Peter Sinclair’s latest video in his This Is Not Cool series for the Yale Forum on Climate Change & the Media looks at why global warming — the steady accumulation of energy in the climate system — continues, despite media buying into the denier-promulgated myth of a hiatus, pause or slowdown in warming. Sinclair’s compiled interviews with real experts — Josh Willis, Kevin Trenberth, and James Hansen among them — and they explain what’s going on in a clear and compelling way. The next time someone claims that warming’s stopped, point them at this video.
4 thoughts on “This is not cool: no slowdown in global warming”
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I don’t think it is useful to dispute whether there is discussion in the literature about something generally described as a “hiatus, pause or slowdown in warming”. It is not some “denier-promulgated myth”.
Solomon wrote “the trend in global surface temperatures has been nearly flat since the late 1990s despite continuing increases in the forcing…”, in 2010. Hansen disputed this in 2010, saying it “is not supported by our data”, but by 2013 even Hansen is writing about “the standstill of global temperature in the past decade”. Trenberth is one of many who use the word “hiatus”, eg. in this recent NPR interview
“Hiatus” seems to be a hot topic. A recent study used the word “hiatus” in its title. ScienceNews, and Nature magazine both published reports about it. i.e. saying it “adds to mounting evidence that cooling in the tropical Pacific is the cause of the global warming hiatus….”
The study itself states that the fact that “the annual mean global temperature has not risen in the twenty first century” is “challenging the prevailing view that anthropogenic forcing causes climate warming”.
A challenge doesn’t mean it is convincing anyone, although people who want to keep their heads in the sand seem to like it.
Richard Alley commented in his AGU Chapman conference on Climate Science Communication talk that people “at the highest levels” in the US government and security apparatus are buying into the denier line that “hiatus” = “nothing to worry about with this climate change BS”, and remarked that this is utter “nonsense”.
Nonsense indeed, David. As Einstein once said:
Naomi Klein’s take on it is that elites profit from disaster, so have short-term incentives to do nothing about climate change – or even to willfully exacerbate it:
http://www.salon.com/2013/09/05/naomi_klein_big_green_groups_are_crippling_the_environmental_movement_partner/
Peter Sinclair went with James Box to Greenland to observe what is happening to the ice. This is a really good video of it but it lasts and hour so make yourself comfortable. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9euZ6q4bEKs
That would be Jason Box, Bob…