The BBC reports:
The report’s authors ultimately conclude that 15 years is still not a long enough timescale to draw firm conclusions about the pause. Scientific studies on the slow-down have cited uptake of heat by the upper oceans as a possible cause, along with the properties of particulate matter in the atmosphere which can reflect solar energy back into space. But published research is still relatively sparse.
A favourite of climate “sceptics”, the Medieval Warm Period, is also referenced in the report. In some places this period, from 950-1250 AD, was comparable in its warming with the late 20th Century, but the report says this did not occur as coherently across seasons and regions as the current phase of warming.
The deep oceans are a ‘black hole’ for the climate modellers. They can’t even handle the clouds we can see. They appear confused about global ocean circulation patters, let alone the more occult vertical convection systems. As far as I can tall, they have not even *thought* about the volcanic heat sources on the ocean floor such as the nearly constant activity at ‘black smokers’, undersea volcanoes, sea-floor spreading zones, or the Gakken Ridge lava outflow zone.
Gotcha. Uptake of heat by the upper oceans, where everybody knows no change has been detected. What happened to the deep oceans? Didn’t that work?
It is hard to say, with all the manipulation of the temperature data, and the closing of weather stations which showed cooling “due to cost savings measures” etc, I don’t think it is possible to compare weather from today against weather from 30 years ago. Maybe against last year, but the metrics have been shifted so much that historical comparisons are worthless.
The recent global warming agenda dates from around 1980 and especially from James Hansen’s claptrap speech in 1988. That warming phase ended by 1998, possibly by 1996, possibly never happened. If you’re going to claim that 1998-2013 is too short to disprove a warming trend of serious proportions, you have to give up the claim that 1975-1998 is long enough to prove a warming trend of serious proportions.
Uncertaintly in a cancer diagnosis may merit aggressive treatment for some patients. Uncertainty about an agenda that threatens the well-being of all the common people on the planet, but not the elites who do most of the noisemaking, is a very good reason to quit doing things.
So we can’t be sure today based on data from an array of satellites and world wide weather stations instantly transmitted across the globe and colated by super computers, but a selection of archaic 3rd party observations in 800 year old books is solid evidence?
Wasn’t it one tree ring, from a tree in Syberia, of a breed that doesn’t really show climate variations well?