Who is being religious here? Who is being scientific? Which side will deal with evidence? And what, in this contentious field, constitutes evidence?
The terms in which warmists and denialists, catastrophists and skeptics denounce each other are mirror images of one another. Each thinks the other is denying evident facts. Articles are written explaining, in all sincerity so far as I can tell, why skeptics and denialists have mental health issues, because the facts are just so evident!!
I apologize for the fuzziness of the graph above. It shows in short blue bars the actuals, discussed below, for a certain type of satellite-derived atmospheric measurement, and the computer projections, on which IPCC alarms are based.
The graph shows that global temperatures, measured in this way, have increased half a degree centigrade since 1977. The black shows that the computer projections were much higher.
The result is as you might expect if you knew the number of assumptions that go into computer modelling, and the need to secure funding for more computer modelling, which can mainly be secured by going along with the herd. Catastrophism leads to grants, in the policy environment of universities, and grant money keeps the professor’s family in the house. Computer modellers are not more venal than anyone else, but they are not less venal, either. They have had strong financial and reputational incentives to go along with the prevailing intellectual line, that CO2 causes global warming, and that we are producing lots of CO2, so the world must be getting significantly warmer. But it is not. Oops!
This is from the Hockey Schtick in August, 2013:
The graphic above depicts the global lower troposphere temperature projections from 73 CMIP5 models from 1979 to 2025 compared to an average of the satellite data from UAH and RSS (blue boxes) and weather balloons (green circles) for the global lower troposphere temperatures since 1979 until now. Note nearly all the model runs project much warmer temperatures than the globe has recently experienced. The thick black line is the average projection of the 73 models.
Next month the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is set to release its update on the physical science of climate change. It will be interesting to see how (or if) its authors try to explain the growing gap between the model projections and the actual climate.