NASA’s Aqua Satellite, used to measure global temperature from space
An article in the prestigious scientific journal Nature reports that the most comprehensive, reliable method we have of measuring global average temperature reveals a decadal warming rate of just about 0.09C per decade. That’s about half the rate predicted by the computer models on which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and various government agencies rely for their predictions of climate doom.
Why’s that significant? Because it undermines the models’ credibility—and the models are the only basis for predictions of future temperature, which are the only basis for policies meant to mitigate future warming.
Oooops!
That article appeared in Nature 24 years ago—January of 1994. And it covered a trend spanning only 15 years, which is pretty short to carry any great significance.
So climate alarmists can heave a sigh of relief, right?
Wrong.
Because a new article, by the same two authors, published yesterday in the Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, found essentially the same thing: a warming rate of 0.095C per decade, this time spanning not 15 but 38 years.
That’s still half the rate predicted by the models.
In other words, after spending billions of dollars on research and refinement, the models are no more credible in their predictions than they were 24 years ago.
The typical response of alarmists is to blame the data, not question the models. The authors of both these studies—John R. Christy and Richard T. McNider—conclude this year’s article with a gentle rebuke of that unscientific method:
this result … suggests many explanations including the possibility that that the average feedbacks of the CMIP-5 generation of climate models are likely skewed to favor positive over negative relative to what is present in the actual Earth system. As noted, we cannot totally discount that natural variability or errors in forcing might also account for the discrepancy between modeled and observed TTCR. However, given the facts that the processes controlling the uptake of energy by oceans and the transfer of heat in the tropical atmosphere are largely parameterized, it is not scientifically justified to dismiss model error, possibly substantial, as one source of the discrepancy.
Richard Arnold says
So this means there is global warming. Right? Albeit only 0.513 degrees Fahrenheit over a 30 year period. Right?
So when others ask me if there is global warming, I must say yes. Right?
E. Calvin Beisner says
Yes, there’s global warming—as there’s been many times in the past, intermittent with global cooling. That it’s happened doesn’t, of course, tell us what (singular or plural) caused it or how long it’s going to continue.
Mark Landsbaum says
The warmists have defined the issue in their terms and tricked opponents into debating terminology. If you’re an opponent, they insist that you “deny global warming.” Of course, that’s nonsense. If you’re an opponent, you actually deny man-made catastrophic global warming caused by CO2 emissions that cause irreversible harm. That’s a bit different.What opponents deny is an alarmism the warmists have conflated to “global warming.” Or more recently “climate change,” which is equally disingenuous. Climates never have been static. They have changed as long as they’ve existed.
Scott Drysdale says
Good information. Sadly the hyperbole and misleading forecasts by Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth inatigated an amydgala hijack on the masses circumventing their gray matter reasoning capability. Fight or flight action is a poor substitute for the scientific method.
CP Snow warned these days would come in his famous REDE lecture last century entitled… “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution”. The masses think they know science but do not and therefore most easily deceived by modern day snake oil salesmen.
E. Calvin Beisner says
Thanks, Scott, for recommending Snow’s essay. It is delightful. It’s also a very interesting example of precisely what it discusses. Snow was of course a great scienitst and to some extent a fine literary figure, but I suspect, based on what I perceive as his quite mistaken notions of the future (from his perspective in 1959), that he didn’t understand economics or politics terribly well, which is why he seemed so pessimistic about the prospects for Great Britain and the United States versus the Soviet Union. Nonetheless, he was quite right to bemoan the widespread ignorance of science among literary intellectuals, and of literature among scientific intellectuals. Oh, for some revival of the old “Renaissance man”!