Readers may recall earlier this week when I pointed out an inconvenient truth, the continental USA has no warming trend for the past decade, in fact it is cooling.
And, going back 15 years, the data is flat. Investors business Daily picked up the story in relation to the BEST controversy:
Don’t Stop Doubting
Posted 06:28 PM ET @ news.investors.com
Climate: Just a few weeks ago, a formerly skeptical scientist made news when he changed his mind about global warming. If he looked at the new data a meteorologist has pulled up, he’d change it back again.
Richard Muller, a physics professor at the University of California, said that data from his Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures (BEST) project convinced him that “global warming is real.” “We see no evidence,” he said Oct. 21, that global warming has “slowed down.”
The alarmists, of course, leveraged Muller’s statements to suit their agenda.
But Muller’s is not the “consensus” position of the team. Judith Curry, a Georgia Tech climate researcher with more than 30 years experience who was also part of the BEST project, has said “there is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped.” She looked at the same data Muller did and noted it shows global temperatures haven’t increased since the late 1990s.
Now comes meteorologist Anthony Watts armed with data showing the continental U.S. has not warmed in the last 10 years, and in fact has grown cooler in the summer and colder in the winter. The numbers aren’t a collection of weather forecasts from Watts, who runs the website “Watts Up With That,” but data from the National Climatic Data Center.
Granted, the Lower 48 aren’t the entire world, only a small slice of it. But it is a large portion of the developed world, a significant contributor of man-made carbon dioxide emissions and full of “heat islands” — big cities — that should be skewing temperature data upward.
Yet, that’s not what’s happening. The 2001-to-2011 trend shows a cooling of 0.87 degrees Fahrenheit compared with the 1911-2010 average. Backing up the starting date to 1996 doesn’t help the alarmists’ case, either. Temperatures are flat over that period.
Both the falling and flat temperature trends are coming at a time when man is putting out more emissions of carbon dioxide than ever. Given that, it seems to us that the U.S. should be warming.
Unlike Muller, we remain skeptics and would be even if he were right. Because rising temperatures are indicative of only one thing — rising temperatures — it’ll take more than an upward trend line to change our minds.
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stevo says:
November 12, 2011 at 4:29 am
Just as the claims by the CAGW crowd are specious. But more to the point, have they (the CAGW crowd) ever disproved the null hypothesis? Well, have they? The short answer: No (or they’d be shouting it from the housetops). All they can do is bumble around whining about the “importance of uncertainty”. They should really look to themselves when it comes to uncertainty (and null hypothesis failure).
Stevo:
When you look at the uncertainty, you have to examine both sides of the bars. The trend may be even steeper for cooling, or it may be slightly up for warming. This essentially tells us that the short term trend is flat with a cooling bias.
The correct conclusion is that there is not significant trend over the last 10 years. This is not surprising, since 10 years is generally too short to show a significant trend in climate data due to substantial year to year variability. Even without formal statistical testing, it’s clear to anyone who works with statistics that the results for this period do not show a significant trend. Talking about trends during this period only confuses people who lack familiarity with statistics.
…. So, Stevo. Now you admit climate uncertainty….. There’s hope for you yet. 😉
As the heat leaves the Pacific, I would expect a sudden tipping point to occur in North America. This would be due to the change in air pressure and jet stream as it crosses the Pacific. Look for the West Coast to suddenly have a sever cold spell and snow in unusual places in California. I would also expect Chicago to have one of the most sever snow storms on record.
Since the La Nina is forming up [broad based down in temperature] strongly, this will be know as the year of the change.
I sure hope that CO2 warms the Earth as strong as they say; we are going to need it!
Well done, Anthony!
One courageous, intrepid person – can and does make a difference.
John Trigge says:
November 11, 2011 at 8:24 pm
richard verney says:
November 11, 2011 at 7:58 pm
‘…although their data may not be of the same standard…’
From what Anthony has discovered about US temperature siting issues, which way are you suggesting the Russian and Chinese data standards might be – better or worse?
No matter what the data quality, it would still be massaged, corrected, adjusted, tweaked, screwed around with, homogenised, averaged, statistically manipulated and tortured until it revealed the ‘correct’ answer.
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The Russians agree:
http://www.newsbusters.org/blogs/julia-seymour/2009/12/18/climategate-fallout-russian-think-tank-says-temperature-data-was-cher
I can not find my link but China also called the data from her weather stations into question.
Wang Chinese station data Fiasco: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/01/climategate-intensifies-jones-and-wang-hid-chinese-station-data-issues/
Mike McMillan says:
November 11, 2011 at 8:38 pm
I don’t think any of the USHCN surface stations have records back to 1011.
Talk to the other Mike. He has records from tree rings back to 1011, calibrated to 1/1011 of a degree.
BillD says:
November 12, 2011 at 6:57 am
Talking about trends during this period only confuses people who lack familiarity with statistics.
People such as climate scientists.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:2010/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1910/to:1943/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1943/to:1976/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1976/to:2010/trend
@ur momisugly Garrett
In the original post (link at the top of this post), Mr Watts did say:
“For the inevitable whining and claims of cherry picking that will come in comments, here’s the complete data set from NCDC plotted from 1895. I added the 1934 reference line in blue:”
The resultant graph showed 0.12deg F / Decade.
To explain the graph above, the IPCC tells us that warming from 1910-1945 was natural, but warming from 1975 onwards was due to CO2. They know this is true because the computer models can’t explain the warming any other way.
Most people that lack the training of climate scientists have to rely on common sense rather than computer models. They can understand what the IPCC cannot. Common sense tells us that both times the earth warmed, it was likely due to the same cause.
Computer models are not aware of this, because computer models have no common sense. None whatsoever. Zero. Zilch. Nada.
Garrett says:
November 12, 2011 at 2:07 am
…….You were kind enough to state that over a 15-year period the trend was flat. It’s a pity you didn’t state the 20-year or 30-year trends.
Now, place yourself back in 1996 and recalculate the previous decadal trends, i.e. from 1986-1996: a whopping -1 degF/decade decline.
Short decadal trends are useless in this debate, and you should know it Anthony.
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What is absolutely useless is the straight trend line of CAGW, when anyone with an ounce of sense knows that temperature is cyclical. There are the ~60 yr ocean cycles, the 88 year Geissenberg cycle, a 200 yr cycle, the ~ 400 yr cycle and the still larger scale cycles of 15,000 to 20,000.
Therefore a flat trend followed by a down trend could very well show a change to the cooling side of a cyclical trend especially when combined with other evidence like the change in Ocean cycles.
The LIE in the statistics is the adherence to a STRAIGHT LINE in the first place.
88yr and 200 yr: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/features.cfm?feature=1319
400yr: http://tenaya.ucsd.edu/~dettinge/PACLIM/Yu02.pdf
“When you look at the uncertainty, you have to examine both sides of the bars. The trend may be even steeper for cooling, or it may be slightly up for warming. This essentially tells us that the short term trend is flat with a cooling bias.”
That’s a woeful misunderstanding of what the uncertainty means. When Watts gets around to calculating the uncertainty on the trend he showed, I’ll explain why. I don’t expect that he will do that any time soon though…
REPLY: Sorry, as I said, it is NCDC’s graph and therefore their presentation issue, write a complaint to them and ask them to do it. 10 years was good enough for Hansen in 1988 BTW – Anthony
Garrett says:
November 12, 2011 at 2:07 am
thats a really funny post. I guess you are advocating the selection of specific time periods to demonstrate a specific point? – or in other words cherry picking! LOL
At the end of the day – the only real and genuine trend in the climate temp will be the one going in to – or coming out of an ice age, or mini-version thereof.
Since you seem to want to argue about time periods for analysis, why don’t you start with the big one – like from 12000 years ago? Then you can describe the uppy downy motion of the climate temps and deduce what exactly? Hmmmm, let me see, perhaps it will be a general upward trend in temperatures?
Now, you have done that, perhaps you can then manage to do what no-one else has satisfactorily and scientifically done yet – which is to show that ANY upward OR downward variation in climate temps upon that generic upward trend is DIRECTLY related to CO2!!
Good Luck – I suspect there’ll be grants to be had too – and if you’re really good and convince the masses to hand over lots of their hard earned cash to pay for energy at vastly inflated prices, with perhaps a couple of billion energy poor deaths around the planet at the same time – I’m sure there could be another worthless and false Nobel prize for you (a la Pachauri et al)!
@Fred Streeter
Thanks for pointing that out. But it does no favor for Mr. Watts. He anticipated the cherry picking “whiners” like me because he was, well, cherry-picking. The only thing that matters in long term climate change is, believe it or not, long term data. Decadal trends are sometimes informative, but are a long way from being useful for making conclusions. I do not deny that some on the AGW side also tend to exagerrate the importance of short trends to suit their agendas.
Gail Combs said
“What is absolutely useless is the straight trend line of CAGW, when anyone with an ounce of sense knows that temperature is cyclical.”
Yes, straight line trends need to be used sparingly – Nature doesn’t usually follow straight lines. Not just because of cycles but because of the chaotic, “noisy” nature of climate. The data that Mr. Watts uses is from a site that makes it easy for regular citizens to access temperature data. It’s called transparency. The graphs they produce are not meant to be used “as is” for pure scientific purposes. Shame on Mr. Watts for using screen captures of graphs from that site to make a scientific argument!
REPLY: So I shouldn’t use NCDC’s publicly accessible presentations to present something to the public here? LOL! . BTW 10 years was good enough for Dr. Hansen in 1988 – Anthony
Garrett says:
“The only thing that matters in long term climate change is, believe it or not, long term data.”
Observe, and learn: click
The planet is emerging – naturally – from the LIA. There has ben no accelerated warming, thus there is no basis for climate alarmism.
If Garrett spins any harder, we can use him for a renewable energy source. 😉
Why is the average temperature line way below the actual temperature lines?
Anthony wrote that “it is NCDC’s graph and therefore their presentation issue, write a complaint to them and ask them to do it.” But just because someone offers a plotting program doesn’t mean the user is absolved from interpreting the results, or its shortcomings. You might just as well plot yearly temperatures from 2008-2010 and say the trend is a startling 3.55 F per decade.
@Dp: See my reply and David Middleton’s reply to Stevo above.
Stevo:
The temperatures during the past 10 years are pretty recent. The actual error band should be quit small, say 5% LSD would be acceptable.
With that in mind, the trend is flat with a cooling bias. Yes, it may be up as well, but that would require one to be at the lower band of error at the beginning and the upper band of error at the end.
Now, I understand that there are some sites where they discount the error bar/band as a skeptic ploy. We all know that those types of sites are virtually worthless as far as scientific content because of the ignorance regarding certainty. (What happens within the error bands).
So, please kindly explain to us folks who are not rocket scientists, why, most of us are prob not even PHD climate scientists. But, with that in mind, a lot of us know how to use basic stats, and the significance of why, how and when error bars are to be implimented, understood, and the degree of certainty derived within that MEAN value.
Smokey says:
The planet is emerging – naturally – from the LIA.
How do you know? If that were true then natural factors would be able to account for the warming since the LIA. They can’t; in particular solar changes can’t. The Milankovitch cycle indicates another 4000 years of cooling. Decrease in volcanic activity compared to the LIA? Today’s temperatures seem to have overshot that. Then you need to consider that the LIA wasn’t global….
Not only have the US temperatures been flat for the last 10-15 years but a similar pattern is happening in Canada. Both the Canadian Annual and winter temperature departures from the 1961-1990 averages have been flat for 10 years when mesured on excel linear trend and based on Environment Canada’s own data. Regionally 7 of the 11 regions reported by Environment Canada showed declining tempertaure departures over the last 10 years . Only the the Atlantic Coast , Northeastern Forests and Arctic Tundra ,Mtns and Fiords showed rising temperature departures. But the North Atlantic Ocean heat content is dropping and so is the Arctic Ocean’s heat content . It will not be long before the Atlantic Coast and the Arctic regions will show similar cooling as the AMO goes cool or negative.
>> Ralph says:
November 12, 2011 at 4:07 am
Living in Florida I’m surprised at the Tallahassee, FL January 1895 – 2011 Trend = -0.30 degF / Decade on the NOAA site. <<
I'm not surprised. A map at Marjorie Kinnen Rawlings' house in Cross Creek, Florida describes the site of her orange grove in the early 20th cenbtury. Cross Creek is about 100 miles north of the current northern extent of orange groves in Florida.
>> Jeff Grantham says:
November 11, 2011 at 11:41 pm
In what way is it “inconvenient” that a mere 2% of the planet is cooling over a time period that isn’t statistically significant? <<
It isn't of course. In the context of Climate Science, nothing is inconvenient. Were the world suddenly plunged into an ice age it would simply be written off as 'consistent with AGW'.
But please, prove me wrong. Describe some test or measurement That Climate Science has claimed would refute AGW.