Pirate's Cove

It’s amusing when members of the Cult of Climastrology confuse themselves

Spectator headline calls the hiatus a "myth"; UEA warmist admits there was a "hiatus in global air temperatures" https://t.co/mpP5g5i2YF

— Tom Nelson (@TomANelson) June 15, 2017

From the article

Readers of The Spectator will be familiar with the argument that climate change, like Britpop, ended in 1998. Raised on a diet of Matt Ridley and James Delingpole, you may have convinced yourself that climate scientists, for their own selfish reasons, continue to peddle a theory that is unsupported by real-world evidence.

No, we do not claim it ended. We rightly, scientifically, factually point out that the claims made by Warmist scientists using computer models failed to account for the pause in statistically significant warming, just like has happened multiple times during the Modern Warm Period. Because, again, the debate is on causation of the warm period, not warming. How much is anthropogenic, and how much natural. If it is mostly/solely caused by Mankind, then the pause should never have happened.

You may also have picked up the idea that the ‘green blob’, as it has been called in these pages, is somehow suppressing the news that global warming is a dead parrot. That was the case made by Dr David Whitehouse, science editor of Lord Lawson’s Global Warming Policy Forum in a Spectator blog in February last year. He accused the world’s media of ignoring a paper in Nature Climate Change which concluded that the rise in global surface temperature had stalled, contrary to the narrative of man-made climate change. In contrast, an earlier paper by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Science magazine, which questioned the existence of that hiatus, had been given huge coverage.

Those of us who work in climate research do not, of course, ignore evidence. A study published in Nature Climate Change does not go unnoticed. But the particular paper to which Whitehouse referred does not counter the reality of man-made change. By the time he wrote his piece, the hiatus in global air temperatures had already come to a blistering halt. The years 2014, 2015 and 2016 were the three hottest years on record — an unprecedented run.

So, wait, it didn’t happen, but, it did happen? This is the kind of insanity you get from people who are more cultish than scientific.

Of course, they go on to blame the whole “the ocean ate my warming” meme.

But this is only part of the story. Anyone who considers climate change to be all about air temperatures at the Earth’s land surface misses something rather important. The evidence is not just blowing in the wind; it is 500 fathoms deep.

That’s convenient.

As a land species, it’s hardly surprising that we’re more concerned about what’s going on in the atmosphere than with conditions under the sea — but in the context of global warming that’s a big mistake. Around 93 per cent of the extra heat gained by the Earth over the past 50 years has sunk into the ocean, while 3 per cent has made ice melt, and 3 per cent has warmed the land. Only around 1 per cent has stayed in the atmosphere. So if we just measure air temperatures, we’re looking in the wrong place for climate change. Recent analyses by the World Meteorological Organisation and independent researchers have looked at deep-ocean as well as sea-surface temperatures, and both groups found that significant increases in total ocean heat content began around 1980, continuing more rapidly after 1998.

Here’s a question that I’ve never seen an answer to: what mechanism caused this eating of the warming to happen?

Also, if this started around 1980, then what caused the Pause to happen in 1998, rather than 1980? You had a warming period from around 1978-1996. Why was the heat not disappearing then?

The apparent slowdown in global temperature rise in the early years of this century was nothing more than the Earth’s climate system expressing its natural variability.

If that’s the case, that it is natural variability … even though the headline and early part of the article said the Pause never happened… then why can’t the warming be mostly/solely (I would argue mostly) natural variability?