By Steve Goddard
Earlier in the month I wrote an article showing the trend in Arctic ice since 2002.
I took a lot of criticism from people for not measuring “crest to crest or trough to trough.”
Any one schooled in analysis of cyclical data would know that one must go from crest-to-crest or trough-to-trough, to maintain some semblance of symmetry about the x-axis.
It is time now to see how serious people are about their belief systems. We have passed the 2010 El Niño peak, and can see what the “real” trend is since the cyclical El Niño peak of 1998.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1998/last:2010/plot/rss/from:1998/last:2010/trend
“Global warming on decadal timescales is continuing without let-up … we conclude that there has been no reduction in the global warming trend of 0.15-0.2C/decade that began in the late 1970s.”
Talk about cherry-picking! Look at his start point. He chose the worst case trough to crest to measure his trend.
Question for readers. Is Hansen correct, or does he need some serious graphing lessons? Below are the trend graphs from 1998-present for all four sources. GISS is way out of line.
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Stu: Point is, anthropogenic aerosols offset some of the anthropogenic warming from long-lived greenhouse gases. Clean up the air (good thing) and you inadvertantly remove that warming mitigation (bad thing).
Spector: Are you arguing that the anthropogenic enhanced greenhouse effect is dwarfed by some other, natural forcing? If so, what, and by how much?
Dave F: According to the IPCC here and here, natural forcing is currently around zero, and most of the current forcing comes from long-lived greenhouse gases, partially offset by aerosols.
John Finn: There is currently a net energy imbalance of ~0.5W/m². That’s where the warming ‘in the pipeline’ comes from. It will take at least a couple of decades for that to equilibrate (and by then atmospheric CO2 is likely to be considerably higher, of course).
Girma: Warming in the early 20th Century was largely due to increase in TSI, which has declined in more recent decades. Current warming is about 0.18C per decade due to anthropogenic greenhouse gases. As I’ve pointed out before, 10 years is just showing you natural variability, not the long-term warming trend. Feel free to dispute this if you can.
Icarus,
Thank you for your numerous comments adding to the traffic total of WUWT. Your support is appreciated.
However, when you say “According to the IPCC…” you forfeit your credibility. The IPCC has never been accurate, and in fact they are simply tax-sucking charlatans from Rajendra Pachauri on down; the truth is not in them.
That is what happens when a group of corrupt pseudo-scientists like Michael Mann of the IPCC are paid really large sums of taxpayer loot to reach a pre-determined opinion: there are the financial winners [Mann’s climate peer review clique] and the losers [the taxpaying public]. Honest science and the scientific method are totally ignored in the IPCC’s conspiracy to loot the public treasury.
stevengoddard: So you agree with Hansen that the evidence shows a warming trend of 0.15 – 0.2C per decade since the late 1970s? If so, what are you arguing is the cause of that warming trend?
Paul Birch – actually I’m almost certain the woodfortrees code doesn’t have a bug, at least not in its linear fitting routine. Mathematically, the average of a sine curve over one cycle is zero, but if you sum up the squares of the residuals from the lines you see on the woodfortrees plot, and from the origin, you’ll see that the lines with gradients are “better” fits. This just shows that linear least squares regression isn’t a good way to understand what a sine curve is doing. Using gnuplot I found that for one cycle of a sine curve represented by y=sin(x*pi/32), the “best” fit had the equation y=-0.0283321x + 0.936467. The RMS residual for this fit was 0.444361; the RMS residual from the origin was 0.707107, the square root of 0.5.
Icarus says:
August 1, 2010 at 2:10 am
Stu: Point is, anthropogenic aerosols offset some of the anthropogenic warming from long-lived greenhouse gases. Clean up the air (good thing) and you inadvertantly remove that warming mitigation (bad thing).
This seems to be the case. But maybe a larger case is that there will always be good things and bad things happening simultaneously and that the definitions of these things will alter depending on your focus, culture, or the times.
Eg. When industrial aerosols were deemed the number one environmental ‘bad thing’ (OMG, Kimberly from Different Strokes has green hair!!!), I wonder how many people were arguing their cooling benefits? A similar case today perhaps in regards to the proposed future warming, where none of the potential benefits of that warming are ever contemplated or discussed. Instead we have semi-serious proposals to inject even more aerosols into the atmosphere to counteract the bad warming. But… didn’t that kind of behaviour itself used to be a ‘bad’ thing?
Perhaps that Different Strokes episode really got to me and therefore I still feel it’s wrong to spray the atmosphere with aerosols. But perhaps what I really wonder about is the future and how CO2 will come to be regarded outside of the current cultural definition.
http://www.crackle.com/c/Diffrent_Strokes_Minisode/Green_Hair_Minisode_/2479139
(just thinking aloud)
Icarus says:
August 1, 2010 at 2:20 am
John Finn: There is currently a net energy imbalance of ~0.5W/m². That’s where the warming ‘in the pipeline’ comes from. It will take at least a couple of decades for that to equilibrate (and by then atmospheric CO2 is likely to be considerably higher, of course).
I’m not sure there is any evidence of this imbalance. This is the problem Kevin Trenberth was confronted with. They either can’t find the missing energy or can’t find “the pipeline”. Can you shed any light on its whereabouts?
Icarus says:
August 1, 2010 at 3:01 am
Girma: Warming in the early 20th Century was largely due to increase in TSI,…
That was the original claim but, according to Leif Svalgaard (and a growing body of opinion), solar variability was much less than previously thought. You may have to look elsewhere for the “unprecedented” rise since ~1902. Of course you could admit -you don’t know but that would imply you didn’t know what caused the post-1970 warming either. Hmmm – tricky one!
Where would that leave the IPCC’s “Detection and Attribution” studies?
When I look at the 600,000 year graph of temperatures, two things stand out:
1. We are presently near the top of a warming trend, and the next major move is likely to be sharply downward;
2. We have had a relatively constant climate for the past 10,000, something that seems to be unprecedented in the last 600,000. What has caused this relative stability?
I wish that something as simple as adding CO2 to the atmosphere could stave off the next ice age, but I just don’t think that is the case.
What one believes in and where one ‘stands’ on the issues has so much to do with where one has been and what one has come to think about all the ‘stuff’ one has experienced. What is wrong with the Scientific Ethic? Is there such a thing? Is it really more appropriate to ask: what is wrong with the Social Ethic of the West? Is there such a thing? Where have we in the West been and what have we come to ‘think’ about all the ‘stuff’ we have experienced? What do we believe? Where do we ‘stand’? It is facinating to study and analyize other people –it gives so many of us something to thinks about and take our minds off ourselves.
Did Herr Mann have a lifetime of rather odd, air conditioned experiences and come to think and believe that the World was getting warmer? Did his high school math teachers let him slide on graphing? Did he ever learn the Social Ethic of the West, if there is one? Did he ever learn the Science Ethic, if there is one? Does it really matter what primary school teachers and college professors believe in? Why?
” Icarus says:
July 31, 2010 at 2:18 pm
‘Alexej Buergin said (July 31, 2010 at 11:46 am):
What does not make sense is the fact that Hansen observes the trend of 0.2°C per decade (for 1998 to 2009), whereas Jones or Spencer do not.’
Spencer’s MSU UAH shows 0.14C per decade over the full data set.
RSS is 0.16C per decade.
GISTEMP is 0.17C per decade.
HADCRUT3 is 0.16C per decade.”
O! say can you see that I have written something in brackets? It says there 1998 to 2010. Your “rebuttal” is about the full data set. So you are trying to fly too high.
As Phil Jones said: There was no significant warming during the last 15 years.
RW says:
August 1, 2010 at 3:15 am
Paul Birch – actually I’m almost certain the woodfortrees code doesn’t have a bug, at least not in its linear fitting routine. Mathematically, the average of a sine curve over one cycle is zero, but if you sum up the squares of the residuals from the lines you see on the woodfortrees plot, and from the origin, you’ll see that the lines with gradients are “better” fits. This just shows that linear least squares regression isn’t a good way to understand what a sine curve is doing.
_________________________________________________________________
On re-examination, I think you’re probably right. There do seem to be bugs in the plotting routine, and bugs (or, possibly, confusing “features”) in the way the form deals with the from and to parameters.
On the substance of what you say, I agree with you. I would go further and say that, for weather data, which is notoriously long-tailed, the least squares method (designed for gaussian errors) is inappropriate. It would be better to use a least error method (minimising the sum of the magnitude of the errors – remember to take the modulus before summing) . This ameliorates the danger of outliers erroneously dominating the results. Also, if you have reason to believe that the curve you are fitting is roughly periodic, it’s better to fit to a sine wave modulating a linear trend, so distinguishing the two effects. Although one can fit linear trend lines to cyclical phenomenon, the results aren’t a whole lot of use – except as propaganda!
Icarus, please show exactly where that pipeline enrgy is hiding. Be specific.
Icarus @ur momisugly August 1, 2010 at 2:17 am says:
Dave F: According to the IPCC here and here, natural forcing is currently around zero, and most of the current forcing comes from long-lived greenhouse gases, partially offset by aerosols.
There is one natural forcing, solar, in that graph. Is the only known climate forcing made by nature the Sun? I would like to see someone use that graph to explain the sudden drop into ice ages, or the temperatures during the carboniferous.
Alexej Buergin: Why do you prefer the 1998 – 2010 data rather than the whole data set?
Kim, I am not a scientist. I am hardly a maven, but thanks for the complement.
Steve Goddard, when I tried peak to peak, I was warned to not use extreme events (peaks or troughs), but instead use averages. The peaks and troughs are associated with short term anomalies like El Nino, La Nina, and volcanoes. It is best to not use them.
John M Reynolds
Larry said (August 1, 2010 at 6:16 am):
Why not? The palaeoclimate data suggests that millions of years ago the Earth was permanently ice-free with the sun being cooler than it is now, the difference being due to the higher atmospheric CO2 that prevailed then. If we achieve the same situation in the future that nature did in the past, wouldn’t it be reasonable to expect the same consequences? If not, why not?
RE:Alexej Buergin: (August 1, 2010 at 7:56 am) “O! say can you see that I have written something in brackets?”
I believe this system treats anything inside angle-brackets to be HTML tag coding, such as I used above to italicize the quoted text. Invalid or disallowed tags are ignored.
RE: Icarus: (August 1, 2010 at 2:13 am) “Spector: Are you arguing that the anthropogenic enhanced greenhouse effect is dwarfed by some other, natural forcing? If so, what, and by how much?
It is well known that there is a maximum stable adiabatic lapse rate linking surface temperatures to the temperature of the tropopause. Every time we have a convection event, nature’s natural air-conditioner has just kicked in. Depending on the situation, this can be violent or gentle.
So far, I have not seen anyone attempt to explain what happened to this natural temperature regulation system in the transition from the Medieval Warm Period to the Little Ice Age. Perhaps something forced the tropopause to a lower altitude and this drove colder temperatures to the surface or perhaps something caused a general cooling of the tropopause level and this was reflected to the surface via the required stable lapse rate.
It appears to me that much of the discussion so far has been focused on surface heating effects with little regard for the fact that surface cannot warm unless the tropopause warms likewise or the rises to a higher level. As the concentration of gaseous water (water ‘vapor’) in the atmosphere is about 100 times that of CO2, I would think that the behavior this gas would be the most important in determining the tropopause level. I have not found any historical year-by-year tropopause temperature and altitude data provided anywhere online.
Another important point is the fact, pointed out by Dr. Spencer, that the tropopause is the level where Earthshine absorbing and emitting (greenhouse) gases primarily serve to cool rather than heat the atmosphere.
@Icarus – you said
“palaeoclimate data suggests”
….. suggests ?
My bank manager “suggests” that I reduce my overdraft,
but in this economic climate, it ain’t gonna happen !!!!
what namby-pamby wishy-washy mindless moronicism is this ?
now a suggestion is all you need as “proof” and then spend
how many billions on the stength of such suggestions ????
Total Humbug !
stength = stench+strength
It doesn’t really matter whether the trend is “anthropogenic” or not–it matters what will happen to the Environment, right?
So why are all the posts about physics and clouds and not about polar bears “declining” in numbers from 5000 a few decades ago to 15 000 now, and other biological science.
Where are all the reports on what carbon dioxide does to grasses (growth up 65% with 10x CO(2) under ideal conditions) or trees (double under similar conditions).
How come we go to the “Tropical Rainforest” section of the Botanical Gardens for the most species Diversity, not to the Arctic Tundra section (which did not even exist)?
If any of this were really about science, we would see thousands of articles on plants, not hundreds, and tens of thousand of articles on terrestrial vertebrates. I found two articles so far in my search for “carbon dioxide levels growth” in the near-ambient range–both of which showed faster growth and earlier hatching in chicken eggs with elevated CO(2).
I found lots of articles with pure speculations about how “global warming” might harm some species, not actual studies of distributions.
Solving this suppression of science is not going to happen by begging the mainstream media by a handful of real scientists (they can’t tell the difference, anyway), nor by getting one good science minister somewhere, and certainly not funding by the oil companies–they pay the greens millions of dollars, giving the greenies strength to dog all their supplies efforts–which RAISES their profits by the Law of Supply and Demand.
But the mid-level coal and oil guys–the gas station owners, the geologists, the miners–those guys know the facts. We need to hook up with them to get the truth out to the general public and the politicians.