Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
[see Updates at the end of this post]
Science is what we use to explain anomalies, to elucidate mysteries, to shed light on unexplained occurrences. For example, once we understand how the earth rotates, there is no great need for a scientific explanation of the sun rising in the morning. If one day the sun were to rise in the afternoon, however, that is an anomaly which would definitely require a scientific explanation. But there is no need to explain the normal everyday occurrences. We don’t need a new understanding if there is nothing new to understand.
Hundreds of thousands of hours of work, and billions of dollars, have been expended trying to explain the recent variations in the climate, particularly the global temperature. But in the rush to find an explanation, a very important question has been left unasked:
Just exactly what unusual, unexpected temperature anomaly are we trying to explain?
The claim is made over and over that humans are having an effect on the climate. But where is the evidence that there is anything that even needs explanation? Where is the abnormal phenomenon? What is it that we are trying to make sense of, what is the unusual occurrence that requires a novel scientific explanation?
There are not a lot of long-term temperature records that can help us in this regard. The longest one is the Central England Temperature record (CET). Although there are problems with the CET (see Sources below), including recent changes in the stations used to calculate it that have slightly inflated the modern temperatures, it is a good starting point for an investigation of whether there is anything happening that is abnormal. Here is that record:
Figure 1. The Central England Temperature Record. Blue line is the monthly temperature in Celsius. Red line is the average temperature. Jagged black line is the 25-year trailing trend, in degrees per century.
Now, where in that record is there anything which is even slightly abnormal? Where is the anomaly that the entire huge edifice of the AGW hypothesis is designed to elucidate? The longest sustained rise is from about 1680 to 1740. That time period also has the steepest rise. The modern period, on the other hand, is barely above the long-term trend despite urban warming. There is nothing unusual about the modern period in any way.
OK, so there’s nothing to explain in the CET. How about another long record?
One of the world’s best single station long-term records is that of the Armagh Observatory in Ireland. It has been maintained with only a couple minor location changes for over 200 years. Figure 2 shows the Armagh record.
Figure 2. Temperature record for Armagh University. Various colored lines as in Figure 1.
We find the same thing in this record as in the CET. The fastest rise was a long, long time ago. The modern rise is once again insignificant. Where in all of this is anything that requires billions of dollars to explain?
Finally, what about the global record? Here, you don’t have to take my word for it. A much chastened Phil Jones (the disgraced former Director of the CRU of email fame), in an interview with the BBC on Friday, February 12, 2010, answered a BBC question as follows:
Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?
An initial point to make is that in the responses to these questions I’ve assumed that when you talk about the global temperature record, you mean the record that combines the estimates from land regions with those from the marine regions of the world. CRU produces the land component, with the Met Office Hadley Centre producing the marine component.
Temperature data for the period 1860-1880 are more uncertain, because of sparser coverage, than for later periods in the 20th Century. The 1860-1880 period is also only 21 years in length. As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below).
I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998.
So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.
So in fact, according to Phil Jones (who strongly believes in the AGW hypothesis) there is nothing unusual about the recent warming either. It is not statistically different from two earlier modern periods of warming. Since these warming periods were before the modern rise in CO2, greenhouse gases cannot have been responsible for those rises.
So my question remains unanswered … where is the anomaly? Where is the unusual occurrence that we are spending billions of dollars trying to explain?
The answer is, there is no unusual warming. There is no anomaly. There is nothing strange or out of the ordinary about the recent warming. It is in no way distinguishable from earlier periods of warming, periods that we know were not due to rising CO2. There is nothing in the record that is in any way different from the centuries-long natural fluctuations in the global climate.
In other words, we have spent billions of dollars and wasted years of work chasing a chimera, a will-of-the-wisp. This is why none of the CO2 explanations have held water … simply because there is nothing unusual to explain.
SOURCES:
CET:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcet/data/download.html
ARMAGH:
ADJUSTMENTS TO THE CET:
http://www.anenglishmanscastle.com/archives/004482.html
JONES BBC INTERVIEW:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8511670.stm
Jones also makes the interesting argument in the interview that the reason he believes that recent warming is anthropogenic (human-caused) is because climate models can’t replicate it … in other words, he has absolutely no evidence at all, he just has the undeniable fact that our current crop of climate models can’t model the climate. Seems to me like that’s a problem with the models rather than a problem with the climate, but hey, what do I know, I was born yesterday …
[UPDATE 1] Further evidence that nothing abnormal is happening is given by the individual US state record high temperatures. Here are the number of US state record high temperatures per decade, from the US National Climate Data Center (NCDC):
Figure 3. US state high temperature records, by decade. In the period 1930-1940, twenty of the fifty US states had their highest recorded temperature.
As you can see, the recent decades have not had record-beating high temperatures, nor are they unusual or abnormal in any way. Nearly half of the high temperature records were set back in the 1930-1940 decade.
[UPDATE 2] Here is another look at the lack of any abnormalities in climate data. I will add more as they come up. This is data on snow extext, from the Rutgers University Global Snow Lab:
Figure 4. Snow cover variation, Northern Hemisphere. Transparent blue line shows the month-by-month cover, and the red line is the average snow cover.
So, nothing to see here. There is no evidence that the climate has gone off course. There is no evidence of the claimed reduction in snow cover which is supposed to provide a positive feedback to warming. In fact, the surprising thing is how little the snow cover has changed over the last forty years.
[UPDATE 3] We often hear about the vanishing polar sea ice. Usually, however, people only look at half of the picture, Arctic sea ice. Although you wouldn’t know it from the scare stories, we do have a South Pole. Here is the record of global sea ice, 1979-2006
Figure 5. Global ice area variation. Blue line shows the month-by-month area, and the red line is the average area. DATA SOURCE
This illustrates the non-intuitive nature of climate. As the global temperature was climbing from 1985 until 1998, global sea ice was increasing. Since then it has decreased, and currently is where we were at the start of the satellite record. Variation in the average is ±2%. Nothing unusual here.
[UPDATE 4] Another oft-mentioned item is tropical cyclones. Here is the record of Accumulated Cyclone Energy, for both the Globe and and Northern Hemisphere, from Ryan Maue .
Figure 6. Accumulated Cyclone Energy. Upper line is global, lower line is Northern Hemisphere. Area between lines is Southern Hemisphere
As you can see, there is nothing out of the ordinary in the accumulated cyclone energy either. It goes up … it comes down. Nature is like that.
[UPDATE 5] Arctic temperatures are often cited as being anomalous. Here’s the record for Alaska;
Figure 7. Alaska Temperature Average from First Order Observing Stations. DATA SOURCE .
The Alaskan temperature is regulated by the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO). The PDO shifted from the cool phase to the warm phase around 1976 [typo corrected, was incorrectly listed as 1986], and has recently switched back to the cool phase. As you can see, other than the step changes due to the PDO, there is little variation in the Alaska temperatures.
[UPDATE 6] There has been much discussion of the effect of rising temperatures on rainfall. Here is the CRU TS3 global precipitation record:
Figure 8. Global Precipitation, from CRU TS3 1° grid. DATA SOURCE
As in all of the records above, there is nothing at all anomalous in the recent rainfall record. The average varies by about ± 2%. There is no trend in the data.
[UPDATE 7] People keep claiming that hurricanes (called “cyclones” in the Southern Hemisphere) have been rising. They claim that damage from hurricanes in the US have been going up. Here is data on hurricane damage:
Figure 9. Normalized US Hurricane losses, in 2009 dollars. SOURCE
The figure above shows normalized US hurricane losses for 1900 to 2009. It shows an estimate of what hurricane damages would be if each hurricane season took place in 2009. The dark line shows the linear best fit from Excel. Obviously, there is no trend. This makes sense as there has also been no trend in U.S. landfall frequencies or intensities over this period (in fact, depending on start date there is evidence for a slight but statistically significant decline, source in PDF).
In terms of global tropical cyclone frequency, it was concluded that there was no significant change in global tropical storm or hurricane numbers from 1970 to 2004, nor any significant change in hurricane numbers for any individual basin over that period, except for the Atlantic (discussed above). Landfall in various regions of East Asia26 during the past 60 years, and those in the Philippines during the past century, also do not show significant trends.
[UPDATE 8] You’d think, from all of the shouting about the greenhouse radiation, that we would have seen some change in it over the last few decades. Here is NOAA data on average outgoing (from the earth to space) longwave (greenhouse) radiation (OLR).
Figure 10. Global Outgoing Longwave Radiation. NOAA Interpolated OLR
Change in the average OLR over the period of record is less than ± 1%, and change since 1980 is only ± 0.5%. The current average value is the same as in 1976.
[UPDATE 9] OK, how about droughts? After all, droughts are supposed to be one of the terrible things that accompany warming, and the earth has warmed over the last century. Here’s the Palmer Drought Severity Index for that time span, 1901-2002:
Figure 11. Palmer Dourght Severity Index. CRU self-calibrating PDSI Once again, despite going up some and down some, we’ve ended up just where we started.
[UPDATE 10] More on the Arctic. From Polyakov et al ., we have this:
Figure 12. Arctic Temperature Anomaly . DATA SOURCE
The study used temperature stations from all around the shore of the Arctic Ocean, plus buoys and ice stations. It covered the area north of the Arctic Circle, that is to say the entire Arctic.
This matches an analysis I did last year of the Nordic countries. Here is a result from that study.
Figure 13. Nordic Land Temperature Anomaly. Original caption says “I used the NORDKLIM dataset available here . I removed the one marine record from “Ship M”. To avoid infilling where there are missing records, I took the “first difference” of all available records for each year and averaged them. Then I used a running sum to calculate the average anomaly. I did not remove cities or adjust for the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect.”
Note that, as we would expect, the temperature of the Nordic Countries is similar to that of the Arctic as a whole. This adds confidence to the results. I show the trends for the same intervals as in Fig. 12.
Again, there is nothing out of the ordinary here. The recent Arctic warming is often held up as evidence for human influence on the climate. The data shows the Arctic warming from 1902-1938 was longer and stronger than the recent warming. There is nothing for CO2 to explain.
Figure 14. Changes in storms in Lund and Stockholm, Sweden. Increasing values shows increasing storms.
About this graph, the authors say:
(1) There is no significant overall long-term trend common to all indices in cyclone activity in the North Atlantic and European region since the Dalton minimum.
(2) The marked positive trend beginning around 1960 ended in the mid-1990s and has since then reversed. This positive trend was more an effect of a 20th century minimum in cyclone activity around 1960, rather than extraordinary high values in 1990s. Both the 1960s minimum and the 1990s maximum were within the long-term variability.
(3) Because the period between the 1960s minima and the 1990s maxima spans a substantial part of the period covered by most reanalysis datasets, any analysis relying solely on such data is likely to find trends in cyclone activity and related measures.
Can’t be much clearer than that. There’s no change in North Atlantic storminess.
[UPDATE 12] More on rainfall, this time extreme rainfall and floods. I took the data from Trend detection in river flow series: 1. Annual maximum flow, and used it to compare record river flows by decade. Here are those results:
Figure 15. Maximum River Flow Index for US, European, and Australian rivers.
The math on this one was more complex than the record state temperatures. The river records are of different lengths, and they don’t span the same time periods. Of course, this affects the odds of getting a record in a given year.
For example, if a river record is say only ten years long, the random chance of any year being the maximum is one in ten. For the longest record in the dataset above, it is one in 176. In addition, the number of river records available in any year varies. To adjust for these differences, I took the odds of the record not being set in that particular year for each stream. This is (1 – 1/record length). I multiplied together all of those (1-1/len) odds for all the records available in that year to give me an overall odds of that year not being a record.
Finally, I took the average of those overall odds for the decade, and multiplied it by the actual count of records in that year. This gave me the maximum river flow index shown above. If there were lots of short records in a given decade, we’d be more likely to get a record by chance, so the record count in that decade is accordingly reduced. On the other hand, if there were only a few long records in that decade, there’s not much chance of a record being set randomly in that decade, so the count would be reduced less.
As you can see, there is no sign of a recent increase in the adjusted number of records. Or as the authors of the study say:
The analysis of annual maximum flows does not support the hypothesis of ubiquitous growth of high flows. Although 27 cases of strong, statistically significant increase were identified by the Mann-Kendall test, there are 31 decreases as well, and most (137) time series do not show any significant changes (at the 10% level).
Once again, we see no sign of the changes in climate predicted by the UN IPCC. What were the changes they predicted?
Figure 16. Observed and Projected Changes from the UN IPCC Third Assessment Report.
As you can see above, there is no increase in extreme drought, precipitation, extreme high temperatures, or cyclone events.
[UPDATE 13] Oh, yeah, a pet peeve of mine. You know how they always say “Yeah, but nine out of the last ten years have been among the ten warmest years of the record”, as though that proved that the last ten years was an unusual, anomalous time?
The trouble with this argument is that in a time of rising temperatures, that is often true. The temperature is rising, so where would you expect the warmest years to be?
How often is it true? Thanks for asking, here’s the data from the GISS temperature record .
Figure 16. Number of “Top Ten” years in the GISS global temperature record up to that point that occurred in the ten years previous to a given year.
So yes, nine of the last ten years were in the top ten years in the record … but that was true three times in the 1940’s. So once again, there is nothing unusual about the recent warming.
[Edited to Add] I got to thinking about the IPCC WG1 report, which is the science report. People always claim that it contains nothing but science, and none of it has been overthrown. So I pulled up the Summary for Policymakers. Under the second section, called “Direct Observations of Climate Change”, the very first item says (emphasis mine):
Eleven of the last twelve years (1995–2006) rank among the 12 warmest years in the instrumental record of global surface temperature9 (since 1850). The updated 100-year linear trend (1906 to 2005) of 0.74°C [0.56°C to 0.92°C] is therefore larger than the corresponding trend for 1901 to 2000 given in the TAR of 0.6°C [0.4°C to 0.8°C].
Since the claim was slightly different than the one I analyzed above, I went back and looked at the top twelve. Here they are:
Figure 17. Number of “Top Twelve” years in the GISS global temperature record up to that point that occurred in the twelve years previous to a given year.
Once again, nothing unusual … yes, the earth has been warming, but not in any unusual or anomalous way.
Next, there is no “therefore” in the comparison of the trends. The mere fact that a number of the warmest years were in the last 12 does not guarantee an increase in the trend. If the post 2000 trend continued to increase regularly and very slightly, there would always be 12 of the warmest years in the last 12 … but the 100 year trend would steadily decrease.
[UPDATE 14] The predicted acceleration of sea level rise is one of the favorites of those who want to scare people about CO2. Since 1992, sea level has been measured by satellite. Here is the record of sea level rise over that period:
Figure 18. TOPEX satellite sea level data. The satellite measures the sea level rise using radar. DATA SOURCE
As you can see, rather than accelerating, sea level rise has been slowing down for the past few years. Another inconvenient truth …
[UPDATE 15] Extreme weather events are a perennial favorite among the forecast ills from purported climate change. I found good data on the maximum three day rainfall totals for eight areas on the US Pacific Coast. The areas are Western Washington, Northwest Oregon, Southwest Oregon, Northwest California, North Central California, West Central California, Southwest California, and Southern California. For each record, I ranked the results, and averaged them across the 8 records. This gave me a ranking index showing which years had the most extreme events over the entire region. Fig. 19 shows the results, with larger numbers showing higher ranked years (those with more extreme rainfall events).
Figure 19. Extreme rainfall events, averaged over eight US Pacific Coast climate zones DATA SOURCE
Richard Telford, your claims on behalf of Ralph F. Keeling are at odds with his own published work. Here is a rather a nice non-copywriten paper that covers the fiendishly difficult background to measuring the steady state levels of atmospheric gasses. Note also how he is very modest with his claims, knowing that the system he is viewing is very complex. In this paper he is measuring changes in Ar/N2. Note that N2 concentrations are biotic, but Ar is not. Keeling is doing very nice science, and points out the problems associated with measurement.
I urge you to read it before trying to state that the fall in O2 levels is due to CO2 generation.
http://bluemoon.ucsd.edu/publications/mip/Ar.pdf
RE: Henry Pool (08:00:51) :
In the case of the CO2 Greenhouse Effect, I think this is more a case of settled public perception rather than scientific understanding. Here is one recent article:
New Research into Greenhouse Effect Challenges Theory of Man-Made Global Warming
“A former NASA contractor whose theory demonstrating that the greenhouse effect is constant and self-regulating and that increases in human CO2 emissions are not the source of global warming is fighting an uphill battle to publish his controversial work.
“Developed by prominent atmospheric physicist Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi, the new theory is enormously significant because it demolishes the prevailing doctrine of anthropogenic greenhouse warming (AGW), which blames humans for pumping CO2 into the atmosphere and triggering runaway global warming that could eventually lead to catastrophic climate change.”
http://www.examiner.com/x-32936-Seminole-County-Environmental-News-Examiner~y2010m2d9-New-research-into-greenhouse-effect-challenges-theory-of-manmade-global-warming
It’s time to halt Cap and Trade and all other forms of Carbon Taxation until the scientific community have produced a truthful and transparent appraisal of what, if anything, is happening. I am a Heating Engineer and Energy Assessor – my whole objective is to conserve a our natural resources until viable, economical alternatives can be found, and to saving businesses money. I know (being an expert!) that you can only get a pint of milk out of a pint bottle and it eventually becomes empty – that I believe of oil and gas.
The businesses are struggling, especially in this economic climate. I get many enquiries (corporate to small private) where the solutions to them meeting their targets are beyond their financial means- even with grants (which are false economy anyway). At present they know they will be penalised by the carbon tax regulations, but they are not able to do much about it. The EPBD 2006 (Energy Performance in Buildings Directive), is at the moment being reviewed by the European Parliament and more than likely extended with even more regulations, policies and policing to enforce the regulations. If it turns out that most of the data is inaccurate and corrupt, then this will go down as the biggest Political and Corporate scam and theft of all time – billions absolutely and totally wasted. That money could have been invested in alternative technology, which would have solved their problem anyway – even if warming did turn out to be true. Unfortunately it looks as though the Chinese and Indians have beaten us to it
with their alternative energy technology.( they have no global warming policy to worry about).
Its now time to bottom it all out, cut out the bad once and for all and move forward. If these recent revelations turn out to be true, in a way, we only have ourselves to blame for not being more vigilant – there must have been enough doubters, scientists and politicians out there over the last forty years to question the events that have led us to this situation?
I suggest that top threads should be flagged and/or included in a pop-up listing in the sidebar.
DirkH
Very good. And what do we call the heat in that reservoir? Ocean Heat Content – OHC. And has it risen since 2003? No, it hasn’t>
There’s some easily accessed data that doesn’t make a conclusive point, but should make anyone on the CO2 bandwagon pause and go huh? Over here http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/ you can see a plot at 3400 meters of the CO2 concentration in the atmoshpere (this is the one IPCC et all keep referring to). You can easily see that CO2 concentrations peak about july/august each year.
Now zip over to the AMSU-A site where you can see their satellite temperature data. You will need java installed on your browser. Click on the “global atmospheric trend” link and you can look at any channel or year that you want on the graph. Unfortunately they don’t have a channel at 3400 meters, but they do have one at 4400 meters which is reasonably close. Every year peak around July/August. Then turn on the “near surface” channel. Every year, peak around July/August. Now turn on the Sea Surface channel. Oops, where did the July/August peak go? The peak moved to more like february/march and actually has a depression in July/August.
So… what ever energy transfers are taking place between atmosphere and near surface seem linked, though which drives which is a different question, the oceans merrily wander around responding to input variations from the sun and angle of the earth’s axis to it (which would maximize energy input in feb/mar due to preponderance of ocean in southern hemisphere) and pretty much ignoring any long wave energy transfers from the atmosphere.
Which would fit exactly with the physics….
Now zip over to the AMSU-A site
AAAAARG forgot the link:
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
Henry@Spector
But why do we not get the big oil companies to give a grant to research the whole issue again (seeing that so many people have come to “believe” that CO2 is a problem) ?
I don’t know about the site you are quoting, why doesn’t the guy stand up for himself?
Anyway, again, he does not show me a balance sheet…i.e cooling in W/m3/24 hour versus warming in W/m3/24hour?
and i meant peak of sst in march/april not feb/mar
too much wine today I think.
Henry Pool (09:53:26) : “I don’t know about the site you are quoting…”
Neither did I, but just for reference, according to the Wikipedia, Examiner.com is a media company based in Denver, Colorado, that operates a network of hyper-local news websites, allowing citizen journalists to share their city-based knowledge on a blog-like platform, in over 100 markets. It is a division of Clarity Media Group, with the primary investor being conservative billionaire Philip Anschutz.
Rob (13:13:29), nice video. It supports what EM Smith as been saying for quite awhile. The warming that we have seen is at night and at higher latitudes. Note you don’t see the warmers addressing this because it cuts the legs out of any argument that AGW will lead to major problems.
The real impact of the recent measured warming (if you accept it as true) is longer growing seasons, more arable land and higher crop yields. Not exactly a catastrophe.
BTW, has anyone wondered about the oddity with AMSU? Both channels 4 and 5 are tracking almost exactly with last years ups and downs. I know it’s only been a month and a half, but it still seems unusual.
I wish I May
I wish I Might
Have My global
warming tonight
Could the milder winters we observed in the Uk since the 90s have anything to do with increased water vapour in the stratosphere which recent research seems to indicate occured because of tropical storms at this time?
DocMartyn (08:54:05)
An interesting technical paper. But a little further digging on at Keeling’s group’s site would have uncovered several papers describing how they interpret their results on oxygen concentration. For example Langenfelds et al 1999 Partitioning of the global fossil CO2 sink using a 19-year trend in atmospheric O2, Geophysical Research Letters, 26, 1897-1900. http://bluemoon.ucsd.edu/publications/ralph/25_Partition.pdf
There are numerous other paper by this group linking a decline in oxygen concentration with fossil fuel combustion. I don’t know why you find this so contentious: burning carbon consumes oxygen. With sufficiently precise instrumentation, like that Keeling has produced, this can be detected and used to help partition the CO2 sink into its various components.
RE: Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi’s theory of climate stabilization:
For what it is worth, here is a You Tube Video I have just found where Dr Miklos Zagoni explains his Hungarian colleagues new research on Greenhouse gasses that show CO2 will not increase the Earth’s temperature any further. (April 27 2009)
Nick Stokes (01:05:17) :
Re: Willis Eschenbach (Feb 13 23:46),
(…) As Ron Broberg pointed out for warming since 1995, There’s only a 26% chance that you’d get that from random (natural?) variation. It’s not long enough to get 95% certainty, but it’s warming.
(…)
Following that Ron Broberg link, one gets:
I’ve searched this page for “26”, you’re the only source of that percentage. I followed the link in the Ron Broberg post, which came from Willis Eschenbach (20:52:24). No 26% there either.
Where did you pull that 26% from?
kadaka (01:34:23) :
Nick Stokes is prone to mis-quoting all the time so being out by a factor of at least 2 is good for Nick Stokes. For example he loves to quote from NOAA reports and swear blind that that is how the adjustments are done rather than actually read the code for himself instead.
He’s also not too good at checking back to the original sources as opposed to just taking what is written in a report as gospel. In that sense he’d make for a perfect IPCC reviewer.
Cherry picking? Check. Incomplete information? Check.
All the hallmarks of a Willis Eschenbach post are present.
Boris,
“Cherry picking? Check. Incomplete information? Check”
Stop looking in the mirror at yourself.
RE: Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach “So my question remains unanswered … where is the anomaly? Where is the unusual occurrence that we are spending billions of dollars trying to explain?”
One might argue that the climate in England must be abnormal due to fluctuations in the Gulf Stream. One might ask Dr. Mann to do a study based on tree-ring proxies to get more ‘reliable’ data beyond the influence North Atlantic. One might…
Willis Eschenbach appears to have convinced some people that there is nothing even “slightly abnormal” about temperatures in “Merrie Olde England”, which have only been increasing slowly.
Of course, if you plot the temperatures on a graph with a range of 40deg.C, as Willis does, then you can guarantee not to show much of any warming that has occurred. You could call it, “hiding the increase”.
But, if you want to see how things have actually changed, then use a graph with an appropriate scale on the y-axis. Like this one, for example, which shows the ten-year average CET temperature anomaly since the seventeenth century:
http://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/cet10y.jpg
Slioch, I don’t think those anomaly graphs are going to be very trendy from now on.
Slioch (14:12:39) :
(…)
Of course, if you plot the temperatures on a graph with a range of 40deg.C, as Willis does…
The first graph goes +25 to -10 deg C, a range of 35. The second goes +20 to -10, a range of 30.
Oh well, not like I should expect something truthful and straightforward from you. Considering where that too-simplified graph you linked to comes from, http://tamino.wordpress.com/, is a blog titled “Open Mind,” with the current most recent post being:
Open Mind. Yeah, sure. Uh-huh. Right…
kadaka (22:08:40)
Yes, you are quite right, the merrie Olde england graph has a range of 35deg.C, not 40.
I’m sure I remember noting that it was 35C – I must be getting glaikit … .
But otherwise I find nothing of merit in your post. The graph I linked to shows the ten year average of the Central England Temperatures series and clearly shows the warming that Willis Eschenbach goes to great lengths to hide. What does it matter what the source of the graph is?
Although I rate Tamino’s abilities and clarity of thought very highly, (and the “Summer and Smoke” February 15, 2010 article to which you refer, here:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2010/02/15/summer-and-smoke/#more-2279
is a must read for WUWT followers) … the “too simplified graph” to which you refer can be replicated by anyone with a little skill with Excel, so its origin is irrelevant.
But in what way is it “too simple”? It contains all the data from the CET series with the temperature values averaged over ten year periods. That has the advantage of largely smoothing out the influence of such things as El Nino/La Nina episodes or volcanic eruptions and all the other events that cause short-term changes to the temperature series. By “simplifying” the graph this irrelevant noise is largely removed and the underlying changes made more obvious. There are of course more sophisticated methods of smoothing graphs, but it seems to me that the great advantage of ten (or five or whatever) year averages is that most people can replicate them themselves: they can take the raw data and see from their own efforts that what people like Tamino are saying is true.
Tamino’s graph has a range of a couple of degrees or so: entirely appropriate since that is the range of temperature variation involved.
You tell me why it is appropriate to draw a graph with a range of 35C for England or 30C for Armagh unless your purpose is to obscure the warming that has occurred.
Kadaka – the origin matters, because the graph or its underlying data might well have been tweaked, or corrected, or adjusted, or homogenised.
We know from Prof Phil Jones that the current warming was matched by earlier global warmings in 1860-80 and 1910-40. Is it just bad luck that CET (as per your graphical version) missed out on both of these previous events?