Old, but untold. Trenberth treated us to a trick in his Halloween interview with Bill Sweet by changing the sign on his own most famous quote. As Trenberth now tells it:
One cherry-picked message saying we can’t account for current global warming and that this is a travesty went viral and got more than 100,000 hits online.
The email in question actually bemoaned how Trenberth couldn’t account for the LACK of global warming:
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.
Global warming… LACK of global warming. Hey, what’s the difference?
This is Trenberth’s answer to having his doubts exposed by the ClimateGate leak: just cover them back up. Pretend that the revealing email said the opposite of what it actually said and PROBLEM SOLVED. The guy’s a genius. No wonder he rose to the esteemed lead author position.
Of course he’s not fooling anyone who knows what he actually said. Add that lack of warming does have to do with the state of global warming, and most knowledgeable people will grant Trenberth the benefit of the doubt, but should they? Ignorant people will be fooled, and Trenberth has a habit of misleading the ignorant.
Here is Trenberth in a follow-up interview with Sweet (after Sweet was apparently inundated with comments and email calling Trenberth a liar and castigating Sweet for playing softball—yay WUWT):
Sweet: Can you say something about the widespread belief that solar activity somehow accounts for the temperature changes we’ve seen in recent decades?
Trenberth: That’s easily disproven. It’s nonsense. Since 1979 we’ve had spacecraft measuring total solar irradiance, and there’s been no change—if anything the sun has cooled slightly. There’s nothing in the record that indicates that the sun is responsible for any of the warming in this period.
Trenberth knows full well that “solar activity” refers primarily to solar-magnetic activity, which varies by an order of magnitude over the solar cycle, while total solar irradiance is almost invariant over the solar cycle (which is why it is called the solar constant). Does he really think he can disprove the theory that 20th century warming was caused by solar activity without looking at anything but the least active solar variable?
Again, the knowledgeable will not be fooled, but it is perfectly clear that Trenberth’s intent in this instance is to deceive the ignorant. He is also providing us with an example of what he was talking about in his original IEEE interview when he said:
Scientists almost always have to address problems in their data, exercising judgment about what might be defective and best disregarded.
That pesky data about solar-magnetic activity and earthly temperatures being highly correlated? (“The long term trends in solar data and in northern hemisphere temperatures have a correlation coefficient of about 0.7 – .8 at a 94% – 98% confidence level.”) “Best disregarded.”
And it is easily done. Just change out “solar activity” for the least active solar quantity and, voilà. As easy as replacing “lack of global warming” with “global warming.”
As J.R. Ewing put it, “once you give up integrity, the rest is easy.”
Any other “lumpies”? (Santa must have had anti-CO2 alarmists in mind when he chose coal for the bad. Like crosses for vampires.)
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Any other “lumpies”?
Whoever it is (we could never know the names, 😉 ) at GISS that is calling 2010 the hottest year ever. Do they (whoever they are) really think people will believe it?
All very interesting, indeed. But please people, let’s not forget the short term goal of our conversation, which is to debunk the phony “hypothesis,” that all of this is due to mankind’s “overproduction” of CO2. Let’s focus on demolishing that piece of leftist propaganda and get on with making this a better world.
Then we can consider more serious conversations about what is actually going on. But if we fail to get that one thing done, there is no possibility whatever that the “conversation” will ever become remotely rational. There has been no evidence presented here, or elsewhere, that increasing CO2 (which is a measurable datum) is in any way connected to the slow increase in world temperature which has been taking place since the start of the continuing recovery from the LIA.
Focus on facts. The current Winter is perfectly consistent with the 60-or so- year cycle that has charcterized Earth’s climate since records began to be collected in the mid-19th Century. Patience is, indeed, a virtue. Stay on the political meme and dislodge the ‘conventional’ wisdom by continuing to point out the divergence between the ‘models’ and empirical reality; that will win this argument over the long haul, which it surely will be.
Merry Whatever to the AGW folk, and Merry Christmas to everyone else. L
Notice the central plank of the latest CAGW perversion of reason and scientific method rests on ‘the continued melting of the Arctic sea ice’?
The latest contortion already being pimped in the MSM states that colder winters are caused by a melting Arctic and that once the Arctic sea ice has melted away then global warming will really take off. It took a while for the stooge MSM to get the latest cover story up and running but now they have the full script handed down we can see the strategy, of course if the sea ice doesnt want to play then all they have achieved is a temporary reprieve but even that will allow the next grant cheque to fall from the warming skies.
The obvious problem with this short term stop gap excuse will be the Arctic sea ice recovery, for this latest theory to be correct then sea ice levels will decline next summer to below 2007 levels. If sea ice levels exceed 2007/8/9/10 then the theory of melting sea ice causing freezing winters will be disproved, the cultists can hardly explain away both sea ice recovery and a return to cold snowy winters with global warming can they? Er, yes they probably will try.
A theory that is being shown to be false time after time and a scientific community using ever more fantastical excuses as to why the theory is still valid, you have to wonder at their determination to deny or at least postpone the final reckoning.
Record cold and record snow this winter? You just wait until the Arctic sea ice has melted away then global warming will really take off and if you believe that then there really is no hope at all is there?
Thanks for an informative post Alex.
Trenberth has been shown to be a stick in the mud when it comes to credibility, and this article is no exception.
thegoodlocust said
“I find it amusing when people expect it to correlate exactly to temperature since these same climate scientists have for years said that heat is would be trapped in the ocean causing a lag in the atmosphere temperature readings. Why couldn’t that lag have been from the increasing solar activity since the end of the LIA?”
Excellent point. I was wondering about that myself. If the rise in CO2 is responsible for the minor rise in tempature, ( about .8) then we should see a rise of tempature AFTER a rise in CO2. The atmosphere would take time to correspond to the rise in CO2, it wouldnt be an instant factor.
Take a fireplace, for example.
You light it, and does it go straight into a massive maxed-out flame? No, it slowly warms up until it reaches its desired heat.
The Earth is the same way. You wont see an instant rise of temp. right alongside CO2. Thats something the warmists dont want to admit. Also, like you said, there was a decrease as well in the 40’s to 70’s, which caused holy hell on agriculture and farming at the time which was related to colder then ususal winters and summers. This destroys the warmists own arguements.
And Richard Holle,
Very thorough post on magnetic field activity. A friend of mine recently proposed the idea that changes in the magentic field have caused the warming as well. This post helps understand the mechanisms of the solar system’s relation to the Earth. Thanks.
Roughly 92.8% (1,041.6 million short tons) of total U.S. coal consumption (1,121.7 million short tons) was used for electricity production at 22 major coal-fired power plants in 2008, the last year for which complete figures are available.
3/19/2010 7:18:44 AM | Larry D. Spears, Money Morning
The problem is coal. It is cheap. It is everywhere. $100 worth of coal buys you 20 million BTU. The thermal equivalent of 100 human slaves working for you for a month, give or take efficiency losses. 100 slaves for $100 a month. In Roman times only a king could afford such luxury. We can’t let this continue. Only the rich and powerful should enjoy such affluence. It is wasted on the average man. We need to ban coal right away and switch to electricity.
First, 1975-2005 warming has been caused by oceans. Second, there is still that ACRIM vs PMOD conflict.
“……As J.R. Ewing put it, “once you give up integrity, the rest is easy.””
An even better quote:-
(stolen from “Aurelian” on http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/)
“I believe it was the late, great Bob Monkhouse who joked: “If you can fake the sincerity, the rest is easy.”
(Quoted in “Gordon Brown”, by Tom Bower, p264)”
Seems to have been created with Trenberth in mind……
PhDs invariably go from a Bachelor of Science (honours) to a PhD. Where have they ever learned to read Science papers in general along this path? Their PhD has them focused on the subject of the PhD. Outside of this focus they are scientifically ignorant. A lovely American saying is “Professor in the class, ignorant on the bus” . This saying must have been conjured up with PhDs in mind. I have never yet met a PhD student who could hold a decent scientific conversation outside of their subject unless they were a rare renaissance man (or woman).
Trenberth: That’s easily disproven. It’s nonsense. Since 1979 we’ve had spacecraft measuring total solar irradiance, and there’s been no change—if anything the sun has cooled slightly. There’s nothing in the record that indicates that the sun is responsible for any of the warming in this period.
Of course, recent scientific measurements are putting a crimp in the “solar constant” theory, as noted in a previous article:
“SORCE’s Solar Spectral Surprise – UV declined, TSI constant”
The “solar constant” may not be changing, but they’re finding changes in the spectrum (especially in the UV range). THERE’S where the changes in warming may be coming from.
Alec Rawls says: “Bob: There are of course many other articles I could cite on the correlation between solar activity and climate. Two leading alarmists, Mike Lockwood and Claus Frohlich, began a 2007 paper by acknowledging that, ‘[t]here is considerable evidence for solar influence on the Earth’s pre-industrial climate,’ citing 17 papers to this effect. Take your pick.”
And the conclusion of Lockwood and Frohlich reads: “There are many interesting palaeoclimate studies that suggest that solar variability had an influence on pre-industrial climate. There are also some detection–attribution studies using global climate models that suggest there was a detectable influence of solar variability in the first half of the twentieth century and that the solar radiative forcing variations were amplified by some mechanism that is, as yet, unknown. However, these findings are not relevant to any debates about modern climate change. Our results show that the observed rapid rise in global mean temperatures seen after 1985 cannot be ascribed to solar variability, whichever of the mechanisms is invoked and no matter how much the solar variation is amplified.”
Again, your reference promotes Anthropogenic Global Warming. That’s two so far.
And your belief that solar variations drive centennial scale global temperatures also contradicts the findings of Leif Svalgaard.
You wrote, “12 years with no warming. Where is the inexplicable warming that these people are talking about? There isn’t any.”
What surface temperature dataset are you referring to? The linear trends of HADCRUT (0.106 deg C/ decade), GISTEMP LOTI (0.205 deg C/decade), and NCDC (0.126 deg C/decade) for the past 12 years are all positive:
http://i54.tinypic.com/2ecjb7b.jpg
And based on the solar-global temperature link you’re promoting, the trends in global surface temperatures for the past 12 years should be the opposite sign (-0.093 deg C/decade):
http://i55.tinypic.com/1zya7mg.jpg
You’ve cited papers that promote AGW, and your arguments are not supported by data, Alec.
Trenberth: “That’s easily disproven. It’s nonsense. Since 1979 we’ve had spacecraft measuring total solar irradiance, and there’s been no change—if anything the sun has cooled slightly. >>>>>There’s nothing in the record that indicates that the sun is responsible for any of the warming in this period.”<<<<>>length.<<<
————
4…….20 PERCENT INCREASE IN VOLCANIC ACTIVITY CAUSED BY SOLAR WIND MAGNETIC INTERACTION WITH EARTH'S MAGNETIC FIELD .
There's some to start with for Mr Trenberth and a few others!
Trenberth: “That’s easily disproven. It’s nonsense. Since 1979 we’ve had spacecraft measuring total solar irradiance, and there’s been no change—if anything the sun has cooled slightly. >>>>>There’s nothing in the record that indicates that the sun is responsible for any of the warming in this period.”<<<<>>length.<<<
————
4…….20 PERCENT INCREASE IN VOLCANIC ACTIVITY CAUSED BY SOLAR WIND MAGNETIC INTERACTION WITH EARTH'S MAGNETIC FIELD .
There's some to start with for Mr Trenberth and a few others!
>> Kwhar
>> The sun is the least active it’s been in decades and the dimmest in a
>> hundred years.
Sun least active in 100 years.
Britain coldest December in 100 years.
Hmmmmm….
.
What has appalled me, and continues to appall me is the total lack of intellectual curiosity in the journalistic professions. What we need is a few sciency journos that would act a bit more like Jeremy Paxman ….. a terrier with bone ….. why couldn’t this guy “Sweet” have just said ” … but actually Kenneth – didn’t the original e-mail say ‘we can’t account for the LACK of warming’ ” And that would be the end of it.
Its not difficult … it just requires them to be a bit curious and a bit skeptical.
onion:
Now consider those correlation figures again for pre-1975. Alarm bells should be ringing if solar activity correlates so well with temperature up until 1975 and then suddenly it diverges. What has increased a lot in the past few decades that could be the new driver? *cough* co2
So we have one more “divergence problem” in addition to the well known tree-ring problem. If sunspots and tree-rings mostly agree and both disagree with GATA, then there is a problem with surface temperature record. NASA told us recently about up to 9 degrees UHI effect, maybe this is the source of both “divergence problems.”
onion says:
December 24, 2010 at 6:25 pm
What has increased a lot in the past few decades that could be the new driver? *cough* co2
CO2 has a lower specific heat capacity than O2 and N2: http://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/spesific-heat-capacity-gases-d_159.html
It has been claimed that this means that it takes less energy to heat CO2 than it does O2 and N2, which, if these three substance were considered in isolation would be a valid point. But in the Earths atmosphere are are not in isolation.
In the atmosphere they are mixed. The true effect is that the gas with the lowest specific heat capacity, CO2 @ur momisugly 0.0385% is forced into thermal equilibrium by the gases O2 and N2 @ur momisugly 99%. The result being that in our environment (in the actual real testable world of reality) CO2 takes longer to warm and yet cools faster than both O2 and N2.
Therefore the effect of adding more CO2 to the atmosphere is the exact opposite of that claim by AGW fraudsters. More CO2 = Cooling.
I have demonstrated this fact with simple easily reproducible £3.50 experiments here: http://www.spinonthat.com/CO2_files/The_Diurnal_Bulge_and_the_Fallacies_of_the_Greenhouse_Effect.html
After more than 1 year I am still waiting for these experiments to be falsified by the AGW fraudsters. . . . . . still no takers!
Where are your genuine experiments demonstrating the heat trapping/temperature increasing properties of CO2 onion,
James Hansen, Phil Jones, Micheal Mann, Kevin Trenberth, Al Gore, Kieth Briffa, Gavin A. Schmidt, Andrew Watson, Rajendra K. Pachauri, David Viner, Vicky Pope, Lisa Jackson, Barrack Obama, Chris Hune, Ed Milliband, David Cameron, Prince Charles, David Meyer de Rothschild????
I am still waiting!
Merry Christmas to all genuine sceptics around the world.
Keep up the fight and beware of the ‘gate-keepers’.
@joel
Maybe that’s not the best graph to correlate to Joel:
http://cbullitt.wordpress.com/2010/09/25/all-your-agw-are-belong-to-us/
Do you have some info on the adjustments done to help clarify?
04 May 2010
New Scientist
Sorry, I nearly fell over while reading this post. New Scientist saying something not connected with CO2 and AGW !!
Either there is some mistake, or the worm has indeed turned. The para-military wing of Greenpeace saying something heretical about AGW?? Build a pyre immediately. Strap the editor to it!!
.
@Pamela Gray says:
December 24, 2010 at 5:48 pm
“..a constant sun is still king no matter what part is being measured..”
Plasma speed/temperature ?
@richard Holle says:
December 24, 2010 at 8:51 pm
179.05yrs. Its a useful look-back, but for good reasons conditions do not always repeat, eg 1814-1993.
‘Course there’s those pesky notes on the HADCRUT program about applying very artificial corrections for decline. Then there’s the horrible state the majority of the land based temperature monitoring stations have been allowed to get into.
Combine bad data collecting with bad computer programming and a bad ‘scientific’ process of skipping hypothesis and theorem straight to “fact”, well that gets you HADCRUT, GISTEMP, sampling of a couple of dozen Siberian trees with only ONE of them exhibiting a pattern of increasing growth… and all the rest of the quite easily debunked garbage, which is even easier to debunk with its proponents own words and program code and the rest of the CRU documents.
I’m a bit worried that people are jumping to conclusions that low sun spot numbers necessarily equal lower temperatures. This is a bit like climate scientists assuming rising C02 equals warming. We have two historical periods of low sun spot activity, the Daulton and Maunder minimums, but these are not the only times when global temperatures plunged – or can anyone prove otherwise? Might opaque skies be an under rated feature of the 17th century?
Re Will
December 25, 2010 at 3:18 am:
Those are interesting points Will but I am afraid I am no physics expert by a longshot and can’t really discuss details like that in any depth. I do though find it hard to reconcile why so many experts would think CO2 is a greenhouse gas if it was clear that it should have a cooling effect. I had thought radiation is the issue rather than heat capacity, not sure where heat capacity fits in.
Re Allan Kiik:
December 25, 2010 at 3:12 am
“So we have one more “divergence problem” in addition to the well known tree-ring problem. If sunspots and tree-rings mostly agree and both disagree with GATA, then there is a problem with surface temperature record. NASA told us recently about up to 9 degrees UHI effect, maybe this is the source of both “divergence problems.””
That’s a good connection you’ve made but if that was the case I would have thought the satellite record would have backed up the tree rings rather than the GATA. The satellite record isn’t affected by UHI so I wouldn’t expect the question to be entirely solvable with UHI.
Interesting paper to choose. So a reconstruction of past solar agrees with a reconstruction of past temperatures that uses questionable proxies and questionable statistical methodology. What the hell, let’s break out the Lean et al. 2000 TSI recon! It had nice peaks and valleys. It was wrong, but it looked good! 🙂
onion says:
December 24, 2010 at 6:25 pm
The paper cited concerning long term solar trends backs up what Trenberth said. It says:
“Note that the most recent warming, since around 1975, has not been considered in the above correlations. During these last 30 years the solar total irradiance, solar UV irradiance and cosmic ray flux has not shown any significant secular trend, so that at least this most recent warming episode must have another source.”
Now consider those correlation figures again for pre-1975. Alarm bells should be ringing if solar activity correlates so well with temperature up until 1975 and then suddenly it diverges. What has increased a lot in the past few decades that could be the new driver? *cough* co2
Cough, a ramp up of TSI from 1900 then a steady high from 1940.
Realclimate
Did the Sun hit record highs over the last few decades?
Alec Rawls says:
10 August 2005 at 2:04 AM
Nice post, but the conclusion: “… solar activity has not increased since the 1950s and is therefore unlikely to be able to explain the recent warming,” would seem to be a non-sequitur.
What matters is not the trend in solar activity but the LEVEL. It does not have to KEEP going up to be a possible cause of warming. It just has to be high, and it has been since the forties.
Presumably you are looking at the modest drop in temperature in the fifties and sixties as inconsistent with a simple solar warming explanation, but it doesn’t have to be simple. Earth has heat sinks that could lead to measured effects being delayed, and other forcings may also be involved. The best evidence for causality would seem to be the long term correlations between solar activity and temperature change. Despite the differences between the different proxies for solar activity, isn’t the overall picture one of long term correlation to temperature?
[Response: You are correct in that you would expect a lag, however, the response to an increase to a steady level of forcing is a lagged increase in temperature and then a asymptotic relaxation to the eventual equilibirum. This is not what is seen. In fact, the rate of temperature increase is rising, and that is only compatible with a continuing increase in the forcing, i.e. from greenhouse gases. – gavin]
===========================================================
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/reconstructedTSI.jpg
http://i446.photobucket.com/albums/qq187/bobclive/irradiance.gif
For me, the evidence above is clear, a ramp up of TSI from around 1900 and then a steady high from 1940 to 2000 leading to the slightly higher temperatures we see today, no room for CO2.
Sun spots or the lack of them are just the visual marker of an active or less active sun which correlate well with temperature trends here on earth. In fact it is hard to find a better correlation between two variables.
Gavins response is utter rubbish if the two graphs above are correct.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/08/did-the-sun-hit-record-highs-over-the-last-few-decades/