
Cause of global warming hiatus found deep in the Atlantic Ocean - aethertap
http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/08/21/cause-of-global-warming-hiatus-found-deep-in-the-atlantic-ocean/
======
phkahler
This is the problem as I see it from TFA:

>> More than a dozen theories have now been proposed for the so-called global
warming hiatus, ranging from air pollution to volcanoes to sunspots.

>> “Every week there’s a new explanation of the hiatus,” said corresponding
author Ka-Kit Tung

First of all, a hypothesis is NOT a theory. Secondly, they have a goal
indicative of an agenda - they're looking for a plausible explanation and
publishing speculation as "theory". If you don't have data you're just
speculating, and by data I don't mean "yeah, volcanoes erupt and emit stuff".
You need data that supports your hypothesis, and if you really want to claim a
theory, IMHO you need some kind of mathematical model. If all these weekly
explanations had data and models to back them, I don't think there would be
nearly so many.

To me this resembles the folks who blame every weather event on climate
change. Even if I accept the premise, they look like fools trying to tie warm,
cold, erratic, extreme, and calm, all to the the same cause with nothing but
simple high level hand waving.

Never mind my views on certain topics, doesn't all that speculation out in the
public view damage the perception of science as a whole? That bothers me.

~~~
Clanan
Doesn't this tie into the idea of falsifiability? All these "theories" cannot
really be disproven, only re-modeled. They're so focused on tying _everything_
to human-caused climate change that they're leaving behind scientific rigor.
As you said, bring on the accurate models and data!

~~~
dasil003
Falsifiability is just a lot harder at a macro scale like the planet. It's
more like astrophysics than classical physics. Perhaps even harder because you
don't have discrete bodies and large spaces, you just have one heavily
intertwined body of interactions.

I don't think that makes it strictly non-falsifiable, it just makes it a
little fuzzier where you have to accept that there are too many variables to
isolate, and you need to take clues and relative changes to be worth something
even if there isn't a controlled scenario that science would prefer.

The worst part of climate change science isn't the uncertainty, it's the fact
that any uncertainty will be grasped upon by the oligarchy to create FUD in
favor of the status quo that generated their fortunes. That systemic bias
could well be the end of the species as we are collectively unable to pull our
heads out of our asses.

~~~
tbrownaw
_any uncertainty will be grasped upon by the oligarchy to create FUD in favor
of the status quo that generated their fortunes_

Ah, but it will _also_ be grasped by researchers to create FUD in favor of
sensationalism so they can get more grants and maybe become famous for Saving
The World.

 _That systemic bias could well be the end of the species as we are
collectively unable to pull our heads out of our asses._

Sure. Or equally unlikely, the opposite systemic bias causes the end of the
species as a result of banning all effective telephone cleaning chemicals
since they react with water to produce greenhouse gasses.

~~~
satellitecat
Maybe they want to save the world for the world's sake. I am generally in
favour of the world.

~~~
lotsofmangos
There is a war against Terra.

Or terror.

Can't be terror though.

You can't have a war against terror.

That's obvious.

Must be Terra then.

We surely aren't led by idiots.

After all.

I too am generally in favour of the world.

\---

satellitecat:

 _Release the kittens._

I repeat:

 _Release all the kittens._

------
guscost
> New research from the University of Washington shows that the heat absent
> from the surface is plunging deep in the north and south Atlantic Ocean, and
> is part of a naturally occurring cycle.

It's acceptable to rush to the conclusion that temperature patterns from the
20th century are driven by anthropogenic influence and declare the matter
settled, but when the warming trend doesn't continue I'm supposed to patiently
wait for these folks to formulate all manner of alternate hypotheses?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Ha! But the difference between their modeling and your bull is, they do the
math?

~~~
yummyfajitas
You don't need to do the math to point out an inconsistency in reasoning. A
few equations and a big computer simulation doesn't mean the rest of us have
to turn off our brain when your conclusions seem inconsistent.

------
3JPLW
Here's the actual article:
[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6199/897](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6199/897)

There's also a short review of the state of the literature in this same issue.
Well worth a read:
[http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6199/860.full](http://www.sciencemag.org/content/345/6199/860.full)

(I'm not sure how much of this content is limited to ivory towers)

~~~
greenyoda
Without a subscription, you can only read the abstract before hitting the
paywall.

------
vixin
I believe this is cause #31: others cited include

[http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/30/list-of-excuses-for-
th...](http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/30/list-of-excuses-for-the-pause-
now-up-to-29/)

Main thing is to keep the show (and funding) ticking along nicely. I'm sure it
will.

~~~
adventured
They just need to hold out until there's finally - after a few decades - an
uptick in temperatures, hurricanes, or tornadoes. The last decade has been
such a never-ending embarrassment of wrong predictions, anything would be
welcomed to recharge the base at this point. Seems like every global warming
proponent I know has lost faith at this point (with faith being the ideal word
for it).

------
nsxwolf
Is there really a hiatus, then, regardless of cause? How does that square with
every new year being the "hottest on record"?

Edit: I ask because as a casual observer, I had always thought this "hiatus"
was denier-speak. But now it seems to be being taken seriously in the articles
I see.

~~~
glenra
Here's the trend for the last ten years - it's flat:

[http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/last:120/plot/ha...](http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/last:120/plot/hadcrut4gl/last:120/trend)

The trend has been flat enough for long enough to falsify all the model
predictions that assumed CO2 was the primary driver and nothing else really
mattered. Those predictions looked GREAT in the late 1990s but don't work now,
so the hunt is on for new explanatory factors. Everybody's got their
favorites.

The main thing to consider with regard to new years being dubbed "the hottest
on record" is selection bias: When a new year looks like it MIGHT be "the
hottest on record", that makes for big scary newspaper headlines. Then when it
(often) turns out that it actually WASN'T the hottest on record, that's not
considered newsworthy. Nor is it newsworthy when the following year is only
the 6th or 10th or 12th hottest. If you only see headlines about it when
there's been a record or somebody has predicted that there WILL be a record,
due to availability bias you are left with the impression that records are
happening constantly.

(And even when the whole year isn't the hottest, the same dynamic applies to
hottest summer, hottest winter, hottest in the northern hemisphere, etc.)

Another thing to consider is that although the current trend is essentially
flat (and has been for over a dozen years), it's flat at a relatively high
level. Since the temperature plateaued but hasn't yet significantly
_decreased_ , people can still claim it's a hot _decade_ or invent silly "X of
the last Y years" constructions to make it seem like the warming trend hasn't
stopped.

~~~
nsxwolf
It's like how box office numbers are reported... "This movie was the biggest
opener ever!... on the Tuesday after Labor Day"

------
IanDrake
Unlike real science, where a scientist would say, "you know what, we thought
our model of X showed promise, but we couldn't reproduce our results in
reality, so we moved on", climate scientists seems to say "hmmm, reality isn't
following our model, where did reality go wrong?"

~~~
satellitecat
If I throw a ball and suddenly it stops, contrary to what I expect, I don't go
"oh, I guess the ball just stopped of its own accord, naturally," I go, why
the hell did it stop?" and look for reasons. Who knows, maybe it really did
just stop naturally, but maybe it was something else (wind.. hit something..
ball burst creating a backwards force..)

------
DennisP
I can't believe anyone actually buys into this idea that there's a significant
pause. Here's a temperature graph of the past couple decades:

[http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/a-warm...](http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/10/a-warming-
pause/?wpmp_tp=1)

There's a long-term trend with a lot of variability year to year. We happened
to have a big temperature spike in the late 90s. That doesn't mean we had a
pause afterwards. Measure from the years just before or just after the spike
and it doesn't look like a pause at all.

~~~
Jach
That chart is missing 5 years of data. Please link to the actual data:
[http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/](http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/)
Before you see the data for 2009-2013, maybe you should make a prediction of
their values.

~~~
anon1385
>maybe you should make a prediction of their values.

4 years is a really tiny meaningless sample in terms of climate. However, here
is what you asked for up to 1998, with a continuation of the linear trend in
red, and a 'pause' in blue (I only have a 'before' graph for HADCRUT4 rather
than GISS, but there isn't much difference - GISS and other temp records can
be seen at the link).

[http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/hadcrut4_98.jpg](http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/hadcrut4_98.jpg)

Maybe you would like to make a prediction?

Here is what happened:
[http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/hadcrut4.jpg](http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/hadcrut4.jpg)

Some 'pause' eh.

Source: [http://tamino.wordpress.com/2014/01/30/global-temperature-
th...](http://tamino.wordpress.com/2014/01/30/global-temperature-the-
post-1998-surprise/)

~~~
sparkie
25 years is also a really tiny meaningless sample in terms of climate. Are we
forgetting that we have a solar cycle of 22 years? We can't tell shit from
such small periods.

~~~
pyre
I thought that I remember the solar cycle being claimed as 11 years. Is this
new?

~~~
lutusp
The OP might be trying to say that 25 years conflicts with two solar cycles.
Because it is in fact an 11-year cycle.

------
FranOntanaya
But, doesn't it follow that lower temperatures would mean less ice melting,
therefore less cold freshwater added to the ocean?

------
alexyes
Not a very scientific approach. The article starts with a conclusion and then
tries to leverage the findings to explain it.

~~~
scott_s
I don't understand your comment - this is a _news_ article. They tend to lead
with the most important information, and explain that information as the
article goes on. When a news article is about a scientific article, it will
tend to start with the conclusion.

But I also don't understand your comment when compared to actual scientific
articles. The high-level conclusions tend to be in the abstract and the
introduction. Scientific papers aren't structured as mysteries, they try to
front-load the important lessons up front.

Don't confuse articles about science, or papers by scientists explaining their
findings, as the scientific process itself.

~~~
alexyes
Thanks for your point. You're right. My fault

