Despite the heated rhetoric from the Obama administration and environmental groups about the urgency of global warming, climate scientists have begun to come to terms with the lack of evidence of catastrophic global warming over the last decade.
“While some climate scientists continue to resist the obvious that the climate system is more complex than they assumed, others are starting to accept that the multi-decadal climate projections provide very incomplete simulations has to how the real climate system works,” Roger Pielke, Sr., Senior Research Scientist at CIRES at the University of Colorado at Boulder, told The Daily Caller News Foundation.
Establishment media outlets have been reporting about the unexpected stabilizing global surface temperatures over at least the last decade, and even former NASA scientist and environmental activist James Hansen has recognized the decade-long lull.
This has frustrated some environmentalists who recently sent a letter to major news networks urging them to have more coverage on global warming, and to stop portraying the issue as a “two-sided debate” by featuring global warming skeptics.
“The divergence of the real world observations from the multi-decadal climate predictions, both in terms of forecasting the magnitude of global warming and of changes in regional climate, is finally initiating a much overdue scientific debate on the level of our knowledge of the climate system,” Pielke added. “While there is no doubt that humans are altering the climate system, it is in a diverse variety of ways besides that caused by adding greenhouse gases such as C02.”
Pielke said that climate scientists are beginning to recognize that the natural climate forces and feedbacks play a larger role than previously thought.
“This is a highly complex calculation to make in the first place. The short period of time, only 10 years in which the increasing temperature has leveled, really doesn’t tell us very much other than the fact that temperatures may still be rising but just not as fast as they were before,” said Elgie Holstein, the senior director for strategic planning at the Environmental Defense Fund, told Fox News.
“The mainstream media cannot maintain the official man-made global warming narrative any longer,” Marc Morano of the climate skeptic website ClimateDepot.com told TheDC News Foundation. “With the lack of warming and the failure to shift the climate debate to ‘extreme weather,’ warmists are now losing once stalwart members of the media in promoting man-made climate fears.”
A study by Norwegian researchers from earlier this year found that global warming is less severe than was predicted by the United Nations climate authority. In fact, studies have been lowering their warming forecasts since the 2007 UN estimate.
In a Washington Times op-ed, Cato Institute climate scholar Patrick Michaels provides a partial list of studies that have made estimates lower than the UN:
“Richard Lindzen gives a range of 0.6 to 1.0 C (Asia-Pacific Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, 2011); Andreas Schmittner, 1.4 to 2.8 C (Science, 2011); James Annan, using two techniques, 1.2 to 3.6 C and 1.3 to 4.2 C (Climatic Change, 2011); J.H. van Hateren, 1.5 to 2.5 C (Climate Dynamics, 2012); Michael Ring, 1.5 to 2.0 C (Atmospheric and Climate Sciences, 2012); and Julia Hargreaves, including cooling from dust, 0.2 to 4.0 C and 0.8 to 3.6 C (Geophysical Research Letters, 2012).”
“It’s appropriate to jump off a ship when it begins to take on water,” Michaels said. “If you look at the monthly temperature anomalies from the University of East Anglia you see no significant trend in any direction going back to the fall of 1996 which would put us at 17 years of no trend.”
“These are not good times for the promoters of global warming,” said Morano. “Earth is failing to follow global warming predictions and the new study claiming current temperatures are the ‘hottest ever’ may be facing a full scientific retraction. The great warmist retreat has officially begun.”
However, environmental groups were encouraged earlier this year when President Obama promised to address global warming during his second term, threatening executive action if Congress failed to pass legislation on the issue.
“We can choose to believe that Superstorm Sandy, and the most severe drought in decades, and the worst wildfires some states have ever seen were all just a freak coincidence,” Obama said in his State of the Union Address. “Or we can choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science — and act before it’s too late.”
Green groups may have a reason to be optimistic as a Gallup poll from March found that 58 percent of Americans say they worry a great deal or fair amount about global warming, up from 51 percent in 2011.
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