Press reactions to the Otto et al paper vary from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Matt Ridley in the Times (£) points to the policy implications and notes that mitigation now looks like a pretty daft approach to take:
It is true that the “transient climate response” is not the end of the story and that the gradual warming of the oceans means that there would be more warming in the pipeline even if we stopped increasing carbon dioxide levels after doubling them. But given the advance of nuclear and solar technology, there is now a good chance we will have decarbonised the economy before any net harm has been done.
Fiona Harvey in the Guardian, meanwhile, is trying to push TCR of 1.8°C as "human disaster looming". This is so absurd as to almost defy belief. At the rate of warming implied by the paper, the impacts of global warming are more likely to be positive than negative for the foreseeable future.
Staying with the ridiculous, New Scientist argues that the prospect of little warming for decades to come should add impetus to efforts to secure a global climate deal.
And the paper's lead author is also keen to spin the results, the FT reporting his remarks as follows:
...in the long term, temperatures are still likely to rise to potentially dangerous levels of more than 2°C above those of pre-industrial times, unless greenhouse gas emissions are curbed. that means there is no reason to believe sceptics’ claims that the earth has stopped warming or that climate policies are a waste of money, said the report’s lead author, Alexander Otto of Oxford university’s Environmental Change Institute.
I'm not sure whether Dr Otto has quite grasped the concept of discounting. I think he might have been better sticking to the science than getting involved with the economics.
The BBC also reckons the results do not mean much:
...when it comes to the longer term picture, the authors say their work is consistent with previous estimates. The IPCC said that climate sensitivity was in the range of 2.0-4.5C.
This latest research, including the decade of stalled temperature rises, produces a range of 0.9-5.0C.
"It is a bigger range of uncertainty," said Dr Otto.
"But it still includes the old range. We would all like climate sensitivity to be lower but it isn't."
Perceptive readers will note that the range quoted of 0.9-5deg;C is different to that quoted by Nic Lewis in his article here last night. The difference is that the BBC is using the whole data range (which includes the poor quality data from the 1970s) whereas Nic is quoting the figure derived only from the most recent and therefore better quality, data. I think reasonable people can differ here, but it is important to note that the mode of the estimate produced by the full range is lower than that of the single-decade estimate.
Bishop Hill