Guest post by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Following my statement at the Doha climate conference last December that there had been no global warming for 16 years, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the railroad engineer who for some reason chairs the IPCC’s climate “science” panel, has been compelled to admit there has been no global warming for 17 years.
The Hadley Centre/CRU records show no warming for 18 years (v.3) or 19 years (v.4), and the RSS satellite dataset shows no warming for 23 years (h/t to Werner Brozek for determining these values).
Engineer Pachauri said warming would have to endure for “30 to 40 years at least” to break the long-term global warming trend. However, the world’s leading climate modelers wrote in the NOAA’s State of the Climate report in 2008 that 15 years or more without warming would indicate a discrepancy between the models and measured reality.
The Australian reports: Dr Pachauri … said that open discussion about controversial science and politically incorrect views was an essential part of tackling climate change.
“In a wide-ranging interview on topics that included this year’s record northern summer Arctic ice growth, the US shale-gas revolution, the collapse of renewable energy subsidies across Europe and the faltering European carbon market, Dr Pachauri said no issues should be off-limits for public discussion.
“In Melbourne for a 24-hour visit to deliver a lecture for Deakin University, Dr Pachauri said that people had the right to question the science, whatever their motivations.
“‘People have to question these things and science only thrives on the basis of questioning,’ Dr Pachauri said.
“He said there was ‘no doubt about it’ that it was good for controversial issues to be ‘thrashed out in the public arena’.
“Dr Pachauri’s views contrast with arguments in Australia that views outside the orthodox position of approved climate scientists should be left unreported.
“Unlike in Britain, there has been little publicity in Australia given to recent acknowledgment by peak climate-science bodies in Britain and the US of what has been a 17-year pause in global warming. Britain’s Met Office has revised down its forecast for a global temperature rise, predicting no further increase to 2017, which would extend the pause to 21 years.”
Source: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nothing-off-limits-in-climate-debate/story-e6frg6n6-1226583112134
Given that the IPCC spends a great deal more thought on getting the propaganda spin right than on doing climate science, one should be healthily suspicious of what Engineer Pachauri is up to.
Inferentially, the bureaucrats have decided they can no longer pretend I was wrong to say there has been no global warming for 16 years. This one cannot be squeezed back into the bottle. So they have decided to focus on n years without warming so that, as soon as an uptick in temperature brings the period without warming to an end, they can neatly overlook the fact that what really matters is the growing, and now acutely embarrassing, discrepancy between predicted and observed long-term warming rates.
At some point – probably quite soon – an el Niño will come along, and global temperature will rise again. Therefore, it would be prudent for us to concentrate not only on the absence of warming for n years, but also on the growing discrepancy between the longer-run warming rate predicted by the IPCC and the rate that has actually occurred over the past 60 years or so.
Since 1950 the world has warmed at a rate equivalent to little more than 1 Celsius degree per century. Yet the IPCC’s central projection is for almost three times that rate over the present century. We should keep the focus on this fundamental and enduring discrepancy, which will outlast a temporary interruption of the long period without global warming that the mainstream media once went to such lengths to conceal.
What this means is that the UN’s attempt to ban me from future annual climate gabfests for telling delegates at Doha that there had been no global warming for 16 years will fail, because soon there will be no more annual climate gabfests to ban me from.
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james griffin says:
February 22, 2013 at 2:23 pm
James,
Our friend Boris is no fool. He has designs on leading the Conservative party and hates the current leader. The AGW scam is only going one way – down the pan. Boris is positioning himself nicely to be untainted by the day of reckoning that will dawn for our political class that signed up to the AGW hysteria and condemned so many to fuel poverty.
Steven Mosher says:
February 22, 2013 at 9:03 pm
Steven, a one per cent reduction in albedo would account for the 0.3K jump in the anomaly from December to January, as per the Widget on this page.
So would a ten per cent increase in CO2 or a one per cent increase in water vapor, but as these two factors remained significantly unchanged from December to January, albedo is probably responsible.
Christopher, you may note that your figure is a time series graph of means and not variances. You are fighting a back-yard war. Just note what Obama said in January 2013. After Climategate in 2009, we got the Wonder-year 2010, the year of the weather extremes. Trenberth, still looking for the missing heat, suddenly realized where it was gone. Note that for establishing an upward trend of means we need 16 years of data, for a similar trend of variances about 160. That may be the updated life expectancy of the IPCC, and Pachauri knows it.
Presumably the question about Pachauri and what he is doing should focus on when the IPCC’s current budget settlement ends and whether there will be another one?
Perhaps some soundings should be taken concerning the formation of a ‘coalition of the unwilling’??
More model output from the IPCC will not change the science since the IPCC do not accept the science only their CO2 driven version of fairyland.
CO2 reacts with energy, true, but does it then do what is attributed to it, NO. The CO2 adsorbs energy, immediately emits energy, at a lower power level, and gets warm itself. All atmospheric CO2 on the day side of the planet is saturated with energy so it is impossible for these to adsorb any more to carry out the GHG thing. The GHG thing also violates the laws of thermodynamics. So a double whammy.
Water vapour does have an extra property. One that cools the surface, moves heat to high atmospheric levels and forms cloud that increases aldebo thus reducing the radiation reaching the surface from the sum. A magic thermostat. It is called evapouration and latent heat a simple physical process that requires lots of heat to achieve, more than 7 times the heat required to increase the temperature of water from 0C to 100C than to get that water to boil.
Oh dear – still doesn’t get it.
Planet Earth, as you put it, is behaving exactly as I would expect if CO2 sensitivity was about 1 deg C per 2xCO2
Which claimed effect are you talking about? The evidence, thus far, suggests the effect claimed by lukewarmers is pretty much spot on.
In the post above Christopher Monckton states that “ The Hadley Centre/CRU records show no warming for 18 years (v.3) or 19 years (v.4) “. This isn’t strictly true. The Hadcrut4 record shows there has been no statistically significant warming for 19 years. All this means is that there is a small probability that the true trend is ZERO (or less). I’ve just calculated the Hadcrut4 trend since Jan 1995 and it’s ~0.1 deg per decade, so the Least Squares trend is still positive.
If we were to perform a statistical hypothesis test in which the NULL hypothesis was 0.2 deg per decade warming then it’s likely that there would again be no statistically significant difference. In other words we wouldn’t be able to reject the possibility that warming over the last 18 (or 19 or whatever) years has been 0.2 deg per decade.
A lot of iffy conclusions can be drawn from how statistics are interpreted. The truth is that it is more likely than not that the world is warmer now than it was 18,19 … 23 or 30 years ago.
Further to my previous post, i.e.
Thanks to Werner’s link (at skepticalscience) I can confirm that my thinking is correct, ie. while we cannt rule out a ZERO trend in the Hadcrut4 data, it’s also the case that we can’t rule out a 0.2 deg/decade trend. Since 1995 the Hadcrut4 trend is
Trend: 0.109 ±0.119 °C/decade (2σ)
Add a year or two or change the significance level by 5% (ie. use 90%) and you get a significant warming trend. It looks very much as though it’s still warming. There is certainly no cooling – or none that is anywhere near statistically significant.
John Finn: ‘If we were to perform a statistical hypothesis test in which the NULL hypothesis was 0.2 deg per decade warming then it’s likely that there would again be no statistically significant difference.’
I don’t buy this. Your hypothesis is called in statistics the alternative. What you are saying is that the power of the test decreases as the alternative value approaches zero, a fact well known in statistics. In stead of the word ‘likely’ you should give us the values of the Type II error for alternative slopes 0.1/ 0.2/0.3/0.4, etc. for n years of data and Type I error 0.05.
@ur momisugly John Finn. You said;
I can’t see that any “advocate for solar forcing” need worry just yet. There is inevitably some degree of buffer caused by the fact that we are at solar high, half height though it is, perhaps also a ten year or so buffer from the previous record solar high.
In addition the tie up between low sunspot count and reduced temperatures seems good, even though the mechanism is not as yet well understood, the expectation of many scientists that the next solar cycle will be a record low for modern science, suggests that a cooling trend is a real if uncertain possibility.
Once it becomes clear that we are past the current solar plateau (high), if the subsequent decline to the next solar low proves to be drawn out then this would be another reason to expect cooling. Add in the AMO expected to enter a negative phase soon and all told I think that those solar advocates who expect cooling are probably sitting comfortably and have little need to worry.
As of today there’s not one mention of this incredible admission by Pachauri in the Marxist Guardian’s ‘environmental’ section. (Instead they have a typical scare-piece about how a currently non-occurring event may cause perma-frost to start ‘melting’) Funny that, as had it been the other way around, say a 17 year period of warming, it would no doubt be plastered all over the place.
They’re having trouble with this real inconvenient truth, there’s no doubt.
It is very unfair to call Mr Pachauri a mere railway engineer. He was also was on the Board of Directors of the Indian Oil Corporation (January 1999 to September 2003)
He became head of the IPCC on 20 April 2002.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rajendra_K._Pachauri
No conflict of interest there.
“If you have five or 10 years when you don’t have the same trend that doesn’t necessarily mean that you are deviating from the trend, you are still around the trend,” Dr Pachauri said.
You will not be around the trend!!
What dr Pachauri neglected to say that if you have1-2 periods of flat or cooling global temperatures lasting10- 20-30 years , there is no way that your original forecasted trend of 3-6 C rise by 2100 is going to take place . .You will be closer to 0.6Crise by 2100 which is exactly the warming in the period 1900-2000. That is why we have been saying that they have exaggerated the trend to get public attention.and the urgency of the threat has been greatly overblown . Now their own words speak to the misinformation they give out
Why is continued warming at 0.2 deg/decade the ALTERNATIVE hypothesis. After all the 0.2 deg warming trend is the status quo. It’s quite reasonable, therefore, to propose a hypothesis which asks whether that trend is continuing. At the 95% level we cannot reject a 0.2 deg warming trend.
Let me remind you of the post-1995 Hadcrut4 trend i.e.
0.109 ±0.119 °C/decade
That is, the true trend lies somewhere between -0.010 deg/decade and 0.228 deg/decade at the 95% confidence level.
Do you not agree that this interval includes a 0.2 deg/decade trend as well as a ZERO trend with the former slightly more probable than the latter. We quantify the respective probabilities of ‘less than zero’ and ‘greater than 0.2’ if you like but I’m not sure this will be particularly useful.
There are some things asserted by the newspaper journalist Monckton here, which are just wrong.
1. Monckton’s assertion of “no global warming for 16 years” is without any scientific basis, since it is not founded on valid empirical, statistical evidence. No detectability of a trend in a time series, which is a combination of a trend and fluctuations is not evidence for an absence of the trend. In statistics, a failure to reject the Null-hypothesis (Zero tropospheric or surface temperature trend in this case) does not falsify the alternative hypothesis (longer-term tropospheric/surface warming trend in this case). To establish empirical, statistical evidence for a true trend change one would have to show that the recent temperature record can be statistically significantly distinguished from the longer-term warming trend, which itself is statistically significant. However, such a statistical significance is not detectable either, at this point. Therefore, a conclusion according to which “global warming stopped” or similar as made by Monckton (and many other “skeptics”) lacks scientific validity.
Additionally, global warming as a physical process is much more than just a rise in the temperature of the troposphere or at the surface. In the big picture of the total planetary energy balance, it also includes the accumulated energy that goes into the melting of the ice caps and the glaciers of the planet, and the accumulation of heat in the oceans. Latter is much more important regarding the amount of additional energy accumulated due to the radiative perturbation coming from increasing greenhouse gases. The oceans are the major component of the climate system, which heats the atmosphere. The ocean heat anomaly has continued to rise in recent years. And the polar ice has been melting with an increasing rate both in the Arctic and Antarctic in recent decades.
2. According to the second hand source under the link provided by Monckton, Pachauri allegedly acknowledged a 17-year pause “in global temperature rise”, but it would need to last “30 to 40 years at least” to break the long-term global warming trend. Thus, even according to this second hand information, Pachauri did not say there had been “no global warming”, if he said it would take 30 to 40 years to break the long-term global warming trend. Assuming the reporting is correct, Pachauri does not think that 17 years were sufficient to draw the conclusion global warming “stopped” or similar. Monckton apparently does some massaging of Pachauri’s alleged statement to reinterpret it as a confirmation of his own assertions, according to which global warming “stopped”.
3. Monckton also asserts following:
“Engineer Pachauri said warming would have to endure for “30 to 40 years at least” to break the long-term global warming trend. However, the world’s leading climate modelers wrote in the NOAA’s State of the Climate report in 2008 that 15 years or more without warming would indicate a discrepancy between the models and measured reality.”
Besides the wrong reproduction of Pachauri’s statement here, as it was reported in the second hand source, this assertion by Monckton about such a statement in NOAA’s State of the Climate Report 2008, which he uses to construct a contradiction between Pachauri’s alleged statement and this report, and to assert that the recent temperature record would indicate a discrepancy between “models and measured reality” is a (deliberate?) falsehood. There is no such statement made in the NOAA Report. Monckton has simply made this up or he does not understand what the NOAA Report says.
4. Contrary to the assertion made here by Monckton, there has not been any discrepancy between the observed and predicted temperature record yet, at least any which is statistically significant. The observed temperature record is still within the 2-sigma uncertainty range of the predicted temperature evolution, as it was provided by the ensemble of simulations with global climate models, which was used for the IPCC Report 2007:
The “Pause” in the warming also includes plenty of “Corrections” by the various climate bodies, without those it would show cooling.
John Finn says:
John, can I suggest that you have a look at some of the threads on Tallblokes web site, they may shake your belief in CO2 warming just a bit and the “Physics” behind the claim. Either way it is very good Scientific reading.
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/
I think Pachauri’s “30 or 40 years at least” remark demonstrates that TAGWPTB now recognize the 30-odd-year cyclical nature of warming and cooling. It should start warming again in another 15 years or so but it will take another 15 for it to be statistically significant.
That’s aeons in terms of being able to use the “crisis” to grow their power, so they’ll move on to something else. Actually, they already have.
As Magoo says February 22, 2013 at 12:53 pm
17 years was good enough to declare “AGW” but not to say that it has stopped or didn’t exist.
As always one rule for them and one for the rest of us.
“(…) the lie may continue (only) so long as the people are protected from the economic, political and military consequences of the lie.”
J. Goebbels.
“If you have five or 10 years when you don’t have the same trend ”
The historical record shows that these periods of no warming and cooling last for much longer and as much as 40 years [ 1890-1930 and again 1940-1980] . If you have two of these periods before 2100 , kiss goodbye to your forecast of 3-6 C by 2100 or even 1-2 C. The figure of 0.6 C rise by 2100 looks better to me .
from Wiki info on Pachuari:
“Other than his academic publications, Pachauri also writes poetry and fiction.”
Perhaps the headline could have been more appropriate to call him “fiction author” .
A C Osborne, on February 23, 2013 at 6:39 am in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/22/ipcc-railroad-engineer-pachauri-acknowledges-no-warming-for-17-years/#comment-1231118
wrote:
You have made this up.
‘…soon there will be no more annual climate gabfests to ban me from..’
I beg to differ, your Lordship – they will go on banging on about this non-event until the funding runs out – and the way that Western governments have swallowed this stuff it could be a long time before that happens…
Perlwitz says:
“Monckton’s assertion of “no global warming for 16 years” is without any scientific basis…”
Liar. That shows ten widely accepted scientific databases. All ten of them show declining global temperatures.
And:
“Contrary to the assertion made here by Monckton, there has not been any discrepancy between the observed and predicted temperature record yet, at least any which is statistically significant.”
Liar.
Perlwitz is a liar. That is all. The truth is not in him.
I would love to see a YouTube debate, with a mutually agreed moderator and venue, between Lord Monckton and this purveyor of false assertions. It would be no contest. Perlwitz woud get a public thrashing for all his mendacious statements.
“this year’s record northern summer Arctic ice growth”
as far as I remember, it was a record MINIMUM Arctic ice growth;
yeah that fits good after the Goebbels Citation above, don’s youthing Mr.Monckton,
why are you never publishing the data BEFORE 1997 Your Highness?