Climate-change skeptics, deniers, denialists, and also unbiased observers have pointed out that measured global temperatures seem to have risen at a slower rate, or perhaps ceased rising at all, since about 1998.
But the media have by and large reported the continuing official alarmist claims that each year has been the hottest on record, that a tipping point is nearly upon us, catastrophe is just around the corner — exemplified perhaps by Al Gore’s recent new film, An Inconvenient Sequel, with interviews of Gore in many media outlets.
However, that the pause in global warming is quite real is shown decisively by the way in which the mainstream consensus has tried to discount the facts, attempting to explain them away.
For example a pamphlet, published jointly by the Royal Society of London and the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, asserts that human-caused release of greenhouse gases is producing long-term warming and climate change, albeit there might be periods on the order of decades where there is no or little warming, as with the period since about 2000 when such natural causes as “lower solar activity and volcanic eruptions” have “masked” the rise in temperature (“Climate-Change Science or Climate-Change Propaganda?”).
That assertion misses the essential point: All the alarmist projections are based on computer models. The models failed to foresee the pause in temperature rise since 1998, demonstrating that the models are inadequate and therefore their projections are wrong. The models also fail to accommodate the period of global cooling rather than warming from the 1940s to the 1970s.
The crux is that the models do not incorporate important natural forces that affect the carbon cycle and the energy interactions. Instead, when the models are patently wrong, as from 1940s to 1970s and since 1998, the modelers and other researchers vested in the theory of human-caused climate change speculate about how one or other natural phenomenon somehow “masks” the asserted underlying temperature rise.
Above all, of course, the theorists neglect to mention that the Earth is still rebounding from the last Ice Age and will, if the last million years are any guide, continue to warm up for many tens of thousands of years (Climate-change facts: Temperature is not determined by carbon dioxide).
The various attempts to explain away the present pause in temperature rise were listed a few years ago at THE HOCKEY SCHTICK: “Updated list of 66 excuses for the 18-26 year ‘pause’ in global warming — ‘If you can’t explain the ‘pause’, you can’t explain the cause’”.
Here are a few of the dozens of excuses for the failure of global temperature to keep up with projections of the climate models:
1. Lower activity of the sun
That ought to raise eyebrows about this whole business. Essentially all the energy Earth receives from out there comes from the Sun. Apparently the computer models do not start by taking that into account?
(Peter Stauning, “Reduced solar activity disguises global temperature rise”, Atmospheric and Climate Sciences, 4 #1, January 2014 “Without the reduction in the solar activity-related contributions the global temperatures would have increased steadily from 1980 to present”)
And of course if the Sun stopped shining altogether…
Anyway, the models are wrong.
2. The heat is being hidden in the ocean depths (Cheng et al., “Improved estimates of ocean heat content from 1960 to 2015”, Science Advances, 10 March 2017, 3 #3, e1601545, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.160154
In other words, the models are wrong about the distribution of supposedly trapped heat.
3. Increased emission of aerosols especially in Asia (Kühn et al., “Climate impacts of changing aerosol emissions since 1996”, Geophysical Research Letters, 41 [14 July 2014] 4711–18, doi:10.1002/2014GL060349)
The climate models are wrong because they do not properly take aerosol emissions into account.
3a. “Volcanic aerosols, not pollutants, tamped down recent Earth warming, says CU study”
In other words, the models are wrong because they cannot take into account the complexities of natural events that affect climate.
4. Reduced emission of greenhouse gases, following the Montreal Protocol eliminating ozone-depleting substances (Estrada et al, “Statistically derived contributions of diverse human influences to twentieth-century temperature changes”, Nature Geoscience, 6 (2013) 1050-55 doi:10.1038/ngeo1999
The climate models are wrong because they do not take into account all greenhouse-gas emissions.
5. “Contributions of stratospheric water vapor to decadal changes in the rate of global warming” (Solomon et al., Science, 327 [2010] 1219-12;
DOI: 10.1126/science.1182488)
In other words, the models are wrong because they do not take account of variations in water vapor in the stratosphere.
6. Strengthened trade winds in the Pacific
Again, the models are wrong because they cannot take account of the innumerable natural phenomena that determine climate.
6a. An amusing corollary is that “Seven years ago, we were told the opposite of what the new Matthew England paper says: slower (not faster) trade winds caused ‘the pause’”
And so on though another 50 or 60 different speculations. Although they are all different, there is a single commonality: The computer models used to represent Earth’s climate are woefully unable to do so. That might well be thought to be obvious a priori in view of the astronomical number of variables and interactions that determine climate. Moreover, a little less obviously perhaps, “global” climate is a human concept. The reality is that short- and long-term changes in climate by no means always occur in parallel in different regions.
Take-away points:
Mainstream climate science has demonstrated that
all the climate models are inadequate
and their projections have been wrong
Since the late 1990s, global temperatures have not risen
to the degree anticipated by climate models and climate alarmists
but that is not officially admitted
even as it is obvious from the excuses offered
for the failure of the models
Skepticism about science and medicine 