It’s old news but it is heretical and fundamentally undermines the fanciful notion that man-made carbon dioxide emissions cause global warming. Plain denial of reality is no longer credible though the most orthodox of the warmists continue to maintain their beliefs. The real scientists just get back to work and try to understand what the models have missed and try to improve the models. The New York Times which has been one of the most ardent adherents to the orthodox line can no longer ignore reality.
The rise in the surface temperature of earth has been markedly slower over the last 15 years than in the 20 years before that. And that lull in warming has occurred even as greenhouse gases have accumulated in the atmosphere at a record pace. …
… in a climate system still dominated by natural variability, there is every reason to think the warming will proceed in fits and starts.
Of course the NYT cannot admit it was wrong or that the heretics were right. Instead it commends the “practitioners of climate science” for being “puzzled”. It will take much more before the NYT will reveal that many of these “practitioners” are little more than “charlatans of climate science”
But given how much is riding on the scientific forecast, the practitioners of climate science would like to understand exactly what is going on. They admit that they do not, even though some potential mechanisms of the slowdown have been suggested. The situation highlights important gaps in our knowledge of the climate system, some of which cannot be closed until we get better measurements from high in space and from deep in the ocean.
And then they make their most fundamental error when they write:
We certainly cannot conclude, as some people want to, that carbon dioxide is not actually a greenhouse gas. More than a century of research thoroughly disproves that claim.
But that is a fallacy. There is no direct evidence that carbon dioxide causes global warming. That is a conclusion reached because there was “no better explanation” given the assumption that man was causing global warming. This assumption came first as some kind of religious tenet and the rest has followed.
In fact the carbon cycle itself is not very well understood as some would claim. We do not actually know how much is absorbed by the oceans. The number – and it is a very large number – used for that comes from equating carbon dioxide production and absorption in some assumed pre-industrial equilibrium which itself has never existed.
Instead of coming to the the most parsimonious explanation which is that the effect of carbon dioxide itself – let alone man-made carbon dioxide – on climate has been grossly exaggerated, the NYT repeats some of the most convoluted fantasies regarding the “lost heat”.
So the real question is where all that heat is going, if not to warm the surface. And a prime suspect is the deep ocean. Our measurements there are not good enough to confirm it absolutely, but a growing body of research suggests this may be an important part of the answer.
Exactly why the ocean would have started to draw down extra heat in recent years is a mystery, and one we badly need to understand. But the main ideas have to do with possible shifts in winds and currents that are causing surface heat to be pulled down faster than before.
The deep-ocean theory is one of a half-dozen explanations that have been proffered for the warming plateau. Perhaps the answer will turn out to be some mix of all of them. And in any event, computer forecasts of climate change suggest that pauses in warming lasting a couple of decades should not surprise us.
Perhaps the NYT would at least concede that the “science” is very far from being settled.
Tags: carbon dioxide, climate, climate change, global warming, NYT
The k2p blog 