Der Spiegel Online: stagnating temperatures a puzzle

“Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years
…
Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth’s average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.”
Clearly none of this is true –
https://sites.google.com/site/europa62/climatechange/yvtayto200
Nothing in the last ten years looks like any change at all from the warming trend of around 0.2C per decade. Just look at the data.
Now, perhaps in 10 years’ time, if we haven’t seen any new record high global average temperatures, you could legitimately claim that there has been a significant change to the warming trend, but right now there is no difference at all between the last ten years and any other ten year period you care to choose in the last several decades. There is just the normal interannual variation superimposed on the warming trend. Again – just look at the data.

“Spiegel”, please.

Natural climate variations cause warming. The issue is not “whether or not” there is warming. Natural climate variations are nowhere near sufficiently understood, which is why modelers base probabilities & other measures of statistical significance on untenable assumptions of randomness.
One sensible option is to stop conflating issues.

The collapse of the AGW House of Cards is going main stream now.
On top of that we now wait for the impact of the ‘”leaked” Hadley CRU data which will pull the rug from under the the scientific establishment that abused science for political objectives.
Watch them and their cronies jump the sinking AGW Titanic that just hit a monster ice berg.
Politicians and Corporate CEO’s are allergic for any involvement or association with high profiled public scandals.
Hopefully the honorable members of the press are able to identify this “Golden” opportunity to restore the integrity of the free press and raise the circulation numbers of their battered media by revealing the biggest scientific, political and economic scam in history to the public.
This scientific scam if it comes out big has the potential to cancel the Copenhagen Climate Conference and trigger an official investigation of unprecedented proportions and a flood of claims.

This is a real turnaround. Not only that ” Der Spiegel” is Germany`s most respected political magazine. This very guy Mojif Latif must have had a Saulus-Paulus experience. For so many years now whenever there was a bit of stronger rains or floods or hot weather, you could be sure to see him appearing in public television,predicting that all these events where just the first signs of a catastrophic global warming if we not…… And I don`t think he would careless risk his splendid position. There must be a wind of change among his colleagues.

Icarus (00:13:10) :
“Nothing in the last ten years looks like any change at all from the warming trend of around 0.2C per decade. Just look at the data.
Again – just look at the data.”
Really?
You should take a look at what the satellites tell us:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/mean:1/offset/from:1980/plot/rss/from:1980/to:1990/trend/plot/rss/from:1990/to:2000/trend/plot/rss/from:2000/to:2010/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1980/mean:1/scale:1
Clearly only 1990’s was the decade of rising temperatures.

It looks that after all, climate scientists have invented the wheel, or recognized that oceanic cycles have effect on global temperatures in multidecadal scale.
It is shame that amateurs, bloggers and WUWT commenters recognized it before the peer-reviewed scientists did.
I loved recent quote from some “leading climate scientist” from Met or CRU: “We are puzzled and have no explanation for this [temperature stagnation].” I would propose that gentleman to give the diploma back and start doing something completely different.

Paul,
If the models predict warming, and there is no warming, then the models are wrong. Therefore, it seems to me that “whether or not there is warming” is important.

Someone appears to have broken a hockey stick!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/6606227/Antarctic-temperatures-between-ice-ages-6C-warmer-than-today.html

When so-called “scientists” cook the data, adding or subtracting (“adjusting”) temperatures at will, no one really can know what the temperatures or temperature changes might have been.
No “scientific method”, no science. Refusing to release actual temperature measurements, actual computer codes which were used to “adjust” the actual temperatures which thermometers indicated, no effort to even consider “margin of error”. . . refusal to release much of anything as to how they came up with the “temperatures” after the “adjustments” . . . all strongly indicative of complete lack of scientific method, which means no real science going on.

“Nothing in the last ten years looks like any change at all from the warming trend of around 0.2C per decade. Just look at the data”
Good idea, just look at the data.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/nhshgl.gif

Again I ask people on both sides, why is 30 years significant? Why is it not 0.3 or 3 or 30 or 300 or 3000 or 30 000 or 300 000 or 3 000 000 ?
I must apologise, as people have kindly tried to answer this before but I’ve never understood the answer.
The graph linked above covers 1945 – 2005, or just two intervals of 30 years. Just two. But it is referred to as a “trend”.
You know if you stand far enough away you can’t see the difference between a triangle, a square, and a circle. They are all just blobs.
Unless someone has a concrete, real world justification for 30 years as the minimum period for “climate”, y’all are just turning everything into blobs, and arguing over whether that blob you see is a square or a triangle.

RR Kampen (00:49:21) :
Re: “Natural climate variations cause warming. ” – ah, so warming has no causes at all. Just happens.
——————————————————–
Being obtuse are we?…. Clearly the context is between natural mechanisms involving global climate changes and that of anthropogenic global warming as per the flawed Hypothesis of AGW….

RR Kampen (00:49:21) :
“”Re: “Natural climate variations cause warming. ” – ah, so warming has no causes at all. Just happens””.
RR kampen,
We have just been offered a peek into a “criminal conspiracy” cooking up our climate data in support of AGW. And here you are, bud naked by a total lack of scientific arguments preaching your warmists believes. Isn’t it frustrating to see your entire thermogeddon doctrine collapsing?
Climate drivers:
Our sun, our oceans and our volcano’s. That’s it.
We are just a spec on the bud of an elephant.

I haven’t slept a wink all night.
If the MSM won’t do their jobs, it’s up to us to spread these emails and data so pervasively that no one can claim ignorance.
I eagerly await Mr. McIntyre’s analysis of the raw data.

Hmmm … mus’ be somp’n’ somebody doesn’t understand.

Puzzled? Of course they’re puzzled. They still don’t get it.
Their dear AGW ideology is circling the drain, and they don’t know why and are absolutely frantic about it.

RR Kampen (00:44:21) :
Your argument is supported by a litany of poor assumptions: Do you really think someone can walk outside, hold up a thermometer, and take earth’s yearly average temperature? With the sources of temperature records in a constant state of change, records more than a few decades old limited to land masses, drift of that measured collective in altitude and latitude, there are countless arguments remaining over how to calculate a single number to represent this, if not for current numbers (for we now have satellites) then for the baseline.
Then there is this glaring reality: The Global Climate Models you guys so fervently look to in predicting doomsday didn’t see this downward shift in global temperatures coming. And they (along with everyone else) can’t tell us (exactly) why it is happening. This offers a stunning revelation, for if they could not see this oscillation coming when they were directly upon it, they have no chance of predicting what will happen in the next century. And more importantly, since they can’t quantitatively measure and explain the mechanisms causing the decline, they can’t discern if the same mechanism was not responsible for the 20 odd year warming spell that preceded it. Game over.
Lets add one other revelation: Our climate is cyclical. Absolute fact. If you doubt this, merely look to the day, the seasons, the lunar cycle, the tides. On the other end of the spectrum, we have precession of the planet, oscillations in the ellipse of our orbit, both relative to the sun and jovian planets. We observe ~30 year oscillations in ocean currents, and warming patterns in the oceans, but we really can’t explain the mechanism which causes them.
But those who would have us believe they are the masters of this universe, and can unequivocally state C02 caused it all, were DENSE enough to ignore all cyclical evidence, and instead predict a LINEAR trend in temperatures. Now they have egg on their faces, and so too, all the blind AGW faithful. The church is revealing its true nature, and it isn’t science. I’ll say it again, Game over.

Spector (02:13:40) :
In my opinion, the real issue is “Do we have a Carbon-Dioxide Crisis?” The problem, as presented, is that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is dangerously near a “tipping point” where it will cause a run-away greenhouse effect cooking the planet.
Scientists argue that there are ‘tipping points’ – i.e. positive feedbacks that would kick in as the global temperature rises – but I’ve never heard a genuine climate scientist asserting that this will ‘cook the planet’ (presumably you mean something along the lines of what happened to Venus). Have you read anything that claims this could happen?

Re: Ron de Haan (03:35:25) :
“We have just been offered a peek into a “criminal conspiracy” cooking up our climate data in support of AGW. ”
I do recognize a hoax when I see one. And what conspiracy is melting the glaciers?
“Climate drivers:
Our sun, our oceans and our volcano’s. That’s it.”
There exist no greenhouse gases? Well, let’s forget physics then, and remember that the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle is exactly 1.1!
“We are just a spec on the bud of an elephant.”
This ‘speck’ can blow up the earth, end most life here and plunge the planet into nucleair winter. And this ‘speck’ can change the atmosphere’s chemistry dramatically, burning up stuff that took tens of millions of years to accumulate. The ‘speck’ you are can fly around the elephant in a day and a half.
You are underestimating the most dominant and agressive living force the solar system has ever endured. Why? Get some pride!

From the full article:
“… We have to explain to the public that greenhouse gases will not cause temperatures to keep rising from one record temperature to the next, but that they are still subject to natural fluctuations,” says Latif. For this reason, he adds, it is dangerous to cite individual weather-related occurrences, such as a drought in Mali or a hurricane, as proof positive that climate change is already fully underway.
“Perhaps we suggested too strongly in the past that the development will continue going up along a simple, straight line. In reality, phases of stagnation or even cooling are completely normal,” says Latif.
****
Absolutely right, they should not have done it, and they should not have remained so quiet while others made leaps of the imagination that linked every temperature peak or extreme weather event to AGW.
They have made dog’s dinner out of the data and I expect it must hurt. I also expect that they are trying to clear the decks and put some distance between themsleves and their past performance in the media.
Obviously this leaves many people feeling confused and cheated. They ought to have been more cautious, they ought to have said that the 1970-2000 rise needed to be treated with caution as it might be partially or largely just natural variation. Perhaps it started from a low base and ended on a high note. Perhaps they should have said that the system can quite quickly jump by .1 or .2C up or down for no predicable reason and that they were not at all certain what the long term trend due to AGW was. What they are saying now just makes them look a little foolish. Perhaps they were saying this all the time and they were just not being quoted.
What would be good at this point would be some firm predictions that put a floor under the future trend. Average Global figures for each future year that the record must equal or better to be consistent with AGW. Then, given that there are no more volcanoes, we can make some sort of judgment.
I wonder what temps people would bet the careers on. I guess that some might think it prudent to say that global temperatures could decline in the next decade.
All in all this was an accident waiting to happen.
Alex

Icarus: Yes, 1880 is a better start since you then reveal the warm period in the first half of the 20th century, but it’s also very conveniently chosen, since 1880 probably was very close to an extreme minimum. Hadcrut goes back to 1850, which reveals another wave. It looks like this (but who knows how much the CRU boys have doctored it to dampen those earlier waves?):
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl
But, suppose for the sake of argument that the difference between the 1930-1940 warm period and the current warm period is indeed 100% due to AGW, and suppose (also unlikely, but for the sake of argument) that CRU actually got it right: Then we’re looking at 0.4 degrees C warming over these years. And if we make the assumption that CO2 was at 310 ppm back then (this is also debatable), we get 0.4 degrees out of the increase from 310 ppm to 390 ppm. That corresponds to 1.2 degrees C of warming per doubling of CO2, not quite what the alarmist tell us!
And, it should be obvious from the above that the real value is more likely to be lower 1.2 degrees than higher.

What continues to annoy me is not just that mainstream media all over the world totally ignore the facts about missing sun-spots and the possible direct correlation to cooling of our atmosphere and surface areas, they also ignore new research that links the inflow of cosmic rays from our galaxy as it (possibly) affects the production of cloud cover. As well, no words of the active volcanoes on Antartica, no words, none, about the affect of the Icelandic (constant) volcanism as it could (possibly) affect air and water currents in that part of the world. Nothing. Mass media filters the message to reflect the current politically correct notion that we humans are more responsible for our demise and trillions should be spent to do something about it. With so much profit to be made, you can be sure that big business will stoke the “we are doomed” fires for a long time to come. Speaking of which, mass media also says very little about the constant illegal burning of the Amazonian forests….etc.

Wow , actual debate on this site!

Good idea, just look at the data.
Thanks for that. It just reinforces my point that there is nothing about temperatures in recent years to suggest any significant change in the long-term warming trend – just the familiar ‘noise’ (interannual variation) superimposed on the warming trend of around 0.2C per decade.

How do you figure that? I see a recovery from the little ice age. I see quite a bit of warming before humans “pumped” tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. The last interglacial peaked at a higher temperature:
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/last_400k_yrs.html
and even in the last 2000 years, ice core data shows higher temperatures:
http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/last_2000_yrs.html
Interglacial periods come and go regardless of the influence of humans. I’m not about to predict when the next glacial advance will happen…but it will happen.

But the climate change believers preach that temperatures should be stable.
Why are they puzzled rather than cheering?

“Perhaps we suggested too strongly in the past that the development will continue going up along a simple, straight line. In reality, phases of stagnation or even cooling are completely normal,” says Latif.”
To that I offer another quote from “V for Vendetta”
“I have not come for what you hoped to do. I’ve come for what you did.”

Rudolf Kipp (00:40:45) :
Nice site Rudolf.
Some Skeptic Publications in the German Language won’t harm.
Keep up the good work.
Europe is at the brink of the introduction of Green Taxes based on this fraud!
Time to wake up and shake the BoBo tree don’t you think so?

This along with the WSJ article are clear signposts that the media are beginning to wake up to the fact that that they have been duped by unethical scientists that have blown out of all proportion CO2 as a climate driver and the predictive accuracy of their climate models (in realty the models do not work at all).
These unethical scientists and those who preach the AGW alarmist propaganda have (pick one)
1) knowingly perpetrated fraud on a grand scale (to secure funding and notoriety).
2) unwittingly allowed their beliefs and groupthink to blind them and their better judgment
3) are just plain incompetent and actually have no idea what they are doing but have become totally dependent on making wild assumptions in order to appear competent or knowledgeable (it requires rigor, discipline, confidence and integrity to simply admit that “we don’t know” while it requires no effort to make spurious alarmist statements)

jh (01:32:40) :
Someone appears to have broken a hockey stick!
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/climatechange/6606227/Antarctic-temperatures-between-ice-ages-6C-warmer-than-today.html
This seems more to the point. A peer-reviewed study in Nature indicating that past warming could well be greater than previously thought. This puts more data on the natural variation side and matches other paleoclimate studies suggesting higher levels of CO2.
Let’s also keep in mind that 90% of all ice on Earth is in the Antarctic. And according to NASA and the satellite record – it has been increasing in size about 4% since early 1970s.
Now this is something to write an email about!

Steve S., of course there are natural variations. My remark alludes to the fact that these natural variations tend to be not pointed out. E.g. the hypothesis ‘it’s warming just because we’re coming out of the LIA’ is hollow. WHY are we coming out of the LIA? What causes this?
There is also a system of belief with many skeptics that there can only be ‘natural variations’ and no anthropogenic cause at all.
I would guest there is anthropogenic factor superposed on natural variations, and that the CO2-effect has clearly come to dominate the natural variations. How do we know this? We know this because there no significant change in natural variables, whereas there is a very significant change in atmospheric chemistry; physics finishes the story.
Re: hunter (06:32:23) :
“RR Kampen,
The first refuge of an AGW true believer, when confronted with data he does not like, is to pretend that it was never about an apocalypse.”
And what is this supposed to do with the subject? What kind of strange spin is this anyway?
Actually, the word ‘alarmist’ is a skeptics’ invention. As is the idea that AGW-proponents necessarily predict apocalypse. A bit paranoid, methinks.

rrKampen: 07:43:29 said;
“And what is this supposed to do with the subject? What kind of strange spin is this anyway?
Actually, the word ‘alarmist’ is a skeptics’ invention. As is the idea that AGW-proponents necessarily predict apocalypse. A bit paranoid, methinks.”
Paranoid, you mean like accusing “non-believing” scientists as being funded and/or controlled by Energy companies perhaps?

In other news, there are reports of a gigantic flaming ball of gas in the sky which, it is rumored, heats the entire planet. Scientists are urging citizens to ignore it while they figure out the problem with the Earth’s temperatures…

From: gjjenkins@meto.gov.uk
To: p.jones@uea.ac.uk, deparker@meadow.meto.govt.uk
Subject: 1996 global temperatures
Date: Fri, 22 Nov 1996 11:23 +0000 (GMT)
Cc: llivingston@meadow.meto.govt.uk, djcarson@meadow.meto.govt.uk, ckfolland@meadow.meto.govt.uk
Phil
Remember all the fun we had last year over 1995 global temperatures,
with early release of information (via Oz), “inventing” the December
monthly value, letters to Nature etc etc?
I think we should have a cunning plan about what to do this year,
simply to avoid a lot of wasted time.
I have been discussing with David P and suggest the following:
1. By 20 Dec we will have land and sea data up to Nov
2. David (?) computes the December land anomaly based on 500hPa
heights up to 20 Dec.
3. We assume that Dec SST anomaly is the same as Nov
4. We can therefore give a good estimate of 1996 global temps by 20
Dec
5. We feed this selectively to Nick Nuttall (who has had this in the
past and seems now to expect special treatment) so that he can write
an article for the silly season. We could also give this to Neville
Nicholls??
6. We explain that data is provisional and how the data has been
created so early (ie the estimate for Dec) and also
7. We explain why the globe is 0.23k (or whatever the final figure is)
cooler than 95 (NAO reversal, slight La Nina). Also that global annual
avg is only accuirate to a few hundredths of a degree (we said this
last year – can we be more exact, eg PS/MS 0.05K or is this to big??)
8. FROM NOW ON WE ANSWER NO MORE ENQUIRIES ABOUT 1996 GLOBAL TEMPS BUT
EXPLAIN THAT IT WILL BE RELEASED IN JANUARY.
9. We relesae the final estimate on 20 Jan, with a joint UEA/MetO
press release. It may not evoke any interest by then.
10. For questions after the release to Nuttall, (I late Dec, early
Jan) we give the same answer as we gave him.
Are you happy with this, or can you suggest something better (ie
simpler)? I know it sound a bit cloak-and-dagger but its just meant to
save time in the long run.
Im copying this to DEP and CKF also for comments.
Cheers
Geoff

hunter, I agree I abhor THAT kind of alarmism too.
Did I ever mention on this forum that as to measures against global warming I side entirely with Lomborg?
Could you please find for me the ten? Fifteen? How many? times I mentioned that here?
I think the AGW-hypothesis is correct and it is my right to defend the thesis.
But I am no ‘alarmist’, simply because I do believe apocalyptically about global warming.
It is just a change, and it is a change that may get important consequences. Or would you even disagree on that?

I am a little shocked by the scale of the revelations but not surprised. To any really objective observer and analyser the AGW concept is bogus – stop.

RR Kampen,
The deliberate ignorance that you display about your faith of choice is very entertaining. Please do not ever change.
That you actually type a response that asserts that Gore, whose latest book is premised on the idea sepcifically that if we do not do what he demands the world will look like the cover of his book, and apparently expect to be considered credible, is rich entertainment.
You true belivers are so sucked in to the bs that you do not notice the smell.
Thanks for making a great day even better.
Cheers,

Kampen:
Then there is a group of people who will move against consensus on any subject, from habit. Like me 1990-2004.
So, you were against the “consensus” before you were for it?
Hmmm….. sounds familiar somehow.

Spen (01:15:23) : ICARUS – I am simple sole whose understanding is that global warming is caused by increasing C02 concentration in the atmosphere. C02 levels have continued to rise over the last 10 years but temperatures have not. The conclusion must be that there are greater natural forces masking the greenhouse effect.
Suppose you are cold at night and you put an extra blanket on the bed. You don’t instantly warm up – it takes a little while of reduced heat loss for you to reach an equilibrium at a higher temperature.
A similar phenomenon applies to the Earth, but of course on a much longer timescale. Greenhouse gases reduce the outgoing radiation to space, so that the planet warms up until the increase in longwave radiation (heat, i.e. infrared) is enough to balance the enhanced greenhouse effect, and the planet is once more in equilibrium. Therefore the rise in global average temperature is not proportional to how *fast* greenhouse gases have risen but to the *concentration*. The main consequence of this fact is that global temperature will continue to rise for many years *even if* we never emit another ounce of CO2 (this is what climate scientists mean when they talk about warming “in the pipeline”).
So, you should expect global average temperature to be rising just because CO2 is 100ppm higher than it was 200 years ago, *not* because CO2 is still rising… and that is what we do see. The warming trend is still at around 0.2C per decade, notwithstanding the normal interannual variability – the ‘noise’ superimposed on that long-term warming trend.

Why is there increased debate on this website?
Because the AGW crowd knows their goals are slipping away and so on an individual basis, this is where they can take action adding their shoulder to the wheel.
Please do, and have your arguments demolished!

Tom_R (07:37:53) :
“Icarus (04:46:23) : Where would you like it to start? How about 1880? –”
How about 1979, since there was never anything close to global coverage before the satellites.
OK then. Satellite data as cited by ‘NastyWolf’:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1980/to:2008/plot/rss/from:1980/to:2008/trend

From American Thinker Blog:
Scientific scandal appears to rock climate change promoters
At first many of us were inclined to dismiss the posted emails from the Institute as fraud, but the head of the institute admits the records were hacked and the emails seem genuine.
Here is a sample of the purportedly hacked material (1079 emails and 72 documents) available online:
From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@XXXX, mhughes@XXXX
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@XXX.osborn@XXXX
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow.
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.
Thanks for the comments, Ray.
Cheers
Phil
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit Telephone XXXX
School of Environmental Sciences Fax XXXX
University of East Anglia
Norwich
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2009/11/scientific_scandal_appears_to.html

Spen (01:15:23) : ICARUS – I am simple sole whose understanding is that global warming is caused by increasing C02 concentration in the atmosphere. C02 levels have continued to rise over the last 10 years but temperatures have not. The conclusion must be that there are greater natural forces masking the greenhouse effect.
Spen, it is best not to ask Icky anything, and certainly not to believe anything he says, as all he continually does, in robot fashion is to continually spout the same, pseudo-scientific AGW gibberish. He is here for entertainment purposes only.

Alexander Harvey (05:30:17) :
“All in all this was an accident waiting to happen.”
That is what I feared most ever since this bandwagon got underway. Last night, while looking for information, I linked to a site that had a lot of additional links and commentary which got progressively wackier, until by the end, the guy was railing about special relativity, one of the most heavily confirmed and usefully predictive theories of all time.
In a time when a large segment of the population believes that heavy doses of vitamins will prevent cancer (such dosing appears to correlate with higher risk), that universal healthcare, economic well-being, and elimination of scarcity can be decreed by law, and that nuclear power plants can explode like nuclear bombs, we do not need the forces of pseudo-science to be given the enormous boost that the defeat of this juggernaut would provide.
The AGW camp bet the ranch of scientific credibility, which did not belong solely to them, on this one roll of the dice. It was irresponsible.

RR Kampen (00:49:21) :
Not only does warming have no causes, apparently so too does cooling, which has been going on the last 10 years.
For 20 years here, from the late 70’s to the late 90’s, it did not snow in November. Since 2001, it has been snowing in November. Yep, it’s snowing here today.
Global Warming is so last last century.

Icarus (10:17:51) :
“Not only do you need to consider this warming ‘in the pipeline’ just from the physics of greenhouse gases, you also need to consider long-term feedbacks from ice sheets, vegetation cover, thawing permafrost and so on, all of which make climate sensitivity a lot more complicated than your simple calculation above suggests”
And even more complicated if you also consider all the negative feedbacks which you so conveniently leave out.

Yes, it’s really complicated. It’s so complicated that the Arctic Sea Ice is recovering nicely and it’s getting quite cold out there.
It’s so complicated the way that expanding ice sheets are reflecting sunlight from a dinged Sun back into space, and GCR induced low clouds are bouncing back weakened sunlight.
It’s so complicated that all I have to do is open my front door and feel the icy cold out there.
It’s so complicated the birds flew south a month and a half early.
Man, that’s some rough stuff.

Bart (10:20:51) wrote: “…we do not need the forces of pseudo-science to be given the enormous boost that the defeat of this juggernaut would provide.”
Doesn’t Bart have this completely backwards?
In reality, the pseudo-science of AGW has done more to promote other pseudo-science than anything else on the planet.
How?
By setting the example that if you lie hard enough, big enough, and often enough, you can be successful with the “BIG LIE” and support your agenda or protect a failed scientific line of inquiry.
Don’t kid yourself, the money, funding, and comfortable careers are trumping real science at an alarming rate.

Whoah, I screwed up the scale by miscounting the axis while using Photoshop to overlay Microsoft Excel graphs. The new version makes more sense since you expect less noise in the global than for a single station!
http://i48.tinypic.com/28c2e4w.jpg

I don’t understand this idea of stalling global temperatures. I just fit each 5-year period of NCDC global mean anomalies since 1997 and every 5 point fit had a positive slope. How is that stalled global warming?
Here’s the data:
1997 0.5584
1998 0.8321
1999 0.6760
2000 0.5175
2001 0.7204
2002 0.8309
2003 0.7711
2004 0.7075
2005 0.9553
2006 0.8159
2007 0.9804
2008 0.7758

NikFromNYC (12:09:43) :
Whoah, I screwed up the scale by miscounting the axis while using Photoshop to overlay Microsoft Excel graphs. The new version makes more sense since you expect less noise in the global than for a single station!
http://i48.tinypic.com/28c2e4w.jpg

Nik…
Here’s a fun exercise: Go to NOAA’s Paleoclimatology page and click on “Climate Reconstructions.” Select “Northern Hemisphere Temperature (Wavelet: Sediments, Tree-rings), 2000 Years, Moberg et al. 2005.”
Download Moberg’s 2000-year NH reconstruction and apply a linear regression to it. The linear trend line will be flat as a pancake. I normalized the UAH series to Moberg and added it in to get a full 2008-year record and plotted it with 1000 years of CO2 data…
Moberg & CO2
I get no secular temperature trend and no long-term correlation between temp’s and CO2.

Chris P is my new muse. His input allowed me to double the punch value of my Central England Don’t Panic! graphic:
http://i45.tinypic.com/iwq8a1.jpg
Copyright Nik Willmore 2009 (can be used freely as long as unmodified).

Icarus (00:13:10) :
I have not read all the comments, so undoubtedly my reply to your opening salvo will be somewhat pre-empted by other posters. Nevertheless, here are a few points. A strong characteristic of people who visit this blog is a desire to look at data, to know where the origin of that data, and to analyze pros and cons of that data. There are at least three reasons why your graph shows you the trend you see. First, the data series is not corrected for UHI and local siting issues that have added a warming trend. (And the ocean data is too complicated to discuss here.) Second, you start the series in the mid 20th century — so you start in the depth of a cycle and go to the the peak. And third, no one here is surprised by a warming trend in modern-temperature readings. You can go back to the late 1800s when thermometer readings have some credibility for a GMT, and you will see an upward trend. That is absolutely no surprise. You could go back to the mid 18th century, and most would expect to see an upward trend since then — we have been coming out of the Little Ice Age, and to the extent that a GMT has meaning, we would expect it to rise over the last 200+ years. Also, most skeptics do expect to see CO2 have some influence on temperature, but the question is whether it has an overwhelming influence. Looking at the data, I conclude that CO2 does not have such an overwhelming influence. It is poorly correlated with temperatures, and only by using opportunistic values of aerosols can one get a good model fit with CO2 being a driver of temperatures.

NikFromNYC :
http://i45.tinypic.com/iwq8a1.jpg
Nik, I hadn’t seen that data set before, so thanks for the pointer. I did my own rather crude chart of it –
https://sites.google.com/site/europa62/climatechange/central-england
I thought there might be some obvious correlation with variations in solar intensity but that’s probably a bit much to ask from a data set which only covers one very small part of the world.
You say: “The oldest thermometer record in existence demonstrates that recent warming is completely normal”. There are at least a couple of problems with this claim –
1: You’re using a data set from one very small part of the land surface and implying that this demonstrates the recent *global* warming is normal. I don’t think that follows.
2: I think you’re implying that because early 18th Century warming was presumably caused by non-anthropogenic forcings, the same must apply to the current warming. I don’t think this follows either. We can’t just assume that because the former was natural, the latter must be too. That’s like the classic “dinosaurs didn’t have SUVs so how come the planet was warmer then?” kind of argument. It doesn’t look like you can blame the current warming on the sun, for example.
3: The current warming does appear to be unprecedented in at least the last 300 years covered by this data. That’s perhaps a bit clearer in the moving average (my chart) than in the raw data. So, not entirely ‘normal’ by that measure either.

I am familiar with both. You can take from me, in case you are not familiar with Gore/IPCC, that neither predict apocalypse…
Then you have a different understanding of “apocalyptic claim” than I do – Gore’s claim of a 20′ sea leavel rise is apocalyptic in my book, as is the prediction of increasing frequency and severity of hurricanes and the (laughably false) attribution both of hurricane Katrina and the resultant flooding of New Orleans to AGW. This goes beyond merely ‘warning of the consequences.’

Icarus (14:37:01) :
[…]
3: The current warming does appear to be unprecedented in at least the last 300 years covered by this data. That’s perhaps a bit clearer in the moving average (my chart) than in the raw data. So, not entirely ‘normal’ by that measure either.

Most of the last 300 years was during something called the “Little Ice Age.” The “Modern Warming” from 1850-2009 is almost identical to the first peak of the Medieval Warm Period…
Medieval vs. Modern Warming
The “anomalous” period is the Little Ice Age; which was far colder than the prior cold period during the Dark Ages.
The magnitude and rate of warming in the early 20th century was almost indentical to the late 20th century…
HadCRUT3 1912-1945 and 1975-2009
The only “anomalous” thing was that the cooling from 1945-1975 was less intense than the surrounding warming periods – And it still lead Time, Newseek and Science News to all run “impending ice age” cover stories in the mid- to late-1970’s.

I do love the smell of AGW desperation in the morning.
(Cue Ride of the Valkyries….)

The socalled financial crisis has caused a slowdown all over the world. It is possible that this slowdown (15 – 20 % average) has caused what we now
can observe.
The whole world have to get the emissions down.
Best regards from Norway

Espen (14:25:57) :
Icarus (10:17:51) :
“I don’t think your argument quite works here. Suppose you could change from 300ppm to 400ppm CO2 in one day. You observe that the world warms up 0.00001C by midnight, and conclude that climate sensitivity is actually 0.00003C per doubling of CO2.”
This is a ridiculous example, my example included a timespan of 69 years, not one night.
That’s my point though – calculating it the way you did, the two examples give wildly different results for climate sensivity, whereas *in reality*, the final temperature you actually *observed* (at equilibrium) would be the same in both cases, regardless of whether you reached your 400ppm in one day or 70 years. That’s why your calculation was wrong. Climate sensitivity depends on actual concentrations of greenhouse gases, not their rate of change.
The point is that the temperature is logarithmically proportional to the concentration.
… not the rate of change; exactly.
“Not only do you need to consider this warming ‘in the pipeline’ just from the physics of greenhouse gases, you also need to consider long-term…”
Where is the “warming in the pipeline”? If anywhere, it would be in the oceans, but ocean heat content has been flat or slightly falling for 6 years.
When scientists talk about ‘warming in the pipeline’ they don’t mean warming that has already occurred – they mean warming which hasn’t occurred yet but which will do in the future because of the radiative imbalance. This is what a ‘forcing’ is all about. If the Earth is radiating away less energy than it is absorbing from the sun then it will *necessarily* warm up (it can’t possibly do otherwise) but it will do so gradually, not instantly, until the balance is restored. Most of that heat will go into the oceans.
“…feedbacks from ice sheets, vegetation cover, thawing permafrost and so on, all of which make climate sensitivity a lot more complicated than your simple calculation above suggests.”
These are better arguments. The problem is that nobody really knows, but what we do know, is e.g. that there was no runaway warming in the Eemian, when temperatures were significantly higher than today.
There was a very large jump in global temperature around 130,000 years ago which does suggest ‘runaway warming’ as you call it but CO2 never got above 280ppm even at the peak, so I’m not sure what that can tell us about today when we have CO2 at 380ppm or so.
http://www.theoildrum.com/story/2006/2/3/0394/97545
http://www.newscientist.com/data/images/ns/cms/dn11659/dn11659-2_738.jpg

Mods: This is all very interesting, but what people really want to know – assuming this revelation about Hadley is significant enough to dismember or seriously damage the entire AGW hypothesis – is:
How will this debunking/scandal effect my 401K, my house value, what kind of car I drive, the value of the dollar, international trade, my job, the cost of groceries, gas, and electricity, etc. ? How it will impact the political balance of power over the next 3 years and other mundane issues of concern to the average ( US ) citizen.
Ordinary folks don’t give a rat’s fanny about the “science” or the internal shenanigans of some obscure research center. They care about how and when it might impact them personally in ways they may not even realize.
How about some words of wisdom for all the “Joe Sixpacks” out here in the real world?

Global tempterature has changed trough out earths history. U can’t use 10 or 30 years periodes to decide anything.
1000 yeras ago the temperature was a lot wearmer than today.
(The Vikings wear thin clothes in wintermonths, and Greeland wars named so not because it was icy.
What we should ask ourselves is where are vi in between two iceages; half, a quarter, 3/4 ?

The problem that underpins these e-mail exchanges is that the data used to support the theory that CO2 ppm increases in the range we are experiencing is triggering a climate catastrophe do not in fact support that theory. This requires the promoters of that theory to massage the data, suppress skeptical reviews, stonewall the dissemination of the information. That means that the claim that the theory is sound, is untrue. This means that policies based on these unsound theories are in themselves not sound.
The issue is that a complex theory about how GHGs operate on climate is in fact not reliable.
The issue is that those who are promoting it, knew it, and sought to control the discussion so as to hide the unreliable nature of what they were claiming.
The magazine is exactly correct in pointing out that global warming has stalled. It has in fact not been happening as claimed at all.

Icarus (18:32:35) :
That’s my point though – calculating it the way you did, the two examples give wildly different results for climate sensivity, whereas *in reality*, the final temperature you actually *observed* (at equilibrium) would be the same in both cases, regardless of whether you reached your 400ppm in one day or 70 years. That’s why your calculation was wrong. Climate sensitivity depends on actual concentrations of greenhouse gases, not their rate of change.

Sigh, it was YOU who provided the ridiculous, contrived one-day example. I simply calculated the climate senstivity from the published CO2 and temperature values for the 69 year period, given the (often asserted) assumption that all warming in this period is due to the increased CO2 levels.

… not the rate of change; exactly.

You still don’t get the math at all, do you? Please re-read your junior high school math before making such a fool of yourself.

When scientists talk about ‘warming in the pipeline’ they don’t mean warming that has already occurred – they mean warming which hasn’t occurred yet but which will do in the future because of the radiative imbalance. This is what a ‘forcing’ is all about. If the Earth is radiating away less energy than it is absorbing from the sun then it will *necessarily* warm up (it can’t possibly do otherwise) but it will do so gradually, not instantly, until the balance is restored. Most of that heat will go into the oceans.

But NOTHING has been going into the oceans for the last 6 years, so according to your logic above, there’s currently no imbalance at all!

There was a very large jump in global temperature around 130,000 years ago which does suggest ‘runaway warming’ as you call it but CO2 never got above 280ppm even at the peak, so I’m not sure what that can tell us about today when we have CO2 at 380ppm or so.

It tells us three things: (1) Much higher temperatures than today are perfectly possible with much less CO2. (2) Much higher temperatures than today did not cause a runaway warming through e.g. the proposed albedo and methane release feedbacks and (3) Much higher temperatures than today did not melt the Greenland ice sheet.

EMAIL #1120593115:
“From: Phil Jones
To: John Christy
Subject: This and that
Date: Tue Jul 5 15:51:55 2005
John,
There has been some email traffic in the last few days to a week – quite
a bit really, only a small part about MSU. The main part has been one of
your House subcommittees wanting Mike Mann and others and IPCC
to respond on how they produced their reconstructions and how IPCC
produced their report.
In case you want to look at this see later in the email !
Also this load of rubbish !
This is from an Australian at BMRC (not Neville Nicholls). It began from the attached
article. What an idiot.
**********
The SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY WOULD COME DOWN ON ME IN NO
UNCERTAIN TERMS IF I SAID THE WORLD HAD COOLED FROM 1998.
OK IT HAS BUT IT IS ONLY 7 YEARS OF DATA AND IT ISN’T STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT.
**********
The Australian also alerted me to this blogging ! I think this is the term ! Luckily I don’t live in Australia.”

Don’t plants stop growing below 200ppm CO2? If there was only 280ppm before this present increase, isn’t that a bit too close for comfort? If CO2 had gone down by as much as it has gone up, wouldn’t we be in a bit of a pickle. I mean, there’s only a certain amount of corned beef you can hoard.
I am in a rage: The FT Weekend magazine has an article ‘Meet 10 of the world’s most respected climate change scientists. And the leading sceptic’ They then have: Rahmstorf, John Mitchell,Pachauri, Myles Allen (Oxford) Tim Lenton (East Anglia) Trenberth, Rapley (Science Mus) Susan Solomon (Colorado) Carl Wunsch, Held (Princeton). The sceptic is Richard Lindzen. Why only one? A great choice, but only one? “While we were willing to consider talking to climate change naysayers…. we found that even their initially compelling arguments were rarely backed up by peer-reviewed research’ Aaaaarrrrrgggghh!!!!
I sent the Editor (editor@ft.com) a sharp letter. I am still cross and might send another, and another….

A sea breeze has been keeping it very cool on the coast today, despite the forecast record 41 degree temperatures. After the Hadley hacking I may be a bit too conspiracy focussed but it does seem strange that of the 22 Sydney weather stations, all five of the coastal temperature stations are non functional today. Perhaps the bureau is shooting for a Sydney record by knocking out all the cool coastal stations from the Sydney average ?
http://www.bom.gov.au/products/IDN60900.shtml
North Head 22/01:35pm –
Fort Denison 22/01:34pm –
Sydney Airport 22/01:35pm 40.5
Little Bay 22/01:35pm –
Kurnell 22/01:34pm –
Wattamolla 22/01:35pm –

I have noticed that a video titled “Climate Change — the objections” by potholer54 appears to contain a typical misrepresentation of carbon dioxide issue.
In this video, part two of a three part series, which purports to be a serious and balanced discussion of the climate change debate, he says that carbon dioxide acts as a blanket blocking all wavelengths from 8 to 18 micrometers — effectively in concert with dissolved H2O, stopping most of the normal thermal radiation in this band.
Yet at RealScience.org I found a chart in a post entitled “Part II: What Angstrom didn’t know” indicating that the baseline, pre-industrial CO2 level blocked wavelengths from about 13.5 to 17 micrometers. With four times as much CO2 in the atmosphere (almost three times our current level); the indicated blocking range is 13 to 17.5 micrometers. I find it hard to accept the notion that we have a serious carbon dioxide crisis with such a minimal change indicated.

All of the last ten 10-year trends in GIS land-ocean series show warming:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1980/to:2009/plot/gistemp/from:2000/to:2009/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1999/to:2008/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1998/to:2007/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1997/to:2006/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1996/to:2005/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1995/to:2004/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1994/to:2003/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1993/to:2002/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1992/to:2001/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1991/to:2000/trend
Even the trend showing the *least* warming – the most recent – still shows warming of over 0.1C per decade.

KlausB: More, this article – as much others before – you won’t see it in German language, not online, not in printing.
It’s in German language here:
http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/0,1518,661308,00.html

Spector (13:49:11) :
…
From another source, I note that various computer models predict a range of one to three degree Celsius global temperature change per doubling of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. These models, however, do not include a number of possible negative feedback effects
Which negative feedback effects are those? What makes me a little wary of such claims is the evidence that the Earth has been quite a bit warmer at various times in the past. If negative feedback effects didn’t limit warming to (say) 1°C in the past, then why should we expect that they will do so in the future? It doesn’t make a great deal of difference whether warming comes from greenhouse gases or from changing solar irradiance, and we know that the latter is well correlated with large changes in global average temperature , so why not expect a similar magnitude from changes in greenhouse gases?

Another bit of reality–
Early sea ice formation traps
Greenland towns and stops supplies
until spring–
http://sermitsiaq.gl/indland/article103562.ece?lang=EN
First time in 20 years–
Early sea ice formation traps
Greenland narwhales in ice
and they are shot–
http://sermitsiaq.gl/indland/article103734.ece?lang=EN