Apparently, one of the proudest achievements of the website SkepticalScience is their “Down the Up Escalator” gif animation. They prominently display it in their right sidebar. The intent of the animation is to show that global temperature anomalies can flatten or cool over decadal or shorter periods while warming over the long term.
The first version was created using the Berkley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) land surface air temperature dataset. That, of course, made SkepticalScience appear two-faced, because the papers associated with the BEST dataset had not yet appeared in any peer-reviewed scientific journals and SkepticalScience downplays any research efforts that haven’t been peer reviewed.
ONE OF THE TRENDS IN THE REVISED ESCALATOR IS MISREPRESENTED
Bogus Escalator
In an effort to distract from their duplicity, SkepticalScience revised and reissued the animation (modified screen cap above), using the average of the GISS LOTI, HADCRUT4, and NCDC land surface air plus sea surface temperature anomaly datasets. If you were to click on the mini “Escalator” animation along the right-hand side of their main page, you’re brought to the updated GISS-, UK Met Office- and NCDC-based Escalator. SkepticalScience describes “The Escalator” animation as (my boldface):
Average of GISS, NCDC, and HadCRUT4 monthly global surface temperature anomalies from January 1970 through August 2012 (green) with linear trends applied to the timeframes Jan ’70 – Oct ’77, May ’77 – Dec ’85, Jan ’86 – June ’94, Nov ’94 – Dec ’00, Jan ’01 – Aug ’12.
You’ll note that they’re now calling it “The Escalator”—no longer calling it the “Down the Up Escalator”. Yet each of the steps in their escalator clearly shows a short-term trend that’s flat or cools slightly.
SkepticalScience misrepresented the trend of the “fourth step”. The time period they selected is November 1994 to December 2000. As it turns out, the only dataset that shows a flat trend during that period is the GISS Land-Ocean Temperature Index (LOTI). Both HADCRUT4 and NCDC have significant warming trends from November 1994 to December 2000 at about 0.08 to 0.09 deg C per decade. The average of the three datasets is approximately 0.06 deg C/decade, and that is a significant warming trend.
Actual Linear Trends During Fourth Step of Escalator
How significant is that 0.06 deg C per decade trend? It’s comparable to the trend in global surface temperatures since 1880.
GISS LOTI Global Surface Temperature Anomalies Since 1880
The following animation will give you an idea what “The Escalator” would look like if SkepticalScience had used the real linear trend for the fourth step. Depending on your browser, you may need to click on the following gif animation.
The Escalator With Actual Linear Trends
A COUPLE OF NOTES
As noted in my WUWT-TV presentation “The Natural Warming of the Global Oceans”, “The Escalator” is an exercise in cherry-picked start and end dates. Proponents of anthropogenic global warming will incorrectly cite “The Escalator” during my blog discussions of ENSO-related upward shifts in Atlantic-Indian-West Pacific (90S-90N, 80W-180) sea surface temperature anomalies. (In recent years, I typically present that dataset as the “Rest-of-the-World”, because I usually now start with the East Pacific data, which shows no warming over the entire 30-year term of the satellite era.) When the disciples of SkepticalScience link “The Escalator”, they are simply trying to distract from the process-caused shifts. Those natural processes were described in the WUWT-TV presentation and detailed with numerous datasets in my book Who Turned on the Heat?
Rest of the World Sea Surface Temperature Anomalies With Linear Trends
The above graph was presented in the post Does The Sea Surface Temperature Record Support The Hypothesis Of Anthropogenic Global Warming?
Proponents of anthropogenic global warming have another, related, inconsequential complaint about my research. They claim the decade-long time periods between the 1986/98/88, 1997/98 and 2009/10 El Niño events are too short for the trends to be significant. Curiously, when SkepticalScience is trying to make a point, they have no trouble presenting a series of decadal trends, and when SkepticalScience is trying to mislead their followers, they have no trouble misrepresenting the trend for a shorter 6-year period. Apparently, linear trends over periods as short as 6 years do have significance. Looks like another example of the double standards of the proponents of anthropogenic global warming.
In the next few days, I’ll present PBS’s sleight of hand about “The Escalator” when they presented it in their Frontline report Climate of Doubt. They were pretty blatant about it.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
KR: Let me expand on why I don’t care if you take my work seriously. My work is not dependent on uncertainties of the linear trends, which is your focus.
I can plot the Atlantic-Indian-West Pacific (which I present as the Rest of the World as opposed to the East Pacific) sea surface temperature anomalies with volcano adjustments (in the post above) or without them, as follows. I don’t need to include linear trends or period average temperatures to show that the Rest of the World data rises primarily during the major El Niño events. Simply color coding the data will suffice:
http://i49.tinypic.com/j638yq.jpg
If I include the period average temperature, then people can get an idea of the magnitude of the upward shifts. The period average temperatures also help to highlight those ENSO-caused upward shifts:
http://i48.tinypic.com/i42u6g.jpg
People complain that period average temperatures can be misleading. They assume they give the wrong impression that the trends between the major El Niño events are flat. So I add the linear trends to satisfy their curiosity:
http://i48.tinypic.com/14w8zls.jpg
Again, the linear trends are not required. People can easily see that there’s little to no warming in the Rest of the World data between the significant El Niño events. They can also see quite plainly that the majority of the warming takes place during the major El Niño events. The question then arises: why do they warm only during major El Niño events? The answer is, because they do not cool proportionally during La Niña events that follow those El Niños. We can see this by detrending the Rest of the World data and comparing it to scaled NINO3.4 sea surface temperature anomalies:
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/figure-13.png
It’s pretty obvious, if the Rest of the World sea surface temperatures cooled proportionally during the La Nina events, they then would mimic the East Pacific data, which has no long-term trend:
http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/figure-111.png
The next question: why don’t the sea surface temperature anomalies for the Rest of the World cool during the La Niñas that follow the major El Niño events? Because, there’s warm water left over after the El Niño that cannot be accounted for by the ENSO index (the NINO3.4 sea surface temperature anomalies).
If carbon dioxide influenced global temperatures as the CAGW crowd maintains, there would not be temperature plateaus of fifteen years or lengthy cooling periods while the atmospheric content of CO2 continued its ascent.
The world seems to have several lines of evidence showing that it is warming. But lets stay with thermometers. James Hansen is a able to show that extreme temperature events are increasing significantly. The year 2010 compared to 1955 shows a huge increase in etreme heat events. If you look further down 2003 to 2011 have very significantly higher extreme events than the period of 1950 to 1980.
1951 to 1980 baseline. James Hansen is comparing the world regions anomalies to 2003 to 2011. I have read over this several times and get something new out of it each time.
1 sigma events occur 33% above and below a mean (or central point)
2 sigma events occur 2.43% above and below
3 sigma events occur .13% above and below
if you look at fig 3 up in the rt hand corner are the percentages of the points lieing in the sigma ranges.
sigma
………-3. -2…-1 ….0 …. +1…+2..+3
1955…. 0… 2… 45…32…. 20…1…..0
2010….. 0….1….15….18….34…18.. 13
2003…….6%
2004…….3%
2005…….5%
2006…….5%
2007…….5%
2008…….4%
2009…….6%
2010……11%
2011……..8%
The near normal distribution expected is close to what 1955 is. If you go back and look at 1965, and 1975 you will see similar numbers provided by Dr. James Hansen. +3 sigma is the very hot category. The sigmas are decreasing and the + sigmas are increasing all through the last decade which is the hottest decade in instrumental temperature history.
Chad Jessup says:
November 25, 2012 at 5:04 pm
If carbon dioxide influenced global temperatures as the CAGW crowd maintains, there would not be temperature plateaus of fifteen years or lengthy cooling periods while the atmospheric content of CO2 continued its ascent
###################################
That is eactly the point of the escalator graph. The warming mainly driven by co2 is not a steady upward rise.
From 1950 to 1980 is nearly flat and yet show mild warming.
1950 to 2012
Trend: 1.15 ±0.20 °C/century (2σ)
1950 to 1980
Trend: 0.27 ±0.53 °C/century (2σ)
Greg House says:
November 25, 2012 at 4:46 pm
….What is the scientific reason to consider the thermometer network to be representative of the whole world or of the whole surface? Is there any scientific proof that they are? …
_______________________________
Actually there has been a lot of work done on that question. The short answer is the data is rubbish.
A.J. Strata did an error analysis on the data.
The ‘Station drop out’ problem (several more on either side of this article)
WUWT: On the “march of the thermometers”
Assume A Spherical Cow – therefore all steaks are round (several more on either side of this article)
“…So what does all this mean? It means that the bulk of all the rise of the numbers comes from instrument change, not from an increase at the individual stations. Further, it means that any temperature series codes (such as GIStemp) run on this data has a built in bias to deal with….”
PART1: The perplexing temperature data published 1974-84 and recent temperature data.
This entire discussion shows quite a bit of desperation at SkS. They are grasping at straws. It is true that cherry picking in any noisy sequence will account for short term trends going against the long term trend. However, the last period of time is getting longer and longer every day.
There is absolutely no indication that this will change. The fizzled El Niño is indicative that something has change (like the PDO) and that something will influence future temperatures. In addition, the Sun will likely become more quiet which can’t help the alarmists. There is absolutely nothing going on that gives any indication the current flat trend will change.
For me this is key. If temperatures were to jump upward at this time I would likely change my position. I wonder if the SkS crew will change their position if temperatures remain flat or drop for the next year? Two years? Five years? Any bets?
The problem is too much co2 leftover from the earth not absorbing it. Its just hard to get around. With extra co2 we get extra infrared being reflected back to earth.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fourth_Assessment_Report
The report is the largest and most detailed summary of the climate change situation ever undertaken, produced by thousands of authors, editors, and reviewers from dozens of countries, citing over 6,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attribution_of_recent_climate_change
The dominant mechanisms (to which recent climate change has been attributed) are anthropogenic, i.e., the result of human activity. They are:[1]
!. increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases
2. global changes to land surface, such as deforestation
3. increasing atmospheric concentrations of aerosols.
There are also natural mechanisms for variation including climate oscillations, changes in solar activity, variations in the Earth’s orbit, and volcanic activity.
Attribution of recent climate change to human activities is based on multiple lines of evidence:[4]
….. A basic physical understanding of the climate system: greenhouse gas concentrations have increased and their warming properties are well-established.[4]
…. Historical estimates of past climate changes suggest that the recent changes in global surface temperature are unusual.[4]
…. Computer-based climate models are unable to replicate the observed warming unless human greenhouse gas emissions are included.[4]
…. Natural forces alone (such as solar and volcanic activity) cannot explain the observed warming.[4]
renewableguy says:
“The warming mainly driven by co2 …”
Thanx for your evidence-free conjecture. However, you have no empirical evidence showing that CO2 causes any measurable warming. It is amusing watching you True Believers try to promote your religion, when you have no physical evidence.
And of course, renewableguy has it exactly backward: the evidence shows that ∆CO2 is caused by ∆T, not vice versa. This is a science site, renewableguy, not a religious True Believer blog like your thinly-trafficked SkS.
Wake me when you have testable, empirical measurements showing that ∆CO2 leads temperature. Because your True Belief isn’t enough to convince to thinking skeptics.
Finally, you make the preposterous and easily falsifiable assertion that “Natural forces alone (such as solar and volcanic activity) cannot explain the observed warming.” Obviously you have never learned about the climate Null Hypothesis, which absolutely falsifies your silly belief: all current global climate parameters have been exceeded throughout the Holocene, when CO2 was much lower. Your ignorance comes from believing what the unreliable climate scare blog SkS preaches. Your belief is akin to faith in witch doctors, and it is quite amusing to thinking folks.
I saw that graph months ago and felt almost embarrassed for Skeptical Science for putting it up there. I’m glad you’ve taken them to task on it because I saw it plastered elsewhere on the web and that got me worried.
renewableguy says:
November 25, 2012 at 5:16 pm
The world seems to have several lines of evidence showing that it is warming. But lets stay with thermometers. James Hansen is a able to show….
___________________________
NO, James Hansen is able to manipulate the data and he does so continueously.
flick graph of Hansen adustments
Side by Side graphs showing revisionist con tricks by Hansen graph
Hansen has absolutely no credibility left.
Here is data that has NOT been manipulated and shows we are not warming in the manner Hansen shows. NOAA October Snow Cover Anomalies (1960 – 2012) Remember the right quantity that should be compared with the insolation – i.e. the sunshine near the Arctic circle – is not the ice volume itself but its time derivative you increase the rate with which the ice/snow volume is decreasing or increasing. I picked October because that would be a month that would be more likely to be sensitive to changes. The Autumnal Equinox is on September 22.
I suggest you go read the links on temperature analysis I provided above.
Yuri Barkin says Earth’s shells “galloped” in 1997-98. Ben Chao shares insights:
Chao, B.F. (2006). Earth’s oblateness and its temporal variations. Comptes Rendus Geoscience 338, 1123-1129. doi:10.1016/j.crte.2006.09.014.
http://www.earth.sinica.edu.tw/~bfchao/publication/eng/2006-Earth%E2%80%99s%20oblateness%20and%20its%20temporal%20variations.pdf
Climate scientists: Do you realize the implications for climate stat-inference assumptions?
Gail Combs says: “Actually there has been a lot of work done on that question. The short answer is the data is rubbish. A.J. Strata did an error analysis on the data. …”
==========================================================
Thanks, Gail. But I mean, it is much worse and much easier. Why search for secondary errors, if the whole “global” thing collapses immediately, if the warmists are asked to prove that the thermometers are on the right representative places and there is/was a sufficient number of them. From my experience they can not prove it and it demonstrates that the whole “global warming” is a pure fiction. We simply can not know, whether there is warming or cooling or whatever globally.
Warmists I talked to on various blogs usually chose to remain silent on the issue but kept promoting the same unproven assertion, either directly or in a sort of skeptical form, unfortunately.
What a convoluted story..
The “Up-the-down-escalator” is supposed to prove how easy it is for skeptics to cherry pick periods of cooling and present them as proof that the earth isn’t warming. It’s intended as an anti-skeptic device.
The fact that a flat trend can’t be found at that step would be pro-warming i.e. even cherry picking we can’t hide warming!
But SkS go out of their way to _lessen_ warming to present a narrative that skeptics have at their disposal some dodgy technique to hide warming. Ahhhh!!
Bob Tisdale – The very fact that you again assert (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/11/25/skeptical-science-misrepresents-their-animation-the-escalator/#comment-1157182) 4 to 12 year trends from SST demonstrates that you do not understand statistical significance, or that short periods of a noisy signal can have both low and high apparent trends far from the actual long term trend.
Readers: – Here’s the “take-home”. As the “Escalator” graphic demonstrates, with cherry-picking you can find low (or high) trends in short periods of a noisy signal. But those short trends are just looking at the _noise_. Which is why (unlike Tisdale) proper science includes measuring the statistical significance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistical_significance) of the trend to see if it is meaningful. Until he does so, until he numerically demonstrates that a trend has appeared over and above the noise – he’s said _nothing_ of interest. He’s just looking at the noise…
Gail Combs says:
November 25, 2012 at 5:28 pm
The bigger problem is that taking thermometer readings at thousands of different places, and averaging them, doesn’t tell you whether the surface of the globe, or the atmosphere, is warming. It’s rubbish.
renewableguy says:
November 25, 2012 at 5:45 pm
The problem is too much co2 leftover from the earth not absorbing it. Its just hard to get around. With extra co2 we get extra infrared being reflected back to earth….
________________________________
Most of us here are well aware of the CO2/infared interaction. We are also aware the radiative forcing caused by CO2 in the atmosphere is proportional to the logarithm of the concentration. We are now into the part of that curve where increases of CO2 do not have much of an effect graph
To multiply the effect of CO2 a positive forcing of water is invoked. But that falls flat on it’s face too. First back radiation from CO2 can not penetrate the oceans graph 1 and graph 2. Next the global relative humidity has been DECREASING not increasing so no positive feed back graph 1 and graph 2
And that does not even get into the fact that the earth NEEDS more CO2.
So far the consequences I have seen are all good. Plants were near starvation Carbon starvation in glacial trees recovered from the La Brea tar pits, southern California and now The Earth’s biosphere is booming, link data suggests that CO2 is the cause. We have pretty much halved the amount of land need to grow a bushel of wheat or corn.
Scientists have discovered an ‘abrupt increase’ since 1988 in the uptake of carbon dioxide (CO2) by the land biosphere.
renewableguy says:
November 25, 2012 at 5:45 pm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Fourth_Assessment_Report
The report is the largest and most detailed summary of the climate change situation ever undertaken, produced by thousands of authors, editors, and reviewers from dozens of countries, citing over 6,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies….
______________________________
OH, good grief.
Read The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert by Donna Laframboise, or at least read the review of the book by Dr. Judith Curry or you can read Donna’s short version here UN’s Climate Bible Gets 21 “F”s on Report Card
renewableguy said (November 25, 2012 at 5:16 pm)
“…The world seems to have several lines of evidence showing that it is warming. But lets stay with thermometers. James Hansen is a able to show that extreme temperature events are increasing significantly. The year 2010 compared to 1955 shows a huge increase in extreme heat events. If you look further down 2003 to 2011 have very significantly higher extreme events than the period of 1950 to 1980…”
And yet, whenever extreme temperature events (and heatwaves) are mentioned, they always fail to put it in the context of the most extreme heatwave ever: Marble Bar, Australia – the town set a world record of most consecutive days of maximum temperatures of 37.8 degrees Celsius (100 degrees Fahrenheit) or more, during a period of 160 such days.
The reason they’ll forget it? It went from 31 October 1923 to 7 April 1924. So it doesn’t fit into the “recent” extreme weather time-frame.
But it could be described as a 1-88 year event.
KR. It is childs play to remove noise and its obvious Bob does not deny the atmospheric climb because it is right there in his graphs. It’s the wood from the trees you cannot see.
Talking of wood from trees. Here shows temperature leads C02 output due to Solar heating of the Sea. Not related to C02 production. If it was air heating (due to C02) it would deny almost all of the yearly C02 cycle. Oh, note C02 lags heat in almost all years here.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/isolate:60/mean:12/scale:0.2/plot/hadcrut3vgl/isolate:60/mean:12/from:1958/plot/esrl-co2/isolate:60/mean:12/scale:0.2/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/isolate:60/mean:12/from:1958/trend
Here is C02, HadCrut3 and Sunspots. For mathematical honesty; ignore the last 1/4 cycle. Note heating to due to Sunspots which affects temperature in turn affects C02 production to the advantage of plant life. Also note C02’s rate increasing due to third world use picking up and taking over from the 90’s. Will need another decade to show the temperature drop due to the present Sun’s inactivity.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/fourier/high-pass:2/low-pass:30/inverse-fourier/normalise/from:1960/plot/sidc-ssn/fourier/high-pass:2/low-pass:30/inverse-fourier/normalise/from:1960/plot/esrl-co2/fourier/high-pass:1.5/low-pass:11/inverse-fourier/normalise
If you have issues with reality. I suggest you see a shrink.
Gail Combs says: “Most of us here are well aware of the CO2/infared interaction. We are also aware the radiative forcing caused by CO2 in the atmosphere is proportional to the logarithm of the concentration.”
==================================================================
I am sorry, but who exactly and how experimentally proved that CO2 causes warming on the surface by sending back to the surface some IR it gets from the surface? Because IR from colder bodies does not necessarily cause warming of warmer bodies, it needs to be proven first.
You surely remember me asking the warmists here on various threads to provide links to real scientific physical experiments proving that and you surely remember the result: ZERO.
Well, things might have changed recently, so what proof do you have now I am unaware of? Please, do not hesitate to publish the links, thank you in advance.
Renewableguy says, “The warming mainly driven by co2 is not a steady upward rise”, an assertion which flies in the face of the laboratory experiments that log a steady rise in temperature when coupled with a steady increase in CO2. That is one bone of contention I have with the CAGW crowd, for if increasing amounts of atmospheric CO2 were such compelling arguments for elevating global mean temperatures, then one would not see decades long decline in those temperatures accompanied by increasing levels of carbon dioxide.
One needs to investigate the entire ensemble of atmospheric, oceanographic, terrestrial, and solar possesses to determine the underlying causes of temperature changes and not rely on a one-dimensional perspective.
KR says:
November 25, 2012 at 6:31 pm
“Statistical significance” depends very much on the properties of the stochastic model. If, for example, there is a long term cyclical process contributing to the observations, then any trend calculated over a fraction of the cycle time is unlikely to be statistically significant.
There is a very apparent ~60 year damped oscillation in the temperature data. You must include those correlations in your model when calculating statistical properties. Application of inappropriate models to determination of statistical significance yields garbage. And, that is what the purveyors of “statistical significance” for the trend from 1970 to 2000 are pushing: garbage.
Greg House says:
November 25, 2012 at 6:22 pm
..Thanks, Gail. But I mean, it is much worse and much easier. Why search for secondary errors, if the whole “global” thing collapses immediately, if the warmists are asked to prove that the thermometers are on the right representative places and there is/was a sufficient number of them. From my experience they can not prove it and it demonstrates that the whole “global warming” is a pure fiction…
_______________________________
Oh, I agree whole heartedly.
Getting a good representative measurement of anything is not easy especially when the historic recorded measurements are to the whole degree and you are showing changes of 0.01C (snicker) I worked as a lab manager in Chemical QC since the 1970’s. When I heard the ASSumption that CO2 was well mixed, I laughed my head off. Uniform mixing is an ever present headache in the chemical industry. With ever changing sources and sinks and only natural mixing of the atmosphere, you are not going to see ‘well mixed’ but the myth was an absolute necessity because it allowed Callendar to pick and choose what historic CO2 measurements he was going to use. link
KR says: “Bob Tisdale – The very fact that you again assert (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/11/25/skeptical-science-misrepresents-their-animation-the-escalator/#comment-1157182) 4 to 12 year trends from SST demonstrates that you do not understand statistical significance, or that short periods of a noisy signal can have both low and high apparent trends far from the actual long term trend.”
KR – The very fact that you elected to misrepresent what I presented in that comment is telling. I did not present a trend that was less than 9 years. And the fact that you, in your “take home” to readers, overlooked the remainder of what I presented to you is also very telling. Combined, they indicate you haven’t yet grasped what was being discussed in that comment to you.
Good-bye, KR.