Adding Epicycles

When the data inconveniently refuses to conform to your theory, just how should a True Believer in that theory respond?

Why, add an epicycle, of course!

Ocean Cooling to Briefly Halt Global Warming, Researchers Say

Parts of North America and Europe may cool naturally over the next decade, as shifting ocean currents temporarily blunt the global-warming effect caused by mankind, Germany's Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences said.

Average temperatures in areas such as California and France may drop over the next 10 years, influenced by colder flows in the North Atlantic, said a report today by the institution based in Kiel, Germany. Temperatures worldwide may stabilize in the period.

Let me get this straight. Lower and/or stable temperatures are now a feature and/or evidence of ongoing global warming. Hmmm, better read farther.

"Natural variations over the next 10 years might be heading in the cold direction," Wood said. "If you run the model long enough, eventually global warming will win."

Well, I'd really hate to misunderstand this, so let's sum up. If there is a slight rise in global temperatures over a few decades that falls entirely within natural variation consistent with historical world climate, we must all panic and spend trillions and trillions of dollars to change our ways, even starve some folks pursuing alternate fuels, because someone's theoretical and unverifiable model says we might raise the temperature of the planet a bit. But if temperatures fail to actually accomodate the models and theory, as they have for the last several years, it's just natural variation interfering with the upward temperature trend signal. And if that lack of predicted temperature trend persists, then it must actually be due to an unanticipated effect of global warming and natural variation.

Because it can't possibly be that the theory underlying the model simply does not correspond all that well to the real world in the first place. When the data and the model do not match, obviously there's something wrong with reality, not with the model! At worst, it just means we need to add another epicycle to the model to get all those orbits temperature trends smoothed out. Because, you know, sooner or later the model will win!

How could we ever doubt such a powerful consensus?

UPDATE: Roger Pielke, Jr. of the CU Center for Science and Technology Policy Research weighs in:

For a while now I've been asking climate scientists to tell me what could be observed in the real world that would be inconsistent with forecasts (predictions, projections, etc.) of climate models, such as those that are used by the IPCC. I've long suspected that the answer is "nothing" and the public silence from those in the outspoken climate science community would seem to back this up. Now a paper in Nature today (PDF) suggests that the world may cool over the next 20 years, and this would not be inconsistent with predictions of longer-term global warming.

I am sure that this is an excellent paper by world class scientists. But when I look at the broader significance of the paper what I see is that there is in fact nothing that can be observed in the climate system that would be inconsistent with climate model predictions. If global cooling over the next few decades is consistent with model predictions, then so too is pretty much anything and everything under the sun.

More commentary on the NATURE paper at The Reference Frame: Nature: AMO will stop warming until 2020 blog. A taster:

Their choice of words is a testimony of the political correctness. For example, in Richard Black's article in the BBC, Keenlyside says:

"One message from our study is that in the short term, you can see changes in the global mean temperature that you might not expect given the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)."

If you wonder what this sentence means, it means "Our models, if correct, imply that the IPCC projections for the next 15-20 years are incorrect."

Gee, it all sounds so familiar somehow.

Previous, with links to MUCH more previous

Ongoing compilation of climate blog posts at Tom Nelson blog.

Still more from our friend Rich Horton over at Blue Crab Boulevard, in the aptly-titled “Global Warming” Goes Ptolemaic.

And still more from American Thinker blog: NASA Confirms Natural Climate Shift

UPDATE: Gaius at Blue Crab Boulevard weighs in with Up To Two Feet of Epicycles.