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CellBioGuy comments on Open thread, Sep. 28 - Oct. 4, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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I'm really hesitant about posting about controversial topics like climate change because of the heavy mind-killing effect they have. But I was recently involved in a debate about climate change, and one of the opponents in the debate pointed to evidence supposedly supporting the 'global warming hiatus' in the past 15 years and that 90's climate models did not predict the hiatus. On the other hand, work by NASA/NOAA suggests that the supposed hiatus is actually illusory and an artifact of uncorrected ocean temperature data. Other sources suggest that the time period in question is too short to say with high confidence whether a hiatus has occurred or not.
Both sides of this debate agreed that climate change was happening; the disagreement was just over the existence of a recent hiatus in land-ocean surface temperature warming and the predictive power of climate models. I am not experienced enough in climate science to determine what the truth is here. Does anyone have any more information?
There are a lot of decade-scale cycles that pump heat energy around the earth system, making it pile up more rapidly in the atmosphere than the deep hydrosphere or vice versa, and various other similar things . Patterns at timescales shorter than a decade or so are almost meaningless as a result.
That certainly wasn't what global-warming people were saying at the end of 1990s.
Well the question is less about heat energy and more about land-ocean surface temperatures. In the debate, both sides agreed that the climate heat content was increasing and that this was due to human activity. The disagreement was about whether surface temperature models should be taken seriously or not.