The Met Office responds to Doug Keenan's statistical significance issue

The Real Headlines based on the conclusions in the met-offices own paper, should be that the changes since 1880 in the UK temperature best fit a random noise pattern of natural variation. Which should be shouted loud and clear.
Everyone please read the actual conclusions on the MO paper, on their own website.
They are agreeing with Doug Keenan that the change in UK temperatures are basically random noise……

Well, I see it’s .8C over 133 years. My point still stands.

dbstealey
I might be trying to get there but at least I think I know what I said. I said the graph was cherry picked and that I would like to see something from the peer reviewed literature and not from someone’s blog. I don’t know if the graph was peer reviewed or not. It doesn’t say. But I do know better than to take a baldly given graph without context or explanation. Been in the game of understanding data for too long.

I attempted to leave a comment on the Met Office blog. Somehow I question whether it will make it through moderation. Here’s the comment:
Unfortunately, this blog post is full of circular reasoning and unsupported claims.
In #1, you write: “The basis for this claim is not, and never has been, the sole use of statistical models to emulate a global temperature trend. Instead it is based on hundreds of years of scientific advancement, supported by the development of high-quality observations and computational modeling.”
You appear to say the statistical models do not support the claim the temperature trend is too large to be natural but the claim is supported by “high-quality observations and computational modeling.” The issue here is that high-quality observations are at odds with computational modeling. There has been a consistent and significant rise in atmospheric CO2 since 1998 but no clear corresponding rise in temperature.
In #3 you write: “Our judgment that changes in temperature since 1850 are driven by human activity is based on information not just from the global temperature trend, or statistics, but also our knowledge of the way that the climate system works, how it responds to global fossil fuel emissions and observations of a wide range of other indicators, such as sea ice, glacier mass, sea level rise, etc.”
This is circular reasoning. You are saying “We know the physics of atmospheric CO2 are causing global warming because we know the physics of atmospheric CO2 cause warming.” I’m sorry, but that is circular reasoning. It is not science. You have a hypothesis, and it is a reasonable hypothesis – but you cannot allow the hypothesis to dictate what the data is telling you. Statistical analysis of the data is essential to determine is the hypothesis is true or if something else may be in play such as a natural negative feedback to the climate system.
In #4 you write: “Because the Met Office does not make an assessment of global warming solely on statistics – let alone the statistical models referred to in Mr Keenan’s article, this exercise is of very little, if any, scientific use.”
This is clearly wrong. Mathematics is the language of science. If you cannot make your argument based on statistics, then you cannot make your argument.

@dbstealey 0621hours. Even the HADCRUT4 chart is looking like a diverging correlation to CO2:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1979/plot/esrl-co2/from:1979/normalise/offset:0.5/plot/esrl-co2/from:1979/normalise/offset:0.5/trend

Margaret, it happens to all of us from time to time. I think it is caused by a glitch or congestion. Your missing comment will show up soon.

dbstealey says:
June 1, 2013 at 3:04 am
Nick Stokes says:
“…this is topsy-turvy.”
Nick is in Australia, so that is to be expected. ☺
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Carbon dioxide in the Southern Hemisphere must be upside down too. Otherwise, how can Antarctica be explained ?
…… you know, sea ice is a proxy for CO2-induced global warming and all that (crap).

Nick Stokes says:
May 31, 2013 at 9:42 pm
Now we are getting near the same page. I can accept your point. But then I have to add that Keenan’s point seems to be that the MET Office has no reasoned basis for preferring their statistic to his statistic which shows no statistically significant warming. I see nothing in what you have said that conflicts with Keenan’s point. Also, remember that Keenan’s point occurs in the context of a question raised by Parliament.

uff, The admission means unprecedented and unique cannot stand, but the villain charged still looks best for the crime.
Really? Let’s see, of the 0.8 C rise, 0.5 C occurred before CO_2 got off of the industrial peg at “trivial and irrelevant”, clearly part of the general recovery from the LIA (which actually happened, once one de-Manns the collective proxy data. Of the remaining 0.3 C, we have (splitting the rise with the admittedly stupid assumption of extrapolatable linear trends in climate data, an assumption contradicted by the merest glance at the LONG term record but nevertheless an essential part of your analysis of the “best villain”, which assumes implicitly that we know what the temperature SHOULD have been without CO_2 (and without the question begging predictions based on equally unverified assumptions about feedback):
1880 – 1970: 0.5 C
1970 – 2013: 0.3 C
(in round numbers, because another absurdity in the entire discussion is writing these numbers with two or three significant digits and without error bars, when the error bars even for the satellite era are at least 0.1 C and for the bulk of the period are more like 0.5 C).
So over roughly 90 years, we had anywhere from 0 to 1 C warming, followed by 40 year where we had anywhere from 0.2 to 0.4 C warming. If one accounts for the probable error, makes the stupid assumption of linearity, ignores the fact that the LIA was the coldest period in the entire nonlinear temperature record of the Holocene, and considers the temperature record as a whole including the last 16 warming-free years, the big question is — do we believe that a crime has been committed at all?
Perhaps — and I’m just throwing this out there — the victim fell down the stairs of their own accord and cracked their own skull perfectly naturally, and the detective is being paid off to pin it all on Colonel Mustard. Perhaps they are all innocent — Plum, Mustard, Green… — and the real perpetrator is the house itself, with its rickety boards, loose rugs at the tops of stairs, and perhaps the victim’s tendency to tipple a bit too much. Perhaps the victim wasn’t quite dead and Mustard tried to rescusitate her but made the mistake of moving her with the rope and severed her already broken spine — or to leave the silly metaphor behind, perhaps some fraction of the post-industrial rise is anthropogenic — but the net anthropogenic contribution (given that we contribute lots of stuff, some with a warming effect and some with a cooling effect) is likely to be less than the total observed rise.
The historical record indeed does not falsify Anthropogenic Global Warming as a hypothesis, but it comes pretty close to falsifying Catastrophic AGW as a hypothesis. Hansen’s publicly televised claims of 5 meter SLR, his published assertions of boiling oceans and a Venus-like conversion of the Earth’s climate, his claims of (always “possible”, never “certain”, just to make sure that they cannot really be falsified to prove him wrong) 5+ degree climate sensitivity are quietly failing, one after another. AR5 appears likely to backpedal to 2 to 3 C climate sensitivity, and if you sorted out the contributing research by time the sensitivity is in full retreat because the predictions based on the higher sensitivities are all diverging rapidly from the actual climate record. People are looking for “missing heat” in a panic. CAGW has been quietly converted to CACC — Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change — so that any natural climate disaster can now be blamed on greenhouse gases, even though global temperatures are no longer rising. Papers are appearing that predict a rise of 1-2 C by the end of the century — solidly non-Catastrophic — essentially what we might expect from CO_2 alone with net-neutral feedback. AR6 may never occur, because the IPCC might no longer exist in a few years and will not exist if temperatures remain flat or fall a bit in the meantime. Changing CAGW to CACC cannot disguise the growing divergence between fantasy predictions of runaway warming and the reality of flat temperatures in spite of far greater increases in CO_2 concentration than the ones that supposedly kicked off the “hockey stick”.
SLR may, in the end, prove to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back. The ocean is a rather sensitive thermometer. SLR from 1880 to the present has risen (for all of the nonsense about “acceleration” at the end) 9 whole inches, roughly one whole inch for every degree celsius of global temperature rise. Even Trenberth has gone on record recently as predicting (again the silly linear extrapolation) 30 whole centimeters of SLR by the end of the century, which is the absolute upper limit that is justified by the data — so far. That is around 13 inches, so far from “catastrophic” that it isn’t funny — it is a rate that is utterly invisible to nearly everybody, just as the 9 inches over the last 140 years has been. Nearly 100% of the “catastrophic” effects of CACC were to come from Hansen’s — word’s fail me — “egregious”, no, “ergot-derived”, probably not, “exagerrated”, well certainly, fantasy of 5 meter SLR, and when that is taken off of the table all that is left is, well, weather — trying to pretend that category 1 Sandy was our fault instead of the accidental collision of two storms (which happens, but usually out to sea) in the middle of the longest stretch ever recorded without a category 3 or better storm making landfall in the US. The Oklahoma tornado is turned into proof of CACC, ignoring the clear statistical evidence that we are in the middle of a similar stretch of less than normal tornado activity, if anything.
Have they no shame? Is no lie too much to tell to maintain the public perception a) that the Earth is warming (it isn’t, not for 16 years) and b) that we are en route to a climate catastrophe (where there isn’t the slightest shred of evidence of any climate related catastrophe ever, anywhere caused by human beings since we turned goatherds loose in the then-green Sahara and Sahel, which was admittedly a big whoops).
In the real-world game of global climate clue, I suspect a frame job. Perhaps it is time to “arrest” the detectives we trusted to be objective in the case and charge them with egregious perjury (tampering with data, omitting error estimates, rewriting the AR reports after the fact), accepting bribes (all the detectives have jobs in the first place only because there is a presumption of the truth of CAGW, otherwise we would never choose to invest anywhere near as much as we are investing in this sort of research), jury tampering (colluding with the supposedly objective news media to ensure that they only report any climate event from the perspective of “it must be proof of CAGW/CACC”).
But is this really criminal? Many of those involved truly believe that whether or not they are cherrypicking convincing data and arguments and ignoring the confounding ones, the conclusion is true and hence any lie — erm, “bending” of the facts — is (apparently) justified. All I can say is — look at the cost. We have tossed hundreds of billions of dollars down this particular rathole, en route to trillions that it will cost on an ever accelerating basis. This is real money spent now, an ongoing catastrophe quite aside from any imaginary projected future ones. By pursuing this to the point of insanity Europe has pushed itself into a financial crisis that threatens the stability of its currency and could trigger the worst depression there in a hundred years if not a resumption of the once-eternal European wars as people resurrect communism, fascism, or any other “ism” that promises to make things better once again. California has barely recovered from the last financial crisis but continues to crush its citizens under the heel of a repressive and destructive energy policy that easily doubles the cost of energy there compared to fair market value nearly anywhere else. 2/3 of the world’s population is struggling to get to where they have things like clean running water, flushable toilets, washing machines, electric lights — the comforts that we all have had for over 100 years and currently consider to be indispensible to mere human existence and we are relentlessly pumping the cost of energy ever higher (to the delight of the entire energy industry, who knows perfectly well that we can’t afford to live without their products and that is happy to provide them at any inflated price we choose to set as they’ll get their percentage cut off of the gross retail price no matter what).
This is the real catastrophe, the human catastrophe. While we are all arguing about whether or not Mustard killed the GW victim or she died of natural causes,
the detectives are ignoring the riot in the street outside that is causing millions of deaths every year, mostly children, and the continuation of literally untold misery and discomfort compared to our own energy-rich existences for well over half the population of the world.
The climate community, as the priests of the CAGW religion, have turned the entire question of climate change into Pascal’s Wager — sure, CAGW might be wrong, but if it is right the disaster is so great that any cost now to ameliorate it is worth it. This causes us to be blind to the aggregated costs of the amelioration right now, eked out one lost or wasted life at a time. This is not just criminal, to the extent that it is supported by lies or distortions of the truth or political rewriting of AR facts, it is evil.
The only way humans can make good decisions is by basing them on our real best state of knowledge at the time, including the uncertainties. No good purpose is served by claiming that a scientific conclusion as uncertain as CACC, based on dysfunctional GCMs and in increasing disagreement with actual observational data even across the period where they should be most predictive, is established fact. Only when the uncertainty of this assertion and its failure to reasonably agree with the ongoing data is made clear to people can they fairly judge how to risk their money — to alleviate a possible problem in 80 years or the ongoing slaughter of innocents due to energy poverty now.
Personally, I grew up in India. I could look out my back window and see the cost in human misery of energy poverty in the form of a mud hut occupied by a family of five that cooked on cow dung or charcoal when they could get it, lit their home at night (if at all) with a ghee/oil lamp made out of terra-cotta, oil with a twist of cotton burning as a wick. The field behind their house was their bathroom, and I imagine that they were given water by our servants, or carried it from elsewhere as there was no free water to be had in India’s hot, dry climate. To me this is a no-brainer — if there was truly solid evidence of catastrophe in the making, that would be one thing, but based on the actual evidence, diverting the world’s resources away from the plight of world poverty into a boondoggle that actively perpetuates it is one of the saddest things imaginable.
So think about this, the next time that you are contemplating Hansen’s insane claims. The world isn’t just preventing an imaginary catastrophe in a hundred years that isn’t well supported by the data. It is in the middle of an ongoing catastrophe right now, a quiet catastrophe that claims the lives of millions and damages the lives of billions. We have to make rational economic choices between the two. We cannot do this as long as self-serving groups trumpet the imaginary catastrophe as a proven fact and twist every common occurrence into “evidence” that it is actually happening now
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