By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
I have now had the opportunity to study SteveF’s remarkable essay at Lucia’s Blackboard, to which Anthony kindly draws attention in his footnote to my earlier posting on the absence of statistically-significant global warming for 17 years 4 months.
SteveF’s conclusion is that once allowance has been made for three naturally-occurring influences – volcanic aerosols, the ~11-year solar cycle and the el Niño/la Niña cycles – the HadCRUt4 warming rate from 1979-1996 was six times faster than from 1997-2012. In the abstract, to allow for uncertainties, he cautiously reduces this to three times faster.
Even if one were to take the unadjusted HadCRUt4 data, the rate of warming from 1979-1996 was more than twice as fast as the rate from 1997-2012.
I decided to look not only at HadCRUt4, as SteveF did, but also at the two satellite datasets, RSS and UAH. RSS showed warming at 0.7 Cº/century from 1979-1996 and cooling at almost 0.1 Cº/century from 1997-2012.
UAH, however, in contrast to both HadCRUt4 and RSS, showed warming in the later period, 1997-2012, that was thrice as fast as the warming of the earlier period, 1979-1996.
SteveF’s essay takes no account of the most substantial medium-term natural cycle that seems to influence global temperatures: the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. The cycles of that great Oscillation tend to exercise a warming influence for about 30 years followed by a cooling influence for about 30 years. This cyclical influence is visible throughout the HadCRUt4 global temperature record since 1850.
There was a remarkably sharp transition from the “cooling” to the “warming” phase of the PDO at the beginning of 1976 and a transition back to “cooling” late in 2001.
The HadCRUt4 warming rate from 1976-2001 was equivalent to almost 1.8 Cº/century (compared with warming at just 1.1 Cº/century from 1979-1996), but from 2002 to the present HadCRUt4 shows cooling at a rate equivalent to almost 0.5 Cº/century (compared with warming at almost 0.5 Cº/century from 1997-2012).
Much of the fall in the warming rate identified by SteveF, therefore, appears to be attributable to the PDO. It would be interesting to adjust the global instrumental temperature anomaly record not only for volcanic aerosols, solar cycles and el Niños but also for the cycles of the PDO, but that is above my present pay-grade.
What is far from clear is the influence, if any, from CO2. Its influence must be very small, for it seems easily overwhelmed by natural influences such as the PDO and the three phenomena studied by SteveF.
During the three “warming” phases of the PDO that are visible in the HadCRUt4 instrumental record since 1850, the warming rates were as follows: 1860-1880 less than 1.0 Cº/century; 1910-1940 1.4 Cº/century; and 1976-2001 1.8 Cº/century.
Superficially, there appears to be an inexorable and strikingly near-linear increase in the warming rates during successive “warming” phases of the PDO. Might this increase be attributable to the monotonic increase in CO2 over recent decades?
If the increase in warming rates were to continue, perhaps as a result of the growing warming influence from CO2, the warming from about 2040-2070 might be equivalent to 2.2 Cº/century; and from 2100-2130 2.6 Cº/century.
It would not be until around 2160-2190 that the warming rate would reach the IPCC’s currently-projected central estimate of 3.0 Cº/century. And, even then, the mean centennial rate after allowing for the “cooling” phases of the PDO would be considerably less.
However, the apparently tidy 1.0 to 1.4 to 1.8 Cº/century-equivalent increase in the rates of global warming during the “warming” phases of the PDO may not be attributable to CO2 at all. The true cause may be another and more sinister man-made phenomenon: Orwellian data revisionism.
Late in 2009, after the first Climategate emails had been sprung on a naively unsuspecting world, Roger Harrabin of the BBC, an acquiescent true-believer in the global-warming Party Line, was told by his superiors that for the sake of what little is left of the BBC’s reputation he should – just for once – ask Professor Jones of the University of East Anglia some critical questions about the temperature record.
Harrabin had never before stopped to think about whether the Party Line was true. That is the trouble with the Party Line: as Orwell points out in 1984, it is intended as a substitute for independent thought – or for any thought.
So he did not know what questions to ask. He asked me for help in framing suitable critical questions.
I told him to ask Jones whether there had been any statistically-significant global warming over the previous 15 years. He thought that was an absurd question. The Party Line said warming was occurring at a rate unprecedented in human history.
I told him to ask the question anyway. To his astonishment, Jones – albeit testily – admitted there had been no warming statistically distinguishable from zero for 15 years.
I also told Harrabin to ask Jones whether the rates of warming during the three “warming” phases of the PDO in the instrumental record since 1850 were statistically distinguishable from one another.
Harrabin got a further surprise when Jones told him that the three rates could not be distinguished from one another, statistically speaking. On the then HadCRUt3 version of the global dataset, the rates of warming were equivalent to 1.0, 1.6 and 1.7 Cº/century respectively. The uncertainties in the data during the first of the three periods, 1860-1880, were so large that the rate could not be distinguished from that of the later two periods.
Our CO2 emissions could not have influenced the second period of PDO-driven warming, but we could in theory have influenced the third. Yet in the HadCRUt3 dataset the two periods showed warming within 0.1 Cº/century of one another: far too little an increase to be statistically significant.
At a climate conference in Cambridge a few years ago, I asked Jones whether, given that the global warming rates in the three “warming” phases of the PDO could not be distinguished from one another statistically speaking, any anthropogenic influence was yet discernible in the temperature record. He said there was a discernible influence, but did not say where or how large it was.
Not long afterwards, and perhaps not coincidentally, he produced HadCRUt4. Suddenly the rates of warming during the second and third PDO “warming” phases were changed from 1.6 and 1.7 Cº/century respectively to 1.4 and 1.8 Cº/century respectively.
As with other such instances of data revisionism in the terrestrial datasets, the later period was changed very little because the satellites were watching and prevented cheating. But the record in the earlier period was pushed downwards, artificially steepening the apparent warming over the 20th century. It is as though we knew better than those who took the earlier measurements what measurements they ought to have recorded, all over the world.
Disentangling the true contribution of CO2 to warming from not only the numerous natural influences but also from the effects of data revisionism is near impossible. We shall have to wait and see. The one fact that is already clear, however, is that the warming rate predicted by the models on whose output the climate scare is founded is proving to be a hefty exaggeration.
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PMHinSC says:
June 17, 2013 at 6:50 am
DesertYote says:
June 16, 2013 at 6:51 pm
J Martin says:
June 16, 2013 at 2:33 pm
@ur momisugly PMHinSC. Finding a different word for Data, almost invariably a plural is one thing. But what really annoys me is the use of the word ‘fishes’ as if it were the plural of ‘fish’ which it most definitely is not.
‘Fish’ is both singular and plural. ‘Fishes’ is most definitely not the plural of ‘fish’.
‘Fishes’ is the proper term to use for a group of types of fish. When I talk about the fishes I have kept, I am referring to the various species of fish, not the number of fish.
How about fishies as in
“Down in the meadow in a little bitty pool
Swam three little fishies and a mama fishie too
“Swim” said the mama fishie, “Swim if you can”
And they swam and they swam all over the dam”
###
‘Fishie’ is a dimmunitive of ‘fish’. It is singular. The proper English plural of this dimmunitive is ‘fishies’. The dimmunitive of a word is a different word and therfor can follow different rules.
Anyway, ‘fish’ is always sigular, whether refering to an individual fish or to a single group of fish.
( I can’t belevle I am actualy writing about English grammer. What have I become? Oy!)
@Txomin says: 11:43 pm
it is not rare to find studies that fiddle with values in order to support otherwise untenable hypotheses. This does not constitute conspiracy. It simply is bad science….
Wikipedia: “a conspiracy is an agreement between two or more persons to commit a crime at some time in the future.”
In criminal law, fraud is intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual;
Fraud is a crime.
“fiddle with values in order to support an otherwise untenable hypothesis”…. would be an intentional deception.
If the deception involves personal gain (either monetarily in the form of grants, employment, or political status) or damage to others, then the deception constitutes fraud.
If two or more people are aware of the deception — and say nothing to expose the deception, or indeed act to continue the deception, then two or more people have agreed to commit fraud.
It is bad science.
It is also conspiracy.
QED
Sandy
Mosh seems to be eating at a different drive by today
tonyb
@Peter in MD 5:44 am
I like this analogy very much. Perhaps the records books do need a footnote documenting X number of Babe Ruth’s home runs occurred is stadiums smaller than any that exist today. Add useful information to increase uncertainty and doubt over existing information. But to change the data is at best an attempt to hide real uncertainty. At worst, it replaces truth with falsehood.
RonC …. thanks.
With all the talk about adjustments to data, the Max Min data are of the utmost importance. In the context of it all, TOBS adjustments seem to be of an importance, but suffice it to say, regardless of what time you observe the temp, a Maximum temp can’t go “down”, it can only go up. LIkewise, a Minimum temp can only go down, not up. The only adjustments I can see that would lower the Maximum temperature would be adjustments for equipment, or adjustments for changes in the environment like change of location, UHI or Agriculture. On the otherhand, from what I’ve gathered reading the comments and articles of people better versed than me, Mimimum Temperature would be the opposite, adjusting down for increased mixing due to Urbanization, or adjusting down due to changes in the environment, like increased humidity resulting from irrigation.
I’m afraid that the gurus who run global temp metrics are trying to adjust the “averaged” temperature based on issues that actually only affect the mimimum or maximum, and would affect them in opposite directions.
Dr. Deanster says:
June 16, 2013 at 7:35 am
Dr Deanster (and others asking much the same thing),
While I don’t have data beyond the late 20’s, and I don’t take much value of the data before the 50’s. I have compiled Min/Max data right from the daily NCDC station records. I’ve also processed a difference between today’s increase in temp minus tonight’s drop in temp here.
Lord Monckton,
I think you’d like what I show as well. There is no loss of cooling since the 50’s, where the average night time drop is almost identical as the day’s warming. And as a overall average from 1950 to 2011 there’s slightly more cooling than warming.
Dr. Deanster says:
June 17, 2013 at 9:35 am
FWIW – I have no idea of the history of the max-min/2 and why it was derived/adopted, but to me, who actually took some weather obs many years ago, I fail to understand why it is considered any kind of metric, ‘average’ or otherwise. As any hiker, sailor, or any ‘outdoors’ person can attest, weather and temperature can pass very quickly or very slowly, thereby affecting the ‘real’ – as in actual – local ‘average’ temperature of the day quite significantly. I can understand using one or the other as a ‘valid’ measurement, so long as the max and min are read at the same time each day – but adding and dividing by 2 does not equate to an average temperature for any given day!
I have major reservations about the temp datasets for this and the UHI reasons but as Mosher is often keen to state – we have to use what we have got! All in all, IMHO, the temp datasets, and any derivation thereof are the subject of numerous inherent and introduced errors (and bias, if you consider the way adjustments can be made). The statistical treatment, averaging, gridding, adjustment, etc of this data does not instill any confidence either!
“What is the collective noun for climate modelers?”
Well known: An incompetency of climate modelers.
Nick Stokes says:
June 16, 2013 at 7:20 pm
goldminor says: June 16, 2013 at 7:12 pm
“Here is one for Nick to muddle over. …When the real data was located in the National Library”
Same deal. Did they think to look on the GHCN unadjusted file?
——————————————————————————————
What would the GHCN have to do with a database in New Zealand?
Kev-in-UK ….
I for one do not buy the TOBS b.s. I can remember many a day when a cold front came in, when in was warmer at 6AM and freezing at 3:30 PM. Granted .. on average … coolest temp of the day is just before sun rise …. hottest temp of the day is usually around 3-5 pm, but regardless of when you measured the temperature, the Minimum can only go colder and the Maximum can only go higher.
Now .. we have Hansen and the gang artificially cooling the past. I don’t see where they get the justification to such, unless they have some proven data regarding instrument changes or station movements. Somehow, I doubt real seriously that anyone has actually looked at each record
MiCrow …thanks .. great stuff. That is exactly what I was looking for. Looking at your graphs, I don’t see any unprecedented warming. While, as you note, the 1940s data is a tad erratic, it clearly is as warm or warmer then than it is now. Expressing the data in real terms, as opposed to exaggerated “anomaly” data is refreshing as well, and shows just how insignificant today’s weather is compared to the last 70 years.
Maybe you should get with Anthony Watts and figure out a way to present and automatically update those graphs on the Temperature Reference Page..
If you use Facebook, you might find this current discussion at The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason’s Facebook page very interesting.
It touches on some of the issues in this post and, well, many.
Further, you might be interested to know just how many of Dawkins’ own atheist skeptic commenters do not buy his line or “reasoning” at all. Neither do I. I’m a big fan of Richard Dawkins in other areas, by the way.
Peter in MD says:
June 17, 2013 at 5:44 am
I’m sorry, adjusting the raw data is not justifalbe in any sense. It would be like going back and adjusting Major League Baseball home run records and saying that because Babe Ruth hit home runs in undersize parks by today’s standards that we have to “adjust” his home run totals down by 50! It rubbish!
—————————————————————————————————–
Great analogy! All other players from that era also had to play within those same boundaries. So the Babe,s performance is justified as compared to the performance of his peers.
If it’s a Delusion of Climate Modellers we have the pleasing dichotomy of Deluders and Deniers.
richard verney says:
June 16, 2013 at 2:56 am
Like many others who read this blog, I am far from convinced that we have a proper handle on UHI and the extent to which the data sets may have become contaminated by this (and I include station drop outs). I know that Anthony is working hard on this. It is not a straight forward exercise.
Exactly. A great deal of the thermometers making the land based data sets are located around human agglomerations and cover a period when the human population grew from 1 billion to 7. It is enough to look at Berkeley’s chart where the dots showing a cooling trend and warming trend are plotted on a map, to recognise the groups of warming islands exactly there where the human agglomerations are.
We all know the UHI phenomenon, we all drive between smaller and bigger cities and can watch how the UHI is influencing the car thermometer. Is it equal for a small city with a big city? Depending on the size most smaller cities create a much smaller delta UHI then bigger cities.
Somehow climatologists try to make us believe the delta UHI from 1850 to today has not influenced at all the thermometers. According to them the cities in 1850 created the same delta UHI as today all over the globe.
Also what is the UHI influence when one is going more to the north? The delta UHI will be higher for a city of similar size and build in higher latitudes. And one can easily see the measured warming being higher in higher latitudes.
But it is not only cities, there are all kind of heat sources and the only study that addressed those is Watts et all 2012
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/07/29/press-release-2/
How many other potential factors are there? Solar system, galactic, or univeral fluctuations? Could dark matter affect our climate? Magnetic fields? Are there longer term trends and cycles that we have no capability to recognize?
It seems far too intertwined and complicated to pin down with any precision. the ‘experts’ have told us they can, while their prognostications indicate otherwise. Unabated in their imagined prescience, albeit increasingly vague, a trend in unbridled hubris is becoming the most easily discerned. And most dangerous.
MiCro says:
June 17, 2013 at 9:42 am
“I have compiled Min/Max data right from the daily NCDC station records.”
Though few people noticed, the plots in your article* indirectly provide a very, very important result of showing that temperatures in the 1940s were as warm as now or warmer both for the globe, for the northern hemisphere, and for the southern hemisphere if looked at in such instrumental data without the “adjustments” of such as Hansen’s GISS / the CRU / the Met Office.
*
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/17/an-analysis-of-night-time-cooling-based-on-ncdc-station-record-data/
While you made a good point in that article, I found that unhighlighted part, which was generally unnoticed, even more interesting, as such global unadjusted raw instrumental temperature data is ordinarily never, ever, ever published today in such a convenient plot form, never before seen as broadly in many hours of personally reading WUWT and elsewhere. (For example, no plot on http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/global-weather-climate/global-temperature/ is remotely equivalent).
“I don’t take much value of the data before the 50′s.”
While contradictory to widely-publicized plots today in which high temperatures around the 1940s are gone from what they depict for the historical record, actually it more fits old publications like what is seen in http://img240.imagevenue.com/img.php?image=40530_DSCN1557_nat_geog_1976_1200x900_122_75lo.JPG which was made back in the relatively apolitical era.
And it relatively suits a bigger picture like that in http://s9.postimg.org/3whiqcrov/climate.gif where the top of the preceding, enlarging on click, is from Holgate 2007, which found the sea level rise rate was “larger in the early part of last century (2.03 ± 0.35 mm/yr 1904–1953), in comparison with the latter part (1.45 ± 0.34 mm/yr 1954–2003).”
groovyman67 says:
June 17, 2013 at 2:24 pm
I’m fond of tidal effects of the planets on the Sun, we know it wobbles around the Solar systems CoG by quite a lot for something as massive as the Sun is (1.989E30 kg).
Monckton of Brenchley says:
June 16, 2013 at 10:25 pm
….so the outlier has a distorting effect, significantly but artificially increasing the apparent warming rate since 1979.
__________________________________
trim the mean.
===================================================================
Or a SciFi Convention?
A Cacophony of Scicobabble?
A Hockey Team?
Someone mentioned the Urban Heat Island (UHI). I made this comment on the last Open Thread.
(That record low was 35*F.)
Gunga Din says: June 17, 2013 at 3:43 pm
markx says: June 17, 2013 at 10:46 am
“What is the collective noun for climate modelers?”
Well known: An incompetency of climate modelers.
===================================================================
Or a SciFi Convention?
A Cacophony of Scicobabble?
A Hockey Team
____________________
Flakes misusing basic statistics. In undergraduate we knew they were in the easy “soft” sciences like environmental biology, political science, sociology and psychology. They’ve grown up to be climate scientists and climate modelers with an axe to grind.
Nick Stokes says:
June 16, 2013 at 2:11 pm
I can’t imagine any situation where it could rationally be said that we can burn carbon without regard for the climate heating effect because we can rely on the Sun to come to the rescue.
The reason we can “burn carbon” without regard to the climate heating effect has nothing to do with what the sun does or doesn’t do. The reason is that the heating effect is so small that it doesn’t matter one iota. It can’t be rationally said that our CO2 emmissions are in any way a danger to our climate without evidence. If we need to fear something, we should fear cooling, which is the real danger. You live in a dream world. Come back to reality, Nick. It’s not so bad.
To the back of the bus, Monckton! In bloody Hell, heroes? Indeed. It’s even Snowing now.
REGARDING THE PLURAL OF LATIN WORDS IN ENGLISH.
i got news for you — Latin words adopted into the English language become English words. Being now English words their plurals are created by applying the rules of English not Latin. i quote myself.
Great nations in vanquished millenniums
Foretold their fall with one same cry
When its arts begin to die
A civilization soon succumbs
In Shakespeare’s age the educated still learned Latin in their schooling. It was a common tongue and though Latin words may have been used in English texts they were still recognized as being “Latin”. (In fact one of the secrets of the sonnets is that a printing convention at the time italicized all “foreign words” in a text. This printing convention shortly changed and the practice was dropped. This convention has largely been forgotten leaving inadequate scholars puzzled about the italicized words in the sonnets.) Now very few people speak Latin and most people don’t know from what language particular “English” words are derived.
When the English language makes a word its own then the rules of English apply. Of course, English being what it is, who knows what the future holds. Latin endings could make a comeback.
Eugene WR Gallun
I guess Nick and Mosh are working on Responses to New paper by Ross McKitrick or should that be BEST defences or other den**ls (in short)