17 years, 3 months with no global warming
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
The Long Pause just got three months longer. Last month, the RSS monthly global mean lower-troposphere temperature anomalies showed no global warming for exactly 204 months – the first dataset to show the full 17 years without warming specified by Santer as demonstrating that the models are in fundamental error.
The sharp drop in global temperature in the past month has made itself felt, and not just in the deep snow across much of North America and the Middle East. The RSS data to November 2013, just available after a delay caused by trouble with the on-board ephemeris on one of the satellites, show no global warming at all for 17 years 3 months.
It is intriguing, and disturbing, that WattsUpWithThat is just about the only place where you will be allowed to see this or any graph showing the spectacularly zero trend line through 207 continuous months of data.
CO2 concentration continues to climb. Global temperature doesn’t. Absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation. Game over, logically speaking.
On any objective test of newsworthiness, the fact of 17 years 3 months with no global warming is surely of more than passing interest to audiences who have been terrified, over and over again, by the over-confident proclamations of the true-believers that catastrophic global warming was the surest of sure things.
Yet the mainstream news media, having backed the wrong horse, cannot bear to tear up their betting slips and move along. They thought they had a hot tip on global warming. They were naïve enough to believe Scientists Say was a dead cert. Yet the spavined nag on which they had bet the ranch fell at the first fence.
The inventiveness with which They wriggle is impressive. Maybe all that air pollution from China is like a parasol. Maybe the warming somehow snuck sneakily past the upper 2000 feet of the ocean so that it didn’t notice, and perhaps it’s lurking in the benthic strata where we can’t measure it. Maybe it’s just waiting to come out when we least expect it and say, “Boo!”.
Anyway, so the wrigglers say, The World Is Still Warming. It must be, because The Models Say So. They say our adding CO2 to the atmosphere is the same as Blowing up Four Whole Atom Bombs Somewhere On Earth Every Second!!!! Just imagine all that HEAT!
Well, it isn’t real. “Imagine” is the right word. If the world were warming, the most sensitive indicator of that warming would be the atmosphere itself. Since the atmosphere has not been warming for 17 years 3 months, an awful possibility is beginning to dawn on even the dimmest of the climate extremists – or, at least, those of them who have somehow found out about the Long Pause.
Maybe natural influences are still strong enough to pull in the other direction and cancel the predicted warming. Maybe the models got the forcing wrong, or the feedbacks wrong, or the climate-sensitivity parameter wrong, or the amplification equation wrong, or the non-radiative transports wrong.
Maybe – heresy of heresies – CO2 is just not that big of a deal any more.
Yet it ought to be having some effect. All other things being equal, even without temperature feedbacks we should be seeing 1 Celsius degree of global warming for every doubling of CO2 concentration.
It is more likely than not that global warming will return eventually. Not at the predicted rate, but it will return. It would be wisest, then, to look not only at the now embarrassingly lengthening Long Pause but also at the now embarrassingly widening Gaping Gap between the +0.23 Celsius/decade predicted by the models for the first half of this century and the –0.02 Celsius/decade that is actually happening.
Meanwhile, Scotland has been enjoying one of the mildest Decembers of recent times. But February is when it usually turns really cold up here. John Betjeman recalled our winters in one of his verses, and raised what has become for climate extremists everywhere the Great Unanswerable Question. Whither went the warmer weather?
Highland Winter
As we huddle close together,
Wrapt about in fur and feather,
Shod in sopping, sodden leather,
Sloshing through the hidden heather
Smothered under feet of snow;
As we curse and blast and blether,
Whither in the regions nether –
Whither went the warmer weather?
Whimpering we wonder whether
Anyone will ever know.
Mr. Born persists in questioning the fact that absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation. Earlier, he had correctly talked of “the valid proposition that p IMP q is equivalent to NOT q IMP NOT p”.
That being so, it follows that the valid proposition that the (true) statement that causation necessarily implies correlation is equivalent to the (true) statement that absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation.
Or, in his terms, the valid proposition that the (untrue) statement that dogginess necessarily implies blackness is equivalent to the (equally untrue) statement that absence of blackness necessarily implies absence of dogginess.
Therefore, the statement that absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation would only be false if it were false that causation necessarily implies correlation.
I agree that maybe this isn’t global warming, but climate change’s. Few years ago there were different weather conditions, but scientists should attentively observe climate because e. g. is written here http://blog.pulawy.com/en/global-problems-with-water-supply /dry regions are getting even less water, while places where plentiful rainfall had been common are now getting even more water. so in my opinion the temperature is changing and seasons are moving. and maybe now it isn’t global warming but in few years it will happen…
Bill Illis says:
December 17, 2013 at 2:21 am
Amazing that a theory which is obviously so wrong is still supported so strongly by so many.
You’d think that so little or no warming would cause more people to reconsider a theory that predicts great warming.
Easy to say that Bill, would you give up millions of dollars when all you have to do is go around preaching about a known falsehood?
This is thread is distressingly pathetic! Joe Born and some others, have totally missed the point! In simple English, the Lord @Monckton of Brenchley, was using the warmist’s argument in disguise! If you disprove the logic of it, you also invalidate their argument and you are agreeing with him, as you should (In terms of deductive logic)! He was being mischievous and many fell for it!
The real world’s axioms involve there always being a trail. Even if intelligent people try to hide it.
It’s the reason only one in every – whatever – number of people are needed to police a society. People with absolutely zero imagination – indeed it’s worth it to lose a few crimes solved so over active imaginations don’t put the innocent in jail
can track things down most people figure – prolly no way to tell.
When a man puts his PhD on he line and systematically works with others to clear entire print journals of opposition to postulates he peddles
the process of even joining in the game is he has a set of comparisons.
Civilization compared.
We who are real scientists
concluded Mark Mosher to Mike Mann to James Hansen to Kevin Trenberth are systematic & highly functioning, socio-criminopaths
desiring to deceive humanity for no other reasons than it’s fun, it beats working, and there’s a lot of money and political celebrity in being professional liars.
They can’t successfully predict which way sensors on the surface of a sphere illuminated to full temp in vacuum
will indicate temperature going if you immerse sphere from vacuum into a frigid, churning, thermally convective, and conductive, fluid bath.
Mark Mosher and Mike Mann and the entire assemblage of criminopathological computer modeling climate scam roaches,
want to make your school tell your kid the answer to the question which way the thermal sensors on that sphere will travel is that the temperature will go UP 90F/30C.
Your local magic gas hillbilly thinks submitting a hot sun warmed rock in a vacuum chamber to buffeting with frigid nitrogen/oxygen makes the temperature go UP and that your child, and his,
should be taught it in school.
And that because of this you should pay the government tax to use fire.
Such people are the class losers who ruined the Soviet Union for 75 years. Hillbillies and immoral slugs who actively protest alongside “sterilize the extra little people” elitists and humanity haters,
teaching your children,
that suspension of reflective media between an illumination source and heat sensors,
to the point 20% never arrives
makes the target sensors show more energy arrives
than when more energy arrives.
That is Greenhouse Gas Theory in action.
Immersion of a vacuum heated rock into frigid nitrogen/oxygen bath, physically reflecting 20% energy from ever seeing the rock,
made every heat sensor on the rock show temperature RISE 90F/30C.
When the thermal conduction
and the convection
aid cooling
the temperature of the earth magically climbed 90F/30C.
“The frigid atmospheric bath washing the sun warmed ground at night warms the earth.”
Yeah and when I close the door on my refrigerator and the light goes out the frigid swirling thermally conductive atmospheric air, keeps my soda warm till I open the door again and light coming in, causes true cooling to start since the air is colder than the soda.
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That’s the kind of clown talk these hillbillies want to tell your child in school to prepare her for a science curriculum. When it’s dark in a refrigerator, air many degrees colder than your soda heats it through backerdistical magical gais and laight.
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Let’s don’t forget the further refrain that after removal physically through diffraction, of 220% energy in,
which made energy sensors record much more energy in than when there was
more energy in,
removal of another few percent light in through suspension of more diffracting H2O/CO2 will make all the sensors on earth show
even more light energy arriving
than when more light energy was arriving.
These three keys to Magic Gais and Laight are what you have to argue with.
Is it any wonder that not one word you ever speak down onto one takes any effect?
It’s politically oriented scientific scamming drawing criminopaths like crap pulls flies.
It’s not science never was, and when you let them reverse the algebraic sign of immersion of vacuum heated objects into frigid fluid,
the only thing you’re ever going to get from such arrogance in crime is the middle finger to you
and to real scientific evidence.
His Lordship and Mr. Born are making this thing too difficult.
Any (good) chemist knows that there are giga tons and giga tons of bi-carbonates dissolved in the oceans and that (any type of) warming would cause it to be released:
HCO3- + heat => CO2 (g) + OH-.
This is the actual reason we are alive today. Cause and effect, get it? There is a causal relationship. More warming naturally causes more CO2. It is not the other way around, as Al Gore alleges in his movie. Without warmth and carbon dioxide there would be nothing, really. To make that what we dearly want, i.e. more crops, more trees, lawns and animals and people, nature uses water and carbon dioxide and warmth, mostly. The fact that humanity adds a bit of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere is purely co-incidental, and appears to be beneficial, if you want to have a green world.
Lord M :
The furtively pseudonymous “DickoryDock Marsupial” …
I must say, in all the years I have been reading posts here, I have NEVER laughed so long and hard, at the deserved thrashing you delivered in the referenced response. Thanks !
@Robert Sheaffer
I gather that that lady does not read WUWT and as Lord M said at the beginning of his post here:
“It is intriguing, and disturbing, that WattsUpWithThat is just about the only place where you will be allowed to see this or any graph showing the spectacularly zero trend line through 207 continuous months of data”
Never mind me who is banned from even posting at SS and other websites, like those of that other nutti fellow…
In South Africa I have pursued everybody in the media that said there is “global warming” to prove this to me from the data sets after showing them my own. As far as I know, it is now not being mentioned here anymore. I specifically warned them that I would go and take the matter to the broadcasting complaints commission if they did it again, i.e. causing unnecessary alarm.
I gather nobody is doing this in the USA? Apparently not enough… !!!
Also, I think in the USA, you will need to get the bible belt behind you. It seems Anthony still does not understand that religion and science are just two different ways to get to the truth. Both must come to the same Truth.
Check out the Christmas story on my blog.
Caught out! Scott Wilmot Bennett has spotted some (but not all) of my Saturnalia mischief. My “formal logical proof” in an earlier comment is of course nonsense, and the computer algorithm is as unfit for its purpose as any of the general-circulation models, as Mr. Born (and to some extent Mr. Haseler) rightly spotted. I must apply for a huge grant for my model at once.
However, my proof based on Mr. Born’s own premise is correct and, therefore, absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation.
But there is one piece of egregious mischief that no one noticed at all. In the canon of Betjeman’s works there is no “Highland Winter”. I made it up. I did my best to emulate his style and, in particular, his occasional informality, his meticulous attention to scansion and his care with rhyming (his Eighteenth-Century Calvinistic Hymn pokes gentle fun at those who do not do their rhyming correctly).
I did leave one clue to indicate that the poem (otherwise quite a good pastiche, though I say it as shouldn’t) might not be by Betjeman. He would not have rhymed the homophones “whether” and “weather”, particularly in successive lines. In Scotland, however, we can get away with that, because we do not pronounce “wh” as “w”, but in a near-whistling fashion very close to the Maori pronunciation of, say “whaka”. or “whenua”. To us and the Maori, then, though not to Betjeman, “whether” and “weather” are not homophones.
Compliments of the season to one and all, and especially to Mr. Born, who wins the prize for seeing through my bogus logical proof. No literature prize is awarded this year, though.
Ah, we’ve joined issue.
Monckton of Brenchley: “That being so, it follows that the valid proposition that the (true) statement that causation necessarily implies correlation is equivalent to the (true) statement that absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation.”
Yes. Those propositions are equivalent. (Let’s hold in abeyance whether they’re true.)
Monckton of Brenchley “Therefore, the statement that absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation would only be false if it were false that causation necessarily implies correlation.”
Yes again. If Lord Monckton had proven that causation necessarily implies correlation, he would have proven that absence of correlation implies absence of causation.
But what the “formal demonstration” purported to show was something else, namely, that “since correlation does not necessarily imply causation, absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation.” It purported to reason from that first statement to that second statement.
Consider that first statement, “correlation does not necessarily imply causation.” None of the four combinations of presence and absence of correlation with presence and absence of causation is inconsistent with that statement; in no individual case does that statement enable us to infer presence or absence of causation from presence or absence of correlation. In contrast, the combination of absence of correlation.with presence of causation is inconsistent with the second statement, that “absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation.”
So any chain of logic that purports to infer the second statement only from the first is flawed.
Monckton of Brenchley: “Mr. Born persists in questioning the fact that absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation.”
Well, it’s true that I question that “fact,” but I haven’t set out to disprove it on this thread. I merely attempted to point out where Lord Monckton’s proof was invalid.
Monckton of Brenchley said:
December 18, 2013 at 3:10 am
“However, my proof based on Mr. Born’s own premise is correct and, therefore, absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation.”
Given the context, this statement is very, very funny! 😉
No literature prize is awarded this year, though.
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Too bad. I rather admire Mosher’s economy with words. Santa will be putting coal in your stocking this year you naughty boy. Let’s hope it keeps you warm this holiday season.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
December 17, 2013 at 1:02 pm
It is a common solecism to imagine that the slope of a trend-line has no influence on the correlation coefficient. However, take two datasets possessing the same least-squares sum. If one has a greater slope than the other, it will also tend to have a greater correlation coefficient. The difference is particularly marked when comparing data with a zero trend with data with a strongly positive or negative trend.
It is not imagination, it is a fact that the Pearson correlation coefficient (r) is invariant under a linear transformation of either X and/or Y, so your assertion is not correct. In any case it wouldn’t be a ‘solecism’. If you wish to continue that argument I suggest you take your own advice and ‘do the math’, let’s see a proof. While you’re at it you should perhaps look up Anscombe’s quartet.
Joe Born says:
December 17, 2013 at 7:04 pm
Nor can we conclude from the fact that correlation doesn’t necessarily imply causation that absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation.
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but correlation does imply causation. Otherwise we would not see learned paper using correlation in an attempt to “persuade” us as to causation. We would not see graphs of CO2 and Temperature as “proof” of AGW.
The problem is the formal definition of “implies”. It has different meaning to different folks.
In the 70’s such news would bring the alarm that we were about to plunge into a new ice age with glaciation of continents, mass starvation, and hunting mastodons for food. The Club of Rome decided that global warming would be a much more profitable control propaganda and so the UN set out to make it work, scientists found they could ride the wave as a wise career move, journalists and environmentalists chimed in with dire warnings that would keep themselves well provisioned and wealthy…al at the expense of truth and integrity.
And Compliments of the Season to Monckton of Brenchley and yours.
I called my wife to read Highland Winter. “That’s his own work” said my wife. 🙂
I have made a copy for my future pleasure. Many thanks.
I have updated the author.
Seems like Moncton thinks there are only 2 variables at play here?
It is not an abstraction. AGW theory is that there will be a correlation. Carbon dioxide increase and surface temperature increase. And, there isn’t.
JRE says: “Seems like Moncton thinks there are only 2 variables at play here?” That’s the AGW theory, which said there would be a correlation between carbon dioxide increase and surface temperature increase.
It is not an abstraction. It’s AGW theory.
The problem is the formal definition of “implies”. It has different meaning to different folks.
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There’s also the cold war between Philosophy and Mathematics.
And the prize for personalities before principles and if I only had a brain goes to…………
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markstoval says: Mr. Mosher……Any honest man with an IQ above that of an ape would understand
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David Rodale says: Mosher, those of us who remember you from the CA days know over time you’ve become delusional at worse and pig headed at best.
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ferd berple says: wrigglers, devoid of facts, himself gets it wrong.
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commieBob says: Really, arguing with Christopher Monckton about logic is about as clever as picking a fight with Chuck Norris.
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Chip Javert says: I guess he’s our pet troll, so we tolerate this trivia and waste time responding to zero-value-add statements. The term “…nailing Jell-o to a wall…” comes to mind.
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Mario Lento says: No no… according to Steven Mosher,
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PaulS says: Mr. Mosher: …….But, keep the faith.
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David, UK says: Argued with all the intellect of a character from the Monty Python ‘Argument’ sketch.
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He right. I’ve had it with you Mosh. You have become a twat.
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“HenryP: To make that what we dearly want, i.e. more crops, more trees, lawns and animals and people, nature uses water and carbon dioxide and warmth, mostly. ”
I like to think of it thus: Nature was losing carbon from the cycle of life, so it created Man to retrieve it in the form of fossil fuels and by combustion return it. (George Carlin gave me the idea.)
“Phil” doubts whether a zero trend-line is more likely than a non-zero trend-line to exhibit a near-zero correlation coefficient. He challenges me to do the math I had asked him to do. So I have done it. Here are the trends in Kelvin per century equivalent, together with the correlation coefficients r squared, on the RSS monthly global mean lower-troposphere temperature anomalies for periods of 17 years 3 months commencing in September of each year from 1979 to 1996 inclusive:
Sep 1979-Nov 1996: 0.63 0.038
Sep 1980-Nov 1997: 0.63 0.087
Sep 1981-Nov 1998: 2.15 0.253 [Great el Nino]
Sep 1982-Nov 1999: 2.14 0.249
Sep 1983-Nov 2000: 2.26 0.284
Sep 1984-Nov 2001: 2.38 0.307
Sep 1985-Nov 2002: 2.20 0.282
Sep 1986-Nov 2003: 2.13 0.269
Sep 1987-Nov 2004: 2.09 0.261
Sep 1988-Nov 2005: 2.52:0.360 [Greatest trend, greatest correlation coefficient]
Sep 1989-Nov 2006: 2.20 0.300
Sep 1990-Nov 2007: 2.13 0.285
Sep 1991-Nov 2008: 1.87 0.216
Sep 1992-Nov 2009: 1.47 0.146
Sep 1993-Nov 2010: 1.27 0.120
Sep 1994-Nov 2011: 0.63 0.032
Sep 1995-Nov 2012: 0.32 0.009
Sep 1996-Nov 2013: 0.03 0.000 [Least trend, lease correlation coefficient]
Now, I did take the trouble to get my methodology checked by an eminent professor of statistics before I began producing these graphs, and he specifically confirmed that the r-squared had been determined correctly: nor was he as surprised as “Phil” was that it was at that time very close to zero, since the trend line had a very near-zero slope.
The table above does seem to suggest that as one approaches a zero trend, one is more likely to get a near-zero correlation coefficient. Now, I haven’t checked the sums of the squares of the residuals in each period, but I don’t suppose they are markedly different from one another. So, as I said earlier in this thread, the r-squared will tend to be less if the slope of the trend-line is less, and particularly where the trend-line is at or near zero.
What am I misunderstanding here? The data in the table do appear to suggest I have a point. I only ask because I want to know.
ferdberple: “The problem is the formal definition of ‘implies’. It has different meaning to different folks.”
In another context I would agree with you. If you’re talking about the discussion between Lord Monckton and me, though, I’m pretty sure Lord M. uses it in the mathematical / symbolic-logic sense: “p implies q” is the same as “if p then q.” And that’s the way I’m using it to.
As to your comment “but correlation does imply causation,” you’re probably right about different meanings for different people.
What am I misunderstanding here?
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Perhaps you’re misunderstanding is that you’ve bashed and called out as trolls people who UNDERSTOOD you’re argument was BS before you asserted (I assume to cover your arse) that the assertion was crap……cheers, RD