Same old New Scientist
Dec 5, 2013
Bishop Hill in Climate: Sceptics

Same old New Scientist. Their editorial today is desperately poor stuff, at best demonstrating a comical lack of understanding of the lukewarmer case and at worst deliberately mispresenting it.

[Sceptics] have been emboldened by scientists' acknowledgment that temperatures on the planet's surface have risen less sharply than expected in recent years. The scientists say that's down to natural variability; the doubters say it is a sign that climate change amounts to little more than ignorable, or even beneficial, "lukewarming".

...

But it is misguided to focus only on the temperature of the thin layer of air that we live in. That is just one of many important indicators. In particular, the oceans are warming too: recent research suggests that in the last 60 years the Pacific's depths have warmed 15 times as fast as at any time in the previous 10,000 years.

Leave aside the fact that for years, upholders of the global warming consensus and their supporters in New Scientist focused relentlessly on surface temperatures. Leave aside the fact that people like Pielke Sr who called for a focus on ocean heat content were damned as heretics or the paid mouthpieces of oil companies. Consider instead the fact that the basis of the lukewarmer case is not based on the hiatus in surface temperature rises, it is that climate sensitivity is low. And climate sensitivity calculations take ocean heat content changes into account.

One wonders if the author took the trouble to actually find out what the lukewarmer argument is before criticising it.

Article originally appeared on (http://www.bishop-hill.net/).
See website for complete article licensing information.