RSS: no global warming for 16 years 11 months
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
The RSS monthly satellite global mean surface temperature anomaly data, delayed by the US Government shutdown, are now available. The data show no global warming at all for 16 years 11 months. This dataset could be the first of the five to pass the strict Santer test: no global warming at all for 17 years.
Since no el Niño is now expected until next spring at the earliest, the long run without any global warming at all is likely to continue for another few months.
CO2 concentration, meanwhile, continues its upward trend. And it is this disconnect between rising CO2 concentration and stable near-surface temperatures that makes the present long hiatus in global warming more significant than the previous periods of a decade or more without warming over the 163 years of global mean surface temperatures. In none of the previous periods was CO2 concentration either as high or rising as fast as it is today.
Climate extremists are prone to show the data since 1970 as an “escalator” with a series of “steps” consisting of decade-long pauses, but an overall rising trend:
However, a trend is not a prediction. There is no guarantee that merely because the trend has been upward it will continue upward. The effect of the frequent supra-decadal periods without warming is to constrain the overall warming rate since 1970 to a not particularly thrilling 1.6 Cº/century equivalent.
Taking the trend since 1950, a fairer benchmark since the period covers a full warming and cooling cycle of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, shows warming at a rate equivalent to less than 1.1 Cº/century.
So, can one clearly distinguish an anthropogenic warming signal in these post-1950 data from the data before 1950, when we could have had no measurable influence on the climate?
The answer is No. Professor Richard Lindzen likes to play a game with his audiences. He shows the following slide, and explains that one of the panels represents the global warming over the 52-year period 1895-1946, and the other represents the warming over the 52-year period 1957-2008. He explains that both graphs are to the same scale and invites his audience to guess which is the earlier period and which is the later.
In fact, the later period is on the left. Let us determine the linear warming trends on each of the two periods:
The later period has a very slightly steeper slope than the earlier, but only by the equivalent of a third of a Celsius degree per century. On these figures, it seems difficult to justify the IPCC’s assertion of 95% confidence that most of the warming since 1950 was anthropogenic.
Meanwhile, the discrepancy between IPCC prediction and observed reality in the monthly Global Warming Prediction Index remains glaring. A shame that the IPCC did not deal honestly or clearly with this discrepancy in its latest Summary for Policymakers.
For Santer’s test see: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/17/ben-santers-17-year-itch/
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dang…meant to say “2010-2015”
You know the warmists will not like this..
And you will all feature heavily on a certain blog in Australia that spends all its time bagging this one.
One after the other, every hypothesis is dismissed.
And with a La Nina around the corner, yes you heard right, no El Nino in 2014, a La Nina instead I would expect to to stretch out to 20 years and cooling to 15 years.
The only hope Santer or anyone on the AGW side has is using the 1640-1710 Maunder Minimum baseline..
Which is why we should push to have temperature measurements and not anomalies that can be manipulated.
Google “Co2 emissions in decline” to find dozens of recent articles like the following (add “NPR” to your search if you want to coax the most tendentious reports to the top of the heap):
Energy-Related Carbon Emissions Dropped Nearly 4 Percent Last Year
OCTOBER 22, 2013 | 10:29 AM
BY TERRENCE HENRY
With all due respect to Rush Limbaugh, I don’t think he’s keeping pace with the facts. Despite the clear upward trend shadowing the back of Christopher Monckton’s temp graphic (the Keeling graph), global warmers are claiming CO2 levels are tapering. Carbon levels are in decline. The fever has broken. The planet may yet be saved, the tipping point averted. Etc. etc. … And the credit is theirs.
There are variations. Here is one that says the Earth is “breathing” differently of late.
“Swinging CO2 Levels Show The Earth Is ‘Breathing’ More Deeply” from NPR’s Richard Harris.
http://www.npr.org/2013/08/08/210243967/swinging-co2-levels-show-the-earth-is-breathing-more-deeply
Skeptics just keep tossing handfuls of sand into their funding machine. How rude.
17 years? I meant 170 years, just a typo
Regards
Ben Santer
Perhaps one of the more interesting observations which could be made currently is this: during the 16 year 11 month hiatus in GSS, the acceleration in the summer ice melt in the Arctic has reached its zenith. Only a small change up to then, then a rapid decline as temperatures stabilised.
What credibility does Santer’s 17 years exclamatory have over say Donald Duck saying 5 years should reveal all? It’s all cartoon, isn’t it? I think the presumption is Santer might know more than Joe SixPack, but really, where’s the proof? What is there that suggests anything Santer has ever said is more valid than what any random person anywhere has said regarding climate? The prevailing evidence is the Santers of the world are nutters for even suggesting absolutes, that is to say, predicting verifiable quantified predictions that can be shown to be flat wrong. And, as it turns out, have been. Santer looks like a fool, but at least he manned up and made a prediction. Mann himself avoids that like a mummy’s curse. Live by models, die by models.
Silver lining? Politicians are losing credibility everywhere as economies keep on tanking. Once the great unwashed realise that ‘AGW’ is a massive con that has had a deeply negative impact on their lives, I would expect a mass clean out – and with the internet rather than mass media driving the conversation perhaps it will turn out to be all for the good. (Daydreaming again, I know!)
Whilst all very interesting and every effort must be made to bring these people to task for previous comments, I think it’s still in vain. Thomas Stocker, at the mockery that was the presentation of the IPCC AR5 Summary for Policy Makers has already moved the goalposts. When being asked pesky questions about the hiatus in the rate of warming he decided that it was not significant as we’d need 30 years of such to attribute anything significant to it. They are clearly betting that the mysterious missing heat is going to shoot from its hiding place, 20,000 leagues under the sea.
And one day someone is going to have to explain to this layman the process by which heat from the energy budget is capable of sequestering itself in the deep ocean without affecting the temperature record of the body of water above it. I may not have enough of a grasp on thermodynamics and fluid dynamics to get my head around this one because it’s baffling me how this claim can be true.
@Doug S I’m glad you have been able to hear Big Ben. As a one-time resident of London for 15 years, I know the locals can become a little blasé about it.
I wonder, have you ever seen Big Ben though?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/picturegalleries/uknews/5407086/Big-Ben-celebrates-its-150th-birthday.html?image=12
It’s surprising how many locals, let alone tourists have no idea that what they see is actually the Clock Tower ( recently renamed the Elizabeth Tower for QEII in her Jubilee year ) of the Palace of Westminster and Big Ben is the E♭ bell inside the tower, the one that counts the chimes.
Thanks once again, Lord Monckton of Brenchley.
edmh says: October 23, 2013 at 9:52 pm
[excerpt]
The world does indeed face a dire and truly urgent threat from climate change. It is just not what the Global Warming Alarmists want everyone to think it is.
The last Millennium 1000 – 2000 AD was the coolest of the current Holocene and about 1.5 °C cooler than the earlier Holocene optimum according to ice core records. The UKMO CET record has lost ~1.0°C in the last 13 years since the year 2000 and winter temperatures have been a full 1.5°C lower in that period. More recently an extreme escalation of the temperature decline has occurred and is shown in the UKMO official Central England Temperature CET record. In the first half of 2013, UK Met Office CET temperatures were a full 1.89°C lower than the monthly averages of the previous 12 years.
That is really significant and it really matters. That marked decline has lead to significant crop failures and serious loss of agricultural productivity. The effect has been mirrored in both hemispheres.
************
Hello edmh,
I share this concern re imminent global cooling but have a question about your above numbers.
I looked at CET’s at http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
and they directionally support your contention but at a glance the recent cooling does not seem quite as large as you say.
What is your data source for CET?
Also, do you have a data source for your claims re crop failures and loss of agricultural activity.
BTW, do you accept HadCET temperatures as-is or do you think there is an inadequate adjustment for UHI, or other such deficiency?
Do you believe, for example, that the ~20-year period from ~1990 to 2010 was really warmer than circa 1935-45?
Thanks, Allan
I caution all of you to not get carried away by the idea that the AGW scam is dying. It isn’t and it won’t. I have been watching the media for a very long time now and recently started to count the number of people and the sum of money that is hanging around this scam. I am here to tell you that I couldn’t finish either count with satisfactory accuracy. They are enormous. $trillions (really trillions) and hundreds of thousands of people. It is the most massive scam in history and we therefore have no precedent for how it will finish.
Many of the media people and the corporation people will bail quite quickly, I think, but they are all waiting for the first. The green charities such as the famous 4 of Greenpeace, FoE, WWF and Oxfam will keep going for ever. Governments are very unpredictable. What they do will depend on the stupidity of the politicians involved and their wish for power or glory (glory coming from saving the planet).
For us in france, socialism dictates the need to tax and spend and that continues unabated and so will the green taxes. Hollande has already firmly ruled out fracking, again and has recently raised taxes on cars and investment. 6000€ to register an SUV is obscene and signals the start of the process to tax fossil fueled vehicles off the roads (incidently, this was the winning suggestion in one of many of Shell-funded green-debates. Shell have contribute staggering amounts of money to all the green beenies. France has to close 22 nuclear power stations by 2023 and has no plan to replace them therefore the whole of europe, including the UK, will be affected by loss of feed through power. Hang on to your hats the ride is going to get really rough.
I believe one of the complaints that Pielke Sr. has often made is that seeing CO2 as the daemon has resulted in other anthropogenic changes being downplayed – in particular land-use changes.
This I think means that in answer to the question “can one clearly distinguish an anthropogenic warming signal in these post-1950 data from the data before 1950, when we could have had no measurable influence on the climate?” that indeed we could have affected the climate prior to 1950, mainly through land-use changes, but of course many of these changes are pretty much saturated now – not much unused land good for farming isn’t being farmed.
I hope that when you come to listen to Big Ben chiming it is not striking midnight at nine twenty five.
As far as the warmists’ escalator goes:
1) The first standstill in the 1970’s was part of a 30 yr pause, coinciding with cold phases of PDO and AMO.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2013/10/21/amo-pdo-cycles/
2) The standstill in the 80’s and 90’s were due to El Chichon and Pinatubo.
Therefore to suggest that the current pause is just a normal decadal event is grossly misleading.
Message from Sen Banter
“17 yrs? Sorry, a typo, I meant 71 yrs!”
It would be interesting to see the outcome if the modellers at IPCC tried to prooftest their model parameters based on the warming trend from 1920’s to 1940’s. How hot should it be now according to such a prooftest model with similar parameters? Just wondering..
@ur momisugly johninoxley, October 23, 2013 at 8:13 pm
I think Santer will not be coming for the warmists this Christmas.
Brilliant, John! Thanks for brightening up my day. I’ll second the nomination for ‘Best comment on thread’ prize for you, sir.
Given the timing, and further to your excellent pun, perhaps Santer’s claim could be known henceforth as:
‘Santer’s Clause”…
——————————————
Reminds me of what I consider the best comment ever on WUWT. I think it was in reference to Peter Gleick, but it might have been Gavin Schmidt. Anyway the offending individual was consumately evading criticism, leading one commenter to say:
He ducks like a quack!
Quite simply the funniest thing I’ve ever read on WUWT…
In fact, it occurs to me that conflating Santer and Christmas might just provide some excellent material for a Cartoon by Josh…
Bill Parsons says:
October 24, 2013 at 12:05 am
“Google “Co2 emissions in decline” to find dozens of recent articles like the following (add “NPR” to your search if you want to coax the most tendentious reports to the top of the heap):
[…]
Those declines have occurred in 5 out of the last 7 years, even last year as the economy began to recover.”
Recover… began last year… that’s a good one! Look at Caterpillar’s stock as a proxy for the global economy….
Unfortunately, the 17-year period is like the “ice free Arctic in 5 years” predictions. Oh, we didn’t mean these 17 (or 5) years, but one in the future.
But that refers only to US emissions, not global emissions. Those are still rising.
That was my coinage–thanks for the compliment. I was pretty pleased with it too. My target at the time was Gore.
@RogerKnights
Roger, I take my hat off to you sir. Though I am clearly a sucker for such wordplays, it was truly inspired. And of course Gore is just as deserving of such a wittcism as the other two crooks – they’re all quacks and are all very practised duckers…
PS: Ant-on-y also called one of my comments “the funniest . . .” That was in response to a story about how Japanese scientists had used enzymes to convert a cow patty into a hamburger.
I said, “Want flies with that?”
Santer will cook up some dubious explanation and move the goalposts sufficiently far enough into the future to cover his retirement date.