It seems everyone here forgets again that a large part of the increase in CO2 is caused by the natural warming from 1950-2000 of the oceans. There are giga tons and giga tons of bicarbonate in the oceans. Everyone knows that if you switch on your kettle, filled with water,
you get this chemical reaction
(more) heat + HCO3- => (more) CO2 + OH-
So the first smoke you see when the water gets warmer is CO2.
Cause and effect, get it? Smoking causes cancer, but cancer does not cause warming.
There is a causal relationship, showing more CO2 in the past, due to it becoming warmer.
The closed box experiments that Tyndall and S.Arrhenius used or any other proposed closed box experiment, cannot be applied to prove that the net effect of more CO2 in the atmosphere is (also) that of more warming. I have explained this here:
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2011/08/11/the-greenhouse-effect-and-the-principle-of-re-radiation-11-aug-2011/
In this respect I have challenged anyone, even dr. Brown, to provide me with the balance sheet, as referred to at the end of the above blog post.

spvincent says:
>>
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.
…
A couple of things: first see what a big difference the choice of starting year makes
…
@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.
>>
Funny isn’t how this “statistical artefact” was an integral part of climate and was to a large extent what was defining the hockey stick and the slope all the defective climate models were tuned to reproduce. Now it’s just an artefact that we are supposed to ignore.
Similarly, anyone who suggested a solar link to climate got laughed of the face of the catastrophically warming Earth. Now we’re supposed to “adjust” to data to account for it.
For two decades we’ve been presented with climate “trends” . Now the trends are going the wrong way they suddenly become “misleading”.
This kind of duplicity seems central to those still trying to pretend that CO2 has any significant impact on climate. But that’s “OK” because it’s for The Cause. It’s OK to twist the truth, to lie and deceive , it’s a moral imperative !
So perhaps spvincent can remove the statistical artefacts the cooled 60s and 70s and the one that warmed 80s and 90s, account for the warming caused by solar variations as well a wanting to adjust for recent declines and tell us what is left of the run away global warming that we are supposed to sacrifice our economy, social structure and nation sovereignty for.
I think he has raised some good points about natural variability, let’s see the upshot of his reasoning.

From spvincent on December 2, 2012 at 9:08 pm:

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.

Actually the only thing worth noting is you don’t understand the uncertainty ranges. As all of the negative uncertainty values exceed the claimed warming trend, none of those figures prove warming. Indeed, within those uncertainty ranges it is possible that there was global cooling during every last one of those figures, as the value minus the (absolute value of the) negative uncertainty amount is always negative.
So the many values you stated give no proof of any global warming whatsoever.

I have read that some 95+ % of the extra energy (extra from energy imbalance) goes down into the oceans. So in my mind we should perhaps be looking more to the oceans and less upp in the air. Perhaps even so that even if we would have had a really huge rise in average air temps it would still be more relevant to stay focused on the oceans.The air is secondary in the end. Also the current sea level rise points upwards and that fact should make us pulling the handbrakes of both coastal exploration aswell as trying to fix the heat balance. With this in mind I think that those who works pro heat storage and ocean level rise should reconcider their standpoint.

Thankyou mogamboguru for pointing out the new and revised world average temperature change. Being now in my twilight years I remember it was accepted world wide for maybe a century that the world average was 14.7 C at 1013 Mb. I would like to see the scientific study that changed these long held views.

Oh Jesus, I wish there had been some global warming, because 40 years of Christmas shopping and its colder than ever here in Britain. In fact it frankly to cold and icy to go out and do the Christmas shopping this time round. So please, stick your climate models where the sun don’t shine. Nobody needs them anymore – its obvious the planet isn’t getting warmer. Anybody that still believes otherwise is living in a state of total sensory deprivation.

“3. The elephant in the room is this: energy companies, in addition to anyone making a lot of money right now all have a big interest in delaying doing anything. There is $172 trillion dollars of fossil fuel in the ground that won’t be available.”
Isn’t it interesting that nobody has suggested stopping the production of fossil fuels? The focus is always on controlling the consumption, i.e. controlling the people not the corporations. Surely it would be much easier to simply tell Saudi Arabia to stop producing oil. It is 60% of the production. There are fewer producers than there are consumers, so it is easier to control the producers.
Why is it that when I go to EU Parliament it is surrounded by banners telling me what a great job Shell and BP are doing on renewable energy and how the EU Parliament should help them by giving them more funds? In the end they are energy companies and they will sell energy – they will use their funds to acquire whatever energy source they require to sell on to us. Makes no odds to them if they acquire a solar panel company or an oil field in Nigeria. Even better for them if they can find some naive politicians to hand them some taxpayer cash in the process.

Dan Pangburn says
Follow the link in my first post
Henry says
sorry I did not see a link anywhere, and I was interested

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” ?
Back in the day when I was actively doing massive computing on beowulf-style clusters and an equally active member of the beowulf list, I was accused on more than one occasion of not actual being human but rather a bot. In fact, I think you can still find a few of the comments googling rgbbot beowulf together.
Bear in mind that I write constantly. As in, I practically live at the keyboard when I’m not fishing, or teaching, or sleeping. And I actually took typing wa-a-ay back in high school, learning to touch type on a genuine IBM Selectric. I got an A. I have no idea what my typing speed is, but it is at least as fast as I would speak to a slightly slow and dimwitted child, a word every 2-3 seconds, so figure 60-80 characters per second when I’m on a tear.
As for the “clear and precise” — bless you, but I wish. I know what I know clearly enough (even where it is probably wrong) but there is too much to know and too little time to learn it.
Beyond that, regarding your woodsfortrees plots for/with HenryP — you will get even more interesting if you fit the data with a set of zero trend lines — that’s right, zero trend — separated by step function jumps. IIRC, you can build a rather decent fit with only one jump (as you’ve observed) — the data is “nearly” flat on both sides of 1997-1998, with a large jump associated with the El Nino. You can do slightly better with 3 or 4 jumps, only one of which is at all large and a couple of which are slightly negative.
This is exploring the Koutsoyiannis approach to climate statistics (what he calls Hurst-Kolmogorov statistics). My own interpretation of this is that the thermal climate is best described as a series of punctuated equilibrium transitions between locally stable attractors in a generalized chaotic phase space. Those attractors are not dense — there seems to be decent phase separation (hence the local stability) but nevertheless there are several attractors available, probably with very different circulatory character, with similar mean temperatures.
This hypothesis describes the data decently — the small transitions are likely to be of the latter character, and may be triggered by relatively “large” events modulating the external forcing or they may well be triggered by nothing at all — a “butterfly wing transition” if you like. The kinds of circulatory changes they represent are probably things like persistent blocking highs or macroscopic modulations of the jet stream or global decadal circulations or thermohaline circulation or nonlinear combinations of all of the above plus solar effects. The large transition visible is almost certainly due to the El Nino that occurred in the 1997-1998 time frame, and is extremely visible in Bob Tisdale’s SST data as well. In fact, you would find it interesting to correlate that SST data (with similar HK fits) and the RSS data.
This is why I think that we simply don’t have enough data to understand the climate system. You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip or spin gold out of straw or turn inadequate data providing insight into a chaotic system into a meaningful and unique model. With a single “major” transition triggered by an obvious event, and fewer minor transitions than one has fingers on a single hand over a mere 33 years of data, one is truly sucking serious wind if one wishes to somehow connect all of these dots into a model with something vaguely approximating predictive power, and if one DID build such a model at the top it would resemble a quantum Langevin model — a stochastic ODE describing transition probabilities between locally stable states in some ensemble where we cannot even begin to describe those states or the forces that cause transitions in between them. What the climate is almost certainly not is a continuously/smoothly varying system — that is an illusion produced by “smoothing” the thermometric record in various ways.
This has enormous implications. If one makes the simple assumption that the past thermal record has this same punctuated equilibrium character, but that it has been smoothed and undersampled and oversampled and adjusted until it is impossible to resolve the transitions, then things like the downturn in temperature in the mid-20th century become critical things to understand, as they demonstrate that there are distinct downward pathways open to the natural phase evolution of the system. It also suggests that there are several very long timescale, slow processes at work shifting the centroid of the mean global temperature distribution associated with the locally stable attractors. It is these processes that people on this list are constantly trying to identify e.g. asserting that solar activity as reflected in sunspots or magnetism or whatever is one, asserting that the positions of the major planets (perhaps as a proxy for where the Sun is relative to the center of mass of the solar system in its highly chaotic orbit) is one, asserting that the phase of the PDO is one, asserting that positive feedback between a warming trend and CO_2 released from the oceans is one. Or, of course, that all of these and more are or may be important, and what’s more, that they may be important two or three at a time!
Everybody looks for simple stupid linear covariance in the climate models. Why is that, one wonders? It might well be that the centroid of global mean temperatures varies with sunspots/solar activity, but only when one, two, or three other conditions are just right. For example, PDO positive and high sunspot count is warming, PDO negative cancels the warming, NAO positive can double down with the PDO to produce warming or cooling independent of the state of the sun, ENSO trumps all on short time scales bumping the system around among the ensemble of locally stable attractors, and what the hell, might as well let volcanoes and human aerosols and the climate 100 years ago that is surfacing in the thermohaline circulation get in on the act.
Is it so surprising that the climate system is nontrivially multivariate? Yet over and over again people look for linear/trivial correlations and accept or reject causal influence because there is/is not a simple linear/trivial correspondence.
Of course I understand why — to fit a nontrivial nonlinear multivariate model requires a shit-pile of data and we don’t got it and ain’t gonna get it in less than decades from now. 33 years of satellite data. Less than 15 years of ARGOS data. We haven’t even spanned the natural variability of the known important drivers, the decadal oscillations, and what we would need to do is span the permutations of their states with permutations of solar and geomagnetic states in order to fit a nonlinear model. This is — and I speak professionally and with deep knowledge — for all practical purposes impossible with the data we have in hand at the moment.
Being an optimist, I think we might start to have a clue in twenty more years, especially if the Sun cooperates and we do indeed sample a Maunder-style minimum in the next cycle (although I frankly doubt the predictive capabilities of the solar climate models that suggest that it might, and wouldn’t therefore be surprised if we don’t). It also might help if the north atlantic oscillation changes phase, or if the oceanic thermohaline circulation varies in such a way that it provides clues (now that we have sampling buoys in place that can give us a full 3D picture of what is going on across the thermocline in something like a global network of oceanic locations, although it still tragically undersamples and non-uniformly samples the ocean). But it has been suggested that it might take 100 years of data (post 1979, if not post 2000) to get enough data to resolve the nonlinear coupling of all of the probably important parameters. And sadly, this could be right — or rather, it almost certainly is right if one wishes to descend the tree far enough to start to resolve things more than three at a time, but I still think we could get a decent first approximation in fifty.
After only thirty we are still waiting to see what the solar cycle will do in coincidence with the PDO, ENSO, the NAO, volcanoes, air pollution, SSTs, the varying polar albedo, CO_2 driving, ozone driving, methane driving, particulates, deep changes in the thermohaline circulation, the slow but inexorable changes in the Earth’s troika of orbital parameters and their ill-understood but obviously nonlinear tendency to drive the Earth back into glaciation, and did I leave anything out? Of course — don’t forget that damned Brazilian Butterfly because it’s not like you can dial all of these parameters into anything and get one answer — the butterfly is capable of making it warm when it “should” cool or cool when it “should” warm because it keeps batting its wings to cause transitions between warming and/or cooling attractors due to what amounts to “noise” in ways that defy prediction by any model.
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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?
Yeah, I noted that too. Or, one could do some simple arithmetic. The surface area of the world’s oceans is 360 million square kilometers. A square kilometer is a million square meters. The surface area is therefore square meters. Conveniently enough, one cubic meter of water has a mass of one metric ton (1000 kg). Forget the .6 in the area. We melt metric tons of water and distribute it on square meters, and it produces precisely 1 mm of Sea Level Rise (SLR).
Or does it?
One thing that I am amazed by is that the alarmists have forgotten their scaling laws (or perhaps they never knew them). Let’s take Greenland, as an entirely apropos example. Suppose that, as occurred last summer, Greenland has an anomalously warm week. We’ll be generous and assume that a whole centimeter of surface ice melts, turning from ice into water at the freezing point that is well mixed into the snow on the surface. In fact, it turns that snow into slush. However, the water content of that slush is not free, and it is hundreds to thousands of miles away from the ocean. A few days later, the surface re-freezes, and one has a relatively dense layer of ice that will lie under this year’s snow pack. This water will not actually appear in the ocean until it makes its way to the perimeter of Greenland through one or another of the active transport mechanisms that cause it to gradually shed ice and water around the perimeter. Those mechanisms take far, far, longer than is relevant to any discussion of the next century to operate.
And Antarctica is even worse. IIRC, the bulk of the “melt” they are worried about is in one relatively small branch of Western Antarctica. Antarctica is a goddamn continent, and almost none of its ice is within a hundred miles of the coast, and most of that ice is frozen rock solid from the top to the bottom and trapped so that it can’t migrate to the coast.
This means that one cannot actually assert that 100% of the 300 Gt of “ice melt” that they claim makes it into the ocean, producing a whole millimeter of SLR. Only a fraction — probably less than one hundredth of this amount — makes it into the ocean. If this “accelerated” melt rate held for 100 years, and the meltwater migrated a whole mile towards the ocean every year — they might get to where a whole half-millimeter of SLR could be attributed to it, if one could resolve this “melting signal” from the background noise of fluctuations in annual snowfall that directly modulate the melt rate at the coasts where meltwater enters the oceans.
They are presenting a static result — a snapshot of a single, tiny time interval on a geological time scale — as if it describes the full dynamic process.
I noted that even Gavin Schmidt was very hesitant about claiming that this was proof of something in the article announcing this “important” news. He knows better. It is direct proof that there is no reason to panic, not proof that we should be panicking, not when one does the arithmetic.
If we more than doubled this rate of ice loss, magically transported 100% of the melt into the sea regardless of where it occurs, and endured 2.5 whole millimeters of SLR on top of the 2.5 millimeters of SLR that has persisted (erratically) over the last 140 plus years, the ocean would rise a spectacular 2 inches per decade instead of the inch to inch and a quarter per decade it is rising now. However, this possibility has to be balanced against the possibility that SSTs have globally stabilized post the 1998 El Nino, which means that the thermal expansion rate might actually be stabilizing as well (although God only knows where the “true equilibrium” thermal distribution of heat in the ocean lies compared to its current one, if the concept has any meaning whatsoever). Dumping lots of freshwater ice melt in could interrupt the THC in nonlinear ways, could make it easier to refreeze the surface of the polar oceans and hence provide negative feedback by modulating the albedo, could increase winter precipitation to that increased snowfall compensates for the increased melt — or have the opposite effects. We don’t even know the sign of the probable feedbacks, yet people are predicting with arrogant confidence that SLR of over a meter by the end of the century is likely and we should take enormously extraordinarily expensive measures now so that we’re ready for it then.
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