Climate change and the "Economist."...

billc

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Interesting how things are changing in the world of climate hysteria...

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/03/climate-change-endgame-in-sight.php

In my Weekly Standard cover story about the fallout from the “Climategate” email scandal three years ago, I offered the following question by way of prediction:

Eventually the climate modeling community is going to have to reconsider the central question: Have the models the IPCC uses for its predictions of catastrophic warming overestimated the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases?

The article then went on to survey emerging research (U.S. government funded!) casting doubt on high estimates of climate sensitivity, along with alternative explanations on some climate factors, such as “black carbon.” The question in my mind the time was how long this would take to begin to break out into the “mainstream” scientific and media world.

Figure 1
That day appears to have arrived. The new issue of The Economist has a long feature on the declining confidence in the high estimates of climate sensitivity. That this appears in The Economist is significant, because this august British news organ has been fully on board with climate alarmism for years now. A Washington-based Economistcorrespondent admitted to me privately several years ago that the senior editors in London had mandated consistent and regular alarmist climate coverage in its pages.

The problem for the climateers is increasingly dire. As The Economistshows in its first chart (Figure 1 here), the recent temperature record is now falling distinctly to the very low end of its predicted range and may soon fall out of it, which means the models are wrong, or, at the very least, that there’s something going on that supposedly “settled” science hasn’t been able to settle. Equally problematic for the theory, one place where the warmth might be hiding—the oceans—is not cooperating with the story line. Recent data show that ocean warming has noticeably slowed, too, as shown in Figure 2 here.
 

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Everyone informed on the matter agrees that climate change is occurring. Predicting the future is difficult, however. This seems to be about the rate of increase, not the fact of increase.
 

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billc

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Hmmmm...not what they said about the last 20 years...

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/new...ientists-puzzled/story-e6frg6z6-1226609140980

Twenty-year hiatus in rising temperatures has climate scientists puzzled

But the fact that global surface temperatures have not followed the expected global warming pattern is now widely accepted.
Research by Ed Hawkins of University of Reading shows surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range projections derived from 20 climate models and if they remain flat, they will fall outside the models' range within a few years.
"The global temperature standstill shows that climate models are diverging from observations," says David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
"If we have not passed it already, we are on the threshold of global observations becoming incompatible with the consensus theory of climate change," he says.

But wait...I thought emissions caused global warming...

Another paper published in Geophysical Research Letters on research from the University of Colorado Boulder found small volcanoes, not more coal power stations in China, were responsible for the slowdown in global warming.

And from the other article...

OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.” . . .
 

Sukerkin

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It's not really a surprise tho' is it? Hands up who really thought that the theoretical predictions of a huge, chaotic and complicated system would neatly match the observations as they came in? There are far too many unknowns and far too many lags and sinks in the system for that to happen.

For me, I am still waiting for my personal Rapid Inversion theory to gain a few more backers :D. What this is based upon is the fact that, after a period of warming following the last major ice age, the process rapidly inverted back into glaciation again. This was probably due to fresh water melting from North America into the North Atlantic ocean (rather than much further south as it previously did).

Because it was caused, so it is thought, by the damming effects of ice sheets in the Great Lakes area, it'll probably not happen again and it'll just continue to get warmer for quite a while before the system does genuinely tip back into a cooling cycle once more.
 
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billc

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HERETIC!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

They know where you live Sukerkin...:ultracool

I can't wait till al gore gets finished with you...
 

Sukerkin

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:lol: You won't get me Al Gore! You don't frighten me with your hockeystick! :shudders in terror and hides behind the duvet (for that deflects all weapons as everyone knows :D) :
 

Carol

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:lol: You won't get me Al Gore! You don't frighten me with your hockeystick! :shudders in terror and hides behind the duvet (for that deflects all weapons as everyone knows :D) :

I know mine does!! :D
 

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Even if another effect did kick in to cool the planet, the fact would remain that anthropogenic effects are a significant upward pressure on temps.
 
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billc

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Hmmmm...

Another paper published in Geophysical Research Letters on research from the University of Colorado Boulder found small volcanoes, not more coal power stations in China, were responsible for the slowdown in global warming.
 
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billc

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On this article...commentary by Michael Barone...

http://washingtonexaminer.com/micha...ella-moment-on-global-warming/article/2525820

Emily Litella was the Saturday Night Livecharacter who would spin out lengthy theories based on her misunderstanding of a word or phrase and, when her error was pointed out, would respond crisply, “Never mind.”
The Economist, which I read and revere and for which I have on occasion written (they assign reviews of books byEconomist writers to outsiders), has long been convinced that we on earth face a crisis caused by man-made global warming. Now the newspaper (as it refers to itself) seems to have reached an Emily Litella moment.
“Global warming slows down,” reads a line on the cover. It references a long story in the science and technology section headlined, “A sensitive matter.”

The writer begins by noting something global warming “skeptics” and “deniers” have been pointing to for some time: “Over the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar.”
In other words, the regnant global warming alarmist theory has not accurately predicted the last 15 years of climate.
 

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Anyone who does any research on the climate changes on earth should understand that warming and cooling are both natural for our planet's climate.
To say we are causing it is just silly. However we can accelerate it. What people don't understand is that we think in relatively short periods of time while our planet operates on a much longer and more gradual scale. The impact that a half degree increase can have above the normal progression is HUGE. But even still, I think our impact on our environment through clear cutting huge expanses of forest and pollution of waterways causes more harm than anything.

The sad thing is we have ways to make it better, but nobody is willing to do it. Not all of it is costly either. I recently saw a study, where they used low cost materials on the outside of building's walls to grow grass, moss, flowers etc. On the outside of building's. This lowered polutants in the air in the alleyways this was tested in, increased oxygen levels and lowered the temperature inside the buildings. Personally I think it's a great idea. But will we ever see it in major production? Of course not.
We have evidence that rooftop gardens help cool buildings and help pollution as well but we don't see much of that either.

I honestly think people overdo the panic from global warming sometimes. But I also think people underestimate our negative impact on the environment as well.

One of my favorite quotes: "Only when the last animal is hunted, the last tree is cut down. And when the last river is poisoned will we finally realize that we can not eat money."
 
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billc

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I agree that warming and cooling happen on the planet...I sit where mile high glaciers used to exist.

However we can accelerate it.

Apparently, for the last 15 years we haven't been...despite increasing levels of green house gases...

The sad thing is we have ways to make it better, but nobody is willing to do it

--natural gas fraking
--nuclear

No one likes nuclear anymore...but that may be changing
 
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billc

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And then you have the reality on the ground in cold countries...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/e...-warming-that-we-should-be-worried-about.html

It’s the cold, not global warming, that we should be worried about

No one seems upset that in modern Britain, old people are freezing to death as hidden taxes make fuel more expensive

The reaction to the 2003 heatwave was extraordinary. It was blamed for 2,000 deaths, and taken as a warning that Britain was horribly unprepared for the coming era of snowless winters and barbecue summers. The government’s chief scientific officer, Sir David King, later declared that climate change was “more serious even than the threat of terrorism” in terms of the number of lives that could be lost. Such language is never used about the cold, which kills at least 10 times as many people every winter. Before long, every political party had signed up to the green agenda.

Since Sir David’s exhortations, some 250,000 Brits have died from the cold, and 10,000 from the heat. It is horribly clear that we have been focusing on the wrong enemy. Instead of making sure energy was affordable, ministers have been trying to make it more expensive, with carbon price floors and emissions trading schemes. Fuel prices have doubled over seven years, forcing millions to choose between heat and food – and government has found itself a major part of the problem.

This is slowly beginning to dawn on Ed Davey, the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. He has tried to point the finger at energy companies, but his own department let the truth slip out in the small print of a report released on Wednesday. The average annual fuel bill is expected to have risen by £76 by 2020, it says. But take out Davey’s hidden taxes (carbon price floor, emissions trading scheme, etc) and we’d be paying an average £123 less. His department has been trying to make homes cheaper to heat, and in a saner world this would be his only remit: to secure not the greenest energy, but the most affordable energy.
By now, the Energy Secretary will also have realised another inconvenient truth – that, for Britain, global warming is likely to save far more lives then it threatens. Delve deep enough into the Government’s forecasts, and they speculate that global warming will lead to 6,000 fewer deaths a year, on average, by the end of the decade. This is the supposed threat facing us: children would be less likely to have snow to play in at Christmas, but more likely to have grandparents to visit over Easter.
 

Sukerkin

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Aye, nuclear will be coming on-line soon enough. There might be a bit of delay tho' thanks to too much hand-wringing and scare-mongering delaying the onset of the necessary civil works.

Of course all bets are off if we come up with a decent solar alternative - and that may still happen.
 

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Hmmmm...not what they said about the last 20 years...

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/new...ientists-puzzled/story-e6frg6z6-1226609140980


<Twenty-year hiatus in rising temperatures has climate scientists puzzled>




But wait...I thought emissions caused global warming...



And from the other article...
Even your graph shows a long term trend. There was a similar pause 1950 to 1980 but overall the trend is up and has been since 1910. Looking at my graph it is entirely possible that that trend has peaked but that remains to be seen. In the mean time we have exceptionally hot conditions and unusual climatic events occurring in Australia.

I never said the cause was man-made. I just don't know how much of recent increases are caused by emissions and how much is natural warming and cooling that has occurred for millennia. :asian:
 

arnisador

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Aye, nuclear will be coming on-line soon enough. There might be a bit of delay tho' thanks to too much hand-wringing and scare-mongering delaying the onset of the necessary civil works.

I'm a big fan of nuclear power. Bring it!
 

Sukerkin

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Aye, I'm not denying that it has attendant problems of it's own with the current fuel choices but it's our only hope for now of keeping the lights on until we get a better solution.
 

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