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Cold is the new warm
Climate
Resistance
Monday, Dec 08, 2008
When is a short term trend not a short term trend? When it’s
an upward anomaly.
James
Randerson in the Guardian tells us that,
This year is set to be the coolest since 2000, according
to a preliminary estimate of global average temperature that
is due to be released next week by the Met Office. The global
average for 2008 should come in close to 14.3C, which is 0.14C
below the average temperature for 2001-07.
But just when you thought it was safe to rush out to buy a guilt-free
4×4… <scary music>
The relatively chilly temperatures compared with recent
years are not evidence that global warming is slowing however,
say climate scientists at the Met Office. “Absolutely
not,” said Dr Peter Stott, the manager of understanding
and attributing climate
change at the Met Office’s Hadley Centre. “If
we are going to understand climate change we need to look at
long-term trends.”
Here’s a curious thing… Whether or not global warming
ever existed, if ‘relatively chilly temperatures are not
‘evidence that global warming is slowing’, then what
is?
That’s not to say that cooler temperatures ‘prove’
that there’s no global warming, but that cooler temperatures
must be evidence that ‘global warming
is slowing’. The difference is between ‘evidence’
on the one hand, and ‘proof’ on the other. Evidence
can support contradictory hypotheses.
(ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW)
If this was mere journalistic oversight, that’s one thing
- even though Randerson, one of the Guardian’s science
correspondents, with a PhD in evolutionary genetics, really
really ought to know the difference between evidence and proof,
and what they stand for. But if the argument belongs to Peter
Stott, then it surely raises questions about his partiality. ‘Absolutely
not‘? Cooling temperatures absolutely are
evidence for the hypothesis that there is no global warming underway,
necessarily.
Prof Myles Allen at Oxford University who runs the climateprediction.net
website, said he feared climate sceptics would overinterpret
the figure. “You can bet your life there will be a lot
of fuss about what a cold year it is. Actually no, its not been
that cold a year, but the human memory is not very long, we
are used to warm years,” he said, “Even in the 80s
[this year] would have felt like a warm year.”
Allen is right to say that people have short memories, but he
is wrong to think that it’s only sceptics who have them,
and make a fuss about exceptional years. For example, Anderson
continues,
The Met Office predicted at the beginning of the year that
2008 would be cooler than recent years because of a La Niña
event - characterised by unusually cold ocean temperatures in
the equatorial Pacific Ocean. It is the mirror image of the
El Niño climate cycle. The Met Office had forecast an annual
global average of 14.37C.
Anderson has a short memory. So does Allen. Scientists at the
Met office are so keen to make a big deal out of unexpected temperatures
that they ‘overinterpret the figures’ before they
have even happened.
At the begining of 2007, a
BBC article informed the world that
“The
world is likely to experience the warmest year on record in 2007,
the UK’s Met Office says.”
Such ‘overinterpretation’…
The global surface temperature is projected to be 0.54C
(0.97F) above the long-term average of 14C (57F), beating the
current record of 0.52C (0.94F), which was set in 1998.
The annual projection was compiled by the UK Met Office’s
Hadley Centre, in conjunction with the University of East Anglia.
Such ‘a fuss about what a hot year it is’…
(even though it hadn’t happened yet).
We have actually run this forecast three times, updating
it every month… and it is completely stable.”
But didn’t the Hadley Centre’s own Peter Stott just
tell us that we ought to be looking at long-term trends? And yet,
a forecast of a short term trend is considered newsworthy. Double
standards are rife in climate science activism.
The Hadley Centre has been issuing the annual forecast
for the past seven years and says it has just a 0.06C margin
of error.
Eight months later, and the Met Office’s confident prediction
was shown to be utter bunk. Temperatures were falling. They revised
their predictions, saying
that they had created a new, more powerful computer model for
predicting the future.
Powerful computer simulations used to create the world’s
first global warming forecast suggests temperature rises will
stall in the next two years, before rising sharply at the end
of the decade.
But
as we suggested earlier in the year, the incautious statements
issued by Met Office scientists looked less like the work of scientific
enquiry, and more like post-hoc speculation about which way the
weather would turn.
In January 2007, the Met Office backed the wrong horse - El Niño.
When La Niña emerged as the favourite, they changed their bets.
This wasn’t sophisticated computer modelling. This was gambling
by gamblers posing in lab coats. It was a safe bet that La Niña’s
effects would last until 2009.
In order to wrong-foot sceptics, activist climate scientists
(for that is what they must be if they are not agnostic about
global warming) have had to reinterpret the evidence. Any downward
tendency is waved away as short-term ‘natural variation’,
caused by La Niña. This creates a casuality for the alarmists
- it means that the significance of the record temperature in
1998 is diminished - clearly it was caused by El Niño. But on
the other hand, ruling out the ‘98 El Niño as ‘natural
variation’ allows the claim that temperatures have increased
since 1998 to be made.
Such chopping-and-changing appears to be the stock-in-trade of
climate scientists and Guardian hacks. But this is because so
much political capital is invested in the direction of lines on
graphs representing weather statistics. And this is particularly
clear in the pages of the Guardian, who have, over the last 12
or so months been especially keen to remind us that cooling trends
are ‘not evidence that global warming is slowing’.
There’s Randerson’s article, for example. Then there’s
an article by Ian Sample, also a science correspondent, who last
year reported that
The forecast of a brief slump in global warming has already
been seized upon by climate change sceptics as evidence that
the world is not heating. Climate scientists say the new high-precision
forecast predicts temperatures will stall because of natural
climate effects that have seen the Southern Ocean and tropical
Pacific cool over the past couple of years.
Then, earlier this year, Fred
Pearce, environmental writer and author of The Last Generation:
How nature will take her revenge for climate change, said
A Germany study published earlier this month predicts the
world will cool over the coming decade. British climate modellers
at the Met Office don’t go so far. They think nature’s
cooling will be more than counterbalanced by the warming effect
of man-made carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
But nobody is sure. In any case, we can expect the deniers
to make the most of this opportunity to pour cold water on the
whole climate change narrative. No year has yet been hotter
than 1998, they will say. True: it was a huge El Niño year.
Now we are on the way back down, they will say. Nonsense. The
underlying trend remains upwards; and as every decade passes,
natural cycles can do less and less to counter the growing human
influence on temperature.
As
we pointed out about the dramatisation of the movement of Arctic
ice extent recently, the progression of curves representing
climate statistics are the dynamic driving political discourse.
The unfolding, present-tense narrative of lines on charts fuels
the commentary about the conflict between the bad-minded ‘deniers’,
and the honest scientists, seeking to destroy or save the world
respectively.
The twists and turns of little blue lines excite the audience,
and provide superficially important news fodder. It fuels debates,
but with wild speculation and utterly meaningless and inconsequential
factoids that will be forgotten by the time the next climate
record is set. Repeat ad nauseam. These artificial dramas are
elevated to ludicrous heights by claims that our entire futures
depend on them. Consequently, life imitates this art. The drama
extends into our real lives. It becomes politics, ethics, laws.
The more we look to little blue lines, the less we realise that
whatever little blue lines do only determines what our existences
will consist of if we believe that the direction of the little
blue line is instructive. It isn’t.
As the comments supplied by scientists at the National Snow and
Ice Data Center (NSIDC) about sea ice extent and the Met Office’s
scientists careless posturing demonstrate, they are complicit
in the politicisation of the climate debate. That is to say they
are not impartial. They are not agnostic about climate change.
And they are not disinterested observers of nature. Climate science
is not a value-free investigation of the material universe.
Climate scientists and science correspondents imbue statistics
with undue political significance. Therefore, they have to resort
to use combative rhetoric when the trends offer conflicting evidence
they cannot yet explain. Rather than contradicting themselves
about the significance of short term trends, and moving the goal
posts constituting long terms trends, climate scientists ought
to be distancing themselves from the political significance of
their work. Because to do otherwise is to legitimise the very
‘deniers’ they seek to diminish. If ‘climate
science’ is where politics happens, then it is not only
reasonable to ask if changes in the direction of change do represent
a weakness in the prevailing view, it is essential.
Of course, a trend of 0.14 below average does not represent a
static climate, but neither does an anomaly of 0.54C represent
the dawn of a new, hostile geological epoch. Fools rush in to
make statements about what such small numbers mean about how many
angels can dance on the head of a pin.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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