Why would anybody but a bunch of desperate doomsayers do a study like "quantifying the consensus" that will only lend further credibility in the eyes of people who already believe in the consensus anyway, instead of addressing legitimate concerns about the huge deviations between climate models an climate reality?

Well, if you had read the paper you cited then you would have written:

He and a bunch of other people frequenting "www.scepticalscience.com" had a look at 11944 ABSTRACTS of arcticles that explicitly deal with the topics "global warming" or "global climate change". NOTHING ELSE. To put it bluntly, even the phrase "global cooling" doesn't pass muster. If the topic was something objective like "climate modelling" without explicitly putting "global warming" or "global climate change" in the topic it didn't pass muster.

The abstracts were evaluated among the 12 people who read them and the allowed to compare notes and re-evaluate their findings, thus building further consensus among the already biased evaluators. In the end, about 8000 of those abstracts evaluated by biased examiners chosen through a biased selection process were evaluated to contain no such statement and were hence excluded. That's 66.4%. Some 32.6% were found to agree with the global warming or global climate change hypothesis necessarily expoused as a topic. Oh the surprise.

You can't find disagreement if you close your eyes. or pretent they don't say anything.

There are no Gen I reactors still operating. (Whether you count Wylfa in the UK as Gen I is a different matter that will be resolved this year, when it shuts down.) Almost everything is Gen II (and has been for decades).

Why are they still running? They are reliable, they were designed for the liftime they're at and margins were generous. Also, alternatives haven't been forthcoming in the last 20-30 years. (30 in the US, 20 in Europe) The trouble I see is not, why are they still running, but why (especially) BWRs haven't been fitted with filtered containment vents. It has been known since 1966 they would leak after a meltdown and a filtered containment vent would provide a leak that conveniently doesn't contaminate the area around the power plant too much. (In Germany the rule is that 99.99% of the Cs and 99% of Iodine must be filtered out.) That is the main problem. When the shit hits the fan, the (Mark I and Mark II) containment of a BWR doesn't do nearly enough. PWRs are just better in this respect, but still have been fitted with filters Germany and France.

There has historically been quite a bit of resistence of the utilities in the US towards any kind of major retrofitting of the internals of the powerplants. There seem to have been efforts to upgrade emergency power supply, even before Fukushima, and provisions against flooding, storms etc. But no major retrofitting of the kind we saw in Europe in the years around 1990, or what we see today in Japan. (Can't think why that would be.)

For a long time it seems that many nuclear reactors in the US were operated by small utilities that genuinely couldn't afford retrofitting. (Which is meant purely as an explanation, not as an excuse.) While in Japan the utilities were large enough and too closely connected to the government to avoid most additional safety measures. It's quite telling that the Japanese government only started thinking about accident management in 1992 and took all the way to the year 2002 to implement anything, which includes such things as a rule that every reactor should have at least two emergency power generators. Hydrogen recombiners or filters were not part of it until 2012 and 2013 respectively. For comparison: In 2006 every operator of nuclear power plants in Europe was made to check their safety measures because two out of four emergency power generators failed to start up in a nuclear power plant in Sweden, due to faulty electrics ...

No containment can contain a meltdown, if it wasn't built to do so. The BWR containments, as used in Fukushima Daiichi, just weren't, because it wasn't deemed necessary. Nureg/CR-6042 made it pretty clear that the focus back in the early 1960ies was on definitively preventing "catastrophic deaths". Preventing contamination just wasn't the goal. From the perspective they had, it was sufficient if meltdowns were unlikely. This has changed, but at least in the US and Japan, the power plants weren't changed to accomodate this.

And I'm not cherrypicking my sources. Any of the well known and often discussed reports like Wash-1400 or Nureg-1150 make it very clear that such BWR containments would overpressurize and leak soon after a meltdown due to hydrogen generation (hydrogen can't be condensed, unlike water steam), leading to widespread contamination after a meltdown. That's not merely a chance, but a certainty. (Whether a meltdown can be prevented is a different matter.) All three also clearly state that flooding and tsunamis (in Wash-1400 "tidal waves") are a potential cause for a meltdown, despite the redundancy of safety equipment, because they cause a full station blackout.

All this is quite different in other containments. Pressure water reactors typically have a large dry containment, that is capable of containing a meltdown, at the very least long enough for most contaminants to settle down in the containment and not outside of it. (Without power to run any pumps, it takes some 20 hours for 99% of the Cesium to settle down. With power, you can run containment sprays and do it in a bit more than half an hour. BWR Mark I/II containments generally don't have such sprays.) Newer BWR containments are also much larger and much more capable of containing a meltdown.

Other countries such as Sweden, France and Germany fitted filtered containment vents to their nuclear power plants in 1980(Sweden) and 1988 (Germany/France). Which would have prevented any significant fallout, because the containments wouldn't overpressurize.

Those facile assumptions have some merits. First: they work.

Yes, 1998 is a bit of an outlier, but in fact temperatures rose back to this level within 2-3 years. And being an outlier, you can easily find in a graph. You'll find the same outlier repeated in 2004. .

My facile assumptions have another advantage: they can be tested. If you don't see the pattern repeated in the 700m-2000m data in another 7 years, well, I'm wrong. And I won't claim my model is outdated. I also won't claim you just have to modify my model or you just have to introduce yet another mechanism. It'll just be wrong.

The point is, my "model" makes the assumption that the heat from the surface speads by some kind of heat transport that is linearly proportional to the vertical distance and difference in temperature. It's nothing fancy. But at least I'm not sitting here saying that nobody can understand the models anyway and then go back to fix the model in three different mutually exclusive ways each purporting to explain exactly what happened, while maintaining that there is no disagreement or doubt.

> Do you realize that the 700-2000 m depth is nearly twice as deep therefore nearly twice as much water and nearly twice as much potential for storing heat as the 0-700 m depth?

Not only did I realize that, even the author realized it and thus used "energy content" and not temperature. You didn't.

As for the portion of 700-2000m, it's going to stop heating up in due time. Judging from page 2 of the NOAA report that the article was based on, the change in heat content of 700-2000m is delayed by about 15 years vs. 0-700m. The heat content of the 0-700m layer seems to lag by about 6 years behind global temperatures. So you'd expect the heat content of the 700-2000m layer to keep rising for another 5 years and then stop - 21 years after the atmospheric temperatures stopped rising in 1998. And that's that.

The oceans as a whole are absorbing heat at about half the rate there was at the time when the temperatures were rising 20 years ago. For the last 10 years, the 0-700m figure has been completely flat.

But what has been said publicly is the opposite of that. The heating of the oceans was supposed to be the *reason* why the air temperatures didn't rise. That is, while the air wasn't heating up, the oceans took up the slack and thus warmed all the more! Now that is just plain wrong. And given that those people knew about the graphs you've shown me for a much longer time than did, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that what they said was intentionally wrong.

They lied.

Do you even realize that your source off-handedly says that ocean heating responds to surface temperatures and not the other way around? What's more, the graphs prove it. Since atmospheric temperatures stopped rising, so did ocean temperatures.

So, now what about the "explanation", that has been brought forward countless times, that the lack of warming in the atmosphere is just an illusion, because in fact, the heat is being trapped in the oceans? Well, it's just plain wrong. Because in this case, the energy content of the oceans should have risen much faster in the last 10 years than at any time before. But in fact, the opposite is the case. Less heat is being trapped in the oceans while atmospheric temperatures stagnate. All that at a time when there is supposedly a much greater forcing by CO2.

So where is the energy hiding? Not just the energy that explains the lack of warming of the atmosphere, but also the energy that explains the lack of warming of the oceans?

The numbers don't add up. The theory is wrong and your attempts to fix it just make it worse.

Well,

could it be the ENSO? No. It is too variable to explain anything lasting for over a decade.

Could it be the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation? No, if anything, it should have reinforced the warming, given that previous negative deviations coincided with cooler climate.

As for the Pacific Decadal Oscillation? That too does not show any significant departures explaining any kind of trend over the last 17 years.

Volcanic eruptions? If you look at the years since 1990, you'll find the only big ones at VEI 5 ("Very Large") and VEI 6 ("Colossal") eruption in 1991, the well published eruption of Pinatubo and mostly forgotton eruption of the Cerro Hudson. The largest and the third largest eruption of the last 100 years happend in 1991 on roughly opposite ends of the world. Since then? Nothing. VEI 4 eruptions are a dime a dozen and equally distributed over time, they cannot explain any trend whatever.

You're trying to fix a theory and it isn't working.

The last major eruption happened in 1991. Emissions of aerosols were less than expected, because the reduction efforts in industrial counties (where an increase was expected) and the collapse of the Soviet Union reduced them more than recent economic progress in China inreased them. (And the Chinese are much more concerned about their emissions today than industrial countries 40 years ago, when they were at similar levels.)

We're talking about predicitons made 13-23 years ago and compare them with the outcome today. The result: they are wrong.

If natural variability can be large enough to prevent the warming from happening, for 17 years on a scale of 0.3K per decade. That is, it not only varies randomly by 0.5K. No, in the last 17 years the natural variability happened in a consistent enough way to produce a flat-line in temperatures against an assumed linear and very strong warming trend.

If this is so, then all the warming we've seen in the last 150 years (~0.8K) can easily be explained by precedents of this exact same kind o natural variability happening in the past, when CO2 variability was much less than today. Because you should remember that the 0.5K virtual cooling through natural variability that you claim has offset another 0.5K of virtual warming, is on the scale and shape(!) of all REAL warming that happened over the last 80 years.

You can't have it both ways. Either natural variability is very much larger than currently admitted (remember any natural variability in terms of warming on this scale has been absolutely ruled out) or the warming models are wrong.

... in countries that are excessively dry and not to far from the the equator.

> For starters, the models can't predict the influence of aerosols

Then why does the First Assessment Report waste so much paper on the influence and modelling of aerosols? Also, wasn't the sun supposed to have neglible influence? Also, if 1998 skews the results of the Third Report, why are its models essentially the same as those of the Second Report in 1996 and the first in 1991?

Your argument is treated in the IPCC report as "Cold Start" - the fallacy of failing to account for the rise of CO2 in previous decades which would have already started to heat up the oceans. In their estimate, this effect has already been accounted for. So, then how come the First Assessment Report of the IPCC gives a best estimate of a rise of 0.3K (0.2K-0.5K) per decade since 1990?

Global temperatures are also below every single projected scenario of the Third Assessment Report 13 years ago, that also took everything into account which you are complaining about. The scenarios included an immediate stop of the rise of CO2 emissions in the year 2000.

Reality consistently contradicts the models. The models are wrong.

The accuracy of global temperature measurement is +- 0.1K. CO2 concentrations rose by a bit more than 10% over those 17 years. Logarithmically speaking (which is all that counts), that's 14% of a doubling. Suppose a doubling would cause a rise of 1.5K (low end of IPCC projections), then we should have seen a rise of 0.2K. That's easily detectable, very well above noise level over a period of two decades (you can take 5 year averages) and just didn't happen.

Suppose a doubling would cause a rise of 4.5K (high end of IPCC projections), the rise should have been 0.6K or about as much as in the last 80 years. Any idiot can see that this didn't happen either in the last 17 years.