The climatistas really are a fun and lovable bunch to watch. Also pathetic. They are victims of their own doomsday scenarios of inexorably rising greenhouse gas levels and the parade of horribles soon to follow. The Paris Accord, even if fully implemented, will barely slow any future warming accord to the standard climate orthodoxy (better known as “The Consensus”). That’s why the former NASA chief climatista James Hansen called the Paris Accord “a fraud.”

What do you do when, having told us for more than 20 years that “we only have ten years left” to act, the deadline passes and we haven’t got anywhere close to a pathway to stabilize (let alone reduce) carbon emissions? You change the scenario is what you do. From The Independent today:

Global warming may be occurring more slowly than previously thought, study suggests Computer modelling used a decade ago to predict how quickly global average temperatures would rise may have forecast too much warming, a study has found. The Earth warmed more slowly than the models forecast, meaning the planet has a slightly better chance of meeting the goals set out in the Paris climate agreement, including limiting global warming to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels. Scientists said previous models may have been “on the hot side”. The findings indicate the danger may not be as acute as was previously thought. Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford and one of the study’s authors told The Times: “We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models. We haven’t seen that in the observations.”

Do tell! Do I even need to mention that this vindicates the so-called “deniers” who have been saying for a decade or more that the climate models “run hot”? Actually the whole article offers lots of good chuckles, like this one:

According to The Times, another of the paper’s 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.” [Emphasis added.]

A revealing slip of the mask, no? And what a disappointment that the climatistas will still have to put up with elections and the people and such. Authoritarianism is so much more fun.

What’s really going on here, of course, is that slowing the rate of predicted global warming is necessary to keep the climate cargo cult going, especially the alternative energy racket, not to mention the climate diplomacy circus. That’s what the actual Nature Geoscience article really says if you want to suffer through the whole thing. The very last sentence gives the whole game away:

Our analysis suggests that ‘pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5◦C’ is not chasing a geophysical impossibility, but is likely to require a significant strengthening of the NDCs [Nationally Determined Contributions] at the first opportunity in 2020 to hedge against the risks of a higher-than expected climate response and/or economic, technical or political impediments to sustained reductions at historically unprecedented rates after 2030.

Translation: Global warming models have overestimated warming, so we need to double down on global climate policy! Yeah, that’s the ticket.