RSS global temperature data: No global warming at all for 202 months

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

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.

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.