Mojib Latif predicted that up to two decades of cooling were coming: “We could be about to enter one or even two decades of cooler temperatures, according to one of the world’s top climate modellers.”

However this does not deny AGW or indicate any kind of reversal in AGW in the same manner that the ENSO does not deny or reverse AGW. It's simply yet another climate oscillation upon which AGW continues to build up year after year.

From http://thingsbreak.wordpress.com/2009/09/11/of-moles-and-whacking-mojib-latif-predicted-two-decades-of-cooling/.

On interannual (more than a single year) and decadal (tens of years) scales, natural variability swamps the long term anthropogenic warming trend. That is to say that variations in naturally occurring aspects of the climate system have more of an impact on the ultimate value of, say, global average temperature over a span of 10 or so years than man-made global warming does.

While this might be surprising for some readers, let’s be clear: This is not “new” information. This does not represent a “shake up” of the climate science community’s understanding of the system, or a blow to “settled science”.

Latif begins the section of his presentation misrepresented by Pearce by confirming that the media incorrectly believes that global warming is monotonic- something that we know the warming is decidedly not; something not claimed by “climate science” or “climate scientists”. Significant natural variability is superimposed on the long term man-made warming trend.

As I've said if we actually do get ten years of cooling then I would have to rethink *my* position. However I mean "real"  cooling based on arbitrary timelines, not cherry picked timelines that only show what you want them to show when you pick precisely 1998 as the starting point.

Plus if as you say we're expecting *cooling* and we do in fact get warmer doesn't that make you that much more wrong?

I guess the bottom line is, is there any evidence whatsoever that you would accept as proving your current position wrong? I've stated my ten year window, you could at least strap on a pair of balls and make a decision.

Your implication (or at least how I interpreted your implication) was that merely seeing a temperature rise over a 30 year period could simply be the result of being in a trough at the beginning and a peak at the end. If so then there would be no accumulated trend over multiple cycles. I acknowledged the fact that decadal cycles do in fact exist but pointed out that in itself does not deny that such cycles are not *superimposed* on real but slow AGW increases.

In reality 50 years should be enough to prove everything to everybody however I'll be long dead and will no longer care. Most people alive probably won't care much either unless of course they have children or grandchildren about which they may be concerned.

How convenient that the predictions change, as if they hadn't existed as such initially, when reality renders them inaccurate.

I stand by expecting that the decade of the 10's will be warmer on average than any decade on record and will contain at least one if not more years warmer than the precious 1998 that skeptics claim was the year that global warming ended.

Is that specific enough for you? Could you perhaps be specific on what sort of evidence might be sufficient to change your mind? Or like most skeptics here is there no possible evidence that could change your mind which in effect proves my point?

Absent consequences, it's an academic discussion that would have petered out many pages ago.  The AGW hypothesis is being used to justify proposed tangible consequences; it's no longer academic.

The skepticism (at least in my case) has more to do with the use of the science than the science itself, though I have significant doubts about the science of climatology because of its dependence on manipulating proxy data of dubious power and reliability and its focus on a sliver of time smaller than a geologic eye blink, not to mention the hubris involved in assuming we can 'fix' a problem not yet sufficiently understood.

Climatology is about as hard a science as astrology right now.  There is nothing resembling a complete surface station record even today, do you really think that a century back, when half the cities in the new world didn't even exist, and the population was a fraction of the size, that we had anything at all resembling the coverage we do now?  It's a joke, we haven't the foggiest idea.  Even with the number we have now, we're barely covering a third of the planet with anything resembling a reasonable spread.  The stations we have had for a long time have, generally speaking, been urbanized(yet mysteriously corrected upwards) and, predictably, show increases.  I do not find them credible, and the guess is definitely not educated based on the numbers.  You say at the very minimum, but that's more like the best possible situation.  One where none of them have utopian leanings, none of them are radical environmentalists, none of them hate capitalism, and none of them are just going with the politicians that fund them for purely pragmatic reasons.

That's not even taking into consideration that all but a couple dozen of them are working off the admittedly manipulated data from politically created bodies beholden to the politicians that fund them.  Markedly anti-US political bodies, we do use more petrol than anyone else after all.

When you can point to the inland beach where Holland used to be, or Bangledesh being half the size it used to be. Hell, I'd settle for the day they evacuate Diego Garcia. In short, if there isn't a meter of sea level rise in your lifetime, the whole thing was a crock of shit.

The important point to Mojib Latif's work is that the warmists now have "peer reviewed research" that they can point to to cover basically ANY pattern we see in the next 10 years. It gets cooler, Mojib Latif was right, it gets warmer he was wrong but everyone else was right; neither disproves AGW but the warmist science was "right" if either happens. It's pretty damn easy to make an "accurate" prediction if you move the bullseye to within arm's reach and make it 10 feet across. Literally anything short of the apocolypse is covered by their predictions.

Indeed, this is why anyone with half a brain should have seen the big red flag waved by the "hide the decline" trick. Not that they resorted to a statistical trick to hide the decline to begin with - it's unfortunate terminology but at least the "debunkers" got that part right; the trick itself is not a huge reason for concern. It's the fact that they used the observed temp for the last portion of the record rather than the tree rings, despite the rings telling them the exact opposite of what the thermometers were saying. Either the thermometers were wrong, or the tree rings were not the reliable temperature record they assumed they were - the two disagree bad enough that the rings and thermometers can't *both* be right, but that is exactly what they assume. then for some magical unexplained reason the tree data goes screwy, coincidentally when they have "reliable" thermometer readings to replace the "previously-reliable-but-now-completely-wrong" tree rings.

The educated guess is not enough, when you are prepared to f*ck up the entire world economy with the carbon cap. We require facts, not guesses.

And i do not see nothing paranoid about not trusting the available temeprature records, on which the predictions are based. I am under impression, that there is no system in these records at all. They come from random locations, some records have years missing, the quality and the calibration of devices, used to record temperature for those 150 years on those different places is at best questionable, the recorded data are adjusted etc...

Again this is my impression based on what i keep reading about it, so i might be wrong. But i think if they measured the atmospheric temp for another 100 years via satellites, i might be much more inclined to trust them.

In all honesty, there is no accurate weather data that reflects the entire world today. There is no real collaborative world effort to look for temperature changes in all of the countries on Earth. Even still, the method for finding out what the "average" temperature seems a bit odd to me.

I expect that you will get that meter in your life but probably not in mine. My guess is 30 years for something that dramatic. The question is what will everyone say when that happens, take a quote from Emily Litella and just say "never mind". If you wait for a meter of rise to acctually occur then you may have committed the planet to a 6 meter rise before it could stabilize. I guess you could always tell your children and grandchildren that you were sorry.