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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rgbatduke says:
June 13, 2013 at 1:17 pm
rgbatduke, thanks for the good laugh and brilliant additional post!
I am sure your horoscope looks 5 stars for you today.
Santer’s later paper:
http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/11/28/1210514109.full.pdf
Admits the models failed, and it turns out we didn’t have to wait 17 years to establish that fact after all.
Why do we even waste time arguing over the statistical significance of every minor blip in the temperature curves? Another recent peer-reviewed paper assures us once again that the tropical hot spot, that inseperable signature of the models, is nowhere to be found. As Dr. Feynman has taught us, the models have failed the data test and are therefore worthless. It’s as simple as that.
rgbWell, who did assemble it? It says at the top “lordmoncktonfoundation.com”.
Aw, c’mon Nick, you can do better than that. Clearly I was referring to the AR5 ensemble average over climate models, which is pulled from the actual publication IIRC. This is hardly the first time it has been presented on WUWT.
And the spaghetti graph is even worse. Which is why they don’t present it in any sort of summary — even lay people inclined to believe in CAGW would question GCMs if they could see how divergent the predictions are from each other and from the actual climate record over the last 33 years, especially with regard to LTT and SST and SLR. SLR predictions are a joke. SST predictions have people scrabbling after missing heat and magic heat transport processes. The troposphere is a major fail. Everybody in climate science knows that these models are failing, and are already looking to explain the failures but only in ways that don’t lose the original message, the prediction (sorry, “projection”) of catastrophe.
I’ve communicated with perfectly reasonable climate scientists who take the average over the spaghetti seriously and hence endorse the 2.5C estimate that comes directly from the average. It’s high time that it was pointed out that this average is a completely meaningless quantity, and that 2/3 of the spaghetti needs to go straight into the toilet as failed, not worth the energy spent running the code. But if they did that, 2.5 C would “instantly” turn into 1-1.5C, or even less, and this would be the equivalent of Mount Tambora exploding under the asses of climate scientists everywhere, an oops so big that nobody would ever trust them again.
Bear in mind that I personally have no opinion. I think if anything all of these computations are unverified and hence unreliable science. We’re decades premature in claiming we have quantitative understanding of the climate. Possible disaster at stake or not, the minute you start lying in science for somebody’s supposed own benefit, you aren’t even on the slippery slope to hell, you’re already in it. Science runs on pure, brutal honesty.
Do you seriously think that is what the AR’s have produced? Honest reporting of the actual science, including its uncertainties and disagreements?
Really?
rgb
Dr. Pachauri said that he would not take notice of these trends unless they continued for 40 years.
I could not work that out seeing Dr.Carter wrote that 30 year spans are climate as opposed to the general comment regarding weather. Does the money run out then!?
rgbatduke says: June 13, 2013 at 1:45 pm
“Aw, c’mon Nick, you can do better than that. Clearly I was referring to the AR5 ensemble average over climate models, which is pulled from the actual publication IIRC.”
You say exactly what you are referring to:
“This is reflected in the graphs Monckton publishes above, where the AR5 trend line is the average over all of these models and in spite of the number of contributors the variance of the models is huge. It is also clearly evident if one publishes a “spaghetti graph” of the individual model projections (as Roy Spencer recently did in another thread) — it looks like the frayed end of a rope, not like a coherent spread around some physics supported result.”
The graphs Monckton publishes above! But these are clearly marked “lordmoncktonfoundation.com” – not a common IPCC adornment. You’ve cited Monckton graphs, Spencer graphs. If there is an AR5 graph with the features you condemn (AR5 trend line etc) where is it?
@climatereason & John Tillman
–Yes, I misread his statement but then it only makes one consider. If you all think that we are actually supposed to be headed into another ice age, then why are we “recovering” from the little ice age?
And if you are all such big fans if the medieval warm period, why wasn’t the little ice age a “recovery” from that, (since we are supposed to be headed into another ice age)
it sounds to me like you are really grasping at straws here.
Disappear? How? Will someone PLEASE explain the mechanism to me?
One proposed mechanism is that e.g. UV light passes into the ocean bypassing the surface layer where absorbed IR turns straight into latent heat with no actual heating, warms it at some moderate depth, which is then gradually mixed downward to the thermocline
The catch is, the water in the deep ocean is stable — denser and colder than the surface layer. It turns over due to variations in surface salinity in the so-called “global conveyor belt” of oceanic heat circulation on a timescale of centuries, and much of this turnover skips the really deep ocean below the thermocline because it is so very stable at a nearly uniform temperature of 4 C. Also, water has a truly enormous specific heat compared to air, even dumping all of the supposed radiative imbalance into the ocean over decades might be expected to produce a truly tiny change in water temperature, especially if the heat makes it all the way down to and through the thermocline.
So one ends up with deep water that is a fraction of a degree warmer than it might have been otherwise (but nevertheless with a huge amount of heat tied up in that temperature increase) that isn’t going anywhere until the oceanic circulation carries it to the surface decades to centuries from now.
To give you some idea of how long it takes to equilibrate some kinds of circulation processes, Jupiter may well be still giving off its heat of formation from four and a half billion years ago! as it is radiating away more energy than it is receiving. Or there could be other processes contributing to that heat. Brown dwarf stars don’t generate heat from fusion, but nevertheless are expected to radiate heat away for 100 billion years from their heat of formation. The Earth’s oceans won’t take that long, but they are always disequilibrated with the atmosphere and land and act as a vast thermal reservoir, effectively a “capacitor” that can absorb or release heat to moderate more rapid/transient changes in the surface/atmospheric reservoirs, which is why Durham (where I live most of the year) is currently 5-10 F warmer outside than where I am sitting in Beaufort next to the ocean at this minute.
So if the “missing heat” really is missing, and is going into the ocean, that is great news as the ocean could absorb it all for 100 years and hardly notice, moderating any predicted temperature increase in the air and on land the entire time, and who knows, perhaps release it slowly to delay the advent of the next glacial epoch a few centuries from now. Although truthfully nobody knows what the climate will do next year, ten years from now, or a century from now, because our current climate models and theories do not seem to work to explain the past (at all!), the present outside of a narrow range across which they are effectively fit, or the future of whenever they were fit. Indeed, they often omit variables that appear to be important in the past, but nobody really knows why.
rgb
rgbatduke says:
In the end, they’re all sons of B’s, aren’t they?
rgb@duke says:
“To give you some idea of how long it takes to equilibrate some kinds of circulation processes, Jupiter may well be still giving off its heat of formation from four and a half billion years ago!”
But since Jupiter’s year is 11.89 years long, it has been radiating for only a mere 379 million years.
[Just practicing to be a SkS ‘science’ writer… ☺]
jai Mitchell said
‘Yes, I misread his statement but then it only makes one consider. If you all think that we are actually supposed to be headed into another ice age, then why are we “recovering” from the little ice age?
And if you are all such big fans if the medieval warm period, why wasn’t the little ice age a “recovery” from that, (since we are supposed to be headed into another ice age)’
So you misread the comment (we all do it) but instead of acknowledging that you then go off at a tangent. The world warms and cools. it cools down before we reach a glacial period and warms up after it. THE Ice age is the daddy of them all, but there have been numerous lesser glacial periods within the last 4000 years of ‘neo glaciation’ or a number of little ice ages if you like, with ‘our’ LIA being the coldest of them all during the holocene. I’ve graphed 6 periods of glaciation over the last 3000 years-‘our’ lia wasn’t the only one as Matthes pointed out, just the most recent.
tonyb
l expect to see further cooling for.the rest of the year.
The current jet stream pattern is what is putting a brake on the warming , but l do think we can expect to see more heavy rain and the risk of floods across the NH during the rest of the year. As Arctic air dives deep to the south.
Jeeze, Nick:
First of all, note “fig 11.33a” on the graph above. Second, note reproductions from the AR5 report here:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/30/ar5-chapter-11-hiding-the-decline-part-ii/
Then there is figure 1.4:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/14/the-real-ipcc-ar5-draft-bombshell-plus-a-poll/
Sure, these are all from the previously released draft, and who knows somebody may have fixed them. But pretending that they are all Monckton’s idea and not part of the actual content of AR5 at least as of five or six months ago is silly. If you are having difficulty accessing the leaked AR5 report and looking at figure 11.33, let me know (it is reproduced in the WUWT above, though so I don’t see how you could be). You might peek at a few other figures where yes, they average over a bunch of GCMs. Is Monckton’s graph a precise reproduction of AR5 11.33a? No, but it comes damn close to 11.33b. And 11.33a reveals the spaghetti snarl in the models themselves and makes it pretty evident that the actual observational data is creeping along the lower edge of the spaghetti from 1998/1999 (La Nina) on.
So, is there a point to your objection, or where you just trying to suggest that AR5 does not present averages over spaghetti and base its confidence interval on the range it occupies? Because 11.33b looks like it does, I’m just sayin. So does 11.11a. So does 1.4, which has the additional evil of adding entirely idiotic and obviously hand drawn “error bars” onto the observational data points.
But where in AR5 does it say “these models appear to be failing”? Or just “Oops”?
Mind you, perhaps they’ve completely rewritten it in the meantime. Who would know? Not me.
rgb
Nick Stokes says:
You say exactly what you are referring to:
Yes, he does. And you understand quite well what he said. And yet you lie and pretend otherwise. Why must you lie, Nick?
The graphs Monckton publishes above! But these are clearly marked “lordmoncktonfoundation.com” – not a common IPCC adornment. You’ve cited Monckton graphs, Spencer graphs. If there is an AR5 graph with the features you condemn (AR5 trend line etc) where is it?
It is on the graphs that Monckton and Spencer published, of course. But then, you knew that.
Monckton and Spencer cite and present the AR5 model ensemble graphs in their own insightful critiques of the AR5 work. Duke expands on those critiques in a particularly cogent way. And you lie about it. Everything under heaven has its purpose, it seems.
First and foremost: a line is simply the wrong function. Period.
@ur momisugly rgbatduke says:
June 13, 2013 at 1:45 pm
“…perfectly reasonable climate scientists…”
————————————————————————————————————————–
Should read: “…give the impression of perfectly reasonable…”
A simulation.
Reason is not restricted to the capacity to follow one comment or assertion (in any language including mathematical) with another that in itself does not create an obvious disjunction with either the first or with other points of apparent relevance that it is obviously contingent on at that particular point. This is mechanical in nature, and relies on the perception that what can be expressed within those particular confines constitutes all that is both required and possible.
This is a lawyers mode of being with apparent plausability of association being in itself the demonstration of the required reality to be established. It is also the mechanism which is used when it is said that someone is “being reasonable” in that they will accept a situation or proposition on the basis that a resolution is desirable quite regardless of the seen and understood, and incompletely identified or acknowledged, elements or context that would otherwise “complicate” matters. These rely on a circumscribed view, and a self-contained justification. Not fundamental principle.
Being “reasonable” in the above social or proceedural way is not evidence of reason. Reason, or the effective existence and application of intelligence, requires, at the start, not just acceptance of a reality but the desire to be subject to it. At any and all times.
The world is full of people who are practiced at, by virtue of not appearing hostile, or not observably failing to agree with that which cannot be denied, seeming “reasonable”. This, in itself, is meaningless. To be genuinely reasonable requires a readiness to admit realities that undermine conveniences built on and around a contrary conception.
Reason and honesty are synonymous.
In the case of “Climate Scientists” who will not or cannot acknowledge a reality pertaining to this field, they are not “reasonable” in any meaningful way. If, in conjunction with such a position, they can pass this off as “reasonable” it merely illustrates a core aspect of their character.
I realize that your use of the word reasonable above was both off-hand and likely intended to communicate the socially civilized nature of the exchanges you refer to, with no apparent hostility or reticence that might be characterized as evasion or duplicity.
But it is very important not to paint a false picture. A pretense of openness and “reasonableness” fails if basic foundational issues of indisputable importance are not acknowledged. And that is the case with these “scientists”.
A stick is a stick. Two plus two does not equal five.
There are no excuses.
and the Bonn talks end in failure:
14 June: Bloomberg: Alessandro Vitelli: UN Climate-Talks Collapse Piles Pressure on November Summit
United Nations talks on reforms to emissions-market rules stalled this week after members rejected a proposal to reconsider the body’s decision-making rules, putting additional pressure on a climate summit in November.
The loss of two weeks’ negotiating time means that items that were due to be discussed in Bonn from June 3 through June 14 may now be revisited at the UN’s annual climate conference in Warsaw at the end of the year, adding to an already-packed agenda that may not be fully addressed, according to a project developers’ group…
The loss of two weeks’ negotiating time may mean that a review of UN offset market rules may not be completed by the end of the year, said Gareth Phillips, chairman of the Project Developers’ Forum, a group representing investors and developers of clean energy projects that generate carbon credits.
“We’ve lost a massive amount of time,” Phillips said today in an interview in Bonn. “Parties were already in two minds over whether they could complete the review of the CDM in Warsaw, so now it looks very unlikely we can conclude the work by then.”…
***“You really can’t expect there to be a negotiation at the seriousness of this one, which is about transforming the whole global energy economy, without there being hurdles and obstacles,” she (Ruth Davis, political director of Greenpeace U.K.) said today in an interview in Bonn…
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-06-13/un-climate-talks-collapse-piles-pressure-on-november-summit.html
Eustace Cranch says:
June 13, 2013 at 12:11 pm
“…one cannot directly and linearly connect absorbed heat with surface temperature changes — it can disappear into the deep ocean for a century or ten…”
Disappear? How? Will someone PLEASE explain the mechanism to me?
Disappeared = not currently measured
rgbatduke says: June 13, 2013 at 2:43 pm
“Jeeze, Nick:
First of all, note “fig 11.33a” on the graph above.”
Yes, but the graph is not Fig 11.33a. Nothing like it.
You said, for example,
“Note the implicit swindle in this graph — by forming a mean and standard deviation over model projections and then using the mean as a “most likely” projection and the variance as representative of the range of the error, one is treating the differences between the models as if they are uncorrelated random variates causing >deviation around a true mean!.”
The AR5 graphs you linked to do not do any of that. No variance or standard deviation is quoted. They do show quantiles of the actual model results, but that is just arithmetic. At most they speak of an “assessed likely range”. There’s nothing anywhere about variance, uncorrelated random deviates etc. That’s all Monckton’s addition.
JJ says: June 13, 2013 at 2:47 pm
“And you understand quite well what he said. And yet you lie and pretend otherwise. Why must you lie, Nick?”
What an absurd charge. Yes, I understand quite well what he said. He said that the graphs that are shown are a swindle, the maker should be bitch-slapped etc. And he clearly thought that he was talking about the IPCC. But he got it wrong, and won’t admit it. The things he’s accusing the IPCC of are actually Monckton alterations of what the IPCC did.
Now you may think that doesn’t matter. But what does factual accuracy count for anyway, in your world.
M Courtney says:
My only fault with the comment by rgbatduke is that it was a comment not a main post. It deserves to be a main post.
I concur!
With the title “The Average of Bull$#!^ is not Roses”
🙂
Steven Mosher says:
June 13, 2013 at 11:54 am
Finally, there is no such thing as falsification. There is confirmation and disconfirmation.
even Popper realized this in the end as did Feynman.
At least you recognise that Popper’ philosophy is toxic to AGW, as it is to other anti-science scams such as the linear no-threshold hypothesis of radiation carcinogenesis, politically mandated to strip the west of its nuclear industry.
However as Popper says, “there are no inductive inferences”. Induction will only take you down the garden path.
Notice how AGW is being pushed into untestable corners, like longer timescales and the deep ocean. You guys are scared of Popper. You need to be.
Nick Stokes says:
June 13, 2013 at 3:23 pm
rgbatduke says: June 13, 2013 at 2:43 pm
“Jeeze, Nick:
First of all, note “fig 11.33a” on the graph above.”
Yes, but the graph is not Fig 11.33a. Nothing like it.
The great AGW WORM-OUT has begun.
“Predict global warming? Me?? No – that’s just a Monkton fabrication.
All we did was project a statistical envelope of warm-cold wet-dry storm-notstorm glacier retreatadvance moreless twisters and peccatogenic day-to-day change in weather which never happened in pre-industrial times.”
Get used to this, NS is the figurehead (aka frigging in the rigging) of a vast diatribe of AGW denial that is on its way.
I don’t like your temperature graph based on HadCRUT4. There are many things wrong with it starting with the choice of scale. The temperature region included is too narrow and should begin where satellite data begin which is 1979. Bimonthly resolution is too course for significant detail – should use at least monthly resolution. And linear fit through a forest of noise is worthless. The right way to show a temperature record is not to use a running mean or to fit any graph to it but to outline it with a broad semi-transparent band as wide as the average random fuzz that is part of the record. That random fuzz is not noise but represents cloudiness that varies randomly. This limits its amplitude and anything that sticks far out is an anthropogenic artifact. You can use linear fit later once you can actually see that it is linear. To find the shape of the mean temperature curve in the presence of ENSO oscillations (which are everywhere) you start by putting dots in the middle of each line connecting an El Nino peak with its neighboring La Nina valley and connecting the dots.This is done after the transparent band is laid down. There will be some random deviations but that is the nearest you will ever get to global mean temperature. These are just general requirements. In my opinion only satellite data should be used when available because ground-based data have been manipulated and secretly computer processed. They do not show the true height of El Nino peaks and their twenty-first century segments have all been raised up by as much as a tenth of a degree. But their worst imaginary feature has been a non-existent warming in the eighties and nineties. They call it the late twentieth century warming and it is still part of AR5 previews like the horsetail graphs of CMIP5. In researching my book What Warming? I compared satellite and ground-based temperature curves and found that satellite curves showed an 18 year linear segment from 1979 to 1997. But ground-based curves showed a steady warming in that time slot which they called “late twentieth century warming.” I considered it fake and put that in the book. Nothing happened. Until last fall, that is, when GISTEMP, HadCRUT, and NCDC temperature repositories decided in unison to get rid of that fake warming and follow the satellite data in the eighties and nineties. Nothing was said about it. I consider this coordinated action an admission that they knew the warming was fake. Their twenty-first century data are likewise screwed up and cannot be trusted. I also discovered that all three were secretly computer processed. That was an accident because they did not know that their software left traces of its work in their database. These consist of sharp, high spikes sticking up from the broad magic marker band at the beginnings of years. They looked like noise but noise does not know the human calender. They are in exact same places in all three data sets and have been there at least as far back as 2008. What connection, if any, they have with that fake warming I do not know. But now that we know there is a no-warming zone in the eighties and nineties and a no-warming zone also in the twenty-first century we can put it all together. There is only a narrow strip between, enough to accommodate the super El Nino of 1998 and its associated step warming. The step warming was caused by the large amount of warm water the super El Nino carried across the ocean. In four years it raised global temperature by a third of a degree Celsius and then stopped. As a result, all twenty-first century temperatures are higher than the nineties. Hansen noticed this and pointed out that of the ten highest temperatures, nine occurred after 2000. Not surprising since they all sit on the high warm platform created by the step warming, the only warming during the entire satellite era. These years cannot be greenhouse warming years because the step warming was oceanic, not atmospheric in origin. There is actually no room left for greenhouse warming during the satellite era because the two no-warming stretches and the super El Nino use up the entire time available. That means no greenhouse warming for the last 34 years. With this fact in mind, can you believe that any of the warming that preceded the satellite era can be greenhouse warming? I think not.
ClimateReason,
(how do you quote somebody on this?)
u said, ” I’ve graphed 6 periods of glaciation over the last 3000 years-’our’ lia wasn’t the only one as Matthes pointed out, just the most recent.”
hasn’t that shown that the temperatures have been going down during this period? The LIA is associated with the maurader minimum, Saying that we are “recovering” from that implies that the sun itself is “recovering” from that. However, the change in temperatures during the last 5 decades are not based on changes in the sun’s intensity since that effect is pretty much instantaneous.
http://chartsgraphs.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/tsi_1611_2009_11yr_ma.png
if you look at this chart, and if you think that solar irradiance is the cause of the variation then we would have 1.5 C average variation every 6.5 years due to the solar cycle (the solar cycle does cause some variation but only very little since it is only .075% of the total sun’s activity (peak to trough)
The Met Office is so worried, it#s holding a meeting to discuss why the UK is no longer experiencing…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2013/jun/13/met-office-uk-bad-weather-cause
… any warming since 2006!