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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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?