A new study claims that el nino effects explain the surge in temperature from 1977 onwards. In the article, the authors claim that 80 percent of climate variability can be accounted for by modelling internal (ie earthbound) climate effects.
“The surge in global temperatures since 1977 can be attributed to a 1976 climate shift in the Pacific Ocean that made warming El Niño conditions more likely than they were over the previous 30 years and cooling La Niña conditions less likely” says corresponding author de Freitas.
The global warming advocates can point to their mountains thousands of articles, but if the assumptions underlying them are wrong, those piles aren’t worth a hill of beans. Even the strongest of theories can be brought down by a single, powerful paper.
In 1956 this is what Chomsky, then a young ambitioius researcher who was virtually unknown, did to behaviorism. He published an article, Review of Verbal Behavior, reviewing BF Skinner’s new book. His review was a scathing indictment of the current state of thinking in psychology and is generally credited with being a pivotal moment in science.
It only takes one brilliant article to topple a scientific edifice.
Is this the Chomsky moment for global warming?
UPDATE: There’s also this paper by Lindzen and Choi in Geophysical Research Letters: On the determination of climate feedbacks from ERBE data