I guess the defense is that they aren’t predicting the temperature so much as a trend in temperatures. Trends are easier to predict than specifics because they are based largely on known historical data projected forward.

From a personal perspective, in Las Vegas, we’ve had odd winters (record warmth) for the past few years in a row. We’ve hit record temperatures in the summers a huge number of times. We even just had a freak snowfall a couple of weeks ago that dropped 6 inches of snow, which is wildly odd! The overall point is, that huge numbers of non-typical weather events are happening for us, which has everyone talking about climate a lot more. Climate change is screwing with our weather like crazy here. I’m sure we’re not alone in this.

Thanks for the comment!

I hesitate to declare a new and opposite trend based on such a short term of cool down. I mean after such a vast number of reports examining 50 or more years of data all seemed to establish a long-term warming trend, it seems to me the cool down we’ve experienced since 2003 could easily be a temporary “glitch” in the overall trend. In fact, I recall reading there are other short-term periods of a few years sprinkled into that 50+ years of climate data which, if removed from the overall long-term trend and viewed on their own, could easily lead us to believe that the planet is quickly headed for an ice age.

On a minor point, I don’t want to seem argumentative at all concerning the validity of Dr. Chapman’s opinion, but it seems to me that there should be a big difference in perceived qualification between a physicist/astronaut and a career climate scientist when specifically voicing opinions on climate. I certainly wouldn’t take the opinion of a dentist over a cardiologist regarding a heart condition despite the fact that they both took anatomy and physiology in school.

At any rate, my understanding is that the belief of the thousands of climate scientists involved with the UN IPCC is that this is a long-term warming -trend-, and as such, it obviously allows for significant variation within the trend. Personally, I’d love to see how the climate of the past 5 years have affected the overall curve of their projected trend. At minimum, it should have pushed the worst case scenario further into the future. Perhaps I’ll look into that for a future blog post.

One point that I -really- liked in the articles you linked was the much higher impact of water vapor versus CO2 on the “greenhouse effect.” That makes perfect sense, but it also worries me a bit. It indicates to me that millions of gasoline-powered cars should not be replaced with millions of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, considering the primary emission of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles is water vapor. Perhaps I’m wrong, but that just seems like throwing gasoline on a fire to try to put it out.

http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/32821

Chapman neither can be caricatured as a greedy oil-company lobbyist nor dismissed as a flat-Earther. He was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology staff physicist, NASA’s first Australian-born astronaut, and Apollo 14’s Mission Scientist.

http://www.scrippsnews.com/node/32821