The sad truth is that those climate activists and progressive politicians who hope that science can provide a rationale for pursuing their draconian and costly public policies appear to be grasping at straws in their attempt to explain why their models do not reflect a decade or more of a global cooling trend. At stake, political ideology, careers, and continued funding for major progressive institutions, infrastructure, bureaucracies, and scientists.

But, no matter what these activists claim …

1. Global climate will continue to change as it has changed historically because global climate is a naturally variable phenomenon.
2. Some degree of global warming is natural as the Earth emerged from the Little Ice Age.
3. The Earth has been hotter and colder in the past – with negligible input from an industrialized society.
4. That man can significantly influence global climate change is a highly speculative hypothesis that is in doubt due to the inability to separate man’s input signal to the climate amid the noise of natural climate variability.
5. That man’s input could drive global climate is in doubt when the real climate drivers are: the Sun’s energy output, the position of the Earth relative to the Sun, the Earth’s rotational and precessional dynamics, the Earth’s vulcanology and plate tectonics, deep ocean currents that trap and redistribute energy, and the greatest greenhouse gas of all – water vapor.
6. It appears that global climate is a self-regulating feedback mechanism where the global temperatures regress to some mean value; constantly increasing and decreasing.
7. The hypothesis of global warming exists only in computerized models that are known to be incomplete, use inadequate assumptions like the doubling of carbon dioxide forcings, and use highly suspect, statistically manipulated data. These models did not predict the 10-15 year cooling trends and scientists are desperate to explain away the failure in order to salvage the credibility of the computerized models.
8. There are significant theories to explain mass die-offs and other catastrophe’s that are credible, including asteroid strikes and biological viruses and diseases.

Here is the latest hoo-hah …  [My comments in blue italic]

Volcanic eruptions ‘contributed to global warming pause’, scientists claim

Scientists said volcanoes had not been taken into account when experts predicted global warming after 1998 - perhaps explaining the apparent 'pause' in climate change. Research could explain why rate of climate change appeared to slow down after 1998 – but experts say volcanoes only offer ‘temporary respite’ from rising temperatures.

According to a study in the US, models for predicting the rate at which temperatures around the world would rise from 1998 onwards did not take into consideration the measurable impact volcanoes can have. Rather than contributing to global warming, eruptions release particles into the air that reflect sunlight – causing temperatures to drop.

[It is well-known that atmospheric disturbances from volcanic activity, like the major cooling after the Mt. Pinatubo eruption, can occur. It is also well-known that the top modeling scientist, Dr. James Hansen of NASA, used his models to calculate global warming was based on trace gasses and particulate matter such as that emitted from volcanoes. To say that scientists did not take this into account is both misleading and disingenuous. Because political activists needed to control economies through the control of man-made byproducts, carbon dioxide became the demonized gas responsible for global warming – reducing the amount of naturally-occurring volcanic output over which man had absolutely no control. Hansen’s 1998 model predictions were wrong by approximately 150%. A degree of error that precludes the making of rational public policies.]

Experts from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California said this phenomenon was not taken into account when predictions were made – offering an explanation for why the world seemed to stop heating up.

“We show that climate model simulations without the effects of early 21st century volcanic eruptions overestimate the tropospheric warming observed since 1998,” wrote Dr Benjamin Santer in the journal Nature Geoscience. “To reduce these uncertainties, better observations of eruption-specific properties of volcanic aerosols are needed, as well as improved representation of these eruption-specific properties in climate model simulations.”

[In essence, the scientists are saying that the climate model simulations were incomplete or incorrect – yet from the very first proclamations of another mini ice age to today’s proclamation of a planetary emergency, the demon has always been “carbon dioxide.” The effect of volcanic activity on the global climate were well understood, but you cannot pursue a political agenda and draconian public policies based on something beyond man’s control. So the scientists continue to rejigger their models in the hope that the output with correlate with the historic and proxy climate records. Or they can simply declare the input data to be deeply flawed.]

Powerful volcanic eruptions send small sulfur droplets, or aerosols, high into the atmosphere where they act as a mirror to reflect the sun's rays and prevent them warming the ground.In 1991, the second largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century occurred when Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines exploded with enormous force, killing almost 1,000 people and causing widespread damage. Millions of tonnes of ash and gas were blasted into the atmosphere from the mountain, reaching an altitude of 21 miles. Over the next two years, average temperatures across the whole of the Earth fell by up to 0.5C. The research showed that Mount Pinatubo and the earlier major eruption of El Chichon in Mexico in 1982 “had important impacts on decadal changes in warming rates.” In addition, 17 “small” eruptions occurred after 1999 which had a cumulative effect increasing the reflective effect of aerosols in the upper atmosphere by up to 7% per year from 2000 to 2009.

[So why do current models – that you would assume to contain the latest assumptions and data – still produce grossly incorrect predictions and cannot account for the cooling no matter how much they are rejiggered?]

Scientists have provided a number of explanations in recent years as to why the apparent global warming “pause” came about, including natural climate variability to failures in accurate surface temperature measurement.

[They are tweaking their speculative hypothesis and models, but, in the final analysis, they cannot provide an answer with the certainty needed to drive draconian political agendas and public policies.]

British climate expert Professor Piers Forster, from the University of Leeds, said: “Volcanoes give us only a temporary respite from the relentless warming pressure of continued increases in CO2.”

[There is no more basis for this speculative assertion than there is for the fundamental failure of the climate models used to scare low-information people into believing there is a planetary emergency.]  

Source: Volcanic eruptions ‘contributed to global warming pause’, scientists claim - Climate Change - Environment - The Independent

About John Kerry and those models …

In a Feb. 16 speech in Indonesia, Secretary of State John Kerry assailed climate-change skeptics as members of the “Flat Earth Society” for doubting the reality of catastrophic climate change. He said,

“We should not allow a tiny minority of shoddy scientists” and “extreme ideologues to compete with scientific facts.”

But who are the Flat Earthers, and who is ignoring the scientific facts?

In ancient times, the notion of a flat Earth was the scientific consensus, and it was only a minority who dared question this belief. We are among today’s scientists who are skeptical about the so-called consensus on climate change. Does that make us modern-day Flat Earthers, as Mr. Kerry suggests, or are we among those who defy the prevailing wisdom to declare that the world is round?

The two fundamental facts are that carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere have increased due to the burning of fossil fuels, and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is a greenhouse gas, trapping heat before it can escape into space.

What is not a known fact is by how much the Earth’s atmosphere will warm in response to this added carbon dioxide. The warming numbers most commonly advanced are created by climate computer models built almost entirely by scientists who believe in catastrophic global warming. The rate of warming forecast by these models depends on many assumptions and engineering to replicate a complex world in tractable terms, such as how water vapor and clouds will react to the direct heat added by carbon dioxide or the rate of heat uptake, or absorption, by the oceans.

The modelers insist that they are unlucky because natural temperature variability is masking the real warming. They might be right, but when a batter goes 0 for 10, he’s better off questioning his swing than blaming the umpire.

The models mostly miss warming in the deep atmosphere—from the Earth’s surface to 75,000 feet—which is supposed to be one of the real signals of warming caused by carbon dioxide. Here, the consensus ignores the reality of temperature observations of the deep atmosphere collected by satellites and balloons, which have continually shown less than half of the warming shown in the average model forecasts.

Read more at: A must read: Why Secretary of State John Kerry Is Flat Wrong on Climate Change

Science is a process of controlled and transparent skepticism, and to deny skeptics is to deny the power of the scientific method itself.

Bottom line …

Activist scientists acting under political pressure produce corrupt science. As we have seen from the Climate-gate e-mails, the top scientists in the global climate debate attempted to produce research results which supported their hypothesis as well as silence those who did not agree with them by subverting the peer-review process. With billions of dollars in taxpayer funds and personal reputations at stake, we can easily see how some might succumb to the temptation to ride the gravy train rather than courageously tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

-- steve 

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