Spiegel has stopped believing. The flagship news magazine writes:
Global warming has stalled for 15 years. Experts thus are having doubts on the reliability of their prognoses. The temperature development is moving along the lowest margins of the UN scenarios.”
Science reporter Axel Bojanowski at Spiegel here looks at the performance of climate models, claiming that a few aren’t doing too bad, while the alarmist ones are failing. As a successful model he cites Myles Allen of Oxford University and his colleagues. Yet most fail, and thus Bojanowski writes:
For this reason some scientists now harbor the hope that the pessimistic climate prognoses could be wrong.”
They are, and tomorrow’s post will show just how miserably poor the models have been. In fact if policymakers had acted opposite of what the models suggested, far better policy would have been the result.
In the report, what Bojanowski is telling us is: sure, many models are not doing well, but I found one that is kind of right.
When you look objectively at the performance of climate models over the last 20 years, there’s really only one rational conclusion that can be drawn: Their performance has been deplorable.
To explain why the alarmist models “could be” wrong, Bojanowski cites former Max-Planck Institute for Meteorology Director Lennart Bengtsson, who calls the current global temperature development “mind boggling“, saying that although CO2 emissions have increased drasticly, “global warming is prgressing considerably slower than expected.”
The same is true when it comes to the tropics, where warming was supposed to be galloping away by now, Bojanowski writes. Both Bengtsson and Spiegel are somewhat astonished that the Earth refuses to warm up. Bojanowski sums it up in Part 2:
Thus there is hope that climate change is progressing less dramaticly than suspected.”
Here you have to read between the lines. What Spiegel really wants to say is: We’ve stopped believing in the climate catastrophe. The climate models have performed like crap, but we are not yet ready to come out and admit it.
Remember, admitting you’ve been wrong for a quarter century takes time.
It’s called the slow walk back. In a few years (if temperatures still fail to rise) you would think they never believed in CAGW. The same is happening in the UK, but more stridently at the Express and Daily Mail. It is gathering pace. 🙂
No, all they have to do is admit the definitive evidence, that the system is broken, and that there is in fact no greenhouse effect, of increasing global mean surface temperature with increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. The atmosphere is fundamentally, globally warmed only by direct absorption of incident solar radiation (not by the planetary surface), and the only effect of increased carbon dioxide or other infrared-active gases is to allow quicker heat transport within the atmosphere, not to add or subtract more heat to the system.
Well a few days ago Der Spiegel had the decency of calling climate sceptics conspiracy theorists. Their source was the now retracted Lewandowsky paper.
So, one should ask Der Spiegel whether they believe that the moon landing has taken place. Because, by their own diffamatory articles, they are now moon landing hoax believers.
From the article:
“How many years, this is now a common question, has the increase of the temperature to stop, until climate scientists rethink their forecasts of future warming?”
My question is not the time. What’s about the CO2 increase?
The CO2 increase at Mauna Loa increased from 1998 to 2012 by 30.35ppm.
The average amount in December 2012 was 394.28ppm.
An increase of nearly 7.7%
The CO2 increase at Mauna Loa from 1959 to 2012 was 79.67ppm. This means that the increase from 1998 to 2012 is about 38% of the Mauna Loa measurement.
About one third of CO2 increase and the temperature is basically flat. Back to the drawing board! This is not science.
Silly question:
Has anyone actually checked where Mauna Loa is on the temperature difference map 2008-2012? http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/natur/bild-877941-447986.html
It’s basically in the white to light-blue area. I’ve never seen any world graphic that showed for Mauna Loa any increase in temperature. No increase at the source of our CO2 data?
Hi Pierre, I wish I could share your joy about the journalists at Der Spiegel coming to their senses. I would suggest there is still a long slog ahead. This afternoon’s edition of the English international newsletter of said publication has an article that bemoans the demise of the European Carbon Trading Market (Cap ‘n Trade): –
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/european-co2-emissions-reduction-system-is-broken-a-892134.html
Look at the obligatory picture of steam rising out of the cooling towers at a power station that accompanies the article; pure, plain and simple propaganda! Old habits die hard, it will take another generation of journalists before the global warming meme is put to rest.
Same newspaper, different viewpoint.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/european-co2-emissions-reduction-system-is-broken-a-892134.html
If twenty prophets are telling the future, there is always one with the most reasonable result. Ask your success prophet to tell the future again, and look what happens.
Admitting that you’re wrong, at least Spiegel have broken cover – we should cautiously welcome their ‘Damascene conversion’.
Though – will it start to thaw the permafrost which has seized up all of the thinking going on in the alarmist camp in the Bundesrat und der Reichstag? I very much doubt it.
But, but…. the media has always said there was a complete scientific consensus!
That is the problem with consensus, as it is only a “general agreement”. It doesn’t mean “proof”.
We say in German “Papier is geduldig”, which could be translated to “paper is tolerant”. Maybe “you can write or print anything you want” could fit the meaning quite well.
Amazingly, we use the exact same words and the exact same spelling in Afrikaans, except we would translate it as ‘paper is patient’, meaning, you can scribble just about any junk on it and it won’t argue back.
And some of the junk written as AGW reports would find some use if they printed it on double ply with perforations.
Seeing how climate works each and everday, one can see that climate is ever changing and not towards a catastrophic warming. In fact, I am incredulous that people who know nothing about weather and climate are such experts. Their reasoning is they have a long list of scientists and other professionals who endorse that AGW is happening.
Some of those experts include Piediatricians. As far as these models, well at least as a weather forecaster, our forecasts are verified daily. These jokers will probably be long dead before the fruits of their fanaticism is borne out.
With nothing to lose, they can make movie like ‘The Day After Tomorrow, where they actually depicted Republican White House officials as doubting climate change. It was an ugly and pernicious swipe at people who contend this is all hype.
This is the classical ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’, where nudity is replaced by Warming. A warming that actually needs more clothes..
But wait, if the Republicans in the beginning of the movie doubted the events that took place later in the movie, that makes them realists… I mean NOTHING of it was even remotely plausible…
Harry, language matters. No scientists doubt that the greenhouse effect is real. What has been properly questioned is the amplification of CO2 warming by added water vapor. The idea of greenhouse warming was proposed by Fourier while Thomas Jefferson was still alive (1824) and was experimentally demonstrated by the time of the American Civil War.
So that was before Prof Lowell found proof of the civilizations on Mars that left the irrigation ditches that he clearly observed through his telescope.? A time of great discovery indeed!
How long before the so-called experts loose their annoited status for being wrong? Soon I hope because their track records has already betrayed them.
In normal science, you come with a bunch of hypotheses and then through observation and tests, knock them done until only one (if you are lucky) survives. That is then tested more, and if it can predict new events, you turn it from hypothesis to theory …. which of course is subject to later data that may knock it down, too. But for a while, at least, you have found something useful and close to “truth”.
Here we are told that one of the models sort-of works. Which would be the normal thing to have happen, and then you would dump the others and run with the one you like until it didn’t work. But the IPCC won’t do this, Hansen can’t do this and nor can McKibben or Gore. Their message is in the high ends. They have to keep the other models in the mixture.
Pauchari now says we have to have at least 50 years of data before we can discount the IPCC narrative. Nice work if you can keep it. That is how long they will keep the alarming models running.
Can we just get back to ordinary hypothesis-testing-revision-testing-theory-testing? If we had been doing this since 1988 we would have stopped the CAGW gravy train. That is why we haven’t done it.
Actually none of the models have done well. Some conservative models
might still be in line with the present but they were well short in the 90s. So theor low forcing element can’t explain the warming that occured then. The only logical conclusion was that the warming was driven by something other than CO2 and CO2 is not the global thermostat.
[…] Spiegel was one of the first to run for the exits: Media Sea Change?! Der Spiegel Stops Believing…’Hot Debate Over Climate: How Reliable Are The Pr… The flagship German news magazine writes: ‘Global warming has stalled for 15 years. […]