RE: Don’t Tell Anyone,
"Recorded" is the key word. The thermometers being used are not reliable - being unsystematically placed and many frequently interrupted. Annual "global" temperatures haven't been recorded for very long. The hottest temperatures recorded of past times during the lifetime of homo sapiens were much hotter. Climate science generally remains in its infancy with basic principles and laws still being hammered out to this day.
Obviously climatic changes are not on the whole good for present human society and two years of supposed global cooling is nothing in earth cycles. A point to add here is that the ocean in the southern hemisphere may have cooled much more than the northern hemisphere warmed but that does not show that everywhere is cooling.
What I mean to say is that nobody really understands climate change yet. If we believed the doomsaying, like the 2012 UN memorandum, then the human world would already be in meltdown. Maybe in this prediction only, the climate models did not underestimate things.
I don't know what "memorandum" you mean, but the IPCC thingies are all understatements, and if they are doomsaying, you may imagine what reality looks like then.
And in most cases the models do underestimate how far the change has already happened. The contrary - that the scientists estimates turn out to be less bad in reality - is the strange outlyer.
You know, this is not the sixties where the first deep studies came out. We are half a century later.
Temperature measurements in the late 1800s were accurate to one- or two-tenths of a degree Fahrenheit.
http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2000-05-28/news/0005280042_1_thermometers-readings-accurate
Tom Skilling is chief meteorologist at WGN-TV. His weather forecasts can be seen Monday through Friday on WGN News at noon and 9 p.m.
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Argue with him if you think that you know better about thermometers then he.
I know the models have almost all hugely underestimated things, which is why I said, "Maybe in this prediction only, the climate models did not underestimate things," the implication being that most models did underestimate. The issue is the reliability of the science when the predictions based on the science are way off.
How long did it take to develop the science of thermodynamics for example? Fifty, sixty years is nothing. Though, to be more precise, I think climate science is beyond its infancy. Last month a method for measuring ocean temperatures was finally developed, and this is after all those decades of temperature measurements which we were pretending were accurate.
Now thermometer accuracy is not what I mean by accuracy here. I'm talking about how thermometers are not placed in any systematic way as to give a thoroughly comprehensive picture of temperature variations round the globe. If you had only one thermometer in the Gobi desert how useful from a scientific perspective is that? Or if you had a thousand in the Atlantic Ocean but none located on the ocean floor?
Your points are valid, but I think you greatly overestimate them. Measurements are not the problem, it are the processes we still don't know about. THAT is the core of "underestimation".
But even that get's outnumbered by orders by the simple fact of how humans behave (or not).
For example I just read that somebody is producing the ozone layer destroying FCKWs again - somethign that did not happen for decades. Somewhere in east asia.
That is not predictable. (Yes, this is not climate change, but easy example.)
Also you forget that the scientists are making literally thousands of models, each with slight differences and often starting way in the past. The models that are closest to what we observe after they have run a few decades are likely to be the most exact for the future too, right?
I have been running those models on my home computers for a decade now through climateprediction.net I know a bit about that part ;)
It's good of you to help with climate modeling.
I'm try not to be hyperbolic in stating how things stand. At this point in time, I would agree, the measurements have gotten sufficiently good - but only very recently - so that now the scientific understanding of what's going on remains the only big hurdle for climatology.