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?
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In the UK we have these other options:
Misconduct in public office:
http://www.cps.gov.uk/legal/l_to_o/misconduct_in_public_office/
and a judicial review:
http://www.judiciary.gov.uk/you-and-the-judiciary/judicial-review
Silver Ralph:
re the question to me in your post at January 15, 2013 at 6:51 am.
If you had bothered to read the link you provided in your post then you would have seen that it begins saying
i.e. the answer to your question is
“On 1 October 2009 its functions were transferred to the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom.”
We really do need a higher standard of troll on WUWT. (Sigh)
Richard
Of course they have committed fraud. The real problem is like Saville …. the establishment just don’t see what is wrong with their behaviour.
However I notice the post above refers to the charge which I think is more apt “misconduct in a public office”. I don’t think you’d have any problem getting any jury in the land to convict … but there’s no chance at all the establishment can allow the public to hold them to account in this manner.
As you said – the law only applies to us not them.
Let’s do a simple calculation. It was about 20 years ago that the first numerical models for forecasting started being used. There have been about 1000 weekly forecasts.
Because the long term weather/climate uses THE SAME physical laws only applied at a DIFFERENT SCALE, we would expect the learning curve for the long term forecast to take teh save time to reach the same level of skill.
So, from what we know, how long will it take to produce a century forecast as good as the current weekly forecast?
100years x 1000 trial runs = 100,000 years
OK, perhaps that sounds harsh? So let’s say we want a forecast as good as their current seasonal forecast? 20 years x 4 = 80 trials. So, it will only take 8000 years to get a century forecast as good as the current seasonal forecast!
This isn’t rocket science … all this is saying is that if you are dealing with similar systems and applying very similar models and all that is different is the scale of the events you are dealing with (not the underlying laws) … then it ought to take roughly the same number of runs through the prediction-measurement-evaluation cycle to improve the model for any time period.
Mike Haseler:
In other words, in 100,000 years climatologists will have 1000 statistically independent observed events of 100 years duration each. At this point in time, if they are lucky climatologists will be in a position to build and validate a predictive model with a forecasting horizon of 100 years. Such a model would provide policy makers on CO2 emissions with information about the outcomes from their policy decisions.
Currently, the temperature time series since the year 1850 provides climatologists with only 1 such event but at least 150 events are required for one to build and validate a predictive model. From this and other evidence it can be concluded that modern climatological models provide policy makers with no information about the outcomes from their policy makers. All of the information that gullible policy makers think they have was fabricated by equivocating climatologists.
Terry Oldberg says:
January 15, 2013 at 7:39 am
Contrary to your understanding, modern climatic GCMs do not predict. They “project” ( http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate-change/guide/future/projections )
You might want to tell the Met Office – I tried; they responded with the IPCC definitions.
Lo and behold, the video where Dr Vicky Pope, Head of Climate Change Advice at the Met Office, talks about the UK Climate Projections 2009 is still up and still confuses projections and predictions (At 3:39 into the video she starts talking about predictions; this is repeated in the titling at 4:03 and the subsequent titling).
Billy Liar:
Dr. Pope is employing the climatologist’s trick of drawing an improper inference from an equivocation. Logicians call this trick the “equivocation fallacy.”
An “equivocation” is an argument in which a polysemic term (term with multiple meanings) changes meanings in the middle of the argument. That a term changes meaning renders an inference that is drawn from the associated equivocation improper.
In the literature of climatology, the word pair prediction/projection is a polysemic term provided that the terms in it are used as synonyms. Climatologists use this and other polysemic terms with a high degree of success in gulling the public.
Donald L. Klipstein says:
January 14, 2013 at 10:01 pm
The banter about so-many-years-without warming is now expanding from 16 or 17 to 18?
In this post we are often talking about two different things and it is too easy to get confused between the two. I will use RSS as an example. There has been no warming for 16 years and a month. However there has been no 95% statistically significant warming for 23 years. That is because there is a greater than 5% chance that there has been no warming for 23 years. To see an illustration of the above points, see the following:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1990/plot/rss/from:1990/trend/plot/rss/from:1990/detrend:0.3128/trend/plot/rss/from:1990/detrend:-0.3128/trend/plot/rss/from:1996.9/trend
It’s a Britishism. It’s never used in America, except maybe archly.
Terry Oldberg says:
January 15, 2013 at 10:04 am
Correct!!!!
It’s all about money. Your government just wants an excuse to raise taxes and happy to fund anyone that supports “man made global warming”. They don’t care if it’s true or not. On the other hand, if the government came out and said “we would like to improve the air quaility in larger cities” there would be little argument from the voters.
richardscourtney says:
Your argument here is wrong for several reasons:
(1) The reason that ENSO is removed from both the data and the model runs is so that one can increase the signal-to-noise ratio and hence get a better estimate of the trend, which means it takes fewer years to detect whether or not the observed trend differs from the range of trends that the models as possible. Hence, by skipping this step, you are ensuring that it will take more years to determine whether or not there is a discrepancy. It is as simple as that.
(2) The authors of that NOAA report did not report how many years of a trend that is not different than zero with 95% statistically-significance are necessary for there to be a discrepancy. They reported how many years for which the trend would have to actually be ZERO when you measure it one needs so that the trend lies outside the 95% confidence cone for trends as predicted by the models. Saying a measured trend is actually zero and saying that the uncertainty in the measured trend does not exclude zero with 95% confidence are two different things.
Either of these points mean that you (and Monckton) are misapplying the NOAA falsification criterion. You can’t just take someone’s criterion and change it because you don’t like it and then use the changed criterion to justify the conclusion that you want to reach.
Read the AlecM post again regarding Houghton. He and Hansen are at the root of “IPCC science” Their version of physics is then used by the modelers, becoming embeded with each iteration.
Atmospheric IR thermodynamics described by AlecM is basic training. Simple IR thermo as taught in engineering has a long history of successful application. Engineers from the 1930s knew the IR properties of CO2 and water vapor from boiler combustion gas.
There are more huge lies, such as the claim that CO2 “accumulates” in the atmosphere for “centuries”
That bizarre claim is so outrageous it defies a sanity check. Ask anyone with any understanding of the global carbon cycle. Real atmospheric CO2 flux rates are at least 20 percent annually. That means ALL CO2 in the atmosphere recycles within a few years to the oceans and surface biology. If you stopped all biological respiration, atmospheric CO2 would vanish rapidly and be gone entirely within 10 years. (Excepting the abiotic exchange with the ocean). But by then all photosynthesis would be totally dead.
Except for Argon, the entire atmosphere is entirely of biological origin.
joeldshore:
I take severe objection to your offensive and untrue post at January 15, 2013 at 12:26 pm.
My post January 15, 2013 at 4:11 am explained that you had knowingly presented disinformation. Your response (that I am answering) does not address either of my two explanations but iterates your disinformation then says to me
NO! I DID NOT!
If you can find fault with either of my explanations then say where I am wrong: I like to learn. But do NOT iterate your disinformation then accuse me of doing something I did not.
Richard
Climate Ace says:
January 14, 2013 at 7:58 p
Well, if I chance to see a self-deluding BAU boosting arrogant, I’ll be sure to let him know you feel that way …
Seriously, my friend, is that your best shot? You’re approaching incoherence. This is a thread about the Met Office and fraud.
Y’know, Ace, this thing of you popping up on various threads where I have commented, just to make yet another ridiculous attempt to bust my chops regardless of the subject of the thread, that all would be just kind of boring if it were not for the creepy stalker aspect of it.
Seriously, bro’, you’re losing it, this thing of following me around just to attack me is turning into an obsession on your part. You should turn your mind to something productive. Endless carping and nit-picking and destructive behavior aren’t good for a man’s spirit.
w.
“In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.” Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
WIRGO
Willis Eschenbach:
re your post at January 15, 2013 at 1:19 pm.
You have no need to be personally upset at the troll posting as ‘Climate Ace’. It may seem to you that he/she/it is stalking you but that is probably an impression gained from taking most interest in threads which you have headed. However, ‘Climate Ace’ has also been snowing several other WUWT threads with his/her/its drivel.
I hope that helps.
Richard
johanna says:
January 15, 2013 at 4:07 am
david m hoffer, thanks for putting alex straight on the ‘death of democracy’ meme. His subsequent post, about how he is obese because of things out of his control when he was a child, kinda says it all.
We are all aware of the shortcomings of democracy, in its various forms, and they are discussed here and elsewhere every day. But, the sirens who promise us Nirvana if only we would give up our individual rights are truly to be feared.
================================================================
People rightly want the freedom to choose. They will gladly accept that freedom. What they don’t want is the personal responsibilty and consequences of an errant choice.
Those who appear to promise freedom with no consequences are true threats to any democratic government.
Werner Brozek says:
In the satellite data, the effect of ENSO is even more pronounced than it is at the surface. So, the statement about having to remove the effects of ENSO is even more important for them. And, in fact, if you look at your plot, it is clear that your trend is being strongly influenced by starting right at the beginning of the big El Nino.
It is also important to note that if you cherrypick exact intervals, which temperature data set you use, etc. enough then it is not too surprising that you can come up with something that falls outside the 95% confidence range. After all, if I do an experiment, say, 20 times, then it is more likely than not that at least one of the values that I get for that experiment will fall outside the 95% confidence range. This is why statistics can get so slippery, particularly when people try to mine the data to get a particular result.
MikeB says:
(1) The departure is one that could easily be due to weather fluctuations, such as those from La Nina (having two significant La Ninas and no strong El Nino in the last few years) and/or the solar mininum.
(2) Yes, it is a “statistical trick”. It is a trick called fitting over a large enough interval that you are not fitting to noise or, in other words, so that the uncertainty in your trend estimate is not too large.
What it is is simply fitting to noise. The error bars on your trend estimate, if you bothered to compute them, would be so large as to be compatible with a large range of trends. So, in fact you cannot conclude what you claim. This graph illustrates the point nicely: http://climateandrisk.files.wordpress.com/2012/02/skeptics-view-of-global-warming.jpg Global warming has now stopped several times since the current trend started in the mid-1970s according to your sort of fitting technique, except that each other time before it has turned out that it hasn’t.
mpainter says:
In fact, let’s give them links into the discussion:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/08/wrong-prediction-wrong-science-unless-its-government-climate-science/#comment-1196353
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/08/wrong-prediction-wrong-science-unless-its-government-climate-science/#comment-1197195
Then they can read what I actually said rather than how you simplistically summarize what I said.
richardscourtney says:
I thought I explained it to you pretty clearly http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/01/14/has-the-met-office-committed-fraud/#comment-1199226 but let’s try a direct response to your two points.
You said:
If by “emulate ENSO”, you mean that the models can’t, say, predict the specific pattern of ENSO, e.g., like the fact that there was a large El Nino in 1998, that is because that is something that is very sensitive to initial conditions. And, your statement, “the models do not emulate the climate system of the real Earth” is a classic all-or-nothing fallacy. In science, our models / theories are never perfect but that doesn’t mean we can never use models / theories to predict things. There is always some finite probability that the model / prediction will be wrong in a prediction…but that is a necessary consequence of the fact that science is inductive.
If by “emulate ENSO”, you just mean that the models have ENSO-like fluctuations, then the problem is not that the models don’t have these (to greater or lesser degrees of fidelity) but rather that they can’t predict the exact time evolution of ENSO because of the sensitivity to initial conditions.
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.
Planet Earth is contradicting joelshore. If he doesn’t understand this important distinction, then there is little that we can do to help him.
D Böehm Stealey says:
January 15, 2013 at 2:31 pm
Planet Earth is contradicting joelshore. If he doesn’t understand this important distinction, then there is little that we can do to help him.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
He doesn’t want help he wants to advance The Cause. ‘Science’ is to be manipulated to support the Cause and that is exactly what he is doing.
You are working from the point of view of an objective reality. I suggest you read Economic Theory: The Philosophy Of Karl Marx to understand the point of view of these ‘scientists’ who do not believe there is an objective reality.
The essay explains all the twisting and turning that we find so bewildering.
Everything contradicts Joel Shore; he contradicts himself:
January 11, 2013 at 12:01 pm Joel Shore says:
“There is no special “AGW theory” to incorporate into the climate models.”
Then, he contradicts this statement at 8:37 am: “I did not say that there is no theory of AGW… but that this theory is formulated / supported on… evidence from climate models.
joeldshore:
I am replying to your post at January 15, 2013 at 2:15 pm.
I pointed out that climate models fail to emulate the emergent property of ENSO and, therefore, they don’t emulate the climate system of the real Earth. You have replied
NO!
ENSO is a variation to Pacific Ocean surface water temperature distributions which seem to be induced by winds. NO CLIMATE MODEL IS REPORTED TO EXHIBIT THIS BEHAVIOUR. So, as I said, the models do NOT emulate ENSO.
Importantly, as I said, ENSO is an emergent property of the global climate system. If a model of a system exhibits emergent properties of the system then there is reason to suppose the model may predict system behaviour. If it fails to emulate an important emergent property then there is no a priori reason to suppose the model will emulate other system behaviour.
Think of it this way.
Someone models the central nervous system of a gazelle from first principles (n.b. the central nervous system of a gazelle has similar – probably less – complexity to that of the Earth’s climate system). Gazelles leap away when lions approach. This leaping at the sight of approaching lions is an emergent property of a gazelle’s central nervous system. This behaviour is not learned: evolution has built-in this response of the gazelle’s central nervous system. But the model does not exhibit this behaviour of a gazelle. Clearly, the model is inadequate for predicting behaviour of the gazelle’s central nervous system.
Nobody would claim that model has useful predictive capability because it is not emulating an important emergent property of the modelled system.
Similarly, the failure of climate models to emulate the important emergent property of ENSO indicates they are not emulating the modelled system sufficiently for it to be assumed the models have any useful predictive ability.
I wrote
You have replied saying
You “help” me!? Don’t be an idiot!
You are plain wrong. The NOAA 2008 Report on ‘State of the Climate’ said
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/climate-assessment-2008-lo-rez.pdf
The global temperature trend has been indistinguishable from zero at 95% confidence for more than 15 years whether or not one removes the 1998 ENSO peak.
Richard
“Or am I going too far in calling a fraud a fraud?”
Not so sir.
You are not going far enough to instead call the fraud a grand larceny of tax monies in all of the UK, Australia, New Zealand and the USA if other countries should not also be included in that list. This is a global grand larceny without a doubt.
joeldshore (Jan. 15, 2013 at 2:15 PM):
In saying “…that doesn’t mean that we can never use models/theories to predict things” and “There is always some finite probability that the model/prediction will be wrong in a prediction” you imply that the models make predictions. I am under the impression that while the climate models of AR4 project, they do not predict. A prediction differs from a projection in the respect that an independent event in a statistical population underlies a prediction but not a projection. That the events are missing for the AR4 models has a number of important consequences. One is that the claims of these models are insusceptible to validation thus lying outside science. Please comment.
joeldshore says:
January 15, 2013 at 1:59 pm
In the satellite data, the effect of ENSO is even more pronounced than it is at the surface. So, the statement about having to remove the effects of ENSO is even more important for them.
You have a point, but the following La Ninas nullified the effect of the 1998 El Nino. So if we make a plot that follows both the El Nino and La Ninas, we get a 0 slope since December 2000. So even this shows there has been no warming for 12 years. However this not long enough for NOAA. But if I do go long enough for NOAA, I could be accused of cherry picking. See
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1996/plot/uah/from:1996/plot/rss/from:2000.9/trend/plot/uah/from:2000.9/trend