Climate Slowdown Means Extreme Rates of Warming 'Not as Likely'

The increases necessary to generate the catastrophic scenarios that you (and many others describe) requires that there be an aggregate positive feedback mechanism in the climate system to magnify the CO2 warming (the anthropomorphic warming). If you read any of the literature you'll see this refered to as the 'climate sensitivity'.

No one knows the actual climate sensitivity relative to CO2 concentrations. No one knows what all the various positive and negative feedback mechanisms are. These are all suppositions by climate scientists that are plugged into their models in order to make the models accurate output the historical record. Then there is a grand leap of faith that says that the models will accurate predict the future record. Except that for the last 10-20 years, the models have been wrong. CO2 has increased but the temperature has not changed according to the models prediction.

The original article says:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported in 2007 that the short-term temperature rise would most likely be 1-3C (1.8-5.4F).

But in this new analysis, by only including the temperatures from the last decade, the projected range would be 0.9-2.0C.

So the models will be tweaked (for example by reducing the climate sensitivity) in order to generate output that matches the new historical record which has 10-20 years of no statistically significant warming.

The problem with all this is that the models can always be tweaked to match the historical record while at the same time generating whatever future prediction you want. And if that doesn't work, you just tweak the model again.

I'll start to believe that the models are reasonable when they remain unchanged for several decades while still tracking the actual observations.

Note, I just picked 100 to illustrate the math. I'm not sure exactly what number would be right there but the point is that the slope of the line continues to drop as long as the there is no change in the observed value that you are measuring.

If you know the science, then you'll understand that predicting exactly what the weather will be on one particular day in one month is fundamentally impossible. But predicting what it is likely to average out to in June in Los Angeles over the next decade is both possible, and routinely done (albeit with significant error bars). There is absolutely no contradiction between these two facts.

Let me illustrate with a good example showing how scientists can understand both the predictability of climate and the unpredictability of weather at the same time. I will illustrate with an important example that is not widely understood by the lay public.

If you know what the Hadley cells are, you can predict at what approximate latitude we'll have jet streams, and why. (Google that term if you don't know what a Hadley cell is - they aren't that complex.) You'll also be able to predict that the jet streams will cause weather to follow them, resulting in (for instance) a general west to east flow of weather over much of the USA and Canada. The fun part is that if you know more fluid mechanics, you can also show that the exact location of the jet stream is chaotic. There will be bends and kinks of with a predictable wavelength (about 2x the width of North America if you are interested) and a generally predictable amplitude, but entirely unpredictable location. Those bends will cause warm weather to be pulled north in one place, and south in another. (Therefore when the East Coast is unseasonably cold, the West Coast tends to be unseasonably warm, and vice versa.) But you can't predict WHERE those bends will actually be.

So this tells us a lot about climate (for instance where it will be wet, where you have rain shadows, etc). It tells us a lot about causes of significant variation, including how big the variation tends to be. But it also says that we can know nothing about which way the variation will go in New York City next October.

Your argument boils down to, "You can't even tell me what New York City will be like next October, you obviously aren't doing science here!" Which is simply ridiculous, since in fact the mechanics, average, and average variation are all understood along with the reasons why we cannot get more exact answers!

Everything that I am describing is standard and has been known for decades. In fact I learned it from my fluid mechanics text over 20 years ago.

Please stop using the, "We can't predict the weather so this can't be settled science" fallacy. It is a cheap cop-out to avoid listening to what actually is known by smart people who have devoted their lives to studying the subject.

(Oh, and you learned something kind of fun. The next time you look on a weather map and see the jet stream, you'll know why it isn't running straight across. And just watch - if you pay attention over the next few months you'll notice unseasonable weather on one coast of North America that is the opposite direction of unseasonable weather on the other. And on the weather maps you'll see the jet stream, and know why it happened.)