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Matt Ridley: Whatever happened to global warming?
Via Mark Perry. Excerpts:
"The climate-research establishment has finally admitted openly what skeptic scientists have been saying for nearly a decade: Global warming has stopped since shortly before this century began.
First the climate-research establishment denied that a pause existed,
noting that if there was a pause, it would invalidate their theories.
Now they say there is a pause (or “hiatus”), but that it doesn’t after
all invalidate their theories.
Alas, their explanations have made their predicament worse by
implying that man-made climate change is so slow and tentative that it
can be easily overwhelmed by natural variation in temperature—a
possibility that they had previously all but ruled out.
It has been roughly two decades since there was a trend in
temperature significantly different from zero. The burst of warming that
preceded the millennium lasted about 20 years and was preceded by 30
years of slight cooling after 1940 (see chart).
Most science journalists, who are strongly biased in favor of
reporting alarming predictions, rather than neutral facts, chose to
ignore the pause until very recently, when there were explanations
available for it. Nearly 40 different excuses for the pause have been
advanced, including Chinese economic growth that supposedly pushed
cooling sulfate particles into the air, the removal of ozone-eating
chemicals, an excess of volcanic emissions, and a slowdown in magnetic
activity in the sun.
The favorite explanation earlier this year was that strong trade
winds in the Pacific Ocean had been taking warmth from the air and
sequestering it in the ocean. This was based on a few sketchy
observations, suggesting a very tiny change in water temperature—a few
hundredths of a degree—at depths of up to 200 meters.
Last month two scientists wrote in Science that they had
instead found the explanation in natural fluctuations in currents in the
Atlantic Ocean. For the last 30 years of the 20th century, Xianyao Chen
and Ka-Kit Tung suggested, these currents had been boosting the warming
by bringing heat to the surface, then for the past 15 years the
currents had been counteracting it by taking heat down deep.
The warming in the last three decades of the 20th century, to quote
the news release that accompanied their paper, “was roughly half due to
global warming and half to the natural Atlantic Ocean cycle.” In other
words, even the modest warming in the 1980s and 1990s—which never
achieved the 0.3 degrees Celsius per decade necessary to satisfy the
feedback-enhanced models that predict about three degrees of warming by
the end of the century—had been exaggerated by natural causes. The
man-made warming of the past 20 years has been so feeble that a shifting
current in one ocean was enough to wipe it out altogether."
From Cafe Hayek
"The U.N. no longer claims that there will be dangerous or rapid
climate change in the next two decades. Last September, between the
second and final draft of its fifth assessment report, the U.N.’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change quietly downgraded the
warming it expected in the 30 years following 1995, to about 0.5
degrees Celsius from 0.7 (or, in Fahrenheit, to about 0.9 degrees, from
1.3).
Even that is likely to be too high. The climate-research
establishment has finally admitted openly what skeptic scientists have
been saying for nearly a decade: Global warming has stopped since
shortly before this century began."
"Putting the icing on the cake of good news, Xianyao Chen and Ka-Kit Tung
think the Atlantic Ocean may continue to prevent any warming for the
next two decades. So in their quest to explain the pause, scientists
have made the future sound even less alarming than before."
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