Der Spiegel: Scientists baffled over halt in global warming

Influential German daily newspaper der Spiegel has finally confronted the truth; Scientists are all at sea concerning the halt in global warming since 1997. This report by Pierre Gosselin from his excellent website notrickszone

Spiegel Ends Europe’s Climate Denialism…European Media Now Scrambling To Explain End Of Warming!
by Pierre Gosselin 19-1-2013

Spiegel has finally gotten around to conceding that global warming has ended, at least for the time being.

Yesterday Spiegel science journalist Axel Bojanowski published a piece called: Klimawandel: Forscher rätseln über Stillstand bei Erderwärmung (Climate change: scientists baffled by the stop in global warming).

We’ve been waiting for this admission a long time, and watching the media reaction is interesting to say the least. Bojanowski writes that “The word has been out for quite some time now that the climate is developing differently than predicted earlier“. He poses the question: “How many more years of stagnation are needed before scientists rethink their predictions of future warming?”

Bojanowski adds:

15 years without warming are now behind us. The stagnation of global near-surface average temperatures shows that the uncertainties in the climate prognoses are surprisingly large. The public is now waiting with suspense to see if the next UN IPCC report, due in September, is going to discuss the warming stop.”

The big question now circulating through the stunned European media, governments and activist organisations is how could the warming stop have happened? Moreover, how do we explain it to the public? To find an answer, Bojanowski contacted a number of sources. The result, in summary: scientists are now left to speculate over an entire range of possible causes. Uncertainty in climate science indeed has never been greater. It’s back to square one.

One explanation Spiegel presents is that the oceans have somehow absorbed the heat and are now hiding it somewhere. Yet, Bojanowski writes that there is very little available data to base this on, “there is a lot of uncertainty concerning the development of the water temperature. It has long appeared that also the oceans have not warmed further since 2003.” Spiegel quotes Kevin Trenberth concerning NASA’s claim that they’ve detected a warming of the oceans: “The uncertainties with the data are too great. We need to improve our measurements“.

Spiegel also writes that the missing heat may be lurking somewhere deep in the oceans. But here Bojanowski [Spiegel] quotes Doug Smith of the Met Office: “This is very difficult to confirm“. Jochem Marotzke of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology suspects that energy has been conveyed to the ocean’s interior, but there’s a dire lack of data to even begin confirming this. Bojanowski writes over the current state of ocean data measurement: “Without intensifying the data measurement network, we are going to have to wait a long time for any proof“.

Scientists also suspect that the stratosphere may have something to do with the recent global temperature stall. Susan Solomon says the stratosphere has gotten considerably drier, and so warming at the surface may have been reduced by a quarter. But Bojanowski reminds us that under the bottom line, the scientists are pretty much without a clue; he writes:

‘However, climate models do not illustrate stratospheric water vapour very well,’ says Marotzke. The prognoses thus remain vague.”

Well then, maybe it’s due to aerosols from China and India blocking out the sun, some scientists are speculating, and ”thus weakening warming by one third“.  Spiegel writes that “If the air were cleaner, then climate warming would accelerate.” But aerosols have always been used in climate models to explain unexpected cooling, such as from 1945 to 1980.

In fact, all the explanations presented by Bojanowski above have already been thoroughly looked at in a book-  one year ago – by a pair of scientists: Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt and Sebastian Lüning. Last year much of the media ostracised them for floating such “crude theories”. A year later it’s indeed strange to see that their “crude theories” are now completely in vogue.

How does Bojanowski sum it up? “The numerous possible explanations do show just how imprecisely climate is understood.”

Read the rest here:
http://notrickszone.com/2013/01/19/spiegel-ends-europes-climate-denialism-european-media-now-scrambling-to-explain-end-of-warming/

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