Matt Ridley Returns with Error-Riddled Articles, as Wall Street Journal Discredits Itself - by Joe Romm

Ridley wants you to believe that global warming has stopped, which it hasn’t.  And he wants you to believe that the human contribution to recent warming is small so you’ll believe future warming will also be small.  But that is also false.

Amusingly, Ridley ends his latest response to the “orthodoxy” this way:

Soon after my article was published, another peer-reviewed paper appeared in the Journal Nature Climate Change, about as mainstream a climate science publication as you can find.  It is entitled:  “Climate model simulations of the observed early-2000s hiatus of global warming.

Yes, Ridley is excited that the title of a very recent article used the phrase “early-2000s hiatus of global warming.”  But of course that study was on surface air temperatures.  And if Ridley had bothered to read it, which he apparently didn’t, he would know that it debunked his entire argument that the climate models are wrong and that the planet has stopped heating up.

That study “vindicates climate models” as Phys.org put it, and it showed that “climate models can recreate the slowdown in global warming since 1998, as long as they correctly factor in crucial variables such as the state of the El Niño system.”  Doh!

As the study’s news release says of the last decade, “Almost all of the heat trapped by additional greenhouse gases during this period has been shown to be going into the deeper layers of the world’s oceans.”

This new study that Ridley and the Wall Street Journal embrace reconfirms that the latest climate models are indeed accurate (once the El Niño Southern Oscillation is taken into account).  That means if we continue on our path of general inaction on climate change (the one they favor), we face 9°F warming for the U.S., faster sea level rise, more extreme weather, and permafrost collapse.”

I will end with one of the country’s leading climatologists, Michael Mann, who made the following point to me about the WSJ piece:

What’s particularly sad is that at the same time the Wall Street Journal editorial board seems intent on leading its readers off a cliff, more and more of the legitimate business community is recognizing and speaking out on the very real threat posed by climate change and on the urgent need to fight it head on to avert an economic calamity (see the recent Risky Business report by Michael Bloomberg, Tom Steyer, and Henry Paulson).  The Journal’s disinformation on and denial of climate change is a betrayal of their readership, who rely on accurate and honest assessments of risk to make sensible investment choices.

Matt Ridley Returns with Error-Riddled Articles, as Wall Street Journal Discredits Itself - by Joe Romm