If 2015 is the hottest year since whenever, what will that mean?

The end result is to make temperature guesses appear smooth and uncomplicated, which is an illusion. That illusion makes it easier for (actually measured) temperatures in modern times to appear more variable. And that makes it easier to appear that we are hotter now, even if we’re not. 

The orthodox will object that these great shifts measured in millions of years don’t display ‘climate’, which is presently defined as the average of weather, and weather is what we have had for thirty years. These are simply conventional definitions, however, and have no ‘scientific’ status, other than their common use. If we go by the satellite temperature record, which starts in 1979, it would be relatively easy for there to be a record, if this year’s el Nino is like the one in 1998. Look at this graph, which shows both the satellite measurements:

But go up to the two top graphs, and you’ll see that this 36-year period is in geological terms a cool time, and such a record would mean nothing.

The ‘pause’. Briggs doesn’t like the term, because it implies a resumption of warming, from whatever cause. For him, el Ninos are an effect of climate, or an example, or an observation, not a cause of anything, even hot and dry here, which is simply part of el Nino — another observation. So to blame el Ninos for preventing the true outcome of more CO2 in the atmosphere is almost nutty. People who put forward this view use the absence of predicted increases as proof the increases were really there, but in masked or modified form! To them, the repeated, consistent and egregiously mistaken predictions made by climate models are true no matter what because [anthropogenic] global warming is true no matter what. 

This essay is easy to read and understand, and he is helpful on the use of parameters in global circulation models. I’ll let Professor Briggs have the last word:

The lesson to be learned from this is that the climate is never constant; it always has changed and always will. Stopping climate change is a human impossibility. 

Footnote: After I had written this piece I discovered a lengthy and useful essay on the quality of temperature data at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/09/24/summary-of-ghcn-adjustment-m odel-effects-on-temperature-data/

Along with the scientists wanting others who disagree with them to be investigated as though they were racketeers, and David Attenborough’s suggestion that we spend even more money making renewable energy affordable, comes a law professor seeking to have the International Court of Justice actually rule on climate change, so the dissidents will finally be quashed. It’s a strange world we live in.

Oh, and Associated Press has decided that from now on its staff won’t use the word ‘denier’ or its close relatives. They are now to refer to such people as ‘climate change doubters’, and those of the opposite persuasion as ‘climate change proponents’. I think I’ll continue with the ‘orthodox’. The real ‘deniers’ to me are those who think that the science of climate is settled.