terry Oldberg says:
April 19, 2013 at 4:26 pm
Tiresome ridiculous and wasteful.
Wake up to yourself.
You are not a child.
PeterB in Indianapolis says:
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.
Stages 2 & 3 also need to be documented and published. So that other scientists can both attempt to duplicate the work and verify that the methodology is sound.
henry@Mark and peterb
Good point by peter. I have given you clues
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/16/the-msm-finally-notices-the-pause/#comment-1277829
you only need a first year stats class of 47 students to each check one weather station and repeat my findings…
make a note of the remarks at my tables, as they also give clues, e.g. you cannot put in long term averages for missing data, as we normally do in stats, when studying weather patterns over time.
My sample was random in that I only approved the (weather) station if it had complete or near complete records.
I also balanced it by latitude and 70/30 @sea and inland, more or less. Longitude does not matter as we are looking at the average yearly temperatures, which includes earth’s seasonal shifts and earth turns every 24 hours. The interesting part is to look at the maxima: you can do a very nice binomial fit if you set the speed of warming/cooling out against time which gives you the deceleration.
if all goes well, you should also come to the conclusion that deceleration of warming started around 1972 or so, and that global cooling will only come to an end around 2040….
…give or take a few years…
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/19/another-escalator/#comment-1281031
Terry Oldberg: Re the lack of a statistical population, do you mean that for a sufficient population to exist there is a requirement for a sufficient number of events to exist, each event in the context of climate science being defined as a 30 year period of recorded temperatures?
Graham W:
Thankyou for the good question you pose to Terry Oldberg at April 22, 2013 at 3:35 am.
Indeed, that is one – of an infinite number of – possible explanation of what Terry Oldberg means. I await his (probable failure to provide) answer with interest because for a long time I and others have been trying to fathom what he means.
Again, thankyou.
Richard