Dr. David Whitehouse of the GWPF expounds on the “prime statistic of global warming” graph and its failure, as first reported here.
The Leaked AR5 Report And Global Temperature
Whatever one’s view about the leaking of the draft IPCC AR5 report it does make fascinating reading, and given the public scrutiny it is now receiving it will be interesting to see what parts of it are changed when the final report is released in a year or so.
One part of it that should be changed is the section on global surface temperature data and its interpretation.
The analysis of global combined land and ocean surface temperature in AR5 is inadequate for what it admits is seen as the prime statistic of global warming. It is highly selective in the references it quotes and in the use of time periods which obscures important, albeit inconvenient, aspects of the temperature data. It is poorly drafted often making a strong assertion, and then somewhat later qualifying if not contradicting it by admitting its statistical insignificance. This leaves the door open for selective and incomplete quoting.
In Chapter 2 the report says that the AR4 report in 2007 said that the rate of change global temperature in the most recent 50 years is double that of the past 100 years. This is not true and is an example of blatant cherry-picking. Why choose the past 100 and the past 50 years? If you go back to the start of the instrumental era of global temperature measurements, about 1880 (the accuracy of the data is not as good as later years but there is no reason to dismiss it as AR5 does) then of the 0.8 – 0.9 deg C warming seen since then 0.5 deg C of it, i.e. most, occurred prior to 1940 when anthropogenic effects were minimal (according to the IPCC AR4).
AR5 admits that of the warmest years on record the “top ten or so years are statistically indistinguishable from one another.” This is sloppy. The “or so” is significant and should be replaced with a more accurate statement. Despite the admitted statistical indistinguishability of the past ten years (at least) AR5 then goes on to say that 2005 and 2010 “effectively” tied for the warmest years! There is no mention of the contribution to global temperature made by the El Nino in those years!
It is in its treatment of the recent global temperature standstill that AR5 is at its most unevenhanded. It says that much attention has been focused on the “apparent flattening in Hadcrut3 trends,” and it says that “similar length phases of no warming exist in all observational records and in climate model simulations.”
No it hasn’t. The IPCC says that the time when anthropogenic influence dominated began between 1960-80. AR5 takes 1979 – 2011 as a period for analysis when temperatures started rising after a 40-year standstill. The fact that is obvious from the data is that the past 16 years of no global temperature increase is unusual and is not an “apparent flattening.” It is a total flattening for 16 years (as AR5 confusingly admits later on), just over half of the duration of the recent warming spell. Flat periods have existed before but they were in the era when mankind’s influence was not significant. The 16-year flatness since mankind has been the prime climatic influence has been the cause of much discussion in the peer-reviewed literature, something that this AR5 does not reflect.
AR5 goes on to say that with the introduction of Hadcrut4 (and its inclusion of high latitude northern hemisphere data) there is now a warming trend. No it isn’t. Look at the Hadcrut4 data and, as the GWPF has demonstrated, it is warmer than Hadcrut3, but it is also flatter for the past 15 years. AR5 also adds that “all products show a warming trend since 1998.” That this is not the case seems to be something that AR5 concedes a little later in the report when it that none of the warming trends they quote are statistically significant!
Referenced And Dismissed
Consider AR5’s summary: “It is virtually certain that global near surface temperatures have increased. Globally averaged near-surface combined land and ocean temperatures, according to several independent analyses, are consistent in exhibiting warming since 1901, much of which has occurred since 1979.”
Nobody doubts that the world has warmed since 1901. But why choose 1901, and what warming is natural and what is anthropogenic? As we have seen the last comment is wrong.
AR5 says: “Super-imposed upon the long-term changes are short-term climatic variations, so warming is not monotonic and trend estimates at decadal or shorter timescales tend to be dominated by short-term variations.”
So since 1979 we have has about 16 years of warming and 16 years of temperature standstill. Which is the short-term natural variation? The warming or the standstill?
AR5 says: “A rise in global average surface temperatures is the best-known indicator of climate change. Although each year and even decade is not always warmer than the last, global surface temperatures have warmed substantially since 1900.” Nobody, of whatever “skeptical” persuasion would disagree with that.
I can’t help but conclude that the pages of the GWPF contain a better analysis than is present in AR5, which is a mess written from a point of view that wants to reference the recent standstill in global temperatures but not impartially consider its implications.
The unacknowledged (in AR5) problem of the global temperature standstill of the past 16 years is well shown in its fig 1.4, which is seen at the head of this article. Click on the image to enlarge. It shows the actual global temperature vs projections made by previous IPCC reports. It is obvious that none of the IPCC projections were any good. The inclusion of the 2012 data, which I hope will be in the 2013 report, will make the comparison between real and predicted effects appear ever starker.
In summary, the global temperature of the past 16 years is a real effect that in any realistic and thorough analysis of the scientific literature is seen to be a significant problem for climate science, indeed it may currently be the biggest problem in climate science. To have it swept under the carpet with a selective use of data and reference material supported by cherry-picked data and timescales is not going to advance its understanding, and is also a disservice to science.
Feedback: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.org
There is only one group dumber than the climate change scientist modelers and forecasters and that is any public policy leader that takes these pathetic failures and looks the other way to do the wrong thing with the public trust. It is worse than taking bribes and looking the other way for person gain. This cheats a generation with a pack of lies that is decidely exposed. The cheats prefer fully cloaked lies as a rule.
“it will be interesting to see what parts of it are changed when the final report is released in a year or so.”
Easy; Anything that contradict the CO2 meme.
Thanks to David Whitehouse of the GlobalWarming Policy foundation for a clearly written critique of the IPCC AR5 second order draft. Critiques like this will enable the authors of AR5 to achieve a much more respectable product, if they have a mind to preserve their credibility, that is.
Thanks again to Alec Rawls for his “liberation” of this draft for public perusal and comment. By this commendable act, he has served the policy of the IPCC, which publicly espouses the policy of a transparent process of writing these reports, which policy everyone agrees, almost.
Quote: “the rate of change global temperature in the most recent 50 years is double that of the past 100 years. This is not true and is an example of blatant cherry-picking.”
It seems that the numbers about the rate of change are approximately correct. 0.5C in the first 100 years and 0.4 in the last 50 means roughly the same change in the last 50 years as the 100 years before.
Aside: Among other interpretations the data suggests a rapidly decreasing sensitivity to CO2. forcing.
The authors are caught on the horns of a dilemma. If they ignore the flattening in the past 15-16 years, even the MSM won’t be able to take them seriously. If they look at it head-on, they may badly damage the whole rationale for the IPCC and the monetary support of thousands of rent-seekers who in turn bolster the IPCC process. Damned if they do, damned if they don’t.
Ad David states, the IPCC chapter on the temperature is a mess and it is at odd with published peer reviewed literature. It is very selective in excluding the numerous empirical analysis publications.
The reason why the climate presents periods of cooling and steady temperature since 1850 is because there are significant climate natural oscillations working at multiple scales such oscillations with a period of about 9.1 yr, 10-11-yr, 20 yr and 60 yr, plus an upward trend which is only partially produced by anthropocentric warming. In particular the steady temperature since 2000 was caused by the cooling phase of both the quasi 20 yr and 60 yr oscillations, which compensated the anthropocentric warming during the same period.
The climate models used by the IPCC simply do not reproduce any of these oscillations probably because they have missing astronomical forcings. In fact, these oscillations are synchronous to astronomical oscillations.
All above is extremely well demonstrated in my peer reviewed papers.
My updated model is here
http://people.duke.edu/~ns2002/#astronomical_model_1
http://people.duke.edu/~ns2002/scafetta-forecast.png
a summary of my research is here
http://people.duke.edu/~ns2002/#astronomical_model
My model agrees much better with the temperature than the IPCC models and is correctly forecasting climate trends since 2000.
I say scrap the IPCC and their assessment reports. What use are they ? Does anyone know what benefits have arisen from the first four assessment reports. Have any lives been saved ? How many people, if any, are healthier of have better living conditions as a result of the assessment reports. Surely the money wasted on the IPCC could be better spent ?
Does anyone know who decides what “0” is?
Also, I was wondering why the graph made it seem the projections aren’t far off, until I realized they based the temperature on -.2 degrees, instead of 0 degrees.
David Whitehouse:
Yes! Well said. Thankyou.
Everybody and especially “Policymakers” needs to read your assessment.
Richard
First sentence should read “David Whitehouse” not “David White.”
[Thanks, fixed. — mod.]
“Which is the short-term natural variation? The warming or the standstill?”
This part could be explored. Essentially it means “whatever we have not accounted for”. Any part of warming or cooling effects they later might account for are then not considered to be part of Natural Variability.
If they want to use that term then they need to use it in every explanation…explaining for each cherry pick that they don’t know how much of the warming or cooling was due to Natural Variance.
This figure puzzled, and continues to puzzle, me. I assume that the colored shaded areas are the two-sigma boundaries, although that is by no means clear — and how in the world would one compute sigma? These are model predictions — are these related to the spread in results integrated out 1, 5, 10 years? If so, this figure is openly unbelievable, suggesting that system state and non-Markovian history dominates the actual supposed forcing the further out you get — otherwise the error ranges should saturate at the natural variance around some concrete prediction. Are they related to the spread in outcomes between completely different models, or outcomes associated with uncertainties in internal model parameters leading to different outcomes? How can one interpret this graph in terms of complementary error functions, cumulative distribution functions, the usual apparatus of statistics to talk about confidence or probability without a full Bayesian analysis of the uncertainty in each contributing parameter? Such an analysis would strongly reduce confidence in everything, of course, in a nonlinear multivariate chaotic model — to the point where its predictions were utterly insignificant as the confidence interval was amplified to being too large to constrain any possible future trajectory.
But let’s imagine that a miracle happened and there is a completely defensible interpretation of the colored shaded regions as 95% confidence levels for some sort of presumed future forcing by CO_2, business as usual, and so on.
Next, we need to look at the “error bars” on the annual global temperature data — what do they mean? Are they computed related to the variance of the contributing data? Are they assessed based on the “theoretical” uncertainties in the measurement process? Did somebody look at the averages and go “gee, I think the probable error in these is around this big”? Or worse, did they go “if we don’t have any error bars at all this become unbelievable, so let’s draw some, and let’s make sure they are big enough not to falsify our hypotheses”?
I rather think they are the latter — for one thing, they are all the same size! According to this figure, annual global temperature is known to within 0.075 C, period, for every year from 1990 to the present. Looking at the temperature spread among the “observed” sources, this is puzzling. For one thing, even treating the samples as “independent and identically distributed” which they almost certainly are not — one of the sources might well have a much larger variance than the others — their mutual distribution does not look particularly Gaussian, although how could one tell with only 36 samples.
Then there is the usual problem with picking their starting year. The temperature in 1990 was, as it happens, almost identical to the temperature in 1980 (according to the UAH LTT, anyway). Move the starting point of their shaded curves back to 1980, and the entire argument is over! And they lose. At least we should be grateful that they didn’t start the curves at the nadir caused by Mount Pinatubo cooling, I suppose. Starting in 1990 means that the 1998 El Nino bump and subsequent flat remain in their predicted range. Starting in 1980 puts the present so far out of their predicted range — even allowing for the limits on this range continuing to grow linearly without bound instead of saturating the way any sort of sensible climate prediction would for it to have any meaning anyway — that the present completely falsifies all of these models.
Since nobody in the game seems to have heard of jacknifing and other sorts of data processing that might eliminate or at least honestly assess errors associated with bias from the starting year, 1980 is at least as good as 1990, and given that the rate of CO_2 increase across this entire interval has been steady to (if anything) increasing, one has to assume that the obvious extrapolation of these models is a lower bound of what is expected from them started back in 1980.
And then there is the grey shading. What the f*ck is up with that? It is unlabelled. It dips with Mt. Pinatubo. It grows so that it is around twice the spread between all of the models combined. It is so broad that it would take at least another decade of flat temperatures to falsify it. Is it something that is supposed to have some meaning? Is it a pretty color somebody added to the figure to get better contrast for the shaded colors? All in all, this is a nearly completely meaningless figure. Perhaps there is sufficient explanation in a caption somewhere, but it looks to me like an open affront to the discipline of statistical analysis.
Nevertheless, if we are as generous as possible and interpret the boundaries as two-sigma confidence intervals and the temperature error estimates as honest one sigma estimates, the data suffices to reject FAR at 95% confidence, reject SAR at 95% confidence, reject AR4 at 95% confidence (filling in the expected 0.075 C in error bar at the end), and leave TAR barely alive on the lower edge of the 95% range. Only the undefined vast grey area survives.
Mind you, this too is a bullshit result, because the climate does not vary like these curves, ever, over any sort of respectable range. But they do not bode well for the CAGW hypothesis even in the AR5 report, even choosing 1990 instead of 1980 as the start year! And I’m not even thinking of addressing the curves if one uses (say) 1997 as the start year, because then the temperature curve is basically flat and moving the vertex of the colored wedges to that year instantly falsifies all of the models, even more badly than starting in 1980.
Their problem is that none of the model wedges allow for zero growth in temperature as a statistically permissible outcome. The lower edges of the colored regions are strictly ascending for all AR’s, with TAR being the only one with a sufficiently small slope on the lower bound that it CAN embrace any reasonable segment of the data when the data turns flat. It is this slope that sets the fundamental confidence level in the climate sensitivity contributing to the models since the temperature has turned remarkably flat post 1980, except for changes associated with strong, discrete modulation produced by specific drivers that have nothing to do with CO_2 per se — Pinatubo, the 1997-1998 ENSO, the 2010 correlated ENSO/NAO phase change. One has to argue that CO_2 is somehow shifting the centroid of the range of end stage outcomes from events of this sort to the systematically warmer side, but that is not evident in the 33+ year data.
Bottom line is that UAH suggests a warming rate of ~0.1 C/decade, across the entire dataset, no special choice of start or end points. This linear fit has little confidence, given the noise in the data (natural variability) and the fact that most of the warming is associated with a single discrete event — the 1997-1998 ENSO max. UAH LTT was flat as a pancake from 1979-1997, jumped by 0.3C from 1995 to 1999 and has been flat as a pancake from 1997 to the present (slight overlap in ranges because it is pointless to talk about annual temperature in this context as if it is a sharp value as far as “climate” is concerned). That’s two intervals of over fifteen years each with no warming, and one single sharp event that produced all of the observed warming.
That all by itself falsifies all of the climate models put together, unless they exhibit exactly this sort of behavior.
rgb
NASA is already tentatively testing other hypothesis of the global temperature variability
Jean Dickey of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena:
“One possibility is the movements of Earth’s core (where Earth’s magnetic field originates) might disturb Earth’s magnetic shielding of charged-particle (i.e., cosmic ray) fluxes that have been hypothesized to affect the formation of clouds. This could affect how much of the sun’s energy is reflected back to space and how much is absorbed by our planet. Other possibilities are that some other core process could be having a more indirect effect on climate, or that an external (e.g. solar) process affects the core and climate simultaneously.”
http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/earth20110309.html
If my calculations are correct than there be more to the JPL’s hypothesis than what Dr. Dickey proposes. My finding is condensed here:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/EarthNV.htm with the strong correlation Arctic-Temperature and. Sun-Antarctica
D.J. Hawkins has it right, but not all of it. The real horns of the dilemma that the IPCC has, are the certainties that it has claimed in previous reports; things like “very likely” meaning 90% probability. Now the recent data shows that these certainties have little basis in science. So the IPCC has to somehow walk a fine line by still claiming that these certainties exist, while at the saame time trying to make these agree with the current data. It was this difficulty that caused Alec Rawls to leak the reporet in the first place. The statements which he succeeded in getting into Chapter 7 made the conclusions in the SPM wrong.
Incidentally, I wonder what logic the IPCC uses for claiming that they can summarize the report, and come to firm conclusions, while the science in the report is not yet complete. It seems to me that this is putting the cart before the horse.
This graph has come in for considerable discussion in the last few days, but as Steve McIntyre is fond of saying, one should keep one’s eye on the pea. Or, alternatively, don’t let the IPCC choose the ground rules.
The graph purports to show upper and lower limits of the IPCC estimates of future temperatures. But remember, as the IPCC constantly admonishes us, these are not predictions, they are projections. What does that mean? It means that the IPCC makes certain assumptions (scenarios) about the CO2 rate of increase, population gain, economic growth, etc.. Each different assumption leads to a different estimate of future temperatures. But some years later we can see which assumption was closest to the truth. That means that the IPCC estimate based on that assumption is the one we should take as their best estimate.
How does this change the graph? Well, looking at the first assessment report, one assumption was the “Business-as-usual” scenario. This gave the highest estimate, the top of the gold area in the graph above. Considering the nearly-perfect exponential growth of CO2 since then, we have probably been following the business-as-usual scenario pretty closely. So the entire rest of the gold area should be wiped out, and only the estimate based on the actual winning scenario should be shown.
This approach could be extended to the next three assessments. In most cases, I suspect, the actual scenario will be found to produce one of the higher estimates. The resultant graph would show four lines, rather than areas, probably all close to the top of their respective areas. Or if one wanted to allow for uncertainty, perhaps the lines would be bounded by uncertainty estimates, but they would be much narrower than the present lower limits, which, remember, are based on scenarios that we now know to be untrue.
This more correct analysis of the IPCC estimates would remove much wiggle room–as it is,they can say that their estimates may be high but at least the lower bound of the estimates is in the ballpark. The proper analysis would show they not only are far out in left field, they aren’t even in the same park!
“There is only one group dumber than the climate change scientist modelers and forecasters and public policy leaders that take these pathetic failures and look the other way to do the wrong thing – the public who pays for it in the first place and who continues to do so.”
there, fixed that for ya.
Courtland:
Quote: “the rate of change global temperature in the most recent 50 years is double that of the past 100 years. This is not true and is an example of blatant cherry-picking.”
It seems that the numbers about the rate of change are approximately correct. 0.5C in the first 100 years and 0.4 in the last 50 means roughly the same change in the last 50 years as the 100 years before.
Aside: Among other interpretations the data suggests a rapidly decreasing sensitivity to CO2. forcing.
________________
I think the quotation is correct. The past 100 year period (0.8-0.9 degree warming) also encompasses the most recent 50 years (o,4 degrees). Thus, the rates in each 50 year period are approximately the same.
On the other hand, the 100 years beginning 1880 are roughly 1/2 of the overall rise; but then the 1979-1998 rise is a rate of close to 2 degrees per century.
End points are critical and leads to cherry picking–which is one of the points of the discussion–along with the flatness of the recent 15-16 years.
rgbatduke
Yes, the error bars on the data plots are conspicuously mysterious. I agree that it could be meant as a “cosmetic” to fuzz over the discrepancy of model forecast with observations. I deem IPCC authors fully capable of such subterfuge. Theyhave done much worse than that.
The whole IPCC ‘reporting’ has become a mish mash of facts, half facts, truths and untruths, half explained, unexplained, real and ‘virtual’ information! Even a single lead author (or editor) cannot present a single written explanation of the ‘state of the science’ because to do so would require that he/she make the honest statement that little they have done/achieved has been proven even half right! They obviously cannot and would not write this as it will destroy the need for their very existence!
I don’t believe a truthful scientist/reviewer could write anything other than ‘Listen, folks, we got a lot of it wrong, we don’t have the data or facts to substantiate our earlier claims, and all previous bets are off until such times as the data/facts are fully available !’
The above analysis is based on collected temperature data which has been “adjusted”, almost always upward, to the extent that ~50% of the reported temperature anomaly is in the adjustments, rather than in the data.
Not only do we not know what the global average surface temperature is, we also don’t know what the anomaly is to any degree of certainty. In light of the expenditure of more than $100 billion, that is unconscionable.
rgbatduke says: December 18, 2012 at 10:40 am
……………
grey shading. What the f*ck is up with that?
In their previous report (2007) grey colour was something called ‘postSRES’ range http://www.ipcc.ch/graphics/syr/fig3-1.jpg
rgbatduke says:
December 18, 2012 at 10:40 am
The grey shading is described in the Fig description. As I read it – it is basically an uncertainty/error bar ‘extension’ of the model projections boundaries based on the Hadcrut4 dataset(?). Though it does seem a bit weird……
Look carefully at Box 2.2 , Table 1, on page 2-21. This states the least squares fit of the mean change per decade of Hadcrut4 from 1901 to 1950 IS EQUAL (at .107/decade) to the rate of change of 1951 to 2011. i.e. The rate of pre 1950 equals the rate of change post 1950. The graphic is on page 2-153.
That is not consistent with, and I could not find, a reference to the rate of change doubling in the 2007 report as noted above (I may have missed it).
However simply demonstrating that the rate of change is identical before and after 1950 means this table and the graphic do not match the written conclusions in the report text.
vukcevic says:
December 18, 2012 at 10:57 am
I am wrong, SRES it is related to CO2.
rgb–
Your post was not up when I began writing mine, but I think you are probably right in suspecting that the grey area is added to give the IPCC a chance to say the actual temperature change is not outside their uncertainty intervals. However, if the graph were properly put together, the lower colored areas corresponding to failed or untrue scenarios would not appear, and any grey areas of assumed uncertainty would be symmetrical around the single lines corresponding to the one scenario that reality picked as the right one. These lines would probably cluster near the upper areas and one could see clearly the departure from reality.
I thought about doing the actual work and finding which scenario in the SAR, TAR, AR4 etc was the one we should use, but it got to be somewhat complicated (i.e., AR4 made some estimates about world population being either 6 billion or 12 billion in 2100–which one is right?) so I gave up. But the important point is not to accept the IPCC version of this graph.
Note also that in Fig. 1.4 the trendline has not been drawn. Although there are error bars, it is legitimate to put it in: the scenarios cover ranges, but the world has had a unique temperature history (even if it is difficult to determine).
The last 22 years of actual temperature changes are left up to the reader to visualize. If the trend were been put in, the disconnect between observation and IPCC scenarios would be more obvious.
The IPCC is in a definite pickle. The report is internally inconsistent, and the authors know it. Each one will be faced with a professional decision if his/her contribution does not support the overall conclusion, or has been downgraded in its significance. It will be tricky.
It is not surprising that two authors have abandoned the process now that the AR5 technical inclusions and comments have ended. From now on there will be just spin happening.
Yet again Dr Whitehouse has hit the nail on the head. A reasonable, articulate and informed analysis that nobody could take issue with. He shows the bias and inadequacy of those who compiled that section of the IPCC report.
Not many people will know that Dr Whitehouse was the BBC’s Science Correspondent and senior to Roger Harrabin. What a difference it would have made to the BBC’s reporting if they had had Dr Whitehouse’s knowledge and clear thinking. But no, they first sidelined him and then sacked him.
Lance Wallace says:
December 18, 2012 at 10:44 am
Lance brings up the relevance of certain Scenarios still being in the mix. True: should not some of the high-end scenarios be dropped, as observations have failed to match the Scenario?
As for CO2 rise: I see a change of goalpost here. With China and India coming on strong in the present or near-future, the warmists could argue that NOW the CO2 increases are going to be greater than expected, so all we have to do is take the high scenarios and re-fix their beginning point to …. 2015.
Thanks Dr. Whitehouse.
One picture is worth a thousand weasal words of warmist warbling.
Seeing as how the raison d’etre of the IPCC is “global warming”, it is incredible how weak that chapter is.
I love this figure.
Ignore for the moment all the extra curves and “error shading”. The temperature trend in the data is essentially flat over the entire period of the IPCC process starting in 1990. There has been no statistically significant warming – period !
The extra curves FAR (first assessment report), SAR (second assessment report) etc. are all normalized to the data at the date they were made. But even then they still fail. Even the errors for AR4 are continued backwards into the past. The error shading projections in time are a masterpiece in covering their backsides. The graph is pure marketing for example:
– Errors on data are not even standard deviations – they are 3 sigma (95% confidence)
– Errors on models are propagated to ever greater values forwards in time. This essentially is saying that the models have no predictive power.
– Only by exaggerating modeling errors with “ensembles of models” can they even plot the actual data on the same graph as the previous predictions.
It is a dog’s dinner !
“There is no mention of the contribution to global temperature made by the El Nino in those years!”
I get confused around this issue. I got into a discussion with revkin recently about 1998 being unsurpassed thus far, hence no global warming since, and he said this was unfair given that was a super el nino. Wait a minute I thought, I don’t recall any warmists saying “don’t take the warming all that seriously from that year as it doesn’t really count given the S.E.N. But If that’s my argument, how can I find fault with them for not mentioning the el nino in connection with the two cited years in the article. In other words, should we not treat warmth as warmth….and cold as cold….given that we can always find proximate causes, no?
Can anyone help me wrap my simple mind around this issue?
I have to ask this again.
Why does Figure 1.4 have the TAR and AR4 wedges originating back in 1990?
Why don’t the wedges expand from their publication dates as they do in Figure 1.7 for CH4? Where is the official reason for constructing the wedges this way?
Monckton weighs in.
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/12/unleashed-monckton-releases-his-ar5-reviewer-comments/
Willie Soon and. Nils-Axel Morner weigh in on sea level rise.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/dec/17/sea-level-rise-data-based-on-shoddy-science/?page=all
I was wrong. Even in Figure 1.7, the uncertainty in the CH4 AR4 wedge at the time of AR4 publication has significant width. Maybe the reason is obvious, but I’m blind to it.
Do Temperatures have a mean? E.M Smith at musing from the Chiefio December 10th.
Statistics I have wilfully ignored for years, so help here would be appreciated.
Too much of the so-called data here is abused, beaten beyond recognition in some cases, now the IPCC unprecedented warming of the late 1900s is a statistically homogenized beast,with an assumed normal or mean,what if there is no statistically useful mean?
I’m always mindful of how these posts about WG1 AR5 might be interpreted or quoted either in the near future by cherry-pickers or in the distant future by historians.
For that reason I think that ‘WG1’ (or WG2-see below) or at least the word, ‘draft’ should always accompany ‘AR5’, especially in the title.
As you can see, even I am already slightly confused between the citing of WG1 and WG2. This is because in his recent post, Alec Rawls referred to WG1 at first (about which he had complained in Feb 2012 in a post on WUWT) but then clearly stated that now that WG2 had come out and had an additional sentence admitting greater solar forcing, he was releasing that draft (ie. WG2). That seems clear enough, but a later post on WUWT refers to the leaking of WG1.
It might seem pedantic now but I can see unnecessary confusion down the road, long after the definitive AR5 document comes out. One eg. is that in 2014, SkS could correctly quote sentences from this post with ‘AR5’ in them and accuse WUWT of misquoting AR5. It could get quite messy and judging by the selective quoting of Rawls by Dana (eg. requoting Rawl’s quote of the summary (saying insignificant solar forcing) without any reference to why Rawls put it in (it was based on TSI and therefore chapter 7 and 8 authors had their wires crossed). SkS was happy for the reader to think Rawls was conceding the very thing he was questioning as true.
That’s what you’re up against and guarding against it, unfortunately, means avoiding what are otherwise innocent omissions. I would recommend interpolating WG1 (or 2- I think it’s 2) into the text where appropriate.
Scute
Question:
What material incentive does the IPCC offer authors who collaborate in this report?
Does the job offer any renumeration? Is there any sort of travel and gala confab that could be attractive for some humble scientist? Or is it only a matter of prestige for the authors?
Can anyone enlighten us on this?
john robertson:
At December 18, 2012 at 11:35 am you ask
Your questions are all individually addressed in Appendix B of the item at
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc0102.htm
I think you will want to read it.
Indeed, your post suggests you may want to read the entire item at the link.
Richard
Stephen Rasey says:
December 18, 2012 at 11:33 am
“I was wrong. Even in Figure 1.7, the uncertainty in the CH4 AR4 wedge at the time of AR4 publication has significant width. Maybe the reason is obvious, but I’m blind to it.”
If they reset their scenarios with every report, even the dumbest idiot notices that they don’t want to be held accountable for their past failed projections.
Poker Guy
When the El Nino spike of 1998 occurred, the global warmers loved it because it served their propagandizing very well. Fourteen years and no warming later it is an inconvenient fact because it emphasizes the lack of warming since then.
The trend line calculated for data from 1997 to date, inclusive of the ‘98 El Nino spike, is flat. There has been no warming for sixteen years. Tell them that, and watch the fun, as before your very eyes they twist themselves into pretzels in their attempt to rescue their precious AGW theory. They pray to the climate gods to send warmth, and if sacrificing virgins was still in vogue, virgins would be even scarcer than they are now.
I love the above graph when put alongside this comment from the new SPM:
“There is very high confidence that coupled climate models provide realistic responses to external
forcing. This is evident from simulations of the surface temperature on continental and larger scales, and the global-scale surface temperature increase over the historical period, especially the last fifty years. {9.4.1, Box 9.1, Figure 9.2, Figure 9.8, 10.2, 11.3, 12.2}”
@richard Courtney Thank you, exactly what I need, have skimmed thro it will read properly tonight, on first read its worse than I could imagine, this widespread vagueness to the IPCC evidence,is it intentional?
I know incompetence should be suspected before malice but this fog of assertions, with little that can be clearly identified and examined on its merits, keeps me thinking malice.
The first CRU emails left me appalled with this bunch.
And confirmed that I lack imagination with respect to the folly of men.
The above analysis is based on collected temperature data which has been “adjusted”, almost always upward, to the extent that ~50% of the reported temperature anomaly is in the adjustments, rather than in the data.
Sure, but I tend to rely on UAH LTT, which is not adjusted, or really adjustable, in this way. And the people caring for both HADCRUT and GISS are finally realizing that they are up against a serious wall. They cannot adjust the data to produce any more warming than they have without the increasing discrepancy with the satellite data going from being an embarrassment to a bald proof to any statistically competent eye that their thumbs have been on the collective scales. Right now they are barely believable, as long as they don’t try to pump surface temperatures any more while UAH LTT and so on remain flat. But they have to remain flat too at this point — any systematic adjustment loses the game entirely.
Not to say that they do have thumbs on the scales, but IMO a simple scatterplot analysis of the year versus the correction relative to the raw data is already enough to very, very strongly suggest that there is one, advertent or inadvertent. Anthony’s own pending paper and work lends credence to that hypothesis without, of course, attributing the discrepancy to malice or (being generous) “laziness” regarding contributing site UHI effects and site validity in the modern era.
But malicious or honest, the gap is already too big to be clearly believable if it is made any larger across the century scale data, and they are similarly constrained by the 33 year satellite data. There is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, no way to adjust, from this point out either the thermometric record stays commensurate with the satellite record or the former is just plain wrong.
Which is, of course, their real problem with the 15, I mean 16, I mean 17, I mean 25 year thing. With the only significant warming event in the 33 year record being associated with a single, strong ENSO peak (although there are also correspondences with relative peaks in the otherwise flat fluctuating trends on both sides of that) the question has to remain — do we have to wait for another strong ENSO before observing another step-like increase in mean temperature? Or to put it even more unfavorably for the CAGW argument, what if we have a strong La Nina event after the current ENSO fizzle and temperatures actually drop, as they often do during La Nina?
It is apparently considered bad form to assert a correlation between solar state and anything, but ENSO has the appearance of a period-halved chaotic response to the solar cycle, with a mean lifetime of 5 years. Its relative strength might — or might not — be correlated with the relative strength of the solar cycle, something that could be true even if Lief is correct and solar cycle variation is truly uninteresting over any relevant timescale (even Lief acknowledges that the current solar cycle is going to be significantly weaker than the last 9 cycles, whether or not that makes the last 9 unusually strong).
All anyone — warmist or denier alike (kidding, kidding:-) has to do is wait. Another few decades (especially ones with a very weak near Maunder minimum cycle if 25 is indeed that) will almost certainly answer many questions, and with satellites (and NASA raw data publication policies) and ARGOS it isn’t going to be easy to thumb scales, if indeed that has been going on.
rgb
“It is virtually certain that global near surface temperatures have increased. ”
Aah, to parse the meaning of the warmists. They consider it a virtue to believe that the world is warming.
Just a standard point, the temperature rise from 1979 coincided with the use of satellite and reduction of land based measurements. Plus a shedload of massive adjustments which had to be applied worldwide to make those lines slope upwards at all. Take those factors as a whole and they can more than explain the rise alone.
Clive Best: ‘There has been no statistically significant warming’. I would say that the conclusion is that there is no warming. Statistical significance is a meta statement. With this conclusion we only can make a Type II error: one of the alternative models is true and we made a false statement. The probability of this error is usually denoted beta. What is the value of beta here?
This excellent analysis shows that the draft report fudges the lack of air temperature warming. This, however, is a lead into Chapter 3 on the warming of the oceans. The SPM proclaims that Trenberth’s missing heat has been found, much of it in the Southern Ocean, at a depth >3000m.
Ch3 Page 10 Lines 23-28
The switch in emphasis from near surface air temperatures to the oceans seems to be important to maintaining the line of global warming. Yet this relies on sparse sampling.
The relevant papers are Levitus et al. 2012 (which Willis looked at here and here) along with Kouketsu et al. 2011 (full paper)
rgbatduke:
In your post at December 18, 2012 at 1:45 pm you say
Yes.
I made the same point concerning mean global temperature (MGT) on WUWT in 2010 when reporting my Parliamentary Submission that I link to at December 18, 2012 at 12:24 pm above. It says
An egregious troll responded on WUWT with a vitriolic personal attack on me for suggesting such adjustments are made. And he suggested that I could be convicted of perjury for submitting such a suggestion to a Parliamentary Inquiry.
The troll still frequently posts knit-picking rubbish on WUWT. I have not been prosecuted but I wait to see the troll’s response to your making the same suggestion.
Richard
Can anybody remember those past days of “global warming” glory when “the science was settled” beyond dispute and no doubts or questions from the Skeptics or Deniers would be entertained?
They are trying to build a platform whereby they can climb down from the outlandish claims made previously as the evidence is no longer supporting the mantra.
What to do if people like Dr. Habibullo Abdussamatov are right ??
It is what Asians call saving face – try to salvage a dignified exit from a strategy which is being exposed as flawed before it collapses totally.
Obviously you cannot simply say we were wrong so you attempt to spin your way out of the “mess” you created.
There is nothing so convoluted as political spin !
“manicbeancounter says:
This excellent analysis shows that the draft report fudges the lack of air temperature warming”
Or, you know, we could go with facts and reality instead…
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23005-leaked-ipcc-report-reaffirms-dangerous-climate-change.html
But don’t let me affect your confirmation bias.
It is not what is written in the draft report that is the game changer, but the leaking. By leaking the report the IPCC have been put on the spot; do they ignore the flaws found by the community that are not included in their inner circle of advocates? If they do they end up looking biased and haughty, so do they acknowledge them by reacting to their thoughtful and well documented criticisms? In which case the AGW simply begins to look like a fantasy.
This leaking is a master stroke, maybe more significant that Climategate 1 and 2.
For once the sceptics have been a jump ahead of the media savvy warmist lobby, it is going to be very interesting to see how they play this.
In reply to Tzo December 18, 2012 at 2:56 pm
Maybe I have a confirmation bias. But derived from my education, I take steps to eliminate that bias by reading the originals and then compare and contrast the opinions. New Scientist just parrots the same response as Nuccitelli and Sherwood. Rawls’ response is valid for all.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/16/a-rebuttal-to-steven-sherwood-and-the-solar-forcing-pundits-of-the-ipcc-ar5-draft-leak/
New Scientist does not mention the surface temperature data. Neither does it mention the warming oceans, nor the admission that hurricanes are nor getting worse, nor the admission that there is no strong evidence to support the hypothesis that weather is getting more extreme.
Of course I might be wrong.
http://manicbeancounter.com/2012/12/14/ar5-first-order-draft-summary-for-policymakers-a-few-notes-on-pages-1-to-8/
Tzo:
Thankyou for the laugh you gave me with your post at December 18, 2012 at 2:56 pm.
Unfortunately, I now have to get my keyboard cleaned of the coffee.
However, it would have been good if you had remembered to add the [sarc] because some people may have thought the NS link was to a scientific – and not a comedic – source.
Richard
Close enough for government work.
“global surface temperatures have warmed substantially since 1900.” Nobody, of whatever “skeptical” persuasion would disagree with that.”
Is it accurate to call a 0.7C increase, or a roughly 0.25% increase in thermal energy, substantial? Because climate scientists always seem to describe the TSI variation as “small”, and it is of a similar magnitude (and the UV component varies much more).
The confused muddle of this draft is exactly the sort of nonsense one would expect when the starting point is a vague and ambiguous hypothesis. Post-modern science at its best (unfortunately). The academy became post–modern, then post-numerate. It is now rapidly becoming post-literate, to be followed by post-sentient.
I agree 100%.
@ Julian in Wales.
“By leaking the report, the IPCC has been put on the spot; do they ignore the twisted “facts” and misinformation created by the propaganda community?”
Fixed.
By the way, the answer is most definitely “YES!”.
“magicbeancounter Says:
Maybe I have a confirmation bias. But derived from my education, I take steps to eliminate that bias by reading the originals ”
Your own blog and a heartland institute propaganda website do not count as “originals”.
richardscourtney says:
December 18, 2012 at 2:29 pm
This adjustment to agree with the MSU data may contribute to the fact that the Jones et al., GISS and GHCN data sets each show no statistically significant rise in MGT since 1995 (i.e. for the last 15 years).
Things are getting worse all the time for certain people. RSS has a negative slope for the last 15 years and 16 years. And while the slope from the last 17 years to the last 23 years is positive, it is NOT significant at the two sigma level. Here are the numbers.
For RSS: +0.130 +/-0.136 C/decade at the two sigma level from 1990
For RSS: +0.135 +/-0.147 C/decade at the two sigma level from 1991
For RSS: +0.142 +/-0.159 C/decade at the two sigma level from 1992
For RSS: +0.107 +/-0.166 C/decade at the two sigma level from 1993
For RSS: +0.069 +/-0.174 C/decade at the two sigma level from 1994
For RSS: +0.043 +/-0.190 C/decade at the two sigma level from 1995
For RSS: +0.036 +/-0.210 C/decade at the two sigma level from 1996
For RSS: -0.003 +/-0.229 C/decade at the two sigma level from 1997
For RSS: -0.045 +/-0.250 C/decade at the two sigma level from 1998
@Werner Brozek,
It’s amazing how often this graph can be used
http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics/Escalator_10-12_med.gif
If you worked in any private industrial firm and you submitted a report to your board where the key argument of your proposal was shown to be completely false [ie global temperatures have not gone up as the co2 levels rose which is completely opposite of what you had previously claimed to be an indisputable fact of science] and your own revised report shows this and you now submitted the same argument again without an adequate explanation nor a new drastically corrected scientific proposal , your walking papers would follow you out the door .It is scientifically criminal to submit a new report and not make solar forcing as the main driver of global climate . We have now a situation where solar activity , global air temperatures and global SST have been all declining for a decade now and the decadal average sunspot # for the last 10 years is at level of [29.3 l which is now below those experienced during the three decades of the last cooling period of 1880-1910.. There is every indication that if the next 2 solar cycles are similarly low as #24, that there is only cooling ahead. and it has nothing to do with co2 levels and every thing to do with solar decline during the last 10 years and the next 20 years . We may not have the mechanism straight yet but the historical relationship is clearly there. One can look at decadal solar trends not monthly or yearly figures but decadal average figures.to see how the global temperatures drop as the average decadal sunspot number drops below say 30-50 level range and temperatures warms when it goes over those levels . Ocean cycles can work against this trend if they are out of sync like during the 1950–1970’s when solar cycle was going up but the temperatures went down because the oceans were in the cool mode and overrode solar warming.
For anyone interested in the non-distorted graph, and non-cherry picked information:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/IPCC_FAR_Since_1880.png
https://skepticalscience.com/lessons-from-past-climate-predictions-ipcc-far.html
Side Note: Interesting how skepticalscience never censors those who use the word ‘warmist’ in the comments section, or censors links to valid scientific studies with the moderator’s reasoning of “That authors shenanigans are not welcome here”.
Yet here, completely different story… Makes you think…
Apparently the NASA-employed authors of this piece have not seen the leaked AR5 Draft:
Climate Likely to Be on Hotter Side of Projections
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2012-352
It also appears that their conclusions are based on erroneous assumptions about cloud forcing.
This discussion of recent global temperature in AR5 points out that we are not given correct information about temperature history since 1979 when satellite measurements began. They are the most accurate source of temperature measurements we have and they tell us the following facts about the last 33 years. First, from 1979 to 1997, there was no warming. There were El Nino peaks and La Nina valleys there but they canceled each other out and global mean temperature did not change. The only warming during the satellite era came when the giant 1998 super El Nino arrived. It carried a huge amount of warm water across the ocean and thereby caused a brief step warming. In four years, global temperature rose by a third of a degree Celsius and then stopped. There has not been any warming since then. But we are not even told of the existence of this step warming. Until recently, the eighties and nineties were shown as a steady temperature rise that wiped out the fact that global mean temperature did not change for eighteen years. It also filled in behind the super El Nino so that the step warming could not be seen. It was called the “late twentieth century warming” and was completely phony. But GISTEMP, NCDC, NOAA, HadCRUT3, and also BEST temperature curves all showed it. It is this warming that is the prime exhibit that proves the existence of anthropogenic warming. But if you now disqualify this warming as phony you are left with no anthropogenic warming at all for the last 33 years. And no support for the fiction that in 1988 Hansen was right to proclaim global warming. I checked the temperature for the eighties and found that what he thought was global warming was in fact just the warm peak of the 1988 El Nino. This El Nino is the middle one of five that satellites see between 1979 and 1997. I have pointed out the phony warming before but surprise, surprise – in August this year both GISTEMP and NCDC started to show the temperature of the eighties and nineties correctly while the others are still staying with the phony upslope of late twentieth century warming. In this latter group is HadCRUT3. But when I looked at its twenty first century data I was in for a totally unexpected surprise: they report not just a lack of warming but an actual cooling since 2001! I measured its rate and found it to be 0.1 degrees Celsius per decade. I have no idea where this comes from because satellites do not show it – their twenty first century curve is flat for the last 12 years, and so are GISTEMP and NCDC. Met Office told us that there was lack of warming for 16 years but I can understand where that comes from: their temperature curve has such poor resolution that the super El Nino peak is smeared out and fills the two La Nina valleys on both sides of it. That is why I now start counting from 2001. In view of this the AR5 fudging of twenty first century data seems like a last-ditch effort that is doomed to failure from conflict with reality. They desperately want to believe that warming exists when it does not. To eliminate future disputes about warming I suggest that the satellite temperature curve should be adopted as the correct global temperature curve.
Tzo says:
“For anyone interested in the non-distorted graph…”
And then Tzo posts this totally distorted nonsense, fabricated by a mendacious cartoonist.
Here is an honest data-based graph showing the long term rising global warming trend. Note that the trend is not accelerating. In fact, global warming stopped a decade and a half ago.
Note that Tzo’s Pseudo-Skeptical Pseudo-Science graph shows [non-existent] acceleration in global warming. That is, of course, an outright lie. The long term [natural] global warming trend has remained within clear parameters, whether CO2 was low, or high. Therefore, the rise in CO2 has had no measurable effect on global temperatures. None. The rise in harmless, beneficial CO2 has caused no acceleration in warming.
Conclusion: the CO2=AGW conjecture is deconstructed. If AGW exists at all, it is far too minor to worry about.
Credibility = 1/number of exclamation points.
David Whitehouse, thank you for your thoughtful review.
Anthony, I was going to compliment David for also apparently putting our itinerant trolls to sleep. However, something seemed to have awakened a couple of them this PM.
So…Let me see if I have this straight. In the past, when this stuff first came to our attention, the model run parts that were reared on mother’s milk show great, nay, perfect correlation. The scenario run ahead not so much, but hope floats amongst the AGWing crowd. But we skeptics protested loudly because model error bars, along with observation error bars, were on some other planet, or the dog ate them, can’t remember which. Time passed.
And this is now. The correlation between models and observations have been completely destroyed. So they finally include the error bars. How timely. Who would have guessed they were SOOOOOOO large from the outset? Certainly not us skeptics.
Reminds me of something else that floats too.
Tzo
you may know this already, but we of WUWT have our own views of sks. It is the only site that is classified here as “unreliable”. And that is a very nice way of putting it. We frequently get visitors from that place. They arrive with a load of spitballs, spit them on the threads, and then leave. Drive-by spitballers can be ignored. The ones who linger become eyesores. If you have any worthwhile contribution to make to the discussion, it is time that you do so.
Policy Guy, feed the trolls, they are an endangered species.
The drop off in their numbers is unprecedented, hunting season will have to be banned, no export of pelts or guided hunts allowed.
Save the arctic trolls.
“Not to say that they do have thumbs on the scales, but IMO a simple scatterplot analysis of the year versus the correction relative to the raw data is already enough to very, very strongly suggest that there is one, advertent or inadvertent.”
I agree rgb, and they are probably leaning on their thumbs with out even realizing it. Anthony’s paper will show the majority of the error in the adjustments. But I even hate to call them “errors” in the adjustments each could be technically correct but still hiding the real trend error. That is the “artificial” rise in the trends that was strictly from the locations of the sensors and most importantly, over a long period of time.
My question is, do you think they will ever be able to properly remove that? I mean each move is assumed correct but the trends are still too high from reality, cities account for such a small portion of the earth’s area. That’s a rarity in science, to have an error that is really “there” but you can’t remove perfectly correct single adjustments. Hmm.
I see a conundrum here… a form of a paradox in the trend.
Here is the odd thing about IPCC predictions. They are in almost perfect lock step with temperature from 1980 to circa beginning of the 21st century or slightly underestimate actual warming. (When they were hindcasting). But immediately diverge when they forecast.
For example:
http://ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/syr/en/figure-spm-4.html
The historical trends are presented with such perfect fit it almost seems as if there was tuning involved (if I didn’t know better).
Tzo says:
December 18, 2012 at 5:17 pm
Side Note: Interesting how skepticalscience never censors those who use the word ‘warmist’ in the comments section, or censors links to valid scientific studies with the moderator’s reasoning of “That authors shenanigans are not welcome here”.
As a person who can’t log onto skeptical science because I have been banned for posting links to credible papers…..I can’t help but laugh at how naive you are.
I had hoped it was a site with valid discussion…….it is only propaganda and I was very sad to find that out.
That is why Skeptical Science Syndrome disorder has become synonymous with being near sighted. The only solution is to see an optometrist so that their view will be expanded to reality.
Thanks for the chuckle.
Tzo:
Since I am not “allowed” to post at Skeptical Science, would you be so kind as to post this link?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/compress:12/offset:14/plot/gistemp/compress:12/offset:13.885/detrend:-0.02/plot/hadcrut3vgl/trend/offset:-0.42/detrend:-0.23/offset:14/plot/hadcrut3vgl/trend/offset:14.1/detrend:-0.23/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.00001/offset:17/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1880/to:2010/trend/offset:14/plot/hadcrut3vgl/scale:0.00001/offset:9
As to the statistics involved in your link to the escalator temp idea, I can only recommend that whoever took the time to do it, most certainly flunked every stat class that he/she attended. In all my years, I have seldom seen a butchering to match that one. But then off course, I recognize the source, do I need to really say more?
Tzo:
Oh yes, as an aside. Being a lot of folks here are not allowed to post at skeptical science, would you be so kind as to extend the posters there an invitation to post here so that we can help them with their near sighted issue?
We can prob recommend an optometrist , or if they don’t have enough cash we could turn on the lights, hold a magnifying glass for them and help them at least view reality for a few minutes. That should create a hunger for more don’t ya think?
rgb: “All anyone — warmist or denier alike (kidding, kidding:-) has to do is wait. Another few decades…”
I agree – I’d love to wait another 16 years, even more: If CO2 keeps rising, and temperatures keep doing their own thing, that will be the end of the CAGW hypothesis.
The problem is that in (Australia, at least) we are being carbon-taxed *right now*. Waiting another 16 years to repeal this tax is going to cost the country’s people a bundle.
What you all must understand is that there can be no CO2-AGW. Yes, zero, zilch.
This is because the lower atmosphere is a near black body emitter in the main GHG bands and the earth’s surface is near a black body. As any engineer or competent physicist will know, the two radiation fields cancel each other out at radiative equilibrium, so little if any UP CO2 band IR from the surface, no absorption.
The only reason the climate people claim there is CO2-AGW is by using the two-stream approximation which is physically wrong because only net radiative flux can do thermodynamic work. The result of this is they exaggerate IR absorbed [the 23 W/m^2 net IR is mainly water vapour side bands, not in self absorption] by 5.8 times at least, hence the imaginary positive feedback.
They justify this by mistakenly imagining pyrgeometers measure a net energy flow. This is balderdash: they measure temperature. If the other body is the same temperature, there is zero net flux in the direction of that body If the other body is at absolute zero, the temperature signal flux is the level.
Yet a pyrgeometer will measure the temperature field in both cases because the shield stops IR coming the other way – a pyrgeometer reading is always an artefact. They even work differently than claimed with much of the internal heat transfer by convection because the sensor plate can never equilibrate radiatively with a clear sky, because of the atmospheric window.
This has been the worst ever scientific project I have come across with 7 errors in the physics, a despeate story of scientific incompetence dressed up by the modelling as pretend valid. The IPCC claims are entirely baseless and the organisation needs closing down at once to be replaced by a science based body..
Never forget that the last millennium 1000 – 2000 AD was the coolest of the current benign Holocene epoch and that at ~12,000 years our happy Holocene, (responsible for the development of all human civilizations) is getting long in the tooth. Overall it has been cooler than the previous Eemian epoch and its end is now overdue when compared with earlier shorter more intense interglacials. See the Inconvenient Sceptic John Kehr figures 65 and 71.
So whether the current sunspot cycle and changing ocean circulation patterns lead to Little Ice Age conditions or perhaps to the impending real end of the Holocene during this millennium, the one thing that the world should not be concerned about is a little Global Warming, well within the level of natural variations that have been seen in the past 1000 / 3000 years.
A cooling, rather than a warming, world leads to both a reduction in agricultural productivity with huge deprivation for Mankind worldwide and probably to more extreme weather events, (possibly like hurricane Sandy). There is even good reason to expect worsening weather events in a cooling world because the temperature differential between the tropics and the poles will be enhanced.
But now the Western world is continually being pressured by propaganda and has widely enacted legislation about “Global Warming / Climate Change / Global Climate Disruption”. These definitions have meant that any adverse weather event can be ascribed to “Climate Change” and thus be blamed on the destructive actions of Mankind.
The Catastrophic Climate Change Alarmists back every horse whichever way it runs. Nonetheless all Alarmist policy recommendations are only intended to control excessive Global Overheating by the reduction of Man-made CO2 emissions.
It is not clear how reducing CO2 emissions would help save the world from a climate change towards a cooling world which now seems to be occurring nor how it could ameliorate severe weather events.
Never forget that the last millennium 1000 – 2000 AD was the coolest of the current benign Holocene epoch and that at ~12,000 years our happy Holocene, (responsible for the development of all human civilizations) is getting long in the tooth. Overall it has been cooler than the previous Eemian epoch and its end is now overdue when compared with earlier shorter more intense interglacials. See the Inconvenient Sceptic John Kehr figures 65 and 71.
So whether the current sunspot cycle and changing ocean circulation patterns lead to Little Ice Age conditions or perhaps to the impending real end of the Holocene during this millennium, the one thing that the world should not be concerned about is a little Global Warming, well within the level of natural variations that have been seen in the past 1000 / 3000 years.
A cooling, rather than a warming, world leads to both a reduction in agricultural productivity with huge deprivation for Mankind worldwide and probably to more extreme weather events, (possibly like hurricane Sandy). There is even good reason to expect worsening weather events in a cooling world because the temperature differential between the tropics and the poles will be enhanced.
But now the Western world is continually being pressured by propaganda and has widely enacted legislation about “Global Warming / Climate Change / Global Climate Disruption”. These definitions have meant that any adverse weather event can be ascribed to “Climate Change” and thus be blamed on the destructive actions of Mankind.
The Catastrophic Climate Change Alarmists back every horse whichever way it runs. Nonetheless all Alarmist policy recommendations are only intended to control excessive Global Overheating by the reduction of Man-made CO2 emissions.
It is not clear how reducing CO2 emissions would help save the world from a climate change towards a cooling world which now seems to be occurring nor how it could ameliorate severe weather events.
[Dupe ? Mod]
Tzo:
I write in a genuine attempt to help you.
Responses to your trolling have been ‘put downs’. This is understandable because your posts have been – shall we say – less than worthy. But I am now writing in hope of assisting you to evaluate your posts with a view to your providing worthy posts in future.
This thread is about the analysis by Whitehouse of statements in the leaked AR5 final draft. It would be appreciated if you were
(a) to present a statement of any error in his quotations of the draft
or
(b) to explain any fault in his analysis of those quotations.
But you have presented neither. Instead , you have made untrue assertions and linked to propaganda web sites.
For example, at December 18, 2012 at 2:56 pm you said
The NS propaganda site is NOT “facts and reality”: it is an alternative opinion from a biased and distorted source.
Indeed, at December 18, 2012 at 3:49 pm, manicbeancounter replied to your opinion by stating glaring flaws in the item which you linked.
Perhaps the item you linked does contain some information you think is pertinent to this thread. If so, then you should have stated that information preferably in your own words. And if you lack ability to formulate the criticism in your own words then you could you could have quoted from the link. In either case, you could have provided the link as the source.
But you did neither. You merely blew a metaphorical raspberry and linked to a propaganda source. So, any reasonable reader of your comment understands your comment to be a statement that you don’t like consideration of anything except the propaganda. In other words, your comment discredited itself. And you emphasised that discredit by adding
That addition says the reason your post contained no statement of value was because you had no such statement to make and, therefore, you resorted to unwarranted insult.
I could dissect all your posts on this thread in similar manner. And your reference to the risible SkS ‘escalator’ is an example of how badly you have defamed your own credibility. That graph was so discredited in a WUWT thread that SkS supporters resorted to pretending it had been produced as “a joke”.
In summation, you are failing to convince anybody with your self-defeating posts that consist solely of unfounded insults and links to propaganda sites.
If you want to be considered as other than a joke then you need to provide posts which state a clear argument supported by cogent evidence preferably backed-up with references.
Of course, your credibility is irrelevant to you if you are one of the trolls being paid to provide pro-AGW posts on the web from behind the shield of anonymity. In that case, brief and pointless posts of the kind you make are sufficient to obtain your income with minimum effort.
Richard
rgbatduke says this about the graph: “This figure puzzled, and continues to puzzle, me. I assume that the colored shaded areas are the two-sigma boundaries, although that is by no means clear — and how in the world would one compute sigma? ”
The AR% draft reports gives this as part of the annotation for the graph:
“Whiskers indicate the 90% uncertainty range of the Morice et al. (2012) dataset from measurement and sampling, bias and coverage (see Appendix for methods). The coloured shading shows the projected range of global annual mean near surface temperature change from 1990 to 2015 for models used in FAR (Scenario D and business-as-usual), SAR (IS92c/1.5 and IS92e/4.5), TAR (full range of TAR Figure 9.13(b) based on the GFDL_R15_a and DOE PCM parameter settings), and AR4 (A1B and A1T). ”
rgbatduke goes on to say “And then there is the grey shading. What the f*ck is up with that? It is unlabelled. ”
The annotation to the graph says “The 90% uncertainty estimate due to observational uncertainty and internal variability based on the HadCRUT4 temperature data for 1951-1980 is depicted by the grey shading. ”
Doesn’t look like a comprehensive analysis to me!!
Tzo says:
For anyone interested in the non-distorted graph, and non-cherry picked information:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/IPCC_FAR_Since_1880.png
Funny how that graph, starting in 1880, /begins/ with .25c of temperature change. If you deduct that from the end point you end up with .75 warming in 130 years, or .6 per century.
GCT:
Your post at December 19, 2012 at 4:18 am provides supporting evidence for the statements of rgbatduke which your post claims to be refuting. Your post says in total
The annotation to the graph says “The 90% uncertainty estimate due to observational uncertainty and internal variability based on the HadCRUT4 temperature data for 1951-1980 is depicted by the grey shading. ”
Doesn’t look like a comprehensive analysis to me!!
OK. So the coloured areas show the range of projections but
the the labeling of the measurement data says
1.
“Whiskers indicate the 90% uncertainty range of the Morice et al. (2012) dataset from measurement and sampling, bias and coverage (see Appendix for methods).”
and
2.
“The 90% uncertainty estimate due to observational uncertainty and internal variability based on the HadCRUT4 temperature data for 1951-1980 is depicted by the grey shading. ”
Which statement should be accepted as indicating the 90% uncertainty, (1) or (2)?
They cannot both be true but both could be wrong.
It seems to me that rgbatduke made a fair comment when he wrote, “What the f*ck is up with that?”
Richard
“The 90% uncertainty estimate due to observational uncertainty and internal variability based on the HadCRUT4 temperature data for 1951-1980 is depicted by the grey shading. ”
Translation:
“The grey shading covers the 90% uncertainty estimate that we have no idea what the hell is going on !”
“Which statement should be accepted as indicating the 90% uncertainty, (1) or (2)?
They cannot both be true but both could be wrong.”
They can both be true because there are two sets of uncertainties marked on the graph.
“It seems to me that rgbatduke made a fair comment when he wrote, “What the f*ck is up with that?”
He actually added that there were no labels, ant that was his problem.
The issue I raised was that rgbatduke made lengthy comments on the graph without having read the graph annotations, which explained what the graph showed.
Not as scholarly as the above submissions but I have commented on the SOD Fig 1.4 and joined up the data points so that the their bands have less visual significance. Also I have added a 3 term exponential moving average of the given data.
http://revfelicity.org/2012/12/17/global-cooling-from-un/
http://revfelicity.org/2012/12/17/global-cooling-from-un/how-trustworthy-ar5-draft/
I have commented on this Fig 1.4 at :
http://revfelicity.org/2012/12/17/global-cooling-from-un/
and modified the figure thus:
http://revfelicity.org/2012/12/17/global-cooling-from-un/how-trustworthy-ar5-draft/
The modded chart shows the data points which helps in removing the visual confusion of their attached bands.
A 3 term exponential moving average of the data is also shown imbedded on the chart and you can see it struggling to maintain a level trend.
GCT:
At December 19, 2012 at 10:03 am you say
Would you care to expand on that, please?
It seems to be what climastrologists call science.
Richard
Tamino has an interesting analysis of Whithouse’s key points. The key point being that the temperature anomaly of the most recent 16 years or so are above the linear trend of the previous era. Check this out to get an objective nonbiased statistical analysis.
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/fake-skeptic-draws-fake-picture-of-global-temperature/#more-6082
REPLY: I love it when somebody with a fake name “Tamino” calls other people and their conclusions “fake”. Heh. Next Tamino will call Nature itself fake for not cooperating at the correct pace. – Anthony
Here’s one of the graphs from Tamino’s analysis. If the warming actually declined in recent years, you would expect the recent data to be below the trend line. What do you see–above or below trend temperatures?
http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2012/12/giss79.jpg
BillD
Indeed.
David Whitehouse claims that “the past 16 years of no global temperature increase is unusual”.
Let’s examine that claim using the WoodforTrees temperature index (an average of two surface HADCRUT3, GISTEMP, and two satellite lower troposphere temperature series, UAH, RSS, starting in 1979):
The claim of “no/little warming for the last 16 years” boils down to this:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/from:1980.67/plot/wti/from:1980.67/trend/plot/wti/last:192/trend
Firstly, let us note that Whitehouse is wrong to claim that the last 16 years has been a time of no global temperature increase. The trend for the last 16 years is less than the trend since 1979, but it is positive.
But, Whitehouse also claims that the trend for the last 16 years is “unusual”, so let’s compare the trend for the last 16 years with the 16 years before that. This what you get:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/from:1979/plot/wti/from:1979/trend/plot/wti/from:1996.67/to:2012.67/trend/plot/wti/from:1980.67/to:1996.87/trend
So, the trend of the 16 years previous to the last 16 years was ALSO less than the trend since 1979.
Do you still think the last 16 year has been unusual, Mr Whitehouse?
Slioch says:
December 20, 2012 at 7:25 am
The trend for the last 16 years is less than the trend since 1979, but it is positive.
It depends on your data set.
When rounded to the nearest year, the following data sets have a slope of 0 for 16 years:
1. HadCrut3: since April 1997 or 15 years, 7 months (goes to October)
2. Sea surface temperatures: since March 1997 or 15 years, 8 months (goes to October)
3. RSS: since January 1997 or 15 years, 11 months (goes to November)
See the graph below to show it all.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1997.25/trend/plot/rss/from:1997.0/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1997.1/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1997.25/plot/rss/from:1997.0/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1997.1
However in view of the significance of the 16 years lately, I would like to elaborate on RSS. The slope for 15 years and 11 months from January 1997 on RSS is -4.1 x 10^-4. But the slope for 16 years and 0 months from December 1996 is +1.3 x 10^-4. So since the magnitude of the negative slope since January 1997 is 3 times than the magnitude of the positive slope since December 1996, I believe I can say that since a quarter of the way through December 1996, in other words from December 8, 1996 to December 7, 2012, the slope is 0. This is 16 years. Therefore RSS is 192/204 or 94% of the way to Santer’s 17 years.
BillD
You should know that Tamino is one of the more discredited AGW types. It will do you no good to link his products from here, that is, if you wish to convince. Now, I grew 3 feet between the ages of 18 and 36. I have a graph that proves this. Tamino made it for me. What do you think?
“BillD
You should know that Tamino is one of the more discredited AGW types. It will do you no good to link his products from here, that is, if you wish to convince. ”
In other words, “He’s BAD, therefore I don’t have to address his arguments.”
That, my friend, is a textbook example of the “argumentum ad hominem.”
BillD & Slioch:
I’m sorry, but the almost painfully obsessive way in which Tamino “dissects” his data in order to make some handwaving points (in the post that you link) reminds me of quants trying to fit trendlines to share prices.
Just not as convincing.
The gray areas have been added to visually give the impression that the IPCC range includes what is within the gray. Without the gray, the disconnect between scenarios and observation are more obvious, as the observations are in the white and have no connection to the ARs/
The gray band is not design. It’s a trick to hide the disconnect.
Anyone with a background in statistics can appreciate Tamino’s work. He even publishes in peer-reviewed journals–a real step up from blog posts. Go ahead and read his current post. He points at a very deceptive way that some “fake skeptics” have analyzed data, including Dr. Whitehouse. It’s not that hard to understand. He’s using simple graphs rather than higher math for this one.
Kevin McKinney says: December 20, 2012 at 12:56 pm
“BillD
You should know that Tamino is one of the more discredited AGW types. It will do you no good to link his products from here, that is, if you wish to convince. ”
In other words, “He’s BAD, therefore I don’t have to address his arguments.”
That, my friend, is a textbook example of the “argumentum ad hominem.”
===================
No, my friend, that is a textbook example of how to avoid brain pollution.
BillD,
In the end, the planet is the final Authority.
Planet Earth flatly disagrees with Tamino and the rest of the climate false alarmists. Therefore, all your arguments amount to is hand-waving; trying to explain away the fact that catastrophic AGW does not exist.
Our planet shows very clearly that there is no such thing as CAGW. Tamino says there is. Which one are you gonna believe?
David;
Distinguish claims and assumptions from conclusions, please:
Has supposedly, or purportedly, been etc. Or since the date after which the GCMs are set up to treat human CO2 emissions as “the prime climatic influence.”
Etc. We Nullifiers maintain that natural processes are all that is necessary to explain climate, and that mankind’s influence is negligible, and should be therefore neglected! The Null Hypothesis rulez!
Brian comment “The Null Hypothesis rulez!” shows the arbitrariness of the position. The null hypothesis is selected by the teste, and could be “there is no change in the warming trend”. Does the data show conclusively there is no warming trend?
A DESTROYER, A HERRING, A CASE AND A BOARD
At least $10 billion was spent on climatologists and their computer models.
Here is a less expensive, deeply scientific method which dramatically improves the long term accuracy of climate predictions.
Using only a destroyer, a herring, a case and a board.
****
Take a navy destroyer, anchor it and give its crew a well deserved leave.
To all, that is, except for one sailor, to whom you feed the salted herring.
You then quench his thirst with a case of strong beer. You get a drunken sailor.
You put the sailor in front of a board with a dart.
As he throws the dart while he is falling flat on his face, the dart will miss the board entirely.
And hit the wall UNDERNEATH the board.
****
Now you can see in the draft IPCC report that all the climatology computer models aimed at some bull’s eye on a high up dart board.
With the measured climate hitting the wall underneath.
Precisely as predicted by our highly accurate destroyer, herring, case and board method above.
Scientific references
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drunken_Sailor
“Taminho” writes about the post. (https://tamino.wordpress.com/2012/12/20/fake-skeptic-draws-fake-picture-of-global-temperature/)
Responses to “Taminho” to his interlocutors:
[Response: You would do better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.]
Response : Some people object to the fact that I moderate comments so severely.I’d say that your comment is a perfect illustration of why I do so, and why it’s a good idea. When nonsense like this is excluded, the quality of discussion can rise above idiocy.
It is a true gentleman.