…are “looking less likely.” The climbdown begins, at least at the BBC.
But remember, we’re still doomed:
Is there any succour in these findings for climate sceptics who say the slowdown over the past 14 years means the global warming is not real?
“None. No comfort whatsoever,” he said.
Well. All right then.
[Update a few minutes later]
The Guardian says we can’t let our guard down:
Otto said that this most recent pattern could not be taken as evidence that climate change has stopped. “Given the noise in the climate and temperature system, you would need to see a much longer period of any pause in order to draw the conclusion that global warming was not occurring,” he said. Such a period could be as long as 40 years of the climate record, he said.
Got that? Only warming trends are important. Cooling is irrelevant.
And their unjustified self confidence never flags:
Richard Allan, reader in climate at the University of Reading, said: “This work has used observations to estimate Earth’s current heating rate and demonstrate that simulations of climate change far in the future seem to be pretty accurate. However, the research also indicates that a minority of simulations may be responding more rapidly towards this overall warming than the observations indicate.”
He said the effect of pollutants in the atmosphere, which reflect the sun’s heat back into space, was particularly hard to measure.
He noted the inferred sensitivity of climate to a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations based on this new study, suggesting a rise of 1.2C to 3.9C, was consistent with the range from climate simulations of 2.2C to 4.7C. He said: “With work like this our predictions become ever better.”
Onward, comrades!
Judy Currie has a post up from The Austrailian that is absolutely devastating:
Academics, like many other intellectuals, have a very high opinion of themselves and their rightness. Humility is not a virtue in their world. If you are right and you have good intentions, then surely you should not only be heard but should also prevail. In fact, you probably believe that you have a duty to prevail and to drown out the views of those who lack your qualifications and capacity to employ models. They are just inferiors who need to be brought into line.
And what would a climate roundup be without a contribution from moon bat Phil Plait:
Examining those 4000 papers, the study authors determined that 97.1 percent of them endorsed the consensus that humans are causing global warming. They contacted 8500 authors of the papers in question and asked them to self-rate those papers. They got responses from 1200 authors, and using the same criteria as the study, it turns out 97.2 percent of the authors endorse the consensus.
I wonder if Doctor Phil ever gets tired of being so perfectly tardy that his reinforcement ratio for foolishness is never under unity.
I’m wondering how much of “global warming” as shown by the instrumental climate record is the result of sloppy methods and will vanish as the record gets longer and quality improves. Is it no coincidence that the record flattened out about the time global warming hysteria took hold and quality instrument records sufficient to track climate became important?
Are you trying to suggest measureing the nutrients in fossilized bat poop to determine temperature fluctuations isn’t as accurate as a thermometer or satellite?
Not just that. Weather networks installed for precision climate monitoring are better than ad-hoc airport weather stations for precision data. But still not good enough to measure the precision claimed by the climate reports.