Let me get this out of the way first. Has the world been warming up?

Yes it has. Especially if you look at the long term history of the world and realize the Little Ice Age, that occurred from about 1350 to about 1850, may have been the coldest period in the last 10,000 years:

There are in fact many scientific studies that show the Little Ice Age, which came to end in the late 19th C, was the coldest period in these regions for maybe 10000 years.

Cold snaps of this magnitude do not pass in a few days. They can take centuries to recover from. Along with the data that shows today’s climate is less than or equal in ‘warmth’ to the Medieval Warm Period that preceded the Little Ice Age, we can conclude that the warming  the Earth has been experiencing over the last 400 years is really just a return to the climatology of previous periods.

Periods prior to human generated CO2.

So now the question becomes: has the world been warming up naturally or from CO2 levels forcing a cascade of Green House Gas effects? Because there is another inescapable fact to face here: CO2 levels have been rising along with the Earth’s temperature.

Back in the day when the IPCC and other Global Warming alarmists were much cockier with their claims, they thankfully published how their Climate Models were showing CO2 forced warming.  And they did this by running two scenarios, one with CO2 driven warming and one without. Here is one example from a post I did back in 2009:

The red/pink shaded area in the graph shows the CO2 driven predictive results for South America, and the blue area is the IPCC model runs if there is NO CO2 forcing. It is that blue region we need to focus on (as well as to note the end of the graph is 2000). The original source of the graph was this post at WUWT which showed many graphs like this for many regions of the globe.

In my 2009 post I noted how the IPCC models gave us two possible answers and the measured temperature data would tell us which one would be true:

The CRU raw station data I have been looking over does not follow the black ‘observation’ lines at all. Those researchers tuning their AGW models to the CRU post ‘adjusted’ data have been chasing a ghost.

The CRU raw temp data actually follows the blue band, where the models say the temps will fall if AGW [human induced global warming] does not exist.

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This is March-April-May for Argentina. It is fairly representative of South America has a whole. Now what happens if I overlay this CRU pre-adjustment historical temp data on top of the IPCC AGW model predictions – what will this data show?

No big surprise for me – it shows the CRU station data, unbiased by alarmists, follows the AGW models without CO2 forcing.

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Conclusion from CRU data: It has been cooling in South America, not rising as the AGW models predicted for man made global warming driven by CO2.

Therefore, if we accept the AGW models as representing proof or disproof of AGW, then the models show CO2 forcing cannot be what is driving the Earth’s climate.

Many years have passed since these posts were up at Strata-Sphere and WUWT. We are now through a period of 15-17 years of flat global temperatures. The models are now completely off track with reality. And scientists are slowly starting to realize this:

Climate experts have long predicted that temperatures would rise in parallel with greenhouse gas emissions. But, for 15 years, they haven’t. In a SPIEGEL interview, meteorologist Hans von Storch discusses how this “puzzle” might force scientists to alter what could be “fundamentally wrong” models.

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Recent CO2 emissions have actually risen even more steeply than we feared. As a result, according to most climate models, we should have seen temperatures rise by around 0.25 degrees Celsius (0.45 degrees Fahrenheit) over the past 10 years. That hasn’t happened. In fact, the increase over the last 15 years was just 0.06 degrees Celsius (0.11 degrees Fahrenheit) — a value very close to zero. This is a serious scientific problem that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will have to confront when it presents its next Assessment Report late next year.

I take issue with the claim the models are “fundamentally wrong“.  They actually appear to be correct – for the case where there is no CO2 forcing.

It seems strange to me thatboth the alarmists and the skeptics forget that the climate models were run to show two diverging scenarios. And the one scenario that has been born out in the measurements is the one where there is no CO2 forcing.

Seems we have validated the models – just not the way the IPCC and alarmists wanted.

Tags: AGW, Climate Models, CRU, Flat Temperatures, Global Warming