The AP reports:
Scientists working on a landmark U.N. report on climate change are struggling to explain why global warming appears to have slowed down in the past 15 years even as greenhouse gas emissions keep rising.
Leaked documents obtained by AP show there are deep concerns among governments over how to address the issue ahead of next week’s meeting of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
One can hope. I’d love to be proven overly pessimistic. Even if it is thoroughly discredited in the public eye, though, I think it’ll just slink back to the shadows of academia to indoctrinate a fresh crop of students who want nothing more than to believe that everyone older than them is stupid and they’re the generation that will save the world.
Unlike the AGW nonsense however, dark matter and dark energy didn’t plummet countries into bankruptcy.
I feel this feeding at the trough of AGW coming to an end very, very soon.
There’s nothing like the disenchantment suffered by the masses to bring these people before the sacrificial table..
Govts. deeply concerned there will not be a catastrophe. Proof it’s not science but politics. The headline should have “good news” in it somewhere.
I’m afraid you’re reading more than I wrote. I never accused anyone of fudging anything. I stated that the calculations did not change. That is the equations used to address gravity were assumed to be accurate. Instead the assumption is that the observation is wrong in the sense that it fails to show the invisible exotic matter that must exist for the necessary values of gravity required for the equations to match the observed motion. Certainly the theory changed as it suddenly included some form of matter we’ve never been able to observe or measure except in the way equations fail to model reality. I have no reason to believe that dark matter does not exist. It’s possible that there exist many forms of matter that we are unable to observe currently. It’s also possible that the original values in the equations were just wrong.
Certainly alternative theories exist, but compare the amount of media coverage they receive to the amount of media declaring dark matter has been proven. Even your use of the word “ilk” has a negative connotation. The fact that professional astrophysicists and macro cosmologists admit amongst themselves that they don’t have all the answers doesn’t change the fact that NOVA runs allegedly educational programming for children declaring dark matter is a fact of the universe. MOND assumes the observations are complete and that the gravitational equations need to be adjusted. It took fifty years after the assumption of dark matter for MOND to gain much traction and it’s still treated as a second-string theory.
I never said anyone had anything backwards so your assertion that I’m the one that has it backward seems oddly personal. I’m not sure how you are involved in cosmology, but if you are an authority, perhaps you could spend some time spreading the word that the search for candidates is still ongoing after 80 years rather than attacking people that express the possibility that they don’t exist. The sad fact is that “mysterious dark matter discovered” makes a better headline than “physicists make error in extremely complicated equation.” I don’t purport to know the truth of the universe, but it’s strangely coincidental how often the more interesting headline is presumed to be the truth.
You’re the one that has it backwards. In cosmology when Observation and Theory disagreed the answer was to change the theory, and the inclusion of dark energy and dark matter (in the Lambda CDM model, for example) is such an attempt. The search for dark matter candidates continues to this day and alternative theories (like MOND and its ilk) are also being examined. No-one is attempting to “fudge” the observations to match the theory, unlike in climate science.
The matching of measurement (for example the positions/magnitudes of the acoustic peaks in the cosmic microwave background radiation) to theory is ongoing as the precision etc. of measurements improve.
Miss-matches result in changes in theory, not the other way around.
It’s worked for the macrocosmologists since 1932. When their calculations didn’t match real world observation they invented undetectable dark matter and dark energy to explain away the difference. Effectively they stated that their calculations were correct, but the observations were wrong. 80 years later there’s still no empirical evidence but they do have a “concensus” with no signs of changing their minds. I foresee the GHG narrative being similarly successful for decades to come. All new data will be retconned into the prevailing theory with no need for anyone to admit they might have been wrong.
Deep concern is how to spin the fact than none of the models seem to work too well. I suppose the heat is going to a hiding place in the deep ocean, that that is not being eaten by aerosols. The energy balance based on model assumption fails and scientists(?) don’t question their assumptions, but look for a hidey hole for the supposed missing heat. Sounds like an engineer I worked with who was designing a new adsorption process and missing closure of his material balance by 20%. He wasted a lot of time and money creating failure after failure.