Especially when the surface temperature isn’t cooperating with the Warmist computer models. Here’s super far left Ryan Cooper at super far left Washington Monthly
The news around climate sensitivity has driven our contrarian population to new heights of glib smugness, and that’s saying something. Up today is Walter Russell Mead, doing his level best to make me pop a cranial blood vessel.
Scientists are theorizing about why surface warming has slowed, and Mead concludes that climate science is all hokum. (Seriously, that’s only a slight exaggeration.)
Two points, before I move on:
1) Once again, global warming is not determined wholly by observed surface temperatures. In fact, it’s rather the opposite. Over 90 percent of the heat captured by increased CO2 concentration ends up in the oceans. This probably has something to do with the staircase behavior of surface temperature, as heat gets alternately sucked up and dumped out of the earth’s enormous mass of water.
That first point is part of the latest fable from The New Climate Deniers that really cropped up this year as a way to protect their cult. First it was “the heat is hiding in the deep oceans!!!!” Now they’ve added on “the surface temperature doesn’t really matter!!!!” Of course, when it’s hot out, then the surface temperature matters to them. This is not science, it’s politics and cult like behavior.
2) Complexity can be misleading. It’s true that the climate is extraordinarily complicated—weather patterns were one of the first examples of chaos theory. Climate scientists argue all the time about whether their models are correctly tuned in all the details (whether this monsoon will get stronger or weaker at a higher temperature, that kind of thing). But the logic of climate change depends on some fairly simple physics. The complexity of the system’s reaction to a very simple force is not some saving grace.
I though I’d throw that in, and not that the simple force is not the implied CO2, but the Sun, which has always been the prime driver of Earth’s climate. From there, you throw in land patterns (some of which are anthropogenic), solar rays from deep space, natural earth forces, and gravity (the Sun, moon, and even the other planets). Scientists don’t really know what causes El Nino and La Nina patterns. Meteorologists are thought to be awesome when they get the weather right about 30% of the time. Yet, we’re supposed to listen to Warmist scientists who tell us what will positively happen 50-100 years out, despite all their computer models failing.
Anyhow, just remember that all that heat is doing a Where’s Waldo in the deep oceans. Because the sea surface temperatures sure aren’t cooperating.
