No global warming at all for 18 years 9 months – a new record
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
As the faithful gather around their capering shamans in Paris for the New Superstition’s annual festival of worship, the Pause lengthens yet again. One-third of Man’s entire influence on climate since the Industrial Revolution has occurred since February 1997. Yet the 225 months since then show no global warming at all (Fig. 1). With this month’s RSS temperature record, the Pause beats last month’s record and now stands at 18 years 9 months.
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 9 months since February 1997, though one-third of all anthropogenic forcings have occurred during the period of the Pause.
The accidental delegate from Burma provoked shrieks of fury from the congregation during the final benediction in Doha three years ago, when he said the Pause had endured for 16 years. Now, almost three years later, the Pause is almost three years longer.
It is worth understanding just how surprised the modelers ought to be by the persistence of the Pause. NOAA, in a very rare fit of honesty, admitted in its 2008 State of the Climate report that 15 years or more without global warming would demonstrate a discrepancy between prediction and observation. The reason for NOAA’s statement is that there is supposed to be a sharp and significant instantaneous response to a radiative forcing such as adding CO2 to the air.
The steepness of this predicted response can be seen in Fig. 1a, which is based on a paper on temperature feedbacks by Professor Richard Lindzen’s former student Professor Gerard Roe in 2009. The graph of Roe’s model output shows that the initial expected response to a forcing is supposed to be an immediate and rapid warming. But, despite the very substantial forcings in the 18 years 9 months since February 1997, not a flicker of warming has resulted.
Figure 1a: Models predict rapid initial warming in response to a forcing. Instead, no warming at all is occurring. Based on Roe (2009).
At the Heartland and Philip Foster events in Paris, I shall reveal in detail the three serious errors that have led the models to over-predict warming so grossly.
The current el Niño, as Bob Tisdale’s distinguished series of reports here demonstrates, is at least as big as the Great el Niño of 1998. The RSS temperature record is beginning to reflect its magnitude.
From next month on, the Pause will probably shorten dramatically and may disappear altogether for a time. However, if there is a following la Niña, as there often is, the Pause may return at some time from the end of next year onward.
The hiatus period of 18 years 9 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.
And yes, the start-date for the Pause has been inching forward, though just a little more slowly than the end-date, which is why the Pause continues on average to lengthen.
So long a stasis in global temperature is simply inconsistent not only with the extremist predictions of the computer models but also with the panic whipped up by the rent-seeking profiteers of doom rubbing their hands with glee in Paris.
The UAH dataset shows a Pause almost as long as the RSS dataset. However, the much-altered surface tamperature datasets show a small warming rate (Fig. 1b).
Figure 1b. 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 1.1 C° per century during the period of the Pause from January 1997 to September 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.
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.
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 discrepancy 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 309 months January 1990 to September 2015 (orange region and red trend line), vs. observed anomalies (dark blue) and trend (bright blue) at just 1.02 K/century equivalent, taken as the mean of the RSS and UAH v.6 satellite monthly mean lower-troposphere temperature anomalies.
Figure 3. Predicted temperature change, January 2005 to September 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.6 satellite lower-troposphere temperature anomalies.
As ever, 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. In a rational scientific discourse, those who had advocated extreme measures to prevent global warming would now be withdrawing and calmly rethinking their hypotheses. However, this is not a rational scientific discourse. On the questioners’ side it is rational: on the believers’ side it is a matter of increasingly blind faith. The New Superstition is no fides quaerens intellectum.
Key facts about global temperature
These facts 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”.
Ø The RSS satellite dataset shows no global warming at all for 225 months from February 1997 to Octber 2015 – more than half the 442-month satellite record.
Ø There has been no warming even though one-third of all anthropogenic forcings since 1750 have occurred since the Pause began in February 1997.
Ø The entire RSS dataset for the 442 months December 1978 to September 2015 shows global warming at an unalarming rate equivalent to just 1.13 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 close to thrice 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. The headline graph in these monthly reports begins in 1997 because that is as far back as one can go in the data and still obtain a zero trend.
Fig. T1a. Graphs for RSS and GISS temperatures starting both in 1997 and in 2001. For each dataset the trend-lines are near-identical, showing conclusively that the argument that the Pause was caused by the 1998 el Nino is false (Werner Brozek and Professor Brown worked out this neat demonstration).
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 Pause, 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.
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.
Figure T7. Near-global ocean temperatures by stratum, 0-1900 m, providing a visual reality check to show just how little the upper strata are affected by minor changes in global air surface temperature. Source: ARGO marine atlas.
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.
In early October 2015 Steven Goddard added some very interesting graphs to his website. The graphs show the extent to which sea levels have been tampered with to make it look as though there has been sea-level rise when it is arguable that in fact there has been little or none.
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. T8):
Figure T8. 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 (Fig. T9):
Figure T9: 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. T10):
Figure T10. 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. T11) and by Spencer & Braswell (2010, 2011) that climate sensitivity is below – and perhaps considerably below – 1 Cº per CO2 doubling.
Figure T11. 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. T12) reaches 20 years without any global warming? If it does, the climate scare will become unsustainable.
Figure T12. The Freedom Clock edges ever closer to 20 years without global warming
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Sir Lord Monckton, thank you for all your great videos and all the effort you have put into defeating this sham !!! I know and have seen some of the price you have personally paid for not towing the line !!!
A question for LM of B ?
Christopher, when you do the least squares fit of the trend line to the data, do you take the Y co-ordinate difference between the data point and the line, or do you take the perpendicular distance of the point from the line, which will be different if the trend is not zero ??
Does it make any difference to the result, when the trend line is not zero slope ?
G
The least-squares trend is determined using algorithms available in any Statistics 101 textbook. The algorithms determine the y-intersect and slope of the line from the data. The residuals (distances between each data point and the trend-line) are vertical distances. This regime is followed regardless of the slope of the line.
The algorithm selects those values of the y-intersect and the slope that have the effect of minimizing the sum of the squares of the residuals, for there is no algorithm to minimize the sum of the residuals themselves.
Thanx
g
Just a small note of statistical caution. OLS routines will correctly calculate regression slopes using the BLUE theorem. But not the statistical uncertainty around that slope, because temperature time series are autocorrelated. McKittricks 2014 paper corrects for this, and his conclusion is as interesting as this post. His metric is slightly different: not slope, but not statistically meaningful slope given the autocorrelation correction. A better metric for invalidating the CMIP5 climate models.
Has anyone noticed that when you calculate the slope and error using the application in SkS (based on the method of Forster to take into account autocorrelation) for before and after 1998, that you get values that make it plausible that it barely warmed from the start of the sat data to 1998 and then warmed at 0.2°C/decade?
There is something wrong with presenting a slope before and after a cherry picked date, calculated independently with a huge uncertainty when autocorrelation is taken into account, and then comparing them to say that you can’t be certain that the warming rate has not decelerated. Its truly idiotic. If your not going to treat the variations from a linear trend like random measurement errors, don’t present results like it is.
Could there be a 0.2°C of warming in the past 18 years due to CO2 levels increasing but hidden in the large natural fluctuations? Possibly but the pause is used to justify claims that the warming so far could be as much poorly understood natural fluctuations as due to human emissions. You can’t then turn the argument into because there is this large natural variations that the pause is a myth, ergo, most of the warming is due to emissions.
Agree, a great guy, puts his cards on the table for all to agree or disagree. A scientist among so many sheep.
Well said Marcus – but just to note, as the WUWT moderators are notorious sticklers for accuracy, that should be ‘toeing the line”‘. #justsaying
Oops !! Thanks
Great work as always, m’Lud!
Thank you.
RSS has a 10 month average of 0.33, tying it for third with 2005. There is no way it will get above third place in 2015. As for 2016? Who knows?
October 1998 beat the 2015 anomaly of 0.440 at 0.461, so for RSS, this is the second warmest October. This is in contrast to UAH which had October 2015 as the warmest October.
Warmest recorded October in over 30 some odd years. Makes sense. I look at the daily forcast in the Vancouver papers and notice that most of the daily records for nearly every month were set in the 1940s.
Didn’t set any records here in October, and I don’t think we set any records during the provinces hot spell in June and July. Of course the media was saying unprecedented heat. Nah
.
The historical records say the 30s and 40s were warmer, and that’s without the current UHI.
In BC the warmest temps for Oct were in the 40s.
Maybe you should recheck your records. According to this table of Vancouver temperature records from 1937-2015, 30% of daily high temp records have been set since 1995, accelerating such that 17% were set in the last decade, and a full 4.1% from the beginning of 2014 to now..
About 13.5% of record highs were set in the 10 years from 1940-1949.
http://vancouver.weatherstats.ca/almanac/temperature.html
1) Urbanization;
2) Switch to digital thermometers, requiring nearby power sources, and
3) Temperature takers’ thumbs on the scales.
Yet BC’s extreme heat record was set in 1939. Among US Pacific NW states (BC’s neighbors), heat records date from the 1890s (OR), 1930s (ID & MT) and 1960s (WA).
Of course your talking about weather, as far as climate goes I’m just seeing anything to panic about. Really no change for a very long time
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=temperature+in+Vancouver+previous+66+years
I don’t think those data demonstrates anything useful about climate change either, and nor does the post I was replying to. I just encourage people to use actual data rather than just their memory when making claims.
OK Sir ,
I have been checking records daily, it just seems to me that most records ( as you say 70%) of them were before 1995. Not very Scientific. Just an observation on my part.
Thank you for the link
So on average 10% of records could be expected to occur per decade here. 30 years 30 percent of records. 1940 – 49 sees 13.5 so the 40s were a little above average.17% for the last decade occurred during the large airport expansion and still ongoing. The airport here used to be surrounded by grass and marsh. Now concrete and blacktop and buildings for miles. Coincidence?
I think many people would be happier with a set of actual observations or those published in say a 1950s document. You of course are at liberty to continue to ‘believe the internet’.
OK , I have been going through these numbers on the link. The numbers are not matching up with the numbers that are being posted in the daily news paper. The link has 2006 as the record for November 06 and the Vancouver sun says 1999 was the record. I found others as well.
Its airport data, flash. A degree of higher readings due to the global average being half a degree higher and another as more tarmac is laid down and jet traffic increases, then add another half when the automated station was introduced. Remember, all that is required to break a record is 0.1°C, the last 20 out of 78 years is a little more than a quarter and yet only 30% of daily high temp records have been set since 1995.
Sounds chicken littlish to me.
I do so hope the ‘accidental delegate from Burma’ will be able to bring this good news to the Paris party.
I would love a video of that !!! LOL
Desperate times call for desperate measures. The solution to all their problems is obvious … do what every con artist does and kick the can down the road until more favorable circumstances exist … a wolf is bound to show up eventually. Let this super dooper Godzilla El Niño kick in and then have everyone reconvene 7-18 November 2016 in Marrakech, Morocco, to do what they can’t do in Paris this year.
Perhaps Mr. Putin would like to have some fun and host one of these junkets in November of 2020 along the north shore of Siberia … just picture it, ice as far as the eye can see and a numbing snowstorm …
Keep up with the good fight. With enough tipping point papers proving false when compared to the actual data, your PAUSE work will turn their Tipping Point into their Tripping Point and the farce will be with them
Or a recap of the top ten things a climate scientist would never say in the year 2000.
10. There will be 7 feet of snow in Boston during the winter of 2014/2015.
9. Global warming causes more snow.
8. The heat is hiding in the oceans.
7. Sea level rise will be measured in millimeters not meters by 2015.
6. Half of the observed heat is due to natural variations from events like el nino.
5. There will be fewer hurricanes.
4. Rain will return to the midwest.
3. Global warming will remain negible in 2015. Way under any current projection.
2. The pause is linked to solar variations.
1. The Antarctic will be gaining ice. The Arctic will not be ice free either in 2015.
Another month and hopefully another nail in the coffin of AGW. Many thanks for all your hard work Lord Monckton. How this farce can continue to be perpetuated is totally beyond me!
The Pause has had a good run for its money. With the coming big el Nino, it may well come to an end. But it has served to point up the discrepancy between prediction and observation – a discrepancy that will continue to grow as the decades pass.
If, as is probable, a subsequent La Niña cancels out the effects of the present El Niño, the plateau will reemerge.
The El Nino is not coming, it is already here and may be peaking now. You have several warm months in 1997 to counter any warm months over the next 6 months. I don’t see the pause changing much over this time. However, if we then get a La Nina like we saw in 98/99/00 then the pause will quickly exceed 19 years and start pushing 20.
Don’t you mean “You have several COLD months in 1997 to counter any warm months over the next 6 months.”?
But unless there is a long lasting step change in temperature coincident upon this current strong El Nino, as there was coincident with the Super El Nino of 1997/8, as you point out, there will almost certainly be a following La Nina, and this La Nina is likely to bring temperatures back down to the 2001 to 2003 anomaly level, in time for the run up to the preparation for AR6.
IF (and that is an IF) that is the case, then by late 2018/early2019, the ‘pause’ will then be over 21 years in duration during which time man will have emitted nearly 40% of all manmade CO2 emissions, and not only will there have been no statistically warming during that time, materially all the models will be outside their 95% confidence bounds.
You state: “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 discrepancy between the predictions of the general-circulation models and observed reality.”
But in reality the ‘pause’ and model discrepancy are one and the same thing, or perhaps more accurately, the model discrepancy is simply a reflection of the ‘pause’ because the models did not predict the ‘pause’. In fact you yourself conclude similarly since you also state: “The fact of a long Pause is an indication of the widening discrepancy between prediction and reality in the temperature record.”
richard verney says: November 6, 2015 at 12:53 am
But in reality the ‘pause’ and model discrepancy are one and the same thing, or perhaps more accurately, the model discrepancy is simply a reflection of the ‘pause’ because the models did not predict the ‘pause’. In fact you yourself conclude similarly since you also state: “The fact of a long Pause is an indication of the widening discrepancy between prediction and reality in the temperature record.”
——————————————
Not quite. The discrepancy existed and was widening even before the pause started. The Pause merely makes that discrepancy stand out all the more. Once the pause ends, the discepancy will still be there and likely will still grow, just not as spectacularily as during the pause.
No Werner, we may be having a slight communications problem. Cold months at the beginning of a trend would influence the trend upward. The last half of 1997 saw increases leading up the the El Nino (.32 in December for example in RSS). The early months actually have negative anomalies. These would be eliminated each month if the trend stays the same length and the beginning months of the next 18 year 9 month period would get progressively get warmer.
Keep in mind that if you start the trend in 1998 right now it shows cooling.
woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1998/plot/rss/from:1998/trend
Exactly true. So my point was that the colder the early month was, the warmer the latest month can be and still have a long pause. But once the start reaches the warm December 1997, it is game over for the pause as we know it.
Indeed it has had a good run for its money, but sadly its days are numbered.
At current anomalies, the UAH pause has only 2 months’ life in it and will vanish in December. RSS will hang on until early 2016, the month of its final demise depending on the exact anomalies between now and then. It might make it through till June.
For all those saying “Aha, the coming la Nina will bring it back again”, I’m afraid that isn’t so. Once it’s gone, it’s gone, unless there is a steeper fall in temperatures than you might expect from a possible la Nina..
Lord Monckton, please also consider the following: forcing from more CO2 first increases the temperature of the atmosphere in response to the reduction of outgoing radiation. The surface warms later in responding to the warmer atmosphere, and oceans delay this response. But since the satellite measure the atmosphere temperature, little delay should be seen here.
Oh dear. That could put a bit of a damper on the Parisites’ festivities.
Lord Monckton, in your opinion what impact does the pause have on the theory of cumulative warming that is ‘locked in’ due to CO2 already emitted? Not only has recent CO2 had zero effect on atmospheric temperatures for 18.9 years but neither has all previous emissions of CO2 either!
That’s a hammer blow to ‘catastrophe’. Surely that points to sensitivity being nowhere near IPCC claimed levels (of up to 4.5C) and also that feedbacks are not sufficient to drive ‘runaway’ warming?
Any warming that is going to happen for any reason has already happened. ALL physical systems react in REAL TIME to any driving perturbation. No physical system will wait around to find out what some average perturbing phenomenon is before doing something about it. Some responses happen in atto-seconds, and after that something else will happen and it will happen as soon as it is possible. Averages are calculated after the fact using the well known numerical origami algorithm:
(A) = sigma [(D(j))(1->n)] / n where D(j) is the j-th element of the data set, and n is the number of elements in the data set.
The one thing that Mother Gaia does not know is what to do with the average value of anything.
g
In reply to Cheshirered, if the cumulative warming is locked in, where is it locked in? It isn’t in the upper strata of the oceans, which have not warmed since ARGO began monitoring them 12 years ago. It isn’t in the lower strata a mile down, because the upper 1.25 miles of the ocean is warming only at a rate equivalent to 1 degree every 430 years; if it’s below that, we can’t measure it and it’s unlikely to affect us all that much up here.
My guess is that Roe’s model showing a rapid initial response to CO2 is correct. If the rapid initial response isn’t happening, then it probably isn’t going to happen later.
ARGO cannot answer the question. ARGO can only shed light on what is happening during the period of the ‘pause’
What Cheshired is getting at is a point that I have frequently raised. Where is the locked in warming which started accruing from industrial times? Eg, where is the locked in warming that has accumulated as from say the 1850s to 1997?
I have several times commented upon the claim that some model runs apparently project a no warming ‘pause’ of 15 years duration, enquiring at what level of CO2 do these projections appear?
Obviously it is easier for the models to project a period of 15 years without warming when CO2 levels are say 320 to 340 ppm than it is for them to project a 15 year period without warming when the CO2 levels are 380 to 400 ppm. This is because of the claim that there is locked in warming due to accumulation of past CO2 emissions, and the fact that the forcing is higher, the more CO2 that there is in the atmosphere.
If global warming stopped in February 1997, then does the following mean that most of the warming in the RSS record happened after it stopped?
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/plot/rss/to:1997.083/trend/plot/rss/trend
I’d think of it like drawing an imaginary line from a point in a shallow valley through to the far side of a higher plateau in front of you.
The trend is up all the way to the far side, but you actually stop ascending when you first reach the near-side of the plateau (not withstanding a few ups and downs on the way).
Mr Klipstein, as ever, prefers bad debating points to good science. The rate of warming on the RSS dataset since 1979 is equivalent to around 1.2 K/century. The fact that the anthropogenic forcings are ever more rapidly increasing, and yet the warming rate is ever more self-evidently declining (there has been none for 18 years 9 months) indicates a discrepancy between prediction and observation that a rational mind would neither ignore nor attempt to explain away.
Despite the probably coming and long overdue super El Niño of 2015-16, in another 36 years, the warming rate will most likely be down to 0.6 K/century, if not lower, thanks to global cooling during some decades until 2051.
But by then, today’s high priests of the cult of man-made global warming will be happily retired and largely beyond the reach of the law.
If what John Chrisite wrote in response to the record October temperature UAH just registered…..
“We thought this El Niño had the potential to be a record setter for some of the quantities we track, and it isn’t disappointing,” Christy said. “Not only is this a strong El Niño, but the transient warming we see from it is superimposed on top of the slowly rising global base temperature. The satellite temperature dataset shows an overall warming of about 0.39 C during the past 36 years. Put a strong El Niño on top of that and we shouldn’t be surprised at what we saw in October.”
… then this may be the last time you get to write this stuff Christopher. Enjoy.
Simon,
What goes up, comes down.
After this El Nino blows off Pacific heat, global temperatures will fall again, as they have been doing during this century.
A single ENSO cycle affects weather, not climate.
With respect to Dr Christie, his comment is based upon a misplaced interpretation of his own data.
Dr Christie has simply ran a straight linear trend line through his data, but when one looks at the data it is clearly inappropriate to draw such a line.
Essentially, the data paints a picture that there is much variability over short time scales (circa 2 to 3 years), but as from launch (1979) through to the run up to the Super El Nino of 1997/8 there is not statistically significant warming, then there is the Super El Nino of 1997/8 and coincident upon that there is a step change in temperature of about 0.26 degC, and then following that event there has been no statistically significant warming from that event to date.
Look at the essentially flat but variable data between 1979 and say 1995, and it is clear that the date when the satellite was launched has had a big impact on any trend occurring during that period. It appears that it was launched at the bottom of a trough. If the satellite had been launched a year or so earlier, assuming the same variability, that was initially seen then the green line in Mr Klipstein’s plot would be even more flat.
My above comment should have concluded:
It is inappropriate to conflate the step change in temperatures which occurred coincident upon the 1997/8 Super El Nino as forming part of a “slowly rising global base temperature.”
I don’t dispute much the discrepancy between predictions and observations. What I dispute is the ~1998 spike being part of the pause as opposed to being part of the warming that preceded a pause starting sometime in the first few years of this century.
Mr Klipstein should try reading the head posting. The trend on the data is zero whether one begins before or after the Great El Niño of 1998. As a matter of fact, the longest period without warming is 18 years 9 months, and that includes the 1998 El Niño.
DLK,
If you play around with starting/end points of trends, you get a total different picture. Cooling since 2001.
A radiosonde data composite posted by Dr. Roy Spencer indicates that the lowest 100-200 meters of the troposphere warmed since 1979 by about .14 degree/decade during the “satellite era”. The global temperature dataset that correlates best with this is the (sadly recently discontinued) HadCRUT3. HadCRUT3 indicates the pause started sometime in 2001, for a flat linear trend from that point of 2001 to the last month of reporting of HadCRUT3.
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:….
Who prefers to start at the LIA….or the global cooling scare
The head posting deals firmly with the nonsensical notion that the start-date for the zero trend is cherry-picked to take advantage of the strong el Nino in 1998. A trend line starting after 1998 is a zero trend, just as a trend line starting before 1998 is a zero trend. sMears, who labels those with whom he disagrees “denialists”, is no statistician, or he would have performed this or one of many other statistical tests which show that the 1998 el Nino was more or less perfectly offset by the 2010 el Nino.
“A trend line starting after 1998 is a zero trend, just as a trend line starting before 1998 is a zero trend.”
~ MoB ~
False. Start at Jan. 1999.
Also note your reference to offsetting la-Ninas when it’s convenient, yet offsetting la-Ninas are ignored when it’s not convenient …
“… the 1998 el Nino was more or less perfectly offset by the 2010 el Nino.”
~ MoB ~
… a perfect example of your “good” and “honest” debating technique.
The 2010 El Nino was a much lesser El Nino than the 1998 one according to most ENSO indices, and according to how much the general satellite-measured lower troposphere temperature spiked above the average for the 5-year period it was centered in.
John@ef should read the head posting, where he will find the zero trend after 1998 plotted. The fact that one can find various other trends by cherry-picking start-points does not alter the fact that just about all the period following the 1998 El Niño shows a zero trend.
Mr Klipstein, who seems determined to be wrong about everything, should try decapitating the 1998 and 2010 el Ninos to remove the outlier weighting caused by the least-squares method and then running the analysis again. The trend is still very close to zero, indicating that the influence of the 1998 El Niño is indeed near-completely offset by the 2010 event.
The El Nino actually STOPS the zero trend calculation going back further.
Apart from that El Nino step of about 0.26C, there has been basically NO WARMING in the whole of the RSS satellite data.
The slight warming before the step has been all but cancelled by the slight warming after.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1979/plot/rss/from:2001.2/trend/plot/rss/from:1979/to:1996/trend/plot/rss/from:2001.2/trend/offset:-.26
Absolutely.
In reality if one looks at the statistical warming, the data set can be split in two parts, chopped by the Super El Nino of 1997/8 where there has been two not one pauses both of approximately 17 years in duration. The first period between 1979 to the run up to the Super El Nino whilst having a slightly positive trend shows no or almost no statistical warming. The second period following that Super El Nino whilst having a slightly negative trend shows no statistically significant warming (or cooling).
The models may so it is alleged project one period of 15 years without warming, but how many model runs project two such periods?
The RSS record covers almost 37 years now. You seem to be blaming the century-class El Nino for a warming burst that for some reason has been sustained rather than followed by cooling down to what was reported in the earlier years in the RSS record.
Good work, Lord Monkton.
I see they still like to use more “corrupt & adulterated” descriptions!
“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.”
Wow !! Unexpected allies in the fight for true science !! Interesting….
https://snt152.mail.live.com/?tid=cmQ6wwnt6D5RGRSWw75afbog2&fid=flinbox
MODS , please remove link..Didn’t go where I wanted and opens my Email ?? Thanks
Wow, you sure subscribe to a lot of porn sites.
:o)
LOL
“surface tamperature datasets”
Beautiful! I love the “_tamper_ature” datasets…
And around the bend comes the La Niña forecast for next summer. Couple that with cooling in the NE Pacific (offset somewhat by warming in the Atlantic) and you no doubt have temps that are flat or slowly dropping for the end of 2016 and 2017. After that, who knows what?
To me it was very interesting this year for some of the feedbacks to kick in with the very warm Pacific waters. Each of the monster typhoons sent a lot of the heat into the upper troposphere and out into space. Nature at its best.
Two things I am hoping and praying for at the end of this month:
1) Parisian airports closed due to snow.
2) Another release of Climategate e-mails.
I’ll settle for two major papers on ice-gain in the Antarctic.
That’ll do for me.
All that I am now waiting for – is for either major announcement to be mentioned on the “non-biased” BBC.
Since they love science so much – I’m sure that they will give these developments ample coverage…
Maybe NASAgate
Rep. Lamar Smith’s congressional science oversight committee is endeavoring to provide NOAAgate via subpoena, violation of which is contemptmof congress, 2USC192. The new dealine is tomorrow, 11/6/2015. Lay in popcorn supplies. Details newly posted over at Climate Etc.including some ‘insider’ tidbits.
Will look forward to that!
But HADCRUT4 is on course to leap up to 0.702 (compared to the 1998 value of 0.536, so they’ll get their ‘hottest year ever!’ headlines.
By the way, does anyone have a view on why 2015 is looking so high?
A big el Nino is happening, and has been lifting temperatures for months. On past form, I’d expect a quite rapid – and perhaps even record – spike in global temperature from here on, peaking somewhere between January and April.
All this emphasis on a monthly ‘record’ when it means nothing at all.
Unless the current strong El Nino by some happy coincident lines up precisely, on a monthly calendar basis, with the Super El Nino of 1997/8 then the progression of these two natural events will be out of sync as to manmade calendar time scales, such that a weaker El Nino could produce a higher monthly anomaly for one particular month but that is simply because it is at a different stage in the progression cycle of the El Nino itself when one El Nino is compared to the other.
The test of this current El Nino will be whether there is a long lasting step change in temperatures coincident with it as there was with the Super El Nino of 1997/8. If that does not occur and instead it follows the 2010 pattern, then all that will remain in the record is a late 2015/early 2016 blip in temperatures which will be brought down by a following La Nina and the temperature anomaly will track back down to say around the 2001 to 2003 level and the ‘pause’ will lengthen well beyond its current 18 year 9 month duration.
However … before we get too cheeky about “the pause”, y’all might want to download the weekly update to the El Niño Southern Oscillation PDF over at NOAA.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf
sobering… to say the least.
The most-predictive ENSO 3.4 statistics now stand at +2.7°C … last week’s was +2.4°C so there’s been a marked increase. Moreover, the undersea (subsurface) anomalies are upwards (still) of +6°C, reaching far across the Pacific.
To me? This couldn’t be much simpler: there is a huge body of anomalously warm water sitting across the whole ENSO equatorial region. The almost comical long term inverted V projection (see bottom of PDF) shows all models pointing to a rapid downturn from super-strong ENSO conditions to more seasonally normal. The continued upward ENSO 3.4 temperature readings however are moving contrary to prediction. Moreover, the subsurface energy of anomalously warm water is not going away anytime soon.
Connect the dots … and you get a ready expectation: The 2015–2016 ENSO will continue to strengthen, will stabilize, then will begin to decline … on a timescale of seasons. The peak numbers ought to be close to record-breaking, with a significant chance that they’ll exceed even the legendary 1997–1998 ENSO season.
And with that … will come some very intense winter conditions on the West Coast of America.
GoatGuy
I would actually be more worried for CA if we weren’t seeing an El Nino, those warm waters probably help keep CA out of another of the megadroughts that were so common in pre-industrial times.
Goatguy is right. This is looking like a big el Nino. It is at least as big as the 1998 Great El Nino. As the head posting says, it will either shorten or eliminate the Pause. The question is whether it will be followed by a correspondingly strong la Nina, as the 1998 event was. For el Ninos are not always followed by la Ninas, in which event the warming rate will come a little closer to what the IPCC has been predicting – though it will probably still be a long way short not only of what was predicted but also of any rate one might want to worry about.
There can be little doubt that this is a strong El Nino. But El Ninos are natural events, not CO2 driven.
Isn’t it amazing that we are talking about how the temperature record may be influenced by a natural event, as if that should be of any concern. We are not talking about how the temperature record may be spiked by CO2 induced warming!.
But this El Nino, no matter how strong it is, will be a DUD unless there is a long lasting step change in temperature coincident with it, as there was with the Super El Nino of 1997/8. If there is no step change, the El Nino of 2015/6 will be but a mere temporary blip on the data set, and all but forgotten in 5 years time.
The significance of the 2015/6 El Nino can only be judged in the run up to the preparation of AR6. At that time will the ‘pause’ be busted, or will there have been no long lasting step change in temperature and will a following L Nina have brought the temperature anomalies back down to the 2001 to 2003 level such that the ‘pause’ will be over 21 years in duration.
That is the acid test for this El Nino.
Richard Verney summarises the position well. No doubt the believers will ascribe the El Niño – it will be a big one – to global warming. And it will shorten and perhaps eradicate the Pause. But the divergence between prediction and observation will continue to widen.
Christopher Monkton,
These periodic updates, of what I call one of the central paradoxes of the climate change hypothesis, are wonderful. Thank you.
It is a central paradox of the climate change hypothesis that while the CO2 emissions rate directly into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels for the past ~36+ years has dramatically increased compared to emissions rates in the previous ~100 years, yet paradoxically the change in temperature (GASTA & LTTA) over the past ~~18 years has either been insignificant or has been trivial in magnitude.
NOTE: There are several additional central paradoxes in the climate change hypothesis that have been addressed by others.
John
Here’s one such paradox.
The growth rate of CO2 has been about the same since c. 1945, when it accelerated after WWII. Yet for the first 32 post-war years, ie until the PDO shift of 1977, global average temperature cooled significantly, leading to worries about the coming ice age in the 1970s.
Then, for about the next 20 years, until c. 1996, the lower atmosphere warmed slightly, similarly to during the 1920s and ’30s. CO2 continued rising during the 1980s and ’90s at about the same rate as before, but now GASTA just happened accidentally to climb as well.
Since the late ’90s, average global temperature has remained flat, although slightly down in this century. Yet if anything CO2 concentration has increased more rapidly, thanks to China and India. No correlation suggests no causation.
To paraphrase Catch-22, that’s some paradox, that Paradox-77.
A good summary.
And that is why I consider that there is no correlation between CO2 and temperature, but of course, there are undoubtedly lags in system response, the impact of natural variation and we have no accurate temperature data sets.
All that we can conclude is that with our best measuring equipment and the TRUE error bounds and limitations of that equipment and the data set that it produces, we cannot detect the signal of CO2 induced warming over and above the noise of natural variation.
If the TRUE error bounds are large, then there is potential for CO2 Climate Sensitivity (if any at all) to be likewise large, but if the TRUE error bounds are small, then CO2 Climate Sensitivity (if any at all) must likewise be small.
The paradox is even greater than it appears: for the models predict that there should be a strong and instantaneous response to a forcing. The absence of any response for 20 years, therefore, is doubly perplexing, both because of the magnitude of the forcing over the period and because the shape of the curve of temperature change over those two decades is so strikingly different from that which was predicted. See the diagram from Roe (2009) in the head posting, which shows how rapidly the initial warming ought to take place.
There are two possibilities. Either the strong anthropogenic forcing is being offset by equally strong natural negative forcings (cooling phase of the PDO, declining solar activity, lower Nino/Nina ratio) or the anthropogenic forcing is not strong.
I incline to the latter opinion, for reasons I shall spell out in Paris.
The fact that for the first three post-war decades earth’s response to rapidly increasing CO2 levels was to cool noticeably shows that the hypothesis of catastrophic man-made global warming was born falsified.
Sir Lord Monckton, Please tell me your going to get a video of it !!! The last video I found of you was 2014 ICCC 9 I think !!
“Gloateus
November 5, 2015 at 11:00 am”
I am not so sure about that. Post WW2 saw significant economic growth, especially in Europe, where countries were rebuilding. I know the UK had horrendous air quality issues which are well documented. So huge volumes of particulates in the air. Also, there was a move away from coal gas to natural gas in the 70’s if I recall correctly and a move from domestic coal/wood fired space/water heating to natural gas and electricity. Basically, the air was cleaned up and it got a little warmer.
Patrick
Whilst I agree that there were genuine pollution issues, what you are really suggesting is that the recent warming is a facet of the developed West cleaning up its air.
This started in the 1960s but the impact of which did not show through until the 1970s, just when warming started to appear, and the air had been cleaned up by the mid 1990s, just as the warming stopped.
Of course China and India are changing the table a little bit, and they too may contribute to the ‘pause’ or possible cooling.
It would be funny if the temperature record is not down to CO2, but rather down to natural events coupled with the high manmade atmospheric aerosol content.
In reply to Marcus, my ICCC10 videos are at Heartland.org. And there will be videos of my speeches in Paris and in Essen next month.
“…capering shamans…” Love it!
I thought there was a HadCRUT5 now.
Record snow in Arizona, courtesy of the Pacific Christ Child:
http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2015/11/04/arizona-snow-el-nino-winter-skiers/75159428/