The scientific method (and other heresies) - Climate Change: The Facts - page 187

This then begs the question—what does cause these variations in the Earth's energy
balance?Therehavebeenarangeofexplanationsofferedtoexplainawaythisrecenthiatus
in temperatures, as well as the previous hiatus that occurred between 1945 and 1975.
In the first instance, many climate scientists have simply refused to accept that these
periods exist in anything other than a random statistical sense—natural year-to-year
variability gives statistical anomalies over short periods. Others have suggested that it is
global emissions of aerosols, which have a net cooling effect, ironically especially those
emitted from burning coal. In this narrative, the 1945-1975 cooling was caused by the
post-war boom, whilst the most recent hiatus is due to the recent rise of Chinese coal
burning. 13
More recently, the favoured narrative is that the global temperature has been relatively
static because the additional heat is being trapped in the oceans instead. A recent paper,
again published in Nature , 14 suggested that this was in large part due to a natural
multi-decadal variability, termed the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) 15 or the
Inter-decadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO), 16 and associated with El Niño and La Niña
behaviour. The narrative is that natural processes mean that the extra heat goes into the
oceans, but that at some time soon, the heat will return with a vengeance.
There are a number of problems with these claims—importantly, the trapping of the
heat is inferred from models, not from observations. The NASA data seems to suggest that
itisnotexcessenergybeingtrappedintheocean,butratherthatthechangeintheIPO/PDO
has led to increased cloudiness, hence a reduction in the incoming shortwave radiation
around the year 2000 (as seen in Figure 3). This would mean that there is no excess to be
trapped, whether in the ocean or anywhere else. Not surprisingly, the recent study did not
consider, let alone evaluate this.