Dr. David Whitehouse of the GWPF expounds on the “prime statistic of global warming” graph and its failure, as first reported here.
The Leaked AR5 Report And Global Temperature
Whatever one’s view about the leaking of the draft IPCC AR5 report it does make fascinating reading, and given the public scrutiny it is now receiving it will be interesting to see what parts of it are changed when the final report is released in a year or so.
One part of it that should be changed is the section on global surface temperature data and its interpretation.
The analysis of global combined land and ocean surface temperature in AR5 is inadequate for what it admits is seen as the prime statistic of global warming. It is highly selective in the references it quotes and in the use of time periods which obscures important, albeit inconvenient, aspects of the temperature data. It is poorly drafted often making a strong assertion, and then somewhat later qualifying if not contradicting it by admitting its statistical insignificance. This leaves the door open for selective and incomplete quoting.
In Chapter 2 the report says that the AR4 report in 2007 said that the rate of change global temperature in the most recent 50 years is double that of the past 100 years. This is not true and is an example of blatant cherry-picking. Why choose the past 100 and the past 50 years? If you go back to the start of the instrumental era of global temperature measurements, about 1880 (the accuracy of the data is not as good as later years but there is no reason to dismiss it as AR5 does) then of the 0.8 – 0.9 deg C warming seen since then 0.5 deg C of it, i.e. most, occurred prior to 1940 when anthropogenic effects were minimal (according to the IPCC AR4).
AR5 admits that of the warmest years on record the “top ten or so years are statistically indistinguishable from one another.” This is sloppy. The “or so” is significant and should be replaced with a more accurate statement. Despite the admitted statistical indistinguishability of the past ten years (at least) AR5 then goes on to say that 2005 and 2010 “effectively” tied for the warmest years! There is no mention of the contribution to global temperature made by the El Nino in those years!
It is in its treatment of the recent global temperature standstill that AR5 is at its most unevenhanded. It says that much attention has been focused on the “apparent flattening in Hadcrut3 trends,” and it says that “similar length phases of no warming exist in all observational records and in climate model simulations.”
No it hasn’t. The IPCC says that the time when anthropogenic influence dominated began between 1960-80. AR5 takes 1979 – 2011 as a period for analysis when temperatures started rising after a 40-year standstill. The fact that is obvious from the data is that the past 16 years of no global temperature increase is unusual and is not an “apparent flattening.” It is a total flattening for 16 years (as AR5 confusingly admits later on), just over half of the duration of the recent warming spell. Flat periods have existed before but they were in the era when mankind’s influence was not significant. The 16-year flatness since mankind has been the prime climatic influence has been the cause of much discussion in the peer-reviewed literature, something that this AR5 does not reflect.
AR5 goes on to say that with the introduction of Hadcrut4 (and its inclusion of high latitude northern hemisphere data) there is now a warming trend. No it isn’t. Look at the Hadcrut4 data and, as the GWPF has demonstrated, it is warmer than Hadcrut3, but it is also flatter for the past 15 years. AR5 also adds that “all products show a warming trend since 1998.” That this is not the case seems to be something that AR5 concedes a little later in the report when it that none of the warming trends they quote are statistically significant!
Referenced And Dismissed
Consider AR5’s summary: “It is virtually certain that global near surface temperatures have increased. Globally averaged near-surface combined land and ocean temperatures, according to several independent analyses, are consistent in exhibiting warming since 1901, much of which has occurred since 1979.”
Nobody doubts that the world has warmed since 1901. But why choose 1901, and what warming is natural and what is anthropogenic? As we have seen the last comment is wrong.
AR5 says: “Super-imposed upon the long-term changes are short-term climatic variations, so warming is not monotonic and trend estimates at decadal or shorter timescales tend to be dominated by short-term variations.”
So since 1979 we have has about 16 years of warming and 16 years of temperature standstill. Which is the short-term natural variation? The warming or the standstill?
AR5 says: “A rise in global average surface temperatures is the best-known indicator of climate change. Although each year and even decade is not always warmer than the last, global surface temperatures have warmed substantially since 1900.” Nobody, of whatever “skeptical” persuasion would disagree with that.
I can’t help but conclude that the pages of the GWPF contain a better analysis than is present in AR5, which is a mess written from a point of view that wants to reference the recent standstill in global temperatures but not impartially consider its implications.
The unacknowledged (in AR5) problem of the global temperature standstill of the past 16 years is well shown in its fig 1.4, which is seen at the head of this article. Click on the image to enlarge. It shows the actual global temperature vs projections made by previous IPCC reports. It is obvious that none of the IPCC projections were any good. The inclusion of the 2012 data, which I hope will be in the 2013 report, will make the comparison between real and predicted effects appear ever starker.
In summary, the global temperature of the past 16 years is a real effect that in any realistic and thorough analysis of the scientific literature is seen to be a significant problem for climate science, indeed it may currently be the biggest problem in climate science. To have it swept under the carpet with a selective use of data and reference material supported by cherry-picked data and timescales is not going to advance its understanding, and is also a disservice to science.
Feedback: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.org
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Note also that in Fig. 1.4 the trendline has not been drawn. Although there are error bars, it is legitimate to put it in: the scenarios cover ranges, but the world has had a unique temperature history (even if it is difficult to determine).
The last 22 years of actual temperature changes are left up to the reader to visualize. If the trend were been put in, the disconnect between observation and IPCC scenarios would be more obvious.
The IPCC is in a definite pickle. The report is internally inconsistent, and the authors know it. Each one will be faced with a professional decision if his/her contribution does not support the overall conclusion, or has been downgraded in its significance. It will be tricky.
It is not surprising that two authors have abandoned the process now that the AR5 technical inclusions and comments have ended. From now on there will be just spin happening.
Yet again Dr Whitehouse has hit the nail on the head. A reasonable, articulate and informed analysis that nobody could take issue with. He shows the bias and inadequacy of those who compiled that section of the IPCC report.
Not many people will know that Dr Whitehouse was the BBC’s Science Correspondent and senior to Roger Harrabin. What a difference it would have made to the BBC’s reporting if they had had Dr Whitehouse’s knowledge and clear thinking. But no, they first sidelined him and then sacked him.
Lance Wallace says:
December 18, 2012 at 10:44 am
Lance brings up the relevance of certain Scenarios still being in the mix. True: should not some of the high-end scenarios be dropped, as observations have failed to match the Scenario?
As for CO2 rise: I see a change of goalpost here. With China and India coming on strong in the present or near-future, the warmists could argue that NOW the CO2 increases are going to be greater than expected, so all we have to do is take the high scenarios and re-fix their beginning point to …. 2015.
Thanks Dr. Whitehouse.
One picture is worth a thousand weasal words of warmist warbling.
Seeing as how the raison d’etre of the IPCC is “global warming”, it is incredible how weak that chapter is.
I love this figure.
Ignore for the moment all the extra curves and “error shading”. The temperature trend in the data is essentially flat over the entire period of the IPCC process starting in 1990. There has been no statistically significant warming – period !
The extra curves FAR (first assessment report), SAR (second assessment report) etc. are all normalized to the data at the date they were made. But even then they still fail. Even the errors for AR4 are continued backwards into the past. The error shading projections in time are a masterpiece in covering their backsides. The graph is pure marketing for example:
– Errors on data are not even standard deviations – they are 3 sigma (95% confidence)
– Errors on models are propagated to ever greater values forwards in time. This essentially is saying that the models have no predictive power.
– Only by exaggerating modeling errors with “ensembles of models” can they even plot the actual data on the same graph as the previous predictions.
It is a dog’s dinner !
“There is no mention of the contribution to global temperature made by the El Nino in those years!”
I get confused around this issue. I got into a discussion with revkin recently about 1998 being unsurpassed thus far, hence no global warming since, and he said this was unfair given that was a super el nino. Wait a minute I thought, I don’t recall any warmists saying “don’t take the warming all that seriously from that year as it doesn’t really count given the S.E.N. But If that’s my argument, how can I find fault with them for not mentioning the el nino in connection with the two cited years in the article. In other words, should we not treat warmth as warmth….and cold as cold….given that we can always find proximate causes, no?
Can anyone help me wrap my simple mind around this issue?
I have to ask this again.
Why does Figure 1.4 have the TAR and AR4 wedges originating back in 1990?
Why don’t the wedges expand from their publication dates as they do in Figure 1.7 for CH4? Where is the official reason for constructing the wedges this way?
Monckton weighs in.
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/12/unleashed-monckton-releases-his-ar5-reviewer-comments/
Willie Soon and. Nils-Axel Morner weigh in on sea level rise.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/dec/17/sea-level-rise-data-based-on-shoddy-science/?page=all
I was wrong. Even in Figure 1.7, the uncertainty in the CH4 AR4 wedge at the time of AR4 publication has significant width. Maybe the reason is obvious, but I’m blind to it.
Do Temperatures have a mean? E.M Smith at musing from the Chiefio December 10th.
Statistics I have wilfully ignored for years, so help here would be appreciated.
Too much of the so-called data here is abused, beaten beyond recognition in some cases, now the IPCC unprecedented warming of the late 1900s is a statistically homogenized beast,with an assumed normal or mean,what if there is no statistically useful mean?
I’m always mindful of how these posts about WG1 AR5 might be interpreted or quoted either in the near future by cherry-pickers or in the distant future by historians.
For that reason I think that ‘WG1’ (or WG2-see below) or at least the word, ‘draft’ should always accompany ‘AR5’, especially in the title.
As you can see, even I am already slightly confused between the citing of WG1 and WG2. This is because in his recent post, Alec Rawls referred to WG1 at first (about which he had complained in Feb 2012 in a post on WUWT) but then clearly stated that now that WG2 had come out and had an additional sentence admitting greater solar forcing, he was releasing that draft (ie. WG2). That seems clear enough, but a later post on WUWT refers to the leaking of WG1.
It might seem pedantic now but I can see unnecessary confusion down the road, long after the definitive AR5 document comes out. One eg. is that in 2014, SkS could correctly quote sentences from this post with ‘AR5’ in them and accuse WUWT of misquoting AR5. It could get quite messy and judging by the selective quoting of Rawls by Dana (eg. requoting Rawl’s quote of the summary (saying insignificant solar forcing) without any reference to why Rawls put it in (it was based on TSI and therefore chapter 7 and 8 authors had their wires crossed). SkS was happy for the reader to think Rawls was conceding the very thing he was questioning as true.
That’s what you’re up against and guarding against it, unfortunately, means avoiding what are otherwise innocent omissions. I would recommend interpolating WG1 (or 2- I think it’s 2) into the text where appropriate.
Scute
Question:
What material incentive does the IPCC offer authors who collaborate in this report?
Does the job offer any renumeration? Is there any sort of travel and gala confab that could be attractive for some humble scientist? Or is it only a matter of prestige for the authors?
Can anyone enlighten us on this?
john robertson:
At December 18, 2012 at 11:35 am you ask
Your questions are all individually addressed in Appendix B of the item at
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/memo/climatedata/uc0102.htm
I think you will want to read it.
Indeed, your post suggests you may want to read the entire item at the link.
Richard
Stephen Rasey says:
December 18, 2012 at 11:33 am
“I was wrong. Even in Figure 1.7, the uncertainty in the CH4 AR4 wedge at the time of AR4 publication has significant width. Maybe the reason is obvious, but I’m blind to it.”
If they reset their scenarios with every report, even the dumbest idiot notices that they don’t want to be held accountable for their past failed projections.
Poker Guy
When the El Nino spike of 1998 occurred, the global warmers loved it because it served their propagandizing very well. Fourteen years and no warming later it is an inconvenient fact because it emphasizes the lack of warming since then.
The trend line calculated for data from 1997 to date, inclusive of the ‘98 El Nino spike, is flat. There has been no warming for sixteen years. Tell them that, and watch the fun, as before your very eyes they twist themselves into pretzels in their attempt to rescue their precious AGW theory. They pray to the climate gods to send warmth, and if sacrificing virgins was still in vogue, virgins would be even scarcer than they are now.
I love the above graph when put alongside this comment from the new SPM:
“There is very high confidence that coupled climate models provide realistic responses to external
forcing. This is evident from simulations of the surface temperature on continental and larger scales, and the global-scale surface temperature increase over the historical period, especially the last fifty years. {9.4.1, Box 9.1, Figure 9.2, Figure 9.8, 10.2, 11.3, 12.2}”
@richard Courtney Thank you, exactly what I need, have skimmed thro it will read properly tonight, on first read its worse than I could imagine, this widespread vagueness to the IPCC evidence,is it intentional?
I know incompetence should be suspected before malice but this fog of assertions, with little that can be clearly identified and examined on its merits, keeps me thinking malice.
The first CRU emails left me appalled with this bunch.
And confirmed that I lack imagination with respect to the folly of men.
The above analysis is based on collected temperature data which has been “adjusted”, almost always upward, to the extent that ~50% of the reported temperature anomaly is in the adjustments, rather than in the data.
Sure, but I tend to rely on UAH LTT, which is not adjusted, or really adjustable, in this way. And the people caring for both HADCRUT and GISS are finally realizing that they are up against a serious wall. They cannot adjust the data to produce any more warming than they have without the increasing discrepancy with the satellite data going from being an embarrassment to a bald proof to any statistically competent eye that their thumbs have been on the collective scales. Right now they are barely believable, as long as they don’t try to pump surface temperatures any more while UAH LTT and so on remain flat. But they have to remain flat too at this point — any systematic adjustment loses the game entirely.
Not to say that they do have thumbs on the scales, but IMO a simple scatterplot analysis of the year versus the correction relative to the raw data is already enough to very, very strongly suggest that there is one, advertent or inadvertent. Anthony’s own pending paper and work lends credence to that hypothesis without, of course, attributing the discrepancy to malice or (being generous) “laziness” regarding contributing site UHI effects and site validity in the modern era.
But malicious or honest, the gap is already too big to be clearly believable if it is made any larger across the century scale data, and they are similarly constrained by the 33 year satellite data. There is nowhere to run, nowhere to hide, no way to adjust, from this point out either the thermometric record stays commensurate with the satellite record or the former is just plain wrong.
Which is, of course, their real problem with the 15, I mean 16, I mean 17, I mean 25 year thing. With the only significant warming event in the 33 year record being associated with a single, strong ENSO peak (although there are also correspondences with relative peaks in the otherwise flat fluctuating trends on both sides of that) the question has to remain — do we have to wait for another strong ENSO before observing another step-like increase in mean temperature? Or to put it even more unfavorably for the CAGW argument, what if we have a strong La Nina event after the current ENSO fizzle and temperatures actually drop, as they often do during La Nina?
It is apparently considered bad form to assert a correlation between solar state and anything, but ENSO has the appearance of a period-halved chaotic response to the solar cycle, with a mean lifetime of 5 years. Its relative strength might — or might not — be correlated with the relative strength of the solar cycle, something that could be true even if Lief is correct and solar cycle variation is truly uninteresting over any relevant timescale (even Lief acknowledges that the current solar cycle is going to be significantly weaker than the last 9 cycles, whether or not that makes the last 9 unusually strong).
All anyone — warmist or denier alike (kidding, kidding:-) has to do is wait. Another few decades (especially ones with a very weak near Maunder minimum cycle if 25 is indeed that) will almost certainly answer many questions, and with satellites (and NASA raw data publication policies) and ARGOS it isn’t going to be easy to thumb scales, if indeed that has been going on.
rgb
“It is virtually certain that global near surface temperatures have increased. ”
Aah, to parse the meaning of the warmists. They consider it a virtue to believe that the world is warming.
Just a standard point, the temperature rise from 1979 coincided with the use of satellite and reduction of land based measurements. Plus a shedload of massive adjustments which had to be applied worldwide to make those lines slope upwards at all. Take those factors as a whole and they can more than explain the rise alone.
Clive Best: ‘There has been no statistically significant warming’. I would say that the conclusion is that there is no warming. Statistical significance is a meta statement. With this conclusion we only can make a Type II error: one of the alternative models is true and we made a false statement. The probability of this error is usually denoted beta. What is the value of beta here?
This excellent analysis shows that the draft report fudges the lack of air temperature warming. This, however, is a lead into Chapter 3 on the warming of the oceans. The SPM proclaims that Trenberth’s missing heat has been found, much of it in the Southern Ocean, at a depth >3000m.
Ch3 Page 10 Lines 23-28
The switch in emphasis from near surface air temperatures to the oceans seems to be important to maintaining the line of global warming. Yet this relies on sparse sampling.
The relevant papers are Levitus et al. 2012 (which Willis looked at here and here) along with Kouketsu et al. 2011 (full paper)
rgbatduke:
In your post at December 18, 2012 at 1:45 pm you say
Yes.
I made the same point concerning mean global temperature (MGT) on WUWT in 2010 when reporting my Parliamentary Submission that I link to at December 18, 2012 at 12:24 pm above. It says
An egregious troll responded on WUWT with a vitriolic personal attack on me for suggesting such adjustments are made. And he suggested that I could be convicted of perjury for submitting such a suggestion to a Parliamentary Inquiry.
The troll still frequently posts knit-picking rubbish on WUWT. I have not been prosecuted but I wait to see the troll’s response to your making the same suggestion.
Richard
Can anybody remember those past days of “global warming” glory when “the science was settled” beyond dispute and no doubts or questions from the Skeptics or Deniers would be entertained?