By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
The dwindling number of paid or unpaid trolls commenting here – dwindling because the less dishonest and less lavishly-funded ones realize the game is up – do not like The Pause. They whine that in order to demonstrate a long period without global warming I have cherry-picked my start date.
No, I have calculated it. I have not, as they suggest, naïvely cherry-picked 1998 as my starting-point so as to take unfair advantage of the Great El Niño of that year. I have not picked 1998 at all.
Instead have determined by iterative calculation the earliest month in the record that shows no global warming at all as far as the present. On the RSS dataset, which I shall use for the analysis to follow, that month is September 1996, giving 17 years 6 months without any global warming.
This graph has become famous. Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace (which is now, with frantic mendacity, trying to disown him), displayed it recently on Fox News, followed by weeping and gnashing of Medicaid dentures right across the leftosphere. Marc Morano has the graph as a lead indicator at the inestimable ClimateDepot.com. It is popping up all over the blogs.
The true-believers wring their tentacles and moan about cherry-picking. So let us deal with that allegation, and discover something fascinating on the way.
To put an end to the allegation that we have cherry-picked our start-date, let us start at the beginning of the satellite record. So here you go, from January 1979.
Oo-er! Instead of a zero trend, we now have a terrifying increase in global temperature, at a rate equivalent to a shockingly sizzling – er – 1.24 Cº per century. That is below the 1.7 Cº/century near-term warming predicted in IPeCaC’s 2013 Fifth Assessment Report. Well below the 2 Cº/century predicted in the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report. Scarcely more than a third of the 3.5 Cº/century mid-range estimate in the 1990 First Assessment Report. A quarter of the 5 Cº/century predicted by the over-excitable James Hansen in front of Congress in 1988.
Evidently, the predictions are becoming less and less extreme as time passes. But they are still well over the top compared with reality. Let us illustrate IPeCaC’s latest version of the “consensus” prediction, comparing it with the RSS real-world observation:
Whichever dataset one chooses, whichever starting point one picks, the rate of global warming predicted by the models has been and remains grossly, flagrantly, egregiously in excess of what is actually happening in the real world. It is this central truth that every attempt to explain away the Pause fails to get to grips with.
One of the slyest ways to pretend the Pause does not exist is offered by “Tamino”, one of the Druids’ white-robed, snaggle-bearded, bushy-eyebrowed archpriests.
“Tamino”, taking time off from his sun-worshiping duties at Stonehenge, invites us to suppose that in 1997 we had predicted that the previously-observed warming rate would either continue as is or turn horizontal. Where would the subsequent annual data points lie?
Tamino’s excited conclusion is that “fourteen of sixteen years were hotter than expected even according to the still-warming prediction, and all sixteen were above the no-warming prediction (although one is just barely so)”.
Phew! Global warming has not Paused after all!! The Earth still has a fever!!! Global temperature is continuing to rise – and at a faster rate than before!!!! What a relief!!!!! We said we were more certain about future global warming than about anything in the whole wide world before, evaah – and we were right!!!!!!
Up to a point, Lord Copper. The truth, if one goes looking for it rather than bashing and mashing the data till they fit the desired outcome, is much more interesting.
First, it is not appropriate to use annual data points when monthly data are available. Using the monthly data multiplies 12-fold the degrees of freedom in the analysis, and makes the picture clearer.
Secondly – and this cannot be said too often – trend lines on observed data, particularly where the data are known to be stochastic and the behavior of the underlying object chaotic, are not, repeat not, repeat not a prediction.
Let us play Tamino’s game of breaking the RSS dataset into pieces. But let us break it into three pieces, not two. Let us look at three periods: January 1979 to January 1993, January 1993 to January 1999, and January 1999 to February 2014.
It was Fred Singer who first pointed out this most startling characteristic of the post-1979 temperature record to me. We were sitting in front of the big computer screen and playing with the temperature datasets using my graphing engine in the library at Rannoch, overlooking the loch and the misty mountains beyond.
An otter was flip-flopping past the window, and the ospreys (a ménage a trois that year, with two adult males, a female and two chicks in the nest) were swooping down to catch the occasional trout.
Fred told me there had been very little trend in global temperature until the Great el Niño of 1998, and very little trend thereafter. But, he said, there had been a remarkable step-change in the data in the short period culminating in the Great el Niño.
The trend till January 1993 and the trend from January 1999 are indeed near-identical at just over a quarter of a Celsius degree per century. Not a lot to worry about there. But the trend over the six years January 1993 to January 1999 was a lulu. It was equivalent to a spectacular 9.4 Cº per century.
So, what caused that sudden upward lurch in global temperature? Since absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation, we know it was not CO2: for CO2 concentration has been rising monotonically, with no sudden leaps and bounds.
Indeed, no phenomenon in the atmosphere could really have caused this lurch. True, there had been a naturally-occurring reduction in cloud cover over the 18 years 1983-2001, and that had caused a forcing of 2.9 Watts per square meter (Pinker et al., 2005), greater by 25% than the entire 2.3 Watts per square meter of manmade forcing from all sources in the 263 years since 1750.
However, as Dr Pinker’s graph shows, the trend in cloud cover forcing was relatively steady, and there was actually a drop in the cloud-cover forcing in 1993-5.
Since solar activity did not change enough over the period to cause the sudden hike in global temperature, there does not appear to have been any external reason why, for six years, temperature should suddenly have risen at a mean rate equivalent to almost 1 Cº per decade.
Nor was there any more land-based volcanic activity than usual: and, if there had been, it would if anything have caused a temporary cooling.
When the impossible has been eliminated, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. The culprit is plainly not atmospheric, not extra-terrestrial, not land-based, but oceanic.
To kick atmospheric temperature permanently upward by almost 0.3 Cº, and to boot the centennial trend northward by almost a full Celsius degree, something drastic must have happened beneath the waves.
Perhaps the still poorly-monitored pattern of overturning that takes warmer water from the mixed upper stratum of the ocean to the much colder benthic strata temporarily slowed.
Perhaps we shall never know. Our ability to monitor changes in ocean heat content, negligible today, was non-existent then, for the ARGO buoys were not yet on duty: and even today, as Willis Eschenbach has pointed out, the coverage is so sparse that it is the equivalent of taking a single temperature and salinity profile of the whole of Lake Superior less than once a year.
Perhaps there was massive subsea volcanic activity in the equatorial eastern Pacific, beginning in 1993/4 and peaking in 1998. Again, we shall never know, for we do not monitor the 3.5 million subsea volcanoes on Earth (the largest of which, occupying a footprint greater than any other in the entire solar system, was only discovered last year).
But the curious thing about this sudden and remarkable warming over just six years – let us call it the Singer Event – is that so very little consideration is given to it in the ramblings of IPeCaC.
The Singer Event accounts for fully four-fifths of the global warming trend across the entire satellite era. Without it, no one would still be wailing about global warming.
But will you find the Singer Event mentioned or discussed in any of IPeCaC’s Summaries for Policymakers from 2001 onward? Er, no. It doesn’t fit the story-line.
Bluntly, unless and until the cause of the Singer Event is nailed down there is nothing whatsoever in the global temperature record during the satellite era to suggest that CO2 is having any detectable effect on global temperature at all.
Finally, just in case any of the trolls want to whinge about why I have confined the analysis to RSS, I prefer RSS because, alone of the five datasets, it correctly represents the 1998 Great el Niño as being significantly bigger than any other el Niño in the instrumental record.
There have been two previous Great el Niños in the past 300 years. Each of those, like the 1998 event and unlike any other in the global instrumental record, caused corals to bleach worldwide on a large scale. Bleaching is a natural defense mechanism against sudden ocean warming, and the corals have recovered from it just fine, as they have evolved to do.
But the corals are a testament to the fact that the Singer Event is something atypical. And it is the RSS dataset that best reflects how exceptional the Singer Event was.
But here, just to please the trolls, is the entire global temperature record since January 1979, taken as the mean of all five global temperature datasets (it is pardonable to take the mean, because although the coverages and measurement methods vary the discrepancies are small enough that they tend to cancel each other over a long enough period).
The bottom line is that the warming trend since 1979 on the RSS dataset was 0.44 Cº, while on the mean of all the datasets it was not vastly greater at 0.51 Cº. So, when the trolls argue that I am cherry-picking, they are arguing pettily about hundredths of a degree.
The Singer Event is highly visible in the five-datasets graph, and still more so in the earlier RSS graph.
I should be most interested in readers’ comments on the Singer Event, because I have been invited to contribute a paper to the reviewed literature about it. All help, even from the trolls, would be very much appreciated.
Instead of a zero trend, we now have a terrifying increase in global temperature, at a rate equivalent to a shockingly sizzling – er – 1.24 Cº per century. That is…Scarcely more than a third of the 0.35 Cº/century mid-range estimate in the 1990 First Assessment Report. A quarter of the 0.5 Cº/century predicted by the over-excitable James Hansen in front of Congress in 1988.
I’m puzzled. Have we misplaced a decimal point here?
“Scarcely more than a third of the 0.35 Cº/century mid-range estimate in the 1990 First Assessment Report. ”
3.5C?
From what I recall of my brief intro to catastrophe theory decades ago, a sudden step change to a new baseline is common in systems where you have a number of chaotically coupled variables. There was even a little demo with rubber bands and a rotating disc, you could maneuver the various bands over quite a range before the position of the disc changed much, but past a certain point it would suddenly shift to another semi stable position. This is pretty analogous to what we see in climate, and most assuredly not the result of a change in a single variable that the whole system is dependent on. Natural systems seldom seem to vary monotonically with one variable.
I think the oceans and their currents and oscillations are the prime suspects, the atmosphere is just too small a heat sink to do much, and down welling IR is absorbed in the top of the oceans and contributes little to ocean heat content.
Typo? Should that have read: “A quarter of the 0.5 Cº/[DECADE] predicted by the over-excitable James Hansen in front of Congress in 1988.”
if the question is ‘how long has it been since there has been any statistically significant warming?’ and the start point is the present and you work your way back, it is impossible to cherry pick a start date…
“1.24 Cº per century. That is below the 1.7 Cº/century near-term warming predicted in IPeCaC’s 2013 Fifth Assessment Report. Well below the 2 Cº/century predicted in the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report. Scarcely more than a third of the 0.35 Cº/century mid-range estimate in the 1990 First Assessment Report. A quarter of the 0.5 Cº/century”
Units!
I remember the 1998 El Nino in eastern Australia. Very calm and warm a summer it was for the surfers, hardly any ocean swells or cyclones at all. So I naturally learnt then to correlate warmer, at least in the SW Pacific, with less storminess, perhaps because a Pacific Ocean where heat is more evenly distributed means less temperature differential and therefore less storms, so we might, based on this, expect less storminess under global warming (the exact opposite of what we are often told). Also I read somewhere that the reason Magellan called it the ‘Pacific’, was because, despite being much bigger was much more ‘peaceful’ than the Atlantic, again possibly because, being larger, heat is more evenly distributed from the poles to the equator.
I have no problem with the Singer event around 1998 being some kind of widespread oceanic circulation and/or turnover event. This is not uncommon on the east coast of Australia for example, the temperature and strength of the east Australian current varies markedly from year to year, and can change character in a matter of days, with e.g. localised upwelling events, but which never last very long. However note that the temperature in the datasets rebounds down from the very high 1998 warming peak fairly quickly, suggesting some sort of sudden event that could also NOT be maintained, which suggests a sudden ‘release’ from a build up scenario, rather than a ‘gradual change’ type of scenario, very much like an oceanic downwelling/upwelling etc.
First, I am curious as to where you get the name “Singer Event”.
Second, the analysis does demonstrate how little we know about the inputs into the Earth’s climate. Clearly the climate does have inputs. And just as clearly the emphasis on CO2 does not appear to be justified.
“Oo-er! Instead of a zero trend, we now have a terrifying increase in global temperature, at a rate equivalent to a shockingly sizzling – er – 1.24 Cº per century. That is below the 1.7 Cº/century near-term warming predicted in IPeCaC’s 2013 Fifth Assessment Report. Well below the 2 Cº/century predicted in the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report. Scarcely more than a third of the 0.35 Cº/century mid-range estimate in the 1990 First Assessment Report. A quarter of the 0.5 Cº/century predicted by the over-excitable James Hansen in front of Congress in 1988″.
Typo alert
I thought RSS was a better data set because it includes more of the historical network data and less extrapolation into polar regions which skew the other data sets to a greater extent. Also, the homogenizing techniques that are used for this were calibrated to sat data specifically during the abnormally high warming rate period in question, further biasing the original data.
Seem to have jumped from deg/century to deg/decade mid-stream there.
This is what Bob Tisdale has been saying for years.
Excellent. Actual science based on real data not some computer prediction.
Comparing the Pinker 2005 plot to the cloud cover plot at the very bottom of http://tinyurl.com/nbnh7hq :
They have a lot of similarity, although with some differences as fits how Pinker 2005 is plotting a somewhat different quantity than the low cloud cover of the latter. Pinker 2005 is plotting flux anomalies for solar radiation reaching the surface, as should be affected by in part by haze, smog, smoke, etc. Also, there may be satellite calibration error in ISCCP data around 1994, suggested to impact high cloud cover data but also perhaps more, discussed by Dr. Shaviv in the Hebrew University debate.*
In temperature, there is of course an El Nino spike especially around 1998, but, in the preceding, I’m talking about cloud cover (related, as albedo change is the main climate driver, but not the same quantity).
That last plot in the prior link (and the many illustrations for other quantities above it) shows much relationship to cosmic ray flux meanwhile; this is a case where a picture is worth a thousand words, and, to see so, look at the plotting of both in the prior link (which also debunks some CAGW movement tricks attempting to hide it, since they have particularly targeted what their best operatives secretly recognize to be their greatest threat).
Although I am more emphasizing the prior link, note the Pinker 2005 paper (not linked in the article) is as a PDF at http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/science-2005-pinker-850-4.pdf
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* http://www.sciencebits.com/HUdebate
Very interesting phenomenon this “Singer step change”. I have been always intrigued by the speed of rotation of this sphere we live on. This speed and its changes are referred to as LOD influencing also weather patterns. see e.g. :http://image.gsfc.nasa.gov/poetry/ask/a11608.html as a first reference. El Ninos are concurrent with a lengthening of LOD (Length of Day). As rotation dynamics influence density differences (temperature difference eg in water and air) I would not be surprised of a causal relationship.
I would argue the 1993-1999 period for selection is incorrect due to volcanic forcing from Mt. Pinatubo. After its eruption in 1991, you can see a clear and immediate downward trend in the data to 1993. We have a well-established scientific mechanism for short-term decreases in temperature due to volcanic eruption, and it’s borne out beautifully by the data. Looking at your average chart, if I disregard the cooling 1991-1993, assuming it’s (primarily) due to the eruption, I see a fairly consistent, linear, upward trend from 1979 through at least 2005, at which point temperatures appear to have leveled off. Mind you, this isn’t calculated in any way, but given the eruption, a consistent linear trend looks to be much more plausible than looking at just the 1993-1999 period.
If we go with your step change theory, your same graph appears to show .6 C of warming in the six-year period between 1985 and 1991, or 0.6 C of warming in the two-year period between 2008 and 2010. Granted, my examples are more cherry-picked than your six-year example (they start at the coldest point and end at the warmest), but they also don’t have as strong a scientific explanation for the observed cooling prior to their start.
devijvers says:
March 19, 2014 at 7:30 am
This is what Bob Tisdale has been saying for years
So, maybe we should call it the Tisdale/Singer Event?
1993 to 1999 represented a period of great political upheaval in the Soviet bloc countries and a large drop in the number of weather stations reporting. Could it be a difficulty in transitioning from one data series to another? How continuous are the data sets really?
I seem to recall a certain tendency to use UAH until a year or two ago. Why the sudden affection for RSS?
Don’t forget the biggest cherry pick of all……… 1979
and the biggest step change of all…. cooling the past
As always, Lord Monckton, an excellent presentation, which is guaranteed to have the bedwetters buying new sheets in bulk from Bed, Bath and Beyond…
One unique phenomenon that took place during the rapid global temperature rise from 1978~1998 were the 2nd and 3rd strongest back-to-back solar cycles in recorded history that occurred from 1976~1996. These two solar cycles marked the end of the strongest 63-year string of solar cycles (1933~1996) in 11,400 years (Solanki et al).
It’s also interesting to note that when the last strong solar cycle ended in 1996, so did the RSS global warming trend.
I understand that correlation doesn’t equate causation, but perhaps the rapid rise of ocean/atmospheric temperatures could be partially explained by these, dare I say it…, unprecedented solar cycles.
The jury is still out on the efficacy of the Svensmark Effect, but CERN’s CLOUD experiment results do hint that Dr. Svensmark may be on to something..
Anyway, Lord Monckton, another entertaining and informative post.
Thank you.
It’s interesting that you mention submarine volcanoes – it’s a subject most seem to avoid as we really know nothing about them. The recently discovered chain of 100+ active volcanoes stretching north between Iceland and Svalbard for example some of which are now nearing the surface must surely be an influence on arctic ice melt as well as OHC. The chain of 100+ discovered running north along NZ’s fault line is yet another. These active chains must deliver massive amounts of heat into the oceans and variations in their activity due to planetary changes could possibly account for sudden changes in OHC . And what of the active chains we haven’t yet discovered?
Most interesting breakdown of the data. There have been some significant Coral Bleaching events which would fit into the steep warming period too although I have yet to be convinced that temperature alone is the cause of these events as the corals in the warmer lagoons have, by my observations, recovered first and are anyway subject to much higher temperatures than the corals on the outside of the reef. If there was indeed a major undersea volcanic event, maybe a change in the water quality is involved.
Ignore if prior comment appears:
Comparing the Pinker 2005 plot to the cloud cover plot at the very bottom of http://tinyurl.com/nbnh7hq :
They have a lot of similarity, although with some differences as fits how Pinker 2005 is plotting a somewhat different quantity than the low cloud cover of the latter. Pinker 2005 is plotting flux anomalies for solar radiation reaching the surface, as should be affected by in part by haze, smog, smoke, etc. Also, there may be satellite calibration error in ISCCP data around 1994, suggested to impact high cloud cover data but also perhaps more, discussed by Dr. Shaviv in the Hebrew University debate.*
In temperature, there is of course an El Nino spike especially around 1998, but, in the preceding, I’m talking about cloud cover (related, as albedo change is the main climate driver, but not the same quantity).
That last plot in the prior link (and the many illustrations for other quantities above it) shows much relationship to cosmic ray flux meanwhile; this is a case where a picture is worth a thousand words, and, to see so, look at the plotting of both in the prior link (which also debunks some CAGW movement tricks attempting to hide it, since they have particularly targeted what their best secretly recognize to be their greatest threat).
Although I am more emphasizing the prior link, note the Pinker 2005 paper (not linked in the article) is as a PDF at
Marcos says:
March 19, 2014 at 7:17 am
if the question is ‘how long has it been since there has been any statistically significant warming?’ and the start point is the present and you work your way back, it is impossible to cherry pick a start date…
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You beat me to it, and the fact that warmist commenters can’t grasp even this simple fact is a testament to what a scientifically stupid bunch of dupes they really are (as if we didn’t already know).