In the much ballyhooed 2008 NOAA “State of the Climate” report on climate change they state, concerning the climate models, something quite relevant to the issues raised by the new story in the UK Daily Mail:
“Near-zero and even negative trends are common for intervals of a decade or less in the simulations, due to the model’s internal climate variability. The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”
Source: http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/climate-assessment-2008-lo-rez.pdf
Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. said in 2009:
“Kudos to NOAA for being among the first to explicitly state what sort of observation would be inconsistent with model predictions — 15 years of no warming.”
(h/t to Tom Harris)
Or how about this:
Climategate’s Phil Jones ‘insisted that 15 or 16 years is not a significant period: pauses of such length had always been expected, he said’ in 2012
‘Yet in 2009, when the [temperature] plateau was already becoming apparent and being discussed by scientists, Jones told a colleague in one of the Climategate emails: ‘Bottom line: the ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’
‘In other words, though 5 years ago he seemed to be saying that 15 years without warming would make him ‘worried’, that period has now become 20 years’ h/t to Climate Change Dispatch.
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.
Yet, today, we see evidence of the goalposts being moved again as the met Office tries to paint this lack of warming “plateau” as being insignificant:
The models exhibit large variations in the rate of warming from year to year and over a decade, owing to climate variations such as ENSO, the Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation and Pacific Decadal Oscillation. So in that sense, such a period is not unexpected. It is not uncommon in the simulations for these periods to last up to 15 years, but longer periods are unlikely.
So we are at 16 years, soon to be 17 years. What happens when we hit 20 years?
Either the models are worth something or they aren’t. In this case it seems they aren’t.
See also:
The Mail On Sunday And The Met Office
by: Dr. David Whitehouse
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Rod Everson,
All modelers do, and estimated variability has been a component of models since at least the 80s.
Yes, hiatuses and rapid short-term increases are expected within the long-term trends. With a caveat – if another forcing becomes a player, like intense volcanic activity for a lengthy duration, the trend may be influenced while that endures. Over the last decade or so we’ve had a compination of factors producing a lowered trend – ENSO and low solar activity, for example. Aerosol forcing 9cooling) is also discussed, but I don’t think there is a robust understanding of that component at present The strong el nino of 1998 lies well above the median trend, and even pops over the 2-sigma envelope.
Not necessarily 50% – recurring confluences of cooling factors can see a preponderance of dips, while still returning to the long-term projected trend, but there should also be periods where the obs rise above the median projections.
I wouldn’t imagine so. Modelers are consistent in saying that they cannot predict interannual weather fluctuations. the best they can hope for is to model the variability, not the timing.
A gradual return to the projected trend is also a possibilty.
I don’t think we need to see mirrored effects, but for the models to be sound WRT obs, we would need to see a return to the median trend at a minimum. And there is a range, rather than a sinlge rising value.
I thought your questions were fair, too.
Richard,
The BBC quote has nothing to do with the email conversation. Jones was asked a question about whether or not there was a statistically significant trend from 1995 (and the trend estimate was 0.12C, as he said in the interview, but just failed statistical significance). In the email conversation they are discussing how much longer the decline should continue before it made projections dicey. Two different things.
In order to parse it your way, we would have to believe that a 5-year declning trend was a concern to them – but short term declines are common as muck, and no one at the time was arguing that the trend from 2004 to 2009 was an issue. No, this email exchange was at the time (May 2009) when the 1998 – 2008 trend showed a decline and was being talked about widely. I just don’t think it was possible Jones was concerned about such a short period – they were talking about the 1998 to 2009 decline, and estimating a further 10 years from *now* (Mike), or 15 years from 2004/5 (Jones) of “continued” warming would indicate something was wrong with forecasts.
I think it’s pretty clear.
Chris Schoneveld:
At October 16, 2012 at 8:47 am you say
OoooKaaay. So, “no warming” now means “cooling”. I see.
It seems I need to buy new running shoes for me to keep up with the speed at which the goal posts keep moving.
Richard
barry:
In your post addressed to me at October 16, 2012 at 9:48 am you say
Yes, it is. You are trying to ‘move the goal posts’.
Richard
I think we need to be examining the difference between daily/yearly rising temps – falling temps.
And if you do, there’s no measurable loss of nightly/seasonal cooling.
And if the minimum winter temperatures get reset each year isn’t that heat lost to space anyways?
ericgrimsrud says:
October 16, 2012 at 7:54 am
“For a better perspective on T changes over the last 150 years, see”
The problem Eric is the data itself doesn’t show that, it’s only when you try to extrapolate measurements over areas that don’t get sampled, and then average that up that you get such increases. There’s been a huge difference in the number of stations over time, as well as temperature over an area isn’t linear.
barry:
At October 16, 2012 at 9:38 am in reply to Rod Everson you say
That’s a good try but not good enough to win a coconut.
The IPCC AR4 predicted (n.b. predicted and not projected) that global temperature would rise at a rate of 0.2deg.C/decade averaged over the first two decades following year 2000. This model-derived prediction was for “committed warming” which was certain because of GHGs already in the system.
The minimum global temperature rise according to this prediction of “committed warming” is for
0.32deg.C rise in global temperature from 2000 to 2020.
And anthropogenic CO2 emissions have continued since 2000 which the models say should have added an additional and similar amount of warming. So, if the models are right then the rise in global temperature from 2000 to 2020 needs to be at least 0.64 deg.C.
Since 2000 there has been no warming but more than half of the first two decades has elapsed and, therefore, the 0.64deg.C has to be achieved over the next nine years. Of course, hypothetically that could happen but it is extremely improbable: the entire rise in global temperature over the last century was only 0.8 deg.C.
Importantly, if the extremely improbable jump of 0.64 deg.C in global temperature were to occur in the present decade then it would not explain where the “committed warming” has been hiding for the last decade.
The models are bunkum. Live with it.
Richard
Wow. The Hadcrut boys and girls installed one of the biggest mega computers in the world to predict BBQ summers and an era of drought but got record cold and record rain. NCAR was inspired by this performance to install an 8MW powered superC to keep up with Jones’s. One could pick away at predictions and trends as long as the trend was rising or rising as fast as they could decently adjust figures, but turning to a negative trend puts the alchemists of climate science all together out of the game. What a poor time for a new supercomputer, fed with CO2 malarkey to come on stream.
Concerning the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and the Little Ice Age (LIA) which are so often brought up in converations like this one:
There are three factors that control the average T of Earth. They are the intensity of solar radiation, the albedo of the Earth and the magnitude of the greehouse effects. These, in turn, can be affected by events on Earth, such as volcanoes, or the lack of, for example. Also, local or regional weather events do not necessarity reflect a global trend.
So how can we know as much about events that occurred centuries ago as we can about events that are occurred in the last decade? The answer of course is we can not. We do not have such information concerning the preindustrial period that we have since then.
Thus the suggest or implication that we can not understand the present without understanding the detailed climates of the past is silly.
warmists. See how they run.
William Holder says:
October 15, 2012 at 8:00 pm
“Could someone please tell me what real world observations have actually agreed with the models or predictions of the last few decades. Have they got anything right?”
Not for surface air temperature (SAT). From the GISS-E2 Model, the downloaded TAS (SAT) monthly global forecast from the KNMI data explorer website, in a CMIP5 RPC4.5 experiment run, shows no 15 year regression trends (rolling month by month, starting year 2000) less than 0.003 C/year (the current HADCRUT4 trend for the last 16 years) until 2067 when emission growth has slowed and equilibrium starts to settle in. Not even close actually, the minimum rolling 15 year trend until 2050 from the model is 0.009C/yr. From this same model run the average rolling 15 year trend is 0.018C/year for the first 25 years of this century. For the record, the RPC4.5 scenario has CO2 peaking at about 540 ppmv in 2100.
The pro-AGW team would object on the basis that our 16 year trend starts with a strong El Nino and the GISS-E2 model doesn’t model ENSO well so the current HADCRUT4 trend “doesn’t count” as a comparison against model runs.
ericgrimsrud:
At October 16, 2012 at 11:33 am you assert
You know you are wrong about that because I have explained it to you before. Those are NOT the only factors affecting the average temperature of the Earth.
For the benefit of others I will state it again.
All recent climate change could be a result of internal climate system variability. Richard Lindzen states the matter more clearly than I could so I quote his words from
http://www.glebedigital.co.uk/blog/?p=1450
Other possibilities also exist; e.g. a redistribution of temperate zones.
Please desist from your habit of making statements that you know are wrong.
Richard
ericgrimsrud says:
October 16, 2012 at 11:33 am
“…how can we know as much about events that occurred centuries ago as we can about events that are occurred in the last decade? The answer of course is we can not.”
Eric, welcome to the geological sciences and to history. Do you doubt the long time ago existence of the dinosaurs? Do you doubt that there were volcanoes over 2B years ago? Do you indeed doubt that there have been numerous ice ages? Do you doubt that it snowed in Greenland over thousands of years? Oh, you accept that. Then it should be easier to convince you of the MWP (when Scottish wines were highly regarded in Europe and Vikings colonized a much warmer Greenland [recent warming is still exposing farmsteads that grew crops and raised sheep that have been buried since the end of MWP]) And you should have no trouble seeing contemporary paintings during the LIA of children playing on thick ice in the Thames River and the old posters and newspaper articles on the “Frost Faires” held on the Thames in the early 19th Century and the reports of Swiss villages in the valleys being crushed by advancing glaciers from the mountains in the 18th century. You can also google the freezing over of the Bosphorus and of New York harbour. New Yorkers even walked across the ice to Staten island. Did you know that a third of the Finns died of starvation because crops wouldn’t grow during the depths of LIA. I haven’t supplied links but this is well known, documented history. Have no fear in exploring outside your comfort zone.
ericgrimsrud says: October 16, 2012 at 7:54 am
“For a better perspective on T changes over the last 150 years…”
Well why pick just the last 150 years if you want to question the significance of the more recent trends? Why not look at the entire climate record?
For a better perspective of our complex climate I’d suggest this excelent WUWT post by Dr. Robert Brown from early this year.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/09/strange-new-attractors-strong-evidence-against-both-positive-feedback-and-catastrophe/
A small excerpt:
There is little in the climate record to suggest the existence of another major stable state, another major attractor, well above the current warm phase attractor. Quite the opposite — the record over the last few tens of millions of years suggest that we are in the middle of a prolonged cooling phase of the planet, of the sort that has happened repeatedly over geological time, such that we are in the warm phase major attractor, and that there is literally nothing out there above it to go to. If there were, we would have gone there, instead, as local variations and oscillation around the many> minor warm phase attractors has repeatedly sampled conditions that would have been likely to cause a transition to occur if one was at all likely. At the very least, there would be a trace of it in the thermal record of the last million years or thereabouts, and there isn’t. We’re in one of the longest, warmest interglacials of the last five, although not at the warmest point of the current interglacial (the Holocene). If there were a still warmer attractor out there, the warmest point of the Holocene would have been likely to find it.
Since it manifestly did not, that suggests that the overall feedbacks are safely negative and all of the “catastrophe” hypotheses but one are relatively unlikely.
The one that should be worrisome? Catastrophic Global Cooling. We know that there is a cold phase major attractor some 5-10C cooler than current temperatures. Human civilization arose in the Holocene, and we have not yet advanced to where it can survive a cold phase transition back to glacial conditions, not without the death of 5 billion people and probable near-collapse of civilization. We know that this transition not only can occur, but will occur. We do not know when, why, or how to estimate its general probability. We do know that the LIA — a mere 400-500 years ago — was the coolest period in the entire Holocene post the Younger Dryas excursion;
ferd berple says: October 16, 2012 at 7:25 am
“DUH! The 21st century is only 12 years.
Hard for normal people to get 15 years of trend out of 12 years of data. It takes a Real Climate Scientists to do that.”
Indeed so. Let me say again – this post tries to say that a statement by NOAA people “puts a kibosh” on something the Met said about Hadcrut 4 over the last fifteen years. The NOAA was referring to model runs in the 21st century, saying that 15 year periods of zero trend were rare (at 95%). And as barry says, they were referring to ENSO-adjusted trends.
So the “kibosh” fails on at least three grounds:
1. As you say, starting 1997 isn’t 21st century. If you wanted to argue that it’s close, I’d be sympathetic. But
2. ENSO adjustment is a big one. The main reason why this period has relatively low trend is that it starts with a big Nino and ends with Ninas. Take that away and, as Foster and Rahmstorf showed, you have a strong uptrend (very much not zero), and
3. most basically, even without 1 and 2, we haven’t observed that zero (or negative) trend.
Nick Stokes:
re your post at October 16, 2012 at 12:02 pm.
Please read my post addressed to barry at October 16, 2012 at 10:52 am. It provides a complete explanation of why your post is irrelevant and misleading twaddle.
It would be appreciated if you were to read the thread instead of picking up talking points from warmist web sites then posting them here without checking that those points have already been rebutted in the thread.
Richard
Richdo says:
“For a better perspective of our complex climate I’d suggest this excelent WUWT post by Dr. Robert Brown from early this year.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/01/09/strange-new-attractors-strong-evidence-against-both-positive-feedback-and-catastrophe/”
Excellent! I’ve made a similar argument against catastrophic warming, it’s never happened before.
[My bold]
That’s what they say. Does anyone know where one can find the results of these simulations so people can check how ‘uncommon’ they are.
So when we hit 17, then 18, 19 and 20 years with no significant warming (or cooling) what is the Met Office and the IPCC going to say about the climate models’ skill? Will they re-assess the projections for the rest of this century? No, they will just move the goalposts another 5 or 10 years. This is either a scam or a religion or both.
You can get your own GCM to run here http://edgcm.columbia.edu/
While it’s not free, you can get a demo license.
richardscourtney says: October 16, 2012 at 12:20 pm
“It would be appreciated if you were to read the thread”
No, you should read the lead post. You’re wanting to talk about why the trend is less than something you claim it should be. But the post claims that a specific statement by NOAA people (see headline) puts the kibosh on the Met counter to Rose. And that NOAA statement refers to a zero trend over 15 years (for models after ENSO adjustment).
Your insistent posts just don’t deal with that at all. Can you explain that “kibosh”?
But if you really want to talk about the AR4 SPM, they said, in 2007, an expected rise of “about 0.2°C/Dec” over the next two decades.
The quote is no longer on the page since at least bfefore
“Last Updated: 12 April 2012”
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/people/gareth-s-jones
H/t Barry Woods
http://www.bishop-hill.net/contributor/18692033
Nick Stokes (October 16, 2012 at 2:16 pm), the AR4 expected temperature rise of “about 0.2°C/Dec” over the next two decades is based on models fed with SRES scenarios from the IPCC Special Report on Emission Scenarios (2000). You are not suggesting we should ignore that and test the trend prediction starting from 2007 are you?
It’s the funding, loss of status and the fear of being tarred and feathered for the rest of your life.
On the other hand we are dealing with an odd sort of character who greets bad news as being good and good news as being bad.
Over the death of John Daly:
“In an odd way this is cheering news”
Nick Stokes:
I am replying to your excuse for posting irrelevant and previously rebutted nonsense which you address to me at October 16, 2012 at 2:16 pm.
It seems you want me to spell things out, so I will.
The above article which is the subject of this thread concludes saying
My post at October 16, 2012 at 10:52 am presented evidence that comparison of the most recent 11 years of the “16 years” to an IPCC prediction (n.b. prediction and not projection) shows the models aren’t “worth something”. The most recent 11 years are in the 21st century.
Then, at October 16, 2012 at 12:02 pm, you made your ‘copy and paste’ from a warmist website which said
That had already been rebutted by my post which reported the importance of the global temperature ‘flat-line’ after year 2000. So, at October 16, 2012 at 12:20 pm, I wrote my post which said to you
And you responded with your excuse which I am replying. It says to me
As I have here itemised
1.
I did read the “lead post” and I addressed its conclusion which I quote in this post.
2.
You did NOT read – or ignored – the conclusion of the “lead post”.
3.
You posted irrelevant twaddle that I had refuted.
4.
I asked you to not copy such irrelevant twaddle from warmist web sites.
5.
You have made a silly excuse that has no relationship to reality and asks me to “explain” your nonsense.
Please feel free to post an apology for your silly attempt at disrupting the thread.
Richard
Jimbo says:
October 16, 2012 at 2:00 pm
“Does anyone know where one can find the results of these simulations so people can check how ‘uncommon’ they are.”
You can get your own GCM with a demo license here:
http://edgcm.columbia.edu/
Nick Stokes says:
October 16, 2012 at 2:16 pm
“But if you really want to talk about the AR4 SPM, they said, in 2007, an expected rise of “about 0.2°C/Dec” over the next two decades.”
That is really funny quoting the one part of AR4 that is essentially the opposite of what the body of the AR4 is saying. Nice try Nick. People resigned over the SPM “conclusions”.
Richdo, Answer: because temperatures over approximately the last 150 years were made with a marvelously accurate and reproducible methods – generally called “thermometers”. Before that we have proxies T methods which are indeed also useful but to not provide the same sensitivity to small T changes.