The Kaufmann et al 2011 paper (Note: Michael L. Mann is a co-author, not the same as Michael E. Mann of hockey team fame) was embargoed until 8PM GMT (12PM PDT) today, and we have an advance copy thanks to Dr. Benny Peiser .
Here is the PDF file: pnas.201102467
The headline from the abstract:
Given the widely noted increase in the warming effects of rising greenhouse gas concentrations, it has been unclear why global surface temperatures did not rise between 1998 and 2008.
But in the conclusion:
The finding that the recent hiatus in warming is driven largely by natural factors does not contradict the hypothesis: “most of the observed increase in global average temperature since the mid 20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations (14).”
From the GWPF:
Comments by Dr David Whitehouse on the PNAS paper Kaufmann et al.
Reconciling anthropogenic climate change with observed temperature 1998 – 2008.
It is good news that the authors recognise that there has been no global temperature increase since 1998. Even after the standstill appears time and again in peer-reviewed scientific studies, many commentators still deny its reality. We live in the warmest decade since thermometer records began about 150 years ago, but it hasn’t gotten any warmer for at least a decade.
The researchers tweak an out-of-date climate computer model and cherry-pick the outcome to get their desired result. They do not use the latest data on the sun’s influence on the Earth, rendering their results of academic interest only.
They blame China’s increasing coal consumption that they say is adding particles into the atmosphere that reflect sunlight and therefore cool the planet. The effect of aerosols and their interplay with other agents of combustion is a major uncertainty in climate models. Moreover, despite China’s coal burning, data indicate that in the past decade the amount of aerosols in the atmosphere has not increased.
The researchers seek to explain the temperature standstill between 1998 and 2008. They say that the global temperature has increased since then.
This is misleading. There was an El Nino in 2010 (natural cyclic warming) but even that did not raise temperatures above 1998. In fact the standstill has continued to 2010 and 2011 appears to be on course to be a cooler year than any of the preceding ten years.
Tweaking computer models like this proves nothing. The real test is in the real world data. The temperature hasn’t increased for over a decade. For there to be any faith in the underlying scientific assumptions the world has to start warming soon, at an enhanced rate to compensate for it being held back for a decade.
Despite what the authors of this paper state after their tinkering with an out of date climate computer model, there is as yet no convincing explanation for the global temperature standstill of the past decade.
Either man-made and natural climatic effects have conspired to completely offset the warming that should have occurred due to greenhouse gasses in the past decade, or our estimation of the ‘climate sensitivity’ to greenhouse gasses is too large.
This is not an extreme or ‘sceptic’ position but represents part of the diversity of scientific opinion presented to the IPCC that is seldom reported.
Dr David Whitehouse
The Global Warming Policy Foundation
e-mail: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.org
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My take on it from the paper – “We don’t know what’s going on, but we aren’t going to admit that” – Anthony
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From Ryan Maue: Mainstream media coverage example headline:
Asia pollution blamed for halt in warming: study — from Reuters
blah blah blah — and the conclusion quotation: “Long term warming will continue unless emissions are reduced,” said Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring at Britain’s Met Office.
Well, hells bells.
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There’s 2 Michael Mann’s??? Nooooooooooo!
Bill Marsh says:
July 4, 2011 at 2:07 pm
Didn’t Dr Mann say that if temps were unchanged (or didn’t increase) for a period of 10 years then he would have to consider his theories of ‘Global Warming’ falsified. Now we have over 20 years of ‘stable’, not increasing temps, where is Dr Mann?
ISTR it was Phil Jones, and it was fifteen years (but I might be wrong). If I’m not wrong, then there’s only two to go until they extend the “it’s not warming if …” criteria by another fifteen years.
“The finding that the recent hiatus in warming is driven largely by natural factors…
Begs the question how much are the natural factors also contributing to any warming
This is inconvenient. Ought to generate some very creative spin.
Its Global Climate Hiatus! Unprecendented Stability! The CO2 is so thick that the climate has seized up and natural variation has ceased! A sure sign of coming Planetary Fever, and now it will be much worse than we thought because, as I saw in a comment once, ‘climate is like a spring’ and now it has all this pent up energy (the missing heat).
Alternatively, it also seems possible that, despite the planet-hating Americans, Chinese and Indians, the Kyoto Protocol has caused this stability and therefore we need more of it. The EU has shown the way!
In any case, we should all know by now that the absence of any evidence of warming is not evidence of the absence of warming.
i thought this AGW was supposed to build on itself with the ever increasing CO2 levels like an out of control freight train running down the tracks, so what is powerful enough to move things in the other direction?
Latest research into the effects of AGW has resulted in the doubling of Michael Mann’s. It’s worse than we thought!
John Baglien (at 12:31 pm above) points to the element of the argument of Kaufmann’s paper that is most telling of the corrupt condition of peer-review science in this field at this time, viz: the hypothesis of AGW, that is explicitly shown to be under strain from its inability to explain observations, is nonetheless taken as the null hypothesis.
It is as though scepticism about AGW claims is not a condition of doubt but a positive position that requires evidence/proof. Thus, it is not the AGW modelling that is in doubt, but rather the 100 years of science supporting the idea of natural climate change on an historical time scale.
Thus, the work of Bruckner, Huntington, De Geer, Brooks, Lamb and so many more since, the accumulated evidence of natural climatic variation and change, this is in doubt. Why? Why is natural climate change not the given and AGW the hypothesis requiring proof?
This is not due to any challenges to the sum of the evidence, because no one is challenging that. So what has cause peer-review science to turned the tables on natural climate change?
It has all the appearance of an engineered forgetting. And the success of this engineered forgetting is evidenced by the fact that most scientists reading this paper, most reviewers, would not even notice the absurdity at the very foundation of the argument of this paper.
The difference between the 1998 El Nino and the 2010 El Nino is that 2010, while it was not as strong as 1998, it lasted longer. So the impact was that the peak global temperature in 2010 never reached as high as 1998 but the average temperature for the year reached or just barely exceeded 1998 because of the broad rise and fall of the event.
You can see that here:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_May_20111.gif
Tenny Naumer, El Nino denier, gets the WUWT fact smack.
Well done Anthony!
I thought the vast majority of increase in heat was due to increase water vapor. Like, twice the amount of forcing as C02. It seems the decrease in water vapor in the stratosphere does contradict that assumption. Hasn’t that always been the big bugaboo?
In any event, the real answer is the models failed to predict current temperatures. They were wrong, end of story.
So, essentially, yet another paper that claim that the slight temperature rise of the 20th century might probably be due to anthropogenic emissions, yet fails to present any actual proof of it.
Here’s a quick and dirty, stab in the dark, conclusion of a study that might yet be made: Some tax funded climate scientist may be insane, without actually knowing they have gone completely bonkers on taxpayers time. 0_o
This paper by Kaufman et. al. is a weak attempt to postpone recognition that the theory that CO2 increases can cause harmful warming has failed. Warmists have argued that although the sun may have driven climate in the past its effects are now completely over-ridden by changes in CO2 levels. Now we are to believe that the almighty CO2 caused warming has been stopped dead in its tracks by the change in Chinese sulfur emissions over the past ten years?! This paper should not have been published without its considering the more obvious explanations for the end of the warming trend despite continued CO2 increases (i.e. CO2 does not significantly drive climate, it is due to the end of the solar “modern maximum” and the present downturn in solar activity, etc.).
Happy Independence Day!
And keep warm.
Temperatures (T) didnt rise between 1998-2008 because the PDO shifted back to negative, and the lag effects from the active sun 1750-1950 finally waned out (same as late summer warmth lag, late daily warmth after noon). The weak effect from C02, observable in lack of warming during 1945-1975 within a negative PDO, is still weak from 1998-2008.
Future predictions. T wont rise much, or more likely be flat to negative in next 10-20 years, with negative PDO and weak sun. T rise from doubling c02 is about 0.1-0.5 degrees C, so no need for alarm. Warmists will bemoan lack of T rise in next 20 years until they finally figure out that climate sensitivity to c02 is weak, but strong with the sun. Wwarmign in late 20th century was mainly due to lag effects from active sun 1750-1950, not c02.
regards,
Notice the article mentions “Surface Temperatures”, which are largely the result of solar spectrum energy reaching the earth surface; about 73% of which is ocean, and getting stored there to ultimately register as a surface temperature. And as Dr Leif constantly reminds us, not much has happened to TSI, so we shouldn’t expect much surface temperature change.
GHGs on the other hand mostly affect atmospheric temperatures; and the LWIR re-emission from the atmosphere, is not even detectable as heat at the surface, and mostly results in increased amount of solar blocking H2O in the atmosphere, from enhanced surface evaporation.
It would have been a lot worse than we thought, had not natural effects been a lot worse than we thought, so we are still right!
Ground truth is a bitch; those pesky data are always capable of disrupting the most elegant hypothesis.
Derek Sorensen says:
July 4, 2011 at 2:53 pm
ISTR it was Phil Jones, and it was fifteen years (but I might be wrong). If I’m not wrong, then there’s only two to go until they extend the “it’s not warming if …” criteria by another fifteen years.
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According to HADCRUT3, we are now over 14 years with no warming:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1997.5/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1997.5/trend
Seems pretty straight forward.
if you read here long enough you will hear people say.. Its the sun! C02 isnt everything!
well, there is some truth in that.
The temperature we see is the result of MANY forcings. c02 represents less than 50% of all forcings.
You will also hear people say what about the negative forcings?
they are important too.
You will hear people say ..what about sunshine!.. well yes, things that block sunshine are important.
Since 1998 the authors sum up the pluses and the minuses.
1. Sun: suns gone quiet. We all agree the sun matters. So do the scientists! and they put a number on it.
2. Air pollution! yes, particles that block the sun are important! so they look at sulfur.
3. Natural variability! yes, they look at that too.
When it’s all said and done, the net forcing over this short term has been negative.
C02 isnt everything. over the short term, the short termed additional positve forcing from C02
(.13w) can be Offset by all those other factors that people have pointed at.
It didnt warm because C02 is NOT the only forcing. In fact its less than 50% of all forcings.
It can be overwhelmed in the short term by other forcings.. like a quiet sun, or like more sulfur in the air. Those observations confirm the theory. they confirm the theory because the theory says the final temp is a function of ALL the forcings.
I can tell this is not a scientific paper by the second paragraph. It says: “Recent analysis address the source of skepticism…”, the skepticism being caused by no warming the last decade. Their stated goal is to silence the AGW critics, not objectively investigate climate variability. Not science at all.
So then they take their simulation and tweak various forcings until they get the result they want.
What is particularly amusing is that, based on their conclusions, we have solved the AGW problem! Temperature goes down, just pump out more CO2. Temperature goes up, just pump out more sulfur emissions. One offsets the other. There’s no need to shift to non CO2 producing energy after all. In fact, it would be a bad thing to “stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations” as long as China is pumping out all these cooling pollutants.
Global warming is caused by the decrease in piracy. Now that there is increased piracy off Somalia, naturally global warming has stopped.
Basically what this says to me is:
We acknowledge that temperatures haven’t risen to the extent we had hypothesized they would despite our best efforts at adjusting the record. So now we must rationalize ways in which the impact of human CO2 emissions might be “hidden” by other things in order to preserve our hypothesis and the policy decisions that depend on it.
I strongly suspect that the PDO did not shift to negative until 2007/2008 timeframe.
It will take another 5 years or more to get a good look at where the cycle plunged negative.
The PDO is supposed to be a 30 to 35 year cycle, and 1978-1998 is too short to fit that bill, so there is a problem: Either the definition of 30 to 35 years is wrong, or it’s too early to tell.
Look at the PDO graphs and see what I mean.
“….or our estimation of the ‘climate sensitivity’ to greenhouse gasses is too large.”
I estimate with 95% confidence level that the CAGW proponents would not have made the climate sensitivity too small. So with an even higher confidence level, the climate sensitivity figure used by alarmists is unquestionably too high. This is at least slightly better science than we usually see from the faithful.
On another note. I see that Channel 4 in the AMSU satellite which senses temps in the atmosphere failed in 2008. My paranoia resurfaces when I see this kind of thing, eventhough I realize hardware wears out. Why do these things happen when things point to a strong cooling trend. We have seen a similar hiatus in sea level measurments when sea level rise began decelerating strongly. We had to wait 6 months while it was rationalized a tweaked into a “virtual sea level” measurement with an annual factor added on. We have seen this when 1998 did not surpass 1934 for highest 20th Century temp. A series of “recalculations” were made to depress 1934’s record to make 1998 the highest (there were even emails from Hansen’s assistant detailing the devious work he had tried to do to achieve this. We saw this in 2010 when they declared a new record using half the year – the second half cooled and ruined it. Now we are seeing that this cooling was because of a broken channel in AMSU. This paper is preparing us for the “repaired” record from 2008 that will show that (as they assert in the paper) that since 2008 it has resumed warming. We have to stop letting Colonel Sanders take care of our chickens for us.
Let’s go back again.
And water wise………………..
The models have a problem yet the science is settled. What a bloody mess! Goodnight all. ;o)