Climate Sensitivity (the short of it)

A new study suggests short term warming will be less, but long-term warming to remain about the same.

Joanne Nova gets all excited about the prospect of less short term warming that she forgets that (in her opinion) models are 100% wrong. She also chooses to ignore the authors comments about long term temperature forecasts remaining unchanged.

Cherry picking the bits of a report she like is what Joanne Nova does best.

What does the author of the paper, Dr Otto, think?

From the ABC

But Dr Otto cautions that the longer-term warming trend will not change and it will eventually result in the same higher temperatures as earlier forecast.

“It certainly is no reason to relax or become complacent in terms of climate policy, because the rate of warming that we will see eventually in the coming centuries has not changed from this data,” he said.

Co-author Myles Allen also writes about another climate denialist …

Now 1.3C is 30% less than 1.8C, but this is hardly a game changer: at face value, our new findings mean that the changes we had previously expected between now and 2050 might take until 2065 to materialise instead. Then again, they might not: 1.8C is within our range of uncertainty; and natural variability will affect what happens in the 2050s anyway.

From the BBC

Writing in Nature Geoscience, the researchers say this will reduce predicted warming in the coming decades.

But long-term, the expected temperature rises will not alter significantly.

Other experts aren’t as enthusiastic as blogger Jo Nova.

Prof Steven Sherwood, from the University of New South Wales had a more sober opinion. When asked …

“Is there any succour in these findings for climate sceptics who say the slowdown over the past 14 years means the global warming is not real?”

“None. No comfort whatsoever,” he said.

More amusing is that in Nova’s rush to support this paper, she accepts the warming of the oceans that only a day earlier she was trying to cast doubt upon. Contradiction doesn’t bother her, so long as she’s raising doubt.

Tags: Climate Sensitivity