Monday, June 19, 2017

Climate Models Pessimistic

Climatistas suffered a double barreled setback today, as reported by Steven Hayward of Power Line. The first bad news was publication of an article in Nature Geoscience coauthored by noted warmists.  The complete article is behind a paywall, but Hayward quotes the abstract, which includes the following comments:
In the early twenty-first century, satellite-derived tropospheric warming trends were generally smaller than trends estimated from a large multi-model ensemble.

Over most of the early twenty-first century, however, model tropospheric warming is substantially larger than observed; warming rate differences are generally outside the range of trends arising from internal variability. The probability that multi-decadal internal variability fully explains the asymmetry between the late twentieth and early twenty-first century results is low (between zero and about 9%).
The second piece of bad news for anthropogenic global warming enthusiasts was an article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It debunks a claim the U.S. can achieve 100% renewable energy by 2050. It concludes:
We point out that this work used invalid modeling tools, contained modeling errors, and made implausible and inadequately supported assumptions. Policy makers should treat with caution any visions of a rapid, reliable, and low-cost transition to entire energy systems that relies almost exclusively on wind, solar, and hydroelectric power.