...The mother of German green weeklies, Die Zeit, appears to be taking measurements at the back of the house in preparation for the installation of a back door! Rahmstorf is back there with them, trying to talk them out of it.
Leading lefty journalist Harald Martenstein of Die Zeit, a weekly that recently portrayed Marc Morano as the Don Corleone of the North American climate denial syndicate, has an amusingly satirical essay on the misfortunes of climate science and modeling: On the surprises of climate change. Hat/tip: klimazwiebel. If you can read German, his essay is a jewel in irony and humor to behold. Effective because few things convey a message better than music or humor.
Martenstein, once a devout believer of the global warming religion, apparently has been struggling to reconcile the glaring differences between climate expectations and hard reality....
Is the Great Climate Alarm Winding Down?
...Climate realists have long been aware that global average surface temperature had stopped sometime around 2000, and even a few years before. Lately alarmists had to admit it. The period with no warming is now as long as was period of warming on which fears were based—17 years according to a leaked draft of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5)—despite continued rise of atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentration.
Observed global average temperatures (GAT) are, in fact, below IPCC’s 2007 Assessment Report’s lowest—and most confident—temperature predictions. The new view in the leaked AR5 shows a complete reversal of the AR4 view, which still touted catastrophic, anthropogenic global warming. ... ...Indeed, the wheels seem to be falling off the climate alarmists’ wagon. Acclaimed physicist Freeman Dyson recently explained that the problem rests in the very heart of climate-change theory (if we can dignify it with that word): the substitution of (hopelessly unrealistic and guess-filled) modeling for experimental and real-world observation. With yet another hockey-stick depiction of past temperatures biting the dust, one wonders when not just the public but also political leaders will at last say, “Enough, children. Quit your fantasies and get back to the real world!”
The bottom line is that no one can say any longer that the world is warming dangerously.
This is in part due to the inherent faultiness of computer models used to predict future warming, which cannot even predict the past, let alone accurately predict the future. Yet, these climate models are the primary basis for increasing government involvement in (and spending on) climate change. ...
The End of an Illusion
...Rather than narrowing in to measure minor variations from the long-term average, which makes annual variations of a few tenths of a degree look enormous, this one zooms out to show us the data in terms of absolute temperature measurements, in which the annual variations over the past 15 years look as insignificant as they really are.
So basically, all that the global warming advocates really have, as the evidentiary basis for their theory, is that global temperatures were a little higher than usual in the late 1990s. That's it. Which proves nothing. The climate varies, just as weather varies, and as far as we can tell, this is all well within the normal range.
That has been one of my complaints about the global warming scare since the very beginning. We only have systematic global temperature measurements going back about 150 years, which on the relevant timescale—a geological time-scale—is a blink of an eye. Moreover, the measurement methods for these global temperatures have been not been entirely consistent, making them susceptible to changes due to everything from a different paint used on the outside of the weather station to the "urban heat island" effect that happens when a weather station in the middle of a field is surrounded over the years by parking lots. And somehow, among all the billions spent on global warming research, not much money seems to have made its way to the enormous international effort that would be required to ensure the accurate and consistent measurement of global temperatures.
So we have not been able to establish what ought to be the starting point for any theory about global temperatures: a baseline for what is a normal global temperature and what is a natural variation in temperature....
