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The researchers tweak an out-of-date climate computer model and cherry-pick the outcome to get their desired result.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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Crosspatch – in addition to being much stronger than the 09/10 El Nino, the 97/98 El Nino was actually two months longer than the 09/10 El Nino (according to ONI, the standard metric for ENSO), so you are going to have to come up with another explanation for why the average global temperatures for the two ENSO events were so similar…
Let us all now watch and see just how quickly Tamino and others will change from vehemently denying that there has been any pause at all in the trend of global warming, to claiming that this pause in warming since 1998 was what has always been predicted by the climate models, and indeed is further proof (if further proof were needed) of how right the models have been all along.
Bystander says:
July 4, 2011 at 12:14 pm
“…‘It is good news that the authors recognise that there has been no global temperature increase since 1998.”
That is not what the paper says. The paper has a cut off date of 2008, it is not commenting on tempatures since then and given that it is 2011 the 2008 cut-off is out of date…”
So, upon actually READING the paper, they have this:
“…Data for global surface temperature indicate little warming between 1998 and 2008. Furthermore, global surface temperature declines 0.2 °C between 2005 and 2008. Although
temperature increases in 2009 and 2010, the lack of a clear increase in global surface temperature between 1998 and 2008, combined with rising concentrations of atmospheric CO2 and other greenhouse gases, prompts some popular commentators to doubt the existing understanding of the relationship among radiative forcing, internal variability, and global surface temperature…”
So they say that there has been LITTLE warming between 1998 and 2008, with COOLING between 2005 and 2008.
And, there is a mention of temp increases for 2009 and 2010.
To me, what’s more surprising is their adding NEWSPAPER articles as references, and using a statement from globalresearch.ca as a scientific reference.
Carter B (2007) High price for a load of hot air. Courier Mail, http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/features/high-price-for-load-of-hot-air/story-e6freowx-1111113766295.
Easterbrook D-J (2008) Global cooling is here—evidence for predicting global cooling
for the next three decades., http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=&aid=
10783.
Gronewald N, Marshall C (December 3, 2009) Rising partisanship sharply erodes US
public’s belief in global warming. NY Times, http://www.nytimes.com/cwire/2009/12/03/03climatewire-rising-partisanship-sharply-erodes-us-public-47381.
Note: The last article lists a ” Page Not Found” error.
Up until now, they’ve always said that the argument was best discussed in the “peer-reviewed” papers. So, with this, we now add the Courier Mail and the NY Times as peer-reviewed papers.
So now they can’t complain if we use those to make a point…
This is perhaps only slightly off topic, but recall the admission by Phil Jones that: “B – Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level.”
However at the end of 2010, the heating over 16 years was significant at the 95% significance level.
See: http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3gl.txt
For 2009, the anomaly was 0.443; for 2010, it was 0.479. For the first 5 months of 2011, it is 0.302. So if we do the following calculations: (0.479 x 12) + (0.302 x 5)/17 = 0.427. So the average for the 17 months from January 1, 2010 to May 31, 2011 is 0.427 which is LESS than the 2009 value of 0.443. Can we therefore be justified in claiming that at the 95% significance level, there has been no warming for 16 years and 5 months?
polistra said:
July 4, 2011 at 12:50 pm
> The CO2 system is wrong. Disproved. Falsified.
> This is an EX-science.
CAGW isn’t dead – it’s pining for the fjords!
“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”
Oh yes there is!
We don’t know of any other physical mechanism that can explain the stalling of GAT during the greatest ever increase of Anthropogenic Carbon Pollution (ACP) ever; ergo
it must be worse than we thought.
We knew already that Global Warming and Cooling is directly attributable to the activities of Man but now we have robust evidence that Global stasis is, also, a direct result of Fossil Fuel greed!
Yup, without a shadow of a doubt, it’s even worse(r) than we got funded to confirm.
🙁
IMHO what is happening is this: Whenever a sceptic comes up with damaging information or a damaging argument – such as the global temperature has not increased for 10 years – “they” get a paper published which can generate a contra headline – such as the non-increase in global temperature is compatible with AGW. The fact that the paper is total crap is completely immaterial. The result is that when a sceptic talks to an AGWer, the AGWer can bog him/her down with counter-arguments based on peer-reviewed papers. By the time the poor unfortunate sceptic has debunked just one of the many crap papers, everyone else will have stopped listening. Or they may even be persuaded that the AGWer is right, because there can’t possibly be that many crap papers.
We have to take our scientific arguments directly to the public. Fortunately our arguments are obviously worthy, and the public are turning away from AGW in droves. But unfortunately, we still have to prise our politicians away from their vision of bucketloads of money. That will be very difficult, and once they get their dirty little paws on some of that money, they can then afford to buy enough PR to keep it flowing in.
JMHO
They claim it was because of all the sulfur from China. Cooled everything off.
http://helenair.com/news/science/article_0e53447a-1279-526e-919d-ae20dac845a9.html
Rocky Road wrote:
Dang Chinese–if they’d just clean up their soot, their CO2 would let “A” global warming continue like the models said. Leave it to the Chinese to mess things up.
(Does this let those dang Chinese off the hook? Maybe Australia should start burning some of their own coal rather than ship billions of tons of it to China–and they should take the soot collectors off their furnaces, too!)
That’s OK, the Chinese are about to fail again by building 400 new nuclear plants over the next 30 years. So don’t worry, they can keep being the scapegoat again, and thus the Western Powers need to cut even harder to compensate.
Or at least that’s what they’ll claim!
Strap yourselves in ladies and gentlement as we re-enter the realitysphere. Things will be a bit bumpy for the next couple of years as bits of AGW theory hit the fuselage but, being essentially intellectual origami and not your actual eagles, turkeys or even chickens, there is no substantive risk.
At some stage there will be reputational innards and lots of feathers all over the place when the penny drops for the mainstream media and then the general public terminate their suspension of disbelief. It will not be pretty but the schadenfreude will be mesmerising. Forget Chappaquiddick, forget Weiner, forget Arnie and his Shrivergate, hell forget MIchael Jackson. This will be the real thing.
Meanwhile enjoy our normal programming.
It is encouraging that this was published in PNAS, even though the authors found it necessary to defend CAGW. If CAGW proves not to be the case, the admissions of error will be presented as improvements of existing models. This paper just provides a preview. I doubt that there will be widespread admissions of error.
If sulphur has such a large influence on global temperatures, surely the decline in sulphur between 1970 and 2000 has increased the amount of climate sensitivity that is ascribed to CO2?
That is, if this paper is correct (no opinion on whether or not it is), doesn’t that imply CO2 climate sensitivity is much lower than previously assumed by the warmists?
Hell will freeze before they will admit that the observed warming is natural.
This just sounds like blind faith to me, that the lack of warming (what a travesty!) doesn’t falsify the hypothesis.
I really wish these guys would publish in a journal with higher peer review standards.
William:
I would be nice if you would post some links to the papers you mentioned. I don’t have them handy at the moment.
What you indicated has as much or more validity as AGW.
Thank you.
Some of you people need to read the paper properly. What they are saying is that human activities can influence climate but it is not as simple as ‘increase Co2 levels and temps go up’. The paper is saying that there are many other moderating effects some natural and some human. The planet has the ability to moderate our influence. They also look at the counter balancing effect of sulfur emissions largely from coal burning and the effect of reducing pollution generally, both of which have had a cooling effect. So increases in sulfur levels and decreases in particulate pollution result in cooling. Since coal produces both CO2 and sulfur they effectively cancel each other to a large extent. They also look at the effect of one of the other main greenhouse gases – water vapour – and have found that reductions in its concentrations have a profound effect.
Summary – our planetary system is very complex and any simplistic explanation ie increases in CO2 mean increases in temps, is unscientific and can lead to false assumptions
Robert of Ottawa says:
July 4, 2011 at 4:01 pm
Global warming is caused by the decrease in piracy. Now that there is increased piracy off Somalia, naturally global warming has stopped.
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Nope. It’s the number of home runs hit in Major League Baseball, which peaked in 1999-2001, and have been slowly falling since.
So far in 2011, they are back down to 1993 levels………
Tenney Naumer says: “Uh, no, there was no El Nino in 2010. There was a very strong La Nina. That is why the fact that 2010 was at least as hot as 1998 was so extraordinary.”
Tenney, to expand on Anthony’s reply, it’s always best to consider both the development and decay years of an ENSO event, and when discussing the ENSO event, to list both years in which the event occurred, like the 2009/10 El Nino, and the 2010/11 La Nina. And you also have to consider that there’s typically at least a one season lag between the variation in equatorial Pacific SST anomalies and the global temperature response to it, meaning that if the El Nino and La Nina events were of similar strengths, the 2009/10 El Nino should have had a greater impact on the year 2010 than the 2010/11 La Nina did. But then you also have to consider the relative strengths of the El Nino and La Nina event. The 2009/10 El Nino peaked at an ONI SST anomaly of 1.8 deg C, but the 2010/11 La Nina peaked at a -1.4 deg C. That way you won’t look so foolish when you come here and spout off something that appears nonsensical to those who understand.
Also, your thought that the global surface temperature response to a La Nina event is the opposite of an El Nino eventis flawed. ENSO is a process. The variations in central equatorial Pacific SST anomalies that people use as a proxy for ENSO event strength and frequency only represent one of the effects of the ENSO process. Those variations do not represent the ENSO process. And anyone who understands that can see through your ENSO argument instantly.
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.
It looks like a double dip La Nina is forming which could make 2012 yet cooler.
Someone actually said there was no el Nino in 2010? Sheesh, what world is their head in?
I stand corrected. So, then, 2010 was an inbetween year and not an El Nino year?
btw, I live in a region of Brazil that has winters. Except this year, the temperatures now are the same as they were in December. I’ve only lived here for 14 years, but the old timers tell me they also have never seen the flowering trees in full bloom in the middle of our winter. Our trees that normally drop their leaves in the fall have not dropped them at all. My plumeria tree dropped its leaves but then put out leaves and flowers again going into winter and has kept them.
This has been a gradual process. I have a pomegranate tree, and during one mild winter about 4 years ago, it decided to try to fruit. Then the next year, it gave fruit twice. The next year, it tried three times. Now, it just doesn’t stop flowering and fruiting. This is completely abnormal for this region.
No one is complaining about the weather. This region is normally miserably damp, dark and drizzly during the months of June and July with lots of mold and people who catch pneumonia. Now it is dry and sunny and warm just like it has been all year so far.
No one knows what winter blooming will do to insects and birds that require certain blooming plants during the spring.
Denise /#comment-694292, H. Lamb was the director at CRU (pre-Tom Wiggley and Phil Jones) and was trying to establish a “natural variability” baseline in order to distinguish the “signal” of man-kinds influence. This work remains incomplete (unfortunately). Until that is done, there is no certainty that anything we are seeing is due to man. To come to any other conclusion is not solid science, IMHO.
“No one knows what winter blooming will do to insects and birds that require certain blooming plants during the spring.” Because they have never seen anything like this throughout their entire species history, and yet they remain. COME ON!!! Where are your critical thinking skills?
Prime Minister Gillard has assured us that by 2070 Sydney will have a tropical climate and the Opera House will be under water. It must be true then. Better get a move on climate – you’re running out of time and the PM has spoken.