Media Criticism, Political Commentary, Science And Society

The Case Of The Missing Heat

4 Comments

Judith Curry does some detective work:

“You can’t keep piling up warm water in the western Pacific,” Trenberth says. “At some point, the water will get so high that it just sloshes back.” And when that happens, if scientists are on the right track, the missing heat will reappear and temperatures will spike once again.

JC comment: Well that is an interesting ‘forecast.’ If this is natural internal variability, e.g. the stadium wave (which includes the PDO), then you would expect warming to resume at some point (I’ve argued this might be in the 2030′s). This would make the hiatus 30+ years (similar in length to the pevious hiatus from 1940 to 1975). This is long enough to invalidate the utility of the current climate models for projecting future climate change.

And about the missing heat reappearing, well stay tuned for my next post on ocean heat content.

We will.

4 thoughts on “The Case Of The Missing Heat”

  1. The part that’ boggling is the sheer number of people that buy into the Trenberth’s ‘hidden heat’.

    It fundamentally destroys the logic of the rest of the message.

    And it is right out in the open. The peak of the ‘last’ 30 year cycle also had terrible trouble hindcasting correctly – and the models were adjusted to hype aerosols as the cause (which were basically unmeasured at that time).

  2. Ah yes, science. You start with the conclusion and you work backwards to come up with a rationalization of how that conclusions fits the evidence. That’s how science is supposed to work right?

  4. Here’s a word swap of “scientists” with “skeptics” in his key paragraph.

    If skeptics choose not to engage in the public debate, we leave a vacuum that will be filled by those whose agenda is one of short-term self-interest. There is a great cost to society if skeptics fail to participate in the larger conversation — if we do not do all we can to ensure that the policy debate is informed by an honest assessment of the risks. In fact, it would be an abrogation of our responsibility to society if we remained quiet in the face of such a grave threat.

    Yet Mann spends his time trying to silence skeptics. He doesn’t want a debate, he wants to dictate.

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