Are We in a Pause or a Decline? (Now Includes at Least April* Data)

IMO we are continuing upward at a lower rate (about 0.1C per decade) than the satellite record (about 0.13 or 0.14C per decade). That rate is unlikely to continue and would be mild warming anyway. The reason we are not likely to continue upward is that the sun has rolled over and we have yet to feel the effects of that due to thermal inertia. We should see a real downtrend in a few years, probably 10 at the most.

When you show the previous increase of temperatures–the one that we are supposedly no longer experiencing–you attribute it to “little ice age recovery” when the overwhelming number of scientific studies, evidences and historical temperature analyses show that this warming had nothing to do with “recovery” of the little ice age.
that being said. I find it a little disturbing that you seem to think that the surface of the earth is the only warming that matters. What I mean to say is that, under certain variable conditions, like the negative PDO we have been experiencing, there is greater mixing of water in the oceans which causes more of the heat energy to be moved to the deeper ocean. When this happens (surface mixing) the upwelling currents cause the sea surface temperature to cool.
right now about 98% off the warming that is occurring is happening in the oceans. Only 2% of the heat is actually going into the air and land surface. Even with 98% of the heat going into the oceans, 9 out of the 10 hottest years in recorded history globally have occurred in the last decade.
http://blogs.agu.org/wildwildscience/2013/01/16/nasa-2012-was-9th-warmest-year-on-record-the-9-warmest-years-have-all-occurred-since-1998/
how you can say that this indicates a “cooling” or a “stagnation” is beyond me.
I look at northern hemisphere land surface temperatures only. I disregard south latitude sea temperatures. Because the majority of our food and population is grown on the land in the northern hemisphere.

Hey , if you want to know whether a dataset shows warming or cooling look at the rate of change.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/-temp/from:2010/plot/gistemp/from:2010/derivative/plot/uah/from:2010/derivative/plot/rss/from:2010/derivative/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2010/derivative/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2010/derivative/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:2010/derivative
Now if someone know how to trick the crippled WFT interface into putting a grid on the plots or plotting a line at y=0 so we don’t have to guess where zero is or put a piece of paper across the screen that would be a real plus as well.

“A Pause or a Decline”
Makes absolutely no difference since we can’t do a ding, dong doodily bit about it.
I would like it much warmer though

peter ward…you answered right!!

Werner, it is not a Pause nor a Decline, but a slowly DECLINING PLATEAU, the
very top of a sine wave: http://www.knowledgeminer.eu/eoo_paper.html
Akasofu makes the mistake of using a LINEARY recovery line from the Little
Ice Age…..he should have extended this recovery line 3- to 400 years or more
back in the past, then the sine line would have surfaced…..therefore, his future
projection with a lineary increase is wrong…..cheers JS

My projection is for the next 3 years that only an El Nino year will make it into the top ten warmist years. For the following five years even a super El Nino year will struggle After that it will be two decades before a year makes it into the top ten.

jai mitchell says:
June 9, 2013 at 1:13 pm
I find it a little disturbing that you seem to think that the surface of the earth is the only warming that matters. …..right now about 98% off the warming that is occurring is happening in the oceans.
If 98% of the heat is going into the oceans, then we do not have to worry about global warming anymore. Who cares if the deep ocean warms from 3.0 to 3.2 degrees or whatever the amount is? Due to the laws of thermodynamics, the deep oceans have to get above 15 C to make the air warmer than 15 C. And there are simply not enough fossil fuels around to enable us to get anywhere close to raising the deep ocean temperature to 15 C.
NOAA says the following:
”The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/climate-assessment-2008-lo-rez.pdf
I am not aware of NOAA changing the goal posts as to what is important with regards to validating the climate models.

jai mitchell says:
June 9, 2013 at 1:13 pm
9 out of the 10 hottest years in recorded history globally have occurred in the last decade
It seems to me that you are not counting the MWP and a few other periods. However, at the same time, with RSS, 2012 ranks 11th, and 2011 ranks 13th, and 2008 is 22nd. So three of the last five years are not even be in the top ten!
That is why we are talking about a “cooling” or a “stagnation”.

Paul Homewood says:
June 9, 2013 at 2:18 pm
Werner Brozek
As far as I know, HADCRUT3 has been discontinued now.
Paul
————————————————-
Paul, I emailed the MO back in Jan on the subject of the discontinuation of HadCRUT3 and its constituent parts and received the following:-
“The plan is to keep both HadSST2 and HadSST3 running in parallel for a while”
Now how long is a while? Maybe a while is no longer than now?

Here in the UK the trends in the weather patterns since 2007 are pointing towards a decline.
The big question about how long it will remain, is still unknown.
But here in the UK at least all the signs are that its beginning to bed in.

Donald L. Klipstein says:
June 9, 2013 at 2:24 pm
However, the 1997-1998 spike was a century-class one.
That is true, but the La Nina that followed it cancelled it in such a way that the slope is negative so we have 16 years of no warming as well as 13 years of no warming. See:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1997.1/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1997.1/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:2000.1/trend

Donald L. Klipstein says:
June 9, 2013 at 2:24 pm
“Smoothed HadCRUT3 is running around where it was in 2001. We have had 12 years of no warming.”
Well and if you smooth even more you get smooth continuous warming since 1750; such is the nature of smoothing. And?

Dinostratus says:
June 9, 2013 at 3:20 pm
Just a general comment and one only loosely related to this post….
I think we in the post digital error have become too enamored with sin waves. The Fourier transform is one of many, many transforms. It’s very convenient for somethings, especially for describing an oscillating system with no net change of internal energy, systems with rigidly defined boundaries, etc., but that doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with whatever system we might be looking at any particular day. I say that as a person who has used it a lot and seen it mislead or even fail too often.

It is foolish to create a linear ‘projection’ based on the outputs of a chaotic system. Is it any more logical to carry out a Fourier transform on the outputs of a chaotic system?

jai mitchell says:
June 9, 2013 at 4:03 pm
1998 the strongest el nino on record with the highest abnormal sea surface temperatures.

The record is very short, and our understanding of climatic processes is still pretty low. So what is there to worry about again?
Oh, and if you think there is a catastrophe happening, why are you using a computer?

I am very happy that this site is also posting political AGW (I am a scientist and very adverse to politics in science). Its now the only way these guys will stop, for example the Tim Yeo story today (thank god for the internet). Just another domino falling…. but the money trough will have to stop if we are to have any chance in stopping “AGW Climate Science Drivel” LOL

Thanks, JustTheFacts.
Good work.
The best global thermometers, satellites, say we are not warming now.
See http://www.drroyspencer.com/latest-global-temperatures/
Even the HadCRUT4 and NCDC say the same.
See http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut4/diagnostics.html and http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/cmb-faq/anomalies.php
I’ll say the same; We not getting any warmer, maybe a little bit cooler.

jai mitchell says:
June 9, 2013 at 1:13 pm
9 out of the 10 hottest years in recorded history globally have occurred in the last decade.
===================
God you’re a tool………
http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/histo3.png

geran says:
June 9, 2013 at 6:28 pm
===========
..he’s paid by the Koch brothers

jai mitchell:
Some are treating you like a troll, which seems justified. However, you’ve asked a few questions and been given answers. What I’d like to know is, are you actually listening? I’d like to believe that you are a real person who is wanting to find out things, rather than someone just trying to stir up the forum (there have been many of those in the past, which is why people are making the assumption).
So here’s the thing. Nothing you have told us is new to WUWT regulars. We are all more than aware of the things you’ve discussed, including “unprecedented warming”, warmest decade on record, ocean acidification, deep sea warming, etc. We’ve also discussed the inaccuracy of past records, uncertainty of proxies, the fact (not belief, fact) that Mann’s hockey stick is a fabrication, not science.
We are also aware that most “climate scientists” hold a certain opinion, but are you aware than “climate scientist” is a new discipline, and in order to get any sort of certification you would need to be of the same mind? Other scientists in other disciplines have clearly pointed out the shortcomings, errors, and outright failures in “climate science”. In fact, many regular commenters at WUWT are scientists.
Facts: the observed temperatures are NOT matching the predictions. There is no credible or observed mechanism for “heat” to flow into the deep oceans, bypassing the atmosphere. The surface temperature record over the last 100 years has been altered, and is not credible in its current, “adjusted” form, while most of the original data is “lost”. The Argo bouys which were deployed to measure ocean temperatures are free floating, which means they tend to follow currents, which are nature’s way of moving HEAT, therefore they will probably always show heating where there is none.
Typically, the majority of WUWT regulars used to believe as you. Asking just a few questions and seeking the answers have made most of us realize that the story we’ve been told is just that: a story. There are far more questions than answers, and the people who were tasked with finding the answers have pretty much made them up to push their own beliefs.
I think if you can stop echoing the AGW line and actually look at what’s being discussed here, you might realize that you, too, are a “skeptic”.

CodeTech
yes, I am a real person. The problem with you folk here is that you are taking an ideological stance that is aligned along political parties. I would estimate that if properly polled, 95% of posters here would agree with the following statement, “socialized government programs intrude on the effectiveness of the free-market system of capitalism and impedes the well being of the population.”
The reason I am saying this is that, without a doubt, the very conservative think tanks and propagandists have been paid very well by those interested in maintaining the status quo. They have found a captive audience in the conservative political camp and most if not all of these are captured ideologically.
———–
when you say there is no “credible” method for heat to flow into the deep oceans, you are denying the fact that we have already measured warming in the oceans. That the amount of warming that has been required to produce the measured warming would raise land surface temperatures by over 10 degrees C.
Even posts on this website speak to the fact that surface winds produce cool sea surface temperatures. What they don’t say is that this is simply due to mixing with colder water below.
What they also don’t say is that it is the temperature differential that drives heat exchanges so a cooler surface temperature MUST absorb more heat energy than a warmer one.
The fact is that the hundreds of millions of dollars spent by the coal and oil lobby to prevent responses to climate change is the dominant player. And there are people out there who are paid to lie. Like Bill Happer (Marshall Institute) who recently went on the CNBC (financial news) and stated that we would be “fine” if CO2 went to 4000 ppm since our early ancestors survived “ok” then.
what he didn’t say is that our early ancestors at that time were the size of cats and ate fruit and bugs that they caught with their own hands. That the sea level was 150 feet higher then and that the average temperature was 12C warmer (PETM Maximum)
So basically he is advocating a world where none of our populations centers near water survive, that our fruits and grains fail to germinate and we have a massive depopulation due to heat stress, and water/food resource depletion.
the Marshall institute was revealed during the lawsuits against the tobacco industry as being paid to thwart science and cloud the discussion around second hand smoke by the tobacco industry. They just moved on over to climate change and there are millions of dollars spent over the last 5 years to keep it up in the face of collapsing arctic sea ice loss, record heat waves and droughts, the driest January-February in California state history, and all of the other weather extremes that are going to be coming more and more rapidly now that the arctic has reached a tipping point.
I do wish that there was more discussion that wasn’t based on falsified arguments and conspiracy theory on this site. That is why I stopped by.

I’m fond of saying, albedo rules the climate.
Antarctic sea is increasing at a record rate and a new maximum record looks a certainty. Winter has just begun and there is already sea ice north of the Antarctic Circle.
It’s not widely appreciated that around and below the Antarctic Circle, at the SH summer solstice, gets more daily solar irradiance than any place on Earth. Come the spring there will be a large increase in solar energy that gets reflected back into space.
This a very powerful positive (cooling) feedback, and I believe we will see year after year of increasing SH sea ice.

Frank Mlinar says:
June 9, 2013 at 6:46 pm
The observational data of the first plot appears to be very inaccurate.
I had just plotted the last 16 years and not since 1850. However if you do plot from 1850, the only time in 130 years that both CO2 and temperature went up at the same time is during the 27 years from 1975 to 2002. Is it possible that the sun or ocean cycles or CFCs were responsible for this simultaneous rise rather than CO2? See:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1880/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1880/to:1910/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1910/to:1945/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1945/to:1975/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1975/to:2002/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2002/to:2014/trend/plot/esrl-co2/from:1958/normalise

cool sea surface temperatures, according to this site, are caused by increased winds pushing warm water across the sea, leaving the cold water (deeper water) behind. This is called mixing.
Pushed across the sea where? This isn’t mixing at all. Mixing involves moving warmed surface water down into cold water at depth. The problem with this is that warmed surface water literally floats on top of colder water underneath. It is as difficult to push down into the cold water as it is to push a beach ball down underwater (at the appropriate scale). You might want to take a look at the temperature profile of ocean water:
http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/Water/temp.html
Note well that the time required for any significant mixing in depth to occur is very, very long. Note also that (as Bob Tisdale has made very clear in repeated studies of sea surface temperatures published in articles on this site) with the exception of ENSO–related events, sea surface temperatures have been nearly perfectly flat over extended periods of time. Since the ocean covers 70% of the Earth’s surface and we are supposedly talking about GLOBAL warming, the fact that ocean temperatures are not rapidly increasing (on the contrary, they are warming at most very, very slowly) is a good thing, is it not?
Finally, it is a bit early to conclude that we know where the “missing heat” is going in spite of claims to the contrary. There are serious problems still with the ARGO data, although there is also hope than in time it will become as reliable as the satellite data. In the meantime, the satellite data is by far the most reliable metric for global temperature out there — it is truly global, for one thing, it isn’t corrupted by sampling bias, “adjustments”, and the UHI effect, and it directly measures the warming of the troposphere, that is, the part of the atmosphere below the stratosphere where we actually live. The satellite data (as indicated above) shows more or less no warming at all for somewhere between twelve and sixteen years. This is strongly confirmed by radiosonde data — soundings — collected by balloons. The warming observed is remarkably less than that predicted by any of the general circulation models — this has to be counted as a significant failure of the physics and/or parameters used in those models.
It is really quite difficult to imagine how all of the heat that should be appearing in the troposphere is instead going into the deep ocean without appearing as surface warming first. Things warm from the inside out, and as I noted above, thermal expansion and Archimedes principle work against downward mixing, which is why almost all of the ocean is at a temperature of 4 C! (See the graph linked above). This is the temperature where water attains its maximum density. To give you an idea of how much “warming” is being claimed for a (comparatively small fraction) of the thermocline — if all of that supposed warming (0.1 C over fifty years, although the article here is not terribly specific about where that warming occurred as it certainly didn’t happen in the deep ocean below the thermocline) were subtracted from the curve on the linked article and plotted on the same graph, you could not possibly distinguish them.
Note well the absurdity of the claim, BTW. The ocean covers 70% of the planet. It is far from homogeneous in temperature anywhere BUT below the thermocline. Even now, there are the merest handful of ARGO buoys compared to the vast, vast area, let alone depth, of the ocean, and ARGO has been semi-complete and taking data on a global basis for at most a handful of years, nothing even close to 50. Any sane estimate of probable error in the temperature estimates obtainable under the best possible circumstances from the best possible instrumentation would surely be many times 0.1 C — remember, they have to measure the temperature profile at depth more or less everywhere in the ocean to get a reliable estimate. So one should probably read this supposed increase as 0.1 C plus or minus 0.3 C or even 0.5 C. Note well that we can measure temperatures on the land far more easily and even there the published estimated errors (when you can find them) are order 0.1 C or more. Yet another reason to trust the satellite data over both the land data and (so far) the sea data.
In the 33 years or so of reliable satellite observations of global troposphere temperatures — which includes the bulk of the so called “hockey stick” — global temperatures have increased at an average, linearized rate of a bit over 0.1 C/decade. Currently they are only 0.17 C or thereabouts over the 30 year mean, and falling. And as noted above, they have been more or less stable ever since the 1997-1998 “Super El Nino” that is almost certainly the proximate cause of the last and only significant warming spell the planet experienced over the entire satellite record, where global temperatures jumped 0.3 C or so in just one year, then fell back, then stabilized around the current flat to slightly decreasing level.
The really funny thing is that there has been no discernible warming from the time that the IPCC succeeded, by dint of Al Gore’s book and movie and an “unprecedented” public relations campaign, in convincing the public that we were certain to warm at a uniform, catastrophic rate for the rest of the century. That prediction, at least, is categorically and manifestly untrue. Perhaps we will one day resume warming. Perhaps not. But we certainly didn’t keep warming as all of the GCMs claimed that we should, which is precisely why everybody is now scrabbling around looking for the missing heat. It is “missing” because it was supposed to warm, and didn’t. The seas were supposed to rise dramatically, and they haven’t, and aren’t. The world’s icepack was all supposed to be dramatically melting, but global ice is almost perfectly normal, with the deficit in the arctic balanced by a substantial (all time record) surplus in the antarctic.
This leaves catastrophic anthropogenic global warming enthusiasts in a difficult position. In law it might be called habeus corpus — the need to produce a body before you go around trying somebody for murder.
Is it really so very unreasonable to require nature to produce some actual, definitively athropogenic, global warming before spending trillions of dollars preventing what may be a phantom, and condemning millions of people to a life of misery and poverty and disease and death as a consequence? Because every dollar you spend on inflated energy prices and measures intended to combat global warming condemns somebody in the third world to wait a little bit longer living in an energy impoverished state that you literally cannot imagine living in. You worry about a 0.1 C rise in the ocean temperature, a substantial fraction of which could not possibly have been caused by carbon dioxide. They worry about how to light their huts at night with a small smoky fire, where to find dried cow dung to burn for light and cooking, where to find water that isn’t infected with horrific parasites, how to get medical care for their children and food for their table, all without affordable energy.
If you asked them to vote — take a chance on an additional 1.6 C temperature increase by the end of the century or remain in abjectly miserable energy poverty for the rest of their lives, a human sacrifice to your certain vision of doom and disaster (while you, of course, continue to live with electric lights and clean water throughout) — how do you think they would vote? All 3 or 4 billion of them?
rgb

@ jai.
‘I would estimate that if properly polled, 95% of posters here would agree with the following statement, “socialized government programs intrude on the effectiveness of the free-market system of capitalism and impedes the well being of the population.”’
You may be right about that. Since I am an unrepentant old socialist, though, I feel I can respond to your claim ‘The problem with you folk here is that you are taking an ideological stance that is aligned along political parties.’
Let us suppose that all, and not just some, of the commenters here are swivel-eyed, foam flecked, ravening right-wingers, obsessed with reds under the beds, and full of Thatcherite ambitions to plunge us back into Victorian slums.
Even so, their politics are irrelevant. The big question is
“Are they right?”, for even total loonies can be right about some things.
And that is a question to be answered by facts and scientific reasoning.
‘I do wish that there was more discussion that wasn’t based on falsified arguments’
Please show how the arguments have been falsified. Give the facts and the scientific reasoning for your position, and then see what response you get.
‘and conspiracy theory on this site.’
When you say ‘the very conservative think tanks and propagandists have been paid very well by those interested in maintaining the status quo’, that sounds rather like a conspiracy theory to me.

@rgbatduke
‘The really funny thing is that there has been no discernible warming from the time that the IPCC succeeded, by dint of Al Gore’s book and movie and an “unprecedented” public relations campaign, in convincing the public that we were certain to warm at a uniform, catastrophic rate for the rest of the century.’
That proves that Al Gore stopped Global Warming and saved us all.

jai mitchell said @ June 9, 2013 at 8:57 pm

@rgbatduke
you have so many misunderstandings about the basics it makes me wonder if you are actually doing this to purposefully lie.

Now that’s really funny!

Folks, Jai Mitchell has repeatedly quoted temperature rise figures from GCM estimates as “fact”… i.e. Jai Mitchell is an unreasonably persistent troll. Jai Mitchell completely disregards any changes to the southern hemisphere due to its higher percentage of water, which has been demonstrably cooling, as evidenced by the record, or near-record Antarctic ice sheets, yet has the gall to shriek “the oceans are warming” over and over. Jai Mitchell is a troll and should be eliminated from serious discussions from this point forward. I come to this site to learn about and to research the Earth’s coming climate, in order to best protect and provide for my family. Jai’s posts add nothing at all, and merely distract the more-knowledgeable into diverse side arguments which decide nothing and waste precious resources (space and time in these forums). I’m not saying that Jai shouldn’t be allowed to post; just please, from now on, stick to the topics and do not feed the troll! LOL

Just came back here to read Jai Mitchell’s evidence for an increase in ocean mixing and the end of stratification as we know it.
I find
jai mitchell says:
June 9, 2013 at 4:03 pm
“I can explain it in a second.”
“cool sea surface temperatures, according to this site, are caused by increased winds pushing warm water across the sea, leaving the cold water (deeper water) behind. This is called mixing.”
That sounds like Jai is a twelve year old.
Listen Jai, go to the wikipedia, read up about stratification, and read about El Nino / La Nina, where they explain the prevailing theory about in which depth the temperature changes happen; you might be surprised that it all happens above the stratified layer;
and please inform yourself that the first 3 m of the ocean contain as much heat as the entire atmosphere, just to put things in prespective.

barry says:
June 9, 2013 at 9:43 pm
So you are deliberately choosing your start date to find the trend you want
I did not “choose” any date. The last date is the most recent month for which WFT had data and I had no choice in that. The furthest date in the past was where the slope is very slightly negative. I did not “choose” that date either. I just went where the data took me to find the longest period of no warming.
The slightly negative trends picked out are not statistically significant either. Doesn’t this rate a mention?
It does rate a mention and I did mention it: “As shown, the first half shows a small rise and the last half shows a small decline. Note that neither the rise in the first half nor the drop in the last half is statistically significant.”
The most you could say from this analysis is that it is not possible to say there is a trend.
The following 7 data sets show a small, but insignificant negative trend since January, 2005: UAH, RSS, HadCRUT4, HadCRUT3, Hadsst2, GISS and NOAA. I now have a question for you that I do not know the answer to: Does the fact that all 7 have a negative trend since January 2005 increase the probability that we really did have cooling since then?
Regarding your other question about the 95%, I really do not like that distinction. I prefer to think of the straight line sections that have a 50% chance of going either up or down. For some reason, climate science and NOAA seem to think the 95% number is important.
As to whether the short-term flattish trends continue, that would seem unlikely at the present rate of GHG emissions. The climate sensitivity estimates have a wide range, but they tend to agree that warming must continue.
However the ocean cycles and the sun and negative feedbacks could nullify the effects of more CO2.

This is why I love this site. People of different stripes are allowed to express their views. Alarmists, sceptic, none are snipped unless totally abusive. Even trolls like jai(oneworldnet in disguise) are allowed. Compare to the warmists sites. There is only one problem…nice guys finish last,and the warmists are not nice guys. Food for thought.

I did not “choose” any date. The last date is the most recent month for which WFT had data and I had no choice in that. The furthest date in the past was where the slope is very slightly negative. I did not “choose” that date either. I just went where the data took me to find the longest period of no warming.

Looking for the furthest date for a negative trend does not indicate that cooling has happened if that trend is mathematically non-significant.

Does the fact that all 7 have a negative trend since January 2005 increase the probability that we really did have cooling since then?

Not when the uncertainty is so much greater than the trend. And the data sets are correlated: surface sets have overlapping station data, and the satellites are measuring the same data.
If you are going to posit no warming due to lack of statistical significance, then the same must apply to cooling or there is a double standard.
If you think positing a result and then tracing data to back to the most recent point is valid, what do you think of my argument of tracing back the data to a point where statistical significance is reached? Aren’t results with statistical significance more meaningful than those without?

About a year ago I made a fit to HADCRUT3 data which included a logarithmic dependence on CO2 forcing, and sinusoidal signals at 60 years, 11 and 9 years. The logarithmic dependence assumes a linear climate response to CO2 forcing (DS = 5.3LnC/C0). I used the Mauna Loa CO2 data extrapolated backwards to 1750. I got a good fit with a strong 60 year signal – see graph here
I then extrapolated this fit forwards in time assuming 2 different emissions scenarios from IPCC. – A1B and B1. The result is shown here
If we take the more reasonable B1B scenario then we find.
o Temperatures remain flat until 2030.
o Thereafter occurs another warming period of ~0.5C ending in 2070.
o Then another flat period lasting until 2100.
o Total global warming from pre-industrial times to 2100 is then ~ 1.7C
So assuming that warming is only caused by CO2 and no action whatsoever was taken to curb emissions – nothing catastrophic happens !

barry says:
June 9, 2013 at 10:51 pm
The mid-range model ensembles include runs that have flat trends for 10, 15 and 20 years. Where do this ‘ilk’ say that a pause could not happen?
That does not seem to jibe with what NOAA thinks. The exact quote from pg 23 is:
”The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/climate-assessment-2008-lo-rez.pdf
barry says:
June 10, 2013 at 12:00 am
If you think positing a result and then tracing data to back to the most recent point is valid, what do you think of my argument of tracing back the data to a point where statistical significance is reached? Aren’t results with statistical significance more meaningful than those without?
The reason I am mentioning this here as well is that yes, your “argument of tracing back the data to a point where statistical significance is reached” is very valid. The only issue is that when you do this, you reach a time of greater than 15 years and according to NOAA, the models show a “discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate”.
Looking for the furthest date for a negative trend does not indicate that cooling has happened if that trend is mathematically non-significant.
If you are referring to my flat lines with a slope of perhaps 5 x 10^-6, I do not even consider those as showing cooling, but rather as showing no slope. But the lines with a slope of 5 x 10^-3 show a slight cooling which is not significant.

Kevin Trenberth has a model that “shows” that the heat is going into the ocean but he doesn’t know why (“This result suggests that changes in the atmospheric
circulation are instrumental for the penetration of the
warming into the ocean, although the mechanisms at work
are still to be established.”).
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50382/abstract
Hm, how do we call it when we have a model that does a hindcast correctly but we have no mechanism? Numerology, right?
Nuccitelli loves it:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/new-research-confirms-global-warming-has-accelerated.html
So Trenberth and Nuccitelli are both numerologists.

If a scientist wanted to claim that there had been a pause in the underlying rate of warming, or that the temperatures were declining, SOLELY ON THE BASIS OF THE OBSERVATIONS, then normal scientific practice would require them to show that there is statistically significant evidence to support this claim. If someone can give detais that show that there is statistically significant evidence for a change in the rate of warming, then lets see it. I very much doubt that such evidence will be forthcoming as the confidence intervals include both 0 and 0.2 degrees per decade (i.e. the IPCC projected rate of warming) and so the observations don’t rule out either hypothesis. For the evidence for a change in the rate of warming to reach statistical significance, the error bars would have to exclude the long term rate of warming.
Note the lack of statistically significant warming does not imply that there has been no warming, just that the observations do not effectively rule out the possibility that there has been no warming. Statistical hypothesis tests are not symmetric.
Note also that claims of global warming are not made solely on the basis of observed global surface temperatures, for example there is also ocean heat content etc.
Lastly, cherry picking the start dates invalidates the test anyway.

What has happened is that when the Pacific gets to a certain threshold warmth (other conditions being equal), the rising air from the heated surface waters of the El Nino reinforces and strengthens the eastern trade winds. And these strengthened winds simply blow the warm surface water mass to the west, where it divides and goes towards both poles. This exposes the atmosphere to the cooler waters from below
This is just a description of ENSO, and is how the ocean COOLS — the warmer water that goes to the poles cools as it moves. I’m still waiting for a description of how heat gets transferred down into the deeper ocean in this process. Warm water on top of cold water is stable. Warm water on top of REALLY cold water at the poles is REALLY stable. Also, this is hardly “missing heat” — this is SEA SURFACE TEMPERATURE, the part that has failed to warm while the subsurface water that you allege is warming has supposedly warmed.
ENSO has been happening forever, since long before CO_2 levels were rising. It may well have been a factor in surface warming ever since the ice age. It is not, however, a good place or mechanism to look for “missing heat” in.
you are again not understanding basic hydrology and surface mixing due to wind and wave action.
what do you suppose causes the thermoclines in the first place???
mixing and pooling in the subsurface layers
Yes, a process that has been going on for a very long time, that has a very, very long relaxation time, and that has to respond to heat that first appears on the surface. Now, please explain how the heat magically appears far below the surface without first being observable in the sea surface temperature records> for the last 16 years, which are flat since the 1997-1998 super-ENSO.
Bear in mind that the people that are trying to credibly explain this are making noises about things like ultraviolet radiative heating that bypasses the atmosphere and that pesky surface layer that isn’t heating because it has a phenomenally efficient latent-heat-driven surface cooling mechanism, in addition to being basically opaque to IR.
when you said,
that is almost certainly the proximate cause of the last and only significant warming spell the planet experienced over the entire satellite record
you are neglecting the fact that the globally warmest years have all been since 2000.
http://blogs.nicholas.duke.edu/thegreengrok/files/2012/07/temperaturerankings.jpg

Have you actually ever looked at the thermal record of the Holocene? Somebody posted a graph of it earlier, but I’m guessing you must have skipped it. Try this one:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
although there are better ones. Note well two specific features of this graph. First, the LIA that you blithely dismiss is an outstanding climatological milestone on this graph by virtue of being the coldest point in the entire Holocene. That’s right, the coldest single feature since the Younger Dryas. Note also that on this curve there is nothing unremarkable about the current temperature, nothing at all remarkable about the fact that the world warmed after the coldest fluctuation observed in a chaotically fluctuating series, nothing remarkable in the assertion that the warming that began at the end of the LIA continues today. The second point is that plotting the current temperature fluctuations on an annual or monthly scale is not an apples to apples comparison (although everybody who wishes to sell something does it). This curve is coarse grain averaged — necessarily, because the data is so averaged — over a comparatively long time period to eliminate the statistical noise of unknown dynamics with shorter time periods and reveal real climate trends. Trends that, I should point out, we cannot explain in any way that works! We have no idea why this curve looks the way that it does. We have no idea what it would look like if humans didn’t even exist. We therefore have very little idea what the human contribution to the overall curve is. If I were to point out an additional feature to make it a triplet look at the implicit uncertainty in the curve! This curve shows the kinds of variation visible in different proxy determinants of past climate, and each of the underlying (colored) curves has its own error bars (unshown, because nobody ever shows error bars on climate curves because then our ignorance would be revealed in a way that any idiot could see).
Eyeballing it, it looks like we don’t really know global temperatures over any time frame up to the very modern era indeed — really the satellite era — within perhaps 1-2 C. There are always enormous, often partially cancelling oscillations in local surface temperatures, oscillations that last centuries, oscillations where the northern hemisphere (for example) warms and the souther hemisphere cools or vice versa. We don’t understand this. We don’t really understand much of anything about the climate, and the GCMs that all of the belief in CAGW is based on fail badly to even agree with each other within 1 C, and are currently diverging rapidly from the actual observed global temperature.
Now, if you want to argue that the present is the warmest time in 300 to 400 years, no argument — warming from the LIA. It is basically impossible to determine if it is the warmest since the MWP. It is probably NOT the warmest similar period since the Roman Warm Period. Both of these previous warm periods occurred naturally, without human help. The LIA occurred naturally, without human help. Finally, given that the temperature is fluctuating around a more or less stable 16 years high (since the 1997-1998 ENSO) it is hardly surprising that a lot of years occur in the top ten. That doesn’t mean that the globe is still discernibly warming in this stretch, only that it warmed in the past. Indeed, as both the lower troposphere temperature and the sea surface temperature make rather clear, it only warmed in specific, discrete increments associated with ENSO — hardly the behavior one expects from a continuously increasing locally linear stimulus response (to CO_2) model, eh?
you have so many misunderstandings about the basics it makes me wonder if you are actually doing this to purposefully lie.
Ah, now the ad hominem starts. But no matter Obi-Wan. Feel free to instruct me and repair my ignorance. Bear in mind that I’m the author of several physics textbooks as you do so, although I freely confess that climate science is merely a hobby, not a profession. So although I’ve worked through e.g. Grant Petty’s First Course in Atmospheric Radiation and Caballero’s book on climate physics, I’m quite certain that my ignorance is profound, because I cannot yet explain the thermal record of the last 16,000 years, the last 2000 years, the last 500 years, or the last 100 years. Can you?
If so, let me know. Right after you explain what measurably changed in ENSO or the laws of physics to permit “missing heat” to somehow bypass the surface layer and end up in the thermocline.
And at your leisure, you might instruct me about the “missing error bars” in the entire general field of climate science. I’d argue that this is by far the more pressing of the missing items.
especially when you say,
take a chance on an additional 1.6 C temperature increase by the end of the century or remain in abjectly miserable energy poverty for the rest of their lives
you are assuming 1. that it will only be 1.6C when the real range is going to be from 4-6′C with a final ESS of 8-10C
Horseshit. Not even a decent minority of climate scientists think this anymore. The current AR5 report might end up as high as 2.5 C, but there is (as is completely expected!) considerable pressure due to the fact that there has been no discernible warming for 12-16 years and the predictions and data are diverging, with the data looking remarkably like the “no increase in CO_2” prediction curve. Climate sensitivity is dropping like a rock, constrained by the data. Is your last name really Hansen? I thought he was the only person left who believed his own crack…
2. That fixing it will lead to poverty.
I ask you only 1 question: regarding number 2 above,
What was the event that caused the U.S. to get out of the great depression and develop a globally defining economic engine?
World war 2, of course. I’m actually not an idiot.
And, bonus question IF you get that one right.
what was the U.S. response to the event that was the catalyst for the economic growth???
Building lots of war materials and sending vast numbers of the unemployed off to fight and die overseas. Inventing deficit spending and ways of inflating the money supply.
But of course you miss my point. In the United States, no matter what we do that spends money like water it can “stimulate the economy”, or not. Whether or not it does depends in great measure on how money balances out deep within the banking industry. This is utterly irrelevant to the problems of the third world. The third world — and I grew up in New Delhi, India, and have seen more poverty outside of my back door than you can even imagine — is suffering right now from energy poverty. You might recall that the electrification project back in the earlier part of the century — wait, you weren’t going to assert that it was that that brought an end to the Great Depression, were you? Silly beanie — instantly raised the standard of living throughout the US, and more or less defined “civilization”, at least where citizens had jobs and could afford even comparatively cheap electricity (which was generally less expensive than other forms of lighting and enabled the production and delivery of safe, clean water from something other than hand pumped wells and hence put an end to the outhouse society).
When you make carbon based energy artificially more expensive, you know what you do? You kick a state like California into a depression that continues there even though it is over nearly everywhere else. You kick the entire continent of Europe into a monetary crisis so profound that they are abandoning the carbon trading ponzi scheme like the hot potato it always was because a) there hasn’t been any discernible warming over the entire lifetime that the scheme has been in place and b) it has cost Europe several times the collective debt of the nations in financial crisis. Given that energy is the critical resource upon which all economies survive, raising energy prices is purely inflationary or, in the case of countries like Greece or Italy that are already marginal economically, enough to push them entirely underwater.
This is, however, a tiny fraction of the impact it has in the third world. There, the impact is — no impact at all. It is the mere continuation of an impoverished life straight out of the nineteenth century — energy poverty. No electrical lights. No electrical heat or air conditioning. No clean water, no sanitation systems. No power to drive new industry to permit people to raise themselves out of poverty and build a 21st century economy.
This impact is the real catastrophe, and it is happening right now. You are obviously ready to allege that we should be fearing Hansen’s hallucinatory 5 meter ocean rise by the year 2100, while the actual rate of SLR might add ten whole inches by 2100, if it is sustained. I suggest you meditate upon just how rapid an ocean rise is required to produce his “catastrophe”, and just how non-catastrophic the roughly ten inch rise over the last century has been.
rgb

Brilliant reply Dr.Brown, to the lousy third rate troll who is not even fit to lace your boots.

The 60 year multidecadal sine wave is superimposed on the “Recovey of the Little Ice Age” linear upward trend of Akasofu. Just by calling it a “recovery” doesn’t make the warming trend sufficiently explained. What is the physical cause of the recovery?

The Pompous Git says:
June 10, 2013 at 12:28 am

In statistics the term significant does not mean important or meaningful. Given sufficient data, a statistically significant result may be very small in magnitude.

I know. I was querying the value of focussing on non-statistically significant trends when statistically significant trends are available with a few more years data.

Given that Hansen’s original paper was based on an interval of 10 years’ warming, then any period of 10 years or greater should be sufficient to weigh against “Hansenist” claims.

Hansen’s model (1981? 1988?) was but one. We have ensembles from the latest IPCC report, which include 10, 15 and 20 year flat trends within a long-term (mid-range) warming scenario.

Note Dr. Syun-Ichi Akasofu’s paper does not surmise when the recovery from the LIA will end, just that it has the appearance his graph depicts.
Would the climate have recovered if humans were not on the planet? Sure, just as similar climate fluctuations have happened even before we humans began walking the planet.
But, I suspect, if we weren’t here we probably wouldn’t care about the changing climate.
Probably.

Paul Clark has just given me a tip to produce a line a zero so I’ve added it to the rate of change plot.
Now we can see directly what years are cooling or not. End of the guessing game.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/-temp/from:2010/plot/gistemp/from:2010/derivative/plot/uah/from:2010/derivative/plot/rss/from:2010/derivative/plot/hadsst2gl/from:2010/derivative/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2010/derivative/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:2010/derivative/plot/rss/scale/from:2010

I still would like to see what “deep ocean heating” look like. Is it similar to the Tropical mid-tropospheric “Hot-spot”? Does warm water sink and cold water rise? Do the oceans actually “store” heat energy in their depths?

Just a comment on the last one. , this is rate of change. So what we see is _deceleration_ started in 1998 and rate of change crossed into negative territory around 2005.
This is exactly the turning point that Willis found in his look at north Pacific yesterday:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/cumulative-monthly-north-pacific-index.jpg

My prediction, based on the UAH data series, is that UAH Global values will average above 0.13 until the end of 2013 and will then drop with minimums below -0.2 through 2014 and return to above the 0.13 figure in 2015/6.
What fancy methodology is the basis for this conclusion you ask? It is just a summary of the UAH Global data so far, the observation of the fairly clear periodic nature in the signal and hence the most probable future based on that data.
http://i1291.photobucket.com/albums/b550/RichardLH/uahtrendsinflectionfuture_zps7451ccf9.png.html
This shows plotting a sequence of moving average filters (in cascade and with particular values designed to remove the digital sampling artifacts that are otherwise created) on the UAH Global data series to identify the major underlying periodic features contained therein. These are evident (in the record and not from any external theory) at 37 months, 4 years and ~60 years. The nodal points indicated are where the various filter outputs ‘cross’ revealing the local ‘zero’ crossings nodal points in the otherwise fairly noisy signal.
Removal of those identifiable cycles would probably reduce the whole series to white noise but that would require much more analysis and, preferably, a much longer data series :-).
In any case it is interesting to pose the question, when is the next falling node due and what value should be placed on it? Also what are the reasons for the above periodic features?
The ones that come to mind are 37 months = Lunar, 4 years = Solar and ~60 years Jupiter? That would mean that tiny lateral tidal/gravitational forces in the atmosphere modify where the jet streams form with consequent (and probably lagged) impacts on Global temperature data.
It is likely that data from RSS data series will show similar charteristics (as they actually come from the same data source after all).
It may also be possible to detect this in the average North/South position of the jet streams which should move based on the above periodicity if the suggestion about gravity being the cause is true.
It is, therefore, possible to claim that all of the observed data variation so far in the UAH Global series can be explained just by using natural periodic cycles of particular periods, phase and magnitudes. This claim is based purely on the data so far collected and the most probable future extention of that data set given the periodic nature of the data observed so far.

wbrozek says:
June 9, 2013 at 10:50 pm
“barry says:
June 9, 2013 at 9:43 pm
So you are deliberately choosing your start date to find the trend you want
I did not “choose” any date. The last date is the most recent month for which WFT had data and I had no choice in that. The furthest date in the past was where the slope is very slightly negative. I did not “choose” that date either. I just went where the data took me to find the longest period of no warming.”
This, folks, IS cognitive dissonance in action.

@rgbatduck
When you make carbon based energy artificially more expensive, you know what you do? You kick a state like California into a depression that continues there even though it is over nearly everywhere else.
—————
California has a 4 billion budget surplus this year.
—————
#2 — WRONG
building lots of war material, and then transforming that domestic spending from war material to be blown up into roads and bridges and other infrastructure.
Just like we will do when you capitulate and realize that you have been sold a flat-earth bill of goods by people PAID to do it by those who want to continue making money selling carbon-based fuels.

barry says:
June 10, 2013 at 6:47 am
Santer et al posited 17-year trends as a minimum for climate studies. Others say more.
From the article:
“For RSS, the slope is flat since December 1996 or 16 years and 6 months. (goes to May) RSS is 198/204 or 97% of the way to Ben Santer’s 17 years. This 97% is real!”
As for Santer’s 17 years and more by others, were any of these time periods quoted 10 or more years ago or is it a matter of people shifting goal posts because the original goal posts were too narrow?

@M Courtney
do you have any idea how many children in the united states have died as a result of ideologically biased, politicized “scientists” who were working for PR firms paid by the tobacco industry worked to cloud the issue regarding the hazards of second hand smoking? At that time it was still legal to smoke in airplanes. . .
These things are well documented in the papers released by Stephen Glantz as a result of the lawsuits against the tobacco industry.
(they also showed how the tobacco industry used cartoons to specifically target children for their products and that they were intentionally manipulating the nicotine levels in their products to make people more addicted).
At the same time the CEOs of the tobacco industry stood up before congress and stated, under oath, that they did not “believe” that nicotine was addictive.
do YOU believe that nicotine is addictive???
If ONLY a scientist could tell you nicotine as addictive or not (based on proven studies and scientific experiments) would you believe it was addictive?
so don’t tell me that evil corporations aren’t interested in killing innocent people and children to make a buck. The fact is, they are and they spend LOTS and LOTS of money doing it.

JP says:
June 10, 2013 at 7:41 am
I still would like to see what “deep ocean heating” look like.
It looks like a desperate ploy to keep the idea of CAGW alive. They love to talk of all the 10^22 Joules that supposedly have gone into the deep ocean, but when you do the calculations, you find it amounts to a small fraction of a degree that you cannot even detect if you were to go from one pool to the next at the slightly higher temperature. Furthermore, if in fact the huge oceans are such a huge buffer that absorbs 98% of the excess heat, then we of course have nothing to worry about. So now the warmists have a further problem, namely to explain how this extra extremely diluted extra heat will somehow concentrate in one place and spike the air temperature.

barry says:
June 10, 2013 at 9:19 am
If we get 25 years of flat or negative trend, then the models are definitely broken.
If we assume this is the new goal post, then in the meantime, are the world governments willing to not waste money on something that may not be a problem after all?

dikranmarsupial says:
June 10, 2013 at 9:47 am
“RichardLH the eye is only too good at seeing signals that don’t actually exist in noise, which is why we have statistics.”
Hmmm. Centered moving average filters are quite good at removing most high pass components in their input. They do have a tendacy to add a ‘ring’ in the output (due to sampling with a square wave) but that can be minimised by multiplying the span value by 1.3371 at each stage which is what is being shown here. This creates a well defined low pass filter with minimal distortions in the output.
In any case what is being detected here is the nodal points. Those lead to the periodic signals. That can be shown with poorer filters as well.
Indeed if you want statistics then by all means distribute the measured values around the curves produced by the interaction of the 37 month, 4 year and ~60 year periodic features visible in the data.

RichardLH, I note that your reply did not contain a statement about how the statistical significance of your oscillation was obtained.
Note I did point out that I accept that there is an oscillation there as there are other lines of physical evidence.

[Snip. Stop it. — mod.]

RichardLH, I note that you are still avoiding the topic of statistical significance. There is nothing wrong with not being able to assess the statistical significance of a finding, there is everything wrong with not being able to admit it and trying to evade the issue. Sorry, life is too short.

jai mitchell says:
June 10, 2013 at 10:06 am
“book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lies_and_the_lying_liars.jpg ”
Book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/When_Prophecy_Fails

RichardLH, that STILL isn’t a test of statistical significance.

dbsteally wrote “Thank you for giving your translation of Phil Jones’ statement.”
actually I read the interview, so I know what he actually said, which was:
“Yes, but only just. I also calculated the trend for the period 1995 to 2009. This trend (0.12C per decade) is positive, but not significant at the 95% significance level. The positive trend is quite close to the significance level. Achieving statistical significance in scientific terms is much more likely for longer periods, and much less likely for shorter periods. ”
Note the part where he relates the difficulty of achieving statistical significance to the length of the period.

wbrozek says:
June 10, 2013 at 9:02 am
“”Henry Galt says:
June 10, 2013 at 8:14 am
This, folks, IS cognitive dissonance in action. “”
Sorry – I was unclear as you probably guessed from my next post.
‘barry’ is a welter of dissonance, some of it cognitive 😉
Your analysis, however, I use all the time and thank you for it here.

dbstealy wrote “…Error bands are only statistical probabilities, not testable reality…”
actually there is a direct equivalence between “error bands” (i.e. confidence intervals) and statistical tests, see http://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/prc/section1/prc15.htm In this case, the test for the statistical significance of a warming trend is to see if the confidence interval excludes zero. However as I said, the lack of statistically significant warming does not imply that there has been no warming, just that the observations do not rule out the possibility that there has been no warming.
If you don’t undestand that, then I am not surprised that you misinterpreted Phil Jones’ statement.

RichardLH a correllation is just a measure of the similarity of two signals, but how do you know if the correllation is high enough to be confident that the apparent correlation does not arise through random chance? That is determined by statistical significance testing. No amount of plotting data and smoothing of the data or visual inspection can determine that, it requeires formal statistical analysis.

dikranmarsupial: I understand correlation which is why I used it. Correlation between the observed data and a peridoicity in that data.
I have no doubt that the distribution in the UAH data into the future will be matched by by a function that only requires white noise and 37 month, 4 year and ~60 year cycles with appropriate phase and magnitude.

RichardLH, you are missing the point, there is nothing wrong with using a correllation, it is a perfectly good statistic for many tasks. The question though is how high a correllation needs to be to be confident it isn’t spurious. This is why scientists go a step further and ask how likely we would see a correllation that high if the observations were simply noise (the usual null hypothesis, but this isn’t always the appropriate choice). They call this the p-value and “reject the null hypothesis” if this probability is below some threshold (commonly 0.05). They do this as a sanity check to avoid jumping to conclusions when they see an apparently good correllation between variables in an analysis (or equivalently the fit of a model). It is this step that you have missed out, but it is a step that involves a fair bit of statistical background. There is nothing wrong with not having this background, but it does mean that you need to be very cautious in interpreting your findings.
As I said, I have no problem agreeeing that there is an oscillation in the data that really does mean somthing about the climate, however the fact that real physical processes can be identified that explain it is much better evidence than a correllation. I am a statistcian and as such I am normally much more easily convinced by physics than I am by statistics, as I know how easy it is to be misled by statistics unless you take the proper steps, such as hypothesis testing (which is deeply flawed, by a useful sanity check nevertheless).

dikranmarsupial: Have you looked at the data analysis I provided? Does it represent a fair summary of the data so far? Is it reasonable to assume that it provides at least some clue as to the likely future?

RichardLH, you are still missing the point. There is a good reason why scientists use statistical hypothesis testing. I’ve tried to explain it to you, but you don’t seem to be listening. It does provide a clue, but (a) why bother with a “clue” when there is an “physical explanation” and (b) why pay attention to a “clue” when no attempt has been made to establish whether the clue is likely to be spurious? Getting to grips with the data is a good thing, but don’t stop at plotting graphs, move on to the next step and you will have a really useful tool for spotting and refuting bogus arguments.

I understand how and why scientists use statistics to demonstrate vadility in their conclusions.
You evaded my question, Does my data summary represent a fair view of the dtaa so far and its likely future?

dikranmarsupial says:
June 10, 2013 at 10:48 am
Note the part where he relates the difficulty of achieving statistical significance to the length of the period.
That is very true. But it is also true that if there were decent warming, then it could be seen in 16 years as the following shows. Note the second row.
Start of 1995 to end 2009: 0.135 +/- 0.147. Warming for 15 years is not significant.
Start of 1995 to end 2010: 0.138 +/- 0.132. Warming for 16 years is significant.
Start of 1995 to end 2011: 0.111 +/- 0.121. Warming for 17 years is not significant.
Start of 1995 to end 2012: 0.098 +/- 0.112. Warming for 18 years is not significant.
And the present situation is that since July 1994 the number is 0.102 ±0.103 °C/decade (2σ). That is almost 19 years.

Henry Galt says:
June 10, 2013 at 11:08 am
Sorry – I was unclear as you probably guessed from my next post.
Thank you for clarifying that.

dikranmarsupial says:
June 10, 2013 at 11:57 am
“This isn’t rocket science, it is normal scientific practice 101.”
Normal science is, if you observe patterns in a data set then you try and determine how those patterns arise and their causes.

Kelvin Vaughan says:
June 9, 2013 at 1:38 pm
Every month this year in Central England has been below the 136 year average and I’m freezing.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I am in the ‘sunny south’ aka mid North Carolina and we have yet to see 90F (32 C) at my local airport. Ten years ago we had 6 days above 90 in April and 17 days above 90 in May. (Summer what Summer?)

Frank Mlinar says:
June 10, 2013 at 11:28 am
What I am saying is until one identifies and accounts for the contributors, one cannot say which way the temperatures are going long term.
Scientists have a pretty good idea what the sun might be doing 2 years from now, but they have no clue if we will have an El Nino or La Nina or neutral conditions 2 years from now. So while we do not know the future, it seems clear we should not spend huge amounts of money on something that may turn out not to be a problem.