Friday, November 30, 2012

Global Warming is still missing in action

While we're getting barraged with doom and gloom stories in the Press (like the laughable Atlantic Magazine 5 Charts that should have you worried), the actual climate refuses to cooperate with the narrative:
Figures released by the UN's World Meteorological Organisation indicate that 2012 is set to be perhaps the ninth hottest globally since records began - but that planetary warming, which effectively stalled around 1998, has yet to resume at the levels seen in the 1980s and early 1990s.

...

The official position of the climate establishment is that global warming is still definitely on and the flat temperatures seen for the last 14 years or so are just a statistical fluke of the sort to be expected when trying to measure such a vast and noisy signal as world temperatures with such precision. (The global warming since 1950 is assessed as just half a degree, a difficult thing to pick out when temperatures everywhere go up and down by many degrees every day and even more over a year.)

That said, there is now some admission even from the hardest climate hardliners that something may be going on which is not understood.
Huh.  Seems that the science isn't quite so settled.  The climate seems to be mocking the climate scientists.

5 comments:

ambisinistral said...

"[J]ust a statistical fluke of the sort to be expected when trying to measure such a vast and noisy signal as world temperatures with such precision."

As opposed to temperature records from tree rings, which can be determined centuries later with great degrees of accuracy.

Old NFO said...

Meh... Bottom line, they don't KNOW, but are trying to baffle us with BS (and put money in their pockets)...

Anonymous said...

There is something odd about people. Cooling in the 1890s, warming in the 1930s, Cooling through 1970. Most recently, warming through 2000, and we can't get the warmists to shut up. Presumably, we are heading for the next round of cyclical cooling, say through 2025 or so. So the decade of the 2030's will worry once again about global cooling.

I could understand this to some extent: The cycles are long enough that each generation thinks it has spotted something completely new. Hungry grad students need papers, and off we go.

However, this I don't understand - why is the rhetoric in this cycle so much more extreme? Why the mass hysteria, the huge political bureaucracies, piles of stupid regulations, etc.? Alternatively, how did we avoid this in previous cycles, and what can we do to prevent it happening again after 2020, when the panic about global cooling kicks in?

Borepatch said...

Anon, the suspicion on why we avoided the hysteria in the past was that the UN hadn't seen this as a way to raise huge amounts of money and power from the industrialized world.

Ken said...

I notice that the reports about rising sea levels and thawing permafrost have replaced direct references to temperature "measurements" lately.