Climatologists now require 20 to 30 years to even consider any climatic trend: Is that really honest, or is it just very convenient?
Guest essay by Stephane Rogeau of France
So that’s it: the 15+ years period of no temperature increase is, according to the IPCC, a non-event, barely worth mentioning in the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM). The explanation is simple: we are just witnessing short usual natural variations of the climate that are consistent with climate models. The question about whether those models had foreseen this so-called “hiatus” is just irrelevant: move along!
But let’s just imagine for a while that since around 2000, the world had seen a warming bigger than everything the IPCC had ever predicted. I mean a situation just opposite to what we have been experiencing until now with regard to model forecasts. What would have been the analysis proposed by the IPCC in its SPM report?
First possible analysis:
“The long-term climate model simulations show a trend in global-mean surface temperature from 1951 to 2012 that agrees with the observed trend (very high confidence). There are, however, differences between simulated and observed trends over periods as short as 10 to 15 years (e.g., 2000 to 2012). Due to natural variability, trends based on short records are very sensitive to the beginning and end dates and do not in general reflect long-term climate trends. As one example, the rate of warming over the past 12 years (2000–2012; 0.23 [+0.13 to +0.33] °C per decade), which begins after the effect of a strong El Niño disappeared, is bigger than the rate calculated since 1951 (1951–2012; 0.12 [0.08 to 0.14] °C per decade).
The observed extra increase in surface warming trend over the period 2000–2012, as compared to the period 1951–2012, is due in roughly equal measure to an increased trend in radiative forcing and a warming contribution from internal variability, which includes a possible redistribution of heat within the ocean.”
Second possible analysis:
“The rapid increase in surface warming during the last period of more than 12 years is a clear sign that, although climate models have gained in precision in their description of climate behavior, several factors had been under-estimated by the scientific community in the AR4. There is strong evidence that both lower and upper limits of the former estimation of transient climate response should be risen by as much as 1°C (very high confidence).
Projections for annual mean surface temperatures for the period 2081-2100 have therefore been reviewed to take into consideration the change in observed trend over the last period of 12 years. All different scenarios now show a very likely increase of global mean surface temperatures of more than 1.5°C by the end of the century, relative to 1985-2005, and up to 6°C in the RCP8.5 scenario.”
Let’s be honest: does anybody believe the IPCC would have chosen to write anything close to the first analysis?
Related: To the IPCC: Forget about “30 years”
they haven’t a clue, they know we know they haven’t a clue but still have their fingers in their ears, waggling their palms and sticking their tongues out as us cos at the moment they know they have all the useful idiots on their side. One less useful idiot felt the wrath of the populace recently – Australia, and it is a beacon of hope.
I don ‘t think your first or second is correct.
If we had had warming, even as bad as the models, but especially if it had been higher than the models, the clarion call would have been to shut off fossil fuel usage immediately. The headlines would have read, “New IPCC report Confirms that it is Worse than we Thought; Global Temperature spiraling out of control due to man’s Fossil Fuel Usage”.
There would have been zero mention of “natural variability”.
Like other cases of social madness, it is the lens created by the obsession of the madness that governs how evidence is viewed. Indeed, the obsession controls what is even considered evidence. For those obsessed with CO2, any weather event is seen as evidence that human caused CO2 is working its evil on Earth. Likewise, a lack of a weather event or even a series of weather events, like temperatures not fulfilling their predicted role, is not reason to question the obsession over CO2, Instead the lack of evidence is more of a test of faith in the obsession that must be overcome. Until the last year or so surface temperatures were the gold standard of proof of AGW predictions. Now when those temperatures do not cooperate, the evidence is ignored.
Just a few years ago AGW obsessives were stating things along the lines of how a long term pause would make them reconsider their position. Now we have not only a pause. We also see a track record of tropical cyclones, floods, droughts, winters and summers not acting as AGW predictions claimed they would. We see Antarctic ice at record levels. Some glaciers starting to grow again. Arctic sea ice growing.
But none of that matters to the CO2 obsessive.
We witness the IPCC become even less of a science based document, and more of a cheap politically driven sales prop.
But none of that matters to the CO2 obsessive.
All that matters is their strange obsession on the idea that CO2 caused by humans is triggering a climate catastrophe…and the power and money pushing that obsession brings to those who claim to be ‘doing something’ about their concerns.
There is definitely an asymmetry here.
One bad storm, or one warm summer in one country, is evidence of global warming. (Or even a cold winter, to some people.)
However, 15 years of no warming is just short-term natural variability.
Stephane Rogeau: Let’s be honest:…
a good start
un bon début
Remember that in Marxism the end always justifies the means, no matter how many are sacrificed along the way. It is all for the cause. And Marxists are never wrong so have no need to debate and certainly no need to provide any evidence, just a loud voice to shout you down.
The way to answer the question is to look at how they responded to the faster than forecast ice loss in the arctic. All we have heard is how dire the situation is.
Some years ago Russian and Ukraine scientists using instruments aboard the Russian part of the International Space Station started monitoring and measuring the sun. They predicted the hiatus in the temperature the hibernation of the sun over coming cycles and a cooling period much like the Maunder minimum. Thus far they have been correct, the next hundred years may be a tad cold. The science boss of the monitoring of the sun is Habibullo I. Abdussamatov. he gives a new take on what controls our temperature. Leif will not be happy.
I can see why they left out mention of Antarctica in the SPM. Ice extent has surpassed 16Mkm^2 as it did last year and only a few other times in the satellite era, all in the new century. I think the rebound in the Arctic and continued increase in Antarctic ice extent is cementing in a long cooling period, longer than the warming period over which there has been all this fuss. Indeed, if this turns out to be so, the period from 1980 to 1998 on a historical chart will look very “cherry-picked” to the mystification of climate science of the future. The CAGW crowd has had to drop the “unprecedented” warming meme, the ice-free arctic, the extinction of the polar bears, the high climate sensitivity and have had to perforce embrace significant natural variability, the hated sun-behaviour contribution, change the sign on cloud feedback, lower climate sensitivity and fill up the sky with aerosols with no help from recent volcanoes to provide oxygen to their dying patient.
Stephane, you are too kind with your alternatives. They would have pushed any warming to the limit and had violence in the streets by managed useful idiots if that were necessary to kill off western civilization. I’m grateful that the theory was falsified before despotic “policymakers” could take up a more aggressive stance.
Alarmists were salivating at the prospect of ramping up the fear and would have gone way beyond version 2 above.
Their frustration is seeping from every word they utter or print.
Shouldn’t they be happy that they were wrong?
“We need some more money so that we can reprogram our models”
“Tone down those adjustments, Jimmy. People might start getting suspicious”
Declare global martial law. Prepare for the final solution to global warming!
I don’t think that the temperatures COULD have varied HIGHER than the model predictions.
Many of the earlier models had wacky predictions of tipping points, at which point the temperature would go up vertically. Lovelace was saying that humans would only be able to live in the Antarctic.
All that would have happened was that the modellers would have said that the extreme models were the true ones, and that the temperature was in line with predictions…
Well, I don’t know about anyone else, but I remember the heatwave of ’76, and a couple of other ‘warm’ summers. I don’t recall the deep freezes of the early 60’s (was too young) but I do recall the last few cold winters!
In short, here in the UK, I defy anyone to (honestly) say that they notice (as in feel) that the climate has gotten any warmer. Other than short term monthly variations, and folk saying stuff like, ‘ain’t it cold/warm/wet/dry for April, etc’ – I find it amazing how anyone ‘believes’ that there is this alleged 0.8degC warming when we all experience the vagaries of climatic variation much greater than that. I am sure a good degree of it (any belief in ‘warming’) is probably psychosematic (sp?) – it makes me wonder how much the world would actually need to warm before folk could genuinely ‘feel’ a difference?
All AR reports are written with one direction in mind: Sheeple…meet cliff.
Here’s an interesting item from the UK’s Daily Telegraph on the subject of Arctic ice ( see Letters to the Editor, p23 Tuesday October 1st 2013):
Sir – I was a meteorologist during the Seventies when glaciers in Europe and other continents had been growing for the previous ten years, and pack ice had been increasing during winters to cover almost all of the Denmark Strait between Iceland and Greenland. Scientists were then warning that the Earth could be entering another ice age.
The current deliberations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have conveniently overlooked this. Before insisting that humans have been the main cause of global warming an explanation of this apparent anomaly should be promulgated.
From: Captain Derek Blacker RN (retd), Director of Naval Oceanography and Meteorology, 1982-84
What would the IPCC have written if there had been 12 years of rapid warming?
3000 scampering chickens without heads?
What would we have seen had warming been more than predicted?
The same thing we see every time some region has a slightly warmer than average summer.
Total hysteria.
What about the sun? It’s hardly mentioned.
I particularly enjoyed the “It occured to me”;
http://drtimball.com/2013/ipcc-climate-a-product-of-lies-damn-lies-and-statistics-built-on-inadequate-data/
You get what you pay for.
And now onward and upward……..to retirement
Clever analysis. It’d be nice if the US government shutdown could somehow be extended all the way to the IPCC. I just read this morning that only 6.6% of the EPA employees have been deemed essential and will be retained during the shutdown. The remainder will be furloughed. What a glorious way to begin the day. Just think of how much better off we’d all be if the same could occur at the UN. After all, the US does pay for 40% of the UN’s budget. [Imagine that, only 2% of the world’s population paying for 40% (not 25%) of the world’s UN’s budget.]
If the IPCC was truly worried about catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, they would greet the news of no warming for the past 15 years with relief rather than excuses.
The IPCC is just like the rest of the UN – full of nothing but beggars, thieves and con men. It is time for the US to renounce its UN membership and withdraw its financial support. In so far as I can see, the UN has never accomplished enough to justify its existence or the financial support it receives.
Tom J says: @ October 2, 2013 at 7:01 am
….I just read this morning that only 6.6% of the EPA employees have been deemed essential and will be retained during the shutdown. The remainder will be furloughed. What a glorious way to begin the day. Just think of how much better off we’d all be if the same could occur at the UN. After all, the US does pay for 40% of the UN’s budget…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Sounds like a darn good reason to continue the shut down until the end of 2016. Then maybe the states would grow a backbone and realize they don’t really need the federal government bribes.
What would the IPCC have written if there had been 12 years of rapid warming?
====
What would the IPCC have written if we had this technology 1000 years ago?
We would have been at the peak of the MWP and falling into the LIA….
…it would have been hysterical!
Kev-in-Uk says:
October 2, 2013 at 6:16 am
===============================
CET getting colder since 2000. Winter temps down by 1 degree centigrade.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
[Remember, many new readers – and some older ones as well – don’t know all of the abbreviations all of the time. Mod]
Why the hypothetical? What the OP describes is the situation leading in to the 2007 report. At a quick glance, I can’t see any discussion of it in the synthesis report — they claim 0.2C/decade, even though the short-term trend then was closer to 0.3C/decade, as noted in tamino’s most recent post.
So the answer is (c) they’d just ignore the issue entirely in the summary document.
Seems to me they are saying it even though it did not happen.
what had happened to temperatures in the 15 and 30 years prior to 1984 when Hansen was running his models that said temps were going to increase greatly? iirc, there had only been a short time of slight warming up to that point…
My 2 cents, I think 30 years is a reasonable amount of time to declare a trend. It’s not so short that temporary events throw it off, it’s not so long that we are unable to ever say a tend has occurred.
I take the 15 years without warming as meaning it hasn’t warmed in 15 years, nothing more. We can’t say it’s an indicator of what’s going to happen in the next 15 years.
To make accurate predictions, we need quality models. These we don’t have yet.
Ehem, for now. If it reaches 30 years they will simply extend it as they have already done. Yet some of them seem to be suffering from amnesia the poor souls. Here is the climate clown, Dr. Paul Jones, shouting about global warming of sixteen years being statistically significant. He does go on to say that 20 to 30 years if preferable.
So he prefers 20 to 30 years but agrees that the hiatus is statistically significant.
Off topic
[Yes, it is off-topic. Mod]
One of the big reasons I remain a skeptic is I ask myself — what would they be saying if the exact opposite had occured. For instance, instead of a warming trend, what if the globe was undergoing a cooling trend? Would we be talking about human induced global cooling that will induce global famine and cause more extreme weather events or would we be talking about a short term natrual climate variability? I think it’s very likely the former is true. It seems to me that humans were going to be blamed for anything short of a completely neutral climate. And, if climate didn’t cooperate, something else to progress the environmentalist agenda would have been found. Long after human induced climate change is dead, human activity will still be blamed for something wrong with the environment/planet and more taxes, wealth redistribution and a new list of ‘evironmental sins’ is likely to be the claimed savior.
“15 years” became a benchmark when a climate modeler (I cant remember who) said that thats how long there would need to be no warming to show that the climate models were wrong
jbird says:
October 2, 2013 at 7:10 am
If the IPCC was truly worried about catastrophic anthropogenic global warming, they would greet the news of no warming for the past 15 years with relief rather than excuses.
This.
Have thought exactly the same for years jbird. After all, we’re facing ‘catastrophe’, right? What better news could there possibly be, ever, than Humanity isn’t getting wiped out this weekend? But from the alarmists…..silence.
It exposes their true stance – political, financial, controlling. Nowt to do with climate in the slightest.
If the scenario you describe had happened, we would currently be in the midst of a worldwide depression due to spotty, expensive electricity and only electric cars and trucks in Europe, the US and Japan. The depression in the West would have hurt China, India and the Middle East.
The Chicken Little crowd would have won the political day and succeeded in closing down most of the fossil fuel industry….before the report.
Has anyone else been reading the MSM headlines this week? They have turned all of their attention to attacking and discrediting skeptics in any way they can. These are the dark ages of climate science.
magicjava says:
October 2, 2013 at 7:55 am
My 2 cents, I think 30 years is a reasonable amount of time to declare a trend
========
and it took 500 years of a downward trend to reach the bottom of the LIA….
…that is now claimed to be an upward trend
We’re just in a hiccup right now…..
…the overall trend is still down
“What would the IPCC have written if there had been 12 years of rapid warming?”
It would be interesting to speculate on what would WattsUpWithGlobalWarming have written if there had been 12 years of rapid warming.
(Reply: No speculation necessary. There would be no censorship of the data here, as there is by the IPCC. But unfortunately for your beliefs, global warming has stopped, so all you have is your baseless ‘speculation’. ~ mod.)
Is that a typo in the report that says:
“As one example, the rate of warming over the past 12 years (2000–2012; 0.23 [+0.13 to +0.33] °C per decade), which begins after the effect of a strong El Niño disappeared, is bigger than the rate calculated since 1951 (1951–2012; 0.12 [0.08 to 0.14] °C per decade).”
Not one temperature dataset has anything remotely close to +0.23C per decade since 2000. It is also not bigger than the trend from 1951-2012, it is indeed smaller. (roughly +0.07C per decade versus +0.12C per decade)
Strange that the IPCC now want 30 year trends, dismiss any ‘change’ under 30 ears and show in “Figure SPM.1” ‘decadal averages – for visual effect.
For some, 30 years good, 10 years bad, for others, its not so good.
wayne Job says:
October 2, 2013 at 5:47 am
“Some years ago Russian and Ukraine scientists using instruments aboard the Russian part of the International Space Station started monitoring and measuring the sun. They predicted the hiatus in the temperature the hibernation of the sun over coming cycles and a cooling period much like the Maunder minimum. Thus far they have been correct, the next hundred years may be a tad cold. The science boss of the monitoring of the sun is Habibullo I. Abdussamatov. he gives a new take on what controls our temperature. Leif will not be happy.
Funny thing is that the critique of the Abdusamatov is basically unable to point out anything else than the extremely questionable conclusions from Lockwood/Fröhlich2008 (which is more about defending PMOD TSI dataset Fröhlich is author thereof, in the old, irrelevant and likely unresolvable ACRIM/PMOD controversy than anything else) who claim “all solar forcings of climate have declined since 1987” – while the solar indices show quite opposite for another two decades – the SSN (the SIDC-SSN 1965-2005 trend still rising), F10.7 (the 1965-2005 trend still rising) and GCR (the 1965-2005 trends still declining) show quite consistently rising mid-term solar activity trend up until mid 2000’s and only then a relatively sharp swift decline.
Pippen Kool:
At October 2, 2013 at 8:21 am you say
Why? I see no reason or interest in such a speculation.
And who or what is WattsUpWithGlobalWarming?
Please explain.
Richard
I am going to repost a comment from Chris4692 @ August 27, 2013 at 6:57 am that documents the falsification criteria.
Off Topic.
Billions / Trillions have been spent on a trace gas boogie man, yet feeble amounts have been allocated to a potential rock slamming into planet earth causing untold damage.
Do we have our priorities in order ladies and gentleman?
IPCC is more politics than science.
The one significant driver of the average global temperature trend since 1610 is disclosed at http://conenssti.blogspot.com/
After about 1895, accurate temperature measurements were made world wide and revealed the natural oscillations above and below the sunspot-number-time-integral-trajectory. The oscillations are caused by the net effect of ocean cycles (which are dominated by the PDO). The resulting graph and physics-based equation that accurately (R2=0.9) calculates the measured anomaly trend are shown at http://climatechange90.blogspot.com/2013/05/natural-climate-change-has-been.html
Gary Pearse says:
October 2, 2013 at 5:48 am
Good observation on Antarctic Ice, but a minor correction;
Antarctic Sea Ice Extents is now setting new record high levels at 19,000,000 sq km’s.
It is Antarctic Sea Ice Area that is greater than 16,000,000 km’s, but as you point out, all of the recent Antarctic sea ice areas over 16,000,000 have occurred in the most recent years.
Equally alarming, the 40 year trend of ALL Antarctic Sea Ice measurements (maximum, average, and minimum extents) continues their steady increases since 1979. At today’s rates of increase in southern sea ice extents, Cape Horn could be closed to ship traffic as soon as 8 to 12 years.
Pippen Kool says:
October 2, 2013 at 8:21 am
It would be interesting to speculate on what would WattsUpWithGlobalWarming have written if there had been 12 years of rapid warming.
=====
that the LIA was 500 years of rapid cooling…that is now claimed as warming
…and the overall trend is still down
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/09/hockey-stick-observed-in-noaa-ice-core-data/
(Repost from today’s WUWT “IPCC flip flop on 2100 temperatures”)
My skepticism has gone all the way to cynicism.
I believe most scientists (97%+, including Michael Mann) know CAGW is puerile hogwash. Venal politicians only care that a critical mass of pathetic-but-willing parties (media outlets, laughably scientifically illiterate citizens) act as true believers, and can be manipulated to cede more political power.
That’s it; that’s all there is to CAGW.
Appeals for scientific integrity by well meaning colleagues (eg: Bob Tisdale, et al) are meaningless; politicians want power for power’s sake and willingly fund ethically challenged scientists who readily produce intellectually corrupt theories and papers. When the general population tires of this particular con-job, politicians will easily throw their pet scientists under the proverbial bus, and move on to the next attention grabber.
This is not a battle for hearts and minds; it’s a battle for money and power.
Pippen Kool
October 2, 2013 at 8:21 am
says:
‘“What would the IPCC have written if there had been 12 years of rapid warming?”
It would be interesting to speculate on what would WattsUpWithGlobalWarming have written if there had been 12 years of rapid warming.’
Actually, I think it might be more interesting to speculate on the difference in the results achieved between the IPCC and WUWT in comparison to the differential in taxpayer dollars that the IPCC and WUWT receive.
Care to speculate?
Pippen Kool says:
October 2, 2013 at 8:21 am
It would be interesting to speculate on what would WattsUpWithGlobalWarming have written if there had been 12 years of rapid warming.
===============================================================
Ok, Pippen, here’s my speculation:
Based upon current & previously demonstrated WUWT performance, some very bright minds would begin an intense and intellectually honest search for a falsifiable hypothesis describing the underlying physics. WUWT has never denied warming, just the “CA” component…
Wonderfully acute. Representatives of the IPCC should be asked the author’s concluding question at a congressional hearing.
RACookPE1978 says: @ October 2, 2013 at 8:51 am
…Equally alarming, the 40 year trend of ALL Antarctic Sea Ice measurements (maximum, average, and minimum extents) continues their steady increases since 1979. At today’s rates of increase in southern sea ice extents, Cape Horn could be closed to ship traffic as soon as 8 to 12 years.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
The question then becomes what happens when Drakes Passage is partially blocked or covered in ice and no longer effected by wind?
Drake Passage and palaeoclimate
Reseach on Drakes Passage today: http://climate.gmu.edu/research/drake.php
And what will they write if we see 12 years of rapid cooling from now?
Simple. Because of Obama’s shutdown, the “temporary” new guys at ‘/www.jpl.nsa.gov/new can’t afford a spell-checker. (They are all over at http://www.myunsecuregovernmenthealthrecords.com trying to get more SSN’s and birthdates stolen from the IRS)…
Tom Trevor:
At October 2, 2013 at 9:58 am you ask
The AGW-scare will be over by then unless there is a large ENSO peak temperature in the intervening years. So, they will probably write nothing.
Richard
“the past 12 years (2000–2012 . . .)” –Huh? 2000 through 2012 is 13 years.
2000 is a poor start-year, because it was a sharp temporary drop-off after the 1998 El Nino jump-up. If it was included, it would be a “cherry pick.”
It would have been better to have chosen the most recent decade, 2003-2012. Or to have used 1990-2012 (23 years), since 1990 was the date of the first AR, and since that would have smoothed out the sharp jumps and dips before and after 2000.
Here’s a link to the IPCC’s (correct) draft chart (but its numbers don’t match up to the ones used in the text quoted–apparently the IPCC has shifted the envelope, as others have pointed out):
http://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/figure-1-4-models-vs-observations-annotated.png?w=560&h=480
They are working on it…http://dailycaller.com/2013/10/02/liberal-media-huddles-to-re-hype-global-warming/
I wonder if anyone here lives Lenard the meeting site? Would love to be the fly on the wall.
Some fifteen year periods are more equal than others…
@RogerKnights
I was more interested in where the +0.23C per decade trend between 2000-2012 came from. That is not supported by the global temperature datasets. The trend during that time is less than one third what that sentence claims it is. It doesn’t matter which dataset is used either.
“[Remember, many new readers – and some older ones as well – don’t know all of the abbreviations all of the time. Mod]”
That’s what a glossary* is for.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/resources/glossary/
we have had three years of cooling…get ready for 27 more..
I can’t seem to find the research predicting increased hurricanes and intensity that supported Al Gore years ago and around the time of the hurricane spike year. I guess old predictions and supporting research is selectively erased from the record? I think it was FSU research but maybe not. I think it would be instructive to compile that and other predictions as reference pages by prediction topic.
After the felonious re-juggling to keep warming going and their “projections” within observations, I now know that they will also jigger the temperature record to suit. After all, they have been doing it for years and they are the gatherers of data. I have been thinking since the surfacestations.org project, that we are going to have to somehow set up our own temp collecting network safe from sabotage. One way is to select 100 global temp stations and duplicate them at some acceptable distance to keep tabs on the network jiggery pokery. These guys have totally jettisoned any pretense at science so it’s only a tiny step to outright totally invent a temperature series. Maybe individuals who live not far from an official station could look after a monitoring network. Oh dear, I don’t like what I’ve become!
15+ years of no temperature increase? That’s if you start with the spike of a century class El Nino. Smoothed HadCRUT3 shows the trend. HadCRUT3 is less-warming than the other major surface indices, and can be seen here:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/
That shows the hiatus as starting sometime in 2011, and currently having gone on for 12 years. Stating 15, 16 or 17 years seems to be cherrypicking the data to overstate one’s case.
You mean like in the 2007 paper by Rahmstorf et al(http://www.sciencemag.org/content/316/5825/709.abstract) where they stated that the 15-year warming trend up to 2006 (which was double the projections) was stated as being “intrinsic variability within the climate system”.
But who needs realy world examples when we’ve got fictitous and hypotheic responses!
See more here http://tamino.wordpress.com/2013/09/21/double-standard/#more-6775
Donald L. Klipstein:
Your post at October 2, 2013 at 11:42 am is wrong in many ways. It says in total
Now (i.e. the present) is the only valid start date when considering how long there has been no discernible change in global temperature. And one then considers back in time from now. Any other date is a cherry-pick.
Smoothing the data is processing it. We are interested in whether the data shows a discernible trend: we are not interested in whether processed data shows anything.
Any model of change could be used but climate science uses linear trends, so that is the appropriate model.
The discernment has to be a trend different from zero at 95% confidence because that is the confidence level used by ‘climate science’.
So, to assess whether there has been discernible global warming recently one needs to take one of the data sets of global temperature time series (e.g. HadCRUTn, GISS, RSS, etc.) and assess past time periods from now to determine the shortest time period which differs from zero with 95% confidence.
All the available time series of global temperature show no discernible global warming or global cooling at 95% confidence for at least 17 years. RSS shows no discernible global warming or global cooling at 95% confidence for 22 years.
Any other statement (except to query the validity of global temperature data compilations) is spin.
Richard
Well, here (SPM p xxiv) is what the IPCC FAR did say in 1990 about the 14 years of warming that had been observed to that date:
“The observed increase could be largely due to natural variability, alternatively this variability and other man-made factors could have offset a still larger man-made greenhouse warming The unequivocal detection of the enhanced greenhouse effect from observations is not likely lor a decade or more, when the committment to future climate change will then be considerably larger than it is today.”
Sounds more like the first.
Tom J says:
October 2, 2013 at 9:13 am
“Actually, I think it might be more interesting to speculate on the difference in the results achieved between the IPCC and WUWT in comparison to the differential in taxpayer dollars that the IPCC and WUWT receive.”
On a related note, it appears that workers at NASA (and along with it GISS) are considered NON-essential employees. If you go to nasa.gov you get the following message:
Due to the lapse in federal government funding, this website is not available.
We sincerely regret this inconvenience.
(maybe some workers were spared…)
On no!! Think of all the climate “science” that’s NOT getting done in the U.S. due to the shutdown! It makes a guy wanna do something drastic, like … ummm … get a vasectomy!
‘No children, happy to go extinct’, tweets weatherman after grim climate-change report made him cry (now he’s considering a vasectomy)’
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2436551/A-weatherman-breaks-tears-vows-NEVER-fly-grim-climate-change-report.html
Just a re-cap on what others and myself have noted. It seems that at the time they were confident that over 17 years was sufficient. Now the goalposts are moved and they will be moved as many times as necessary. I predicted this some time back.
Nick Stokes:
re your post at October 2, 2013 at 12:00 pm
Taking your interpretation of the 1990 IPCC SPM as being true, then there has been no progress in ‘climate science’ as reported by the IPCC since 1990. That being so, then I assume you agree the $billions per year that is being wasted on ‘climate science’ should be spent on something which could provide something useful.
So, when can we expect you to start campaigning for the funding of your job to be stopped?
Richard
Tom Trevor says:
October 2, 2013 at 9:58 am
And what will they write if we see 12 years of rapid cooling from now?
Now that is something I’m really looking forward too. It could even be funnier than AR5 and Nick Stokes, R gates combined
If it requires 30 years to make a trend then you have to wonder if there was any cause for alarm in the first place.
The graph you linked to says “Global average temperature 1850-2011”
Thank you richardscourtney.
Donald, why didn’t you look at RSS?
I love speculating as much as the next person, but it isn’t proof of anything. With regard to what they would do if warming stopped has been answered: move the goalposts. These people are very short sighted and do not look further into the future than their current problems require. Thus they are left twisting in the wind as the data continues to not support them in new and fun ways.
I think it isn’t particularly useful to set up a hypothesis about what the IPCC would do which is contrary to fact, then beat them up for something they didn’t do. Yes, I believe they wouldn’t have worried that the sample size was too small if there had been excess warming, but it doesn’t mean anything because it didn’t happen. They can do the same thing to us and it would be equally useless. What we can do is point out that they are changing their standard without a basis for doing so. They set the standard, they should have to live with it. They moved the goalpost once already when the data was against them, and now that data has met that standard, they try to move it once again. This we know because it happened, and they responded with another standard change. No speculation needed.
Data isn’t really for or against them, but their science is more religion, and they consider the continuing halt in warming as enemy behavior. At some point, one of them might just suggest that us skeptics are rigging the data by a secret conspiracy to open all our refrigerator doors and let the cool air out to influence the readings. They just might be that crazy.
psychosomatic. Mind over body.
Were you thinking of “pyscho semantic” = crazy talk? 😉
typo: “psycho semantic”
Yeah, and it’s even weirder than that. The Warm-Alarmists are discouraged by cooling or standstill, which is escape from the horrors they claim to fear. We skeptics who fear cooling are forced to celebrate it because it disproves Warmalarmism, and dislike warming stats, despite the historical record that universally says global warming is a major boon to both civilization and Nature!! E.g., in reality, an open Arctic Ocean would be great! (Paleontology (buried bones) shows even polar bear populations peak in warming eras.)
By their fruits shall ye know them, and the fruits of Alarmism are pervasively perverse. Even before implementing its suicidal mitigation recommendations.
Personally, I think a benchmark of 30 years is probably correct. Unfortunately it was always correct, so when the alarms went off in the late seventies early eighties it should always have been with a caveat that nothing was certain until it had been happening for 30 years.
My logic is that the PDO takes approximately 60 years per cycle and we are now on the downward trend of the cycle. Assuming that the upward trend of this PDO started in the early seventies then it was way too early to be making alarmist statements until a thirty year period had passed and they could determine if the temperature would just keep rising or whether it would flatten off and then drop. In order to establish the trend we needed to have looked at the peaks or the troughs of the cycles and then determine if the peak or trough was rising.
Theoretically, we could make an estimate of the last peak by looking at the early 1940s data, but unfortunately there has been so much instrumentation change and shenanigans with “adjusting” the data that it would be hard to establish if the early 1940s peak was higher or lower than the 1998 peak. I think that the coverage is just not there either.
So we are no 15 years from the peak and we will probably need to wait a further 15 years before we get to the trough. If temperatures don’t actually fall to early 1970s levels then we need to understand that mechanism.
Reality is that those who were making alarmist statements in the early days were either ignorant of scale of natural variability or chose to hide this. Now there is no excuse.
It goes up, it goes down. When it goes up it is us. When it goes down it is nature. You cannot win with these morons. ClimateGate came and went, now it is business as usual. As though nothing happened.
Look, it is the same with Snowden. Snow-who? Most people would say! Exactly!
Look, we live in strange times, surrounded by strange people, they are not interested in the truth. They are interested in X-Factor style TV shows.
The Earth has become a science fiction dystopia.
I will tell you a story (sorry Willis, I know you do not like stories 🙂 ).
Where I live, we are forced to separate our waste into “recyclable” and “land-fill”. When I pointed out to a house guest the absolute futility of the process… the fact that most of the “recyclable” in the UK gets shipped off for land fill in foreign lands (e.g. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2304773/The-great-recycling-trick-How-carefully-sorted-waste-dumped-abroad.html ), then fact that if the stuff was really worth recycling then the company would be knocking down my door to bid for my waste… that they would not require a huge government subsidy … and do you know what she said?
Do you have any idea what she said to me?
This is what she said: “Oh, I don’t care. Just so long as I know that I am doing my bit.”
I am not joking. That is what she actually said to me.
I repeat: The Earth has become a science fiction dystopia.
Donald L. Klipstein says:
October 2, 2013 at 11:42 am
15+ years of no temperature increase? That’s if you start with the spike of a century class El Nino. ….
That shows the hiatus as starting sometime in 2011, and currently having gone on for 12 years. Stating 15, 16 or 17 years seems to be cherrypicking the data to overstate one’s case.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
No it is not started during the century class El Nino, it was started BEFORE the el nino. It also includes all the data sets. Discussed here. Also Dr. Pachauri, the science chairman of the IPCC, admitted in Melbourne early in 2013 that there had been a 17-year “pause” in global warming.
….
It is also not cherrypicking because was based on the criteria set to disprove CAGW and counting backwards.
These are the falsification criteria statements made by Warmists:
1. Prof. Phil Jones saying in the Climategate emails – “Bottom line: the “no upward trend” has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.” Also see: interview with Judith Curry and Phil Jones
2. Ben Santer in a 2011 paper “Our results show that temperature records of at least 17 years in length are required for identifying human effects on global-mean tropospheric temperature.” link
3. The NOAA falsification criterion is on page S23 of its 2008 report titled The State Of The Climate
4. we are looking at no changes in temperature over a period longer than the 10 years that James Hansen once said would show the models wrong;
So the falsification criteria is 15 years to 17 years. That is why we start at the present and count backwards. Once we hit 17 years The Goose is Cooked. Unfortunately the Goose seems to be a zombie and keeps rising from the dead. (Now where did I put my silver bullets, garlic and a wooden stake?)
Frank K. says:
October 2, 2013 at 12:06 pm
On no!! Think of all the climate “science” that’s NOT getting done in the U.S. due to the shutdown! It makes a guy wanna do something drastic, like … ummm … get a vasectomy!
‘No children, happy to go extinct’, tweets weatherman after grim climate-change report made him cry (now he’s considering a vasectomy)’
============================================
He should be encouraged. The fewer stupid genes there are in the world, the better for humanity as a whole.
They were telling me that co2 was now the main climate driver, and that co2 was now overwhelming natural climate drivers. Now nature seems to be overwhelming the ‘main climate driver’.
As we have seen, 17 years was enough (in the past at least.) 🙂 In the years to come if the planet’s surface temps cool, what then? Oh, the deep oceans. I wish the IPCC had told us to expect this earlier, it would have cleared up a lot of misunderstanding.
at http://conenssti.blogspot.com/
Who guessed that it could be so simple?
All measurements point to the average global temperature TREND since 1610 (the start of regular recording of sunspot numbers) being driven by something(s) that are driven by the sunspot number time-integral and OSCILLATIONS above and below the trend are the net effect of ocean cycles. Since temperatures have been accurately measured world wide, the net effect of ocean cycles has been approximately +-1/5 K with a period of 64 years. Most recent peak was in approximately 2005.
Aerosols, volcanos, change to the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, etc. have had no significant effect on average global temperature.
http://conenssti.blogspot.com/
Good perspective indeed, thanks Stephane Rogeau !