By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
The IPCC, having spent almost two months working out how to respond to my complaint about a notoriously bogus graph in its Fourth Assessment Report, has found itself not guilty. In doing so, it is wilfully perpetuating a fraud, which will now be reported to the prosecuting authorities.
My complaint was as follows:
“The graph purports to show, but does not show, that the rate of global warming has been accelerating and that the accelerated global warming is anthropogenic.”
The conclusion the IPCC draws by superimposing multiple trend-lines on the HadCRUt curve of global mean surface temperature anomalies since 1850 is that because the trend-lines starting more recently are steepest the world is warming ever faster and we are to blame. The caption to the graph makes this clear:
“Note that for shorter recent periods, the slope is greater, indicating accelerated warming. … increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases dominate the observed warming after the mid-1970s …”.
Dr. Pachauri, the IPCC’s climate-science chairman, drew the same two bogus conclusions from this graph in a lecture in New South Wales some years ago:
“… In recent years this graph has become much steeper. If you draw a line through the last 100 years, the slope is a 0.74 C° line. But if you look at the last 50 years, [it is] almost twice as steep as the total 100-year period. So it would be appropriate to conclude that … warming is taking place at a much faster rate, and clearly if we don’t bring about some changes we’d have much faster changes in future.”
I had invited the IPCC to reconsider its use of a technique so bogus that if one applies multiple trend-lines to a sine-wave (which has a zero trend) one can demonstrate either that the trend is ever more rapidly declining or that it is ever more rapidly increasing.
In fact, the global temperature trend is not increasing. In the 101 months since January 2005, the benchmark date for the IPCC’s forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), there has been no global warming.
The bright blue trend-line on the HadCRUt dataset shows cooling. Yet the bright red line showing the AR5 projections suggests that a rapid warming should be taking place. In little more than eight years the IPCC’s projection is already more than a quarter of a Celsius degree (or half a Fahrenheit degree) above observed reality:
The IPCC knows perfectly well that the two conclusions it invited readers to draw in the caption from the slopes of the multiple trend-lines in the graph are indefensible, misleading, and – let us not mince words – fraudulent. It avoids admitting its error by breaking down my complaint into five parts, of which only the first two go to the substance of my complaint. And, even with these two, the IPCC carefully avoids addressing the substance of my complaint:
1. M of B complaint: the graph “purports to show that the rate of global warming has been accelerating”.
IPCC response: “The indicated trends on the two figures are factually correct. They are correctly determined and clearly indicated on the legend accompanying these figures. … Therefore, the claim is not warranted.”
But I had not complained that the trend-lines had been incorrectly determined. Indeed, I had demonstrated that correctly-calculated trend-lines applied to a sine-wave could produce false conclusions very similar to that of the IPCC. The inaccuracy about which I had complained lay in the drawing of improper conclusions from the trend-lines.
2. M of B: the graph “purports to show that the accelerated global warming is anthropogenic”.
IPCC: “The figures were not used to make a statement on the causes of a possible increase in trend. … Detection and attribution assessments are based on a comprehensive evaluation of detection and attribution research that is presented in AR4 Chapter 9. That chapter’s assessments are not based on evidence of differences in linear trends between different periods. Therefore, the claim is not warranted.”
But the IPCC’s caption plainly attributes the rapid warming from the 1970s onward to Man. So the graphs were used, and explicitly used, “to make a statement on the causes of a possible increase in trend”. Besides, if Chapter 9 had already reached its assessment by other means, what was the purpose of the bogus graph, except to mislead?
3. M of B (subsidiary point): I had understood that the graph was and altered version of what had appeared in the scientists final draft.
IPCC: “The figures in question appeared in the Final Drafts of Chapter 3 and of the Technical Summary with the same numbering as in the published versions. The trends, including the detailed legend with the numerical values and the uncertainties were included in the Final Draft as in the published version, except for copy-editing changes. Trends were added in the Final Draft versions of these figures in response to comments on the Second Order Draft … Therefore, the claim is not warranted.”
Score half a point for the IPCC here. The graph with the bogus trend-lines had appeared in the final draft. However, it had appeared without the trend-lines in all versions that preceded the final draft. Someone had added the trend-lines, but should not have done so.
4. M of B (subsidiary point): The text accompanying the defective graph says: “An increasing rate of warming has taken place over the last 25 years, …”.
IPCC: From the context it is clear that the authors emphasize that the global mean is not the complete picture (“ … with important regional variations”) and that trends are not smooth (“… has occurred in two phases …”, and “… more strongly from the 1970s …”), and that all these statements are factually correct and discuss in words what is visible in the graph. “Therefore, the claim is not warranted.”
But my complaint is not about what may have been said elsewhere in the report, nor about whether what was said elsewhere in the report was factually correct. It is about the bogus graph, whose accompanying text must be read first and foremost in the context of the graph that it accompanies. The fact that “the global mean is not the complete picture” has nothing whatever to do with whether or not it is appropriate to draw inaccurate conclusions from the relative slopes of multiple arbitrarily-chosen trend-lines.
5. M of B (subsidiary point): the text accompanying the graph says, “The rate of warming averaged over the last 50 years (0.13°C ± 0.03°C per decade) is nearly twice that for the last 100 years.”
IPCC: The quoted words “are factually correct. Therefore the claim is not warranted. In conclusion, the Co-Chairs of WGI and the WGI Bureau find that no action is warranted in response to this claim.”
But I had nowhere asserted that the quoted words were not factually correct. I had stated that it was not appropriate for the IPCC to draw from the relative slopes of the various trend lines the unjustifiable conclusion that the rate of global warming was accelerating and that we were to blame.
It would not be difficult to persuade a jury that the IPCC’s assertion that various data were “factually correct”, when I had at no point challenged the factual correctness, merely the inappropriate conclusions that had been drawn, was evidence of its continuing attempt to mislead the public.
I have shown the bogus graph to hundreds of audiences all around the world. Recently I have been asking them to imagine that they were a fraud jury. All have voted to convict – and, on almost every occasion, the votes have been unanimous.
The difficulty, though, is that the IPCC, as one of a proliferating number of supranational agencies, is not answerable to any jurisdiction, except possibly that of Switzerland, where it is headquartered.
If the IPCC were answerable to the British courts, I should invite the police to prosecute and then, if they did not act, I should go before the magistrates myself. I have done it before. If the case is sound, a summons will be issued against the accused. I once hauled the British Secret Police (delicately called the “Crime Agency”) before the beaks, got a summons, and forced these thugs into a humiliating climbdown. But that is another story.
The Swiss authorities have established a specialist bureau to investigate frauds, the Bureau de l’Escroquerie. Its expertise is considerable, and it is well used to dealing with frauds a great deal more complex than those of the IPCC.
Whether the Swiss authorities will act on my complaint to them remains to be seen. Don’t hold your breath. However, now that the IPCC knows that a formal complaint has been submitted, it had better tread more carefully. If the Swiss police were to receive multiple complaints about different aspects of the IPCC’s misconduct – the Himalayan glaciers affair, for instance – they would not be able to look the other way indefinitely.
So, if the IPCC wishes to survive (and, frankly, it has had its day), it will have to be a great deal more careful in future to comply with the scientific method – and with the criminal law.
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I agree the IPCC fudges the science and is the one of the reasons we have not solved the problems 1) why did the planet warm in the last 70 years, 2) what causes the glacial/interglacial cycle, and 3) how will the planet’s climate change due the current abrupt solar magnetic cycle change and due to future increase in atmospheric CO2.
The IPCC is however a bit player in the climate wars. The IPCC provides the justification for the green scam policies. The green scam policies is the problem that causes damages not the IPCC. Likely criminal negligence is the legal tool to address the green scam policies rather than fraud.
The starting block for a criminal or civil case for damages or an order to cease the action that is causing damages is first to determine what is the strength of the evidence and logic to support ‘negligence’.
An example of a related negligence case that might be initiated is to stop the conversion of food to biofuel which is madness and will lead to food wars if it is not stopped. There are injured parties (starving and malnutrition in third world countries), the mandated used of biofuel forces the conversion of food to biofuel. There is a direct connection between the conversion of food to biofuel and a reduction in available food for people due to the lag in time to convert additional virgin forest to agricultural land and there are limited third world resources to compete with Western countries for agriculture land to grow food to feed people as opposed to convert to biofuel. The food to biofuel problem becomes particularly actuate if one adds significant crop failures do global cooling.
The case to establish negligence for actions of the IPCC is more complicate and is dependent on what will happen next (warming, cooling, or no change in planetary temperature) and what is the current understanding of the science (the cause of the observed climate change). The warmists have unsuccessfully tried to push cases that coal suppliers or power companies are negligence based on the warmist paradigm. The warmists failed as they could not establish causation.
The warmist have correctly noted that if the planet was not highly sensitive to forcing changes and if CO2 was not the primary driver of climate they could not logically explain the glacial/interglacial cycle.
As it appears there will unequivocal significant cooling, legal action will not be necessary to get the attention of the scientific community or the politicians. Based on the warmist’s paradigm significant cooling due to current solar magnetic cycle change is currently believed to be possible. If the impossible happens, then there will need to be first a physical explanation for what is happening or at least an acknowledgement that the CO2 mechanism saturates and the sun was cause of the majority of the warming in the last 70 years which will soon be followed by a discussion of options to address cooling climate change.
Criminal negligence
But criminal negligence is a ‘misfeasance or ‘nonfeasance’ (see omission), where the fault lies in the failure to foresee and so allow otherwise avoidable dangers to manifest. In some cases this failure can rise to the level of willful blindness where the individual intentionally avoids adverting to the reality of a situation. (In the United States, there may sometimes be a slightly different interpretation for willful blindness.) The degree of culpability is determined by applying a reasonable person standard. Criminal negligence becomes “gross” when the failure to foresee involves a “wanton disregard for human life” (see the discussion in corporate manslaughter).
Definition:
Negligence is often defined as
(1) not doing something which a reasonable person would do, or
(2) doing something which a reasonable person would not do.
Thus negligence can involve acts of commission and acts of omission.
In order to succeed in a negligence case, the plaintiff, or person suing, must generally satisfy the court of the following four elements:
1. Duty of care
2. Breach of standard of care
3. Injury or loss
4. Causation, ie., the causal link between the defendant’s act and the injury or loss.
rgbatduke says:
June 29, 2013 at 6:30 am
======================
Fantastic essay. Thank you.
The IPCC respondent(s)sound like very open minded folks “NO, NO, NO, NO!”. Certainly the type of folks that we would want to influence our energy use and related behavior.
On a more important note, I also endorse the notion of using legal remedies to curtail the efforts of these Eco-Fascists based upon the fact that their misguided science will exact tremendous economic hardship on many innocent people worldwide. Unfortunately, that is the only remedy that those misguided folks are likely to understand.
Four papers on line, that you may find of interest, provide some eye-opening insight on the cause of change to average global temperature and why it has stopped warming. The papers are straight-forward calculations using readily available data up to May, 2013.
The first one is ‘Global warming made simple’ at http://lowaltitudeclouds.blogspot.com/ . It shows, with simple thermal radiation calculations, how a tiny change in the amount of low-altitude clouds could account for half of the average global temperature change in the 20th century, and what could have caused that tiny cloud change. (The other half of the temperature change is from net average natural ocean oscillation which is dominated by the PDO)
The second paper is ‘Natural Climate change has been hiding in plain sight’ at http://climatechange90.blogspot.com/2013/05/natural-climate-change-has-been.html . This paper presents a simple equation that calculates average global temperatures since they have been accurately measured world wide (about 1895) with an accuracy of 90%, irrespective of whether the influence of CO2 is included or not. The equation uses a proxy which is the time-integral of sunspot numbers. A graph is included which shows the calculated trajectory overlaid on measurements.
Change to the level of atmospheric CO2 had no significant effect on average global temperature.
A third paper, ‘The End of Global Warming’ at http://endofgw.blogspot.com/ expands recent (since 1996) measurements and includes a graph showing the growing separation between the rising CO2 and not-rising average global temperature.
The fourth paper http://consensusmistakes.blogspot.com/ exposes some of the mistakes that have been made by the ‘Consensus’ and the IPCC
rgbatduke says:
June 29, 2013 at 6:30 am
I’ll second the “fantastic essay” rating.
However, you say this: “…They would like the entire world, basically, to be Amish. A world with only a few hundred million people in it, preferrably, living surrounded by primal wilderness. They hate the human species itself….” These aren’t the rural, non-college folk living around Duke, but people being “taught” at Duke, and Princeton, and just about every university these days, as well as many who are doing the “teaching”. How do you coexist in such a place, and more importantly, is there any hope to wrest these “places of learning” back from the idiots?
I wonder if anyone has developed any tests(legal) to distinguish a professional persons actions from incompetent to fraudulent?
It would appear to me we need a series of tests that legal professionals could use when prosecuting these people, to tunnel down into their behaviour to determin guilt.
You can see it now, a wide variety of culprits escaping justice (my view) by wriggling through poorly devised tests.
We need gold standard tests for use against a series of professional areas of activity ie
You can you this type of stats but not this one to ‘demonstrate’ this effect etc etc
Thank you for another excellent thread Lord Christopher Monckton of Brenchley.
Well, the short answer is Yes!
To be fair, I should also mention that the long answer is H–l Yes!
Should I be hopeful that the penance for being found guilty is winter duty physically measuring ice at the poles?
The sine curve was just an ad absurdem example to show how you can mislead! No one is suggesting a sine wave pattern in the climate.
If you examine the data properly using the best tools available there is a clear cut sine component which should be deducted before attributing any changes to anything. Sadly the best of this sort of tool is only available to military users as it is used to test if supposedly random data has a hidden information content. If you take the sinusoidal component out, the forcing drops from a figure you can fiddle to be from 1.3 to 2.2 depending on your wishful thinking factor, sorry mathematical trick, to a maximum of around 0.7 if my memory is correct.
As for a test to distinguish incompetent from fraudulent, surely lobbying to present only one side of a case when the claim is that the case is beyond question shows clearly that the intent was fraudulent. Even if the IPCC cannot be prosecuted the lecturers that lobbied the BBC to violate its charter and brainwash the public should be taken to the cleaners. Sometime if you can’t kick the lion it helps to at at lest kick the cat.
Yes, prosecute the rascals (oh, sorry, don’t mean toi insult the term ‘rascal’ by using it to refer to these australopethecines (woops! another insult to a word).
The IPCC obtained money by making statements which they knew or should have know were false. Many individuals did likewise (the so-called “research” grants). We know who the bad guys are, and what they did – let’s go after them.
And hats off to Lord Monckton, whose nobility extends far and away beyond his bloodline.
rgbatduke says:
June 29, 2013 at 6:30 am
Interestingly, the millenium goal of reducing poverty by half by 2015 might have already been reached…
http://archive.atlantic-community.org/index/items/view/Global_Poverty%3A_Has_a_Millenium_Goal_Been_Reached%3F
…notice the interesting conclusion:
“There is ample food for thought, too, if one only considers the fact that, had such a cash transfer programs been in place in 2010, they would have cost $66 billion – i.e. little more than half of official international aid.”
…in other words, international aid is mostly a scam…
It would seem that the UN IPCC do not recognise a schoolboy stats error when it is staring them in the face. If they leave this in the publication then individual governments should be notified of an error of such magnitude in what should be a simple chart, then how many other errors are there in the document and are they prepared to risk the fragile economies of the world on such shoddy statistics.
“increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases dominate the observed warming after the mid-1970s …”
I think they are leveraging what this report predicted back in 1979:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id=aJpjAAAAIBAJ&sjid=N3wDAAAAIBAJ&pg=6824,139587&dq=global+warming&hl=en
And now that this same report’s predictions about cooling look to be coming true (at least so far up to this point), they are scrambling to find anthropogenic reasons for “the pause.”
And does anybody know how the CO2 ppm is measured? Do we have thousands of CO2 stations all over the globe and are we taking the data from them to come up with a global average? Or is the CO2 ppm taken from just 1 single CO2 site?
This is the Monckton I’ve come to respect. Of course the game is very simple really, the science wing makes vague statements while the political and media wings make the core of the unsubstantiated dire alarmist agenda policy twaddle out of the “science”. They are coordinated and corrupt but it’s accepted as a social norm. A hard politically correct system that will also be judging the “fraud” claims.
There’s merit in the concept but the U.N. is unaccountable in practice. AGW is a coded term for a global political regime, the co2 and science inferences are only a part. This is certainly a better approach than the last headline of accepting IPCC talking points and figures as a starting point in “adaptation” cost analysis debates. Totally validating the IPCC fraud benchmarks in the process.
I commend Monckton but does he really believe the AGW movement was based on science to begin with? That’s a myth reinforced while his intentions are good. Climate science itself is cherry-picked mud leading nowhere which is how the crime was conceived very early on. Proving fraud through mountains of abstracts that everyone has already self-indemnified as being “our best work at the time” looks impossible. The IPCC is fundamentally a political consensus organization not a valid science authority following the implied standard practice logic Monckton wishes to assume in the courts premise. AGW is first and foremost a political crime and fraud, the willing base of academics and “experts” are a chapter.
Technical skeptics and technical front-line advocates would be better focused on the whole AGW motivation meme that leads to political rejection of the premise of Greenshirt social management which is more important in totality to the broad debate. For example, why would IPCC related people commit fraud for the AGW meme to begin with? Most skeptics know but many are reluctant to be direct and take the position. Fraud and deception are assumed around the IPCC and climate science community and under the protection of the very global consensus that created it and whom Monckton is asking a hearing, whitewash results are 97% certain. This has better intentions but again may not be the best tactic in practice.
These aren’t the rural, non-college folk living around Duke, but people being “taught” at Duke, and Princeton, and just about every university these days, as well as many who are doing the “teaching”. How do you coexist in such a place, and more importantly, is there any hope to wrest these “places of learning” back from the idiots?
I don’t think you do them justice. First of all, most of the people teaching at the University level, certainly at the level of the Universities you mention, are very committed and do a very conscientious job teaching. Remember, climate science is almost UNtaught at any University — part of the problem. There was no such thing, not really, until a decade or so ago. Students by and large aren’t either committed or uncommitted to AGW. They are at an age where they no longer respect their elders enough to accept everything they are told as being gospel truth (a good thing!) and not yet at an age or experience where they can fully judge for themselves. And they are not stupid.
So there isn’t really any need to “wrest” places of learning back from idiots, at least, no more than usual. Most faculty are disinterested and unable to make informed judgments in climate science because (and trust me on this one) it is not easy to become decently informed in climate science. I’m still working on it, and I’m not “an idiot”. The problem is that the science is very, very difficult, the evidence is diverse and easily misinterpreted, and it is thus easy to just “trust the experts”, especially when the experts tell you that they are saving the world, if you’re not with us you’re against us, if you do not accept everything we tell you are a “climate change denier” and responsible for destroying the earth.
Perhaps a lot of faculty have a “wait and see” attitude — if CAGW is wrong, nature will eventually let us know (true) and no harm will be done (not true) if we pursue a policy of abating CO_2 in the meantime.
It is this last belief — that no harm will be done, no harm is being done, with things like carbon trading, exorbitant obstacles and controls on carbon burning electrical plants, subsidy of inefficient electrical generation schemes — that is not clearly articulated. The actual cost of the amelioration efforts is carefully hidden and deeply amortized. It takes something like the near-collapse of the Euro and the quenching of the entire European economy to wake people up to a realization that demonizing carbon at the same time they continue to demonize nuclear power (the only viable global alternative capable of actually sustaining civilization at even current levels) is a sure road to a depression that will make the Great Depression seem like good times.
It is this facade that is really cracking. China no longer buys it at all — they will worry about CO_2 when all of China is civilized and wealthy (and in the meantime they are investing heavily in thorium, because it is a “toxic waste” byproduct of their rare earth mines ANYWAY and it is almost certainly useable as a comparatively safe fission fuel. Russia seems unconvinced — and Russian scientists are no slouches! Europe is in open revolt as the “bill” for all of the wind generation plants is finally coming due. And it hasn’t warmed according to any of the prescriptions of e.g. AR4.
Personally, I plan to wait and see — even with a dearth of cooling for 13 to 17 years, CAGW could still be a true hypothesis. We cannot tell, because we don’t know what the baseline temperature “should” be doing or would be doing without the CO_2. Perhaps we’d be plunging into the next glacial era. Perhaps not. The GCMs cannot tell us, because they fail basic hypothesis testing (which doesn’t mean they are wrong per se, but it means that there is no reason to think that they are correct, individually or collectively). They also fail to even validate one another — no two GCMs seem to give the same answer even when presented an idealized “toy planet” without any of the “interesting” structure that Earth has.
But in the meantime, while waiting to see — perhaps we could raise the standard of living of the poorest 1/3 of the people on the planet up to, say, the 1950s? Washing machines, refrigerators, electric lights, flushing toilets, reliable clean water, decent transportation? Is that too much to ask? Because if we fail to do that, we don’t HAVE to wait until 2100 for a catastrophe. We are a catastrophe to the poor, right now.
rgb
If the actual frauds can be proven, then the IPCC should be prosecuted for crimes against humanity.
The claim that “the rate of global warming has been accelerating” would be supported by a second-order linear regression – one that uses a quadratic equation instead of a straight line. The least-squares *estimate* of the ‘accelerating rate of warming’ would appear quantitatively as the coefficient of the second-order (quadratic) term in such a regression. The curve would be a parabola, not a splicing of straight lines. There would also be variances to estimate probable errors of the estimates, confidence limits, etc.
But one can hardly expect such statistical sophistication from anyone who is evidently oblivious to the hyperbolic error bounds on the linear regression produced by the separate variances in the bi-variate mean and the slope. Such concepts are treated in any basic statistics course, and do not even require calculus. Any chapter on standard linear regression will explain them.
http://www.jerrydallal.com/LHSP/slr.htm
We need to be aware that the climate wars are a dangerous distraction from what appears to be a real and imminent problem that it appears will require a global response. The skeptics should not cheer that the planet is now cooling and we have won the climate wars.
Even though we are currently experiencing the start of cooling, the paradigm of global warming is so strong and the knowledge of the abrupt end of all of the past interglacial periods and cyclic abrupt climate change so remote, we are continuing as if all is fine which it is not. There are cycles of warming followed by cooling in the paleo record. For example, the Medieval Warm period was followed by the Little Ice age. There are nine (9) cyclic warming and cooling periods during the current interglacial period (the Holocene) and there are a further 14 more warming and cooling periods in the glacial period. (23 in total that can be tracked and the warming and cooling periods correlate with solar magnetic cycle changes.)
We should be aware the Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle is occasionally followed by a Heinrich event which it appears terminates interglacial periods. The abrupt very, very, strong Heinrich cooling events occur roughly every 8000 to 10,000 years. The cooling associated with an abrupt change to a Little Ice age climate will result in crop failures and food shortages. The cooling associated with a Heinrich event, the termination of an interglacial period is difficult to even imagine which needs to be done and its affects quantified to enable preparation to be done, if it appears the Little Ice age cooling will be followed by what causes a Heinrich event.
The same regions of the planet that warmed in the 20th century are the same regions of the planet that warmed during the Medieval Warm period. Obviously as we are suddenly experiencing Little Ice age type cooling something has changed to cause the cooling. The something that has changed to cause the cooling is the sun. The below graphical comparison of solar cycles 22, 23, 24 tells only part of the story.
The solar magnetic cycle is changing quarter by quarter. There is a visual change in the appearance of the sunspot groups. I have no idea what NASA is waiting for to make a public announcement. The climate wars will be soon be over. The warmists are fighting the wrong war.
http://www.solen.info/solar/images/comparison_recent_cycles.png
http://cc.oulu.fi/~usoskin/personal/nature02995.pdf
Unusual activity of the Sun during recent decades compared to the previous 11,000 years
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/jun/12/farmers-fail-weather-wheat-crop
The wettest autumn since records began, followed by the coldest spring in 50 years, has devastated British wheat, forcing food manufacturers to import nearly 2.5m tonnes of the crop. … ….Britain is usually the EU’s third biggest wheat grower but it will be a net importer for the first time in 11 years.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/typical-british-weather-rain-cold-and-high-winds-set-to-return-as-uk-summer-fizzles-out-8655945.html
http://www.thelocal.fr/20130521/weather-men-bring-more-bad-news-for-france
According to Météo France, the national weather agency, the heavy rain that kept most people trapped in doors over last weekend’s Pentecost holiday is to continue until the end of the month, meaning that Spring 2013 is set to be one of the coldest in the last 20 years.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/31/italy-shivers-cursed-spring-relentless-rain
In the north-west, according to the Italian meteorological society, residents have had the coldest May since 1991. In much of the north-east, the spring has been the wettest for at least 150 years. A mountain stage of the Giro d’Italia bike race was called off due to snow and ice. Beach resorts in Tuscany have been flooded. Many farmers have suffered huge damage to their crops. …. ….Now, as June arrives, it should technically be summer. But it certainly doesn’t feel like it.
https://www.wmo.int/pages/mediacentre/news_members/documents/2013-05-29DeutschlandwetterimFruhling2013en.pdf
… Coldest spring since 1987 Spring 2013 was the coldest in Germany since 1987. The average temperature of 6.7 degrees Celsius (°C) was 1.0 degree lower than the reference values for 1961 to 1990 and as much as 1.8 degrees below the figure for the comparative period from 1981 to 2010.
http://www.euronews.com/2013/05/24/wintry-spring-costs-western-europe/
…A tourist who found it bewildering said: “It is very strange, but I think the whole of Europe had a very long winter, but I didn’t expect snow in the Serra de Estrela in May.” The northern Spanish city of Burgos felt temperatures drop to 3ºC on May 15. In the French interior they’ve been averaging 4-5 degrees below normal, so people have kept the heating going.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Ice_Age
Little Ice Age
The Little Ice Age (LIA) was a period of cooling that occurred after the Medieval Warm Period (Medieval Climate Optimum).[1] While it was not a true ice age, the term was introduced into the scientific literature by François E. Matthes in 1939.[2] It has been conventionally defined as a period extending from the 16th to the 19th centuries,[3][4][5] or alternatively, from about 1350 to about 1850,[6] though climatologists and historians working with local records no longer expect to agree on either the start or end dates of this period, which varied according to local conditions ….
….The population of Iceland fell by half, but this was perhaps caused by fluorosis after the eruption of the volcano Laki in 1783.[20] Iceland also suffered failures of cereal crops, and people moved away from a grain-based diet.[21] The Norse colonies in Greenland starved and vanished (by the early 15th century), as crops failed and livestock …. …. Hubert Lamb said that in many years, “snowfall was much heavier … ….Crop practices throughout Europe had to be altered to adapt to the shortened, less reliable growing season, and there were many years of dearth and famine (such as the Great Famine of 1315–1317, although this may have been before the LIA proper).[25] According to Elizabeth Ewan and Janay Nugent, “Famines in France 1693–94, Norway 1695–96 and Sweden 1696–97 claimed roughly 10% of the population of each country. In Estonia and Finland in 1696–97, losses have been estimated at a fifth and a third of the national populations, respectively.”[26] Viticulture disappeared from some northern regions. Violent storms caused serious flooding and loss of life. Some of these resulted in permanent loss of large areas of land from the Danish, German and Dutch coasts.[24] Historian Wolfgang Behringer has linked intensive witch-hunting episodes in Europe to agricultural failures during the Little Ice Age.[36]
rgbatduke-
As a non-scientist, I really appreciate your posts and enjoy them as much as any that I read. Your thought process and conduct on this site should be the gold standard for all scientists. Climate science would improve if all participants followed your lead. Sadly, I have seen far too many examples of the worst that science has to offer. The very top scientists of any field are the first to admit they dont know it all and welcome the search for the truth.
No. It is time we sued our politicians for fraud in imposing increasing taxes for one of the biggest scams in history. To believe sycophants, who hide under their titles of “scientists”, beggars belief when the interests of politicians, who are no more than public servants, are devoid of the long term interests of their Country and the legitimate peoples therein.
rgbatduke says: June 29, 2013 at 5:03 am
“A correct application of statistics to the GCMs would be to formulate the null hypothesis “this model is correct” (one at a time!), generate a Monte Carlo spread of results for that model to sample the effect of chaos, generate the mean (per model!) and deciles away from the mean (per model!) and note that reality is in every single case in the last decile (or worse) of the model envelopes, and that the models without exception (one at a time!) exaggerate the warming. One would then systematically reject the null hypothesis “this model is correct”, one at a time, for all of the models that contributed to AR4, and conclude that we have very little idea w
hat is going to happen to the climate in 100 years because we do not understand and cannot predict what the climate is doing right now.”
The above was actually already done here:
Scafetta N., 2012. Testing an astronomically based decadal-scale empirical harmonic climate model versus the IPCC (2007) general circulation climate models. Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 80, 124-137.
http://people.duke.edu/~ns2002/pdf/ATP3533.pdf
The claim that “the rate of global warming has been accelerating” would be supported by a second-order linear regression – one that uses a quadratic equation instead of a straight line. The least-squares *estimate* of the ‘accelerating rate of warming’ would appear quantitatively as the coefficient of the second-order (quadratic) term in such a regression. The curve would be a parabola, not a splicing of straight lines. There would also be variances to estimate probable errors of the estimates, confidence limits, etc.
Well, yes, but there is no justification for fitting a) a constant; b) a straight line; c) a quadratic; d) an exponential (which would also fit the data tolerably well given the broad error bars), e) a harmonic function; f) more complicated analytic functions, including cubics, hyperbolic secants, etc.
As previously mentioned, the error bars on the figure are absolute nonsense from the point of view of trying to do a proper regression fit anyway. I know from a considerable amount of experience that the quality of the fit one obtains (and one’s ability to resolve different nonlinear function fits as “better” or “worse”, e.g. the computation of R-squared to differentiate a linear fit with nonzero slope to one with zero slope) strongly depends on having meaningful error bars. Otherwise one risks fitting statistical noise, not any actual trend at all. If you (say) quadruple the error bars on the data from the nineteenth century, and amplify the error on the earlier part of the twentieth century by a factor of three, and the error on the latter part of the twentieth century by a factor of two (to smoothly match contemporary estimates of probable error in global temperature that are still IMO too small and lacking much in the way of systematic defensible basis, at least that I’ve seen).
Remember, one is sampling a large planet with imperfect tools at flawed land sites and with almost NO useful oceanic data. Antarctica was terra incognita; much of the Arctic, much of Siberia, much of China, even large parts of Canada and the United States were virtually unmeasured except in very specific locations back in the 19th century. Only satellite measurements of LTT and ARGO measurements in the last decade form anything like defensibly precise measures of global temperature without unknown UHI and method/sampling errors, and ARGO is by no means stable yet in its results and still horrendously undersamples the surface area of the sea.
Next, the graph above HAPPENS (IMO quite deliberately) to be an interval where the behavior is (nearly) monotonic — this quite naturally causes the human mind to assume that the unseen part of the graph off to the left is nearly constant, uninfluenced by evil human activity, and suggests that humans and their expanding civilization are the proximate cause of all of the warming visible on the curve. Replace the graph with this one:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
(noting well that even this curve is based on the illustrated mess of colored spaghetti, and has probable error bars that are large enough to translate any attempt to fit anything to it to R-squared = 0 from 8 to 10 ky before the present to the present) and all bets are off. Even using the (IMO probably biased) 2 kybp graph (which curiously lacks the RWP clearly visible on the 12 kybp graph). The 2 kybp still has the MWP on it, as well as the LIA, where it is clear that the LIA was the coldest single stretch in ten thousand years (and with much better resolution — we can be fairly sure that it really was seriously cold). The entire graph above is revealed to be only part of an upswing 400 years old, that began utterly without human influence and that appears to have peaked — although this is difficult to properly say given the relative time scales and granularity of the curves, but they started it by putting e.g. “2004” temperatures on the curves to commit a sampling error fallacy that is not forgiven by being explained in a caption nobody reads and few would understand if they did read.
Global climate as represented in “global average temperature” (or by any other measure) has never been constant, linear, quadratic, predictable, or (so far) understandable. We cannot predict, compute, or even explain a single one of the structures visible in the 12 thousand year curve, and have only the crudest of heuristic explanations for the variation on the (click through) 5 mybp curve linked at the bottom of this figure. We are on a rollercoaster driven be enormously powerful forces that apparently can easily overwhelm any predicted increase due to CO_2 and utterly confound any attempt to establish e.g. climate sensitivity or feedback from an imagined “warming signal” somehow resolvable from a predictable baseline behavior.
If the human race had any sense at all, it would acknowledge that the right answer to the question “What will the climate be doing in 100 years?” is nobody knows, we cannot yet predict with any confidence at all what will be happening in two years, let alone twenty or a hundred. We could be plunging into the next Pliestocene glaciation. We could be warming back to near the Holocene Optimum. We could be returning to conditions and temperatures not seen since the Miocene — this is essentially the “catastrophe” predicted by Hansen (see the 65 mybp curve) — putting an abrupt end to the Pliestocene. Or, we could be doing none of the above, merely continuing to bounce around some sort of latter-day Holocene mean trend (where the Holocene itself has clearly been cooling on average for some 8,000 years, although there are clearly warm and cool periods interspersed that nobody can predict, compute, or even heuristically explain).
Given the honest, correct answer of “We don’t know”, we need to look long and hard about the motives and interests of those that claim otherwise, that claim a knowledge that the data and our demonstrable computational capabilities clearly do not support, while diverting a significant fraction of the GGP — gross global product — into “climate stuff”, research, ameliorating a supposedly certain disaster, and so on, at the expense of the simple economic health of the developed countries and the prolongation of the misery of the underdeveloped countries. We need to think about longer term plans, and what the real costs of both action and inaction are while we wait to accumulate data and knowledge that might in 20 to 50 years (or more) allow us to actually understand what is going on well enough to make actual predictions with some computable and empirically verifiable probability of being right.
At the moment, the best that can be said of the GCMs is that simple hypothesis testing suffices to reject all, or nearly all, of them as being too broken to take seriously, and curiously, all of the errors are on the side of far too much warming compared to what has been observed over the last 30 years that the GCMs have been supposedly predicting disaster, especially over the last 13 to 17 years where there has been little to no warming at all but the GCMs predicted strong warming.
Without the support of verified, functioning, predictive, hindcastable GCMs, all we are left with is the statement of the CAGW hypothesis. Yes, it could be true. No, it could be false. Yes, if true it would probably be bad, but one cannot rationally compute the risk and expectation value of any associated loss if one cannot assign an actual meaningful number to the probability that it is true, and even “true” comes with a rather wide range of possibilities ranging from not catastrophic at all to “Back to the Eocene Optimum” or even worse. Taking small, inexpensive steps to hedge our bets against the worst of these possibilities is fine while we learn to do better, but diverting 10 or 20% of the GGP and ensuring the deaths of tens to hundreds of millions of humans due to prolonged energy poverty and misdirected resources on the basis of a deliberately misrepresented picture of certainty? That’s not so fine. At the very least an honest appraisal of risks and costs needs to occur that simply has not occurred.
The dialogue so far has been a monologue, one where even questioning the certainty of the disaster or the real costs of trying to avert it has been rendered politically incorrect, stupid, willfully blind, in cahoots with a greedy energy industry (that I am fairly certain are making far more money, far more easily, from selling energy at the inflated and rapidly fluctuating prices associated with the panic and amelioration than they ever would have in a flat untampered economy). The real cost to the world’s poorest people is only just now being exposed, and is horrific enough that even some of the (formerly) most passionate advocates of the CAGW scenario are backing off, especially given that the global temperature is at least momentarily no cooperating with and supporting the catastrophic scenario.
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Definitely recent deceleration in evidence (thought to be of Somalian origin).
O/T A wind farm scheduled for New England region in NSW has been aborted, too expensive.
One step in the right direction. We are very windy here sometimes, and after the two wind turbines capsized in Cornwall, maybe they are worried about how this will go? Also they are pushing solar here too. Anyway must go, and gud luck Lord Christopher?