Yesterday brought widespread news coverage of a new “study” published in Nature Geoscience which concludes that global warming has not been progressing as fast as expected, and that climate models might be a “little bit” wrong.

(That the “little bit” is a factor of 2 or 3 is a fine point upon which we won’t quibble here.)

I’m still trying to process my feelings about how the two authors, Myles Allen and Michael Grubb, might have been allowed to wander so far off the Empire’s (UN IPCC’s) reservation.

My initial reaction to the news was captured by my wife:

I’ve been thinking about what led to this turn of events. I’ve decided it was not some random realization by rogue elements of the Empire. It was not a tactical anomaly, but instead a strategic trial balloon of sorts.

Had John Christy or I tried to publish such a paper, Storm Troopers led by Darth Trenberth would have been quickly dispatched to put down the rebellion.

The realization by the authors that the climate models have produced too much warming since about 2000 has been out there for at least 5 years. It has been no secret, and Christy and I have been lambasted as “deniers” for repeatedly pointing it out.

The timing of the authors’ realization of the same seems not very believable. Quoting from the Independent article,

According to The Times, another of the papers authors, Michael Grubb, a professor of international energy and climate change at University College London, admitted his earlier forecasting models had overplayed how temperatures would rise. At the Paris climate summit in 2015, Professor Grubb said: “All the evidence from the past 15 years leads me to conclude that actually delivering 1.5C is simply incompatible with democracy.” But speaking to The Times he said: “When the facts change, I change my mind, as [John Maynard] Keynes said.”

Now, I must ask, what did Grubb know, and when did he know it? What exactly has changed in the model forecasts since the Paris summit in December 2015?

Exactly nothing.

Allen and Grubb knew the models had a problem well before that.

I suspect there have been years of discussions in e-cigarette vapor-filled back rooms where Empire leaders have been discussing how the increasing disparity between models and observations should be handled. The resulting new paper is part of a grand scheme that Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich perfected decades ago. I believe the new narrative taking shape is this: “yes, we were wrong, but only in the timing of the coming global warming disaster. It is still going to happen… but now we have time to fix it, before it really, really is too late.”

I wonder if Allen and Grubb will also be called “deniers” for pointing out that the emperor’s models have no clothes?

Only time will tell. For now, all I can say is, welcome to the dark side.

Since it is card-carrying members of the climate establishment saying the models are wrong, though, they will probably be hailed as visionaries.