The Los Angeles Times reports:
It’s a climate puzzle that has vexed scientists for more than a decade and added fuel to the arguments of those who insist man-made global warming is a myth.
Since just before the start of the 21st century, the Earth’s average global surface temperature has failed to rise despite soaring levels of heat-trapping greenhouse gases and years of dire warnings from environmental advocates.
Now, as scientists with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change gather in Sweden this week to approve portions of the IPCC’s fifth assessment report, they are finding themselves pressured to explain this glaring discrepancy.
The panel, a United Nations creation that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, hopes to brief world leaders on the current state of climate science in a clear, unified voice. However, experts inside and outside the process say members probably will engage in heated debate over the causes and significance of the so-called global warming hiatus.
“It’s contentious,” said IPCC panelist Shang-Ping Xie, a professor of climate science at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. “The stakes have been raised by various people, especially the skeptics.”
Though scientists don’t have any firm answers, they do have multiple theories. Xie has argued that the hiatus is the result of heat absorption by the Pacific Ocean — a little-understood, naturally occurring process that repeats itself every few decades. Xie and his colleagues presented the idea in a study published last month in the prestigious journal Nature.
The theory, which is gaining adherents, remains unproved by actual observation. Surface temperature records date to the late 1800s, but measurements of deep water temperature began only in the 1960s, so there just isn’t enough data to chart the long-term patterns, Xie said.
Reblogged this on Mothers Against Wind Turbines and commented:
Wow…..this sounds more far out than their last story…..
How do they get that “warm water” to stay there like that, and not blend in with the colder water?
Even if ocean absorption is a probable cause for the “hiatus”, isn’t the fact that it wasn’t taken in account by the modeling (i.e. predictions) indicate a several lack of knowledge about climate forcers and a severe blow to the validity of global warming theory as “settled science”?
But the biggest problem is that they can’t even prove that this happening. Like the cooling from 1940 to 1970 being attributed to atmospherical particulate matter (i.e. soot) which has no empirical evidence to support it, other than it keeps the AGW theory intact. The warming resumed after stricter air quality regulations were enacted in the 70s, or so the theory goes, although nobody has quantified this theory in the least.
The warmists have jumped on these unproven, theoretical, likely not occurring events, as gospel to salvage their limping theory. In theater, these explanations are called “deus ex machina” or the introduction of an unexplained and unpredicted element, to resolve a seemingly unresolvable problem. Literally “god from machine” for the use of elaborate mechanical devices which would descend from above (representing the gods) to fix the predicament. We commonly call this “divine intervention” in everyday practice. Today, this cheezy resolution results in groans from the audience, as it should in so-called scientific theory. So much for separating the numenal from the phenomenal.
Unfortunately this isn’t the only theory using deus ex machina to explain events which run contrary to observation or evidence.