CO2 Is So Powerful It Can Cause Global Warming To Pause For Decades

A new Nature paper claims that pauses and cooling phases mean that C02 may cause more warming than anyone thought.

It’s all so obvious. If researchers start with models that don’t work, they can find anything they look for — even abject nonsense which is the complete opposite of what the models predicted.

Holy Simulation! Let’s take this reasoning and run with it  — in the unlikely event, we actually get relentless rising temperatures, that will imply that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is lower. Can’t see that press release coming…

Nature has sunk so low these days it’s competing with The Onion.

The big problem bugging believers was that global warming paused, which no model predicted, and which remains unexplained still, despite moving goalposts, searching in data that doesn’t exist, and using error bars 17 times larger than the signal.

The immutable problem is that energy shalt not be created nor destroyed, so The Pause still matters even years after it stopped pausing.

The empty space still shows the models don’t understand the climate — CO2 was supposed to be heating the world, all day, every day.

Quadrillions of Joules have to go somewhere, they can’t just vanish, but models don’t know where they went. If we can’t explain the pause, we can’t explain the cause, and the models can’t predict anything.

In studies like these, the broken model is not a bug, it’s a mandatory requirement — if these models actually worked, it wouldn’t be as easy to produce any and every conclusion that an unskeptical scientist could hope to “be surprised” by.

The true value of this study, if any, is in 100 years time when some psychology Ph.D. student will be able to complete an extra paragraph on the 6th-dimensional flexibility of human rationalization and confirmation bias.

Busted climate models can literally prove anything. The more busted they are, the better.

More sensitive climates are more variable climates

University of Exeter

A decade without any global warming is more likely to happen if the climate is more sensitive to carbon dioxide emissions, new research has revealed.

A decade without warming is even more likely to happen if CO2 is irrelevant.

A team of scientists from the University of Exeter and the Centre of Ecology and Hydrology in the UK has conducted pioneering new research into why both surges and slowdowns of warming take place.

Using sophisticated climate models the team, led by Ph.D. student Femke Nijsse, discovered if the climate was more sensitive to CO₂concentration also displayed larger variations of warming over a decade.

When combined with information from simulations without any carbon dioxide increases, the authors were able to assess the natural variability of each climate model.

The research is published this week in Nature Climate Change.

Femke Nijsse, from the University of Exeter, said: “We were surprised to see that even when we took into account that sensitive climate models warm more over the last decades of the 20th century, these sensitive models were still more likely to have short periods of cooling.”

Climate sensitivity, which sits at the very heart of climate science, is the amount of global warming that takes place as atmospheric CO₂ concentrations rise.

For many years, estimates have put climate sensitivity somewhere between 1.5-4.5°C of warming for a doubling of pre-industrial CO₂ levels.

The study found that cooling — or “hiatus” — decades were more than twice as likely around the turn of the century in high sensitivity models (models that warm 4.5 ºC after doubling CO₂), compared to low sensitivity models (models that warm 1.5 ºC after doubling CO₂).

Here comes The Caveat:

Co-author Dr. Mark Williamson, A Research Fellow at Exeter: “This does not mean that the presence of a global warming slowdown at the beginning of the 21st century implies we live in a highly sensitive world.

This paper is just here to be a handy excuse, the bandaid:

“By looking at all decades together, we get a better picture and find observations are broadly consistent with a central estimate of climate sensitivity”

Ms. Nijsse added: “We still don’t exactly know how much the climate system will heat up, nor do we know exactly what the range of natural variability in trends will be over the coming decades. But our study shows that these risks should not be considered as separate.”

Here comes the new scary buzzword –  “hyperwarming”

The paper also studied the chance that a decade in the 21st century could warm by as much as the entire 20th century — a scenario that the research team calls “hyperwarming.”

Under a scenario where carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels continue to increase, the chance of hyperwarming is even more dependent on climate sensitivity than the long-term global warming trend.

Increasing the climate sensitivity by 50% from a central estimate of 3 ºC would increase the mean global warming to the end of this century by slightly less than 50%, but would increase the chance of a hyperwarming decade by more than a factor of ten.

The research was supported by the European Research Council (‘ECCLES’ project) and the UK’s Natural Environment Research Council.

REFERENCE

Femke J. M. M. Nijsse, Peter M. Cox, Chris Huntingford, Mark S. Williamson. Decadal global temperature variability increases strongly with climate sensitivity. Nature Climate Change, 2019; DOI: 10.1038/s41558-019-0527-4

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