Guest essay by Christopher Monckton
As soon as the BBC/Maslowski forecast of no sea ice in the Arctic summer by 2013 has been disproven (see countdown on right sidebar), WUWT will need another countdown. May I propose the Santer countdown?
On November 17, 2011, Ben Santer and numerous colleagues, including researchers from Remote Sensing Systems (RSS), published a paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research (Atmospheres) that, as his press release said,
“shows that climate models can and do simulate short, 10- to 12-year “hiatus periods” with minimal warming, even when the models are run with historical increases in greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosol particles. … tropospheric temperature records must be at least 17 years long to discriminate between internal climate noise and the signal of human-caused changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere.”
In an earlier posting I demonstrated that for more than 17 years (now 17 years 7 months) the HadCRUt4 monthly global mean surface temperature anomaly dataset had shown no global warming distinguishable from the combined 2 σ measurement, coverage, and bias uncertainties published together with the data themselves.
However, there were those who said that, nevertheless, the HadCRUt4 data appeared to show some warming (albeit less than 1 Cº/century). Well, the first of the five principal datasets to show no warming at all for 17 years is likely to be the RSS dataset of Santer’s own colleagues. Today the data for August 2013 were made available:
The least-squares linear-regression trend on the data from the RSS satellites since November 1996 shows there has been no global warming at all for 202 months (16 years 10 months). In a few more months, unless an el Niño comes along in January, its favorite month, RSS may be the first dataset to show 17 full years with a zero global warming trend.
The NOAA’s 2008 State of the Climate report said 15 or more years without global warming would indicate what was delicately described as a “discrepancy” between prediction and observation.
Fifteen years without warming duly came and went: indeed, Professor Jones of the University of East Anglia was the first to admit this, in response to a question I had suggested to Roger Harrabin of the BBC (who had thought I was daft to suggest that there had been no statistically-significant warming for as much as a decade and a half).
So Santer moved the goalposts.
Taking the mean of all five principal global-temperature datasets (GISS, HadCRUt4, NCDC, RSS, and UAH), since the new millennium began on 1 January 2001 there has been no global warming at all for 152 months (12 years 8 months):
Therefore, those who are anxious to believe that the long pause in global warming is what the models expected, or at least allowed for, can take a crumb of comfort from that.
Two important caveats. First, linear trends are not predictions. They are only one way of representing the trend (if any) that has already occurred over a chosen period in a stochastic dataset such as the global mean surface or lower-troposphere temperature anomalies.
Secondly, a strong el Niño, or a resumption of stronger solar activity, or simply some hitherto-unexplained factor in natural climate variability, could cause a resumption of global warming at any time. The central consideration, then, is not whether there have been x years without global warming, vexing though this embarrassing statistic is to the true-believers and their models. It is the extent and the persistence of the discrepancy between predicted and observed global warming.
The monthly Global Warming Prediction Index keeps track of this discrepancy. The index number for September 2013, published today, is 0.22 Cº. That is how much the IPCC’s central projection of global warming over the 8 years 8 months from January 2005 to August 2013 has overshot the observed temperature trend.
Today’s index graph shows 34 models’ projections of global warming since January 2005 in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report as an orange region. The IPCC’s central projection, the thick red line, is that the world should have warmed by 0.20 Cº (equivalent to 2.33 Cº/century) since that starting date.
The mean of the RSS and UAH satellite measurements, in dark blue over the bright blue trend-line, shows global cooling of 0.02 Cº (–0.22 Cº/century). The models have thus over-predicted warming since January 2005 by 0.22 Cº (2.55 Cº/century).
The 18 ppmv (202 ppmv/century) rise in the trend on the gray dogtooth CO2 concentration curve, plus other ghg increases, should have caused 0.1 Cº warming, with the remaining 0.1 ºC from previous CO2 increases. No warming has occurred.
On its own, the CO2 increase since 2005 should have caused a radiative forcing of 0.24 Watts per square meter, or 0.34 W m–2 after including the influence of all other greenhouse gases. Even without temperature feedbacks, according to the IPCC’s methods this forcing should have caused 0.1 Cº warming. Adding in the IPCC’s temperature estimates of temperature feedbacks and of previously-committed global warming should have caused up to 0.3 Cº warming since January 2005. None has occurred.
Note how the temperature has failed to rise since 2005, notwithstanding that the CO2 concentration has risen quite rapidly. The usual suspects like to display what they call an “escalator graph” with many of Santer’s “hiatus periods” of 10-12 years without any global warming, but an overall rising trend nonetheless.
However, previous periods free of global warming did not occur while Man was putting more CO2 in the air anything like as rapidly as he is today. Now that CO2 concentration is rising, so should temperature be rising, if the IPCC were correct about how much warming we should expect as CO2 concentration increases.
The “escalator graph”, then, is meaningless, except to the extent that the frequency with which the “hiatus periods” occurs suggests that the probability of seeing anything like the 2.8 Cº warming this century that is the IPCC’s central projection is not very great.
Though the IPCC projects that the world should have warmed by 0.20 Cº (2.33 Cº/century) since 2005, the mean of the RSS and UAH satellite datasets shows cooling of 0.02 Cº (0.22 Cº/century). The predicted and actual trends are visibly diverging. Solar physicists expect significant cooling in the coming decades. If they are right, the divergence will become more than merely embarrassing.
Even as things stand, if the IPCC overshoot over the past 104 months were to continue for 100 years the IPCC’s prediction would exceed the measured trend by more than 2.5 Cº.
If Jeffrey Patterson’s harmonic decomposition of the past 113 years’ temperature records is correct, the world may actually be cooler in 2100 than in 2000.
A shame we shall not be there to see the baffled faces of the profiteers of doom.
Just thought an old presentation would be fun:
Just thought an old presentation would be fun to have another go:
The bafflement will be due to their incredulity that everyone still does not buy into their doom saying.
I suppose now they can run around saying, “We’re all doomed, we’re all doomed!” (Climate activists, that is, and their funding).
Shocking News! Who would have thought that when the atmosphere changed from 99.965% not CO2 to an insanely high 99.96% not CO2 that temperatures would not have skyrocketed! I thought so for sure, they told me so.
since 17 years seems to be the magic number for climate modelers, had there been 17 years of warming before Hansen made his predictions of climatic doom in 1984?
Gleencz,
Great use of actual numbers and logic!!
“May I propose the Santer countdown?”
I proposed something akin to this in a comment here several months ago. I’d still love to see it done!
Was this covered on WUWT? If not does anyone know about the ‘paper’?
If RSS is at 16 yrs 10 months with no warming, it could hit 17 yrs before a potential January El-Nino, right?
May I propose a turbine tear down. Give gore et all a hammer and chisel to remove the tons of concrete holding up the bleebing things up.
I had to visit WUWT and cleanse myself of the insanity of reading comments from the faithful on a CNN article re: Humberto. It is amazing and disappointing how many people have absolutely no knowledge of the haitus and simply parrot the “97% of scientists” line without any understanding of how it was derived. While clearly wrong, Obama’s tweet of this figure has had the desired effect of making people think that virtually every scientist agrees that man cause the majority of global warming and you are a flat-earther if you believe otherwise.
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Reblogged this on wwlee4411 and commented:
Global warming, climate change, or whatever you want to call it is BOGUS!
“Down the up escalator.”
Reblogged this on CACA and commented:
‘Where, Oh Where, Has that Global Warming Gone?’ — ‘One highly plausible answer to this mystery is that the climate models upon which IPCC’s failed projections are based exaggerate climate sensitivity to CO², underestimate known natural forcings, and simply don’t understand how to factor in and calibrate other influences such as ocean cycles and solar activity.’
http://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2013/09/10/terrifying-flat-global-temperature-crisis-threatens-to-disrupt-u-n-climate-conference-agenda/
Have no fear though, the IPCC liars will have a smorgasbord of “explanations” for what they will call “the slowdown” later this month in Sweden.
While Mr. Monckton’s article uses the term “predict” on a number of occasions, predictions are not a feature of the investigation that is described by the article. In logic, a “prediction” is an extrapolation from an observed state of a system to an unobserved but observable state of the same system. For example, it is an extrapolation from the observed state “cloudy” to the unobserved but observable state “rain in the next 24 hours.” By convention, the former state is called the “condition” while the latter state is called the outcome. A pairing of a condition with an outcome is a description of an event but for the research that is described by Monckton’s article, there are no events. This is clear from the fact that there are no relative frequencies, for relative frequencies are a feature of a collection of events but there are none here.
I’m sure I had read on this site that the satellite datasets showed no warming for 23 years and the land based datasets showed no warming for 16 years. How come your data / interpretation is different ?
The profiteers of doom are no doubt already struggling to conceal their baffled faces.
Jimbo: Have you asked at NoTrickZone?
Bar an el nino event which happens we should be OK for a while, unless we have a volcanic event. But what is the scientific basis for carbon taxes and abatement schemes that are eschewed by the politicians, economists and the press?
Terry Oldberg:
I see that at September 11, 2013 at 2:51 pm you continue your practice of presenting sophist nonsense as a method to obfuscate the undeniable fact that IPCC predictions have failed.
For example, you write
There is
an “event” (i.e. the global temperature in 1997)
and
a “prediction” (i.e. how the IPCC said global temperature would rise after then).
And the “outcome” is the difference between that “event” and the “prediction”. That outcome is shown in the above graphs.
So, please do NOT try to destroy this thread with your sophistry as you have other threads. Your nonsense has been refuted repeatedly by rgb@duke, by me, by etc.. There is no need for this thread to be tied up with your nonsense, too.
Richard
Robert Orme says:
September 11, 2013 at 2:58 pm
Bar an el nino event which happens we should be OK for a while
————————————
Not sure that we aren’t witnessing a type of El Nino event right now:-
http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2013/09/09/august-2013-sea-surface-temperature-sst-anomaly-update/
PS I am sure that Bob will disagree with me, no worries, I am a great admirer of Bob’s work, I just have to ask questions. At the moment I do not see why an El Nino “warm pool” has to always dissipate back along the equator. Why can it not “slosh” into extratropical areas?
What the pause does is falsify the GCM models on which ECS, hence CAGW, are based. IT does not, by itself, falsify AGW. Add in the fundamental reasons why AR4 (and soon AR5) meta analyses got it all wrong and sceptics are home free. And the answers do not require appeal to ‘natural’ unexplained variability– although that is a significant factor just now being acknowledged by AGW proponents as an excuse for their predictive failures. There was provable positive water vapor feedback (constant UTrH) and positive cloud feedback bias in the AR4 meta analysis. Classic selection biases. All continued ineaked AR5 WG1 SOD. Published multiple places previously including over on Dr. Curry’s blog after serious scientific scrutiny, and in an ebook.
All this should bring the IPCC house of cards down soon.
Let the new countdown begin.
I think that moving the goal post is a bad strategy for the Alarmists. It makes them look desperate. In the interest of being helpful, I’ve drafted a statement that will be far better at keeping the pod people on message:
Today is Paul “Bear” Bryant’s birthday. He was a brilliant pragmatist (and football coach). This has to be significant, somehow.
On November 17, 2011, Ben Santer and numerous colleagues, including researchers from Remote Sensing Systems (RSS), published a paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research (Atmospheres) that, as his press release said,
“shows that climate models can and do simulate short, 10- to 12-year “hiatus periods” with minimal warming, even when the models are run with historical increases in greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosol particles. … tropospheric temperature records must be at least 17 years long to discriminate between internal climate noise and the signal of human-caused changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere.”
//////////////////////////////
i would like to see the detail on this. In particular for each model that shows a 10 to 12 year “hiatus period”:
1. what level of CO2 existed in the model run during the period of ‘hiatus’
2. What CO2 forcing was the model running
3. What negative forcings existed in the model run during the “hiatus period” and how are these negative forcings broken down.
Obviously it is easier to have a 10 year period of hiatus than a 17 year period of hiatus.
Likewise, it is easier to have a relatively short period of hiatus when say CO2 levels are ~310 rising to ~330ppm than it is when CO2 levels are ~380 rising to ~400ppm
It is vitally important to know the climate sensitivity being used by these models. Is it only low sensitivity models that show a “hiatus period” and beyond what level for climate sensitivity do no models show a “hiatus period”?
It is also extremely important to know what negative forcings the model used to offset the positive forcing of CO2. Are these randomly generated, or are they based on prediction and/or data? What assumptions have been made with respect to the level of negative forcings employed by the models? A comparision of the negative forcings operative by the model during the “hiatus period” needs to be compared to those operative today which we know about as a result of fact based observation.
Without detail, Santer’s statement should be regarded as mere puff and carrying no weight.
given the issues highlighted by this very blog in regard to actual temperature measurements,land and ocean,the cynic in me tends to think there may well be net cooling over this period. if that is the case,and continues to be so,it really is going to be interesting to watch the warmist response over the next decade or so.
provided i do not die of hypothermia as scotland attempts to rely on 100% renewable energy by 2020 first.
I asked Walter Dnes the question below. Here is the question and his answer:
What is the maximum that September has to be and still allow 204 months to be reached? Thanks!
Note that 204 months will be October 1996 to September 2013.
I’ve played around with the series, and it looks like it would have to be 0.154, assuming no other months of the series are modified. The spreadsheet slope() function uses all the points in the range to calculate slope, which is why the caveat. This August was 0.167, and in May, we had 0.139. So 0.154 is definitely possible.
Walter Dnes
If Jeffrey Patterson’s harmonic decomposition of the past 113 years’ temperature records is correct, the world may actually be cooler in 2100 than in 2000.
A shame we shall not be there to see the baffled faces of the profiteers of doom.
It’s a bloody damn shame we won’t be there to insist on the return all of the wasted money and resources, with compound interest calculated after inflation adjustments! The lost opportunity costs are incalculable…..
In response to a commenter’s query, in the RSS dataset the difference between the 16 years 10 months without any warming and the 23 years without statistically significant warming is that for almost 17 years there has been no global warming at all.
Bruce Cobb,
I expect the IPCC will switch track to the dangerous extreme weather events line. This “argument” seems to be in vogue amongst the Warmistas.
And once again we are looking at changes in temp over a tiny time scale, graphs and all that. Please don’t get drawn into the joke of looking at what is weather or multi-decadal stuff. It’s meaningless nonsense encouraged by paid scientists who need in their next pay packet. It means roughly shit.
bit chilly says:
September 11, 2013 at 3:59 pm
provided i do not die of hypothermia as scotland attempts to rely on 100% renewable energy by 2020 first.
Is drying and burning peat an ‘approved’ renewable resource as yet, in The Land of the Scots?
MtK
Secondly, a strong el Niño, or a resumption of stronger solar activity, or simply some hitherto-unexplained factor in natural climate variability, could cause a resumption of global warming at any time
/////////////////////
But these are not CO2 driven events, and if one or more of them were to occur and if they were to drive temperatures upwards then this would not be the result of CO2 forcing. Rather, it would be the consequence falling under the umbrella of natural variation.
It is important to bear in mind that the satellite data (which extends for some 33 years) only shows a single and isolated one off warming in and around the super El Nino of 1998. Prior to that El Nino the temperatures were flat between 1979 and about 1996/7 and following that event, from about [1999] to date the temperatures have again been flat. There is no first order correlation between temperature and CO2 in the 33 year period of the satellite record.
The satellite record suggests that climate sensitivity is so low that it cannot be measured within the limitations imposed by the design, sensitivity, resolution and errors of our current best measurement devices. As matters stand, for the past 33 years, we cannot seperate the signal to CO2 from the noise of natural variation.
Further to my post above. The second sentence of the second para contained a typo. The reference to 1990 should have been 1999, ie.,
“Prior to that El Nino the temperatures were flat between 1979 and about 1996/7 and following that event, from about 1999 to date the temperatures have again been flat. “
J Martin says:
September 11, 2013 at 2:53 pm
I’m sure I had read on this site that the satellite datasets showed no warming for 23 years
That number is true for RSS and it is the time that SkS shows no statistically significant warming. Since August, 1989, SkS says “Trend: 0.123 ±0.125 °C/decade (2σ)”. (That would now be 24 years.) See: http://www.skepticalscience.com/trend.php
On the other hand, Nick Stokes’ site at: http://moyhu.blogspot.com.au/p/temperature-trend-viewer.html?Xxdat=%5B0,1,4,48,92%5D
gives: “CI from -0.025 to 1.965” since January 1993. This would be 20 years and 8 months.
So, can we consider the 17＋year requirement to be the “Santer Clause”?
Using the oft flogged acidification of the ocean misrepresentation, a temperature trend of zero represents cooling because it isn’t getting hotter. In fact we’re 0.something degrees cooler than if the models were worth the money wasted on them.
My next question is, what percentage of the cooling is human-caused? How much more acidic, excuse me, cooler would it be if there were no human contribution to global cooling? What are the consequences of CAGC in the short and long terms? Should we start giving away coal to reverse this chilling new climate? Is this a good time to sell my carbon investments? Was Al Gore right that climate change is the greatest challenge to the human race ever? Was this cooling what he had in mind when he said that?
Ok – that was several questions, but once you have your tongue firmly in your cheek its hard to stop.
There is no discernible reason why a temperature estimate from microwaves sensed in a satellite should correlate 1:1 with sensors in MMTS shelters some arbitrary height above local ground level. I’m not really confident that the two types of record should be averaged.
Apart from that, I’d be cautious about excess jubilation, which could come back to bite the bum. Nature is rather unpredictable and the chance that a 1998-type year will repeat is finite.
Better to stick to the record than to ‘project’, eh? That’s what the other lot does, project from models.
My guess is that the warmists are praying for a nice big volcano, then they can model that and come to the conclusion that the heating has been hidden.
@mpaul,
Love it! You speak as if you’ve audited a few courses in Circular Logic at some Liberal uni…ever been to Townsville, Australia?
@richardscourtney says it well, and if ANYTHING has failed to be a “prediction”, it is all the GCM, which are nothing but expensive Ouija Boards. IF I create a program, give it a starting condition, let it run, any claim that because my initial conditions were a reconstruction of an actual day’s weather, that therefore the end state of my GCM’s run was a valid prediction is simply false.
The alarmists have conflated their models with reality.
The predictions of the alarmists have no basis in reality, the assumptions behind the programs no proven basis in fact, and the fallacy behind the notion that by taking the combined outputs of any number of such machines and by some magic analysis, produce a factual result applicable to the real world, even a trend should be obvious to anyone who can put together a truth table. That a computer program behaves a certain way is no proof that nature will, all assertions to the contrary. It is, after all, only a reflection of the biases of those who programmed it. If they knew enough to make a program that could ape the environment accurately, they wouldn’t need the program in the first place.
Models are abstrations, which can be useful. But they should not be mistaken for reality.
@Rud Istvan makes the very valid point that warming may well be real, regardless the lunacy of the alarmists. The takeaway point (which the alarmists are trying very very hard to take away from everyone, lest the world’s population do what should’ve been done long since: ignore them) is that alarmists have not proven their claims that increased CO2 level is a cause of warming (rather than a result), or that mankind is to blame for any changes in climate either way, or that the warming seen since the late 19th century has been caused by anything unnatural, or that any warming (or lack thereof) is anything other than the result of a natural process, and well within the natural variation for the Earth’s climate. Further, for all their alarmism, they have yet to prove—in contradiction of the vast history to the contrary—that if we ARE heading into a warm period similar to the Medieval Warm Period or Roman Warming, that it will be in any way harmful to mankind. It’s a matter of history that all previous warm periods have been a great boon to mankind (when live gives you lemons, the REALLY smart man asks for tequila and salt).
If the worst that happens is that a few rich elitist snobs have to retreat from their submerging seaside bungaloes, where’s the downside ?
(I only refrain from mentioning the inconvenience to the poor because a) they adapt, and always have; and b) I’ve yet to see any Greenie-treehugging-alarmist come to the aid of farmers whose land is currently a couple of fathoms under the Mississippi River, for example…so obviously they’re not important in the alarmists’ calculus…)
If Al Gore had won in 2000 – he would of forced a heap of stupid regulations on us then been declaring victory now how it worked — I thank God he did not win.
johnny pics says:
September 11, 2013 at 2:25 pm
May I propose a turbine tear down. Give gore et all a hammer and chisel to remove the tons of concrete holding up the bleebing things up.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
OH what a LOVELY IDEA!
Make the punishment fit the crime. All of the loud mouthed doomsayers in academia and the NGOs and the bureaucracies should be equipped with hammers, chisels and wheel barrows and be made to remover every last scrap of Wind turbines and Solar panels from the landscape. (Dutifully placing each piece in the correct recycling bin of course.)
This will be on their on dime of course.
Is this a global pandemic of anosmia? Can’t people smell the stench of a corrupting ideology? Will they have to be deprived of literally everything before they wake up and smell the roses again?
Bruce Cobb says:
September 11, 2013 at 2:48 pm
Have no fear though, the IPCC liars will have a smorgasbord of “explanations” for what they will call “the slowdown” later this month in Sweden.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
And with luck Mother Nature will have a lovely blizzard waiting to greet them. (Possible – Record low was 32F (0C) on September 23 1996)
mpaul says: @ September 11, 2013 at 3:37 pm
…In a statement, the Union of Honest Scientists notes, “the evidence of the harm created by global warming to our computer infrastructure is now overwhelming, and while it is already too late, we call on lawmakers to immediately enact legislation that will begin to reverse the damage to our computers….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
GEE, I think I just read that statement with slight modifications over at FORBES a couple of minutes ago:
Perhaps they should hire that journalist to write their press copy. /sarc
“Solar physicists expect significant cooling in the coming decades.”
Some solar physicists . . .
OR: A number of sun watchers . . .
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Green Sand says:
September 11, 2013 at 3:20 pm
. . .“slosh” into extratropical areas?
If the Trade Winds never cease, one might suppose the warm pool in the western Pacific Ocean would leak heat to someplace other than the eastern Pacific. I have trouble imagining this would be a “slosh” in any same-sense as the release of water when the Trade Winds cease.
Sorry, left the slash out
You do realise that it’s only 201 months since November 1996? You can’t count both the beginning and end months in your number, so I’d hate to see everyone celebrating a month too early. After all, if you measure a fall of the average monthly temperature temperature of 0.1 degree starting in July and ending in August, that is a one-month fall, not a 2-month fall.
Martin Hodgkins says: @ September 11, 2013 at 4:13 pm
And once again we are looking at changes in temp over a tiny time scale….
Then how about this?
The authors state that most glaciers in Norway didn’t exist 6,000 years ago, and the highest period of the glacial activity has been in the past 600 years.
Alternate: Norway Experiencing Greatest Glacial Activity in the past 1,000 year
And if the next 2 months come in at, say 0.18 and 0.2, then the period of negative slope goes back to October 1996, and the above argument becomes irrelevant. On the other hand, a September anomaly of 0.26, and we lose a month off the far end. Exciting stuff!
Robert of Ottawa said:
September 11, 2013 at 4:08 pm
> I expect the IPCC will switch track to the dangerous extreme weather
> events line. This “argument” seems to be in vogue amongst the Warmistas.
The response to that is to point to Dr. Baliunas’ Youtube video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcAy4sOcS5M She pointed out some extreme reactions to extreme weather during the Little Ice Age. This includes 50,000 “witches” being executed for “weather cooking”. The executioners were confident of their case. After all, the weather was totally un-natural, what we would refer to today as “outside the range of natural variation”.
I think that in this situation, “the best defense is a good offense”. Point out to people that the last time sunspots dropped off the map, Europe recorded the Little Ice Age and lots of extreme weather. Now that sunspots are declining again, *WE* have to be the ones predicting doom and gloom. But in our case, pointing the finger at the sun.
The odds that a model is incorrect grows nonlinearly with the length of time that the data deviates from that model. To put it another way, if the model is correct, the odds of a 15 year flattening are MUCH smaller than a 10 year flattening.
Thus if I had tied my reputation to validity of the IPCC climate models, I would be sweating bullets right now.
@ A. D. Everard.
I hope you are not suggesting that we are not doomed?
Lord Monckton, Bravo! The Santer Countdown, love it.
However, the logic of start point needs to be crystal clear: either it is a rolling 17 years from present, or it is the start of RSS measurement or some other logical point. The claim of cherry picking aside, a longer interval would illuminate and perhaps emphasise the CO2 climb.
Indeed, as the 17 years are exceeded, the countdown becomes a counter.
Richard Barraclough says:
September 11, 2013 at 5:26 pm
You do realise that it’s only 201 months since November 1996? You can’t count both the beginning and end months in your number, so I’d hate to see everyone celebrating a month too early.
It is November 1st 1996 through August 31st 2013. So yes, both months count and the number is 202.
We could have a 2 degree C decline in global temperatures in just a 5-year period, but after having debated with several diehard CAGWers, they will never relent. Even a definite return to the equivalent of the Maunder Minimum, would be blamed on CO2 by the CAGWers. It is a matter of faith, and not of fact with them.
Werner Brozek says:
September 11, 2013 at 4:00 pm
I asked Walter Dnes the question below. Here is the question and his answer:
What is the maximum that September has to be and still allow 204 months to be reached? Thanks!
Note that 204 months will be October 1996 to September 2013.
I’ve played around with the series, and it looks like it would have to be 0.154, assuming no other months of the series are modified. The spreadsheet slope() function uses all the points in the range to calculate slope, which is why the caveat. This August was 0.167, and in May, we had 0.139. So 0.154 is definitely possible.
Walter Dnes
I checked the AMSU daily results and right now the trend is definitely downward. If this continues and RSS follows the same trend, then we might get the .154 for September. Until then we have the Arctic sea ice minimum to keep us on the edge of our seats. 😉
Jeeeze, it’s almost like the “Greenhouse Gas Effect” has nothing to do with the average temperature at the surface of the Earth. How could that be ? There are so many well crafted models, numerous elegant thought experiments (thanks Willis, et. al.), lavish explanations, detailed hypotheses and claims that anyone who does not “believe in it” is a “lunatic”, or “deluded”.
So, after decades of modeling and studies and meetings and treaties and subsidies and “travesties” we have the results; the Earth and its gaseous atmosphere does not act as a man (excuse me, human person) made greenhouse which only concentrates heat temporarily by restricting convection. Who would have thought that?
Maybe the folks advising farmers about the waste of dollars involved in fabricating a real plastic greenhouse with useless “IR trapping” coatings on the plastic films?
Or maybe the engineers that have never in a whole century figured out how to accomplish anything useful with the Arrhenius “greenhouse effect”. Funny that the engineers found something useful to do with Peltiers’s effect and Einstein’s Photoelectric effect and the list goes on and on but no one could ever do anything useful with Arrhenius’s “effect”. Must be the engineers that are too dumb to figure it out ?
The same engineers that flew us to the moon, created the Hubble space telescope, gave us 99.999% dependable electricity (in many places), the microprocessor… the list goes on. They are the ones that just could not figure out anything useful to do with the “effect”.
Arrhenius was indeed a very smart guy, but everybody (including Babe Ruth) strikes out once in a while.
OK, now the sarc tag goes ON.
Cheers, Kevin
Could you PLEASE publish the URL for your first graph, in text that is large enough to be readable, and in subsequent posts, always do same for all graphs used ?
and, if your using a web tool to plot this data, or if there is an RSS tool to gen a plot from the .txt files please explain how the graph is generated ?
richardscourtney:
Contrary to your claim, the global temperature in 1997 is not an example of an “event.” Perhaps you meant to claim that the global temperature in 1997 is an example of an outcome of an event but this is not true either.
How the IPCC said global temperature would rise after 1997 is not an example of a “prediction” in the logical context of that word. To characterize me as a sophist does not further your argument but rather exposes the illogic of it as my character is unrelated to the topic under discussion. By the way, to inaccurately smear the reputation of a professional, including me, is illegal under the defamation laws of both the US and the UK.
Throughout our recent debate, you have steadfastly refused to face up to the issue that is raised by my peer-reviewed article at http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=7923 . Rather than face up to it, you continue to draw conclusions from arguments that are equivocations from polysemic terms that include “prediction.” Under a principle of logic, these conclusions are improper.
Of course, Santer and his elves will simply move the goal posts once again under cover of media darkness. Changing the rules is how Climatastropy works.
But there’s another issue: Although future El Nino warming will doubtless bring the Lysenkoists out into the streets to sing Kumbaya and dance the Kazatsky, as richard verney says, above, “[El Ninos] are not CO2 driven events, and if one or more of them were to occur and if they were to drive temperatures upwards then this would not be the result of CO2 forcing. Rather, it would be…natural variation.”
Good post. I am not sure what the escalator graph is, but it does appear every 11 years or so that there is an increase or decrease in temperatures which roughly follow the solar cycles – not CO2.
Do we have to wait another 17 years before they give up (and remain silent versus admit they were wrong of course).
I don’t know.
But starting today, we should set a deadline for warming to start showing up and publicize that deadline because there has to be a best before date / a stall theory date for this movement. There has to be a cut-off. We can’t keep going on imagining there will 2.5C of warming in the next 87 years, 77 years, 67 years, next five years.
And the media needs to start being more objective and reporting on the failure of the theory to date and quit reporting on how global warming will cause any number of universe-wide disasters.
Its time to set the stage for the “it sounded like a good theory to some but it was just wrong” call.
Non-linear transgression.
About that 17 year figure – it is as much BS as all the swags and modeled disinformation anyone has produce on the consensus site. It can just as easily be 15 years or 20 years – when the claim was made nobody had any idea what the climate was actually going to do, but the 17 year swag seemed unachievable at the time, I’m sure. So who cares if it is off a month or a year – the record is what it is and I don’t expect there will be a BBC/Maslowski apology or correction, or even a rational explanation. There will certainly be no fully qualified declaration the claim was in error or that fudge factor allows an indefinite window to show the truth/lie of it. It was a dumb guess and they guessed wrong. The greater error was to have made the claim in the first place based only on CAGW faith based beliefs of the workings of the climates of the world. Yes, climates. There is no single global climate and never has been.
>However, previous periods free of global warming did not occur while Man was putting more CO2 in the air anything like as rapidly as he is today.
Has this been confirmed in terms of CO2’s logarithmic effect on temperature?
The Santer Clause? Or maybe Bad Santer….
I support the name Santer’s Clause or Santer Clause because it is hard to forget and with long term predictions /projections /prophecies we need to have a memorable title for the chapter in the upcoming publication, “How to get rich without really lying – Global warming for the small investor”.
@richard SC
Thanks for taking on the professional. I note his threat to sue. I am in Canada so it may be safer for me to pick up the brickbat but in any case I have a very good UK lawyer.
He says before you can sue for damage to a reputation it must be proven there is one in the relevant audience (“public”) which is us (bloggers). Past responses may be helpful (for you).
Maybe we should try the World Bank climate science concept and ask what the world would look like if we had acted on prediction of 4 C degree warming that did not happen?
…a wise man once said “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”
God, I’d LOVE to read some Hockey Team emails about now!! Imagine the panic from the rent-seeking academic crowd! Speaking fees plunging, book sales falling, etc. Good times!
Crispin in Waterloo:
Do you have an argument regarding the issue of whether the global temperature in 1997 is an example of an “event”? If so, what is this argument?
Terry Oldberg;
By the way, to inaccurately smear the reputation of a professional, including me, is illegal under the defamation laws of both the US and the UK.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Oh gimmme a break. Unable to win the argument with facts and reason so you resort to veiled threats? You can call what the IPCC has published anything you want, for ALL practical purposes they are predictions, and observations are outside of the range of the predictions. If you want to call them projections, then observations are outside the range of the projections. If you want to call them forecasts, then observations are outside the range of the forecasts. If you want to call the WAGs, then observations are outside the range of the WAGs.
If you have something to contribute, then please do. But harping on this one illogical point over and over, thread after thread, is a waste of your time as well as everyone else’s.
DocMartyn says:
September 11, 2013 at 4:45 pm
My guess is that the warmists are praying for a nice big volcano, then they can model that and come to the conclusion that the heating has been hidden.
*
Oh! That’s where it went.
Terry Oldberg says:
September 11, 2013 at 2:51 pm
Terry Oldberg says:
September 11, 2013 at 8:23 pm
Yada, yada, yada…
…tiresome.
Gail Combs says:
September 11, 2013 at 5:00 pm
johnny pics says:
September 11, 2013 at 2:25 pm
May I propose a turbine tear down. Give gore et all a hammer and chisel to remove the tons of concrete holding up the bleebing things up.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
OH what a LOVELY IDEA!
Make the punishment fit the crime. All of the loud mouthed doomsayers in academia and the NGOs and the bureaucracies should be equipped with hammers, chisels and wheel barrows and be made to remover every last scrap of Wind turbines and Solar panels from the landscape. (Dutifully placing each piece in the correct recycling bin of course.)
This will be on their on dime of course.
*
Scrap the wheelbarrows – the anti-industrialists believe them to be too high tech.
RoHa says:
September 11, 2013 at 6:19 pm
@ A. D. Everard.
I hope you are not suggesting that we are not doomed?
*
Ooops!
I don’t get it. So climate models don’t predict on target? So what, it is a model. This year we are having record heat in various places on the earth, such as record heat in Alaska earlier. But, as you know,, what is called global warming is just about a statistical measure – the mean. Really, it is the spread of phenomena that is important, how many outliers you get. We are having odd weather – in CA we had very little to no rain from January on, and now we are having intense fires. Is that a joke? What is up with you guys – who cares about the mean value – it is the weird weather and it is causing problems with our agriculture and our water supplies. Fires have threatened SF water supply, towns in Texas have been going dry. There are trends going on. There are big fires in the Yukon. Something is going on, whatever you want to call it.
Terry Oldberg says:
September 11, 2013 at 8:23 pm
You can call it Trevor or Kevin, but the thing is still the same. We should not be concerned at such linguistic contortions when the object of the discussion remains the same object. How many warmists can spit onto the head of a pin? (sorry about the typo, can’t be bothered to change the ‘p’ to an ‘h’) irrelevant.
BTW I spy a split infinitive – surely contrary to the English laws of grammar?
Bill Illis says: @ September 11, 2013 at 8:37 pm
Do we have to wait another 17 years before they give up (and remain silent versus admit they were wrong of course).
I don’t know.
But starting today, we should set a deadline for warming to start showing up and publicize that deadline because there has to be a best before date / a stall theory date for this movement. There has to be a cut-off…..
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
There is. It has already been stated by the Warmists:
1. Prof. Phil Jones saying in the Climategate emails – “Bottom line: the “no upward trend” has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.” Also see: interview with Judith Curry and Phil Jones
2. Ben Santer in a 2011 paper “Our results show that temperature records of at least 17 years in length are required for identifying human effects on global-mean tropospheric temperature.” link
3. The NOAA falsification criterion is on page S23 of its 2008 report titled The State Of The Climate
In other words by their own standards CAGW has been falsified but don’t expect them to honor their word. At this point I think it would take Brussels and Washington D.C. being buried under a mile of ice and I am sure Gore and Hansen and other hardcores would STILL claim it was CO2 wot done it and there would be the brain dead who still believed their claims.
“If Jeffrey Patterson’s harmonic decomposition of the past 113 years’ temperature records is correct, the world may actually be cooler in 2100 than in 2000.”
NONSENSE.
Jeffrey Patterson himself has said it would be best not to use his analysis for projection and disowned the title given to the article.
There is plenty of well-founded reasons like the rest of the data presented here. Please do not degrade the sceptical position by adopting such ill-founded projections that even the author suggests are not good for projecting future temps.
Richard said “i would like to see the detail on this. In particular for each model that shows a 10 to 12 year “hiatus period””
I wouldn’t hold your breath if I were you. They only came out with that claim after the fact and not before.
KevinK says:
September 11, 2013 at 7:48 pm
///////////////////////////////
Further to the above post.
It is amazing that if DWLWIR was a real real source of energy capable of performing sensible work that no one has ever been able to extraxt useful work from the 324 w/m2 of DWLWIR (see attached diagram http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/abstracts/files/kevin1997_1.html ).
If this energy could be extracted it would solve the world’s energy problems and therefore one would have expected there to be serious research into extracting this energy. After all to date a couple of trillions of dollars has been pumped into climate science so there is no shortage of money and yet nothing has been done to extract this clean energy source. Where is the R&D and research papers on extracting this energy? This is even more surprising since it additionally would drastically reduce the emissions of the ‘dreaded’ CO2 as well as providing all the energy mankind could ever wish for. Even if a DWLWIR ‘photoelectric’ cell (extractor whatever you wish to call it) was only half as efficient as a solar ‘photoelectric’ cell, on a net basis, it would still be a better option than extracting energy from solar.
Why would anyone engineer wish to tap into and exploit the 168 w/m2 of solar which is fickle, does not exist at night, has far less power in winter time (when in many countries demand for reliable energy is at its greatest) when they could tap into a stable 324w/m2 available 24/7 come rain or shine? Why are we spending so much money on developing solar ‘photelctric’ and not some form of DWLWIR collector/converter?
This speaks volumes as to what real physicists think about this ‘energy’ source..
If we get 17 years of cooling they will then claim that the models show that this is possible. But as of right now you never hear them mention the word cooling, even though we have been cooling for the last 5 years. When it happens the few that are left clinging to their religion will undoubtedly claim that it is included in the models and that warming will resume with a vengeance.
Lord Monckton and Werner, Thank you for your replies clarifying the difference between no statistical and none. Much appreciated.
bit chilly says:
September 11, 2013 at 3:59 pm
Bishop Hill has a take on the Scottish drive to a renewable future by the Auditor General
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/9/12/auditor-general-youre-having-us-on.html
Mac the Knife says:
September 11, 2013 at 4:14 pm
Burning peat might become a bit of an issue for the Single Malt Whisky world if greens get their way.
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/for-peats-sake-green-group-triggers-fear-for-single-malts.21398426
Geoff Sherrington says:
September 11, 2013 at 4:43 pm
////////////////////
In absolute terms, of course one would not expect them to read the same since they do not measure temperature at the same location.
However, apart from the fact that the satellite has wider coverage and is also measuring temperature over the oceans, one would expect to see similar trends. After all, any warming which the land based stations have noticed must be going somewhere, and presumably this is upwards into the higher atmosphere being measured by the satellites.
It is extremely unlikely that the difference in warming observed by the land stations and the satellites is somehow entrapped in a small column of air extending vertically only some metres (may be a few hundred metres) above ground rather than making its way towards the higher atmosphere from where the satellite measurements are made. accordingly, one would expect to see the same trend and yet there is no late 1970s to early 1990s warming in the satellite record.
There has been approximately 0.3degC of warming during the 33 years of the satellite record, but this is no way a linear event, instead, the entire 0.3degC (or so) is exclusively concentrated and occured in and around the Super El Nino of 1998. As I mentioned previously, this is not some CO2 event, and the satellite data shows no CO2 induced warming during the 33 years of its record.
PS. I accept that the satellite record is short and far shorter than one would wish to use for considering whether anything un towards was happening at this stage in a glacial/interglacial cycle. But then again so is the land based thermometer measurements, and proxiies are not thermometers and cannot be reliably tuned and calibrated to the thermometer scale that we use. they are rife with uncertainties and errors. C’est la vie, or perhaps in this instance, c’est la guerre is the more pertinent expression..
Bill says: @ September 11, 2013 at 11:17 pm
I don’t get it. So climate models don’t predict on target?….There are trends going on. There are big fires in the Yukon. Something is going on, whatever you want to call it.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
It is called the Jet Stream going from Zonal to Meridional flow. Meridional flow gives you blocking highs leading to floods, droughts very cold or very hot for a long time. Don’t think this is all new it is not. We had the Dust bowl in the 1930’s and The Anasazi Great Drought and NASA: Sun-Climate Connection in Old Nile [Water Level] Records (For definitions and descriptions see link 1 and link 2 )
The Russian drought a few years ago was caused by a Blocking High. NASA: Extreme 2010 Russian Fires and Pakistan Floods Linked Meteorologically… research finds that the same large-scale meteorological event — an abnormal Rossby wave — sparked extreme heat and persistent wildfires in Russia as well as unusual downstream wind patterns that shifted rainfall in the Indian monsoon region and fueled heavy flooding in Pakistan.
Stephen WIlde goes into it in much more depth link
This is why the CAGW Media propaganda has switched from ‘Global Warming’ to ‘Weather Weirding/Extremes’ Meridional flow IS going to give you weather extremes, such as droughts, floods, extreme heat and extreme cold. This means you can get great headlines to push your political agenda.
Remember
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” ~ H. L. Mencken
richard verney says: @ September 11, 2013 at 11:50 pm
Why would any
oneengineer wish to tap into and exploit the 168 w/m2 of solar which is fickle, does not exist at night, has far less power in winter time (when in many countries demand for reliable energy is at its greatest) when they could tap into a stable 324w/m2 available 24/7 come rain or shine? Why are we spending so much money on developing solar ‘photelctric’ and not some form of DWLWIR collector/converter?>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
OH that one is a keeper. What fun tossing that one out at the warmists at the Groniad or Huff’nPuff.
ROTF
Gail Combs says:
September 11, 2013 at 5:38 pm
//////////////////////
Further to the point made by Gail regarding Norwegian glaciers, see the attached article http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2408825/Melting-ice-reveals-1-700-year-old-woolly-jumper–experts-say-come.html
Here we with hard and incontrovertible proof (in the form of a physical object that we can see and hold) that glacial coverage in this region of northern Norway was some 1700 years ago not as extensive as it is today,
This find is quite interesting since 1700 years ago is after the Roman Warm Period and before the Medieval warm period and therefore suggests that perhaps the Roman Warm Period lasted longer than presently thought, or that the Medieval Warm Period started earlier than presently thought, or perhaps there was a further warm period between the two. Whatever, it is clear that in the recent past it has been considerably warmer in northern climes than it is today. Of course, that might only be local and not global (after all evidence regarding the southern hemishpere is sparse due to the greater oceanic area and because man in the area was not as advanced as man in the northern hemisphere and did not leave as much or as detailed archaelogical evidence), but if local, there is no known mechanism whereby such an event could occur for an extended period. Further, if there is some such mechanism whereby there could be localised warming in high northern climes, this mechanism may explain why today the Arctic appears to be warming at a greater rate than the Antartic. The presently observed Arctic ice loss may be due to the same mechanism that caused the medieval Warm Period and teh warming suggested in northern Norway some 1700 years ago..
SandyInLimousin says: @ September 12, 2013 at 12:04 am
…..Burning peat might become a bit of an issue for the Single Malt Whisky world if greens get their way.
http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/home-news/for-peats-sake-green-group-triggers-fear-for-single-malts.21398426
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Well That will be the end of the Greenies and the Biodiversity Treaty in Scotland. Take me Whiskey away Would Ja! Here in the USA we had Shay’s Rebellion when the US government went messing with our whiskey. Even lost a couple of cavers in West Virgina because the natives thought they were government revenuers.
Terry Oldberg:
re your post at September 11, 2013 at 8:23 pm.
THE IPCC HAS MADE PREDICTIONS AND THOSE PREDICTIONS HAVE TURNED OUT TO BE WRONG.
Your sophistry does not and cannot change that. It wastes space on threads and disrupts them. YOU ARE WRONG. That somebody reviewed your nonsense does not stop it being nonsense. And your attempts at damage limitation for the IPCC’s failure deserve ridicule,
That is all I have to say on the matter, and I commend everybody to ignore your nonsense or you could destroy this thread as you have others.
Richard
The usual suspects like to display what they call an “escalator graph” with many of Santer’s “hiatus periods” of 10-12 years without any global warming, but an overall rising trend nonetheless.
—
I’m glad Michael Mann wasn’t smart enough to change his hockey stick into a stairway to heaven before he showed it to the world. Had he included a few hiatus periods (steps) along the way, he could lay claim to an ounce of credibility right now. As it is, he left no room for explaining the current “pause” in warming.
How about Prof Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University?
“Given present trends in extent and thickness, the ice in September will be gone in a very short while, perhaps by 2015. In subsequent years, the ice-free window will widen, to 2-3 months, then 4-5 months etc, and the trends suggest that within 20 years time we may have six ice-free months per year.”
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/jul/24/arctic-ice-free-methane-economy-catastrophe
Bill Illis:
In your post at September 11, 2013 at 8:37 pm
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/11/rss-global-temperature-data-no-global-warming-at-all-for-202-months/#comment-1414819
You ask
No, the maximum deadline is not 17 years: it is only SEVEN years; i.e. by 2020.
As I have repeatedly said, the explanation for this is in IPCC AR4 (2007) Chapter 10.7 which can be read at
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch10s10-7.html
It says there
In other words, it was expected that global temperature would rise at an average rate of “0.2°C per decade” over the first two decades of this century with half of this rise being due to atmospheric GHG emissions which were already in the system.
This assertion of “committed warming” should have had large uncertainty because the Report was published in 2007 and there was then no indication of any global temperature rise over the previous 7 years. There has still not been any rise and we are now way past the half-way mark of the “first two decades of the 21st century”.
So, if this “committed warming” is to occur such as to provide a rise of 0.2°C per decade by 2020 then global temperature would need to rise over the next 7 years by about 0.4°C. And this assumes the “average” rise over the two decades is the difference between the temperatures at 2000 and 2020. If the average rise of each of the two decades is assumed to be the “average” (i.e. linear trend) over those two decades then global temperature now needs to rise before 2020 by more than it rose over the entire twentieth century. It only rose ~0.8°C over the entire twentieth century.
Simply, the “committed warming” has disappeared (perhaps it has eloped with Trenberth’s ‘missing heat’?).
This disappearance of the “committed warming” is – of itself – sufficient to falsify the AGW hypothesis as emulated by climate models. If we reach 2020 without any detection of the “committed warming” then it will be 100% certain that all projections of global warming are complete bunkum.
Richard
If the Santer countdown goes beyond 17 years, we should attach his name to the hiatus and call it “The Santer Pause” as a reminder of his folly.
richard verney says:September 11, 2013 at 11:50 pm
“It is amazing that if DWLWIR was a real real source of energy capable of performing sensible work that no one has ever been able to extraxt useful work from the 324 w/m2 of DWLWIR”
It’s very well understood that you cannot get DLWIR to do work. If you look at the 2008 Trenberth budget, there is 161 W/m2 SW reaching the surface, 396 W/m2 upward LW and 333 W/m2 downward. The down IR makes an important contribution to keeping the surface warm, but the net IR flux is upward, because the upper atmosphere is cooler than the surface.
This will be true of any surface that tries to collect DLWIR at surface temperature. It must lose more energy than it gains. No useful energy source there.
Many thanks to commenters, most of whom have understood the simple point illustrated by the near-17-year “Pause” in global warming: that the Pause indicates that all or very nearly all of the models have been over-predicting global warming.
However, the Pause – which is not really known about outside a small circle of skeptical researchers, because it does not fit the story-line adopted too hastily by the news media – is plainly worrying the trolls, some of whom are so persistent in peddling confusion and nonsense that one infers they are paid to do it, for no one would make such an ass of himself otherwise. The troll-count in this thread is higher than usual, and that means They are worried.
I am by no means that all of those to whose comments I am now going to reply are time-wasters, trolls or paid trolls. That will be left to the reader. Some of the questions that follow are sensible: others are not. Here goes.
Mr Hodgkin says “we are looking at changes in temp[erature] over a tiny timescale, graphs and all that”. No. On the RSS dataset – admittedly only the first of five – we are looking at no changes in temperature over a period longer than the 10 years that the unspeakable James Hansen once said would show the models wrong; longer than the 15 years that a Climategate email by the unspeakable Phil Jones says would show the models wrong; longer than the 15 years that the NOAA, in its 2008 State of the Climate report, says would show the models wrong; and within two months of the 17 years that the unspeakable Ben Santer says would show the models wrong.
Mr Sherrington says I was wrong to take the mean of the monthly temperature anomalies from both terrestrial and satellite datasets. No. The unspeakable Phil Jones has shown that since 1979 the least-squares trend-lines on the three datasets are near-coincident. Since the tropospheric lapse-rate is constant, and since we are measuring anomalies and not absolute temperatures, the satellite and surface temperature anomaly data are indeed directly comparable. True, the areas of coverage are not coincident, but that is de minimis.
Mr Barraclough says it is only 201 months since November 1996. No. The monthly anomalies are compiled from daily measurements, and the period of the graph is 202 full months. Also, the least-squares trend is taken not by comparing only the starting and ending month but by taking the data for all months, including those at each end.
Steve in Seattle asks for legible URLs for the graphs. They are at lordmoncktonfoundation.com
Steve in Seattle also asks how I am plotting the data. The program I use to read in the datasets, scale and draw the graphs, calculate and display the trends was “turned on a lathey of my own making”. The methodology, and in particular the appropriateness of the least-squares trend method and the accuracy of the determination of the correlation coefficient were kindly verified by Professor Steve Farish of the University of Melbourne.
Mr. Oldberg says I should not use the word “predict” when referring to the outputs of the sacrosanct climate models. How right he is: their predictive skill is negligible. However, the phrase “We predict”, in relation to temperature change and to other imagined (and, thus far, imaginary) changes in the climate occurs many times in the IPCC’s First Assessment Report, so he should waste the IPCC’s time, not ours, with his futile semantic quibbles.
Mr. Oldberg goes on to complain that “predictions are not a feature of the investigation that is described by the article”. Hurrah: he has understood the point in the head posting that trends on past stochastic data are not predictive of future trends. However, the IPCC’s past predictions are “a feature of the investigation”, because the IPCC predicted rapid global warming that has not occurred at all, on the RSS data, for 202 months.
Mr. Oldberg denies that the IPCC made any predictions about how fast the world would warm since 1997. No. The IPCC, in its 1990 First Assessment Report, predicted that to 2035 the world would warm at a rate equivalent to 0.3[0.2, 0.5] K/decade. Outturn since 1990 has been less than half the central estimate. Outturn since 1997, on the RSS dataset, has been zero. Get used to it.
Mr. Oldberg suggests there is nothing special about starting the RSS temperature graph where I do. No. The graph starts at the earliest month since which the least-squares trend on that dataset shows no global warming at all. Mr. Oldberg seems to be trying to sow confusion. He should raise his game or go elsewhere. He is not a seeker after truth.
Precisely to end the deliberately obscurantist and semantically-illiterate droolings of Mr. Oldberg, Bill Illis has usefully suggested that a target should be set for the performance of the models. That is what we have to do in medical research, where we are obliged to declare in advance the criteria by which our success or failure in making a prediction about – say – the efficacy of a proposed treatment will be judged in a clinical trial. The criteria must be agreed by independent statisticians before the trial proceeds. In comparison to this rigor, the indiscipline of climate modeling is a scandal.
MikeN asks whether, in the escalator graph that shows multiple “hiatus periods” of 5-13 years without global warming since 1970, I had properly taken into account the CO2 forcing, which is a logarithmic function not only of the proportionate change in concentration. One need not even do that: for each of the “hiatus periods” exhibits a small warming, except the last, which is the only true period of non-warming since 1970.
Mr. Goodman say I am wrong to say that, “If Jeffrey Patterson’s harmonic decomposition of the past 113 years’ temperature records is correct, the world may actually be cooler in 2100 than in 2000”. No. I am right to say that. I did not say that his decomposition was correct, and I did not say that, even if it was correct, the world would actually be cooler in 2100 than in 2000. I said it might – as his own graph very clearly shows. As it happens, at least two other analyses that I have seen, using similar methods but also incorporating the natural as well as anthropogenic aetiology of temperature change, reach not dissimilar conclusions. They may be right.
“Bill” (no relation to the sensible Bill Illis) says we should ignore the failure of the planet to warm as predicted and talk about odd weather in California instead. Odd weather has been happening for 4567 million years, so “Bill” should not be surprised that it is still happening. He may like to read the magisterial paper by Edward N. Lorenz, Deterministic non-periodic flow, published in a climate journal in 1963, to understand why what later came to be called “chaos” causes odd and unpredictable weather.
It is also a matter of logic that phenomena – such as recent odd weather – that the climate-extremists attribute to global warming cannot have been caused by global warming when there has not been any for almost 17 years. But then, logic has never played much part in what passes for “thinking” among the true-believers in the New Religion, or they would never have clambered on to the global warming bandwagon in the first place, particularly just at the moment when – as the graphs in the head posting show – the wheels are falling off.
More great Lord Monckton. Do keep it up.
Bingo!
@ Monckton of Brenchley
I dips me lid to you, good sir. 🙂
At risk of stating the obvious, might it not be an idea to show these graphs in context? Set the temperature scale to 0-25°C, and let people actually see the ranges of temperatures that they are being terrified with. You know and I know that all that would be displayed is a slightly wiggly line, but this is not what is being portrayed to the unthinking sheeple (e.g. politicians) out there – at the moment, all they see is scarily steep slopes!
Lord Monckton
In your post at September 12, 2013 at 1:10 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/11/rss-global-temperature-data-no-global-warming-at-all-for-202-months/#comment-1414935
you say
With respect, the IPCC has itself set such a deadline; i.e. 2020.
I explain this (with citation, quotation and link) in my post to Bill Illis at September 12, 2013 at 12:46 am.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/11/rss-global-temperature-data-no-global-warming-at-all-for-202-months/#comment-1414929
Another 7 years may seem a long time, but not so. As I explain in my post to Bill Illis (linked from this post above) it is already very probable that the falsification criterion SET BY THE IPCC has already been met. And each month which passes without discernible global temperature rise moves that probability nearer to 100%.
Richard
Radical Rodent says:
September 12, 2013 at 2:27 am
I tend to agree. If every paper or essay about climate change was put into the correct context – I am sure every person reading (and understanding the relative position) would dismiss the arguments over tenths of a degree of warming as pointless BS!
e.g.
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ice_Age_Temperature.png
(yeah, it’s wiki, but since it’s probably been ‘approved’ by Connolley, we’ll use it! LOL)
Bill says:
September 11, 2013 at 11:17 pm:
You seem to be under an illusion that weather should not be “weird”. It has always been weird: look at the “weird” mid-western dustbowls of the 1930s; the several “weird” tropical storm floodings of New York in the 19th century; the “weird” UK winter of 1962/3; the “weird” annual floods of York (the original York) in the 1960s. Forest fires are not exactly unusual, either – indeed, there are many ecosystems that require fire for propagation of the plants. The only forest fires that are unusual are those of the rain forests of Brazil or Indonesia; but they don’t count, as they are being set to grow “green” crops.
Climates change, and I doubt there are many on here who would dispute that. What is disputed is that the present changes in climates (if any) has been caused by humans (other than on the micro scale – much like termites, do, I suppose…) , or that humans could have any effect upon reducing or “mitigating” the change.
Richard Courtney is of course right that the IPCC has made various near-term predictions.. Its forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report is going to say that warming at a rate of 0.233 K/decade will occur from now to 2050 – slightly up on the values in teh Fourth Assessment Report. However, the purpose of a prospective clinical trial is that the yardstick for success or failure is agreed by all parties at the outset, and all parties agree to accept that if the result falls short of the yardstick then the regimen under trial has failed. At present, there is no agreement by the IPCC and the modelers that if warming fails to match certain stated predictions by a stated date then they are wrong. There now needs to be exactly the formal approach that Bill Illis suggests.
More positive news following the Australian election – Monckton gets a mention:
Climate sceptic MP Dennis Jensen wants to be science minister
Date
September 12, 2013 – 11:20AM
Coalition MP Dennis Jensen, who is a vocal climate science sceptic, has called on Prime Minister-elect Tony Abbott to appoint him as science minister. “At the moment to be honest I’m feeling under-utilised,” said Dr Jensen, the member for Tangney in Western Australia, who has a master’s degree in physics and a PhD in material science. “I think that I’ve got a lot to offer,” he added. “I’ve got some unique attributes.”
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Mr Abbott was expected to give the science portfolio to Victorian MP Sophie Mirabella, but she may lose her seat of Indi to the popular independent Cathy McGowan.
Dr Jensen suggests he would be better qualified than anyone to take charge of science.
“I’m not aware of any other scientist [in the Parliament],” he said.
Dr Jensen has made headlines by questioning the scientific consensus that humans are contributing to global warming.
Dr Jensen believes carbon dioxide is contributing somewhat to global temperatures, but not as much as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is suggesting.
Moreover, Dr Jensen does not think governments should be taking urgent action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
“In the climate area there is appeal to authority and appeal to consensus, neither of which is scientific at all,” Dr Jensen told Fairfax Media on Thursday.
“Scientific reality doesn’t give a damn who said it and it doesn’t give a damn how many say it.”
It was wrong to accept the view of the 97 per cent of climate scientists who agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely caused by human activities, because “the argument of consensus . . . is a flawed argument,” Dr Jensen said.
The colourful Englishman, Lord Christopher Monckton, who toured Australia to debunk the “bogus science” of global warming, was closer to the mark, Dr Jensen suggested.
“Most of the stuff [Lord Monckton] says is entirely reasonable,” Dr Jensen said.
“Some of it I don’t agree with but on the whole a lot of what he says is in my view correct.”
—end
Monckton of Brenchley:
Thankyou for the reply to me which you provide at September 12, 2013 at 3:14 am.
I copy it here in full so the context of my response is clear.
I do not agree that “There now needs to be exactly the formal approach that Bill Illis suggests.”
I disagree for two reasons.
Firstly, realism and practicality.
There is no possibility that the IPCC will agree to such a formal definition because it would preclude the ‘goal post moving’ which is one of their preferred tactics. So, sadly, there is no realistic possibility of obtaining agreement on the “formal definition”. Hence, effort would be expended to no purpose in attempt to obtain the agreement, and that effort could be spent on other things.
Secondly, necessity.
There is no need to seek the unobtainable agreement of the IPCC when the IPCC has already published a falsifiable statement. The only need is to accept that statement and to hold them to it.
The IPCC made the statement so the only needed agreement is ours.
Please note the nature of what the IPCC has stated. I provide a link, quotation and reference together with my explanation in my post in this thread at
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/11/rss-global-temperature-data-no-global-warming-at-all-for-202-months/#comment-1414929
So,
The IPCC predicted that global temperature would rise at an average rate of “0.2°C per decade” over the first two decades of this century with half of this rise being due to atmospheric GHG emissions which were already in the system and GHG emissions have been as predicted.
We need to ‘hold their feet to the fire’ about that because basic assumptions used to construct the models are wrong if that warming does not occur.
The only possibilities are
(a) GHG emissions do not have as much warming effect as the models assume so the AGW-scare is grossly exaggerated.
or
(b) Natural climate variation induces change in global temperature of at least 0.2°C per decade and, therefore, warming and cooling of that magnitude occurs naturally so NONE of the global warming over the twentieth century can reasonably be attributed to anthropogenic GHG emissions.
or
(c) A combination of (a) and (b).
The models are useless for indicating future climate change whichever of those possibilities is true, and those are the ONLY possibilities
So, in conclusion, I argue that the now needed pressure is to publicise the missing ‘committed warming’ and what it indicates. Campaigning and/or negotiating to obtain an unobtainable agreement would distract from the needed publicity.
Richard
Projections or Predictions: Dictionary definitions say,
To Project-. an estimate or forecast based on present trends.
To Predict – state that (a specified event) will happen in the future.
It used to be projections, according to Professor Mike Hulme, founding director of the Tyndall Centre at UEA
“Representing Uncertainty in Climate Change Scenarios and Impact Studies”
Proceedings of the ECLA T-2 Helsinki Workshop , 14-16 April, 1999
Mike Hulme (Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia), and Timothy R. Carter, (Finnish Environment Institute, Helsinki.
“Climate change is an inexact field of science. It has long been recognised, by researchers and decision makers alike, that uncertainties pervade all branches of the subject. However, as the science of climate change has progressed, the effectiveness with which uncertainies have been identified, analysed and represented by scientists has abjectly failed to keep pace with the burgeoning demand for usable information about future climate and its impacts (Shackley et al.., 1998; Rotmans and Dowlatabadi, 1998; Jaeger et al,1998; Jones, 1999).”
Uncertainty is a constant companion of scientists and decision-makers involved in global climate change research and management. This uncertainty arises from two quite different sources – ‘incomplete’ knowledge and ‘unknowable’ knowledge. ‘Incomplete’ knowledge affects much of our model design, whether they be climate models (e.g. poorly understood cloud physics) or impact models.
Unknowable’ knowledge arises from the inherent indeterminacy of future human society and of the climate system. Human (and therefore social) actions are not predictable in any deterministic sense and we will always have to create future greenhouse gas emissions trajectories on the basis of indeterminate scenario analysis (Nakicenovic et al.., 1998). Uncertainties in climate change predictions arising from this source are therefore endemic.
The climate system, as a complex non-linear dynamic system, is indeterminate and even with perfect models and unlimited computing power, for a given scenario a range of future climates will always be simulated. It is for this reason that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have always adopted the term ‘PROJECTION’.
Climatologists commonly describe the present-day climate using observations from a recent thirty-year period (e.g. 1951-80 or 1961-90). The performance of GCMs at simulating present climate can be tested with reference to such information, although measurement errors, interpolation errors and sampling errors lead to considerable uncertainty regarding the true baseline climate (e.g. New et al.., 1999).
Climate is also known to vary naturally on multi-decadal (e.g. 30-year) time scales and for reasons that have nothing to do with anthropogenic forcing.
Determining what is the true level of natural climate variability on 30-year timescales is not therefore straightforward. Observational data are limited to at most usually 100 years or so (and in any case may already contain an anthropogenic signal).”
Only five years later, “the science” had become “settled”, with this 2004 statement from the Hadley Centre: (although Professor Bob Watson, IPCC head before Pachauri, said at Kyoto in 1997, that it was already settled).
“Recent research on climate change science from the Hadley Centre, December 2004”
“Complex climate models with detailed representation of the atmosphere, ocean and land surface are the only tools that can independently PREDICT changes in climate averages and extremes over the planet.”
Hi Steve in Seattle
Are you still looking for the url for the data for the graph. ?
You can find it at
ftp://ftp.ssmi.com/msu/monthly_time_series/rss_monthly_msu_amsu_channel_tlt_anomalies_land_and_ocean_v03_3.txt
By running your cursor over it, you can select the whole data set, and then do a copy and paste into Excel. Within that, there’s a function to convert text to data in columns, and then you can play with it to your heart’s content.
Regards
Richard
Richard Courtney is right that we should draw attention to the missing warming that was supposed to be in the pipeline but is embarrassingly absent. However, there is also value in persuading governments, several of whose more sensible representatives read Watts Up With That, to put pressure on the IPCC to lay down some clear criteria against which their predictions will be weighed in the balance at a specified date. If the IPCC had known all along that governments were going to impose upon it the discipline that is automatic in the preparation of clinical trials, its reports would not have been so exaggerated over the years.
It is entirely possible that governments will begin to set standards which the IPCC’s predictions must meet, and we should encourage sensible governments to do just that.
As this is all based on the initial Santer’s Scam, why continue to play their game of data manipulation and changing goal posts – there is no reason to take any of their predictions seriously. No scientist would.
http://www.amlibpub.com/essays/ipcc-global-warming-report.html
“The research de Frietas refers to which used only a portion of the available data was by Santer, et al. The illustration below shows the differences compared to the full data set used by Michaels and Knappenberger, as explained by Dr. Arthur Robinson in Access to Energy (July 1997): “The solid points inside the oval in Figure 1 are those reported by Santer, et al. The open circles in Figure 1 are those added by Michaels and Knappenberger, who looked up the data. Since Santer’s paper was published in 1996 and was used prior to publication to influence the IPCC report, there can be little doubt that he and his co-authors deliberately omitted data points to create the trend they reported. It is inconceivable that even the most incompetent scientist finding such a pronounced trend to support his hypothesis in the data between 1963 and 1987, would not, when writing in 1995 (published in 1996), look at the data between 1987 and 1995 to see if the trend continued. These data do not support the hypothesis. So, Santer clearly faked the result, circulated it during IPCC proceedings in order to influence world global climate policy, and later published it in Nature. Michaels and Knappenberger caught him, but their paper was published several months after his—long after the correction could undue [undo] the bias introduced by Santer into the IPCC report.”
DennisA:
Allow me to clarify your post at September 12, 2013 at 4:15 am.
The IPCC AR4 WG1 Glossary is at
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/annex1sglossary-a-d.html
where it provides these definitions
Clearly, the IPCC itself says it makes Climate predictions at “at seasonal, interannual or long-term time scales”. And it has made one such prediction which is obviously wrong.
The importance of this prediction being wrong is explained in my post at
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/11/rss-global-temperature-data-no-global-warming-at-all-for-202-months/#comment-1415005
The IPCC also says it makes projections which “depend upon the emission/concentration/radiative forcing scenario”. Clearly, after the event a projection becomes a prediction when its “emission/concentration/radiative forcing scenario” matches the reality that subsequently happened.
In summation, all arguments about projections and predictions are obscurantism which hides the undeniable reality that reality has shown IPCC predictions are wrong.
Richard
Monckton of Brenchley:
Thankyou for your post at September 12, 2013 at 4:30 am.
I support you in your endeavour to encourage governments to “set standards which the IPCC’s predictions must meet”. I consider your endeavour to be doomed to failure, but I hope you can prove me wrong about this.
Richard
justaknitter says:
September 12, 2013 at 12:41 am
How about Prof Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University?
“Given present trends in extent and thickness, the ice in September will be gone in a very short while….. http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2013/jul/24/arctic-ice-free-methane-economy-catastrophe
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
He really really needs to have his eyes checked and to take a good course in statistics before he embarrasses himself further.
Nelson says: September 11, 2013 at 2:35 pm
I understand that the President of The Flat Earth Society is in fact a believer.
Lord M, at 4.30am, said, “However, there is also value in persuading governments, several of whose more sensible representatives read Watts Up With That, to put pressure on the IPCC…”
It is reassuring to know that WUWT is read by ‘sensible representatives’. Are these ministers, civil servants or MPs? Whoever they are, they can continue to read the civilised discussions on WUWT, so ably moderated by Anthony and his mods.
Thank you one and all.
“Taking the mean of all five principal global-temperature datasets (GISS, HadCRUt4, NCDC, RSS, and UAH)”
Isn’t an average of datasets that are based primarily on the same raw data essentially meaningless? All you’re getting is an idea of the difference in applied adjustments to that raw data.
Nigel S
Don’t you just love Scientists making those bold predictions with ‘could, may, might, and perhaps’ qualifiers all over them?
“Given present trends in extent and thickness, the ice in September will be gone in a very short while, perhaps by 2015. In subsequent years, the ice-free window will widen, to 2-3 months, then 4-5 months etc, and the trends suggest that within 20 years time we may have six ice-free months per year.”
I’d say, in response, that the trends perhaps might possibly not suggest anything of the sort and ice in September may not be gone in a very short while.
Any chance we can get these charts with different scales to show how flat both CO2 and Temps are?
One thing I disagree with, this line “the world may actually be cooler in 2100 than in 2000”. With both the PDO and AMO in cool mode, I expect the world will do exactly what it did in the seventies, and get noticably cooler very soon (reletively speaking, a decade or two). Thus, we won’t have to to miss this “A shame we shall not be there to see the baffled faces of the profiteers of doom”.
As for the influence of the sun, I think people are missing something. The one and only time we see in records of a noticable cooling associated with a quiet sun was during the little ice age. The sun had gone quiet before then, yet there had been no noticable cooling, which suggests that it takes a while for the cooling to manifest (if it is even the suns fault at all). Then along came a quiet sun period twice as lomg as any previous one, and there was still no noticable global cooling. Then there was a period of ‘normal’ sun activity (since the sun goes ‘quiet’ every once in a while, what really is “normal’?), followed by a period of quietness twice as long as the previous record beaking one, and only then did the earth get cool. This suggests that, if a quiet sun really does make a cool earth, that it takes a very quiet sun for 100+ years or more to make that cool earth. Thus, a few decades of a semi-quiet sun does not seem to be something to worry about. The PDO plus AMO both in cool phase is a lot more certain to cause noticable cooling.
There is a set of connected observations that disproves the extreme AGW hypothesis. The lack of warming for 17 years is only one of the fundamental issues with the extreme AGW hypothesis.
If an idea, a theory is repeated enough, it is natural to assume that the theory is fundamentally correct. The past and present observational data supports the assertion that the CO2 mechanism saturates and the majority of the warming in the last 100 years was caused by solar magnetic cycle changes.
The planet has cyclically warmed and cooled in the past; with the warming and cooling occurring in the same regions that warmed in the last 100 years. The past cyclic warming and cooling periods were not caused by atmospheric CO2 changes. Past solar magnetic cycle changes correlate with the past warming and cooling periods. Something in the past that correlates with solar magnetic cycle changes caused the planet to warm and cool, cyclically in the same regions; high Northern latitudes and Greenland Ice Sheet.
There are multiple periods in the paleo record when planetary temperature does not correlate with atmospheric CO2. What is the physical explanation for past periods warming and cooling periods when there was no correlation between atmospheric CO2 levels and planetary temperature?
Dansgaard-Oeschger (D-O) warming and cooling cycles (1450 year cycle plus or minus 500 years) and atmospheric CO2 gradually increases.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/GISP2%20TemperatureSince10700%20BP%20with%20CO2%20from%20EPICA%20DomeC.gif
http://www.climate4you.com/
The following is a paper that provides a prediction as to how much cooling to expect in response to the abrupt solar magnetic cycle 24 change.
http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.3256
Solar activity and Svalbard temperatures
The long temperature series at Svalbard (Longyearbyen) show large variations, and a positive trend since its start in 1912. During this period solar activity has increased, as indicated by shorter solar cycles. The temperature at Svalbard is negatively correlated with the length of the solar cycle. The strongest negative correlation is found with lags 10 to 12 years. …. ….These models show that 60 per cent of the annual and winter temperature variations are explained by solar activity. For the spring, summer and fall temperatures autocorrelations in the residuals exists, and additional variables may contribute to the variations. These models can be applied as forecasting models. …. …..We predict an annual mean temperature decrease for Svalbard of 3.5 ±2C from solar cycle 23 to solar cycle 24 (2009 to 2020) and a decrease in the winter temperature of ≈6 C.
in response to @Gail Combs September 12, 2013 at 12:07 am:
“It is called the Jet Stream going from Zonal to Meridional flow. Meridional flow gives you blocking highs leading to floods, droughts very cold or very hot for a long time.”
Yes, that is what I heard from Jeff Masters, along with his scientific colleagues – in their view it is related to the loss of seasonal sea ice in the Arctic – creating Meridional flow. And that the pattern will be more stalled weather systems that create climatic events like the flooding rains we have seen in southeast Asia in June. It is just not weird weather in California, it is the general pattern throughout the globe that is creating exceptional events. Just the fact that there has been a great loss of sea ice is definitely exceptional.
Bill says:September 12, 2013 at 7:03 am […]
Just the fact that there has been a great loss of sea ice is definitely exceptional.
But a 60% increase in ice this year over last is not exceptional…
Bill:
re your bloviation at September 12, 2013 at 7:03 am.
Weather changes. Sometimes it is good. Sometimes it is bad. That is true everywhere.
Weather has extremes. And the extremes have always been severe: that is why they are called extremes. And that, too, is true everywhere.
There is nothing unusual about Arctic ice cover: it is varying as it always has.
Importantly, no recent climate behaviours are unprecedented in the holocene.
It would be news if weather were to stop varying. Your post contains no news.
Richard
Bill, the claim that the Arctic sea ice minimum was responsible for changes in the jet streams was refuted by another recent paper. The jet stream is most likely controlled by the 4 phases of the PDO/AMO (and variations within).
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/grl.50880/abstract
“Previous studies have suggested that Arctic amplification has caused planetary‒scale waves to elongate meridionally and slow down, resulting in more frequent blocking patterns and extreme weather. Here trends in the meridional extent of atmospheric waves over North America and the North Atlantic are investigated in three reanalyses, and it is demonstrated that previously reported positive trends are likely an artifact of the methodology.”
Is the polar see-saw due to change? It turns out that Antarctica has a record warmth so far this year while the Arctic had record cold this summer. Does this mean the trends are now going to flip with reductions in ice in Antarctica while the Arctic sees increases in ice? Will the alarmists change their tune if this happens?
The drama builds.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
September 12, 2013 at 1:10 am
Excellent piece. It would, and continues to seem, that the relationship between CO2 and temperature is spurious and not causal in nature. Or as some believe, the reverse causality with temperature causing the CO2 increase with a lag in time may still show to be more the case. I continue to believe that climate consists of so many variables for which we have poor or no reliable historic data as to be chaotic in nature and be unpredictable, at this time, with the possible exception of the Milankovitch cycles. And even these are only roughly reliable in predicting when real climate change ensues.
richardscourtney (Sept. 11, 2013 at 3:02 pm):
On Sept. 11 at 3:02 pm you state that “There is an ‘event’ (i.e. the global temperature in 1997)…” To state that the global temperature in 1997 is an example of an event is logically similar to stating that in a flip of a coin, “heads” is an example of an event. Actually, it is the flip that is an example of an event. Would you care to take another stab at the identity of the events underlying the climate models of IPCC AR4 or do you now admit that there are none?
Bill says:
September 12, 2013 at 7:03 am […]
“Just the fact that there has been a great loss of sea ice is definitely exceptional.”
Bill, you DO realize that melted arctic ice will begin refreezing in about 20 days and continue increasing until April next year? So fear not, new ice is on the way!!
Terry Oldberg says:
September 11, 2013 at 8:23 pm
“…you have steadfastly refused to face up to the issue that is raised by my peer-reviewed article at http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=7923 .”
I laughed when I realized that he is calling a blog entry a “peer-reviewed article”. He both misrepresents the nature of the link and employs a polysemic term (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peer_review), but to make matters worse, he invokes this fallacy in order to use another fallacy: argument from authority (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority).
To quote the man in black: “Truly, you have a dizzying intellect”.
O_o
Terry Oldberg:
In your post addressed to me at September 12, 2013 at 8:17 am you ask
NO! But show me your back and I am willing to take a stab.
Stop wasting space on the thread with your nonsensical and untrue drivel.
Richard
Richard Verney said, “Likewise, it is easier to have a relatively short period of hiatus when say CO2 levels are ~310 rising to ~330ppm than it is when CO2 levels are ~380 rising to ~400ppm”
Actually you have that exactly backwards. Since the effect of CO2 on temperature is purportedly logarithmic, it should have a GREATER effect on temperature when rising from 310 to 300ppm than when rising from 380 to 400 ppm. Therefore, the higher the concentration of CO2 gets, the less effect it should have, and the greater the likelihood of a “pause” (perhaps because the CO2 absorption bands are saturated and it isn’t really having any further effect at all?? [speculation])
Bill says, “Yes, that is what I heard from Jeff Masters, along with his scientific colleagues – in their view it is related to the loss of seasonal sea ice in the Arctic – creating Meridional flow. And that the pattern will be more stalled weather systems that create climatic events like the flooding rains we have seen in southeast Asia in June. It is just not weird weather in California, it is the general pattern throughout the globe that is creating exceptional events. Just the fact that there has been a great loss of sea ice is definitely exceptional.”
Umm… Bill…. ARE YOU AWARE that the Arctic has 60% greater sea ice extent as of September 11th 2013 compared to the Arctic sea ice extent of September 11, 2012? If you ARE aware of that totally indisputable fact, then please explain to me how a 60% GAIN in year/year Arctic sea ice can be described as a loss???
Monckton of Brenchley:
Would you care to try to identify for us the events underlying the general circulation models of AR4?
By the way, the article that you characterize as “drool” is an example of an argument. It can be concluded from this argument that you have repeatedly been guilty of the equivocation fallacy in your own writings.
Good work.
PS. Some of us are young enough to have a decent chance of being around in 2100. I love challenging my brainwashed teachers in class.
@justaknitter,
The “ZOMG METHANE BOMB” “hypothesis” has been thoroughly debunked here, there, and everywhere else multiple times. Whadams has no idea what he is talking about. Further, if you go to the grauniad for your “environmental news” you won’t ever get any real information whatsoever, it is all hopelessly biased.
@ Terry Oldberg
“Would you care to try to identify for us the events underlying the general circulation models of AR4?”
ROFL, what would be the point… they are not even valid models to begin with, and they do not model any actual events, so why do you keep harping on the whole stupid “identify the events” meme???
@ Terry Oldberg
“To state that the global temperature in 1997 is an example of an event is logically similar to stating that in a flip of a coin, “heads” is an example of an event. Actually, it is the flip that is an example of an event.”
Ok, so what you are saying is that the flip of the coin is the event, and the coin landing on heads is the outcome of the event. Sure, makes sense. Now, how does this relate in any way whatsoever to the convoluted point you seem to be attempting to make relating to this thread?
It seems to me that you are attempting to say that temperature cannot even be modeled because it is not an event, merely and outcome of an event or series of events or collection of events or whatever. If that is the point you are trying to make, then PLEASE SAY SO! If that is not the point you are trying to make then PLEASE MAKE A CONCISE AND COGENT POINT rather than clogging up the thread with stuff that people cannot even properly interpret, much less care about.
PeterB in Indianapolis:
In your post at September 12, 2013 at 8:34 am
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/11/rss-global-temperature-data-no-global-warming-at-all-for-202-months/#comment-1415163
you rightly say then in parenthesis ask
In the atmosphere CO2 has two absorbtion bands and they are near 15 microns and 4 microns.
Most IR by CO2 is absorbed in the 15 micron band and almost none in the 4 micron band.
The 15 micron band is saturated and increases its absorbtion by band broadening. Indeed, this saturation is why there is the logarithmic effect which you mention.
Richard
Richardscourtney:
Say – “This disappearance of the “committed warming” is – of itself – sufficient to falsify the AGW hypothesis as emulated by climate models. If we reach 2020 without any detection of the “committed warming” then it will be 100% certain that all projections of global warming are complete bunkum.”
What can we do then? Obviously nothing has turned the tide. Perhaps its time to agree on some metrics that will falsify AGW? It’s almost as if AGW has a life all of its own and it appears all political.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
September 12, 2013 at 4:30 am
Richard Courtney is right that we should draw attention to the missing warming that was supposed to be in the pipeline but is embarrassingly absent. However, there is also value in persuading governments, several of whose more sensible representatives read Watts Up With That, to put pressure on the IPCC to lay down some clear criteria against which their predictions will be weighed in the balance at a specified date. If the IPCC had known all along that governments were going to impose upon it the discipline that is automatic in the preparation of clinical trials, its reports would not have been so exaggerated over the years.
Didn’t a group of Gov. go to the IPCC this month to question parts of the report? I agree also with Lord Monckton because this is a political issue as much and maybe even more than a scientific issue, though one wonders how it started out. Public opinion and media opinion must be swayed if AGW is to go away. I don’t think science will be enough unfortunately.
Terry Oldburg: While Mr. Monckton’s article uses the term “predict” on a number of occasions, predictions are not a feature of the investigation that is described by the article. In logic, a “prediction” is an extrapolation from an observed state of a system to an unobserved but observable state of the same system. For example, it is an extrapolation from the observed state “cloudy” to the unobserved but observable state “rain in the next 24 hours.” By convention, the former state is called the “condition” while the latter state is called the outcome. A pairing of a condition with an outcome is a description of an event but for the research that is described by Monckton’s article, there are no events. This is clear from the fact that there are no relative frequencies, for relative frequencies are a feature of a collection of events but there are none here.
Has anybody explained to policy makers and advocates such as James Hansen that these models are not “predictions? A lot of people seem to be under the impression that the world will evolve according to the models.
Why is a 202 month interval of no warming not an “event”? It was just such an event that Santner et al showed was a minimal duration for concluding that “climate had changed”. Ironically, if that is the correct word, Hansen et al started alarming the world that “climate had changed” to a warming phase after a shorter event than 17 years. So far, 100% of the most recent intervals of 202 months duration have displayed no warming.
Bill Marsh says: @ September 12, 2013 at 5:58 am
“Taking the mean of all five principal global-temperature datasets (GISS, HadCRUt4, NCDC, RSS, and UAH)”
Isn’t an average of datasets that are based primarily on the same raw data essentially meaningless?….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
They are not the same. Three (GISS, HadCRUt4, NCDC) are land-based measurements and two are satellite-based (RSS, UAH) measurements.
Terry Oldburg: Would you care to try to identify for us the events underlying the general circulation models of AR4?
That might be an interesting question. The event that is the target of the post here is the unpredicted 202 month long event of no warming. It is a clear contrast to the models’ result of 202 months of monotonic warming.
Me Lord. Whats the best coarse of action to go about reclaiming my Co2 based road tax which is now anually £490 (same as a Double Decker Bus with 6 x the Co2 emmisions) and that of my good ladys 15 yr old vehicle which is £220 as being ‘Miss Sold’ , (similar to PPI claims)
I have contacted the Minister Ed Davey and his associates on many occations (while keeping him informed of all the recent developments in the climate saga via accurate links) about being Carbon Taxed to death, ….. to no avail What would you suggest ?
It is going to get worse from here as the temperature decline will be increasing going forward.
As I said AGW theory has already been proven wrong to those of us who know better.
Legatus says: @ September 12, 2013 at 6:31 am
….As for the influence of the sun, I think people are missing something….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
At this point we do not know although there is some supporting data such as that from Richard Feyman’s Sister, Dr. Joan Feynman.
NASA Finds Sun-Climate Connection in Old Nile Records (The link I had to the actual paper is dead)
There are lots of other papers a listing with links can be found HERE: Solar and Cosmic Rays
A Sun-Climate connection of course is always under attack because it could shoot down CAGW.
Gail,
It seems to me that anyone who would discount a connection of the Sun to the climate of the Earth would have to be a true “denier”. The Sun’s input is about 99.99999% (or some such) of the energy input into the climate system.
Now I know that certain people (you know who you are) will claim that the energy input from the Sun is so close to “constant” that it can be taken as a constant, so it does not account for any VARIATIONS in climate. However, it seems to me that more and more such variations are being discussed (here and elsewhere) all the time.
It also seems to me that most of the attempted refutation of the proposed Sun-Climate links usually boils down to “nope, doesn’t actually happen” with no actual supporting data to show that it in fact doesn’t happen.
I think that we will not only find that the Sun represents virtually all of the energy input into the climate system, but we will likely also find that the Sun represents a VERY significant portion of the explanation of the variability of our climate once more and more people start really studying this.
BBould:
Thankyou for your post at September 12, 2013 at 8:53 am which is addressed to me and concludes saying
AGW is and always has been a political issue.
For my analysis of how the started please see
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/richard-courtney-the-history-of-the-global-warming-scare/
Please read the introduction which explains how and why that analysis was conducted BEFORE AGW became a scare and predicted that it would become a serious issue.
And please note its Figure 2 and observe that the scare would ‘run’ if all reference to science (on the right of the diagram) were removed. So, science has always been an adjunct to (excuse for?) the AGW-scare, and I think it still is.
However, the public has been misled into thinking the scare has a scientific basis. This is my major concern because the scare has resulted in damage to the conduct of all science and not only ‘climate science’. And the public understanding of the scare can only be corrected by informing them of the true nature of the scare.
Therefore, I agree about the need to inform the public about the reality of so-called ‘climate science’ but the problem is ‘how?’. Importantly, we need a clear message to present to the public, and that is why I argue that the existing model failure needs to be clearly stated.
I will be pleased if Lord Monckton can obtain the agreement on model validation criterion which he seeks, but I doubt he can. Whether or not he can, I stress that I think we need to proclaim the simple truth that the climate models have failed and that failure demonstrates the understandings of climate used in the models are wrong.
As for informing politicians, I have done my bit, and I was pleased with the results of the Copenhagen Conference which in December 2009 killed any possibility of a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. I can provide politicians with information they want to negotiate about AGW, but people like me lack the expertise in political lobbying which is now needed.
The political expertise of people like Lord Lawson, Lord Monckton, Vaklav Klaus, and etc. now needs to be mobilised. And the time is past when there was usefulness for people like me who have been working in the background to inform politicians of the nature of the science.
I hope I have explained my view.
Richard
Bill says:
September 12, 2013 at 7:03 am
…. “It is called the Jet Stream going from Zonal to Meridional flow. Meridional flow gives you blocking highs leading to floods, droughts very cold or very hot for a long time.”
Yes, that is what I heard from Jeff Masters, along with his scientific colleagues – in their view it is related to the loss of seasonal sea ice in the Arctic….
>>>>>>>>>>
Given the recovery of the Arctic sea ice to within 2 standard deviations of normal (gray) this year since January – link The lower than normal Arctic temperature – linkand the record high Antarctic Sea Ice – link. This summer/fall/winter will certainly be a test for Masters conjecture now won’t it? (It has been darn cool and wet this summer in NC BTW.)
(Anthony has the ice data sets on a link to the left.)
richardscourtney says:
September 12, 2013 at 4:56 am
Richard, I was not disagreeing with you, merely providing a little history. My comment was made up of direct quotes from Mike Hulme and Hadley.
Don’t let Terry Oldberg wind you up.
Philip Jones says: @ September 12, 2013 at 8:42 am
….Some of us are young enough to have a decent chance of being around in 2100. I love challenging my brainwashed teachers in class.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Oh, lord if you are reading here at WUWT with any regularity you must be a holy terror. Wouldn’t I love to be a fly on the wall in your class room.
(Watch out that they don’t try to medicate you in to another one of the brain dead.)
DennisA:
Thankyou for your message to me at September 12, 2013 at 9:45 am.
I know you were not disagreeing with me and I was trying to add clarity for others to read. I apologise if I offended: that was not my intention.
And thankyou for your advice about Terry Oldberg. As you perceive, after all these months (years?) I have got fed up with his nonsense.
Richard
You realize, of course, that the 17-year hiatus period is just a setup for the next hockey stick.
Gail Combs says:September 12, 2013 at 9:16 am
http://trs-new.jpl.nasa.gov/dspace/bitstream/2014/40231/1/06-1989.pdf
Also presentation PDF here.
BBould says: @ September 12, 2013 at 8:53 am
…..I agree also with Lord Monckton because this is a political issue as much and maybe even more than a scientific issue, though one wonders how it started out. Public opinion and media opinion must be swayed if AGW is to go away. I don’t think science will be enough unfortunately.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>.
A bit of background on the ‘Follow the Money’ aspect.
The banks own the press, or at least a large portion of it. link
WHAT IS IN IT FOR THE BANKS?
THE FLY IN THE OINTMENT (and a bit of damage control)
AND THE PLOT THICKENS:
RUSSIA and company did not take this sitting down.
The World Bank and IMF are not held in very high regarded by those they ‘Help’ either. link
Behind the scenes is Pascal Lamy of the World Trade Organization who tells us the actual plans.
Lamy considers the EU as the ‘Model’ for Global Governance BTW link
Seems that the BRICS countries are not too impressed and have moved on from those 1930’s plans leaving the World Bank/IMF/WTO manipulators flatfooted. Now if only us little guys can keep from getting stomped to death while the elephants dance.
Gail, you are getting far off topic…
Terminology: An “event” can be anything which occurs. More usefull are terms such as suspected causal variables (independent variables) and suspected dependent variables. And since we have so many of the independent variables intercorrelated with one and other, the result is a high incidence of mulicolinearity. I suppose if one buys the argument that CO2 follows temperature then using the 202 months of no temperature increase one could postulate that this “event”, ie independent variable might cause CO2 to increase less in the future as a result.
AJB says: @ September 12, 2013 at 10:25 am
Thanks for the new links.
I’d like to know about the guy who thinks he may be around in 2100. If he was born today he’d be 87 in 2100. Let me know what supplements you’re taking or are you counting on significant advance in the genetics field of medicine?
Jim G says: @ September 12, 2013 at 10:34 am
….I suppose if one buys the argument that CO2 follows temperature then using the 202 months of no temperature increase one could postulate that this “event”, ie independent variable might cause CO2 to increase less in the future as a result.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
There are several estimates of the ‘Lag’ in the temperature-CO2 data. One of the WUWT discussions on CO2 – Temp correlations.
Richardscourtney”
Says “The economy of every country is affected by the performance of the world economy. The economic disruption in the developed world would harm economic activity everywhere. The largest affects would be in the developed countries because their economies are largest. But the worst effects would be suffered by the world’s poorest peoples (people who are near to starvation are starved by economic disruption.).”
It certainly does appear that we have a very flat global economy presently, well predicted!
I very much liked your article, especially from an English viewpoint because that information was all new to me. Many of the reasons you mentioned I had thought about at one time or another but was never able to express them nearly as well as you.
Good article I have bookmarked it and will use it as needed.
PeterB in Indianapolis says:
September 12, 2013 at 8:39 am
Bill says, “Yes, that is what I heard from Jeff Masters, along with his scientific colleagues…
Aha Bill – there’s your problem…don’t go “Wunderground” and expect to get any unbiased information on climate! In fact…you don’t have go to “Wunderground” at all – there are MUCH better weather information sites on the internet.
I notice that it is occasionally mentioned that one “cause” of global warming over the 20th century may be that the planet is “recovering” from the Little Ice Age. However, I do not see many mentions of what evidence we should be looking for to determine when the threshold for that “recovery” is achieved. The current hiatus might for instance mark the threshold of that “recovery” and the planetary pause as it considers the continued descent into the major glacial epoch a few tens of thousands of years from now.
Gail Combs:
Says: ” The carbon economy is the fastest growing industry globally with US$84 billion of carbon trading conducted in 2007, doubling to $116 billion in 2008, and expected to reach over $200 billion by 2012 and over $2,000 billion by 2020″
That scares me! If its all about the money it will be a very difficult train to stop. However if it can be shown that it would benefit the global economy by doing away with carbon trading there may be a chance. Go Australia!
Thanks for your comments Gail Combs.
Gail Combs says:
September 12, 2013 at 10:47 am
Thanks for the link. Have seen it before but at my age a memory refresher is always welcome. Probably the 202 month lack of warming is not sufficient to register any proof of CO2 following temp but if the cooling continues, as many suspect, there may be your proof in the future. Not that it will influence the truly religious among the warmers or the politicians who use the “cause” to gain power or the researchers who use it to obtain grants..
richard verney says:
September 11, 2013 at 11:50 pm
KevinK says:
September 11, 2013 at 7:48 pm
///////////////////////////////
Further to the above post.
It is amazing that if DWLWIR was a real real source of energy capable of performing sensible work that no one has ever been able to extraxt useful work from the 324 w/m2 of DWLWIR (see attached diagram http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/abstracts/files/kevin1997_1.html ).
Can’t get the math to work out on the diagram.
When I add the goinzies and the gooutzies I come up with a mismatch of 30 w/m^2 at the earth’s surface. Where is my math error?
And at what altitude is the w/m^2 based upon ..
I don’t get it something about radiation falling off at a fourth power when distance is squared….
Duster says:
September 12, 2013 at 11:02 am
You have identified a troubling and challenging question I’ve been asking for a while. Most likely, the climatologist who does solve it will have earned his or her Nobel Prize.
A couple of points: It’s not really true that the temperature increase from the LIA is a “cause” of what we call modern global warming, but rather it is the “symptom” of global warming. Does that make sense? No honest and humble scientist or layman can say they know “exactly” what “caused” the long term temperature cycles we have identified as Minoan Warm Period, Roman Warm Period, the Dark Ages, Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age, and Modern Warming Period. And, in fact, there are almost certainly several different “causes” some at odds with each other at various times, amplitudes, and periods – if indeed, all of the causes are cyclical themselves. The result of all “causes” together are combined into what we believe is that long term temperature record.
SO, to answer your question, you need to make several assumptions. First, you need to assume that the same root causes that affected temperature in the Minoan, Roman, and Medieval Ages will still cause the same temperature change now. In fact, that is the entire root of the CAGW agenda! They claim that “logically” man’s CO2 MUST affect temperatures today because the CO2 has been added now, and was not present to the same amount in the those past few warming periods. (They discount obviously any thought or consideration of the much earlier periods when CO2 was many times higher than it will be in the future due to man’s release, but that too is one of their faults.)
Two. Once you have made the assumption that the long-term temperature record IS cyclical, AND that that period of long-term cycles will repeat or can be predicted to repeat at some time period, AND that repetition will be at a similar amount as before – or predictably less than before since each hot period seems smaller than its predecessors! – THEN you need to figure out what the period was, when the next peak will be (since that period may not be a pure regular beat, and how high the past peaks were and what their trends will be.
So, when were the past three peaks of the last three Warming Periods?
From that, when will the next peak occur?
With that, what will the next peak likely be?
Now, on top of all of that, there appears to be a short-term cycle of temperture laid over the long term temperature cycle.
No, we don’t what causes that short-term cycle either.
We don’t know if that short term cycle will repeat in the future either.
So, what are the most recent short term “peaks” and flat spots and dips in the modern temperature record?
Once the short term cycle is determined, then add both cycles together and look:
Is the 2000-2010 peak merely a “flat spot” in the temperature record that will end up with surface temperatures increasing again as they did from 1975 through 1998?
Were the 1935-1945 peak and 2000-2010 the maximum of the Modern Warming Period, or will there be one more “peak” about 55-60 years after 2000? Well, that depends on when you consider the Medieval Warming period “peak” was, doesn’t it?
Now, since the root cause of the long term temperature cycle is not known, one could argue rightfully, that we have no business looking at long term temperature predictions. So what?
We did not know WHY gravity forced the planets into elliptical orbits, nor WHY the continents moved, nor HOW DNA “worked” but all those processes were USED with great success for many years before the “WHY” was answered.
“Bill says:
September 12, 2013 at 7:03 am ”
If you want any respect here you need to provide data to back up your claims.
Please define the statistical definition of “exceptional” weather that you are using in your diatribes.
Otherwise, you are just another foolish eco cultist.
Robert of Ottawa says:
September 11, 2013 at 4:08 pm
Bruce Cobb,
I expect the IPCC will switch track to the dangerous extreme weather events line. This “argument” seems to be in vogue amongst the Warmistas.
I agree, Crichton’s predictions are the only ones holding up.
PeterB in Indianapolis says:
September 12, 2013 at 8:34 am
Richard Verney said, “Likewise, it is easier to have a relatively short period of hiatus when say CO2 levels are ~310 rising to ~330ppm than it is when CO2 levels are ~380 rising to ~400ppm”
Actually you have that exactly backwards. Since the effect of CO2 on temperature is purportedly logarithmic, it should have a GREATER effect on temperature when rising from 310 to 3[3]0ppm than when rising from 380 to 400 ppm. Therefore, the higher the concentration of CO2 gets, the less effect it should have, and the greater the likelihood of a “pause”
////////////////////////
My comment is based upon their assumptions with respect to TCS & ECS which underpin the models that they use to project warming.
Of course, it may be that the IR bands are already saturated at today’s level of CO2, but that is not the position programmed into the models. (and my comment therefore ignores that).
Assuming that currently the IR bands are not already saturated, then the positive forcing associated with today’s level of CO2 (ie., around 400ppm) is greater than the positive forcing associated with CO2 at say the 1960s level (ie., ~320ppm).
Whilst it may be the case that the increase in forcing in relaticve terms beween CO2 increasing from 380 to 400ppm, is less than the increase in forcing in relative terms between CO2 increasinfg from 310 to 330ppm (because the effect is logarithmic) we are not looking at the relative increase, but rather the absolute forcing associated with the then current level of CO2. In other words taking an average, we are looking at the absolute forcing of CO2 at 320ppm 9the mid point between 310 to 330ppm) and comparing this with the forcing at 390ppm (being the mid point between 380 to 400ppm).
Leaving aside aerosls and volcanoes, a pause in the temperature record should only occur when the positive forcing associated with CO2 is broadly similar to the negative forcing associated with natural variation such that one cancels out the other.
When CO2 levels are at say 310 rising to 330ppm (ie., around the 1940s to 1970s), the positive forcing of CO2 may be cancelled out by the negative forcing of natural variation. However, if CO2 levels have reached upwards of 380ppm (as they were in the late 1990s) then since the forcing associated with CO2 at this level is greater than the forcing when CO2 was only 310ppm, it is more difficult for negative forcing associated with natural variation to cancel out the warming effect of CO2. It can only do so if the negative forcing associated with natural variation is greater today than it was say back when CO2 levels were circca 310ppm
This is my point. We need to know at what level of CO2 the models project a temperature hiatus. If this was when CO2 was at say about 300 ppm, or at say 330ppm, it does not adequately explain why there is pause when CO2 is approaching 400ppm.
I hoope that clarifies the point I was seeking to make.
Box of Rocks says: @ September 12, 2013 at 12:06 pm
….Can’t get the math to work out on the diagram.
When I add the goinzies and the gooutzies I come up with a mismatch of 30 w/m^2 at the earth’s surface. Where is my math error?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
You might want to take a look at John Kehr’s articles on energy balance.
http://theinconvenientskeptic.com/category/energy-balance/
RACookPE1978 says:
September 12, 2013 at 12:11 pm
Shorthand talk will bite one every time. The reason that “cause” was in quotes was to call into attention the very point you make. I tend to prefer uniformitarianism as a basic principle that expresses itself in all earth science. One aspect of that fact is that the physical properties of materials like CO2 do not change over geological time. Thus CO2 from human sources is not different from other sources – well, possibly isotopically, but that doesn’t alter the physical properties that purportedly are what makes important to the AGW hypothesis. That in turn means that CAGW was falsified long before the hypothesis was even advanced. It has been known for many decades now that atmospheric CO2 has been many times present levels in the past. No catastrophe then means none in the future that can be blamed on excess CO2, QED.
I’m not really fond of the idea that long term “climate” patterns are actually cyclical. I think they may be more quasi-cyclical – really chaotic, reflecting movement about a Lorenzian attractor. If you consider the pattern of warm and cold periods over the Pliocene and Pleistocene, e.g.:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pliocene_benthic_carbonate_18O.png
you see that during the latter Pleistocene the warm-cold “cyclic” pattern deepened and chilled extremely. Compared to the comparatively kindly patterns of the Miocene we’re living in an icebox even during the present interstadial.
@ Green Sand says:
September 11, 2013 at 3:20 pm
Perhaps what is developing over the NW Pacific is just a reflection of the Cold PDO, which began in 2007.
Check out this negative PDO graphic:
http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo/
Re: Monckton of Brenchley 12 Sept 2013 at 1.10 am
“Mr Sherrington says I was wrong to take the mean of the monthly temperature anomalies from both terrestrial and satellite datasets………………………….
The correlation of satellite lower troposphere temperature with surface-based records is reasonable at some coarse scales, but it is a source of continuing problems. In Australia, the BoM made a great hullabaloo about DJF summer temperatures being the iconic “angry summer”, with average temperatures (from their data set) claimed to set all time new records.
With Jo Nova & some volunteers, we got stuck into this, Here is a graphs from Jo’s blog that I’ve stored on my web site.
http://www.geoffstuff.com/aust-uah-v-bom-1981-10-means%5b1%5d.jpg
You will see at once that the two records disagree by about 0.7 degrees for the last DJF.
This is a very large disagreement.
It was with examples like this in mind that I objected lightly to the averaging of records taken at different times and different places, broadly objecting to the average of a number of satellite and surface temperatures.
At a deeper level, some properties like autocorrelation are somewhat different for the satellite class of data and the surface-based. If you are going on to do statistical analysis like WUWT guest Jeffery S Patterson posted about the same date as this, you would need to quantify such differences. They are different animals, depending on which spectacles one is wearing.
Thanks to both Lord Monckton and R Barraclough. Don’t have MS office, so will sub a open source web tool.
Gail Combs & PeterB in Indianapolis,
I should have more clearly communicated my thoughts. I think Prof Peter Wadhams and his predictions should replace the Maslowski Countdown. The Maslowski Massive Miss should be properly and permanently enshrined in some way, but a new prediction countdown should replace it.
Maybe if a few of these guys get embarrassed they will dial back the fear mongering a notch or two or 10. Thank you Anthony for coming up with a way to hold at least one of these twits accountable. It is so frustrating to watch these people spout off and then just walk away. They take no responsibility for the laws, taxes, spending and public policy that they leave in their wake.
?? A volcano, unless it rains hot rock globally, is likely to cause some cooling. And the bolded word means the opposite of what you seem to think.
Robert Orme;
On further thought, are you recommending Nordhaus’ carbon taxes? Punishing energy production is contra-indicated. His models, like the CAGW ones, posit and assume CO2 harm, and discount/ignore warming benefits.
Greening of arid places and enhancement of drought-tolerance in food plants argue for CO2 subsidies, not taxes.
Mr. Sherrington continues to insist that one ought not to average satellite and terrestrial temperatures because they can be very different. Well, that is precisely why one averages them – to get some idea of what the middle position might look like.
As to autocorrelation, having verified with a statistician that the highly stochastic global temperature dataset is so little auto-correlated that one might as well use least-squares regression for the trend-lines, there is really no need to worry too much about whether the auto-correlation characteristics of satellite and surface datasets are to some small extent different. I’m not using AR(n) modeling because there’s no point, and it would generate more arguments than it would resolve. So I stick to good old least-squares regression, which everyone who has done Stats 101 understands.
One only has to look at the vast error-bars published by HadCRUt4 (i.e. plus or minus 0.15 K) to realize that when plotting global temperatures there is little point in counting angels on a pinhead, statistically speaking. And that’s before one starts on the enormous amount of tampering that GISS and others have done, suppressing global temperatures in the 1930s to make the apparent 21st century warming seem larger than it actually was.
All I do is take the data and process them in the simplest possible way, because that minimizes the opportunities for the usual suspects to whinge about what was done. They will whinge anyway, on principle, but ordinary people, on seeing the very clear temperature graphs I try to produce, are getting the picture very clearly now.
Even the scientific community are catching on to the value of clear data images. When I put out a one-page 200-month zero-warming graph at the back of the World Federation of Scientists’ lecture hall a couple of weeks ago, every copy was snapped up. The truly astonishing thing about the temperature record is that the mainstream media will not, will not, will not let the public know that global warming is not happening at the predicted rate or, recently, at all.
“The truly astonishing thing about the temperature record is that the mainstream media will not, will not, will not let the public know that global warming is not happening at the predicted rate or, recently, at all.”
The Met and RS have been pushing “rising temperature” all the two decades they knew that no such thing was happening. That is where the fault lies. CRU fully complicit in the Met fraud.
http://www.orthodoxytoday.org/blog/2009/11/global-warming-fraud-by-hadley-cru-exposed/
“Global Warming Fraud by Hadley CRU Exposed
November 20, 2009
Telegraph Media Group | by James Delingpole | Nov. 20, 2009
“The conspiracy behind the Anthropogenic Global Warming myth (aka AGW) has been suddenly, brutally and quite deliciously exposed after a hacker broke into the computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (aka Hadley CRU) and released 61 megabytes of confidential files onto the internet. (Hat tip: Watts Up With That)
“When you read some of those files – including 1079 emails and 72 documents – you realise just why the boffins at Hadley CRU might have preferred to keep them confidential. As Andrew Bolt puts it, this scandal could well be “the greatest in modern science”.”
This did get press coverage – but what we got was a cover up.
The Met Office and CRU still conspire to deceive us, the RS still promotes this deception. The greatest scandal in modern science continues because those creating it still continue and will continue to continue until it is raised and destroyed at the poitical level.
You could alway take up your seat and bring this to everyone’s attention..
Terry Oldberg – your arguments are founded in your arcane knowledge of logic and which you have apparently put a great deal of your time. What defines your sophistry is your assumption that you can engage others and fling your arcane knowledge about as if it were common knowledge and to use esoterica as a weapon in a war of words. It is not acceptable, and it is inappropriate and haughty to purposely talk over the heads of lay and educated people from your unique but arcane station and expect an response on your terms. It also makes you look a fool but you’ve got to already know that. I’m thinking I’m seeing symptoms of Asperger’s here as evidenced by your trying very hard to not be accepted. Not uncommon at all among intelligent people.
Not sure that dp is right about Mr. Oldberg displaying any knowledge of logic. In this thread he has argued with the IPCC’s use of the word “predict” on the ground that there was no “event” for it to compare its predictions with. However, the rules of logic on the definition of terms require that, if a term is not to be used in its generally-understood meaning, that fact must be made explicit. I have been using the word “predict” in its plain and full meaning, from the Latin, namely to “say what will happen”. The “event” with which I have dared to compare the IPCC’s predictions is the observed global warming over the longest period before today during which no global warming was observed. For I am using “event” in its plain and full meaning: “that which has happened”.
To summarize: I have compared what the IPCC says will happen with what has happened. What has happened is not what the IPCC said would happen. It is as simple as that. Mr. Oldberg is an instance of that species of troll who, utterly unable to refute the clear and simple scientific points being made, does his inferentially paid worst to sow pointless confusion. Fortunately he is inept at doing so: therefore, his futile wafflings merely serve to undermine the case against the scientific truth that all with a clear eye can see: not much warming is to be expected from our adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and not much is happening, even though in some quarters much warming is profitably but erroneously predicted.
I say “inferentially paid” because no one who was not paid would spend so much time and effort elaborately making a fool of himself.
Why would one want to correct for auto-correlation when that is what the climate is.
It is auto-correlated by its nature. Today’s temperature is likely to be similar to yesterday’s temperature and it is, in fact, quite influenced by yesterday’s temperature.
This September is likely to be similar to last September. It is more likely to be similar to last September than to the September of 100 years ago or 500 years ago. This September may be influenced by what last year’s September was in just a tiny way, but it is, in fact, a non-zero.
That is what the climate is. Energy slowly accumulates and slowly escapes. Correcting for auto-correlation is like taking out what we are trying to measure.
Suppose the anomalies for, say, May to August are 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 and 0.4. Then in September, it cools to 0.35. You have a one-month cooling trend, 2 data points, a 1 month trend. You don’t suddenly jump from no cooling to 2 months in the space of 1 month. Similarly with 202 data points, a 201 month trend.
@ Terry Oldberg says:
September 12, 2013 at 8:17 am
“richardscourtney (Sept. 11, 2013 at 3:02 pm):
On Sept. 11 at 3:02 pm you state that “There is an ‘event’ (i.e. the global temperature in 1997)…” To state that the global temperature in 1997 is an example of an event is logically similar to stating that in a flip of a coin, “heads” is an example of an event. Actually, it is the flip that is an example of an event. Would you care to take another stab at the identity of the events underlying the climate models of IPCC AR4 or do you now admit that there are none?”
You know, I was going to leave this all to Lord Brenchley and Richard, who were doing such a wonderful and entertaining job of putting you in your place. But it appears you must play the fool, and this was, for me, the last straw, and I skipped the rest of the replies to tell you so (and thus, if I am repeating what anyone else has already pointed out, please forgive my impetuousity—but this Terry Oldberg person is really annoying).
First, you asserted,
” richardscourtney:
Contrary to your claim, the global temperature in 1997 is not an example of an “event.” ”
You are wrong. An event may be the experience of two or more events that occur in sequence or concurrently that can be subsequently categorized as an “event.” This is a well known, non-esoteric use of the term “event.”
You then asserted, “By the way, to inaccurately smear the reputation of a professional,
including me, is illegal under the defamation laws of both the US and the UK.”
You are wrong again, at least as regards the United States (as an aside, what would it mean if I “accurately” smeared your reputation? For one who prates about “logic”, and likes to toss around polysyllabic, esoteric terms, the vagueness and imprecision of “inaccurately smear”—as polysemic as any world or phrase you accuse Richard of using—is breathtaking). As the Supreme Court of the United States found, in its decision in re New York Times v. Sullivan, public officials could win a suit for libel only if they could prove “actual malice” which was defined in the decision as, “knowledge that the information was false,” or that it was published “with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.”
By the way, the truth is always an absolute defense against libel in the United States.
“Professionals” are not given any separate standing under the law; and if they were, we have only YOUR assertion that you are a professional. At what, sir? I too am a professional. So what? The simple fact is, the law does not protect you from libel because you claim to be a “professional,” nor does it protect you from ordinary opinions which rise from the use of First Amendment rights. You must prove actual malice. Good luck with that.
You asked of Crispin of Waterloo about the “issue” of whether the global temperature in 1997 was an event. There IS no issue. It would appear that the only issue is that you alone are not aware that the mean of all the recorded surface temperatures for 1997 qualifies as an event.
As I told one who appears to be one of your ideological brethren, elsewhere (ie., he too appears to be a limaceous slubberdegulion), I have no rights on this blog to tell you to peddle your “logic” elsewhere—but I do wish you would.
@ Gail Combs says:
September 12, 2013 at 10:31 am
By the way, that post was a tour-de-force! Ok, off subject slightly (Loved your other posts re: Jet Stream. Saw the report of research regarding the possible impact of jetstream orbit on Arctic Ice some time back, here on WUWT. Yours was a timely reminder!), but a tour-de-force—Brava!
Thought to ponder: what happens if the BRICS nations and the OPEC nations actually do reprice the cost of a barrel of oil in a new basket of funds, instead of the World’s Reserve Currency (currently the US Dollar)?
YOur post was not too far off topic when you realize that the entire AGW hoax has become so large because malefactors see it as a method to steal more money clipping the tickets on international transactions which they’re fighting to have governments mandate in order to “combat global warming” or “extreme weather events” or whatever they want to call it (h/t to Ian Wishart and “Air Con” and if you’re reading this, Ian, please: we want ANOTHER updated version!).
We are “skeptics” and “deniers” because we disagree with the way science has been perverted to serve the egos of some, the power-hunger of yet others, and the greed of many more. The purity of that anger at the abuse of Science aside, we shouldn’t forget the dangers intendent upon their success, should the hoaxters win their battle to put their argument across and drown everyone else out.
There is a great deal more at risk here than principles, and the first ones harmed will NOT be those getting ripped off in developed nations: it will be the poor who starve and die first due to insane legislation about “carbon.” Lord Brenchley is too polite in his references to Mr. Hansen et al.
Richard Barraclough says:
September 14, 2013 at 8:11 am
You have a one-month cooling trend, 2 data points, a 1 month trend.
You have to keep in mind that the numbers you see are actually the month long averages. So taking RSS for example for June, July and August, the numbers are 0.291, 0.222 and 0.167. If we make the simplifying assumption that temperatures changed linearly over these three months, you could argue that these were the values on the 15th of each month. However in each case, the values at end of each month were lower. That means the values at the start of each month had to be higher to compensate. So if the values went down from 0.291 to 0.167 over 2 months from June 15 to August 15, or whether they went down from 0.3325 on June 1 to 0.1395 on August 31 over 3 months makes no difference to the slope. Look at it this way, 3 data points do indeed cover 3 months since each data point covers a complete month.