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
According to the argo buoys, global warming stopped in 2003. As the NODC is reportedly not supplying further argo data, are we to assume this is because they are showing ocean heat content now falling? Also, Jones testified earlier this year that we have had no statistically-proven air temperature rise since 1998.
Also, the Sagan and Pollack two-stream approximation for cloud ‘reflectance’ adapted by Lacis and Hansen in 1974 and apparently used in the IPCC models is wrong. It’s because it assumes constant Mie asymmetry factor, g, and Mie derived this solely for a plane wave. The only time that boundary condition is met is at the first scatterimg with cloud droplets in line of sight with the sun. For diffuse scattering, the operational definition of g is 0.5 but one can argue it’s indeterminate because there is no wave
So, the ‘cloud albedo effect’ cooling correction in AR4 is imaginary and at the least one should scale back the IPCC’s predictions of climate sensitivity by a factor of about 3. Also, after experiment failed to prove the cooling effect, NASA publicised an entirely false physical explanation of it, ‘reflection from droplet surfaces’. Was this to keep the correction in AR4 thereby to maintain the myth of high climate sensitivity?
In reality, aerosol pollution must cause a decrease of albedo for thicker clouds, so it’s a heating effect, another form of AGW. It’s easy to prove theoretically. Consider a thick cloud with 15 micron droplets. The component of albedo from the first scattering is approximately [1-g], about 0.2. Reduce the droplet size to 5 microns and you reduce it to about 0.1. So, in the first case 80% of the sun’s energy enters the cloud to scatter diffusely and in the second case, it’s 90%. Thus, assuming no absorption and symmetrical diffuse radiation, albedo falls from 0.6 to 0.55, a decrease of about 8%.
AS the IPCC models have apparently always had this mathematical flaw they have always been wrong about CO2-AGW. Net CO2-AGW could be very low indeed. It seems Sagan was wrong about Venus and about the possibility of CAGW on Earth.
I am sure that their are negative feed backs in water vapour and clouds as has already been said but if co2 is to succeed in driving world temperatures up then it has to melt the ice at both polar ice caps,I know that the level of ice is probably determined by ocean and sun cycles and wind also,co2 is not really doing a very good job of that.Antarctica has grown in size recently and the arctic summer minimum has declined up to 2007 since then it has leveled off like world temperatures .
PS according to the above analysis, global warming stopped in 2003 because ‘cloud albedo effect’ heating, possibly the result of the ‘Asian Brown Cloud’ as globalisation drove Asian industrialisation, saturated.
And as Asian cleans up its aerosol pollution, if as I suspect net CO2-AGW is very low through a natural control system, global warming should reverse.
As the IPCC so disingenuously put it, “…warming of the climate system is unequivocal….”.
According to them (paraphrasing), human CO2 emissions have been the overwhelming climate driver since about 1950.
But the climate has been warming since about 1750.
Rob Vermeulen + Owen, what is it about the c. 1950 – 2010 warming (about 1.2°C/ century) that makes it so obviously mainly due to human CO2 forcing and therefore different from (for instance) the c. 1910 – c. 1940 warming (about 1.3°C/ century)….
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1900/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1950/to:2011/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1950/trend
…. which could not have been due to any significant human influence …..
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis/graphics/global_ff_1751_2006.jpg
….and will obviously result in such catastrophic consequences, that makes it imperative that human industrial progress since the enlightenment must be deconstructed?
PPS Since real [hemispherical] albedos of water clouds can be up to c. 0.7 and there’s an angular dependence you shouldn’t see for a Lambertian, diffuse emitter, there is additional direct backscattering. It’s probably because the wave entering the cloud is strongly non-plane, with peak, relative forward intensity after the first scattering of 10^7 for 15 micron droplets. This presumably causes g to be <<0.5 at the next scattering.
Since the peak intensity falls by a factor of c. 100 when droplet size falls to 5 microns, there may be a sharp decline of this component of albedo due to pollution. The geometrical concentration is because scattering on the way out of the cloud probably forms a cone of radiation. I believe some groups are modelling this.
And … you know what is the worst possible way to measure 1/f noise variation? (with large amounts of long term variation) To use a short-term proxy like trees whose growth shows the variation in rate of growth of an individual for a few decades … for which it provides a relatively clear signal, but which is subject to long-term environmental nulling of change as the rest of the forest around the tree adapts. So , over the lifetime of the tree, the general tree canopy will change so as to increase or reduce competition as the climate improves/worsens, so that even though one individual tree may do well/worse if there is a step change in climate, eventually the other trees will grow or die so as to provide the optimum competition.
So, whilst we are told tree ring proxies are a measure of the climatic effect on an individual tree, in the long run other trees will grow and/or other tree die until the optimum rate of competition/growth is achieved for the given climatic conditions.
Let’s give an example: if e.g. the climatic conditions allowed 1000tonnes of wood to grow per year in a forest of 10,000 trees, and then the climate changed to permit 1100tonnes, then obviously the trees in the forest would have additional growth with an average of 110kg instead of 100kg. However, that increased growth would also apply to younger trees who will be less likely to die out and more likely to mature, so that we would expect the density of tree to increase. If that does so until there are 11,000 trees, then that 110kg/tree will reduce back down to 100kg/tree even though the climatic conditions would favour more tree ring growth for an individual tree!
Of course, the “balance” of tree density and tree growth may not be the same in the new climate, and the long term proxy is a combination of effects on individual trees LESS the canopy nulling effect.
But in summary: tree are a good short term proxy for climate, but a pathetic even useless long term proxy because tree rings show the growth of one tree on its own, and climate affects the rate of growth of the whole canopy/forest .
For the flat earth societies kind consideration: Oops, watts up with it now?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1880/to:2010/mean:75
[NOTE: I went ahead and approved your post, however, if you are going to post here try dropping the derogatory characterizations / snark. I will NOT approve further such garbage. .. bl57~mod]
H2O….. It’s wonderful stuff…. 🙂
RE: Samoht says:
November 10, 2010 at 2:56 am
Try this Thomas:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1880/to:2010/isolate:75
If Willis has read this post, he must be quietly smiling to himself. I find his tropical thunderstorm ‘thermostat’ theory utterly fascinating.
Theodore says:
November 9, 2010 at 11:02 am
“Do you think it is merely a coincidence that the warming stopped at the same time that sceptics started looking at the data?”
It’s a Heisenberg Uncertainty in regard to climate data, also known as the “1-2-3-Red light!” effect.
Reply to Samoht: 02.56
Agreed, there has been substantial warming since the mid 1980s. However, there’s absolutely no proof it has been from CO2-AGW.
This is because the models are wrong in their calculation of the largest ‘correction’ to the observed ‘CO2 signal’, median 0.4 W/m^2 in Figure 2.4 of AR4. This is the ‘cloud albedo effect’ of -0.7 W/m^2. It’s entirely imaginary, no experimental or theoretical justification except for thin clouds with very low total albedo.
So, one must consider the much more likely explanation of AGW, heating from lower albedo of thick clouds as aerosol pollution reduces direct backscattering at the upper surface. The implication of course is that net CO2-AGW is controlled by strong negative feedback.
James Allison says:
If the skeptics stop looking at the data then warming would start again.
Ok, everybody stop looking now! It’s colder than (the cold 1961-1990) normal right now and has been so for weeks, I could use at least +5C, thank you!
RE: Alexander says:
November 10, 2010 at 3:32 am
Agreed, there has been substantial warming since the mid 1980s. However, there’s absolutely no proof it has been from CO2-AGW.
The mid-1980s is a strange reference point. There was a step increase prior to the 1998 El Nino event. An increase which would be / is hard to attribute to CO2-AGW. Since that time, of the step increase, I do not see any substantial warming. Another thing about the step-increase. Since that time the way the temperatures have acted is quite a bit different from any time during the last century. A long deep cooling headed our way?
David Whitehouse said;
————————
David Whitehouse,
I love Agatha Christie, but like her little Belgium sleuth more than the matronly English one.
Occam’s razor could be applied and maybe the answer is simply that the IPCC supported theory of GHG effect by CO2 isn’t correct and needs to be changed. The actual temp record prevails, not the CO2 GHG theory.
John
Everything you need to know about global warming in the UK but were afraid to ask:
Theodore says:
November 9, 2010 at 11:02 am
Absolutely not! It may be that the number of skeptics increased when people felt that reality was wasn’t keeping up with the claims about warming, but there have been skeptics looking at and questioning the data since the gloom and doom predictions first appeared. Some have paid a heavy cost from the scorn and ridicule directed their way for decades and must feel relief that there are more people to carry the standard.
Some off the top of my head are Joe D’Aleo, Bob Carter, John Daly, Richard Lindzen, Nils-Axel Morner, Fred Singer, and many others who I don’t know when they took a public stand that the warming of the 1970s and 1980s was not due just to CO2 increases.
For your penance, I think you should double my list and find the earliest to their skepticism.
Theodore says:
November 9, 2010 at 11:02 am
Do you think it is merely a coincidence that the warming stopped at the same time that sceptics started looking at the data?
You could also say that this started about the same time as computers and there models, although now people have had a look at these models and are starting to compare it with real world data they are shaking there heads and realising how worng they where.
Maybe:
1. The unbridled freedom of the AGW supporters to tack on 0.5 degrees here and there, discard the bad bits, harness UHI for the cause, erase MWP, etc with impunity has been curbed by Climategate and the resulting acceptance of sceptics in the debate. These are not the warmest decades – they are as warm as fiddlers were allowed to get away with.
2. If there was warming caused by anthros, why wouldn’t a “pause” be caused by the natural system’s reaction to a warming, whatever the cause. Your distrust of coincidence is justified. It is not a coincidence that when you are pushed into a swimming pool you also get wet at the same time.
3. We now have a new metric to judge the significance of a cooling trend. That is the growing hysterics, the violent tasteless videos and games being produced by the desperate CAGW head cases, the “discovery” and claiming as their own of UHI effects, the importance of clouds… stay tuned the list will continue to grow.
Jim T says:
November 10, 2010 at 5:34 am
Silly video.
What is this ‘anthromorphogenic (?) ‘ climate change Barnett talks so ill informedly about?
Chris Huhne, by the way, doesn’t really give a monkeys what your opinion on climate change is he’s moved on…
“Regardless of the public consensus on climate change, it is clear that relying on increasingly rare fossil fuels is not a long-term option. We cannot be exposed to the risk of resource conflict. Nor can we afford to remain at the mercy of volatile fossil fuel markets.
Not only are we vulnerable to interruptions in supply, we are also exposed to fluctuations in price. Oil or gas price shocks could reverberate throughout our fragile economy, hampering growth.
“A more sustainable supply of energy is not an expensive luxury. It is a critical component in our national and economic security.”
In the face of fiscal austerity, is it clear that greening our economy is the best way build a more balanced economy – and to secure more sustainable growth. With thousands of jobs in whole new industries, it is one of the brightest prospects not just for economic recovery, but for growth.”
http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/news/huhne_globe/huhne_globe.aspx
One scientific way of describing climate change is to test for trends. The upward trend in the earth’s temperature has continued since the turn of the century. Mr Whitehouse’s conclusions seem to be based on nonscientific, statistically challenged reasoning. He should spend more time at Tamino’s to catch up on his statistics.
@Andrew P. says:
November 9, 2010 at 10:00 pm
Yes Andrew that is the article that gave me pause to examine AGW for myself and not just believe. I read it in spring of 2008 even though it was published in 2007.
@Tim Williams says:
November 9, 2010 at 12:08 pm
Tim you forgot to add ‘since the end of the LIA in 1850’ , your retort should read – –
Oh yeah. Like all those other little standstills in the ,long term, increasing trend since the end of the LIA in 1850. Who would have thought we would have warming after cooling ?
BillD: ‘The upward trend in the earth’s temperature has continued since the turn of the century. Mr Whitehouse’s conclusions seem to be based on nonscientific, statistically challenged reasoning.’
Evidence about the failure properly to correct for the UHI effect is accumulating fast, e.g.: http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/29775
‘The Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) admits it was wrong about urban heating effects as a professional statistical analysis by Andrew Barnham exposes a BOM claim that “since 1960 the mean temperature in Australia has increased by about 0.7 °C”; the BOM assertion has no empirical scientific basis.’
I’ll be surprised if the World temperature rise will stay at 0.74 K. We could lose a third.
BillD,
Tamino?? You’re kidding, right? L. Ron Hubbard would be more scientific.
If you want a trend since “the turn of the century,” here’s one: click It nicely explains the recent cessation of warming.
The Earth continues to emerge from the LIA. It is still not as warm as it has been many, many times during the Holocene. During the Minoan, when there were no SUVs roaming the Earth, the planet was much warmer than today.
But go ahead and believe that this is not simply natural climate variability. Just so you understand that there’s no science in your conjecture.