From: The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 9 November 2010
It seems probable that 2010 will be in terms of global annual average temperature statistically identical to the annual temperatures of the past decade. Some eminent climatologists, such as Professor Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, suggest the global annual average temperatures haven’t changed for the past 15 years. We are reaching the point where the temperature standstill is becoming the major feature of the recent global warm period that began in 1980. In brief, the global temperature has remained constant for longer than it has increased. Perhaps this should not be surprising as in the seven decades since 1940 the world has gotten warmer in only two of them, and if one considers each decade individually the increase in temperature in each has barely been statistically significant. Only when the warming in the 1980’s is added to that of the first half of the 1990’s does the change exceed the noise in the system.
But what does this 10-15 year temperature standstill mean?
For some it means nothing. Ten to fifteen years is too short a time period to say anything about climate they would argue pointing out that at least thirty years is needed to see significant changes. They also point out that this decade is warmer than the 1990’s and the 1990’s were warmer than the 1980’s and that is a clear demonstration of global warming.
I know few who would argue that we don’t live in the warmest decade for probably a millennium and there are now few who would argue that the period of warming ended about a decade ago leaving us with a plateau of annual temperatures. However, there is information in the decadal structure of the present warming spell that can say something about what is happening.
All would agree that the global climate is changing constantly within certain limits due to the combination of anthropogenic and natural factors. The manmade factors are postulated to be responsible for climate change whereas the natural factors are taken to be agents of climate variability. The additional greenhouse effect caused by mankind’s emissions is a unique climatic forcing factor in that it operates in one direction only, that of increasing the temperature. If that is the case then something has been cooling the planet. We can say something about what is cooling the earth. The key point about the greenhouse effect in this context is that it depends upon one factor – the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere.
In the past decade the atmospheric CO2 levels have increased from 370 ppm to 390 ppm and using those figure the IPCC once estimated that the world should have warmed by at least 0.2 deg C. The fact that the world has not warmed at all means that all the other climatic factors have had a net effect of producing 0.2 deg C of cooling.
But there is more. The counterbalancing climatic factors have not only compensated for the postulated AGW at the end of the decade they have kept the global annual average temperature constant throughout the past 10-15 years when the AGW effect wants to increase it. The key point that makes this constancy fascinating is that for every value of CO2 there is an equilibrium temperature that is higher the greater the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. In other words, the higher CO2 concentration at the end of the decade exerts a stronger climate forcing than at the beginning of the decade.
Mirror Image
This makes what has happened in the past decade all the more remarkable. Because the greenhouse effect wants to force the temperature up which in the absence of a cooling influence is what would have happened, the fact that the temperature has remained constant indicates that whatever has been cooling the planet has had to increase in strength at precisely the same rate as the CO2 warming in order to keep the temperature a constant straight line.
This means that for 10-15 years the combined effect of all the Earth’s climate variability factors have increased in such a way as to exactly compensate for the rise in temperature that the increased CO2 would have given us. It is not a question of the earth’s decadal climate cycles adding up to produce a constant cooling effect, they must produce an increasing cooling effect that increases in strength at exactly the same rate as the enhanced greenhouse effect so as to keep the earth’s temperature constant.
Can it really be the case that over the past 15 years the sum total of all the earth’s natural climatic variables such as changes in solar irradiance, volcanoes, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, and the Arctic Oscillation, all of which can change from cooling to warming over decadal timescales, have behaved in such as way as to produce a cooling effect that is the mirror image of the warming postulated by the anthropogenic climate forcings from CO2 and other greenhouse gasses, from the changing water vapour, from tropospheric ozone, and from a clearing aerosol burden?
Am I alone in thinking that in the dynamically changing global climate this looks like a contrived, indeed scientifically suspicious, situation?
Is it a coincidence that the human and natural factors balance out this way? I am reminded of a line written by Agatha Christie: “Any coincidence”, said Miss Marple to herself, “is always worth noticing. You can throw it away later if it is only a coincidence.”
Feedback: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.org
“The manmade factors are postulated to be responsible for climate change whereas the natural factors are taken to be agents of climate variability.”
That is incredibly bad writing, like somebody talking while asleep. It needs to be edited, or translated, into English. If climate experts are actually talking that way, they need to be chained to luminous, beeping dictionaries.
What is the difference between being responsible for climate change and being an agent of climate variability?
Expanding on my post at 3:35pm: Let us look at NIWA which is referenced here;
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/11/25/uh-oh-raw-data-in-new-zealand-tells-a-different-story-than-the-official-one/
In that instance NIWA stated they were following “…international agreement on how to make temperature adjustments…” But let’s look at the practicalities of that;
It is only possible to move past temperatures when adjusting otherwise you will introduce a step change immediately before all following recorded (raw) temperatures. In the case of NIWA, these temperature adjustments were generally downward and therefore showed a rising trend. Temperatures after that will not be adjusted so whatever trend occurs after the adjustments is the real trend.
The raw data trend in NZ was only slightly positive but after adjustment became 0.92°C/100 years. So when was this adjustment made? As the graphs are plotting anomalies, there would have been no anomaly at that time, zero. The graph shows that to be late 1980’s. I wonder where Jim Salinger was working at that time.
To put this is the simplest terms possible, …
… the energy is escaping the Earth at exactly the same rate that the Sun’s energy is coming in – exactly that is.
In other words, there is no extra radiative forcing from GHGs or any net change in any other climate factor.
Very simple and no climate model should be able to argue with the climate on its very simplest terms.
Been playing around with the daily radiation budget numbers – this is how close the energy escaping is versus the energy coming in.
At about noon, the solar radiation is at a maximum – Earth average 960.0000 watts/m2/second.
The energy escaping/rising to the colder atmosphere at noon – 959.9983 Watts/m2/second. There is just an extremely small difference so that there is slight accumulation until the temperature peaks at about 3:00 pm or 4:00 pm.
After that, the energy escaping starts to exceed the energy coming in (again just a very small difference – unmeasureable really). After the Sun sets, about 0.001 Watts/m2/second is escaping to the colder upper atmosphere and to space. [Of course, the energy flowing out exceeds the back-radiation as the global warming set like to call it so the back-radiation does not really describe the real activity in the real atmosphere which makes it a red herring].
There is just a tiny differential throughout the day, in every second in the 24 hour period.
For the 15 year period in question, it is a ZERO difference.
Simple.
Is this negative feedback? Listen to Gaia’s Guardian my friend:
Glad to see someone thinking about climate history. I have analyzed the available data and made comparisons between satellite and ground-based measurements. They do not agree because huge sections of temperature curves overlapping satellite data have been cooked. As in falsified; and I show how it was done in my book. But here let me just outline what the real climate history looks like. First, the three primary sources of world temperature – NASA, NOAA, and Hadley Centre – all show a phony warming in the eighties and nineties that starts in the late seventies. I can tell that from the satellite record which begins in late 1979 and continues to the present. There was no warming in the eighties and nineties at all, just a temperature oscillation, up and down by half a degree for twenty years. But there was also real warming which started in 1998 when a super El Nino arrived. Global temperature rose by a third of a degree in four years, and then stopped. This warming was not carboniferous. A third of a degree is half of what has been allotted to the entire twentieth century. That is why the current decade is the warmest on record. There was no further warming but temperature stayed near the El Nino maximum point for six years, the twenty-first century high. That ended with a La Nina cooling in 2008 which inaugurated the present oscillating climate period. The temperature oscillations in the eighties and nineties were not random but consisted of El Nino peaks of which there were five in twenty years. The valleys in between were La Ninas and together they outlined the course of the ENSO oscillation that has a global climate influence. They are present in all temperature curves if some idiot did not wipe them out with a running average. There is a superstition among these “climate” scientists that a thirty year average has some magical properties. The only magic I see in a thirty year average is that it destroys data they should be interpreting. ENSO oscillations began when the Isthmus of Panama rose from the sea and they are expected to continue in the foreseeable future. They were interrupted in 1998 by a super El Nino which was not part of ENSO and which brought much warm water with it across the ocean. The result was that warming continued after the El Nino was over and produced the twenty-first century high I mentioned. The La Nina of 2008 was simply the restart of the ENSO oscillations that were suppressed in the aftermath of the super El Nino. Since then we have had the El Nino of 2010 which has peaked and the next La Nina is already on the way. I expect this to continue indefinitely if nothing unusual does not interrupt it. The IPCC dream of seeing a steady increase of temperature is simply out of the question. If you now look at the temperature curve for the last thirty years as a whole you will see two parallel sections. On the left is the oscillatory period whose center line lines up nicely with NOAA’s chart from the fifties to the seventies. That part goes back before they started their fakery. On the right is a horizontal section starting in 2001/2002 that can be extended to the center line of the new oscillating climate. And in between them is a transition region that starts with the super El Nino. This is just the basics and I highly recommend that you get the rest from my book.
Mr. Whitehouse,
Your assertion that there has been no warming in the past 10-15 years is just that – an assertion. I see no support for your assertion in the Wood for Trees plot of the 4 major indices of average global temperature over the past 15 years (see http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1995/offset:-.24/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1995/offset:-.15/plot/rss/from:1995/plot/uah/from:1995/plot/uah/from:1995/trend). This plot, using the UAH trend line, shows over a 0.2 degree change in the interval.
I see no support for your assertion in the NSIDC plot of September arctic ice extents for the past 15 years (see http://nsidc.org/images/arcticseaicenews/20101004_Figure3.png ). The sea ice levels at the September minimum show, if anything, an acceleration in ice loss, and the PIOMAS models show accelerating loss of ice volume. The European Cryosat will soon be making an independent measurement of the volume of the arctic sea ice. More good data!
I see no support for your assertion in the most recent update of the GRACE measurements of Greenland ice mass (see http://www.skepticalscience.com/Greenland-ice-mass-loss-after-the-2010-summer.html), and the GPS measurements of Greenland crustal uplift.
The great preponderance of measured data shows that global warming is continuing unabated. Your assertion is puzzling to say the least.
There are some quite silly comments here.
Jimmi –
the answer that Prof Jones said to the question as to if there had been no warming since 1995 in the BBC interview was ‘YES” – the qualifications Jones gives are actually irrelevant and express his wish the answer was not yes but providing no scientific or statistical evidence to change it. Nuanced or not the answer to the question id ‘YES”
Ben U –
I saw the point Dr Whitehouse is making – climate change he applies to man-made influences that act only one way. Climate variability he attributes to climate variations that can act both ways (warming and cooling). It’s like the difference between global warming and climate change was once used before those advocating GW changed it to CC because the world wasn’t actually warming at all in the past decade.
Mark S.
Read the GWPF article. Whitehouse goes into the debate about cherry picking and DOES NOT choose 1998 as you say.
Tim Williams.
On choosing small time periods is not the point. The temperature standstill since 1995 is now of longer duration since the 1980 – 95 warming spell so if any climatic event should be regarded through the prism of too short a time period to be of long-term climatic importance then the 80-95 warming ranks lower than the 95-2010 stasis.
Some of our correspondents do not seem to have appreciated the article’s subtlety, sometimes by not reading to the end.
It seems to me to be very much a case of ‘reductio ad absurdum’.
I was wondering, what has been the fate of Anthony and Pilke Sr.’s paper? Is it caught in the web of peer review?
The article is statistically speaking, nonsense, and doesn’t show a single graph of real data to support its premise.
The truth is that the last 15 years have a best fit linear trend of 0.12C/decade.
BBC: Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
Phil Jones: Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods.
BBC: How confident are you that warming has taken place and that humans are mainly responsible?
Phil Jones: I’m 100% confident that the climate has warmed. As to the second question, I would go along with IPCC Chapter 9 – there’s evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.
David Whitehouse is entitled to his opinion but not his own facts.
Peterc says:
November 9, 2010 at 7:40 pm
That is not the difference of meanings between “change” and “variability”. So he uses some sloppy, debased English, and you with complaints of silly criticism want to make a shibboleth of it. I’d say it’s best to avoid aberrant usage of everyday English addressed to the general reader, whether it’s a result of linguistic incompetence as in the present case or of obfuscatory intent as in the warmist case.
Mark S says:
November 9, 2010 at 2:03 pm
“It’s also worth noting that the anomaly for this year, if it holds, would be a record temperature in the NOAA dataset. Currently it stands at .65. And in the last few months we’ve set the record for the warmest 12 month span in modern history (since late 1800s).”
What you say may be true for the NOAA data set but it is not true for the Hadcrut3 data set. At the present time, to the end of September, the Hadcrut3 data set (http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3gl.txt) shows an anomaly of 0.511 to the end of September. By contrast, the 1998 value was 0.548. And judging by Dr. Spencer’s daily data, it appears that the October data will drop the 2010 anomaly to under 0.5, but we will have to wait and see for that. Now as for the warmest 12 month span, if you wish to play games and move the goal posts, I can do that as well. The 1998 figure of 0.548 was from January 1, 1998 to December 31, 1998. However if we were to take the 12 month period from September 1, 1997, to August 31, 1998, the anomaly rises to 0.577.
Ben u
don’t agree. David Whitehouse is clearly a more sophisticated writer than you perceive.
and Ben U – Shibboleth – really!!!!
Thanks for posting this Anthony. As other’s have pointed out, there’s some rather subtle irony in there which some appear to have missed.
The summary by Charles Higley also hits the nail on the head. Arno Arrak makes some good points also – particularly about the nonsense of smoothing out the 30 year mean.
p.s. Sun Spot – I assume that the earlier essay by David Whitehouse you read in 2008 but now can’t source is this one: http://www.newstatesman.com/scitech/2007/12/global-warming-temperature
It caused such a stooshie in the New Statesman that they felt it necessary to give a right of reply to Mark Lynas.
I have flagged this on the tips page but surprised that there’s still no link to it from WUWT – a great letter from Matt Ridley to David MacKay, the UK Government’s Chieg Scientific Advisor: http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/best-shot
Deceleration of global warming rate in the last two decades by a factor of 8.3 from 0.25 deg C per decade for the period from 1990 to 2000 to only 0.03 deg C per decade for the period from 2000 to 2010.
http://bit.ly/c1kf5I
Where is the man made global warming?
It just does not exist.
So, just because natural variability can hide a 0.2 degree rise, it can also hide a 2 degree rise? Interesting theory.
Well, we all here at WUWT knew or suspected that CO2 is not what caused warming in the first place, e.g.
http://letterdash.com/HenryP/more-carbon-dioxide-is-ok-ok
We also know that CO2 stimulates growth and greenery: it is afterall the “oxygen” for plants and trees. …. An interesting observation I made here in Africa is the cooling observed when you enter a forest. It is not just the cooling caused by the shades of the trees. You can actually feel the distinct coolness coming from the bottom up. You can clearly feel that greenery and forests actually absorb heat from its surroundings which is needed for growth.
I also saw here on WUWT recently that there is evidence of earth becoming greener. So in addition to the radiative cooling cooling caused by CO2 I now also found another part of the CO2 that causes cooling and not warming……
It is and it stays a truly amazing molecule without which life would not have been possible.
Here is the flat global mean temperature trend since 1998:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/to:2010/trend:12/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998/to:2010
The only warming you get out of burning fossil fuels is the stored energy that is released.
It came from the sun, and it gets radiated back into space.
The CO2 and O2 hanging around after the burning of fossil fuels represent zero. They were already here to begin with.
If Earth were to respond to forcings from releasing what was already stored here, so too would your house only need to be heated once per winter.
The Atmosphere leaks, man, it just plain leaks. Get over it.
Ah yes,so the trend is essentially flat from 1979 to 1997 according to Singer, and also flat from 1998 to now…..
Anyone see the snag in this type of analysis? Or is a discontinuity of 0.22C on the Jan 1st 1998 a physically believable occurrence?
God, British humour doesn’t travel well, does it? We’re born and bred on it, and can spot it very quickly. He’s gently yanking people’s chains, as Americans might put it, or as we might, pulling their legs, having them on, taking the Mickey or taking the piss. Out of whom? Warmists, not sceptics.
Well, lies again and again… The temperature is rithnow right where the IPCC models predicted. See for example
http://www.climat-evolution.com/article-prevision-de-la-variabilite-climatique-60540587.html
I also see it difficult to state that the temperature has not increased in the last 15 years
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1995/offset:-0.15/mean:12/plot/gistemp/from:1995/offset:-0.24/mean:12/plot/uah/from:1995/mean:12/plot/rss/from:1995/mean:12
What Jones meant to say is that trends done over short periods (such as 10 or 15 years) are not statistically significant.
This post is very pertinent to me because it one was of the key bits of evidence that shows the bias and lack of science by the global warmers.
As a scientist, knowing that the average time for variation of the climate is 10years, a 10 year “pause” (actual slight cooling) is extremely significant … not because it is statistically meaningful to say: “warming has stopped”, but because 10 years is enough to say that this is not a statistical blip.
Something has definitely happened between the 1970-2000 apparent upward trend and the apparent pause/cooling: that is a fact that is indisputable.
It is also indisputable that it has had a profound effect on the debate regarding manmade warming.
Now let’s see what wikipedia says about the 21st century pause/(cooling): ….
“”
That is how I could tell that Wikipedia was completely utterly misportraying the facts on global temperature … no that’s not strong enough, Wikipedia is spreading outright falsehoods. It has not warmed in the last decade, a fact that is extraordinary enough when warming is supposedly “the greatest problem facing mankind” that it deserves a whole article on Wikipedia to look at the whole range of issues from possible causes to the political impacts on the global warming debate.
But not a word** on Wikipedia.
**PS. I’ve not read Wikipedia in a while, but given the last exchange with the editors who “own” the warmists articles, I’ve no reason to believe they’d ever accept any mention of the 21st century pause.
Sorry, I posted before I’d read the article:
This article is utter crap and based on warmist nonsense and a misunderstanding of climatic variation
Climatic variation is a 1/f type noise. For those who don’t understand what it means: 1/f noise appears on a graph like a very drunk person with amnesia walking down the street … they walk as if they have a purpose … they walk forwards with vary little short term variation, but just as you think you know where they are heading they veer off and go somewhere else, and the longer you look the less clear it is where they are heading.
In contrast the typical noise on which this article is based is the “bee-bop” noise of some disco dancing roller skating youth who shows a great deal of variation in their momentary position but whose direction, speed and final destination are very very predictable.
What this article fails to understand is that if the young disco dancer were to change direction and cross the road, it would indicate a change in behaviour, whereas if the drunk had been walking along the sidewalk and then crossed the road, … there’s absolutely no change in behaviour! They’re still drunk, they’re still going in random directions and they are as likely to cross back over the road as head over the sea wall (not knowing the cliff was on the other side …. oh for the good old days of University).
The point people just can’t seem to get into their thick skulls, is that all the changes in that there is nothing at all inconsistent with all the changes in the last 150 years being entirely random variation (of 1/f noise).
If I knew how to post an image here, and I could find my diagrams I sent to the Science and Technology committee of the house of commons, I could make it clearer:
Climatic noise isn’t like “ordinary noise”! It is 1/f noise where it is incredibly difficult to separate “signal” from “noise” and treating climatic variation as if it were “ordinary” noise where the “signal” is what is left after simple filtering of the “noise” is why we’ve spent the last 10 years being fixated by climatic noise as if it were a signal”