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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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.