P Gosselin @ NoTricksZone:
It’s not every morning one wakes up and finds you’ve been quoted by the New York Times. That’s what happened to me this morning.
In his article, A Change in Temperature, Justin Gillis tells his readers that the issue of CO2 climate sensitivity has become more hotly disputed than ever, but warns catastrophe still looms.
Here are just a few comments I have:
1) The New York Times first have to learn that science is not about insisting you are correct, or being obsessed with a popular pet hypothesis. In the article Justin Gillis and scientist James Annan come across as having a very hard time departing from the hypothesis that CO2 climate sensitivity is high.
2. CO2 lags temperature, history has proven. Moreover, although CO2 has risen tremendously (in relative terms) over the last 15 years, the global temperature has not. For the last 15 years, sensitivity has been zero. Worse, there’s strong, mounting evidence that there isn’t going to be any warming for another 10 or 20 years at least. (Hint: oceans).
3. There’s no correlation between CO2 and temperature. Of the last 130 years, CO2 has risen 100% of the time, but temperature have risen only during 45 of those years (1920-45 and 1978-98). That’s a very lousy correlation. And you only need to look back at the previous interglacial during the Eem. While CO2 was steady at about 280 ppm, the temperature dropped 6°C.
Now it’s CO2 quadrupling
4. But what I find particularly interesting about Gillis’s latest article is that the once much ballyhooed consensus is totally shattered, and the overall warmist retreat now taking place. It is clear that scientists are now abandoning the high CO2 sensitivity values in droves.
