Natural Variability is the get-out-of-jail card for climate modelers that lasts 30 years
What does a climate scientist say when they can’t predict the climate on a local, regional, or continental scale, in the near future or the historic past, and they can’t do rain, clouds, humidity or drought either?
They say the models are better than ever, and any discrepancy is just natural variability.
Climate modelers are prepared now for 30 more years of failure:
‘Most Of The Globe’ Could Experience ‘No Warming’ For 30 Years Due To Temperature-Driving Internal Variability
By Kenneth Richard on 13. July 2020, NoTricksZone
A new study documents the dominance of internal variability in decadal-scale global temperature changes and suggests we may experience a global cooling trend during the next 15 or even 30 years despite rising greenhouse gases.
Maher et al. (2020) acknowledge that internal variability in global surface temperature variations is “a difficult concept to communicate” because we have very few observations of its impact and so we must rely on assumptions about how the climate system might work.
From the paper:
We confirm that in the short-term, surface temperature trend projections are dominated by internal variability, with little influence of structural model differences or warming pathway. Additionally we demonstrate that this result is independent of the model-dependent estimate of the magnitude of internal variability.
Internal variability is the approved term, but if you say natural variability instead, we’ll have to arrest you.
Indeed, and perhaps counter intuitively, in all models a lack of warming, or even a cooling trend could be observed at all individual points on the globe, even under the largest greenhouse gas emissions.
Warming. Cooling. Whatever. It’s all success.
If only climate scientists had evidence — they wouldn’t need to cling to random noise of storms, fires and floods.
REFERENCE
Maher et al., (2020) Quantifying the role of internal variability in the temperature we expect to observe in the coming decades, Environmental Research Letters, Volume 15, Number 5