Climate change predictions: What went wrong?

Earth and climate – an ongoing controversy

They could perhaps have taken more notice of this paper by Spencer and Braswell six years ago, which found that Earth’s atmosphere is more efficient at releasing energy to space than models used to forecast climate change have been programmed to “believe.”
H/T The GWPF.

As egg-on-face moments go, it was a double-yolker, writes Nigel Hawkes in The Sunday Times [restricted access].

Last week a group of climate scientists published a paper that admitted the estimates of global warming used for years to torture the world’s conscience and justify massive spending on non-carbon energy sources were, er, wrong.

The admission was overdue acknowledgment of something that has been obvious for years.

Being wrong is not a criminal offence, especially in science, where in the long run almost everything turns out to be wrong, but the global warmers have adopted such a high-and-mighty tone to anyone who questions them that for sceptics this was pure joy.

The world may still be doomed, but it is not quite as doomed as the climatologists have repeatedly told us.

The admission was overdue acknowledgment of something that has been obvious for years. Despite the climate models predicting rapidly rising temperatures, between 1998 and 2013 temperatures barely rose at all. This was a pause, not a change in the underlying trend, the scientists and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change insisted. Global warming was still going on, even when it wasn’t.

The pause hadn’t been predicted by the computer models, but admitting that wasn’t really an option. Anxiety needed to be ramped up in order to achieve international agreement on cutting carbon emissions. That was achieved — at the cost of browbeating doubters — and the Paris agreement struck in 2016 committed signatories to limit warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

It couldn’t actually be done, the scientists said. To keep warming below 1.5C, total emissions from 2015 onwards could not amount to more than 70 gigatonnes of carbon — seven years’ worth at current emission rates.

Last week’s paper in Nature Geoscience recalculates that as 200 gigatonnes, or 240 gigatonnes if great efforts are also made to reduce other global-warming gases such as nitrous oxide and methane.

Continued here.
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See also – SUNDAY TIMES: CLIMATE BELIEVERS WON’T GO COOL ON GLOBAL WARMING, THEY’VE AN INDUSTRY TO SUPPORT