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
Good point and for that matter where is the missing hot spot (AGW fingerprint)? Where is the hidden heat?
http://joannenova.com.au/tag/missing-hot-spot/
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/06/how-john-cook-unskeptically-believes-in-a-hotspot-that-thermometers-cant-find/
Many on WUWT have said it before and I’ll say it again: the truth always wins out in the end. According to Santer just 1 more year. I can see many climate scientists anxiously grinding their teeth and quietly wailing in the toilet. Your hidden pain will soon be over chaps.
AlecM:
At October 14, 2012 at 7:00 am you apply the same logical fallacy of ‘Argument From Ignorance’ as warmists when you write concerning global temperature change
No! Absolutely not!
There could be any of several causes.
Indeed, it is quite possible that internal variability of the climate system may dominate both anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing and solar forcing. Several people – including me – have been pointing out this possibility since the early 1990s.
Notably, Richard Lindzen has been consistently explaining the matter. His first publication concerning the possibility of which I am aware was in 1997. Much more recently he has published an explanation at
http://www.glebedigital.co.uk/blog/?p=1450
His explanation at that link says
Richard
Ric Werme says:
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.
Yes. The problem with Santer’s answer is that it is to the wrong question. The answer to the correct question would be phrased in terms of “at most ______ years before we give up on this nonsense.”
They answer the “at least” question, to avoid answering the “at most” question. The “at most” should have been published twenty years ago as part of their prediction. That is what scientists would have done. These guys aren’t scientists. They are religionists. “Scientology” was taken, so they call their faith “climatology”.
The problem is, what do religionists do when prophesy fails? Minor sects either admit they were wrong and their movement dissolves, or they reinterpret the prophesy in a way that avoids falsification. By the second method, minor sects can persist long enough to become major religions. Major religions have money and civil power, so they can make a third response to prophetic failure: control the information that falsifies the prophesy. Climatology is well entrenched with monied interests and civil power, and Climategate has demonstrated the willingness of those with their thumbs on the scales to press down hard. Phil Jones said he’d be worried when the plateau hit 15 years. That means he’s worried now. Trenberth is worried and angry. They aren’t the only ones who can imagine peasants with pitchforks knocking on the abbey door. And when those guys get worried, we should worry about what they’re up to.
HADCRUT4 shows more recent warming than HADCRUT3? There is a hockey stick wrt recent temps in GISSTemp 2.5 vs. 2.0? Huh.
Big Dutch Newspaper
Aarde warmt niet meer op (Earth stops warming )
http://www.telegraaf.nl/buitenland/13073519/__Aarde_warmt_niet_meer_op__.html
Most people leaving a comment say for years to know that they are fooled.
Trenberth : ”With the links between weather and climate for instance – we know they are there, but the specific numbers need work”
Whats the difference between weather and climate? Statistically speaking how about this: when looking at data weather is what falls in the Prediction Interval and climate is what falls in the Confidence Interval.
Allan MacRae says:
October 14, 2012 at 6:15 am
1/ Comparing two plots of measured then processed data without taking the error bars into account is a meaningless exercise;
2/ Claiming that the temperature rose by 0.09C since with quoting the associated statistical and systematic error is also meaningless. Is it 0.09C +/- 0.01C or 0.09C +/- 0.5C or what?
3/ Claiming to know the change in global temperature [whatever such a dubious concept means] to within ~ 0.1C strains credulity to say the least. The US land based stations at best have a resolution [precision] of 0.01º F [0.006C] with an accuracy [systematic error] of +/- 0.1º F [ +/- 0.06C ] over the range. The errors at two spatially different sites cannot be reduced by averaging, but should be added in quadrature.
LazyTeenager says:
October 13, 2012 at 6:47 pm
Hmm, hold on guys, isn’t this the data set you claim was faked?
Does this mean you believe it, now that is gives the answer you want?
Does this mean you no longer believe that Phil Jones is a cheat?
===============
Actually, Lazy, what we are saying is that even with flawed data, adjusted at all times to favor warming, there has been no warming for 16 years. In other words, even with the deck stacked in favor of “global warming”, the models have failed to accurately predict a 16 year short-term trend.
LazyTeenager says:
October 13, 2012 at 6:47 pm
“Hmm, hold on guys, isn’t this the data set you claim was faked? Does this mean you believe it, now that is gives the answer you want?”
This is too easy Lazy. Had they not stepped the temps up in recent decades and stepped them down in earlier decades (net 0.5 C+ since the 30s) we would have significant cooling instead of “no statistically significant warming”. The trouble with these step functions though is that going forward, you may have to step the recent ones back down again to maintain recent up-trends and this would put 1934 into a “year without summer”. This is likely already in the works – they can’t let this go on past the 17th year.
Has anyone read the alleged report?
No?
Ah, well there’s a reason for that …….
Sometimes it pays to check the veracity of made up news stories.
http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/2012/10/14/met-office-in-the-media-14-october-2012/
Richard: yes, I accept your point. however, the 179 year solar cycle is exemplified by the 1645 event [2×179 years before 2003] which with the cooling ENSO led 40 odd years later to the very cold 1690s of which John Evelyn wrote in his diaries of tree leaves emerging in early June.
The successive event, starting in 1824 did not have the cooling ENSO and was less severe. Because we have had so much heat stored in the oceans in the 20th Century solar Grand Maximum, we will probably have greater relative cooling in the next 40 years.
However, I agree that there are other factors. Thus the Arctic melting probably involves phytoplankton blooms triggered by Fe from melting old ice reducing cloud albedo over much of the Northern hemisphere.The same mechanism accounts with Milankovitch for the end of ice ages. We have also has the growth of Asian aerosol pollution reducing cloud albedo.
By following the Mail story I was led to UK floods. Then I remember the projections of increased droughts. I also recall the huge amounts of rain the UK had from spring to summer and now the autumn. So now compare and contrast co2’s magical powers.
Same kinda nonsense also happened in Australia where permanent drought turned into green deserts, overspilling dams and biblical floods. It’s just the weather and not the climate.
Thanks to Mr Bliss’s link to the Met Office reply on their blog I have now pieced together the claims and counter claims by toggling to and fro between article and blog as well as links given by the Met Office blog post.
I’ve laid out my findings below. It wouldn’t be facetious to liken their claims and counter claims to a hackneyed Hollywood sword fight in a banqueting hall where, instead of a straight duel, they upend tables, grab candelabras and slash down curtains to thwart and deflect the thrusts of the other party. Except in this case it is very far from being chivalric.
That said, the main thrust of the Mail article is correct. This is despite the mealy mouthed wording, stretching of the truth, no source cited for the graph and “smoke billowing” from cooling towers in the picture. It’s a shame that despite being on the high ground, David Rose resorts to these measures. But it is the Daily Mail.
Firstly, the first paragraph of Rose’s article implies right off the bat that there was a written report by the Met Office which stated that global warming stopped 16 years ago:
‘ Global warming stopped 16 years ago reveals Met Office report…’
This is a typical ploy, putting what looks like a quote at the beginning of a sentence, followed by the word ‘reveals’ (not ‘says’). BTW the quote marks above are my quotes of Rose’s article. Therefore Rose is the one making the claim. Although this is correct, he is trying to imply that the Met Office are admitting to it and doing so by making it the central point in a special written report. Furthermore, he implies that this is embarrassing because it was “quietly released”.
The Met Office blog post reply says there is no such report and that Rose must be referring to the HADcrut 4 update. This is probably the case. They say that they had reported that they were working on it six months before and that they had published it on their website. This was in order to counter the claim that it was not quietly revealed. However, Rose says later in his article “…with no media fanfare…”. That, along with the ‘quietly revealed’ earlier on clearly should be taken together and can only mean that it was not trumpeted to the media as it would be if the new data had shown a rise. Therefore, the Met Office were answering the bare bones of the first charge and not the full accusation in the round.
The Met Office go on to say:
“Mr Rose says the Met Office made no comment about its decadal climate predictions. This is because he did not ask us to make a comment about them.”
However Rose did ask, during their email exchange:
“Q.2 Second, tell me what this [new data] says about the models used by the IPCC and others which have predicted a rise of 0.2 degrees celsius per decade for the 21st century.”
This question is really a two part question: firstly, what does the new data say about their models? Secondly, albeit implicitly, what does it therefore have to say about their decadal climate predictions. The Met Office chose to answer the first of the two in its email reply but not the second. The implicit nature of the second is hardly obscure and
still less so for the Met Office because they are quick to link us to an earlier blog post “on the same theme” (their words) in Jan 2012, publishing an email exchange with Rose on the exact same subject of decadal projections where they answer at length, a question from Rose about the projections. In this earlier post they go onto complain that they were misrepresented because their rambling reply to Rose , citing projections as probabilistic and conflating temperature values with temperature trends, was cut for Rose’s (January) article.
Returning to the October article, Rose says (of the Met Office email exchange spokesman)
“Asked about a prediction that the Met Office made in 2009- that three of the the ensuing five years would set a new world temperature record- he made no comment.”
There is no specific reference to this in the email exchange which is cited as being reproduced in full by the Met Office blog post writer. Neither does it appear in the January exchange. That ‘3 out of 5’ so-called prediction was almost certainly a ‘probabalistic projection’ and not a prediction. Nevertheless it may have constituted part of the decadal projections which the Met Office knew were being implicitly referred to. This is the only piece of speculation in my comment. I would like to know if this is the case. Still, David Rose could have made it a bit clearer instead of implying that he had asked a direct question and got no answer.
In summary, there was no specific report, the Met Office didn’t declare that global warming had stopped. They didn’t bury anything. They did release new HadCRUT data that now ‘reveals’ that there has been either no warming or statistically insignificant warming in the last 16 years. They did not trumpet this as they have done for warming trends. They implied that they hadn’t been asked about decadal projections which they technically had but chose to ignore that technicality. Rose implied that his questions were direct and clear whereas they were implicit and thereby included a technical get-out if that implication was ignored. If this was a deliberate trap, the Met Office fell into it. However, it is impossible to know if it was deliberate but Rose definitely capitalised on their failure to acknowledge the obvious question of projections needing to be rethought, based on well-trodden ground in previous email exchanges.
I still have no source for that very un-HadCRUt looking graph. I wish they would publish clear temperature tables on their homepage. That site is like a thicket. All tables from them and GISS etc look like 1940’s hand-typed photocopies of enemy code.
Finally, this is for David Rose and the Met Office: I resent having to spend my Sunday afternoon unpicking other people’s spin and prevarications when they know full well that it will take hours of research and a laborious explanation like this to get to the bottom of it. It may seem to you that I have a choice whether to embark on it. However, when I know that the world is being told that temperatures are rising when they are not, how can I possibly just stand by when I can see through your spin, employed both for and against the argument? Neither helps the average Mail reader nor the taxpaying funders of the Met Office.
Scute
Henry@Jimbo
follow the Nile and its flooding and put my sine wave next to it…
makes sense does it not, more rains during a cooling period,
seeing that in general cooling causes condensation….
garymount says:
October 13, 2012 at 10:25 pm
My mother has informed me that she saw on the tv news a chart with lots of red on it showing how the worlds oceans are turning acidic.
=============
To say the oceans are turning acidic is a deception. It is a scientific fraud of the worst sort. Freshwater is much more “acidic” than the oceans for example, and we drink fresh water. Plants and animals live in “acidic” fresh water without any problem.
For all practical purposes it is impossible to turn the oceans acidic. They are mildly caustic, and are perhaps becoming slightly more neutral. However, due to the salt content you cannot make them acidic without first removing the salt. Something that is well beyond the power of human beings. We might as well try and shift the sun in its orbit.
Plants and animals dissolve in a caustic solution more readily than an acidic solution. For example, a caustic solution will dissolve hair and fat, while we drink acids like soda pop and orange juice without any harm. For this reason marine creatures often feel “slimy” as they use mucous to protect themselves from the caustic sea-water.
The oceans in the past were more much more acidic than now, thus it is likely that living creatures have within themselves the ability to survive if the oceans were to magically become acidic. Osmotic pressure due to lack/abundance of salt is what kills marine animals when they move between salt and fresh water environments.
I sent this article to Drudge Report and I’m happy to report that the UK MAIL article (not, alas, this WUWT article) made it on the Drudge Report!!!
Like I said earlier, the Streisand Effect is now running its course.
richardscourtney says:
October 14, 2012 at 8:30 am
For small changes in climate associated with tenths of a degree, there is no need for any external cause.
===========
Exactly. There a huge variation in day/night and winter/summer temperatures. Coupled with an asymmetric surface of the planet, this will lead to an asymmetric distribution of temperature, leading to natural variability in the average temperature.
We know from the paleo data that natural variability of +/- 6C can exists in time periods as short as a decade or two. There is nothing unusual about the much smaller variability observed during the past 150 years.
Here is the Met office response to the Daily Mail article:
http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/2012/01/29/met-office-in-the-media-29-january-2012/
They claim the article was “wrong”…
Today the Mail on Sunday published a story written by David Rose entitled “Forget global warming – it’s Cycle 25 we need to worry about”.
This article includes numerous errors in the reporting of published peer reviewed science undertaken by the Met Office Hadley Centre and for Mr. Rose to suggest that the latest global temperatures available show no warming in the last 15 years is entirely misleading.
Despite the Met Office having spoken to David Rose ahead of the publication of the story, he has chosen to not fully include the answers we gave him to questions around decadal projections produced by the Met Office or his belief that we have seen no warming since 1997.
The graph does seem to support the Daily Mail Story.
I see that ZedsDeadBed, who faithfully trolled Bishop Hill for a long time, has now gone over to the Daily Mail to comment.
I also see that the Mail article still ends with So let’s be clear. Yes: global warming is real, and some of it at least has been caused by the CO2 emitted by fossil fuels – all of which I am now sure is rubbish. But still, I’m grateful for the rest of the article.
And the latest comment by the Met Office is here…
http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/2012/10/14/met-office-in-the-media-14-october-2012/
An article by David Rose appears today in the Mail on Sunday under the title: ‘Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report quietly released… and here is the chart to prove it’
It is the second article Mr Rose has written which contains some misleading information, after he wrote an article earlier this year on the same theme – you see our response to that one here.
To address some of the points in the article published today:
Firstly, the Met Office has not issued a report on this issue. We can only assume the article is referring to the completion of work to update the HadCRUT4 global temperature dataset compiled by ourselves and the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit.
We announced that this work was going on in March and it was finished this week. You can see the HadCRUT4 website here.
Secondly, Mr Rose says the Met Office made no comment about its decadal climate predictions. This is because he did not ask us to make a comment about them.
You can see our full response to all of the questions Mr Rose did ask us below:
Interesting responses…
Paul Vaughan shows some stunning correlation pictures up thread here. Yes, they do look like a stunning degree of correlation between ocean temperatures and solar activity that astrophysicists should be taking seriously.
Article for Tallbloke? Work with the Electric Universe people? Demostrate Leif’s bias in this area, while still honouring his expertise? Prayer? All these and more, perhaps. Who was it said, science advances one death at a time, or words to that effect? The most important thing is whether YOU are doing what Great Spirit sent you here to do. All the rest falls into place when you know you are in line with your soul’s purpose or as another said, Seek first the Kingdom of Heaven, and everything else will be added.
2o years of hype….social engineering….green based wealth redistribution…DEAD
Lucy says
….whether YOU are doing what Great Spirit sent you here to do.
Henry says
Hi Lucy, I am so glad to see someone here with faith. You blessed me. Looking at all the comments I get from WUWT about my faith I was beginning to think that Jesus was right when he asked if there actually will be anyone with faith left when He comes back …. (Luke 18vs 8)
Looking for the truth, is always honorable as we know from Jesus conversation with Pilate/….never forgetting that He is the Truth, personified.
I am sure we will wrap up it here soon, as it becomes more and more obvious that humanity is facing some serious cooling in the years ahead. They cannot hide it for much longer. As I have explained earlier, they will have to make some plans. Earth’s energy storehouses are now a bit empty, from now onward I expect average temps to follow the same route as the maxima, falling by at least as much (I hope it is not more)
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
But it is not like we have not been there before. If you want to know what the weather was like 88 years ago, look at today’s weather forecast….
Max Planck, I believe – , “science advances one funeral at a time.”
It looks like the starch has been knocked out of the bump up from the 1998 super El Nino. It it hasn’t the La Nina that is now forming will finish it off. This La Nina may become a Super La Nina—but not certain of that yet. But either way, this La Nina will show definite cooling in the earth since 1997.
Blue i.e., La Nina conditions, forming:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/GODAS/ocean_briefing_new/pent_temp_godas_eq_xz.gif
More La Nina blue:
http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/sub_surf_mon.gif
More blue seen creeping across the equator:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_update/sstanim.gif
@WillR
Thanks for posting the two Met Office blog posts. I should have included them in my comment just before yours