Climatologists now require 20 to 30 years to even consider any climatic trend: Is that really honest, or is it just very convenient?
Guest essay by Stephane Rogeau of France
So that’s it: the 15+ years period of no temperature increase is, according to the IPCC, a non-event, barely worth mentioning in the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM). The explanation is simple: we are just witnessing short usual natural variations of the climate that are consistent with climate models. The question about whether those models had foreseen this so-called “hiatus” is just irrelevant: move along!
But let’s just imagine for a while that since around 2000, the world had seen a warming bigger than everything the IPCC had ever predicted. I mean a situation just opposite to what we have been experiencing until now with regard to model forecasts. What would have been the analysis proposed by the IPCC in its SPM report?
First possible analysis:
“The long-term climate model simulations show a trend in global-mean surface temperature from 1951 to 2012 that agrees with the observed trend (very high confidence). There are, however, differences between simulated and observed trends over periods as short as 10 to 15 years (e.g., 2000 to 2012). Due to natural variability, trends based on short records are very sensitive to the beginning and end dates and do not in general reflect long-term climate trends. As one example, the rate of warming over the past 12 years (2000–2012; 0.23 [+0.13 to +0.33] °C per decade), which begins after the effect of a strong El Niño disappeared, is bigger than the rate calculated since 1951 (1951–2012; 0.12 [0.08 to 0.14] °C per decade).
The observed extra increase in surface warming trend over the period 2000–2012, as compared to the period 1951–2012, is due in roughly equal measure to an increased trend in radiative forcing and a warming contribution from internal variability, which includes a possible redistribution of heat within the ocean.”
Second possible analysis:
“The rapid increase in surface warming during the last period of more than 12 years is a clear sign that, although climate models have gained in precision in their description of climate behavior, several factors had been under-estimated by the scientific community in the AR4. There is strong evidence that both lower and upper limits of the former estimation of transient climate response should be risen by as much as 1°C (very high confidence).
Projections for annual mean surface temperatures for the period 2081-2100 have therefore been reviewed to take into consideration the change in observed trend over the last period of 12 years. All different scenarios now show a very likely increase of global mean surface temperatures of more than 1.5°C by the end of the century, relative to 1985-2005, and up to 6°C in the RCP8.5 scenario.”
Let’s be honest: does anybody believe the IPCC would have chosen to write anything close to the first analysis?
Related: To the IPCC: Forget about “30 years”
The graph you linked to says “Global average temperature 1850-2011”
Thank you richardscourtney.
Donald, why didn’t you look at RSS?
I love speculating as much as the next person, but it isn’t proof of anything. With regard to what they would do if warming stopped has been answered: move the goalposts. These people are very short sighted and do not look further into the future than their current problems require. Thus they are left twisting in the wind as the data continues to not support them in new and fun ways.
I think it isn’t particularly useful to set up a hypothesis about what the IPCC would do which is contrary to fact, then beat them up for something they didn’t do. Yes, I believe they wouldn’t have worried that the sample size was too small if there had been excess warming, but it doesn’t mean anything because it didn’t happen. They can do the same thing to us and it would be equally useless. What we can do is point out that they are changing their standard without a basis for doing so. They set the standard, they should have to live with it. They moved the goalpost once already when the data was against them, and now that data has met that standard, they try to move it once again. This we know because it happened, and they responded with another standard change. No speculation needed.
Data isn’t really for or against them, but their science is more religion, and they consider the continuing halt in warming as enemy behavior. At some point, one of them might just suggest that us skeptics are rigging the data by a secret conspiracy to open all our refrigerator doors and let the cool air out to influence the readings. They just might be that crazy.
psychosomatic. Mind over body.
Were you thinking of “pyscho semantic” = crazy talk? 😉
typo: “psycho semantic”
Yeah, and it’s even weirder than that. The Warm-Alarmists are discouraged by cooling or standstill, which is escape from the horrors they claim to fear. We skeptics who fear cooling are forced to celebrate it because it disproves Warmalarmism, and dislike warming stats, despite the historical record that universally says global warming is a major boon to both civilization and Nature!! E.g., in reality, an open Arctic Ocean would be great! (Paleontology (buried bones) shows even polar bear populations peak in warming eras.)
By their fruits shall ye know them, and the fruits of Alarmism are pervasively perverse. Even before implementing its suicidal mitigation recommendations.
Personally, I think a benchmark of 30 years is probably correct. Unfortunately it was always correct, so when the alarms went off in the late seventies early eighties it should always have been with a caveat that nothing was certain until it had been happening for 30 years.
My logic is that the PDO takes approximately 60 years per cycle and we are now on the downward trend of the cycle. Assuming that the upward trend of this PDO started in the early seventies then it was way too early to be making alarmist statements until a thirty year period had passed and they could determine if the temperature would just keep rising or whether it would flatten off and then drop. In order to establish the trend we needed to have looked at the peaks or the troughs of the cycles and then determine if the peak or trough was rising.
Theoretically, we could make an estimate of the last peak by looking at the early 1940s data, but unfortunately there has been so much instrumentation change and shenanigans with “adjusting” the data that it would be hard to establish if the early 1940s peak was higher or lower than the 1998 peak. I think that the coverage is just not there either.
So we are no 15 years from the peak and we will probably need to wait a further 15 years before we get to the trough. If temperatures don’t actually fall to early 1970s levels then we need to understand that mechanism.
Reality is that those who were making alarmist statements in the early days were either ignorant of scale of natural variability or chose to hide this. Now there is no excuse.
It goes up, it goes down. When it goes up it is us. When it goes down it is nature. You cannot win with these morons. ClimateGate came and went, now it is business as usual. As though nothing happened.
Look, it is the same with Snowden. Snow-who? Most people would say! Exactly!
Look, we live in strange times, surrounded by strange people, they are not interested in the truth. They are interested in X-Factor style TV shows.
The Earth has become a science fiction dystopia.
I will tell you a story (sorry Willis, I know you do not like stories 🙂 ).
Where I live, we are forced to separate our waste into “recyclable” and “land-fill”. When I pointed out to a house guest the absolute futility of the process… the fact that most of the “recyclable” in the UK gets shipped off for land fill in foreign lands (e.g. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2304773/The-great-recycling-trick-How-carefully-sorted-waste-dumped-abroad.html ), then fact that if the stuff was really worth recycling then the company would be knocking down my door to bid for my waste… that they would not require a huge government subsidy … and do you know what she said?
Do you have any idea what she said to me?
This is what she said: “Oh, I don’t care. Just so long as I know that I am doing my bit.”
I am not joking. That is what she actually said to me.
I repeat: The Earth has become a science fiction dystopia.
Donald L. Klipstein says:
October 2, 2013 at 11:42 am
15+ years of no temperature increase? That’s if you start with the spike of a century class El Nino. ….
That shows the hiatus as starting sometime in 2011, and currently having gone on for 12 years. Stating 15, 16 or 17 years seems to be cherrypicking the data to overstate one’s case.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
No it is not started during the century class El Nino, it was started BEFORE the el nino. It also includes all the data sets. Discussed here. Also Dr. Pachauri, the science chairman of the IPCC, admitted in Melbourne early in 2013 that there had been a 17-year “pause” in global warming.
….
It is also not cherrypicking because was based on the criteria set to disprove CAGW and counting backwards.
These are the falsification criteria statements made by 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
4. we are looking at no changes in temperature over a period longer than the 10 years that James Hansen once said would show the models wrong;
So the falsification criteria is 15 years to 17 years. That is why we start at the present and count backwards. Once we hit 17 years The Goose is Cooked. Unfortunately the Goose seems to be a zombie and keeps rising from the dead. (Now where did I put my silver bullets, garlic and a wooden stake?)
Frank K. says:
October 2, 2013 at 12:06 pm
On no!! Think of all the climate “science” that’s NOT getting done in the U.S. due to the shutdown! It makes a guy wanna do something drastic, like … ummm … get a vasectomy!
‘No children, happy to go extinct’, tweets weatherman after grim climate-change report made him cry (now he’s considering a vasectomy)’
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He should be encouraged. The fewer stupid genes there are in the world, the better for humanity as a whole.
They were telling me that co2 was now the main climate driver, and that co2 was now overwhelming natural climate drivers. Now nature seems to be overwhelming the ‘main climate driver’.
As we have seen, 17 years was enough (in the past at least.) 🙂 In the years to come if the planet’s surface temps cool, what then? Oh, the deep oceans. I wish the IPCC had told us to expect this earlier, it would have cleared up a lot of misunderstanding.
at http://conenssti.blogspot.com/
Who guessed that it could be so simple?
All measurements point to the average global temperature TREND since 1610 (the start of regular recording of sunspot numbers) being driven by something(s) that are driven by the sunspot number time-integral and OSCILLATIONS above and below the trend are the net effect of ocean cycles. Since temperatures have been accurately measured world wide, the net effect of ocean cycles has been approximately +-1/5 K with a period of 64 years. Most recent peak was in approximately 2005.
Aerosols, volcanos, change to the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, etc. have had no significant effect on average global temperature.
http://conenssti.blogspot.com/
Good perspective indeed, thanks Stephane Rogeau !