UPDATE: There’s a response from the Met Office here
A report in the UK Daily Mail reveals a Met Office report quietly released… and here is the chart to prove it:
By David Rose
- The figures reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012 there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures
- This means that the ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996
The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week.
The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.
This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years.
The new data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, was issued quietly on the internet, without any media fanfare, and, until today, it has not been reported.
This stands in sharp contrast to the release of the previous figures six months ago, which went only to the end of 2010 – a very warm year.
Ending the data then means it is possible to show a slight warming trend since 1997, but 2011 and the first eight months of 2012 were much cooler, and thus this trend is erased.
Some climate scientists, such as Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, last week dismissed the significance of the plateau, saying that 15 or 16 years is too short a period from which to draw conclusions.
Others disagreed. Professor Judith Curry, who is the head of the climate science department at America’s prestigious Georgia Tech university, told The Mail on Sunday that it was clear that the computer models used to predict future warming were ‘deeply flawed’.
h/t to reader “Dino”
regarding the significance of the period from 1997, recall that Dr. Ben Santer claimed 17 years was the period needed:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/17/ben-santers-17-year-itch/
They find that tropospheric temperature records must be at least 17 years long to discriminate between internal climate noise and the signal of human-caused changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere.
MIT Professor Richard Lindzen said something similar in a WUWT guest post:
There has been no warming since 1997 and no
statistically significant warming since 1995.
Bob Tisdale did a 17 and 30 year trend comparison here
Here’s the HADCRUT4 4.1.1. dataset
kadaka,
Then all you have to do is change the start year to 1994 to see what the 17-year trend looks like.
Here it is
17 year trend for that period is 0.16C/decade.
Dear Dr. Curry, thank you for standing up for the scientific method and having the courage to tell the world what the data shows. I hope your name and reputation will be held up as an example of courage and integrity in science for decades to come. I’m very proud of you and Georgia Tech. Stay strong and hold your head high.
Phillip Bratby says:
October 14, 2012 at 3:48 am
See Met Office rapid response to David Rose here
http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/
Thanks for the link Philip. It’s interesting to see that the Met.Office have now switched to a new data set, HADCRUT4, because HADCRUt3 doesn’t show any warming this century. HADCRUT4 has the advantage of allowing them to extrapolate figures for regions of the Arctic where there are no actual thermometer measurements available. This brings HADCRUT4 into line with James Hansen’s GISS and gives much more scope for imaginative manipulation (guessing). It’s rather like me deciding whether to take an umbrella in London based on the weather forecast for Nice in the south of France.
However, using the HADCRUT3 database we see a clear pattern. Temperatures fell from 1880 to 1910, rose from 1910 to 1940, fell from 1940 to 1970, rose from 1970 to 2000 and declined from 2000 onwards.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1880/to:2012/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1880/to:1910/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1911/to:1940/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1941/to:1970/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1971/to:2000/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:2001/to:2012/trend
This is an uncomfortable graph for the Met. Office since it predicted in 2009 that 3 of the next 5 years would be warmer than 1998.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8299079.stm
This prediction is clearly heading for a spectacular fail.
Mystery as to why a local data set should be compared to global, but in any case, if we’re looking for a climate signal instead of just pointing at the variability, then the current decade is hotter than the previous one, which is hotter than the previous. On climate scales, global warming has not stopped since the 60s. The only way you can conclude otherwise is to look at decadal trends, but that isn’t going to tell you much about climate changes.
REPLY: Careful with that argument, or you’ll be forced to explain why a few trees and Mike Mann’s opinion represents the globe – Anthony
You have HadCut4 data here, updated till August 2012
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut4/data/current/download.html
For 16 years, the trend line slope is : +0.071 / decade.
Met Office response to original article is here:
http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/
The answer to question 2 is revealing.
P. solar: No, “trends” are never “robust”. Whenever you do fit a linear you are proposing that a linear model reasonably characterises the data. There is nothing “linear” about climate so one thing you can be sure of is that the model is fundamentally wrong.
barry says:
October 14, 2012 at 3:31 am
It’s true that linear trends have limited application. But my point was against the Daily Mail chart, which has no statistical analysis whatsoever. It is even less reasonable to eye-ball a bunch of noisy data, pick the endpoints, and use that to say something about trends (warming/no change/cooling) – exactly what David rose has done, unfortunately, in the article.
I don’t agree that just plotting the data “less reasonable” than doing inappropriate “trend” fitting.
It is clear without fitting a mathematical model that the data is essentially flat over that period. You don’t need science degree to work it out , nor do you need to know what r-squares , correlation coefficients and statistically significant trends are about.
Adding a trend line would have been poor science since it is not an appropriate model. So adding such a line would have forced an inappropriate interpretation on the reader.
The Daily Mails readership is more interested in tits , slimming and celebs than science (to judge by their content). So any more rigorous stuff would have been lost or confusing.
However, anyone with at least one eye in a reasonable state of repair can see what the data shows.
And all this is from hadSST4 which has added yet more recent warning “adjustments” to the previous hadSST3 (which still seems to be the basic reference dataset).
This is the ‘Mail , not a peer reviewed journal . I think the presentation is appropriate for the target audience.
the Met Office states they answered this question from David Rose:
Q.1 “First, please confirm that they do indeed reveal no warming trend since 1997.”
with this:
Met Office: “The linear trend from August 1997 (in the middle of an exceptionally strong El Nino) to August 2012 (coming at the tail end of a double-dip La Nina) is about 0.03°C/decade, amounting to a temperature increase of 0.05°C over that period”
http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/category/met-office-in-the-media/
the graph with Rose’s article in the Daily Mail illustrates precisely the above. the met office is not denying this, they confirmed it in their answer.
Rose’s article of 13 October could hardly be a re-write of a January article, because he and the Met Office are discussing a period up to August 2012.
the Met Office and Rose refer to updated Hadcrut 4m, which the Met Office states was completed “this week” and the Met Office has a graph to August 2012 on their HadCrut4 page, from which i presume the 1997-August 2012 period has been extracted :
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut4/
Phil Jones has responded to the facts of the data as David Rose reported them; Judith Curry likewise, meaning the Met Office, Jones, Curry and Rose are all on the same page, so why the attempts to discredit Rose and/or the Daily Mail?
the only argument is whether the data is even more damaging to the CAGW cause than stated, because the data itself has a man-made warming bias.
JJ says:
October 13, 2012 at 9:08 pm
This sounds like the precision used in everyday speech from us software engineers, which is not all that different from scientists and even lawyers.
Had Santer claimed simply “17 years” then I would ask on my snarkier days “Why is 17 years good, but 18 years is bad?” “At least 17 years” affirms that periods of 18 or longer are also good. (Modulo cherry picking and all the other non-absolutes software engineers include.)
There is no ‘red line’ for the Warmistas, beyond which they would admit that no significant AGW is occurring. AGW aka climate change is not only a business for them, it is a religion. As an analogy, and forgive me if I offend the religious, it is like atheists debating the existence of God with true believers. They always keep seeing signs of God everywhere, even if you and I just see a tree or a rock. How many years without evidence is enough for them? There will never be enough. After all, climate is always changing – nicht wahr?
Natural Variability …
Judy Curry said:
“‘[…] Natural variability has been shown over the past two decades to have a magnitude that dominates the greenhouse warming effect. It is becoming increasingly apparent that our attribution of warming since 1980 and future projections of climate change needs to consider natural internal variability as a factor of fundamental importance.’”
David Rose wrote of Phil Jones:
1. “Even Prof Jones admitted that he and his colleagues did not understand the impact of ‘natural variability’”
2. “[…] Phil Jones and his colleagues now admit they do not understand the role of ‘natural variability’.”
Phil Jones said:
“‘We don’t fully understand how to input things [into climate models] like changes in the oceans […] We don’t know what natural variability is doing.’”
From David Rose’s article:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2217286/Global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago-reveals-Met-Office-report-quietly-released–chart-prove-it.html#ixzz29E78OR9H
I dare Jones to stare at this animation for 1 full minute: http://i48.tinypic.com/2v14sc5.gif
barry
delighted to enlighten you as to why a ‘local’ data set such as Cet has relevance to the global temperatures. Its because many leading scientists say so, and my own studies also indicate it is a good-but not perfect-proxy for the global temperature (assuming global has any meaning when one third of temperature stations are showing cooling). Here is my article citing the studies and also demonstrating that there has been a steadily warming overall trend for 350 years
http://judithcurry.com/2011/12/01/the-long-slow-thaw/
tonyb
barry says:
October 14, 2012 at 4:19 am
You seem to have missed a major point in the article:
One graph at the MET office is interesting, http://metofficenews.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/ranked_combined.png includes 2011. Their caption from the article notes:
The “point made above” is also consistent with “no warming” or “plateau”. One can get all excited about 2011 marking the decline since the plateau, but one can also blame that on the La Niñ, ala 2008.
The upcoming El Niño might get the plateau back on track, but that seems to have gone AWOL. I changed the El Niño meter back to NCEP data now that I know how to get their current data. Its data is what Bob Tisdale refers to, and is what I used before I gave up on summary data from NCEP that often stopped getting updated. The ENSO 3.4 value dropped from 0.26 to 0.21. While that change is typical of the noisy signal, this is firmly in the “La Nada” range.
Henry says
The results do not surprise me as an analysis of maximum temperatures on a global sample (47 weather stations) showed that we turned negative (to cooling) in 1995.
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
I did not do an analysis of the hadcrut 4 data set yet because I do not trust the data anyway, since I came across some clear hanky panky in Gibraltar (the results there did not tie up at all with neighboring Spanish weather stations),
However, I did come across this graph from Bob Tisdale who looked at it in a bit more detail.
http://i41.tinypic.com/33pek1x.jpg
If you compare the brown global HADISST SST anomalies with my sine wave, you see that things are beginning to fall into place (for me at least).
e.g. you can see that natural “global warming” started around 1927 and lasted until 1995 as can be also predicted from my sine wave. Remember that in my sine wave we are looking at the trend in maximum temperature which is like energy-in, so there could be a few years lag either way.
Looking at that 204 month trend from Bob, it seems we dropped about 0.1 degree C since 2000, right?
I don’t want to frighten you guys, but the trend that I am predicting in my sine wave is looking just about right. Earth energy stores are depleted now and therefore I predict that we will fall as much as we are falling on the maxima. Going by my own wave, we will fall about -0.035 x 5 = -0.2 degrees K in the next 5 years. After that, more cold is yet to come, until about 2038.
Stop worrying about the carbon. Get worried about the cold. The big freeze is here. Winters in the NH are going to be bad. SH is also cooling now, it seems at the same speed…..
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2012/10/10/hadcrut4-v-hadcrut3/
HADCRUT4 V HADCRUT3
October 10, 2012
“The new version increases warming (or rather decreases cooling) since 1998 by 0.09C, a significant amount for a 13 year time span. Whilst the changes should not affect the trend in future years, they will affect the debate as to whether temperatures have increased in the last decade or so.”
Here is a graph of HADCRUT4 V HADCRUT3
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/image8.png
barry:
All your posts – including your response to me – are answered by P. Solar in his post at October 14, 2012 at 4:48 am .
The issue is simple and is as follows.
1.
The trend analysis assumes linearity.
2.
The period of the last 16 years approximates to a linear trend in the HadCRUT3 temperature time series.
3.
Extrapolating back in time, the time series diverges from the recent linear trend about 16 years ago.
4.
Therefore, the data of the last 16 years provide the most “robust” (n.b. your definition of “robust”) linear trend obtainable from the time series for any period ending at the present.
5.
Prior to 16 years ago another linear trend existed for a period of ~17 years.
6.
The data of the entire HadCRUT3 time series are explicable as being a linear rise from the LIA for several centuries with a saw-tooth oscillation overlaid on the linear trend.
7.
The model of 6 differs from the model of a linear trend.
The models of 1 and 6 each indicates absence of discernible AGW. And irrelevant arguments about what is “robust” cannot change that.
Future data may or may not indicate the presence of discernible AGW, but the existing data unambiguously shows the absence of discernible AGW.
However, some people (e.g. Perlw1tz) obfuscate by saying the inability to discern AGW does not prove there is no AGW. This obfuscation is also not relevant because if AGW is too small for it to be observed then it can only be too small for it to be a cause of valid concern.
Richard
P.S. to my above post:
Does anyone actually ever use the word “whilst” in spoken English?
One sees ”whilst” from time to time in writing, but in dozens of trips to the UK I have NEVER heard it used in conversation.
I looked it up and found this (whist I was waiting for my Earl Grey to steep):
mand on February 26, 2009 12:02 pm
As a Brit, whilst sounds quaint to me too. Some do prefer to use it, but you’ll notice that they use it when speaking to their child’s headteacher or in job interviews. In other words, in order to sound posh / clever / better bred than they are.
Anyway, I’m preoccupied now – see you later, after a whilst. 🙂
James Barrington-Biscuitbarrel says: October 14, 2012 at 2:19 am
“….. on the tears of poor people…”
Energy traders, bankers, financiers and traders sporting double barreled names and pretending they are saving the world whilst they enrich themselves trading carbon credits and managing funds is a contemptible thing.
Jimmy lad, I was in Belarus and Ukraine earlier this year, when it was 25- 30 C below zero, and I’ve spent a lot of time in the back blocks of northern China, where it also gets down to minus 25 to 30C below.
There are a lot of poor people in those areas, and they spend a disproportionate amount of their income on energy. Making energy more expensive while you save the world will kill people.
There is no way that Phil Jones and his colleagues did not understand the impact of ‘natural variability’. No way, not buying it. Everyone in science knows and understands natural variability, all climatologists know about it and understand it fully. Jones is not being truthful. How could he even contemplate making such a statement. openly. Its is simply not a believable thing to say.
Since there can be no CO2-AGW [multiple reasons], there has to be a solar explanation of this.
The most likely is the 179 year conjunction of the outer planets [Saturn one side, Jupiter, Neptune and Uranus the other], about double the 88 year sine wave period. In 2003, this led to the sudden collapse of the solar magnetic field because the Sun’s centre of mass was at its furthest distance from the barycentre of the solar system, leading to maximum tidal forces.
Allan MacRae says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/13/report-global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago/#comment-1109222
Henry says. Good comment, good point. I knew they were crooking the results. Anything to keep the AGW dream alive. Like I said, I know that in Gibraltar they manipulated the results as well.
Better is to just trust my own dataset. We dropped by about 0.2 degrees C since 2000 and all my graphs, even the most moderate one (which is the sine wave) show that we will drop by at least another 0.2 degrees C over the next 5 years.
Somehow, looking at history repeating itself, I think they will again somehow manage to fool the people and “hide the decline”.
You answered your own question. The data is the authoritative source. The graph is just a way of representing the data.
WRT the graph in the article: It appears that the person who generated the graph is a graphic artist/photographer named Ben Weller who does work for the Daily Mail.
Then the same goes for the previous ‘warming’ period.
By the way did any of the climate models prior to 2005 project the standstill? I vaguely recollect that the answer is no but my advance apologies if I’m wrong.
Ahhhhhh but they happily draw conclusions (speculations) about the recent US heatwave (lasting several weeks) and linking it to global warming. Now I see how the game is played. 15 years too short while 1 month is OK. Cherry picking season has commenced!!!
Henry@AlecM
Well, before they started with this carbon dioxide nonsense they did look in the direction of the planets.
http://www.cyclesresearchinstitute.org/cycles-astronomy/arnold_theory_order.pdf
To quote from the above paper:
A Weather Cycle as observed in the Nile Flood cycle, Max rain followed by Min rain, appears discernible with maximums at 1750, 1860, 1950 and minimums at 1670, 1800, 1900 and a minimum at 1990 predicted.
(The 1990 turned out to be 1995 when cooling started?!)
So far, I do not exclude a gravitational or electromagnetic swing/switch that changes the UV coming into earth. In turn this seems to change the chemical reactions of certain chemicals reacting to the UV lying on top of the atmosphere. My sine wave suggests 44 years of cooling (which we know started in 1995) and 44 years of warming. Remember this is energy-in, What earth does with the energy could be different by at least 5 years on either side, probably more.