Guest post by David Middleton
A very thoughtful column by Ross Pomeroy at Real Clear Science…
Is Climate ‘Lukewarmism’ Legitimate?
To many, prominent writers Matt Ridley, Ross Douthat, and Oren Cass are a baffling bunch. They are the visible proponents of the position that climate change is real, manmade, and occurring as predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), yet it does not yet constitute a worrying or catastrophic problem. They are “lukewarmers.”
So what do we make of these climate change moderates, who do not hold the invalid, unevidenced opinions of those who deny the scientific consensus, yet at the same time, do not ascribe to the apocalyptic scenarios espoused by climate alarmists and the accompanying solutions to avert them?
As far as I can tell, lukewarmers’ views are legitimate. The mountains of evidence present in the most recent IPCC assessment report, comprising more than 9,200 peer-reviewed studies, cannot simply be cast aside as the product of a conspiracy or a statistical fluke of climate models. If lukewarmers accept the science, they are on solid ground.
[…]
To his credit, lukewarm New York Times columnist Ross Douthat agrees. “Every lukewarmer, including especially those in positions of political authority, should be pressed to identify trends that would push them toward greater alarmism and a sharper focus on the issue.”
In other words, they must recognize some level of evidence that will cause them to change their views. If they don’t, they have proven themselves not to be lukewarm moderates but dogmatic deniers.
“Every lukewarmer, including especially those in positions of political authority, should be pressed to identify trends that would push them toward greater alarmism and a sharper focus on the issue.”
This is not a one-sided question. It should also be asked, “What trends would push a lukewarmer towards lesser alarmism and a sharper focus on the issue.”
For this lukewarmer, there is a level of evidence that would cause me to change my views. This would be some level of evidence above…
Almost every catastrophic prediction is based on climate models using the RCP 8.5 scenario (RCP = relative concentration pathway) and a far-too high climate sensitivity. RCP 8.5 is not even suitable for bad science fiction. Actual emissions are tracking closer to RCP 6.0. When a realistic transient climate response is applied to RCP 6.0 emissions, the warming tracks RCP 4.5… A scenario which stays below the “2° C limit,” possibly even below 1.5° C.
Note that the 2σ (95%) range in 2100 is 2° C (± 1° C)… And the model is running a little hot relative to the observations. The 2016 El Niño should spike toward the top of the 2σ range, not toward the model mean. I am working on a more detailed post on this and “Gavin’s Twitter Trick,” that I hope to post later this week – So I won’t be responding to comments about the hotness of the models in this thread.
Ross Douthat had an excellent column on this in the New York Times (of all places)…
Neither Hot Nor Cold on Climate
Ross Douthat JUNE 3, 2017
LIKE a lot of conservatives who write about public policy, my views on climate change place me in the ranks of what the British writer Matt Ridley once dubbed the “lukewarmers.”
Lukewarmers accept that the earth is warming and that our civilization’s ample CO2 emissions are a major cause. They doubt, however, that climate change represents a crisis unique among the varied challenges we face, or that the global regulatory schemes advanced to deal with it will work as advertised. And they raise an eyebrow at the contrast between the apocalyptic, absolutist rhetoric with which these schemes are regularly defended and their actual details, which seem mostly designed to enable the globe’s statesmen to greenwash the pursuit of economic and political self-interest.
More specifically, lukewarmers look at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s official projections and see a strong likelihood that rising temperatures will drag on G.D.P. without leading to catastrophe. They look at the record of climatological predictions and see a pattern in which observed warming hugs the lower, non-disastrous end of the spectrum of projections. And they look at the substance of the Paris accord, which papered over a failed attempt to set binding emission rules with a set of fine-sounding promises, and see little to justify all the anguish and despair over Donald Trump’s decision to abandon it.
[…]
Although, I do take issue with is this statement:
Lukewarmers accept that the earth is warming and that our civilization’s ample CO2 emissions are a major cause.
The Earth’s average surface temperature has warmed since the 1600’s and our CO2 emissions have played a role in that warming. Relative to the total carbon flux, our emissions are hardly “ample” and 20-30% doesn’t strike me as a “major cause.”
And I would also take issue with Mr. Douthat’s answer to his own challenge:
I’ll answer that challenge myself: My own alarm over climate change has gone up modestly since the Obama-era cap-and-trade debates, as the decade or more in which observed warming was slow or even flat — the much-contested warming “pause” — has given way to a clearer rise in global temperatures.
If you chart this spike against the range of climate change projections, it brings the trend up into the middle of climatologists’ scenarios for the first time in some years. Maybe that will be temporary and it will fall back. But the closer the real trend gets to the worst-case projections, the more my lukewarmism will look Pollyannish and require substantial reassessment.
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The 2016 El Niño spike didn’t bring “the *trend* up into the middle of climatologists’ scenarios.” The bottom of the 2σ range is the P97.5 case, 97.5% of the model runs resulted in more warming than P97.5. The model mean is the P50 case, 50% of the model runs resulted in more warming than P50. The top of the 2σ range is the P02.5 case, 2.5% of the model runs resulted in more warming than P02.5. A major El Niño spike should spike from P50 toward P02.5, not from P97.5 toward P50. For a discussion of this nomenclature see The Good, the Bad and the Null Hypothesis.
Lukewarmerism is well-grounded in science and economics. I suppose it could even be viewed as a climatological version of Pascal’s wager. Matt Ridley also has an excellent article on Lukewarmerism…
MY LIFE AS A CLIMATE LUKEWARMER
Published on: Tuesday, 20 January, 2015The polarisation of the climate debate has gone too far
This article appeared in the Times on January 19, 2015:
I am a climate lukewarmer. That means I think recent global warming is real, mostly man-made and will continue but I no longer think it is likely to be dangerous and I think its slow and erratic progress so far is what we should expect in the future. That last year was the warmest yet, in some data sets, but only by a smidgen more than 2005, is precisely in line with such lukewarm thinking.
This view annoys some sceptics who think all climate change is natural or imaginary, but it is even more infuriating to most publicly funded scientists and politicians, who insist climate change is a big risk. My middle-of-the-road position is considered not just wrong, but disgraceful, shameful, verging on scandalous. I am subjected to torrents of online abuse for holding it, very little of it from sceptics.
I was even kept off the shortlist for a part-time, unpaid public-sector appointment in a field unrelated to climate because of having this view, or so the headhunter thought. In the climate debate, paying obeisance to climate scaremongering is about as mandatory for a public appointment, or public funding, as being a Protestant was in 18th-century England.
[…]
Update:
Marlo Lewis has provided a handy list of the range of opinions that come under the “lukewarmer” label. I subscribe to each of these in some form or to some degree:
“In general, I would describe a ‘lukewarmer’ as someone who:
– Thinks anthropogenic climate change is real but very far from being a planetary emergency
– Takes due notice of the increasing divergence between climate model predictions and observations and the growing body of scientific literature challenging IPCC climate sensitivity estimates.
– Regards the usual pastiche of remedies — carbon taxes, cap-and-trade, renewable energy quota, CO2 performance standards – as either an expensive exercise in futility or a ‘cure’ worse than the alleged disease (depending how aggressively those policies are implemented).
– Is impressed by — and thankful for — the immense albeit usually unsung benefits of the CO2 fertilization effect on global agriculture and green things generally.
– Recognizes that poverty remains the world’s leading cause of preventable illness and premature death.
– Understands that plentiful, affordable, scalable energy (most of which comes from CO2-emitting fossil fuels) is essential to poverty eradication and progress towards a healthier, safer, more prosperous world.”
Update 2:
The main point of my article was to draw attention to how ad-hominem, vicious and personal the attacks on lukewarmers now are from the guardians of the flame of climate alarm. Though I had a huge and overwhelmingly positive response, I could not have wished for a better example of my point than some of the negative reactions to this article. An egregious example was the death threats I received from a Guardian contributor and Greenpeace “translator”, Gary Evans.
On 21 January The Guardian published an article by Dana Nuccitelli, specifically criticizing me. The article was illustrated with a picture of the severed head of a zombie. Beneath the article appeared the following comment from “Bluecloud”:
“Should that not be Ridley’s severed head in the photo?”
[…]
Other Lukewarmers like Dr. Pat Michaels, Chip Knappenberger, Dr. Judith Curry, Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr. John Christy are routinely subjected to similar ad hominem attacks from the “guardians of the flame of climate alarm.”
So… If you are a fellow Lukewarmer… What evidence would push you toward alarmism? What evidence would push you toward rejecting human impacts on the climate as being less than a rounding error? (Note: I view the impacts as only being slightly larger than a rounding error).
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ntesdorf: Yes. How likely is it that our total historical industrial output at 1% of the carbon cycle dominates it? Our annual output is lost in the data noise. The Antarctic ocean sink is the most significant unknown.
My main point is that the greenhouse effect (atmosphere T – no atmosphere T = 33 C) is an assumption that’s never been quantified by warmists, or if it has they’ve kept quiet about it.
They talk about spectral transmission of the atmosphere ignoring the accepted fact that IR transfers energy from surface to space even when it is absorbed. The key question being ignored is how fast is it transferred – the radiative delay.
My calculation is typically about 4 hours, which seems like a long time, but it doesn’t do much heating. The intuitive comparison is a 200W lightbulb heating a gym for 4 hours. I ignore convective and evaporative transfer which speed things up greatly.
Answer: ∆T = about 0.15 C, not 33 C.
The calculations (in my Radiative Delay article) are fairly simple. I’ve provided a spreadsheet. My challenge to warmists – luke or otherwise – is to show me where I’m significantly wrong. It’s a first order estimate to keep the physics simple, but I doubt that I’m out by a factor of 200.
dai
Simple physics indeed are the key to beginning to understand this. Start from 2 identical rocky planets the same distance from the sun. One has the earth’s atmosphere, the other has none. This may look like a difficult thought experiment, it’s tricky to do the real experiment as the Magrethian stores are not open this millenium (some kind of religious holiday for mice IIRC). So we have to do it in our heads…. OH NO WE DON’T !!!!! We have exactly the right “apparatus” already. It is called the moon.
Consider carefully the difference between the plot of moon surface regolith temperature over moon day/night versus earth surface temperature over earth day/night. One rotation on axis is enough to extract some basic physics. Clearly a gaseous atmosphere has a MODERATING effect on surface temperature. It is cooler in the day and hotter at night. Forget averages for the moment. We know what the waveform of the energy input is for any particular sq m. Compare the graphs between earth and moon and explain using simple physics how a gaseous atmosphere has a moderating effect on the surface temperature of a rock.
How exactly does the gas in the way make the rock cooler when exposed to the full sunlight? How exactly does the gas in the way make the formerly daytime heated rock lose less heat at night time? It’s sort of like it SLOWS DOWN the heat loss. Remember those graphs, X axis is TIME, very instructive to look at the slopes.
Planets which rotate relative slowly compared to the earth are quite interesting.
A large dense atmosphere (whatever its composition) has a large thermal mass and large thermal inertia.
But this is particularly so when one is dealing with a water world where there are phase changes to water. It is a matter of enthalpy.
“How exactly does the gas in the way make the rock cooler when exposed to the full sunlight?”
Absorption of solar near infrared by atmospheric water vapour, and some minor scattering.
As rv says, atmosphere acts as a buffer – cooler than surface during the day and warmer at night.
Transfer in most (moist) places mainly radiative via water vapour. Some thermal conductivity and evaporation.
Because surface radiation increases with T^4, daytime cooling reduces radiation more than nighttime warming increases it. So mean temperature increases to regain radiative balance over the daily cycle.
dai
“My main point is that the greenhouse effect (atmosphere T – no atmosphere T = 33 C) is an assumption that’s never been quantified by warmists”
greenhouse effect is a known misnomer, and the major issue is that it hides the difference between the effect of atmosphere, even without GHG, and the effetcts of GHG.
As The Reverend Badger pointed out, even without any GHE, atmosphere rises average temperature (because of T^4 law, lowering maximum temp lowers radiative loss much more than rising minimal temperature increase it).
Manmade warming was merely a plausible hypothesis that the data disproved with hiatus’ in the Argo sea surface temps, cooling of the stratosphere and warming of the troposphere whilst CO2 was still rising. This meant that nobody could separate out natural from manmade warming. All we actually knew was that the previous alarmism was unfounded, that models were inadequate for policy and that skepticism was proven to be the wiser outlook. Struck by the real world data disproving their apocalyptic scenarios some alarmists then decided to adjust the data instead of their opinion. This is the dogmatic bias that needs addressed! Believe what you like but don’t call that belief a science!
All correct… except for the bit about disproving their stated hypothesis.
While there is no evidence supporting catastrophic AGW… As nearly as I can tell, *their* hypothesis is that anthropogenic GHG emissions are the cause of >50% of the warming since 1950. I don’t see how that hypothesis can be proven or disproven. However, there is at least some evidence that anthropogenic GHG emissions are the cause some of the warming since 1950. Although it is not quantifiable without either a firm grasp of climate sensitivity or the 100% natural contribution.
GHG emissions are the cause of >50% of the warming since 1950. I don’t see how that hypothesis can be proven or disproven.
It will be disproven in time.
Or it was thought CO2 caused warming before 1950.
In a few years, are going to say it stated when China become the largest emitter of CO2?
Or China is currently more than twice US, and US was thought to be part of the major cause of global warming. And seems US will continue to lower it’s emiisions and China will continue to cause more [though China may not report it].
It’s proven now.
Let me rephrase that so I’m not misunderstood.
It’s disproven now.
“Lukewarmer” is just a stupid label. A position can only be described as scientific or unscientific or outside the realm of science. The position that observed global warming is mostly man-made is unscientific. To be scientific, “mostly” must be quantified precisely (51-100% is no good) and must be a result of rigorous statistical analysis of legitimate (not tampered) temperature data that rejects the null hypothesis (natural causes) A “100% consensus” is outside the realm of science. It is not even wrong. Climate models are math not science. Even if all the equations are correct, they don’t prove AGW. They only prove the math is correct. Mathematicians can prove the equations of ten-dimensional space, it doesn’t prove they exist. Science requires empirical evidence not just fantastic number crunching.
Climate model aren’t math either. Chaos theory IS math, and its math forbids to use Taylor’s theorem in chaotic systems, while this is just what climate models are doing. Math tells that if you try nonetheless, you’ll just get the kind of random BS that climate model provides, as they do.
Math tells that climate model are just useless BS.
Labeling a certain set of beliefs as lukewarmer is no more nonsensical than is labeling a certain physics theory as String theory.
It’s just a label that’s applied to a certain position.
Longer term geological evidence and the faint sun paradox essentially can rule out high climate sensitivity over the long term. We know that liquid oceans have been present on Earth as early as 4 billion years ago, when the sun was 30% less bright. This means temperatures cannot have been vastly different than today. As the sun strengthened feedbacks as high as 2 watts/m2/degC would have caused run away temperatures, and boiled the oceans. It seems likely that there are stabilizing effects on climate which lead a water covered planet like Earth to self-regulate temperatures
As a lukewarmer, here’s what it would take to make ME concerned about global warming:
1. Verification that the Stefan-Boltzmann law is wrong, and temperature increases at a much greater rate than the fourth ROOT of the radiation flux.
2. A drastic revision of Astrophysical theory, demonstrating that stars do NOT become more luminous as they age.
3. A drastic revision from geologists demonstrating that the earth and sun are NOT about 4.6 billion years old, and that the earth did NOT have liquid oceans and life going back about 4 billion years.
The possibility of all three of these happening is damn close to zero.
To add to your mysteries:
How did Mars have liquid oceans, some 3.5 to 4 billion years ago, as some claim, if the sun was weak at that time?
What was the Carboniferous climate? Great forests grew. Will these return with increased carbon dioxide?
Most people think of the Carboniferous as a hot, swampy forest with lots of ferns and big bugs. In the US, the Carboniferous is subdivided into the Mississippian (360-320 MYA) and the Pennsylvanian (320-300 MYA). The Mississippian was hot with a high CO2 concentration, the subsequent Pennsylvanian climate was very similar to that of today… relatively cool temperatures and about 400 ppm CO2.
Correct. The Carboniferous ice age began with high CO2, levels of which then fell to around about present concentration over millions of years, due to prolonged cold, which caused carbon dioxide to leave the air and enter the oceans.
Yep… Same thing happened in the Quaternary.
Re Climate sensitivity see
https://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-coming-cooling-usefully-accurate_17.html
It says:
“The IPCC AR4 SPM report section 8.6 deals with forcing, feedbacks and climate sensitivity. It recognizes the shortcomings of the models. Section 8.6.4 concludes in paragraph 4 (4): “Moreover it is not yet clear which tests are critical for constraining the future projections, consequently a set of model metrics that might be used to narrow the range of plausible climate change feedbacks and climate sensitivity has yet to be developed”
What could be clearer? The IPCC itself said in 2007 that it doesn’t even know what metrics to put into the models to test their reliability. That is, it doesn’t know what future temperatures will be and therefore can’t calculate the climate sensitivity to CO2. This also begs a further question of what erroneous assumptions (e.g., that CO2 is the main climate driver) went into the “plausible” models to be tested any way.
The IPCC itself has now recognized this uncertainty in estimating CS – the AR5 SPM says in Footnote 16 page 16 (5): “No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies.” Paradoxically the claim is still made that the UNFCCC Agenda 21 actions can dial up a desired temperature by controlling CO2 levels. This is cognitive dissonance so extreme as to be irrational. There is no empirical evidence which requires that anthropogenic CO2 has any significant effect on global temperatures.
The climate model forecasts, on which the entire Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming meme rests, are structured with no regard to the natural 60+/- year and, more importantly, 1,000 year periodicities that are so obvious in the temperature record. The modelers approach is simply a scientific disaster and lacks even average commonsense. It is exactly like taking the temperature trend from, say, February to July and projecting it ahead linearly for 20 years beyond an inversion point. The models are generally back-tuned for less than 150 years when the relevant time scale is millennial. The radiative forcings shown in Fig. 1 reflect the past assumptions. The IPCC future temperature projections depend in addition on the Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) chosen for analysis. The RCPs depend on highly speculative scenarios, principally population and energy source and price forecasts, dreamt up by sundry sources. The cost/benefit analysis of actions taken to limit CO2 levels depends on the discount rate used and allowances made, if any, for the positive future positive economic effects of CO2 production on agriculture and of fossil fuel based energy production. The structural uncertainties inherent in this phase of the temperature projections are clearly so large, especially when added to the uncertainties of the science already discussed, that the outcomes provide no basis for action or even rational discussion by government policymakers. The IPCC range of ECS estimates reflects merely the predilections of the modellers – a classic case of “Weapons of Math Destruction” (6).
I utterly reject the idea that we are involved in a great big misunderstanding, and it amazes me that so many otherwise intelligent people still believe we are . . It’s like a gang of robbers are holding up a bank, and some other customers are discussing what it is about doing business at a bank, these fellows don’t understand . .
The question also applies to the other side. What evidence would lead them to abandon CAGW hysteria.
Electro-shock therapy… 😆
Several trillion dollars of public funds have been squandered on global warming hysteria. There never was any evidence that climate sensitivity to increasing CO2 was high enough to cause dangerous global warming. Claims of wilder weather, etc. are pure fiction. Global warming alarmism is a failed hypothesis.
Since 1940 there has been ~22 years of positive correlation of temperature with CO2, and ~55 years of negative or ~zero correlation. The global warming hypo is contradicted by a full-Earth-scale test since 1940, when fossil fuel combustion accelerated. CO2 is NOT a significant driver of global warming.
The leading advocates of global warming hysteria and their institutions have profited handsomely from this obvious sc@m. What will dissuade them are huge lawsuits under civil RICO in the USA, and class action lawsuits elsewhere.
.
MACCRAY
Your post is a brilliant summary of the climate change scam that took you only three short, well written paragraphs.
But what we really want you to discuss is whether +2.0 degrees will really cause a climate disaster, or whether +2.0 degrees is perfectly safe, but +2.1 degrees will cause a disaster?
Also, we need to know how high the hills must be when we move up to the hiils to avoid the global warming flooding in the valleys where we now live?
Seriously now, I’m not sure if the CO2 correlation with average temperature should look at individual years.
I don’t trust the temperature data to be that accurate from year to year, so I look only at broad trends, and sI tart using satellite data as soon as it became available.
My own “correlation summary” is below:
Since 1940 there have been three different relationships of CO2 levels and average temperature:
1940 to 1975 Negative correlation
1975 to 2003 Positive correlation
2003 to 2015 Little or no correlation
My Conclusion:
Three different CO2 – average temperature relationships in just 75 years is strong evidence that CO2 levels do not control the average temperature of our planet.
Richard Greene wrote:
Since 1940 there have been three different relationships of CO2 levels and average temperature:
1940 to 1975 Negative correlation
1975 to 2003 Positive correlation
2003 to 2015 Little or no correlation””
Richard, your summary and mine are close – I say no significant warming since ~1997, you say since 2003. Close enough.
IN answer to your question (I hope):
IF climate is sensitive to increasing atmospheric CO2, that sensitivity is quite low, less than 1C/(2xCO2) and it is unlikely that CO2-induced warming will exceed 1C, and highly unlikely it will reach 2C.
As we published in 2002::
“Climate science does not support the theory of catastrophic human-made global warming – the alleged warming crisis does not exist.”
Then there is the wild card:
I am still awaiting an intelligent response to my 2008 observation that atmospheric CO2 LAGS temperature by ~9 months in the modern data record. The best response to date is “It MUST BE a feedback effect”. Right-o, and if frogs could fly they wouldn’t have to bump around on their butts. 🙂
Best regards, Allan
CO2 absorbs IR from the ground and thermalizes it within a few feet of the ground.
I use a figure of 50m for IR mean free path at ground level, though I’ve seen a wide range of values suggested.
At TOA, CO2 absorbs and re-radiates IR, making an opaque layer to 15-micron IR,
Radiative gasses are largely excited and de-excited in collisions – mainly with N2 and O2. Opacity implies a passive absorber. Air with RGs is active and bathed in a photon sea of its own creation.
Central to the whole AGW issue is how fast this radiation transfers heat from the Earth’s surface to space. That’s the radiative delay I mentioned above. It varies with wavelength. I start with a mean value measured as downwelling at the surface.
http://brindabella.id.au/climarc/dai/RadiativeDelay/RadiativeDelayInContext170828.pdf
dai
Excerpting my post from above, for Rev. Badger and others:
When the climate science community ignores credible evidence such as this, is it because they think it is irrelevant or because it makes their heads hurt to think outside their comfort zones?
Regards, Allan 🙂
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/09/25/is-climate-lukewarmism-legitimate/comment-page-1/#comment-2620948
[excerpted]
I proved in January 2008 (published on icecap.us) that CO2 lags temperature at all measured time scales, from ~~300 to 800 years in the ice core record to ~9 months in the modern data record, on a shorter time cycle. The proof is that dCO2/dt changes ~contemporaneously with global temperature, and its integral atmospheric CO2 lags temperature by about 9 months. Here is an approximation: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:1979/mean:12/derivative/plot/uah5/from:1979/scale:0.22/offset:0.14
If ECS was significant, CO2 would not lag temperature at all measured time scales and this close relationship would not be apparent in the data record.
My conclusion does NOT mean that current temperature change is the only or even the primary driver of increasing CO2 – other major drivers of increasing CO2 could include fossil fuel combustion, deforestation, deep ocean exsolution of CO2, etc.
Humlum et al published a conclusion similar to mine in 2013, but the climate science community is only now starting to openly discuss this subject – I think it is important, far too important to be ignored.
******************
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2017/07/20/alarums-and-excursions/comment-page-1/#comment-2559727
RE a successful predictive track record. We published the following in 2002*.
“The ultimate agenda of pro-Kyoto advocates is to eliminate fossil fuels, but this would result in a catastrophic shortfall in global energy supply – the wasteful, inefficient energy solutions proposed by Kyoto advocates simply cannot replace fossil fuels.”
We also wrote in the same article, prior to recognition that the current ~20 year “Pause” was already underway:
“Climate science does not support the theory of catastrophic human-made global warming – the alleged warming crisis does not exist.”
Regards to all, Allan
* Source:
PEGG, reprinted in edited form at their request by several other professional journals , The Globe and Mail and La Presse in translation, by Baliunas, Patterson and MacRae.
http://www.apega.ca/members/publications/peggs/WEB11_02/kyoto_pt.htm
http://www.friendsofscience.org/assets/documents/KyotoAPEGA2002REV1.pdf
I do consider myself a “lukewarmer”. What would push me towards more alarm is I’m seeing the possibility of a “step factor” in how the temps are moving that creates end point problems in averaging and leads to inadvertent cherry picking when you look at 10 or 20 year trends. So I want to see what temps do over the next couple years post the big 2016 spike. Looking at UAH, do they stay around that .4C area or come down a bit, even if higher than the previous .2C run we had there? So far we haven’t seen anything close to the falloff in temps we saw after ’98, but it’s still a bit early to say as well.