You Ought to Have a Look: 2015 Temperatures, Climate Sensitivity, and the Warming Hiatus

You Ought to Have a Look: 2015 Temperatures, Climate Sensitivity, and the Warming Hiatus | Cato @ Liberty:
"What’s lost in a lot of the discussion about human-caused climate change is not that the sum of human activities is leading to some warming of the earth’s temperature, but that the observed rate of warming (both at the earth’s surface and throughout the lower atmosphere) is considerably less than has been anticipated by the collection of climate models upon whose projections climate alarm (i.e., justification for strict restrictions on the use of fossil fuels) is built.

We highlight in this issue of You Ought to Have a Look a couple of articles that address this issue that we think are worth checking out.

First is this post from Steve McIntyre over at Climate Audit that we managed to dig out from among all the “record temperatures of 2015” stories. In his analysis, McIntyre places the 2015 global temperature anomaly not in real world context, but in the context of the world of climate models.

Climate model-world is important because it is in that realm where climate change catastrophes play out, and that influences the actions of real-world people to try to keep them contained in model-world.

So how did the observed 2015 temperatures compare to model world expectations? 
Not so well.

In a series of tweets over the holidays, we pointed out that the El Niño-fueled, record-busting, high temperatures of 2015 barely reached to the temperatures of an average year expected by the climate models.

All of the individual models have trends well above observations…   There are now over 440 months of data and these discrepancies will not vanish with a few months of El Nino.

Be sure to check out the whole article here. 
We’re pretty sure you won’t read about any of this in the mainstream media.

....After tearing through the numerous methodological deficiencies and misapplied statistics contained in the paper, Neal is left shaking his head at the peer-review process that gave rise to the publication of this paper in the first place, and offered this warning:

Those familiar with the scientific literature will realize that completely wrong papers are published regularly, even in peer-reviewed journals, and even when (as for this paper) many of the flaws ought to have been obvious to the reviewers.  So perhaps there’s nothing too notable about the publication of this paper.  On the other hand, one may wonder whether the stringency of the review process was affected by how congenial the paper’s conclusions were to the editor and reviewers.  One may also wonder whether a paper reaching the opposite conclusion would have been touted as a great achievement by Stanford University. Certainly this paper should be seen as a reminder that the reverence for “peer-reviewed scientific studies” sometimes seen in popular expositions is unfounded.

Well said.