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.
Doesn’t anthropogenic CO2 have a half life of 4 years? While the rise we’re seeing now requires a half life of at least 30 years? So humans can’t be the cause of the CO2 rise regardless of its effects. We contribute 4% I think. And the effects have exponentially diminishing (aka logarithmic) returns.
Rob Dawg says:
[bolds mine]
“Almost right. Implies, does not prove.”
In response to Monckton’s “Absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation.”
Uh? So, he’s almost right by saying exactly what you say is right and not saying what you’re saying is almost right?
Lord Monckton is absolutely right, causation without correlation is possible but it does necessarily imply otherwise. Decorrelation is evdidence of a non-causal relationship although not conclusive like correlation is evidence of a causal relationship although not conclusive.
Viscount Monckton writes –
“Yet it ought to be having some effect. All other things being equal…”
But all other things are not equal.
Strong vertical tropospheric convective circulation depends on radiative cooling at altitude allowing subsidence of air masses. It is this circulation that pneumatically produces the lapse rate observed below the tropopause. Without radiative gases, strong vertical tropospheric convective circulation would stall and the atmosphere would trend isothermal. The temperature of the resulting isothermal atmosphere would be driven by surface Tmax not surface Tav.
Now look at the original “basic physics” of the “settled science”. They assume that the troposphere will still exhibit strong vertical circulation and a strong lapse rate in the absence of radiative gases. They then use an incorrectly calculated* surface Tav to calculate the temperature of this theoretical non-radiative atmosphere. They calculated changes in radiative flux only, without simultaneously solving for changing speed of mechanical energy transport for changing concentrations of radiative gases. They got it wrong.
Viscount Monckton writes –
“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.”
Failing to correctly model the non-radiative transports, or the changes in these energy transports with changing radiative gas concentrations correctly, is the critical error in the radiative greenhouse hypothesis.
*Surface Tav under a non-radiative atmosphere has also been modelled incorrectly by climate “scientists”. They assumed that downwelling LWIR has the same effect over the oceans as land. However liquid water that is free to evaporatively cool cannot be heated nor have its cooling rate slowed by incident LWIR. That means no “snowball earth” and no “heat hiding in the oceans”
It is not just the AGW hypothesis that is in error , but its foundation, the radiative greenhouse hypothesis. The null hypothesis still stands for both.
But what is the null hypothesis for the radiative greenhouse effect? The hypothesis claims you can solve for atmospheric temperature by applying SB equations to a moving gas atmosphere over a liquid water ocean. The null hypothesis is “radiative flux equations used alone won’t do it”. The null hypothesis stands.
Perhaps what Steven has in mind is:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normally_distributed_and_uncorrelated_does_not_imply_independent
Nice read, thanks.
I must say it must be very painful to those who ,willfully or not, accepted the indoctrination into AGW.
It must be like watching a loved one pass as an inoperable cancer slowly metastasizes their life away in a digital world.
I do feel for them.
Ok , I am over it.
Hopefully we will soon see lawmakers react to factual observation and not failing models. The economies of the world, let alone the population, need the change. Punative energy policy does have negative feedbacks associated with such.
Lord Monckton wrote, “Yet the spavined nag on which they had bet the ranch fell at the first fence.”
You know the saying, You can lead a horse to water vapor, but you can’t make them think.”… or something to that effect…
The bed-wetters (as Lord Monckton appropriately names them) have adroitly propagandized the masses into believing the non-nullifiable notion of “Climate Change”, where any weather event is evidence of CAGW: too much rain=CAGW, too little rain=CAGW, no snow=CAGW, record snow=CAGW, record cold temps=CAGW, lack of severe weather=CAGW, record Antarctic Ice Extents=CAGW, record Arctic Ice recovery=CAGW, etc.
“Climate Change” has become like the mythical Greek monster Hydra, where every head Hercules would cut off, two heads would take its place… Hercules eventually defeated the beast by cauterizing each head stump with Hydra’s own poisonous blood and eventually lobbing off Hydra’s last remaining immortal head…
CAGW skeptics are now finally in the process of cauterizing each of the bed-wetter’s scary heads with their own poisonous empirical evidence. CAGW’s god Hera will occasionally send a giant crab (lost heat hiding in the ocean depths, for example) to distract the skeptics and gain some time, but the bed-wetters are quickly running out of both scary giant crabs and scary heads.
And so the saga continues….until freedom and reason are restored.
UnfrozenCavemanMD says:
December 16, 2013 at 6:02 pm
Moving the goal post to 20 years in 5 … 4 … 3 … 2 …
It is already too late for NOAA with their 95% criteria. According to SkS, for their two sigma numbers, we cannot rule out a zero slope since July, 1989, or a period of over 24 years.
According to Nick Stokes’ site, it is since December, 1992 that the warming is not statistically significant. This is exactly 21 years. However neither site has the November numbers yet so an extra month could possibly be added to each.
Steven Mosher says:
December 16, 2013 at 3:40 pm
Steven Mosher says:
December 16, 2013 at 3:40 pm
‘Absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation. ”
wrong.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Well, kind of, sort of true: lack of correlation may result from lack of statistical power, range of variation, linearity. However, once significant rigorous effort has been invested to address those concerns, then it certainly begins to look like absence of correlation implies absence of causation.
Unfortunately, it’s devastating to compare Steven’s intellectual arguments with those from Bob Tisdale. That I know of, Steven has never articulated intellectual argument on WUWT (I may have missed one) – he simply give links to irrelevant or inarticulate websites.
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.
I’m not feeling so bad now that I didn’t finish high school these days. I went on NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center web site and looked up the continental US for the twentieth century by decade.
1901 through 1910 had an average temperature of 51.72 (F).
This varies as the century went along with figures by decade of 51.33, 52.01, 52.69, 52.09, 52.15, 51.75, 51.80, 51.46, ending the century in 1991 through 2000 with a huge heat surge of 52.83.
So, the last decade of the twentieth century was a massive 0..26 degree F over the very toasty 40’s. Where was the panic in 1949? Oops, it dropped back to 51.46 by the 80’s.
Anthropogenic Global Warming has to be the biggest semi science sociolagic fraud in the history of the world.
Shakespeare had it right… “much ado about nothing”. Arguing about an averaged line moving within the statistical margin of error is, by definition, insane. AGW has never existed, nor will it ever as long as there are plants, oceans, and an atmosphere on this planet.
‘Absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation.’
Sloppy overkill. Many factors could be overriding the warming.
Disappointing, Mr Monckton.
And I went unto the Warmists and said Fear Not! For the CO2 is logarithmic and the T varies with the 4th root of P and that is the Physics.
And They mocked me and said Have you not seen the Tree Rings?
What hath Tree Rings to do with the Physics I asked of them. And they said if I did not know I was a fool.
And so I came to look upon the Tree Rings and they were false. For they did not foretell the instrumental record for near half its course, and this the Warmists tried to Hide. And when it came to pass that only a Single Tree spoke of what they said, I said again, Fear Not, for CO2 is logarithmic and T varies with the 4th root of P and that is the Physics.
And they mocked me and said that the seas would rise up with increasing fury.
What hath Sea Level Rise to do with the Physics I asked of them. And they said if I did not know I was a fool.
And so I came to look upon the Sea Level Rise and lo it was steady over the course of the data. Why has one among you purchased at much cost a monstrous house next to the Sea you say will rise up I asked. Have you, like me, understood that CO2 is logarithmic and T varies with the 4th root of P and that is the Physics?
And they mocked me and said that the ice was melting and this was a harbinger of doom.
What hath ice melting at one tiny part of the world to do with the Physics I asked of them. And they said if I did not know I was a fool.
And so I came to look upon the Sea Ice and lo, while that of the North was Melting, that of the South was Growing. And as I said this unto Them, lo, the North began to grow also. You who have proclaimed the far reaches of the earth the only safe haven from the coming Heat have no emigrated to those lands, nor procured property there, do you, as I, Fear Not for CO2 is logarithmic and T varies with the 4th root of P and that is the Physics?
Thunderbolts and Lightning! Very Very Frightening! The droughts and the hurricanes shall smite us!
What hath droughts and hurricanes to do with the Physics as asked of them, hopeless now because I already knew it was I who was the fool.
And so I came to look upon the droughts and found them unchanged. And I looked upon the hurricanes and found them to be in decline. And I said again Fear Not for the CO2 is logarithmic and they interrupted me and mocked me.
You are a fool they said, for you are not a climate scientist, and so you do not understand. And I said unto them, Other than the collecting of the Data from Trees and Satellites and other such complex tasks, what skills beyond first year physics and statistics are required to analyse Them? And they Refused to Answer and the Anth_ny did Ban them until such time as they should Answer and then they became Abusive and the Anth_ny banned them forever.
But still others took up the Cause and said Lo, the Heat is hiding in places where we cannot see it, and it shall someday spring forth upon us and smite us.
And I could not look upon those places where none could see and so I asked how this springing forth could happen, by what mechanism of Physics could this occur?
And for this They have no Answer.
Fear Not I said, for Co2 is logarithmic and T varies with the 4th root of P and that is the Physics.
And they spoke among themselves and said we must find a new means by which to prophecy doom. We shall search and search for such a means, but under no circumstance will we discuss the Physics.
in Australia we all get exited when our news media allows” 3 seconds” on there news about all the snow falling around the world, but we cannot complain at least we saw it for 3 seconds
Normally I argue for people to cut Steven Mosher slack, but not tonight.
Steven, while correlation does not necessarily indicate causation, causation necessarily indicates correlation, a conditional statement is logically equivalent to its contrapositive.
Knowing perfectly well that you’re not a simpleton, I’m highly confident that what I’m talking about isn’t what you mean, and that somehow this is not relevant. Unfortunately for simpletons like myself in the audience, I’m utterly unable to deduce what that ‘somehow’ might be from your response. If you’re going to go to the trouble to post at all, couldn’t you elucidate just a little further than that?
The complete collapse of the CAGW hypothesis reminds of the delusional Black Knight in Monty Python’s Holy Grail:
CAGW has suffered many “flesh wounds” recently…:
whither went BBC Business Daily’s report on IEA’s King Coal report? BBC’s audio online has other items from last nite’s show, but not the reality-based interview with van der Hoeven, in which she re-emphasised that additional coal production capacity of a half‐million tonnes per annum will be added EACH DAY until 2018:
16 Dec: Paris: IEA: Remarks by Maria van der Hoeven at Launch of the Medium‐Term Coal Market Report 2013
And yet no fuel is as responsible for powering the economic growth that has pulled billions out of poverty in the past decades…
***Over the next six years, additional coal production capacity of a half‐million tonnes per annum will be added worldwide … each day. That will be necessary to meet a worldwide demand increase of 2.3% per year on average until 2018.
And while it is true that demand growth is concentrated in non‐OECD countries, coal does not decline in the OECD…
And in China, the scale of coal in the economy is simply incomparable to fuels elsewhere. Replacing coal with gas in Chinese power generation would require twice the volume of all global LNG trade.
Coal therefore continues to play an important role in economic growth and energy security worldwide…
Progress on CCS is effectively stalled, and a meaningful carbon price is missing.
http://www.iea.org/newsroomandevents/speeches/131206MCMR2013LaunchRemarks.pdf
NYT disappeared their story too, by using the old coal URL but turning it into an oil story, courtesty of EIA, as opposed to IEA, which they only mention 7 paras into the story:
16 Dec: NYT: Clifford Krauss/Stanley Reed: U.S. Oil Production Is Projected to Surge
The annual outlook by the department’s Energy Information Agency was cited by experts as confirmation that the United States was well on its way to achieving virtual energy independence.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/17/business/international/global-coal-use-predicted-to-keep-growing.html?_r=0
further confirmation the NYT coal story did exist:
16 Dec: InsideClimateNews: NYT: IEA Report: Global Coal Use Predicted to Keep Growing
Global consumption of coal, a major source of the greenhouse gases blamed for rising global temperatures and other pollutants, is likely to continue to grow at “a relentless pace” through 2018, according to a report by the International Energy Agency.
“Like it or not, coal is here to stay for a long time to come,” said Maria van der Hoeven, the agency’s executive director, in a statement…LINK
http://insideclimatenews.org/todaysnews/20131216/iea-report-global-coal-use-predicted-keep-growing
aha. EIA came out with an “EARLY VERSION” of their annual report, perfectly timed to squash the IEA coal report, by any chance?
16 Dec: Forbes: Christopher Helman: U.S. Energy Outlook: More Oil, More Gas, Less Carbon. Yay America!
The federal government’s Energy Information Administration is out today with an early version of its Annual Energy Outlook for 2014…
http://www.forbes.com/sites/christopherhelman/2013/12/16/govt-energy-outlook-more-oil-more-gas-less-carbon-yay-america/
The rant continues.
I certainly get it if it’s not worth Steven’s time to explain this, but in this case why was it worth Steven’s time to post the single word wrong in the first place? If we presume that the point of posting is to communicate something (and perhaps we are foolish to make such assumptions, since apparently we’re wrong even to assume that causation implies correlation), what was the intent of the communication? It seems the point was to tell us we are wrong without explaining why. In general I don’t see much point in paying attention to people who find value in crappy games like that. That’s just plain wrong.
Okay. I’m done venting now.
The average anomaly so far for the first 11 months is 0.224 which would rank it 9th or 10th for the year. It should be noted that this year was neutral in terms of ENSO so no one can use the excuse that if we had only properly accounted for ENSO, we would see an increase. Judging by the area under the zero line and between the September 1996 to December 1997 anomalies, it would take a strong El Nino to reduce the time to under 17 years. CO2 alone or even a weak El Nino are just not up to it.
I for one expect warming to continue, as it has with some interruptions for the last 10,000 years. Glaciers may also retreat as they have for millenia – 10,000 years ago the place where I sit was under 1000 feet of ice. The 17 year pause does not disprove long-term warming, but it does completely undermine the models on which much of the current (contrived) (so-called) “consensus” is based.
I’ll also be on the record to say that I wish mankind would stop burning so much fossil fuel, just because it would be nice to leave some for future generations. I know, I know that all that extra CO2 is good for the forests, but let’s not be greedy about it.
+emphasis
Did you mean… for example, the “cooling” could be overriding the warming? Or?
DavidMHoffer. What a wonderful litany to CAGW. Loved it!
Lord Monckton,
Always a pleasure to read what you’ve got to say. I’d be much more enthusiastic about your argument if you could help me grasp what’s wrong with this common rebuttal. Immediately after pointing out that atmospheric temperatures have been flat and suggesting that the missing energy is not in fact hiding in the ocean, my warmist colleague invariably looks at me with pity and asks how it is the oceans are still rising if energy isn’t collecting in the system. If it’s not thermal expansion, and it’s not melting ice, because both of those require energy, what exactly do I propose is the explanation.
And I shut up at that point, because I have no answer. I guess I could concoct an argument about aquifiers adding previously trapped water to the system, but I don’t honestly believe this accounts for the problem myself.
If you have an argument that refutes this rebuttal I’d be delighted if you’d share it with me.
Best regards and thanks for your post.
davidmhoffer says:
December 16, 2013 at 7:17 pm
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That is absolutely priceless! The best laugh I’ve had so far this month.
I’ve filed it for future use.
davidmhoffer says:
December 16, 2013 at 7:17 pm
_—————————–
That was brilliant and enjoyable. Thank you for the artful perspective of truths.
Now for some blogging house cleaning.
What did someone do to Janice Moore? She was an intermittent breath of fresh air in a sometimes stuffy room!
Let alone the fact that Gail Combs has been MIA!
Was she not the top poster here in the recent past ?
We cannot afford to lose any “Riders on the Storm”
Video not redacted ↘
▶
Mark Bofill says: December 16, 2013 at 7:51 pm
It seems the point was to tell us we are wrong without explaining why.
causation can exist when correlation is zero. The upshot of these two facts is that, in general and without additional information, correlation reveals literally nothing about causation. It is neither necessary nor sufficient for it.
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You’re right and Mosher was correct…..Rude? yep…. http://theincidentaleconomist.com/wordpress/causation-without-correlation-is-possible/