This article and graphic from David Rose in the UK Daily Mail has caused quite a stir as we covered it here over the weekend. The Met Office has responded exactly as one would expect they would and I repeat their response below.
From the Met Office WordPress blog:
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:
Hi David,
Here’s a response to your questions. I’ve kept them as concise as possible but the issues you raise require considerable explanation.
Q.1 “First, please confirm that they do indeed reveal no warming trend since 1997.”
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, but equally we could calculate the linear trend from 1999, during the subsequent La Nina, and show a more substantial warming.
As we’ve stressed before, choosing a starting or end point on short-term scales can be very misleading. Climate change can only be detected from multi-decadal timescales due to the inherent variability in the climate system. If you use a longer period from HadCRUT4 the trend looks very different. For example, 1979 to 2011 shows 0.16°C/decade (or 0.15°C/decade in the NCDC dataset, 0.16°C/decade in GISS). Looking at successive decades over this period, each decade was warmer than the previous – so the 1990s were warmer than the 1980s, and the 2000s were warmer than both. Eight of the top ten warmest years have occurred in the last decade.
Over the last 140 years global surface temperatures have risen by about 0.8ºC. However, within this record there have been several periods lasting a decade or more during which temperatures have risen very slowly or cooled. The current period of reduced warming is not unprecedented and 15 year long periods are not unusual.
Q.2 “Second, tell me what this 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. I accept that there will always be periods when a rising gradient may be interrupted. But this flat period has now gone on for about the same time as the 1980 – 1996 warming.”
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.
Q.3 “Finally, do these data suggest that factors other than CO2 – such as multi-decadal oceanic cycles – may exert a greater influence on climate than previously realised?”
We have limited observations on multi-decadal oceanic cycles but we have known for some time that they may act to slow down or accelerate the observed warming trend. In addition, we also know that changes in the surface temperature occur not just due to internal variability, but are also influenced by “external forcings”, such as changes in solar activity, volcanic eruptions or aerosol emissions. Combined, several of these factors could account for some or all of the reduced warming trend seen over the last decade – but this is an area of ongoing research.
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The below graph which shows years ranked in order of global temperature was not included in the response to Mr Rose, but is useful in this context as it illustrates the point made above that eight of the warmest years on record have occurred in the past decade.
Graph showing years ranked in order of global temperature.
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One wonders what the Met Office would say about the data if the many circular adjustments and artificial biases were removed from the data.
From the NCDC web site: “Why are there more cold (negative) step changes than warm (positive) step changes in the historical land surface air temperature records represented in the GHCN v3 dataset? The reason for the larger number of cold step changes is not completely clear, but they may be due in part to systematic changes in station locations from city centers to cooler airport locations that occurred in many parts of the world from the 1930s through the 1960s.”
So, NCDC says maybe people moved the thermometers from city centers to cooler outside the city airports. So, NCDC adjust the temperature back by adding in increments for the removal of the thermometers from the heat island effect adding in the artifical heat of the city which they seem to want to keep including even going to the extent of adding it back in when people try to move thermometers to less biased locations. Okay. But why are they adding back in the heat island effect?
Is there a different way to read their statement? Why make these adjustments anyway? Can’t we assume that over a large enough sample of thermometers located by people they are not systematically choosing cool locations or warm locations but choosing better locations over time or at least equally bad locations. The large magnitude of the “adjustments” subtracting and adding 0.5C to the historical record implies almost a systematic attempt by thermometer placers to “reduce” the temperature today and an opposite motive in the past people systematically attempted to raise the temperature by placing thermometers in heated places but somewhere around 1980 thermometer placers systematically changed motives to reducing temp readings from their previous bias to place instruments trying to raise temperatures. Without justifying such counterintuitive behavior don’t we have to assume that over time thermometers in the US are sufficiently distributed and being placed over time with either the same or better overall placement? How can one justify a 0.5C adjustment to the overall record becasue of a bias in placement that hasn’t been demonstrated but simply through mathematical trickery to the underlying data?
What! Bring out the 97%. Now where did I hear about the 95%+ or 97%+ or whatever ‘certainty’ that it was man’s greenhouse gases what done it?
Remember this quote chaps. It’s the one to use whenever they attribute weather events to climate change. The funny thing is that despite this quote they keep ignoring it. They know full well the IPCC and the WMO use 30 years or more of weather data to define climate.
In other words, trends don’t matter because of natural variablity.
Except when we tell you its CO2!!!
Time to spank these children and send them to bed.
This is OT – on what appears to be another new form of censorship.
As some may know, WOT is a very popular Firefox add-on whose main original purpose was to warn users about potentially unsafe sites (unsafe in the technical sense: trojan horses etc.). It works by people giving it a safe or unsafe rating.
If a site has a bad reputation, it gives you a red circle next to a google search result. If you try to go to it directly from a link, you get a big warning page about its potential unsafety. Most people will be deterred from going to it, unless they personally know it’s safe.
I’ve been noticing that this add-on is increasingly being used as a means of censoring the views of sites. Of the blogroll on the right side of WUWT, at least three sites have been thus censored:
C3 Headlines
The GWPF
CO2 Science
I am not very familiar with the first two, but I often visit CO2 Science, a very informative site, and was surprised to see it had acquired the reputation of being unsafe through WOT voting.
All kinds of sites are being thus labeled just because voters disagree with the ideas they find in them, nothing to do with their safety.
Example: the Save America Foundation is a perfectly safe site. It happens to be concerned with the lack of transparency inherent in electronic voting machines, the potential for fraud, and various other constitutional issues. Today I wanted to go to it in order to read an older article by Victoria Collier (who has just published a new report on the topic in the November issue of Harper’s Magazine). Again, you get the spooky-looking WOT page warning you that you may be going into unsafe territory. I am considering turning WOT off permanently. Such zealotry everywhere!!
http://www.saveamericafoundation.com/category/voter-fraud/
Looking at successive decades over this period, each decade was warmer than the previous – so the 1990s were warmer than the 1980s, and the 2000s were warmer than both. Eight of the top ten warmest years have occurred in the last decade.
Just as 10 of my tallest years occurred in my last decade… because I stopped growing 40 years ago
http://tinyurl.com/ageHeight
Center column of Drudge Report with 30,000,000 page views per day;
http://www.drudgereport.com/
That’s what I call critical mass public consumption of truth.
“As we’ve stressed before, choosing a starting or end point on short-term scales can be very misleading…….For example, 1979 to 2011.”
“August 2012 (coming at the tail end of a double-dip La Nina)”
Actually, August 2012 was near the end of a weak El Nino. And why would we think that the 1997 value did not use January data? The title of the graph does not mention only Augusts. Even ignoring all that, the linear trend was supposed to be 0.2 C per decade. His using the lower 0.05 numbers is rather indicative that the realized warming over that period is much lower than the IPCC’s best estimate.
obviously Michael Mann hasn’t been observing the data!
4 Oct: Guardian: Jo Confino: Climate change may force evacuation of vulnerable island states within a decade
(Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University)
Mann, who is one of the primary targets for attacks by “climate deniers,” said that there is still uncertainty about the speed of global warming as it is not clear what the impact of feedback mechanisms could be…
“If you look at the US, some of these things are unfolding ahead of schedule and we are already contending with climate change impacts that were once theoretical,” he said.
“We predicted decades ago that this might eventually happen. We are watching them unfold and there are very real consequences to our economy and to our environment.
“The climate models tell us that what today are record breaking levels of heat will become a typical summer in a matter of 20-30 years if we carry on with business as usual. Not only will this become the new normal but we will have to change the scale because we will see heat and drought far worse than anything we have seen before.”
The silver lining in all the bad news is that while the political system is gridlocked when it comes to confronting climate change, public attitudes are starting to change.
“It is going to take a little while to sink in,” says Mann “but there is evidence of a dramatic shift in awareness and the public increasingly recognises climate change is real and if the public becomes convinced of this, they will demand action and they are connecting the dots because we are seeing climate change playing out in a very visible way.
“I think we are close to a potential tipping point in public consciousness and what will tip it, you never quite know, but another summer like the one we just witnessed we will see a dramatic shift in public pressure to do something about this problem.”…
He said the tactics of those who question climate change was not only to intimidate scientists already in the public arena, but also to warn off others from taking part in the public discourse.
But Mann believes the power of the Koch brothers and others in the fossil fuel lobby, whom he believes have been responsible for poisoning the whole climate change debate, is on the wane.
“I am optimistic,” he says. “The forces of denial will not go down with a whimper and as the rhetoric becomes more heated and the attacks become more concerted, we see the last vestiges of a movement that is dying…
“There are an increasing number of companies like Walmart which are ideologically conservative but have a real commitment to sustainability as they realise that as people become more concerned, they will reward companies that are part of the solution.”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sustainable-business/blog/polar-arctic-greenland-ice-climate-change?newsfeed=true
“Over the last 140 years global surface temperatures have risen by about 0.8ºC”
I;ve seen various dates as to when Co2 started to cause some warming. 1950 is used by BEST. Others use 1970.
In either case, the concept of 140 years of AGW is bogus and should not have been used.
Rose’s headline “global warming stopped ” is imprecise and misleading”. It is true that SST data – the best measure of global temperature trends because of the thermal inertia of the oceans and the UHI effect on the land data – show that there has been no net warming since 1997 – with CO2 up 8,5% .However the same data show that warming peaked in about 2003 and that since then the earth has actually been in a cooling trend. Empirically the phase of the PDO and the declining solar magnetic field strength ( Livinston and Penn) indicating a possible coming Maunder minimum , suggest at least 20 – 30 years of cooling. Beyoned that our knowledge is insufficient to make any actionable predictions. The IPCC climate models were and are structured to produce a desired result and have limited empirical connection to the real climate.
no mention yet of the anomaly period they used for that chart at the end (1961-1990). whenever i see the unusually cold 60s/70s as a ‘normal’ period, i see red flags. either use the most recent 30 year period or use the entire time period being compared…
When ever you seen any two decimal places claims for precision, you should ask yourself is this in practice possible or is it merely an artefact of ‘adjustment ; that come not from know facts but intelligent ‘guess work ‘
Hands up who thinks there is much chance of temperature records from 100 or even 70 years ago being correct to two decimal places.
Gras Albert
“Just as 10 of my tallest years occurred in my last decade… because I stopped growing 40 years ago”
Thanks, a useful analogy
“…The current period of reduced warming is not unprecedented…”
Neither was the previous period of increased warming.
With more, let’s say independent forecasters inclining to the view that temps are about to head downhill over the next decade or two, the entertainment might get better yet in the years to come.
I have a suggestion for some real number crunching here; Remove all decimals.
What do we get?
A straight line. In other words; Nothing to be alarmed over.
klem says:
October 15, 2012 at 11:22 am
You may also like to get fully weaseled up:
http://thedilbertstore.com/products/65162-dilbert-and-the-way-of-the-weasel
“Looking at successive decades over this period, each decade was warmer than the previous – so the 1990s were warmer than the 1980s, and the 2000s were warmer than both. Eight of the top ten warmest years have occurred in the last decade.”
Why do they get away with the above, often repeated, statement as evidence that warming is continuing? In that context it’s logically meaningless because it’s exactly what you’d expect if there had been warming 9from whatever source) which stopped in the last decade or so. Once something warms up, it takes time to cool down again even if you turn down the heat source.
In fact, anything else would suggest worryingly rapid cooling ahead!
jmrsudbury says:
October 15, 2012 at 1:23 pm
> “August 2012 (coming at the tail end of a double-dip La Nina)”
> Actually, August 2012 was near the end of a weak El Nino.
El Niño conditions didn’t last long enough to cause things to be declared an El Niño. I don’t have time to dig up the definition, but it’s sort of like a recession – by the time it’s declared, everyone knows it is.
More to the point – I think El Niño warming takes a few month to make it into the temperature record, so we may not have seen it yet.
Buy the biggest computer on the block and all the big iron goes to your head.
Or is that the biggest computer in the country?
http://adirondackdailyenterprise.com/page/content.detail/id/533454/Transcending-climate-catastrophe.html?nav=5041
1) It is not uncommon in the simulations for these periods to last up to 15 years, but longer periods are unlikely.
Says the Met Office. So if we do not get back to warming by 2015, what, then? Does “unlikely” become “within variation as predicted by computer modelling”?
2) external forcings”, such as changes in solar activity, volcanic eruptions or aerosol emissions. Combined, several of these factors could account for some or all of the reduced warming trend seen over the last decade – but this is an area of ongoing research.
For a start: “reduced warming trend”, i.e. statistically zero. Then: CO2 forcing must equal at least the negative forcings of the other, cooling trends. But they are not sure. Still, you could rule some out: volcanic eruptions? Definite “no”. Aerosol emissions? Just got a negative forcing number to check. Solar … another hard number to check.
They are getting backed into a corner, you think?
Its important to understand that not only is temperature not responding but the energy is missing. Climate and weather are one thing but conservation of energy is an
Its important to understand that not only is temperature not responding but the energy is missing. Climate and weather are one thing but conservation of energy is an immutable law that must be satisfied instant by instant. The energy is missing. It’s not in the oceans it’s not in the atmosphere it’s not on the earth. It escaped. If it escaped and they didn’t predict it would escape then how dO we know it won’t all escape? If that energy has escaped why? How can any prediction be taken seriously if they didn’t understand this?
“eight of the warmest years on record have occurred in the past decade”
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“And many of the highest points on a sine-wave, will be near the crest of the wave. That does not imply that the sine-wave is not in decline from thereon in.”
Moreover, their claim is an absolute insult to anyone who understands a minimal level of Math, Science, or logic. It is an insult for the gang to think there are so many “stupid” people who can not see through the poor logic of their statement. Sure, some of the mathematically challenged folks may not see through the manipulation of the comment immediately, but once explained they understand.
How stupid do they think we are??
It is obvious that the agw fanatics think little of average person. They assume their scare tactics will work that if they say that te petabytes remain high that the average person then concludes they are right that temperatures could climb 3C by 2100 when there is zero change in nearly 2 decades. This may work for another few years but it’s unmistakable that the consequences of agw is inconsequential unless you are a pure h2o ice crystal located north of 80 degrees latitude.
The Met Office always knows… after the facts as their prediction for September was spot… off. LOL