All the talk now is about the Otto et al paper that just has come out, which claims that, well, the warming isn’t going to be like we thought. Oops.
Chart source: www.nature.com/ngeo/journal.pdf
Spiegel provides a first glimpse of the reaction from Germany: New Study On Climate Change: Earth Warming More Slowly Than Feared.
The Spiegel piece starts:
Most extreme scenarios less likely…
And later writes:
The annual mean temperature would thus be about 0.9°C and 2°C higher than pre-industrial times. Thus they are considerably less than the forecast of the UN climate scientists in the year 2007, who estimated an increase of 1 – 3°C .
Co-author Reto Knutti said the new estimates for the time period are welcome.”
Reasons cited for the slowdown are heat absorption by the oceans, reduced solar activity, and high levels of aerosols in the atmosphere. Spiegel ends the article with:
Lead author Otto says the slowdown is not evidence that climate change is not going to happen. ‘You would need a considerably longer time period to be able to say there is not going to be any warming,’ he told the ‘Guardian’. Such a phase could last up to 40 years.”
You’ve got to be kidding me. Now it’s 40 years?
The recent warming was just 18 years long 1980 – 1998, and that was enough for them to declare a permanent climate state of emergency. And now that it hasn’t warmed in 15 years, they’re telling us that we’ve got to wait another 25 years to say that it’s not man-made. Such BS.
First rats to abandon ship
So what would possibly compel a group of mostly alarmist scientists to produce such results? Answer: It has dawned on them that other factors really are playing a big time role and that it wouldn’t be long before they looked like fools. What we are seeing are the first rats swimming off the sinking ship that is man-made global warming.
That doesn’t stop The Graudian to comment the very same paper by Fiona Harvey as (I kid you not):
“Climate change: human disaster looms, claims new research”
You can’t make this up….
I think calling them “rats abandoning ship” isn’t accurate in light of Otto’s recent comments about the paper.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22567023
I’m probably premature with that characterization. Well, the ship is sinking anyway.
You might be premature if you look at one study in isolation. But the study suggests that the rate of warming will be significantly less than previously thought. A couple more years of no warming will moderate sensitivity even Moreover, warming of itself is a curiosity. It is the adverse consequences that are the concern. The most extreme “concerns” are listed on your 129 climate science scandals as being erroneous. For instance 3. African Agriculture; 30. Coral Reefs; 40. Mass Extinctions; 59. Himalaya-gate….
Combine the two factors, and the size of consensus projections for catastrophic global warming are a small fraction of what they were a few years ago.
Anthropogenic Global negative Warming.
So you see, the warmists always win.
“First rats to abandon ship” – kind of, but as Sebastian Lüning (Die kalte Sonne) once said:
A kind of academic life insurance for future research funding – but a step in the right direction
Why 40 years? I guess Alexander Otto learned that from the PIK – Potsdam institute for Climate Impact Research. He was a Research Assistant there (September 2007 – May 2011)
“The recent warming was just 18 years long 1980 – 1998, and that was enough for them to declare a permanent climate state of emergency. And now that it hasn’t warmed in 15 years, they’re telling us that we’ve got to wait another 25 years to say that it’s not man-made. Such BS.”
Spot on PG.
The sensitivity parameter is a statistical play in a small window of temperatures and CO2 levels and the assumption that the latter causes the first. We could also take world food production and we would get a food sensitivity parameter. With rising CO2 level and stagnating temperatures we will observe in one publication after the other that the estimate slowly declines, but this does not add anything to what we already know. If there is a reason to abandon the ship, it simply can be found in the past fifteen years of temperature data.
But the most absurd is the IPCC-confidence distribution for the parameter. It is impossible to obtain that in a honest way because we do not know how selective the window is chosen. This is not a random choice from world history but the result of an obsession and the inevitable post-hoc fallacy.
Just focus your attention on something unusual, for example a bird flew through your window and is now sitting in your room. If you are a statistician, you may try the null hypothesis that windows are left randomly open and that birds fly randomly around. You will find that the probability of the event on precisely this day is extremely low. This is ‘significant’ and you have to conclude that there is something in your house attracting birds. After some theorizing you may decide to compute a bird sensitivity parameter for your home. The value will be shocking high. You could also make a distribution for the real value and find the trivial result that the probability of a low sensitivity must be extremely low. Of course, you have to recompute the estimate from day to day. Because the birds do not return, the estimate declines but will remain disturbing high because you do not drop the event on the basis of which you began the exercise. The post-hoc fallacy is an important factor behind the decline effect, of which we see here a nice example.
From the BBC article:
“But when it comes to the longer term picture, the authors say their work is consistent with previous estimates. The IPCC said that climate sensitivity was in the range of 2.0-4.5C.
This latest research, including the decade of stalled temperature rises, produces a range of 0.9-5.0C.
“It is a bigger range of uncertainty,” said Dr Otto.
“But it still includes the old range. We would all like climate sensitivity to be lower but it isn’t.”
”
So after spending billions of Dollars on supercomputers and decades of research IPCC climate scientists have now found out that the future is more uncertain than they thought.
If we spend some billions more, cultivate another 10,000 “climate scientists”, feed and water them well and wait another 20 years, they will probably find out that the uncertainty is bigger still. Naive extrapolation; a hypothesis.
I think I’ll apply. This looks like free money. I like free money.
The distribution could be of a type in which mean and variance are correlated. With a lower mean we could get an increased variance. I do not give a penny for a distribution based on the post-hoc fallacy. They should do the computations on data not yet used in the process upto this point. I’ve posted a short comment that did not arrive here. Let it be: the essence is that we see the well known decline effect to be expected after the post-hoc fallacy.
They are talking about something which doesn’t physically exist
Climate sensitivity is a measure of how much temperatures will increase following an increase in CO2 levels.
The implication is that rising CO2 levels CAUSE temperatures to rise. If this is not the case climate sensitivity has no predicitive power at all. It’s simply rubbish.
This graph show temperatures have not kept in step with CO2 levels
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1960/plot/esrl-co2/scale:0.01/offset:-3.2
and this one shows temperature changes preceeding changes in CO2 levels
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/isolate:60/mean:12/scale:0.25/plot/hadcrut3vgl/isolate:60/mean:12/from:1958
Over the last few days people have been commenting on various blogs about lower predicitions for future temperatures.
The real story is the method being used has no predictive power at all.
Der Spiegel has a new writeup about Otto et al that looks like a mutilated version of the BBS article. Not written by Bojanowski but by an anonymous ultra alarmist. Does not mention the widening of the variance; says that climate models are proven correct. Well if you move the goalposts post facto, maybe that was the purpose of Otto et.al. in the first place.
http://www.spiegel.de/wissenschaft/natur/globale-erwaermung-studie-bestaetigt-bisherige-klimamodelle-a-901123.html
Clever lying by omission.
Sorry, BBC article, not BBS (Freudian slip I think)
Yeah, I noticed their change in music. No wonder Spiegel readers are the confused they are.