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:
I wish posts like this would simply state their argument. There’s a big bold heading saying:
“Met Office admits claims of significant temperature rise untenable”
But all it actually reports is a Met statement that “the temperature rise since about 1880 is statistically significant”. And if you follow the link to BH, there’s a long ramble from Doug Keenan on his opinions about the meaning of statistical significance, and confused discussion in the House of Lords.
So did “Met Office admits claims of significant temperature rise untenable”? Where? How?
“Lord Donoughue then tabled a Parliamentary Question…”
—
I had to look up the word “tabled” to find out why its usage here appears to be the opposite of what “tabled” normally means. Sure enough, it can have opposite meanings depending on how and where it is used. It appears that the Queen’s English lends itself well to double-speak. I suspect that politicians have evolved it that way on purpose.
tabled (Verb)
1) Postpone consideration of: “I’d like the issue to be tabled for the next few months”.
2) Present formally for discussion or consideration at a meeting: “an MP tabled an amendment to the bill”.
John Tillman says:
May 27, 2013 at 11:23 am
Cloud cover for Northern Europe has been reconstructed back to AD 1000.
Hard to say how reliable or representative that is [and it is not ‘data’]. There does not seem to a solar signal there either: http://www.leif.org/research/Norway-Cloud-cover-Reconstr.png In particular, the Maunder Minimum had low cloud cover [should be high temps]
Soon ‘climate science’ is going to run out of options.
There are two natural variables which partially correlate with the CET for whole of instrumental records:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/FromSunToCET.htm
As a British taxpayer for number of decades since age of 22, I demand that my member of parliament, currently a minister, considers the above seriously, stop misusing my money, and most importantly ignore any objections from Dr. Svalgaard, who to best of my knowledge, never contributed a penny to the British exchequer, so there doc! 🙂
There is a ‘statistically significant’ degree of panic among the AGWs, also I noticed among some of their more covert supporters.
Vuk
I gave this chart to my MP a couple of weeks ago who has shown it to the climate minister at DECC and asked for his comments concerning the sharp increase in prices at a time of a sharp fall in temperatures
http://climatereason.com/Graphs/Graph11.png
tonyb
Jimbo/John West
It’s been cold in parts of the Southern Hemisphere too.
http://www.couriermail.com.au/news/queensland/southeast-shivers-through-record-cold-while-west-rejoices-as-rain-finally-falls/story-e6freoof-1226648699772
Nick Stokes
“So did “Met Office admits claims of significant temperature rise untenable”? Where? How?”
I wondered the same question. I wish the answer had been in plain speak but basically it says the Earth has been significantly warming since 1880 but with varying trends depending on what time frame you choose. Not difficult.
Heads should roll. Trillions of dollars have been misspent on green fantasies due to this falsehood. This money could and should have been spent on resolving real problems not fabricated ones.
lsvalgaard says:
May 27, 2013 at 11:53 am
John Tillman says:
May 27, 2013 at 11:23 am
Cloud cover for Northern Europe has been reconstructed back to AD 1000.
Hard to say how reliable or representative that is [and it is not ‘data’]. There does not seem to a solar signal there either: http://www.leif.org/research/Norway-Cloud-cover-Reconstr.png In particular, the Maunder Minimum had low cloud cover [should be high temps]
————————————-
Agree of course that reconstructions aren’t data, while tree ring widths are, which is to what I assume your graph title refers.
Maybe low cloud cover led to freezing nights in the Maunder.
But your work does appear not to support Dr. Svensmark’s hypothesis regarding cosmic rays, clouds & climate.
@ur momisugly Nick Milner:
There isn’t “one skeptical consensus”. We leave “the foolish consistency hobgoblin of little minds” to the warmers.
So some think “we agree the planet has warmed” while others of us do not.
I, for example, take the position that it has warmed, cooled, stayed the same, and done “all of the above”. It depends 100% on where you set your start and end points and what span of time you consider. (And there is data to back this up…)
So the last 8000 to 9000 years we have been in a long term cooling trend. The MWP was a touch warmer than now, too. But it was colder than now prior to the MWP, so we warmed from before. We’ve also warmed fairly dramatically out of the bottom of the Little Ice Age (when ice flows banged into the walls of Constantinople… haven’t seen that in a while). Yet it is colder now than it was in 1998 (snow in New York this holiday… )
And so it goes…
There’s a “lower bound” of a glacial state, and an upper bound of a peak “interglacial state” of about 2 C more than now (only reached in the first “rush” out of a glacial as an overshoot, so no longer available to us as our sunshine 65 N is too low now, and dropping…) Between those bounds, we oscillate, on several different time scales from several different absolutely natural drivers not one of which is CO2. So depending on what cycle you pick (consciously, or accidentally by setting a length of time…) you will find warming, cooling, or oscillating sideways.
What make me a skeptic is NOT the question of warming or cooling (as it is only answerable with “yes”…) but the question of “caused by people” where the answer is clearly “No!”. (Sub question of “CO2 has any significant effect?” is “substantially no, but a slight cooling in the stratosphere. Troposphere it does nothing and at the tropopause it does nearly nothing. http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2012/12/12/tropopause-rules/ )
So, with all that said:
Always nice to see someone feeding at the public trough have to admit to being self serving and trying to scare the children to get their candy…
If we are really lucky, the Parents will figure out that they need a different babysitter…
In reply to:
lsvalgaard says:
May 27, 2013 at 10:47 am
William Astley says:
May 27, 2013 at 8:55 am
Hint solar modulation of clouds.
there is no evidence for that, quite the contrary, e.g. http://www.leif.org/EOS/Cloud-Cover-GCR-Disconnect.png
What is the point of showing a graph of GCR Vs Low level cloud for a period in which the solar magnetic cycle is inhibiting that mechanism? The inhibiting mechanism is connected with the linear reduction in the magnetic field strength of newly formed sunspots.
Did you read Svensmark’s paper on the polar see-saw which proves the mechanism that solar modulation of planetary cloud cover causes the D-O cycle and the polar see-saw? Very interesting I would recommend it.
We have just finished experience the warming phase of Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle. I guess no one noticed the Antarctic Ice sheet cooled when the Southern hemisphere and particularly the Northern hemisphere warmed. That is one of the characteristic signatures of a D-O cycle.
The cooling phase is next. There is observational evidence of cooling.
You should be interested in the solar implications of how magnetic cycle 24 unfolds. Have you noticed pores form rather than sunspots? That is an intermediate stage. The next stage is no pores, no sunspots and falling large scale magnetic field.
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0612145v1
The Antarctic climate anomaly and galactic cosmic rays
Borehole temperatures in the ice sheets spanning the past 6000 years show Antarctica repeatedly warming when Greenland cooled, and vice versa (Fig. 1) [13, 14]. North-south oscillations of greater amplitude associated with Dansgaard-Oeschger events are evident in oxygenisotope data from the Wurm-Wisconsin glaciation[15]. The phenomenon has been called the polar see-saw[15, 16], but that implies a north-south symmetry that is absent. Greenland is better coupled to global temperatures than Antarctica is, and the fulcrum of the temperature swings is near the Antarctic Circle. A more apt term for the effect is the Antarctic climate anomaly. …. ….Attempts to account for it have included the hypothesis of a south-flowing warm ocean current crossing the Equator[17] with a built-in time lag supposedly intended to match paleoclimatic data. That there is no significant delay in the Antarctic climate anomaly is already apparent at the high-frequency end of Fig. (1). While mechanisms involving ocean currents might help to intensify or reverse the effects of climate changes, they are too slow to explain the almost instantaneous operation of the Antarctic climate anomaly. … …..Figure (2a) also shows that the polar warming effect of clouds is not symmetrical, being most pronounced beyond 75◦S. In the Arctic it does no more than offset the cooling effect, despite the fact that the Arctic is much cloudier than the Antarctic (Fig. (2b)). The main reason for the difference seems to be the exceptionally high albedo of Antarctica in the absence of clouds.
Margaret Hardman says:
May 27, 2013 at 11:07 am
“I would expect everyone on this site to agree that there has been significant warming since 1850, the CET shows it clearly.”
Margaret, you are correct. Also, few here disagree that CO2 absorbs LWIR radiation and back radiates some to the surface. However, an examination of the CET also shows that the beginning of the series doesn’t look much different than the end and that natural variability is 2 degrees or more (the mainstream CAGW proponents advise that the brunt of anthropo CO2 has been emitted since 1950 and before that it was insignificant – their main “proof” for CAGW is: What else could it be?”).
So, how significant is the 0.8C rise since 1880 in terms of anthropogenic’s proprortion of it – we can’t rule out natural variability. The significance is therefore in question. The IPCC’s projections are falling outside the 5%-95% confidence limits after only a few years. This has caused a flurry of rethinking that has recently chopped the climate sensitivity to half what it was and much agonizing over a 15yr+ hiatus in warming that some warming proponents have come to think may last to 2030 or longer. To add more ice to the warming scheme, it would appear that warming at a certain stage gives birth to a number of phenomena to counteract the warming (or the cooling for that matter) – evaporation, convection, clouds, thunderstorms, organic aerosols emitted by plants under excessive heating that form nuclei for cloud formation, melting of ice, (cooling: the disappearance of these phenomena permitting more solar to reach the surface and freezing of water which emits latent heat into the atmosphere). It is a wondrous piece of engineering (I’m an engineer so it is especially pleasing to me) that is gradually getting to be more widely appreciated because of sites like WUWT.
Will Richard Telford please explain to me and others too if they are mystified, the subtext of his remark “More of a red herring than a cat. Only Keenan cannot tell the difference.”
Am I the only one in the dark?
Is it not the case that :- a demonstration that there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1880 is either wrong in which case the mistake should be exposed or if right, has profound significance in terms of the billions of dollars expended in the wake of those government policies (across the globe) drawn up in response specifically to the assertion that there has been a statistically significant shift in global temperature.
I am ignoring those measures aimed at restricting CO2 levels since they are always related to the putative AGW hypothesis and a balanced debate as to the results of an increased CO2 atmosphere appears to be totally lacking in government circles – trumped as it is always by the AGW thesis.
To Nick Stokes and Margaret Hardman,
Re “Met Office admits claims of significant temperature rise untenable”
I am not a statistician, but I was able to follow the argument presented. I think the two paragraphs below are key to answer your question if you read them carefully. I present them in reverse order because the last one clarifies the first and explains in plain English why the Met Office claim of significant temperature rise is untenable, or in other words, why their argument cannot be reasonably defended.
“The second paragraph [of the Met Office answer to question 6] gives the relative likelihood of the trending autoregressive model with respect to the driftless model. The relative likelihood is 0.08, if we analyze years 1900–2012 , and it is 0.001, if we analyze years 1850–2012 (using Met Office data). In either case, then, the trending autoregressive model is much less likely than the driftless model to be the better model of the data. Hence, the statistical model that was relied upon in the Answer to the original Question (HL3050) is untenable.”
“The supplement demonstrates that the likelihood of the driftless model is about 1000 times that of the trending autoregressive model. Thus the model used by HM Government should be rejected, in favor of the driftless model. With the driftless model, however, the rise in temperatures since 1880 is not significant. In other words, the correct Answer to the Question (HL3050) might be No.”
William Astley says:
May 27, 2013 at 12:20 pm
What is the point of showing a graph of GCR Vs Low level cloud for a period in which the solar magnetic cycle is inhibiting that mechanism? The inhibiting mechanism is connected with the linear reduction in the magnetic field strength of newly formed sunspots.
So, during the Maunder Minimum you would not expect GCRs to form Low Level Clouds and produce cooling, right?
Jimbo says:
May 27, 2013 at 9:43 am
“Meanwhile in Germany it looks like they are having the coldest Spring in 40 years.
Notrickszone”
Oh yes we do. This does not shake the belief system of my warmist colleagues, though – trusting your own memory and your own senses is unscientific.
“Those who are unaware they are walking in darkness, will never seek the light.”–Bruce Lee
@Nick Stokes: You say: “And if you follow the link to BH, there’s a long ramble from Doug Keenan on his opinions about the meaning of statistical significance, and confused discussion in the House of Lords.”
Well, as I see it, the ‘long ramble’ is as nothing compared to the way the Met Office stone-walled SIX questions about the significance of the MO’s stats. As for a ‘confused discussion in the HoL’: perhaps you could cite the item in Hansard that shows this. As far as I can see, the only confusion was within the MO and the DECC as to how they could possibly evade the question without actually lying (not the done thing in the Mother of Parliaments).
That the planet has warmed is not at issue. The fact that the correlation of that warming to CO2 levels has been shown to be insignificant has put the lie to warmist dogma. And on that lie you and the Green Reich would have the West commit trillions of dollars on a wet dream, while, along the way, impoverishing millions of people, not to mention causing the deaths of many, many more.
I would have had more tolerance for your views if you had responded from the point of view of the statistician that you appear to be – and challenged DK on the stats, and not the length of his article.
@DirkH: Love your comments. If I may: “Those who are unaware they are walking in darkness, will never seek the light.”–Bruce Lee is surely the same as: There are none so blind as they who will not see. Nick Stokes comes to mind…..
Louis says: May 27, 2013 at 12:28 pm
Louis, it does not answer the question. This is not the Met Office “admits claims of significant temperature rise untenable”. It is still only the case that Douglas Keenan thinks they are untenable. The Met Office didn’t say so.
And as Richard Telford says, his opinions are not widely shared. Here’s Lucia:
“Doug is going on about the fact that a statistical model treating the of trendless data with ARIMA noise with d=1 appears to fit the data better linear trend+ ARIMA with d=0. It probably does so but that means very little becausse:
1) Physically no one expects the AGW forcings would have caused the trend to look like “straight line + noise” since whatever.
2) ARIMA with d=1 alone would violate the first law of thermo. (i.e. violates the 1st law of thermo. We don’t even need to get fancy and go to the 2nd.)
2)”
Margaret Hardman says:
May 27, 2013 at 12:00 pm
Nick Stokes
“So did “Met Office admits claims of significant temperature rise untenable”? Where? How?”
“I wondered the same question. I wish the answer had been in plain speak but basically it says the Earth has been significantly warming since 1880 but with varying trends depending on what time frame you choose. Not difficult.”
You had to go to Bishop Hill for the whole story: Doug Neal is a statistician at the Met Office and after the Met Office had stonewalled for weeks on answering the MP’s question posed about 10 times, Bishop Hill contacted Doug Neal and asked him directly:
“Doug McNeall is a statistician. He and I have had cordial e-mail discussions in the past. In particular, after my op-ed piece in WSJ appeared, on 12 August 2011, McNeall sent me an e-mail stating that the trending autoregressive model (used by the Met Office) is “simply inadequate”.”
Snotrocket says: May 27, 2013 at 12:34 pm
Well, the confused discussion started in the first question, which simply asked if the rise was significant. Someone had do work out what that meant. It went downhill from there.
But as for statistics, I’ll pass that toLucia:
“Doug is going on about the fact that a statistical model treating the of trendless data with ARIMA noise with d=1 appears to fit the data better linear trend+ ARIMA with d=0. It probably does so but that means very little becausse:
1) Physically no one expects the AGW forcings would have caused the trend to look like “straight line + noise” since whatever.
2) ARIMA with d=1 alone would violate the first law of thermo. (i.e. violates the 1st law of thermo. We don’t even need to get fancy and go to the 2nd.)”
The truth is Global Warming/Climate Change is the excuse for politicos and bureaucrats and their cronies to reorganize the economy and society for their benefit. The sequel to Limits to Growth from the Club of Rome put out another piece of propaganda in 1992 called Beyond the Limits. Like most good propaganda it had a kernel of truth–namely this quote that ended the book that :the answers to the world’s problems begin with a ‘new humanism.” Funded of course at our expense by people who think we all exist to provide funding for them so they can administer us. Then it quotes Aurelio Peccei as follows:
“The humanism consonant with our epoch must replace and reverse principles and norms that have heretofore regarded as untouchable, but that have become inapplicable,or discordant with our purpose [as Tonto would say who is ‘we’?]; it must encourage the rise of new value systems to redress our inner balance [Guess whose values?], and of new spiritual, ethical, philosophical, social, political, esthetic, and artistic motivations to fill the emptiness of our life; it must be capable of restoring within us …love, friendship, understanding, solidarity, a spirit of sacrifice, conviviality; and it must make us understand that the more closely these qualities link us to other forms of life and to our brothers and sisters everywhere in the world, the more we shall gain.”
Well, since all that self-interested malarkey would be a difficult sell, we get the “sky is falling!the globe is heating up! there’s no time to spare! the UN needs to be in charge to save us all.”
Hard to sell when there is demonstrably no crisis. And that new altered consciousness via education for sustainable development is just not widespread enough yet.
And the UK is much further along in building its education and economy around this Statist fantasy for permanent power.
Scott Basinger says:
May 27, 2013 at 9:15 am
———————–
The problem with Keenan’s analysis should be obvious. The 1 in the ARIMA(3,1,0) is needed because the data are non-stationary – the mean is not constant – the temperature is increasing. Whether this temperature increase is removed by differencing as Keenan has done, or fitted with a linear trend, depends on the aims of the analysis. Both agree that there is significant warming, and neither model can determine the cause of the warming.
As the climate forcings have not increased in a linear fashion, it is not surprising that a linear trend is not a very good fit to the instrumental data.
richard telford says:
May 27, 2013 at 12:57 pm
“…As the climate forcings have not increased in a linear fashion, it is not surprising that a linear trend is not a very good fit to the instrumental data.”
____________________
Oh, please! The instrumental data doesn’t show any trend, except no warming for quite some time while CO2 has… well, you know. Still, you make statements like that!
Nick Stokes says: May 27, 2013 at 12:47 pm
“Well, the confused discussion started in the first question, which simply asked if the rise was significant.”
Nick: You said that the ‘confused discussion’ was in the HoL. That didn’t happen, did it? Only in your mind. Lord Donoughue’s was a written question; there is no discussion about it in the HoL – not that it didn’t take place between DECC and MO.
So you ducked that one. Then you ducked the other one about commenting as a statistician. You did the classic politician’s trick of invoking ‘plausible deniability’: you didn’t answer the question directly, you quoted Lucia – and then, didn’t say whether you agree with her or not. That leaves you an out if it turns out that Lucia’s argument falls, you can claim that you only pointed to it, you didn’t endorse it.
In all the years I’ve been on sceptic (or otherwise) blogs I’ve never found a warmist answer a direct question with a direct answer.