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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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.