By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
In the closing minutes of the final plenary of the U.N.’s Doha climate summit, when no one else had anything further to add, I spent a few seconds telling the delegates something that the bad scientists and the malicious media have done their level best to conceal. There has been no global warming for 16 years.
In the real world, this surely welcome news would have been greeted with cheers of relief and delight. Since the beginning of 1997, despite the wailing and gnashing of dentures among the classe politique, despite the regulations, the taxations, the carbon trades, the windmills, the interminable, earnestly flatulent U.N. conferences, the CO2 concentration that they had declared to be Public Enemy No. 1 has not stabilized. It has grown by one-twelfth.
Yet this startling growth has not produced so much as a twentieth of a Celsius degree of global warming. Any warming below the measurement uncertainty of 0.05 Cº in the global-temperature datasets is statistically indistinguishable from zero.
The much-vaunted “consensus” of the much-touted “ensembles” of the much-heralded “models” has been proven wrong. The much-feted “modelers” had written in 2008 that their much-cited “simulations” ruled out, to 95% confidence, intervals of 15 years or more without global warming. To them, 16 years without warming were as near impossible as makes no difference.
Yet those impossible years happened. However, you would never have known that surely not uninteresting piece of good news from reading the newspapers or watching ABC, BBC, CBC, NBC, et hoc genus omne. The media are not in the business of giving the facts or telling the truth any more.
Precisely because journalists no longer bother to provide the inconvenient truth to their audiences, and because they are no longer willing even to provide the people with the straightforward facts without which democracy itself cannot function, the depressingly ill-informed and scientifically-illiterate delegates in Doha can be forgiven for not having known that global warming stopped a long while back.
That is why they should have been excited and delighted when they heard the news – nearly all of them for the very first time.
But this was the alternative reality that is the corrupt, self-serving U.N. Howls, hoots and hollers of dismay and fury greeted my short, polite announcement. This absurdly inappropriate reaction raises a fascinating question.
How are we to dig a rat-hole wide enough to allow the useful idiots and true-believers to escape as each passing year makes it more and more obvious that their fatuous credo has all the plausibility of the now somewhat discredited notion that the world was to be snuffed out at this year’s winter solstice?
Every student of the arts of diplomacy in the civil-service and staff colleges of the U.K. hears much about the rat-hole problem. How does one let the other side off some hook on which they have imprudently impaled themselves, while minimizing their loss of face?
A cornered rat will fight savagely, even against overwhelming odds, because it has no alternative. Give the rat a way out and it will instinctively take it.
The first step in digging a diplomatic rat-hole is to show that one understands how one’s opponents came to make their mistake. One might make a point of agreeing with their premise – in the present instance, the long-proven fact that adding a greenhouse gas to an atmosphere such as ours can be expected, ceteris paribus, to cause some warming.
Then one tries to find justifications for their standpoint. There are five good reasons why the global warming that they – and we – might have expected has not occurred for 16 years: natural variability in general; the appreciable decline in solar activity since the Grand Maximum that peaked in 1960; the current 30-year cooling phase of the ocean oscillations, which began late in 2001 with the transition from the warming phase that had begun in 1976; the recent double-dip la Niña; and the frequency with which supra-decadal periods without warming have occurred in the instrumental record since 1850.
The next trick is to help them, sympathetically, to focus the blame for their error on as few of their number as possible. Here, the target is obvious. The models are to blame for the mess the true-believers are in.
We must help them to understand why the models got it so very wrong. This will not be easy, because nearly all of our opponents have no science or math at all.
We can start our deconstruction of the models by pointing out that – given the five good reasons why global warming might not occur for 15 years or more at a time – the modelers’ ruling out periods of 15 years or more without warming shows they have given insufficient weight to the influence of natural variability. We can poke gentle fun at their description of CO2 as “ the tuning-knob of the climate”, and help them to put things into perspective by reminding them that Man has so far altered only 1/10,000 of the atmosphere, and may alter 1/3000 of it by 2100.
We cannot altogether avoid the math. But we can put it all in plain English, and we can use logic, which is more accessible to the layman than climatological physics. Here goes.
The fundamental equation of climate sensitivity says temperature change is the product of a forcing and a climate-sensitivity parameter.
The modellers’ definition of forcing is illogical; their assumptions about the value of the climate-sensitivity parameter are not Popper-falsifiable; and their claims of reliability for their long-term predictions are empirically disproven and theoretically insupportable. Let us explain.
The IPCC defines a forcing as the net down-minus-up flux of radiation at the tropopause, holding surface temperature fixed. Yet forcings change that temperature. A proposition and its converse cannot simultaneously be true. That is the fundamental postulate of logic, and the models’ definition of forcing manifestly offends against it.
No surprise, then, that since 1995 the IPCC has had to cut its estimate of the CO2 forcing by 15%. The “consensus” disagrees with itself. Note in passing that the CO2 forcing function is logarithmic: each further molecule causes less warming than those before it. Diminishing returns apply.
We can remind our opponents that direct warming is little more than 1 Cº per doubling of CO2 concentration, well within natural variability. It is not a crisis. We can explain that the modelers have imaginatively introduced amplifying or “positive” temperature feedbacks, which, they hope, will triple the direct warming from CO2.
Yet this dubious hypothesis, not being Popper-falsifiable, is not logic and, therefore, not science. If a hypothesis cannot be checked by any empirical or theoretical method, it is not – stricto sensu – a hypothesis at all. It is of no interest to science.
Not one of the imagined feedbacks is empirically measurable or theoretically determinable to a sufficient precision by any method. As an expert reviewer for the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, I have described its strongly net-positive feedback interval as guesswork – and that, in logic and therefore in science, is exactly what it is.
There is a powerful theoretical reason for suspecting that the modellers’ guess that feedbacks triple direct warming is erroneous. The climatic closed-loop feedback gain implicit in the IPCC’s climate-sensitivity estimate of 3.3[2.0, 4.5] Cº per CO2 doubling falls on the interval 0.62[0.42, 0.74], though you will find no mention of the crucial concept of loop gain either in the IPCC’s documents or – as far as I can discover – in any of the few papers that discuss the mathematics of temperature feedbacks in the climate object.
Process engineers building electronic circuits, who invented feedback mathematics, tell us any loop gain much above zero is too near the singularity – at a loop gain of 1 – in the feedback-amplification equation. At a gain as high as is implicit in the models’ climate-sensitivity estimates, the geological record would show violent oscillations between extremes of warming and cooling.
Yet for 64 million years the Earth’s surface temperature has fluctuated by only 3%, or 8 Cº, either side of the long-run mean. These fluctuations can give us an ice-planet at one moment and a hothouse Earth the next, but they are altogether too small to be consistent with a feedback loop gain anywhere near as close to the singularity as official estimates imply, for homeostatic conditions prevail.
The atmosphere’s lower bound, the ocean, is a vast heat-sink 1100 times denser than the air. Since 3000 bathythermographs were deployed in 2006 no significant ocean warming has been found.
The upper bound of the atmosphere is outer space, to which any excess heat radiates harmlessly away.
Homeostasis, then, is what we should expect, and it is what we get. Accordingly, the climatic loop gain – far from being as impossibly high as the IPCC’s central estimate of 0.62 – cannot much exceed zero, so the warming at CO2 doubling will scarcely exceed 1 Cº.
It is also worth explaining to our opponents the fundamental reason why models cannot do what the modelers claim for them. The overriding difficulty in attempting to model the climate is that it behaves as a chaotic object. We can never know the values of its millions of defining parameters at any chosen moment to a sufficient precision to permit reliable projection of the bifurcations, or Sandy-like departures from an apparently steady state, that are inherent in all objects that behave chaotically. Therefore, reliable, very-long-term prediction of future climate states is known a priori to be unavailable by any method.
The modelers have tried to overcome this constraint by saying that the models are all we have, so we must make the best of them. But it is self-evidently illogical to use models when reliable, very-long-term weather forecasting is not available by any method.
This fundamental limitation on the reliability of long-term predictions by the models – known as the Lorenz constraint, after the father of computerized or “numerical” weather forecasting, whose 1963 paper Deterministic Non-Periodic Flow founded chaos theory by examining the behavior of a five-variable mini-model of the climate constructed as a heuristic – tells us something more, and very important, about the climate.
Bifurcations (or, in our opponents’ intellectual baby-talk, “tipping-points”) in the evolution of the climate object over time are not a whit more likely to occur in a rapidly-warming climate than in a climate which – like our own – is not warming at all.
Sandy and Bopha, and the hot summer in the U.S., could not have been caused by global warming, for the blindingly obvious reason that for 16 years there has not been any.
However, there are many variables in the climate object other than CO2 concentration and surface temperature. Even the tiniest perturbation in any one of these millions of parameters is enough, in an object that behaves chaotically, to induce a bifurcation.
Nothing in the mathematics of chaos leads one to conclude that “tipping-points” are any more likely to occur in response to a large change in the value of one of the parameters (such as surface temperature) that describe an object than in response to an infinitesimal change.
The clincher, in most diplomatic discussions, is money. Once we have led our opponents to understand that there is simply no reason to place any credence whatsoever in the exaggerations that are now painfully self-evident in the models, we can turn their attention to climate economics.
Pretend, ad argumentum, that the IPCC’s central estimate of 2.8 Cº warming by 2100 is true, and that Stern was right to say that the GDP cost of failing to prevent 3 Cº warming this century will be around 1.5% of GDP. Then, at the minimum 5% market inter-temporal discount rate, the cost of trying to abate this decade’s predicted warming of 0.15 Cº by topical, typical CO2-mitigation measures as cost-ineffective as, say, Australia’s carbon tax would be 48 times greater than the cost of later adaptation. At a zero discount rate, the cost of action will exceed the cost arising from inaction 36 times over.
How so? Australia emits just 1.2% of Man’s CO2, of which Ms. Gillard aims to cut 5% this decade. So Australia’s scheme, even if it worked, would cutting just 0.06% of global emissions by 2020. In turn, that would cut CO2 concentration from a predicted 410 μatm to 409.988 μatm. It is this infinitesimal change in CO2 concentration, characteristic of all measures intended – however piously – to mitigate future warming that is the chief reason why there is no economic case for spending any money at all on mitigation today.
The tiny drop in CO2 concentration would cut predicted temperature by 0.00006 Cº. This pathetic result would be achieved at a cost of $130 billion, which works out at $2 quadrillion/Cº. Abating the 0.15 Cº warming predicted for this decade would thus cost $317 trillion, or $45,000/head worldwide, or 59% of global GDP.
Mitigation measures inexpensive enough to be affordable will be ineffective: measures expensive enough to be effective will be unaffordable. Since the premium exceeds the cost of the risk, don’t insure. That is a precautionary principle worthy of the name.
When the child born in Bethlehem ~2012 years ago grew up, He told His audience the parable of the prodigal son, who had squandered his inheritance but was nevertheless welcomed by his father with a fatted calf when he returned and said he was sorry.
However vicious and cruel the true-believers in the global-warming fantasy have been to those few of us who have dared publicly to question their credo that has now been so thoroughly discredited by events, we should make sure that the rat-hole we dig for their escape from their lavish folly is as commodious as possible.
If all else fails, we can pray for them as He prayed looking down from the Cross on the world He had created.
Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.
miker613 says:
December 25, 2012 at 5:24 am
“The much-feted “modelers” had written in 2008 that their much-cited “simulations” ruled out, to 95% confidence, intervals of 15 years or more without global warming. To them, 16 years without warming were as near impossible as makes no difference.” Is there a source for this? …
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
NOAA
The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/climate-assessment-2008-lo-rez.pdf
——————————–
Santer, Mears, Doutriaux, Caldwell, Gleckler, Wigley, S. Solomon, Gillett, Ivanova, Karl, Lanzante, Meehl, Stott, Taylor, Thorne, Wehner,. Wentz
“A single decade of observational TLT data is therefore inadequate for identifying a slowly evolving anthropogenic warming signal. Our results show that temperature records of at least 17 years in length are required for identifying human effects on global-mean tropospheric temperature. ”
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2011/2011JD016263.shtml
We will be at the seventeen year mark in January.
Alexandriu Doru says:
December 26, 2012 at 8:22 am
The planet is warming.
Even on GISS, it stopped over a decade ago. There has been no warming on GISS since May 2001 or 11 years, 7 months (goes to November) See:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:2001.33/plot/gistemp/from:2001.33/trend
Well, no – we already have over 30 years of an unequivocal AGW trend, and no evidence of any reduction in that trend to date. Nor do we have any reason to expect such a reduction, barring a huge and long-lasting increase in explosive volcanism.
Christopher, I hope that you are cured of the virus you recently suffered.
But, now it’s no longer the season of false goodwill, let’s look at reality.
You rubbished rgbatduke for no good reason. You owe him an apology. In front of us all.
E.M.Smith says:
December 26, 2012 at 8:57 am
A bunch of very useful and interesting things, as long as one recognizes:
a) We cannot accurately hindcast the (apparent, as best we can tell from uncertain proxies) the pattern or values of global temperatures over geological time. Really, we can’t. We haven’t got a clue as to what really causes the transitions from completely stable warm temperatures to completely stable cold temperatures across regions of apparent bistability. The Milankovitch theory only goes so far, and only works so well, over only the Pliestocene, and only then if one accepts that we are really clueless about why the major variation occurs that is modulated by the Mil. dips into and out of glacials and interglacials in the overall ice age. There are completely unexplained dips into glaciation in the middle of warm eras over the last 65 million years or so.
b) We cannot forecast it either. We cannot assign a meaningful value to an “expected” temperature ten years, twenty years, fifty years, or a hundred years into the future, regardless of the claims of the modelers. Those models cannot explain the variability observed over the last 2000 years, let alone the variability observed over truly geological time. They assume “all things being equal” (and hence ignorable) except these (two, three, four) local variables in their attempt to extrapolate anomalies, but ignore the global variables completely and ignore the non-Markovian dynamics completely (simply because they cannot possibly integrate them). The nonlinear, chaotic, non-Markovian dynamics alone almost certainly produce variability several times larger than the total observed warming over the last century, and that is without accounting for the unknown functional contributions from e.g. Milankovitch-type variations.
This means that you are in no better shape than the climate modelers. They make excessively confident claims that the world will not only warm, but warm at thus and such a rate starting “now”. You appear to be making a claim that the world will not only cool, but will cool at thus and such a rate starting “now”.
How about the claim that we haven’t any friggin’ idea whether the Earth is about to warm, cool, remain about the same for years, decades, or centuries? I agree that we do have some reason to think that it will cool back into glaciation at some point in the future — unless the catastrophists are right and the CO_2 in the atmosphere will hang out for 1000 years or more and completely prevent a return to glaciation. Wait, that’s right back to “no idea”, isn’t it.
In general I like your arguments. The Earth is a multistable multivariate nonlinear chaotic open dynamical system consisting of multiple coupled subsystems with a dazzling array of characteristic times and internal mechanisms for absorbing, transporting, and ultimately losing energy while maintaining a nearly constant mean temperature. The entire range of temperature variation observed in the geological record is around 3-4% of the mean (10 kelvin or so) — and that is across ice ages and warm ages — where the warm age upward variation possible for the Earth as far as the past record is concerned appears to be capped at around 1% (2-3 plus kelvin). An honest plot of global temperatures in degrees kelvin over the last 2000 years — not the “anomaly”, the actual temperature — would look surprisingly like a straight line — if drawn with a three pixel wide line the variation would be unresolvable compared to the value in a 300 pixel high graph. That includes the Roman Warm, Medieval Warm, Modern Warm, and Little Ice Age variations. The variation over the entire Holocene would be barely resolvable to the eye, at scale (between 1 and 2%) although if you plotted it on back through the Younger Dryas and into the last glacial era it would be more like 3-4%.
But it is always good to admit our degree of ignorance. We cannot say with any certainty that it will continue to warm, or that it will cool. We can only wait, measure, learn and hope that eventually we’ll understand enough to do so.
rgb
… and:
Looks like your wish has been granted:
Recent Warming Reverses Long-Term Arctic Cooling
Darrell S. Kaufman1,*,
David P. Schneider2,
Nicholas P. McKay3,
Caspar M. Ammann2,
Raymond S. Bradley4,
Keith R. Briffa5,
Gifford H. Miller6,
Bette L. Otto-Bliesner2,
Jonathan T. Overpeck3,
Bo M. Vinther7,
Science 4 September 2009:
Vol. 325 no. 5945 pp. 1236-1239
DOI: 10.1126/science.1173983
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/325/5945/1236.short
garymount says:
December 25, 2012 at 5:34 am
When the late summer arctic sea ice returns to normal extent, this major icon of global warming / climate change, will be wiped out. I intend to heavily promote the statements made that the sea ice will be gone by 2015 compared to the actual trend from the low of this year. Sometime in the not to distant future, I will be shouting from the roof top that the skeptics were right all along.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Yes it is looking like the warming cycle in the Arctic has bottomed out.
Length of Arctic melt season
Hudson bay Ice is growing faster than normal: (Data from NOAA)
Northern Hemisphere Snow Cover – October (October will be most sensitive to cooling)
Then there is Alaska:
July 30, 2012: Summer so far at record cold levels – Lowest average high temperatures since May 1 on record
July 14, 2012: Record cold wave breaks 13 low temperature records
December 4, 2012: Fairbanks high temperature today barely rose above the previous record low.
Alaska can not afford to play ducks and drakes with their weather information. Neither can Russia for that matter and they are predicting colder weather ahead too. Astrophysicist Dr Habibullo Abdussamatov is predicting a 100 yrs of cooling. link
He is not the only Russian Scientist to blow a raspberry at the Global Warming hysteria.
Scientists Of The Russian Academy Of Science: “Global Warming Is Coming To An End – Return To Early 1980s Level”
Russian scientist Oleg Pokrovsky of the Main Geophysical Observatory says the world should expect cooling – and not warming
So are the Chinese.
Chinese Scientists Predict Imminent Global Cooling
Chinese 2,485 year tree ring study shows natural cycles control climate, temps may cool til 2068
Lin Zhen-Shan and Sun Xian of the Nanjing Normal University in China argue that the cooling in China is already well underway since 2000.
Given Russia and China are getting plastered with snow and low temperatures, I doubt they are going to listen to James Hansen of Michael Mann.
Listing of major winter weather link
(I figure we really should offset the very one-sided news reporting)
I was honestly surprised and disappointed that Monckton did not contritely apologize to Robert Brown for being “cute”. Brown (perhaps) has his equals on this site, but likely no clear superiors.
As for Brown using a pseudonym, his is rather semi-opaque, particularly among regular WUWT readers, unlike some that are totally invented. Perhaps he prefers to remain slightly under the radar as some skeptical academics (and others) need to, at least until they retire!
When a skeptic of global warming speaks up, especially locally, he/she is apt to be associated, without any intended justification, with a menu of at least a half-dozen “flat-earth” views which he/she may or may not (usually not) additionally embrace. The attacker, recognizing himself being far outclassed on anything actually scientific, resorts to a checklist of supposed political and religious issues (etc.) that the attacker feels he/she does personally understand, or better, issues which have no objective answers.
The Global Warming issue is highly political, and so at times, bringing up the political aspects of GW (and only those political issues) seems appropriate. Religion has no part in science, ever, although one may be excused for mentioning it as a reason for personal good will and/or charitability not otherwise warranted! Many of us, grading final exams at the end of fall term, just before Christmas vacation, gave a few extra “Christmas Points” as a general mood.
But leave out the non-AGW politics, and (most) all the religion. After all, that includes two of the canonical ill-advised subjects. In either case, if you do include them, you are at best “preaching to the choir” as a likely minority subset of readers. Assuming your science is sound, you can thereby only severely dilute that message.
In point of fact, with regard to even peripherally bringing in religion, a few will say and many more will think, in the continuing theme of the mascot of this thread, and in Monckton’s beloved Latin: “Non Gradus Anus Rodentum!” And as for the official titles of English nobility adding anything, Americans got over that a few hundred years ago – many history texts carry this information!
Until such time as we stick strictly only to science, we invite the taunts of “flat-earth” and fail to gain the support of the more general skeptical rationalists who too often consider climate-skeptics as just anti-science. Monckton essay was largely excellent. The title and timing was an unfortunate mistake.
Looking for face-saving escapes for alarmists is a generous gesture, even if calling such escapes ‘rat-holes’ is a little on the nippy side. As an admirer of the compassion and other good things found in the Christian religion, I have added a link to this post as a footnote to the seasonal greetings on my own blog.
I think the ‘blame the models’ escape route might work for some, but not all. There has been irresponsibility and groupthink on a global scale in recent decades on climate.
It was irresponsible of political leaders to defer to such as the IPCC and the Royal Society without, for something as important as this has become, calling for or commissioning more objective and penetrating analyses of climate behaviour and possible trends, as well as of the IPCC itself. Instead we saw such as the Stern Report, the details and origins of which would have fuelled an episode or two of ‘Yes Minister’. One just needs to see how many flaws in the scientific case, and in the IPCC itself, have been exposed thanks to free individuals working on their own initiatives. They deserve great praise, and perhaps one day they will get it when the current madness is over and all the escape routes have been widely deployed. Christopher Monckton is certainly one of them, as is Anthony Watts our host.
It was irresponsible of scientifically qualified campaigners to treat models as if they were evidence when it is clear that modern computing is quite unable to model adequately the climate system (and may never achieve a predictive skill for fundamental reasons) in general, and the role of carbon dioxide in particular. Something like that is admitted in the IPCC reports themselves, if not in the SPMs. Too many important phenomena, including the progress of CO2 from surface release onwards, have sub-grid scale aspects that the models necessarily gloss over. They do not ‘include CO2 in the models’. Instead the peculiar device of ‘external forcing’ is used. The overall impact of CO2 is not an output of the models, but rather is presumed as an input. They do not watch the models to see the impact of CO2 – an intimately internal part of the system. They watch the models to see the impact of an imposed ‘external forcing’.
It was irresponsible of teachers, campaigners, sundry organisations and ‘concerned’ individuals to make websites, write books, hold ‘events’, devise curricula aimed at children with the express purpose of using fear to persuade them to nag their parents into political and domestic ‘actions’. What inhumanity was and is there from zealots who would bring gloom and doom and premature responsibility into childhoods for the sake of their fashionable cause?
My past tense suggests this war of ideas is over, but I fear that is but wishful thinking encouraged perhaps by seasonal good cheer. I suspect not enough people in positions of power and influence have not yet sensed any need for an escape route from their past excesses. But wishful thinking is pleasant, as are Monckton’s sentiments in his post.
mpainter says:
December 25, 2012 at 6:59 am
…This called a drive by spitball, John Brooke, and it seems that you are good for nothing else.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Oh you should see him in action over at Jo Nova’s.
Well, butting in is hardly the best of manners.Who owes whom an apology? Perhaps you should demonstrate. Seems to be getting pretty complicated. It seems best to stick to climate science.
Alexandriu Doru says:
December 26, 2012 at 8:22 am
GISS Land-Ocean Temperature Anomalies (10 years mean ,deg. Celsius)
Doru, I do not find land temperature measurements, where one thermometer is to give information for hundreds of thousands of square kilometres, of any value.
Try to think at the location where you are and the temperature in locations all around in 1200 km distance. Can you by any means use your thermometer in your yard or balcony to give a value or any trend for those? That is the GISS data that you use.
Especially where we have a dynamic history in the respective data where past values are being modified over and over and over again. I find it not realistic to approximate the values within tens of degrees for the whole globe with that method.
Be aware that the ocean data is measured separately and has stable temperatures – see ocean data from satellite. The last decade:
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2012/12/17/mid-december-2012-sea-surface-temperature-anomaly-update/
You can also search for last 3 decades on Bob’s site.
In addition, satellite data does not show the same trend over land, pls check both RSS and UHI.
Please check the web about GISS adjustments and where the data comes from, please check information over UHI or airports – see also the Watts at all 2012 paper from the link up on the page or here referring data quality:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/29/press-release-2/
@Icarus62:
We have “over 30 years” of a very much ‘equivocal’ warming ‘trend’, AND a 16+ year flat line trend.
The prior ‘warming’ is very much equivocal due to the way the temperature data have been cooked, re-fried, fermented, and homogenized. Most egregious are the TOBS adjustment applied to all stations, even those that do not deserve it, the ‘wrong way’ UHI ‘correction’ that warms stations, and the “MMTS” ‘adjustment’ for a ‘cooling bias’ that really locked in a false warming from Stevenson Screen aging. The “cooling bias” that was “corrected” out was in fact the correct result. It was the paint aging on Stevenson Screens (and swap from whitewash to latex) that was in error.
Oh, and homogenizing as done in GIStemp that spreads the false heat to places that show no warming.
You will also note I’ve left the A out of things. Your “30 years” just happen to land right on top of the warming half of the 60 year PDO cycle. You must have a 60 year POV at a minimum to avoid just detecting the completely normal and natural PDO / AMO cycles as ‘trend’ that isn’t a trend. Just like the folks in the ’60s and ’70s were frothing about “New Ice Age Coming” thanks to looking at only 30 years worth. It is one of the most basic deceptions in “Climate Science”: To claim that a 30 year average of weather is climate. It isn’t. It is only a 30 year average of weather; and that is just way too short. (There are longer cycles of weather too. At least a 180 year and what looks like a 1500 to 1800 year cycle. Your climate changes on geologic time scales and due to changes of geologic circumstances. Altitude, latitude, distance from water, land form.)
So you have found a false warming signal from looking at too short a chunk of data from a natural 60 (ish) year cycle that is not caused by people.
Now how does a 60 year sin wave look near a top? It has about a 30 year rise, and then as the cycle rolls over the top, you have a ‘high point’ looking back and not much drop yet. In fact, you would get a peak about 10 years back and have about a 15 year flat period average. Slowly as the descending part of the sin wave picks up, you will get ever longer ‘flat trend periods (and ever longer descending trend periods at the shorter end. ) What have we got now? Golly, looks just like that….
Now, with the N.H. snow extent outside the ‘climatology’ lines already, and with most of winter still ahead, we’re going to continue cooling / down trend for the rest of the year. And the next. And the next. And the next…. (May as well get used to it now. Sleepy sun is past peak of this sunspot cycle and we’re lined up for at least a decade of this…)
BTW, proforma reminder: The way you find the ‘interval of zero slope’ STARTS from NOW. Then you draw a flat line backwards in time. Now calculate the ‘trend’ from points in time ever further back in time. At the point where trend goes flat on the fit; that is your ‘zero trend since’ date. There is NO “cherry picking” that date. It is a consequence of the search, not a choice.
(Were I choosing a date, I’d be choosing any of 1934, 1720, MWP, Roman Optimum or even the Holocene Optimum. All of which were as warm or in many cases warmer than now, so you get zero trend to lower temperature trends. Now THAT would be cherry picking… though also more honest about our actual temperature trends. Slowly headed down over 8000 years.)
@neil:
Please don’t speak for me. I have no need to see any apology. You may want one, but that’s just you. (if the worst thing that happens to someone in comments is that their name gets ‘played with’, they are leading a sheltered life and ought to celebrate it …. IMHO)
On the whole ‘angels and pins’ thing of the DOB of Christ: I won’t go into it, but there’s pretty good evidence that we’re off by no more than 7 years and no less than 4. There are many lines of evidence, and not just ‘gospels’. The Roman histories are what tell us the present calendar is off a few years.
Not that it really matters.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar
The Julian Calendar was in use from about 45 BC so not a lot of date conversion needed to cover the history from then or the records until you reach the 1500’s calendar shift to the current one.
That some guy named Christ existed, and was born within a few years of the present calendar year 1, is not in doubt. That he was anything special is an opinion (though one often strongly held) that is not subject to resolution by argument. So mostly I just don’t see the point behind complaining about it one way or the other…
So can we get back to climate and AGW issues….
ups, pls check both RSS and UAH (not UHI)…
@RGBatDuke:
I think you have read into my words something I did not say. I did not say “we start cooling now” into an ice age glacial. I said we COULD start cooling now into an ice age glacial. That the radiative status due to orbital mechanics allows it now, and that nothing holds us in the warm state. (But until something finishes pushing us out of the warm state, we’re not going to get much colder either, nor can we get much warmer either.)
I suspect that the ‘sleepy sun’ has a shot at tipping us to cold. But it might not make it that far. We could easily have a Dalton like event, maybe even a ‘year without a summer’, and then come right back to ‘near now’ conditions.
The major assertion I make about “now” and change, is just that we can’t get significantly warmer. 2 C is all we’ve got (based on prior interglacials and the Holocene Optimum).
There is a minor subtext assertion that the longer term trend is colder (and it is). We’ve rounded over the high point of the Holocene Optimum. We’re cooling “now”. But the rate of cooling is so shallow that the 1500 – 1800 year weather cycles move us up and down more than the slope of the Holocene rollover. So the ‘trend line’ from 8 kya to 110,000 AD is down. Period. Full stop. But, on that trend line, back near ‘now’, is a cycle that goes wider on each side of that trend for the last / next 3000 years than the slope of that trend line. Significantly.
In fact, as it takes 100,000 years for the full on ice cap to form, I’ve often pointed out that we could be already in the start phase of the Ice Age Glacial and just not notice. The ice advances about 800 horizontal FEET per year; yet the 1500 year weather cycle moves the ice edge back and forth by tens of miles (perhaps even hundreds of miles, given historic ice at Constantinople). So unless we have a 3000 year ice record of high precision, we’d never notice that 800 foot ‘advance’… (Do we really notice that the sea level was higher a few thousand years ago, and that the “ice has advanced” since then? It clearly has… )
So to say that we’re on the warm side, and it’s a lot more stable to the bottom, and we ARE going to that bottom, as soon as the first big cold pushes us past the hysteresis barrier, well, it just is NOT saying “And that is happening now!”… It could be, but we won’t know for 100 years…. or not…
We do know from prior interglacials that we don’t get more than 2 C warmer then things ‘spike down’ hard. (On a 100,000 year time scale it is a ‘spike down’. On a human life time scale it is likely not measurable…)
BTW, the key thing that the referenced paper adds, IMHO, is an explanation of just those ‘we can not know why’ things you mention. Millankovich no longer has to carry the whole burden. Now he just “sets the table” for what is able to happen; then ocean changes / oscillations “serve the meal” when the timing is right.
IMHO there are at least 4 more things needed to cover all the details, but they mostly will be ‘trigger events’ to the ocean changes.
1) Lunar tidal cycle of 1500 – 1800 years.
http://www.pnas.org/content/97/8/3814.full
2) Solar cycling ( Grand Minimum and potential longer cycles; up to 5000 years).
3) Volcanic cycling (perhaps coordinated with #1 and #2 via tidal forces.
4) Rock falls from space (also with potential ‘coordination’ via orbital resonance effects.)
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2011/11/03/lunar-resonance-and-taurid-storms/
There’s about another half dozen things that IMHO are contributory, but at much lower levels of effect or are consequences of one of the above. (Like cosmic rays or magnetic changes).
So yes, we can’t predict all those things so we can never know what tomorrow will bring. Could be an extinction level event rock fall and a “Nuclear Winter”, or could be a sudden solar brightening to a new level and a “Tropical Antarctica”. But we can say that the trends in “the other stuff” strongly favor cooling and that in the next 20,000 years we’re pretty much guaranteed to be in the next Glacial. Heck, even that it is more likely than not that we are clearly in the start of the next glacial inside 2000 years. And it is ‘reasonable’ to speculate that the next “big cold excursion” is not recoverable (with an implied ‘without a large hot excursion’, even though we don’t have any driver for a hot excursion…)
In short: I’d bet hard money we drop into a clear ‘start of the glacial’ inside 700 years. Orbital dynamics make it possible and the historic rate of large rock falls from space and volcanoes make it very unlikely we will have no trigger events for cold. Unfortunately, there’s no one who can be trusted to hold the bet purse for that long 😉
@icarus62:
The problem with that is the time period. Too short. The long cycle that we know of is 5000 years. Inside that, the next one is 1800 (or sometimes looks like 1500) years. A 2000 year trend can be wrong due to that 5000 year cycle and it can give a ‘false flat’ for an 1800 year cycle.
There were forests at the arctic ocean edge 8000 ya. There are none now. We’re still in a “cooling trend” on the longer time scale baseline. And precession and obliquity and all continue to move against us…
So we’re going into the next glacial. CO2 can’t stop it (we’ve had glacials in the past with much higher CO2 levels… a few thousand ppm…) The only questions, really, are date of onset and rapidity of decent. My ‘best guess’ is about 300 years. My fear is ’30 years’. My hope is ‘3000 years’. All are possible. (though beyond 300 years is a very remote possibility.)
FWIW, look at that lunar / tidal paper. It also finds a 23,000 year cycle. In the last couple of thousand years, we’ve climbed to the peak on that one. So right now we’ve got BOTH the 5000 and 23,000 year cycles peaking. Even with all that, we are colder than 8 kya. In the next 300 years we fall off both those high points of cycles. While the insolation level is too low to keep us in an interglacial.
So the best ‘fit’ to the known data is that we’ve got a non-CO2 cyclicallity that gave us our present warmth out of the L.I.A., and it’s ending now. A bit of a dip over the next 30 years (hopefully not enough for a new LIA) then a larger dip over 300 years (that is likely to trigger a LIA, but hopefully not a full on I.A. Glacial) then the inevitable as the orbital mechanics just move too far for natural cycles on earth to counter it.
Icarus62 says:
December 26, 2012 at 9:20 am
Gail Combs says:
We will be at the seventeen year mark in January.
Well, no – we already have over 30 years of an unequivocal AGW trend, and no evidence of any reduction in that trend to date. Nor do we have any reason to expect such a reduction, barring a huge and long-lasting increase in explosive volcanism.
So tell us in your own words; what have temperatures done for the last 16 years?
I’ll even include a graph to help you:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/10/13/report-global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago/
Bonus points question: What does that tell you about your much-vaunted GCMs?
Take your time. We know how math and science-challenged you people can be.
cosmic says: @ur momisugly December 25, 2012 at 8:05 am
….An interesting way of looking at things Christopher, but unfortunately, I don’t believe the nonsense will end without a lot of people being hurt as the consequences of the policies which have been enacted are felt.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
People are already being hurt/killed.
UK – National Energy Action estimates that 5.5 million households will have plunged into fuel poverty by early next year due to price rises.
UK – Some 7,800 people die during winter because they can’t afford to heat their homes properly, says fuel poverty expert Professor Christine Liddell of the University of Ulster. That works out at 65 deaths a day.
Hundreds die from the cold in eastern Europe
In the USA Smart Meters are going to be used to shut off electric to homes and small businesses as Coal plants are shut down and ‘replaced’ by green energy. This is straight from an Texas energy provider.
Given the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ crowd is not know for their ‘conservatism’ or restraint, I would not want to be standing at ground zero when someone starts taking the goodies away from these people who have been insulated from reality. Even worse try taking away the goodies from the inner city welfare types.
A large ‘explosion’ is coming if Obama succeeds in closing down even more of the coal plants who generated 52.8% in 1997. (It is now down to ~45%) especially when more than 1,000 New Coal Plants [are] Planned Worldwide
And it is not just your electricity bill. Increasing the cost of energy will increase the cost of EVERYTHING.
richard verney:
To place the satellite record in perspective, the period of 33 years corresponds to at least 0 and at most 1 observed event of 30 year duration. Whether it is 0 or 1 cannot be determined because the climatologists have not yet seen fit to tell us the starting and ending times of climatological events. A single event ( or none at all ) cannot tell us anything of significance about the relationship, if any, between the CO2 level and the outcomes of climatological events.
Some inattentive and ill-informed person stated:
“David Hoffer takes me to task for describing the pseudonymous “Rgbatduke” more concisely as “Ratduke”. If people lack the courage or honesty to use their real names in public, they cannot complain if their pseudonyms are played with a little.”
How’s that? Does he know what a pseudonym is? Can “Lard Monkey” be properly characterized as a pseudonym?
He adds: “I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. It’s Christmas. My rule is to try to do the kind and gentle thing first” even as he challenges connollEy for mendacity.
Transparent attempts to manipulate a crowd by appeals to divine authority, puerile ad hom in the form of puns on a person’s name, false accusations and displays of disrespect are the hallmarks of a fraud backed into a corner (while he appeals for a rat hole).
One is what one does.
I shall reflect on this as I consider the origin of the meme ‘carbon pollution’ as a political device.
@Gail Combs:
Good points…
BTW, the result will not be as the Green Fanatics expect.
As I’m in California, and we’re “living that dream” faster than most, we’ve already had the “rolling blackouts” experience. Now, with some spectacular (and rising fast) electric rates, some other things are starting to happen too.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/camping-at-home-is-cheaper/
First off, it’s now cheaper for me to BBQ (with charcoal or propane). So any time the weather is OK, cooking is done outdoors over crude fires in stead of indoors in my all electric kitchen.
Next summer, the project is to build in a better outdoor kitchen with a better oven. Oh, and I have a gas stove top to replace the electric one that I’m needing to install.
Under Democratic Governor Grey (out) Davis (who was recalled due to bungling electric rates… something the political class ought to contemplate…. in California even… folks willing to roast a Democrat…) we had rolling blackouts. I put small computer type UPS boxes on the important things (lights, communications center) and bought a generator. On outages, I’d fire up the generator after 10 minutes or so.
Now keeping all those batteries float charged wasted some power, increasing total demand. Not what they wanted, but hey, not my problem they can’t connect cause and effect… And running a gasoline generator without smog controls isn’t nearly as clean as modern coal plants, but hey, not my problem…
I bought the parts for a battery box and a couple of kW inverter (going to just put the core of the house on a giant UPS…) when The Gov got flushed. Still have the parts.
So when “things get bad enough”, I’ll just finish that project. At that point, the “smart meter” becomes an irrelevant thing. I can charge my home battery pile from the gasoline generator, from my Diesel car, or from ‘whatever’. Whichever fuel is cheapest. Whenever I want. Even while I’m cooking on the patio over a pile of wood and making smoke like a coal fired locomotive… The future is waiting for you now… and it looks a lot like the 1800s…
I’ve even got the parts to make a ‘rocket stove’ and will be trying it this summer (using yard clippings for fuel). Just to be ready for when our “leaders” get us moved back to 3rd World levels of technology…
Video of how to make ersatz stoves including camping stoves and rocket stove here:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/05/27/beer-cans-will-save-the-world/
I’m sure my neighbors will get used to the smell of chicken drippings burning on bamboo chunks… and the smoke…
(It will also be fun to watch the folks who buy electric cars discovering what happens when the power is cut and quadruples in price when it is available…)
Werner Brozek says:
“There is zero trend on GISS temperatures if you start on 2001.33”
Yes, but if you start only 2 years earlier, in1999 , you get 1.2celsius /century.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/data/gistemp/from:1999/trend/plot/gistemp/from:2001.33/trend
This shows that your approach is not robust.
On contrary the 10 years mean may be started in any year and gives the same result:more than 0.2 celsius for the last decade
The earth is warming.
@Gnomish:
Get over it. We’ve moved on.
Konrad says: December 25, 2012 at 2:58 pm
=============================
You have put your finger on the very nub of the problem, I think. Without greenhouse gases there would be no convective cooling, which means no cooling. Adding greenhouse gas to the atmosphere enhances convective cooling. This is what the AGW theory ignores and has to ignore if it is to be articulated with any conviction. If one grasps this principle, the absurdity of AGW theory becomes apparent.
OT @ur momisugly Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
I think you may have jumped to a conclusion about RGBatDuke. His identity is well known to us here at WUWT, RGB is his initials and Duke University is where he is a professor. Typically he links his name to his home page. While I do agree with you that to criticize Christians on Christmas day is bad form, my faith and I suspect yours is not so fragile as not to be able to turn the other cheek. I have found RGB to be an especially lucid and logical commenter here and consider him an asset to our cause as I do you.
(A box of cigars to anyone who can convincingly argue that language is either created (by man) or the product of an evolutionary process but not both.)
rgbatduke:
While Bayes’s theorem is logically flawless, the approach to drawing inferences that is called “Bayesian” is generally logically flawed. The existence of a prior probability densitity function (prior PDF) is a premise to the Bayesian argument but there are generally many prior PDFs with consequential violation of law of non-contradiction.
There is an exception to the rule that the Bayesian argument is logically flawed. Under this exception, falsifiability is satisfied. Thus, those inferences that are made by our brains that are Bayesian and logical are also falsifiable.
By the way, In drawing inferences from temperature time series, climatologists use the Bayesian approach in circumstances in which there are many prior PDFs. In following this approach, these climatologists violate the law of non-contradiction. That non-contradiction is violated is one of the dirty secrets that are covered up by the IPCC in editing its periodic assessment reports.