Update and confirmation of 'Global warming stopped 16 years ago' aka 'the pause'

“We received hundreds of responses from readers, who were overwhelmingly critical of those climate change experts who believe that global warming is inevitable.”
Well then they are wrong. More CO2 with all other things equal means higher temperatures in the future. What’s up for debate is how big the effect will be, and whether that is a good or bad thing (it would be good to delay or stop the next ice age).

Looks like a hockey stick to me 😉

Actually the question is whether or not CO2 is the ‘evil game changer’ it is claimed. Research on nuclear submarines suggest a different scenario. The average CO2 level on an operational submarine may be as high as 2,000 ppm, but is generally around 700 ppm (I think Anthony has a post on this somewhere) which rather refutes some of the claims of ‘heat’ trapping as the submarines are able to maintain a fairly stable internal temperature, admittedly with air conditioning to regulate it. The bigger problem at the upper end of the scale is the narcotic effect on the brain. But at 700 ppm it is not measurable.
If Hansen et al are to be believed, these submarines should be unbearably hot after a very short patrol. They’re not. In fact some compartments have a heating problem.

give thanx david rose, judith curry, anthony watts, steve mcintyre, joanne nova, andred montford and all who have helped to rescue the scientific method from a dangerous shift back to scientific dogma.

I wonder if there is a 16 year pause in the unadjusted data
http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2012/10/21/defiling-the-past/

The Met Office now confirms on its climate blog that no significant warming has occurred recently: ‘We agree with Mr Rose that there has only been a very small amount of warming in the 21st Century.’
That’s still a lie. If they were honestly attempting to speak the truth they would say there has been statistically insignificant warming in the 21st century.” That’s as good as none at all, not “a very small amount.”

clivebest@6:21
“Even Skeptical Science give an error of 0.152”
==================================================
I would suggest that you carefully examine the methodology of anything SS indicates. They hold the rank of being #1 as the worst cherry pickers of all time.
And they keep finding imaginary warming. Delusional is a nice term to describe their outcomes.
We have not warmed for 16 years. That is what the data shows and it will soon be 17.

Judith Curry wants us to acknowledge the “pause”, how does she know, it could be a peak not a pause on the way up.

Thank you, Dr. Curry.
It is a shame more papers don’t report this story.

IT IS ALL ABOUT SUNSPOT ACTIVITY IN OUR PLACE IN TIME AND SPACE.
Since the Cycle that began around 1976 and including climate lag, the cycles have been deceasing until 2008 and those three cycles generated our global warming that incorporates the start of Arctic Ice measurements in 1979.
Now we are in a solar minimum that is mirroring the weather and climate conditions that came about from a flat sunspot cycle that looks like Devil’s Tower. The sunspot minimum, which is more acurately measured than the ones in 1700 and 1800 will give a future generations a better idea of sunspot activity effects on future weather and climate.
Climate changes a bit one season at a time.

Therefore a correct statistical statement is that the data show a trend of 0.0 ± 0.1°C
An even better statistical statement is that the R value (or R^2 value) for any linear fit is absurdly small, in this case around 0.01 or even smaller (if I’m doing the arithmetic in my head correctly, always open to doubt:-).
However, neither of the statements above are truly statistically meaningful because we don’t know the underlying timescales or functional forms of the natural, unforced variation. What we do know is that the temperature series is not composed of the means of independent, identically distributed samples. It is possible that the “pause” is itself pure statistical noise in a long term warming trend. It could be that the “pause” is the peak before a long term downward trend. It could be that the pause isn’t a pause, it is a new more or less steady state that will last decades with minor variations up or down. What is almost certain is that on a time scale of centuries the climate will move up or down a degree C or more, at least it has fairly consistently varied by that much or more in the historical (instrumental and non-instrumental) past and much more than that in the prehistorical past known only by proxies.
One of my favorite forms of amusement in the past has been watching Monte Carlo results as they evolve out of a Markov Chain of one sort or another, often one where the actual functional form of the result is known either analytically or to a very high approximation. The results, especially in or near a critical regime, do not generally reflect that underlying analytic form particularly well until one has a lot of iid data, many runs. It makes the efforts of those who are trying to extract the analytical “signal” from the non-Markovian, chaotic, sparsely sampled, error-laden temperature data equally amusing.
One day Bob Tisdale will marry his SST data up with Koutsoyiannis’s Hurst-Kolmogorov analysis and we’ll actually start using the approximately correct Markov process to model the global data. Sometime after that — perhaps another decade or three — with a good enough instrumental record that actually spans full cycles of the major decadal oscillations, and with a lot more data on how the Sun by means known and (currently) unknown influences global climate we may be able to go beyond numerology and make statements about what is trend and what is noise in climate science.
At the moment, the “pause” could be (as the CAGW enthusiasts allege) just that, a pause in a process of runaway global warming driven by anthropogenic greenhouse gases (a possibility skeptics would do well to keep in mind as it is far from disproven — so far). Or it could be — almost anything else you can imagine. We just don’t know, because predicting the climate a decade or two from now is pissing into an F5 tornado, metaphorically speaking. We might as well contact somebody from the psychic ads section of the National Enquirer to get their take on it as listen to the IPCC or climate researchers, and this is acknowledged by the more honest of the latter.
We don’t know how to predict what the temperature would be or should be in the absence of human-produced CO_2 (or aerosols, ozone, methane, particulate dust, agricultural runoff in the Gulf of Mexico or Bay of Bengal, goats, and macro-scale wheat farms that have replaced forests across the temperate zone. We don’t know how to “predict” what it appears to have been in the past. We don’t know what it is going to do in the future. Not even in very broad terms, not really. Hell, at the moment, I’m not even certain what the weather is going to do in the short run — ENSO went south, metaphorically, the wooly caterpillars are extra wooly (but might have been as confused by ENSO as we humans are), the sun is approaching its feeble solar maximum (feeble yes, but still maximum for the cycle) and besides, the weather we experience in NC is as much a function of what happens to the jet stream as it is of winter cooling per se, and the jet stream is influenced by all of the major oscillations AFAICT. So it’s a crap shoot. Long, cold and snowy? Maybe. Warm enough to sunbathe in January? It was back in 1975 and several times since — it may be once again. Even NOAA refuses to say — ENSO has confused them too.
Predicting the weather is easy. The weather today is most likely to be like the weather yesterday, modulated by an easy seasonal adjustment. That simple prediction will be right more than half the time. Predicting the climate? Not so much.
rgb

Judith Curry wants us to acknowledge the “pause”, how does she know, it could be a peak not a pause on the way up.
See my reply. The “pause” bit is simply acknowledging that it has been statistically indistinguishable from no trend for over a decade, even as it has a very strong warming trend over (say) four decades, a somewhat weaker trend over six decades, and a stronger trend again over a century to a century and a half, a very strong trend if you go back 350 years, a very weak trend if you go back a thousand years, and a negative trend if you go back some two thousand years.
We do not know how to predict the baseline temperature the Earth “should” have absent all noise. We do not even know if such a concept is meaningful — the Earth is a non-Markovian chaotic system with numerous positive and negative feedbacks and a very long “memory effect” associated with the century-plus scale of turnover in the oceans — the butterfly effect means that our climate in a decade could be influenced by things like whether or not I sneeze today — the best we can do is produce an ensemble of possible future climates even with modeling, one so broad that even the “average” over this ensemble is most unlikely to be what actually works out.
So sure, it could be a peak, a pause, or a new more or less (at least transiently) steady state. Time will tell.
It does have one very interesting consequence. Back in 1997 (and before) various predictions were made concerning future temperature trajectories given various levels of presumed climate sensitivity/feedback. Every year that the current trendless trend continues actually provides us with valuable data as it permits us to reject the more extreme of those sensitivities as being inconsistent with observation. Indeed, sensitivity is being systematically reduced AR to AR, even by the IPCC, because the data simply doesn’t support the more catastrophic values. This, more than anything else, is why catastrophic warmism is on the decline and lukewarmism on the rise.
One can, of course play logical fallacy bingo with this:
http://lifesnow.com/bingo/
and claim that refusal to accept this (by those that are still so refusing) is moving the goalposts, just as they can (and do) claim that pointing it out is cherrypicking the data (while of course filling in all of the squares for things like Argumentum ad Populum, Appeal to Fear, Special Pleading, Opinion stated as Fact…).
I’ve suggested to Anthony that he permanently post links to Logical Fallacy Bingo off to the side on his site, so that we can all play with all the top articles — both pro and con. I think it would be most instructive for everybody, and might even impose a certain discipline on the discussion (I can think of many times where I would have gotten “bingo” from a single post on a WUWT thread, again both ways).
For example, let me terrorize you with the threat of rising seas and melting polar icecaps and dying polar bears and penguins, or with a cabal of evil Liberals who want to raise taxes and create a world socialism. They’re both an appeal to fear. Let’s invoke “96% of all scientists” by all means — it fills in a lot of squares, but when skeptics claim certain knowledge that the current temperatures are a peak and they will go down with the sunspot level, that fills in a few for the other side as well (nobody wants to acknowledge the truth, which is that we don’t really know what they will do, or why they will end up doing what they end up doing, at least not yet). We can all revel in False Dilemmas galore — choosing between world socialism and accepting AGW, choosing between catastrophic AGW and carbon futures that enrich selected humans now without actually solving the problem (but beware the Nirvana fallacy on both sides).
rgb

It’s hard to acknowledge the truth of global warming when the factual reality interferes with the political ideology you are planning to make the basis for a redesigned and planned economy worldwide. Remember perceptions of reality matter to future individual behavior more than actual reality. Falsehoods believed prevail in other words when it comes to incentives to act or not. But then actual reality does win out in the end in terms of the consequences of all this manipulation of people and economies and societies through modelling and education based on the false premise of catastrophic manmade global warming.
http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/squelching-climate-skepticism-while-employing-operant-conditioning-tactics-against-schoolchildren/ is the write up of the US National Academy of Sciences report I mentioned on using education, K-14, to eliminate climate skepticism as if this were the Soviet Union and we all need M-L approved political officers to monitor that all decisions are consistent with the ideology. The report also mentioned how the new science standards will be controversial so the squelching should come in covertly through systems thinking in all academic subjects. Which of course asserts that there is such a thing as a single Unified science instead of social sciences and natural and physical sciences. There goes the science of the Enlightenment by ed school fiat.
So, whatever the temps and whatever the weather, it is hard for the politicians and bureaucrats and crony businesses planning to cash in on being a preferred state approved monopolist vendor of a mandated good or service to give up their AGW trophy. Because they hate free markets and they hate individualism and AGW is the perfect excuse to bind Prometheus back up and shift to an aristocracy of pull.
At our considerable expense. And that’s before the inevitable cleanup since reality will bite in the end even if it remains unknown and unperceived.

Chuck says:
October 21, 2012 at 7:34 am
IT IS ALL ABOUT SUNSPOT ACTIVITY IN OUR PLACE IN TIME AND SPACE…
________________
Leif in 5-4-3-

Grey Monk said nuclear sub atmospheres had between700 and 2000 ppm CO2
I think that is way too low GM….
“Data collected on nine nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines indicate an average CO2 concentration of 3,500 ppm with a range of 0-10,600 ppm, and data collected on 10 nuclear-powered attack submarines indicate an average CO2 concentration of 4,100 ppm with a range of 300-11,300 ppm (Hagar 2003). – page 46”
That is for 3-6 months and they still have to press the same buttons/levers/keys/switches at the end of the voyage as at the start!

The Met made the comment that the platueau could contine for some time. I suspect they are expecting further La Nina domination along with a cooling East Pacific due to upwelling cold water which in turn will in turn intensify the marine layer (low clouds) which inhibits the radiative heating of the ocean. The colder water will inhibit evaporation and bring low humidity and drought to Western North and South America. They will discover the power of natural feedbacks.

rgbatduke on October 21, 2012 at 7:51 am
However, neither of the statements above are truly statistically meaningful because we don’t know the underlying timescales or functional forms of the natural, unforced variation. What we do know is that the temperature series is not composed of the means of independent, identically distributed samples. [ . . . ]

– – – – – –
rgbatduke,
A noteworthy discussion which I will reread often.
I appreciate the above quote from your long post. It will help me keep perspective when decadal timescales are considered while discussing climate science.
John

rgbatduke;
Ouch and thank you a concise summary of our ignorance and our blinding assumptions wrt our knowledge.

The underlying assumption of climate science is that a small change in temperature indicates a change in climate. Is this a reasonable assumption? Isn’t water (rainfall) at least as important a measure of climate. So, how can we consider temperature without also considering rainfall?
For example, if we break climate down by temp and rainfall as below, we find that the hospitable regions of the earth for life occur where it is both wet and warm, and the inhospitable regions occur where it is cold and/or dry. Thus, if anything, global warming should make the earth more hospitable to life, by increasing rainfall and temperature.
moisture
———-
desert – dry
grasslands – moist
forests – wet
temperature
————–
tropical – hot
temperate – warm
arctic – cold
climate
———
tropical grasslands – hospitable
tropical forests – hospitable
temperate grasslands – hospitable
temperate forests – hospitable
temperate desert – inhospitable
arctic desert – inhospitable
arctic grasslands – rare – hospitable
arctic forests – rare – hospitable
tropical desert – rare – inhospitable

Chuck says:
October 21, 2012 at 7:34 am
All very interesting and everyone should read the current report (similar to, but updated) by Leif (follow link here):
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/19/muscheler-retracts-offers-a-new-excuse-for-why-solar-activity-cant-be-responsible-for-post-70s-warming/#comment-1114376
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
rgbatduke says:
October 21, 2012 at 7:51 am
Good points regarding “the pause.”
And of interest is: “Monte Carlo results as they evolve out of a Markov Chain” — Many folks will run into this wall when a financial advisor “runs some numbers” and reports they have an 83.6 % chance of out-living their retirement savings. Okay, I just made up that number. Still, the prospect for many is not very “amusing” and they should be much more concerned with doing something about this real problem and less with doing something about the climate.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Raise the level of your game.” [Prof. Judith Curry]
Those of the anti-CAGW persuasion should carry printed cards with this advice to hand out to friends that aren’t paying attention.

SAMURAI says:
October 21, 2012 at 7:47 am
A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but this Rose has created quite a stink….
Once more into the breach, my friends, once more…
Because he has opened the sewer where resides the stink that is the BBC and the UK Met Off ???

rgbatduke says:
October 21, 2012 at 8:33 am
(but beware the Nirvana fallacy on both sides).
===========================================
What a load of academic liberal bs……………
You can tell when liberals are losing…..and they know it
….all of a sudden both side become morons

For the information of your readers unfamiliar with the UK press I would point out the following.
The UK press is unusual in that, although it is a dying trade nowadays,that the London based newspapers reach everywhere in the UK by morning. It is genuinely a national press.
There are of course regional newspapers, some of excellent reputation, which circulate locally, and do comment on on national politics and of course local papers.
Traditionally the national press, Fleet Street although none are printed there now, is divided into the heavyweights, The Times, sometimes referred to as the London Times, and which considers itself the newspaper of the Establishment and of record, the Telegraph which is right wing, the Guardian, used to be the Manchester Guardian, which is left wing, and the upstart the Independant.
The middle ground is fought over between the Mail and the Express, the latter having faded badly of recent years but seems to have recovered under new ownership.
At the bottom are what our American friends might call the yellow press, chiefly the Sun, Mirror and Star: although they can on occasion throw a political punch.
But in the trade the Mail has the reputation of meticulous reporting when they bother, and are not doing celeb stories or lifestyle or whatever is the fashionable rubbish of the moment.
When the Mail publishes a serious story like this one be sure their reporters have done their homework properly. Hence their counterblast.
Kindest Regards

Thanks Brian Johnson uk and davidmhoffer, first for pointing out that my numbers were too low and second for flagging the point about ‘enclosed’ spaces. All the arguments I’ve seen and heard about CO2 being the “Greenhouse demon” are based on experiments using closed vessels. Al Gore used one in his infamous movie – and that was a point I should have made. In the open, and at the concentrations found in nature, it just doesn’t happen the way it does in a closed container – and even in those you need to do some fairly strange things to get it to work.

A little off topic.
Anyone know what IR wavelength(s) is (are) given off by humans?
And how this compares to absorption wavelengths of CO2?
Thanks in advance.

Ross, humans do not emit in specific wavelengths, but rather in a curve whose maximum depends on skin temperature.
Of course the relation is only valid for naked humans; clothing blocks radiation of heat and messes up the curve.

“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

rgbatduke says:
October 21, 2012 at 8:33 am
“For example, let me terrorize you with the threat of rising seas and melting polar icecaps and dying polar bears and penguins, or with a cabal of evil Liberals who want to raise taxes and create a world socialism. ”
Bad example. There is evidence for the second, delivered by the warmists themselves.
http://www.wbgu.de/fileadmin/templates/dateien/veroeffentlichungen/hauptgutachten/jg2011/wbgu_jg2011_kurz_en.pdf

‘We agree with Mr Rose that there has only been a very small amount of warming in the 21st Century.’

Mmmmmmm.

‘We agree with Mr Rose that there has only been a statistically insignificant warming in the 21st Century.’

There, fixed.

The Met Office has accused the Mail of cherry picking yet let’s look at their dishonest behaviour.

In April, the Met Office released figures up to the end of 2010 – an extremely warm year – which meant it was able to say there had been a statistically significant warming trend after 1997, albeit a very small one. However, 2011 and 2012 so far have been much cooler, meaning the trend has disappeared. This may explain why the updated figures were issued last week without a media fanfare.

I am just waiting for the day when a few Warmist climate scientists are struck by a bout of integrity and raise their arm and say:
“The models have a Warming bias.”
“We need to look at AGW theory again and make adjustments.”
“The theory has been falsified.” (almost?)
I thought this is how other science works. Silly me.

2012 in Perspective so far on Six Data Sets
Note the bolded numbers for each data set where the lower bolded number is the highest anomaly recorded so far in 2012 and the higher one is the all time record so far. There is no comparison.
With the UAH anomaly for September at 0.34, the average for the first nine months of the year is (-0.13 -0.13 + 0.05 + 0.23 + 0.18 + 0.24 + 0.13 + 0.20 + 0.34)/9 = 0.123. If the average stayed this way for the rest of the year, its ranking would be 10th. 1998 was the warmest at 0.428. The highest ever monthly anomaly was in April of 1998 when it reached 0.66.
With the GISS anomaly for September at 0.60, the average for the first nine months of the year is (0.32 + 0.36 + 0.45 + 0.55 + 0.67 + 0.55 + 0.46 + 0.57 + 0.60)/9 = 0.503. This would rank 10th if it stayed this way. 2010 was the warmest at 0.63. The highest ever monthly anomalies were in March of 2002 and January of 2007 when it reached 0.88.
With the Hadcrut3 anomaly for August at 0.508, the average for the first eight months of the year is (0.217 + 0.193 + 0.305 + 0.481 + 0.475 + 0.477 + 0.448 + 0.508)/8 = 0.388. This would rank 11th if it stayed this way. 1998 was the warmest at 0.548. The highest ever monthly anomaly was in February of 1998 when it reached 0.756. One has to back to the 1940s to find the previous time that a Hadcrut3 record was not beaten in 10 years or less.
With the sea surface anomaly for September at 0.453, the average for the first nine months of the year is (0.203 + 0.230 + 0.241 + 0.292 + 0.339 + 0.352 + 0.385 + 0.440 + 0.453)/9 = 0.326. This would rank 10th if it stayed this way. 1998 was the warmest at 0.451. The highest ever monthly anomaly was in August of 1998 when it reached 0.555.
With the RSS anomaly for September at 0.383, the average for the first nine months of the year is (-0.059 -0.122 + 0.072 + 0.331 + 0.232 + 0.338 + 0.291 + 0.255 + 0.383)/9 = 0.191. If the average stayed this way for the rest of the year, its ranking would be 11th. 1998 was the warmest at 0.55. The highest ever monthly anomaly was in April of 1998 when it reached 0.857.
With the Hadcrut4 anomaly for August at 0.526, the average for the first eight months of the year is (0.288 + 0.209 + 0.339 + 0.514 + 0.516 + 0.501 + 0.469 + 0.526)/8 = 0.420. If the average stayed this way for the rest of the year, its ranking would be 11th. 2010 was the warmest at 0.54. The highest ever monthly anomaly was in January of 2007 when it reached 0.818. With the 2011 anomaly at 0.399 in 12th place and the 2008 anomaly of 0.383 in 14th place, if things stay as they are, then 3 of the last 5 years are not even in the top 10 in Hadcrut4.
On all six of the above data sets, a record is out of reach.
On all data sets, the different times for a slope that is at least very slightly negative ranges from 11 years and 9 months to 15 years and 9 months, but note *
1. UAH: (*New update not on woodfortrees yet)
2. GISS: since January 2001 or 11 years, 9 months (goes to September)
3. Combination of 4 global temperatures: since November 2000 or 11 years, 10 months (goes to August)
4. HadCrut3: since March 1997 or 15 years, 6 months (goes to August)
5. Sea surface temperatures: since February 1997 or 15 years, 8 months (goes to September)
6. RSS: since January 1997 or 15 years, 9 months (goes to September)
RSS is 189/204 or 92.6% of the way to Santer’s 17 years.
7. Hadcrut4: since November 2000 or 11 years, 10 months (goes to August.)
P.S. My earlier graph estimating Hadcrut4 using GISS was off by only one month as the flat line started in December 2000 in the estimation.
See the graph below to show it all.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1997.16/trend/plot/gistemp/from:2001.0/trend/plot/rss/from:1997.0/trend/plot/wti/from:2000.8/trend/plot/hadsst2gl/from:1997.08/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2000.8/trend

can not believe all the different comments on this one. wow

Re-Brand to, “Climate Changes” or “Climate Changing”, NOT “Climate Change”, to be more scientifically accurate terminology please.

So Had Crut 3 trend 1997-2012 was 0.01 C per decade, so essentially zero.
HadCrut 4 trend 1997-2012 is 0.06 C per decade.
This seems to me as quite an readjustment…upwards, again. They were bothered with the lack of warming and decided to adjust it away (still moderate, but noticeable. HAdCrut 5 will certainly have 0.15C for the same period, don’t doubt a moment).

‘We agree with Mr Rose that there has only been a very small amount of warming in the 21st Century.’
———
Well that is stating the obvious, because that is what the graph says. But Rose is playing a bit of a shell game here. The important question is: what is this plateau in temperature evidence of? Is it evidence that the green house effect has stopped? Answer no. [based on what? . . this looks like trolling . . mod]
In the first place the random variation in the climate system is quite large, making detection of changes in the long term trend difficult to detect. So we don’t know if the plateau is just random variation or a real changed in long term trend. [looks like more trolling . . mod]
If this was just a case of assuming a linear trend with random variation superimposed, then statistical tests can distinguish whether Rose can crow or not.
Since I know squat about statistics, and I am not an authority figure around here anyhow, I suggest you go and pester your favorite statistics auditor for an opinion about Roses hand waving argument.[looks like more trolling . . mod]
I will be cheeky and suggest you will not get an answer. If you don’t, I expect you can figure out the answer from the silence.[yes, you guessed it, more trolling . . mod]
[your content free posts are not adding much and could easily be construed as trolling which I am sure is not your intention. Please try and add to the knowledge content of the site . . mod]

John Brookes says:
October 22, 2012 at 3:16 am
Another content and synapse free post. Why even bother? You do not sway anyone by posts like this. In fact, quite the opposite. Are you unable to see this?

As far as warming, here in new york it seems to get warmer every year. For instance, It’s winter time and it feels like spring. The trees are as green as june, so I don’t know what’s going on and who’s right.

And in the larger picture, it’s still getting warmer.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/plot/esrl-co2/normalise/plot/pmod/scale:0.2/offset:-273.6/plot/gistemp/from:1995/trend/plot/pmod/scale:0.2/offset:-273.6/trend/plot/gistemp/mean:131
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/#null

Wishful thinking DB.
What is the source of you first chart?
You can’t prove radiative physics wrong by squashing and detrending data records.
So, what you are saying is that if you shrink the scale, and detrend the data, you can take the trend out of the data. Wow, you’ve got some mad math skills there.
Let’s torture the data a little less and see what what they look like:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/plot/gistemp
If you look at it just right, you can almost see an increase.
There’s no point in me humoring your delusions.

Chris G,
The source for the first chart is the CET record. If you don’t know that, you need to read the WUWT archives for about six months to get up to speed.
Now look at this chart. You will notice that ∆CO2 always follows ∆T. All this time you have been laboring under the assumption that ∆T is caused by ∆CO2. As you can see, it is exactly the opposite.
When your premise is wrong, your conclusions will necessarily be wrong.

rgbatduke has an excellent post @Oct 21 7:51
An ignorant layman like myself finds posts of that sort most interesting. Up until a short time ago I was unaware that modern weather forecasting is merely the broad application of statistical chance, just slightly better than rolling dice or throwing darts at a board.
It’s a bit better than that with weather (which is “short term climate”). Weather forecasts, given satellites overhead providing excellent data and a fair understanding of the immediate atmospheric physics that drives it, tend to be excellent one to three days out, decent a week out, and start to break down fairly quickly after that. I don’t know the exact statistics of the lagged correlation between prediction and reality — perhaps Anthony does, if he is still reading along with this thread as it is his thing — but at some point the forecast regresses to the statistical mean behavior for the time of year.
Climate (which is “long term weather”) attempts to predict the variation in this mean from year to year. Well, that’s not quite true, because the random noise year to year exceeds the systematic variation in the signal by an order of magnitude or so, and the mean itself isn’t the mean, it is some sort of running mean that averages over this noise. So they try to predict the variation in the coarse grained average over a suitable window extending back from the present that has to be long enough to reduce the undesirable short term noise, short enough that it doesn’t eliminate the secular variation they are trying to predict or make it move so slowly as to be useless on the timescale they are trying to predict. The woodsfortrees site lets you do this yourself — you can apply a variety of statistical processing to the actual record your very own self and see the results graphed in real time, including selecting windows to do the coarse grain average. I can’t remember if they let you select windowing functions — the most common one is a square function but an arguably better choice is an exponential or half-gaussian window that smoothly reduces the contribution of earlier years rather than cuts them off all at once.
Hence the problem with signal and noise. We don’t know which is which, for climate. There are doubtless parts of the signal that represent secular time variation of the mean that is not “random” or chaotic noise but is solidly entrenched, causally linked stuff with timescales ranging from hours to centuries. We even know some of these causal phenomena and have an idea of their timescales. Examples of long term contributors to this at least partially deterministic secular variation include the Sun (which is itself a climate system that we also cannot predict particularly well and which affects the climate on Earth multiple ways only some of which we have a good physical handle on), the global decadal atmospheric oscillations (which are tied to the ocean), the ocean itself (which is coupled back to the atmosphere), and heterodyning in annual oscillations (constructive interference, if you like, between year to year “random” variations which usually cancel (producing the mean behavior) but often do not, producing the extremes of the distribution.
Since those extremes have a “lifetime” and are nonlinear coupled to everything else, the variations of the climate about some fairly arbitrarily defined “mean” aren’t really Gaussian, yearly climate isn’t a set of independent and identically distributed samples, and most of the assumptions underlying ordinary statistics break down so that concepts such as “mean” and “variance” and “standard deviation” — all of which give us predictive capabilities for iid samples drawn from stationary distributions with bounded variance via the central limit theorem — are a lot less meaningful and predictive. Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s book “The Black Swan” goes over this, primarily in the context of economic markets where a “Black Swan Event” is a rare event with very high impact, such as the one day the market loses all of the money it made in the previous thirty years, confounding the expectations of those that were following the short term trend in the windowed mean and thinking it had actual predictive value.
The exact same thing could happen in the case of climate, which is also nonlinear and full of unknown chaotic causality and feedback loops. It could happen in either direction, even. Right now the trend — in a fairly narrow window of past behavior imperfectly known and with a growing experimental uncertainty — is general, slow warming over the last 150 or so years, so it is “safe” to bet on more general, slow warming using the past is a good predictor of the future model and completely ignoring underlying possible causes as being so complicated that they might as well be random noise. However, the climate could “suddenly” downtrend into the next glaciation on top of the elevated CO_2 — it has in the past when CO_2 levels were more than ten times what they are today (Ordovician-Silurian transition) and there is no way we can be certain that it cannot happen again because we don’t know why it happened then, only that it did. It could also “suddenly” uptrend into a “catastrophically” warmer state. These are the moral equivalents of a Black Swan market crash, confounding all of the short-term statistical numerology based on the (too) simple assumption that today will be mostly like yesterday, somewhat like today was a year ago, less so like it was a century ago, and not at all like it was 20,000 years ago.
This is my primary bitch with climate science. It isn’t that it isn’t trying, and using “decent” methodology as far as it goes as it tries. It is that there is IMO insufficient attention paid to the limits of our knowledge and how much of our “predictions” are really numerology in a tightly coupled non-Markovian chaotic multimode system with unknown couplings and dynamics galore and at least three or four distinct hydrodynamic systems of enormous complexity (two on the Earth and at least two on the Sun) contributing, where hydrodynamic systems — let alone magnetohydrodynamic systems — are the most complicated and difficult mathematics in the known Universe, so far, relevant to the real world. Unified field theory is simple in comparison.
A fair statement of our ignorance would significantly reduce the certainty of our predictions of continued warming, increase the expected possibility of cooling, allow for the possibility of either catastrophic warming or cooling, recognize that while there is probably damn-all we can do about either the trends or the extremes as we don’t really have a good enough grasp on the dynamics to understand the secular variations in climate or the primary drivers of the climate over the last 2000 years (inferred by proxy to the extent that we can, with increasingly large error bars the further back one goes) or even the last 200, it is probably wiser to not twist the tiger’s toe where and as we can avoid it because we do not know for certain how the nonlinear system will respond to toe twists.
Again, there are numerous examples of “what can it hurt” activities that in hindsight caused market crashes in “rolling good times” — electronics companies pretending they were banks and loaning dotcom startups equipment in lieu of money, savings and loan companies that ignored the risks of downturns that would wipe out their investment strategies, the ability to buy on margin that literally created money out of thin air in the form of kited checks that were always paid off by the next rise in the market — until the day they weren’t and all of the virtual money in the system evaporated like the illusion that it always was.
Perhaps CO_2 is the devil itself, the CAGW enthusiasts are right, we are on the edge of runaway positive feedback that will cause a Black Swan climate event that turns the Earth into Venus complete with boiling oceans (a la Hansen’s most extreme nonsense). You have to envision not a certainty, but a gradually decreasing set of probabilities of these futures as they become more extreme, because you don’t know that this won’t happen any more than Hansen knows that it will, we only know that it hasn’t happened yet or happened in its more extreme forms anywhere in the several billion year long climate history of the world, as best as we can deduce it from paleontological records. If CO_2 is the devil, perhaps we can ameliorate or reduce the probability of the more extreme events by at least trying to keep from driving it up to concentrations 2-3 times what it has been in the relatively recent past, as those extremes could have an unexpected nonlinear impact on the ecosystem (not just the climate, and not just good or bad, but unexpected).
Perhaps CO_2 is harmless to highly beneficial, perhaps global climate is completely insensitive to it and all of the warming and cooling of the past has been simply coincidental where it has corresponded to matching changes in CO_2, or rather perhaps temperature determines CO_2 level instead of the other way around. Perhaps the world is on the edge of returning to a (little or big) ice age, the state of increased glaciation for the next 80,000 or so years. Perhaps our climate is determined by tiny variations in the local environment of the part of the galaxy the Sun happens to be passing through, only we haven’t been able to observe solar and galactic state well enough, long enough, to be able to see this. And don’t be certain that we could see it — if 90% of the mass of the galaxy is missing and invisible because it doesn’t directly couple to the electromagnetic field, solar state could vary proportional to the amount of dark matter that the sun “eats” as it passes through clouds of it in the galaxy, altering its gravitation. The solar interior/core is a hotbed of nuclear interaction, and dark matter may couple to nuclear interactions enough to be slowed down and captured within the sun, yet not coupled to light so that it cannot be driven away the way ordinary charged matter is as the solar wind.
Our ignorance is really pretty profound, still. We have come a long way since the Enlightenment, and we have the tools to learn almost anything, given time, but we haven’t had the time to build and use all of the tools and make the observations required to work it all out. Until we know what dark matter and dark energy really are (which could still include “nothing”, because they might not exist at all but something more mundane could be causing the phenomena we use to infer their possible existence) we are missing a pretty enormous piece of the physics puzzle and this has to reduce our confidence in all predictions of macroscopic scale phenomena like solar state and planetary climate.
In the meantime, it is pointless to panic and wreck the world’s economy and create a certain catastrophe to try to avoid an uncertain (and probably unlikely) catastrophe predicted by the more extreme variants of largely unsuccessful models. At the same time it is perfectly reasonable to take small steps to try to avoid twisting the toe of the tiger, and try to gradually convert our civilization away from carbon based energy. There are good reasons to do that anyway, and hedging one’s bets is only common sense (especially for Black Swan events). Taleb points out that ignoring the possibility of the extreme events and failing to be sufficiently conservative and hedge bets, even at the expense of making less money than the next guy, is what dooms long term investment first that make short term assumptions about the progress of the market. Perhaps humans should hedge the climate bet, instead of allowing our pockets to be picked by people who seek to exploit the sensationalism and create a panic that will make them rich or going around claiming that we are “certain” that CO_2 is a harmless trace gas, that the greenhouse effect doesn’t even exist, that there is zero chance of catastrophic warming, that an ice age is coming, that skeptics know what will happen to the climate ten years from now any more than the warmists do.
I’m unashamed to say that I don’t. In a decade, it might well be warmer. It might be catastrophically warming, the arctic melted, greenland melting, the antarctic finally melting to catch up, and all sorts of other bad stuff. It might well be pretty much the same. It might be cooler. It might even be a lot cooler, falling back from the current temperature peak to levels closer to those last seen in the 1960s, 1920s, or 1800s. If I had to pick, I’d pick the same to a bit cooler (betting on the sun trumping CO_2, basically), but I wouldn’t bet hundreds of dollars on it. I certainly wouldn’t bet hundreds of dollars on much warmer, which is what CAGW enthusiasts would have us all do. Nor would I bet hundreds of dollars that we will be “plunging back to a little ice age” even if we enter a Maunder minimum, although this is certainly possible. The extremes are generally worse bets than the middle; they just have much greater (more “catastrophic”) costs if they come home.
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