What are the real questions?
Basically, there’s one real problem — the real climate refuses to behave correctly. I went into this at length then, so I won’t repeat the whole argument, but the basic point is this: the actual observed temperatures have been flat for almost 20 years, and are now at the edge of the confidence interval — that is, the modelers would have taken a 20-1 bet against the temperatures staying this low.
Damn you, Gaia!
Oh well, they had a 50-50 shot and guessed wrong. Of course, they guessed wrong 40 years ago as well. Damn the bad luck.
It was a losers bet on their part anyway. Temps going up doesn’t validate their position (could be simply natural variations) – temps going down invalidates, however. Idiotic to box yourself in like that.
Good point.
And since the planet’s temperature looks like an audio waveform with frequency components ranging everywhere from daily to eons, with a well-bounded pattern that stretches back about four billion years, what kind of idiots would suggest an exponential curve fit? With the huge natural swings obvious in the geological record, one thing is certain. If the temperatures headed up, the temperatures will just as surely head back down.
Another certainty is an observation about roller coasters. The people who were screaming on the way up will always scream even louder on the way down.
One of the advantages of growing older is the opportunity for perspective. At 56, I’m old enough to remember when “Made in Japan” meant it was junk. I also remember people saying, “It came from a computer so it must be true.” I also remember those predictions of an imminent ice age only to be followed a few years later with man-made global warming based on computer models that have never been validated and proved to actually, you know, predict stuff that actually happens.
If your computer model doesn’t match reality, it isn’t reality that’s wrong.
And, a host of other disasters which never arrived. It has ever been thus. The tale of Chicken Little dates to antiquity. Wikipedia says two and a half millennia. It is deeply ingrained in us to be afraid of the unknown.
Face it, skeptics, we can’t win this argument.
They (the AGW crowd) are getting closer to winning… First, they called it man-made global warming, and that proved untenable. They refocused, calling it “climate change”, which is a far broader brush. The fact is that climate change does exist – and it always has. The little ice age was climate change, and other examples include the beginning and end of the last glacial era. The only real problem for the AGW crew in this scenario is that the climate appears to not be changing at this time.
Therefor, they only need to refocus slightly to win their argument. They can do this by phrasing their case thusly; “If we don’t cut back on (insert strawman emission of choice here) Earth will experience climate.”
That phrasing is inarguable accurate, for, if we don’t do something, Earth will experience climate. Now who could argue with that?
/sarc