By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
As Anthony and others have pointed out, even the New York Times has at last been constrained to admit what Dr. Pachauri of the IPCC was constrained to admit some months ago. There has been no global warming statistically distinguishable from zero for getting on for two decades.
The NYT says the absence of warming arises because skeptics cherry-pick 1998, the year of the Great el Niño, as their starting point. However, as Anthony explained yesterday, the stasis goes back farther than that. He says we shall soon be approaching Dr. Ben Santer’s 17-year test: if there is no warming for 17 years, the models are wrong.
Usefully, the latest version of the Hadley Centre/Climatic Research Unit monthly global mean surface temperature anomaly series provides not only the anomalies themselves but also the 2 σ uncertainties.
Superimposing the temperature curve and its least-squares linear-regression trend on the statistical insignificance region bounded by the means of the trends on these published uncertainties since January 1996 demonstrates that there has been no statistically-significant warming in 17 years 4 months:
On Dr. Santer’s 17-year test, then, the models may have failed. A rethink is needed.
The fact that an apparent warming rate equivalent to almost 0.9 Cº is statistically insignificant may seem surprising at first sight, but there are two reasons for it. First, the published uncertainties are substantial: approximately 0.15 Cº either side of the central estimate.
Secondly, one weakness of linear regression is that it is unduly influenced by outliers. Visibly, the Great el Niño of 1998 is one such outlier.
If 1998 were the only outlier, and particularly if it were the largest, going back to 1996 would be much the same as cherry-picking 1998 itself as the start date.
However, the magnitude of the 1998 positive outlier is countervailed by that of the 1996/7 la Niña. Also, there is a still more substantial positive outlier in the shape of the 2007 el Niño, against which the la Niña of 2008 countervails.
In passing, note that the cooling from January 2007 to January 2008 is the fastest January-to-January cooling in the HadCRUT4 record going back to 1850.
Bearing these considerations in mind, going back to January 1996 is a fair test for statistical significance. And, as the graph shows, there has been no warming that we can statistically distinguish from zero throughout that period, for even the rightmost endpoint of the regression trend-line falls (albeit barely) within the region of statistical insignificance.
Be that as it may, one should beware of focusing the debate solely on how many years and months have passed without significant global warming. Another strong el Niño could – at least temporarily – bring the long period without warming to an end. If so, the cry-babies will screech that catastrophic global warming has resumed, the models were right all along, etc., etc.
It is better to focus on the ever-widening discrepancy between predicted and observed warming rates. The IPCC’s forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report backcasts the interval of 34 models’ global warming projections to 2005, since when the world should have been warming at a rate equivalent to 2.33 Cº/century. Instead, it has been cooling at a rate equivalent to a statistically-insignificant 0.87 Cº/century:
The variance between prediction and observation over the 100 months from January 2005 to April 2013 is thus equivalent to 3.2 Cº/century.
The correlation coefficient is low, the period of record is short, and I have not yet obtained the monthly projected-anomaly data from the modelers to allow a proper p-value comparison.
Yet it is becoming difficult to suggest with a straight face that the models’ projections are healthily on track.
From now on, I propose to publish a monthly index of the variance between the IPCC’s predicted global warming and the thermometers’ measurements. That variance may well inexorably widen over time.
In any event, the index will limit the scope for false claims that the world continues to warm at an unprecedented and dangerous rate.
UPDATE: Lucia’s Blackboard has a detailed essay analyzing the recent trend, written by SteveF, using an improved index for accounting for ENSO, volcanic aerosols, and solar cycles. He concludes the best estimate rate of warming from 1997 to 2012 is less than 1/3 the rate of warming from 1979 to 1996. Also, the original version of this story incorrectly referred to the Washington Post, when it was actually the New York Times article by Justin Gillis. That reference has been corrected.- Anthony
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Thank you.
1. Time to point out again that when the warmists convinced the world to use anomaly graphs in considering the climate system they more or less won the game. As Essex and McKitrick (and others) point out, temperature, graphed in Kelvins, has been pretty close to flat for the past thousand years or so. The system displays remarkable homeostasis, and almost no lay people are aware of this simple fact.
2. I would like to make a documentary in which man-on-the-street interviews are conducted where the interviewee gets to draw absolute temps over the last century, last millennium, etc. The exaggerated sense of what has been happening would be hilarious, and kind of sad, to see.
3. The intellectual knots that the warmists have already tied themselves into explaining away the last decade and a half of global temps have been ugly. And, as most here know, I am betting that the ugliness gets uglier for the next decade and a half — at least.
4. Don’t sell your coat.
There can be no CO2-GW, A or otherwise. And even if there were, there could be no positive feedback. CO2 is the working fluid in the control system maintaining OLR = SW thermalised.
This is imposed by irreversible thermodynamics – the increased radiation entropy from converting 5500 K SW to 255 K LW. The clouds adapt to control atmosphere entropy production to a minimum.
Basic science was forgotten by Hansen when the first GISS modelling paper wrongly assumed CO2 blocked 7 – 14 micron OLR and LR warming was the GHE: 1981_Hansen_etal.pdf from NASA. They got funding and fame for 32 years of a scientific scam.
Very nice post …. I made some similar remarks in comments on a John Abrahams / Dana Nuticelli article in the Guardian yesterday – just asking how climate change effects could be “accelerating” when temperatures have not been going up ….. and had my comments repeatedly censored. I woke up this morning to find I am now banned as a commenter. Simply a very sad indictment of the inability of warmest ‘scientists’ to tolerate any form of critique or basic obvious questioning.
Note that “No warming” and “no statistically significant warming” are not the same thing. The most reasonable interpretation of Santer’s statement is that there has to be no measured warming for 17 years, and as is clear from the diagram there has been warming, only not large enough to be statistically significant. The uncertainly is large enough that the data are also consistent with a trend of 0,2 K/decade, i.e., in line with IPCC predictions.
Yes indeed. A few days ago, the Belgian newspaper ‘Metro’, too, wrote that the temperatures are accelerating dangerously. Well heavens…
I am 100% positive I remember Gavin saying 10 years somewhere on ReallywrongClimate. No warming for 10 years, the models were wrong….
Correction: The essay at Lucia’s Blackboard was written by SteveF, not by Lucia.
Re Santer et al. (2011). Is it not the case that this paper explicitly refers to lower troposphere (i.e. satellite) data and that it also explicitly refers to the “observational” data, rather than statistical significance levels?
In other words, all Santer et al. 2011 stated was that we should see a warming trend in the raw satellite data over a period of 17 years. At present that is what we do see in both UAH and RSS (much more so in UAH).
I don’t immediately see what Santer et al. 2011 has to do with statistical significance in a surface station data set such as HadCRUT4.
I keep seeing these graphs with linear progressions. Seriously. I mean seriously. Since when is weather/climate a linear behavorist? The equations that attempt to map/predict magnetic fields of the earth are complex Fourier series. Is someone, somewhere suggesting that the magnetic field is more complex than the climate envelope about the earth? I realize this is a short timescale and things may look linear but they are not. Not even close. Like I said in the beginning, the great climate hoax is nothing more than what I just called it. I am glad someone has the tolerance to deal with these idiots. I certainly don’t.
So how did the climate scientists and the news media including the NYT report the 1998 El Nino? Apocalypse now, I would suggest! So even if the start date was cherry picked, it would be fair game.
Thomas said:
“the data are also…..in line with IPCC predictions.”
Ha, ha, ha, ha!
And the sky is green and the grass is blue…..
No statistically significant warming in 18 years and 5 months:
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1995/plot/rss/from:1995/trend
#Time series (rss) from 1979 to 2013.42
#Selected data from 1995
#Least squares trend line; slope = 0.00365171 per year
No varming in 16 years and 5 months:
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1997/plot/rss/from:1997/trend
#Time series (rss) from 1979 to 2013.42
#Selected data from 1997
#Least squares trend line; slope = -0.000798188 per year
Oh lord…
SteveF wrote Estimating the Underlying Trend in Recent Warming
(“12 June, 2013 (20:10) Written by: SteveF” posted at Lucia’s The Blackboard
This looks like a SteveF provides a major improvement in understanding and quantifying the “shorter” term impacts of solar, volcanoes and ocean oscillations (ENSO) and their related lags. Now hope he can get it formally published.
This post is preaching to the choir (and, with all due respect for Christopher Monckton’s energy in the climate debates, it is by a scientific dilettante, however well-informed and clearly intelligent, to an audience of laypersons–what the failure of climate science, in the present incompetent consensus, has brought us all to). (And I am not one of the many who has a pet theory, and claims to have all the answers–I merely kept my eyes and mind open for clear, definitive evidence of what is really wrong, and found it, as some portion of the readers here well know. I am a professional scientist, a physicist, in the older academic tradition, that knew how to Verify.)
ImranCan’s comment above confirms what so many should already know: The Insane Left (my term for them) only dared to alarm the world with this monumental fraud because they fervently want to believe a benevolent universe (not God, heaven forbid, but only a universe in which “you create your own reality”–one of the great lies of the modern world) has put into their hands an authoritative instrument through which their similarly-fixated political ideology could take over… the western world, at least. The “science” has ALWAYS been “settled”, period, because they NEED it to be, to hold together their fundamentally creaky coalition of peoples bitter, for any reason, against “the old order”. They want a revolution, one way or another. And this is war, one way or another. The best hope for mankind, and especially the western world, is that somehow a growing number of those who have been suborned to the Insane Left will come to their senses, let their innate intelligence come out, and declare their independence and opposition to the would-be tyrants.
Perhaps off-topic, but I am having serious thoughts about why we constantly refer to the “greenhouse effect”. To use a greenhouse is to use a pretty poor analogy; the Earth is not surrounded by a hard shell of “greenhouse gasses”, with air movements and other causes of potential cooling inside strictly regulated. It could be that we are not only barking up the wrong tree, but we are in the wrong garden, in the wrong country – and it is not even a tree!
About 99% of the Earth’s atmosphere (i.e. 20.9% oxygen and 78% nitrogen) is not composed of “greenhouse gasses.” Why not test the idea: find a greenhouse, and remove 99% of the glass, so as to leave a thin web of glass (let us assume this is possible). I doubt you will be able to measure any difference between the “inside” of the greenhouse and outside; however, to “improve” its effectiveness, add 0.05% more glass. Stand back, and watch in amazement as the temperatures soar!
You don’t think someone is trying to sell us a load of snake oil, do you?
ImranCan says at June 13, 2013 at 4:05 am
I also linked to the MET office and showed that temperature rises are not accelerating. In additon I pointed out the theoretical basis for the acceleration was challenged empirically by the lack of the Tropical Hotspot (with a link to Jo Nova).
So I also am now banned from posting at the Guardian. That is, I am subject to “pre-moderation”.
The worst impact of creating this echo-chamber is the decline in the Guardian’s readership. The number of comments on their environment blogs is declining rapidly.
It is a shame that a lively, left-wing forum has decided to commit suicide by out-sourcing moderation to alleged scientists who can’t defend their position.
How long until the advertisers realise?
@ur momisugly MattN
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/a-barrier-to-understanding/
Norman Page asks:
“what year would you reconsider the CO2 – Warming paradigm if the CRU Global annual mean temperature is cooler than 2005 – 2009…?”
Schmidt answers:
“You need a greater than a decade non-trend that is significantly different from projections. [0.2 – 0.3 deg/decade]”
“So I also am now banned from posting at the Guardian.”
Welcome to the newspeak Orwellian media complex, Winston.
Fortunately, we are still free enough in this world to tell the Guardian (and, most importantly, their $ponsor$) to stuff it…
How long before the 17 year test becomes a 25 year test? – just a matter of homogenising!
If memory serves, it seems that the Meteorological community has used the ‘thirty-year’ time frame for standardizing its records, in order to classify climate and climate zones. I suspect that meteorologists might soon suggest that a ‘fifty-year’ or even a ‘sixty-year’ time frame become the standard reference frame.
That would be one way to get around Gavin’s “… seventeen year …” test.
Or, we could just adjust the data some more, to make them fit the models … … … ………
At first there were a few looking for the truth. Then there were more. Soon there were many. Next there was an army marching for the truth. Now the truth goes marching on!
Oh, it’s that army of ones again. They have liberated the truth.
sorry, but I don’t know how to put musical notes in a blog post 😉
What I want to know from any Warmists is what would falsify the climate model projections as used by the IPCC? Example 20 years of no warming?
M Courtney at 5:25 a.m. says:
“So I also am now banned from posting at the Guardian. That is, I am subject to “pre-moderation”.
The worst impact of creating this echo-chamber is the decline in the Guardian’s readership. The number of comments on their environment blogs is declining rapidly.
It is a shame that a lively, left-wing forum has decided to commit suicide by out-sourcing moderation to alleged scientists who can’t defend their position.
How long until the advertisers realise?”
Would that these former institutions of the Fourth Estate were subject to the forces of the market. Many would have failed already. However, they are being funded — and their employees (formerly investigative journalists) fully paid and supported — as the mouthpiece of elites who are acting similarly to the Robber Barons of the U.S. 19th Century. At least the Robber Barons through their greed also brought productivity. Not so much these elites. Who are they? Fabulously wealthy Islamists on our oil money; brilliant financial scam artists like financiers whether “left or right” (debt posing as equity); IT corporations who (corps are persons) destroy competition; all those corporations that also hate “the market” (immigration “reform” for cheap labor — that will take care of those independent Americans); and the secular religionists. What a motley group.
They will eventually fail. We must see that they do not take the rest of us along with them. Thank you Anthony and crew for your valiant and courageous efforts.
It is meaningless to say that there is warming, just not statistically significant warming. Someone who says that does not know what statistical significance is.