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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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 . . .