Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out
By Gerald Traufetter
At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average.
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.
Ironically, climate change appears to have stalled in the run-up to the upcoming world summit in the Danish capital, where thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, business leaders and environmental activists plan to negotiate a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Billions of euros are at stake in the negotiations.
Reached a Plateau
The planet’s temperature curve rose sharply for almost 30 years, as global temperatures increased by an average of 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.25 degrees Fahrenheit) from the 1970s to the late 1990s. “At present, however, the warming is taking a break,” confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany’s best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. “There can be no argument about that,” he says. “We have to face that fact.”
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Chris P wrote: “Good idea, just look at the data. http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/nhshgl.gif”
Yes, let’s indeed HAVE a look at the data. A real look without the funky outlandish zero line with spiky things colored red. In fact, let’s have a very good look at the data by extending it back say…two hundred years:
http://i49.tinypic.com/24oaezd.jpg
Now let’s analyze the data, given that we now trust our two hundred hear extension back in time:
http://i35.tinypic.com/2db1d89.jpg
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
Icarus-
I don’t know you so I don’t know if you are being deliberately obtuse or it just comes naturally. I don’t know a single sentient being who doesn’t get the concept that the climate is in constant flux and has been since the beginning of recorded time. That’s not the debate.
The debate is what, if any, impact humans have had on the climate. It is the duty of those who insist that humans are causing significant and potentially catastrophic damage to prove it using transparent facts. To date, they have failed miserably in this endeavour.
The leak of the CRU data is another nail in the coffin confirming what many of us have believed all along, warmists have been cooking the data to prove their pet theory not letting the data drive them to a conclusion. That’s many things, science isn’t one of them.
Btw, about your nom de blog, Icarus lost his wings by flying too close to the sun not from man made climate change. You know, that big yellow ball in ths sky which has always had the dominant affect on our climate. Perhaps you should come up with a new name, or are you the ironic type?
Ron de Haan (03:35:25) :
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.
Perhaps by volcano’s you also meant heat coming from our own earths core that more then likely has as much influnce as anything in warming, though I am unsure of anything talking about this other then theory… We do of course have a glowing hot center to this thing we call Earth…
Which reminds me we have more to fear from Yellowstone finally shooting out as a super volcano then we do CO2 emissions, CO2 MAY warm the earth, a Yellowstone event will cause horrible horrible results and WILL occur someday.
Yeah, it is complicated. This report from our ABC, who will publish or broadcast anything that promotes global warming, tells us that the Arctic may be ice free in just 20 years time. But the irony, it says, is that it will uncover more resources under the Arctic ice shelf which caused global warming in the first place:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2009/11/20/2749007.htm
Now that would be a real dilemma for future generations to resolve!
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
Steve Schapel (01:30:16) “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.”
It’s a time-consuming red-herring.
–
RR Kampen (00:49:21) “warming has no causes at all. Just happens.”
No such claim has been made.
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.
“I believe that questioning the reality of global warming, man-caused or otherwise, is a distraction — the real question is “do we have a dangerous carbon-dioxide crisis?”
Yes we have a “carbon-dioxide crisis” we are in a CO2 starved geological time period that is stunting plant growth. If theCO2 sequestering idiots actually do reduce the CO2 globally we could end up killing off the plant life and thus ALL life on this planet. Even just reducing CO2 levels and banning the use of CO2 in green houses could promote starvation…..
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).
James F. Evans (11:35:55) :
“Doesn’t Bart have this completely backwards?”
I may have stated it clumsily, but you and I are in absolute agreement. By making “science” suspect, they will have unleashed the forces of unreason.
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.
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. And otherwise, alarmists tend to aruge that anything above 30 years is climate… And btw. you didn’t get the math right, if you could estimate climate sensitivity from one night as in your contrived example, it would be 0.000024 per doubling, not 0.00003.
the actual temperature rise depends on the *concentration* of greenhouse gases, not the rate of change.
You’re talking nonsense here. The point is that the temperature is logarithmically proportional to the concentration. But I think you already showed us that you don’t get the math above.
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.
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.
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.
Gail Combs (13:11:21) “CO2 sequestering idiots”
You are wise to call a spade a spade. Here in Canada, the province of Saskatchewan is muddying the waters with their nonsense on this front. 100% sleazy – no benefit to the environment – no benefit to consumers – no benefit to taxpayers. All they’re doing is creating real problems to solve fake ones. Their premier is losing his touch. He now comes across as a fast-talking snake-oil salesman.
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.
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.
Is Icarus actually “Flanagan” in Drag?
Sure sounds like Flanagan’s old “warmer lies and disinformation”!
I do love the smell of AGW desperation in the morning.
(Cue Ride of the Valkyries….)
As a German, I have to explain, ‘Der Spiegel’ was famous for its investigative journalism. Nowadays, thats not real anymore.
I did have an abonnement from ’75 until ‘ 93, cancelled it, when I recognized ‘Der Spiegel’ did go mainstream.
More, this article – as much others before – you won’t see it in German language, not online, not in printing. Amazing.
Quite some posters here are complaining about Ignorance&Silence in MSM about the hystery of AGW. In Germany it’s worse, much worse.
Don’t expect, that ‘Der Spiegel’ will write any real inconstructive about
AGW, until every other and his dog did it already.
In the last ten years, ‘Der Spiegel’ was the mouth-pipe of people a.l.a.
Stefan Rahmsdorf (PIK, Germany) and others.
Best Regards
KlausB
p.s. Anthony, do give the operators some extra pay, they always do deserve it,
today absolute sincerely.
[Our only pay is times like this, when the shenanigans get exposed. ~dbs, mod.]
Kampen, I’m surprised to see people of your pursuasion still around given what is happenning in the climate change industry at the moment. Perhaps you could answer a couple of questions to help me understand what you are getting at. How have we recovered from the last ice age and all previous ice ages without anthropogenic CO2? How can we have cooling periods if AGW is the dominant climate driver?
Have you read the Hadcrut e-mails? Dynamite aren’t they.
Martin Mason (17:31:29) “Kampen, I’m surprised to see people of your pursuasion still around”
Maybe he has windmills &/or carbon sequestration to sell you.
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
Icarus –
Your comments on the Der Spiegel article regarding recent temperature trends are incoherent.
Allow me to remind you of the article lead:
“”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,…””
[caps are mine for emphasis]
The article states and restates the topic is on RECENT temperature trends. To which you respond:
“” Icarus (00:13:10) :
Clearly none of this is true -“”
and then attempt to substantiate your response by plotting long term temperature for the last SIXTY years, an incoherent non-sequitor.
You then state repeatedly that nothing has changed in the long term trend of 0.2C per decade, only to refute yourself by posting your own linear regression here:
“”Icarus (04:38:28) :
[…]
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1980/to:2008/plot/rss/from:1980/to:2008/trend“”
which shows a linear trend of 0.16 deg C per decade over the 28 years including the ’98 El Nino. Why the decrease? Because the absence of warming in since 2000 has begun to pull at the long term trend, the POINT of the Der Speigel story.
If you wanted to contribute usefully graphic information relevant to discussion of THIS article, then the following was all that was necessary, or relevant:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1980/to:2008/plot/rss/from:2000/to:2009/trend