Guest post by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
The truth is out. No amount of hand-wringing or numerical prestidigitation on the part of the usual suspects can any longer conceal from the world the fact that global warming has been statistically indistinguishable from zero for at least 18 years. The wretched models did not predict that.
When I told the December 2012 UN climate summit in Doha that there had been no warming for at least 16 years, the furious delegates howled me down.
The UN later edited the videotape to remove the howling. The delegates were furious not because I was speaking out of turn (they did not know that at the time) but because the truth was inconvenient.
The Guardian carried a sneer-story about my intervention. When a reader sent in a politely-worded comment to the effect that, objectively speaking, it was true that over the relevant period the least-squares linear-regression trend on the Hadley/CRU global surface temperature data was as near flat as makes no statistical difference, within two minutes The Guardian deleted the comment from its misleadingly-titled “Comment Is Free” website.
The determined reader resubmitted the comment. This time it was gone in 45 seconds, and – what is more – the stub indicating that he had commented disappeared as well. Just 28 years after George Orwell’s 1984, the hard Left are still dumping the inconvenient truth down the memory-hole.
The Met Office, as WattsUpWithThat revealed recently, has noticeably downshifted its lurid warming prediction for the rest of this decade.
When it predicted a “barbecue summer” (wrong: that summer was exceptionally cold and wet), and then a record warm winter (wrong: that was the second-coldest December in central England since records began in 1659); and then, this spring, a record dry summer for the UK (wrong again: 2012 proved to be the second-wettest on record: not for nothing is it now known as the “Wet Office”), it trumpeted its predictions of impending global-warming-driven climate disaster from the rooftops.
And the scientifically-illiterate politicians threw money at it.
If the Met Office’s new prediction is right, by 2017 the global warming rate will have been statistically indistinguishable from zero for two full decades.
So, did the bureaucrats call a giant press conference to announce the good news? Er, no. They put up their new prediction on an obscure corner of their website, on Christmas Day, and hoped that everyone would be too full of Christmas cheer to notice.
That raises – again – a question that Britain can no longer afford to ignore. Has the Wet Office committed serious fraud against taxpayers?
Let us examine just one disfiguring episode. When David Rose of the Mail on Sunday wrote two pieces last year, several months apart, saying there had been no global warming for 15 years, the Met Office responded to each article with Met Office in the Media blog postings that, between them, made the following assertions:
1. “… [F]or Mr. Rose to suggest that the latest global temperatures available show no warming in the last 15 years is entirely misleading.”
2. “What is absolutely clear is that we have continued to see a trend of warming …”.
3. “The linear trend from August 1997 (in the middle of an exceptionally strong El Niño) to August 2012 (coming at the tail end of a double-dip La Niña) is about 0.03 C°/decade …”.
4. “Each of the top ten warmest years have occurred in the last decade.”
5. “The models exhibit large variations in the rate of warming … so … such a period [15 years without warming] is not unexpected. It is not uncommon in the simulations for these periods to last up to 15 years, but longer periods are unlikely.”
Each of the assertions enumerated above was calculated to deceive. Each assertion is a lie. It is a lie told for financial advantage. M’lud, let me take each assertion in turn and briefly outline the evidence.
1. The assertion that Mr Rose was “entirely misleading” to say there had been no global warming for 15 years is not just entirely misleading: it is entirely false. The least-squares linear-regression trend on the global temperature data is statistically indistinguishable from zero for 18 years (HadCRUt4), or 19 years (HadCRUt3), or even 23 years (RSS).
2. What is absolutely clear is that the assertion that “it is absolutely clear that we have continued to see a trend of warming” is absolutely, clearly false. The assertion is timescale-dependent. The Met Office justified it by noting that each of the last n decades was warmer than the decade that preceded it. A simple heuristic will demonstrate the dishonesty of this argument. Take a two-decade period. In each of years 1-2, the world warms by 0.05 Cº. In each of years 3-20, the world does not warm at all. Sure, the second decade will be warmer than the first. But global warming will still have stopped for 18 years. By making comparisons on timescales longer than the 18 years without warming, what we are seeing is long-past warming, not a continuing “trend of warming”.
3. In August 1997 global temperatures were not “in the middle of an exceptionally strong El Niño”: they were in transition, about halfway between La Niña (cooler than normal) and El Niño (warmer than normal) conditions. Likewise, temperatures in August 2012 were not “at the tail-end of a double-dip La Niña”: they were plainly again in transition between the La Niña of 2011/12 and the El Niño due in a year or two.
4. The Met Office’s assertion that each of the past ten years has been in the top ten is dataset-dependent. On most datasets, 1998 was the warmest year on the global instrumental record (which only began 160-odd years ago). Therefore, on these datasets, it cannot have been possible for each of the last ten years to be among the warmest on record.
5. Finally, the Met Office shoots itself in the foot by implicitly admitting that there has been a 15-year period without warming, saying that such a period is “not unexpected”. Yet that period was not “expected” by any of the dozens of lavishly-funded computer models that have been enriching their operators – including the Met Office, whose new computer cost gazillions and has the carbon footprint of a small town every time it is switched on. The NOAA’s State of the Climate report in 2008 said this: “Near-zero and even negative trends are common for intervals of a decade or less in the simulations, due to the model’s internal climate variability. The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 years 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.”
In short, the Met Office lied repeatedly to do down a journalist who had uttered the inconvenient truth that there had been no global warming for at least 15 years.
The Fraud Act 2000 defines the serious imprisonable offence of fraud as dishonestly making an express or implied representation that the offender knows is or may be untrue or misleading, intending to gain money or other property (here, grant funding) or to cause loss or risk of loss to another ($30 billion a year of unnecessary “green” taxes, fees and charges to the British public).
So I reported the Met Office to the Serious Fraud Office, which has a specific remit to deal with frauds that involve large sums (here, tens of billions) and organized crime (here, that appreciable fraction of the academic and scientific community that has been telling similar porkies.
Of course, there is one law for us (do the crime, do the time) and quite another for Them (do the crime, make a mint, have a Nobel Peace Prize). The Serious Fraud Office is not interested in investigating Serious Fraud – not if it might involve a publicly-funded body making up stuff to please the corrupt politicians who pay not only its own salaries but also those of the Serious Fraud Office.
The Met Office’s fraud will not be investigated. “Why not try your local police?” said the Serious Fraud Office.
So here is my question. In the specific instance I have sketched out above, where a journalist was publicly named and wrongly shamed by a powerful taxpayer-funded official body telling lies, has that body committed a serious fraud that forms part of a pattern of connected frauds right across the governing class worldwide?
Or am I going too far in calling a fraud a fraud?
@joeldshore:
“This point suffers from the same issues as the ones above. It confounds this by failing to understand the difference between saying that an observed trend falls outside the 95% confidence cone of the models and that an observed trend has a 95% confidence cone that includes trends (in this case, in particular, a zero trend) that fall outside the 95% confidence cone of the models . If you don’t understand this important distinction, then there is little that I can do to help you.”
So what you’re saying is, really, that your interpretation of the NOAA’s statement is that they proposed a period of time over which it is actually impossible to show statistically that there was no trend (due to the noise in the data). By saying 15 years, a time period over which the 95% confidence cone of an observed trend would more than likely include a positive, negative and zero trend due to the noise in the data over that time, they were knowingly making a statement that it would be statistically impossible for anyone to refute. Seems like a strange and somewhat dishonest thing for them to do.
richardscourtney says:
Well, this is not an area that I have studied in any detail but a 1 minute google search turned up this paper from 2006 that thought the coupled models were doing a reasonably good job with ENSO: ftp://cola.gmu.edu/pub/ctr/ctr_210.pdf I imagine things have improved since then.
At any rate, this is totally irrelevant to the question of whether you can simply apply NOAA’s criterion to the data without doing what they say you MUST do to the data before applying the criterion. Making excuses about whether you think the models are doing a good enough job simulating ENSO is just throwing up hay to hide the fact that you are falsely claiming to be applying their criterion when you are in fact not doing it the way they say you have to.
As for your continuing confusion on what the NOAA report said, they said:
I can understand how if they had instead written “The simulations rule out zero trends (at the 95% level) 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.” then one could make the argument that they meant it in the way that you are interpreting it (although it would actually be pretty ambiguous). However, the way they have written it makes it clear that “(at the 95% level)” modifies “rules out” not “zero trends”.
Graham W says:
I don’t follow your logic at all. (You may not even be understanding what I am trying to say.) In fact, thinking about what is a reasonable statement makes it quite clear that my interpretation is the more reasonable one: If they really meant to say that a 15-year period in which the 95% confidence cone of the observed trend includes zero meant there is inconsistency between the model and data, then that would imply that such an inconsistency would occur even if the best-fit trend over that time period were almost as large as the average trend that the models predict: After all, over a 15-year period, the uncertainty in the trend is somewhere around 0.14 C per decade by one estimate! ( http://www.skepticalscience.com/trend.php ) Worse yet, since the calculation of uncertainties for correlated data is not an exact science, they would really need to specify more detail about how one should calculate this 95% confidence interval.
My interpretation (the one that follows from actually reading what they wrote and assuming they wrote it in the way that they meant it) is that you compute the trend over 15 years (after correcting for ENSO), take that value (without regard to what its uncertainty is) and if that value is zero or less, then that trend lies outside the 95% confidence interval for what the models predict. I don’t see anything at all that is statistically impossible to refute. And, the other thing that makes my interpretation more reasonable is that it doesn’t rely on ill-defined discussions of how one calculates the 95% confidence interval for the trend in the empirical data. You take data for a 15-year period, remove ENSO from the data in the way documented in the paper that they reference, fit a linear trend line by standard regression methods and you get something unambiguous that you can check: Is that trend greater than 0 or less than 0? If it is less than 0 then, you can conclude that there is a statistically-significant deviation from the model predictions with 95% confidence.
I said:
Actually, a little further thought while I was in the shower (always the best time to get your thinking straight) made me realize that even this wording would not really support the interpretation of Richard and Monckton because it still talks about the simulations ruling out zero trends at the 95% confidence level. It doesn’t talk about data not ruling out zero trends at the 95% confidence level.
There is really no support for Monckton and Richard’s interpretation even if we assume that the authors put the parenthetical expression at the wrong point in that phrase. Simply put, your interpretation cannot be justified from what was written in the NOAA report.
richardscourtney says:
January 15, 2013 at 1:31 pm
Richard, thank you for your kind thoughts.
However, let me assure you that I’m not upset by Ace. I find him and his fellows kind of humorous in their own bizarre manner, in part because they tend to be so predictable.
I don’t have the time or the interest to get “personally upset” with voices on the internet, so please set your mind at ease in that regard. Oh, I may write at times with an upset tone, or an angry tone, or any one of a host of tones, dramatic, sad, reflective, instructive, dispassionate, happy, the list is long … but I do so deliberately and with forethought.
It’s hard to explain. It’s not fake, my emotions about the world I live in are real, I’m a passionate man. But I don’t let my passions and my emotions run me. Instead, I use them when required, I release them as needed, I parse them to fit the situation, I conjure them up with my words. I’m not caught in my reaction to Ace. I picked that tone from a selection of possibilities, for reasons which are never entirely clear to me, but which seem to work somehow. Or at least folks are kind enough to say so.
My best to you, and thanks for your thoughts and contributions,
w.
Joel,
Noise is signal we don’t comprehend, or wish to deny. The atmosphere recieves most of its energy from the oceans. The oceans recieve massive amounts of energy from UV, particularly in the crystal clear “dead zones” and their efforts to expunge this energy are frustrated by that superheated skin.
To continue the heart analogy begun earlier, ENSO is a palpitation, a fibrillation, a resonance of Rossby and Kelvin waves. But it is not noise, it is signal that indicates how the system works. Enso always overshoots the trend, but the 1997 El Nino was not exceptional, it was just a hinge.
” You take data for a 15-year period, remove ENSO from the data”
This suggests ENSO is not a function included in the models. Why not include it?
If you tell me that the reason is because ENSO can’t be accurately predicted…… Well what does that say about the rest of the model? I believe an agent of Chaos is at work here confounding the predictors. (H/T Maxwell Smart and Edward Lorenz).
OTOH if ENSO is in the models why do you need to remove it from the data?
The determined reader resubmitted the comment. This time it was gone in 45 seconds,
Would [not] make a habit of doing that as they will ban you from the site as they did to me. Comment is only free if you are a leftists state sector worker with communist leanings as I discovered. To AGW disbelievers the site is a no go area.
Don’t know how but Would not somehow mutated to Would to. Sorry folks.
Joeldshore: I did understand what you were saying. Your response to me indicates that you did not comprehend the point I was making. You make the point that by your calculation the noise in the data is 0.14C over the 15 years. So I ask again, why would they make the statement that the models rule out zero trends for 15 years when over such a period of time it will not be possible to easy abolish whether or not there has been a zero trend due to the noise in the data?
0.14C over ten years and “establish” not “easy abolish” (stupid predictive text on my iPhone).
Joel Shore:
I am replying to your posts addressed to me at January 15, 2013 at 7:26 pm and January 15, 2013 at 7:43 pm.
Please read the responses to those posts from M Simon and Graham W. They provide complete answers to your nonsense.
Your arguments are ridiculous and, therefore, anything I were to add to the points from M Simon and Graham W would be ridicule. I choose not to do that unless, of course, you invite me to.
Richard
Fraud or simply bad science? There is obviously a difference between fraud and an honest mistake.
There’s a good example from 1998: Mann’s original hockey stick paper, MBH98.
He used an auto calibration period in the 20th century. The weighting of each proxy was determined by how well it matched the thermometer record. A good match could give a proxy hundreds of times more weighting than for poor matches.
On the face of it, this seems perfectly acceptable. But it has a fatal flaw. Suppose you feed in red noise (the drunkard’s walk). The method will pick out any drunkard’s walks that randomly happen to match the calibration. In other words, it will pick out drunkard’s walks that have a hockey blade. But, because the data is random, the earlier parts will average out to zero trend. Now you have a complete hockey stick: a flat blade and a sharp upwards blade. And yet the data is completely random. Mann’s method was certain to produce hockey sticks, whatever the data.
At this point it could be an honest mistake: the method seems to make sense.
However, it seems clear that Mann knew about this and he hid the results in a directory named Censored. In the following years many people, including Steve McIntyre, demonstrated that Mann’s method would indeed generate perfect hockey sticks from red noise. In a ClimateGate 2 email, a climate scientist relates how he too showed that Mann’s method generated hockey sticks from red noise.
And yet Mann insists there is nothing wrong with his method.
Yes, scientists often make mistakes. But if the mistake can be proven and the scientist simply ignores that, then he is a fraud.
Mann repeated this in 2008 with the Tiljander data. His method converted a cooling trend to a warming trend (upside-down Mann, as McIntyre described it). Mann is well aware of this, but again he refuses to do anything about it.
The sad, sad thing is that the people who should be protecting science against fraud have been steadfastly looking the other way.
No climate scientists or institutions such as the Met Office can claim they haven’t been warned about fraudulent behaviour. So, in my opinion, they are all a part of the fraud. And we are forced to pay for this fraud every time we receive an energy bill. This fraud will cost the world trillions of dollars. It is a crime against humanity.
Chris
Joel Shore is a secular saint!
Graham W says:
I am not sure why you are addressing this question to me since your argument, when you follow it through, provides support for my interpretation and shows how wrong Richard’s and Monckton’s is. Here’s the answer: It is not hard at all to establish what the trend has been by my interpretation of what they have written. You [after removing ENSO in the way described in the paper that they reference] just compute the trend by linear regression and that is the trend.
Now, you would say: “But, wait, because of noise the ‘real’ underlying trend could be greater or less than this.” And, my answer would be, “Yes. That is why a trend of 0 in the data is still compatible with the idea that warming is continuing.” But, you don’t have to worry about this: They have already taken it into account by running the climate models many times with perturbed initial conditions and looking at the distributions of trends that they get over 15 year periods [after removing the effect of ENSO] and they have apparently found that 95% of the time, the models give trends greater than 0 over such a 15 year period.
Now, let’s take a critical look at what Monckton and Richard are telling us to do: They want us to measure the trend, compute the uncertainty (at 95% confidence level) in that trend and if the 95% confidence cone includes zero, they want to conclude that there is a statistically-significant deviation with the model predictions. Let’s give an example that illustrates how perverse that is: Let’s say we measured a trend of 0.12 +/- 0.14 C per decade. Then by Richard and Monckton’s prescription, we would conclude that since we can’t rule out a zero trend with 95% confidence, then there is a statistically-significant deviation with the model predictions. Yet, the top of our 95% confidence boundary is a trend of 0.26 C per decade, which is easily above the average trend in the models (which is a bit less than 0.2 C per decade, basically between 0.15 and 0.2 C). Does it make any sense that a trend that is compatible with an underlying trend as high as 0.26 C per decade at the 95% confidence level would be so low that it shows a statistically-significant deviation from the models?!?! [In reality, the +/- 0.14 C per decade of uncertainty over 15 years may be a little high for data with ENSO removed since that removal process will reduce the uncertainty in the trend somewhat, but since Richard and Monckton insist on doing this exercise without removing ENSO then it is reasonable to use this estimate.]
M Simon says:
No…You remove the ENSO signal from both the models and the data. So, the models do have an ENSO signal in them. The reason to remove it is to reduce noise because the actual pattern of El Ninos and La Ninas that you get is very sensitive to the initial conditions.
If you tell me that the reason is because ENSO can’t be accurately predicted…… Well what does that say about the rest of the model? I believe an agent of Chaos is at work here confounding the predictors. (H/T Maxwell Smart and Edward Lorenz).
Chaos does not say that NOTHING can be predicted about the future. It says that things that are very sensitive to the initial conditions cannot be predicted. Certain things involving average behavior can be predicted. And, the extent to which you can or can’t predict things is best determined by experimenting with the models (and how it is done for both modern numerical weather prediction and for climate prediction): If you run the models with perturbed initial conditions, then you will find that some things are very sensitive to initial conditions and others are not.
For example, if you run one of the weather models to predict the weather in Rochester on July 4th of this year, you will get a fine weather map…but if you perturb the initial conditions even a tiny bit, you will get a completely different weather map.
However, if you run the model to predict the average temperature in the month of July as compared to the month of January in Rochester, you will find a temperature some 20 C warmer in July than January. And, if you perturb the initial conditions and run the model again, you will get this same result (within some variability, say, 20%).
Similarly, if you run a climate model 100 years in the future under some scenario of increasing greenhouse gases, then you will get a certain prediction of how the global temperature changes…and, if you then perturb the initial conditions and run it again, you will get a prediction for the global temperature change that is similar to the one that you got before. The particular ups-and-downs from year to year (due to ENSO and other things) will be different, but the basic trend will be the same.
gymnosperm says:
Even if you subscribe to some notion about a long-term effects due to El Nino and La Ninas, the process by which the ENSO signal is removed from the data does not affect the long-term trends, i.e., it removes only the short-term effects of ENSO. So, it should not be a problem.
However, even if you object to this whole process of removing ENSO, the solution is not to takes someone’s criterion that involves putting the data through this process, not go through the process, and then still apply their criterion based on data that has been put through this process. What you would have to do in this case is simply say, “Oh well…I don’t like what they say you have to do to the data so I can’t use their criterion.” To use their criterion on data that has not been analyzed in the way they say it has to be to reduce the noise sufficiently is simply misusing it.
richardscourtney says:
I have now clearly answered the points made by M Simon and Graham W, which were both based on very basic misunderstandings, the former of what chaos theory says and the latter (presumably) of what I was saying.
Whoops…I made an HTML coding error: In this comment http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/14/has-the-met-office-committed-fraud/#comment-1200226 , the paragraph beginning “If you tell me that the reason is because ENSO can’t be accurately predicted…” are not my words but M Simon’s.
joeldshore:
Your entire post at January 16, 2013 at 5:54 am says
Clearly answered!? Clearly? Answered?
Joel, surely even you can see your claim is risible.
You have obviously evaded – not answered – their points.
Please note that at January 16, 2013 at 5:28 am John Brookes applauds you!
Think how wrong you have to be to get acclaim from John Brookes: your responses are that bad.
Let us review the issues.
Do the models emulate ENSO? No, but you claim they do.
Can the models project the future including ENSO? No, and you admit they don’t.
In 2008 did NOAA say of climate model simulations?
YES! But you don’t like it and assert they should have said something else. And you then pretend that ‘something else’ is what they did say when you write this lie.
NO! They did NOT do that.
NOAA said “simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more”.
The “95% confidence” applies to whether a trend differs from zero: it does NOT apply to the proportion of model runs.
If the models showed such 15 year periods for 5% of the model runs then they would not “rule out” such 15 year periods. The simulations would indicate that 1 in 20 runs provided such periods. Even you should be able to understand that if you try.
Try saying this to yourself 100 times, “RULE OUT, RULE OUT, RULE OUT”, and then reality may manage to penetrate your skull.
And we have had a zero trend (at 95% confidence) for more than 15 years whether or not you include the 1998 ENSO peak. This shows the models are wrong.
Also, you have confused chaos with emergent properties, but since you say you are incapable of understanding what “rule out” means I will not attempt to explain chaos theory to you (such an attempt would require much more ambition than I possess).
Richard
Joel Shore:
The temperature record of the last sixteen years refutes the projections of the GCM’s.
In fact, the last ten years have shown a cooling trend and it appears that this will continue indefinitely.From the first AGW theory has been shown to be faulty, and now the climate record provides observations which refute AGW theory, your convoluted arguments to justify data tampering notwithstanding.
Chris Wright: Your post is sort of a hijack from the original discussion, but since you repeat several untrue statements that you may have heard from others, I would like to correct the record.
If you read Mann’s book, you will find that there are two reasons why Mann says this is not relevant:
(1) They used a particular type of red noise that he says is not realistic.
(2) They did not use the correct statistical methods to check that the reconstructions they got passed statistical verification tests. If they had, they would have seen their reconstructions did not pass these verification tests.
And, the National Academy of Sciences report on temperature reconstructions weighed in on this general issue and said the following ( http://www.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11676&page=113 ):
You say:
No…The “Censored” directory contains tests of the sensitivity of the result to leaving out various proxies (“censoring” certain proxies). And, what those tests show is that getting a reconstruction back to 1000 AD that passes verification tests does depend strongly on the proxy that is produced using tree ring data from the Western U.S. Did Mann hide this fact? Not unless you consider publishing this fact in Geophysical Research Letters to be hiding it: http://www.ltrr.arizona.edu/webhome/aprilc/data/my%20stuff/MBH1999.pdf (The relevant discussion is in the lefthand column on p. 761.)
The only real point of dispute as I understand it is that McIntyre claims that this sensitivity was already present for the reconstruction back to 1400, whereas Mann claims it is only an issue for reconstructions back to 1000. This whole argument rests on which verification statistic to compute and other such things, but it is basically irrelevant since you need the reconstruction back to 1000 to see the Medieval Warm Period.
You say:
This is also false. Because Tiljander noted that they believed their proxies to be corrupted in the 20th century, in the supplementary materials of the paper, Mann noted this potential issue with the proxies and repeated the analysis leaving out these proxies.
Your post indicates that you have just uncritically bought into claims you have read that are half-truths at best and complete falsehoods at worst.
Regarding the notion that the ENSO can be removed, an ability to remove it is a consequence from the non-existence of the statistical population that underlies modern climatological models. In divorcing themselves from this population, climatologists have divorced themselves from logic and the scientific method of inquiry.
Joeldshore: I have understood perfectly well everything you have said all along. What you would do well to consider is that if someone disagrees with you, it does not necessarily mean that they don’t understand what you are saying. You make the arrogant assumption that since I am in diagreement with you, it’s just because I’ve got your argument wrong – it can’t possibly be (to your mind) that I have understood everything you have said and still disagree with it. You’re so deeply convinced that your own way of thinking is correct, you are not even open to the possibility of considering other points of view or following them to their logical conclusions (in fact what you did was take part of my argument and twist it around to fit in with your own point of view, then conclude that not only does your twisted representation of my argument represent my argument, you claim that it was your argument all along!)
Not only this, but you have even so far implied that you know what I’m thinking, that you know what I’m going to say to you next, and that you (and you alone, in this particular argument) know exactly what the NOAA means by its statement. You assume your interpretation of the NOAA’s statement MUST be correct, since you have said it. You are essentially arguing from your own authority! Lol.
At least you admit that it is only an interpretation. To clarify, here is what I think is wrong with your interpretation:
1) It is extremely unlikely that you will “just compute the trend by linear regression” and get a result of exactly zero. Trends are always far more likely to be slightly positive or slightly negative. We are dealing with very small trends generally, i.e. relatively close to zero…start to see the problem? So in an earlier comment you allow that the trend could be negative as well as zero. So kind of you. So a negative observed trend is “allowed” to prove the existence of a zero trend. You’re really too kind.
2) More to the point, what exactly is anyone supposed to do with this “exactly zero” or negative trend? What should be said to the NOAA? “We’ve found this exact zero trend, but ignore the whole 95% confidence thing – that’s not important according to Sir Joel D Shore’s interpretation of your statement…yeah, yeah I know that it’s standard scientific practice to include it, but don’t…because Joel said so”. Of course they are going to laugh you out of town. What you are proposing is just absurd; it’s not scientifically acceptable, or even practical, for their own purposes, let alone anything else.
Both of these points lead me neatly on to my original question, the one you’re so keen on ignoring. I’m not going to repeat it, this time I’m going to suggest some answers to it, since you refuse to:
a) It could simply be that they were too arrogant, like yourself; too convinced that the warming signal would always be greater than the noise, so there was no way anyone would ever be able to say the trend was statistically indistinguishable from zero even over a 15 year period. They were short-sighted.
b) If a) seems too implausible, perhaps they simply made a statement that they knew would be impossible to validate or falsify. They intentionally misled.
c) If a) and b) are still both unacceptable to you, and you still prefer your interpretation, then you’ll need to counter 1) and 2) above. Thanks.
Chris Wright:
If you read the post by joeldshore at January 16, 2013 at 8:06 am then you will see he explains that Michael Mann’s book explains ‘black is white’ and ‘white is black’.
sarc on/ Clearly, that is all the evidence you need for you to understand you should not have read the climategate emails? /sarc off
Richard