Guest essay by Neil Catto
The other day I conducted a presentation using the UK CET, like I have on several occasions. Along with explaining it as the longest recognised instrumental record of historical temperature anywhere on Earth, it is the best record we have to understand long the past.
Fig 1 Central England Mean Monthly Temperatures 1659-2012
As part of this presentation I point out that the temperature from 1659 to 2012 has only increased 0.87 Deg C in 353 years, or equivalent to 0.025 Deg C/decade. Considering this is a recovery period from the Little Ice Age it is hardly surprising and just part of natural variation. At this stage I normally get a few “really?” questions.
“The UK MetOffice’s own figures”, I reply.
The other day however was a bit different, someone in the audience asked “so how long will it take to get to the dangerous 2 Degrees C?”
Pause, why hadn’t I worked that one out before? Quick calculation done, 800 years I replied.
“Say again?”
I recalculate, and say “800 years given the current trend”. Gobsmacked audience!
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Noticed interesting year of 1740(deep fall of temps) and the preceding warming of more than 2 degrees in 15 years. What happened? Well, its not the sun and it aint volcanoes according to David Archibold in a previous blog here on WUWT(JUNE 2013). He proposes a potential 1740 event occurring in the next 2 years based on a statistical methodology. Baring in mind this is a central england/ north european event of 1740 it is not therefore a record of world temps which may hint at a local mechanism? unfortunately most other records dont go back this far.
smiffy
Nick luke says:
October 31, 2013 at 3:40 am
In the post, the figure was for decadel rate of increase, not per century.
cheers,
gary
If you zoom into the CET graph, it shows that the English climate has been rapidly and consistently getting colder since 2000. And it certainly feels colder.
Recently the Daily Telegraph had a headline claiming that the British climate is getting warmer faster than the rest of the world. Clearly, climate scientists have a strange idea of the present tense. It was actually true during the 1990’s, CET shows a rise of about one degree C in little over a decade, which is extremely rapid. But to say that our climate is rapidly getting warmer now is a lie, pure and simple. Right now, and for the past 13 years, it’s been getting colder.
That’s why I often find myself wearing a sweater at the height of summer. And staring out at thick snow in the winter.
How much longer will our politicians be taken in by this nonsense. Quite a long time, I suspect, with outrageous lies like this to keep them going.
Chris
Here’s the Wikipedia Holocene temperature chart. Can someone explain why this doesn’t simply end the debate? What’s the problem here? I understand that there’s nuance upon nuance, but ther is nothing dramatic or unprecedented about current temperatures. Is that correct?
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/ca/Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
Since we’ve been gradually cooling over the past 7k years, by perhaps 0.5°, there’s no reason to think that trend won’t continue, and certainly no reason to think we’ll be warmer. We are after all, headed for another ice age eventually.
Our friends at the MET office I believe ably assisted by [fragrant] Phil still manage to create a Hockey Stick Graph?
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/graphs/HadCET_graph_ylybars_uptodate.gif
I may be wrong, but your 800 tears is valid if, and only if, the data is ergodic. Since the data is almost certainly not ergodic, then the 800 years is meaningless.
[Wasn’t there a song a while back about “800 teardrops” ? Or was that “800 teargodics”? .. 8<) Mod]
Which “the temperature” would that be? There is no “the temperature” when it comes to climate. Averaging temperatures over disparate areas gives you nothing physically meaningful. You’re playing the same silly shell game as alarmists.
800 Years to raise temperatures by 2 degees C
One can now see how absurd the past MET OFFICE forecasts were when they projected 4 degrees C by just 2060 . Yet IPCC is still projecting in their A1FI scenario a rise of 4 degrees C by 2100 in their latest report. AR5
So what now?
Western civilization must reduce its standard of living so that children, 800 years from now, will know what snow is.
In 1996 when the Australian temperatures were homogenized/adjusted Sydney Observatory Hill data had adjustment made where due to the addition of a Stevenson Screen all previous data was adjusted down .5C and because the thermometer was moved the 10m to where the new box was all previous data was adjusted down by .7C – that’s a total of 1.2C.
Can you believe it?
Agreed. Do it! I believe WordPress hosting is free?
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Neil Catto,
A anectodatal sign of the times. Good news I think because it implies some awakening from the ‘settled’ alarming climate mythos.
Hey, I am trying to track back to the root source / fundamental basis of the claim of there being a “dangerous 2 Degrees C”.
It crops up frequently in dialog on climate. I want to critically review it for premise detection and analysis purposes.
Anyone, a few pointers to primary sources of the basis of the idea of a “dangerous 2 Degrees C” would be appreciated.
John
Is the Global temperature record correct?
Looking at the CET you would expect to see the large increase in global temperatures showing to some degree but it hasn’t.
Check this graph of temperature vs monitoring stations.
http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/nvst.html
Perhaps this can explain the standstill. The cull takes out stations in the colder regions so the global temperature record rises. After the cull the situation is stable and the stations are reflecting the true global temperature which is not rising. This would explain why we had a massive step in the global temperature record and the current pause.
Apologies to anyone who tried contacting me via my website, Gmail would not accept the autoforwards set up, but they seem to be working now.
Regarding an 800.org, I assume we’re talking ppm, not years. A good motto might be “Do it for the plants!” Yes it would be the perfect antidote to the 350.org idiocy.
Most of the hysteria over global warming does not concern itself over what are seen as purely natural fluctuations over the 300 years from 1650 to 1950. The trend of the CET data over this period is even less, at 0.18 degrees per century, or about 1100 years to increase by 2 degrees.
Since 1950, which is the focus of the anthropogenic scare, the trend in CET has been almost 10 times as much, at 1.7 degrees C per century. Even at this rate, it’s about 120 years to increase by 2 degrees. I realise one cannot really extrapolate a linear trend in something as chaotic as temperature, but that was the gist of this post, and , yes, it has been dropping for a few years, so perhaps 120 years is too short.
Some commentators have attributed the sudden fall in temperature in 1740, after the benign 1730’s to a volcano or two on the Kamchatka peninsula. The cold weather and associated crop failures killed 20 per cent of the population of Ireland.
OK this is not a criticism. I’m just curious. What kind of thermometer was used to make those early measurements? The modern thermomether wasn’t invented until the early 1700’s.
Steve Cords says:October 30, 2013 at 11:21 pm
…”Sea levels have risen 5 feet in the last 8,000 years (times and elevations approximate for discussion) and we are suddenly concerned about the last few inches.”
The difference is no one knew about the 5 feet as it rose. No one was telling the folks about it or what it meant.
Now we have mad scientist alarmists measuring everything and purposefully interpreting every change as a worrisome indicator in order to justify their continued monitoring,.
Monitoring change has become the ticket to ride for every lazy and nonproductive academic wishing to be a legitimate scientist.
It’s the easiest pitch possible for those needing to gin up reasons to make their hobby time look like work.
They’ve managed to turn their endless observation gibberish into deliverables.
They monitor, speculate and report whatever they can dream up.
It’s limitless and thousands upon thousands are using this gig.
A fine example is Oregon State University academics (Lubchenco, Barth and Chan) engaged in their perpetual and expensive monitoring of oxygen levels in our sea water off the Oregon coast. Every single new reading delivers another layer of speculation about how something very serious MUST be occurring. Accompanied with declarations of how useful their work and information gathering is.
http://www.piscoweb.org/research/science-by-discipline/coastal-oceanography/hypoxia/hypoxia-updates
It’s all as useless as counting grains of sand on our beaches.
Just Google “Oregon ocean dead zones” and see how massive the ruse has become.
It’s an entirely baseless problem, falsely connected to global warming and embellished over many years into being accepted by RealClimate types as “established science”.
David S says:
October 31, 2013 at 8:57 am
OK this is not a criticism. I’m just curious. What kind of thermometer was used to make those early measurements? The modern thermomether wasn’t invented until the early 1700′s.
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see http://www.rmets.org.uk/sites/default/files/qj74manley.pdf
but if you are lazy, the data is pretty bad, sometimes consisting of reconstructions employing dubious techniques like temps taken from unheated rooms inside, etc.
For what it’s worth, this data is what it is….not very useful but of some interest.
This IS criticism:
Most importantly, there were no replicates, no random sampling, questionable adjustments, etc. just as is the case in essentially ALL temperature records globally.
The data is crap; It always has been crap, and it likely always will be crap if history to date is any indication.
M Courtney at 1:17 am
I don’t know if catastrophic climate change happened in 1750 but the fact that Britain was on the way up is not proof that there wasn’t.
But it is counter evidence to the notion 2 degrees of warming is catastrophic.
A few reasons for this this post;
a. to show how little warming there has been (on record) over the length of instrumental data (I agree the data has been adjusted in all manner of ways especially the very small adjustment for UHI, which I believe is ~1.6 Deg C) In a post from earlier this year.
b. I thought 800 is as nice a number as 97% or 95% or 100% settled
c. yes it was done in fun – but from a serious point I would like this 800 years spread wide and clear to remove the fear of CAGW from as many as possible ( I get phone calls from people genuinely frightened and wanting to make life changing decisions)
d. I’ll bet Auntie doesn’t mention this, any bets?
In late 1739 mt Tarumae erupted: temp went from 9.2 Deg C in 1739 to 6.84 Deg C in 1740 and back to 9.30 Deg C in 1741
thanks for all your comments
iirc, the 2 degrees C ‘limit’ was a number pulled out of thin air by some German climate scientists. they looked at what historical temp variations had been, saw that a difference of 2 degrees C had happened with no catastrophic results and declared that to be the ‘safe’ range.
a link to this story was in the comments here in the last month or two
Regardless of whether one accepts AGW or not, it’s time readers of this blog were a bit more critical of some of the WUWT posts. Neil Catto concludes that it will take 800 years for the 2 deg C threshold to be breached – presumably based on the 353 year trend since 1659.
This is a ridiculous conclusion. As far as AGW is concerned the first 300 years of the record are largely irrelevant. The relatively shallow trend since the 1650s is simply due to the fact that the trend in the first 200-300 years was more or less flat (which pretty much puts the kibosh on the LIA at least as far as Central England is concerned). Analysis of CET trends show the following
1700-1900 -0.05. degrees per century
That’s about as flat as you can get. Now what about the trend since 1900
1900-2012 0.81 degree per century
So virtually ALL the warming in the CET record is in the last 100 years or so – but even that trend is dwarfed by the last 50-60 years.
1950-2012 1.7 degree per century
or warming of about 0.85 degrees per 50 years. There was essentially NO warming trend for at least 250 years . All the warming has taken place in the last few decades. The CET record doesn’t provide much support for either natural variability or LIA recovery.
John Finn,
That is only on your planet. Here on Planet Earth, the natural recovery from the LIA has been ≈0.25 – ≈0.35º/century.
I don’t know where you get your assertions, but even über-alarmist Phil Jones shows that global warming did not just happen recently.
John Finn:
re your post at October 31, 2013 at 12:57 pm.
If I need a cherry picker then I now know who to contact.
Scroll up and look at the graph.
It shows a clear linear trend (that is the straight red line in the graph) with variability of the actual data (that is the wiggly blue line in the graph) providing variation around that trend.
There is no indication of any change to the trend. However, because of the wiggles it is possible to pick periods of warming or cooling of the actual data to fit whatever one wants to (mis)represent.
Richard