by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Michael Steketee, writing in The Australian in January 2011, echoed the BBC (whose journalists’ pension fund is heavily weighted towards “green” “investments”) and other climate-extremist vested interests in claiming that 2010 was the warmest year on record worldwide. Mr. Steketee’s short article makes two dozen questionable assertions, which either require heavy qualification or are downright false. His assertions will be printed in bold face: the truth will appear in Roman face.
1. BASED ON PRELIMINARY DATA TO NOVEMBER 30, SEA SURFACE TEMPERATURES AROUND AUSTRALIA WERE THE WARMEST ON RECORD LAST YEAR, AS WERE THOSE FOR THE PAST DECADE.
The record only began ten decades ago. As for sea temperatures, they are less significant for analyzing “global warming” than estimated total ocean heat content. A recent paper by Professors David Douglass and Robert Knox of Rochester University, New York, has established that – contrary to various climate-extremist assertions – there has been no net accumulation of “missing energy” in the form of heat in the oceans worldwide in the six years since ocean heat content was first reliably measured by the 3000 automated ARGO bathythermographs in 2003. This finding implies that the amount of warming we can expect from even quite a large increase in CO2 concentration is far less than the IPCC and other climate-extremist groups maintain.
2. THE WORLD METEOROLOGICAL ORGANISATION SAYS THE YEAR TO THE END OF OCTOBER WAS THE WARMEST SINCE INSTRUMENTAL CLIMATE RECORDS STARTED IN 1850 – 0.55 C° ABOVE THE 1961-90 AVERAGE OF 14 C°.
It is easy to cherry-pick periods of less than a calendar year and say they establish a new record. The cherry-picking of the first nine months of 2010 is particularly unacceptable, since that period was dominated by a substantial El Niño Southern Oscillation, a sudden alteration in the pattern of ocean currents worldwide that leads to warmer weather for several months all round the world. The last few months of the year, carefully excluded from Mr. Steketee’s statement, showed the beginnings of a La Niña event, which tends largely to reverse the effect of its preceding El Niño and make the world cooler. Indeed, the calendar year from January to December 2010, according to the reliable RSS and UAH satellite records, was not the warmest on record. Besides, what is important is how fast the world is warming. In fact, the rate of warming from 1975-2001, at 0.16 C° per decade, was the fastest rate to be sustained for more than a decade in the 160-year record, but exactly the same rate occurred from 1860-1880 and again from 1910-1940, when we could not possibly have had anything to do with it. Since late 2001 there has been virtually no “global warming” at all.
3. THE LAST DECADE ALSO WAS THE WARMEST ON RECORD.
After 300 years of global warming, during nearly all of which we could not on any view have influenced the climate to a measurable degree, it is scarcely surprising that recent decades will be warmer than earlier decades. That is what one would expect. If one has been climbing up a steep hill for a long time, one should not be surprised to find oneself higher up at the end of the climb than at the beginning.
4. THE WORLD IS NOT COOLER COMPARED TO 1998.
Actually, it is cooler. There was a remarkable spike in global temperatures in 1998, caused not by manmade “global warming” but by a Great El Niño event – an alteration in the pattern of ocean currents that begins in the equatorial eastern Pacific and spreads around the globe, lasting a few months. In the first nine months of 2010 there was another substantial El Niño, but even at its peak it did not match the Great El Niño of 1998.
5. THE TRENDS HAPPEN TO FOLLOW CLOSELY THE PREDICTIONS OVER THE PAST 40 YEARS OF TEMPERATURE RISES RESULTING FROM INCREASED GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS.
In the 40 years since 1970, global temperatures have risen at a linear rate equivalent to around 1.3 C°/century. CO2 concentration is rising in a straight line at just 2 ppmv/year at present and, even if it were to accelerate to an exponential rate of increase, the corresponding temperature increase would be expected to rise merely in a straight line. On any view, 1.3 C° of further “global warming” this century would be harmless. The IPCC is predicting 3.4 C°, but since the turn of the millennium on 1 January 2001 global temperature has risen (taking the average of the two satellite datasets) at a rate equivalent to just 0.6 C°/century, rather less than the warming rate of the entire 20th century. In these numbers, there is nothing whatever to worry about – except the tendency of some journalists to conceal them.
6. MOST SCIENTISTS AGREE THAT DOUBLING THE CARBON DIOXIDE IN THE ATMOSPHERE IS LIKELY TO LEAD TO WARMING OF 2-3 C°.
It is doubtful whether Mr. Steketee had consulted “most scientists”. Most scientists, not being climate scientists, rightly take no view on the climate debate. Most climate scientists have not studied the question of how much warming a given increase in CO2 concentration will cause: therefore, whatever opinion they may have is not much more valuable than that of a layman. Most of the few dozen scientists worldwide whom Prof. Richard Lindzen of MIT estimates have actually studied climate sensitivity to the point of publication in a learned journal have reached their results not by measurement and observation but by mere modeling. The models predict warming in the range mentioned by Mr. Steketee, but at numerous crucial points the models are known to reflect the climate inaccurately. In particular, the models predict that if and only if Man is the cause of warming, the tropical upper air, six miles above the ground, should warm up to thrice as fast as the surface, but this tropical upper-troposphere “hot-spot” has not been observed in 50 years of measurement by balloon-mounted radiosondes, sondes dropped from high-flying aircraft,
or satellites. Also, the models predict that every Celsius degree of warming should increase evaporation from the Earth’s surface by 1-3%, but the observed increase is more like 6%. From this it is simple to calculate that the IPCC has overestimated fourfold the amount of warming we can expect from adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. Take away that prodigious exaggeration, demonstrated repeatedly in scientific papers but never reported by the likes of Mr. Steketee, and the climate “crisis” vanishes.
7. WARMING OF 2-3 C° RISKS SIGNIFICANT ENVIRONMENTAL AND ECONOMIC DAMAGE.
Actually, the IPCC’s current thinking is that up to 2° of warming compared with the present would be harmless and even beneficial. Since far greater temperatures than this have been the rule on Earth for most of the past 600 million years, there is no sound scientific basis for the assumption that “significant environmental and economic damage” would result from so small an additional warming. However, significant economic damage is already resulting from the costly but pointlessly Canute-like attempts governments to try to make “global warming” go away.
8. GREENHOUSE GAS CONCENTRATIONS ROSE BY 27.5% FROM 1990-2009.
Since anthropogenic effects on the climate are net-zero except for CO2, we need only consider CO2 concentration, which was 353 parts per million by volume in 1990 and is 390 ppmv now, an increase not of 27.5% but of just 10.5%.
9. ARCTIC SEA ICE SHRANK TO ITS THIRD-LOWEST AREA IN THE SATELLITE RECORDS, OFFSET ONLY SLIGHTLY BY GROWTH IN ANTARCTIC SEA ICE.
In fact, the global sea-ice record shows virtually no change throughout the past 30 years, because the quite rapid loss of Arctic sea ice since the satellites were watching has been matched by a near-equally rapid gain of Antarctic sea ice. Indeed, when the summer extent of Arctic sea ice reached its lowest point in the 30-year record in mid-September 2007, just three weeks later the Antarctic sea extent reached a 30-year record high. The record low was widely reported; the corresponding record high was almost entirely unreported.
10. GLOBAL SNOW COVER IS FALLING, INFERENTIALLY BECAUSE OF MAN’S INFLUENCE.
In fact, a new record high for snow cover was set in the winter of 2008/2009, and there is some chance that a further record high will be set this year.
11. GLOBAL SEA LEVELS ARE RISING, INFERENTIALLY BECAUSE OF MAN’S INFLUENCE.
In fact, the rate of increase in sea level has not changed since satellites first began measuring it reliably in 1993. It is a dizzying 1 ft/century – not vastly greater than the 8 inches/century that had previously been inferred from tide-gauges. A recent paper has confirmed what marine biologists had long suspected: coral atolls simply grow to meet the light as the sea rises, and some of them have even gained land mass recently according to a
just-published scientific paper. Professor Niklas Mörner, who has been studying sea level for a third of a century, says it is physically impossible for sea level to rise at much above its present rate, and he expects 4-8 inches of sea level rise this century, if anything rather below the rate of increase in the last century. In the 11,400 years since the end of the last Ice Age, sea level has risen at an average of 4 feet/century, though it is now rising much more slowly because very nearly all of the land-based ice that is at low enough latitudes and altitudes to melt has long since gone.
12. MUNICH RE SAYS 2010 SAW THE SECOND-HIGHEST NUMBER OF NATURAL CATASTROPHES SINCE 1980, 90% OF THEM WEATHER-RELATED.
There are really only three categories of insurable natural catastrophe – meteorological, epidemiological, and seismic (volcanism, earthquakes, tsunamis, etc.). Except during years when major seismic disasters occur (such as the tsunami caused by an earthquake in 2000), or when major pandemics kill large numbers at an unexpected rate (and that did not happen in 2010), weather-related natural disasters always account for getting on for 90% of all such disasters. Because the climate is a mathematically-chaotic object, the incidence of weather-related disasters is highly variable from year to year, and there is no good reason to attribute the major events of 2010 to manmade “global warming”.
13. THE TEMPERATURE OF 46.4 C° IN MELBOURNE ONE SATURDAY IN 2010 WAS MORE THAN 3 C° ABOVE THE PREVIOUS HIGHEST FOR FEBRUARY.
February is the height of summer in Melbourne. Since the planet has been warming for 300 years, it is not surprising to find high-temperature records being broken from time to time. However, some very spectacular cold-weather records were also broken both in early 2010, when all 49 contiguous United States were covered in snow for the first time since satellite monitoring began 30 years ago, and in December, which was the coldest final month of the year in central England since records began 352 years ago. However, neither the hot-weather nor the cold-weather extremes of 2010 have much to do with manmade “global warming”; like the heatwave of 2003 in Europe that is said to have killed 35,000 people, they are known to have been caused by an unusual pattern of what meteorologists call “blocking highs” – comparatively rare areas of stable high pressure that dislodge the jet-streams from their usual path and lock weather systems in place for days or sometimes even months at a time. No link has been established between the frequency, intensity, or duration of blocking highs and manmade “global warming”.
14. IN MOSCOW, JULY 2010 WAS MORE THAN 2 C° ABOVE THE PREVIOUS TEMPERATURE RECORD, AND TEMPERATURE ON 29 JULY WAS 38.2 C°.
And the lowest-ever temperatures have been measured in several British and US locations in the past 12 months. Cherry-picking individual extreme-weather events that point in one direction only, when there are thousands of such events that also point in another direction, is neither sound science nor sound journalism.
15. THE HEATWAVE AND FOREST FIRES IN CENTRAL RUSSIA KILLED AT LEAST 56,000, MAKING IT THE WORST NATURAL DISASTER IN RUSSIA’S HISTORY.
More cherry-picking, and the notion that the forest fires were the worst natural disaster in Russia’s history is questionable. Intense cold – such as when General January and General February defeated Corporal Hitler at the gates of Stalingrad in 1941 – has many times killed hundreds of thousands in Russia.
16. IN PAKISTAN, 1769 WERE KILLED IN THE COUNTRY’S WORST-EVER FLOODS.
In fact, the floods were not the worst ever: merely the worst since 1980. The region has long been prone to flooding, and has flooded catastrophically at infrequent intervals when a blocking high combined with unusually strong runoff of snow from the Himalayas swells the numerous rivers of the region (Punjab, or panj-aub, means “five rivers”). The flooding was not caused by manmade “global warming” but by a blocking high.
17. THE HURRICANE SEASON IN THE NORTH ATLANTIC WAS ONE OF THE MOST SEVERE IN THE LAST CENTURY.
In fact, Dr. Ryan Maue of Florida State University, who maintains the Accumulated Cyclone Energy Index, a 24-month running sum of the frequency, intensity and duration of all tropical cyclones, typhoons and hurricanes round the world, says that the index is at its least value in the past 30 years, and close to its least value in 50 years. For 150 years the number of landfalling Atlantic hurricanes has shown no trend at all: this is a long and reliable record, because one does not require complex instrumentation to know that one has been struck by a hurricane.
18. EVEN CAUTIOUS SCIENTISTS TEND TO SAY WE CAN BLAME MANMADE CLIMATE CHANGE.
Cautious scientists say no such thing. Even the excitable and exaggeration-prone IPCC has repeatedly stated that individual extreme-weather events cannot be attributed to manmade “global warming”, and it would be particularly incautious of any scientist to blame the blocking highs that caused nearly all of the weather-related damage in 2010 on us when these are long-established, naturally-occurring phenomena.
19. CLIMATE CHANGE HAS CONTRIBUTED TO THE 20% DECLINE IN RAINFALL IN PARTS OF SOUTHERN AUSTRALIA OVER THE PAST 40 YEARS.
Climate change began 4,567 million years ago, on that Thursday when the Earth first formed (as Prof. Plimer puts it). The question is whether manmade climate change has contributed to the drought. Interestingly, there has been very heavy rainfall in previously drought-ridden parts of southern Australia in each of the last two years. Australia has a desert climate: it is no surprise, therefore, that periods of drought – sometimes prolonged – will occur. One of the longest records of drought and flood we have is the Nilometer, dating back 5000 years. Periods of drought far more savage than anything seen in modern times were frequent occurrences, and entire regions of Egypt became uninhabitable as a result. A 20% decline in rainfall in a single region, therefore, cannot be safely attributed to anything other than the natural variability of the climate.
20. THERE IS STRONG EVIDENCE THAT “GLOBAL WARMING” MADE THE BUSH-FIRES AROUND MELBOURNE WORSE.
There is no such evidence. As the IPCC has repeatedly said, ascribing individual, local extreme-weather events to “global warming” is impermissible.
21. THERE HAS BEEN A SUCCESSION OF EXTRAORDINARY HEATWAVES, WITH BIG JUMPS IN RECORD TEMPERATURES, STARTING IN EUROPE IN 2003 AND CONTINUING ALL AROUND THE WORLD, CULMINATING IN RUSSIA LAST YEAR. MORE THAN 17 COUNTRIES BROKE THEIR MAXIMUM TEMPERATURE RECORDS IN 2010, AND “YOU REALLY HAVE TO STRAIN CREDIBILITY TO SAY IT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH CLIMATE CHANGE.”
The heatwave in Europe in 2003 is known to have been caused by a blocking high similar to those which gave Russia its record high temperatures in 2010 and kept the monsoon fixed over Pakistan for long enough to cause catastrophic flooding. You really have to stretch credibility to say it has anything to do with manmade “global warming”. Though that heatwave may have killed 35,000 right across Europe, a three-day cold snap in Britain the previous year had killed 21,000 just in one country. The net effect of warmer worldwide weather, therefore, is to reduce deaths, not to increase them. That is why periods such as the Holocene Climate Optimum, when temperatures were 3 C° warmer than the present for most of the time between 6000 and 8000 years ago, are called “optima”: warmer weather is better for most Earth species – including Man – than colder weather.
22. FOR 20 YEARS MORE HOT-WEATHER THAN COLD-WEATHER TEMPERATURE RECORDS HAVE BEEN SET.
This is merely another way of saying that temperatures today are generally higher than they were 20 years ago. Since there has been some warming, more hot-weather than cold-weather records have been set. Not exactly surprising, and not exactly alarming either: for the mere fact of warming tells us nothing about the cause of the warming, particularly when the rate of warming in recent decades has been no greater than what has been seen in two previous quarter-century periods over the past 160 years.
23. EVEN IF GREENHOUSE-GAS EMISSIONS WERE TO STABILIZE AT LITTLE MORE THAN TODAY’S LEVELS, 2 C° OF FURTHER WARMING WILL OCCUR – FOUR TIMES THE INCREASE OVER THE PAST 30 YEARS.
This value of 2 C° – like too many others in this regrettably fictitious article – appears to have been plucked out of thin air. Let us do the math. We can ignore all Man’s influences on the climate except CO2 because, up to now, they have been self-canceling, as the table of “radiative forcings” in the IPCC’s most recent quinquennial Assessment Report shows. In 1750, before the Industrial Revolution, the concentration of CO2 was 278 ppmv. Now it is 390 ppmv. Taking the multi-model mean central estimate from Box 10.2 on p.798 of the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, plus or minus one standard deviation, we can derive the following simple equation for the total amount of warming to be expected in 1000 years’
time, when the climate has fully settled to equilibrium after the perturbation that our carbon emissions to date are thought to have caused:
ΔTequ = (4.7 ± 1) ln(390/278) F°
Let us generously go one standard deviation above the central estimate: thus, a high-end estimate of the total equilibrium warming the IPCC would expect as a result of our CO2 emissions since 1750 is 5.7 times the natural logarithm of the proportionate increase in CO2 concentration in the 260-year period: i.e. 1.9 C°. Even this total since 1750 to the present is below the 2 C° Mr. Setekee says is lurking in the pipeline.
Now, to pretend that manmade “global warming” is a problem as big as the IPCC says it is, and that there will be more warming in the pipeline even if we freeze our emissions at today’s levels, we have to pretend that all of the observed warming since 1750 – i.e. about 1.2 C° – was our fault. So we deduct that 1.2 C° from the 1.9 C° equilibrium warming. Just 0.7 C° of warmer weather is still to come, at equilibrium.
However, various climate extremists have published papers saying that equilibrium warming will not occur for 1000 years (or even, in a particularly fatuous recent paper, 3000 years). The IPCC itself only expects about 57% of equilibrium warming to occur by 2100: the rest will take so long to arrive that even our children’s children will not be around to notice, and the residual warming will happen so gradually that everyone and everything will have plenty of time to adjust.
Bottom line, then: by 2100 we can expect not 2 C° of further “global warming” as a result of our emissions so far, but 0.4 C° at most. The truth, as ever in the climate debate, is a great deal less thrilling than the lie.
24. ADAPTATION TO THE CONSEQUENCES OF “GLOBAL WARMING” WILL GET MORE DIFFICULT THE LONGER WE DELAY.
This assertion, too, has no scientific basis whatsoever. The costs of adaptation are chiefly an economic rather than a climatological question. Every serious economic analysis (I exclude the discredited propaganda exercise of Stern, with its absurd near-zero discount rate and its rate of “global warming” well in excess of the IPCC’s most extreme projections) has demonstrated that the costs of waiting and adapting to any adverse consequences that may arise from “global warming”, even if per impossibile that warming were to occur at the rapid rate imagined by the IPCC but not yet seen in the instrumental temperature record, would be orders of magnitude cheaper and more cost-effective than any Canute-like attempt to prevent any further “global warming” by taxing and regulating CO2 emissions. It follows that adaptation to the consequences of “global warming” will get easier and cheaper the longer we wait: for then we will only have to adapt to the probably few and minor consequences that will eventually occur, and not until they occur, and only where and to the extent that they occur.
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A PDF version of this document is available here
Simon from Sydney says:
January 9, 2011 at 4:23 am
“Good stuff, but seriously, why bother? Steketee is a left-wing GW catastrophist rant-meister who knows nothing about the subject. Anyone with half a brain who reads The Australian knows to skip over Steketee’s column like they know to skip Phillip Adams’ – both of them should go and work for The Age instead. A sledgehammer to crack a nut, I’m afraid, or a nut-case, perhaps. Direct your efforts at a more worthy target next time.”
Steketee or not, Monckton skewers MSM parrotts nicely.
It is too easy to get bogged down in detail and be fighting alligators while your aim is to drain the swamp.
Monckton missed a great opportunity to keep it short and simple and simply point out that Steketee is wrong about the increase in greenhouse gases because water vapor is greenhouse gas and in fact by far the most prevalent one and that the increase in total greenhouse gases is very small like 1 -2 % , not the 38% that Steketee claims.
Monckton’s criticisms will now get lost in the noise as shown on this thread.
20. THERE IS STRONG EVIDENCE THAT “GLOBAL WARMING” MADE THE BUSH-FIRES AROUND MELBOURNE WORSE.
They were made worse by environmetal laws stopping householders from clearing scrub/trees from the close proximity of their houses, this helped the spread not Global Warming.
———————————
What is more, despite the knowledge that this was so, there is, once again, a huge regrowth of brush,(wattles, eucalypts, etc.) in places like Marysville. I felt a sort of despair when I visited and saw this for myself a few weeks ago.
onion says:
January 9, 2011 at 12:33 pm
Not sure I followed that post. But to be clear, trying to split hairs is rather tedious. In 2) Monckton clearly says
”Since late 2001 there has been virtually no “global warming” at all.” Jones actually reckons its since 1995, but qualifies with the term ‘statistically significant’. I think you should accept the same qualification – basically, if there is any warming since the late 90’s its statistically insignificant but the fact remains that warming has been ongoing for at least 300 yrs, so on a decadal scale, a later decade would be expected to be warmer than a previous one. At least, that’s how I read Moncktons point(s), so I do not see any error.
David @ur momisugly 7:45 am:
Yes, I saw that too, and wondered at the term ‘unprecedented’. The floods are very widespread though. I feel so sorry for all those affected.
There is one factor that might tend to make people think things are becoming worse. It is that, thanks to modern communications, we all know so much more, so immediately, of what is happening in the world. News media love disasters, so they will certainly ensure that we hear about them.
P Solar @ur momisugly 8:23:
Did you mean ‘serf’ ?
Why should not a Lord of the Realm not have a valid opinion?
After reading this article & the comments ~ methinks even this coffee much needs ‘warming’…decidedly ‘local’, tho…’going global’ would be a tad too much.
I suggest this sport (while indeed necessary) this ‘verbal boxing’ (with Monckton indeed serving up KO’s to even seemingly adroit Aussie (chicken little) scientists) boils down ~ yet again ~ to a rather basic ‘them’ vs. ‘us’ scenario:
THEM: ‘WE ‘ARE’ GOD.’ which is merely: “We want to PLAY God” (said in the teensy tiny screeching tones of a few thousand Shirley McClains)
US: “NO… YOU’RE NOT.” (as hundreds of thousands casually look over shoulders toward the screeching) …because, “You’re all about HOT AIR and keeping folks: #1. AFRAID and #2. In the DARK” (said in a confident and polite ~ though, indeed – ‘thunderous’ – response.)
I thank Goodness for home schooling. I thank Goodness for the indomitable human spirit. I thank Goodness that ‘real men’ (while charmingly fallible, still) choose to boldly stand to inspire others & to refute propaganda – wherever it is found on this globe.
You all inspire. I thank all of you.
Now…rather than ‘nuke’ that coffee… I’ll put the kettle on the boil…grab my smokes… and lean back and enjoy life on the front veranda on yet another breezy & lovely South Australian morning
Cynthia Lauren
Us
I meant ‘Why should a Lord of the Realm not have a valid opinion?’….obviously it’s getting late and a bit of shut-eye is needed!
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/08/21/worlds-worst-heatwave-the-marble-bar-heatwave-1923-24/
Better than ‘it was cold at Stalingrad’, is snippets from history of previous conditions of raging peat fires in Russia, posted by marchesarosa August 22,2010 at 8:49 am
Another great Monckton debunk-the-debunker piece. I’d like to recommend something really ripe for debunking – if Chris Monckton / everyone / anyone here would do it.
Start with the picture here. Have fun.
Proceed to the whole pdf “guide” here.
Then add the final de-debunk to the OurClimate app.
Kev-in-UK says:
January 9, 2011 at 3:40 am
smacca says:
January 9, 2011 at 3:21 am
I respectfully suggest you read and digest both points more carefully.
Kev,
I am well aware of the point you make. But Monckton, as always, is just a little vague in his responses.
As usual with a Monkton piece, its well written and persuasive, but has simple errors that undermine its plausibility when examined at a more than superficial level.
This seems common with media articles aimed at a non-scientific readership, the writing may convince the layman, (and the choir) but is rejected by the better informed. The same problem with errors and simplifications to the point of inaccuracy are seen in the article he is attacking. And I agree with a number of his criticisms.
Two aspects tend to reduce Monkton’s credibility from my POV.
One- The inclusion of Nils-Axel Mörner is rather like quoting Behe or Demski in a discussion on evolution. It instantly reduces your credibility to a very low level. The rest of the statement on sea level seems to gloss over the fact that the rise of a foot in the last 100 years follows sea levels that have been essentially unchanged for several thousand years. Certainly the recent rate of sea level rise is far greater than any seen since human societies kept written records.
Two- The assertion that it is to be expected that the records show decadel warming because we have been warming from ‘Natural’ causes since the end of the ice age.
This is not accurate. The Holocene maximum – so far! – was shortly after the Eurasian and American ice-caps melted. Since then temperatures have been falling with some decadel to century variation – LIA and MWP for instance. But ascribing the recent warming to one of these ‘natural’ variations begs the question – what is the CAUSE of the ‘natural’ variation.
‘Natural’ variation is only ever description, NOT an explanation.
EVEN IF GREENHOUSE-GAS EMISSIONS WERE TO STABILIZE AT LITTLE MORE THAN TODAY’S LEVELS, 2 C° OF FURTHER WARMING WILL OCCUR – FOUR TIMES THE INCREASE OVER THE PAST 30 YEARS.
Wow, comparing an estimated rise over a century to the rise over 30 years, which already means a factor of 3.3 and getting worked up over an estimated factor of 4.
How to lie with statistics 101.
Smokey:
“Regarding the “fingerprint” of global warming – the tropospheric hot spot – sorry to disappoint you, but the “fingerprint” was the output of a model. It never existed in the real world; observation shows that it doesn’t exist. ”
The observations do show that the hotspot exists. It happens to be smaller than predicted. A good deal smaller. What one can conclude from this is as follows.
A. The method of comparing them is in error ( using a ensemble of models )
B. The models don’t represent the process accurately enough.
C. The observations have more error , bias than was thought.
D. Some combination of A,B, and C.
“Looking back, most of our Cape Verde systems over the past month have fortunately followed a similar track and recurved out into the open Atlantic and have not been significant threats to the United States. Why is this? well hurricanes are steered by the flow of air over a large depth of the troposphere. They typically move around large and deep areas of high pressure (ridge). Well typically during the peak of the hurricane season a well established ridge is present over the central Atlantic, known as the Bermuda-Azores High. Often tropical systems follow the southern extent of the ridge westward as this is the “path of least resistance”. If the ridge does not extent far enough westward the system will simply rotate around the ridge and move more northward. This has been the case this season, as a series of upper-level low pressure areas or troughs have passed through the flow and weaken or erode the western side of the Bermuda High, thus allowing tropical systems to follow the “easy” path northward around the ridge. In 2004 and 2005 this was a different story as the ridge extended far enough westward to simply push systems toward the continental United States. Although this is a very simplistic representation of the steering regimes of tropical cyclones it gives a general idea how Cape Verde storms often progress. Predicting this pattern prior to the season is quite difficult, thus estimating the risk to areas of coastline before the start of a hurricane season is a tremendous forecasting challenge. As far as activity for this season, despite the slow start it is well on its way to being a very active year. So far this season has featured 11 named storms, 5 hurricanes, and 4 major hurricanes (Danielle, Earl, Igor, and Julia), an average season has 10-6-2. So with about 45% of the season remaining it looks like the seasonal forecasts of an active year will verify.”
http://ttuhrt.blogspot.com/2010/09/2010-atlantic-hurricane-season-so-far.html
http://www.nnvl.noaa.gov/MediaDetail.php?MediaID=595&MediaTypeID=2
Re UK Excess Winter Deaths
Government data here
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id=574
and in more detail here (pdf)
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/pdfdir/deaths1110.pdf
or regional data from here
http://www.statistics.gov.uk/statbase/ssdataset.asp?vlnk=7089
Sean McHugh says:
January 9, 2011 at 4:53 am
smacca said:
Poor Chris sounds a bit confused here. Cooler one minute, warmer the next……………
I doubt anyone else got confused with Monckton’s citing then commenting. That resolution is not so with your poor rendering, which doesn’t distinguish between your own comments and quotes. Your remark, about his supposed confusion, was confusing itself – and a bit weird.
Sean,
as I stated earlier, Monckton is always a little vague. It gives him room to move if required.
In regard to El Nino, Monckton states,
“The last few months of the year, carefully excluded from Mr. Steketee’s statement, showed the beginnings of a La Niña event, “.
You should have read the BOM link a little more carefully. The last paragraph states.
“So Australia’s rainfall patterns had switched from being typical of El Niño well before the main ENSO indicators had shown strong signs of retreating to neutral values, although SSTs had been in slow decline since the end of December. A more emphatic sign was the 25.8 rise in the SOI from March to April 2010 which heralded the end of the event as far as broadscale indicators were concerned. ”
A positive SOI indicates La Nina, therefore, we entered a La Nina pattern in April 2010.
I prefer to go to the source of the data, instead of reading a newspaper report.
Why would this dude post in 2011 about things that have more current data? Hide the decline! It’s not the first time or last time, but when you think about it the only conclusion is they are cherry picking the data they want to push. Bastards!
the north qld floods are merely the biggest in 50 or nearly a hundred years. other flooding in the outback are the biggest in 70 years, but for Steketee it’s all “unprecedented”:
5 Jan: SMH: Kym Agius: Rocky may be spared from massive peak
The river reached 9.2 metres on Wednesday afternoon, short of the 9.4m peak predicted…
The 9.4m peak would have matched the 1954 flood but would have fallen short of the 10.11m reached in 1918…
http://news.smh.com.au/breaking-news-national/rocky-may-be-spared-from-massive-peak-20110105-19fbs.html
8 Jan: SMH, Australia: Erik Jensen: A way of life for the proud swampers
But the royal visit did not earn a mention in town – all people wanted to talk about was how Rockhampton withstood the 1954 flood, the second highest peak since the devastating flood of 1918….
http://www.smh.com.au/national/a-way-of-life-for-the-proud-swampers-20110107-19ito.html
same day, same newspaper company, Fairfax, even the same journo, yet note the difference from the above account:
8 Jan: Age, Australia: Andrew Rule and Erik Jensen: When the water came
Climate change or not, there is little argument this flood is bigger than those of 1954 and 1991 and rivals legendary floods of 1918 and 1893, part of local folk memory…
http://www.theage.com.au/national/when-the-water-came-20110107-19ix0.html
btw, the rain is lovely.
smacca says:
January 9, 2011 at 1:45 pm
Monckton is vague? Yes, perhaps he is less than detailed in some of his repostes but you have to accept that he is trying to rebutt in a similar vein to the accusation – i.e. without detailed science and references, etc. Horese for courses and all that! I mean, there would be very little point in describing reams of science (which he personally may well not understand in detail anyway) against a basically presented set of premises by some clearly non-scientific journalist type!
This kind of harks to the whole ‘fault’ of the AGW theme – which is that instead of it being correctly and honestly debated amongst scientists – it has been deliberately promoted in MSM for ‘effect’ – take your pick what that ‘effect’ is intended to be – but the end result is the same in that the general public are being spoon fed a half story. And that is frankly wrong (and I would say the same if it was simply anti-AGW stuff in the MSM).
“Wrong. Here’s how Accuweather sums up the 2010 season–as in the top quintile in terms of ACE since 1950: As November draws to a close, AccuWeather.com takes a look back at the intense and unusual 2010 Atlantic hurricane season. In what was one of the top five most active seasons on record, the United States was unusually spared most of the activity and severe conditions.”
Interesting that the ACE in the North Atlantic was specified here. I believe Monckton’s point was that world wide ACE was as low as ever observed in the satellite era. Isn’t this global warming, oops I mean climate change, oops I mean climate disruption GLOBAL in scope. Doesn’t selecting one of the few regions where there was an increase in ACE rather than a decrease represent cherry picking?
stevenmosher says:
January 9, 2011 at 2:12 pm
Steven – very valid points but there should be some suggestion of liklihood of where the ‘error’ lies.
A. The method of comparing them is in error ( using a ensemble of models )
– is kind of against observational based science because the theory (or model in this case) should at least reasonably match the observations otherwise the theory is usually assumed to be wrong – at least initially! (and after decades of AGW, you’d think that we were getting pretty good at ‘looking’ for the right data? – if not, then scrap it, because we have wasted an awful lot of time and money on it and still don’t have a clue!)
B. The models don’t represent the process accurately enough.
– this is surely a very high probability given the scale of the problem and the number and sizes of the various processes involved in ‘climate’
C. The observations have more error , bias than was thought.
– always difficult, but realistically, there is a low probability of major flaws – errors in measurements etc, will always be present but in the context of climate (i.e. the vast number of variables) any single set of measurements should not really be used as a defining characteristic.
D. Some combination of A,B, and C.
– of course, but I think if you asked anyone where the likely ‘errors’ are – they would mostly suggest that it will be the models and some (or many) of their assumptions that are wrong – not the ‘basic’ observations – I say, ‘basic’, because at this stage many observations are mostly basic!
Blocking (Omega) highs in the Canadian Prairies are a god send. They may not be everywhere in the world, but for us bring them on. BTW they seem to be declining lately, maybe they moved to Europe, Pakistan and Russia?
Monckton 1 vs Steketee 0
“Its like someone backed up a truck full of failure and dumped it all on Steketee’s nice green lawn…”
“onion says:
January 9, 2011 at 11:26 am
“3. THE LAST DECADE ALSO WAS THE WARMEST ON RECORD.”
To this he claims to be unsurprised. He expects that. Why then in point #4 does he suggest the world has cooled since 1998. That would actually surely cause him not to expect the last decade to be the warmest on record.”
Both statements are completely true according to the Hadcrut3 data. As an illustration, imagine a mountain climber going UP A STEEP mountain between 1990 and 1998. He reaches the top in 1998 and then VERY SLOWLY goes down during the next 12 years. If you take the average height from 2000 to 2009, it is higher than the average height from 1990 to 1999. But this does not negate the fact that the peak was reached in 1998.