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.
It is not just that the Sun has nodded off to sleep but that vulcanism has truly awakened. Gee, who would have thought it was only CO2 that caused ‘climate’?? hint, $$$$$$$$$$
A good read everyday/
http://theextinctionprotocol.wordpress.com/
regards
Since the AGW theory basically relies on the belief that carbon dioxide traps heat from the sun that has been reflected from Earth (normally after a few hours delay) the temperature data will not make any sense until we use the appropriate measurement parameter. This is not a second, a minute, an hour, a day, a week, a month or a year as these are all earthly measurement parameters. The parameter that should be used is the solar cycle since the sun is the ultimate source of the heat that can supposedly be trapped by greenhouse gases. But even when one uses the solar cycle as the primary measurement parameter we must remember that oceans, ice and land all store heat in various amounts for various lengths of time. Oceans and ice sheets store heat for very long times (often centuries or millennia) whereas non-forested land (deserts) give up stored heat within a relatively short time of the source of radiation going (i.e. at night).
We shouldn’t overlook that the sun provides energy to Earth in many ways. While most is provided in the long-wave length infra-red spectrum of photons the short wave-length spectrum also provides heat by a delayed reaction (as anyone who has had severe sunburn will attest). The shortest wave-length frequency also provides additional heat to the upper atmosphere through chemical reactions.
The AGW theory is and always was simplistic nonsense because the scientists involved were not measuring temperature changes using the right measurement parameters and they are not allowing for the leads and lags caused by periodic changes in the distribution of photon emissions from the sun.
If you just very roughly allow for the leads and lags then the only correlation that matters is the correlation between between the magnetic strength of each solar cycle (and its immediately previous solar cycle) and the average global temperature change during that cycle. Although there are not enough data points since modern instrumentation commenced it looks pretty likely that when solar cycles are very strong global temperatures rise and when the solar cycles are very weak temperatures firstly stabilize but then start to fall. There is a lot of proxy and anecdotal data to suggest this has always been the case.
There is one significant complication. Weak solar magnetic cycles cause increased volcanic activity due the increase in cosmic rays reaching the atmosphere and producing high energy atomic particles that penetrate and weaken the calderas of some types of volcanoes. Very large eruptions can produce an almost immediate fall in global temperatures because their emitted aerosols filter out some of the radiated heat from the sun. Although the aerosols will eventually clear it could take several relatively strong solar cycles to restore global temperatures to what they were before the first of the weak cycles. This is the nightmare scenario as a one or two degree reduction in global temperatures is likely to make it very difficult to grow sufficient food to feed the human race at current levels – never mind the level projected by mid-century.
Satellite data is approaching 40 years. Unfortunately, NASA ate the first 6 years, so we are now stuck with 34 years. Of that, 50% show an upward trend, and 50% show a flat trend. Based upon ground reading “proxies” we know that prior to the satellite data, the trend was negative. So what we have is really no trend. Up, down even is not a trend. It is a kids game.
Great stuff, Monkton of Brenchley. I always enjoy your deft hand and exquisite vocabulary. Best of the Christmas Season to you and all who “deny” the status quo.
A cause without an effect is not much of a cause. Really, arguing with Christopher Monckton about logic is about as clever as picking a fight with Chuck Norris.
Pause implies that temperature will resume an upward trend. No one knows that for sure. Temperatures might drop just like they did starting in 1944, but the important thing is that pause or flat spot, the models didn’t predict or project it. The models didn’t predict the 1998 spike either. In other words, the models were wrong then and they are wrong today. There is no reason to believe the models will be right 100 years from now.
Its amazing how the most ridiculous arguments about remote possibilities the models could still be right are invoked by alarmists, but they dismiss out of hand any possibility they are wrong.
Almost as if they have a very unscientific emotional attachment to their current theories.
Gareth Phillips says:
December 16, 2013 at 4:20 pm
So have global temperatures fallen? No? Then they have still risen, what has happened is the rate of rise has flattened, but the long term trend is still up.
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So that means there is no other answer but that 1 part in 20,000 of the atmosphere changing from something to CO2 is what caused an “unprecedented” .4C rise in temp? Is that the only possible factor that could have caused temps to rise .6C during the past 85 years? What caused the rise in temp from 1910 to 1940? What caused the .3C drop in temp from 1880 to 1910? It is completely absurd what has happened to Science! It has been murdered.
The Met Office, (Key contributor to IPCC) confirms the RSS data.
Not really. There was a spike in about 1997-8, a one-time ENSO step change. There is no justification for associating the previous 1979-1996 period with it. Statistical jiggery-pokery, aka end-point selectrion fallacy. So the entire warming model is based on an un-anticipated, unexplained 2-year change, not even a brief 20-year “trend”. Then with a bit of parametrical prestidigitation ….
Met office Hadley data
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut3/diagnostics/global/nh+sh/
typo:
selectrionselectionSteven Mosher says:
December 16, 2013 at 3:40 pm
‘Absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation. ”
wrong.
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Another wrigglers, devoid of facts, himself gets it wrong.
Of course lack of correlation implies absence of causation. Doesn’t prove but most certainly implies. Importantly it places the onus on the proponents to demonstrate why the hypothesis has not been falsified by the lack of correlation.
In other words, the shoe is on the other foot. The lack of warming is strong evidence that AGW is a failed theory. Not that it needs some tweaking. Rather that it has failed, it that it completely failed to predict what has now been observed.
” would not dance on the grave of majority climate science just yet.”
Well Gareth I think it’s all due to natural variation – please direct me to the scientific research listing and quantifying all the factors which caused the earth to move in and out of ice ages in the pre-industrial era. To one decimal place would be fine thanks.
Gareth Phillips says:
December 16, 2013 at 4:20 pm
So have global temperatures fallen? No? Then they have still risen, what has happened is the rate of rise has flattened, but the long term trend is still up.
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Temps have been rising since the time of the French revolution. No doubt a result of the introduction of the fossil fueled Madame La Guillotine. Or maybe it was the blood of the aristo’s that so upset the gods in heaven that they are slowly roasting us in hell. Like frogs in a giant stew pot, the heat is rising so slowly that none notice.
MACK1 says:
December 16, 2013 at 5:38 pm
please direct me to the scientific research listing and quantifying all the factors which caused the earth to move in and out of ice ages in the pre-industrial era.
============
How about a single climate model that can reliably recreate the Medieval, Roman, Minoan, and previous Holocene warnings, without the need to selectively employ volcanoes as the universal explanation.
Theo Goodwin says:
… By “media response,” I do not mean another interview with Alarmists who repeat the same dogma. I mean an honest statement by the media of the criteria that they use to judge statements by Alarmists.
—
What makes you think that they use any criteria at all? The quality of science reporting in the mainstream media has hit rock bottom – not just for climate science, but for any field of science. There is virtually no news item in my own field (biomedicine) that will not make me cringe and groan, usually with some outlandish claims of “new therapies” that are just around the corner.
Very rarely does one see a science news item nowadays that is not just copied from a press release by some research organization or other interested party. The media simply don’t seem to have any people left with an actual scientific understanding – they just supply a megaphone that will amplify any sound from whichever bodily orifice it is attached to. This, in turn, has encouraged the interested parties to become ever more brazen in their claims and self-serving in their hyperbolic mental flatulence.
Academia, as an institution, has come to cynically abuse its supposed monopoly on humanity’s redemption much in the same way as the catholic church did before the protestant reformation. That reformation was about the people taking back their Christian faith from a church that had proven unfit to maintain it. Today, the people need to take science. Just as the catholic church needed the threat of reformation to mend its ways, academia today needs a vigorous challenge by an informed public. WUWT and similar venues have a greater role to play in this than the media.
OK, long rant, never mind. Seems I’m getting old; I shall follow those ridiculous news items about Soon Curing Dementia with renewed enthusiasm.
Theo Goodwin says:
December 16, 2013 at 4:48 pm
.
.
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… Do remember to take some prescription vitamin D supplements. You are way up there. You are as far north as Latvia.
——-
Never take prescription vitamin D!!! That is the patent drug, vitamin D2 made from fungi, which is essentially nonfunctional in animals. Take OTC (in the uS et al) vitamin D3, the natural animal form, at about 5000 iu/day.
I do agree though, “Thank you, Christopher Monckton.”
The RSS data does show the planet is cooling.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1996.8/plot/rss/from:1996.9/to:2005/trend/plot/rss/from:2005/to/trend
Of course, 9 years is not considered relevant if you are a true believer. However, when put in the context above we see only a small warming followed by a small cooling over the 17 years. Even the small warming was much less than predicted.
In addition, both hadcrut4 and GISS also show cooling from 2005. We are in ENSO neutral conditions. There is absolutely no reason for the planet to be cooler than models predict if they have the science right.
Keep in mind that the RSS trend from 1996.5 is only .00045C/year. If December continues the current downward slide we could be close to 17 years and 6 months when the next RSS data is released. However, without some real strong cooling this addition of multiple months will eventually come to an end. 1995 ended with a La Nina and before that we had Pinatubo.
Actually, Gareth, the long term trend is down ..
Responding to :Gareth Phillips said on December 16, 2013 at 4:20 pm
“So have global temperatures fallen? No? Then they have still risen, what has happened is the rate of rise has flattened, but the long term trend is still up, until there is a reduction in temperature. I would not dance on the grave of majority climate science just yet.”
The Minoan warm period was warmer than the Roman Warm Period, which was warmer than the Medieval Warm period, which was warmer than now. The cycles of warmer and colder periods is on a cooling trend, which is consistent with the records for earlier inter-glacials.
If anything, we are on the way into the next glacial phase.
Alex
fred;
“roasting”? Neither slowly nor swiftly; warming is to be welcomed. Bring back, bring back bring back the Minoan Warm Period to me, to me! Please!
The Warmists’ (and Lukewarmists’) mantra is false in every respect, including projected costs and consequences.
Moving the goal post to 20 years in 5 … 4 … 3 … 2 …
Michael Palmer says:
December 16, 2013 at 5:48 pm
*
You raise an excellent point (several, in fact). We not only need to take back science but take public reporting, as well. Perhaps our protests should not be (only) at the gates of government buildings but at MSM offices, and perhaps a few Universities too.
Clearly they don’t yet understand that we don’t like being lied to, we don’t like being robbed and we don’t like being blamed for things that are perfectly natural.
As for the word “implies” (used elsewhere), it’s amazing how Catastrophists love to hide behind that word and similar and understand them very clearly when looking for a loophole to escape through, yet refuse to see it at all when used by someone else.
Christopher? An excellent article, I enjoy your observations very much, and I’m having a great time with the comments. Thank you.
nevket240, that link is much appreciated and will be read daily.
Thank you.
“Moving the goal post to 20 years in 5 … 4 … 3 … 2 …”
It’s almost a certainty that several members of the team are currently working on papers that move the goal posts. The only question is when they will appear.
Lord Monckton–Five years ago I attended my daughter’s graduation from the University of Glasgow–December 2008. My husband had told me that December was mild and I did not need any heavy clothes. That year it was cold and snowy in the first week in December, and I was out buying warmer clothes just to get through the week. Glad I was not there for February!! And I am glad it is mild for you this year. We in Kansas are enjoying a very cold December so far. No warming here to speak of. The 1930s heat and drought have set records that have not been broken yet.