Has Global Warming Stalled?

An error seems to have been made with all three tables. The new ones should have been put in with all December numbers up to date and with Hadcrut3 and 4 in 10th place.

Well, I’m going to start with the premise that maybe global warming hasn’t stalled. It has stalled, but let’s just say that it hasn’t.
So what? The point is that we are recovering from the Little Ice Age, and the warming has been the product of nature, not of a theorized CO2 GHE. All they have actually is a theoretical model to back their conception of CO2’s GHE. No evidence. And other seemingly equally valid theoretical models do not lead CO2 to raise climate temps; for example, one model maintains that the GHE of CO2 is effectively nil after 200ppm.
The IPCC actually maintained that they had evidence of a causal correlation between CO2 & temperature until around 2004, when they were forced to acknowledge that there was no evidence. None. Nevertheless, Al Gore went ahead in his 2005 movie deceptively suggesting there was evidence. Because by and large the people don’t actually know about Al Gore & the IPCC’s deception on CO2, I ask that if possible you share and help spread the word about this key M4GW produced 3 minute video that shows algor’s blatant deception on CO2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WK_WyvfcJyg&info=GGWarmingSwindle_CO2Lag

Dear Supporter
It seems that the temperature graphs are capable of misinterpretation by non-believers. This has led to unfortunate and counter-productive questions being raise by those who wish harm to The Cause. The tentacles of the Big Oil Funded Denier Conspiracy run deep.
We would like to assure all our supporters that we will leave no stone unturned in our quest to eliminate such disbelief.
As a first step, we have appointed a high-powered Adjustment Task Force. Their remit will be to understand in depth the root causes of such misinterpretation and make such data adjustments as are necessary to prevent their recurrence. They are taking guidance in this matter from the Modelling Secretariat to ensure that correct interpretations will then be made.
Secondly they will issue new guidelines on acceptable data for publication. ‘Observers’ please note…data falling outside of the expected ranges (as determined by the Modelling Secretariat) will be rejected.
Please delete this e-mail on receipt. Our colleagues in Norwich England had some difficulties by not doing so, so we urge you to double check.

OOPs!
Appendix
As well, the very last one at the end of the conclusion should have been:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1990/mean:12/offset:-0.16
Corrected.
The very last one is the above going from 1990.

Steven Mosher says:
February 10, 2013 at 2:16 pm
We are quite sure that the underlying process is not linear.
I agree with you. It should be a sine wave. But how would NOAA even make a statement based on a sine wave? As well, WFT works best with straight lines. So while this is not perfect, we have to use the tools we have.

Steven Mosher says:
February 10, 2013 at 2:16 pm
next, you need to look at autocorrelation before you make confidence intervals.
True, but he’s just established that there is no trend over a given section. How could there be autocorrelation?

Jimbo says: @ February 10, 2013 at 3:39 pm
…..After which the non-deniers have a choice. Deny or accept observations? No?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Nah, they just change the goal posts. The monster in the closet has already morphed from “An Ice Age is Coming” to “Global Warming” to “Climate Change” to “Weather Weirding”
The only thing that remains the same is the need for a crisis.
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary…. Civilization, at bottom, is nothing but a colossal swindle.” ~ H.L. Mencken
Mencken really hit the nail on the head with this one:
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”

I’ve got a bit of a problem with the representation of CO2 (compared to linear trends) in the first graph. If you’d plotted the expected temperature response to the CO2 increase that might be more acceptable. Between 1998 and 2012 the annual average CO2 concentration has risen from ~367 ppm to ~394 ppm which according to the Myhre et al formula should produce a forcing of about 0.4 watts/m2 . If you’re a CAGW advocate this equates to a warming of 0.25-0.3 deg C . For a lukewarmer it’s more like 0.1 deg C. I doubt there is a statistically significant difference between the ‘lukewarmer’ projections and (any of) the actual data. This is possibly not the case for the CAGW projections but this ignores other factors such as reduced solar activity over the past decade (~0.1 deg C ??).
In a nutshell: the lukewarmer projections look well on track while the lower end CAGW projections are still possible.

Further to Climate Control Central Command (‘Data’ and ‘Observations’ Secretariat) says:
February 10, 2013 at 2:39 pm.
Also for our comrades in East Anglia – if questioned by children as to why more white fluffy stuff is coming out of the sky they should be reminded that this is just another very rare and exciting event and in no way should be compared with the last event in January which cancelled trains to Norwich and closed over 2000 schools – which was extremely rare and exciting.
(Anglia News of about 2 hours ago:
More snow is falling in many parts of the Anglia region and it’s settling in some places. Up to 10 cm (4 inches) could accumulate in places. All the region’s councils have gritters out as temperatures are expected to fall close to freezing)

For us (or maybe just me) statistics dummies, could you briefly explain what “2 sigma” means, and how it relates to the term “statistically significant”. I went to the SkS website and played with their trend calculator, and read some of the definitions. For example if a linear trend is 0.003 +/- 0.003, then the slope of the trend is between 0.000 and 0.006. But what does the 2 sigma mean, and how do you determine statistical significance? And what does that +/- range mean?
Thanks
[Reply: Sigma is shorthand for ‘standard deviation’ (that probably doesn’t explain much if you are not familiar with statistics already). The more standard deviations you have, the further you are from average. The -/+ means how much the value is likely to vary. So saying I have an 8 ounce cup of tea +/- 1 means I might have anywhere form a 7 ounce to a 9 ounce cup of tea. Statistical significance takes more than a note to explain, but mostly says how much you can trust a conclusion. If I have a sample of 6 cups of tea and they are average 8 ounces, it might be that the next one is 9 or 10. If I have a sample of 1200 cups, and they are 8 ounces +/- 0.1 ounce, it is highly likely (very statistically significant) that my next cup will be betwwn 7.9 and 8.1 ounces. I can’t say that about my first sample as it is too small to be ‘statistically significant’. Back on that trend and +/-: When a trend has a value the same as the error range, it means you don’t know much about the trend. Having $2 +/- $2 says I might have money, or not, in equal probability… -ModE]

Tom Jones says:
February 10, 2013 at 6:39 pm
The business of taking the average of an ensemble of simulations is not even vaguely convincing.
========
It is a nonsense. The earth has a near infinite number of possible futures. This is clearly shown by quantum mechanics. Some of those futures are more probable than others, but it is beyond our ability to calculate the probabilities.
Taking the average of 10 wrong answers does not improve the quality of the answer. If you ask 10 idiots the square root of a 100, will the average be closer to the correct answer than any one of the answers? No, it is 10 times more likely that one of the idiots will be closer to the true answer than is the average.
The reason for this is simple. The idiots have 10 chances to get closer to the correct answer. The average only has 1. Thus you would expect that if you repeated the exercise 11 times, only once would the average be closer. The other 10 times one of the idiots would beat the average

SkepticGoneWild says:
February 10, 2013 at 6:42 pm
[Reply: Sigma is shorthand for ‘standard deviation’
=========
To complicate things further, most calculations of ‘standard deviation’ rely on the assumption that the underlying data is a “normal distribution”. Most of our statistical theory relies on this assumption.
However, it has been found that most time-series data (such as stock markets and climate) does not follow a normal distribution. This means that our confidence levels are often incorrect about how “likely” something is to happen. This leads people to bet the farm on a “sure thing” in the stock market, and is very similar to the current situation where politicians, scientists and countries are betting their economic future on climate.
We assume that the future is fairly certain because we expect the future to behave like the past. However, this is an entirely naive belief because we already know the past while we do not know the future. This leads us to significantly underestimate the size of the unknown when we try and consider all the things that might happen going forward.
Thus, the plans of mice and men aft go awry.

Interesting that even with all the obvious fudging of numbers still going on, the alarmies can’t do any better than to say the temperature curve is “flat.” Any statement by them that it is flat infallibly means it is trending downward, and that cooling, not merely a pause in warming, has been occurring for the last 15 years.
A correction to one poster’s comment: There have never been any years anywhere near as warm as the 1934-1938 period since that time, NOAA and IPCC lies to the contrary notwithstanding – not even 1953, a relatively hot one, and certainly not 1997-1998. There has in fact been an overall cooling trend, as demonstrated by the negative slope of the regression line for the past 80 years. Cyclical variations in the meantime have not affected the overall downward trend over the longer term. And interestingly again, this long-term cooling has taken place while CO2 in the atmosphere increased by nearly 40 percent. Therefore, no CO2-caused, hence no man-caused, global warming. Q.E.D.
Second proof: Inter alia, animal respiration alone pours at least 30, maybe as much as 75 times as much CO2 into the air as human activity. And then, there is ordinarily 30 to 140 times as much water vapor – a substantially more effective heat-trapping substance than there is CO2, in the atmosphere at any given time. And these are only a couple of many examples that can be cited on both sides of the CO2 equation. Man is an infinitesimal of an infinitesimal – man’s role in climate change is therefore, mathematically speaking, one over infinity squared. Q.E.D. again.
The hubris and effrontery of people who think they can control climate – especially by controlling only one tiny fraction of one tiny factor in climate change – is truly breathtaking. Back off, God/Mother Nature (take your pick of which), we’re in charge now, they’re saying.

ferd berple says:
February 10, 2013 at 7:59 pm
“Thus, the plans of mice and men aft go awry.”
I think I prefer the original
“The best laid schemes of mice and men gang aft agley
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promised joy.”
It encapsulates the entire CAGW proposition from “scheme” with its connotation of dishonesty, to the obfuscation of “gang aft agley” which needs an expert to interpret, to the promise of an idealised future for a little inconvenience now.
Perhaps Mr. Burns was the true visionary.

Wow, this may be the final nail. The U.N. conspiracy has stalled temperature rise to really through off those who don’t see the conspiracy.

Dear Supporter
The General Secretary of the CCCC has asked me to write directly to you to inform you of an important change in the way in which our operations will henceforth be conducted.
Following on from the poor publicity and consequent Denier opportunities presented by the mishandling of the recent temperature and and trends by our ‘colleagues’ in the D&O Secretariat, they have all accepted compulsory early retirement.
We have taken this opportunity to remove D&O from our strategic portfolio of work and so the Modelling Secretariat will now have complete control of all ‘data’ released for any form of publication. To boost our capabilities in this area we hope soon to acquire the services (on secondment) of a valued team of experienced climatalarmists currently located in Norwich UK.
Please welcome them to our happy bunch of crusaders.
I urge you all to redouble your efforts to ensure that only Modelling secretariat approved data is ever released. There is only one True Message and we must ensure that there are no further misunderstandings because of a lack of zeal and enthusiasm for the cause..
Though regrettable, we also need to introduce severe disciplinary sanctions for any deviations from the path. To emphasise this point the previous leader of D&O will be making a public confession of his errors live on webcam tomorrow at noon. The memorial service will begin at 14:00.
The General Secretary also wishes to convey his best wishes to you all. His well-earned retirement begins forthwith – at an undisclosed location. Rest assured GS, that we will be able to find you so that your past ‘achievements’ can be put in their proper context and the judgement of history applied!
Of course, our honoured Emeritus Professor – who has recently added a further honour to his distinguished record – will continue to use Twitter to remind you of the scientific facts you need to use in your day-to-day work
Best Wishes to You All
LA
[/sarcasm ? Mod]

Did anyone calculate the correlation between CO2 levels and temperature? Would be interestin to see?

It’s enough to make a grown man cry. Here we have a set of facts that no one is disputing, and the catastrophists are spinning it as a success
the lukewarmers are claiming it proves them right
and the sceptics(inluding me) are agog that anyone can doubt they were right all along

The final chart with the question “the MET office believes that the 1998 mark will be beaten by 2017. Do you agree?” looks rather different if you put a simple linear trend line through the data presented.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1990/mean:12/offset:-0.16/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1990/mean:12/offset:-0.16/trend

Here’s another view of this, upping the filter to remove 2 years an shorter.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1970/mean:24/mean:18/mean:14/derivative/plot/sine:10/scale:0,00001/from:1990/to:2015
Here we see the 80s and 90s each had two warming periods and one cooling each. Since 1997 it is swinging about evenly each side of zero.
I’d called that ‘stalled’ if we want to draw a simplistic conclusion.

http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1970/mean:24/mean:18/mean:14/derivative/plot/sine:10/scale:0,00001/from:1990/to:2015/plot/gistemp/mean:24/mean:18/mean:14/derivative/from:1970/plot/rss/from/mean:24/mean:18/mean:14/derivative/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1970/mean:24/mean:18/mean:14/derivative
Including more data sets. Interestingly it is only the RSS satellite data that shows a noticeably larger positive swing than negative swing in the more recent cycle.

So the extra heat must have gone into the oceans, where it fed Irene, Sandy and Nemo and is melting sea- and shelf ice everywhere.

I have but one question, if the rather dubious corrections to the older temperatures { people in the old days did not read the thermometers correctly} the trend may be down rather than zero.
This is more of a worry than warming, the last long cold spell some time ago was not conducive to comfort nor the growing of food.
It bothers me that I have young grand children and fools are squandering our future capacity to adapt quickly to a fate worse than a degree or two of warming.

Tom Curtis says:
February 10, 2013 at 4:24 pm
“As usual, the purported skeptics here fail to look at the interesting question, what is the longest period for each data set such that all trends shorter than that period are differ[ent] from a trend of 0.21 C per decade (the IPCC predicted value) by a statistically significant amount.”
A nonsensical question really, since if you pick any specific time period within any temperature data set and then look at trends, within that period, of a shorter length of time – all these shorter length trends will automatically have a higher level of uncertainty attached to them (the shorter the time period the greater the uncertainty in the data) and therefore the chances of them being statistically distinguishable, at the 95% level, from a trend of 0.21 C per decade will of course be lower and lower the shorter the trends get.
However, there’s plenty of long periods of time where the trend is different from a trend of 0.21 C per decade by a statistically significant amount, for instance, using this tool:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/trend.php
And looking at the HADCRUT 4 data from 1863 – 2013, you get a trend of 0.051 +/- 0.007 C/decade. So that’s a 150 year period where the trend only has a 5% chance of being higher than 0.058 C/decade, nowhere near as high as 0.21 C per decade.
It’s the same story with every other trend data set you can look at with the trend calculator – apart from the two satellite data sets since of course the data doesn’t go back as far. Can’t get a 150 year period with that. Interestingly though, with those satellite datasets, the trend since satellite records began, to present, is still statistically distinguishable from a trend of 0.21 C per decade, with 95% confidence in one case. The two results are:
RSS: 0.133 +/- 0.073 C/decade (so a maximum trend – at the 95% confidence level – of 0.2060 C per decade…still not as high as the IPCC predicted value of 0.21 C per decade unless you’re going to round up to 2 decimal places…and it could also be as low as 0.06 C/decade with the same level of confidence.
UAH: 0.138 +/- 0.074 C/decade (so a maximum trend – at the 95% confidence level – of 0.2120 C…so JUST within the bounds of their prediction. Could also be as low as 0.064 C/decade.

cRR Kampen says:
February 11, 2013 at 2:35 am
So the extra heat must have gone into the oceans, where it fed Irene, Sandy and Nemo and is melting sea- and shelf ice everywhere.
Antidotes for your ignorance are just a click away: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/08/bob-tisdale-shows-how-forecast-the-facts-brad-johnson-is-fecklessly-factless-about-ocean-warming/

And yet a February 7 post on RealClimate, “2012 Updates on Model-Observation Results” concludes that all is well with the models. Would appreciate comments on their main tricks.

Climate Control Central Command (Modelling Secretariat) says: …….
Re: [/sarcasm ? Mod]
Mod, I think it was more parody / satire personally.

Nigel Harris says:
February 11, 2013 at 5:03 am
None of the analysis presented here actually answers the question asked at the top of the page “Has global warming stalled?”.
Thank you for your excellent points! I know there is a difference of opinion as to exactly what the 95% refers to in NOAA’s statement. I am not going to get into semantics here. For me, the most important facts are that RSS, Hadsst2 and Hadcrut3 show a slope of 0 for over 15 years. I realize there are error bars, but they have a 50% chance of going up or down from the point of 0 slope. So at the minimum, these three sets would be proof that global warming has stalled for a significant period of time. As for the other three sets, there could be room for debate here.
P.S. Thank you for a good idea!
Max™ says:
February 11, 2013 at 2:18 am

sceptical says:
February 10, 2013 at 9:04 pm
Wow, this may be the final nail. The U.N. conspiracy has stalled temperature rise to really through off those who don’t see the conspiracy.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
No it is not.
As long as the Mass Media papers over the cracks and no reporter will touch it, the Propaganda Machine will keep deflecting attention to ‘Weather Wierding’
The banks, financiers, and large corporations (advertisers) have much to much riding on this scam. (See my comment here on the MSM – banker connections )
For those like _Jim who think people are in control of corporation stock: Start with A Brief History Of The Mutual Fund “…Shady dealings at major fund companies demonstrated that mutual funds aren’t always benign investments managed by folks who have their shareholders’ best interests in mind….” Mutual funds separate the ‘owner’ of the stock from the ‘voter of the stock’ and therefore shift control of the company into the hands of the mutual funds.

World’s Stocks Controlled by Select Few
A recent analysis of the 2007 financial markets of 48 countries has revealed that the world’s finances are in the hands of just a few mutual funds, banks, and corporations. This is the first clear picture of the global concentration of financial power……
A pair of physicists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich did a physics-based analysis of the world economy … revealing what they called the “backbone” of each country’s financial market. These backbones represented the owners of 80 percent of a country’s market capital, yet consisted of remarkably few shareholders….
…. Glattfelder said. “If you then look at who is at the end of these links, you find that it’s the same guys…

Then there are our ‘benign’ bankers: Top Senate Democrat: bankers “own” the U.S. Congress and the last fleecing of the sheep: How AIG Bailout Drivings More Foreclosures and this article “How Wall Street Insiders Are Using the Bailout to Stage a Revolution” and this interview Heist of the century
Finally this article:

Ignoring Elites, Historians Are Missing a Major Factor in Politics and History
Steve Fraser, Gary Gerstel (2005)
… Over the last quarter-century, historians have by and large ceased writing about the role of ruling elites in the country’s evolution. Or if they have taken up the subject, they have done so to argue against its salience for grasping the essentials of American political history. Yet there is something peculiar about this recent intellectual aversion, even if we accept as true the beliefs that democracy, social mobility, and economic dynamism have long inhibited the congealing of a ruling stratum. This aversion has coincided, after all, with one of the largest and fastest-growing disparities in the division of income and wealth in American history….Neglecting the powerful had not been characteristic of historical work before World War II.

On Robberies committed with paper:
“Of all the contrivances for cheating the laboring classes of mankind, none has been more effectual than that which deludes them with paper money. This is one of the most effectual of inventions to fertilize the rich man’s field by the sweat of the poor man’s brow. Ordinary tyranny, oppression, excessive taxation: These bear lightly the happiness of the mass of the community, compared with fraudulent currencies and robberies committed with depreciated paper.” ~ Daniel Webster 1832

The newest ‘Paper’
World Bank Carbon Finance Report for 2007
The carbon economy is the fastest growing industry globally with US$84 billion of carbon trading conducted in 2007, doubling to $116 billion in 2008, and expected to reach over $200 billion by 2012 and over $2,000 billion by 2020.

The ‘Carbon Economy’ is just the newest twist on the old game of “cheating the laboring classes of mankind” because every single one of those dollars come from the pockets of the laboring classes and finds its way into the pockets of the financiers with nothing given in return except the false promise that we are ‘Controlling the Climate’
Waking Activists up to these facts is where the true fight is. People may not understand Physics and Chemistry and Statistics but they do understand scams and frauds. In our favor the trust in bankers/financiers is at an all time low. It does not matter if you are far right or far left, or in the middle, we should all be on the same side when preventing a massive rip-off and the ‘collateral damage’ of the deaths of thousands if not millions.
The people behind the fraud know this is where the fight is. They have been very proactive against us in several different ways. These include:
1. Funding activists through foundations. They even muddy the funding trail by setting up go-betweens such as the Tides Foundation
2. Controlling the activists. This activity started long ago with the ‘Innocents’ Clubs’ and has moved to the modern NGOs

“Very few of even the larger international NGOs are operationally democratic, in the sense that members elect officers or direct policy on particular issues,” notes Peter Spiro. “Arguably it is more often money than membership that determines influence, and money more often represents the support of centralized elites, such as major foundations, than of the grass roots.” The CGG [Commission on Global Governance] has benefited substantially from the largesse of the MacArthur, Carnegie, and Ford Foundations…. http://www.afn.org/~govern/strong.html

3. Repeating ad nauseum their claim that ‘deniers’ are funded by ‘Big Oil’ .
4. Declaring that ‘deniers’ are mentally deficient. To aid this latest tactic Dr. Lewandowsky is trying to publish two peer-reviewed papers designed to make skeptics look like flat-earth mouth breathers unfit for polite society.

Philip Shehan says:
More cherry picking.
Let’s just concentrate on one of the data sets shown – the claim that Hadcrut4 temperature data is flat since November 2000.
Look also at the data from 1999. Or compare the entire Muana Loa data set from 1958 with temperature.
And remember, “statistical significance” here is at the 95% level. That is, even a 94% probability that the data is not a chance result fails at this level.
http://tinyurl.com/atsx4os
==========
Yes, I would agree with your introductory phrase , what you are doing is “more cherry picking”. The usual IPCC deception. Chose a period where both are going in the same direction and pretend this shows causation.
Why did you chose 1968? Let’s see. What does 1928 look like?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1928/mean:12/plot/esrl-co2/from:1928/normalise/scale:0.75/offset:0.2/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1999/to:2013/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2000.9/to:2013/trend
Now Mauna Loa record does not go that far back but no one pretends CO2 was dropping from 1930-1960. So what YOU were doing is cherry picking.
What the author was doing was testing the data against a specific claim that was intended to be falsifiable statement … which turned out to be falsified. There is no “cherry-picking” involved in testing where a hypothesis fits the claims of its authors.
That is simple, honest application of scientific method.
What part of “simple” and “honest” is causing you problems Professor Cherry-picker?

Phil says: Since nature has not eschewed ENSO, nature has not in fact ‘done it’, in fact when the data is corrected for the presence of ENSO no such 15 year period is observed. You need to come to terms with that.
===
Oh, you gotta love it.
When the data is “corrected” ….. Hey bud, the DATA is correct, that’s why it’s called the data (singular datum: point of reference) . That’s where science starts. Now how about correcting the frigging models?
No one was “correcting” for the lack of ENSO when they were winding up the world at the end of the century. Then the “uncorrected” warming was a “wake up call” etc. etc. Now it we have to take it into account.
How about we “correct” for the 60y cycle and the 10y and the 9y and then come back and look at what climate is really doing?
When all the cycle peaked at once it was all fine and dandy to claim the world was about to turn into Venus. Now the wind is blowing in the other direction , it suddenly has to be corrected…. until next time it starts going up again and we can forget the “corrections”.
The sad thing is you guys are probably serious and honestly believe this garbage.

richardscourtney says:
February 10, 2013 at 5:48 pm

The NOAA falsification criterion is on page S23 of its 2008 report titled ‘The State Of The Climate’ and can be read at
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/climate-assessment-2008-lo-rez.pdf

DirkH says:
February 11, 2013 at 5:48 am

See Richard Courtney’s comment above. It is NOAA’s falsification criterion.

The term “falsification criterion” is highly misleading. There is no “falsification criterion” published by NOAA or anyone else. Here again is the relevant quote:

“Near-zero and even negative trends are common for intervals of a decade or less, due to the model’s internal climate variability. The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.

This defines a discrepency, not falsification. There’s no reason to believe NOAA indends these words to be synonlyms.
To start with, when an event takes place that was only 5% probable, the only thing we can say for sure is that we are surprised. (Or, in this case if you’re Phil Jones, you can say that you’re worried.) Sometimes we have tests that will accept or reject a hypothesis (really, rejecting or accepting a null hypothesis) at the 95% level–if we define it that way, and we’re willing to live with the mistakes. We do this In the context of, say, drug testing, We can’t do statistical tests without error, and getting down to a 1% error is very expensive. And, for the final tests, the statistics is all we have. So, some benificial drugs are rejected, and some useless ones accepted, because that simply cannot be helped.
But in science, when the question is, “what’s going on? How does nature work in this system?” we look at the data, perhaps noting that some of it is surprising, and then view it in context with the rest of the data. Some data may show a problem for the hypothesis (or the model) but there’s no universal, automatic rejection criterion.
Even if you decide that the hypothesis (or computer model) is not working, it may be possible to salvage it. It may be that a modified version will work much better, and the discrepencies between data and prediction may even point the way to refining the hypotheses (or model). This is quite common in science. A great many scientists could give advice on how to do this, and, importantly, on when to give up. But, there aren’t any hard-and-fast rules on it, certainly none so simplistic as a 95% criterion for one test.
So: There is no specific “falsificaton citerion” for models based on flat temperatures, only an informal definition of “discrepency.” A discrepency does not falsify the models; it is interesting enough to merit a closer look.
BUT: there is an even more serious problem with this 95% discrepency definition: not all of the processes contributing to temperature are explicitly predicted in the models. Specifically, you cannot predict ENSO, Solar radiation, or even volcanoes many years into the future. So, instead, the models include future El Nino and La Nina events at random (although with frequency and strength consistent with what we know), and do not consider solar and volcanic forcings at all for the future. (Anybody who understands these things can at least guess how solar brightening or dimming, or volcanic eruptions, would affect the model projections.) These all come into play for “hindcasting,” wherein they run the models using the observed ENSO, solar, and volcanic events. 1998 saw a record-breaking El Nino, followed by La Nina events soon afterards and also recently. The sun has been quiet lately, too, which should be of great interest to anyone interested in climate issues.
People keep ignoring this. Really, this is not that difficult. Suppose a soccer (football) commentator, doing TV broadcasts of the games, acquired an uncanny knack for predicting the winners and scores of individual games. But, one week, some of the best players on the stronger team are injured an auto accident and cannot play. They lose. The following week, there’s a surprise announcement; a weaker team acquires a star player and wins handily. The commentator is wrong on both counts. Does everyone say, “he’s lost his touch, he’s no good at predicting!” Or do they say, “He could not have foreseen that?” Reasonable people would say the latter.
So, in looking at recent temperatures, how to deal with ENSO, modeled only statistically in forecasts, and with solar (and volcanic) influences? Rahmstorf and Foster did so with a multivarite regression analysis: http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/7/4/044035/article
This is from 2011, but since then, the issues have been more of the same.
Bob Tisdale has taken issue with the ENSO part, at least:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/11/28/mythbusting-rahmstorf-and-foster/
and
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/14/tisdale-on-foster-and-rahmstorf-take-2/
Although I think Rahmstorf and Foster have shown that it’s plausible that there is no discrepency for temperatures over the last two decades and longer–or to put it another way, there is not necesarily any discrepency–I would like to see some hindcasts run over that time period, showing how ENSO, solar, and volcanoes fit with known physical parameters, not just fitting them to one another.
Science is complicated. We’re used to getting simple explanations that summarize a lot of this complexity into a more digestible form. But some explanations, like “flat temperatures–models falsified” are much too simple. Even a little digging is enough to falsify a misleading explanation such as that one.

Werner,
Apologies for the second post, but I wanted also to respond specifically to your comment (February 11, 2013 at 9:28 am) about my suggestion:

Your final chart looks rather different if you put a simple linear trend line through the data presented.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1990/mean:12/offset:-0.16/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1990/mean:12/offset:-0.16/trend

You said:

Take a closer look at this. 2012 ended at 0.274. The slope of the line is 0.015. So if we multiply this by 5 to get us to 2017, we get 0.075, and adding to 0.274 gives 0.35 which is less than 0.40. So it would have to rise at a faster slope than is shown to reach the 1998 mark.

Werner, if you think that the slope of 0.015 has any validity as a predictor of what might happen next, then you have to embrace the entire linear regression model. The linear regression model is telling us both that the slope is 0.015 and that the best estimate of the real value (after eliminating noise) at the end of 2012 is 0.381. You can’t pick out the slope figure and apply it using the Dec 2012 figure of 0.274 as the starting point, because the model tells us we’re already at 0.381 at Dec 2012.
The latest observation, 0.274, is just a single observation. It happens to be 0.108 (roughly 2 standard deviations according to Skeptical Science’s calculator) below the best estimate of the central trend value at Dec 2012. If the linear model is right, that 0.108 deviation is noise. By 2017, we’re as likely to end up 0.108 above the trend as 0.108 below it. So a figure of 0.35 is possible, but so is a figure of 0.57! And the most likely outcome (if the linear model is right) is going to be bang on the current trend line, or round about 0.45, which is comfortably above the 1998 figure.

Nigel Harris says:
February 11, 2013 at 1:00 pm
Hello Nigel,
The Hadcrut people did something really strange with regards to their prediction of 0.43. They used a different base line where the 1998 value became 0.40 instead of 0.56. That is why I had to offset it by -0.16. Here is what they really should have used:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1997/mean:12
However this makes no difference to my final conclusion.
Note that the final point on the above graph is close to the 2012 average of 0.434. I do not think the slope will go up at 0.015/year. I am just saying that even if it did, you would not reach the 1998 height. That would rival the fastest trends ever recorded. See:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm

“Has Global Warming Stalled?”
Of course it has. Only the ignorant and the dishonest would claim otherwise.

Philip Shehan says:
February 11, 2013 at 3:27 pm
In the short term the noise swamps the signal, and the shorter the time frame the greater the uncertainty.  …..Only multidecadal trends are meaningful.
But on the other hand, if the warming rate is high enough, then 16 years is sufficient. Check out the following for Hadcrut4:
Start of 1995 to end 2009: 0.133 +/- 0.144. Warming for 15 years is NOT significant.
Start of 1995 to end 2010: 0.137 +/- 0.129. Warming for 16 years IS significant.
Start of 1995 to end 2011: 0.109 +/- 0.119. Warming for 17 years is NOT significant.
Start of 1995 to October 2012: 0.098 +/- 0.111. Warming for 18 years is NOT significant.

Phil.,
You sound positively jealous that Werner Brozek has posted such a credible argument.
There’s nothing stopping you from posting your own article, you know. Then you would see all the similar nitpicking comments about whether a test has one tail or two, etc.
Face facts, Werner has made a good case. Global warming has stalled.

Werner, You are not only cherry picking years, you are picking years and months within a very short time frame and find one set that is only just significant. You are rather making my point for me.

Philip Shehan says:
February 11, 2013 at 7:58 pm
Werner, You are not only cherry picking years, you are picking years and months within a very short time frame and find one set that is only just significant.
At this point in time, three of the data sets that I discussed show no warming for over 15 years, namely RSS, Hadcrut3 and Hadsst2. And three do not show this, namely GISS, UAH and Hadcrut4. It will be interesting to see what this year brings.

justthefactswuwt says:
February 11, 2013 at 9:17 pm…
It’s not really whether or not a particular period shows no warming. Its whether or not a particular data set says anything meaningfull with regards to warming, cooling or stasis.
I included the period 1995 to the present because there is a concurrent discussion of this on Andrew Bolt’s website. Professor Sinclair Davidson correctly identifies that period as showing no statistically significant warming at the 95% confidence level. (Actually he was looking at hadcrut 3 data rather than hadcrut 4 as I have done):
Trend: 0.098 ±0.111 °C/decade (2σ)
What this means is that there is a 95% probability that the actual trend is between 0.209 and -0.013 °C/decade. In other words, you can’t be sure (at least at the 95% level) whether the temperature is actually warming, cooling or static over this period, not just whether or not it is warming.
Werner points out that if you look at a shorter period from 1995 to the end of 2010 rather than the the beginning of 2013 you can identify a trend (to 95% confidence) for that period and it is warming, but perhaps by as little as 0.008 °C/decade.
So for any period you choose, if you want to call the period warming, cooling or static, you need to look at the entire 95% probability range and see of the trend is positive or negative. The range will generally be narrower the longer the period you look at. (But not certainly – again because the signal to noise is lower for short periods, and the assumption here is that the trend is linear which may not hold over many decades.)

justthefactswuwt:
How about if I look for another unique attribute of each data set, such as the maximum regression slope for periods ending with the latest value (excluding periods of less than 10 years which give extreme but clearly non-significant values) and say that UAH has been rising by 2.05 C/decade since October 1991
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1991.75/plot/uah/from:1991.75/trend
and Hadcrut4 has been rising by 1.74 C/decade since December 1973
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1973.9/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1973.9/trend
(and so on for other data sets). Is that not be cherry picking?

“David Cage says:
February 11, 2013 at 11:42 pm
…Anyone who believes we are should have to sign up to the idea of full compensation by climate scientists if they are wrong since they refuse to have their work external scrutinised by external examiners.”
The idea that scientists, climate or otherwise, refuse to have their work scrutinised by “external examiners” or anyone else is complete nonsense.
The entire scientific project rests on the publicaton, discussion and challenging of results and theories which is precisely what is going on here.
Who are these “external examiners” to be? Presumably they would have to be people who are most qualified to understand the science. Scientists in fact. And who is going to appoint them? Governments? “Independent” think tanks? Industry? Conservation groups?
And as for compensation, are skeptics to be made to pay for losses incured if the majority of climate scientists are right.
In Italy we have had the ludicrous situation where scientists have been convicted of a criminal offense because they were not “alarmist” enough about the possibility of an earthquake occuring.

Nigel Harris says:
February 12, 2013 at 1:28 am
justthefactswuwt:
“How about if I look for another unique attribute of each data set, such as the maximum regression slope for periods ending with the latest value (excluding periods of less than 10 years which give extreme but clearly non-significant values) and say that UAH has been rising by 2.05 C/decade since October 1991
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1991.75/plot/uah/from:1991.75/trend
and Hadcrut4 has been rising by 1.74 C/decade since December 1973
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1973.9/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1973.9/trend
(and so on for other data sets). Is that not be cherry picking?”
Not cherry picking, just wrong by a factor of 10. The trends you are referring to are 0.204 +/- 0.150 C/decade, for UAH, and 0.175 +/- 0.035 C/decade. These figures are from the skeptical science trend calculator.
2.05 C/decade would give a rise of 20.5 degrees C over 100 years.
And the answer to your question is no, it’s not cherry picking. These two trends exist. What of them? What’s your point?

Nigel Harris says:
February 12, 2013 at 1:28 am
justthefactswuwt:
P.S: As I’ve said already, the trend in the HADCRUT 4 data from 1863 – present, is 0.051 +/- 0.007 C/decade. So there is only a 5% chance that the trend over this entire time period is greater than 0.058 C/decade. Nevertheless, if you look at shorter time periods within that 150 year period, you will find higher trends, like the ones you have. So clearly temperatures haven’t and don’t just go up in a straight line. You can see that just from looking at a graph of the data over the 150 years.
If there are short term trends higher than this 0.051 C/decade, with 95% confidence (and there are, for instance 1975 – 1991 in the HADCRUT 4 data) then there MUST be lower short-term trends to balance it all out. It’s just that you can’t discern these lower or zero or slightly negative short trends from the noise because the computed trends are inevitably going to be lower than their 95% confidence intervals. I mean how long a period with a “trend” of very near to zero would you need to have to be 95% sure it was a trend, in this noisy data!? 50 years? 100 years? How likely is that to happen!? This doesn’t mean that these near zero trends can’t exist [and in fact, they MUST do as I have demonstrated], and that it’s just “cherry picking” to point out trends that are statistically-indistinguishable from zero.

Philip Shehan says:
February 12, 2013 at 5:50 am
So unless Werner has done such of an analysis on his flat data sets they are not telling us much.
I have done no analysis. I just let NOAA tell me how big the goal post was, namely 15 years of 0 slope and I have just confirmed that Earth scored a goal on three of the data sets. For all I know, NOAA could be wrong. You would need to take that up with them.

UPDATES
We do not have any update from WFT for GISS and Hadcrut3 for December, however this site has now been updated to the end of December: http://www.skepticalscience.com/trend.php
In the report, I said:
1. For GISS, the slope is flat since May 2001 or 11 years, 7 months. (goes to November)
2. For Hadcrut3, the slope is flat since May 1997 or 15 years, 7 months. (goes to November)
With the update, that is now changed to:
1. For GISS, the slope is flat since March 2001 or 11 years, 10 months. (goes to December)
2. For Hadcrut3, the slope is flat since March 1997 or 15 years, 10 months. (goes to December) (The slope is 0.000/decade here)
In addition, all parts of section 2 are changed slightly, however I do not think it is worth commenting on a change in the third decimal place or a change of a single month. However GISS changed from October 1995 to June 1995 for the period where there has not been significant warming according to their criteria.

Philip Shehan says:
February 12, 2013 at 2:03 pm
Excuse me for substituting Hadcrut 4 data for RSS but the latter does not go back to 1958
Trend: 0.038 ±0.137 °C/decade (2σ)
Is there any reason you did not take Hadcrut3? For the same period, it gives
Trend: -0.010 ±0.146 °C/decade (2σ)
However even going with 0.38/century, that is way less than 2/century, so it is obviously nothing to worry about, right?

Werner:
No reason at all not to use Hadcrut3. Its just I had been using Hadcrut4 in my earlier analysis and I assume 4 is the new improved version but all the data sets are close enough. Preferring one data set over another is another example of cherry picking. But this is another way of making my point here. Over multidecal time periods, these data sets are so similar that cherry picking is rather pointless.
And yes, an increase of 0.38 over the next century would not be cause for concern, but the point I am making is the 95% range for that fit is 1.75 to -0.99 C per century (on the dubious assumption that the trend is linear over a century)
For the Hadcrut3 data the trend is a drop of 0.1 C per century within a range of 1.36 to -1.56 C.
The point here is that although one data set predicts a small rise in trend and the other a small drop, the uncertainties in short term trends make this distinction next to meaningless.

Earth to Rachel:
Global warming has stalled. That is a fact.
Sorry about your belief system. Reality intrudes.

Justthefactswuwt,
Excellent rebuttal. Anyone can see that we are currently in a cold phase — not a full blown Ice Age, but a temporary cool interglacial that could end at any time. It was not that many thousands of years ago that the northern U.S. was covered in mile-thick glacier ice. That will certainly happen again.
If Rachel replies, I expect her to back up her belief system with facts similar to those that you have posted above. But of course, she probably will either not reply, or she will go off on an emotional rant devoid of any scientific evidence. Because lacking empirical evidence, emotion is the driving force behind the belief system of climate alarmists.

justthefactswuwt says:
February 12, 2013 at 8:52 pm…
Yes Rachel is mistaken. Global temperatures have varied wildly over geologic timescales. As your plots indicate, a primary driver is changes in the Earth’s axis tilt and orbit.
The thing is that for these factors have had an insignificant effect on temperature change in the last 150 years – a blink in geologic timescales. For the first time in the Earth’s history, humans have been affecting climate by burning huge amounts of carbon locked up in the earth’s crust and pumping large amounts of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere as a waste product.
Attempts to account for the increase in temperature since the onset of the industrial revolution using entirely “natural” forcings without including this anthropogenic factor have not matched the temperature data.

I had a look at my own data set again, (47 weather stations, with complete or nearly complete records, balanced by latitude and balanced by @sea/inland 70/30 – longitude does not matter)
specifically looking at the speed of warming :
The speed of warming/cooling for means is 0.014K/annum calculated from 1974 (38 yrs), 0.013K/annum from 1980 (32 yrs), 0.014 from 1990 (22 years) and -0.017 from 2000 (12 years).
The speed of warming/cooling for maxima is 0.036K/annum from 1974 (38 yrs), 0.029K/annum from 1980 (32 yrs), 0.014 from 1990 (22 years) and -0.016 from 2000 (12 years).
So basically, we changed sign from warming to cooling, at least before 2000….
I can therefore confirm that I would expect “a stalling” for an even longer period than 12 years.
From your graphs, it seems to me Hadcrut3 comes nearest to my own observations.
Does anyone know: What exactly is the difference between Hadcrut3 and HADCRUT4?

HenryP says:
February 12, 2013 at 10:00 pm …
http://www.thegwpf.org/an-updated-hadcrut4-and-some-surprises/
A complaint levelled at earlier Hadcrut versions was that it had limited sampling from higher latitudes in the Northern hemisphere, where greater warming has been observed and thus underestimated the global temperature.

HenryP says:
February 12, 2013 at 10:00 pm
Does anyone know: What exactly is the difference between Hadcrut3 and HADCRUT4?
Do you mean other than making the hottest year 2010 instead of 1998? Presumably Hadcrut4 is more accurate since it does things like taking more northern stations into account properly making it more like GISS. Perhaps others have a more complete answer.

Werner.
The evidence I had in mind was this (and other references which show much the same thing but I frankly cannot be bothered searching for at the moment):
http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/figspm-4.htm
Have not looked to see if the detail of this figure explains your question about the two thirty year periods.

Philip says
A complaint leveled at earlier Hadcrut versions was that it had limited sampling from higher latitudes in the Northern hemisphere, where greater warming has been observed and thus underestimated the global temperature.
Henry says
Interesting.
When I considered the sample I was going to take, I thought that
1) longitude would not matter, because I would be looking at average yearly temps. at that specific spot on earth and record how that spot changes over time. So, the earth’s seasonal up and down shift during the year would be included and cancelled out and since earth rotates every 24 hours I would be looking continuously at exactly the correct amount of energy beamed down, so to speak.
2) I thought it would be very important to balance my sample by latitude! In fact when you add all my plus and negative latitudes you come to just about zero. Otherwise you would /could get a bit of a warped picture of the actual global temperature trend.
3) just as a further precaution I also balanced my sample by @sea/inland 70/30 because I considered that inland rises and falls usually are much more dramatic then those at or near sea.
Nevertheless, at first glance my results for means do look meaningless. However, by looking at the development of the maxima,
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
you do begin to see that my means also make sense. We are on a parabolic looking curve and earth is trying to balance and straighten things out. There is some lag between what (change) we get from the sun and what earth is putting out (average temp.)
Note that as shown in the second graph of the quoted blog, it looks like each particular place on earth is on its own sine wave of energy (change) coming from the sun.
Having said that, and knowing what I know now, I would say that if (all?) the data sets being quoted here did not take into account to balance the sample by latitude, neither by 70/30 sea/land, I would expect to get and to see lob sided results.