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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Smokey,
Little OT but thought you might like this bit of info.
Seems according to NCDC the OK 115 year trend finally made it back to, yep, ZERO.
Here’s the report today:
OKLAHOMA
Climate Summary
October 2011
The average temperature in October 2011 was 61.5 F. This was -0.1 F cooler than the 1901-2000 (20th century) average, the 55th coolest October in 117 years. The temperature trend for the period of record (1895 to present) is 0.0 degrees Fahrenheit per decade.
Good reason to stay firmly skeptical. Well, physics says energy does not chose favorites, it always shares itself. So where the hell is Oklahoma’s piece? Huh? I’m cold.
No serious that is the one aspect that makes all of this a mirage. You can’t have South America with negative trends, mid-America with no trend and large cities with +4C trends over long periods of time, not in a real world. It’s got to be the cities and stations (a.k.a. UHI) and all of the major temperature databases have it imprinted. Probably from the splicing adjustments at apparent discontinuities guessing those were errors when what they were splicing out WAS the UHI signature. That’s seems the only possible answer to the spectrum of secondary questions it causes.
Smokey, might explain that last sentence. Long ago they put a station in a tiny town. Over 10-20 years the tiny town is now in the center of a large town. Station in the way and really should be sited better and showing an upward trend (UHI). Move it 6 miles out of town to a farm. Temp takes sizable drop. Town grows to small city and station moved further out to keep record ‘good’ but has trended further up (UHI). Move it 15 miles from downtown. Another immediate drop. Grows to large city more trending.
Here comes NCDC to purify the temperature records. There are apparent errors, look at these one day drops when the station was moved. Must be a calibration error. Splice the drop out. Same on the next one. Splice it out and correct the error.
But those drops were NOT calibration errors. They WERE the UHI and now you have a hefty continuous upward trend and it is not real.
Any way that could have actually happened in the databases? I don’t know enough to answer that.
One more Smokey:
In fact, I have already downloaded the some 600 megs of BEST’s raw data and it’s readable now. I haven’t looked whether they have released the adjusted data yet but this might be as simple as creating a database of the adjustments (hopefully after any weighting) and seeing if there are more downward pieces spliced out than upward corrections spliced out. That would assume all splices are equally weighted at the end or a weighting adjust to these spliced out records would have to occur. Someone needs to do exactly that.
If all corrections are equal and both flavors symmetrical then that would imply no UHI signiture was spliced out. My guess is you would find more downward discontinuities spliced that upward spliced out if that scenario above is actually happening in the data purification process.
Does that make sense?
Makes sense to me, Wayne.
“stevo says:
November 14, 2011 at 9:25 pm
Sensible people look at all the data, and sensible people know about the implications of statistics.”
I assume we agree that not much has been happening temperature wise since 1998, correct? Now that is a reasonable length of time, but not 30 years. However see the 60 year cycles at the following from 1880:
http://sbvor.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-amo-killed-cagw-cult.html
What is interesting is that the flatness since 1998 is totally consistent with this 60 year cycle that has been going on for the last 130 years. Note the very slight rise of about 0.8 C over since 1880. So if that should continue at the same rate, it will be another 150 years before we reach the 2 C that is presumably so bad for us. I disagree with that, but that is another topic.
Jack Greer says:
November 15, 2011 at 8:48 pm: [ … ]
Jack, neither of the links you posted say what you seem to think. I have never claimed that human CO2 emissions are non-existent. What I have said consistently is that the rise in CO2 is harmless and beneficial to the biosphere.
I read not only the comment you linked, but that whole long thread. I answered your comments. But when I asked you a question… well, toward the end of the thread roger says it better than I could:
roger says:
February 4, 2011 at 12:47 pm
Smokey says:
February 3, 2011 at 6:51 pm
Jack Greer,
I’ve read the UN/IPCC report. Answer my question.
“But answer came there none………………………..”
Smokey says:
…Wrong. By not indicating a time period, deconstruction is easy.
Your prove my point by having to focus on such a tiny time interval and a tiny subset of the planet (the surface). This seems like all people like you have left anymore.
Because there is no verifiable, testable evidence that human emitted CO2 causes warming. It may cause some small amount of warming, but there is no evidence; there are only computer models.
Wrong. There is paleoclimate data, and there are direct measurements showing decreases in outgoing radiation at CO2 absorption frequencies (Harries et al, Nature, 2001).
Werner Brozek says:
But if the present warming of essentially 0 continues until May of next year, it will be 15 years at that time with no warming. So when the last 15 years are “cherry picked”, that is nothing to sneeze at.
werner, this is incorrect. the linear trend of the uah data for the last 15 years is .0764 (.0327) C per decade.
and here’s what phil jones told the bbc this june:
“The trend over the period 1995-2009 was significant at the 90% level, but wasn’t significant at the standard 95% level that people use,” Professor Jones told BBC News.
“Basically what’s changed is one more year [of data]. That period 1995-2009 was just 15 years – and because of the uncertainty in estimating trends over short periods, an extra year has made that trend significant at the 95% level which is the traditional threshold that statisticians have used for many years.
“It just shows the difficulty of achieving significance with a short time series, and that’s why longer series – 20 or 30 years – would be a much better way of estimating trends and getting significance on a consistent basis.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13719510
Camburn says:
Will you also agree that the current warm period is essentially not yet visible on a climatic time scale? As in the Holocene?
the globally averaged change from the bottom of an ice age to the top is about 7 C. we’ve had 1 C since 1950. that 1 C is easily visible on on a ‘climatic time scale’.
Smokey, Above, you were prattling-on about how CO2 had always lagged warming (Snowball Earth not withstanding) and couldn’t be a significant forcing component contributing to GW. I simply made the point that you had previously acknowledged that the marginal abnormal increase in atmospheric CO2 we see now was man-made. By extension I was pointing out the CO2 isn’t “lagging” and that you simply choose to blow-off its GHG impact on current/future climate. When you quibbled about my claim of your acknowledgment, I showed you where you had done so. My links say exactly what I had intended.
Re: your off-topic question in the “Has the BBC broken faith with the General Public?” thread: Having read through that thread, I’m sure you saw my comment about wanting to stay on topic and not flit-off on a tangent, as you frequently do. Steven Mosher also commented, in that thread, as to why people are reluctant to engage you in extended discussion, on topic or not. Hint: it’s not because your questions are well formed, or that your response expectations are reasonable, or that your arguments are particularly relevant or persuasive, or that people expect their counter points to be thoughtfully considered. … and then there are the inevitable unearned self-congratulatory “victory” proclamations … case-in-point ==> http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/11/ibd-picks-up-my-article-on-the-us-cooling-trend/#comment-798163
Seriously, who in their right mind would wish to participate in that kind of discussion?
…. Anyway.
You must be getting sick of posting that fabulously powerful Bastardi image. Let me help you out.
Here’s some other conclusive “The earth is cooling” images you might use.
CO2: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:1958/to:1972
Temp: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1958/to:1972/plot/gistemp/from:1958/to:1972/trend
Pay no attention to these, especially their logarithmic character ….
CO2: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:1958/to:2011
Temp: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1958/to:2011/plot/gistemp/from:1958/to:2011/trend
Smokey says:
Show me the forcing: click
you repeatedly pick out little plots of short time periods of one slice of the climate system and use it to try and make large-scale conclusions.
where did you ever learn this is how science is done?
George E. Smith says:
More CO2 absorbs a little more of that narrow bandwidth. More CO2 also absorbs more of the incoming solar spectrum FORCING (in the 2-4 micron range. Ergo; less solar spectrum FORCING energy reaches the global surface. Global surface with less solar energy cools down.
nice theory. where’s the math to back it up, using the laws of radiation and the known solar spectrum?
do you really think no one ever though of this before?
“CO2 does not “cause” warming, junior. CO2 delays IR emissions. It acts as a [mild] insulator. Your understanding is well below an 8th grade level. I recommend that you read the WUWT archives, and attempt to get up to speed on the subject. In your case it will be a hard slog, but I suppose anything is possible. You can start your education here.”
Yeah, right – learn from the archives here? You seem pretty whacked out generally but that’s just over the top.
CO2 absorbs IR photons and re-emits them. The ones that reach the ground warm it. If the CO2 wasn’t there, the ground would be colder. Ergo, CO2 causes warming.
You dispute that, and then you have the gall to suggest that a plot of temperatures covering only 2002.0 to 2009.5 could possibly demonstrate your claims?
Are you still denying that CO2 is a greenhouse gas?
Jack Greer,
Sorry those charts that clearly show that CO2 isn’t having the predicted effect on temperature bother you so much. Since you like using WFT, you can see here that the planet has been naturally warming since the LIA, with no acceleration of warming despite a ≈40% increase in [harmless, beneficial] CO2. In fact, as the green line shows the long term trend is declining. Reasonable folks will look at those facts and conclude that the red faced, spittle-flecked, wild-eyed arm waving over “carbon” is just overhyped nonsense. [Note that I said “reasonable folks”.]
Finally, stevo and Grantham aren’t reasonable folks because they reject out of hand every chart I post. So if any of you boys want to specify a time frame, I’m sure one of my thousands of saved charts will fit the bill, and show everyone that your wild-eyed CAGW claims are nonsense. Just ask, and I’ll post it.☺
@Smokey says:
November 16, 2011 at 7:24 pm
Nice graph. You’re a comedian, right Smokey?
==> http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/mean:12/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1850/to:1890/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1850/to:1930/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1850/to:1970/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1850/to:2010/trend
==>http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/to:2010/mean:12/plot/hadcrut3vgl/to:1850/to:1890/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1890/to:1930/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1930/to:1970/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1970/to:2010/trend
You’ll be rejected out-of-hand each time you try to support your position with irrelevant graphs or ones of insufficient time scale to show significance … not to mention the ridiculously doctored graph you just presented to me.
“Jeff Grantham says:
November 16, 2011 at 2:35 pm
Werner Brozek says:
But if the present warming of essentially 0 continues until May of next year, it will be 15 years at that time with no warming. So when the last 15 years are “cherry picked”, that is nothing to sneeze at.
werner, this is incorrect. the linear trend of the uah data for the last 15 years is .0764 (.0327) C per decade.”
With regards to this, see my comment at
“Werner Brozek says:
November 14, 2011 at 9:56 am
“stevo says:
November 14, 2011 at 1:39 am
HadCrut:”
It seems clear to me that I was referring back to the HadCrut and NOT uah.
“The trend over the period 1995-2009 was significant at the 90% level, but wasn’t significant at the standard 95% level that people use,” Professor Jones told BBC News.
“Basically what’s changed is one more year [of data]. That period 1995-2009 was just 15 years – and because of the uncertainty in estimating trends over short periods, an extra year has made that trend significant at the 95% level which is the traditional threshold that statisticians have used for many years.”
Professor Jones should never have said this because almost as soon as he said it, it was already irrelevant. The anomaly for 2009 was 0.443. The anomaly for 2010 was 0.477. However the anomaly for the first 9 months of 2011 so far is only 0.358. So it is simple to do the math for the average for the last 21 months, namely 12(0.477) + 9(0.358) all divided by 21 gives 0.426. This is LESS than the 2009 value of 0.443. So in other words, the warming for the last 16 years and 9 months is NOT significant at the 95% level. And when the figures are in for all of 2011, we will have 17 years of warming that is NOT significant at the 95% level. If you do not believe me, see the graphics at:
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/
Focus on the top 95% error bar for 1995 and note that it is way above the bottom error bar for the presently green 2011 line. It is so much higher that the green line cannot catch up any more for the remainder of the year.
“I assume we agree that not much has been happening temperature wise since 1998, correct?”
If by this you mean that nothing at all changed in 1998, and that the behaviour of global temperatures from 1998 to now is exactly in line with the behaviour of global temperatures from 1975-1998, then yes, we agree. Is that what you mean?
“stevo says:
November 17, 2011 at 1:07 am
Is that what you mean?”
Not really. 1975 to 1998 was way different from 1998 to the present. For specifics:
The HadCrut3 slope for 1975 to 1997.5 is + 0.0144312 so it is quite positive.
However the slope from 1997.5 to date is -0.000146044, or essentially 0 for all practical purposes. Both of these slopes are consistent with the 60 year sine curve in temperatures for the last 130 years as can be seen by the second graph down at:
http://sbvor.blogspot.com/2010/12/how-amo-killed-cagw-cult.html
This is the graph that shows the IPCC Prediction and where we are actually at now.
Why have you chosen 1997.5? And why haven’t you quoted the uncertainty on those trends? And why haven’t you compared the 1975-cherry picked year trend with the 1975-present trend?
“stevo says:
November 17, 2011 at 2:33 pm
Why have you chosen 1997.5? And why haven’t you quoted the uncertainty on those trends? And why haven’t you compared the 1975-cherry picked year trend with the 1975-present trend?”
As for 1997.5, this was pretty close to the time when the El Nino effects became noticeable on the global temperatures. As for the uncertainty in the trends, we can say that the chances are only about 50% that either warming or cooling happened since that time so saying the temperatures are flat since 1997.5 or 1998 would be fairly accurate. I agree that 1975 to 1998 is about the same slope as 1975 to 2012. That just happens due to the way the numbers turn out. But let me ask you a question. Suppose a child is born in 1975 and grows until the age of 23 when the year is 1998. Then growth stops. Now you can plot the height from 1975 to 2011 and get an upward slope and thereby conclude that the person is still growing in 2011. Just because you can get an upward slope according to the graphing program does not been height has increased past 1998. So my question to you is this: At what point do you decide the person has stopped growing in 1998 based on the graphs?
Your attempt to quantify the uncertainty is well wide of the mark. Application of well-defined mathematical principles to well defined actual numbers tells us that there is no significance to 1998. Your efforts to give it some importance are pure cherry picking.
If the height of a person from year to year, sometimes going up and sometimes going down, in a way that was random but autocorrelated, then indeed, how would you decide whether there was an underlying trend, and how big that trend was?
Jack Greer,
As I’ve mentioned before, you can show just about anything with WFT. I showed that the planet has been in a warming trend since the LIA, and you showed that at times the warming has reversed. But there is a problem with your graphs that I have pointed out several times in other threads. It is this:
Whenever either a zero base line, or an arbitrary temperature baseline is used, the normal warming trend from the LIA is made to look artificially scary; a false hockey stick shape is created. That’s why flat baseline charts are always used by GISS and the rest. But when a trend line chart is used, it is clear that there has been no accelerated warming – which is the central [and failed] prediction of the alarmist crowd.
The trend from the LIA is intact, as can be seen here. Nothing unusual is occurring. AGW is just a giant head fake; sound and fury signifying nothing. CO2 may add a tiny bit of beneficial warmth, but that’s about it.
To stevo, everything is cherry picking. It’s the best argument he can comee up with. But I note that he hasn’t taken up my challenge to name a time frame that he prefers. I have charts for every time frame, from months to billions of years.
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Tucci78 says:
November 12, 2011 at 10:41 pm
At 9:56 PM on 11 November, ,Bob Johnston had commented:
Gawd, I’m so tired of hearing how Muller was a skeptic. As someone who owns his book “Physics for Future Presidents” I can assure you that Muller has never been skeptical of AGW….
____________
Are there any online sources of statements uttered by Muller which can be cited as demonstrating his previous allegiance to the AGW bogosity?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Yes very definitely. He owns Muller & Assoc. see my comment : http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/10/30/the-best-whopper-ever/#comment-783396
stevo says:
November 16, 2011 at 4:22 am
Jack Greer said “I’m unaware of a single member within the climate science community, skeptic or not, who disputes the CO2 feedback process. None.” To which George E. Smith responded “Well say hello to one who does.”
George E. Smith – in what sense do you consider yourself a member of the climate science community? Do you hold an academic position? Do you have a record of publications?
___________________________
ROTFLMAO.
Do a search on him before you insult the man again. Smokey gave you a broad hint when he told you that George and forgotten more than you will ever know.