The observed rate of warming is less than has been anticipated climate models

See You Ought to Have a Look: 2015 Temperatures, Climate Sensitivity, and the Warming Hiatus.

"What’s lost in a lot of the discussion about human-caused climate change is not that the sum of human activities is leading to some warming of the earth’s temperature, but that the observed rate of warming (both at the earth’s surface and throughout the lower atmosphere) is considerably less than has been anticipated by the collection of climate models upon whose projections climate alarm (i.e., justification for strict restrictions on the use of fossil fuels) is built.

We highlight in this issue of You Ought to Have a Look a couple of articles that address this issue that we think are worth checking out.

First is this post from Steve McIntyre over at Climate Audit that we managed to dig out from among all the “record temperatures of 2015” stories. In his analysis, McIntyre places the 2015 global temperature anomaly not in real world context, but in the context of the world of climate models.

Climate model-world is important because it is in that realm where climate change catastrophes play out, and that influences the actions of real-world people to try to keep them contained in model-world.

So how did the observed 2015 temperatures compare to model world expectations? Not so well.

In a seriesoftweets over the holidays, we pointed out that the El Niño-fueled, record-busting, high temperatures of 2015 barely reached to the temperatures of an average year expected by the climate models.



In his post, unconstrained by Twitter’s 140-character limit, McIntyre takes a bit more verbose and detailed look at the situation, and includes additional examinations of the satellite record of temperatures in the lower atmosphere as well as a comparison of observed trends and model expected trends in both the surface and lower atmospheric temperatures histories since 1979.

The latter comparison for global average surface temperatures looks like this, with the observed trend (the red dashed line) falling near or below the fifth percentile of the expected trends (the lower whisker) from a host of climate models:



McIntyre writes:

All of the individual models have trends well above observations…   There are now over 440 months of data and these discrepancies will not vanish with a few months of El Nino."