New NOAA Research Puts Global Warming 'Hiatus' in Doubt

[TJ in Oregon]

I certainly believe the mechanism behind global warming (the blackbody radiation spectra of certain atmospheric gases) contributes to increasing the global temperature. I don't think many people can really deny that much. But what is far less obvious is the magnitude of this increase in temperature. I'm not quite sure the signal is larger than the noise and the temperature data over the last couple decades casts  that further into question. If I were to place a bet, I would probably say there's about a 70% chance that the greenhouse gas effect is leading to a significant increase in global temperature.

The dataset discussed in the article is less than idea for a lot of reasons. There are just so many inconsistencies between measurements done at different places over the course of years and as a result we have a litany of complicated corrections applied to fix this that or the other thing, each of which adds more uncertainty to the model. In many of their datapoints, the error bars are quite a bit larger than the trend. Again, it's probably real but I've seen plenty of data from other experiments that looked more convincing than this which turned out to be artifacts. Again, it's probably real but Snowguy's arguments shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. It's entirely possible that the actual greenhouse gas warming effect is irrelevantly small, the trend is mostly noise, and the adjustments are just everyone being so convinced we already know what the data is 'supposed' to be that we'll find a way to make it say that.

On the policy side of things, what I think we ought to be doing now is trying to figure out how we can increase our nuclear power output. No other alternative to fossil fuels can provide the type of base load that nuclear can right now. We should be lightly subsidizing wind and funding research into the rest.