A Scientist Publishes Her Notes for an Upcoming Talk on the Causes and Implications of the 17 Year Global Warming Pause

Interesting document.

You should know going in she's not firmly against global warming theory. But she is honest enough to confess that the theory, as currently understood, is wrong, at least in important details, and she's willing to "go there," at least in a speculative way, and consider the possibility that the theory is wrong in the main as well.

She seems extremely skeptical of last year's spin that the ocean is "hiding" huge amounts of heat by some unexplained mechanism.

She does seem to see some plausibility in another theory, the "stadium wave" theory, which isn't terribly surprising -- the Stadium Wave hypothesis is her own pet theory.

One of the most controversial issues emerging from the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) is the failure of global climate models to predict a hiatus in warming of global surface temperatures since 1998. Several ideas have been put forward to explain this hiatus, including what the IPCC refers to as ‘unpredictable climate variability’ that is associated with large-scale circulation regimes in the atmosphere and ocean. The most familiar of these regimes is El Niño/La Niña. On longer multi-decadal time scales, there is a network of atmospheric and oceanic circulation regimes, including the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

A new paper published in the journal Climate Dynamics suggests that this ‘unpredictable climate variability’ behaves in a more predictable way than previously assumed. The paper’s authors, Marcia Wyatt and Judith Curry, point to the so-called ‘stadium-wave’ signal that propagates like the cheer at sporting events whereby sections of sports fans seated in a stadium stand and sit as a ‘wave’ propagates through the audience. In like manner, the ‘stadium wave’ climate signal propagates across the Northern Hemisphere through a network of ocean, ice, and atmospheric circulation regimes that self-organize into a collective tempo.

The stadium wave hypothesis provides a plausible explanation for the hiatus in warming and helps explain why climate models did not predict this hiatus. Further, the new hypothesis suggests how long the hiatus might last.

But this seems to me a pure speculation. She's offering a possible explanation for how various forces come together (well, they nearly conspire) to push temperatures down (which then offsets, I guess, the increase in temperatures predicted by Global Warming theorists).

We are very far from "The Science Is Settled" when we're still thrashing about for the best speculation as to why temperatures aren't rising as predicted.

You can't say "the Science is Settled" and then propose the speculation that maybe the ocean is "hiding" heat by some unknown mechanism (and hiding it, by the way, in some place we can't actually find or measure), or the speculation of a chaotic system that self-organizes towards a cooling tendency.

Either of these speculations may turn out to be true -- but at the moment, they are mere speculations, which not only aren't proven but are still in fairly early stages of theorization.

That is, they're still pretty half-baked. They're hardly past the brainstorming phase.

A theory is as strong as it its weakest proof. Global Warming now relies, unavoidably, not only on mere speculations, but on speculations people can't even agree upon (in a "The Speculation is Settled" sort of "consensus").

This reduces all of global warming theory to the level of mere speculation.

posted by Ace at 06:27 PM

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