Guest post by James Padgett
Many of you are aware that the concept of continental drift, proposed by Alfred Wegener, was widely ridiculed by his contemporaries. This reaction was in spite of the very clear visual evidence that the continents could be fit together like a giant puzzle.
I think this is where we are in climate science today. There is an obvious answer that many experts cannot see even though a young child would understand when presented with the evidence.
Our current crop of experts cannot see simple solutions. Their science is esoteric and alchemical. It is so complex, so easy to misunderstand, that, like the ancient Greek mystery religions, there is a public dogma and then there are the internal mysteries only the initiated are given access to.
And then there are the heretics who challenge their declared truths.
That isn’t to say that many climatologists aren’t smart. On the contrary, they can be very smart, but that doesn’t preclude them from being very wrong on both collective and individual levels.
One of the most brilliant men alive in the last century, John von Neumann, believed that by the 1960’s our knowledge of atmospheric fluid dynamics would be so great, and our computer simulations so precise, that we’d be able to control the weather by making small changes to the system.
It is true that the climate models used today do a very good job with fluid dynamics, but despite that understanding we can neither predict nor control the weather (and the climate) to the degree he imagined.
An incredible genius, he made a mistake. He didn’t understand the fundamental chaos that made his vision impossible.
In regard to the climate, I hope my simple vision is closer to reality than the excuse-filled spaghetti hypothesis that currently brandishes the self-given title of “settled science.”
My proposal, that climate is primarily driven by solar and oceanic influences, is probably believed by more than a few skeptics, but hopefully I can make a compelling case for it that both small children and climate scientists can understand. To that end I’ll take a quick look at the temperature record from 1900 until the present. I will explain the case for the oceanic/solar model and articulate the excuses given by the anthropogenic camp for the decades that inconveniently do not line up with the hypothesis of carbon dioxide being the primary driver of climate change.
1900-1944:
This period is largely warming. What could possibly be the cause of that?
The sun seems to be the obvious answer. It is so obvious in fact that even most mainstream climatologists admit its influence in these years. Some also say there is an anthropogenic effect in there, somewhere, and they could be right, but it certainly isn’t obvious.
And while the Atlantic is in its cool phase over the earlier part of this period, the largest ocean, the Pacific, is warm,especially in the last couple decades, but when it turns into its cool phase….
1945-1976:
We get 30 years of cooling in the surface station record.
According to proponents of the anthropogenic model, the unprecedented increase in carbon dioxide following World War II was not only masked, but overpowered by sulfate emissions. That is an interesting excuse, but this cooling period exactly matches the cool phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO).
So much so that when it goes into its warm phase in…
1977-1998:
We get 20 more years of warming:
which is kicked up a notch towards the end as the Atlantic goes into its warm phase:
That leaves us with the final period from…
1999-Present:
After the super El Nino of 1998 temperatures have largely flat-lined and perhaps even dropped slightly. Both the Atlantic and Pacific are in their warm phases and the sun remains at the “high” levels following the recovery from the Little Ice Age, but the Pacific seems to be wobbling cooler and cooler as it shifts back into its cool phase.
True we are the “warmest decade on record,” but we are also the only decade on record with both oceans in their warm phases in a time of relatively high solar activity. The only comparable time would be during and around the 1930’s and early 1940’s, around the time of the Dust Bowl, and the sun wasn’t as active back then – and that’s assuming the records are an accurate reflection of global temperatures back then.
So how do climate scientists explain this lack of warming for over a decade? Ah, well they blame the sulfates again – a classic excuse, while others say that the heat has teleported deep into the oceans. I say teleported because there is no record of the journey of that missing heat into those unmeasured depths from the well-measured depths it would normally have had to travel through in order to get to that abyss.
Of course, others say this time period is simply not statistically significant, but the only period of heating we can’t directly trace to the sun, the time from 1977-1998, a mere twenty year period, is certainly statistically significant in some minds.
To that I only have one question for them:
Are you smarter than a 5th grader?
Cheers,
James Padgett
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You are way off in the satellite era. I will describe it based on my book “What Warming?” The eighties and the nineties were a period where nothing much happened but alternating El Nino and La Nina phases of ENSO. The mean temperature stayed the same and there was no warming. But you connect an imaginary warming of that period with the 21st century across the 1998 super El Nino. This simply should not be done. The super El Nino did not belong to the ENSO system but brought its own large supply of warm water across the ocean. This raised the global temperature of the beginning of the 21st century by a third of a degree. It is this warming and not any greenhouse effect that was responsible for the very warm first decade of our century. There was no additional warming after that and according to the BEST temperature data there has not been any warming at all since our century began. This means that this one short spurt of warming was in effect a step warming, initiated by the 1998 super El Nino. Since there was no warming before or after it this gives us two horizontal, linear curve segments that flank it but do not meet. As to the early part of the century, my graph from the Met Office shows cooling from 1880 to 1910 followed by warming from 1910 to the beginning of World War II. From the end of the war till the 1998 super El Nino shows up there is essentially no warming while carbon dioxide keeps relentlessly increasing. Bjørn Lomborg assigned this early twentieth century warming to solar influence and I think he is right. But the fifty year stretch of no warming after the end of the war cannot be explained by the greenhouse effect. Lame attempts have been made to claim that warming was covered up by aerosols but the southern hemisphere cooled more than the northern hemisphere did even though the aerosols originated in the northern hemisphere. We thus have two stretches of twentieth century warming with a fifty year no-warming stretch in between. Since carbon dioxide was steadily increasing no way can this temperature history be explained by carbon dioxide greenhouse effect.
Volker Doormann says:
November 5, 2011 at 3:16 pm
My plot shows a blue curve what IS the sum of solar tidal geometric functions of six planets
So produce seven plots, one for each of the six planet and one for the sum.
R Gates,
The power of models is their ability to indicate dynamical trends and relationships. (i.e. more CO2=less Arctic sea ice, etc.).
Correction: (among) the power of models is alleged to be their ability to indicate dynamical trends and relationships. This remains an unsupported allegation wrt climate models, and a question that you persist on begging. You appeal to models to makes claims that are not apparent in the observational record, and attempt to cover it by more appeals to models.
The concept of what a model earth would be doing “now” or the real earth would be doing “now” is meaningless, as that is not what their intent is.
LOL. Yes, dear. The models are not intended model, and they certainly are not supposed to reflect anything now. They cannot be expected to tell us anything about now, their only power is to tell us with requisite certainty what now is going to be like at a politically convenient time in the future. Just far enough out that the prediction cannot be tested before policy must be made, but not so far out that the sense of imperative fizzles. I gather that the current optimum for that time frame is considered to be about 17 years.
Your misrepresentation of my comments perhaps indicates that you don’t really understand what models are for and aren’t for.
Sweetheart, I write models for a living. I know what they are for, and I know how they are often misused. I have seen it attempted by others abusing my own work, let alone the crap that is pulled with ‘climate models’ in these politicized times. Save your condescension.
In regards to what a Maunder or Dalton Minimum like solar event might do a model earth with both current levels and lower levels (as they were several centuries ago) is plug these into the model and see what trends and dynamics develops.
You forgot to finish that sentence with “… in the model.” It is important to remind the reader, as well as yourself, of the only realm wherein those results are relevant.
You float between pretending the models are not supposed to be indicative of conditions, and pretending that they are absolutely reflective – e.g. when you say that such models allow us to know what the actual earth would be doing now under 280 ppm CO2. LOL.
Know. LOL.
Of course, the models don’t currently include all the effects that a quiet sun has on the climate (as they are either not fully know or not fully quantified).
Yes, your models do not currently include all of the ad hoc excuses for flat to down trending temperature and energy balance that you now wish to appeal to. And you better plan ahead and gin up a few more bandaids for the future. People are only going to buy the situational reparamerization of aerosols for so long before they can’t hold in the laughter, and you can’t fill the holes with too much of the ‘quiet sun’ before the whole house of cards comes down on your head.
Funny how those deficits were not coinsidered of import before … in fact the whole notion that those unmodeled effects of a quiet sun were of an interesting magnitude was brashly denigrated by people like you, using the same condescension that you employ now.
Even funnier how you yet use the word know to describe what these painfully inadequately parameterized models spit out. Chutzpah, Bubby called it.
All the global surface temperature data sets have short-term cooling periods. Here’s an example from the last 40 years with BEST data.
Example
6 cooling periods from 1972, but an overall warming trend for the whole period of 0.26C/decade.
Just a graphical way to demonstrate that time periods that are too short will not tell you anything about the long-term trend.
Borrowing a reasonable parameter from the title of this thread (not less than 20-year time periods), let’s test Judith Curry’s assertion that there has been a pause/slowdown in global warming from 1998. I will plot trends from 1979 to 1998 inclusive, and from 1979 to the end of the data set (except for BEST, where the last 2 months are only Antarctic temps). I’ve chosen 1979 as the start date so that satellite data can be compared directly.
BEST
Using statistically significant time periods, it is clear from BEST data that warming has not ‘paused’ or ‘stopped’ or ‘slowed down’. Here is a ‘scientific basis’ for suggesting there has been no change in the trend, or rate of climate change. remember, if you use less than 16/17 years, the results will not be statistically significant and you will not be able to say anything conclusive about a change in trend
As it happens, if you DO compare the post-1998 trend to the pre-1998 trend from BEST data, they are virtually identical. Of course, the post-98 data is not statistically significant, and this result is not robust. However, it does put the lie to Judith Curry’s assertion that there is ‘no scientific’ basis to say that warming hasn’t stopped/slowed/paused whatever. The null hypothesis is the trend prior to 1998. To break the null hypothesis, a deviation from the trend has to be statistically significant. We don’t have enough post-98 data to achieve a statistically significant trend, so we cannot falsify the null hypothesis, to say that the trend in warming has stopped/slowed down or whatever.
So that was from BEST data, just to test what Judith said.
Here is the 20yr and 30yr plot for GISS, HadCRU, RSS and UAH – global data this time, not just land only. The trends are virtually identical. Using only statistically significant periods, the trend in warming has not changed much post-1998.
Statistical significance is derived by mathematics, not by arbitrary choice as someone queried upthread. The only choice is the degree of confidence in a trend before ‘statistical significance’ is achieved. While 90% is used in some disciplines to denote statistical significance, the more common 95% confidence tests tend to apply to climate-related data analysis.
In the following plot, a 10 year and a 14 year cooling trend can be found in the early UAH data.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1987/to:1997/trend/plot/uah/from:1980/to:1995/trend/plot/uah
The period 1987 to 1990 is a decade of cooling. The period 1980 to 1995 represents a ‘cooling trend’ of 14 years. But neither of these represent the true signal in the data. they are more indicative of the noise in the data – otherwise known as ‘weather’.
Neither are statistically significant, but ‘skeptics’ would have been arguing back then that these represented some meaningful ‘slowdown’ in global temps. We have the advantage of hindsight here. Can we learn from it?
Just to compare, here is the last 10 (complete) years ‘trend’ and the ‘trend’ since 1998 for UAH;
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:1987/to:1997/trend/plot/uah/from:1980/to:1995/trend/plot/uah/plot/uah/from:2001/to:2011/trend/plot/uah/from:1998/to:2011/trend
Neither are statistically significant, but they are both positive. So if one insists on using these periods to talk about climate trends, then compare with the cooling periods early in the record for similar periods and think again how meaningful the last 10 – 14 years is WRT the underlying signal.
I particularly like the falsifiable prediction provided on page 7, which compares to IPPC prediction:
Figure 2b: The figure shows that the linear trend between 1880 and 2000 is a continuation of
recovery from the LIA. It shows also the predicted temperature rise by the IPCC after 2000.
Another possibility is also shown, in which the recovery from the LIA would continue to 2100,
together with the superposed multi-decadal oscillation. This possible progress beyond the peak
of an oscillation could explain the halting of the warming after 2000. The observed temperature
in 2008 is shown by a red dot with a green arrow.
I hope someone can post this graph jpg. GK
Not since fifth grade.
“barry says:
November 5, 2011 at 9:21 pm”
Barry, see the following on what Pat Michaels says:
http://www.thegwpf.org/the-climate-record/4239-pat-michaels-a-few-observations-on-the-latest-best-kerfluffle-and-recent-trends.html
Two relevant quotes:
“Observation #3: The last ten years of the BEST data indeed show no statistically significant warming trend, no matter how you slice and dice them.
Observation #5: Both records are in reasonable agreement about the length of time without a significant warming trend. In the CRU record it is 15.0 years. In the University of Alabama MSU it is 13.9, and in the Remote Sensing Systems version of the MSU it is 15.6 years.”
I appreciate where you are coming from. Both you and Richard Muller have one view as to what a significant time period is whereas Pat Michaels and Judith Curry have a different view. So the real debate is not what actually happened over the last dozen or so years, but how significant the time period is.
I was there an undergraduate geology student in the the early 1960 when the continental drift thing all came down. The major question most of us young students and many of our professors had was simply, how do you move a continent? As soon as that was answered, it did not take long for myself and most others to accept the idea. That is called a paradigm shift. Climate stuff is, shall we say a bit more complex and the analogy brakes down quickly. The magnetic reversals of the oceanic crust moving out from the rift zones was clear and explanatory. (I saw the map and even before I read the article knew what the conclusion would be. I took it and ran to the geology department coffee room.) Not in detail but in the general. What I don’t see, and that may well be due to my near fossil status, is what might be found as a paradigm shift, something that lays open the driving forces behind ups and downs of climate. Many have their pet ideas. None seem all wrong but none seem quite right either.
Other points. Most models in geology and the bulk of the earth sciences are only predictive of the long haul. Geologic time is well geologic, that is you can put away your watch and probably your annual calendar too. In situation after situation we see geologic processes are complex and intertwined. The devil is always in the details. If my memory serves climatology is a branch of physical geography as in meteorology. Physical geography is like geology an, earth science. We are sciences and not pseudosciences; our hypotheses are testable, we realize our models explain but do not produce data. We know any model we would use in a predictive mode must be calibrated by empirical measures. We do not or know we should not confuse correlation with causation.
Thanks Curiousgeorge. That firms up my thoughts on that subject.
Anthnoy
The sunspot figure is covered with the “WUWT on Facebook” image.
Is it possible to move it down the page?
Thanks
[Reply: To make sure Anthony sees your request, please post it in Tips & Notes. Thanks, ~dbs, mod.]
When looking at those cycles of ocean temperatures, this paper ought to be looked at:
http://www.pnas.org/content/97/8/3814.full
I basically proceeds from lunar orbit, nodal crossing, and perigee timing/location to find an 1800 year periodicity to earth ocean tides. One with peaks that fairly neatly match recorded cold periods. Bond Events. Elk Lake dust layers. Akkadian drought. Etc.
They also find shorter (and one longer) tidal cycles as well. One is a 179 year cycle that is remarkably close to the “Solar Barycenter” period; so perhaps it’s not the solar tides and solar heat output that maters so much as the effect on Earthly tides? (My speculation).
Gee… a 90 year pattern, and an 18 year pattern, so some beat frequencies will be produced. Perhaps they blend in such a way that recently we’ve seen a quasi-60 year PDO? A surmise and place to ‘dig hear’ more than a conclusion… but still. We have cycles of ocean temperatures that are at least a sub-multiple of a known tidal cycle. I think that’s important.
As the tides slope the oceans around, we get more or less cold water up the West coast of South America, and a colder or warmer Pacific results. IMHO, it really can be that simple.
Simple (well, to the extent orbital mechanics and tides are simple 😉 mechanics. No magic gas. No teleconnected solar thermal process. No “random oscillation of the ocean”. Just simple phsyical processes.
That recently we’ve been on a ‘warming trend’ of tides explains the recent past rather nicely.
This graph:
http://www.pnas.org/content/97/8/3814/F1.large.jpg
Though a bit hard to read, shows a ‘peak’ of cold (per this tidal thesis) in about 1974, then we fall off that peak, on average, toward today (warming in the process). There are what look to me sort of like some ‘cooler’ times ‘about now’ as the mass of the lines are a bit higher than just before (lower is warmer) but the general longer term trend continues toward a ‘warmer’ pattern until about 2090. (One can only hope that the general ‘sleep sun’ outweighs this or we’re going to be dealing with CO2 religion for a long time… if the tide thesis is correct.)
At any rate, an actual mapping of this ‘data’ onto the PDO / AMO state would be far more instructive than my ‘eyeball compare’ and likely more fruitful too.
So, to the point of this posting:
If you have known 18, 90, 180, and even 1800 year cycles of tides, and the ocean temperatures do change with the water motion, what makes either a 20 year or a 10 year period significant? You need an 1800+ year perspective, at least… and a close comparison to known drivers like the tides…
Werner,
I read the Pat Michaels page. I’ll comment on it if you do me the courtesy of commenting on the points I was making in my post first. That would be politer than completely ignoring it and expecting me to follow your lead. Thanks.
James Padgett
One word for your article => Brilliant!
James, could you please, please include the following graph at the end of your article?
http://bit.ly/nz6PFx
James, is it just a coincidence the AMO index correlates with the following global mean temperature pattern?
http://bit.ly/uXy8jw
The emperor has no clothes regarding AGW!
Leif Svalgaard says:
November 5, 2011 at 7:21 pm
Volker Doormann says:
November 5, 2011 at 3:16 pm
“My plot shows a blue curve what IS the sum of solar tidal geometric functions of six planets”
So produce seven plots, one for each of the six planet and one for the sum.
It is senseless to give knowledge to a black hole.
My discovery of the main climate frequency of 2/1.827 ky^-1 of a couple of celestial bodies and its synodic tide pattern is able to make a terrestrial climate forecast for 1000 years. Adding other faster couples and it’s tide functions to this pattern the resolution of the climate frequencies can be higher until some month.
http://www.volker-doormann.org/images/ghi2_xx.jpg
Simple two couples do show that the time scale in the plot of Prof. Patzelt is not correct. And moreover the comparison does show that because of the knowledge of the movement of the bodies the coming climate in the next 1000 years is simple summing of solar tide functions.
This method is unique. No one ever has shown such a simulation of the terrestrial climate inclusive a forecast for 1000 years.
It is senseless to give knowledge to a black hole. Knowledge is only for those who respect knowledge.
V.
Werner,
Statistical significance is tested by mathematics, not opinion. Michaels and Curry offer no mathematical analysis to support their views, and those views are meaningless until they do so. Michaels’ views in that article are rather silly, too.
@Philip Bradley says:
November 5, 2011 at 4:49 am
///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Philip
Perhaps the better interpretation is that it shows a lack of understanding of the extent and variability of the noise? At 15 years they cannot wean out the signal from the noise. At 16 years they think that they can wean out the signal from the noise (and hence the plea of now being statistically significant) but by the time 17 years of data comes in the signal remains lost in the noise. The 16 year declaration is based upon a lack of understanding and appreciation of the extent and variability of the noise which in practice swamps the signal being looked for.
This is why we do not know whether it is necessary to assess cliamte changes over 10 or 15 or 20 or 30 or 60 or 100 or 5000 or 1000 or 2000 or 5000 years etc.
I think that the issue most people fail to discuss is simple:
THIS ISN’T ABOUT SCIENCE.
This is now about two polarised camps, the losing one of which will have their credibility destroyed.
That cannot be allowed to happoen, so the losing camp will try and maneuvre to the other position without acknowledging what they are doing.
Because if they didn’t, hundreds of Professors would hold up their hands and say: ‘we’ve been bullshitting for 10 years, knowing full well the truth’.
The politicians would all look fools, which they cannot abide being seen as.
So we are where we are. The warmists trying to add solar and oceanic influences onto their models, whilst continuing to ostracise those who always advocated that position.
James Padgett:
Could you provide a citation for this? The only things I can find are to do with his development of numerical weather forecasting and his proposal for reducing the albedo of snow areas in the event of an ice-age.
Volker Doormann says:
November 6, 2011 at 12:41 am
This method is unique. No one ever has shown such a simulation of the terrestrial climate inclusive a forecast for 1000 years.
Not unique, there are plenty of us prepared to speculate.
http://tinyurl.com/2dg9u22/?q=node/61
Bob,
It has no impact on Global Temperatures. The PDO is actually inversely related to the Sea Surface Temperatures of that part of the North Pacific.
You are totally missing the point. The PDO is just one symptom of the ‘reversal’ of the climate system and the mechanism(s) behind has a huge impact on global temperatures, but the PDO is not supposed to correlate with temperature because of the thermal inertia. The correlation is between PDO and the rate of change of temperature. http://virakkraft.com/Hadcrut-deriv-PDO.png
JJ says:
“R Gates
Furthermore, we’d have to know what the global temperatures would be like during the same period if you reduced the CO2 levels to 280 ppm or so. Interestingly, we can do that via the climate models, and we get something that looks a lot like the Dalton Minimum.
Please review your participation on this thread, as it is nonsensical.”
Come on JJ, if you apply that high a standard there would be very few comments indeed!
Rhys Jaggar said:
” So we are where we are. The warmists trying to add solar and oceanic influences onto their models, whilst continuing to ostracise those who always advocated that position.”
——
You have no idea that solar and oceanic dynamics have been part of global climate system models for decades? Furthermore, you have no idea that models are always evolving to include more and more dynamical processes once those processes can be fully quantified? Suggest you read:
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/Trenberth/trenberth.papers/T_Nature1997.pdf
But in general, there isn’t any conceivable way that models will add some new found process that will suddenly show that increases in anthropogenic greenhouse gases will not result in a warmer future in the long run , and furthermore, the current plateau in global temperatures is a general feature shown in many global climate models as likely occurring at various points during the course of the next century as we have a general trend upward in the long run. It would in fact be a negative against the accuracy and validity of those models if such periods did not occur!
DRSG says:
November 5, 2011 at 7:01 am
I think it’s clear that the world has warmed. We are not longer in a Glaciation period, after all. Of course, the question isn’t “has the world warmed?” The question is “how much did the world cool after the height of the MWP and have we come back up to that high point?”
The way I see it is that we don’t really know how warm the entire planet was during the WMP. We don’t know what caused the planet to drop from that height to the depths of the LIA, and we don’t know why the temperature returned to a warmer period afterwards. That’s a lot of unknown.
We do know that the seas have been rising (which requires heating and the addition of meltwater) for over 12,000 years. We do know that for the vast majority of that time, the rise in sea levels were higher than the “out of control warming” period of 1977 – 1998.
We do know that the temperatures we were able to measure in the mid-1930s were approximately the same as the temperatures of the mid 1990s, and we did not produce enough CO2 during the early 20th century to significantly alter the balance of warming (rebound from the LIA).
We also know that the slope of “Global Warming” during the 1910 – 1940 period was virtually identical to the slope of warming from 1977 – 1998, without the amount of CO2 emissions produced by humans to cause it. We also know that we are producing CO2 emissions faster now than we ever have in the history of ever, and yet the slope of warming has gone to virtually zero (actually slightly negative) for almost a statistically significant amount of time.
Should the world begin warming again at 0.17C per decade tomorrow, in 10 years we will still not match the temperature of 1998, 2006, or even 1934. At that point, we’ll have a “statistically significant” result that will show that warming from CO2 does not match the kind of rise in temperature that the warmists have been projecting.
Volker Doormann says:
November 6, 2011 at 12:41 am
It is senseless to give knowledge to a black hole.
Especially when there is no knowledge to give…