UPDATE (April 15, 2016): I discovered an error in the model-data comparison and model-data difference graphs (Figures 10 and 11) that impacted only the January 2016 value. The error has been corrected.
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Guest Post by Bob Tisdale
We recently discussed the February 2016 El Niño-related upsurges in the RSS and UAH lower troposphere temperature (TLT) data in the post March 2016 Update of Global Temperature Responses to 1997/98 and 2015/16 El Niño Events. Not to be outdone, the GISS Land-Ocean Temperature (LOTI) data showed a +0.21 deg C jump in global land+ocean surface temperatures from January to February 2016…tacked on to the +0.24 deg C jump from September to October 2015.
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This post provides an update of the values for the three primary suppliers of global land+ocean surface temperature reconstructions—GISS through February 2016 and HADCRUT4 and NCEI (formerly NCDC) through January 2016—and of the two suppliers of satellite-based lower troposphere temperature composites (RSS and UAH) through February 2016. It also includes a model-data comparison.
INITIAL NOTES:
The NOAA NCEI product is the new global land+ocean surface reconstruction with the manufactured warming presented in Karl et al. (2015). For summaries of the oddities found in the new NOAA ERSST.v4 “pause-buster” sea surface temperature data see the posts:
- The Oddities in NOAA’s New “Pause-Buster” Sea Surface Temperature Product – An Overview of Past Posts
- On the Monumental Differences in Warming Rates between Global Sea Surface Temperature Datasets during the NOAA-Picked Global-Warming Hiatus Period of 2000 to 2014
Even though the changes to the ERSST reconstruction since 1998 cannot be justified by the night marine air temperature product that was used as a reference for bias adjustments (See comparison graph here), and even though NOAA appears to have manipulated the parameters in their sea surface temperature model to produce high warming rates (See the post here), GISS also switched to the new “pause-buster” NCEI ERSST.v4 sea surface temperature reconstruction with their July 2015 update.
The UKMO also recently made adjustments to their HadCRUT4 product, but they are minor compared to the GISS and NCEI adjustments.
We’re using the UAH lower troposphere temperature anomalies Release 6.5 for this post even though it’s in beta form. And for those who wish to whine about my portrayals of the changes to the UAH and to the GISS and NCEI products, see the post here.
The GISS LOTI surface temperature reconstruction and the two lower troposphere temperature composites are for the most recent month. The HADCRUT4 and NCEI products lag one month.
Much of the following text is boilerplate…updated for all products. The boilerplate is intended for those new to the presentation of global surface temperature anomalies.
Most of the update graphs start in 1979. That’s a commonly used start year for global temperature products because many of the satellite-based temperature composites start then.
We discussed why the three suppliers of surface temperature products use different base years for anomalies in chapter 1.25 – Many, But Not All, Climate Metrics Are Presented in Anomaly and in Absolute Forms of my free ebook On Global Warming and the Illusion of Control – Part 1 (25MB).
Since the July 2015 update, we’re using the UKMO’s HadCRUT4 reconstruction for the model-data comparisons.
GISS LAND OCEAN TEMPERATURE INDEX (LOTI)
Introduction: The GISS Land Ocean Temperature Index (LOTI) reconstruction is a product of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Starting with the June 2015 update, GISS LOTI uses the new NOAA Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature version 4 (ERSST.v4), the pause-buster reconstruction, which also infills grids without temperature samples. For land surfaces, GISS adjusts GHCN and other land surface temperature products via a number of methods and infills areas without temperature samples using 1200km smoothing. Refer to the GISS description here. Unlike the UK Met Office and NCEI products, GISS masks sea surface temperature data at the poles, anywhere seasonal sea ice has existed, and they extend land surface temperature data out over the oceans in those locations, regardless of whether or not sea surface temperature observations for the polar oceans are available that month. Refer to the discussions here and here. GISS uses the base years of 1951-1980 as the reference period for anomalies. The values for the GISS product are found here. (I archived the former version here at the WaybackMachine.)
Update: The February 2016 GISS global temperature anomaly is +1.35 deg C. It jumped noticeably since January 2016, a +0.21 deg C increase.
Figure 1 – GISS Land-Ocean Temperature Index
NCEI GLOBAL SURFACE TEMPERATURE ANOMALIES (LAGS ONE MONTH)
NOTE: The NCEI only produces the product with the manufactured-warming adjustments presented in the paper Karl et al. (2015). As far as I know, the former version of the reconstruction is no longer available online. For more information on those curious adjustments, see the posts:
- NOAA/NCDC’s new ‘pause-buster’ paper: a laughable attempt to create warming by adjusting past data
- More Curiosities about NOAA’s New “Pause Busting” Sea Surface Temperature Dataset
- Open Letter to Tom Karl of NOAA/NCEI Regarding “Hiatus Busting” Paper
- NOAA Releases New Pause-Buster Global Surface Temperature Data and Immediately Claims Record-High Temps for June 2015 – What a Surprise!
And recently:
- Pause Buster SST Data: Has NOAA Adjusted Away a Relationship between NMAT and SST that the Consensus of CMIP5 Climate Models Indicate Should Exist?
- The Oddities in NOAA’s New “Pause-Buster” Sea Surface Temperature Product – An Overview of Past Posts
- On the Monumental Differences in Warming Rates between Global Sea Surface Temperature Datasets during the NOAA-Picked Global-Warming Hiatus Period of 2000 to 2014
Introduction: The NOAA Global (Land and Ocean) Surface Temperature Anomaly reconstruction is the product of the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), which was formerly known as the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). NCEI merges their new “pause buster” Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperature version 4 (ERSST.v4) with the new Global Historical Climatology Network-Monthly (GHCN-M) version 3.3.0 for land surface air temperatures. The ERSST.v4 sea surface temperature reconstruction infills grids without temperature samples in a given month. NCEI also infills land surface grids using statistical methods, but they do not infill over the polar oceans when sea ice exists. When sea ice exists, NCEI leave a polar ocean grid blank.
The source of the NCEI values is through their Global Surface Temperature Anomalies webpage. Click on the link to Anomalies and Index Data.)
Update (Lags One Month): The January 2016 NCEI global land plus sea surface temperature anomaly was +1.04 deg C. See Figure 2. It dropped (a decrease of -0.08 deg C) since December 2015.
Figure 2 – NCEI Global (Land and Ocean) Surface Temperature Anomalies
UK MET OFFICE HADCRUT4 (LAGS ONE MONTH)
Introduction: The UK Met Office HADCRUT4 reconstruction merges CRUTEM4 land-surface air temperature product and the HadSST3 sea-surface temperature (SST) reconstruction. CRUTEM4 is the product of the combined efforts of the Met Office Hadley Centre and the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. And HadSST3 is a product of the Hadley Centre. Unlike the GISS and NCEI reconstructions, grids without temperature samples for a given month are not infilled in the HADCRUT4 product. That is, if a 5-deg latitude by 5-deg longitude grid does not have a temperature anomaly value in a given month, it is left blank. Blank grids are indirectly assigned the average values for their respective hemispheres before the hemispheric values are merged. The HADCRUT4 reconstruction is described in the Morice et al (2012) paper here. The CRUTEM4 product is described in Jones et al (2012) here. And the HadSST3 reconstruction is presented in the 2-part Kennedy et al (2012) paper here and here. The UKMO uses the base years of 1961-1990 for anomalies. The monthly values of the HADCRUT4 product can be found here.
Update (Lags One Month): The January 2016 HADCRUT4 global temperature anomaly is +0.89 deg C. See Figure 3. It decreased (about -0.11 deg C) since December 2015.
Figure 3 – HADCRUT4
UAH LOWER TROPOSPHERE TEMPERATURE ANOMALY COMPOSITE (UAH TLT)
Special sensors (microwave sounding units) aboard satellites have orbited the Earth since the late 1970s, allowing scientists to calculate the temperatures of the atmosphere at various heights above sea level (lower troposphere, mid troposphere, tropopause and lower stratosphere). The atmospheric temperature values are calculated from a series of satellites with overlapping operation periods, not from a single satellite. Because the atmospheric temperature products rely on numerous satellites, they are known as composites. The level nearest to the surface of the Earth is the lower troposphere. The lower troposphere temperature composite include the altitudes of zero to about 12,500 meters, but are most heavily weighted to the altitudes of less than 3000 meters. See the left-hand cell of the illustration here.
The monthly UAH lower troposphere temperature composite is the product of the Earth System Science Center of the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH). UAH provides the lower troposphere temperature anomalies broken down into numerous subsets. See the webpage here. The UAH lower troposphere temperature composite are supported by Christy et al. (2000) MSU Tropospheric Temperatures: Dataset Construction and Radiosonde Comparisons. Additionally, Dr. Roy Spencer of UAH presents at his blog the monthly UAH TLT anomaly updates a few days before the release at the UAH website. Those posts are also regularly cross posted at WattsUpWithThat. UAH uses the base years of 1981-2010 for anomalies. The UAH lower troposphere temperature product is for the latitudes of 85S to 85N, which represent more than 99% of the surface of the globe.
UAH recently released a beta version of Release 6.0 of their atmospheric temperature product. Those enhancements lowered the warming rates of their lower troposphere temperature anomalies. See Dr. Roy Spencer’s blog post Version 6.0 of the UAH Temperature Dataset Released: New LT Trend = +0.11 C/decade and my blog post New UAH Lower Troposphere Temperature Data Show No Global Warming for More Than 18 Years. The UAH lower troposphere anomalies Release 6.5 beta through February 2016 are here.
Update: The February 2016 UAH (Release 6.5 beta) lower troposphere temperature anomaly is +0.83 deg C. It jumped (an increase of about +0.29 deg C) since January 2016.
Figure 4 – UAH Lower Troposphere Temperature (TLT) Anomaly Composite – Release 6.5 Beta
RSS LOWER TROPOSPHERE TEMPERATURE ANOMALY COMPOSITE (RSS TLT)
Like the UAH lower troposphere temperature product, Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) calculates lower troposphere temperature anomalies from microwave sounding units aboard a series of NOAA satellites. RSS describes their product at the Upper Air Temperature webpage. The RSS product is supported by Mears and Wentz (2009) Construction of the Remote Sensing Systems V3.2 Atmospheric Temperature Records from the MSU and AMSU Microwave Sounders. RSS also presents their lower troposphere temperature composite in various subsets. The land+ocean TLT values are here. Curiously, on that webpage, RSS lists the composite as extending from 82.5S to 82.5N, while on their Upper Air Temperature webpage linked above, they state:
We do not provide monthly means poleward of 82.5 degrees (or south of 70S for TLT) due to difficulties in merging measurements in these regions.
Also see the RSS MSU & AMSU Time Series Trend Browse Tool. RSS uses the base years of 1979 to 1998 for anomalies.
Note: RSS recently release new versions of the mid-troposphere temperature and lower stratosphere temperature (TLS) products. So far, their lower troposphere temperature product has not been updated to this new version.
Update: The February 2016 RSS lower troposphere temperature anomaly is +0.97 deg C. It jumped (an increase of about +0.31 deg C) since January 2016.
Figure 5 – RSS Lower Troposphere Temperature (TLT) Anomalies
COMPARISONS
The GISS, HADCRUT4 and NCEI global surface temperature anomalies and the RSS and UAH lower troposphere temperature anomalies are compared in the next three time-series graphs. Figure 6 compares the five global temperature anomaly products starting in 1979. Again, due to the timing of this post, the HADCRUT4 and NCEI updates lag the UAH, RSS and GISS products by a month. For those wanting a closer look at the more recent wiggles and trends, Figure 7 starts in 1998, which was the start year used by von Storch et al (2013) Can climate models explain the recent stagnation in global warming? They, of course, found that the CMIP3 (IPCC AR4) and CMIP5 (IPCC AR5) models could NOT explain the recent slowdown in warming, but that was before NOAA manufactured warming with their new ERSST.v4 reconstruction.
Figure 8 starts in 2001, which was the year Kevin Trenberth chose for the start of the warming slowdown in his RMS article Has Global Warming Stalled?
Because the suppliers all use different base years for calculating anomalies, I’ve referenced them to a common 30-year period: 1981 to 2010. Referring to their discussion under FAQ 9 here, according to NOAA:
This period is used in order to comply with a recommended World Meteorological Organization (WMO) Policy, which suggests using the latest decade for the 30-year average.
The impacts of the unjustifiable adjustments to the ERSST.v4 reconstruction are visible in the two shorter-term comparisons, Figures 7 and 8. That is, the short-term warming rates of the new NCEI and GISS reconstructions are noticeably higher during “the hiatus”, as are the trends of the newly revised HADCRUT product. See the June 2015 update for the trends before the adjustments. But the trends of the revised reconstructions still fall short of the modeled warming rates during the hiatus periods.
Figure 6 – Comparison Starting in 1979
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Figure 7 – Comparison Starting in 1998
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Figure 8 – Comparison Starting in 2001
Note also that the graphs list the trends of the CMIP5 multi-model mean (historic and RCP8.5 forcings), which are the climate models used by the IPCC for their 5th Assessment Report.
AVERAGE
Figure 9 presents the average of the GISS, HADCRUT and NCEI land plus sea surface temperature anomaly reconstructions and the average of the RSS and UAH lower troposphere temperature composites. Again because the HADCRUT4 and NCEI products lag one month in this update, the most current average only includes the GISS product.
Figure 9 – Average of Global Land+Sea Surface Temperature Anomaly Products
Just in case you’re having trouble see the differences, here’s a .gif animation cycling between the two.
Animation 1
MODEL-DATA COMPARISON & DIFFERENCE
Note: The HADCRUT4 reconstruction is now used in this section. [End note.]
Considering the uptick in surface temperatures in 2014, 2015 and now 2016 (see the posts here and here), government agencies that supply global surface temperature products have been touting “record high” combined global land and ocean surface temperatures. Alarmists happily ignore the fact that it is easy to have record high global temperatures in the midst of a hiatus or slowdown in global warming, and they have been using the recent record highs to draw attention away from the growing difference between observed global surface temperatures and the IPCC climate model-based projections of them.
There are a number of ways to present how poorly climate models simulate global surface temperatures. Normally they are compared in a time-series graph. See the example in Figure 10. In that example, the UKMO HadCRUT4 land+ocean surface temperature reconstruction is compared to the multi-model mean of the climate models stored in the CMIP5 archive, which was used by the IPCC for their 5th Assessment Report. The reconstruction and model outputs have been smoothed with 61-month running-mean filters to reduce the monthly variations. The climate science community commonly uses a 5-year running-mean filter (basically the same as a 61-month filter) to minimize the impacts of El Niño and La Niña events, as shown on the GISS webpage here. Also, the anomalies for the reconstruction and model outputs have been referenced to the period of 1880 to 2013 so not to bias the results. That is, by using almost the full term of the data, no one with any common sense can claim I’ve cherry picked the base years for anomalies with this comparison.
Figure 10 (CORRECTED)
It’s very hard to overlook the fact that, over the past decade, climate models are simulating way too much warming and are diverging rapidly from reality.
Another way to show how poorly climate models perform is to subtract the observations-based reconstruction from the average of the model outputs (model mean). We first presented and discussed this method using global surface temperatures in absolute form. (See the post On the Elusive Absolute Global Mean Surface Temperature – A Model-Data Comparison.) The graph below shows a model-data difference using anomalies, where the data are represented by the UKMO HadCRUT4 land+ocean surface temperature product and the model simulations of global surface temperature are represented by the multi-model mean of the models stored in the CMIP5 archive. Like Figure 10, to assure that the base years used for anomalies did not bias the graph, the full term of the graph (1880 to 2013) was used as the reference period.
In this example, we’re illustrating the model-data differences in the monthly surface temperature anomalies. Also included in red is the difference smoothed with a 61-month running mean filter.
Figure 11 (CORRECTED)
The greatest difference between models and reconstruction occurs now.
There was also a major difference, but of the opposite sign, in the late 1880s. That difference decreases drastically from the 1880s and switches signs by the 1910s. The reason: the models do not properly simulate the observed cooling that takes place at that time. Because the models failed to properly simulate the cooling from the 1880s to the 1910s, they also failed to properly simulate the warming that took place from the 1910s until 1940. That explains the long-term decrease in the difference during that period and the switching of signs in the difference once again. The difference cycles back and forth, nearing a zero difference in the 1980s and 90s, indicating the models are tracking observations better (relatively) during that period. And from the 1990s to present, because of the slowdown in warming, the difference has increased to greatest value ever…where the difference indicates the models are showing too much warming.
It’s very easy to see the recent record-high global surface temperatures have had a tiny impact on the difference between models and observations.
See the post On the Use of the Multi-Model Mean for a discussion of its use in model-data comparisons.
MONTHLY SEA SURFACE TEMPERATURE UPDATE
The most recent sea surface temperature update can be found here. The satellite-enhanced sea surface temperature composite (Reynolds OI.2) are presented in global, hemispheric and ocean-basin bases.
RECENT RECORD HIGHS
We discussed the recent record-high global sea surface temperatures for 2014 and 2015 and the reasons for them in General Discussions 2 and 3 of my recent free ebook On Global Warming and the Illusion of Control (25MB). The book was introduced in the post here (cross post at WattsUpWithThat is here).
It looks like the “pause” is officially over.
The pause “officially” never was…
Going by Lord Monckton’s definition of the pause, the January data for both RSS and UAH6.0beta5 still had pauses of 18 years and 8 months and 18 years and 4 months respectively. However with the February anomalies, there is no longer a pause on either data set.
“It looks like the “pause” is officially over.”
Hang on, hold your horses, we’ll only know that in about five years when we see what actually comes next.
No. This El Niño with neutralize the ’98 El Niño that you start with. It won’t be until the early 2020’s that you will start using 2016/2017 as the starting point for a new “pause”.
traf, as usual you still don’t get it.
Officially?
After the warmists went to absurd lengths to explain/refuse pause every month for the last several years;
the pause currently has a termination point.
Caused, as ristvan notes, by El Nino burps and exhalations.
With a ‘pause’ of a few months, these small exhalations might’ve actually ended a pause. However, a pause of a significant 18.67 years, it takes more than a couple of months of a minor temperature anomaly peak to ‘end’ a pause.
For now the pause is temporarily locked at 18.67 months.
Does anyone else ever wonder why the metric conversion folks left measurement of a year and ‘months’ untouched?
ATheoK: go look for Marking Time: The Epic Quest to Invent the Perfect Calendar by Duncan Steel. The calendar is crazier than you ever dreamed.
2 months increase in temp and the official pause is over. 18 years of pause was never enough of time to make it official, yet alone admit that there was a pause. How quickly you revert to back warming? Let us wait another 18 years perhaps and see if that is really over?
Hypocrite
It looks like logic and reasoning is officially over.
Knowing something about statistics, there are only two plausible interpretations of your figures 1-5:
1.We are all going to die very soon of CAGW, worse than warmunists thought!!!.
2. Nino heat Burps get compensated. My money is on not panicking over an El Nino ‘burp’.
Time will tell. Thanks for the update, either way.
Hello ristvan.
You often make reference to your e-books. Could you recommend one that deals with the transmission of near-IR through the lower troposphere?
I recently mentioned the Beer-Lambert law here, and a few people took exception. I know that spontaneous IR emissions can raise havoc with standard, relatively simple treatments of absorption, so I am looking for a rather more detailed approach.
As an aside, one commenter was critical, claiming that fluorescence would break the Beer-Lambert law. Perhaps such a case would flummox an undergraduate, but I am sure I know how to keep a fluorescent photon from the detector in an absorption spectrometer. I consider such deviations from linearity to be defects in instrumentation (or instrument selection) rather than failures of a fairly basic law.
In any event, I know these simple approaches can break down when the sample is both a photon sink and source. Thanks in advance.
if it is correct, “global warming” due to CO2 is more properly “increased retained enthalpy” due to CO2. The same goes for any other theory of why the 20th century did show an increase in surface temperatures worldwide. Given the thermal inertia of the system, sudden spikes of the sort presented for the last year or two cannot represent increased retained enthalpy but must be a consequence of re-arranged surface enthalpy. Further I maintain that all the “fuzz” on figure 11 around the 61 month mean or some other moving average must be similar. The longer term average is probably meaningful. The fuzz isn’t. In particular, the ENSO is more a re-arrangement of the enthalpy of the surface layer in the Pacific than it is an increase or decrease in total ocean enthalpy as we know. While it is an interesting hobby to follow the month to month variations and they certainly have an effect on the weather, to say they are meaningful to be consistent with any hypothesis is more bunk than science.
I agree with this assessment. The el nino phenomenon appears to be the movement of warm surface water Eastward across the Pacific, making way for cooler water from the South or below to occupy the surface in the Western Pacific. It is unclear to me how this represents “global” warming, which would be an increase of enthalpy. In fact, AGW theory and models seem to require that this increase in enthalpy manifests itself exclusively as sensible heat. This is obviously impossible. Additionally, the theory says that the heating of the atmosphere caused by GHG’s is progressive. If that is true, how does “global” enthalpy fall after the el nino? I realise there are a lot of details which can modify this big picture, but I don’t see where AGW theory or investigation even attempts to address the massive holes in their basic premise.
Looks like wee’re doomed, again.
lts just not the UKMO climate models have been running warm recently.
Their weather models also tend to run too warm as well. When the BBC weather do their 7 day forecasts, their error tend to be on the warm side. At the start of this week they forecast that high pressure would build to the SE of the UK. So bringing warm air up from the SW. But my own forecast which are based on the jet stream forecast charts told me they would be wrong. My forecast suggested that the high pressure would form to the NEE of the UK, so bringing in cooler air from the east. lt was my forecast that ended up been the most correct.
This is not the first time its happened. When there forecasts suggest there will be warmer weather then my own. lts my forecasts that are the most often right. Where their weather models tend to error is by forecasting weather patterns bringing warmer air from the south more often then what happens in the real world.
I’ve noticed something similar during the last years. The weather models are tending to forecast changes in weather patterns too early, resulting in a “deference” of what they forecast in the following runs. Furthermore, they are tending to forecast low systems and precipitation too strong (after day 5 or something), which makes me angry regularly in winter if there are several inches (or even feet!) of snow forecasted (since I’m a winter fan), of which most of it actually doesn’t fall (if any).
Sry if my english is bad, it’s not my native language. :/
I have noticed similar, periods where there is invariably ~50%+ precipitation forecast in the 3-5 day range that fades as they are revised and that day rolls closer. It’s as if the models have become more easily ‘excitable’ and are biased against predicting stable pressure systems, all trigger-happy to devolve into chaos at a certain sharp cliff. In this video we see a demonstration of this phenomenon where in the immediate future perhaps a single model may forecast extreme weather and is voted out… then suddenly around the 3 day mark, all the weather models suddenly erupt into hip-gyrating butterfly-wing abandon.
As one who regrets he can only think and speak English, I am grateful and humbled to witness your successful effort.
A spike in reported temperature is meaningless with respect to climate change. A fundamental factor in transient heat transfer analysis is effective thermal capacitance. This is sometimes called thermal inertia. Thermal capacitance is what causes the ‘thermal lag’ that Eschenbach talks about at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/08/24/lags-and-leads/ and Dr. Roy at http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/04/a-global-warming-cookbook-what-causes-temperature-to-change/ . Schwartz at http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/steve/pubs/HeatCapacity.pdf determined the effective thermal capacitance of the planet to be about 17 W Yr m^-2K^-1. (The effective thermal capacitance is equivalent to total participation of the top 110 meters of ocean.)
This also means a time constant of about 5 years. Even if there was a step change in forcing, it would take 5 years to get just 63.2% of the change to the new steady-state value. A step change in energy (i.e. a step change in true average global temperature) is not physically possible with credible forcings.
Why don’t they accept the few models that come close to reality and throw the rest away ?
…Are they not scary enough ?
Either not scary enough or else they don’t support underlying AGW theory. We believe that their theory is nonsense. If we’re correct, it will eventually collapse. We just want the science to win out sooner rather than later. Given the massive political momentum we are dealing with, we probably require a period of indisputable global cooling or an extended period of human advancement wherein minor changes in global temps are clearly unimportant. Either way, we fight the good fight and humanity works it out. Perhaps the world will learn from this how to keep the politics out of science.
Well, they have certainly well-and-truly disappeared the ’98 El Nino!
Coming fall in 17-19 will offset the rise as per 06-07/0910 nino/post nino. Still know acknowledgement of NCEP cfsv2 which have 6 hr initializations
I notice that despite the protestations, the general fit between the model and the data seems to be fairly good, about what I expect from a model of a process this complex. That is, until they start diverging around 2000 and the models keep going up while the data flattens out. I guess that this is the famous “pause”.
Previous articles on WUWT have commented on how the models seem to have been tweaked so as to reproduce historical trends, meaning that their ability to predict the future is seriously compromised. Is that what we’re seeing here?
i more think we see a step jump warming induced by solar driven El nino’s and which is a natural warming driver laid next to models that use CO2 as driver.
i suspect a new step jump but this will depend on where the el nino heat will go…
The El Nino heat will go out to space as it always does. Ultimately it is an ocean cooling event.
Paul they are not using data. They are comparing the models to adjusted data. The point being that data is not data after it has been adjusted. Adjustments turn data into convenient lying B***S***.
Paul of Alexandria
There is a simple explanation for it (it is a back-casting and not forecasting)
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GR1.jpg
Looks like it is time for Anthony to admit that AGW is real, close down the website, and return the donations he has fleeced from readers.
even so an el nino caused jump is entirely a natural warming cause, something WUWT never has denied FYI
Simon,
Speak for yourself, turkey.
I’ve donated plenty, and I have no regrets. No one ‘fleeced’ me.
How much have you donated here, anyway? Not one penny, I’d wager.
Are you sure that wasn’t just a gentle reminder from Simon to encourage us that it was time to donate to the WUWT pot again to keep it going?
Ok time for me to donate another $20.
I’d just like to point out this is not the Simon who posts here regularly, as in me. I would not be so rude as to come here and say such a thing. I’m happy to disagree and state my case, but not write that.
Simon,
Thanks for making that distinction. Maybe you could add an identifier, like the letter of your last name. We certainly wouldn’t want to think you’re the Kool-Aid drinking Simon.
..There is a big difference between AGW and CAGW , but you lefties like to interchange them when it suits your need !
CAGW is a term that’s used solely by opponents of AGW, it’s not used in science at all, so I don’t know who these ‘lefties’ are that you refer to?
Phil, I’m glad you agree that AGW is not “catastrophic.” However, there were plenty of global warming alarmists like Hansen and Gore who made public claims about the pending catastrophe due to global warming. I don’t think they have repented, so to claim that “CAGW is a term that’s used solely by opponents of AGW” is a bit disingenuous. And if science has never used the term CAGW or referred to AGW as catastrophic, it only proves that alarmists never really had any actual science backing up their claims. Thanks to you (and RationalWiki) for making that clear.
“CAGW”, for “catastrophic anthropogenic global warming”, is a snarl word (or snarl acronym) that global warming d3nialists use for the established science of climate change. A Google Scholar search indicates that the term is never used in the scientific literature on climate. http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Global_warming#CAGW
Ahh, but Louis, do these same scientists use the catastrophe meme when speaking to the public? Check Lexus Nexus for the things they say to the press. They can’t weasel out by saying the university PR department writes the press releases either. If the liberal arts majors mess up your work in a press release, you say something or be branded by it as a legitimate representation of your views about your research.
CAGW is an acronym invented and deployed by ‘skeptics.’ Skeptics who utterly dismiss the notion that future warming could be significant. For me it is enough to acknowledge that there is a range of possibilities and risk low to high. Until someone convinces me that the Pollyanna view of future climate is incontrovertible I will continue see future warming as having a range of possible outcomes, including relatively benign or severe, and proceed accordingly.
barry,
If it were not for ‘CAGW’, there would not be all this discussion — and a lot less grant money would be shoveled into ‘climate studies’.
So whether you like it or not, Catastrophic AGW is the narrative. YOUR narrative. Because without the ‘C’, there’s no problem.
Now, explain how this so-called ‘science’ article isn’t warning of a catastrophe.
“So whether you like it or not, Catastrophic AGW is the narrative. YOUR narrative.”
My “narrative” is what I posted. Here it is again.
“For me it is enough to acknowledge that there is a range of possibilities and risk low to high. Until someone convinces me that the Pollyanna view of future climate is incontrovertible I will continue see future warming as having a range of possible outcomes, including relatively benign or severe, and proceed accordingly.”
Your narrative appears to be that severe outcomes are simply impossible. This seems like nothing more than a Pollyanna view of the issue. Wishful thinking. Myopia.
My perspective includes the possibility of little warming. I guess that might confuse some people. But it allows me to consider the range of risk without clinging to one view like some ideologue.
barry says:
My perspective includes the possibility of little warming.
Quantify that with a percentage. Compare it with another percentage: how likely do you think the threat of seriously bad global warming is?
And I don’t have a narrative. You do. I am still waiting for the very first measurement quantifying AGW. But after more than a century of searching, that measurement is as elusive as ever.
Isn’t your perspective that there is no, or infinitesimally small risk of significant warming in the future from increased greenhouse gases? If not, what is it? Do you not discount the upper range of future warming?
(As for the greenhouse effect – no one sane doubts that. Not Anthony Watts, as pointed out above [or Spencer, Pielke Snr and Jr, or Christy, or Lindzen]. There is an abundance of evidence and physics behind that, and I’m not gong down that well-worn path with you. I’m curious what response, with no deviation from my question, you have, which is about the range of outcomes into the future. No possibility of deleterious effects is my estimate of your position. Agree?)
One month? And the trolls want WUWT to close down?
hahahaha! (A long and very loud belly laugh!)
Tell you what, let all of the truly fleeced taxpayer funds be returned, with interest since the alarmists love to describe the CAGW ventures as investment’.
WUWT will remain a science site devoted to the impact, science and metrics of weather. Which if you hadn’t been so busy trying to poison the discussions; it has always been.
Why? Because there is a graph showing that February 2016 may have been 0.1 degree warmer than the 1998 peak. OMG – run for your lives, the world may potentially be 0.1 degree warmer on average.
It’s totally irrelevant to actual real humans who face real problems and challenges each day.
Or should we close down – because the “pause buster” has erased the 1998 from the records. Even though it was definitely to produce alarming trends at the time.
Cooling the past and warming the present, y-axis magnification, the deni@l of natural variability and the manufacture and exaggeration of consequences – those seem to be the only games in alarmist town.
Apologies, should have read, “Even though (1998 El Nino) was definitely used to produce alarming trends at the time.”
World food stocks at record highs with more people living than ever before. Fewer and fewer people living in poverty every year. The world’s deserts greening. Babies smiling and laughing. It’s awful, just awful.
“Even though (1998 El Nino) was definitely used to produce alarming trends at the time.”
The only trend I’m aware of that gets near your comment is from the 2007 IPCC report, where one trend was of 25 years to 2005. That is little affected by the 1998 el Nino.
For surface data of 25 years, strong ENSO events at the beginning or end of the trend make little difference. Here is the difference in trend between 1972-1997, 1973-98 and 1974-99.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1970/to:2001/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1972/to:1998/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1973/to:1999/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1974/to:2000/trend
The trend difference between them is less than 3 hundredths of a degree/decade (less than 0.3C/century).
(BTW, the highest trend is that ending in December 1999, not 1998)
One can get larger trend changes from small adjustments in the time-period by a) using shorter time-periods, and b) using lower tropospheric (satellite) temperature records. They have more variability in the anomalies.
I know of no “alarming” public announcements derived from running short-term trends to 1998.
Do you have a pointer?
Here you go – from Karl himself, at the time. Using 1998 as the peak to create some nice alarming trend lines:
http://rmgsc.cr.usgs.gov/outgoing/threshold_articles/Karletal2000.pdf
idefatigablefrog,
You’ve discovered someone doing a trend analysis of global temperature in 1999. Good job.
“Alarming,” you said. From the discussion in the paper paper;
It is less certain whether the rate of temperature change has been constant since 1976, or whether the recent string of record breaking temperatures represents yet another increase increase in the rate of temperature change… but unusual events can occur and the probabilities of observing the consecutive string of record breaking temperatures are not uncharacteristically low…. At this point however, it may be premature to abandon the hypothesis of a constant rate of temperature increase since 1976.
Perhaps you expected researchers to refrain from doing trend analysis immediately after the then record warmth on 1998? Otherwise, this doesn’t help your point. Caveats are included. Lots of “indicates,” “if,” “possible,” “may,” “imply,” but no “alarm”. Even the title of the paper asks a question rather than screams a result.
I know of no “alarming” public announcements derived from running short-term trends to 1998. That temperature trends were being analysed in 1999 is hardly surprising.
Simon, I suspect you’re new here. Anthony has always agreed that AGW is real. It’s the catastrophic part of CAGW that’s at issue.
The models predicted much more warming than what has actually occurred. Now they (and you) want to claim they were right by saying, “See, the warming isn’t zero.” But no one ever said it was zero.
Had the planet warmed as much as predicted, it might well have been catastrophic. Instead, the polar bears are doing fine. The corals are doing fine. Oceanfront property is doing fine. The alarmist misdirection tactic is falling flat.
Saying the pause is over is not the same as saying that there never was a pause. The word “pause” means temporary. A permanent pause would be a contradiction in terms – sort of like reasonable alarmist.
Frederick Michael,
‘Simon’ isn’t new here, it’s just that he’s incapable of facing the facts. He made up his mind early on, based on scant information, and now he simply cannot admit that he was wrong — and worse, that skeptics of the ‘dangerous AGW’ scare were right all along.
DB
It’s simple, the Simon who made the (nasty dig at AW)comment is not your pal Simon who chats with you regularly. I’m on your side with this one. And Frederick I agree AW has never denied AGW.
what strikes me is the very big sensitivity to this el nino in the surface data compared to the super duper 1997-1998 el nino…. Especially in the GISS graph. shouldn’t they be comparable?
perhaps it has to do with the blob but i can’t get passed through that. Maybe something to investigate in a later stage as the data moves on?
Between December 1997 and February 1998, GISS went up 0.29. Between December 2015 and February 2016, GISS went up 0.25. At least that is not a huge difference.
Really amazing map of out-going long-wave radiation for the last month.
It also shows the mechanics of how an El Nino impacts temperatures and why there is a lag.
We think the energy from the hot ocean temperatures in an El Nino is released to the atmosphere and that is what makes it warmer after an El Nino.
But it is really how much cloud builds up over top of the central Pacific. Sure the hot ocean temperature is releasing energy, but it is the CLOUDS, that build up so much that they STOP much of that extra energy being released to space.
The clouds hold the heat IN.
There is a huge area in the central Pacific where out-going energy to space has been 50 W/m2 lower than normal over the last 30 days. An area the size of Europe.
50 W/m2 is a huge number, it something like 20% below normal and nowhere else on Earth can have numbers this large over this large of an area.
It takes time for all these thunderstorm clouds to build up to this level and then time for the extra energy held in to spread around the planet with the prevailing atmospheric circulation patterns. This is the explanation for the LAG of three months.
I have never seen this big of area in the OLR maps having -50 W/m2 less OLR going to space. 50 W/m2 should be compared to the forcing from doubled CO2 which is just 3.7 W/m2.
February 2016 reduced OLR peak compared the Nino 3.4 peak in mid-November 2015.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/map/images/olr/olr.anom.30day.gif
Thank yoy Bill Illis for directing attention to this. I see this as the interesting discussion when it comes to atmospheric warming. There are really large fluctuations in enrgy transport and balance. When the UAH temperatures went up with 1 deg C in 1997, it is more than the temperature increase for 250 years (surface). One year change more than 250 years of warming. If it has been a pause or not does not matter compared to how quick change can be. And what matter now is how fast the temperatures change is. Perhaps the clouds can be a part of the explanation.
And I think it is also remarkable to see how fast heat get into and out of oceans.
One can readily see SST cooling since mid-Dec in the area of the OLR anomaly, and ocean-wide:
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2015/anomnight.12.14.2015.gif
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2016/anomnight.2.11.2016.gif
http://www.ospo.noaa.gov/data/sst/anomaly/2016/anomnight.3.10.2016.gif
Ocean Heat Content dropped last month to mostly below pre-2015 ENSO levels:
Equatorial Upper 300m temperature Average anomaly based on 1981-2010 Climatology (deg C)
YR MON 130E-80W 160E-80W 180W-100W
2014 12 0.50 0.48 0.54
2015 1 0.28 0.22 0.15
2015 2 0.54 0.65 0.83
2015 3 0.85 1.17 1.52
2015 4 1.05 1.42 1.74
2015 5 1.03 1.42 1.53
2015 6 0.87 1.27 1.51
2015 7 0.92 1.36 1.69
2015 8 0.99 1.43 1.97
2015 9 1.04 1.48 1.80
2015 10 1.04 1.51 1.91
2015 11 0.92 1.41 1.78
2015 12 0.58 1.04 1.20
2016 1 0.44 0.88 1.25
2016 2 -0.03 0.31 0.57
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ocean/index/heat_content_index.txt
Global SSTs are dropping now:
2015/12 0.717
2016/01 0.732
2016/02 0.604
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadsst3/data/HadSST.3.1.1.0/diagnostics/HadSST.3.1.1.0_monthly_globe_ts.txt
As are tropical SSTs:
2015/12 1.053
2016/01 1.129
2016/02 0.878
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadsst3/data/HadSST.3.1.1.0/diagnostics/HadSST.3.1.1.0_monthly_tropics_ts.txt
As you probably know, Climate4you.com has a series of interesting charts on the relationship between OLR and temperatures. This particular chart is the most interesting, at least to me:
http://www.climate4you.com/images/NOAA%20CPC%20EquatorOutgoingLWradiationAnomalyMonthly%20and%20HadCRUT3%20since1979%20With37monthRunningAverage.gif
(If chart doesn’t show, sorry!) Ole Humlun’s comment on the chart is as follows:
Somebody smarter than me will have to reconcile these data w/ Willis’ thunderstorm thermostat hypothesis, which seems to run on a shorter timescale.
Best,
The problem as I see it is the ocean is releasing this extra evaporated water with its latent heat to form these clouds. This warms the air as there is nowhere for those IR photons to go except into the air. If they hit the water they are converted to latent heat of evaporation and add to the cloudiness and cool the water. Eventually this would lead to the water losing its heat to the atmosphere until the evaporation cycle is broken when the water gets too cold and the hot air is transported away. During this time of cloudiness, the water gets a double whammy on cooling: 1st by the added surface evaporation, 2nd by the lack of incoming UV to warm the water.
The question I have is once the ocean cools to the point of cloud breakup, how long does it take that warm moist air to dissipate and give off all that heat and where?
Owen asked, ” how long does it take that warm moist air to dissipate and give off all that heat and where?”
About a week to ten days for the US, and the heat and moisture is released over the land area and beyond from where the moisture first arrived, ie from the Pacific, from northern or southern pathways, or from the Carribean going north, or, more rarely from the Atlantic, either from the tropics or northward.
These events happen as a result of what I call “solar blasts”, as most of the time such evaporation events occur after TSI spikes that have lasted for several days, more rarely weeks, or sometimes up to a month.
The land+ocean TLT values are here. Curiously, on that webpage, RSS lists the composite as extending from 82.5S to 82.5N, while on their Upper Air Temperature webpage linked above, they state:
“We do not provide monthly means poleward of 82.5 degrees (or south of 70S for TLT) due to difficulties in merging measurements in these regions.”
The link you cited shows TLT only going to 70S.
The pause still exists: No global warming for more than 18 years. Check here:
http://klimawandler.blogspot.de/2016/03/despite-el-nino-pause-still-exists-no.html
Figure 7 says RSS is +0.002 C/decade. Granted, it is extremely small, but not zero or negative.
…0.02 / century is within the margin of error, so it is meaningless !
The Climate Forecast System Reanalysis (CFSR) estimates show the big upward spike since October but still show a weak downward trend for this century so far (since 2001):
The CFSR Antarctic estimates show a significant downward trend since 1979, which is inconsistent with the AGW from CO2 hypothesis and suggests that other factors are dominant, even in the northern hemisphere.
More CFSR graphs and discussion here (updated monthly):
https://oz4caster.wordpress.com/monthly-trends/
Climate science is in its infancy and is far from being able to provide consistently accurate forecasts for months and much less for years or decades. My understanding is that the long-range climate models are not showing the Antarctic downward temperature trend and this discrepancy adds to the list of model failings that cast considerable doubt on their accuracy. Projections from climate models appear to be mainly speculation at this point and should not be used for policy decisions.
thanks Bryan!
GISS and Karl are apparently using 1984 as a manual, not a horror story. What happened to the 1997-8 El Nino?
WUWT is becoming unusable due to ADVERTISING taking over almost all of my router. This hass taken ten minutes to write
Robinedwards36, I had the same problem and thought I would have to give up on this site. Thanks to recommendations here, I now use adblock. It’s free and it works.
For all you Adblock users out there, remember to drop a few $$ into the tip jar for this site…
TANSTAAFL!
Is adblock a Firefox add-on?
Yes it is. Go to your Tools menu, click Add-ons, enter “Adblock Plus” in the ‘Search all add-ons’ box…
I just installed it, and bingo! – everything is finally running smoothly! Hope it stays that way. Good luck.
Yes, and there are a few others that you could also try.
No Global Warming Pause At All For 37 Years 2 Months – A New Record – The No-Pause Period Lengthens Again
The least-squares linear-regression trend on the RSS satellite monthly global mean surface temperature anomaly dataset shows no global warming pause for 37 years 2 months since January 1979.
January 1979 is the beginning of the RSS satellite monthly global mean surface temperature record, which means the No-Pause Period has lasted for the entire length of the existing RSS satellite monthly global mean surface temperature data.
Our latest topical graph (linked below) 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 positive trend. The start-date is not “cherry-picked” so as to coincide with any particular weather event. Instead, it is calculated so as to find the longest period with a positive trend.
Unfortunately, it is not possible to look back farther than January of 1979, because that is the start of the RSS satellite monthly global mean surface temperature data.
The graph linked below includes the RSS lower troposphere dataset for the No-Pause Period, with a least-squares linear-regression trend line.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1979/plot/rss/from:1979/trend
As usual, dcpetterson doesn’t get it.
Willful ignorance.
dbstealey, such a brilliantly rational response! I am awed by your use of data and the compelling logic of your reply. It is almost as if you wrote it yourself.
However you didn’t, unfortunately, address the data or the rationale. We have a Non-Pause Period of 37 years and two months, from January of 1979 to February of 2016. Nor were those dates cherry-picked in any way. They simply show the longest possible period within the RSS data set that has a positive trend. (It happens to correspond with the entire data set, but that is simply coincidental.)
The least-squares linear trendline proves there was no global warming pause at all for 37 years and two months.
If one starts at the bottom of a sign wave and follows it out for 270 degrees drawing lines from that start to the current point on the wave, one will see positive slopes on all possible points. Indeed if one starts at the bottom and follows for a full cycle one will get at worst a zero slope on any given line.
Temperatures are not exactly cyclic, but appear to have pseudo-cycles imposed on a general recovery warming from the little ice age COLD period. One would expect a recovery from a little ice age to have a warming trend and indeed we have measured one. In fact we have measured one that looks somewhat weaker than a similar warming 1000ish years ago (dark ages cold period into medieval warm period) and 2000ish years ago (heading into Roman warm period) etc. (Minoan warm, climate optimum, on and on back to the recovery from the last great glaciation.) The problem is we like to pretend that our ancestors were ignorant, unenlightened beasts who couldn’t tell when crops failed due to climate issues, or grew in bumper yields for opposite climatic reasons. Because they had not learned to put marks on a glass tube and fill it with a quantity of quicksilver or alcohol and record these everyday at the same time and in the same manner, they obviously were cretins who should be ignored on all matters climate.
We still do not know what caused the completely natural warmings of the past, so we can not under any circumstances even begin to blame man for this warming until we know what caused those natural events of the past in great detail, to do otherwise is counter to the scientific method.
dcpetterson,
You still don’t understand how the ‘pause’ is calculated.
(Hint: count back from today, not from some arbitrary point up to now.)
Owen,
Which ones don’t we know? Can you name them?
We do know the current influences on the climate, and the warming we are now seeing cannot be explained without taking into account the effects of added greenhouse gasses.
db,
You don’t understand how Monckton’s technique works. But let’s take your hint:
Okay, Counting back from today, you get a upward trendline in the first month back (January 2016 to February 2016 is a positive trendline)
You get a positive trendline from the second month back to today (December 2016 to February 2016 is a positive trendline).
In fact, you get, a positive trendline starting in every month going to today, reaching all the way back to the beginning of the RSS dataset. RSS shows 37 years and 2 months of No Pause At All In Global Warming
If you use the GISTemp dataset instead of the limited RSS dataset, you get a positive trendline every month you go back from today, for the full set of over 136 years.
Using Monckton’s patented technique, there has been Absolutely No Pause In Global Warming At All for over 136 years.
If you disagree, ask Chris Monckton and argue with him.
Typo:
“You get a positive trendline from the second month back to today (December 2016 to February 2016 is a positive trendline).”
should, of course, be
“You get a positive trendline from the second month back to today (December 2015 to February 2016 is a positive trendline).”
As I explained previously, the graph I linked shows:
I did not start “from some arbitrary point up to now.” I calculated backward to the earliest month “as far back as it is possible to go and still find a positive trend.” That is precisely Monckton’s technique. If you don’t like it, argue with him.
Owen in GA, you’re right, of course. You wrote:
We still do not know what caused the completely natural warmings of the past.
dcpetterson replied:
Which ones don’t we know? Can you name them?
Owen, are we actually trying to school logic illiterates?
I’m trying to figure out how you would write down things you don’t know about. Because if we had the unknowns figured out, we would know it all…
Guys- those charts are all upside down, right? Right??? What are we gonna say now if they’re not? Um, sorry? When does that next rocket take off? Guys? What now?
(rude comment about intelligence and parentage of Neraho self-censored in case he is being sarcastic and is not in fact an ignorant troll) We follow the data. Climate is not what happens this month or even last year, that is weather.
If it warmed, so what? We attribute that warming to an el Nino, which last time I checked was not controlled by Dr. Evil from his moon base, but was in fact a natural process.
Warming is not a problem. Attribution to humans without firm evidence is. This argument is about the abandonment by certain parties of any semblance of the scientific method in favor of moving humanity back to the short brutish lives lived by our ancestors only a short century or two in the past.
Warming is not enough to show AGW let alone CAGW (we read press releases in addition to the articles so we can dispense with the “search the articles, no one uses that nomenclature” argument). Correlation (which has never been that good) between CO2 and upward temperature likewise is not enough to prove AGW. There has to be a hypothesis that makes measurable predictions that would be different for CO2 warming from the normal rebound from the little ice age kind. Then after verifying theoretically that the prediction would be different than natural changes, we would proceed to carefully measure this predicted behavior over the course of many natural cycles to check for the predicted difference. Once the mechanism checked out, there would be extensive checking that other mechanisms present in the system would not produce the same effect.
None of that has happened.
What is interesting is that the sudden rise in global average temperature anomalies the past 6 months DOES correspond to the sudden change in Antarctica sea ice: For the past 5 years of the “pause”, Antarctic sea ice remained generally steady at +1.0 Mkm^2 every month. tracking this anomaly from season to season through sea ice fall increase, winter darkness, spring melt, and summer inflection then re-freezing. For the 10 years prior to the “pause” Antarctic sea ice generally increased between 1992 and its peak/plateau from 2007-2015.
But.
From Sept 2015 through March, Antarctic sea ice has decreased from a +1.0 anomaly to a -0.10 to -0.18 anomaly. certainly near zero, certainly well within the +/- 1 sigma standard deviation of normal. But still, more than 1.0 to 1.5 Mkn^2 square kilometers of LESS reflecting surface to cool the planet every minute of every day for 6 months.
In contrast, despite the hype, the Arctic has been stagnant, the Arctic sea ice anomaly really has not changed at all. Further, the Arctic sea ice is “dark” (below the horizon) during 7 months of the year, so ANY decrease in Arctic sea ice coverage the past 6 months is not only not a trend, but would serve to further cool the planet.
the Pacific currents off of South America reverse the El Nino trend: A hot spot of of Peru/Ecuador does not flow “south” towards Antarctic waters 9to melt sea ice down there) but westward by the Coriolis forces towards the Pacific Island then slowly bed south to Antarctica. The 2015 El Nino has not had time to heat Antarctic waters. yet.
The ‘Pause‘.
dbstealey,
You seem to be arguing that a contrary trendline of a subset of the data can somehow undo the trendline of the entire dataset. If that is what you are arguing, then observe this graph which is a subset of your claimed “pause”, and which clearly — by your logic — entirely invalidates the idea of a “pause”. There is a positive trend in the portion of the false “pause” that you cherry-picked.
In any case, the longest period for which there is a positive trendline in the RSS data set is 37 years and 2 months. That is the No-Pause Period. The linear trendline proves it.
In fact, dbstealey, observe this graph which shows two subsets of your alleged “pause”, which together account for 88% of your data subset.
Your alleged cherry-picked “pause” actually includes two periods of sharply-increasing global temperatures. Further, your cherry-picked “pause” is embedded within a period of No Pause At All that has now lengthened to 37 years and 2 months, and will grow longer again next month.
dcpetterson,
You don’t know any more about this than you know how to close your HTML tags.
A year ago everyone acknowledged the so-called “Pause”. But now you sheeple have been issued new talking points: “The ‘Pause” never happened'”.
Could you be any less credible?
As Stephen Schneider instructed you, LYING for a ‘good’ cause is A-OK.
You learned that lesson well.
“A year ago everyone acknowledged the so-called “Pause”.”
You give no quotes, as usual. Here is RealClimate, Dec 2014:
“There simply has been no statistically significant slowdown, let alone a “pause”.”
Right you are, Nick. Tamino has also been quite clear there’s been no “pause”.
In fact, the last time there was a significant change in the slope of the warming trend was in the 1970s.
I do note dbstealey did not respond to the substance of my comment. He wanted to claim there was a “pause” because a cherry-picked subset of the data shows some statistical noise. I demonstrated that the period of his “pause” actually consists of at least two similar subsets of rapidly-rising temperatures. (And this is all within the cherry-picked dataset of RSS lower troposphere temperatures).
I also am not certain whether dbstealey recognizes that I used the same techniques and same language and same logic that Chris Monckton used to create his “pause”. If dbstealey is going to claim there is something wrong with my presentation, then dbstealey has to apply precisely the same criticism to Chris Monckton’s fake “pause”.
The difference between me and Monckton is that I’m using the whole dataset, and not relying on short-term meaningless statistical noise.
In the RSS dataset, the No-Pause Period has now reached 37 years and 2 months, and will lengthen again next month.
Nick Stokes,
‘realclimate’ is no more credible than Michael Mann is (cf: Climategate).
Pick a credible source if you want to post examples. As late as last year even IPCC scientist were trying to ‘explain’ why the ‘pause’ was still happening.
Eighteen+ years of no warming is pretty hard to explain, without inventing stories.
Here are the first 30 EXCUSES for the ‘pause’:
http://americandigest.org/a_the_30.jpg
And your High Priest Michael Mann himself has pulled the rug out from under your deceptive claims.
Complain to Mann if you don’t like it (and petterson, that’s my comeback line. Think up your own, if you can).
db,
I see you’ve degenerated into Wayne’s World. There’s no reason for me to continue a discussion with someone who offers no data or logic. I’ve made my points, and you have avoided them because you can’t dispute them. Take care, See you next time.
Pause or no pause, for me the relevant aspect is the disagreement between observation and prediction. Last week I bet AU$100 with my colleague here that in 20 years, that is, 2036, global temperatures will be less than 1oC than current ones (2016). I guess I chose a good starting point (el nino!).
I must correct: less than 1oC HIGHER than current ones. It did not make sense the way I wrote.
Matheus,
You made an excellent wager. Betting with liars is almost always a win-win. Along with the money, you will get bragging rights, too.
“This is only the global average surface temperature and it’s only one measure of the climate system – and it’s a very fickle measure.
There’s an over-emphasis on the surface air temperature.” – Prof Matt England
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/planet-oz/2016/mar/03/did-global-warming-really-slowdown-have-a-large-injection-of-nuance-and-a-side-order-of-abuse
~ ~ ~
Michael Mann: “I’ve always consider the satellite record the least reliable of all instrumental temperature observations”
http://www.climatecentral.org/news/what-to-know-februarys-satellite-temp-record-20091
. . .
Where to from here?
Mark M,
From that wild-eyed ‘Climate Central’ link:
…satellites are also seeing blazing heat in the Arctic… the Earth continued its record-blazing hot streak… all the excitement about the satellite spike… Watch out! Satellite data shows Feb setting crazy heat records. ‘Whopping,’… the surface temperature data analyzed and reported by NASA, NOAA and others is viewed as the gold standard…
Anyone who writes that kind of breathless propaganda is appealing to the scientific dimwit crowd. ‘Blazing heat in the Arctic’?? That’s emotion, not science.
And almost everyone quoted has been quoted before — in the Climategate emails, where they openly discuss hijacking the peer review process, dodging taxes, jeopardizing the careers of anyone who doesn’t toe the runaway global warming narrative, and in general, practicing pseudo-science.
Both their blog readers can believe that nonsense if they want; but most knowledgeable folks don’t.
This is all fine and dandy and you have done a considerable amount of work in this presentation, but……
How can this have any meaning when all the data has been altered and does not reflect the real world?
If you came to these graphs and commentary boards quite fresh you might say something like this, just looking at the plots and not knowing what they were about:
1. There seems to be a thing here that there are five ways of measuring.
2. Looking at the longest run of data all seem to agree that this thing is somewhere between 1 and 2
3. But taking a rough average this thing seems to be a bit less than 1 and a half.
4. If you take three of the data sets namely blue, red, brown (something to do with the “surface” of this thing) then “this thing is somewhere between 1 and 2 but probably a bit less than one and a half” seem to be indicated pretty much however you cut the data.
5. If you take two of the data sets namely green and orange (something to do with the “lower troposphere” of this thing) then if you choose to focus on shorter period of times then you might wonder if this thing might be zero after all.
6. But then again when you look at Figure 9, and especially the animation, the issue seems to be that the 1998 “troposphere” data point is creating this perception when you look at just some of this data.
7. But reassuringly for all, on returning to figure 6 of the whole thing, where all five data sets are shown in their fullest form, this data suggest that this thing seems to be somewhere between 1 and 2, and probably a bit less than one and a half.
I know there is a lot of debate around all of this – feel free to tell me i am naive, but i am not quite as naive as my language suggests – but in essence that’s what this data shows when you look at if fresh…?
Within 1 year La Nina will be here and UAH temperatures will be back down to 0.2 or less.
The pause will live on.
The noise being made by the “it’s worse than we thought” crowd will be replaced with the sound of crickets.
Hi wallensworth,
Using the UAHV6beta5 product, anomalies of 0.2 or even 0.1 will not be sufficiently low to produce a non-positive linear trend in the next year. In fact, assuming next month drops down to +0.45, or the next 2 months drop down to +0.22 each, then every month for the rest of the year could drop down to anomalies of 0.0 and the linear trend would still be positive. If the anomaly drops down to +0.33 for the next 3 months, then anomalies for the rest of the year could drop to -0.18 and still not remove the positive trend.
ENSO projections for the next few months show us returning to ENSO-neutral in the June/July timeframe, so it seems highly unlikely that we will see anything approaching such precipitous drops by August, never mind before then. La Nina conditions are likely starting in the August/September timeframes, but even if a resulting La Nina is deep, it is unlikely to be _that_ deep: for some context, there have only been 22 months with zero or negative anomalies in the past 10 years. There have only been 5 months with anomalies of -0.18 or less in the past 10 years. Having 7 of them line up in a row would be… improbable.
And I meant to make clear – assuming we are taking about the period beginning with the 1997/1998 El Nino, using the UAHV6beta5.
It would be very interesting to see the land based data sets broken down by region. Why does the 15/16 El Nino show up like the 97/98 El Nino DID at the time it was measured.
Any bets on how many years until the 15/16 Nino is adjusted downward in order to hide subsequent cooling?
RWturner,
It seems like you have the adjustment trend backwards: between UAH 5.6 and UAH6.0beta5, every single month from March 2008 to December 2015 has been adjusted downwards/cooler, whereas all but 3 months between 1997 and 2001 inclusive (so 57 out of 60 months) were adjusted upwards/warmer. There doesn’t seem to be a trend of adjusting the UAH 97/98 values downwards whatsoever…
Or are you suggesting that those adjustments were invalid, and that Spencer and Christie will fix those values by reversing their previous corrections?
Nope, but I will bet good money that a few short years from now we’ll be hearing about the ‘pause’ that started in 2015/16.
Regarding whether conditions will move to la Nina or neutral over the coming year, 8 different institutes make predictions. Most predict ENSO neutral to the end of the year. The graph at this link only shows the BoM multi-model ensemble (region 3.4).
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/#tabs=Outlooks
For the near future, most of the institutes predict ENSO neutral (region 3.4). You can see the mean predictions for July for the 8 institutes at this link.
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/model-summary/#tabs=Pacific-Ocean
Canadian and French institutes are the two predicting la Nina conditions later in the year. Various others (Japan, UK, US, EU, Australia) predict neutral.
More details here: http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/model-summary/#tabs=Models
So you’re saying the Groundhog was right.