One of the best things about WUWT is the number of eyes and minds at work, multiplying the efforts. This is interesting. Now that the 1998 El Nino is disappearing off the 10 year scale, things are looking a bit different
From “crosspatch” in comments:
NCDC now has December 2008 in the database. Annual North American temperature since 1998 (11 years of data) is falling over the period at a rate of 0.78(F)/decade or 7.8(F)per century. At this rate we will be in an ice age within 5 decades. If you can get the graphic, the heavy black like is the average over the century 1901 to 2000.
Here is the graphic from their automated graphics generator linked to their database:
Source: National Climatic Data Center
While the link he provided is only a result, I’m sure he’ll share the method in comments to this post.
UPDATE: He has indeed, see below. Try your own hand at it. The trend will likely flatten a bit with the removal of 1998 from the 10 year set. Of course you could pick any number of scales/periods and get different results. The point being made here is that the last 10 years hasn’t met with some model expectations.
Also I have corrected in the text the reference to Centigrade when it was actually Fahrenheit, note the (F). NCDC being an arm of the US government operates on the English unit system whereas most other organizations use metric, and thus Centigrade. I’ve made the mistake myself, so has NASA, who famously lost a Mars probe when they botched orbit entry calculations by use of Metric and English units on different science teams.
UPDATE2: Some folks are erroneously thinking that this graph above represents a global trend, it does not. Read on.
It represents US data from NCDC. Also there has been the usual complaint that “10 years isn’t long enough to determine any useful trend”. Perhaps, but when NASA’s James Hansen went before congress in 1988 to declare a “crisis in the making”, there had only been about 10 years of positive trend data since the PDO flip in 1978. It seemed adequate then:
In the graph above, note that the GISS station data does follow the Hansen C scenario, but that we are currently well below it.
Yes we really do need longer data periods to determine climate trends, 30 years is the climatic standard, but you can also learn useful information from examining shorter trends and regional trends.
To generate the graphic I made:
Leave the “Data Type” field at “Mean Temperature”
Select “Annual” from the “Period” field pull down
Select “1998″ as “First Year To Display”
and click the blue “Submit” oval at the below the data entry form.
“Okay guys, so can you show me that the data seen over the last 10 years for the U.S. is out-of-the-range of what climate models project? ”
Did you mean project, or predict, or maybe forecast? The question seems rather ambiguous. Are you asking for previous “projections” that are out of range of current climate conditions? Or are you asking for current models that are constantly adjusted that are out of range for current climate conditions.
If I reminded you of say Hansen 1988 in front of Congress being way too high, would you scoff and laugh and claim that Hansen didn’t have the knowledge he has today, and that’s how science proceeds, and that sceptics are wrong to doubt?
Somebody’s head’s gonna role when this gets back to Hansen and Gore.
I wonder how Hansen’s going to nail this.
Somebody is going to have to turn that hockey stick upside down would’nt you agree.
VG (09:21:41) :
” and again hathaway is always right as the goalposts are moved and D Archibald wrong
http://www.solarcycle24.com/ (sorry for being sarcastic…). D Archibald will still be much closer I reckon at 40 ”
I notice that in this latest Hathaway prediction, Solar Cycle 24 is now forecast to be SMALLER than Cycle 23.
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/ssn_predict_l.gif
I have a copy of the Hathaway JUNE 2008 forecast, in which he still predicted Cycle 24 to be larger than 23.
Does anyone know if January 2009 is Hathaway’s FIRST forecast predicting a SMALLER Cycle 24 ?
Joel,
Roger Pielke last year showed a number of past climate model projections and thier verification stats. It wasn’t pretty. The models had to be refreshed every 2-3 years with fresh data inorder to slow their built in warm biases. That is, initial model runs were anywhere from 20-40% warm if allowed to run on thier own. Gavin, of course was not pleased, and RC created a thread (which you linked to).
To put it another way, the models never showed neutral or cooling -only warming, and lots of it. Pielke chose GCM runs from the 1990s and early 2000, and verified them with data from HadCRUT I believe (the RC folks of course like GISS temps). In every case, the GCMs had a definite warm bias, which continues to this day. Also, the infamous mid tropespheric hot spot, which is one of the AGW signals has failed to materiialize. RC nows says that the IPCC never meant the hot spot to be an AGW signal. In any event, the GCM models used by people like Dr Hansen have a very high warm bias. Hansen, BTW warned that the tipping point for runaway AGW feedbacks in 2017. Where did he get that year? Why the GCMs, of course.
One last thing, the GCMs cannot predict the changes or intensities of any of the major climate teleconnections. If you cannot predict changes in ENSO, or the NAO you might as well go back to the drawing board.
Forgot to mention I saw Lou Dobbs on CNN yesterday. Sounds like he’s got a low drum beat started on the possibility that its not warming but actually cooling that’s expected. I expect him to ease on in to this a little further until he’s got a steady loud drum beat. When that happens that’ll be another crack in the ice under the feet of Gore and Hansen and the AGW crowd.
I wonder? When the Gore investment fund fails and loses all those investment dollars will he ask the Fed Gov to bail his people out?
“…temperature since 1998 (11 years of data) is falling over the period at a rate of 0.78C/decade or 7.8C per century. ”
This is a planetary emergency!
We have a climate crisis!
Anyone who doesn’t believe this is a flat-earther!
We’ve got to act not now to curb icehouse gases!
Sea levels could drop 6 meters!
This is what the corral reefs could look like!
This was Kilamanjaro in 2005, This is what it looks liked today!
The Gulf of Mexio could soon disappear!
The palm trees in our tropics are struggling to suvive!
The elk are running out of tundra grass!!
We’re facing an impending tipping point!
————-
Relax folks, I’m just practicing! There’s money to be made with global cooling! Let’s get started today!
Carbon futures never looked better.
Buy today!
Global cooling is happening even faster than our worst-case model scenarios!
Soon it’ll be possible to snowshoe to the equator!
We’ve got to have Congressional Hearings…where scientists can turn down the heat, wear their parkas and shiver while testifying before a Senate Committee!
and do so on CNN!
tarpon says,
“Maybe a better discussion would be to haul out the hoaxes first 1988 IPCC model predictions and see how reality has followed the computer models. […] It would be OK to allow 5 year updates […]”
I’d love to see a dedicated webpage devoted to doing just that, and nothing more. Though, I don’t understand why such an audit would allow 5 year updates. The whole point of such an exercise would be to test the climate models, not to test the modelers dexterity with changing models to reflect observed data. We already know that they are good at that.
Almost all AGW models use 300 km grid sizes. Having seen and reviewed the results of the residual error for model that goes down to 50 km grid sizes, I can state unequivacally that any AGW model that uses greater than 75 km grid size is prone to numerical diffusion and is completely unusable under basic numerical analysis protocols.
Leif:
“I agree, Hathaway is a good scientist.”
What do you base that judgement on Leif? It seems to me that when a guy just pushes his curve to the left or increases the slope of the rising trend in order to stay closer to the predicted high date, that he is just saving face. I don’t have an issue with someone being wrong once in a while. But it looks to me like Hathaway simply adjusts again and again as he is overtaken by reality. Does Hathaway have a past record of success that inspires you with confidence?
Has anyone here been over to Climate Audit and looked at the Mauri Timonen’s Supra long Finnish Dendro Chronology? It covers 7500 years and shows cycles upon cycles of climate trends indicated by different tree growth rates. As I recall there was a spectral analysis that showed cycles of 30-37 years, ~48 years, ~82 years and 95 years. In other words, the climate it very much like a roller coaster. Assigning a linear trend, up or down, to a system that is as non-linear as the historical data indicate is absurd. Its time to stop assigning linear slopes to short term data sets and guessing where it might be in 100 years. It was this reliance on linear plots from the ’70s to the turn of the century that led us to the AGW nonsense we have now.
Here’s the temperatures for the continent of Australia – http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1037/3175164436_814eedc3e4.jpg?v=0 . 4C per century, or 7C if you start in 1999.
Given these data are apparently higher quality that the US data (http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/change/reference.shtml), I think this proves global warming.
ak:
“Choose an exceptional year and make a trend line from that point – brilliant!”
While I agree that picking a year with a strong El Nino is going to help you get a negative slope, you also have to look at the La Nina that immediately followed that El Nino. It was long, and it actually had slightly more of an impact on the slope that the preceeding El Nino. The two events taken together ended up having little effect on the trend line. In fact there were 4 El Nino’s and 3 La Nina’s over the entire period, and their total effect was also extremely small on the outcome of the slope.
It is truly surprising to me that climate models like NASA’s Model E work at all. To see how truly sad the source code is, you can check it out here:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/modelEsrc/
And you can examine the pathetic “documentation” here…
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/modelE/
For extra credit, try to find the differential equations that are actually being solved (or rather crudely approximated) by the code.
It’s too bad that the NASA scientists who are entrusted with developing and maintaining these codes (the results of which are subsequently used as fodder for climate “studies” and policy documents) are too busy blogging to be bothered with properly documenting, verifying and validating their numerical procedures…
here’s another graph showing the actual temps v Hansen predictions.
http://users.tpg.com.au/johnsay1/Stuff/temp18.jpg
best viewed at 150%
JP:
“If you cannot predict changes in ENSO, or the NAO you might as well go back to the drawing board.”
Hallelujia. This is what I’ve been saying for some time now. The problem with a cooling trend is not so much that natural variation is able to overcome climate sensitivity for some short period of time, but rather that the natural variation that has caused the 11 year trend is inexplicable, even in retrospect, by the climate community. If you claim that the man made CO2 forced temperature trend should be .2C per decade, then you need to be able to explain what natural elements of variation caused that trend to be absent. If you can’t, then you certainly don’t have enough information to create climate models that reach 100 years into the future.
Global warming threat to ski industry
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7809254.stm
It is indeed awkward, to say the least, to start the trendline with 1998, an exceptionally hot El Nino event — because this is a standard AGWers “debunking” of “denialist” claims that the planet has cooled in the last 10 years. What is more intersiting — and more clever, strategically speaking – is that the trend is downward not only for every single year since 1998, but also starting in 1997 — thus before the El Nino. All trends starting before 1997 are upward,however…. let’s see what happens in 2009! BBBBRRRRRRRR I just wish the AGWers were right, I’m FREEEEEZING!
I see that according to Dr Hansen the climate by 2009 should be as warm or warmer than during the Eemian (the previous interglacial). Is there any Londoner reading this who can go out and check if any hippopotamus have turned up in the Thames yet? They were there during the Eemian.
Sean,
I thought that Dendro is dead as a proxy for past temperature as they have discovered that a) trees (or at least leaves) maintain a steady internal temperature unrelated to atmospheric temperature, and b) tree ring size has been shown to be more related to water levels than temperature.
Perhaps you should go and study what the AGW predictions really are before you talk about them.
Alas, Joel, such have reviewed and studied to death at WUWT. For instance, in his Bjerknes Lecture of December last, Dr. James Hansen concluded:
“If the planet gets too warm, the water vapor feedback can cause a runaway greenhouse effect. The ocean boils into the atmosphere and life is extinguished. … Our model blows up before the oceans boil, but it suggests that perhaps runaway conditions could occur with added forcing as small as 10-20 W/m2.”
Exploding models do not give confidence in either the models or their output. Should we rely on exploding models? Should we rely on AGW predictions that Creation itself is doomed? In particular, should we rely on outrageous predictions that fly in the face of all historical and empirical evidence?
I’m sorry for those that cling to models that yield absurd outputs. I am not sorry for pointing out the absurdity. What galls me is that AGW alarmists complain about the debunking of their absurd exploding models without a speck of scientific defense. If your models say the seas are going to boil, then stand behind that. Don’t mince around whining that nobody understands you.
crosspatch (12:40:36) :
Ötzi the Iceman’s mummy (3300 B.C.) was found in 1991 in the Schnalstal glacier in the Alps.
such have been reviewed …