OVERVIEW
This post illustrates what many people envision after reading scientific papers about the predicted multidecadal persistence of the hiatus period—papers like Li et al. (2013) and Wyatt and Curry (2013). See my blog post Another Peer-Reviewed Paper Predicting the Cessation of Global Warming Will Last At Least Another Decade.
NOTE: In addition to the above papers, see Pierre Gosselin’s post Explosive: Max Planck Institute Initial Forecast Shows 0.5°C Cooling Of North Atlantic SST By 2016!
INTRODUCTION
I published a quick post introducing Li et al (2013), Another Peer-Reviewed Paper Predicting the Cessation of Global Warming Will Last At Least Another Decade. The cross post at WattsUpWithThat is here. My Figures 1 and 2 are Figures 3 and 4b from Li et al. (2013). Their Figure 3 shows a multidecadal component from Northern Hemisphere surface temperatures and a relatively low warming rate in a residual—a warming rate that excludes the higher rate imposed by the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation since the mid-1970s. Their Figure 4b shows the Li et al. (2013) predicted cooling of Northern Hemisphere temperatures through 2027.
Figure 1
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Figure 2
Earlier, I clearly showed in the blog post IPCC Still Delusional about Carbon Dioxide that climate models can’t simulate the sea surface temperatures of the global oceans from 1880 to present, when the temperature record is broken down into four multidecadal warming and cooling (less warming) periods. The oceans cover 70% of the planet. If modelers can’t simulate sea surface temperatures, they can’t simulate global temperatures.
Von Storch, et al. (2013) stated in “Can Climate Models Explain the Recent Stagnation in Global Warming?”:
However, for the 15-year trend interval corresponding to the latest observation period 1998-2012, only 2% of the 62 CMIP5 and less than 1% of the 189 CMIP3 trend computations are as low as or lower than the observed trend.
Clearly, if 98% of the current generation of models (CMIP5), and 99% of the earlier generation of models (CMIP3), do not simulate the current hiatus period of 15 years, it’s highly unlikely they model multidecadal hiatus periods lasting 3 decades.
Additionally, in the post Questions the Media Should Be Asking the IPCC – The Hiatus in Warming, under the heading of Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, I illustrated that the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation is not a forced component of climate models.
WHAT MOST PEOPLE ENVISION WHEN THEY READ PAPERS ABOUT MULTIDECADAL VARIABILITY AND THE PREDICTED PERSISTENCE OF THE HALT IN GLOBAL WARMING
Li et al. (2013) predicted Northern Hemisphere surface temperatures will cool slightly until 2027. They used HADCRUT4 data. I’ve used the same dataset in Figure 3, starting in January 1916 and running to the more current month of July 2013. Figure 3 also shows the multi-model ensemble mean of the simulations of Northern Hemisphere surface temperatures from January 1916 through December 2027. The models are the CMIP5 generation, used by the IPCC for their 5th Assessment Report. (Both data and model outputs are available from the KNMI Climate Explorer.) The data and model outputs have been smoothed with 121-month running-average filters. For the data-based projection, I simply spliced the smoothed data starting in January 1945 to the end of the current smoothed data.
Figure 3
If Northern Hemisphere surface temperatures cool through 2027 (at the same rate they had starting in 1945), the divergence between models and data will continue to grow. The reason: the modelers simply extended forward in time the high warming rate from their simulations of the late warming period. That clearly shows that the modelers did NOT consider the known multidecadal variations in surface temperatures in their projections.
Something else to consider: Li et al (2013) did not state the cessation of warming would end in 2027. Their model is only valid for 16 years into the future. After the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) switches again at some time in the future, using the Li et al (2013) model, they would then be able to predict an end to the multidecadal Northern Hemisphere cooling—and it would occur16 years after that NAO switch.
WILL THE IPCC’S FAILURE TO ADDRESS MULTIDECADAL VARIABILITY WILL BE THEIR DOWNFALL?
Let’s take this another step: Most people will also envision the multidecadal variations extending further into the future. That is, they will imagine a projection of future Northern Hemisphere surface temperatures repeating the slight cooling from 1945 to the mid-1970s along with the later warming, followed by yet another slight cooling of Northern Hemisphere surface temperatures, in a repeat of the past “cycle”. That is, they will envision the surface temperature record repeating itself. And in their minds’ eyes, they see an ever growing divergence between the models and their projections, like the one shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4
CLOSING
It’s very obvious that climate modelers, under the direction of the IPCC, simply tuned their models to the high rate of warming from one half of a multidecadal “cycle” without considering the other counterbalancing or offsetting portion of the “cycle”. The IPCC’s position has been and continues to be that the warming from the mid-1970s to the turn of the century was caused primarily by manmade greenhouse gases—a position that has always been unsupportable because climate models do not properly simulate multidecadal variability. The evidence of the model failings become more pronounced with every passing month of the halt in global warming.
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I’m really not sure we can say there is a cessation in global warming until we see some significant cooling. At present there is a hiatus in the rate of warming which may or may not be significant, but we are still in a situation where the climate has warmed and remains warmed, so it’s difficult to describe that as a cessation any more than a kettle remaining hot when taken off the stove remains in a warmed condition until it has cooled. Apologies for the semantics but we need to be accurate in what we are describing.
“I’m really not sure we can say there is a cessation in global warming until we see some significant cooling.” A rather disengnious statement as the climate only needs to balance out to demonstrate that the globe has stopped warming and the CAGW hoax is once again exposed. Everyone on this planet is aware that everything from daily life to Planet rotation and seasons are cyclic, Everything has a cycle and yet all those, all knowing specialists, refuse to accept that the weather behaves in that fashion as well. It’s back to the drawing board for them all, to begin again.
Gareth Phillips, Your semantics are misleading and you are not being accurate at all, on the contrary. It is so simple. Warming means that something is getting warmer. If it stays the same temperature (cold or warm has only relative meaning) is has CEASED to warm any further.
The crux, I believe, is the world-wide urbanization from late 60s to 90s.
For instance, a normal car is, while driving, equivalent to a 30-kW giant heater.
A simple calculation, based on the number of running cars and the heat capacity of air (20.8 J/mol/K), gives a temp rise of 2-3 degC for the air mass up to the height of ca. 1 km in the metropolitan area of Tokyo.
Around the year 2000 urbanization tended to saturate in many big- and medium-sized cities in the world, and hence the readings of surface-based thermometers stopped rising.
Another paper preaching to the choir. The warmists, the Royal Society, the American
Physical Society, the WMO, AGU, etc. are not listening or taking part in SCIENTIFIC discussions. Who is going to bell the cat?
Well Gareth I don’t think anyone will disagree with what you say – although 20 years ago those who used a 10 pence (UK) piece of graph paper, due to lack of an available supercomputer, and hand-sketched a continuation of the pre-existing MDO were very close to where we are now. And certainly a whole ballpark nearer than any of the models.
On top of that, while global temps remain stagnated – many parts of the northern hemisphere have seen cooling and bitter winters (we all know weather is not climate). The Central England Temperature (CET) has been going southwards for a decade now. I was talking to a farmer recently in the English Midlands who told me the growing season has slipped about 3 weeks since the millennium.
The alarmists simply mistook the upside of the MDO that occurred through the 90’s as an acceleration of warming, which it wasn’t, since it was at the same rate of warming as the 19th century upside (0.16c per decade). Their misapprehension was aided by the cooling of the Pinatubo event and the the super El Nino in the late 90’s. The recovery was steeper than the overall trend.
Gareth Phillips says:
October 14, 2013 at 3:23 am
I’m really not sure we can say there is a cessation in global warming until we see some significant cooling. At present there is a hiatus in the rate of warming which may or may not be significant, but we are still in a situation where the climate has warmed and remains warmed, so it’s difficult to describe that as a cessation any more than a kettle remaining hot when taken off the stove remains in a warmed condition until it has cooled. Apologies for the semantics but we need to be accurate in what we are describing.
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I’m not sure why the cessation of global warming has to be global cooling. It could as well be relatively flat temperatures. The kettle is put on a warmer and the energy is balanced.
Most accurate tracker of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation can be obtained from interaction the Earth’s magnetic field with the 22 year solar Hale cycle
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/GSC1.htm
The downturn in the solar activity will inevitably mean decline in the NA SST.
Tony Brown’s work is relevant here:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/06/26/noticeable-climate-change/
and
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/16/historic-variations-in-temperature-number-four-the-hockey-stick/
Tony’s comment in a current discussion on Lorenz at Judy Curry’s is:
“We are affected by even short periods of change, be they annual or decadal. We seem to have got hung up on 30 year and century long periods of climate change and read all sorts of meanings into them. They in turn need to be put into context with the much broader picture which does tell us something which is that our overall climate is hugely variable and does not conform to the notion of a static climate until 1880 or so that has become the norm.”
(hope you don’t mind, Tony, was not sure if/when you would see this).
At the risk of irritating Bob Tisdale yet again, HadCRUT4 is NOT a “dataset”; rather, it is an “adjusted” temperature anomaly record. The work Anthony and others have done suggests that up to half of that anomaly might exist only in the adjustments and not in the underlying data.
The TEAM refers to these temperature anomaly records as “datasets” in an effort to suggest that they are real data. We adopt their sloppy redefinition of data at our peril.
johanna:
re your post at October 14, 2013 at 4:34 am.
With respect to both you and tonyb, in my opinion it does not matter if he objects to your quoting and citing his work because his work is so good and so important that it needs to be quoted and cited often.
Richard
The hypothesis that there are multi-decade ocean cycles that have a well defined time period and magnitude is one that has yet to be confirmed by objective data. li et al certainly failed to confirm that the AMO they are referencing has a ~60 year period or a predictable amplitude. You can not derive a cycle from less than two peaks of its supposed period.
What limited cycles that are detectable show a consistent pattern. The shorter the cycle the greater the climate variation, the longer it is the smaller the observable anomaly. The ENSO cycle is inherently unpredictable in frequency and magnitude, but causes the largest variations within a few years or less. The Longer cycles that have been proposed, but rarely confirmed, all have much smaller ranges of variation.
There is no paleoclimate evidence that these purported cycles are anything other than energy neutral over a few years.
In fact for any supposed cycles of several decades it is necessary to rely on the same paleoclimate evidence that shows that recent warming is exceptional in the last 8000 years and confirms that these assumed ‘cycles’ are climate neutral in their purported effect over that period and have not caused any similar excursions in the past.
The ipcc models, not being based on reality can only predict warming. The Global Warming Halt of now nearly 17 years has effectively broken the models already, which is why they are grasping at straws like “hidden heat”. For now, multidecadal variations can certainly take the credit for the ipcc’s downfall. In the future, though, more credit may be given to the sun.
Chris Schoneveld says:
October 14, 2013 at 4:05 am
Gareth Phillips, Your semantics are misleading and you are not being accurate at all, on the contrary. It is so simple. Warming means that something is getting warmer. If it stays the same temperature (cold or warm has only relative meaning) is has CEASED to warm any further.
I agree Chris, like most things, it is semantics, but I do not intend to mislead. Imagine a car speeding up to 70 miles an hour on the M1 pushed by a powerful motor. Now if the motor stops and the car is free wheeling for a for while at 70 miles and hour, is it still speeding, although it is no longer being powered? The temps may not be rising at the previous rates, but make no mistake, they remain raised and we do not know whether they will fall back or whether the previous rate of increase will resume. Like the car, they may wind down or the engine may kick back in, but the car has certainly not stopped as yet.
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Bob Tisdale,
Another great set-up for stimulating discussion. Thank you once again.
The IPCC is a locus for model discussion, certainly. And they are not appearing rational in handling their failed model approaches. You have shown that.
If one can answer whether the IPCC will fall by failed models then I think one needs go to look at other loci of climate discussion. Let’s pick one => the upcoming 2013 Annual AGU Fall meeting in San Francisco in Dec.
Go to the AGU Meeting webpage, non-members can browse around to some extent. I see little evidence of diminished emphasis on the IPCC centric model approach when compared to previous fall meetings.
But, what I do see as different is a growing frantic undercurrent about US Federal Government’s significant sequestration of research funds. Models may be singled out as the lowest kind of priority to fund.
I suggest, to answer your question, to look at other scientific academies, institutes, societies and associations. Are they finally trying to correct the IPCC’s science?
My understanding of cultural change is the IPCC cannot fall except by the hands of those academies, institutes, societies and associations. And further, they will change only through a skeptical dominance of their members.
Bob, your work is laying important groundwork. Lots of work left to do
John
It’s not that they failed to model the PDO and AMO – it’s that they didn’t think them important. Natural processes that were “noise”.
Gareth Phillips says:
You make the assumption that normal is less warm than present. Since most of the Holocene was as warm or warmer than present, and we clearly had a cold period about 1300 to 1850, why do you assume the present is unusual rather than just a recovery from the LIA back to normal? The fact is that either the warming was a recovery from whatever caused the LIA, or if there is AGW, it is relatively small and is sitting on top of a larger natural variation that dominates the climate. Either case argues against their being a CAGW.
The AGW movement is in a similar place to 1st Century Christians. They were told Jesus was returning right away, that those living would see Him return in an Apocalypse. The Church grew out of that, to explain why He did not return as previously promised.
AGW true believers have to develop a way to at once continue their moral pose regarding “decarbonization” and still explain away the fact that their predictions are useless, their facts tainted or worse, and their remedies don’t do more than make AGW insiders wealthy.
Gareth Phillips:
At October 14, 2013 at 5:21 am you continue your disingenuous semantics when you write
NO! Global warming has stopped.
Your assertion that “temps may not be rising at the previous rates” is a false statement of lack of confidence.
There has been no discernible change in global temperature (at 95% confidence) for at least the last 17 years according all data sets (RSS says the last 22 years). But there was discernible global warming (at 95% confidence) for the previous 17 years according all data sets.
Discernible global warming has stopped.
A change in global temperature is certain to occur in future. But it is not known if that change will be a resumption of warming towards the temperatures of the Medieval Warm Period or the initiation of cooling towards the temperatures of the Little Ice Age.
Richard
It is yet another cold day for the believers in CAGW, as the natural swings of nature takes its inevitable course, the number of skeptics will be passed the tipping point, and the doom-mongers will be consigned to an embarrassment of history.
I don’t want get into the usual slanging match with you Richard so I won’t use any bold type or block capitals. You are correct that the rate of warming has pretty well slowed to a stop, but we remain at that temperature, there is a difference in these two statements. The rate has of warming has stopped, but we remain at an elevated temperature compared with recent records. Leonard Weinstein(above) has a reasonable point in stating that we cannot be entirely sure whether the current situation is a normal rebound from the LIA, or whether as most people have it, that there is an anthropogenic factor. I’m not certain, and I think that is a healthy stance. Certainty bounding on zealtotry is the bane of climate science on all sides. I believe we are seeing a hiatus, it’s anybodies guess as to where it will go from here.
Correction, that should be Zealotry in my last post, cursed MacBook auto corrects!
LearDog says: “It’s not that they failed to model the PDO and AMO – it’s that they didn’t think them important. Natural processes that were ‘noise’.”
Additionally, LearDog, the models can’t simulate naturally occurring, coupled ocean-atmosphere processes, because they are unforced components of Earth’s actual climate.
SSTs are the best metric for global climate. There has been no net warming since 1997 and the earth entered a cooling trend in about 2003 ( See Fig 7 at the latest post at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com ) which will likely last for 20 years and perhaps for hundreds of years beyond that.
Check the basic data at ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/annual.ocean.90S.90N.df_1901-2000mean.dat
The link to my site also provides a forecast for the timing and extent of the coming cooling.
@gareth, The fact that the warming has stopped the past 17 years is in no way incongruent with the fact that temps remain (so far) at a somewhat elevated level. Either you are being disingenuous, or are incredibly dense not to see that. Furthermore, the fact that warming has stopped does not in any way make a claim as to what direction future temperatures will take. Calling it a “hiatus” or “pause”, on the other hand, implies future warming. Semantics indeed.