“Potsdam, We Have A Problem!”…As Observed Reality Diverges From Models, Europe’s Major Media Grow Skeptical

RahmstorfDoubts over climate science are snowballing among the elite media in Europe.

A wave of “climate science skepticism” in the media and other institutions is sweeping across Europe (see below).

The latest to shock the warmists is Switzerland’s leading daily Neue Züricher Zeitung (New Zurich Newspaper – NZZ), which obviously has noticed that things aren’t warming up like they were once projected. In its latest report the NZZ has declared the science as: very much in dispute. H/t: Tomislav Rus at Facebook.

The title of the NZZ’s latest piece: The Missing «Hotspot» In The Sky.

The NZZ writes that according to climate models, the air in the middle troposphere was supposed to warm up strongly, “however measurements show that the temperature has risen much less than previously forecast. More and more scientists are admitting that there is problem. […] gradually the impression that the climate models for the region of the equator have a problem is growing.”

The NZZ looks at the model prognoses of the troposphere, which projected a warming at an altitude of 8 to 12 km. It’s not showing up, it writes, and now scientists are scratching their heads.

The NZZ adds:

On average the CMIP5 models have over-estimated the warming of the troposphere, writes a team led by California scientist Benjamin Santer recently wrote in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Also in a draft for the first part of the UN IPCC assessment report, which will be published this year, the authors admitted a discrepancy for almost all models.”

It is dawning on the NZZ that the models are just nowhere near properly describing the Earth’s atmosphere and climate development. The Swiss daily is finally realizing that there is perhaps far more to the climate than just trace gas CO2:

In the climate system there are so many feedback mechanisms at work that today no scientist knows what would come out of the corrected models – first one has to know what the correction will look like.”

NZZ sums up the dilemma scientists now face:

To start with, when it comes to the ‘hotspot’, the scientists are dealing with a nut that is still too hard for them to crack.”

The Swiss NZZ is hardly the only flagship daily that has skepticism beginning to pour out of its media pages. What follows are some recent examples of reports that are sending quakes and tremors throughout Europe’s climate institutes, and causing pillars to crack.

Europe’s leading media casting serious doubt:

Spiegel here and here:

Global warming has stalled for 15 years. Experts thus are having doubts on the reliability of their prognoses.”

Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten:

Nothing indicates that climate here is running amok in global warming. […]  The fact is that we can’t see a link between the warming and the increased sea level. The global warming has until now been totally harmless.”

Die Welt here:

Scientists warn of ice age

Bild here and here,

Russian scientist sees next ice age approaching. Starting in 2014 it will start getting colder and colder. […] it was the fifth winter in a row that has been colder than normal, which is in complete contradiction to the climate prognoses of 13 years ago. Back then winters with snow and ice in Germany were viewed as an obsolete model.”

And the Telegraph in the UK:

Global warming: time to rein back on doom and gloom?”

Moreover, leading European meteorologists have been outing:

Sweden’s renowned Lennart Bengtsson:

…lower tropical troposphere, 20°S –20°N, has only got about a third of the warming compared to what is predicted by present climate models.”

Germany’s Dominik Jung here:

In the year 2000 the climate experts prophesied that winters with ice and snow in Germany would no longer exist. That this claim is false is shown by current facts, and in many regions with just a glance out the window!”

Dr. Karsten Brandt:

…it is also a fact that the horror scenarios produced for Germany are without any scientific merit.”

Warmist scientists have great doubts

Also leading warmist scientists like Hans von Storch and Fritz Vahrenholt have released best-selling books, expressing serious doubts on the computer projected climate catastrophe and aiming sharp criticism at the attempted political coup by the over zealously activist scientists at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.

Chasm between models and observations undeniable

So what’s behind the overall movement? Is skepticism just the latest hip trend?  Warming after all, is old and people are just sick of hearing about it – especially when shoveling snow during Easter.

It’s much more than just a trend. The real rocket fuel behind the media skepticism is the widening chasm between model projections and actually observed data. Each year the chasm grows wider, and now has reached such dimensions that even diehard warmist media are not even able to deny it. Time to fold.

Now they are hacking out a back door escape.

Rahmstorf pasted photo above: RealClimate blog.

17 responses to ““Potsdam, We Have A Problem!”…As Observed Reality Diverges From Models, Europe’s Major Media Grow Skeptical”

  1. Edward.

    “Time to fold.”

    Indeed it is, however will the politicians get it?

    Sceptical politicians are like hens teeth – non existent and isn’t that the real problem especially here in Europe and particularly: in Germany and here in Britain where the green madness becomes ever more fervent.

    The UK, where the chancellor George Osborne this April has just introduced a carbon floor price, which will mean the ongoing insanity of the green agenda is strangling the last remaining vestiges of life out of all the British manufacturing and heavy industy sector.

    It is good that the EU and European media is now slowly coming to its collective senses but already in certain countries – the damage has been done.

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/9150665/UK-carbon-tax-will-leave-British-companies-uncompetitive-warns-Energy-Select-Committee-chairman-Tim-Yeo.html

  2. Loodt Pretorius

    Evidently, the resolution of the models they use is wrong. Until they have a computer model that can give us the average temperature of the air inside the Grand Canyon, down to the resolution of a coke can, they are doodling and drawing coarse cartoons!

    1. DirkH

      That would do nothing. On that scale you would have to predict how a turbulence develops.

      As long as the climate of the Earth is simulated as a freely oscillating system (which it is not; it is IMHO a system coupled to space weather, i.e. the sun), they will never get a model with predictive skill beyond, just to mention an impossibly high bar, one month.

      1. Edward.

        The inter-relationship of the earth’s inner and outer fluid core and the resultant ‘geodynamo’ [+ coriolis] is the cause of the earth’s magnetic field – it helps the planet to maintain an atmosphere and protects us from some of the more dangerous effects of the ‘solar/space wind’.

        It is a mistake to think, that the earth’s atmosphere is a ‘closed system’. Irradiation in and out into space occurs and affects the balance of the atmospheric ‘thermometer’ – something over which the IPCC was in denial.

        Oceans too play a major role but climate simulation computer models are too basic to predict future scenarios – we don’t know the full picture and space, the solar influence plays a big part – how big we just do not know.

  3. Jimbo

    Has the media mogul Rupert Murdoch turned sceptic? Here he is in many quotes sounding like a typical alarmist.

    And here he is back in the new year.

    Independent – 11 January 2013
    “Mr Murdoch had been moved to speak out partly by an article in his Wall Street Journal by Matt Ridley, a provocative science author and a columnist on the paper. In a piece last Saturday, headlined “The Greening of the Planet”, Ridley wrote: …..”
    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/media/press/has-rupert-murdoch-turned-into-a-climate-change-sceptic-8448688.html

    1. DirkH

      WSJ is also Murdoch and did report about ClimateGate in 2009.

  4. Jimbo
  5. Graeme No.3

    Jimbo:
    Murdoch’s The Australian has been running occasional sceptical pieces for 3 years. Lately it has become quite sceptical with numerous articles and reader’s letters. It hasn’t stopped printing AGW articles or letters, but these are getting fewer as the faith dies out.

    I point out that the Sydney Morning Herald, and its stablemate The Age (Melbourne) still adhere to to the AGW line and are losing sales rapidly. The Australian is steady or gaining circulation in a declining market.

  6. Pethefin

    According to Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, the sea ice reached a new all-time-record along the Swedisch coast of the Baltic Sea on 29th of March:

    http://www.smhi.se/nyhetsarkiv/maximal-isutbredning-senare-an-nagonsin-tidigare-1.29691

    No screaming headlines though in the media…

  7. Casper

    I think the global cooling is not a real problem, currently. The European Crisis will stop any subventions via austerity programmes. You don’t believe? Just read what “Die Welt” reports:
    http://www.welt.de/politik/deutschland/article115077777/Der-Energiewende-droht-das-Geld-auszugehen.html
    I think that will happen by 2015…

  8. alex

    Newspapers sell when they have darmatic stories to tell. Climate change has gone the way of the dinosaurs and are not inetersting anymore. What is more inetersting is reading how the theory, or better still the hypothesis of anthropogenic global warming/climate change was wrong from the start and how the politicised scientists kept feeding it billions of dollars/euros while peole suffered.

    The NYT has even removed its climate change journalists me thinks. And that’s a real heavy one.

    The media have realised this and are shedding their pro-AGW propoganda. The politicians come next.

    1. DirkH

      The media are synchronized. For getting access to circles of power they sing the song the powers want them to sing.

      When they walk back from the CO2AGW then that is only because the priorities of the powerful have shifted.

  9. Bob Carter hade rätt – media missleder | The Climate Scam

    […] Och det verkar som åtminstone en del av de mest inflytelserika tidningarna i Europa börjar inse att det hela är ohållbart. […]

  10. Walter Schneider

    Hello Pierre, a minor typo in a prominent spot needs to be fixed: in “leading daily Neuer Züricher Zeitung,” Neuer must read Neue, es ist die Zeitung, nicht der Zeitung. [Thanks! -PG]

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