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.
Support CFACT’s mission here.
I try to go through all responses before responding, but with 274 so far, it takes a while. Thank you to the people who have already responded on my behalf who are often in a different time zone. I will add my thoughts to a few that have caught my eye and hopefully will not repeat what was said by others.
LetsBeReasonable says:
December 2, 2012 at 3:35 am
Werner, I must have done something wrong with the graphs. I changed the starting point at 1996 instead of 1997 and all the trend lines went up. What is happening?
I am reminded of an exchange a few years ago when a beggar asked for a coffee. I obliged and gave him a 2 dollar coupon for Tim Hortons which was nearby. He then changed the goal post on me and asked for a toonie which is a 2 dollar Canadian coin. I refused saying he asked for a coffee and I gave him one. So what does this have to do with NOAA? They said certain things would be true if certain conditions were met (or not met). I responded with respect to the 15 years and then some. So yes, if you start in 1996, there will be warming. The other question that also could be answered is if this is significant or not. Below, I plotted RSS and the graph from 1997 has a slope of 0 but from 1995, the slope is 0.004/year. (You may recall the interview with Phil Jones where he said that 0.012/year over 15 years was NOT significant, so I would imagine that 0.004/year over 18 years is not significant either.) I believe it was Richard Lindzen who said we had no warming since 1997 and no significant warming since 1995.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1995/plot/rss/from:1997/trend/plot/rss/from:1995/trend
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?
No, that’s just some people on the list who are “certain” — with no more grounds than those of the warmists — that the Earth is about to cool. In the long run, of course, they are correct — the current interglacial (the Holocene) is bound to end at some point soon in geological time, but that could be anytime from “starting right now” to “in a thousand years” or even longer. Some are silly enough to fit a sine function to some fragment of data and believe that that has predictive value.
The problem is that nobody knows why the Eocene ended and the Pleistocene (the current ice age) started, and nobody knows exactly where and why the Pliestocene is a modulated series of glaciations followed by brief stretches of interglacial. There are theories — see e.g. the Milankovitch cycle — but they have no quantitative predictive value and the actual causal mechanism is far from clear. So we do not know what the temperature outside “should” be, with and/or without CO_2. We do know historically that the Little Ice Age that ended around 200 years ago was tied for the coldest century long stretch of the entire Holocene — that is, the coldest for the last 11,000 or so years (where it might surprise you to learn that the Holocene Optimum was between 1.5 and 2 C warmer than it is today, without CO_2).
So the fact of the matter is that there is a risk of the Earth cooling — in fact, there is a risk of a return to open glaciation, the start of the next 90,000 year glacial era — but it is not a particularly high risk and we have no way to meaningfully do much better than to say “sometime in the next few centuries”. CO_2 might, actually, help prevent the next glacial era (or at least, might delay it) but even that is not clear — the Ordovician-Silurian ice age began with CO_2 levels of 7000 ppm. That is around 17 times the current level, almost 1% of the atmosphere CO_2 — and persisted for millions of years with CO_2 levels consistently in the ballpark of 4000 ppm. If the Earth’s climate system (which we do not understand, in my opinion, well enough to predict even a single decade out let alone a century) decides it is time for glaciation, I suspect that nothing we can do will have any meaningful effect on the process, just as I don’t think that we have had any profound warming influence on the Earth so far.
The fundamental issue is this. We have some thirty three years of halfway decent climate data — perhaps twice that if you are very generous — which is the blink of an eye in the chaotic climate system that is the Earth. There has been roughly 0.3 C warming over that thirty-three year stretch, or roughly 0.1 C/decade. It is almost certain that some fraction of that warming was completely natural, not due to human causes and we do not know that fraction — a reasonable guess would be to extrapolate the warming rate from the entire post LIA era, which is already close to 0.1 C/decade. It is probably reasonable to assign roughly 0.3 C total warming to Anthropogenic CO_2 — that is everything, not just the last thirty years but from the beginning of time. It might be as much as 0.5C, it might be as little as 0.1C (or even be negative), but the physics suggests a warming on the order of 1.2 C upon a complete doubling of CO_2 if we don’t pretend to more knowledge than we have concerning the nature and signs of the feedbacks.
At the moment there is little reason to think that we are headed towards catastrophe. When the combined membership of the AMA and AGU were surveyed — this is surveying climate scientists in general, not the public or the particular climate scientists that are most vocal on the issue — 15% were not convinced of anthropogenic global warming at all, and over half of them doubted that the warming anthropogenic or not would be catastrophic. It’s the George Mason survey — feel free to look it up. The general consensus was, and remains, that there has definitely and unsurprisingly been warming post LIA, that humans have caused some part of this (how much open to considerable debate as the science is not settled or particularly clear), that there is some chance of it being “catastrophic” warming in the future, a much larger chance that it will not be, and some chance that it will not warm further at all or even cool.
The rational thing to do is to continue to pursue the science, especially the accumulation of a few more decades of halfway decent data, until that science becomes a bit clearer, without betting our prosperity and the prosperity of our children and the calamitous and catastrophic perpetuation of global poverty and untold misery in the present on the relatively small chance of the warming being catastrophic and there being something we can do about it to prevent it from becoming so.
So far, if catastrophe is in the cards, the measures proposed won’t prevent it even according to those that predict it! In fact, it won’t have any effect on the catastrophe at all according to the worst case doom and gloomers. We could stop burning carbon worldwide tomorrow and if the carbon cycle model currently in favor with the CAGW crowd is correct (which I doubt) it would take centuries for the Earth’s CO_2 level to go back to “normal” — whatever that means, given that it varies by almost a factor of 2 completely naturally from glacial era to interglacial. In fact, according to that model the CO_2 levels will continue to go up as long as we contribute any CO_2 at all, because they’ve stuck an absurdly long relaxation time into their basic system of equations (one with very little empirical foundation, again IMO).
Again, I suggest that you reread the top article carefully. I actually do not think it is the best example of Monckton’s writing — a few people have noted that its tone is not terribly elevating, and I have to agree — but I sense and sympathize with his frustration, given the content of the article. There is a stench of hypocrisy that stretches from Al Gore’s globe-hopping by jet and his huge house and large car all the way to a collection of people with nothing better to do who have jetted to Doha to have a big party and figure out how to continue their quest for World Domination, hypocrisy with king-sized blinders that seem quite incapable of permitting the slightest bit of doubt to enter, even when bold predictions like those openly made in the 2008 report come back to bite them in the ass.
I myself am not a believer in CAGW. Nor am I a disbeliever. The only thing that I “believe” in regarding the subject is our own ignorance, combined with a fairly firm belief that there is little reason to panic visible in the climate record, and that is before various thumbs were laid firmly on the scales. Remove those thumbs and there is even less reason to panic.
My own prediction for the climate is this. We will probably continue to experience mild warming for another ten to twenty years — warming on the order of 0.1C per decade. It will probably occur in bursts — the climate record shows clear signs of punctuated equilibrium, a Hurst-Kolmogorov process — most likely associated with strong El Ninos (if we get back to where strong El Ninos occur — the last couple have fizzled out altogether, hence the lack of warming). In the meantime, we will without much additional effort beyond existing research and the obvious profit incentives drop the cost of solar power by a factor of four, and it will become at least competitive with the cheapest ways of generating electrical power. We will also have at least one major breakthrough in energy storage technology. The two together will cause solar to become more profitable than coal independent of subsidy, for much but not all of the world. Without anybody being inconvenienced or “doing” anything beyond pursuing the most profitable course, global consumption of carbon will then drop like a rock no matter what we do in the meantime.
Beyond twenty years I don’t think anybody has a clue as to what the temperature will do. I don’t even have a lot of confidence in my own prediction. It wouldn’t surprise me if it got cooler, especially if the Sun enters a true Maunder-style minimum. Nor would it surprise me if it got warmer than my modest prediction. But either way, I think roughly 500 ppm is likely to be the peak level of CO_2 before it comes down, and it may well fail to make it to 500 ppm, and even the catastrophists would have a hard time making a catastrophe out of that given 0.3 C of warming in association with the bump from 300 to 400.
We could make it more likely to cut off before 500 ppm — invest massively in nuclear power. Nuclear power is actually relatively cheap, so this is a cost-benefit win, if we regulate them carefully for safety and avoid nuclear proliferation (both risks, but less catastrophic than the inflated predictions of the catastrophists). But I don’t think we will, and in the end I don’t think it will matter.
rgb
However, Truth is the Daughter of Time, so let us see.
Well put.
Let us see.
rgb
HenryP says:
December 2, 2012 at 12:30 pm
Henry@davidmhoffer
Do the same plot with Hadcrut 3? Note the difference?
>>>>>>>>
Interesting, and you got me thinking. Why would I try and depict this using an arcane system of thermometers with varying degrees of siting and observational quality that report about 0.00000001% of the earth surface when we’ve got a few $billion of satellites up there that are orders of magnitude more accurate?
Of course, we only have data from 1979…. but the result is far more dramatic and makes the point better. I was stunned at how pronounced the transition is:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1979/to:2012/trend/plot/rss/from:1979/to:1996/trend/plot/rss/from:1997/to:2012/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1979/to:2012/mean:3
Can we agree that ‘denier’ is a pejorative in a scientific sense. (a word or phrase that has negative connotations or that is intended to disparage or belittle)?
A ‘skeptic’ might not disbelieve in Global Warming; rather they are not ready to believe Global Warming is all Anthropogenic much less Catastrophic.
Let’s examine your point: (thefreedictionary)
Skeptic: — “One who instinctively or habitually doubts, questions, or disagrees with assertions or generally accepted conclusions.” To me, that sounds pejorative enough.
Alarmist: “A person who …alarm others, as by … exaggerated rumors of impending danger or catastrophe” “Exaggerated” is the Skeptics’ main issue. Looks like a perfect fit.
How about alternatives that might be a better choice:
“Proponent” — you jest! They are certainly not PROponents of CAGW. They are not in favor of it.
“Catastrophists” — those who predict catastrophe. That might fit some, but goes too far for most. I don’t think it will or should catch on.
Warner – Someone who gives a warning to others — too general.
Warmer – Someone who give a warning of warming? Likes warming? It is too confusing
Tipper – Someone who expresses danger of a CAGW tipping point or is in bed with Al Gore.
Scaremonger,
Conspirator, (see Climategate).
Zealot
Flimflamer –
Beguiler
I think “Alarmist” is the best of the bunch.
At this time there are two other terms that I want to be put on the table:
Chicken Little — a panicky innocent who thinks the world is coming to an end and leads his friends straight to
Foxy Loxy and were never seen again.
Re Gail Combs: 8:04 am
The word I would use to classify Gail is Astute
…and of course I managed to chop it at 1996 instead of 1997. When you do…. wow:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1979/to:2012/trend/plot/rss/from:1979/to:1997/trend/plot/rss/from:1998/to:2012/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1979/to:2012/mean:3
2. The Temperature increases of the 20th century appear to match the CO2 releases remarkably well. Except for the 40s-70′s. Which would seem to indicate that CO2/temperature are not related.
Well, and then there is the 1700-1940s, where the temperature increase clearly hasn’t got a bloody thing to do with the CO_2 levels. Even proponents of CO_2 driven CAGW acknowledge that pre-1950 CO_2 levels were too low to have any meaningful effect on the basic climate. The rise before that time was the result of warming, not the cause, just as the LIA was not caused by a “drop” in CO_2. There are obviously other major regulators of climate. We obviously do not know or understand what they are, not well enough to predict them. The other regulators of climate have caused temperature variations as large as that seen at the end of the 20th century repeatedly, if one can believe the proxy reconstructions of the Holocene. Note well that this includes dips we cannot explain as well as rises we cannot explain. The Arctic melted once before, in the 1930s, at a time when the cause could not possibly have been CO_2 — it caused scary headlines at the time, although of course we had no satellites or instrumentation handy to systematically record it like we do now.
You are basically right, though — it is probable that CO_2 has had some effect, possible that it has had no effect, possible that it has had a relatively large effect. We simply do not understand the science well enough to know which, not yet, probably not for decades still (if not a century). There are many time scales at play here, in a huge chaotic system with nonlinear feedbacks galore. There is little reason to think based on the historical record that the climate is massively nonlinearly unstable on the warm side, but it is absolutely certain that it is massively nonlinearly unstable on the low side, as between 80 and 90% of the last 500,000 years have been spent with the Earth in the grip of relentless glaciation the likes of which humans have not experienced since they invented the written word or cities or agriculture.
We’d like for the Earth’s climate to remain unchanged, because really, it is a pretty great time to be alive. Not too warm, not too cold. Nature, on the other hand, may have other ideas.
rgb
Nail – that would be you Pat – meet hammer – that would be:rgbatduke says: December 2, 2012 at 6:59 am.
andrew says:
December 2, 2012 at 6:59 am
Why is the long term temperature trend from say 1950 – 2012 higher than for 1950 – 1997 if warming stopped in 1997 as per the article, surely the long term trend should be lower or the same if you include data points from 1997-2012 if warming stopped in 1997?
Here is my perspective. I did try my method from 1950 and I must confess it did not work, but it did work from 1985, as shown below. What I assumed was that warming did not stop in 1997, but rather that the temperatures follow a (very poor) sine wave. So if there was a slope of 0 for 16 years, then the top of the sine wave would be after 8 years or at 2005. You could argue that a flat slope of 16 years consists of warming for 8 years and then identical cooling for 8 years. If you get the slope from 1985 to 2005 and then from 1985 to date, the latter slope is lower as shown below. However going back to 1950 gives virtually identical slopes with this method.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1985/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1985/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1985/to:2005/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1997/to:2005/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:2005/trend
Andrew Clark and Pat Ravasio-
First Andrew. You are correct about temperatures in the 40’s thru 70’s and the past 15 years. Here’s the fact- only 20 years (1978 to 1998) of the past 70 years has shown warming despite steadily rising CO2 emissions and concentrations. What does that suggest?
And Pat- you are correct that few posts show or mention the data. That’s because most here are familiar with the science and data which Anthony has conveniently linked at the “Reference Pages” above. Study them and do the necessary homework to understand them- a year’s worth of study minimum for most of us. For extra credit, go to the scienceofdoom website (listed by Anthony as an AGW site) and study there. I find that, with many exceptions, the skeptics and lukewarmers are more conversant with the science and the data than are the alarmists. Many at all the web sites are personally invested in one side or the other or have political agendas. From them you can learn the power of confirmation bias! Learning enough to form your own educated opinions is an exciting journey. Enjoy!
rgbatduke says:
December 2, 2012 at 6:45 pm
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Life is not fair. There’s only 13 minutes between your last two comments. You wrote that last one in 13 minutes? I couldn’t write something that clear and precise in 13 hours and you tossed it off in 13 minutes?
Anthony – how about a resource page? “the collected works of rgbatduke” ?
Gail Combs says: December 2, 2012 at 11:27 am
“….Just to make it clear I did not come up with “Ag Cartel” Dr. John M. Connor, Dept. of Agricultural Economics, Purdue University did. THE FOOD AND AGRICULTURAL GLOBAL CARTELS OF THE 1990s: OVERVIEW AND UPDATE…”
http://www.agecon.purdue.edu/staff/connor/papers/Private_Intl_Cartels_7_18_03.htm
Thanks Gail… fascinating stuff. Certainly some cartels at work there ….. but really he was not so much talking about the big farming and grain trading companies, rather particular products – lysine, vitamins, citric acid, choline chloride … in this case cartel (price fixing) behavior can be seen.
But big agriculture takes over the world by related but different methods … WTO based “free” trade agreements, food aid to starving nations with “free trade agreements” attached, the power of being able to make huge shipments, and just by getting very close to governments, especially in developing nations. Governments justifiably love these guys, they do bring great efficiency of scale, and keep right up with technology ….. but in the end, they do control the price (but not necessarily via cartels).
Their power is amazing – I was trying to pursue a project in Indonesia, but with disputes over land ownership due to vague and overlapping records and fraudulent grabs linked to government officials (which lower level government are very happy to see as it then guarantees their involvement) – I spoke to one of the two biggest oil palm groups. I asked how they deal with land disputes as they expand. He said “Well, we win, unless it is with the X group (the other large group), then it is a fair fight, but with anyone else, we win”.
Today I am in Thailand. Two companies here control 70% of both the pig and chicken farming in the country, and both are fully integrated from feedmills through to packaged food. Good companies, but very, very powerful.
But back to the discussion at hand: The problem we have discussing this is when we use words like Ag Cartel, Big Oil, etc, the average Joe stops reading …. brought up with the indoctrination of ‘free capitalist systems’, the power of the ‘market’, and the belief that anyone can succeed if only he works hard, they don’t even want to think for a moment how bent the system is and how they are being pillaged.
So, I try to stay away from the “catch phrases”, even if they do encapsulate the reality of the situation.
“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.”
The simplest explanation is that at long last there is someone near the top of the UN who understands how important fossil fuels are to the future of mankind.
Qatari deputy prime minister Abdullah bin Hamad al-Attiyah, president of the UN Climate Change Summit, is in charge of the Doha “Event”. He wants more hydrofracking and other new extraction technologies.
Please support Attiyah. We need more people like him near the “Levers of Power”.
“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.”
The simplest explanation is that there is (at last) someone near the “Levers of Power” at the UN who understands the importance of fossil fuels to the future of mankind. I refer to Qatari deputy prime minister Abdullah bin Hamad al-Attiyah, president of the UN Climate Change Summit, who promotes hydrofracking and the mining of methane clathrates to avoid planetary energy disaster.
Please support Attiyah. We need more people like him.
davidmhoffer,
rgb is a multi-talented dude. He even brews his own beer.
rgbatduke, December 2, 2012 at 6:45 pm,
An admirable summary of the lack of certainty in “Climate Science”.
People like Al Gore who proclaim that they understand what is going on are “complete and shameless rogues” as brilliantly pilloried here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/02/is-al-gore-the-latter-day-pardoner/
I agree that rgbatdukes comments above are well worthy of elevating to full post status… in fact I might print them out and frame them to put on my wall:
rgbatduke says:
December 2, 2012 at 6:59 am
rgbatduke says:
December 2, 2012 at 6:21 pm
…and I just saw the one at :
rgbatduke says:
December 2, 2012 at 6:45 pm
and
rgbatduke says:
December 2, 2012 at 4:12 pm
Between Gail and rgb, this is a helluva thread.
davidmhoffer says:
December 2, 2012 at 7:18 pm
rgbatduke says:
December 2, 2012 at 6:45 pm
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Life is not fair…
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I figure his students are very lucky. One of my Intro. Physics profs. was so bad we all went to the lectures by the other prof much to the horror of the school admin. Talk about a vote of no confidence.
And yes it would be nice to have his best comments collected but that is better left to Ric Werme.
rgbatduke, December 2, 2012 at 6:21 pm
I really enjoyed that essay. As you point out, we have an inkling about what causes “Ice Ages” but we lack the knowledge to make forecasts or even convincing “Backcasts”.
The thing that is missing from the work of the IPCC’s technical folk (Working Group 1) is the kind of perspective that you provide.
For example the IPCC tries to scare us by mentioning that global ice is melting at the rate of ~300 Giga-tonnes per year while failing to mention that there is an “Inventory” of 30 million Giga-tonnes of ice. If they told us that it will take 100,000 years to melt all the ice at the present rate, would anyone be alarmed?
To address some of the points made in response to my previous posts:
The essential point is that the perceived lack of warming over the last 16 years is a statistical artefact caused by a large El Nino event at the start of that period. Doesn’t this figure of 16 strike anyone as suspicious? It ought to, and in fact when you look at trends using periods of 14 and 18 years you get very different results.
@Werner Brozek and others: try changing that value of 1997.25 in your graphs by a couple of years either way and you will see what I mean.
Taking the Hadcrut4 dataset, here are the trend values in degrees C/decade over five closely-related time periods.
1995-2012 +0.109 +/- 0.129
1996-2012 +0.107 +/- 0.129
1997-2012 +0.058 +/- 0.142
1998-2012 +0.052 +/- 0.153
1999-2012 +0.095 +/- 0.162
Let’s look at a satellite-derived dataset (UAH)
1995-2012 +0.139 +/- 0.203
1996-2012 +0.138 +/- 0.227
1997-2012 +0.106 +/- 0.252
1998-2012 +0.063 +/- 0.153
1999-2012 +0.179 +/- 0.262
A couple of things: first see what a big difference the choice of starting year makes, and secondly note that, even during the period when there was allegedly no warming (start year 97 or 98: take your pick), there was STILL an overall upward trend in the data according to these 2 datasets (and others I’ve looked at).
The claim that global warming stopped in 1998 is simply false.
Data taken from http://www.skepticalscience.com/trend.php : that from woodfortrees.org gives similar results.
————————
@HenryGalt: the point about that ‘escalator’ graph is not to cherry pick but to demonstrate how easily data can be cherry picked. If you think otherwise, please explain why.
—————
@DirkH: Many factors such as solar variability and changes in Earth orbit are known to affect earth’s climate: a bit of variability is to be expected whether or not any additional AGW forcing is imposed.
————–
@others: The “levelling-off” of warming in the middle of the last century is attributable to a negative forcing due to stratospheric aerosols. Global warming is affected by other factors in addition to CO2.
rgbatduke says December 2, 2012 at 4:12 pm: “And Viet Nam itself was, of course, a massive and successful boondoggle (as was Iraq) intended to transfer truly enormous amounts of money from the taxpayers into the pockets of the military-industrial complex’s owners.”
==========================================================
Really? Sounds exactly like communists propaganda to me. This is their favourite topic, “military-industrial complex’s owners”. I did not now that military had “owners”.
According to my information, America defended South Vietnam from being taken over by the North Vietnamese communists.
spvincent says:
December 2, 2012 at 9:08 pm
“@DirkH: Many factors such as solar variability and changes in Earth orbit are known to affect earth’s climate: a bit of variability is to be expected whether or not any additional AGW forcing is imposed.”
Very good. So you have just confirmed that we do not need CO2’s influence to explain the warming during the 80ies and 90ies. By Occam’s Razor we can declare the CO2AGW theory as interesting but not necessary to explain observed temperatures.
What was it again with “the biggest crisis we will ever face”…? (Not your words; some other believer, maybe Pat) Oh, ’twas a natural variation wiggle, you know what they do , those wiggles, ’twas nothing really…
henry@davidmhoffer &dr Brown
now watch the cooling trend since 2002:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1979/to:2012/trend/plot/rss/from:1979/to:1996/trend/plot/rss/from:2002/to:2012/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1979/to:2012/mean:3
get it? Hadcrut 3 shows a similar result of a drop of about 0.1 degree C since 2002. My own data set shows a drop of almost 0.2 degree C since 2000. It is not a lot, as far as yet,
but, DO YOU ALL GET THIS: we are cooling!!! Globally. Naturally.
Furthermore, my own (silly?) results, showing a 88 year sine wave of 44 warming and 44 years cooling,
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2012/10/02/best-sine-wave-fit-for-the-drop-in-global-maximum-temperatures/
suggest that this cooling will accelerate and carry on well until at least 2035. By that time all arctic ice loss will freeze back. As it did from 1922-1945.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/03/16/you-ask-i-provide-november-2nd-1922-arctic-ocean-getting-warm-seals-vanish-and-icebergs-melt/
There is at least one other scientist that agrees with me
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/11/19/cooling-in-the-near-future/
.
For anyone who saw that disgusting Roger Harrabib report on Doha, on the BBC, please make a complaint via this online form.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaints
.
It is far far to late for this correction, but unfortunately
Werner Brozek says:
December 1, 2012 at 9:28 pm
Gave the correct quote from the NOAA.gov “State of the Climate in 2008” Report
but gave the page number as 23; the correct page number is 123.
It is in a two page section (pp 122 & 123) with a blue instead of white background to emphasize it, with the heading
This short section they emphasize has no printed page numbers.