President Obama has repeated the same false claim. Most jaw-dropping was Oreskes’s claim that climate change is happening “faster than scientists predicted.” This is flat-out untrue. Share the facts at Climate Depot: climatedepot/ A 2013 commentary co-authored by Francis Zwiers, an elected member of the IPCC Bureau and former IPCC lead coordinating author, found that recent observed global warming was significantly less than the surface trend simulated by climate models. In the 15 years to 2012, the observed trend of 0.05 degrees Centigrade per decade — not significantly different from zero, according to the authors — was more than four times smaller than the averaged simulated trend of 20 climate models used by the IPCC. Since the turn of the century, the 15-year running trend in observed temperature has fallen back to the 1900–2012 trend, an increase of around seven tenths of one degree Centigrade per century. For Oreskes’s claim to be valid, scientists would have had to be expecting global cooling. In science, models are used to produce predictions that can be tested against nature and thereby advance scientific knowledge. On this basis, the clear inference of the disagreement between climate-model simulations and observations over the past two decades is that scientists’ current understanding of the climate system is faulty. With the intensifying drumbeat of alarm and exaggeration anticipating this year’s Paris climate conference in December, climate-change alarmists face a conundrum: The more they act true to form, the more voters become skeptical and, in the United States, the greater the political incentives for Republicans to block climate-change policies. As yet, the alarmists don’t seem to have gotten the message. If temperatures never catch up to the models, will the media stop repeating the false claim that global warming is happening faster than expected?
Posted on: Fri, 09 Jan 2015 15:11:32 +0000
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