CHRISTOPHER MONCKTON of BRENCHLEY
DELEGATES at the 18th annual UN climate gabfest at the dismal, echoing Doha conference center – one of the least exotic locations chosen for these rebarbatively repetitive exercises in pointlessness – have an Oops! problem.
No, not the sand-flies. Not the questionable food. Not the near-record low attendance. The Oops! problem is this. For the past 16 of the 18-year series of annual hot-air sessions about hot air, the world’s hot air has not gotten hotter. There has been no global warming. At all. Zilch. Nada. Zip. Bupkis.
The equations of classical physics do not require the arrow of time to flow only forward. However, observation indicates this is what always happens. So tomorrow’s predicted warming that has not happened today cannot have caused yesterday’s superstorms, now, can it?
That means They can’t even get away with claiming that tropical storm Sandy and other recent extreme-weather happenings were All Our Fault. After more than a decade and a half without any global warming at all, one does not need to be a climate scientist to know that global warming cannot have been to blame.
Or, rather, one needs not to be a climate scientist. The wearisomely elaborate choreography of these yearly galah sessions has followed its usual course this time, with a spate of suspiciously-timed reports in the once-mainstream media solemnly recording that “Scientists Say” their predictions of doom are worse than ever. But the reports are no longer front-page news. The people have tuned out.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPeCaC), the grim, supranational bureaucracy that makes up turgid, multi-thousand-page climate assessments every five years, has not even been invited to Doha. Oversight or calculated insult? It’s your call.
IPeCaC is about to churn out yet another futile tome. And how will its upcoming Fifth Assessment Report deal with the absence of global warming since a year after the Second Assessment report? Simple. The global-warming profiteers’ bible won’t mention it.
There will be absolutely nothing about the embarrassing 16-year global-warming stasis in the thousands of pages of the new report. Zilch. Nada. Zip. Bupkis.
Instead, the report will hilariously suggest that up to 1.4 Cº of the 0.6 Cº global warming observed in the past 60 years was manmade.
No, that is not a typesetting error. The new official meme will be that if it had not been for all those naughty emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases the world would have gotten up to 0.8 Cº cooler since the 1950s. Yeah, right.
If you will believe that, as the Duke of Wellington used to say, you will believe anything.
The smarter minds at the conference (all two of us) are beginning to ask what it was that the much-trumpeted “consensus” got wrong. The answer is that two-thirds of the warming predicted by the models is uneducated guesswork. The computer models assume that any warming causes further warming, by various “temperature feedbacks”.
Trouble is, not one of the supposed feedbacks can be established reliably either by measurement or by theory. A growing body of scientists think feedbacks may even be net-negative, countervailing against the tiny direct warming from greenhouse gases rather than arbitrarily multiplying it by three to spin up a scare out of not a lot.
IPeCaC’s official prediction in its First Assessment Report in 1990 was that the world would warm at a rate equivalent to 0.3 Cº/decade, or more than 0.6 Cº by now.
But the real-world, measured outturn was 0.14 Cº/decade, and just 0.3 Cº in the quarter of a century since 1990: less than half of what the “consensus” had over-predicted.
In 2008, the world’s “consensus” climate modelers wrote a paper saying ten years without global warming was to be expected (though their billion-dollar brains had somehow failed to predict it). They added that 15 years or more without global warming would establish a discrepancy between real-world observation and their X-boxes’ predictions. You will find their paper in NOAA’s State of the Climate Report for 2008.
By the modelers’ own criterion, then, HAL has failed its most basic test – trying to predict how much global warming will happen.
Yet Ms. Christina Figurehead, chief executive of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, says “centralization” of global governing power (in her hands, natch) is the solution. Solution to what?
And what solution? Even if the world were to warm by 2.2 Cº this century (for IPeCaC will implicitly cut its central estimate from 2.8 Cº in the previous Assessment Report six years ago), it would be at least ten times cheaper and more cost-effective to adapt to warming’s consequences the day after tomorrow than to try to prevent it today.
It is the do-nothing option that is scientifically sound and economically right. And nothing is precisely what 17 previous annual climate yatteramas have done. Zilch. Nada. Zip. Bupkis.
This year’s 18th yadayadathon will be no different. Perhaps it will be the last. In future, Ms. Figurehead, practice what you preach, cut out the carbon footprint from all those travel miles, go virtual, and hold your climate chatternooga chit-chats on FaceTwit.
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rgb: I have seen many of your posts over time. Excellent stuff 🙂
Jimmy Haigh says:
December 2, 2012 at 10:26 am
I’ve just watched an excruciating report on the BBC on the Doha Climate Jamboree with uber warmonger Roger Harriban spouting 5 minutes of absolute climate bollocks. Absolutely outrageous stuff. I was swearing at the telly.
I just watched the other lot (ITV) talking to the Tydall centre. Same ole same ole. Just unbelieveable crap.
@Spvincent, the Met does a lot of tap dancing around the fact (and it’s an undeniable one) that since 1998 there has been no further warming. I will admit, the tap dancing is noteworthy.
spvincent says:
December 2, 2012 at 11:13 am
First of all you need to be more discerning. Read the Met off pr more carefully. Then go to the met off site and download their data and plot. Then go to the NOAA site and do the same. Then come back and apologise.
spvincent: Your rebuttal and that of the Met, consists only of repeated statements that we are currently warm. It confirms that temperatures have been flat: “The current period of reduced warming is not unprecedented and 15 year long periods are not unusual.” So while we ARE warm there has been no significant warming for one half a climatic period. Even my grandchildren understand the difference between being warm and warming. It doesn’t say much, that you don’t. GK
Regarding steeper slope for 1950-2012 than for 1950-97:
There was a super El Nino year in 1997/98, skewing the average.
Mystery solved.
spvincent says:
December 2, 2012 at 11:13 am
It’s noteworthy that the article provides no references to back up the statement….
_____________________________
But others here have. See Werner Brozek’s comment. Therefore your comment is a FAIL!
There is no warming and yet the alarmists insist there is. Their best argument is to laugh at the suggestion that two skeptics are correct and all the climate scientists are wrong. It’s quite ironic that you need to be a scientist to read that there has been no warming from those very same scientists. And yet they insist that skeptics are wrong when they mention the non-warming.
With alarmists, it’s like fight club. Rule #1 is that there currently is no warming. Rule #2 is no one talks about the non-warming.
Silver Ralph says:
“Actually, Andy, since water vapour is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, perhaps the real devil is the cooling towers, and not the smoke stack!!”
The amount of water vapour released as steam by humans is infinitesimal compared to water vapour released by the forces of nature. Human steam, is a total irrelevance.
But PLEASE, don’t give the nonces that after world control any new ideas !!
They might decide steam is the next boggieman !!
Henry@davidmhoffer
Do the same plot with Hadcrut 3? Note the difference? Why?
Either way, both hadcrut3 and hadcrut4 show cooling from 2002
(and no warming from 1997 or 1998)
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/to:2012/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/to:2012/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2002/to:2012/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:2002/to:2012/trend
My own results suggest we are heading for more cooling
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
looking at energy-in
Better be ready for more storms, cold and snow.
I don’t agree with Had4, it only has been changed to show a little more warming where there was none. It was a travesty that no significant warming was occurring so the need to adjust for confirmation bias was due. With Had4 including Arctic data where there was none available in the past, it is like comparing oranges with apples. If it makes global temperatures warmer now it certainly will make global temperatures warmer in the past during similar periods. It may be improving the data in the long term for future, but it makes the older data a unfair comparison and more worthless for comparing honest trends in the past with data including more Arctic values. Saying that the honest trends comparing with historic warmer periods have been lost long ago. The Arctic stations say there is no difference recently to the late 1930’s/ early 1940’s.
http://imageshack.us/scaled/medium/141/arctictempstrend.png
The change by Had4 was explained due to including more Arctic data, but has been shown previously like the GISS Arctic temperatures would have to be many degrees higher just to affect the global data, so there has been moving chairs around the deck for other regions too.
http://img829.imageshack.us/img829/5412/gissvrssextarc.png
The final irony that may not have been thought about with this change, is once the Arctic starts cooling in future it will have a bigger affect on cooling global temperatures. I bet you didn’t think about that one did you?
@ur momisugly spvincent:
Here are three WUWT threads on the Met Office’s response to the Daily Mail article, in chronological order:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/15/the-met-office-responds-to-global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/15/noaas-15-year-statement-from-2008-puts-a-kibosh-on-the-current-met-office-insignificance-claims-that-global-warming-flatlined-for-16-years/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/25/met-office-statistics-questioned/
“So tomorrow’s predicted warming that has not happened today cannot have caused yesterday’s superstorms, now, can it?”
That has been my biggest sticking point for years but never put it so well.
All of the countless observations (and fabrications) being falsely attributed to global warming have come from alarmists pretending the future warming happened yesterday.
With 16 yrs (and counting) of no warming contradicting their scurrilous portrayal of the past, present and future alarmists have no where to go, no where to hide and no cards left to play.
They are sitting there at the table, clinging to the last of their chips with no friends in the room.
They are taking pathetic to levels mankind has never seen before.
@Patricia Ravasio (@patravasio) December 2, 2012 at 12:19 am
Welcome to our group. Please keep an open mind as you read the various comments. Some are a bit rough, but their writers feel that the comment is justified.
Re part of the information at http://truth-out.org/news/item/13083-meet-the-climate-denial-machine regarding the supposed confidence of “climate experts” (the (in)famous 97.4%), please read
http://opinion.financialpost.com/2011/01/03/lawrence-solomon-97-cooked-stats/ for the full story. If you investigate, you are going to find similar rebuttals for the views. of you or those with similar thinking.
IanM
MikeB and others: regression slope is based on a sum of cross products (in which temperature is a term), but let’s keep it easy with a mean: In 1950 your village had one poor resident. Each year someone arrived who was a bit wealthier and in 1997 you saw the first millionaire. Since then each year a millionaire arrived but all millionaires 1997-2012 were equally rich. Compute over time the mean wealth 1950-1997 and the mean wealth 1950-2012.
It’s a noisy data set, and what’s been done is to select a starting point corresponding to a large spike in temperature (the large 1997/98 El Nino event), pick a suitably small time interval, throw away the rest of the data and then blindly apply some statistical routines like regression analysis. With such a technique you can always find some period where the warming appears to have levelled off but it’s meaningless as a way to determine future trends.
This graph illustrates the point rather well.
Do you seriously think that the conclusion presented, that warming has stopped, would pass peer review?
Pat Ravasio says:
December 2, 2012 at 12:02 pm
So wait, you are saying that fossil fuels do not cause warming, but that if we shift away from them to clean energies, there is a risk of the earth cooling? Uh, could you just think that through and try agan?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Pat, it is customary to quote the person you are responding to so we know who said it, and exactly what they said.
Not knowing who said exactly what, my suggestion to you would be that most skeptics don’t argue that CO2 does not cause warming. They argue that the amount is far less than claimed, and certainly not catastrophic. As for potential for an ice age, yes that is a possibility. The earth has spent much more time in ice ages than in interglacials, and the current interglacial is in fact getting long in the tooth.
Would elevated CO2 levels save us? Doubtful. All the fossil fuel we have burned in the last century has only added about 100 ppm to the background CO2 levels. Please keep in mind that CO2 is logarithmic. To get one additional degree out of it, you would have to double current levels which are currently around 400 ppm. So if an ice age sets in, we’d need 6 or 8 degrees to save our butts. For an extra 6 degrees we’d need:
2 x 400 = 800 = 1 degree
2 x 800 = 1600 = 2 deg
3200 = 3 deg
6400 = 4 deg
12,800 = 5 deg
25,600 = 6 deg
So we’d need to pump into the atmosphere about 250 TIMES as much CO2 as we did in the last 100 years. And that’s assuming that feedbacks aren’t negative, and the data is increasingly suggesting that they are (in which case we’d need even more).
This same problem works in reverse by the way. If the planet’s temperature would otherwise be stable, those are the amounts of CO2 to cause those amounts of warming. Adding 100 ppm of CO2 to 280 ppm as we did in the last 100 years is a 40% increase. Adding 100 ppm to 400 is only a 25% increase, and correspondingly much less warming than the previous 100 ppm.
SPVincent,
The Met Office’s insistence that temperatures have continued rising over the past 15 years is based on their claim that the temperature trend for the period from 1997 to 2012 shows +0.03C per decade for a total temperature rise of +0.05C for that period.
That is to say, if the per decade trend continues, by the year 2345 the temperature will rise 1.0C over the current value. Whoa!!!
Of course, how they can measure a GLOBAL average temperature to the resolution of a few hundreths of a degree is a mystery to me. Further compounding the confusion over their statement, their graph actually shows a declining temperature trend since 2000. Go figure!
andrew asked:
Why is the long term temperature trend from say 1950 – 2012 higher than for 1950 – 1997 …
I’ll put it differently from Mr. Courtney. The 50ies and 60ies have been relatively cold, after it was 1997 relatively warm. As you add the warmer years after 1997- although they are cooler than 1997-98 – you have more warm years at the end and thus the linear trend has to increase; it goes over the temps in the last years of your data row. Try it out in a spreadsheet – you’ll beat Phil Jones.
Pat Ravasio says:
December 2, 2012 at 12:02 pm
“So wait, you are saying that fossil fuels do not cause warming, but that if we shift away from them to clean energies, there is a risk of the earth cooling? Uh, could you just think that through and try agan?”
Pat, it would be helpful if you indicated to whom you answered. My answer is this: A doubling of CO2 (100% increase) has an increased radiative forcing of 3.5 W/m^2 as a consequence. We are only at 40% so probably only 2 W/m^2 or so for now . Compared to the variation of insolation at the surface due to variation of cloud cover totally insignificant. As Lüning and Vahrenholt show in Die Kalte Sonne
(english interview of Lüning here:
)
there is historical evidence for significant solar influence much stronger than that – probably modulation of cloud cover OR an effect of very variable UV radiation component of solar spectrum.
No matter which it is, this solar influence is NOT accounted for by the IPCC and is probably the REAL key to future temperature development.
Yes, antropogenic CO2 has an influence, BUT, it’s probably so small that we wouldn’t even be able to discern it in the noise if we tried to measure it. (I know of no conclusive observational proof of long term increased average backradiation in the CO2 absorption/emission band. )
Pat, the world is cooling, naturally. Got it? We have left you many clues. We can take a horse to the water but we cannot make him drink.
Pat Ravasio says:
December 2, 2012 at 12:02 pm
So wait, you are saying that fossil fuels do not cause warming, but that if we shift away from them to clean energies, there is a risk of the earth cooling? Uh, could you just think that through and try agan?
Huh? How on earth did you come up with that? Reading comprehension FAIL.
Pat Ravasio says: “Hi my name is Pat Ravasio and I am an ignorant climate cult sock puppet”
Yes, thanks for the update Pat. Keep on drinking the Kool-aide at 350.org. Maybe try spreading some of that propaganda in your garden and see if it makes the plants grow…
I live in Florida and have not burst into flames yet. Also, we have gone seven years without being hit by a hurricane. Maybe we could encourage all the warmer panic’ers to move north and settle Canada and Alaska… Naked in the winter when they can feel the climate….
I would like to thank Anthony, the mods and everybody for having allowed me to read several excellent comments here. Such as those by Gail Combs, davidmhoffer on operations on trends and the very clear and quiet one by rgbatduke, which could be promoted to a post. Not to mention all the others.