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:
Third: Compile a complete and permanent archive of all activity on every warmist site. Then, every day thereafter, pluck from it a quote of the day for use as a sticky-post at the head of every site that subscribes to it, and for RSS feeds, for the sake of laughs. There’ll be comedy gold there for the next ten million years.
Regarding temperature as a random walk, William Briggs had a fun post regarding
“Arcsine Climate” using R programming here:
http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=257
Margaret Hardman says:
May 27, 2013 at 3:33 pm
“This is one of the reasons why I agree with the AGW hypothesis and not those that stack untenable assumptions upon untenable assumptions.”
Did you just write that for fun? If you wanted to give an example of ‘untenable assumptions stacked on untenable assumptions’ you need look no further than the useless models that the Met Office have persistently clung to.
Oh, and Nick: I’d stop digging while you can still climb out of the hole. I’ve read all your comments on this thread and they are just pure hand-waving. I have to ask you, if the Met Office really didn’t have a problem with their CAGW claims, why did they avoid the question six times over?
Congratulations to Doug and Lord Donahue for persisting and wrenching this admission out of the Met Office. BUT, as expected, NOT A SINGLE WORD OF IT HAS LEAKED OUT INTO THE MAIN STREAM MEDIA.
SHAME ON THEM.
“richard telford says:
May 27, 2013 at 8:52 am
….
################################
‘If you have to stoop to using ad hominem arguments, you could at least ensure that the ad hominem is correct. The salary of academics is not dependent on their opinions – a concept known as academic freedom.’
“REPLY: A famous quote is an “ad hom” LOL!. Yes no dependency, sure, no ‘publish or perish’ until such time you get that cushy deal known as tenure, where you can be free to be as loony as Paul Ehrlich without fear of losing your job. It doesn’t work that way in the real world outside academia my friend.” – Anthony
An alternate reply might have been , “Maybe immediate salary is not dependent on opinion, but government GRANT money certainly is.”
milodonharlani says:
May 27, 2013 at 5:01 pm
============
Thanks, it is nice when someone catches the drift.
You don’t feel so lonely 🙂
Matt G says:
May 27, 2013 at 4:46 pm
Using 0.8c is still cherry picking since the data began, the recent temperatures really are only about 0.4c – 0.5c warmer than the 1880′s.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl
That temperature range is nothing in the scale of natural variance.
=======================================
exactly…….the explanation with the fewest and simplest assumption…is that it’s no big deal
You can’t argue that the science has improved…and use thermometer readings from 130 years ago…
the rest of the proxies are nothing more than tea leaves and bones
a 1/2 of one degree in 130 years…and that’s fudged
@u.k.
———————
“Rainy Day Women
“Well, they’ll stone ya when you’re trying to be so good,
They’ll stone ya just a-like they said they would.
They’ll stone ya when you’re tryin’ to go home.
Then they’ll stone ya when you’re there all alone.
But I would not feel so all alone,
Everybody must get stoned.”
Make that cloudy day woman.
I surely hope I don’t catch a drift during the grueling Calais to Dover & back ice skating marathon, but if it has been cloudy, there are liable to be lots of snow drifts en route.
Will collect careful WX data for a complete “clouds & rain” (with apologies to 17th & 20th century Japan) report upon my return to this century.
joerommiswrong says: May 27, 2013 at 5:10 pm
“I have to ask you, if the Met Office really didn’t have a problem with their CAGW claims, why did they avoid the question six times over?”
With a post that begins with a blatantly false headline, you have to look carefully at everything that follows. Doug Keenan says
“HM Government did not answer. Lord Donoughue asked a second time. They did not answer. He asked a third time. Again they did not answer. He then asked a fourth time.”
But Hirst, Met director, says
“I would like to assure you that the Met Office has not refused to answer any questions. The questions you refer to were answered by Baroness Verma, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Department of Energy and Climate Change.”
I believe Hirst.
DK seems upset because the Met was slow to stop what they were doing to carry out his nutty calculation. I think that is very understandable.
u.k.(us) says:
May 27, 2013 at 4:53 pm
Come on Leif, you can tell us !!
The truth will never leave this blog
“One cannot empty the well of truth with a leaky bucket”.
…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. …
Actually, I’m not sure that that’s true. My recollection is that it had always been accepted that the 1900s were a little cold, and that there was a warm spell in the 1940s, and a cold spell in the 1970s, and that these were within normal limits, and nothing to do with AGW.
The big idea that Mann pushed was that these variations were all minor, and that AGW really started to take off in the 1980s. The 20 years 1980-2000 were the heyday of Global Warming – continuing up without a break. The models all showed amazing temperatures due in 2030, and most of the AGW crowd were behaving as if these temperatures had actually happened. That’s where you get your ‘statistical significance’ from – the assumption that we would have 50 years with a graph going up at accelerating speeds. In 2000 it seemed quite safe to say that, and no one would contradict you.
Now, of course, we can see that it’s just a glitch – augmented by data falsification…
The pressure is on. Common sense is beginning to break out across the UK.
Hallelujah!
With the footnote I am reading WUWT on and off, so I do miss a lot of info presented here, it is my general impression climate related discussions on WUWT about phenomena, trends, data, models etc. in most cases focus on the planet as a whole. Differentiation does play a role, say oceans vs. land vs atmosphere, northern hemisphere vs. southern, Arctic region vs. Antarctic, but these are broad differentiations and stay close to the global scale.
This makes sense, as “global warming” or “climate change” are central topics on WUWT, and these are global phenomena.
On the other hand, there is more between local weather on the one hand, and global phenomena on the other. I feel there is a big gap between the two, something is missing. Maybe I should call “local climate” or “area-specific climate”. It feels to me like for understanding climate phenomena by people who study this, a big leap is made from localized weather phenomena to global trends. Is this big leap realistic?
You would expect some steps in-between, say from local or regional weather patterns to regional or area-specific climate phenomena, say coastal regions vs. tundra’s vs. mountains vs. high plateau’s etc. Also more specification by continents and part of continents.
Kind of saying here my feeling is “global climate science” is over-reaching at this point. Wouldn’t it be better to focus some more on regional-specific climate phenomena?
One of the reasons also being the data or proxies used, in my understanding, have a regional origin, like Vostok or Greenland or Yamal. The UHI-effect also points in this direction.
Just an observation from the sideline.
Time to un fund the UN, UN IPCC and UN FCCC.
I by supposition assume the clause that the U.S.A. cannot re-claim the Trillions of U.S.A. dollars the U.S.A. Governments (G.H.W. Buch, Clinton, G.W. Bush, Obama) funneled to the UN, UN IPCC and UN FCCC. I would posit that such moneys found their way to the narcotics cartels in the Middle East and South America, at the behest of the U.S.A. President. That, by design. Ah The Hand of Man. (not Mann; M.E.Mann is an idiot ! nothing more needs to be said on Mann.).
A very sad day of the ‘taxpaying peoples’ of the U.S.A.
Perhaps a way out of this ‘WWI quagmire’ is to un fund the UN in all respects.
That means in particular and on Front Burner the un funding of the salary+benefits+healthcare+retirement of the ‘U.S.A. Ambassador’ to the UN, MS. Susan Rice.
I would advise the U.S.A. ‘Judiciary’ to investigate MS. Rice ! Much to the found there !
I would also advise the C3I Directorate and National Security Council to revoke Mr. Kerry’s access and clearances to All National Security Data & Intelligence ASAP.
That is the most important move in the last 24 hrs and needs to be done with rapid speed.
Many years ago, I agreed and signed to continuous ‘wiretapping’ and ‘postage inspection’ and ‘ongoing physical surveillance.’
In this way on this blog, they will read my recommendation even if they are not administratively posted on WUWT and with that I can pay back the ‘loan’ given me many years ago by the DoD. 🙂
Hurrah for the persistent Lord Donoughue!
It seems the 6th time is the charm!
Let’s encourage Lord Donoughue to continue, until the MET office (Slingo, et.al.) publicly recants their false “statistically significant’ bollocks and removes all such references on their web sites, blogs, and literature.
vukcevic says:
May 27, 2013 at 1:46 pm
I don’t know where you live, but most of ‘normal and sane’ people who live in UK, don’t really care what Met Office admits or doesn’t; people have realised for some time now that their projections of so called ‘global warming’ now transmuted into climate change, and consequently long term forecasts have become a national joke.
I’ve had the same thoughts about Nick’s comments for some time. If I ever need a laugh, he’s always there.
Master_Of_Puppets says:
May 27, 2013 at 6:25 pm
_________________
good job
@ur momisugly Nick Stokes:
If you are that dogmatic about headlines perhaps you could start with this one and work your way up, or down as the case requires:
“It’s true: 97% of research papers say climate change is happening”
http://theconversation.com/its-true-97-of-research-papers-say-climate-change-is-happening-14051
Knock yourself out !!
Temporal chaotic response, which represents the basis of fundamental understanding of chaotic response, cannot exhibit a trend with time. Averages of chaotic responses are themselves chaotic. Thus these averages cannot exhibit a trend with time.
The original 1963 system of three simple, non-linear ODEs devised by Lorenz can be used to demonstrate the above. Imposing a time-varying effective Rayleigh number during the calculations of the numerical solutions of the equations will not give a response showing a trend with time. The effective Rayleigh number measures the energy addition into the fluid from the boundaries of the flow.
I do not know if the results for low-dimension temporal chaotic response carry over un-changed to the spatial-temporal chaotic case.
If the temperature in the ( spatial-temporal ) physical domain is chaotic, averages of the temperature will be chaotic, and neither of these can exhibit a response that has a trend with time.
harrydhuffman (@harrydhuffman) says:
There is NO CO2 “greenhouse effect”, of increasing temperature with increasing CO2
It will, unfortunately, be a long time before people actually accept this fact. Oh well ! 🙁
OT
http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterferrara/2013/05/26/to-the-horror-of-global-warming-alarmists-global-cooling-is-here/2/
Rob MW says:
May 27, 2013 at 7:19 pm
@ur momisugly Nick Stokes:
If you are that dogmatic about headlines perhaps you could start with this one and work your way up, or down as the case requires:
“It’s true: 97% of research papers say climate change is happening”
____________________________________________________________________________
But of course that’s for a noble cause.
In reply to:
lsvalgaard says:
May 27, 2013 at 3:55 pm
William Astley says:
May 27, 2013 at 3:51 pm
“So, during the Maunder Minimum you would not expect GCRs to form Low Level Clouds and produce cooling, right?”
The inhibiting mechanism is transient. When the inhibiting mechanism ceases the planet will cool relatively quickly.
So, how long does the transient mechanism last? [in particular during the Maunder Minimum] Presumably when it stops sunspots rapidly form again, right?
William:
No. The sunspots will not reform. The solar magnetic state during a Maunder minimum is different than the solar magnetic state that causes a Heinrich event.
The current solar observations (how the sun has changed over the last 100 years and in particular in the last 10 years) appear to indicate that the solar magnetic cycle has been interrupted which will lead to Heinrich event as opposed to a Maunder minimum which is a very weak solar magnetic cycle.
I have worked back from the earth observations (Assuming what has happened on the earth cyclically has a physical cause then each of the earth observations in the different time periods can be used to determine how the sun changes over 8000 to 10000 years). Everything that has happened in the past and that will happen in the future has a physical explanation. The paleo climatic analysis over the last 10 years has gradually eliminated other hypothesized mechanisms, ocean current changes was the primary alternative and an assumed super high sensitivity to forcing change that could amplify small changes.
How the planet is currently reacting to an increase in atmospheric CO2 indicates the planet resists forcing changes. If the planet resists forcing changes, then the past cyclic abrupt climate changes were caused by a very strong forcing function. For both of those reasons, I believe what I am proposing (In fact, what I am proposing is basically taken from other peer reviewed papers. What is new is looking into multiple specialties in different fields following and looking for related anomalies.) is the only physically viable solution.
Oh, and be sure to read the comments. Rob Honeycutt tosses in for SkS with the usual talking points along with what appears other drones from SkS.
William Astley says:
May 27, 2013 at 8:06 pm
—————————-
What he said.