Thoughts from Steve Hayward on the latest propaganda failure:
The temperature plateau and the persistent limitations and errors of the computer models strongly suggest the kind of “anomalies” that Thomas Kuhn famously explained should constitute a crisis for dominant scientific theories. What’s more, several papers recently published in the peer-reviewed literature conclude climate sensitivity is much lower than previously thought, making the problem of climate change much less likely to be catastrophic and more likely to be easily managed. But with the notable exceptions of the Economist and straight-shooting New York Times science blogger Andrew Revkin, these heterodox findings, which have steadily eroded the catastrophic climate change narrative, have received almost no media attention.
Despite all this, there has been not even the hint of a second thought from the climateers, nor any reflection that their opinions or strategies could bear some modification. The environmental community is so deeply invested in looming catastrophe that it’s difficult to envision a scientific result that would alter their cult-like bearing. Rather than reflect, they deflect, blaming the Koch brothers, the fossil fuel industry, and Republican “climate deniers” for their lack of political progress. Yet organized opposition to climate change fanaticism is tiny compared with the swollen staffs and huge marketing budgets of the major environmental organizations, not to mention the government agencies around the world that have thrown in with them on the issue. The main energy trade associations seldom speak up about climate science controversies. The major conservative think tanks have no climate change programs to speak of. The Cato Institute devotes just two people to the issue. The main opposition to climate fanaticism is confined to the Heartland Institute, the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and a scattering of relentless bloggers who have acquired surprisingly large readerships. That’s it. These are boutique operations next to the environmental establishment: The total budgets for all of these efforts would probably not add up to a month’s spending by just the Sierra Club. And yet we are to believe that this comparatively small effort has kept the climate change agenda at bay. It certainly keeps climateers in an uproar.
Well, someone has to do it.
I like his point about how little our understanding of a critical aspect, the temperature forcing of atmospheric CO2 concentration has changed in 110 years.
Incidentally, this sounds like something that will be miraculously rebutted within a few years with a definitive and highly obfuscated study by the usual suspects – just like it did with the Medieval Warm Period (solved with the “hockey stick”), the lack of urgency of predictions (“worse than we thought” models and the introduction of “extreme weather”), or the prolonged and growing deviation between prediction and reality (“missing heat”).
I don’t find this as surprising as he does. Nor do I believe for an instant that we don’t understand things way better than Arrhenius did. It’s just that, as we learn more, we learn more complexities as well.
In practice, it’s still very significant that the climate complexity has that much uncertainty. While I can’t see it as being a good idea to run a massive open-ended experiment on the earth’s atmosphere, we may yet get lucky that it turns out not to be a big deal. And when solar power and the like become actually cheaper than coal (probably around mid-century), people will stop using it on their own without need for world socialism, so adding CO2 is at least temporary.
I don’t see the problem here. The climate models work just fine – on paper. It’s only in the real world that they fail (for almost two decades a demonstrated zero capacity to predict the future, or even, run backwards, to accurately model the past). But, generally, the seem to work just fine if one simply totally ignores the real world.
/sarc
As for the missing heat problem… I have great faith that it will soon be found… most likely in the trunk of somebody’s car somewhere, right next to the stuffed ballot boxes.
I found the missing heat in the bottom of my sock drawer two years ago and have been converting it to Bitcoins under the radar, as the market for missing heat is pretty sketchy. I’m trading with human vermin with college degrees.
One a side note, Roy Spencer puts UHI at about 1.5 C, depending on population density, and we’ve already had about 0.5C of overall warming. Alarmists claim that 2C will bring about the collapse of civilization, and if you add background warming to UHI you get those two degrees. So I’m thinking that liberal cities are already dead, and we just have to eliminate the few survivors to put them out of their climate-induced misery. At the very least, we shouldn’t let them vote because they’ve been compromised by planet-destroying heat.
I’d also note the heat index, which at the upper ranges can rise by 2 or 3 C for a 5 percent change in humidity. Running your lawn sprinkler probably won’t wipe out human civilization, but it will certainly wipe it out within a several-block radius if winds are low. Who knew that a lawn sprinkler had such power?
Most likely, the missing heat from just over 4 years ago is somewhere out past Alpha Centauri by now… an the stuff generated after that is following right behind it.
My theory, which is mine, follows the lines I am about to relate.
The missing heat, which is missing from the air, is not in the oceans, where it is, therefore, still missing. The missing heat instead has collected, being thin at one end, much MUCH thicker in the middle, and then thin again at the far end, where, as it were, the middle is quite near the global poles. That is to say, that the missing heat is in the ice atop the oceans, and under the air, where temperatures have greatly increased, but not, sufficiently, according to this theory of mine, to actually change the state of the ice. That is to say that ice at 40 degrees below zero (Fahrenheit) , or in the alternative 40 degrees below zero Centigrade, what some theorists, although not I, are pleased to call “Celcius” may warm by as many as ten degrees, whilst not changing phase. So the ice is warmer, but warm ice, after all, is still ice.
I am confident any peer reviewer will find that , this theory of mine seems to have hit the nail on the head, accounting for the missing heat, AND the pause, while remaining entirely consistant with the consensus of scientific opinion regarding greenhouse brontosauruses — I mean, gasses.
Brilliant!!!! You need to apply for a grant. I can help you place sensors all across the ice to measure the increase in temp. (BTW does the ice in my drink count?)
The missing heat is being hoarded by the Koch Brothers, along with their money and political influence. Just ask Harry Reid.