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Crises of Climate
Over at Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait forecasts impending doom now that the committees that oversee NASA and NOAA (The National Atmospheric Administration) will be chaired, respectively, by Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio.
Plait’s primary cause for concern is that both men are climate change “deniers” (a “staunch denier” in Cruz’s case). More specifically, he cites both of them saying that global warming has paused for more than a decade. As Cruz puts it in an interview Plait embeds:
[T]he data are not supporting what the advocates are arguing. The last 15 years, there has been no recorded warming. Contrary to all the theories that they are expounding, there has been should have been warming over the last fifteen years. It hasn’t happened. They don’t have an explanation for that.
So far as this un-credentialed writer is able to glean, this is factually incorrect: most data sets show that the Earth’s atmosphere has warmed since the mid-nineties. However — and it’s a big however — global temperatures have not risen anywhere near as much as the climate models predicted. How significant has the differences been? It’s complicated, but the models predicted warming between two and six times what has actually been observed over the past few decades, far less than what the doomsday scenarios peddled by popular media and certain former vice presidents promised (disclosure: some researchers have posited that the data is incomplete and that attempts to re-create it show that warming did happen much as expected).
This should not be terribly surprising. As Ricochet member Teunis Dorlas explained last year, it’s hard enough to model something as relatively simple as a parachute. Something as complicated and dynamic as the Earth’s atmosphere — with the dizzying number of variables that drive it and feed back upon each other — requires a herculean effort and, as the world does not actually have demigods, we have to get by with mere mortals using machines as best they can. Consider further that the research has political ramifications and requires the cooperation of thousands of people all over the globe, and it’s no wonder the whole thing’s contentious and messy.
So if there has been global warming — albeit, much less than predicted — does that make Cruz and Rubio worthy of the “denier” label? Not in my book, though both could use a sit-down by a sober-minded someone with familiarity beyond the basic talking points. In that same interview, Cruz goes on the cite the worries about global cooling that were in vogue in the 1970s as reason for skepticism, a point that seems well past its expiration date. If the senators are going to exert oversight on these matters, it would behoove them to do some better reading on them (I recommend Matt Ridley for starters) and to stop pretending that a nine-year-old documentary by a former vice president is the definitive work of climate science.
Simply put, being an informed skeptic requires you address the best the other side offers, not just its hysterical weak-men and straw-men. Phil Plait’s a decent and fair-minded enough person to write about the warming pause in another article and — while he disagrees in part — he makes concessions that would likely get him booed off a stage shared with Al Gore (“To be clear, warming over the past few years has slowed a bit compared with a few years before but…”) and that kind of back-and-forth is more likely to lead us to better discussions and smarter decisions.
But returning to his piece on Cruz and Rubio, Plait concludes that he “can’t imagine what disasters the GOP will wreak” now that it’s empowered by a bunch of anti-science whack-jobs. That’s not quite a prediction, but it’s close. It’ll take a few years to get a definitive answer, but I’ll wager Plait’s political prognostications on this aren’t a lot better than most climate models.
Published in General
For the life of me I can’t figure out why no politician has framed it the way you just did (that I know of).
Isn’t it funny that if you say you’re afraid of a nuclear confrontation with Iran or Russia people say you’re paranoid, but if you say you’re afraid of climate change they will say you’re a deep, concerned person?
Bailey is inaccurate, which is a venal sin for a “science” writer. Lomborg accepts many of the assumptions of earth-worshippers without question.
But Matt Ridley is simply superb. So are many of the writers at WattsUp, especially Eschenbach, whose thermostat analogies for sea temperatures and equatorial weather are stunningly clear-sighted and explained.
Tom, you may also find this of interest:
NEW PAPER: Why Models Run Hot: Results From An Irreducibly Simple Climate Model
From Briggs & Monckton. Briggs has been one of the key statisticians on the skeptic side of things.
Well, up until just a few months ago, Ridley was in the same camp as I.
My sense of Lomborg is that he is willing to claim to accept warmist dogma that the Earth is warming and humans are a contributing cause, for the reason that it allows him to shed the label of “denier” as he makes his argument that there are many more serious problems we should be focusing on, and that our dollars are much better spent on those problems.
Just skimmed it — I’ll check it out more carefully later — but that article and the paper it discussed both seemed to say what I wrote in the OP: that there has been warming, though it’s negligible.
And:
Am I not correct?
I remember Phil Plait because he was one of the leftists who banned me from his site years ago because I had the temerity to disagree with some silly thing someone wrote there.
Since then I’ve seen more endless examples of fraud and deceit by people like him who claim
global warmingclimate change will incinerate the planet, or something.Whatevs, Phil. As far as I’m concerned you’re just another shameless liar, and I have no interest in anything you have to say.
You’re conflating two different points. What you said in the OP was that there’s been warming in the last 15 years, that is incorrect.
The model in the link I provided goes back farther than 15 years. During that period, there as been warming if you use the adjusted data that feeds the alarmist models.
Monckton et al are showing what’s wrong with the models, not the data. Watt’s addressed the data.
From everything I’ve read, the warming in the 20th century only exists in the adjustments. And the adjustments made always increase the warming trend, whether it’s by increasing current warming, or decreasing prior warm periods.
The adjustments are made to the surface temperature data, not the atmospheric data, which shows a very small amount of warming though still way below that predicted by the models. In the end it doesn’t really make any difference, whether it’s no warming or slight warming the actual data demonstrates something is seriously wrong with the models.
I find Climate Audit the best place for detailed analysis of specific issues. Watt is a good overall source, though I dislike and distrust Monckton ever since I realized several years ago he used one of the tricks employed by the alarmist lobby, truncating trend charts to only show the years most favorable to his theories.
That’s not the worst thing in the world, as Briggs points out: you always need a start and a finish point, and those are always arbitrary.
What can be dishonest is to truncate a trend (“hide the decline”) when revealing that data would show that the rest of your data is unreliable. This is known as “lying by omission”, of course.
I’d be interested to hear that Monckton’s done something like that.
I just came across this from Judith Curry at climatologist at Georgia Tech on her blog Climate Etc.
Curry has become more skeptical over the years and is probably best described today as a “lukewarmist” and has taken a lot of flack for her willingness to consider alternative views. I’ve found her to be thoughtful and credible.