By Steve Goddard
Back in January, our friends were crowing about the warmest satellite temperatures on record. But now they seem to have lost interest in satellites. I wonder why?
Data: http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
It probably has to do with the fact that temperature anomalies are plummeting at a rate of 0.47 °C/year and that satellite temperatures in 2010 are showing no signs of setting a record.
The attention span of our alarmist friends seems to be getting shorter and shorter. They lock in on a week of warm temperatures on the east coast, a week of warm temperatures in Europe, a week of rapid melt in the Arctic. But they have completely lost the plot of the big picture.
The graph below shows Hansen’s A/B/C scenarios in black, and GISTEMP overlaid in red.
Note that actual GISTEMP is below all three of Hansen’s forecasts. According to RealClimate :
Scenario B was roughly a linear increase in forcings, and Scenario C was similar to B, but had close to constant forcings from 2000 onwards. Scenario B and C had an ‘El Chichon’ sized volcanic eruption in 1995. Essentially, a high, middle and low estimate were chosen to bracket the set of possibilities. Hansen specifically stated that he thought the middle scenario (B) the “most plausible”.
In other words, actual temperature rise has been less than Hansen forecast – even if there was a huge volcanic eruption in the 1990s, and no new CO2 introduced over the past decade! We have fallen more than half a degree below Hansen’s “most plausible” scenario, even though CO2 emissions have risen faster than worst case.
Conclusions:
- We are not going to set a record this year (for the whole year)
- Hansen has vastly overestimated climate sensitivity
- Temperatures have risen slower than Hansen forecast for a carbon free 21st century
So what exactly is it that these folks are still worried about?
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Time to go buy a thick winter coat!
“So what exactly is it that these folks are still worried about?”
Their paycheck.
This information really doesn’t matter to Hansen or any of the AGW folk because each and every one of them lacks an understanding of the terminology of scientific method. If you point out to them that the observed facts falsify their hypotheses, they fail to understand “observed,” “fact,” and “hypothesis.” Of course, they will say that the time period must be hundreds of years long before it is taken seriously. Then they will say that we must spend a bazillion dollars in the next decade. And people say Al Gore is stupid.
“So what exactly is it that these folks are still worried about?”
I don’t think they are really worried about anything. They know the holes that are in their theory.
I do think climate science has adopted the liberal play book.
They have managed to include every person on the planet into some sort of victim scenario. The more victims they create, the more money they make.
This is just good business, and it is a business. The more victims they create, the more need for their product, the more money they make.
OT
My personal interest in the man-made global warming debate and the science behind it can be dated to the Cap-And-Trade bill that eventually passed in the House of Representatives in August of 2009.
The first article to convince me something was going on with the Sun and the dubious claim the climate of the Earth is mans fault, was from February 2008. I soon figured out the vast majority of the climate of the planet is the Sun’s fault, not mine. Therefore, I should not be forced to pay for the climate of the planet.
“Twelve-month long drop in world temperatures wipes out a century of warming”
“Scientists quoted in a past DailyTech article link the cooling to reduced solar activity which they claim is a much larger driver of climate change than man-made greenhouse gases. The dramatic cooling seen in just 12 months time seems to bear that out. While the data doesn’t itself disprove that carbon dioxide is acting to warm the planet, it does demonstrate clearly that more powerful factors are now cooling it.”
Temperature Monitors Report Widescale Global Cooling
http://www.dailytech.com/Temperature+Monitors+Report+Widescale+Global+Cooling/article10866.htm
After reading this article, I took a large interest in what our Sun was doing and I began rooting for an extended solar minimum as I knew it would destroy the AGW theory and it’s cheer leaders for the carbon tax.
The Sun has performed beyond my wildest expectations to destroy the AGW theory.
It’s sad people are freezing to death in large numbers and hardships of cold weather are being experienced, but it is necessary. I recognized the magnitude of the deception to bring about global governance and a world wide carbon tax that would make that possible, and what it would take to defeat that scam.
Enjoy your rest Mr Sun, and thank you.
They haven’t “lost the plot” – the plot hasn’t changed one bit. The plot is to lie, obfuscate, and manipulate anything possible to try and get Congress to pass a “climate bill”, one side effect of which would be to set them all up for life with grants and positions in the new apparatus that would have to be built.
Anything which does not advance that goal has got to be erased from the Public Record, insofar as it is possible for them to do it. And anything which may advance that goal, even if only valid for a minute or two, will be seized upon as some great trophy.
This is *Not* about science. It has not been about science for a very long time now. It is about money and control. That’s all.
What’s going to be amusing to watch will be to see how quickly the last vestiges of this movement collapse once the promise of Money for Nothing in some vast climate scheme is finally gone for good. August 9th is the day their dreams finally come crashing to the ground. Once that hope is removed, their is nothing left to hold the movement together.
And on that day their will be much lamentation and gnashing of teeth.
This is the problem with making predictions, sooner or later the time comes when the prediction gets to be compared to reality. Not sure it’ll stop the predictions coming though!
Uhm… They’re worried about being wrong, and will do almost anything to keep from being wrong?
I think the problem may be this: I spoke to someone today who has just graduated from university in geophysics and is about to apply to become a meteorologist “possibly at the CRU” (his words). Naturally I wanted his opinion on climate change. It turned out he didn’t know anything about the PDO or the AMO and asked me how they were driven. He didn’t know about the predictions of 20-30 years of cooling and just kept coming back to the same mantra about the science of CO2 forcing. He didn’t even want to know about feedbacks. Now, this is a man who will, in the next few years, very possibly be working in weather and climate for the CRU.
Sad, really.
Steve Goddard likes forecasts. Some months ago on here I forecast that by feb 2011 UAH would be below the Dec 2007-Jan 2008 anomaly. This is based on my understanding of solar-ocean interactions.
Looking depressingly good so far.
So what exactly is it that these folks are still worried about?
November 2, 2010?
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
July 17 hottest day ever recorded beating the record previous to this year by more than 0.1C
“It probably has to do with the fact that temperature anomalies are plummeting at a rate of 0.47 °C/year and that satellite temperatures in 2010 are showing no signs of setting a record. ”
So nearly 1C ever two years? Rubbish. Utter rubbish.
I have discussed the inaccuracy of Dr Hansen’s models projections for 2010 online but have been hampered by my inability to show a graph of the results. Dr Hansen published a rebuttal to his critics dated 2005 and the climate alarmists point to that rebuttal to prove that his predictions are right on target. He actually wasn’t doing badly as of 2005.
I point out to them that my calendar doesn’t say 2005 anymore. The predicted scenario “B” goes sharply up starting in 2005 while reality shows temperature falling. So how could he possibly be right on target ? I predict we won’t see an update of the 2005 defense from the good Dr ever ! He couldn’t do it without lying or admitting he was way way high in his estimates.
Thanks for the updated graph it is very accurate !
As far as the satellite and surface station data disagreeing I think until “Cities in Space” are a reality they always will diverge.
What to worry about?
1 I can see November from my house.
2 Another nasty cold wet winter
3 More failure in acceptance of the warmist dogma.
The fear is expressed in two actions. Refusing to release the computer code and hiding the data. They are still very afraid of the severe errors/cheating being exposed. If the Fortran was clean, it could be open to the world. If that data hadn’t been changed, no one would care who saw it.
sandy
It is supposed to have warmed up by 0.6C, not 0.1C.
Probably without realizing it, you are saying that Hansen was off by 600%.
stevengoddard says:
July 21, 2010 at 2:25 pm
> sandy
> It is supposed to have warmed up by 0.6C, not 0.1C.
> Probably without realizing it, you are saying that Hansen was off by 600%.
If he forecasted 0.6 and we got 0.1, then his error was (0.1 – 0.6)/0.6, or -83%. If he forecasted 0.1 and we got 0.6, then his error would be (0.6 – 0.1)/0.6, or 500%. If he forecasted 0.6 and we got 0.6, then his error would be (0.6-0.6)/0.6, or 0%.
I recommend people avoid expressing errors in terms of percentages unless the situtation makes their utility – and the math – very clear.
What are you doing?!…You are supposed to HIDE THE DECLINE!
Hansen did get the CO2 right… It tracked Scenario “A” with uncanny precision. The actual warming has been slightly less than Hansen’s Scenario C…
In most branches of science, when experimental results falsify the original hypothesis, scientists discard or modify the original hypothesis. In Hansen’s case, he just pitches the story with zealotry rarely seen outside of lunatic asylums.
The Hansen Model: Another very simple disproof of Anthropogenic Global Warming
You don’t say which UAH channels you’re plotting. I’ve been tracking Channels 4 and 5 daily here, and they are both running pretty high, well above recent years. Here’s Channel 4 (near surface), and Channel 5 (around 14000 ft).
Conclusions:
We are not going to set a record this year (for the whole year)
Hansen has vastly overestimated climate sensitivity
Temperatures have risen slower than Hansen forecast for a carbon free 21st century
So what exactly is it that these folks are still worried about?
“IT’S ALL ABOUT THE MONEY BOYS”
— Dr. Hansen (In an Honest Moment)
“We have fallen more than half a degree below Hansen’s “most plausible” scenario, even though CO2 emissions have risen faster than worst case.”
Bingo! Thank you Mr. Goddard. Supporters of Hansen have tried to point out (following his 2005 defense of this chart) that CO2, as measured in parts ppm, have not climbed as fast as predicted. However in doing this they have shined a light on another failed aspect of CAGW, which is the capacity of the earth to absorb an increase in “emissions” is greater then they understood. So now observations show t not only the above failure of the CAGW theory, but that the CAGW theory was also wrong on feedbacks as well as the lifetime of an individual CO2 molecule in the atmosphere.
Yet they continue to “predict” disaster, and to ignore the benefits of increased CO2.
I think you mean Hansen was off by 500%.
0.2C is 100% off
0.3C is 200% off
0.4C is 300% off
0.5C is 400% off
0.6C is 500% off
This is just another example of sceptics exaggerating the errors of hard-working AGW
fund raisersscientists.BTW, the complete failure of this chart by Hansen should be required reading for every member of congress.
Like they read anything, they don’t even read what they do pass.
Hansen made those predictions … in 1988.
What were your predictions in 1988?
The only blog I have seen emphasising teh temperature records is Joe Romms. No other climate blog that I visit regularly (Skeptical Science, Open Mind, Real Climate, Deep Climate, Rabett Run…) have blogged about hot summer temperatures. A few have mentioned Arctic Ice, but I don’t see any talking up the chances of a record year.
Nor do I see any “losing interest in satellites”. Where did that come from?
So 2010 is declining after El Nino just like 1998? Nobody is surprised. The question is: how low will it go?
Haggle all the you like, cherry pick years and months etc etc The planet is warming, even by UAH observations. Where is the cooling?
TLT
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
Hansen forecast 0.6. Actual is 0.1 .
That is a factor of 6X or 600%.
Hansen’s own data is by far the hottest of the 4 major data sets, but still hasn’t delivered enough for him:
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2010/07/hansen-maintains-title-of-leading.html
Well from my perspective, at least 2 generations know nothing of the Chicken “The Sky is Falling” story; nor of the Salem Witch Trials (the children would not lie, hang whomever the children say is a witch); nor of the centuries of the cartoons showing someone with a sign saying “the end is near.” Human nature has not changed over perhaps thousands of years. So the current “sky is falling” or “the end is near” global warming crowd identifies everyone else as a “witch” and here we are with today’s journalist who never acquired any wisdom from any these stories, that have occurred since the history of recorded times, and, when proven wrong, will all claim that they were just reporting what the so called “scientists” were saying.
David,
Excellent post! They don’t know how to predict, they just make guesses.
Could it be that the finger in the pie is more important than the eye in the sky?
Frank. Even he did exagerrate, Hansen was still wrong by a massive margin. This is just another example of alarmists picking out tiny holes in skeptics arguments when their whole theory is proven to be complete balderdash.
Boy, this is really gonna piss off John & Harry. Excellent!
Last year was the sweetest thing here in the NorthWest corner of the USA. We were the only warm spot as everyone froze. God Bless El Nino. But now, the cold is coming, and I’m not looking forward to it. And if Bastardi is right, the truly brutal cold won’t arrive for perhaps a decade. If the Global Religio-Socialist plot doesn’t get its teeth into us after November, we may have a chance to turn the boat around.
toby
The point is that the dire predictions aren’t happening – and the people who made them haven’t generated much confidence in their skills.
Steven,
” no new CO2 introduced over the past decade”
“Temperatures have risen slower than Hansen forecast for a carbon free 21st century”
There is a difference in meaning between what the abstract of the linked paper say – “a rapid curtailment of trace gas emissions such that the net climate forcing ceases to increase after the year 2000” and the two quotes above from the article in that he abstract’s description does not imply complete cessation of anthropogenic carbon emissions, i.e. you are inaccurately exaggerating how draconian the CO2 emissions cuts assumed in that scenario were.
Steve just a quick question, why doesn’t your giss temp overlay track Hansen’s ‘observed’ line in his graph? Was he using a different data set?
The MONEY is what’s missing!! Whatta scam!
We need to give this stuff a name for the ages…..if we borrow from “Ponzi Scheme,” how about “Jonesy Scheme”?
[REPLY – Watch it there, buddy! ~ Evan Jones]
Some time ago I asked for an explanation from Spencer as to why some of the chanels from amsu had been dropped (in particular CHLT which was rising at 1.2C/decade) but also why ch05 was changed to ch05 aqua and then modified to a new version of ch05 aqua. All this with no notes on the discover website.
No explanation was forthcoming.
The major changes have removed the rapidly rising trends. Why?
I have linked the plots below
http://img40.imageshack.us/img40/9871/amsu20100721.png
Note that all FEB 29ths have been removed!
Assuming The AMSU team have now stabilized on their plots ch04 is still showing an upward trend of almost 0.5C per decade
I do not understand where you -0.5C comes from unless you are looking at a cherry picked period.
\harry
Michael and wws:
As for Cap and Tax; of course it has nothing to do with Global Warming, it is a new and highly desired revenue source period. Unfortunately it appears to have reached a point where no matter what happens with Global Warming its is still going to be enacted.
Even if all of the most ardent warmer scientists recanted tomorrow and disavowed the possiblity of CO2 affecting climate congress would still try, and probably succeed, in passing the tax.
It’s about the money.
So we’re to excuse a 500% or 600% (I still say 500%, Steve) inaccuracy rate in a prediction made 22 years ago as natural, but accept predictions he’s making for the next 22 years?
As for what predictions were made by any of the sceptics — they didn’t make any because they knew there was too little information to go by.
Is this a like-for-like comparison? The GISTEMP plot seems to be the 5 year mean, so the last few years flat-line around 0.5.
Year/Annual/5yr Mean
2005 .62 .55
2006 .54 .53
2007 .57 .55
2008 .43 *
2009 .57 *
2010 * *
Whereas the average of the monthly GISTEMP readings so far for 2010 is 0.71, still below Scenario B, but rather closer than the c0.5C implied by the graph. (Baselines are also slightly different, but the effect is minor, about 0.06C). Also just zero-ing two noisy series in the same year could introduce a bias, better to look at trends, as the RC article did. The data is available…..
The model used 32 years ago did indeed overestimate climate sensitivity – it had a value of about 4C, a more up to date figure would be around 3C, this has a limited impact in the first few decades, but would cause the model to over-estimate after that – just what we are observing. Hansen said as much in 2005:
Close agreement of observed temperature change with simulations for the most realistic climate forcing (scenario B) is accidental, given the large unforced variability in both model and real world. Indeed, moderate overestimate of global warming is likely because the sensitivity of the model used , 4.2°C for doubled CO2, is larger than our current estimate for actual climate sensitivity, which is 3 1°C for doubled CO2, based mainly on paleoclimate data.
To see model projections for the lower sensitivity see the TAR. Since the 1990 baseline, the nearest scenario to actual emissions has been A1F1, the corresponding projection was for a rise in global temperatures of 0.32C or 0.16C/decade. The 1990-2010 linear trend in the UAH data was 0.164C.
Some of the arithmetic about warming percentage differences is really rather silly.
What if the forecast had been 0.01 rather than 0.1. Now do the percentage arithmetic, and you’ll find values of up to 6000%, using some of the methods people have proposed. Now change it to 0.001, and 0.0001, and zero. Percentage change is not sensible. It’s a bit like journalists reporting that the temperature is twice as hot as normal. They don’t understand temperature scales – or much else, I sometimes think!
This way of describing errors in climate forecasts is truly silly. Stick to simple arithmetic differences, and then we’ll all understand it (I hope).
stevengoddard says:
July 21, 2010 at 3:06 pm
Hansen forecast 0.6. Actual is 0.1 .
That is a factor of 6X or 600%.
—————–Reply:
Steve is right, guys. Hansen’s forecast was 6 times actual. Do the math: 6 x 0.1 = 0.6. It doesn’t get any clearer. Hansen overshot by 600% or 6 times. The 600% factor (when set in sufficient gramatical terms) is mathematically correct.
Since Hansen’s C model is with constant forcing, and C matches the real world best so far, or at least the satellite record.
This seems to show that Hansen’s dooms-day forcing scenario is a wash.
Where’ s that guy from Huntsville when you need him?
@toby
Since the planet is always either warming or cooling, I’d say the cooling comes after the warming peaks… Then it will cool for thirty or forty years. All this superimposed on longer term trends…
Enneagram says: July 21, 2010 at 2:44 pm
Hmmmmm. I’m thinking it’s a tad too late for that option.
This is yet another example of one of life’s ‘unwritten rules’: ‘Reality doesn’t give a damn what you think’.
toby: “Haggle all the you like, cherry pick years and months etc etc The planet is warming, even by UAH observations. Where is the cooling?”
12 years later it is cooler than 1998. 12 years. It was supposed to be warmer.
And it looks like the drop in 2010 will be bigger than the 1998 drop.
And, really terrifying, is the thought that earth temperatures lag big drops in solar by as much 10 years. 8 – 10 years from now its gonna be REAL COLD.
sandy jardine said
“July 21, 2010 at 2:16 pm
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
July 17 hottest day ever recorded beating the record previous to this year by more than 0.1C”
If you follow your own link the July 17 Figure is actually .1C lower than 2009 let alone the hottest day ever. The 20th July this year was .30C cooler than the same day last year
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps+001
We both know its only weather but what was your point?
tonyb
You ask: “But now they seem to have lost interest in satellites. I wonder why?”
I’m sure you know the answer — it took me all of 10 min to find it. It’s here:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/sst/ersst_version.php
The summary is that cloud cover — which looks cooler than the ground or sea surface — introduces a small cold bias that is difficult to correct for.
One of the well established criteria of a good theory is how well the predictions work out. If no predictions can be made from a theory, it is a pretty useless theory and if the predictions are wrong it is likely a wrong theory. If the predictions are right, it still does not prove a theory, it just makes it a pretty good theory.
My personal preference have been for quite some time the satelite data, not because they are so much better or accurate, because I don’t really have a good understanding of all the static and non-static corrections that are applied. I have however assumed that the same corrections are made for the full sequence of data and that thus proper trends can be fairly accurately interpreted. We have seen enough examples of mismanagement of surface sites and surface data, never mind the imbalance between oceanic and continental grids. It is time to throw all those out and concentrate on satelite measurements, as I am sure the scientific community will do eventually.
It always seems to me that Real Climate were being a bit disingenuous with the line that “Hansen considered scenario B the most plausible”. In the original report, if I remember correctly, Scenario A, the really scary one, is described as the “business as usual” scenario with continuing exponential growth of CO2, scenario B is presented as the result of some restraint with linear growth of CO2, and scenario C assumes NO growth in forcings from 2000 onwards.
I raised this with Gavin some years ago; his response was (roughly) that “as it happened the actual growth in forcing was closest to scenario B which Jim always thought the most probable.”
If that’s true why did Jim call scenario A “Business as usual”? Or was this a bit of post-hoc rationalisation after Pat Michaels used Scenario A to mock him?
Now as far as I can see, CO2 is still on it’s relentless exponential march, so by rights we still ought to be somewhere on Scenario A. If we’re on Scenario B it means that Hansen’s prediction of future forcing was well wrong. And the prediction is a fully integral part of the model. If we’re on Scenario C it means that he both got the forcings wrong AND that his model sensitivity is way too high. Below C…
More recently, Gavin has inded conceded that “the model sensitivity was too high, at roughly 4.2 C for a doubling of CO2 against a mid-value for modern models of 3 C”
(well that’s only 40% out I suppose, not bad for a wild guess)
But of course none of this really matters because the modern models are so much more accurate. Says Gavin. Particularly since the newer the model, the less time it’s had to disprove itself. Such is Science.
In 2010 Earth stands on the threshold of a 70-year Maunder Minimum similar to that of 1645 – 1715 when wine froze in Louis XIV’s goblet in his palace of Versailles. Yet having willfully sabotaged global energy economies since the 1970s, climate hysterics such as Briffa, Hansen, Jones, Mann, Trenberth et al. continue to trumpet utterly failed hypotheses in bad faith under false pretenses, always to the extreme detriment of honest scientific projects.
By 2020 – 2030, as Earth’s Long Summer –our current Holocene Interglacial Epoch– fades to long-overdue Pleistocene Ice Time, Hansen and his ilk will be seen for what they are: Death-eating Luddite sociopaths, nihilists raking off propaganda monies at the expense of human mega-deaths. Nothing anyone can say does justice to the hateful attitudes this wretched coterie purveys. From the destruction of post-Enlightenment industrial/scientific civilization, nothing will dissuade them– nothing. In sheer self-defense, we wonder: What is to be done?
I thought Scenario B was actually supposed to be roughly the best we can hope for with reasonable efforts at limiting future C02 from that point forward, and therefore, based on the fact we haven’t made much progress if any, that Scenario A would be what Hansen would have predicted we should be on at this point. Surely he wouldn’t count Kyoto as qualifying us for “Scenario B”.
And Scenario C was a fairly draconian set of efforts to reduce CO2 from that point forward, which very obviously have not happened.
And yet here we are with clear daylight (in our favor) between actual and Scenario C.
Steve, you said Hansen was “off by” 600% . not “the change is 600% of Hansen’s projection”. So please have the humility to admit that slight error rather than selectively missing out words in a vain attempt to be right in the face of conflicting evidence.
You are running dangerously close to doing what you criticise others of doing.
Thanks for the interesting post. Now I’ll have to go and check out what you saying is accurate.
regards/
Hansen’s model is ‘hard wired’ with a ‘radiative forcing constant’ of lambda = 0.67 C/W.m-2. This is derived from the ‘hockey stick’ and assumes a 100 ppm increase in CO2 produces a 1 C rise in ‘surface temperature’. Using real spectroscopic numbers from the HITRAN data base, the 100 ppm increase in CO2 produces an increase in the downward long wave IR flux of 1.7 W.m-2, so 1/1.7 = 0.67. This is climate astrology not climate science. There is no physics involved. The CO2 just magically produces the temperature rise in the model. Are we using caloric or phlogiston? It is a circular hockey stick argument. Hockey stick in, more hockey stick out.
In reality, the meteorological surface temeprature data has no CO2 ‘signature’ . It is just the change in ocean temperature from the region of origin of the weather system.
For the US, the dominant term is the PDO then the AMO. Follow the ocean indices and look for more declines. All we are seeing is a repeat of the ‘dust bowl’ temerpature peak and decline that started in the 1930’s – assuming that Hansen hasn’t ‘homogenized’ those numbers too.
For a more detailed discussion look at the recent Energy and Environment Article ‘A Null Hypothesis for CO2’ E&E 21(4) 171-200 (2010).
http://multi-science.metapress.com/content/nm45w65nvnj3/?p=1b3c6d84b53646e98ca8f09e235d6320&pi=1
Tonyb
I wish people would take the elementary precaution of stating what dataset they are talking about. Your latest seems to be sea surface temperatures.
Another inconvenient truth!
“”” BQuartero says:
July 21, 2010 at 4:10 pm
One of the well established criteria of a good theory is how well the predictions work out. If no predictions can be made from a theory, it is a pretty useless theory and if the predictions are wrong it is likely a wrong theory. If the predictions are right, it still does not prove a theory, it just makes it a pretty good theory. “””
So what would be your opinion of a theory; that not only was “pretty good” but it even predicted the value of a fundamental Physical Constant of Nature (the fine structure Constant) to within less than half of the standard Deviation of the very best experimentally measured value of that constant; which is something like a part in 10^8 agreement with experiment and theory.
Would that be a good theory in your view ?
What if the theory included no observations of any observed Physical phenomena; and contained no other fundamental physical Constants of Nature in its formulation; yet it predicts the correct value of a natural constant to a part in 10^8 or so.
Is that a good theory; or not ?
Stevej says:
July 21, 2010 at 4:10 pm
“You ask: “But now they seem to have lost interest in satellites. I wonder why?”
I’m sure you know the answer — it took me all of 10 min to find it. It’s here:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/sst/ersst_version.php
The summary is that cloud cover — which looks cooler than the ground or sea surface — introduces a small cold bias that is difficult to correct for.”
As opposed to warm biasses from UHI that are easily corrected for (by simply doubling them). 😉
Where in the world did the idea come from in this thread that we’ve only seen .1°C warming when the prediction was for .6°C?
There is no dataset in existence that only shows .1°C warming since 1988.
Also, the graph purporting to show GISTEMP is not entirely accurate, as it doesn’t reflect the 2005 temperature reading which was greater than .6°C anomaly.
Nor does the graph or the discussion reflect the current trailing 12 month GISTEMP anomaly being ~.7°C anomaly.
Several in the comments have mentioned the fact that it’s been acknowledged by Hansen that the sensitivity of his ’88 model was too high. And, of course, we are still barely edging out of the longest and deepest solar minimum in a century, which he certainly couldn’t have predicted back then. If you adjust the model output down a bit for the assumed more accurate modern sensitivity estimate, reflect the current high anomaly, and do a mental accounting for the unusual solar minimum, then we are back to pretty good agreement.
Scenario B was roughly a linear increase in forcings, and Scenario C was similar to B, but had close to constant forcings from 2000 onwards. Scenario B and C had an ‘El Chichon’ sized volcanic eruption in 1995. Essentially, a high, middle and low estimate were chosen to bracket the set of possibilities. Hansen specifically stated that he thought the middle scenario (B) the “most plausible”.
I don’t think this is correct. I think this was discussed at length a few years ago at CA, and the deal is Scenario A and B are essentailly the same with scenario ‘B’ have some negative feedback from volcanic activity. Scenario ‘C’ was a pie-in-the-sky scenario where Y2K levels of CO2 were held constant. As you can see, we are coming in well under scenatio C, despite continued upward trend of CO2 since 2000. We are A LONG WAY from scenario B, which as you correctly stated Hansen declared “most likely to occur.”
Gary D, regarding Cap and Tax – from what I am reading from The Hill, it appears that everyone involved behind the scenes is preparing to accept that nothing will happen before the recess, and they’re going to pin their hopes on the September session. Always easier to put something off if you can keep the thin flame of hope burning!
And to that I say, Please Do!!!! No one running for office is going to stand for a new tax bill just a few weeks before an election – that’s the kiss of death! Point is, they all know this, but they’re going to pretend not to know it just to get out of the session and string the enviros along. (From the enviro’s side, this is the lousy thing about trusting professional liars – they lie to everyone! They can’t help it!!!)
And then fall will come, and whoops! Can’t pass it before an election! So it will be put off again, this time to the lame duck session. Now that’s the real danger – we just have to hope the Republicans have the nerve to put on the full-court filibuster and prevent *anything* more from being passed until the new Congress takes office in January.
And once January 2011 is past us, the Cap’n’Tax danger will be passed. It’s a white knuckle 6 months to go, though – the only times the country is truly safe is when Congress is adjourned!
DirkH,
Good hunting! So, clouds introduce a cold bias. Yeah. In other words, they don’t like to work with cloud data because it does not permit high enough temperatures in the result. So, they chuck the cloud data. Definitely a case of GIGO.
sandy jardine says:
July 21, 2010 at 2:16 pm
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
July 17 hottest day ever recorded beating the record previous to this year by more than 0.1C
“It probably has to do with the fact that temperature anomalies are plummeting at a rate of 0.47 °C/year and that satellite temperatures in 2010 are showing no signs of setting a record. ”
So nearly 1C ever two years? Rubbish. Utter rubbish.
____________
Sandy, it is utter rubbish.
Steve likes to cherry pick data (usually short term weather related fluctuations) to try an make points about the climate. Everyone knows that after an El Nino event such as we had, we will see a cooling of ocean surface in the Pacific and often the onset of a La Nina. These are the natural variations in climate, and are no different than the solar variations. What is most remarkable in my estimation is that global temps didn’t even fall more during the long and deep solar minimum that we just came through. I’ve still not heard AGW explain this in any scientific way. By the way they were carrying on at one point about the solar minimum, you’d of thought a new ice age was upon us, but temperatures held up– not rising, but not falling either.
Steve is essentially giddy with excitement over the natural downward oscillation that occurs after an El Nino event. In looking at the GISTEMP chart he used:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.A2.lrg.gif
What one should be looking at the rise in temperatures this past century. Climate change is not seen (nor refuted) in short term ENSO or solar cycle events. While it is true that during the long and deep solar minimum (most quiet sun in a century) we did not see a continuation in the rapid rise in temps we saw in the later part of the 90’s and first few years of the 21st Century, we are now seeing a resumption in that rise this year. The AGW skeptics would like to believe that 100% of the record warm temps in the first half of 2010 were all due to El Nino, but logically this makes no sense. We just came out of the longest and deepest solar minimum in a century, and then we had a moderate El Nino event and suddenly we jump into record warmth? There must be some other factor at work here. It is quiet understandable if you factor in the additional forcings from CO2 (which is the longer term signal amongst the shorter term noise of solar cycles, ENSO, etc.)
BenjaminG writes:
“And, of course, we are still barely edging out of the longest and deepest solar minimum in a century, which he certainly couldn’t have predicted back then.”
Sir, you share the AGW proponent’s non-appreciation of scientific method. According to scientifi method, you formulate hypotheses to explain the data at hand, Then you make predictions from those hypotheses and compare them to observed fact to determine if the predictions are true. If the predictions are false you declare one or more of your hypotheses false and set about revising them. You do not say, “Oh, since then I have learned about the behavior of the sun and I can take that and some other matters into account and smooth out everything.” Rather, you say, my original hypotheses did not account for the sun and, for that reason, I must formulate a new set of hypotheses which does include hypotheses about the sun’s behavior. This is especially important when you have made yourself world-famous for claiming that CO2 and “CO2 forcings” explain all increases in temperature and that the sun has no role to play. You should have enough humility, even without understanding scientific method, to say “I was wrong about the sun and I was wrong that CO2 explains it all.”
“While doing research 12 or 13 years ago, I met Jim Hansen, the scientist who in 1988 predicted the greenhouse effect before Congress. I went over to the window with him and looked out on Broadway in New York City and said, “If what you’re saying about the greenhouse effect is true, is anything going to look different down there in 20 years?” He looked for a while and was quiet and didn’t say anything for a couple seconds. Then he said, “Well, there will be more traffic.” I, of course, didn’t think he heard the question right. Then he explained, “The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/22/a-little-known-but-failed-20-year-old-climate-change-prediction-by-dr-james-hansen/
Can anyone in NY describe what its like to swim in the West Side Highway?
Ha ha ha ha.
BenjaminG says: July 21, 2010 at 5:02 pm
“If you adjust the model output down a bit for the assumed more accurate modern sensitivity estimate, reflect the current high anomaly, and do a mental accounting for the unusual solar minimum, then we are back to pretty good agreement.”
If you adjust the model forecast output made in the past to match the current temperature readings, then we are back to pretty good agreement, for now, well at least until sunset. It may need some more adjustment tomorrow when the sun comes up.
What a joke.
Toby, you said RealClimate isn’t making a big deal about 2010. We’ll see in January 2011. The warmers were burned by what happened in 2007/2008, so of course they are more cautious these days, especially since even NOAA is forecasting a huge drop in global temps in the next 9-12 months.
Since Gavin at RC offered a fool’s bet on his own terms in his Global Cooling-Wanna Bet?, post, and since RC has lectured on the insignificance of no statistically significant warming since 1995, I wonder if he’d be willing to bet by end of 2015 there will still be no statistically significant warming since 1995? He knew darn well it was impossible for anyone to win his bet, but is he willing to have his bluff called for a Real bet?
George F. Smith,
You ask some good questions. In science, the word “prediction” is not used in the sloppy manner of the street where someone can say that he “predicts that Obama will resign this afternoon.” In science, you have a prediction only if it is derived from hypotheses that explain the phenomenon predicted. So, Kepler’s Laws (look them up, they are way cool) enabled Galileo to use his telescope to predict the phases of Venus. In so doing, he was showing that each phase-event was an instance of the regularities described by Kepler’s Laws. No laws (hypotheses), no prediction.
tonyb says:
July 21, 2010 at 4:10 pm
sandy jardine said
“July 21, 2010 at 2:16 pm
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
July 17 hottest day ever recorded beating the record previous to this year by more than 0.1C”
If you follow your own link the July 17 Figure is actually .1C lower than 2009 let alone the hottest day ever. The 20th July this year was .30C cooler than the same day last year
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps+001
We both know its only weather but what was your point?
Spencer recommends Aqua Ch05 on that site as the best daily estimate of the TLT which is the measure that Steve is talking about. Steve claims that “satellite temperatures in 2010 are showing no sign of setting a record”, however Spencer’s recommended source shows that today is the hottest temperature recorded at any time on that channel since 1978. That fits most people’s definition of a record!
The anomaly plots are known to be the result of a completely ad hoc adjustment by S&C so assigning some meaning to the monthly variation of anomaly seems to be entirely meaningless.
@John Blake says:
July 21, 2010 at 4:29 pm
…By 2020 – 2030, as Earth’s Long Summer –our current Holocene Interglacial Epoch– fades to long-overdue Pleistocene Ice Time, Hansen and his ilk will be seen for what they are: Death-eating Luddite sociopaths, nihilists raking off propaganda monies at the expense of human mega-deaths. Nothing anyone can say does justice to the hateful attitudes this wretched coterie purveys. From the destruction of post-Enlightenment industrial/scientific civilization, nothing will dissuade them– nothing. In sheer self-defense, we wonder: What is to be done?
REPLY: John, thanks for the post, excellent!
One of my very liberal (e.g. “terrified”) faculty at Univ of Illinois just sent this missive around in a list-serve email:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/calling_all_future-eaters_20100719/
CALLING ALL FUTURE EATERS!! Heh! Raise yer hands….This mess actually calls for a “climate uprising” against big business, profligate carbon consumers etc.
Yeah, boy…a bunch of RealClimate geeks, armed with Mattel light-sabers, trying to take down big oil!! OOOOOO I’m scared!!
So what exactly is it that these folks are still worried about?
Money, power, prestige, credibility etc. that is inexorably slipping away, out of thier control.
The Climate Bubble has a slow leak, and it’s beyond reach.
I replaced a bunch of incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescents in 2003.
Please don’t thank me for single-handedly halting global warming. Just send money.
Let’s all get on the same page with what Hansen himself views as the right way to plot his scenarios. Someone above linked to his 2005 PNAS article, where he had a graph that was waived around by some at the time as a victory flag. Here is the updated version.
http://img42.imageshack.us/img42/252/hansen2009all.jpg
No five year runing averages, just a plot comparing his scenarios to GISS station data and land/ocean data. Sometimes, some folks forget Hansen’s own words:
“Therefore, the best temperature observation for
comparison with climate models probably falls between the meteorological
station surface air analysis and the land–ocean temperature
index.”
I expect 2010 to come in quite similar to 2005 or 2007 when all is said and done. No amount of dancing, rationalization, or wishful thinking can allow anyone to say Scenario B is going to look “pretty good” for 2010.
Salem Witch Trials (the children would not lie, hang whomever the children say is a witch)
A great injustice. Perhaps half of them were entirely innocent . . .
So what exactly is it that these folks are still worried about?
It was habit forming.
RockyRoad says:
July 21, 2010 at 3:50 pm
stevengoddard says:
July 21, 2010 at 3:06 pm
> Hansen forecast 0.6. Actual is 0.1 .
>That is a factor of 6X or 600%.
> —————–Reply:
> Steve is right, guys. Hansen’s forecast was 6 times actual.
That isn’t what Steve said, which was “Hansen was off by 600%”. Suppose I got a 5% raise at work. My new salary would be 105% of what it was before – not 5% of what it was before. A ratio vs. a difference, and Steve said difference (“off by [0.5°]”) and reported a ratio – 6X. And technically, that implied something like Hansen predicted a 0.1° rise and we had a 0.6° rise. Of course, we only got 1/6 (17%) of what Hansen predicted, hence my assertion he was off by 83%.
BTW, if you go to a store some day and find there’s a one day sale with everything 25% off, how much will prices go up tomorrow? Hint – not 25%. Percentages are best used for ratios of less than 1.25 or so.
> Do the math: 6 x 0.1 = 0.6. It doesn’t get any clearer. Hansen overshot by 600% or 6 times. The 600% factor (when set in sufficient gramatical terms) is mathematically correct.
We can fudge the “gramatical [sic] terms”? That may be good PR or marketing, but it’s crappy and unclear science.
Phil, as usual misquoting
“We are not going to set a record this year (for the whole year)”
When your belief system depends on BS, why bother?
Is this a Bart Homer moment for Hansen ?
Big Oops.
R. Gates
If the temperature drops about half a degree this year, do you think it is going to be a record year? Does that make you giddy?
How about an honest discussion instead of spin?
evanmjones says:
July 21, 2010 at 5:52 pm
>> Salem Witch Trials (the children would not lie, hang whomever the children say is a witch)
> A great injustice. Perhaps half of them were entirely innocent . . .
Cute. BTW, the trial transcripts still exist! It’s pretty clear where the guilt lies.
BTW, we haven’t learned – http://wermenh.com/wenatchee.html . Oh good, a lot of links still work. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer did a wonderful job covering the story once the realized what was going on. Not sure if it has any analogies to AGW other than the misplaced certainty of the those in power.
Phil: “The anomaly plots are known to be the result of a completely ad hoc adjustment by S&C so assigning some meaning to the monthly variation of anomaly seems to be entirely meaningless.”
Any credibility you might have had with the rest of your post — you completely lost with that ridiculous slander. UAH and RSS (which I would charaterize as advocates of the AGW theory) have a collegial and mutually beneficial relationship of reviewing and helping each other on adjustments that are needed in raw satellite readings.
If your charge is typical of the quality of your analysis, then my time would be better spent skipping your comments.
We are not going to set a record this year (for the whole year)
If politicians can have any say in it they will create it, some how, at least from James Hansen’s data set. They’ve been working together with him from way back:
CRS, Dr.P.H. says:
July 21, 2010 at 5:27 pm
“[…]CALLING ALL FUTURE EATERS!! Heh! Raise yer hands….This mess actually calls for a “climate uprising” against big business, profligate carbon consumers etc. […]”
Thanks for sharing. Interesting malthusian doomsday perspective.
[snip]
Hansen predictions are for yearly averages, so one should compare with, well, the same thing:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1970/offset:0.15/mean:12/plot/gistemp/from:1970/offset:0.06/mean:12/plot/uah/from:1970/mean:12/offset:0.3/plot/rss/from:1970/mean:12/offset:0.3
The curves have been translated to have a zero anomaly in the 70-75 period, just like Hansen’s graph. You may note that we are currently at +0.7 compared to this baseline, which is spot on scenario B.
DirkH says:
“Thanks for sharing. Interesting malthusian doomsday perspective.”
The article practically screams “biologist”. I think they’re easy prey, most of them, at least.
And, of course, we are still barely edging out of the longest and deepest solar minimum in a century, which he certainly couldn’t have predicted back then.
Quite predictable, actually, if the Seuss/DeVries cycle (or Gleissberg) is a valid theory. But a single bum cycle probably won’t do it. Variance from top to bottom of a normal Schwabe cycle is only c. 0.1C. But if we are in for a Grand Minimum, it is hard to predict. We don’t really know the effect (or lack of effect) of a Grand Minimum yet.
If you adjust the model output down a bit for the assumed more accurate modern sensitivity estimate, reflect the current high anomaly, and do a mental accounting for the unusual solar minimum, then we are back to pretty good agreement.
But surely sensitivity is a central part of his prediction . . .
R Gates: You continue to disregard the satellite temperature data from UAH clearly showing that 1998 was warmer than this year. Why do you do so? You must love playing devil’s advocate or else you really have moved from being a 75% believer in AGW to nearly 100%
Oh BTW,
“Nadir Of Western Civilization To Be Reached This Friday At 3:32 P.M.”
http://www.theonion.com/articles/nadir-of-western-civilization-to-be-reached-this-f,2812/
James Hansen’s defenders utilize the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy: shoot holes in a barn door, then draw a circle around them and claim a bulls-eye. In Hansen’s case, it’s a moving bulls-eye:
Hansen/GISS “adjusted” temperature record. [blink gif]
Hansen’s W-R-O-N-G predictions. Yes, they were all wrong.
More Hansen/GISS “adjustments”.
Hansen’s 1988 predictions vs the data.
Hansen made three predictions covering a wide temperature range. He was wrong on every one. Yet some folks still believe Hansen knows what he’s talking about.
Lots of well thought out comments on the thread tonight.
All I have to say is wait until the heart of this la nina + pdo cold cycle + low solar cycle & see how far below the trend we are (especially since the trend continues up – time is not the friend of the AGW crowd). I would say within a couple years, we will be sooo far below the forecast trend that even the strongest of AGW believers will saying, “You know, those, skeptics were right all along (but they will only mutter it to themselves)”
Rob
You are behind the times. One bloated six month el nino is not an annual trend, and 2010 B is 1.1
I can’t even say nice try
Point him to Chapter 5 of Roy Spencer’s Great Global Warming Blunder, which tackles “the science of CO2 forcing” head-on.
What trophy will they give the probable paranoid schizo head of GISS Hansen for losing his own satellites to prove his own point I wonder?
The he made it without satellites award?
Rob Vermeulen says:
July 21, 2010 at 6:12 pm
“You may note that we are currently at +0.7 compared to this baseline, which is spot on scenario B.”
Nice try. Scenario B calls for an anomaly of about 0.85 in 2009 and greater than 1.0 in 2010. And remember, Hansen himself says the “right” metric is somewhere between station data and land/ocean.
Sorry, can’t stop following the link between biologists and affection to civilizations collapse… This one fits so nicely:
“Conformists may kill civilizations”
http://www.bioedonline.org/news/news.cfm?art=5382
(No, it’s not The Onion. I think it’s serious. I’m not sure, though.)
If I understand this right, this is the up-to-the-day data for the temperature of interest:
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps
To see the temp “anomaly” you must click the box next to “Average” (on the bottom right) and then click “redraw” (bottom left). The month of July anomaly is in the +0.6 to +0.7 range which turns the yearly average back into a pretty close horse-race. August will need a pretty dramatic drop to keep the overall lead from changing. I’d be pretty surprised if 2010 didn’t turn out to be warmer than 1998 according to this graph.
If this isn’t the right data set, let me know. I’m none too happy about this.
evanmjones says:
July 21, 2010 at 2:16 pm
“So what exactly is it that these folks are still worried about?”
November 2, 2010?
—
That’s when the US government climate indu$try funding will begin to decline towards a large negative anomaly…
R. Gates says:
July 21, 2010 at 5:17 pm
What is most remarkable in my estimation is that global temps didn’t even fall more during the long and deep solar minimum that we just came through. I’ve still not heard AGW explain this in any scientific way. By the way they were carrying on at one point about the solar minimum, you’d of thought a new ice age was upon us, but temperatures held up– not rising, but not falling either.
Maybe you should get out more, you obviously have no knowledge of the interactions between the Sun, ocean heat storage and climate. The deep solar minimum will be a downstream effect that is just starting to show it teeth now. This coupled with the natural ocean cycles and associated changes in the upper atmosphere related to the reduced EUV, should see a continued reduction of world temperatures over the coming years. There will still be hotspots for you to cherrypick, but these are normal during times of low EUV.
If real world temperatures rise on a steady path over the next decade then there might be cause for concern, as nearly all the cooling players are engaged. But I would suggest it’s way too early to be writing off what is already in the pipeline.
Smokey says:
July 21, 2010 at 6:27 pm
“Hansen made three predictions covering a wide temperature range. He was wrong on every one. Yet some folks still believe Hansen knows what he’s talking about.”
From my AGW-bah-humbug perspective, you’re preaching to the choir. However I think that it would be more elegant to compare reality with the most favorable *linear combination* (to Hansen) of his three predictions. Then it should be apparent to every scientifically literate person that Hansen was assuming a very large net positive feedback that does not exist in the natural world.
In the paper Hansen says that the model that the scenario was based on had a climate sensitivity of 4.2 degrees. He stated the likely range for climate sensitivity was between 2.5 and 5 degrees.
If you reduce the temperures down proportionaly to reflect a reduction in climate sensitivity from 4.2 to 3 degrees, then the 2010 temperature for scenario B would be roughly 0.7. For the last 12 months GISS has average 0.65. A climate sensitivity of 3 degrees is still within the range of what Hansen said the likely climate sensitivity was. The 4th IPCC report stated that climate sensitivity is between 2.5 and 4.5, with a best estimate of 3.
For scenario A vs B, Co2 emmissions have been equal to scenario A, but emmissions of other greenhouse gases, in particular methane have been much lower, with a total greenhouse gas forcing quite close to scenario B. However in comparison with Hansen’s scenario B, more of the greenhouse gas is Co2 – which is very long lived in the atmosphere, and less is methane which is lasts a much shorter time in the atmosphere.
On Uah, I notice that the current La Nina appears to be developing stronger and faster than the 2007/2008 La Nina, yet temperatures are warmer than the same time in 2007. Not the best start to predictions that early 2011 will be cooler than 2008.
Michael Hauber,
Great. If we keep adjusting as we go along once we know what the answer is, we’re sure to be right.
Now I see why the science is so certain.
Frederick Michael: You link doesn’t work for me. Here is the one I think you mean:
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
But this chart doesn’t go back past 2003.
The full anomaly since 1979 is here: http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/
Michael Hauber says:
“For scenario A vs B, Co2 emmissions have been equal to scenario A, but emmissions of other greenhouse gases, in particular methane have been much lower, with a total greenhouse gas forcing quite close to scenario B. However in comparison with Hansen’s scenario B, more of the greenhouse gas is Co2 – which is very long lived in the atmosphere…”
Wrong. CO2 is not ‘very long lived.’ The average life of a CO2 molecule is under ten years, which falsifies your argument. Quit listening to the IPCC.
David says:
July 21, 2010 at 3:00 pm
BTW, the complete failure of this chart by Hansen should be required reading for every member of congress.
They wouldn’t care. We just need new politicians who will care. In America we vote. And we vote again. And again. Sooner or later Washington will make sense.
toby says:
July 21, 2010 at 3:01 pm
I don’t see any talking up the chances of a record year.
Pulease!!!!!
BenjaminG says:
July 21, 2010 at 5:02 pm
If you adjust the model output down a bit for the assumed more accurate modern sensitivity estimate, reflect the current high anomaly, and do a mental accounting for the unusual solar minimum, then we are back to pretty good agreement
============================================================
Does any of this involve dead chickens?
Ben, are you saying that when Hansen said he knew exactly what he was talking about in ’88, he didn’t?
But he knows exactly what he’s talking about now? and the proof of that is hind-casting all of his predictions……….
evanmjones says:
July 21, 2010 at 2:16 pm
So what exactly is it that these folks are still worried about?
November 2, 2010?
______________
The lame duck session that comes after November 2, 2010. That is when all the voted out senators who don’t give a rat’s @$$ about anything but the big job they were promised vote as they were instructed by the corporations.
We may see some very nasty bills passed like Markey’s Cap and Trade and Markey’s farm regulation bill designed to kill farming in the USA. (What the heck is a farm bill doing coming out of the Markey?!?)
Here is the farm bill, and when you read it think about 2.1 million farmers, average age late fifties, many Vietnam and Gulf war vets with post-traumatic stress disorder armed to the teeth. Thing could get REAL interesting. I would not be a USDA field inspector for all the tea in china.
http://www.farmtoconsumer.org/news/news-15june2009.htm
Here is a report of one of the USDA – farmer clashes that has made the rounds in the farming community in 2006. Phil Jones is well loved compared to how many US farmers now feel about the USDA. The story was verified by a friend of mine who visited the farm. http://www.readthehook.com/Stories/2006/10/05/COVER-boarSlaughter-F.doc.aspx
More details here including documents http://nonais.org/index.php/2006/10/02/henshaw-documents/
There are several other clashes so this is not an isolated case.
“If ever time should come, when vain and aspiring men shall possess the highest seats in Government, our country will stand in need of its experienced patriots to prevent its ruin.”
~~Samuel Adams
I think GISS temperatures have been flat (in a rectangular range) since 2002, a range below the heights of 1998. In 2008 they dipped below the rectangle. In 2009 they shot up to the top of the rectangle. In the first half of 2010 they shot above the rectangle. Now they are heading back down, and are predicted on all sides to keep falling (except by Ulric Lyons). To me it looks like 2010 will be more than offset by 2008, and thus that we can continue to say that temperatures have moved sideways for eight or nine years.
Once we get ten years of sideways motion under our belt it will be too long to be dismissed as a blip. We’ll be entitled to say that the GYA is much less tightly linked to its alleged “forcing” than warmist theory and modeling allows for. And we’ll even be entitled to say that it’s more likely that the up-years of 2009 and 2010 were a “last hurrah” before a PDO-driven down-phase takes over.
Oops–change “GYA” above to “GTA” (global temperature average).
c james says:
July 21, 2010 at 6:52 pm
Frederick Michael: You link doesn’t work for me. Here is the one I think you mean:
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
But this chart doesn’t go back past 2003.
The full anomaly since 1979 is here: http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/
Yes, your link gets to the same spot — but you must click on Ch05 AQUA to get the right graph.
You haven’t done anything to cure my pessimism though. It looks like 2010 will “catch up to” 1998 real soon. The alarmist predictions for a new record high global temp have a good chance of being fulfilled.
TomRude says:
July 21, 2010 at 2:00 pm
“So what exactly is it that these folks are still worried about?”
Their paycheck.”
and humiliation, embarassment, loss of credibility, being the butt of jokes,
beeing a fool, caught lying and jail?
Really there is no wonder the wamers keep it up.
They have traveled so far in one direction while telling everyone they are going in another they can’t possibly admit their wrong direction.
If I were leaving Portland to walk to Seattle, passed city after city south of Portland while telling everyone where I was going, and then arrived at the California I would be so used to my story I’d keep it till I was at least in San Diego.
So I figure the Jane Lubchenco cabal has bout another decade or so of heading in the wrong direction.
If anyone wonders how they could be that looney and what kind of people now run things I offer exhibit A.
Enjoy this Jane Lubchenco piece from 1998.
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/279/5350/491
Your neck will hurt from shaking your head.
It was buried in Jane’s 2010 4th of July special here.
http://www.open-spaces.com/article-v2n1-lubchenco.php
Harry Lu says:
July 21, 2010 at 3:41 pm
Some time ago I asked for an explanation from Spencer as to why….
_______________________________________________________
I think he explains here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/02/june-2010-temperature-cooling-a-bit-as-el-nino-fades/
David Middleton says: “…In most branches of science, when experimental results falsify the original hypothesis, scientists discard or modify the original hypothesis. In Hansen’s case, he just pitches the story with zealotry rarely seen outside of lunatic asylums.”
The heartbreak of proctocraniosis? Or could it be a messiah complex?
On https://www.intrade.com there’s a bet available on whether the GISS Global Average Temperature for 2010-2014 will exceed 2005-2009 by 0.1 degree C. The last bet made was at about 50/50 odds. That ought to suit him. (If he doesn’t like the temperature increase specified, he can just make a lower “bid.”)
latitude said: “Ben, are you saying that when Hansen said he knew exactly what he was talking about in ’88, he didn’t?”
If you’d like to point me to where Hansen said he knew exactly what the sensitivity was, or what the solar cycle would be, then I’d be glad to acknowledge he was completely wrong. In fact he gave a range for sensitivity that includes the modern estimate. And you can be sure that his papers had plenty of other caveats about the uncertainties involved.
theo wrote: “Rather, you say, my original hypotheses did not account for the sun and, for that reason, I must formulate a new set of hypotheses which does include hypotheses about the sun’s behavior. This is especially important when you have made yourself world-famous for claiming that CO2 and “CO2 forcings” explain all increases in temperature and that the sun has no role to play. You should have enough humility, even without understanding scientific method, to say “I was wrong about the sun and I was wrong that CO2 explains it all.””
If you could point me to somewhere where Hansen claimed that the sun had no role to play then I’d be glad to condemn that statement as wrong. Since his original training was as an astrophysicist I think you will be hard pressed to find such a statement. And, perhaps you will be glad to know that more recent GISS climate models do include explicit terms for the solar input and even go so far as attempting to predict the ongoing solar cycle. Unfortunately we do not know much about the basis for said cycle, and predictions beyond ‘there is likely to be an 11 year cycle’ are little better than chance. Nobody predicted the current extended minimum, that I’m aware of, so even the more advanced models that did attempt to predict and incorporate the solar cycle into their predictions in the last decade certainly got the solar forcing at least somewhat wrong over the last couple years.
In ’88 Hansen stood before Congress and expressed certainty that we would see warming from our ongoing emissions. He was correct, we have warmed, from what at the time was a record high temperature. He has admitted that his ’88 model was off in it’s sensitivity estimate, and he has spent the intervening decades, in part, improving on his groups climate models. Sounds like a scientist at work to me. Your mileage may vary depending on your world view and preconceived notions about climate science in general and Hansen in particular.
How many times will we be accused of cherry picking by people who point to a 0.7 anomaly, at the peak of an el nino, as proof of anything?
Amino Acids:
Brilliant quote!
Smokey says:
Not only do you fail to address any substantively relevant part of Michael Hauber’s post, but the one irrelevent point that you do make justs perpetuate a misconception that even fellow skeptics like Ferdinand Engelbeen ( http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/07/some-people-claim-that-theres-a-human-to-blame/#comment-416440 ) and Willis Eschenbach ( http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/07/some-people-claim-that-theres-a-human-to-blame/#comment-413680 ) have tried…apparently in vain…to correct. I sort of feel sorry for them having to deal with the likes of this in their own ranks.
David Middleton says: “…In most branches of science, when experimental results falsify the original hypothesis, scientists discard or modify the original hypothesis. In Hansen’s case, he just pitches the story with zealotry rarely seen outside of lunatic asylums.”
Umm, you ignore the fact that Hansen’s models have indeed been modified, repeatedly, to take into account our growing knowledge. The more recent ones incorporate a lower sensitivity than the ’88 model, and incorporate the solar cycle.
Roger Knights says:
July 21, 2010 at 7:32 pm
“…it’s more likely that the up-years of 2009 and 2010 were a “last hurrah” before a PDO-driven down-phase takes over.”
Undamped equilibrium-seeking systems have propensity for moving in unpredictable M and W patterns that drive forecasters batty. They are ubiquitous in stock prices and temperature data. Consequently, I suspected that the 1998 highs would be challenged by 2012 at the latest. Despite the onset of La Nina, the present year is shaping up as such a challenge. No matter if it exceeds 1998 or not, it will be the next two years that will tell us whether this is the last hurrah.
Ric Werme says:
July 21, 2010 at 6:04 pm
evanmjones says:
July 21, 2010 at 5:52 pm
>> Salem Witch Trials (the children would not lie, hang whomever the children say is a witch)
> A great injustice. Perhaps half of them were entirely innocent . . .
Cute. BTW, the trial transcripts still exist! It’s pretty clear where the guilt lies.
BTW, we haven’t learned – http://wermenh.com/wenatchee.html . Oh good, a lot of links still work. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer did a wonderful job covering the story once the realized what was going on. Not sure if it has any analogies to AGW other than the misplaced certainty of the those in power.
_________________________________________________________________________
That particular type of witch hunt is still alive and well. I know of at least a half dozen cases personally. Four were at the instigation of a nasty drug dealer as pay back against parents who ticked her off – pure spite and in two cases the parents lost the kids.
R. Gates says:
July 21, 2010 at 5:17 pm
It is quiet understandable if you factor in the additional forcings from CO2 (which is the longer term signal amongst the shorter term noise of solar cycles, ENSO, etc.)
=======================================
This Proverbs passage comes to mind:
“Even a fool, when he keeps silent, is considered wise.”
Frederick Michael says: “It looks like 2010 will “catch up to” 1998 real soon. The alarmist predictions for a new record high global temp have a good chance of being fulfilled.”
I believe there is a zero percent chance of 2010 catching up to 1998. The temps are already beginning to fall, the La Nina is coming on strong and we are in a cold PDO phase. I guess we’ll see but everything I know about meteorology and climate tells me the alarmist predictions are wrong again because they don’t understand how the atmosphere really works.
BenjaminG,
You don’t have a clue about hypotheses or prediction. Unless you want to have a career as a climate scientist, get Carl G. Hempel’s “Philosophy of Science.” The book is the very best introduction to scientific method ever written.
Models are analytic tools and cannot be used to make predictions. All they can do is make explicit what is implicit in their starting assumptions. Hypotheses are used to make predictions and are true or false about the world.
Brilliant post, by the way, Steve.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Smokey says:
No, Hansen made three projections based on three different possible scenarios of future forcings with them spelled out in the scientific paper that he wrote in sufficient detail that one can check and see which forcing scenario actually came closest to being the one that we have followed. Then, one can compare the temperature rise that the model showed under that scenario to the temperature rise that has actually been seen and one finds that it is in pretty good agreement, given the uncertainties in trends in a noisy data.
Of course, eventually Hansen’s model will deviate in a statistically-significant way from the actual data, as it must…because the model assumes a certain specific climate sensitivity (toward the high end of the range of what we expect it to be) and presumably the actual climate has a somewhat different sensitivity and over time that difference should eventually become distinguishable. Given that Hansen’s model did have a climate sensitivity of 4.2 C per CO2 doubling, one better well hope that Hansen’s model deviates high of what the actual climate system has in store for us.
So, whose projections from back in 1988 has done a better job in capturing the reality? I’ve never seen Lindzen’s prediction or Monckton’s or Anthony’s or Roy Spencer’s.
The stair-stepped nature of the red line is quite obvious, with the flat parts following solar maxima, and this is about what would be expected with about 0.05 degrees up and down each year on the background of general warming. Therefore my prediction is that we will get another upward step over the next 5 years unless the solar max fails, which would be spectacular. If that happens, the warming will be more smooth, but the same on average over the next ten years. Just doing the obvious extrapolation, science aside.
should have said “each cycle” not “each year”
Frederick Michael says:
July 21, 2010 at 7:35 pm
c james says:
July 21, 2010 at 6:52 pm
Frederick Michael: You link doesn’t work for me. Here is the one I think you mean:
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/
But this chart doesn’t go back past 2003.
The full anomaly since 1979 is here: http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/
Yes, your link gets to the same spot — but you must click on Ch05 AQUA to get the right graph.
You haven’t done anything to cure my pessimism though. It looks like 2010 will “catch up to” 1998 real soon. The alarmist predictions for a new record high global temp have a good chance of being fulfilled.
__________________________________________________________________
How about READING what the author of the chart says like the rest of us have been doing?
Here are Spencer’s reports for each month:
Spencer: Record January warmth is mostly sea: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/05/spencer-record-january-warmth-is-mostly-sea/
February UAH global temperature anomaly – little change: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/05/february-uah-global-temperature-anomaly-little-change/
March UAH Global Temperature Update: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/04/05/march-uah-global-temperature-update/
UAH global temperature anomaly, a bit cooler in April: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/05/uah-global-temperature-anomaly-a-bit-cooler-in-april/
Spencer: Global Average Sea Surface Temperatures Poised for a Plunge http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/20/spencer-global-average-sea-surface-temperatures-poised-for-a-plunge/
May UAH Global Temperature Anomaly – holding steady: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/04/may-uah-global-temperature-holding-steady/
Spencer: SST’s headed down – fast Global Average Sea Surface Temperatures Continue their Plunge: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/22/spencer-ssts-headed-down-fast/
June 2010 Temperature, cooling a bit as El Nino fadeshttp://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/02/june-2010-temperature-cooling-a-bit-as-el-nino-fades/
Mike G says:
July 21, 2010 at 4:01 pm
@toby
Since the planet is always either warming or cooling, I’d say the cooling comes after the warming peaks… Then it will cool for thirty or forty years. All this superimposed on longer term trends…
True, true.
But then in 30 to 40 years, the same cadre of climate insiders will be back with the same prognostications of gloom, and doom, doom, DOOOOOOM!
People forgot all about the late 60’s – early 70’s possible ice age scare, didn’t they?
Well, actually, hardly anyone was paying attention to the doomsayers back then, as I recall.
After that, the high priests in the temples of arcane knowledge and moolah got together to connive and machinate.
They set about to analyze the meteorological, astronomical, and geophysical historical records from long past, and connected the dots.
Just as the high priests of old had used arcane knowledge of the Solar eclipse –known to but a few– to scare the hoi polloi (the commoners) into submission, by declaring that they would allow the moon to ‘swallow’ the sun and cast the Earth into eternal darkness if they didn’t acquiesce to the demands of the high priests, so too we witness that same scheming on the part of the high priests of the climate temple walking hand-in-hand with their pay masters in the banking sector.
All anyone really has to do is read history in order to comprehend where this path leads: The road to ruin for the common man, and untold riches for the cadre and their fellow travelers.
Again, as I’ve stated more times than I’d care to recount: WHY do you think it is that THEY are pushing like mad to enact Cap and Trade?
Why? Because they want to make sure such gets enacted before the REAL cooling sets in, and then they will crow that it worked even though the cooling happened all without ANY reductions of CO2.
Artificial eclipses, anyone?
Joel Shore says:
July 21, 2010 at 8:15 pm
Smokey says:
Hansen made three predictions…blah blah blah
So, whose projections from back in 1988 has done a better job in capturing the reality? I’ve never seen Lindzen’s prediction or Monckton’s or Anthony’s or Roy Spencer’s.
================================
What “job in capturing reality”, Joel?
No fiddle faddling can make the Hansen “prediction” look good.
And in terms of the four you named, Joel, none of them have to prove anything….whatsoever.
For them…
The first and the last are actually busy just doing science business as usual, you know, another UN-FUNDED boring day in the study of natural climate variability.
In regards to the middle two, I am not sure what you mean.
You just have sour grapes because your meteorologist-trained friend author of this blog has so many hits on his site and a damn helluvalot good minds who contribute here (you not excluded)….and then there is Monckton….
did I ever think…in in a thousand years….would you ever even begin to have the ability to agree with him??
But then again, I can tell you are a very smart chap and hopefully someday…you will be free of the political agenda that holds so many in your “chicken little inconvenient truth” camp…captive.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
Geoff Sharp says:
July 21, 2010 at 6:45 pm
I believe S. America just got a lapful of what’s in the pipeline.
The MSM is strangely quiet on this. Not even a faint whisper.
For those not happy with me “cherry picking” the actual temperature, two remarks:
– what I plot is a 12-month average
– before the el nino, the anomaly was 0.6 as you can verify. that is still much higher than scenario B. I really wonder how this hand-written curve has been “created”.
And also:
the satellite temperatures in july are beating all records again
savethesharks says:
July 21, 2010 at 9:07 pm
The GISS Model E (a descendant of Hansen’s code) is a garbage code that NASA doesn’t even properly document. No one even knows what differential equations it’s solving. And they couldn’t care less…
Yet they suck up the stimulus climate ca$h like it’s going out of style…
Why can’t they give the responsibility for climate software development to GFDL or NCAR, so it can be done correctly?
You can’t blame them though…both Hansen and Schmidt make six figure salaries!
BQuartero says:
July 21, 2010 at 4:10 pm
[–snip for brevity–]
My personal preference have been for quite some time the satelite data, not because they are so much better or accurate, because I don’t really have a good understanding of all the static and non-static corrections that are applied. I have however assumed that the same corrections are made for the full sequence of data and that thus proper trends can be fairly accurately interpreted. We have seen enough examples of mismanagement of surface sites and surface data, never mind the imbalance between oceanic and continental grids. It is time to throw all those out and concentrate on satelite measurements, as I am sure the scientific community will do eventually.
I would recommend against any such act as you suggest for a number of reasons, not the least of which has to do with actual on-the-spot measurements.
Satellites are great, but you know? They too can be made to lie about things. All it takes is for a bit of software to be inserted surreptitiously, motivated by the greed or other considerations.
Plausible deniability happens daily. Just ask the CIA: Who? What? When? I don’t have a clue about what you’re talking about!!!! Go away! Leave me alone!!
For my money, I’d rather have an independent agency be assigned to validate the ground stations on a periodic basis –both randomly and scheduled– to ascertain quality.
Another unconnected team could do the same thing with the satellites.
But tossing the baby with the bath water?
Hansen’s models were not even close to reality. We can cherry pick and say that in the midst of an el nino that the model “looks” like what he predicted in one of his three scenarios, but if we compare it to other years it is compeltely and utterly wrong.
Just look at the graphs and we see that the model just “happens” to intersect reality at one point and all of a sudden you warmists are all like “Hansen was RIGHT!”. That is like having a dream with fairies and pixie dust and seeing a pine tree and saying the dream happened in real life, because the pine tree is real.
No, he was wrong, he is still wrong, and he is still not a scientist. He ceased to be a scientist the day he appeared before congress and told them X needed to be done. That is not what a scientist does, that is what an activist does. A true scientist would be busting his butt trying to figure out the truth, not “picketing” coal power plants, putting global warming on trial, and trying to get people off the hook for vandalism, fraud, etc because their actions “were saving the world from global warming.”
No Hansen is most definitely not a scientist. I wouldn’t trust him to fill my car up with gasoline. Would you? Remember, this is the same man who says vandalism is ok if its saving the world. If a person would not trust him to fill up a car with gasoline, would a person also possibly not trust him to model or predict the future?
I am talking common sense here. This man should have been sacked the second he put an agenda down in front of congress. Heck, I am not even sure he is qualified to do any job in our society. I think he would be better off in a zoo with all of those polar bears he says are going to die. At least then we could throw banana peels at him and laugh at what a failure he is today, and what he has done in the past.
We understand the climate no better then we did the year he addressed congress because climate science stopped, and climate activism started. All those years of wasted research trying to prove climate models will end up biting us in the rear one day…when a true understanding of the climate could make a difference….
Today, we know CO2 and mankind has a warming impact on the environment, but we have no clue what the effect really is because we spent 25 years now trying to prove a nutjob correct instead of trying to get to the bottom of reality.
Maybe I am harsh on Hansen, but the man lost any respect that I have for fellow humans the second he gets people off of crimes because of global warming. I don’t care what your motive for doing the crime is, if you do the crime, do the time. True martyrs for their causes will suffer and admit when they are wrong. Fakes and frauds will dance around trying to get away with it by fixing reality to match their fairyland.
And anyone who defends Hansen is just as bad in my book. If you want to dance to Hansen’s magical fairyland, you go for it. Just do not expect me to respect you as a person for denying true reality.
*** THIS JUST IN ***
(AP) Today the spokesman for AGW announced that an error had been discovered and that the homogenized temperature anomalies since 2005 have been mistakenly reported at least 1°C lower than they actually believe they should be. It is worse than you thought!
Surely it’s better to plot the deltas rather than the actual anomaly. What we’re interested in is the rate of change. Like this. For whatever reason it looks like the stove got turned down a notch or two at the end of last summer. A better comparison might be 1983.
BenjaminG
Hansen has increased his forecasts for temperature and sea level rise, not decreased them. In other words his forecasts get worse, not better.
Paul K2 Comments ….
July 17th, 2010 at 9:14 pm
Geez… Can this be made any more confusing? The UAH data seem to be changing faster than anyone can keep up with the changes. We have different satellite data being replaced for previous satellite data, and at the same time there are adjustments being made for a spurious seasonal effect. The result is a spectacular downward revision in the UAH monthly anomalies with version 5.3 reading so very different from the previous version (much lower monthly anomalies). Spencer and Christy are already having enough trouble getting accurate monthly anomalies out, but now this post says we can place our trust in daily anomaly data. Yikes!
I am still very confused by the adjustments made in February, that were stated not to effect the annual anomaly average, just lower some months, and increase others. But it appears that what happened, is that some of the temperature rise for early 2010 was shifted back to 2009, and where we would have expected the downward adjustments to the January and February anomalies (the weird seasonal high in the “old” UAH dataset) to be counteracted by upward adjustments in May and June (the weird seasonal high in the “old” data set), this didn’t happen. At this point in time, I don’t think anyone (other than Spencer and Christy) have any idea what adjustments were made and why they were made. We are being asked to trust their professional competence and not question the reported data.
OK, I get this: my first instinct is to trust the professional experts in this field of study, and to believe Spencer and Christy, even though we have no way of knowing how they are adjusting the raw data and why. Lets hope they have the monthly anomalies correctly reported; but why jump off the cliff here and start talking about daily anomalies? I am not sure that we can trust any calculated daily anomalies, especially since we have seen recent large divergences between the daily raw data, and the reported UAH monthly anomaly over the last couple of months.
OTOH, the daily satellite data show measured temperatures on Channel 5 that are warmer than any prior temperatures measured on that Channel 5… I.e. the high temperatures during the real seasonal upswing in the troposphere temperature in July have produced readings for a number of days, that have equalled or exceeded the previous high temperature for Channel 5. In short, this month we are getting temperature readings for the troposphere that are higher that any temperature ever previously measured… and the highest temperature on Channel 5 was measured just last July (2009).
Statistically, any one measurement isn’t high enough to state unequivocally that the troposphere has higher temperatures than before, but as the number of record days this month rack up, there may be a statistically meaningful result if 10+ measurements this month exceed the highest measurement ever taken in the previous 30 years.
BTW, the July 15 date (latest data) show the highest temperature ever measured for a single day on Channel 5. It seems to me, that there is quite a bit of hand waving trying to explain away the high readings this month.
__________
Steve Goddard its you reading the month scaled anomalies! Thiis is really stupid to do so.
The Antarctic and Greenland ice core proxy records put the Altithermal at least 1C above, and the Eemian at least 2C above c. 1990, i.e. at the top and off the top of Hansen’s chart http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/Greenland_GISP2_long.html — http://www.junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/Vostok_long.html .
“1. We are not going to set a record this year (for the whole year)”
Again, all this hype about 2010 being the hottest is about to get doused with cold water.
“2. Hansen has vastly overestimated climate sensitivity”
Amplification of Global Warming by Carbon-Cycle Feedback Significantly Less Than Thought, Study Suggests
Temperature and CO2 feedback ‘weaker than thought’
“3. Temperatures have risen slower than Hansen forecast for a carbon free 21st century”
But Hansen used models so he must be correct. Surely Mobjib of IPCC and Bastardi of AccuWeather must be wrong in their forecast of a coming cooling.
evanmjones says:
July 21, 2010 at 5:52 pm
Salem Witch Trials (the children would not lie, hang whomever the children say is a witch)
A great injustice. Perhaps half of them were entirely innocent . . .
How about ‘All of them?’
Gail Combs says:
July 21, 2010 at 8:45 pm
How about READING what the author of the chart says like the rest of us have been doing?
I did. As of July 2nd (the time of the last post you linked to) I was happy. Then the AQUA channel 5 temps started shooting up.
In any case, this graph:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/
is gonna get a BIG uptick for July. The data is already 2/3 in.
Maybe the La Nina will finally take hold and global temps will drop, but for the last few weeks, just the opposite has been happening. The sea surface temp maps show a La Nina already forming but the AQUA ch5 temps keep rising. WUWT?
I am not familiar with the time lag between the SOI cycles and global temps, so maybe this delay is normal. If so, someone please explain that.
theo wrote: “Rather, you say, my original hypotheses did not account for the sun and, for that reason, I must formulate a new set of hypotheses which does include hypotheses about the sun’s behavior. This is especially important when you have made yourself world-famous for claiming that CO2 and “CO2 forcings” explain all increases in temperature and that the sun has no role to play. You should have enough humility, even without understanding scientific method, to say “I was wrong about the sun and I was wrong that CO2 explains it all.””
Look up Hansen’s 1981 paper ‘Climate Impact of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide.’ In it Hansen discusses the fact that including solar variations in a statisitcal model improved the fit to historical temperatures.
Also in the 1981 paper, he includes a projection of temperatures in the future which shows 2010 temperatures at about 0.4 degrees. This is based on a climate sensitivity of 2.8 degrees, and is Co2 only.
Air temps lag behind SST’s by a couple of months on average. This is because the oceans drive the atmosphere, not the other way round.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:2007/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2007/scale:1.7/offset:-0.3
Frederick Michaels asks:
I am not familiar with the time lag between the SOI cycles and global temps, so maybe this delay is normal. If so, someone please explain that.
The normal pattern for Uah temperatures during a year that starts El Nino and ends La Nina is for a peak in January, a slow drop until June, and then a slow increase until September, after which temperatures drop quite quickly to a minimum in the following January. This profile is based on average behaviour of 5 years, so the recovery in temperature from June to September may be a statistical fluke and not reflect the true average temperature response.
Joel Shore says:
July 21, 2010 at 8:15 pm
In your opinion, will an astrologer responding to criticism have a fair point in pointing out that his critics have failed to produce more accurate predictions?
@joel Shore says: July 21, 2010 at 8:15 pm
“So, whose projections from back in 1988 has done a better job in capturing the reality? I’ve never seen Lindzen’s prediction or Monckton’s or Anthony’s or Roy Spencer’s.”
Which version of “reality” are you talking about?
In real reality, climate is a random walk and we just don’t have the knowledge to do “a better job”.
The climate just keeps on doin’ whatta climate’s gotta do. And no amount of playing about on supercomputers will change that.
All the four you name understand that and have way more sense than to pretend they can make skilled predictions. And none of them are advocating spending trillions on solving a problem that almost certainly doesn’t exist using technology that factually does not work and passing laws that will lead to damage to the economy that makes the Credit Crunch look like a hiccup..
899 says:
July 21, 2010 at 9:01 pm
Mike G says:
July 21, 2010 at 4:01 pm
@toby
Since the planet is always either warming or cooling, I’d say the cooling comes after the warming peaks… Then it will cool for thirty or forty years. All this superimposed on longer term trends…
True, true.
….After that, the high priests in the temples of arcane knowledge and moolah got together to connive and machinate.
They set about to analyze the meteorological, astronomical, and geophysical historical records from long past, and connected the dots.
Just as the high priests of old had used arcane knowledge of the Solar eclipse –known to but a few– to scare the hoi polloi (the commoners) into submission, by declaring that they would allow the moon to ‘swallow’ the sun and cast the Earth into eternal darkness if they didn’t acquiesce to the demands of the high priests, so too we witness that same scheming on the part of the high priests of the climate temple walking hand-in-hand with their pay masters in the banking sector.
All anyone really has to do is read history in order to comprehend where this path leads: The road to ruin for the common man, and untold riches for the cadre and their fellow travelers.
Again, as I’ve stated more times than I’d care to recount: WHY do you think it is that THEY are pushing like mad to enact Cap and Trade?
Why? Because they want to make sure such gets enacted before the REAL cooling sets in, and then they will crow that it worked even though the cooling happened all without ANY reductions of CO2.
Artificial eclipses, anyone?
______________________________________________________________________-
Yes It is real interesting to look at the time line of global warming. There was a whole bunch of research done around 1965 to 1975 including a CIA report in 1974 on “global COOLING” Key was the low maximum predicted by Gleissberg (1971) for cycle 21. As well as the work that validated the Milankovitch Hypothesis.
I have often wondered if the politicians and very wealthy think we ARE headed into another Ice Age shortly and are preparing themselves (not us) to survive it… Seed Banks, DNA banks, transfer of resources to southern climes (India & South China& Africa & North S. America) HMMmmmm
Here is some of the research from the time period supporting the Milankovitch Hypothesis.
1967 Nicholas J. Shackleton, “Oxygen Isotope Analyses and Pleistocene Temperatures Re-Assessed.” Nature 215: 15-17.
1968 Wallace S. Broecker, et al., “Milankovitch Hypothesis Supported by Precise Dating of Coral Reef and Deep-Sea Sediments.” Science 159: 297-300.
1968 Wallace S. Broecker, “In Defense of the Astronomical Theory of Glaciation.” Meteorological Monographs 8(30): 139-41.
And this one has to be a classic:
1972 Stephen H. Schneider, “Cloudiness as a Global Climate Feedback Mechanism: The Effects of Radiation Balance and Surface Temperature of Variations in Cloudiness.” J. Atmospheric Sciences 29: 1413-22.
Then on the political side you have:
Obama’s Science Czar John Holdren who advocates “de-development of the United States”
1971 Paul R. Ehrlich and J. P. Holdren, “Impact of Population Growth.” Science 171: 1212-14.
1972 Donella H. Meadows, et al., The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books.
And of course the start of it all, the UN First Earth Summit speech by Maurice Strong on Global Warming and pollution.
Can we please stop bringing recorded facts to a model fight, hard cold numbers have no place in a computer model and the paper clip is handy because he gives out free PR advice.
On a side note Anotny i have a 3in square of foam with a bit of string attached for you, I thought you could tie it to your forehead to help with the banging of your head against that very stubbon wall.
So what exactly is it that these folks are still worried about?
December 21, 2012
Steve goddard said:
“The point is that the dire predictions aren’t happening – and the people who made them haven’t generated much confidence in their skills.”
Whether you believe in the predictions or not seems to be depend on your “prior predisposition” – if you are a non-believer in AGW, you can rationalise away anything that undermines your world view. The reverse is also true of course, there are those who will be less inclined to question the evidence.
I think there are enough signs of the “dire predictions” (I am not sure if anyone made dire predictions for 2010 and before) to justify taking serious action. And I find climate scientists reasonably sound on the science. My personal justification is more the “precautionary principle” or the “prudence principle” – that one should take sensible steps to prepare for the worse events that may happen. I think that springs from a conservative view of life and the earth, not a wild eyed radical “left-wing” perspective.
It’s worse than we thought, the amount of lying by the warmists I mean, but not only, the cooling is worse than we thought too.
What are the warmists worried about? Many said it before me but its worth repeating a million times: Their pay cheque following the imminent collapse of the AGW/CC pyramid scheme. There are three props holding up this pyramid scheme:
The pseudo-scientists (paid by the politicians’ grants)
The politicians (supported by the pseudo-scientists’ reports in return for these grants)
(Leftist) Journalists ( who are riding on the wave of fear-mongering, hyping the issue and selling their monster-eats-babies stories to the gull(ible)s.)
It only takes one of these three props for the scam to collapse, and it is collapsing and they are worried and they are trying to push the thermometer up by hyping a hotter than average month in a few countries in the NH, while hiding the decline in the rest of the planet.
It is my opinion, based on the many and continuous reports of record colds all over the world, that the current warmist reports saying that 2010 will be the hottest ever is a BIG LIE, contrived to prop up the collapsing scam. Let’s be real, one hotter or colder than normal place is weather, two also, three…. but hell, if its freezing all over the planet all the winter times and even in summer times, continuously, is it weather or climate? And where is the truth? I am convinced that one day, all these warmist ‘scientific’ reports will be revealed as what they really are: LIES. Time will tell, or is it already telling us so?
Gail Combs
“All anyone really has to do is read history in order to comprehend where this path leads: The road to ruin for the common man, and untold riches for the cadre and their fellow travellers.”
Too true.
Why did NOAA/NASA announce the ‘hottest year ever’ 6 months into the year?
Because they know that the rest of the year will be getting colder.
And , just how wrong were they?
Roy Spencer and REMSS show that every month’s anomoly in 1998 was greater that the same month in 2010.
Mike G says:
July 21, 2010 at 4:01 pm
@toby
Since the planet is always either warming or cooling, I’d say the cooling comes after the warming peaks… Then it will cool for thirty or forty years. All this superimposed on longer term trends…
And conversely, when it’s cooling and there is an ice age coming c.1974 it will start warming. Unless of course the team have been through and deleted that particular warming or cooling.
Martin Brumby says: “Which version of “reality” are you talking about?
In real reality, climate is a random walk and we just don’t have the knowledge to do “a better job”. “
Martin, in reality we only have 150 years of climate data from which to assess the noise profile (and much of that is noisy!). Random walk which gives rise to Brownian noise (aka Red Noise) has a 1/f^2 frequency distribution.
From memory I think the noise spectrum of the climate is closer to pink noise or 1/ƒ noise which is a signal or process with a frequency spectrum such that the power spectral density is inversely proportional to the frequency. In pink noise, each octave carries an equal amount of noise power. The name arises from being intermediate between white noise (1/ƒ^0) and red noise (1/ƒ^2).
However when you are dealing with something that can’t be measured in periods shorter than a year, and for which we only have 150years worth of records, it really is quite difficult to determine exactly the nature of the noise signal (particularly when part of that signal is presumed by some to be induced by external factors like CO2).
So, I’d prefer you said something like: “In real reality, climate is like a random walk”, or better still: “In real reality, climate has changed in a way not too dissimilar from a random walk”.
Or better still, the climate signal in the last 150 years appears to show a 1/f^n noise profile (where there was too little data to give an exact value for n but it could be 1)
Are you sure about the GISSTEMP overall? It doesn’t seem to match with the observation overall on the Real Climate website.
I wrote overall when I meant overlay. Your second graph, if the predictions are that wrong compared to the observations wouldn’t many people be shouting about this? I’ll try again with the correct English.
Are you sure you got the overlay of the GISTEMP record on Hansen’s predictions correct?
That’s interesting, so it is essentially a problem with the institutions using their authority and members naturally wishing to remain loyal to their field? It comes down to job security?
So this is what people mean when they say “denialists are anti-science” — they don’t take kindly to challenges to their wisdom or authority. Anti-science is anti their science.
They know what is at stake, but the thing is, theirs is a harder position to defend. I mean, they have a 50/50 chance of the world warming for a period, but they appear to be already running out of luck.
This is a bit silly. 1998 Was the strongest El Niño ever recorded. It’s quite clear that the satellite measurements overestimate temperature compared to the instrumental record during El Niño events. However, as we are now approaching a LaNiña event, and the satellite record is approaching record levels, while the surface record is breaking records, your analysis appears to fail to take account of the complexity needed to interpret this data.
rbateman says:
July 21, 2010 at 5:34 pm
Maybe they should hire BP to stop the leak?
My personal justification is more the “precautionary principle” or the “prudence principle” – that one should take sensible steps to prepare for the worse events that may happen.
My personal justification is the “precautionary principle” too. I don’t like to spend money unless it is on something that works. I take precautions that I don’t get sold a pup.
So I find spending on reducing CO2 to be precisely the opposite of precautionary. I am concerned that 1) we cannot hope to get political agreement to reduce CO2; and 2) that CO2 is not correct culprit.
The real drive to cut CO2 is not the “precautionary principle”, but the thought that we are consuming too much and headed for economic and social disaster. AGW is a useful way to blackmail the hesitant into agreeing. If you don’t buy into the “we are consuming too much” meme then AGW is a very hard sell.
CRS, Dr.P.H. says:
July 21, 2010 at 5:27 pm
Al Gore is going to be in a lot of trouble.
toby says: “Whether you believe in the predictions or not seems to be depend on your “prior predisposition” – if you are a non-believer in AGW, you can rationalise away anything that undermines your world view. The reverse is also true of course, there are those who will be less inclined to question the evidence.”
Toby, a very valid point, but you are forgetting that the whole basis of science is to remove the subjective judgement of the individual. Worse still, by pretending climate “science” is a science and then allowing whole realms of the subject to be determined by personal judgements such as you are expressing, really prevents proper analysis by the types of rational arguments that are used in pseudo sciences like economics and market research.
In real science the subjectiveness of the observer isn’t a problem, because in real science the subject acts to remove the subjectiveness of the observer so that all observers following the methodology arrive at the same result. You cannot simultaneously say that climate “science” is a science and say that it all “depend(s) on your “prior predisposition””
I think there are enough signs of the “dire predictions” (I am not sure if anyone made dire predictions for 2010 and before) to justify taking serious action. And I find climate scientists reasonably sound on the science. My personal justification is more the “precautionary principle” or the “prudence principle” – that one should take sensible steps to prepare for the worse events that may happen.
So based on this so called “precautionary principle”, the worst event that will happen is the next ice-age which we know (based on proven scientific facts not guesses) is going to make large parts of the world uninhabitable. Based on the precautionary principle we would therefore try to warm the climate as much as possible to prevent any possibility of a new ice age.
Or to put it another way … if you can’t prove your position by the facts, scare people into doing what you personally think based on your own judgement seems to be what your own political nouse seems to think is the worst possible scenario.
Well what is your precautionary principle for:
1. 6billion population that is increasing?
Oil reserves depleting which will likely plunge us into a world economic depression probably leading to world war.
The abuse of low level antibiotics in animal farming promoting the development of antibiotic immune bacteria whose proliferation through the animal meat trade is being spread throughout the world so that “based on the precautionary principle”, we won’t have any tools to tackle common infections within a few decades.
Or perhaps your personal worst case scenario is that the climate may change so dramatically that as Dr David Viner of the CRU put in 2000 within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”, “Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.
When I was a child, I got an infection that a generation before could have killed me but I was lucky to be born at a time when antibiotics were available and we hadn’t so abused them that antibiotic immune bacteria were not rife in society. When I was a child, I did not want for warmth or food, because I lived in a society rich from fossil fuel.
If we are going to change the world based on the “precautionary principle” well lets at least base that precautionary action on some real problem not the imagined problem of a bit less snow.
its funny reading threads like this. Prior to about 2005 warmists contemptuously ignored talk of oceanic and solar cycles as benighted antedeluvian phenomenology. But now with increasing frequency they are scurrying for refuge in ENSO, decadal oceanic and solar cycles to explain non-warming. WUWT?
AGW proponents always ignore two important facts:
1. Our planet’s natural climatic cycles – the circa 0.7 degrees C increase in global temperature since the 1850s – is mostly/all due to these cycles.
2. There is no evidence of CO2 forcing or feedback in the geological record.
Joel Shore says:
July 21, 2010 at 8:15
Maybe they are honest enough to say they don’t know?
The main stream media is claiming that the first half of this year is the warmest on record.
Jan.-June warmest first half of year on record
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38263788/ns/us_news-environment/
I realise that predicting future trends in climate is difficult but surely it should not be impossible to verify or refute claims about a short period that has just finished. Is the claim true or not, and if not why not?
Another recent claim concerns Lake Tanganyika.
African lake warmest in 1,500 years
http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2010/07/21/African-lake-warmest-in-1500-years/UPI-59601279754870/
I think this second report is more important than the first because if it is true then presumably it casts doubt on the worldwide significance of the Medieval Warm Period.
Kdkd:
At July 22, 2010 at 1:46 am you assert:
“1998 Was the strongest El Niño ever recorded. It’s quite clear that the satellite measurements overestimate temperature compared to the instrumental record during El Niño events. However, as we are now approaching a LaNiña event, and the satellite record is approaching record levels, while the surface record is breaking records, your analysis appears to fail to take account of the complexity needed to interpret this data.”
OK. So try this data.
The global climate sytem seems to vary in cycles that are overlayed on each other. The cause(s) of these cycles are not known but some suggest these cycles may relate to solar behaviour.
Several lines of evidence from history and from archaeology suggest there is an apparent ~900 year oscillation that caused the Roman Warm Period (RWP), then the Dark Age Cool Period (DACP), then the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), then the Little Ice Age (LIA), and the present warm period (PWP).
And the various estimates of mean global temperature (MGT) each suggest there is an apparent ~60 year cycle that provide cooling from ~1880 to ~1910, then warming to ~1940, then cooling to ~1970, then warming to ~2000, then cooling since.
If these patterns continue then the ~60 year cycle can be anticipated to revert to a warming phase around 2030, and the ~900 year oscillation can be anticipated to revert to a cooling phase during this century.
So, if these patterns continue, then either
(a) MGT will revert to rising because these two oscillations will both be in a warming phase around 2030,
or
(b) MGT will fall back to the levels it had in the DACP and MWP because the ~900 year oscillation has reverted to a cooling phase.
Does your “science” exclude explanation of observational data? If not, then how does your “science” explain these apparent oscillations, and does your science predict their future development and/or cessation?
Richard
Hey guys just wait for Tipping Point.
He’s coming soon
Sorry guys Mr Point crashed his car off a cliff on the way here, Mrs Point will be here soon though
…
Excellent post, Steve and many thanks.
Dr PH and Ric Werne, your links are enlightening!
Some of my antedecedents fled the witch-sniffers and the generally joyless dogma-ridden nastiness of the Puritans and emigrated to the new colonies in America during the 17th century. By the beginning of the 20th century, most of my once-English family had become Canadians, Americans, Australians and New Zealanders. Knowing something of my own family history and its well-documented love of music, literature, learning and fun is a part of why I tend to have a sceptical attitude to what ‘authorities’ tell me is going to happen in the future and and expect me to do in preparation. The climate cartel who are promoting the ridiculous and scientifically dishonest canard that Man is causing the majority of climate change are the new Puritans, who are as arrogant, devious and self-serving as they ever were. Being aware of what they are is a good beginning to avoiding the new Dark Ages they wish to impose on us.
Are you sure you got the overlay of the GISTEMP record on Hansen’s predictions correct?
The plot seems to be the GISTEMP 5-year mean, that is the mean of the 5 years centred on the year in question. So the last year plotted in 2007, which misses the bulk of the recent record warmth. Means are great for filtering out noise but to be a like-for-like you’d need also to plot the 5-year mean of the model data alongside, rather than just the annual, as was done. The average anomaly for 2010 is about 0.2C higher than the last GISTEMP figure plotted.
The data is indeed noisy, before plotting the forced projection, Hansen did a control run wthout external forcings. This showed variability of 0.4C, that is the model planet varies naturally by that much all on its own, so comparing individual years and concluding ‘600% wrong’ is indeed nonsensical, the modelled ‘weather’ cannot be expected to match exactly the planetary weather and so individual discrepencies of 0.4C or greater do not falsify the projection. Indeed, this noisy data is a target-rich environment for obsessive cherry-pickers, e.g. the model projects a rise from 2006-2016 of just 0.16C, the GISTEMP trend for the last few decades is nearer 0.2C, so the model underestimated by 25% …..just as ridiculous as the ‘600%’. Long-term trends are a better comparison.
One consequence of the noise is that Scenario B shoots up this year, then drops back and roughly flatlines for 5 years, so it is not that surprising that a comparison with observations now shows real-world temperatures less than this modelled spike.
I’ll just quietly repeat:-
IPCC projection 1990-2010 : 0.16C / decade.
Observed trend (UAH) : 0.164C / decade.
kdkd says:
July 22, 2010 at 1:46 am (Edit)
This is a bit silly. 1998 Was the strongest El Niño ever recorded. It’s quite clear that the satellite measurements overestimate temperature compared to the instrumental record during El Niño events.
No, it’s just that the satellites and the surface guages are measuring two different things. The Satellite measures the temperature in the lower toposphere, whereas the surface temp is measuring a combination of just above ground and sea surface temps.
The oceans are made of stuff (water) which has a much higher heat capacity than the atmosphere. So when the oceans release enough heat to go down in temp at the surface by, say, 0.5C, the lower troposphere temp will tumble by nearly twice that a few months later after the relased heat has escaped to space.
The opposite happens in El Nino. The SST’s rise as heat moves up from the deep, the air temp follows suit a few months later but by nearly double the rise in SST.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:2007/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2007/scale:1.7/offset:-0.3
tallbloke:
Thanks. That’s a reasonably convincing mechanism for *why* the satellite measures overestimate over certain parts of the cycle. It doesn’t mean that my explanation is wrong, just that it is simplified. The global surface measurements are still showing record temperatures exceeding 1998.
According to GISS
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt
Anomaly is +0.58 and coming down sharply from the high of +0.82 in March, a pretty dramatic fall.
Yes indeed the UAH, RSS, HARDCRUT and GISS all in agreement showing rapid falls in global temps.
Only GISS shows a record half year all other sources show it to be the second warmest to 1998.
UAH and RSS are in broad agreement as usual UAH a bit lower. Even the mid-troposphere “corrected” measurements (i.e. taking into account the absorption from increased CO2) show them to be the second highest on record and not the highest.
If 2010 is the hottest year, which now looks increasingly unlikely, then it won’t be unanimous as it was in 1998.
Rob Vermeulen says:
July 21, 2010 at 9:20 pm
“- before the el nino, the anomaly was 0.6 as you can verify. that is still much higher than scenario B. I really wonder how this hand-written curve has been “created”.
Which Scenario B are you looking at? Or are you stuck in the year 2000?
HR, please see my comment at July 21, 2010 at 5:44 pm
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/21/the-satellites-are-missing/#comment-436277
As a layman I find this much more useful than all the talk about temperatures.
If I read this right, the real issue is energy content and where that energy is located and where it is moving from and where it is going.
I wonder, New Agers are usually quite drawn to the notion of “energy movements”.
Those who talk about energy flows could come across to the general public as sounding like they are more in touch with reality than those who bang on about abstract notions of temperature and computer models.
The question, “How much energy is in the ocean?” could sound to many like it is eminently sensible and valuable.
Stefan says:
July 22, 2010 at 5:05 am (Edit)
tallbloke says:
The oceans are made of stuff (water) which has a much higher heat capacity than the atmosphere. So when the oceans release enough heat to go down in temp at the surface by, say, 0.5C, the lower troposphere temp will tumble by nearly twice that a few months later after the relased heat has escaped to space.
As a layman I find this much more useful than all the talk about temperatures.
The question, “How much energy is in the ocean?” could sound to many like it is eminently sensible and valuable.
A big and important question, to which no-one has a certain answer as far as I know. All we get from the oceanologists is an ‘anomaly’ relative to an earlier dateline.
If you find my explanation useful, you may want to look at my outline for a holistic climatology here:
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2010/06/29/holistic-climate-theory-part-1/
kdkd says:
July 22, 2010 at 4:01 am (Edit)
tallbloke:
Thanks. That’s a reasonably convincing mechanism for *why* the satellite measures overestimate over certain parts of the cycle. It doesn’t mean that my explanation is wrong, just that it is simplified.
I’m sorry to have to disagree, but the satellites are not ‘overestimating’ anything. They are correctly measuring the change in temperature occurring in the troposphere, which for the reasons I explained, is larger than the changes in the surface record.
This is well worth a read if you are interested in ocean heat content and where the energy comes from/goes to.
http://www.sciencebits.com/calorimeter
I get curious. Is it normal for the global mean temperature anomalies to vary over the year as shown in the above graph? Why?
One would naively assume that global mean temperatures would not show any trace of seasonality, since they are global.
When we’ve accumulated ~20 years of temperature observations subsequent to Hansen’s modified models, we can test them like the 1988 model.
The 1988 model predicted that:
ΔCO2(a) + ΔCH4 (a) + ΔTG(a) = Δ(a)
(TG = Trace gases like CFC’s)
The experimental results were:
ΔCO2(a) + ΔCH4 (c) + ΔTG(b to c) < Δ(c)
Hansen would have had to lower the climate’s CO2 sensitivity to a negative number in order to modify his model to correctly retrocast the period from 1988-2009. Or he would have had to elevate solar and other natural forcings to the point that they totally dominate the anthropogenic components (which they do).
I forgot yhr T’s on the right side of the equations…
ΔCO2(a) + ΔCH4 (a) + ΔTG(a) = ΔT(a)
(TG = Trace gases like CFC’s)
The experimental results were:
ΔCO2(a) + ΔCH4 (c) + ΔTG(b to c) < ΔT(c)
I also misspelled or fat-fingered “the”.
Magnus says:
July 22, 2010 at 5:46 am
When a year starts in El nino conditions, and ends in La Nina conditions, the temperature can swing a lot.
El Nino can happen on average 3 years out of seven IIRC, so it’s not unusual, but not regularly seasonal either.
Phil Clarke
Your claim that “Scenario B shoots up this year, then drops back and roughly flatlines for 5 years” is incorrect. It shoots up and stays there for five years.
2010 is the year that blows away Hansen 1988. Denial is not an option.
We do know more about climate now than 1988. We know that sensitivity to CO2 is much less than Hansen imagined.
BenjaminG says:
July 21, 2010 at 5:02 pm
Where in the world did the idea come from in this thread that we’ve only seen .1°C warming when the prediction was for .6°C?
There is no dataset in existence that only shows .1°C warming since 1988.
++++
Dunno what I’m doing wrong, but I look at that graph at the top and I see ~.25C difference in 1988 vs current for GISS, with Scenario A having predicted a further ~.6C on top of that.
And I still say Hansen predicted Scenario A should be where we are today, as Scenario B in his testimony included CO2 growth limitations that have not occurred.
Ok guys I’m very happy to read that there’s so much people interested in climate , and this means in our life in this planet, well sometime we should think , where we are going to…?! and we are all together my friends on this same “car” , but who is to drive…..?
geo says:
And I still say Hansen predicted Scenario A should be where we are today, as Scenario B in his testimony included CO2 growth limitations that have not occurred.
Then you should read his report because you’re flat out wrong, just like McIntyre was on the same subject a couple of years ago.
Mods is that why my post on this was censored yesterday, because I took McIntyre’s name in vain?
[reply] Read the blog policy. RT-mod
David Middleton says: July 22, 2010 at 5:53 am
Seems like a very straight forward analysis of the falsification. Are you certain that you are correct?
Also about the statemet:
“The experimental results were:”
Should that read:
“The actual results were:”
And, can I cut/paste you on that?
@tallbloke thanks!
David Middleton says: July 22, 2010 at 5:53 am
Would it be fair to substitute ‘NASA’ for ‘Hansen’ in your statements or did NASA have an independant model?
Does the ‘Hansen’ model speak for ‘NASA’?
@Roy:
Regarding the warming of Lake Tanganyika, see these two WUWT threads:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/18/unprecedented-warming-in-lake-tanganyika/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/20/tanganyika-revisited/
Geoff Sharp says:
July 21, 2010 at 6:45 pm
R. Gates says:
July 21, 2010 at 5:17 pm
What is most remarkable in my estimation is that global temps didn’t even fall more during the long and deep solar minimum that we just came through. I’ve still not heard AGW explain this in any scientific way. By the way they were carrying on at one point about the solar minimum, you’d of thought a new ice age was upon us, but temperatures held up– not rising, but not falling either.
Maybe you should get out more, you obviously have no knowledge of the interactions between the Sun, ocean heat storage and climate. The deep solar minimum will be a downstream effect that is just starting to show it teeth now. This coupled with the natural ocean cycles and associated changes in the upper atmosphere related to the reduced EUV, should see a continued reduction of world temperatures over the coming years. There will still be hotspots for you to cherrypick, but these are normal during times of low EUV.
If real world temperatures rise on a steady path over the next decade then there might be cause for concern, as nearly all the cooling players are engaged. But I would suggest it’s way too early to be writing off what is already in the pipeline.
____________
The long a deep solar minimum we just passed through should have produced much more of an effect on cooling (according to AGW skeptics) yet the first half of 2010 saw record temps. Skeptics seem determined to put this all on the El Nino, even though this El Nino wasn’t as strong as 1998. To deny the effects of increased CO2 is to deny part of the equation. El Nino and Solar cycles are smaller players and seem to take a back seat to the general forcing from the 40% increase in CO2 since the 1700’s. Undoubtedly the solar minimum put a damper of global temps in the past 3 years, and even if an onset of a La Nina keeps 2010 from being the hottest year on record, it will be right up there, and there is a very good chance that with another El Nino during the current solar cycle rise to solar max in 2013 we will see another global temperature record before 2015. The most likely and most logical major cause of these higher temps is CO2.
In percentage terms, a new record high global temperature record between now and 2015 can be attributed to:
50% CO2 forcings
30% ENSO
20% Solar Maximum (with related increase in TSI and decrease in GCR’s)
Take a look at the excellent charts at this site:
http://www.climate4you.com/
Click on Sun on the left hand side, and study the charts. You easily see the ENSO and Solar cycles riding on top of the general increase in temps over the past few decades.
tty much immediate to within 6 months of the cycle and seemed to based on total solar irradiance, and perhaps on the effect of reduced solar wind and increased GCR’s. Every reliable chart we have shows this quite easily, such as this one:
NASA is working on green energy and muslim peace initiatives now…….Russia is working on an advanced space program now. CO2 will drop in the US, Obama’s plans are killing the economy
Phil Clarke: “IPCC projection 1990-2010 : 0.16C / decade.
Observed trend (UAH) : 0.164C / decade.”
“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?
1860-1880 21 0.163
1910-1940 31 0.15
1975-1998 24 0.166
1975-2009 35 0.161
http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=5134
So, Phil, what you are arguining is that the IPCC blames CO2 for warming rates that have occurred 3 other times int he last 150 years.
In effect you are blaming CO2 for naturally occuring warming.
How stupid.
That’s kind of a semantic thing. The way you put it is technically correct.
Hypotheses are tested by experiments. In this case, the “hypothesis” was Hansen’s model prediction and the “experiment” was the actual ΔT from 1988-2009.
Hansen is NASA’s top climate science official… But I’m not sure if it’s fair to blame NASA for Hansen’s work.
“Your claim that “Scenario B shoots up this year, then drops back and roughly flatlines for 5 years” is incorrect”
Here are the numbers:
2009 0.873
2010 1.035
2011 0.971
In 2010 the scenario shoots up by .16C then drops back 0.06C, losing over 1/3 of that rise. The 2010-2016 average is then 1.01C.
But bickering about individual years is futile; no single year can falsify the model. Indeed, I certainly agree that denying that the IPCC A1F1 projection was breathtakingly accurate is not an option.
R. Gates says:
July 22, 2010 at 7:13 am (Edit)
http://www.climate4you.com/
Click on Sun on the left hand side, and study the charts.
Try this chart on my site:
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/nailing-the-solar-activity-global-temperature-divergence-lie/
Ref – John Blake says:
July 21, 2010 at 4:29 pm
“…Yet having willfully sabotaged global energy economies since the 1970s, climate hysterics such as Briffa, Hansen, Jones, Mann, Trenberth et al. continue to trumpet utterly failed hypotheses in bad faith under false pretenses, always to the extreme detriment of honest scientific projects…. From the destruction of post-Enlightenment industrial/scientific civilization, nothing will dissuade them– nothing. In sheer self-defense, we wonder: What is to be done?”
_______________________
Not to worry. Like the Dark Ages, the Plague, etc., etc., this too will end. Have a feeling that when it does, there’ll be a lot less of us than there is now. But… all this is really just background, it’s today, those we live, love, hate, and work with the most, and the little things in life that matter most. Smile! Stop for a moment! Look around! Smell the roses;-)
Phil–
Hansen in his testimony described Scenario A as “Business as usual”. In what way has “business as usual” been deviated from since 1988 in any impactful way re limiting CO2 growth in the atmosphere? Perhaps you can convince me of what a great job we’ve done as a race since 1988 after all in spite of what I read at alarmist sites.
Phil. says:
July 22, 2010 at 6:53 am
[reply] Read the blog policy. RT-mod
Enlighten me, what was wrong with the post on Hansen’s report, specifically?
Possible new satellite to be launched by UK – This MUST provide open access
to the climate info element of it’s function.
If the Met Office get hold of it we are sunk !!
http://www.thegwpf.org/the-observatory/1287-exactly-what-we-need-uk-to-open-earth-observation-hub.html
R. Gates says:
July 22, 2010 at 7:13 am
You are getting confused, the educated are not expecting big falls in world temps to happen simultaneously during a protracted solar minimum. The climate system is influenced by solar output (which includes cloud cover), ocean cycles and the ENSO cycle, there is no need to factor in CO2.
You are cherry picking a couple of months that are part of the natural ENSO cycle which will increasingly be affected by cooler waters in the Pacific for the next 20 or so years. La Ninas will be stronger with El Ninos loosing strength, coupled with the possible impending solar grand minimum and the impending cool AO the writing is on the wall. The PDO cycle moves in sync with the temperature record, a weak Sun will only add to the cooling.
Your links for solar output are a bit outdated, maybe you should study my website, I don’t need to study your suggested charts. Your area of study might include the PDO etc, which you seem to be omitting.
Steve Goddard errs in calling Hansen’s A/B/C scenarios “forecasts.” Actually a scenario differs from a forecast. This difference has significant implications for climatology.
A scenario (aka “projection”) is a mathematical function that maps the time to the global average temperature anomaly. A “forecast” is an extrapolation to the future outcome of a statistical event. Were they to be defined, the complete set of these events would form the statistical population for the IPCC models. The IPCC has not yet identified this population.
A model for which the associated population is defined has the property which, in the philosophy of science, is called “falsifiability.” Falsifiability is the mark of a model that is “scientific” in nature. The IPCC models are not falsifiable, thus lying outside science.
Interest is nice but not effective. There exists the whole psychology of human development which is often completely ignored by ecology and environmentalists.
Environmentalists want people to care, but they don’t understand how and why a person might begin to care. Most of the world does not care. Most of the world is still struggling with achieving a Western standard of living and a Western level of equal rights for men and women as citizens of a free country.
Most Westerners don’t understand that to truly care about the world is a trans-ego development. Environmentalists are not past their own egos. I’m not being mean to them. They just underestimate what it really takes to transform people. It can’t be imposed by political power nor by restructuring the economy.
So, nice that people take an interest, but world change won’t happen for 200 years.
Sorry, I know it is off topic but it is just one of those things in environmentalism that never really gets mentioned.
toby says:
July 21, 2010 at 3:01 pm
“Haggle all the you like, cherry pick years and months etc etc The planet is warming, even by UAH observations. Where is the cooling?”
I pick the Altithermal (Holocene Optimum) as my temperature starting time. We are definitely cooling. Temperatures have been headed down for thousands of years, Toby.
Next down trend will be unpleasant. No CO2 induced warming here.
@mkelly,
It’s been pretty well “all down hill” since about 8 KYA and steeply down hill since 3 KYA…
GISP2: 10 KYA to Present
Compared to prior warming legs of the Holocene Bond cycle, this one has been rather mild.
More Hansen 1988 (this time from his published paper, not his congressional testimony): “Scenario A assumes that growth rates of trace gas emissions typical of the 1970s and 1980s will continue indefinitely”. Well, that’s consistent with the “business as usual” phrase he used in front of Congress.
So go look at the Mauna Loa record here http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo.png Compare the slope for 1970-1990 and 1990-2010, and explain to me how there is some significant reduction in the growth rate to justify a “Scenario B” result?
Hansen’s description of Scenario B as “most plausible” was based on his belief that it *wouldn’t be* “business as usual” for 1990-2010 (in part he assumed government would take some action to help produce that result, just not the radical action demanded to meet Scenario C).
tallbloke says:
July 22, 2010 at 7:35 am
R. Gates says:
July 22, 2010 at 7:13 am (Edit)
http://www.climate4you.com/
Click on Sun on the left hand side, and study the charts.
Try this chart on my site:
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2010/07/21/nailing-the-solar-activity-global-temperature-divergence-lie/
_________
Thanks for the link…your site shall perhaps turn out to be the best tip from WUWT I’ve gotten this week…I shall study it with interest.
Steve,
If you add just 1 data point (12/2009) to the front of your satellite plot the trend changes from your -0.47 °C/year to a positive 0.06 °C/year. If you make it an “entire” year (7/2009 – 6/2010) the trend becomes a positive 0.20 °C/year. And if you add just 1 data point (6/2009) to the front of that graph you’ll get an impressive 0.32 °C/year or a whopping 3.2 °C/decade!
Hmm? I wonder if there’s something people could learn from these tidbits of information.
To really get a nice positive trend you can plot “entire” 2 years (7/2008 – 6/2010) produces a positive trend of 0.25 °C/year or a whopping (and quite silly) 2.5 °C/decade.
They are worried about millions/billions in government grants and Cap’n Trade profits.
“”” Theo Goodwin says:
July 21, 2010 at 5:25 pm
George F. Smith,
You ask some good questions. In science, the word “prediction” is not used in the sloppy manner of the street where someone can say that he “predicts that Obama will resign this afternoon.” In science, you have a prediction only if it is derived from hypotheses that explain the phenomenon predicted. So, Kepler’s Laws (look them up, they are way cool) enabled Galileo to use his telescope to predict the phases of Venus. In so doing, he was showing that each phase-event was an instance of the regularities described by Kepler’s Laws. No laws (hypotheses), no prediction. “””
I’m not sure what you are querying in my use of the word “prediction”; I used it in exactly the way I intended to use it.
Specifically; that was an instance in which a theory/law/rule/model/whatever “predicted” the numerical outcome of an experiment ; in this case a measurement of the Fine Structure Constant; which is one of the important Fundamental Constants of Physics. And the agreement between the “theory” predicted value; and the best experimentally measured value (at that time) was within less than 50% of the Standard Deviation of the experimental errors of that experiment.
That theory simply said that:-
1/alpha = (pi^a.b^c.d^e.f^g.h^i)^0.25 Where alpha is the fine structure constant; approximately 1/137 , and (a, b, …i) are small integers; not necessarily all different. And of course pi = -sqrt(-1) .ln(-1) .
This theory was published in a reputable scientific Journal in the 1960s; and was immediately accepted by a lot of scientists; because the predicted value was so accurate. But it is purely a mathematical formulation; and all of mathematics is pure fiction; that we made up out of whole cloth, yet this formula predicted the value of a fundamental Physical Constant of Nature.
Computer programmers and some clever mathematicians demonstrated that the same formula with different integers generated a list of about 8-10 values form 1/alpha all of which were accurate within one standard deviation from the best experimental value; and one on the list was even much closer than the original published formula. So the whole thing was a farce; yet scientists embraced it on the grounds that it was so accurate it must be right.
And why would I want to look up Keplers Laws; I learned them in High School about 60 years ago; so I presume they haven’t changed since; and that they still teach the same version in high school today ?
@John Blake says:
July 21, 2010 at 4:29 pm ,
I concur !!!
It was an article by David Whitehead the solar scientist in the spring of 2008 that changed my mind from warmist to skeptic. This article was the British equivalent of a scenario where Canada’s media darling warmist David Suzuki would renounce AGW alarmism and become a skeptic.
Ken Winters says:
July 22, 2010 at 9:51 am
Served in the Navy with a gent named Ken Winters. He was from Cleveland. Last I knew lived in Maine. Kenneth H. Winters III.
stevengoddard,
“How about an honest discussion instead of spin?”
If you want an honest discussion maybe you shouldn’t claim that Hansen’s scenario B, as shown in the chart above, includes a prediction that the global temperature as measured by satellites on July 17, 2010 would be 0.6 degrees Celsius higher than the previous record for that date. 0.6 appears to be roughly the amount of increaae in the annual average temperature scenario B implies in 2010 compared to 1984, when the model run apparently begins using assumed future forcings rather than observed past ones, but that says nothing about what the weather would be like on a particular day in July and even if it did one would expect that new records for July 17 might have been set between 1984 and 2010. You were very much comparing apples and oranges there.
Joel Shore says:
July 21, 2010 at 8:15 pm
[snip]
Am I wrong or does Joel always show up to defend Hansen? Oh well, he did a really, really bad job this time.
Essentially what Joel stated is that it was perfectly OK for Hansen to yell fire in a crowded theater even though he had little understanding of the situation. Then Joel goes on ask why others didn’t yell something. It’s such a ludicrous claim I can only laugh in response.
Come on, Joel, your bosses will be expecting a lot better defense than this.
stevengoddard says:
July 22, 2010 at 6:01 am
2010 is the year that blows away Hansen 1988. Denial is not an option.
—-
Or is 2010 the year that takes the wind out of the sceptic canon?
It boils down to this: if the graph in the post would be properly drawn (cf.
Phil Clarke, above) the message is clearly that Hansen was more or less
right. That he, on basis of newer evidence, revised the climate sensitivity is
normal scientific practice, which we should appreciate, since he has been
transparent about it.
Now, the sceptics often repeat that they don’t have to prove anything (wrong)
and therefore we cannot judge their performance 1988-2009. Please recall
that sceptics in 1988 not only denied the role of anthropogenic emissions,
but the whole idea of a warming trend! It stands to reason, given their
vehement opposition to NASA/Hansen projections, that any mental model
(in 1988 and long after) attached to the framework of the graph in question
would look quite different to Hansen’s projections. Since Hansen’s lowest
scenario licks the observed temperature graph, the sceptic stance is very
pff the mark, anyway you figure it.
So, tell me again, which boat is leaking a bit and which boat is sinking fast?
Djon
The GISS trend line and predictions are all Hansen’s. If you don’t like them, talk to him about it.
Trying to blame me for Hansen’s mis-predictions is pretty ridiculous.
The quantity of excuses and weasel words being used by Dr. Hansen apologists here is rather impressive.
Geo:
I’m pretty sure Scenario A and B are essentially the same with ‘B’ having some (palusible) volcanic negative forcings. That’s it. Both scenarios assumed continued “business as usual” CO2 increases. Only ‘C’ held CO2 constant after Y2K….
geo says:
First of all, what you need to look at is not the change in slope but the change in 2nd derivative. More specifically, what you need to look at is the rate at which anthropogenic CO2 emissions grow year-over-year. Hansen spells out in his scientific paper exactly what rate he assumed for each case. (I believe that Scenario A assumed 2% growth each year whereas Scenario B assumed 1%, or something like that…You have to check the scientific paper.)
Second of all, it is more than just Co2 that matters: Methane concentrations leveled off for a while and that caused the forcing due to methane to be less than expected. Also, Scenario A assumed no major volcanic eruptions while B and C assumed one major volcanic eruption in the mid-90s. In fact, we had the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo in the early 90s which I believe was actually somewhat larger than the size of the eruption that Hansen had assumed in Scenarios B and C.
A carefully analysis of the forcings for each scenario shows that the total forcings fall at or even a bit below those assumed for Scenario B, so that is the most correct one to compare to.
R. Gates says:
July 21, 2010 at 5:17 pm
Have you considered that you might come across, at least in writing, as a [snip]? I am sure you are not but lecturing other people on how they think or feel puts you in grave danger of encouraging them to think you might be.
[reply] Please address the ideas and try to avoid personalising the debate. It wasn’t a rude insult, but still, try to avoid it. Thanks RT-mod
Richard M says:
No, what I am saying is that it is pretty ridiculous to blame the person yelling fire when there really is a fire, just because he predicted that the flames would shoot 10 meters into the air whereas it looks like at the moment they are only shooting 7.7 meters into the air. This is especially true when all the other people back who were telling us that there was no fire at all are getting a free pass.
Joel Shore says:
July 22, 2010 at 12:18 pm
just because he predicted that the flames would shoot 10 meters into the air whereas it looks like at the moment they are only shooting 7.7 meters into the air.
Can anyone tell me where this bonfire is because I could do with a warm up on this chilly July evening.
Thanks.
Tallbloke,
Yes, where is that “fire”? Everything observed today can be explained through natural climate variability, since it has all happened many times over in the past.
geo says:
July 22, 2010 at 8:59 am
More Hansen 1988 (this time from his published paper, not his congressional testimony): “Scenario A assumes that growth rates of trace gas emissions typical of the 1970s and 1980s will continue indefinitely”. Well, that’s consistent with the “business as usual” phrase he used in front of Congress.
So go look at the Mauna Loa record here http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/webdata/ccgg/trends/co2_data_mlo.png Compare the slope for 1970-1990 and 1990-2010, and explain to me how there is some significant reduction in the growth rate to justify a “Scenario B” result?
I suggest again that you read the report, note Hansen wrote: “Scenario A assumes that growth rates of trace gas emissions typical of the 1970s and 1980s will continue indefinitely”, he did not write “Scenario A assumes that growth rates of CO2 typical of the 1970s and 1980s will continue indefinitely”, that’s the whole point of the report. You have made the same mistake that McIntyre made in Jan 2008, if you want to find out without reading the paper you can read my contributions to a sequence of threads on this subject at CA then. I’m not going to write a more detailed post here because of the vagaries of the moderation here, they’ve already wasted enough of my time yesterday.
Billy Liar says:
July 22, 2010 at 12:16 pm
R. Gates says:
July 21, 2010 at 5:17 pm
[reply] Please address the ideas and try to avoid personalising the debate. It wasn’t a rude insult, but still, try to avoid it. Thanks RT-mod
How about you pass that message on to your main agent provocateur here, Steve Goddard. It’s a bit rich snipping others while you allow him free rein!
I’m still waiting for a reply to my earlier question.
REPLY: Phil, how about you dial it back a bit? I’m getting rather tired of your provocateurism also. Don’t like it, don’t visit. -Anthony
OK, I search Climate Audit (his record keeping is immaculate) and found this entry on Hansen’s scenarios: http://climateaudit.org/2008/01/24/hansen-1988-details-of-forcing-projections/
“Scenario A assumes that CO2 emissions will grow 1.5% per year and that CFC emission will grow 1.5% per year. Scenario B assumes constant future emissions. If populations increase, Scenario B requires emissions per capita to decrease. Scenario C has drastic cuts in emissions by the year 2000, with CFC emissions eliminated entirely and other trace gas emissions reduced to a level where they just balance their sinks. These scenarios are designed to cover a very broad range of cases. If I were forced to choose one as the most plausible, I would say Scenario B. My guess is that the world is now probably following a course that will take it somewhere between A and B. (p. 51)”
So, I ake this to mean the following:
A) busuness as usaul with no changes in emissions
B) holding emissions constant after a certain date.
C) drastic cut in emissions by 2000.
In reality, which scenario has the world followed since 1988? I’d say we are much, much closer to the ‘A’ scenario in terms of our emissions, right? I mean, we haven’t done a d@mn thing to curb CO2 output. But lets just say we really did shoot between A and B like Hansen said. The ACTUAL TEMPERTURE MEASUREMENTS are not even close to those predicted “most likely” scenarios. Not even in the ballpark…
Yes, I had noticed a real lack of comments about the Satellites too and had wondered why… 🙂
OT but in the same category of “when the data doesn’t support the cause it gets real quiet”. I just posted the following on RC in the entry by Tamino on the “Hockey Stick Illusion” and do NOT expect it to get past moderation.
—–
I am currently reading “The Hockey Stick Illusion” and am enjoying it.
Speaking of graphs…it must be frustrating to see that the general public is beginning to see through the empty “science” (and very *full* politics) espoused here by Tamino and friends as evidenced by the relative rankings of your web site and Tamino’s blog when compared to the Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre sites:
Alexa Rankings
Both of the skeptic sites beat both of your sites and the esteemed wattsupwiththat.com has about 5 *times* the traffic as yours! I know you won’t post this inconvenient truth as this site doesn’t like hard numbers but hopefully they will give you reason to consider if you might have been hoodwinked yourself in all this AGW mess.
Joel Shore says:
July 22, 2010 at 12:18 pm
Using your fire analogy it would be important on how the fire started not that the flames are 7.7 or 10 m high. Hansen calls it arson. I say started by lightening and since it is part of nature in the big forest it will go out by itself.
All the posts regarding the 0.1 °C vs. 0.6 °C percentage errors are totally irrelevent and confusing to the topic at hand (i.e. accuracy of Hansens 1988 model run). The actual warming that has occurred from 1987 (the last full year of instrumentation data prior to Hansens paper) and now isn’t 0.1 °C. Depending on how you analyze the data the observed warming from 1987 to now is between 0.31 °C and 0.45 °C.
The formula for percent error is:
% error = |actual value – theoretic value| / (theoretic value) * 100
|0.31 – 0.6| / 0.6 * 100 = 48.3%
|0.45 – 0.6| / 0.6 * 100 = 25.0%
The combined GISS (Hansens dataset) Land-Ocean global temperature anomaly in 1987 was 0.26 °C. The 2009 anomaly was 0.57 °C. That’s a warming of 0.31 °C. However, if you include 2010 (the first 6 months average to 0.71 °C) the warming would be 0.45 °C.
But given the noise in the data, using single years for comparisons isn’t the right approach. A better method would be to fit a trendline on the data and compare it’s value in 1987 and now. I fit a trendline to the data from 1969 through 2009 and found the warming to be 0.35 °C.
Another approach would be to use 5 year averages. The 5-yr average ending in 1987 was 0.16 °C and in 2009 it was 0.55 °C, for an actual warming of 0.39 °C.
Joel Shore says:
July 22, 2010 at 12:18 pm
No, what I am saying is that it is pretty ridiculous to blame the person yelling fire when there really is a fire, just because he predicted that the flames would shoot 10 meters into the air whereas it looks like at the moment they are only shooting 7.7 meters into the air. This is especially true when all the other people back who were telling us that there was no fire at all are getting a free pass.
*******************
The big bugaboo of the climate alarmists is sea level rise. The other supposed bad effects don’t seem to be happening at all, like increased tornadoes floods etc.
Actually despite the panic the oceans are rising at a rate of 3 MM per year or 1 cigarette length in 30 years. Since 2005 the rate has gone to almost zero.
This is according to that bastion of big oil the U of Colorado.
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/
Where is all of the water going from the glaciers, Greenland and Iceland going and why do we care ?
Actually nothing even mildly frightening is happening
So where is this fire you speak of ?
stevengoddard,
“The GISS trend line and predictions are all Hansen’s. If you don’t like them, talk to him about it.
Trying to blame me for Hansen’s mis-predictions is pretty ridiculous.”
Show me where Hansen predicted that the global temperature measured by satellites for July 17, 2010 would be 0.6 degrees Celsius above the previous record for that date – I don’t see that in any of the figures in your post. You can’t because he didn’t make any such prediction and yet asserting that he had was the implicit basis of your claim that he had made a 600% error.
Smokey, your CO2 list here is pretty impressive;
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0120a5e507c9970c-pi
Now, from a CAGW’ers point of view, one would probably immediately say that the average of all these papers must be the true value. After first removing the most radical values first, of course.
Like the IPCC value, for example.
Phil. says:
July 22, 2010 at 12:48 pm
Billy Liar says:
July 22, 2010 at 12:16 pm
REPLY: Phil, how about you dial it back a bit? I’m getting rather tired of your provocateurism also. Don’t like it, don’t visit. -Anthony
That’s easily fixed, tell Goddard to ‘fess up when he makes mistakes instead of lashing out at posters who pick him up on it. Particularly like in this thread where he bald-faced lies about what he said when anyone can see that I quoted him correctly. He’s behaving like a loose cannon like he did over the ‘CO2 freezing’ issue, you need to rein him in again. This is supposed to be a science blog.
REPLY: Y’know Phil, when you spout that ‘This is supposed to be a science blog.” claptrap, I wonder what your true motivations are. You are supposed to be an academic at a major university. Yet you spend several hours a day in a field not related to your work there anonymously harping on people here. You now have 1736 comments on WUWT, going back to Feb 2nd, 2008. That volume makes me wonder if you secured a grant just for the purpose of rebuttal here because I sure can’t see your university condoning that much time spent on a personal issue.
Given that, you could do with a bit of dial back yourself.
I agree, everybody could benefit from better manners, more tact, and less sniping. Frankly I’m tired of it all on this thread from both sides. As an academic, set an example. Everybody else, Goddard included: Use more tact, dial it back, and reap the benefits that will bring. – Anthony
Joel Shore says:
July 22, 2010 at 12:18 pm
No, what I am saying is that it is pretty ridiculous to blame the person yelling fire when there really is a fire, just because he predicted that the flames would shoot 10 meters into the air whereas it looks like at the moment they are only shooting 7.7 meters into the air. This is especially true when all the other people back who were telling us that there was no fire at all are getting a free pass.
Yes sirree, it’s been a pretty devastating fire there, Joel. Destruction everywhere you look. Your remarks keep getting funnier every time you try to justify the last one. Time to accept the truth. As of 2010, the AGW alarmism (aka the fire) is a complete and total bust. Hansen was wrong as are all his supporters. Get over it.
What makes this even funnier is no one know what part of the equation natural climate changes play. Clearly, there are many factors that would tend to make a logical person think that *some* natural warming should have occurred through about 2005. So, this makes Hansen’s claims even worse. He was aided by nature and still missed by a mile.
MattN says:
July 22, 2010 at 1:04 pm
So, I ake this to mean the following:
A) busuness as usaul with no changes in emissions
B) holding emissions constant after a certain date.
C) drastic cut in emissions by 2000.
In reality, which scenario has the world followed since 1988? I’d say we are much, much closer to the ‘A’ scenario in terms of our emissions, right? I mean, we haven’t done a d@mn thing to curb CO2 output. But lets just say we really did shoot between A and B like Hansen said. The ACTUAL TEMPERTURE MEASUREMENTS are not even close to those predicted “most likely” scenarios. Not even in the ballpark…
Most of the increase by 2010 was projected to be due to the other trace gases, not CO2. Scenario C is the best match to what has happened to Freons, CH4 etc.
John M says:
July 21, 2010 at 6:50 pm
Smokey, I have another comment about your list of CO2 papers;
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0120a5e507c9970c-pi
Should all these authors now be added to the Black-List?
Each and every one of them has participated in a small torpedo into the CAGW religion.
So its only fair they get punished for their sins, me thinks.
netdr says:
July 22, 2010 at 1:21 pm
“Actually despite the panic the oceans are rising at a rate of 3 MM per year or 1 cigarette length in 30 years. Since 2005 the rate has gone to almost zero.”
Even Al Gore has lost his fear and bought a sea-side mansion. As Al Gore received a Nobel Prize together with the IPCC, he must be quite a trusted person in AGW circles – at least there was no anomisity between him and Rajendra K. Pachauri visible during the ceremony.
So if even Al Gore loses his fear from sea level rise, it can’t be as bad as Hansen predicted, right? Do the AGW crowd agree so far? Or was that too nasty?
animosity, not anomisity – 😉
Richard S. Courtney
Your attempt at rebuttal is of no relevance to my point which was about the point estimates of global temperature in the present day. But by way of rebutting yours, Ancient natural cycles are irrelevant for attributing recent global warming to humans.
tallbloke
All I was doing was accounting for the difference between the satellite data and the surface data. Your explanation (and assumption that there’s no significant error term in the measureents), and my simplified explanation (and the assumption that there is a significant systematic error term) both are coherent, and do not create a need to question the scientific consensus.
Over in Australia the ruling Labor party (the party of global warming alarm) just sacked the sitting Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. Rudd was Australia’s version of Al Gore. It became clear that Labor could not win the next election with Rudd in charge.
(I did enjoy watching him cry on national television when he had to resign).
Now he’s sniping from the sidelines and his political enemies are firing back. The story that is all over the news today is that during his entire time in office (about 2 years) all Rudd wanted to do was get himself a job at the UN. He’s a great mate of Ban Kai Moon.
We will have a general election in a few weeks and Climate Change is a big issue.
So his replacement, Julia Gillard (from the Socialist Left) has a new policy on Climate Change. She is going to select 200 or so Australians (randomly she says) to determine the community consensus on Climate Change. This will then become the governments official scientific position. That’s how low Science has fallen in my country.
Why don’t we all use this graph to declare victory over global warming. Although no world wide laws have been passed, all our world wide conciousnesses have been raised so that our individual uncoerced actions have sloved the greenhouse warming problem. We all simulataniously realized that trace gases other than CO2 were the real problem and we have curtailed their use. A victory for the IPCC (which can now be dissolved). It shows that mankind will do the right thing if we have the right information. Now we can move on to other problems, as suggested by Lomberg and others.
kdkd,
Your use of “ancient” is unscientifically vague. The ancient Earth is billions of years old. So let’s start with something very recent: the Holocene, which we are at the tail end of now.
We have been in the interglacial Holocene for about 10,000 years. The climate has naturally varied within the observed parameters during that time, and the current climate is well within those natural parameters.
We are currently about in the middle of the Holocene temperatures.
If you go back farther, to 140,000 ybp, you see that we are in the sweet spot; sometimes the temperature naturally goes well above today’s, but much more often the Earth is in an Ice Age. That is very scary, unlike the few tenths of a degree of natural warming that we’ve seen since the LIA.
And if you go back to 400,000 ybp, you can see what is in store — and it isn’t global warming. Note also that temperature rises precede rises in CO2, clearly indicating that most of the current rise in CO2 is the result of natural warming, and not the cause.
Finally, looking back 740,000 years, we see that warm interglacial periods are short-lived, and the normal condition of the Earth is an Ice Age.
If CO2 provided the warming claimed, then we should be burning all the fossil fuels we possibly can. But of course, CO2 is only a minor bit player when it comes to warming. It can not possibly save us from the next Ice Age, because its total effect is minuscule. The observed temperature changes are due almost exclusively to natural climate variability.
MattN says:
Rather than reading a necessarily simplified quote from Hansen’s Congressional testimony on what the scenarios are, you need to read what he actually wrote in the technical literature regarding those scenarios: http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/1988/1988_Hansen_etal.pdf The rough descriptions of each scenario are given in Section 4 starting on p. 9343 and more detailed descriptions of the trace gas forcings (and of how the volcanic forcing was modeled) are in Appendix B, which starts on p. 9360.
Hansen spelled out the details of these scenarios in gory detail so that one could in fact rigorously compare them with what actually came to pass. You can’t just wing it by guessing what came to pass on the basis of your owned flawed knowledge and the simplified descriptions of the scenarios that Hansen gave in his Congressional testimony.
…And, of course, in that paper I referenced, Hansen also ventures an educated guess as to what scenario is most likely to represent our future course, saying, “Scenario A, since it is exponential, must eventually be on the high side of reality in view of finite resource constraints and environmental concerns… Scenario C is a more drastic curtailment of emissions than has generally been imagined … Scenario B is perhaps the most plausible of the three cases.”
And, indeed, as it turned out, Scenario B has been the most plausible. I believe that the increases in fossil fuel Co2 may be a little higher than B, but I think methane emissions levels rose even less than Scenario B, and curtailment of CFC emissions has probably followed something closest to Scenario C since the phase-outs of those were actually sped up under subsequent agreements of the Montreal Protocol (so in that case indeed “more drastic curtailment of emissions than has generally been imagined” were made).
And, a major volcanic eruption occurred in the early 1990s as Scenario B and C but not A envisioned; and, I believe the Mt. Pinatubo eruption actually resulted in somewhat larger optical depths than the El Chichon event that was presumed in the models for Scenarios B and C. The detailed graphs of the various forcings have been shown in the figure from Gavin Schmidt’s piece included in the Climate Audit post http://climateaudit.org/2008/01/24/hansen-1988-details-of-forcing-projections/
kdkd,
Also, please don’t bother us with SkepticalScience, whose very name is a lie. They are a 100% climate alarmist blog. Since they lie about who they are, you can pretty much bet your last dollar that everything they write has a climate alarmist spin intended to convince newbie readers that CO2 is gonna getcha. Relax, it’s not happening despite a 35% increase in that minor trace gas.
A while back a post of mine, vey much like the one above and no less professional, never saw the light of day.
Contrast that censorship with WUWT, which approves a wide range of opinion. No contest; SS is disingenuous, backed by secretive benefactors, and unreliable.
You may not agree with everyone here, but you do get both sides of the story, and you can make up your own mind. That isn’t allowed by those insecure alarmist echo chamber blogs.
Joel Shore,
You’re beating a dead horse. Hansen was WRONG.
Joel Shore says:
July 22, 2010 at 7:10 pm
Rather than reading a necessarily simplified quote from Hansen’s Congressional testimony on what the scenarios are, you need to read what he actually wrote in the technical literature regarding those scenarios:
Sounds to me like Joel is stating that Hansen may have exaggerated the science to Congress. Some might call that lying. Isn’t there a law against that?
The problem is that the AGW theory amounts to, “Umm, you ignore the fact that Hansen’s models have indeed been modified, repeatedly, to take into account our growing knowledge. The more recent ones incorporate a lower sensitivity than the ’88 model, and incorporate the solar cycle.”
Every modification repeatedly changes the story. Please admit that the science isn’t settled.
BenjaminG writes:
“If you’d like to point me to where Hansen said he knew exactly what the sensitivity was, or what the solar cycle would be, then I’d be glad to acknowledge he was completely wrong. In fact he gave a range for sensitivity that includes the modern estimate. And you can be sure that his papers had plenty of other caveats about the uncertainties involved.”
Then you and he are treating his “hypotheses” as not falsifiable. In fact, the explanation that you gave in an earlier post, amounts to instructions for making a hypothesis not falsifiable. But falsifiability is a requirement of scientific method. Can you state what conditions would falsify these hypotheses?
Michael Hauber writes:
“Look up Hansen’s 1981 paper ‘Climate Impact of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide.’ In it Hansen discusses the fact that including solar variations in a statisitcal model improved the fit to historical temperatures.”
Did he specify under what conditons the fit would fail? In other words, did he specify the conditions that would falsify his hypotheses? The way Hansen defenders on this site write, when you find conflicting data you just fit it to your hypotheses. That is not science. The conditions that would falsify a hypothesis are part of its meaning.
Kdkd:
At July 22, 2010 at 3:27 pm you say to me:
“Your attempt at rebuttal is of no relevance to my point which was about the point estimates of global temperature in the present day. But by way of rebutting yours, Ancient natural cycles are irrelevant for attributing recent global warming to humans.”
Say what!?
Your link is to consideration of the D-O event and is not relevant to anything I have written here.
My post at July 22, 2010 at 3:02 am concerned much more recent cycles. So, I again spell it out – so it is clear which cycles I was commenting – and add an explicit conclusion that seems to have evaded you.
The global climate system seems to vary in cycles that are overlaid on each other. The cause(s) of these cycles are not known but some suggest these cycles may relate to solar behaviour.
Several lines of evidence from history and from archaeology suggest there is an apparent ~900 year oscillation that caused the Roman Warm Period (RWP), then the Dark Age Cool Period (DACP), then the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), then the Little Ice Age (LIA), and the present warm period (PWP).
And the various estimates of mean global temperature (MGT) each suggest there is an apparent ~60 year cycle that provided cooling from ~1880 to ~1910, then warming to ~1940, then cooling to ~1970, then warming to ~2000, then cooling since.
If these patterns continue then the ~60 year cycle can be anticipated to revert to a warming phase around 2030, and the ~900 year oscillation can be anticipated to revert to a cooling phase during this century.
So, if these patterns continue, then either
(a)
MGT will revert to rising because these two oscillations will both be in a warming phase around 2030,
or
(b)
MGT will fall back to the levels it had in the DACP and MWP because the ~900 year oscillation has reverted to a cooling phase.
The observed pattern has been used as justification for assertions that emissions from human activity affected MGT during the twentieth century. But there is no evidence for that.
Indeed, the fact is that the observed warming during the twentieth century is completely consistent with that recent warming being part of the natural variation which gave us the RWP, the DACP, the MWP, the LIA, and the PWP.
The null hypothesis is that nothing has changed when nothing is observed to have changed. Observations of fluctuations in climate behaviour indicate that nothing has changed as a result of emissions from human activity.
Richard
When is Hansen coming out with scenario D? I wonder.
Richard S Courtney says:
July 23, 2010 at 12:23 am (Edit)
Several lines of evidence from history and from archaeology suggest there is an apparent ~900 year oscillation that caused the Roman Warm Period (RWP), then the Dark Age Cool Period (DACP), then the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), then the Little Ice Age (LIA), and the present warm period (PWP).
There is an ~934 year cycle in the distribution of mass and angular momentum in the solar system involving the two largest planets, Jupiter and Saturn.
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2009/12/30/meet-the-new-kepler-p-a-semi/#comment-130
Better late than never. I have been catching up on my reading and have noticed a curious contradiction between some WUWT blogs and a recent announcement by NOAA reported in the Daily Telegraph, also on the 21st. Summarising, the NOAA is reported as saying that June 2010 was the hottest month ever recorded, and the Jan-Jun period was the warmest combined land and ocean surface temperature since 1880 when reliable temperature readings begin. They say also that Artic Ice cover has retreated more than ever before by Jul 1st, putting it on track to shrink beyond its smallest area to date in 2007. They are forecasting that 2010 is on track to be the hottest year since records began. They say that Jun was the 304th consecutive month with a global surface temperature above the 20th Century average.
However the UAH global temperature anomolies shown above, and recent data on ice extent published on WUWT do not appear to agree with the data in the NOAA announcement. It would be nice to know who to believe. No wonder we laymen are confused!
@joel Shore
Any fool can come up with nice plausible sounding interpretations. (A demonstration of which alerted Freud to the unconscious and the hidden motivations of man).
The point is, is your interpretation more useful than any other?
Theo wrote: “falsifiability is a requirement of scientific method. Can you state what conditions would falsify these hypotheses?”
I think a problem comes in the common characterization of Hansen’s hypothesis as something like ‘GHGs are the only important factor in climate’. That has never been the case. As quoted above, even in his first climate paper, back in ’81, he acknowledged the impact of the sun.
A noisy signal with chaotic aspects makes it difficult to test climate projections over shorter time periods. There is no doubt about that. I can’t tell you exactly what trend since ’88 would have dropped the implied GHG sensitivity below the range he gave at the time, after factoring in the noise from such unpredictable aspects as solar input, but surely, given how things have played out, if we were looking at a negative trend since then, I imagine the hypothesis that GHGs play an important role would be in trouble.
Horse says:
July 23, 2010 at 3:32 am
No wonder we laymen are confused!
It is all about cherry picking. If you see the word NOAA, GISS or Hansen then I suggest you take it with a grain of salt. If you are keen then take the time to research thoroughly and the answers start to become clear. The so called called hottest records are taken during a strong El Nino event that still does not equate to the 1998 El Nino. The ice melt is another example, there was a very brief period recently after a near recent record winter ice accumulation in the arctic where there was a sudden decline in ice extent. But if you look at the big picture on the JAXA page there is an abundance of ice that will most likely be very high this arctic summer. Also if you check the world total and we are at about average. No loss of ice = no sea level rise.
There is some big cooling to come, and the AGW freaks know it. They are just making hay while the Sun shines.
*********
Frederick Michael says:
July 21, 2010 at 11:08 pm
http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/
is gonna get a BIG uptick for July. The data is already 2/3 in.
Maybe the La Nina will finally take hold and global temps will drop, but for the last few weeks, just the opposite has been happening. The sea surface temp maps show a La Nina already forming but the AQUA ch5 temps keep rising. WUWT?
I am not familiar with the time lag between the SOI cycles and global temps, so maybe this delay is normal. If so, someone please explain that.
********
I agree this is surprising. A change in sea-surface water temps (SST) should quickly change the air temp immediately above it. I understand it takes time to change the mid-troposphere temps above, but a thunderstorm can push air up from near the surface to the stratosphere in just a few hrs, so it doesn’t seem like the Sat temps would lag the SSTs for several months. Again, this is hard for me to understand.
Whatever the causes, it seems this is another reason why even Sat mid-trop temps (which are far superior to surface-station/thermometer readings) are still not a good indicator of global heat-content.
Geoff Sharpe wrote: “if you look at the big picture on the JAXA page there is an abundance of ice that will most likely be very high this arctic summer.”
Wha? On what planet? We are currently running at second lowest extent measured in 31 years of satellite data, more than two standard deviations below normal, and you predict a ‘very high’ result for later on? Good luck with that. IMO there is no way we even get up to the thirty year average this summer/fall. We’ll most likely be among the lowest 4 or 5, though a new record low is looking less likely than it might have a month ago.
And he said: “No loss of ice = no sea level rise.”
Sea ice loss has practically no effect on sea level rise, which comes from thermal expansion of the oceans and from land based ice loss.
And: “There is some big cooling to come”
Don’t hold your breath.We’ve already been in a solar minimum and negative PDO for years, yet we’re setting new record highs. We’ll see normal cooling associated with the coming La Nina. But when the next El Nino comes, we’ll likely be right back setting new records.
Just for grins… I plotted the HadCRUT3 Northern Hemisphere GTA with Alley’s Central Greenland temperature reconstruction over the last 10,000 years from the GISP2 ice core…
Holocene GISP2 & HadCRUT3
There is absolutely nothing anomalous about the climate change since 1850 when viewed in the overall context of the Holocene.
Earlier kdkd posted:
This is simply wrong. Bond et al., 1997 clearly showed that the Pleistocene Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle clearly continued into the Holocene in a subdued fashion. The D-O and Bond cycles are clearly evident in the GISP2 ice core…
GISP2 50kya
If we zoom in on the Subatlantic chronozone, it’s pretty obvious that the apparent secular warming trend in the HadCRUT3 series is nothing more than just another warming leg in the D-O/Bond (~1,470-yr) Cycle…
Subatlantic Chronozone
I tied the HadCRUT3 to the GISP2 data with a very simple static adjustment. While not “apples & apples”, the GISP2 data correlate very well with Moberg’s 2005 NH reconstruction (which is correctly tied into the instrumental record without any of “Mike’s Nature Tricks” or declined hiding).
Moberg, Mann, Esper & Alley
Geoff Sharp said:
“There is some big cooling to come, and the AGW freaks know it. They are just making hay while the Sun shines…”
________
No evidence for “big cooling” anywhere, unless you’re going to look at the upcoming La Nina cyclical event as evidence for your big cooling or cherry pick weather anomalies. The past 12 months (June 09 to June 2010) have been the warmest on instrument record. This of course is driving the skeptics nuts, as they expected the solar minimum to have driven down temps to near ice age conditions or some such rot. With the rising solar cycle to solar max in 2013, if we get an El Nino in 2011-2015 (anywhere in that time period) we will most certainly hit a new record high global temperature record, and I’m predicted a summer low Arctic Ice extent of 2.5 million sq. km. by 2015.
“No evidence for “big cooling” anywhere…” Typically wrong, Gates.
The climate has been cooling throughout the Holocene. We need all the warming we can get, and then some.
Richard M:
Not giving Congress every bit of detail that appears in your technical papers on a subject does not constitute exaggerating or lying.
R. Gates says:
July 23, 2010 at 10:09 am
No evidence for “big cooling” anywhere,
There is an ocean cycle you might need to become acquainted with, try googling “PDO” you might notice the temperature record follows this oscillation. A quiet Sun will also add to the mix, the outcome of this component is still unknown.
We don’t trust your “instrument record”
BenjaminG says:
July 23, 2010 at 8:56 am
Wha? On what planet?
You might need to read my reply to R. Gates…also read up on the PDO.
You are not looking at the total record when it comes to sea ice. Do some research and you will see the world sea ice extent is traveling right on average, Antarctica is approaching a 30 year high or do you choose to ignore these basic facts. In the Arctic over winter there was a near record extent, there was some above average melting in June which has now leveled off and heading at this stage for a high ice extent for summer. Anthony’s new ice page shows it all http://wattsupwiththat.com/sea-ice-page/ come back to me if you see something you don’t understand.
Melting sea ice does not translate into rising oceans, but one would assume a corresponding land loss of ice if sea ice extents were substantially down, fact is they are not, along with no sea level rise. So we are left with no rise in temps for the last decade, no loss of sea ice, oceans not rising….but CO2 continues to rise?
CO2 effectively reaches saturation point as a GHG after 50ppm….you guys are on a loser.
Smokey says:
July 23, 2010 at 10:37 am
“No evidence for “big cooling” anywhere…” Typically wrong, Gates.
The climate has been cooling throughout the Holocene. We need all the warming we can get, and then some.
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_cHhMa7ARDDg/SsZbFvC5SJI/AAAAAAAABLY/uZxh6g17bmE/s1600-h/GISP2_10Ke.jpg
Just by eyeballing that graph I can say that the warming is almost over and that the next big drop will happen very soon, possibly coinciding with a Bond event, unlike the last drop ~1000 years ago. Usually the cooling takes around 100-150 years or so to complete itself (though some studies suggest that the actual cooling occurs in just a couple of decades and the century-plus figure is simply a result of the extreme amount of smoothing required to remove the noise from the data.) At any rate, the cooling occurs much faster than the warming. Another way of looking at it is that both the cooling and the warming happen quickly, but the earth stays in the cool state much longer than it stays in the warm state. A mixture of both ways of looking at the graph is likely the case. Good analogs for the amount and speed (note my comment about the smoothing) of drop to be expected are found at 3.2 Kyr and 6.8 Kyr.
R. Gates: July 23, 2010 at 10:09 am
With the rising solar cycle to solar max in 2013, if we get an El Nino in 2011-2015 (anywhere in that time period) we will most certainly hit a new record high global temperature record, and I’m predicted a summer low Arctic Ice extent of 2.5 million sq. km. by 2015.
Smart move, going long-term. Those flubbed short-range predictions were killin’ ya…
S. Hemisphere winters (ie. now) mostly have a bigger impact on lowering global temperatures than N. Hemisphere winters on LT temp`s:
http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt
But wait a minute, the data for August are already in, August 2010 was the warmest month on record!