UN's massive new climate report adds little explanation for 'pause' in warming

[WestVirginiaRebel]

Fox News:

An enormous U.N. report on the scientific data behind global warming was made available Monday, yet it offers little concrete explanation for an earthly oddity: the planet’s climate has hit the pause button.

 

Since 1998, there has been no significant increase in global average surface temperature, and some areas -- notably the Northern Hemisphere -- have actually cooled. The 2,200-page new Technical Report attributes that to a combination of several factors, including natural variability, reduced heating from the sun and the ocean acting like a “heat sink” to suck up extra warmth in the atmosphere.

 

One problem with that conclusion, according to some climate scientists, is that the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has limited the hiatus to 10-15 years. Anastasios Tsonis, distinguished professor at the University of Wisconsin – Milwaukee, believes the pause will last much longer than that. He points to repeated periods of warming and cooling in the 20th century.

 

“Each one of those regimes lasts about 30 years … I would assume something like another 15 years of leveling off or cooling,” he told Fox News.

 

That goes well beyond the window the IPCC has acknowledged, which Tsonis and other scientists believe will significantly change the predictions for temperature rise over the next century.

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The Great Pause.

[Valin]

@WestVirginaRebel

 

 

WSJ: Climate of Uncertainty

A U.N. report can't explain the hiatus in global warming.

9/30/13

 

Between 1998 and 2012 the global economy more than doubled in size—to some $71 trillion in GDP from $30 trillion. That's the good news. Over the same period the world pumped more than 100 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That is supposedly the bad news. Yet global surface temperatures have remained essentially flat. That's the mystery: If emitting CO2 into the atmosphere causes global warming, why hasn't the globe been warming?

 

That's the question we would have liked to see answered by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which Friday published the summary of its fifth report on what co-chairman Thomas Stocker calls "the greatest challenge of our times." It would have also been nice to see some humility from the IPCC, which since its last report in 2007 has seen some of its leading scientists exposed as bullies, and some of its most eye-catching predictions debunked. (Remember the vanishing Himalayan glaciers?)

 

No such luck. "Warming of the climate system is unequivocal," insists the report in its first bold-face conclusion, followed by the claim that "each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth's surface than any preceding decade since 1850." What follows are warnings of shrinking ice sheets, rapidly rising sea levels and other scary events.

 

So what about the warming that hasn't been happening since 1998? Here's the key paragraph, buried on page 10: "The observed reduction in surface warming trend over the period 1998-2012 as compared to the period 1951-2012, is due in roughly equal measure to a reduced trend in radiative forcing and a cooling contribution from internal variability, which includes a possible redistribution of heat within the ocean."

 

(Snip)