The satellites are missing

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:

1. We are not going to set a record this year (for the whole year)
2. Hansen has vastly overestimated climate sensitivity
3. 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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