Once again, the deniers jump on anything, and don't care if they misrepresent a person's views to do so. First off, your source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newsbusters
"The Media Research Center (MRC) is a conservative content analysis organization based in Alexandria, Virginia, founded in 1987 by L. Brent Bozell III. Its stated mission, according to its website, is "to bring balance and responsibility to the news media", and the MRC catalogs and reports on what it asserts to be widespread liberal media bias in the United States press.
The MRC has received financial support from several foundations, including the Bradley, Scaife, Olin, Castle Rock, Carthage and JM foundations."
Now, as merely semi-responsible reporting notes,
"few climate scientists go as far as Latif", which is absolutely correct. Even that reporting is at best only semi-responsible. For example, as Latif noted right at the outset of his speech, talking about how the media mistakenly believes that global warming is supposed to be a constant upswing, with no variation. He then presented the possibility of the NAO causing a temporary cooling trend as a "What-If" scenario,
talking about how the denialsphere would run with it:
Quote:
It may well happen that you enter a decade, or maybe even two- you know- when the temperature cools- alright- relative to the present level- alright?
And then- you know- I know what’s going to happen -you know? I will get- you know- millions of phone calls- you know:
“Eh, what’s going on? So, is global warming disappearing?” You know? “Have you lied on us?”
So- you know- and therefore this is the reason why we need to address this decadal prediction issue.
|
(more on decadal predictions in a bit).
Furthermore it is simply not true that the planet "has been cooling". Even if you use the cherry-picked start-and-endpoints and a cherry-picked choice of planetary temperatures, it
still doesn't show a cooling trend:
Contrary to a naive approach, trend-line setting involves the intermediary points, not just the start and end-points, and a trend-line for even the cherry-picked years and datasets still shows a warming trend.
Back to Latif. He's talking about short-term fluctuations masking the long-term fluctuations -- in particular, the NAO (North Atlantic Oscillation). Think "El Nino that takes 10-20 years". Like El Nino, it has nothing to do with CO2 forcing; it's simply noise added to the system. Here's his paper:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal...ture06921.html
The summary of his abstract?
Quote:
|
Our results suggest that global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming
|
Want to see his actual scenario from his presentation? See page 3:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature06921
Does that look to you like what the skeptics are trying to portray this as? Once again,
global warming does not mean that random noise and fluctuation will cease. It simply means that the underlying trend that the noise is
on top of is rising. And to top it all off, the concept of the NAO causing an overall decline at *any point* is a minority position anyway. It doesn't likely have enough amplitude.
But this does bring up a very important topic: short term accuracy. In general, people expect forecasts to be most accurate in the short term, and least accurate in the long term. But that's not the way it works:
(Source: Hawkins and Sutton; couldn't find a direct link, sorry, but I did find this copy)
What happens is that in the very short term (days), the models accurately pick up current trends and storm fronts and jet stream patterns and so forth, and they move across the world roughly accurately. Over time, as anyone who's looked at long range forecasts, they get off on when and where they are, how extreme they are, etc. So after that, the models keep sending storm fronts and so forth across the world, but they don't match up at all with when the actual fronts cross. But here's the key factor: they statistically happen with the same distribution of geography, frequency, and intensity. The same thing happens with the various atmospheric and oceanic oscillations -- they're a big factor in the short term, but the longer-term picture you look at, the less relevant they become. They're just noise.
The important thing to realize is that this is not a "shakeup". This is nothing new. The noise can have masking effects (or amplifying effects) on the signal. However, the signal remains regardless of what kind of noise is on top of it.