The global warming and climate change debate waging in the pages of the WSJ and blogs exposes public to embarrassing "consensus" climate science failures
(click on images to enlarge)
This past week has seen a war of words breakout in the WSJ pages (here and here) between non-alarmists and alarmists. Although nearly 100% of scientists agree that climate change is happening, that global warming has taken place since the Little Ice Age and that humans do have an influence on climate, the public (via the WSJ) has now been witness to the unbelievably lame argument made by global warming alarmist scientists.
As "97%" of the world populace knows, the IPCC has falsely prophesied for the last two decades that human CO2 emissions are causing "runaway" warming that is resulting in a climate "tipping point." As the above two charts clearly indicate, the IPCC climate model prediction of runaway warming has been immensely wrong.
The leftmost chart tracks HadCRUT annual global temperatures (light purple) versus the IPCC's climate model predictions. The blue, red and green curves are temperature projections if CO2 emissions continued "as is" and the orange curve is if CO2 emissions were held constant at 2000 levels. (Light purple dotted line is anticipated anomaly by 2025 per the HadCRUT linear trend.)
Obviously, the observed global temperatures are robustly below all the climate model scenarios anticipated, even with actual CO2 emissions continuing their "business-as-usual" growth.
The second chart (rightmost) plots absolute annual global temperatures and CO2 levels for the last 30 years, since January 1, 1982. The IPCC models and alarmists envision that global temperatures could exceed 20°C by year 2100 due to a doubling of pre-industrial CO2 levels - this chart puts the last 30 years in that alarmist context.
Per the linear trend of the last 30 years (1.58°C/century), global temperatures are on a path to reach 15.75°C by 2100, a maximum that is a fraction of the IPCC's much publicized catastrophic predictions. The blue curve is the 5-year average of annual temperature change - this is the actual outcome versus the scary "runaway," "tipping point" global warming that all alarmist scientists believed was occurring during the recent "warmest" decades.
Speaking of "warmest," this is now the go-to-scary-word of alarmist "consensus" scientists. Literally, they have been forced to use this lame adjective because of the embarrassing empirical evidence. In essence, "warmest" (take your pick - day, month, quarter, year and decade) replaces words such as "accelerating," "rapid" and "runaway" warming, which are demonstrably false.
Indeed, the lameness of the underlying AGW "science" has become palpable.
Conclusion:
- The catastrophic (CAGW) theory is empirically a very lame theory
- Global warming is not rapid, accelerating or runaway
- Since 1850 the per century linear trend is +0.43°C (+0.34°C by 2100AD)
- Last 30 years, the per century linear trend is +1.58°C (+1.40°C by 2100AD)
- Last 15 years, the per century linear trend is +0.34°C (+0.29°C by 2100AD)
- Last 10 years, the per century linear trend is -0.72°C (-0.63°C by year 2100AD)
Note: Linear trends are not predictions; temperature data & CO2 data