Readers may recall earlier this week when I pointed out an inconvenient truth, the continental USA has no warming trend for the past decade, in fact it is cooling.
And, going back 15 years, the data is flat. Investors business Daily picked up the story in relation to the BEST controversy:
Don’t Stop Doubting
Posted 06:28 PM ET @ news.investors.com
Climate: Just a few weeks ago, a formerly skeptical scientist made news when he changed his mind about global warming. If he looked at the new data a meteorologist has pulled up, he’d change it back again.
Richard Muller, a physics professor at the University of California, said that data from his Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures (BEST) project convinced him that “global warming is real.” “We see no evidence,” he said Oct. 21, that global warming has “slowed down.”
The alarmists, of course, leveraged Muller’s statements to suit their agenda.
But Muller’s is not the “consensus” position of the team. Judith Curry, a Georgia Tech climate researcher with more than 30 years experience who was also part of the BEST project, has said “there is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped.” She looked at the same data Muller did and noted it shows global temperatures haven’t increased since the late 1990s.
Now comes meteorologist Anthony Watts armed with data showing the continental U.S. has not warmed in the last 10 years, and in fact has grown cooler in the summer and colder in the winter. The numbers aren’t a collection of weather forecasts from Watts, who runs the website “Watts Up With That,” but data from the National Climatic Data Center.
Granted, the Lower 48 aren’t the entire world, only a small slice of it. But it is a large portion of the developed world, a significant contributor of man-made carbon dioxide emissions and full of “heat islands” — big cities — that should be skewing temperature data upward.
Yet, that’s not what’s happening. The 2001-to-2011 trend shows a cooling of 0.87 degrees Fahrenheit compared with the 1911-2010 average. Backing up the starting date to 1996 doesn’t help the alarmists’ case, either. Temperatures are flat over that period.
Both the falling and flat temperature trends are coming at a time when man is putting out more emissions of carbon dioxide than ever. Given that, it seems to us that the U.S. should be warming.
Unlike Muller, we remain skeptics and would be even if he were right. Because rising temperatures are indicative of only one thing — rising temperatures — it’ll take more than an upward trend line to change our minds.
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> carbon monoxide than ever
Sigh.
typo in penultimate para
– dioxide or monoxide
Carbon dioxide…Carbon monoxide? Whatever.
carbon dioxide (slip) vs CO
How strange that the trend line and supposed average both lie below every single data point. Also remarkable that no indication of uncertainty on the estimated trend is given. Will you be rectifying this omission?
REPLY: Oh please. Don’t you ever do anything but whine and complain? Write to the National Climate Data center and ask them to fix it, since it is their output graph, not mine. Note the label on the lower right. You can duplicate it exactly here:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/cag3/cag3.html
-Anthony
Error in next to last paragraph noted above
[Fixed, thanks. ~dbs, mod.]
Good to see that your post has got some traction. As the article states, the US is a significant area of the developed Northern Hemisphere. Its trends need expanation, Indeed, it would be usedul to carry out a similar analysis of Russia and China (although their data may not be of the same standard).
IT was also good to see the comment “…rising temperatures are indicative of only one thing — rising temperatures…” Not enought people understand this simple but important point. Rising temperatures alone tell us nothing about the cause.
To Stevo: That’s because it’s the average of the last 100 years not for the last 10 years. Apparently the trend line was placed where it was for clarity. What counts with the trend is not the position but the slope.
No link back to here in the IBD article. That’s unfortunate.
There’s only one comment on it right now. I tried to register for the silly thing but it kept spitting out an error.
If someone can register like really soon now they can drop a link to Anthony’s article in the #2 comment. That’s not as good as in the OP but it’s better than nothing.
The average is for the period 1011 — 2011, which was cooler than the more recent decade. That’s why it’s below the current decade’s data. The trendline, I assume, is anchored to the horizontal average line to provide a way of visually estimating its slope.
Contact NOAA’s National Climate Data Center. The graphs they generate don’t provide this info.
stevo says:
November 11, 2011 at 7:54 pm
Be careful stevo – you might be turning into a sceptic. Best not let your friends know.
richard verney says:
November 11, 2011 at 7:58 pm
‘…although their data may not be of the same standard…’
From what Anthony has discovered about US temperature siting issues, which way are you suggesting the Russian and Chinese data standards might be – better or worse?
No matter what the data quality, it would still be massaged, corrected, adjusted, tweaked, screwed around with, homogenised, averaged, statistically manipulated and tortured until it revealed the ‘correct’ answer.
You can set the reference period on the NCDC menu. IIRC It defaults to 1901-2000. I think the trendline plots in the right place if you use a shorter, more recent reference period.
The US winter cooling trend actually started in ~1992. The trend is pervasive. Out of all of the US cities you can select, only a few exhibited winter warming trends over the last 20 years.
Roger Knights says: stevo says: “How strange that the trend line and supposed average both lie below every single data point.”
The average is for the period 1011 — 2011, which was cooler than the more recent decade. That’s why it’s below the current decade’s data.
I don’t think any of the USHCN surface stations have records back to 1011.
Some scientists have detected an accelerating ‘global warming’ trend since 1980 (near 1,5°C per century), while others have detected more recently a significant slowing, and even a reversal of this trend since 2001, to near -0.5°C (-0.9°F) per century. This is shown in the Climatic Research Unit and the UK Met. Office Hadley Centre data (HADCRUT3).
See WoodForTrees.org: Plot of HADCRUT3 Unadjusted global monthly mean temperature anomalies from 1980 (°C) + linear trend from 2001.
If in Series 2 you change the From (time) Value to 1998 you will see how the trend has been flat from 1998 on (0.03°C per century).
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1980/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:2001/trend
More Carbon dioxide, More sugar, but solar cycles mean that little bees can not grow a mature hive, which I have personally witnessed, this year where if it wasn’t for colder times then the bee hive my father and nephew happened to step on while on a walk through a forest would have been fatal, there were very young bees/wasps brushed of there clothes that were too young to sting (they curled up and fell to the ground) there was over 80 bees counted and there was no swarm that followed them. after looking into this I can say that this could have been serious and they could have received hundreds of stings each and possibly causing death, if it had been just 10-5 years earlier there were more reports of higher activity of hives.
I have seen fue hives that are dangerous this past 5 years and less wasps/bees luckily for my own family only one major sting was counted.
One year a wasp nest took hold of my aunts garden shed and terrorized the whole neighborhood that was around 1999, it was much warmer, I stayed at her house one week end. One night I went into the kitchen for a class of water, when I switched the light on, the strangest sight I had ever seen, thousands of wasps had covered the ceilings and walls, stranger still, after I got a glass of water I left the kitchen and went to bed, the next morning I asked about the wasps and no one else had seen them. very weird!
Climate: Just a few weeks ago, a formerly skeptical scientist made news when he changed his mind about global warming. If he looked at the new data a meteorologist has pulled up, he’d change it back again.
Richard Muller, a physics professor at the University of California, said that data from his Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures (BEST) project convinced him that “global warming is real.” “We see no evidence,” he said Oct. 21, that global warming has “slowed down.”
Gawd, I’m so tired of hearing how Muller was a skeptic. As someone who owns his book “Physics for Future Presidents” I can assure you that Muller has never been skeptical of AGW. Anyone reading the chapter on global warming will come away with the impression that AGW is real and there will be catastrophic consequences even though the proof noted in the book is the same dismal crap we see everywhere else. The idea that Muller ever was a skeptic is laughable.
Oops–my finger hit the wrong key; I meant to type 1911.
That’s a quote you can take to the bank!
DaveE.
In what way is it “inconvenient” that a mere 2% of the planet is cooling over a time period that isn’t statistically significant?
stevo asks a good question: what is the uncertainty of the slope? It’s easy to calculate (as is the slope). Why wasn’t this done, as well as doing a test for statistical significance?
A statistic means nothing without an indication of its significance (both in the time and space domains).
Is this a statistically significant effect?
Anthony,
Your graph, from an objective scientific viewpoint shows two things:
1. the average annual temperatures of the last decade show a cooling trend over that 10 year period
2. the average annual temperatures of the last decade have all been higher than the 1901-2011 average.
Point No. 1 is of little scientific value because, as I’m sure you’re aware, anyone can pick and choose a 10 year period that suits them. Long term climate trends occur over longer periods than that.
Point No. 2. has more scientific value because it is more statistically significant: a 10-year period compared to a 110-year period, with the result that the continent has warmed.
You were kind enough to state that over a 15-year period the trend was flat. It’s a pity you didn’t state the 20-year or 30-year trends.
Now, place yourself back in 1996 and recalculate the previous decadal trends, i.e. from 1986-1996: a whopping -1 degF/decade decline.
Short decadal trends are useless in this debate, and you should know it Anthony.
Best regards.
Living in Florida I’m surprised at the Tallahassee, FL January 1895 – 2011 Trend = -0.30 degF / Decade on the NOAA site.
http://climvis.ncdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/cag3/hr-display3.pl
Evidently you don’t understand the importance of the uncertainty on the trend. Hint: the uncertainty, when you calculate it, will show that your claims are specious.