Richard P. Feynman famously said, "It doesn't matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn't matter how smart you are. If it doesn't agree with experiment, it's wrong." The global warming climate models can be said to have been subject to the experiment of observations over the last 17 years, and they don't agree.
Therefore, they're wrong.
To put a finer point on it, climate modellers generally show confidence intervals with their projections. A confidence interval is the range within which observations should fall with a certain probability if the model is correct. For example, typically 95% confidence intervals are shown as lines above and below the expected future temperatures, meaning that observations should fall within the limits with a probability of 95% or greater. Actual temperatures are skirting the lower limit, below which there should be only 2.5% probability of occurring if the model is correct. Another way of saying that is that there is no more than one chance in 40 that the models are correct, rather long odds to base a policy involving hundreds of billions of dollars.
Oh, yes, they have excuses. The alarmists say a decade or two isn't long enough to draw a conclusion and that what they call the "hiatus" can be explained as natural variability. In testimony to the U.S. Senate by Judith Curry (Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology), she said: "If the recent warming hiatus is caused by natural variability, then this raises the question as to what extent the warming between 1975 and 2000 can also be explained by natural climate variability."
Another explanation, often expressed with exasperation as if explaining something to a child for the umpteenth time, is that the excess heat is "hiding" in the deep ocean. This is handwaving: There is no theory to explain just how the heat gets transferred to the deep ocean, and it's nothing more than speculation.
It is true that the ocean has enormous capacity to store heat with only small changes in temperature, but can they point to measurements showing these changes? No: the Argo system collects temperature and salinity data by means of floats distributed over the globe down to 2000 meters, and if it showed an increase in ocean temperature to explain the hiatus, there is no doubt that we would have heard about it. Hence the "theory," if it can be called that, is that the heat is below 2000 meters, hence the reference to the "deep ocean."
If we suppose for the sake of argument that the deep ocean theory is correct, then why isn't it in the models? The reason, of course, is that the models don't take it into account because they have no idea by what mechanism the excess heat gets there. Isn't this in effect an admission that the models are wrong?
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