Excerpt from Bishop Hill (plus a cartoon from Josh) showing that the claim of a statistically significant temperature rise can’t be supported, and the Met office is ducking parliamentary questions: (h/t Randy Hughes)
Met Office admits claims of significant temperature rise untenable
This is a guest post by Doug Keenan.
It has been widely claimed that the increase in global temperatures since the late 1800s is too large to be reasonably attributed to natural random variation. Moreover, that claim is arguably the biggest reason for concern about global warming. The basis for the claim has recently been discussed in the UK Parliament. It turns out that the claim has no basis, and scientists at the Met Office have been trying to cover that up.
The Parliamentary Question that started this was put by Lord Donoughue on 8 November 2012. The Question is as follows.
To ask Her Majesty’s Government … whether they consider a rise in global temperature of 0.8 degrees Celsius since 1880 to be significant. [HL3050]
The Answer claimed that “the temperature rise since about 1880 is statistically significant”. This means that the temperature rise could not be reasonably attributed to natural random variation — i.e. global warming is real.
…
The issue here is the claim that “the temperature rise since about 1880 is statistically significant”, which was made by the Met Office in response to the original Question (HL3050). The basis for that claim has now been effectively acknowledged to be untenable. Possibly there is some other basis for the claim, but that seems extremely implausible: the claim does not seem to have any valid basis.
Go read the entire essay here: http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/5/27/met-office-admits-claims-of-significant-temperature-rise-unt.html
Josh has a go at them:
Maybe the Met gnomes have been shamed into greater truthiness by the blood on their hands of all the old people who died of exposure in Britain this winter.
Nick Stokes on May 28, 2013 at 4:24 pm
“…If it turns out that random variation could have caused the warming, that does not demolish the theory – it’s still true that things are happening as it predicted.”
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Oh, really? How much of your warming predictions are “still true” this past 16 years, or so?
Nick Stokes says:
May 28, 2013 at 4:24 pm
If it turns out that random variation could have caused the warming, that does not demolish the theory – it’s still true that things are happening as it predicted.
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actually Nick, yes it does…..but that’s for another day
I’m curious as to what your answer would be to Agnostic…
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Agnostic says:
May 28, 2013 at 4:24 am
@Nick Stokes:
If that’s wrong please explain.
Scott Scarborough says:
May 28, 2013 at 10:35 am
Does this mean when someone asks us “has the earth warmed over the last century” we can say “NO!”
Not quite. It means there may have been some warming, or maybe not. But if there has been warming, it is insignificant when compared to natural variability.
There is a clear warming tend in the HadCRUT4 data which Doug Keenan mostly removed by differencing and analysing the residuals. This is the “1” in ARIMA(3,1,0).
I ran accross this quote by Patrick J. Michaels and couldn’t help but think of Richard Telford’s inane response to Anthony up-thread.
“Your scientists said exactly what you paid them to tell you.”
“In Big Science, money is power. Money is publications. Money is promotion and tenure, television time, awards, rewards and a permanent ticket out of coach. There’s simply no incentive for scientists to do anything but perpetuate their issues.” Patrick J. Michaels
Busted!
Latitude says: May 28, 2013 at 6:12 pm
“actually Nick, yes it does…..but that’s for another day
I’m curious as to what your answer would be to Agnostic…”
Well, the general fallacy is that the Met office is claiming a linear fit. They aren’t. They are determining a trend, which is just a summary statistic, like variance. And they are showing it is significantly different from zero. That’s a perfectly proper, orthodox procedure, done frequently by people in all fields. There have been many such analyses at WUWT. And so showing that you can get a better fit with something else is irrelevant. They weren’t claiming a fit in the first place. They were testing a trend for significance.
But the general issue, relevant here, is the role of statistical significance. It’s needed if you’re making a deduction from a population property. Then you have to be sure it couldn’t be just chance.
But if you are womderting whether some population is behaving in accordance with an expectation derived from some independent reasoning, then it is not a requirement, because you are not deducing from the population statistic.
Suppose you have a coin that you have weighted so you expect it to show heads 75% of the time. So you toss 8 times and get 6 heads. That’s not statistically significantly different from 4. But it’s consistent with your expectation. There’s no better result you could have got. You can feel more confident. It’s true that showing it’s significantly different from an unweighted coin would prove, well, that. But you knew it was weighted. What you really want from further testing is quantification of the bias.
Elizabeth says:
May 28, 2013 at 4:13 pm
I think Nick should definitely be NOT told to go away from this site. These guys are the best evidence of the stupidity of the AGW “theory” which is not working. They only help to support the skeptic case (over time).. Others are Telford, Flannery etc. Unfortunately there all Australian and reflect very poorly on the Australian Higher Education system destroyed by Dawkins in the 80′s
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I think the Australian Higher Education system was destroyed well before the 80’s. I reckon it was on a path of destruction in the 60’s gauging the hard line communist English teacher that I had.
Steve B says: May 28, 2013 at 10:07 pm
“I think the Australian Higher Education system was destroyed well before the 80′s. I reckon it was on a path of destruction in the 60′s gauging the hard line communist English teacher that I had.”
You can’t use me as evidence there. I preceded both those perils.
Nick Stokes,
what is your opinion on the Foster and Rahmsdorf paper wich is used at Real Climate to show that the (adjusted) temperature data agree well with the projections of the IPCC 3rd (2001) and 4th (2007) assessment reports?
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/02/2012-updates-to-model-observation-comparions/
Is Nick Stokes Australian? If this is true, it’s clear evidence the once “lucky country” is well and truly rooted beyond repair.
John Bills says: May 28, 2013 at 11:51 pm
“Nick Stokes, what is your opinion on the Foster and Rahmsdorf paper…”
Well, they are doing what needs to be done. It’s clear that the residuals are not random but reflect ENSO etc. Anything that can predict them using known quantities is likely to be better than modelling them as noise. I’ve seen criticism that the allowance for various effects isn’t perfect, but no analysis that says it’s better than doing nothing. And it makes the estimated trend more meaningful, since the residuals are closer to random.
I made a gadget here so you can see the F&R trends and CI limits.
Nick Stokes,
So your opinion is: the recent “slowdown” in warming is the result of known natural factors.
John Bills says: May 29, 2013 at 1:17 am
“So your opinion is: the recent “slowdown” in warming is the result of known natural factors.”
I think it is due to a preponderance of La Nina years, which would be accounted for in a F&R analysis.
Nick Stokes,
Is the warming that we have seen from 1980 – 1998, before the “slowdown”, due to preponderance of El Niño years?
I forgot:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/
John Bills says: May 29, 2013 at 2:02 am
“Is the warming that we have seen from 1980 – 1998, before the “slowdown”, due to preponderance of El Niño years?”
It must have an effect. That was indeed a warming, now we have a ‘slowdown’ (plateau). That’s what happens when natural variations overlay a forced uptrend.
Looking at the MEI in the link I posted I now understand why FR didn’t do their analysis back to 1950.
@Nick
Thankyou for your response.
“Well, the general fallacy is that the Met office is claiming a linear fit. They aren’t. ”
Yes they are, that’s the model chosen to claim statistical significance by them. That’s what DK is objecting to. He rightly says it should be acknowledged that other trendless statistical models potentially fit better, even if they themselves are not correct either.
If you go over to Bishop Hill, you’ll see that Richard Betts has posted a response by Doug McNeall. Here
“They were testing a trend for significance.”
Where D McNeall is saying that the correct response to the question of satatistical significance is “that is not a valid question”, to which DK responds “it surely is!”
“Suppose you have a coin that you have weighted so you expect it to show heads 75% of the time. ”
That’s exactly the problem with the approach to statistical significance that DK is objecting to. If you make assumptions about what you what you are testing, you have to justify that against the null. You have assumed that the coin is weighted, but you don’t know by how much (even if you think you have a good idea), or even if it really is. You don’t get to assume something against assuming nothing until you have shown that the assumption does better than assuming nothing.
If you have a normal coin and you throw heads 3 times in a row, then a further 2 more times, you can say that its less likely that you would get 5 heads in a row than 3. But you don’t know if that sequence is part of a much longer sequence in which it’s likely that 5 heads in a row would occur eventually. That’s why there are rules governing how to describe what you see in statistics to stop you fooling yourself. We invent causal relationships with data that may not necessarily be true, and this is especially true when we have something in mind, such as increasing levels of CO2 and industrialisation. The mind easily makes intuitive associations and correlations, and creates plausible stories to explain them, but this has time and time again proven to be unreliable. Statisticians understand this and their relationship with data is such that they try to avoid being fooled by it. Really smart people, with high levels of expertise in their specific area, are constantly fooled by this human cognitive problem.
This is why Doug McNeall cannot come out and say that the warming is statistically significant. He tries to argue that the warming is “significant”, but that was not what the question tabled in Parliament was about. Nor even, from the point of view of not being fooled by your own data, is necessarily “significant”. “Significant” compared to what? Yamal tree rings?
I am the Labour Peer who embarked on this exercise. I am not a scientist nor statistician, though with some background in economics. Became engaged for three reasons. First I was appalled by the terrible energy costs inflicted on the poor. Second, that I realised when talking to Green alarmists that I was dealing with a faith cult not interested in facts. Third, that in Parliament and the rest of Europe we had launched a huge energy strategy, with enormous implications for our economic competitiveness, which needed stronger justification than I had encountered. At first I believed the ministerial assurances that there was a total scientific consensus for the alarmist predictions and when, with the help of sites such as this I saw this was not true, I became more concerned. As a former adviser to the tv series Yes Prime Minister, I am aware but wary of political schemes to con the public, especially where some of the proponents, as those conducting Parliaments Climate Change Committees, may have financial interests.
My worries grew as I asked my Question (there was no confused discussion as one of your bloggers suggest – just a straight question and a series of waffle responses, not an Answer as is required by Lords custom). In 28 years in Parliament I do not recall such obfuscation. The fact that most of the non answers came from the Met Office and not the responsible Department of Business, raised my concerns.
One blogger suggests that heads should roll. That perhaps applies to the Met Office , but not to the relevant minister, Baroness Verma. She signed responses to a technical Question. Ministers are usually, as I was, generalists, not technical experts and have to trust their officials to give proper and honest replies, as the Ministerial Code requires. When it became clear that they were ducking the issue, she ensured that the sixth Question received the reply which the MO clearly, and for understandable reasons, exposed in this blog, did not want to give.
I began with the short Question whether the claimed rise in temperatures was significant because that seemed the right place to start. It published their assumption. Then it was possible to probe the basis for that – with a model which might or might not be adequate to support the huge economic and social implications which governments of both parties have accepted and imposed.
I shall start from the basis that this is the greatest transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich (including some of my friends) since the enclosures of the eighteenth century. It beggars belief that my Labour Party introduced it, with such unquestioning good will).
Whether Parliament or Government will follow this issue up and question the sandy basis on which their huge superstructure of energy reconstruction and massive financial imposts on industry and the community is built, remains to be seen. It will not be easy , since questioning a self righteous faith is never easy. But I propose to persist, despite obfuscation from departments and moral disapproval from political colleagues. In this I am greatly helped by brilliant Doug Keenan (who I have never yet met, but will) and the GWPF. Suggested Lords Questions, brief and factual, which might extract helpful factual information, on this site, will be helpful. My general policy position was stated in the Lords Queens Speech on the Tuesday of that debate. Warming alarmists have already consigned me, a Catholic, to Hell, so correspondence will find me at that address.l
Bernard Donoughue
[Thank you for your time, and your response here. Mod]
Many thanks to Lord Donoughue for starting the questioning process at Parliamentary level and contributing here.
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milodonharlani,
Thanks for your response. Nice addition to the discourse.
A balanced discourse is open now, the discourse the IPCC led consensus supporters often discouraged and sometimes even tried to block (see CG1 & CG2).
My thanks go to Anthony and other bloggers for their venues where we can freely have the balanced discourse.
John
Lord Donoughue,
Thanks for taking the time to respond here.
“there was no confused discussion as one of your bloggers suggest “
That was I. It was my first reading and I didn’t properly distinguish between what was written and what was spoken. But it was confused, starting with your first question:
“To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the latest climate figures from the Met Office; whether those figures suggest there has been any significant global warming since (1) 1998, and (2) 1880; and whether they have any plans to amend their policies to meet carbon emission targets in the light of those figures.[HL2728]”
“Significant” could mean many things. It seems Doug Keenan meant “statistically significant”. That comes at various levels. 95% is common, but it should be specified.
Baroness Verma responded:
“The latest update of the HadCRUT4 global temperature dataset, produced by the Met Office and the Climatic Research Unit, shows a long-term upward trend in average global temperature, although on a shorter timescale, global average temperature has not increased significantly since around 1998. The HadCRUT4 dataset shows that global temperatures have increased by about 0.8 degrees centigrade since around 1880.”
followed by some sensible and appropriate discussion on the nature of variability. Now she too should have specified the confidence level and perhaps the noise model. And yes, she did not quantify the uncertainty re 1880.
That reluctance is understandable. While it is reasonable to think of a single trend figure since 1998, it is clear that carbon emissions have varied greatly since 1880, and a more meaningful estimate could be achieved by a more elaborate model. It seems DK had one behind his back (a silly one), but if that is what you are trying to elicit, your first question made no mention of it.
That is strange. From my perspective, I do not see anything confusing regarding this question, “To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the latest climate figures from the Met Office; whether those figures suggest there has been any significant global warming since (1) 1998, and (2) 1880; and whether they have any plans to amend their policies to meet carbon emission targets in the light of those figures.[HL2728]“.
@ur momisugly Nick…I see your response as to why it might be confusing, but it seems to me that you are merely playing with word constructs. Significant does not mean statistically significant, or Lord Donoughue would have said statistically significant in the first place. He used the word significant in the sense of ‘Will this potential significant warming trend have adverse effects on the population and the world population’. That is the meaning and intent as far as I can determine. His statement as a whole, is asking the underlying question ‘Being that none of your models have predicted real observed conditions in Earth dynamics, why are you pressing on for carbon control when there is as yet no proof of your being correct regarding the effects of dangerous atmospheric changes from rising co2’.