A Lot of Hot Air

UK weather: Blistering heatwaves and tropical storms to last four years with 'abnormally hot' air until 2022

So touted the Mirror headline of an article from the 15th August 2018 edition. The news article was based on new research by a team led by Dr Florian Sevellec, of the University of Southampton. Brazenly she said: “Warming caused by greenhouse gas is not linear. It appears to have lapsed in the early 21st century". So wait a minute, she concedes that global warming has "lapsed" since the new century began eighteen years ago.

One might hope that this would have prompted the good doctor to review her assumption that the world is in fact warming. No way! She confidently asserts:

"A new method for predicting mean temperatures, however, suggests the next few years will be hotter than expected.” The system, developed with French and Dutch researchers, uses a statistical method to search 20th and 21st century climate simulations, find similarities to current conditions and then make forecasts.

Apparently, the "lapse" is now over and this new statistical technique ensures that from now on the world will be warming again. At least until 2022! No doubt her research was well funded by the usual interested parties and her academic career will benefit because the results obtained using this new technique support the current climate orthodoxy of relentless global warming.

This is "climate science" in the early 21st century and Dr Florian Sevellec would be regarded as an expert climate scientist. Where is the science in all of this? She admits that the globe has not warmed during the opening years of the new century and then she uses a new and clearly as yet unproven statistical technique to predict what will happen over the coming few years, based on "climate simulations"!

All that most readers will remember is that the next four years are going to be "abnormally hot". Even if they're not, I'm sure climate experts like Dr Sevellec won't be phased. They'll explain it away as a "protracted and atypical lapse" before the warming begins in earnest. They'll go off and tweak their statistical tools to take account of unforeseen variables and then reassure us that the next eight years are going to feel like a "furnace".

It's sad to see presumably intelligent scientists like Dr Sevellec abandoning the scientific method and making unfounded claims about the coming "blistering heat waves and tropical storms". It seems that all climate scientists must worship at the anthropogenic global warming branch of the Church of Climatology.