Wednesday, August 27, 2014

Excuses for the 18 year 'pause' of global warming take a quantum leap up to #52

"If you can't explain the 'pause', you can't explain the cause"




Thanks to a quote-rich Andrew Revkin/New York Times article today, the updated list of excuses for the 18 year "pause" or "hiatus" of global warming has taken a quantum leap up to #52:

An updated list of at least 29 32 36 38 39 41 52 excuses for the 18 year 'pause' in global warming, including recent scientific papers, media quotes, blogs, and related debunkings: 

1) Low solar activity

2) Oceans ate the global warming [debunked] [debunked] [debunked]

3) Chinese coal use [debunked]

4) Montreal Protocol

5) What ‘pause’? [debunked] [debunked] [debunked] [debunked]

6) Volcanic aerosols [debunked]

7) Stratospheric Water Vapor

8) Faster Pacific trade winds [debunked]

9) Stadium Waves

10) ‘Coincidence!’

11) Pine aerosols

12) It's "not so unusual" and "no more than natural variability"

13) "Scientists looking at the wrong 'lousy' data" http://

14) Cold nights getting colder in Northern Hemisphere

15) We forgot to cherry-pick models in tune with natural variability [debunked]

16) Negative phase of Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation

17) AMOC ocean oscillation

18) "Global brightening" has stopped

19) "Ahistorical media"

20) "It's the hottest decade ever" Decadal averages used to hide the 'pause' [debunked]

21) Few El Ninos since 1999

22) Temperature variations fall "roughly in the middle of the AR4 model results"

23) "Not scientifically relevant"

24) The wrong type of El Ninos

25) Slower trade winds [debunked]

26) The climate is less sensitive to CO2 than previously thought [see also]

27) PDO and AMO natural cycles and here

28) ENSO






35) Scientists forgot "to look at our models and observations and ask questions"

36) The models really do explain the "pause" [debunked] [debunked] [debunked]


37) As soon as the sun, the weather and volcanoes – all natural factors – allow, the world will start warming again. Who knew?


38) Trenberth's "missing heat" is hiding in the Atlantic, not Pacific as Trenberth claimed [debunked] [Dr. Curry's take] [Author: “Every week there’s a new explanation of the hiatus”]


39) "Slowdown" due to "a delayed rebound effect from 1991 Mount Pinatubo aerosols and deep prolonged solar minimum"



[Before this new paper, anthropogenic aerosols were thought to cool the climate or to have minimal effects on climate, but as of now, they "surprisingly warm" the climate] 

42) 'Missing heat' is not "supported by the data itself" in the "real ocean":
"it is not clear to me, actually, that an accelerated warming of some...layer of the ocean ... is robustly supported by the data itself. Until we clear up whether there has been some kind of accelerated warming at depth in the real ocean, I think these results serve as interesting hypotheses about why the rate of surface warming has slowed-down, but we still lack a definitive answer on this topic."[Josh Willis]






48) "the argument that the hiatus will last for another decade or two is very weak and I would not put much faith in that. If the cycle has a period of 60-70 years, that means we have one or two cycles of observations. And I don’t think you can much about a cycle with just 1-2 cycles: e.g., what the actual period of the variability is, how regular it is, etc. You really need dozens of cycles to determine what the actual underlying variability looks like. In fact, I don’t think we even know if it IS a cycle." [Andrew Dessler]



" If the science is done right, the calculated uncertainty takes account of this background variation. But none of these papers, Tung, or Trenberth, does that. Overlain on top of this natural behavior is the small, and often shaky, observing systems, both atmosphere and ocean where the shifting places and times and technologies must also produce a change even if none actually occurred. The “hiatus” is likely real, but so what? The fuss is mainly about normal behavior of the climate system." [Carl Wunsch]

52) "The central problem of climate science is to ask what you do and say when your data are, by almost any standard, inadequate? If I spend three years analyzing my data, and the only defensible inference is that “the data are inadequate to answer the question,” how do you publish? How do you get your grant renewed? A common answer is to distort the calculation of the uncertainty, or ignore it all together, and proclaim an exciting story that the New York Times will pick up...How many such stories have been withdrawn years later when enough adequate data became available?" [Carl Wunsch]


3 comments:

  1. Can't seem to keep up with you...graphic was updated to 40 reasons this past weekend:

    http://www.c3headlines.com/2014/08/its-a-97-consensus-reasons-for-global-warming-pause-climbs-to-40-.html

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    Replies
    1. Thanks C3, appreciate it

      BTW - there may be some revisions on this very shortly to separate papers from media quotes so hold off for a bit on a new graphic if you're planning one. Thanks

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    2. Shall do. If you get a chance, send me an email when you publish new list. Thanks.

      c3headlines@gmail.com

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