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This does make me giggle

New estimate based on the forthcoming upturn in solar activity and El Niño southern oscillation cycles is expected to silence global warming sceptics

After years and years of stating that solar activity* is not the determinant of climate change as various non-believers have been saying, now solar activity is going to be used to prove that, umm, solar activity is not the determinant of climate change.

Nice one, that.

* This is not what the IPCC reports themselves actually say of course. They do ascribe a role to changes in solar activity, just not a very large one as compared with other drivers. Please remember that there is a huge gap between what the various official reports say and what cheerleaders on various sides read into them.

2 thoughts on “This does make me giggle”

  1. They know if they wait long enough they’ll eventually get some more “warming” to “prove” their case. Much like the Met Office announcing early every year that this summer will be a scorching inferno, and then it’s a wet misery with three sunny days. But if they keep doing it, they’ll eventually get a scorching statistical outlier like ’76 and then they can say “aha, told you so!”

    It’s the same technique as cold reading “psychics”. Count only the hits, ignore the misses.

  2. Oh come on. Bob Henson’s point is expressed fairly clearly in the article. He’s saying global warming skeptics have been arguing that there is no long term upward trend, whereas actually we have been in the downswing of a shorter-period cycle, so temperatures have been flat. This cycle’s now moving to an upswing, so this spurious argument will no longer be available.

    Cheap shot by global warming skeptics, cheap shot back if global warming advocates start claiming all the upswing as long term trend too.

    Sigh. This is really not the way to do the cost-benefit assessment of a possible market failure with costs of trillions if we get it wrong. (And I’m not a partisan for either side – I mean costs either from either a type I or a type II error).

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