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/
Related articles
- Dana Nuccitelli Can’t Come to Terms with the Death of the AGW Hypothesis (wattsupwiththat.com)
- Radiative Forcing, Radiative Feedbacks and Radiative Imbalance – The 2013 WG1 IPCC Report Failed to Properly Report on this Issue (wattsupwiththat.com)
- Another Peer-Reviewed Paper Predicting the Cessation of Global Warming Will Last At Least Another Decade (wattsupwiththat.com)
- Mystery of the ‘Missing’ Global Warming – Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)
@RogerKnights
Very funny! I missed that one. It’s the pithy one-liners that always do it for me. Does that mean I’m full of pith?
Hi Jan. Here are a few more. I may not have been the first to think of some of these—I haven’t Googled for most of them. They all relate, at least vaguely, to the climate change situation.
Too big to jail (This is the only one of mine that’s gone viral, re bankers)
A Nobel lie (Gore’s movie)
An Inconvenient Goof (Gore’s movie)
Nonsensus
Academia nut
Hype springs eternal (This has gotten around, but I was 1st with it, 25 years ago)
Bulloney
I’ll crow tomorrow (i.e., I’ll laugh last, when temperatures fall) (A 1950’s bestselling memoir was titled I’ll Cry Tomorrow)
What, me curry?! (Judy Curry’s unofficial motto—she liked it when I sent it to her)
Jeer review (comments on WUWT on warmist claims)
Booty is only sin deep (just cut a corner …)
The grossest story every told.
We, the 3-percenters, are the sensible selvage, not the lunatic fringe.
What I would like to see is the IPCC “flip” to a cold phase and begin warning about the dire consequences of cooling. I’m not sure how they are going to make it the rich, white mans fault though.
Data! You call that data! THIS is the story of data!
http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/3876219.htm#comments
Part 1 of the Cholestorol Club and it’s rise and rise to fame and fortune, dripping in sublime irony for the blind idiots and ideologues at Aunty who can’t see or hear themselves in their own digital images and sounds. The analogy and parallels completely lost on them as they’ve been parrotting Gore, Figueres and having love-ins with McKibben all week over the Sydney bushfires as proof positive they’re all right, if only that nasty Abbott (Figueres is talking through her hat!) and his Govt could see what they see along with the Climatology Club. Can’t wait for episode 2 of ‘The Heart of the Matter’. Watch the Heart Foundation bloke answering the hard question. Sublime irony Aunty. Simply sublime.
@RogerKnights
Wow! You’re prolific. My favourites? Academia Nut and Jeer Review. Great work, keep it up…
Bill Parsons says: “With all due respect to Rush Limbaugh, I don’t think he’s keeping pace with the facts. “
Oh yes he is!… With all due respect, Rush Limbaugh knows how to push buttons and he just pushed yours:
Skeptics just keep tossing handfuls of sand into their funding machine. How rude.
Just as you imply, it IS all about funding; funding your alarmism scam. That was the ultimate point Rush was making – it is YOUR funding that is going down – worldwide, according to the “Global Warming Policy Foundation”, dropping from $700 billion to $359 billion per year. That trend has liberals VERY worried. Good news doesn’t sell….
And your “Carbon levels are in decline.” ? In fact no they are not, not even close. http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/mlo.html
***
Noblesse Oblige says:
October 23, 2013 at 7:18 pm
And what is the scientific basis for the 17 year interval. Locusts?
***
Yes, indeedy! The warmth will swarm out of the ground all at once in a mass exodus driven by sexual-heat.
No real need to worry about decadal averages as a way out for the climate industry. They defer a change in trend, but cannot change it. If the underlying trend in global temperatures remains stable, or even falling, this will show up in decadal averages eventually. This is familiar to economists, where a recession in quarterly GDP only shows up as a fall in annual GDP a year afterwards.
Or 13.
As for moving the goalposts TomRude predicted this back in 2011 on the very same “Ben Santer’s 17 year itch” post. It was the very first comment too.
Back in February Pachauri huffed and puffed as he started the process of shifting the goalposts.
Expect a new flurry of papers pushing back the 17 years to maybe 25 years or more. Whatever happens to falsify CAGW speculations, expect a new set of papers aimed at keeping the great gravy train rolling along. Possible future Arctic sea ice expansion……….as set of papers will explain it away and in fact blame man’s Satanic gases for interfering with natural ocean currents etc. It would be called a temporary recovery in its the long term disappearance. What if it got back up to the 1979 level? It would still be caused temporary and in any case why don’t we look at volume.
Cat and mouse.
Great link to that ABC program on the BS (bad science) behind the vilification of saturated fats! http://www.abc.net.au/catalyst/stories/3876219.htm#comments
The worst current science myths are that saturated dietary fat is is bad for you and the catastrophic consequences of CO2.
Christopher Monckton,
Thanks for your update on the current continuous period of 203 months (ending Sept 2013) that shows no GASTA increase (no warming) for the RSS dataset based on linear trend analysis.
When the datasets for the exact same period are finally available for GSS, NCDC, UAH and HadCRUt4 then it would be great to see their linear trends as well.
I would also be useful to see an average of all 5 datasets (GSS + HadCRUt4 + NCDC + RSS + UAH) for the 203 month period ending Sept 2013. NOTE: I think you did something like an average of all 5 datasets for a shorter period in one of your previous posts here at WUWT.
It will be interesting to see the precipitous drop in Climate Sensitivity Estimates (CSE) should the GASTA data continue with no warming or no significant warming or some cooling. We should start a CSE guessing pool at 6 months intervals. it would help keep media focus on the IPCC’s faults and failures. And it would be fun.
John
Mustn’t forget the science is settled on CAGW just the same as it is on Catastrophic Cholesterol because of the correlation warmies 🙂
@ur momisugly Stephen Richards. I live in France and I have not heard anything along the lines of 22 power stations to be closed. To get into power Hollande made a deal with the greens to close down Nuclear plants, at first 80% by 2050 but that was quickly reduced. Merkel on top of her 3ed victory has announced that she wishes to give Brussels far more control over fiscal policy over nation states, believe me France will NEVER accept this and don’t forget Hollande is SO unpopular that Marine la Pen has recently made some politically significant gains, considered an impossibility even 12 months ago. Behind the scenes in France there is a civil service who’s sole raison d’etre is the continued existence and life of La France, even though the E.U. is ultimately a French construct, if it has to be abandoned for the sake of it’s survival it will be, quite apart from the general feeling of the vast number of the population outside Paris.
I need some help on this. We are in an interglacial period. What is the normal warming rate in an interglacial?
Noblesse Oblige says:
October 23, 2013 at 7:18 pm
“And what is the scientific basis for the 17 year interval. Locusts?”
Lately it seems hard to get straight answers for such questions and increasingly we find attempts at straight answers gone wrong. [exp: What does hide the decline mean?]
Anyway, about the Santer-17 thing: I don’t remember if I read this or whether it is a long ago WAG that I’ve internalized but one could look at all the model runs of all the models and search for the longest periods of no warming. What are graduate assistants paid for if not for this sort of thing? So, say you find many periods of 5 years, fewer of 10 years, and only 1 or 2 of 15 years. None longer. 17 is a nice number (prime, in fact) and sufficiently larger than 15 such that additional model runs are unlikely to output a period of no warming that long. You then go on record as saying a period of 17 years is needed to confirm our models are bonkers – or something like that.
At the top there is the phrase “the strict Santer test: no global warming at all for 17 years.”
My thought is that this “test” is of the same level of importance as the “95 % certain” category, namely, none.
Allan Macrae
The CET (as reported by the Met Office) has indeed dipped since the millenium, and if you pick your years quite carefully you can find a drop of more than 1.5 degrees C in winter temperatures.
For example, the 5 winters from 1998 to 2002 had a mean temp of 5.33, and the most recent 5 winters have a mean of 3.58. However, the periods are too carefully chosen, and too short to be able to attach much significance to them.
The first 6 months of 2013 were certainly very cold, Every month was lower than the 1961-90 reference period quoted by the Met Office. But since then, July, August and October (so far) have all been around 2 degrees above average, with September close to it.
The warmest “decade” in the record was that from July 1997 to June 2007 at 10.51 degrees. By the end of October, the most recent decade will have dipped to 10.12, a run of years which includes 2006 and 2011, the hottest 2 on record, so you can’t really describe it as a “trend”, even though there have been a few cold snaps in there too.
By the way, if the RSS anomaly for October is above 0.2 degrees, then a month will get lost off the far end of marginally negative slope. Watch with bated breath!
>why is it warmists don’t try to claim CREDIT for the lull in warming?
Reminds me of that classic old joke that ends with: “Does it work? You don’t see any elephants around here, do you?”
“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.”
Note also that the current hiatus is over 10% of the entire 163 record and growing.
Does this mean there won’t be Giant Crabs?
To paraphrase a great scientist, “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of Giant Crabs at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”
Reg Nelson says: Does this mean there won’t be Giant Crabs?
Could be Giant Dragonflies in our future though! More NPP via more CO2 and warmer temperatures could lead to an increase of O2 concentration which allows some insects to grow bigger – MUCH bigger!
http://phys.org/news/2010-10-giant-insects-unravel-ancient-oxygen.html
(70 centimeters = ~27 inches)
Mike M says:
October 24, 2013 at 6:44 am
Re-read my post, would you Mike? Short of an irrational fear of being turned into Obamacarrion, I’m not generally an alarmist, although someone over-reacting to something that I didn’t say can bring me close. It was late when I posted, however, so let me try this again.
The records showing temperature plateauing are credible. Whether they are still being tinkered with to show temps as high as they are is a question I’ll leave to the experts.
Even-more credible records show rising Co2 levels world-wide. No contest. I read these two facts the same way you do – global warming is a fairy tale. But it’s an ongoing saga, and the global warming bards want to claim credit for their heroes.
At the same time that world-wide CO2 levels are rising, the U.S. levels appear to be in decline. That decline appears to be what green sources are touting in the articles propagating across the internet. The reasons for the decline are worth mentioning here even if they only modestly affect current temperatures. They include: U.S industrial declines during the great recession, along with outsourcing to other countries; subsidized green energy; the boom in natural gas and shift from coal to gas-fired power plants; a reduction in U.S. driving and flying miles over last 6 years, as well as better fuel efficiency of both cars and planes.
So, as misdirected as their battle is with CO2, Obama and his crew appear to be winning. Give them some credit. They’re bringing down Co2 levels… along with our economy, our wealth-generation capabilities, and most of our freedoms…
http://www.yaleclimatemediaforum.org/2013/05/whats-behind-the-good-news-declines-in-u-s-co2-emissions/ (May article to Yale climate forum, by Zeke Hausfather)
I haven’t listened to Rush’s full screed, but he evidently has missed the apologetic (subtly defensive) shift in the tone of stories coming out of liberal media lately. If he listened, he would hear the spate of stories apparently designed to justify and explain the 15-17 year plateau in temperatures in terms of the superlative efforts of greens.
I assume most readers here at WUWT have been watching as the media does this not-so-subtle pivot to qualified acknowledgement of temperature “slow-downs”, but maybe some people have missed it.
Warmists are twisting in the wind, and I for one am savoring the sight. Credit them with reducing Co2:
Good boys! Now look what your big government, anti-growth, anti-competitive policies have done to the economy, and to the levels of trust in government
I think that’s the battle they are really trying to win. And it’s the war they are unintentionally losing.
@John Leon
I’m sorry to disappoint you John but the EU was as much the inspiration of a British civil servant (James Arthur Salter) as it was his esteemed French friend and counterpart (Jean Monnet), though Salter has been carefully airbrushed from official EU history. They were both deeply invested in the inter-war internationalist scene, both worked in far-flung places and had very influential friends and connections across the globe. They were the epitome of the powerful parasitic types that have carefully crafted this modern world in their own image!
Though I’m delighted to hear that the EU will be abandoned if necessary, perhaps given the rise of Le Pen’s popularity, it’s better the devil you know…
The graphs are quite powerful. unless you are familiar with ENSO, IPCC, RSS and all the climate terminology people are just going to look at those and say clearly the earth is getting warmer. I don’t buy AGW but no wonder it’s been easy for them to convince alot of people.
@Ashby Manson
Here’s another great link for those that might want to further investigate the ‘alternative’ view of saturated fat: http://www.westonaprice.org/