By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
For 223 months, since January 1997, there has been no global warming at all (Fig. 1). This month’s RSS temperature shows the Pause setting a new record at 18 years 7 months.
It is becoming ever more likely that the temperature increase that usually accompanies an El Niño will begin to shorten the Pause somewhat, just in time for the Paris climate summit, though a subsequent La Niña would be likely to bring about a resumption and perhaps even a lengthening of the Pause.
Figure 1. The least-squares linear-regression trend on the RSS satellite monthly global mean surface temperature anomaly dataset shows no global warming for 18 years 7 months since January 1997.
The hiatus period of 18 years 7 months is the farthest back one can go in the RSS satellite temperature record and still show a sub-zero trend. The start date is not cherry-picked: it is calculated. And the graph does not mean there is no such thing as global warming. Going back further shows a small warming rate.
The Pause has now drawn blood. In the run-up to the climate conference in Paris this December, the failure of the world to warm at all for well over half the satellite record has provoked the climate extremists to resort to desperate measures to try to do away with the Pause.
First there was Tom Karl with his paper attempting to wipe out the Pause by arbitrarily adding a hefty increase to all the ocean temperature measurements made by the 3600 automated ARGO bathythermograph buoys circulating in the oceans. Hey presto! All three of the longest-standing terrestrial temperature datasets – GISS, HadCRUT4 and NCDC – were duly adjusted, yet again, to show more global warming than has really occurred.
However, the measured and recorded facts are these. In the 11 full years April 2004 to March 2015, for which the ARGO system has been providing reasonably-calibrated though inevitably ill-resolved data (each buoy has to represent 200,000 km3 of ocean temperature with only three readings a month), there has been no warming at all in the upper 750 m, and only a little below that, so that the trend over the period of operation shows a warming equivalent to just 1 C° every 430 years.
Figure 1a. Near-global ocean temperatures by stratum, 0-1900 m. Source: ARGO marine atlas.
And in the lower troposphere, the warming according to RSS occurred at a rate equivalent to 1 C° every 700 years.
Figure 1b. The least-squares linear-regression trend on the UAH satellite monthly global mean surface temperature anomaly dataset shows no global warming for 18 years 5 months since March 1997.
Then along came another paper, this time saying that the GISS global temperature record shows global warming during the Pause and that, therefore, GISS shows global warming during the Pause. This instance of argumentum ad petitionem principii, the fallacy of circular argument, passed peer review without difficulty because it came to the politically-correct conclusion that there was no Pause.
The paper reached its conclusion, however, without mentioning the word “satellite”. The UAH data show no warming for 18 years 5 months.
Figure 1c. The least-squares linear-regression trend on the UAH satellite monthly global mean surface temperature anomaly dataset shows no global warming for 18 years 5 months since March 1997.
For completeness, though no reliance can now be placed on the terrestrial datasets, here is the “warming” rate they show since January 1997:
Figure 1d. The least-squares linear-regression trend on the mean of the GISS, HadCRUT4 and NCDC terrestrial monthly global mean surface temperature anomaly datasets shows global warming at a rate equivalent to a little over 1 C° per century during the period of the Pause from January 1997 to July 2015.
Bearing in mind that one-third of the 2.4 W m–2 radiative forcing from all manmade sources since 1750 has occurred during the period of the Pause, a warming rate equivalent to little more than 1 C°/century is not exactly alarming. However, the paper that reported the supposed absence of the Pause was extremely careful not to report just how little warming the terrestrial datasets – even after all their many tamperings – actually show.
As always, a note of caution. Merely because there has been little or no warming in recent decades, one may not draw the conclusion that warming has ended forever. The trend lines measure what has occurred: they do not predict what will occur.
Furthermore, the long, slow build-up of the current el Nino, which has now become strongish and – on past form – will not peak till the turn of the year, is already affecting tropical temperatures and, as the thermohaline circulation does its thing, must eventually affect global temperatures.
Though one may expect the el Nino to be followed by a la Nina, canceling the temporary warming, this does not always happen. In short, the Pause may well come to an end and then disappear. However, as this regular column has stressed before, the Pause – politically useful though it may be to all who wish that the “official” scientific community would remember its duty of skepticism – is far less important than the growing divergence between the predictions of the general-circulation models and observed reality.
The divergence between the models’ predictions in 1990 (Fig. 2) and 2005 (Fig. 3), on the one hand, and the observed outturn, on the other, continues to widen. If the Pause lengthens just a little more, the rate of warming in the quarter-century since the IPCC’s First Assessment Report in 1990 will fall below 1 C°/century equivalent.
Figure 2. Near-term projections of warming at a rate equivalent to 2.8 [1.9, 4.2] K/century, made with “substantial confidence” in IPCC (1990), for the 307 months January 1990 to July 2015 (orange region and red trend line), vs. observed anomalies (dark blue) and trend (bright blue) at just 1 K/century equivalent, taken as the mean of the RSS and UAH v. 5.6 satellite monthly mean lower-troposphere temperature anomalies.
Figure 3. Predicted temperature change, January 2005 to July 2015, at a rate equivalent to 1.7 [1.0, 2.3] Cº/century (orange zone with thick red best-estimate trend line), compared with the near-zero observed anomalies (dark blue) and real-world trend (bright blue), taken as the mean of the RSS and UAH v. 5.6 satellite lower-troposphere temperature anomalies.
The page Key Facts about Global Temperature (below) should be shown to anyone who persists in believing that, in the words of Mr Obama’s Twitteratus, “global warming is real, manmade and dangerous”.
The Technical Note explains the sources of the IPCC’s predictions in 1990 and in 2005, and also demonstrates that that according to the ARGO bathythermograph data the oceans are warming at a rate equivalent to less than a quarter of a Celsius degree per century.
Key facts about global temperature
Ø The RSS satellite dataset shows no global warming at all for 223 months from January 1997 to July 2015 – more than half the 439-month satellite record.
Ø There has been no warming even though one-third of all anthropogenic forcings since 1750 have occurred since January 1997, during the pause in global warming.
Ø The entire RSS dataset from January 1979 to date shows global warming at an unalarming rate equivalent to just 1.2 Cº per century.
Ø Since 1950, when a human influence on global temperature first became theoretically possible, the global warming trend has been equivalent to below 1.2 Cº per century.
Ø The global warming trend since 1900 is equivalent to 0.75 Cº per century. This is well within natural variability and may not have much to do with us.
Ø The fastest warming rate lasting 15 years or more since 1950 occurred over the 33 years from 1974 to 2006. It was equivalent to 2.0 Cº per century.
Ø Compare the warming on the Central England temperature dataset in the 40 years 1694-1733, well before the Industrial Revolution, equivalent to 4.33 C°/century.
Ø In 1990, the IPCC’s mid-range prediction of near-term warming was equivalent to 2.8 Cº per century, higher by two-thirds than its current prediction of 1.7 Cº/century.
Ø The warming trend since 1990, when the IPCC wrote its first report, is equivalent to 1 Cº per century. The IPCC had predicted more than two and a half times as much.
Ø To meet the IPCC’s central prediction of 1 C° warming from 1990-2025, in the next decade a warming of 0.75 C°, equivalent to 7.5 C°/century, would have to occur.
Ø Though the IPCC has cut its near-term warming prediction, it has not cut its high-end business as usual centennial warming prediction of 4.8 Cº warming to 2100.
Ø The IPCC’s predicted 4.8 Cº warming by 2100 is well over twice the greatest rate of warming lasting more than 15 years that has been measured since 1950.
Ø The IPCC’s 4.8 Cº-by-2100 prediction is four times the observed real-world warming trend since we might in theory have begun influencing it in 1950.
Ø The oceans, according to the 3600+ ARGO buoys, are warming at a rate of just 0.02 Cº per decade, equivalent to 0.23 Cº per century, or 1 C° in 430 years.
Ø Recent extreme-weather events cannot be blamed on global warming, because there has not been any global warming to speak of. It is as simple as that.
Technical note
Our latest topical graph shows the least-squares linear-regression trend on the RSS satellite monthly global mean lower-troposphere dataset for as far back as it is possible to go and still find a zero trend. The start-date is not “cherry-picked” so as to coincide with the temperature spike caused by the 1998 el Niño. Instead, it is calculated so as to find the longest period with a zero trend.
The fact of a long Pause is an indication of the widening discrepancy between prediction and reality in the temperature record.
The satellite datasets are arguably less unreliable than other datasets in that they show the 1998 Great El Niño more clearly than all other datasets. The Great el Niño, like its two predecessors in the past 300 years, caused widespread global coral bleaching, providing an independent verification that the satellite datasets are better able than the rest to capture such fluctuations without artificially filtering them out.
Terrestrial temperatures are measured by thermometers. Thermometers correctly sited in rural areas away from manmade heat sources show warming rates below those that are published. The satellite datasets are based on reference measurements made by the most accurate thermometers available – platinum resistance thermometers, which provide an independent verification of the temperature measurements by checking via spaceward mirrors the known temperature of the cosmic background radiation, which is 1% of the freezing point of water, or just 2.73 degrees above absolute zero. It was by measuring minuscule variations in the cosmic background radiation that the NASA anisotropy probe determined the age of the Universe: 13.82 billion years.
The RSS graph (Fig. 1) is accurate. The data are lifted monthly straight from the RSS website. A computer algorithm reads them down from the text file and plots them automatically using an advanced routine that automatically adjusts the aspect ratio of the data window at both axes so as to show the data at maximum scale, for clarity.
The latest monthly data point is visually inspected to ensure that it has been correctly positioned. The light blue trend line plotted across the dark blue spline-curve that shows the actual data is determined by the method of least-squares linear regression, which calculates the y-intercept and slope of the line.
The IPCC and most other agencies use linear regression to determine global temperature trends. Professor Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia recommends it in one of the Climategate emails. The method is appropriate because global temperature records exhibit little auto-regression, since summer temperatures in one hemisphere are compensated by winter in the other. Therefore, an AR(n) model would generate results little different from a least-squares trend.
Dr Stephen Farish, Professor of Epidemiological Statistics at the University of Melbourne, kindly verified the reliability of the algorithm that determines the trend on the graph and the correlation coefficient, which is very low because, though the data are highly variable, the trend is flat.
RSS itself is now taking a serious interest in the length of the Great Pause. Dr Carl Mears, the senior research scientist at RSS, discusses it at remss.com/blog/recent-slowing-rise-global-temperatures.
Dr Mears’ results are summarized in Fig. T1:
Figure T1. Output of 33 IPCC models (turquoise) compared with measured RSS global temperature change (black), 1979-2014. The transient coolings caused by the volcanic eruptions of Chichón (1983) and Pinatubo (1991) are shown, as is the spike in warming caused by the great el Niño of 1998.
Dr Mears writes:
“The denialists like to assume that the cause for the model/observation discrepancy is some kind of problem with the fundamental model physics, and they pooh-pooh any other sort of explanation. This leads them to conclude, very likely erroneously, that the long-term sensitivity of the climate is much less than is currently thought.”
Dr Mears concedes the growing discrepancy between the RSS data and the models, but he alleges “cherry-picking” of the start-date for the global-temperature graph:
“Recently, a number of articles in the mainstream press have pointed out that there appears to have been little or no change in globally averaged temperature over the last two decades. Because of this, we are getting a lot of questions along the lines of ‘I saw this plot on a denialist web site. Is this really your data?’ While some of these reports have ‘cherry-picked’ their end points to make their evidence seem even stronger, there is not much doubt that the rate of warming since the late 1990s is less than that predicted by most of the IPCC AR5 simulations of historical climate. … The denialists really like to fit trends starting in 1997, so that the huge 1997-98 ENSO event is at the start of their time series, resulting in a linear fit with the smallest possible slope.”
In fact, the spike in temperatures caused by the Great el Niño of 1998 is almost entirely offset in the linear-trend calculation by two factors: the not dissimilar spike of the 2010 el Niño, and the sheer length of the Great Pause itself.
Curiously, Dr Mears prefers the terrestrial datasets to the satellite datasets. The UK Met Office, however, uses the satellite data to calibrate its own terrestrial record.
The length of the Great Pause in global warming, significant though it now is, is of less importance than the ever-growing discrepancy between the temperature trends predicted by models and the far less exciting real-world temperature change that has been observed. The el Nino may well strengthen throughout this year, reducing the length of the Great Pause. However, the discrepancy between prediction and observation continues to widen.
Sources of the IPCC projections in Figs. 2 and 3
IPCC’s First Assessment Report predicted that global temperature would rise by 1.0 [0.7, 1.5] Cº to 2025, equivalent to 2.8 [1.9, 4.2] Cº per century. The executive summary asked, “How much confidence do we have in our predictions?” IPCC pointed out some uncertainties (clouds, oceans, etc.), but concluded:
“Nevertheless, … we have substantial confidence that models can predict at least the broad-scale features of climate change. … There are similarities between results from the coupled models using simple representations of the ocean and those using more sophisticated descriptions, and our understanding of such differences as do occur gives us some confidence in the results.”
That “substantial confidence” was substantial over-confidence. For the rate of global warming since 1990 – the most important of the “broad-scale features of climate change” that the models were supposed to predict – is now below half what the IPCC had then predicted.
In 1990, the IPCC said this:
“Based on current models we predict:
“under the IPCC Business-as-Usual (Scenario A) emissions of greenhouse gases, a rate of increase of global mean temperature during the next century of about 0.3 Cº per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2 Cº to 0.5 Cº per decade), this is greater than that seen over the past 10,000 years. This will result in a likely increase in global mean temperature of about 1 Cº above the present value by 2025 and 3 Cº before the end of the next century. The rise will not be steady because of the influence of other factors” (p. xii).
Later, the IPCC said:
“The numbers given below are based on high-resolution models, scaled to be consistent with our best estimate of global mean warming of 1.8 Cº by 2030. For values consistent with other estimates of global temperature rise, the numbers below should be reduced by 30% for the low estimate or increased by 50% for the high estimate” (p. xxiv).
The orange region in Fig. 2 represents the IPCC’s medium-term Scenario-A estimate of near-term warming, i.e. 1.0 [0.7, 1.5] K by 2025.
The IPCC’s predicted global warming over the 25 years from 1990 to the present differs little from a straight line (Fig. T2).
Figure T2. Historical warming from 1850-1990, and predicted warming from 1990-2100 on the IPCC’s “business-as-usual” Scenario A (IPCC, 1990, p. xxii).
Because this difference between a straight line and the slight uptick in the warming rate the IPCC predicted over the period 1990-2025 is so small, one can look at it another way. To reach the 1 K central estimate of warming since 1990 by 2025, there would have to be twice as much warming in the next ten years as there was in the last 25 years. That is not likely.
But is the Pause perhaps caused by the fact that CO2 emissions have not been rising anything like as fast as the IPCC’s “business-as-usual” Scenario A prediction in 1990? No: CO2 emissions have risen rather above the Scenario-A prediction (Fig. T3).
Figure T3. CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, etc., in 2012, from Le Quéré et al. (2014), plotted against the chart of “man-made carbon dioxide emissions”, in billions of tonnes of carbon per year, from IPCC (1990).
Plainly, therefore, CO2 emissions since 1990 have proven to be closer to Scenario A than to any other case, because for all the talk about CO2 emissions reduction the fact is that the rate of expansion of fossil-fuel burning in China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, etc., far outstrips the paltry reductions we have achieved in the West to date.
True, methane concentration has not risen as predicted in 1990 (Fig. T4), for methane emissions, though largely uncontrolled, are simply not rising as the models had predicted. Here, too, all of the predictions were extravagantly baseless.
The overall picture is clear. Scenario A is the emissions scenario from 1990 that is closest to the observed CO2 emissions outturn.
Figure T4. Methane concentration as predicted in four IPCC Assessment Reports, together with (in black) the observed outturn, which is running along the bottom of the least prediction. This graph appeared in the pre-final draft of IPCC (2013), but had mysteriously been deleted from the final, published version, inferentially because the IPCC did not want to display such a plain comparison between absurdly exaggerated predictions and unexciting reality.
To be precise, a quarter-century after 1990, the global-warming outturn to date – expressed as the least-squares linear-regression trend on the mean of the RSS and UAH monthly global mean surface temperature anomalies – is 0.27 Cº, equivalent to little more than 1 Cº/century. The IPCC’s central estimate of 0.71 Cº, equivalent to 2.8 Cº/century, that was predicted for Scenario A in IPCC (1990) with “substantial confidence” was approaching three times too big. In fact, the outturn is visibly well below even the least estimate.
In 1990, the IPCC’s central prediction of the near-term warming rate was higher by two-thirds than its prediction is today. Then it was 2.8 C/century equivalent. Now it is just 1.7 Cº equivalent – and, as Fig. T5 shows, even that is proving to be a substantial exaggeration.
Is the ocean warming?
One frequently-discussed explanation for the Great Pause is that the coupled ocean-atmosphere system has continued to accumulate heat at approximately the rate predicted by the models, but that in recent decades the heat has been removed from the atmosphere by the ocean and, since globally the near-surface strata show far less warming than the models had predicted, it is hypothesized that what is called the “missing heat” has traveled to the little-measured abyssal strata below 2000 m, whence it may emerge at some future date.
Actually, it is not known whether the ocean is warming: each of the 3600 automated ARGO bathythermograph buoys takes just three measurements a month in 200,000 cubic kilometres of ocean – roughly a 100,000-square-mile box more than 316 km square and 2 km deep. Plainly, the results on the basis of a resolution that sparse (which, as Willis Eschenbach puts it, is approximately the equivalent of trying to take a single temperature and salinity profile taken at a single point in Lake Superior less than once a year) are not going to be a lot better than guesswork.
Unfortunately ARGO seems not to have updated the ocean dataset since December 2014. However, what we have gives us 11 full years of data. Results are plotted in Fig. T5. The ocean warming, if ARGO is right, is equivalent to just 0.02 Cº decade–1, equivalent to 0.2 Cº century–1.
Figure T5. The entire near-global ARGO 2 km ocean temperature dataset from January 2004 to December 2014 (black spline-curve), with the least-squares linear-regression trend calculated from the data by the author (green arrow).
Finally, though the ARGO buoys measure ocean temperature change directly, before publication NOAA craftily converts the temperature change into zettajoules of ocean heat content change, which make the change seem a whole lot larger.
The terrifying-sounding heat content change of 260 ZJ from 1970 to 2014 (Fig. T6) is equivalent to just 0.2 K/century of global warming. All those “Hiroshima bombs of heat” of which the climate-extremist websites speak are a barely discernible pinprick. The ocean and its heat capacity are a lot bigger than some may realize.
Figure T6. Ocean heat content change, 1957-2013, in Zettajoules from NOAA’s NODC Ocean Climate Lab: http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT, with the heat content values converted back to the ocean temperature changes in Kelvin that were originally measured. NOAA’s conversion of the minuscule warming data to Zettajoules, combined with the exaggerated vertical aspect of the graph, has the effect of making a very small change in ocean temperature seem considerably more significant than it is.
Converting the ocean heat content change back to temperature change reveals an interesting discrepancy between NOAA’s data and that of the ARGO system. Over the period of ARGO data, from 2004-2014, the NOAA data imply that the oceans are warming at 0.05 Cº decade–1, equivalent to 0.5 Cº century–1, or rather more than double the rate shown by ARGO.
ARGO has the better-resolved dataset, but since the resolutions of all ocean datasets are very low one should treat all these results with caution. What one can say is that, on such evidence as these datasets are capable of providing, the difference between underlying warming rate of the ocean and that of the atmosphere is not statistically significant, suggesting that if the “missing heat” is hiding in the oceans it has magically found its way into the abyssal strata without managing to warm the upper strata on the way. On these data, too, there is no evidence of rapid or catastrophic ocean warming.
Furthermore, to date no empirical, theoretical or numerical method, complex or simple, has yet successfully specified mechanistically either how the heat generated by anthropogenic greenhouse-gas enrichment of the atmosphere has reached the deep ocean without much altering the heat content of the intervening near-surface strata or how the heat from the bottom of the ocean may eventually re-emerge to perturb the near-surface climate conditions relevant to land-based life on Earth.
Most ocean models used in performing coupled general-circulation model sensitivity runs simply cannot resolve most of the physical processes relevant for capturing heat uptake by the deep ocean. Ultimately, the second law of thermodynamics requires that any heat which may have accumulated in the deep ocean will dissipate via various diffusive processes. It is not plausible that any heat taken up by the deep ocean will suddenly warm the upper ocean and, via the upper ocean, the atmosphere.
If the “deep heat” explanation for the Pause were correct (and it is merely one among dozens that have been offered), the complex models have failed to account for it correctly: otherwise, the growing discrepancy between the predicted and observed atmospheric warming rates would not have become as significant as it has.
Why were the models’ predictions exaggerated?
In 1990 the IPCC predicted – on its business-as-usual Scenario A – that from the Industrial Revolution till the present there would have been 4 Watts per square meter of radiative forcing caused by Man (Fig. T7):
Figure T7. Predicted manmade radiative forcings (IPCC, 1990).
However, from 1995 onward the IPCC decided to assume, on rather slender evidence, that anthropogenic particulate aerosols – mostly soot from combustion – were shading the Earth from the Sun to a large enough extent to cause a strong negative forcing. It has also now belatedly realized that its projected increases in methane concentration were wild exaggerations. As a result of these and other changes, it now estimates that the net anthropogenic forcing of the industrial era is just 2.3 Watts per square meter, or little more than half its prediction in 1990:
Figure T8: Net anthropogenic forcings, 1750 to 1950, 1980 and 2012 (IPCC, 2013).
Even this, however, may be a considerable exaggeration. For the best estimate of the actual current top-of-atmosphere radiative imbalance (total natural and anthropo-genic net forcing) is only 0.6 Watts per square meter (Fig. T9):
Figure T9. Energy budget diagram for the Earth from Stephens et al. (2012)
In short, most of the forcing predicted by the IPCC is either an exaggeration or has already resulted in whatever temperature change it was going to cause. There is little global warming in the pipeline as a result of our past and present sins of emission.
It is also possible that the IPCC and the models have relentlessly exaggerated climate sensitivity. One recent paper on this question is Monckton of Brenchley et al. (2015), which found climate sensitivity to be in the region of 1 Cº per CO2 doubling (go to scibull.com and click “Most Read Articles”). The paper identified errors in the models’ treatment of temperature feedbacks and their amplification, which account for two-thirds of the equilibrium warming predicted by the IPCC.
Professor Ray Bates gave a paper in Moscow in summer 2015 in which he concluded, based on the analysis by Lindzen & Choi (2009, 2011) (Fig. T10), that temperature feedbacks are net-negative. Accordingly, he supports the conclusion both by Lindzen & Choi (1990) (Fig. T10) and by Spencer & Braswell (2010, 2011) that climate sensitivity is below – and perhaps considerably below – 1 Cº per CO2 doubling.
Figure T10. Reality (center) vs. 11 models. From Lindzen & Choi (2009).
A growing body of reviewed papers find climate sensitivity considerably below the 3 [1.5, 4.5] Cº per CO2 doubling that was first put forward in the Charney Report of 1979 for the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and is still the IPCC’s best estimate today.
On the evidence to date, therefore, there is no scientific basis for taking any action at all to mitigate CO2 emissions.
Finally, how long will it be before the Freedom Clock (Fig. T11) reaches 20 years without any global warming? If it does, the climate scare will become unsustainable.
Figure T11. The Freedom Clock
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
In actuality, we are undergoing a vicious but undetectable heat wave, which will only become apparent in 99.073 years.
Are you losing your touch Christopher ?
I thought last month you warned us that El Nino might start another upward trend; terminating the hiatus / pause / stop / whatever .
Now you surprise us with an unprecedented new record.
Well we’ll take whatever we can get, considering the stiff opposition we face.
Wow your hiatus can now legally vote in the USA, and may yet be able to drink.
g
Beware – Another BGV effort to take your eyes away from the nut in the shell.
Had one like this yesterday.
Auto
The “Super El-Niño” has yet to officially appear! The “warm blob” of slightly warmer surface temperature water (& air too) that occupied the NorthEastern Pacific is slowly moving south off the CA coast and will join the already warming waters of the Eastern Equatorial Pacific.
But that is only 2/3 of what’s needed for the term “Super El-Niño.” The last is an Eastern movement of the “Equatorial Counter Current” which transports warm water from the Western Pacific back East, against the Trade Winds. But that requires warmer waters off Northern Australia and the Philippine Islands, and at this point they are not there. If the current (I guess this is a pun?) warm waters off Ecuador aided by the CA “Blob” get driven West by the Trades over the next month or so, we have a shot at the “Super” nomenclature, as the EQ Countercurrent containing a sufficient volume of warm water, needs to reach the Eastern Pacific in the December timeframe – the “Niño” comes from the Christ Child which is related to the Christmas Season when it “normally” appears.
The last time we had a decent EQ countercurrent was in spring 2014 – wrong time of year, as the very warm waters off the Australian and Philippine ended up crossing the Pacific and found colder waters off Ecuador and ended up dissipating as a result into a “false alarm” for the much ballyhooed “El Niño” that never happened. See the attached mp4, which starts out with exceptionally warm waters in the January Western Pacific, crosses from West to East in early spring and just plain fizzles out by summertime.
/Users/Tom/Desktop/New Desktop/animation-1-ssh-v-t300 version2.mp4
This time might be different if the conditions I mentioned above take hold. Still, even a 2/3 El Niño may bring some much needed rain to CA, and maybe avoid the crazy flooding they had when the 3/3 event last happened!
@tomwys1,
Joe Bastardi said it required cold waters around Australia, like 1997. Who’s right?
Please replace and insert this new link in my comment, as it was not viewable as a videoclip if you tried to access it:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4219691/Countercurrent.mp4
I’d like to reply to MRW as follows:
**********
MRW August 6, 2015 at 3:52 pm
@tomwys1,
But that requires warmer waters off Northern Australia and the Philippine Islands, and at this point they are not there.
Joe Bastardi said it required cold waters around Australia, like 1997. Who’s right?
**********
We both are, MRW, and with precision! Joe’s an exceptional Meteorologist and I’m pretty good too!
Here’s an (oversimplified) answer: Notice on the MP4 how the January Western Pacific is unusually hot as the clip begins playing, but observe the effect after the Equatorial CounterCurrent literally drains the Philippine and Australian coasts of the warm water. By summer of 2014, when the Super El Niño would be in full swing, the statement by Joe is absolutely on target, and that will be exactly the situation if what I call the 3/3 event happens.
Meteorology IS fascinating!!!
Enter the link between the quotes, but omit the quotes themselves!
So this would do the trick:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4219691/Countercurrent.mp4
Anyone who buys the hokeyschtick that Monckton is trying to sell you – I have a lovely bridge in London going cheap.
Already gone; it’s in Lake Havasu.
Well, I have a lovely water purification plant (actually several), built at a cost of a billion each, when the global warming rent seekers convinced the premiers that it would never rain again.
I don’t know in which month of 1979 the satellite era began, but I’ll be generous and assume January. In that case, it has lasted 36 years and six months. Thus, for over half that time, there has now been no warming.
Sturgis, did you note in the AUH update – http://www.drroyspencer.com/2015/08/uah-v6-0-global-temperature-update-for-july-2015-0-18-c/ – that this months temperature was lower than July 1988, when some guy named J. Hansen was spouting off about boiling oceans and forever rising temps. Did somewhere in DC I think.
Sound like your 75 anniversary is going well in SD.
Not so, since there is a step change in temperature (of about 0.25degC) in and around the lead up to and dispersion of the 1998 Super El Nino.
In the satellite data, there is no steady linear rise in temperature, but instead, just a single and isolated one off warming event, which event coincides with the 1998 Super El Nino and was probably caused by such event (although correlation is not in itself evidence of causation).
I have never seen anyone suggest that the 1998 Super El Nino was caused by the then current (high) levels of CO2, and it would appear that the Super El Nino of 1998 was an entirely natural event.
The upshot of this is that within the error bounds and limitations of our best measuring device, we are unable to detect the signal (if any) to CO2 and extract that signal from the noise of natural variation within the system itself.
Thanks!!
I think figure 1b’s figure caption is incorrect.
Is there a Nobel Prize for fact checking? Is there any prize for fact checking. There should be.
And the prize should be scaled according to the size of the Goliath claim or policy over reach it topples.
You really have no clue how to read the English language or how math works. Better to keep quiet than to show the world the depth of your ignorance.
BrianV: “…the calculations are not reliable” Are you suggesting that if the data set remained the same and the calculations were repeated, then the result would be different? No, the calculated start date would not change – it would be the same. But, with new information comes a change in the start date for a trend line with zero slope.
When the data set keeps changing (by adding new data points as they become available), I don’t understand why you’d think that the trend lines through those adding data points would have to retain their previous “start dates.”
Brian G Valentine
I regret then that you fail to understand any part of HOW the “Pause” is defined; what the actual “starting date” for the Pause is (Hint! it is today’s date = The latest measurement reported by the system being used); and the flat linear trend BACKWARDS from today’s date. Given those parameters, there is no possible way but random coincidence that the “Pause” can begin twice on the same date.
Unlike NASA/GISS/NOAA manipulated dates and data, the Pause is uniquely defined by only one term: How long has the myth of Global Warming been stopped. Naturally, not by the grace of GISS and the money of geopolitics.
[commenter using fake identity, deleted per WUWT policy –mod]
Anyway to find out what he said to me before it was deleted?
Funny that the comment thread about timelines is now all scrambled with respect to the timeline!
Does a Great el Niño like 1998 produce an extended or Great La Nina in its aftermath?
The start date is this month. Where it ends up depends on this months temperature. It is hind-casting looking backwards to see how far back in time can we look until the average temp shows a change. I can’t see why you have a problem understanding the concept. I get it and I have been known to be fairly dumb at times. So where does that leave you?
Yes, Brian, the Pause starts today and ends in the past. That is how it is defined. I understand that your mind is shut to all new thought, but hopefully one day your mind will open and allow just a little bit of light in.
This about asking the question how long in the recorded temperature record has there been no measurable amount of warming or cooling.
One could also ask how long has been a cooling trend. Or ask how long we had warming trend.
One can loosely say we had warming trend for over 100 years.
Or we have had warming prior to the end of the Little Ice Age which is said to have ended around 1850 AD. Or had the temperatures had not increase prior to 1850, the Little Ice Age would not have ended.
Or 1850 is identified as the time where most of glacier in world started to retreat and this trend has continued from the period 1850 to 2015 [165 years, so far]. Most don’t expect most of glaciers to start advancing within foreseeable future [next couple decades or more].
But for most the glaciers to stop advance and begin to retreat in 1850, there had to be warming prior
to 1850. Just as were average temperature were a present time to decline significantly one would then expect within a couple decades that most glacier would begin to advance. Or just as the cooling of 60’s and 70’s cause some people to incorrectly predict the beginning of a “ice age”.
The problem with saying how long we been in warming period is related lack of the accurate global measurement and how much warming per century. Less than .3 C per century is problematic due to lack of accurate measurement But perhaps one ask how long as been about .4 C of warming per century and I would say it’s more than 2 centuries.
But what relevant, is there is a theory that increase level of CO2 will cause a measurable and significant increase in global temperature, and modern measurements with the 18 year 7 month pause
indicates this is incorrect.
It still seems possible that we could measure how much warming is caused by CO2, but unlikely it causes much warming.
Brian is a pr!ck, mate. DNFTT. He’s probably 11.
“He’s probably 11.”
Certainly only low junior high mathematically !
I mean , talk about … derrrrrrr !!
If your favorite basketball player was on a hot streak shooting free throws and you wanted to find how many he had made in a row, you could start with his last score sheet and count backwards until you found where he last missed a shot. You could do a similar thing to find out how many games in a row your favorite soccer player had scored a goal. That’s not cherry picking. It’s simply a way to answer the question you want to know.
Snip. ~mod.
It’s where we are with Socrates. It’s where we’ve been for a long time:
The fact that scientific data showing that there has been no measurable change in any global climate parameter that can be directly attributed to carbon dioxide rising from 280 ppm to 400 ppm can easily be explained using worthless analogies and other manipulations of the English language.
Clownish, given that we have the data.
The start date (as defined by Monckton’s method), cannot move back any more unless there is an unexpectedly steep fall in temperature.
If temperatures remain around current levels, it will gradually creep forward through 1997. If anomalies for the next year remain at say, 0.3 , (in other words, no noticeable change over the next 12 months), the Pause will still start in 1997, but will be on increasingly shaky ground.
A year of anomalies above 0.375, and it will move forward to December 1997 by this time next year, before vanishing altogether.
A slight fall, to below 0.25, will see the Pause as robust as ever a year from now.
Brian, were you born under a bridge, or did you develop your remarkable troll skills through hard work and natural unpleasantness? What Monckton says is that the the data is searched from the present backward to determine the longest span of zero-gradient in the linear trend. The pause doesn’t “start” today despite what is being said by others, though anyone who actually read and understood Monckton’s essay would comprehend the use. Nor does it “start” at some arbitrarily designated date in the past. Instead the “pause” is a property of the data itself. All Monckton does is look at the calculated span of trendless data, which, as he points out has been growing longer. He also points out that real events like a strong EN could well put an end to any pause. That is because the “pause” is simply the calculation of a linear regression that shows zero trend. Consequently, if an EN pushes temps high enough, then, calculated by the method that Monckton describes, no zero trend can appear in the data for some time afterward (period being dependent entirely on the nature of the weather following the EN). Now, if you can’t understand that, don’t continue to confuse terms of art with standard English. Go back to school and take Stat 1 and learn about linear regression.
He has an emotional investment in not understanding that fact.
Mr. Monckton and or Mr. Watts,
Get this information to Donald Trumps org. before the debate tonight.
He can use it in an answer to make fools of the Climate Change guys in the debate.
Lots of eyes on this tonight, very useful moment in time.
No, no, no, the sifts are reliable.
Hi Chris. Another good post. But I have to wonder what Mears would have said if there had been no ’98 El Nino. (There could be children alive today who will never have heard a scientist swear – NOT)
“And the graph does not mean there is no such thing as global warming. Going back further shows a small warming rate.” and “Merely because there has been little or no warming in recent decades, one may not draw the conclusion that warming has ended forever. The trend lines measure what has occurred: they do not predict what will occur.” I wonder if Monckton’s critics ever notice statements like these. Probably not.
If we were to go back further in time and include say the MWP, or the Roman Warm Period, or the Minoan Warm Period, or the Holocene Optimum, it would show cooling!
The fact that there has been no warming for over 18 years proves that CO2 is not that big a player when it comes to climate.
Learn to deal with reality.
That the world has warmed, everyone agrees with.
The claim that CO2 was the major factor behind this warming has been disproven.
If that comment is directed at me, you misunderstand what I was trying to convey. I was trying to make a point in support of Monckton because I agree with his view. I meant that his critics probably don’t look at how reasonable his arguments are when they criticize him.
I was reminded about the “settled science” of silicone breast implants by something this morning. No science, just stupidity with people believing it. Yes, it had to be investigated, but any sort of reasonable attempt at honest statistics threw out any relationship. Fortunately, that is where it is at this moment, but still, folks went bankrupt over it.
My wife is a fairly intelligent person. I met her at MIT when I did my PhD there and she still works in the deep space plasma group at this point in time. She was totally unaware that then entire silicone breast implant thing was bologna once careful, objective studies were done. Sadly, folks do not have her background in science and medicine either.
A very insightful comment, ShrNfr, Respect.
I’ve lost track of the number of normally smart people who have declared that they just don’t have the time to study up on the issue for themselves.
They have been told by the media that 97% of the scientists who do study this issue have reached the same conclusion, and that is good enough for them.
The only problem I see with it is that asserting its length to the month gives it an unwarranted patina of precision .
You raise an excellent point!
The slope from January 1, 1997 is -0.000252. The slope from December 1, 1996 is +0.000141. Note that the negative slope is larger than the positive slope. This means that the “real” starting time for the period of 0 slope could be closer to December 1 than January 1.
Let us assume it is December 11, 1996 for argument sake. That means there is a 50% chance that the time for a slope of LESS than zero occurs after December 11, 1996. But there is also a 50% chance that the time for a slope of MORE than zero also occurs after December 11, 1996.
The bottom line is that there is a greater than 50% chance that the line has a negative slope from January 1, 1997.
“In other words, the pause slipped back 4 months from the present. Overall, the data you present shows that over the 13 months in which you claim “the calculated start date” is slipping towards the present, it actually slipped 9 months back away from the present.”
So pure.
“The Pause has now drawn blood. In the run-up to the climate conference in Paris this December, the failure of the world to warm at all for well over half the satellite record has provoked the climate extremists to resort to desperate measures to try to do away with the Pause”
Warmist have no blood, no heart, no science but an excess of BS!
The blood of many good sceptics litter the pavements outside the opulent and exotic meeting places habituated by the rent seeking zombies, trolling the halls of the disreputable, lies filled climate conference caper, all on the taxpayers dime! What a sight, Obama and the Pope holding hands with fake glycerin tear drops streaming down their cheeks,.Oh the humanity Paris will be another drool and drivel fest with lots of good food, private jets and 100 foot Prius 2 seat limos!
That guess is a result of a non-comprehension of Lord M’s statement and utterly wrong.
Brian, that’s already been explained to you numerous times by numerous posters. Your willful ignorance shows you up for the troll that you are. Time to get back under your bridge.
“…On Jul 3 2014 Monckton claims it started Sept 1996…
…On Jan 3, 2015 Moncktion claims it started Oct 1996…
…Now in this article he claims it started Jan 1997…
The real ugly is that as the temperatures continues to rise over the next few years, the calculated start date will continue to slip towards the present (as it is happening right now)”…
If your “real ugly” scenario were to actually be real, not only would the calculated start date slip towards the present, but the length would shorten until eventually there were a warming trend for all past dates.
Surely you’ve noticed by the dates you posted above that the pause is getting longer instead? The start dates aren’t “slipping towards the present.” When July 3, 2014 was the present, the pause started Sept 1996. Six months later, when the present was Jan 3, 2015, the pause started in Oct 1996. In other words, the pause slipped 5 months back from the present over that time period. And now here we are 7 months later, and the pause start has only shifted to 3 month later. In other words, the pause slipped back 4 months from the present. Overall, the data you present shows that over the 13 months in which you claim “the calculated start date” is slipping towards the present, it actually slipped 9 months back away from the present.
Good job, idiot.
Did you take note of the temperatures for the sequences you’ve highlighted? If so is the trend up or down?
Dr Mears writes:
“The denialists like to assume that the cause for the model/observation discrepancy is some kind of problem with the fundamental model physics, and they pooh-pooh…”
Methinks the pooh-pooh is coming out of your mouth-mouth…
Clearly then, the problem is with the real observations which simply refuse to comply with Dr. Mears’ model.
As Ernest (Lord) Rutherford said (from the list of famous Kiwi sayings):
” If you have to use statistics; you should have done a better experiment. ”
Seems like Dr. Mears agrees.
The experiments should continue, until they obey the models.
in 10-20 years they are going to retroactively adjust the present temp up anyway
And the troll jumps aboard as soon as possible to hijack the tread. Nice work, Brian. Since your view point can’t be supported, hopefully everyone will recognize that your posts are useless and skip them for the meaningful ones. I’ll not “honor” your work again since doing so merely draws attention to your ignorance, and as proof that Bush’s “no child left behind” program was a failure.
I personally enjoy an argument. Every claim nomatter its validity aught to have its place. Unpacking claims and arguments has given WUWT a voracity and credibility other sites lack due to their intolerance
Voracity or veracity?
Yeah that was veracity. Unless I was being poetical…I wasn’t.
Note to Brian VG. Here in the Village, if you dissent from the ‘message’, you are known as a troll
[Reply: He is worse than a troll, he is an identity thief. ~mod.]
Village Idiot:
You say
OK. I have no experience of your Village of idiots so you may be right, but so what?
Here in the real world (which includes WUWT) a troll is someone who attempts to disrupt a thread from its subject. The attempt often consists of presenting irrelevance usually with inclusion of offensive insults.
This thread is about the misnamed ‘Pause’.
Brian G Valentine is a troll attempting to disrupt the thread by persistently pretending the calculation of the length of the ‘Pause’ should not alter when the sampled data set alters which it does with every addition of an additional month of data.
And you are a troll attempting to disrupt the thread by pretending Brian G Valentine may not be a troll.
Richard
Apparently the same troll.
Richard, it’s your friend, Brian.
Usually imitation is a form of flattery – in this case, not so.
Brian G Valentine:
You are NOT my “friend”.
You are a sock puppet attempting to troll this thread by posting nonsense.
Richard
Brian G V:
I have a post in moderation that assumes your “flattery” comment is from the troll, but I have now seen posts on another thread which proclaim the real you is not the person who has been posting under your name in this thread.
I apologise if my curt rejection was to a post from the real you.
Richard
Wow! Where’s the warmest party?
Paris, this year.
Starting at the end violates the assumptions of the underlying data generating model.
What does this even mean? What is the “underlying data generation model?”
It is an oxymoron. Models don’t produce data.
Yes we know BEST use data generating models. As do NOAA and GISS.
Come on Stephen Mosher, explain this cryptic post!
What is the “underlying data generating model?” Which end is “the end” and which assumptions were violated. Inquiring minds want to know. : )
Bob Andersen said, “The only problem I see with it is that asserting its length to the month gives it an unwarranted patina of precision.” The question posed is how many months have past with no warming. The data are reported every month. How could one not report in to a precision of one month? The data for lower troposphere temperature are very precise, maybe as precise as +/- 0.08°C, but certainly far more precise than surface thermometers.
Furthermore, it’s impossible to cherry pick a start date when the question is how many months have passed with no warming. All you can do is calculate the trend and see how far back it goes. It’s just math.
Yah data generating. Haha
Comment bombers no need to do no ‘splainin’!
Climate Models generating data is an issue.
There is data and then there is derived data. Derived data is not necessarily a bad thing but is a disaster if derived incorrectly. I don’t think anyone wants their account earnings incorrectly overstated and than those overstated earnings used in determining tax liability.
Fortunately financial institutions are much better at deriving data than climate models. Not sure what this has to do with the method for determining the pause.
I believe he is asserting that it isn’t fair to analyze a time series that way. The argument is silly though, which is un-Mosher-like. The explicit description that Monckton offers of what he is looking at, and how it is being characterized (which is all that trend line does) doesn’t mistreat the data in any fashion. It doesn’t reorder anything, or require an operation that would do something nasty and non-Euclidean to the data. It isn’t even unsual.
Besides, the “data generating model” is to take daily temperatures, puree (homogenize) them into a soup, spread it over the planet, calculate how deep the soup is and determine if the depth has changed since the last pot was made. That is easily as ugly as politics or sausage manufacture and it is difficult imagine anything “violating” it or whatever could possibly pass for the “assumptions” justifying it.
Great.
Ø Recent extreme-weather events cannot be blamed on global warming, because there has not been any global warming to speak of. It is as simple as that.
What “extreme-weather events” ????
Statistics never apply to singular events.
There are ways to measure extreme weather.
Droughts can be defined, meaured and quantified. Same for hurricane/cyclone energy, tornado damage, etc, etc. Then plot those measured values over time.
Plotted over decades, extreme weather shows zero or declining trends.
What “extreme-weather events” ????
The extremely unremarkable weather we have been having. This is completely unprecedented!
Actually, I believe that the start date has not shifted.
Consider this;
July 2015 pause is 18 years and 6 months; ergo start date is Jan 1997.
Aug 2015 pause is 18 years and 7 months; ergo start date is Jan 1997.
Jan 1997 = Jan 1997; ergo the start date has not changed.
QED (Quite Easily Done).
g
The real beauty is that as the temperatures start to drop over the next few years, the hindcasted start date will go back further and further.
That will really confuse the poor little boy 🙂
[snip -fake commenter using assumed name -mod]
The really ugly thing is that some people cannot appreciate the real beauty of having all this temperature data to analyze, play with and speculate about.
The “pause” or “hiatus” is a convention that was invoked by the alarmists as a device to hide the decline in temperature from the peak of the 1997/98 El Nino and rationalize why temperatures were no longer increasing in line with their projections of doom.
One would think they’d be flattered that the sceptic realist community has embraced their favored terminology and is maintaining a close watch on how the global temperature is meandering, and that they’d be reassured that the meandering is well within natural norms.
But no. Now that the pause is lengthening and temperatures are not shooting up in line with the worst case scenario, the alarmists have no valid cause for alarm and yet they are more alarmed than ever.
Snip. ~mod.
AndyG55 August 6, 2015 at 3:53 pm
The real beauty is that as the temperatures start to drop over the next few years, the hindcasted start date will go back further and further..
////////////////////
Absolutely, and if perchance temperatures were to drop by say 0.25degC between now and say 2030, there would, at that time, be no statistically significant warming in the satellite record at all, ie., as from it inception in 1979.
Apart from the step caused by the NON-CO2 forced 1998 – 2001 ocean cooling event, which raised atmospheric temperatures by about 0.26C, there is basically NO WARMING in the entire satellite record.
The very slight warming before is basically cancelled by the slight cooling afterwards.
There is ABSOLUTELY ZERO CO2 WARMING SIGNATURE in the WHOLE of the satellite data record.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1979/plot/rss/from:2001.2/trend/plot/rss/from:1979/to:1997/trend/plot/rss/from:2001.2/trend/offset:-.26
It all depends how far back you want to look at the data. I suggest we go back some 2000 years which includes the medieval warm period and the Roman warm period and we will end up with a pause that goes back to more than 2000 years.
Have some fun, already! The pause clearly dates to the PETM!
“””””…..
Brian G Valentine
August 6, 2015 at 7:16 pm
George E. Smith.
..
On Jan 3 2015 Monckton said the pause started Oct 1996
..
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/01/03/the-great-pause-lengthens-again/ …..”””””
Well thank you so much for the information Brian.
What you don’t understand, is that Lord Monckton’s algorithm, not only calculates the slope of the trend line; but it also calculates the maximum slope value that would be considered ” not statistically different from zero ” FOR THAT DATA SET.
When you add a new data value to the set, that was not in the set, the previous month; not only does the trend line change, but so does the maximum slope value which for that new data set, would be considered not statistically different from zero.
Any anomalous (unprecedented) weather event that may occur from current month to next month, could upset, both the trend line, and the maximum not statistically different from zero slope, and that could change the length of the ” pause “.
If I’m not mistaken (it has happened) it was YOU who first mentioned the change from Dec 96 to Jam.97 for a one month update.
I simply pointed out that for this latest one month update, there was NO change in the start date, since you seem to be fixated on how the early date is calculated.
It is NOT selected, by anything but the data, and the algorithm.
You need to get a life; or a paying job.
g
[commenter using fake identity, deleted per WUWT policy –mod]
Not to change the subject too much, but what do they have against satellite data anyways? Is it because it doesn’t support their theories? Why haven’t we seen any new data from the OCO-2 satellite in over a year? Inquisitive minds want to know.
http://www.space.com/26101-nasa-orbiting-carbon-observatory2-mission-photos.html
Apparently, they have not yet determined quite how to mangle it into a form that supports their preconceptions. But, they are clever folks. I’m already groaning in anticipation of the hash they will assuredly make of it. Probably, they will find some kind of “error” in the measurements that has to be “adjusted” out.
I think this falls into a general leftist: if you see something work in practice, deny it if it doesn’t work in theory.
Lord help us if Roy Spencer and John Christy forsake religion. Then the satellite data will suffer the tortures of the damned and be cast into the same hell as the surface data.
Only one possible answer. It doesn’t support their agenda.
There is a contact at the top of the page of their website. Just ask them.
In the meantime …
http://www.earthmagazine.org/sites/earthmagazine.org/files/2014-12/PIA18934_0.jpg
I agree. I was looking for OCO-2 data yesterday but found nothing. Watts up with that?
Thomas
You say
Using special software the raw OCO-2 data can be downloaded from here.
The issue is that only the first month of the data was provided as this plot which shows there is no correspondence between ‘high’ levels of atmospheric CO2 and sites of emissions of CO2 from human activities. But that plot was only for one month.
If the lack of correspondence exists throughout a year then that would disprove the claims of the rising atmospheric CO2 being caused by human emissions of CO2 overloading the natural sinks of CO2.
The software to provide the plots exists; at very least, it existed when the first month of data was released. This poses the question as to why the use of that software was discontinued immediately when it was noticed that the plot of the first month of data seemed to provide an inconvenient indication.
An annual plot would provide definitive evidence before the COP in Paris in December, and I predicted that such a plot would not then be provided.
Richard
Thomas:
Sorry, I posted too soon.
I wrote
“The issue is that only the first month of the data was provided as this plot which shows there is no correspondence between ‘high’ levels of atmospheric CO2 and sites of emissions of CO2 from human activities. But that plot was only for one month.”
I intended to write
“The issue is that only the first month of the data was provided as this plot copied in this thread by AJBwhich shows there is no correspondence between ‘high’ levels of atmospheric CO2 and sites of emissions of CO2 from human activities. But that plot was only for one month.”
Sorry.
Richard
Thank you Richard Courtney. It is very odd that they have not published more data. I’m going to them why and when they intend to release more data.
That is a consequence of the algorithm. The start date can’t be known in advance since that is what the algorithm is looking for. It can’t be cherry-picked because it dependent upon the instantaneous end point. The end point is provided by the data source. The temperature can shift too. That is another characteristic of the end point. The only option available to anyone doing the calculation is to choose an end point that produces a desired result (not good science) and hide results of those that don’t.
In the current case I think the end points are released monthly. Running calcs on every end point then should show a trend of increasing span of time since global warming was evident in the record. It would be most convincing if the duration returned from every possible end point supports the claim that the duration is continually lengthening. A long-term trend is sufficient, though.
If you do a back calculation with 2 sd’s (as many climate scientists™ like to use) then a ZERO trend is statistically supportable back some 26 years in the RSS data.