RUTHFULLY YOURS

You will remember that global warming isn’t absent; it is just in hiding, deep underneath the world’s oceans, just waiting to emerge.  And now, to explain the downright embarrassing fact that that the sea level rise isn’t flooding poor island nations the way it was supposed to, we now have – ta-da! – “thirsty continents.”  Why, those tricky continents, it turns out, actually absorb water in their soil.  Who knew?

Sean Greene explains in the Los Angeles Times:

Despite the accelerated melting of glaciers and ice sheets, sea levels aren’t rising quite as quickly as scientists anticipated. The reason: Continents are absorbing more of the water before it flows into the seas, according to a new study.

Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory figured this out by measuring changes in Earth’s gravity with twin satellites orbiting the Earth in tandem. Over the past decade, thirsty continents have slowed the rate of sea level rise by about 20%, or about 1 millimeter per year, according to the study published in Science.

Okay, it’s not “the dog ate my global warming,” but it is an attempt to explain away yet another failure of a doomsday scenario that was used to panic the public into uncritically accepting economy-killing measures that would, just coincidentally, vastly increase the power of governments over all economic activity.

Tom Hartsfield, writing in Real Clear Science, gets to the nub of the issue:

Weekly, we’re bombarded with doom-and-gloom future scenarios spit out of these models. The public is supposed to quiver in fear and to disregard and forget the many times that these predictions have failed.

Models told us that the years of 1998-2013 were supposed to show ever-increasing runaway warming. And yet, these years actually exhibited the famous “global warming hiatus.” An article published in Nature says that zero models predicted this.

Numerous modelers have told us that the Arctic polar ice would be completely gone by now. It’s still there. Many models now seem to skew in the opposite direction, predicting more ice than we see today.

Modeler Kerry Emanuel’s widely reported initial correlation of global warming with dramatically worse hurricane seasons has been strongly rebutted by multiple groups, leading him to reconsider.

The scientific failure here isn’t that models are inaccurate — it’s that the models are presented as undebatable apocalyptic predictors, harbingers of certain future catastrophe. Omens that compel us to rethink our lives. If we take issue with that, we’re heretics.

Given how fallible climate models are, why shouldn’t we be skeptical of the scary headlines? How good can your science be if you try to prove your point by ruining your detractors rather than through empirical success?

Sea level rise is just the latest rebuttal of the we-are-doomed orthodoxy.