Richard Kerr (Science) in 2009: Warming ‘Pause’ About to Be Replaced by ‘Jolt’
Guest essay by Robert Bradley Jr.
“Pauses as long as 15 years are rare in the simulations, and ‘we expect that [real-world] warming will resume in the next few years,’ the Hadley Centre group writes…. Researchers … agree that no sort of natural variability can hold off greenhouse warming much longer.”
– Richard Kerr, Science (2009)
That’s Richard A. Kerr, the longtime, award-winning climate-change scribe for Science magazine, the flagship publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The article, “What Happened to Global Warming? Scientists Say Just Wait a Bit,” was published October 1, 2009.
The article is important in the history of climate thought because it captures neatly the (over)confidence of the scientists who turn to models to justify their faith that past overestimation will soon be reversed. Judith Curry’s recent discovery of F. A. Hayek’s Nobel Prize Lecture in Economics, The Pretense of Knowledge, marks a new front in the mainstream climate debate. [1]
Secondly, today’s explanation for the “pause” (a term used in Kerr’s 2009 article) is not mentioned back then—ocean delay.
Third, Kerr frames the debate in political terms with Copenhagen just ahead—and fails to interview or include the contrary views about how climate sensitivity might be less than the climate models assume in their physical equations.
Here is the guts of the Kerr article as the 5th year anniversary comes this year:
The blogosphere has been having a field day with global warming’s apparent decade-long stagnation. Negotiators are working toward an international global warming agreement to be signed in Copenhagen in December, yet there hasn’t been any warming for a decade. What’s the point, bloggers ask?
Climate researchers are beginning to answer back in their preferred venue, the peer-reviewed literature. The pause in warming is real enough, but it’s just temporary, they argue from their analyses.
A natural swing in climate to the cool side has been holding greenhouse warming back, and such swings don’t last forever. “In the end, global warming will prevail,” says climate scientist Gavin
Schmidt of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City.
The latest response from the climate community comes in State of the Climate in 2008, a special supplement to the current (August) issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Climate researcher Jeff Knight and eight colleagues at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, U.K., first establish that—at least in one leading temperature record—greenhouse warming has been stopped in its tracks for the past 10 years.
In the HadCRUT3 temperature record, the world warmed by 0.07°C±0.07°C from 1999 through 2008, not the 0.20°C expected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Corrected for the natural temperature effects of El Niño and its sister climate event La Niña, the decade’s trend is a perfectly flat 0.00°C.
So contrarian bloggers are right: There’s been no increase in greenhouse warming lately. That result came as no surprise to
Knight and his colleagues or, for that matter, to most climate scientists. But the Hadley Centre group took the next step, using climate modeling to try to quantify how unusual a 10-year warming pause might be.
In 10 modeling runs of 21st century climate totaling 700 years worth of simulation, long-term warming proceeded about as expected: 2.0°C by the end of the century. But along the way in the 700 years of simulation, about 17 separate 10-year intervals had temperature trends resembling that of the past decade—that is, more or less flat.
From this result, the group concludes that the model can reproduce natural jostlings of the climate system—perhaps a shift in heat-carrying ocean currents—that can cool the world and hold off greenhouse warming for a decade. But natural climate variability in the model has its limits. Pauses as long as 15 years are rare in the simulations, and “we expect that [real-world] warming will resume in the next few years,” the Hadley Centre group writes.
And that resumption could come as a bit of a jolt, says Adam Scaife of the group, as the temperature catches up with the greenhouse gases added during the pause.
Pinning the pause on natural variability makes sense to most researchers. “That goes without saying,” writes climate researcher Stefan Rahmstorf of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany by e-mail. “We’ve made [that point] several times on RealClimate,” a blog.
Solar physicist Judith Lean of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., and climate modeler David Rind of GISS reached the same conclusion in a peer-reviewed 15 August paper in Geophysical Research Letters. They broke down recent temperature variation into components attributable to greenhouse gases, pollutant aerosols, volcanic aerosols, El Niño/La Niña, and solar variability.
Combined, those influences explain all of the observed variability, by Lean and Rind’s accounting. But unlike the Hadley Centre’s model-based analysis, this assessment attributes a good deal of climate variability to variability in solar activity. That’s because most models can’t translate solar variability into climate variability the way the actual climate system can (Science, 28 August, p. 1058), Rind says.
Researchers may differ about exactly what’s behind recent natural climate variability, but they agree that no sort of natural variability can hold off greenhouse warming much longer. “Our prediction is that if past is prologue, the solar component will turn around and lead to rapid warming in the next 5 years,” says Rind.
Climate modeler David Smith of the Hadley Centre, who was not involved in the State of the Climate analysis, says his group’s climate model forecasts—made much the way weather forecasts are made—are still calling for warming to resume in the next few years as ocean influences reverse (Science, 10 August 2007, p. 746). Whether that’s in time to boost climate negotiations is anyone’s guess.
The ball is back in Richard Kerr’s court. Dr. Kerr, let’s have a five-year update for Science with a headline like “What Happened to Global Warming: Can Mainstream Climate Science Regain Its Footing?” His update might well take into account Judith Curry’s current post, IPCC AR5 weakens the case for AGW), that documented “several key elements … weakening of the case for attributing the warming [to] human influences:
- Lack of warming since 1998 and growing discrepancies with climate model projections
- Evidence of decreased climate sensitivity to increases in CO2
- Evidence that sea level rise in 1920-1950 is of the same magnitude as in 1993-2012
- Increasing Antarctic sea ice extent
- Low confidence in attributing extreme weather events to anthropogenic global warming.”
———–
[1] Curry cited this quotation from Hayek’s 1974 lecture: “I confess that I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much indetermined and unpredictable, to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.”
– See more at: http://www.masterresource.org/2014/01/kerr-science-2009-pause-jolt/#sthash.WL2iT5vI.dpuf
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In 10 modeling runs of 21st century climate totaling 700 years worth of simulation, long-term warming proceeded about as expected: 2.0°C by the end of the century. But along the way in the 700 years of simulation, about 17 separate 10-year intervals had temperature trends resembling that of the past decade—that is, more or less flat
Help me clarify this, please. They did 10 runs for the 21st century. Each run gave a different result? By the end of each run of the model temp had reach 2°C above what norm (or the average end warming for 10 runs was 2°C)? Even though they did 900 years worth of runs (2010 – 2100 * 10) they got 700 years worth of simulation (90 years worth of simulationS) in those 10 runs they got an average of 1.7 10 yr flat intervals / run.? We have had 17 years of relatively insignificant warming / cooling (depending on whose adulterated numbers you use).
Is this what those clowns at the UK met off call science? My god, you poor people. Stupidity is so engrained in the psyche of British government scientists they don’t even recognise their stupidity when placed before their peers. God help us all.
The ball is back in Richard Kerr’s court. Dr. Kerr, let’s have a five-year update for Science with a headline like “What Happened to Global Warming: Can Mainstream Climate Science Regain Its Footing?”
______________________
Fat + Chance = HaHAAAAA
All this talk about running the models and so many simulations came out with pauses (hiatuses or whatever). So perhaps some smarter person than I can steer me in the right direction.
They do not have hundreds of models. Fortunately. They have but a few. So when they say that 17 out of x hundred showed a 10 year pause, that means something is not right.
It appears they are merely dice rolling. And the law of probability says that every once in a while, you can roll 10 successive rolls of snake eyes.
But while the science of probabilities is valid, this is not that science. basically, they are saying they are rolling dice (weighted of course) to find out how many chances they get to get it right. But they have no clue what the next roll is going to be.
“Predictions are hard, especially about the future.”, Yogi Berra, American philosopher
We all face the risk of outliving our predictions, except when the prediction period is a century long.
In this same spirit, it might be time to revisit the model scenario graphic used during the 1988 Hansen/Wirth “warm hearing room trick” presentation to Congress. (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/20/how-well-did-hansen-1988-do/)
An economists blog I read offers their opinion on climate science use of models and computer simms:
http://catallaxyfiles.com/2014/01/14/computer-based-statistical-and-econometric-packages/
Just to quote I paragraph:
“This pathetic error-prone analysis has been the foundation of so-called ‘climate science’ which is riddled with basic analytical flaws such as mis-specification, omitted variables, multicollinearity, heteroskedasticity, measurement errors, autocorrelation, data mining to support prior conclusions, publication bias, and confusing causality with correlation.”
You guys got it all wrong – all their billions spent on mitigating AGW is finally paying off – we have the “pause” in warming. We just need to pay more to the third world and we get the next mini or full blown ice age! What can go wrong?
It would be interesting to see how many times and for how long they had to run the model they used back then to get a 17 year pause. It should be simple enough to do.
“The pause in warming is real enough, but it’s just temporary, they argue from their analyses.”
They are oblivious to the fact that is clear to the rest of us – they did not predict the pause and so we have no faith whatsoever in any of their other ‘get out of jail’ predictions for the future.
I wonder what the end temperature was for those model runs that had long pauses in them.
Warmists: “Since we’ve rolled 18 tails in a row, we’re now gonna have a jolt of heads in a row.”
So, they didn’t foresee the pause on their models, but now the same models predict a resumed warming after this pause?
How do i get a job like that?
“In the HadCRUT3 temperature record, the world warmed by 0.07°C±0.07°C from 1999 through 2008, not the 0.20°C expected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.”
David Rose at the Daily Mail said in a recent article that the IPCC had predicted the 0.2 C increase but that AR5 was ignoring this and using sleight of hand by referring to the 1951-2013 rise of circa 0.12/decade being little different from AR4. (Long time frame gobbles up the effect of the pause). After the article, alarmist blogs rounded on Rose saying the IPCC had never said there would be a 2.0 C rise from 1999. So who’s telling the truth? I’m sure I heard the 0.2 C claim being bandied about till they saw the temps stalling.
Armageddon cults with their dire predictions for the imminent end of the world – regularly updated, whenever the drop dead date passes without anything ever happening – bear a striking resemblance to those made by today’s climate science models.
The gullible have always been prone to falling for scary fantasy stories – so nothing new there.
“Pauses as long as 15 years are rare in the simulations, and ‘we expect that [real-world] warming will resume in the next few years,’ the Hadley Centre group writes…”
Wishful thinking so far.
For the past 17 years, global warming has stopped. They can accurately label it a “pause” — but only if it resumes.
Global warming has not resumed. It is still stopped, and for all anyone knows, temperatures could just as well decline. Therefore, calling it a “pause” is only wishful thinking. It is also known as: ‘spin’. But is that kind of ‘spin’ really science?
It’s all about sunspots. This man made global warming religion crusade is nothing but tributes to fools. May the next Nobel Peace prize go to some one one who earned it not some excuse for controlling Cap and. Trade.
I have the Euro nations come into my resort store complaining about Cap and Trade Tax on all their plane Tickets. I introduce them to Sunspot Activity. It is nice to see the Brite squirm when they know they have been lied to and taxed again by the Euro Union with the blessing of the Crown. Swift upper lip is a constant.
“A natural swing in climate to the cool side has been holding greenhouse warming back, and such swings don’t last forever. “In the end, global warming will prevail,” says climate scientist Gavin
Schmidt of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City.”
So Gavin implicitly admits the models are wrong (as they can’t even predict natural stuff) but also he has no basis for assuming that the warming previously was not mostly a natural swing. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.
Scute:
Your post at January 14, 2014 at 2:15 pm asks
The IPCC AR4 did make such a prediction, but it was for “0.2°C per decade” over the first two decades of this century.
The failure of this warming to occur falsifies the models and amendments to the models to “emulate” the pause do not alter this because half of the warming was said to be “committed” from the past.
The explanation for this is in IPCC AR4 (2007) Chapter 10.7 which can be read at
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-7.html
It says there
In other words, it was expected that global temperature would rise at an average rate of “0.2°C per decade” over the first two decades of this century with half of this rise being due to atmospheric GHG emissions which were already in the system.
This assertion of “committed warming” should have had large uncertainty because the Report was published in 2007 and there was then no indication of any global temperature rise over the previous 7 years. There has still not been any rise and we are now way past the half-way mark of the “first two decades of the 21st century”.
So, if this “committed warming” is to occur such as to provide a rise of 0.2°C per decade by 2020 then global temperature would need to rise over the next 6 years by about 0.4°C. And this assumes the “average” rise over the two decades is the difference between the temperatures at 2000 and 2020. If the average rise of each of the two decades is assumed to be the “average” (i.e. linear trend) over those two decades then global temperature now needs to rise before 2020 by more than it rose over the entire twentieth century. It only rose ~0.8°C over the entire twentieth century.
Simply, the “committed warming” has disappeared (perhaps it has eloped with Trenberth’s ‘missing heat’?).
This disappearance of the “committed warming” is – of itself – sufficient to falsify the AGW hypothesis as emulated by climate models. If we reach 2020 without any detection of the “committed warming” then it will be 100% certain that all projections of global warming are complete bunkum.
And amendments to the models to “emulate” the pause do not alter this because half of the warming was said to be “committed” from the past.
Richard
@ur momisugly luysii Jan 14th 2013 at 1:57 pm
You got me thinking. These people use such weasel words that I wonder whether the 10 model runs were cherry-picked out of 100 or 1000 runs which showed no 10 year pauses (except the 10 cherry-picked). In my experience with wheedling out the truth behind their words, it is the omission of the truth over and above what is otherwise a true statement that tells us what they really did. The following quote from the article may well be true:
“In 10 modeling runs of 21st century climate totaling 700 years worth of simulation, long-term warming proceeded about as expected: 2.0°C by the end of the century. But along the way in the 700 years of simulation, about 17 separate 10-year intervals had temperature trends resembling that of the past decade—that is, more or less flat.” …..
but this statement doesn’t preclude the possibility that 1000 runs were done and 990 binned. Remember, these people have no shame in essentially telling big lies by omitting the truth e.g. at the AR5 SPM press conference and the Met Office’s grossly misleading response to David Rose’s first pause article in 2012.
I’m surprised I never thought to question the number of model runs before- I’ve heard of this study several times over the years. Despite having no trust at all in what they say, I still let that one slip through.
Sorry about the format error. This is a repost.
Scute:
Your post at January 14, 2014 at 2:15 pm asks
The IPCC AR4 did make such a prediction, but it was for “0.2°C per decade” over the first two decades of this century.
The failure of this warming to occur falsifies the models and amendments to the models to “emulate” the pause do not alter this because half of the warming was said to be “committed” from the past.
The explanation for this is in IPCC AR4 (2007) Chapter 10.7 which can be read at
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-7.html
It says there
In other words, it was expected that global temperature would rise at an average rate of “0.2°C per decade” over the first two decades of this century with half of this rise being due to atmospheric GHG emissions which were already in the system.
This assertion of “committed warming” should have had large uncertainty because the Report was published in 2007 and there was then no indication of any global temperature rise over the previous 7 years. There has still not been any rise and we are now way past the half-way mark of the “first two decades of the 21st century”.
So, if this “committed warming” is to occur such as to provide a rise of 0.2°C per decade by 2020 then global temperature would need to rise over the next 6 years by about 0.4°C. And this assumes the “average” rise over the two decades is the difference between the temperatures at 2000 and 2020. If the average rise of each of the two decades is assumed to be the “average” (i.e. linear trend) over those two decades then global temperature now needs to rise before 2020 by more than it rose over the entire twentieth century. It only rose ~0.8°C over the entire twentieth century.
Simply, the “committed warming” has disappeared (perhaps it has eloped with Trenberth’s ‘missing heat’?).
This disappearance of the “committed warming” is – of itself – sufficient to falsify the AGW hypothesis as emulated by climate models. If we reach 2020 without any detection of the “committed warming” then it will be 100% certain that all projections of global warming are complete bunkum.
And amendments to the models to “emulate” the pause do not alter this because half of the warming was said to be “committed” from the past.
Richard
Modellers standard answer is: yes, we accept that we didn’t quite get it right. The modelling you refer to was done x years ago when we had less data an less sophisticated methods, but….
Now we have data for additional x years and we have improved our modelling techniques, so you should trust us now!
And it’s working on the gullible.
dbstealey says:
January 14, 2014 at 2:25 pm
“Wishful thinking so far.
For the past 17 years, global warming has stopped. They can accurately label it a “pause” — but only if it resumes. ”
My thoughts exactly.
“In the end, global warming will prevail,” says climate scientist Gavin
Schmidt of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City.
This sounds like Gavin Schmidt is talking about a political war rather than science. It sounds like he is saying they will prevail no matter what they have to do to “win”. Why one would even suspect that he would use NASA to fudge the data records and would use government funds to help spread propaganda rather than truth.
Must just be my skeptical and suspicious nature.
Jolt is mere dysphemism for the familiar epithet JERK!
The greatest obstacle to progress is the illusion of knowledge.
Scute said:
“…alarmist blogs rounded on Rose saying the IPCC had never said there would be a 2.0 C rise from 1999”.
The WG1 report (and SPM) for AR4 in 2007 forecast warming of 0.2°C/decade for the following two decades. This was sharply reduced in AR5.
Because 2.0°C (from pre-industrial times) is the warming limit fixed at Copenhagen, there have been dozens of predictions by modelers, most of which spanned the period 2045-2075 as most likely. But it now appears this was all spin, probably generated by focus on the A2 and A1F1 emission scenarios, and the high end of the sensitivity range.
It’s clear from the Kerr article that mainstream science has never really believed the 2°C limit would be achieved before the end of the century.
If 2100 was the consensus date in 2009, it must now be well into next century – given that the IPCC has discounted the models by about 40% in their Stockholm non-expert assessment. And the whole expected process is lagging by at least 17 years.