It doesn’t come as any surprise to regular Power Line readers that the politically and economically motivated climate hysteria with which we are constantly bombarded is false. This piece by Javier Vinós at Watts Up With That, titled “Good 2022 Climate News the MSM didn’t tell you,” does an excellent job of summing up the reality that is usually obscured.
As Vinos says, there has been mild warming during the last 40 years. But the rate of warming has been slowing down, not accelerating as the alarmists’ models predict:
[T]he good news that no one is telling us is that global warming is slowing down. The 15-year rate was very high from the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, reaching 0.35 °C/decade. The average over the entire period of satellite records is 1.3 °C per century or 0.13 °C/decade, but the long-term trend has fallen from 1.6 °C/century to 1 °C/century today. The current cooling period is contributing to this decline in the long-term warming rate.
The “current cooling period” refers to the fact that mean global temperature has declined over the last seven years.
Vinos points out, as we have many times, that claims of increasingly severe weather are simply false:
He also makes a point that I don’t think is raised often enough:
[I]n a warmer world, the temperature gradient between the equator and the poles is smaller, reducing the amount of energy to be transported and the intensity of atmospheric circulation, so we should not expect warming to increase the frequency of extreme events, just as we should not expect the global precipitation level to decrease.
But the most important point is that the alarmists’ models are wrong. All of the predictions of doom that we see constantly are based not on observation–the actual facts of climate are benign–but rather on model predictions. But we know for a fact that the models are wrong. A model that is refuted by observation is a bad model. Period. It cannot be a basis for public policy:
[D]espite costing a fortune these models are useless. The 5th Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP5) was already projecting greater warming for the period 2006-2022 than has been observed. To the dismay of climatologists (Voosen 2022), the changes introduced in the CMIP6 models cause much more warming to be projected, so they have decided that, instead of averaging all models as was done in CMIP5, only the coolest ones should be averaged. Even so, the deviation between models and reality becomes more unbearable with each passing year (Figure 4).
This is the key chart:
So we should celebrate the fact that 2022 was another good year for the Earth’s climate.
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