[gmcquillan]

I don't know that I agree with the thesis of this article whatsoever; basically some cherry-picked research estimates "we may only see 1.5 to 2 degree increases, and we haven't had any real warming in the past 10 years; Therefore, we might want to reevaluate the amount of energy and attention we spend on mitigating carbon emissions"

That seems like a pretty flimsy argument.

1. I don't think there's strong evidence that 'global average temperatures stopped increasing.' Many of the world's largest average temperature readings have happened in the last ten years (2010, especially, but even recent reports show upward trends: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/2012/13).

2. Cherry-picking a few people whose models show a lower than average range, doesn't tell me anything other than the author of this article is suffering from wishful thinking.

3. The heart of the article seems to be suggesting this: "If climate change isn't that bad, maybe we don't have to do anything about it, " but ignores the opposite proposition. Oddly, I'm not even sure why such an article is necessary since the world collectively isn't making any earnest attempts to curb carbon emissions. Any reductions have been economically based, not environmental.

No, I think this is a hit piece on the climate change movement couched as due-diligence and beneficial skepticism.

[ChuckMcM]

Interesting take on it. I didn't see it as a hit piece so much as a "Hmm, what do we make of this?" piece.

The data that the temperature for the last 10 years has remained basically flat is coming from the exact same sources that have advocated awareness of anthropogenic change, the IPCC being one of them. Unless things change a lot we're very much in danger of having the mean temperature of the planet land outside the error bars in the models.

What that means is that climate is a complicated thing (not too surprising), and that the models are missing some components.

The article wasn't about "Cherry picking" as far as I read it was more along the lines, "Well if all 21 models of the IPCC are inaccurate, what are some of the models they rejected?" That is asking the question, "If we don't have the right answer, what other answers were proposed?" Finding a model that both explains the previous temperatures with the data we have and is more accurately predicting the changes we're observing is the goal.

[gmcquillan]

And the "What do we make of this" is definitely a valid question. Every model is going to be inaccurate to some degree. We should strive to improve them!

I took issue with picking a few individual researchers' models which have a lower range than the IPCC estimates (which are influenced by those lower estimates). The case could, and probably is, be made for higher ranged estimates. The point is, if you curate a subset of models to bolster your bias, you're not contributing any meaningful data to the discourse.

[ChuckMcM]

I read it that they were taking those studies with the lower range because the temperature as measured is about to fall out of the lowest range predicted by the IPCC models. I suspect, but can't prove, that if temperature were about to fall out of the upper range of predicted temperatures they would have selected a few models that the IPCC had rejected that showed that as an outcome.

I agree with the statement "Every model is going to be inaccurate to some degree." the problem here is that when the actual temperatures start landing outside the range of even the uncertainty bars for a model it ceases to be "inaccurate" and is simply "wrong."

The political sensitivity of that possibility can not to be under estimated.

[gmcquillan]

I think that if the uncertainty of the models were under threat, then this would be a bigger issue. We'd be reading about this in Nature, not The Economist.

This premise, I think, has flaws:

I didn't see any citation for the "past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat" number, but I do notice that the NASA number quoted is a five year running average (over only 10 years), which would naturally flatten any trends over that time frame.

It seems like this notion that "warming is over" is pretty cyclical. Check out: http://www.skepticalscience.com/global-cooling-january-2007-...

This image in particular is interesting: http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/Escalator_2012_500....