Global Warming Cultists Say Earth May Be In For a Cooling Period, Which Just Further Confirms the Planet Will Be Warming Soon

A bevy of choice quotes, says ArthurK.

My favorite, from the reporter:

In candid mood, climate scientists avoided blaming nature for their faltering predictions, however.

Ah! They narrowly avoided blaming nature for disagreeing with their models. How considerate of them.

Forecasts of climate change are about to go seriously out of kilter. One of the world's top climate modellers said Thursday we could be about to enter "one or even two decades during which temperatures cool.

"People will say this is global warming disappearing," he told more than 1500 of the world's top climate scientists gathering in Geneva at the UN's World Climate Conference.

"I am not one of the sceptics," insisted Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, Germany. "However, we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it."

I find it shocking that a scientist even needs this kind of motivation for scientific inquiry. "We have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it"?!?! You can only be spurred to do your jobs by the threat of professional embarassement from those outside your field?

Few climate scientists go as far as Latif, an author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But more and more agree that the short-term prognosis for climate change is much less certain than once thought.

Nature vs humans

This is bad timing....

But some of the climate scientists gathered in Geneva to discuss how this might be done admitted that, on such timescales, natural variability is at least as important as the long-term climate changes from global warming. "In many ways we know more about what will happen in the 2050s than next year," said Vicky Pope from the UK Met Office.

Actually you don't. It's just that the 2050's are comfortably remote in time and you have greater confidence about making predictions that won't be disproven for 40 years.

It's the next few years you sweat, because you just might wind up looking like a jackass before you've retired or died off.

Ask Paul "Global Cooling/The Great Coming Ice Age" Ehrlich about that. Oh, wait. Don't. No one in your profession does. Why fix what's not broken.

Cold Atlantic

Latif predicted that in the next few years a natural cooling trend would dominate over warming caused by humans....

Breaking with climate-change orthodoxy, he said NAO [North Atlantic Oscillation] cycles were probably responsible for some of the strong global warming seen in the past three decades. "But how much? The jury is still out" he told the conference. The NAO is now moving into a colder phase.

But the science is settled. We have natural cycles contributing to temperature variability -- obviously so, since we've had a variable global temperature before humans even walked the earth -- but we know for a fact that humans are the main culprits.

Except we kinda-sorta don't know that either. "The jury is still out," except it's not -- the science is settled, remember.

...

In candid mood, climate scientists avoided blaming nature for their faltering predictions, however. "Model biases are also still a serious problem. We have a long way to go to get them right. They are hurting our forecasts," said Tim Stockdale of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, UK.

Medium-range, eh? Damn, what a bad position to be in. If only you were in charge of long and beyond-human-memory-range predictions you could claim whatever the hell you liked.

Read the whole thing. I've had to snippy-snippy a lot of key parts about the actual science.

posted by Ace at 02:50 PM

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