We regret to inform you that a fresh round of pause-posts have cropped up in the Daily Caller and Breitbart.
As per usual, they (deliberately) confuse a slowdown in the rate of warming’s acceleration with temperatures flatlining, and conflate model fine-tuning with model failure.
For those interested in the details of denier misrepresentation of this new study by Santer, Mann and a bunch of other big names in climate science, see HotWhopper. Straightforward and technical coverage is available at Carbon Brief.
But for those as tired as we are of this overblown issue, here’s the gist of it. Santer et al look at why the rate of warming slowed after 2000, and suggest it’s a combination of natural variability and underestimation by models of the frequency of cooling forces. This underestimation isn’t an issue of climate sensitivity, but of things like a string of climate-cooling volcano eruptions in the early 21st century, a cooler than expected sun, and how much climate-cooling aerosol pollution would be in the air.
These unexpected and unpredictable climate-cooling factors, coinciding with some natural variability that happened to swing towards lower temperatures, meant that models projected a little more warming than we saw. Not much, but enough that it’s worth the time of legitimate scientists to undertake a study like this to continue sharpening models.
Can deniers use this study to claim models have failed? Sure. Would that be dishonest? Of course. Will that stop them? Hasn’t before.
So to turn the tables on them, Victor Venema applies their “warming’s paused” cherry-picking approach to the post-2011 temperature trend to show a massive spike in warming. It’s silly and dishonest, which is the point. Since deniers use this sort of cherry-picking to make their pause claim, why shouldn’t alarmists make the opposite point? After all, deniers can’t criticize it without also criticizing their own process.
Venema’s self-aware argument is a sort of artificial cherry picking--Maraschino-picking, if you will--and it’s the perfect topper to the tasteless, unnatural pause sundae the deniers are trying to scoop together.
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