Maggie's Farm

It's a cinch he doesn't read his own links. I think you're right: he doesn't get past titles or, at best, blurbs.

Trivial and far below the forecasts. Which means two things: (1) the model mistakes the underlying mechanisms, and (2) if that underwhelming lukewarming trend had been forecast 30 years ago, warming alarmists could never have gotten anyone's attention in the first place. Which, frankly, probably explains the "mistakes" in the underlying mechanisms embodied in the models, which include entirely unwarranted assumptions about positive CO2/water vapor feedbacks for the apparent purpose of punching up otherwise decidedly undramatic forecasts. The problem is, being unwarranted, the assumptions never are borne out by the climate as it actually occurs. Clearly, the feedback mechanism is either very weakly positive or even negative. The strong positive feedback is a pure fantasy, clung to for entirely rhetorical purposes because it makes the curve swoop up alarmingly any year now, but never this year.

It's fair to say there's been some modest warming. It's not clear that it's a significant trend in light of natural variability over the last few hundred or few thousand years. It's consistent with the data, but not an inevitable conclusion, to say that human activity is contributing to whatever trend is truly signal and not noise. It's not at all clear that the trend is severe enough to be a problem, and certainly not clear that the solutions proposed to date could possibly be said to be worth their cost.

The developing world isn't going to kill large numbers of its citizens by foregoing the benefits of abundant energy, just to avoid a modest increase in warmth. To get anyone seriously interested even in contemplating such a drastic program requires projections of a radical increase in warmth. But this in turn requires revising the forecast constantly, because the radical increase in warmth never actually shows up in the present. It's always scheduled for 5-10 years from now. What happens now is always flat or lukewarm, and non-alarming.

Shame that's not what's proposed. And no one at any time, to my knowledge, has ever adopted the strawman position that there indisputably has been no warming trend over the last 150 years. What we say repeatedly is that there is very likely a trivial warming trend, that it may or may not be a signal above the noise when taking the last few centuries or millennia into account, and that therefore human agency is disputable (though possible) and the magnitude of the change doesn't warrant huge concern. Again, therefore, extremely expensive and dangerous dismantlings of the world's energy-delivery systems are not only unnecessary, but are well known to have deadly impacts of their own.

The most important points, and therefore those never ever ever acknowledged or discussed by proselytes, are that the models on which the anti-warming crusade depends are consistently wrong, that they consistently--decade after decade--drastically overstate the mild warming trend, that they are based on a politically driven but scientifically shaky and unproven assumption about positive CO2/water vapor feedback, and that the refusal even to discuss these problems reveals the whole thing as a dishonest political maneuver.

But your whole take is, "Oh, so you admit there's been a trivial warming trend, that proves something." It's as if you were prescribing amputation because of a body temperature increase of 0.1 of a degree, which you insisted on reporting as a 6-degree rise you project to happen any hour now. "Imminent rampant infection! Must amputate or lose the patient!" The family objects, "But it's only a tiny temperature change, possibly within the normal range of his lifetime. Is it really worth losing a leg over?" You answer, "So you ADMIT he's running a fever! Get out the knives, you heartless deniers! Call security, and escort these people off the civilized premises!--and by the way, it's not an amputation, it's a limb adaptation."