Angry in the Great White North

Originally reported on Discovery News, the study admits that the Earth is, in fact, not warming as environmentalists have feverishly hoped:

[According] to a new study in Geophysical Research Letters, global warming may have hit a speed bump and could go into hiding for decades.

Earth's climate continues to confound scientists. Following a 30-year trend of warming, global temperatures have flatlined since 2001 despite rising greenhouse gas concentrations, and a heat surplus that should have cranked up the planetary thermostat.

"It is possible that a fraction of the most recent rapid warming since the 1970s was due to a free variation in climate," Isaac Held of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Princeton, New Jersey wrote in an email to Discovery News. "Suggesting that the warming might possibly slow down or even stagnate for a few years before rapid warming commences again."

"Free variation" is the code phrase for "can't be blamed on industrial economies of the West".

In other words, just regular climactic change that the Earth undergoes.

But the funniest bit is the prediction for the future:

[Kyle Swanson of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee] thinks the trend could continue for up to 30 years. But he warned that it's just a hiccup, and that humans' penchant for spewing greenhouse gases will certainly come back to haunt us.

"When the climate kicks back out of this state, we'll have explosive warming," Swanson said. "Thirty years of greenhouse gas radiative forcing will still be there and then bang, the warming will return and be very aggressive."

So let me get this straight.  Climate scientists are puzzled that their precious models have not successfully predicted the non-warming (ie, cooling) that has happened over the last few years, but they expect us to believe yet another prediction, this one being a full thirty years into the future?

Right.

And this one has global warming just popping up out of the ether.  How does that work again?

But when you think about it, this thirty-year prediction makes a lot of sense.  For the next three decades, if these people are to be believed, global warming will be lurking on the sidelines, waiting to pounce on us.  We won't actually see any warming, but apparently that's now to be expected.

If in thirty years, the temperature spikes, then these guys win!

And if, as I suspect, nothing notable happens in thirty years?  Well, then all that means is that all the money spent on semi-plausible carbon dioxide reduction programs, as well as all the money transfers to third world countries, did the trick, and that's why the temperature has remained stable.

Gee, good thing we listened to them, eh, instead of spending thirty years on something like increasing the food supply or wiping out childhood diseases.