RSS: no global warming for 16 years 11 months
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
The RSS monthly satellite global mean surface temperature anomaly data, delayed by the US Government shutdown, are now available. The data show no global warming at all for 16 years 11 months. This dataset could be the first of the five to pass the strict Santer test: no global warming at all for 17 years.
Since no el Niño is now expected until next spring at the earliest, the long run without any global warming at all is likely to continue for another few months.
CO2 concentration, meanwhile, continues its upward trend. And it is this disconnect between rising CO2 concentration and stable near-surface temperatures that makes the present long hiatus in global warming more significant than the previous periods of a decade or more without warming over the 163 years of global mean surface temperatures. In none of the previous periods was CO2 concentration either as high or rising as fast as it is today.
Climate extremists are prone to show the data since 1970 as an “escalator” with a series of “steps” consisting of decade-long pauses, but an overall rising trend:
However, a trend is not a prediction. There is no guarantee that merely because the trend has been upward it will continue upward. The effect of the frequent supra-decadal periods without warming is to constrain the overall warming rate since 1970 to a not particularly thrilling 1.6 Cº/century equivalent.
Taking the trend since 1950, a fairer benchmark since the period covers a full warming and cooling cycle of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, shows warming at a rate equivalent to less than 1.1 Cº/century.
So, can one clearly distinguish an anthropogenic warming signal in these post-1950 data from the data before 1950, when we could have had no measurable influence on the climate?
The answer is No. Professor Richard Lindzen likes to play a game with his audiences. He shows the following slide, and explains that one of the panels represents the global warming over the 52-year period 1895-1946, and the other represents the warming over the 52-year period 1957-2008. He explains that both graphs are to the same scale and invites his audience to guess which is the earlier period and which is the later.
In fact, the later period is on the left. Let us determine the linear warming trends on each of the two periods:
The later period has a very slightly steeper slope than the earlier, but only by the equivalent of a third of a Celsius degree per century. On these figures, it seems difficult to justify the IPCC’s assertion of 95% confidence that most of the warming since 1950 was anthropogenic.
Meanwhile, the discrepancy between IPCC prediction and observed reality in the monthly Global Warming Prediction Index remains glaring. A shame that the IPCC did not deal honestly or clearly with this discrepancy in its latest Summary for Policymakers.
For Santer’s test see: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/17/ben-santers-17-year-itch/
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I’m looking forward to the 20-year period 1997 to 2016. At that point, there will have been no warming, indeed probably statistically significant cooling in unadjusted data, for as long as the allegedly Mann-made, 20-year warming period of 1977-96, despite our enjoying ever higher levels of the life-giving compound CO2 in our air.
Santer wrote a later paper:
““The multimodel average tropospheric temperature trends are outside the 5–95 percentile range of RSS results at most latitudes.”
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/11/28/1210514109.full.pdf
17 years? You mean 27. It’s a common typo, what with the keys being so close together.
/flees
…. 1 month to go
What about the AMO look at this chart about 1970 to present.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-amo
Jquip says:
October 23, 2013 at 6:32 pm
Funny, but that’s what they’ll say. Or go the whole hog with Patchy & claim at least 30, 45 or more years without warming or with cooling will be needed to falsify CACA. Depends on how young the “climate scientist” is.
16 years, 11 months is more than 95%!!
Let’s call it DONE.
Well, while we have gone almost 17 years without any statistically significant warming, we have had climate change and it is climate change that threatens all of us.
/sarc
🙂
Well, we know they are already moving the goalposts. The problem there is that they’ll soon run out of places to move them to. At every step, they are painting themselves into a corner.
It would be so much quicker and cleaner if they just admitted to getting it wrong… No, wait, there’s still all that money involved. Billions of taxpayer dollars. Billions and billions. Oh dear, I guess they can’t let go and they can’t hang on much longer, it’s death either way. I’d say they’re not feeling too well at the moment.
Well, the “ice free” countdown clock is no more. We do have room now for another……no?
milodon: “Depends on how young the “climate scientist” is.”
For amusement, young scientists are popping out of school at around 24-25 years of age. Episodic memories begin around 6 – 8 years old. So the current young scientists are those who have no personal recollection of increasing temperatures during their life. Or in only the first couple years after they could remember the plots on My Little Pony.
I’m sure the warmists will change it to “Santer meant until 2017, not 17 years.”
For my money, the 0.33K/Century is the upper limit of Anthro climate effect. What ECS does that compute to?
It’s thirty seconds before midnight, Fantasy Science Cult …
prepare
to meet
your doom…..
All during WWII, every day, the BBC broadcast Big Ben’s faithful chimes — just so the Na-z-1s would know that London was. D Day has come for the Envirostalinists. Their doom is sealed. They are raging and snarling like the cornered rats that they are, but, it is only a matter of time until the forces of Truth triumph.
Truth will win.
And what is the scientific basis for the 17 year interval. Locusts?
RE: “Since no el Niño is now expected until next spring at the earliest, the long run without any global warming at all is likely to continue for another few months.”
Furthermore, with the current far Western Hemisphere, upper North latitude Rex Block in place, it would be very difficult for ENSO Positive conditions to get established. I would not be at all surprised to see ENSO Neutral to Negative conditions lasting at least one more year. This is after all Negative Phase PDO mode, which may be modulating ENSO and hemispheric patterns.
Chris @NJSnowFan says:
October 23, 2013 at 6:37 pm
What about the AMO look at this chart
============
add in NH SST
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-amo/plot/hadsst2nh
What is apparent, and Monckton alluded to it, is that they simply move the goal posts. It is no longer necessary to show a warming trend, as long as one existed in the industrialization era. TO them, all the rest is simply noise.
Another benchmark that rarely gets mention, but is worth considering for its reasonableness, was given by Santer’s predecessor on the IPCC detection and attribution chapter. In FAR Ch 8 Wigley et al answered the question on when might we achieve AGW detection. (This must be seen in the context of a strong, vocal and public protest against Hansen’s congressional declaration of detection in 1988 which was otherwise remained undeclared in many papers and reports.) In FAR in 1990, when after a first drafting Wigley was especially requested to address the question of ‘when,’ he came back and said that there would need to be another 1/2 degree warming on top of the 1/2 already achieved in the last 100 years.
This finding is often quoted as no detection ‘for a decade or more,’ but the ‘decade or more’ was about when we expect by model prediction for the 1/2 warming to be achieved. What is strongly suggested by Wigley et al (in amongst all the AGW excitement of the time) is that if the 1/2 warm does occur in the next few decades then the model predictions would be increasingly called into question, and so a negative result comes up for consideration…or, better, the null hypothesis gets confirmed with higher degrees of certainty. With a lack of warming in the decades subsequent to 1990 we are ‘detecting’ that the sensitivity of the models is not validating empirically.
This is interesting in the context of the subsequent corruption of IPCC detection and attribution finding by Santer’s hand in the following assessment using the pattern of warming ‘finger print’ method. (Wigley had qualified his answer by saying that detection might be earlier if new techniques are found.) When Santer’s argument turned out to be weak (and otherwise no ‘hotspot’ etc), they returned to the GMT, but it could not this time be the instrument record that would persuade, but a new look proxy record in the hockey stick. With Santer’s and Mann’s science called into question, it seems reasonable to return to Wigley’s text in the first assessment.
philjourdan: “What is apparent, and Monckton alluded to it, is that they simply move the goal posts.”
Now now, that’s unseemly and might be misunderstood as an accusation of shenanigans. The scientifically proper understanding is that AGW will evolve motile hypotheses.
@Jquip – Yes, you are correct. I forgot the new PC term is “evolve”.
Rush laid it on thick today asking why is it warmists don’t try to claim CREDIT for the lull in warming? They could have tried to convince everyone that no further warming for all this time was direct evidence that their efforts curbing CO2, attacking SUV’s, wasting money on green energy, preventing 3rd world countries from advancing and otherwise collapsing industrial civilization in general – are showing signs of working. But nooooooooo! As he pointed out, the fact that they are not trying to do that is evidence in itself that “man-made global warming” is not driven by science at all, it’s driven by a political agenda.
Sixteen years eleven months with no warming increase – it is obvious that the warming moved back down to the earth’s core after escaping into the ocean first. In seriousness I have never yet seen any so called AGW scientists even mention what blue jets, sprites, and elves were in the atmosphere. The fact is very clear humans are just beginning to understand the complex actions of this planet.
berniel: “… it seems reasonable to return to Wigley’s text in the first assessment.”
Can’t happen for social reasons. Wigley’s statement is what would be needed to even *establish* the claim in any manner. Santer’s claim can be used as a herpderp bone to throw on falsification. Letting simmer the idea that the claim was ever empirically validated to begin with. A return to Wigley’s statement is a prima facia acknowledgement that it never has been.
That’s not just egg in the face, it opens up all manner of income loss, torts, and possible criminal charges for misuse of funds, fraud, etc.
Jquip says:
October 23, 2013 at 7:02 pm
All the more reason for them to challenge the orthodoxy, did not their career prospects rest upon upholding it.
Well do I remember the strange WX year of 1977. And the bitter winters of the late 1960s, especially 1968. To the extent that there has been warming in my part of the world, it is from fewer sub-zero F. lows in winter rather than fewer above 100 degree highs in summer.
The warmists are in denial concerning the scientific/logical implications of the plateau of 16 years with no warming. A plateau with no warming and a half dozen other observations/fundamental analysis results supports the assertion that a significant portion of the warming in the last 150 years was due to some other forcing function(s) (say changes in the solar magnetic cycle for instance).
As they say on Wall Street, the trend is your friend in terms of predicting what will happen next.
As Latitude noted in the discussions concerning polar sea ice:
October 23, 2013 at 5:26 am
Huge increase in five year old ice…….that they now call four year old ice
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/what-nsidc-is-hiding/
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/nsidcs-nature-trick-hiding-the-massive-incline/
William:
Ditto for Antarctic sea ice.
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_stddev_timeseries.png
It is difficult to imagine what creative explanation will be spun to explain global cooling. The heat hiding in the ocean will not cut it.