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.
Arguing with a CAGW type is like arguing with a stadium/arena/megaproject promoter. They’re both tax-and-spend-liberals…
1) a) The stadium/arena/megaproject promoter advocates spend huge sums of public money on unnecessary luxuries.
1) b) The CAGW type advocates spend huge sums of public money on unnecessary “green projects”
2) a) When you run the numbers and show that there’s no economic benefit from a megapoject, the promoter invents non-existant “hidden economic benefits” to skew the numbers.
2) b) When you run the numbers and show that there’s no global warming for the past decade or two, the CAGW type invents non-existant “hidden warming” to skew the numbers.
Absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation. Game over, logically speaking.
You can’t say so , it may imply multiple causations…CO2 is merely a factor among others
ANd 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!”
yes that could be valid explanations be true, the problem is they said “science is settled”.
Alex Cruickshank says:
December 16, 2013 at 5:53 pm
Actually, Gareth, the long term trend is down ..
[…]
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
—————————————————————————————————————
The historic long term trend is even more “down” than that. Over the past 4.5 billion years or so, the Earth has cooled from a ball of molten rock into a habitable planet.
More than that, the future long term trend can absolutely be guaranteed to be down. Sooner or later the Sun will die and, assuming the Earth isn’t eaten in the fireball, it will become very, very, cold indeed. 😉
Anthony, I encourage you to update the ‘Climate Fail’ section of your site to reflect the definitely broken state of climate models.
Perhaps some view of the Arctic showing the still-extant ice-caps would also be of use.
I know its easier to have me suggest what you ought to do, than it is for you to do it. I apologise for that.
News media only like bad news. So, the fact CO2 is nothing like the problem it was thought isn’t news.
The real impact of this has been to undermine the credibility of those people who call themselves “scientists”. I suspect that the caricature of the scientist in holywood is going to change from the “mad-professor” who is on the verge of insanity but extremely clever … to the TOTALLY MAD-professor who believes in all kinds of nonsense like Aliens, global warming, ESP, etc, who not only misunderstands society but also misunderstands what used to be called “science”.
I accept Lord Monckton’s conclusions. As a self taught layman I have a theoretical question; What would be the equilibrium temperature of a black body permanently irradiated by long wave IR in the range 13 to 17 microns?
Seems to be some logic chopping here on correlation vs causation.
AGW theory says a rise in CO2 concentration in the atmosphere will raise air temperatures. This theory is “evidenced” by the production of numerous models which predicted a rise in air temperatures. This is causation, and over time frames which the proponents developed – not the skeptics.
Despite clear data manipulation, we see no rise in air temperatures within the allowed timescales. The predictions have failed.
The onus is therefore on the proponents of the the theory to explain why the causation is not occurring. It is not enough to say that lack of correlation does not invalidate their theory.
Mark Bofill says:
December 16, 2013 at 8:23 pm
(Re. Mark’s comment about the oceans still rising.)
Mark over 60 percent of the tide gauges show lowering or flat sea levels. (Per a recent paper they estimate 1mm per year, which, when it comes to the incredibly complicated measuring of sea level is not different then zero. (For over two decades geologist argued, and some still do, about the existence of the Palmdale bulge, hotly debating the claimed existence of a 300 mm bulge in the Southern California desert, which, after all, should be orders of magnitude simpler then measuring a one to three mm rise in the global oceans)
The satellite trend has been adjusted repeatedly, and like the land based T reading, the adjustment is towards raising the previous trend. Just when the trends were flattening, they were pulled off line for months, and new metrics were included such as the isotactic adjustment for the presumption of lowering sea beds. I suggest you can familiarize yourself with this and then ask the alarmists a question.
Ask them how the increased heat from CO2 all went into the atmosphere from 1980 until 1998, and the suddenly decided to bypass, not only the atmosphere, but the first 700 meters of ocean?
If their FUBAR logic has them still making detailed arguments, remind that that even if they are correct, the claimed “warming” in the oceans and or atmosphere, is still only about one third of what the models predicted, and likely to continue to be beneficial to humans. The “C” is entirely missing from CAGW. (Neither Nick or Mosher will engage in this subject) Truthfully the GW has always been missing, (The SH and tropics barely warmed at all) the W is now absent for 17 years, and the “A” is a theory with only simplistic support in a complex world. So remind me why we wish to destroy the worlds economy and submit to global government?
PS, actually Mr. Mosher will not engage on any subject, as he is clearly above reasoned debate.
Really people? All the long winded responses to Mosh’s “wrong”.
Here’s the appropriate response to Mosh’s assertion.
LOL@ur momisugly Mosh!!!!! 😀 Well, jorgekafkazar, got it pretty much right, too. Or, we can start a meme ….. look at all those causes running amok!!! They’re correlated to nothing and is caused by the nothings!!!!
‘Absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation. ”
wrong.
Within the context of the article I side with Monckton rather than Mosher. However, is it true generally?
An example is where one variable increases but another suddenly changes. For example, reducing temperature of water and the formation of ice. If we drop the temperature of water from 20C to 5C and measure the amount of ice, we will find a lack of correlation. But does that mean that change in temperature does not cause ice to form?
Not generally, but it does within the context of the range of temperatures being considered.
What if we measured something so small that it was dominated by noise? E.g. according to relativity a watch in a car should vary. So, I check my watch, drive around the world, and then compare it to the clock in the house. The two are extremely likely to have varied one with respect to the other – but due to tolerances in the timekeeping of the watch and not due to relativity, so I repeat with a car load of clocks and a house full of clocks. I obtain a huge statistical variation, but it is much larger than the change I’m trying to measure, but the statistical change happens to falsify the predicted outcome.
Does this disprove relativity? No. Could I say: “travelling in a car causes time to change”?
Theoretically it does, but practically (i.e. within the contexts of the measurements being taken) it does not.
However, the crux, is that we are not trying to disprove something that is proven, but instead questioning whether it is proven in the first place. In such a situation, in science, the null hypothesis always wins unless or until evidence proves otherwise. So, in terms of proposing a scientific theory, unless or until evidence shows otherwise, then a lack of correlation logically does force us to a conclusion that there is a lack of correlation (unless or until there is overwhelming evidence by some other avenue).
So, e.g. we have good reason to believe that CO2 has a particular spectral response deemed the “greenhouse effect”. A lack of correlation of temperature and CO2 does not disprove this link, however … if we take into account the expected greenhouse effect of CO2 which suggests warming of about 0.05/decade (?) … then we have actually seen about 0.085C COOLING over the last 17 years
So, if we only consider the theory of enhanced warming from feedbacks, the theory says there should have been warming over the last 17 years. Instead there has been substantial cooling. As such, if “the science is settled” with the greenhouse effect of CO2, it is “settled” that the theory of enhanced feedbacks has been shown to be false.
Samurai: nice comparison with the hydra. The bed wetters are about to discover that their settled science is wrong because only a false theory implies everything. They must have noted that when its name had to be changed from warming into change and their opponents had to be called ‘change deniers’. Because change has about the same meaning as time, the name had to be made scary by the introduction of extremes, making it possible to exploit weird weather events as a last resort. It’s a big joke but a tragedy for the faithful. It’s their hydra, not ours.
Two comments:
1. There is a world of difference between AGW and CAGW. AGW is almost certainly real, but a minor, mildly interesting phenomenon, maybe partly caused by rising CO2 levels., and/or increased irrigation, and/or UHI, and/or etc. While CAGW is a fantasy which alarmists promote and their models are pre=programmed to predict. The alarmists like to muddle up the two subjects and so do far too many sceptics.
2. Thank heavens for the satellite data like RSS. Can you imagine what the GISS data would look like now without the satellite data to keep it at least partly honest?
Mark Bofill says “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”.
The oceans have been rising for millenia due to water run-off from (land-based) ice following the last ice age, after which temperatures stabilised at normal inter-glacial levels.
There is still a long way to go in this: the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are still with us, and will still be melting for millennia – so MSLs will continue to rise.
But it is not this constant run-off, giving constant rise in MSL, which indicates energy “collecting in the system”. If energy is collecting” (so temperatures are rising) the ice run-off rate would be increasing and we would see an *acceleration* in MSL rise – not just a constant rise.
If you look at http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/ocean-pages/ocean/ while the constant rise is clear it is hard to spot any *acceleration* in the rate of rise, which would be the true sign of “energy collecting in the system”.
I wonder what the reaction would be if Michael Mann invited us to draw firm conclusions from a regression that had an r-squared of erm …, zero.
Oh, and the UAH analysis of the same source data is definitely NOT flat, leading his Lordship open to the charge of cherry-picking.
David Rodale says:
December 16, 2013 at 4:01 pm
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.
He right. I’ve had it with you Mosh. You have become a twat.
I’m going to play advocatus diaboli here:
Looking at the graph, 1978 was clearly an anomaly and including it leaves one open to charges of ‘cherry-picking’. Leaving that out gives a total of 12 years with no warming, according to global temperature datasets.
BUT.
Trying to quote an average temperature is a fool’s game. With sufficiently precise thermometers you will find differences between different volumes of a room, let alone the entire bloody atmosphere. What’s the ‘average’, then? SInce the AGW hypothesis proposes that the whole planet is heating up, that must apply to the majority of localations within it. So we don’t need an average temperature for the globe, with all the errors that implies, we simply need to look at trends in each location. Anthony’s surfacestations.org allows us (for the USA) to look at siting problems like urbanisation, etc. So those stations can be removed. Likewise any at airports, where the increase in jet aviation and the fact that temperature sensors only record a maximum and minimum for each day (meaning that a quick swipe of jet exhaust can easily give a completely fallacious high reading). From the rest, pick any of the (few) well-maintained and sited stations witha long record and look at the trends. As Michael Chrighton pointed out in “State of Fear” using NASA records, places like Syracuse, Albany and Oswego in New York state all show a decline, along with many others round the world.
You don’t need a temperature database, just look at local trends.
And finally: “Whither in the regions nether –” Isn’t there a typo? Surely it should be “wither”?
[Whither–> interrogativeadverb
to what place or state: whither are we bound? | they asked people whither they would emigrate.
• what is the likely future of: whither modern architecture? . . I think the usage is correct . . mod]
Nick says ‘On the basis of the instrumental temperature record alone, it is possible that that global surface temperatures have been flat for more than 100 years (…) can anyone prove me wrong?’
I can’t prove you are wrong. If all thermometers on every square inch of the world would show positively correlated results, an arbitrary selection might do. Because in the USA alone about 30 percent of the surface stations show negative trends and 70 percent positive trends over a certain period, the earth surface is a melting pot of ups and downs (interactions). So I have to prove that the instrumental record is a perfect representative sample before anything could be said about the mean. Our record almost certainly is a biased sample.
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, until there is a reduction in temperature. I would not dance on the grave of majority climate science just yet.
You fail to define ‘long term’ if we take the Holocene as a whole the temperature trend is significantly down and the brief rise in the last 80 years or so is a totally insignificant echo of previous warmer optima.
why all the negative comments on Mosher?
he was just explaining that he (as in Steve) has finally admitted he has been wrong all these years!!
Around 1996 the last global warming sunspot cycle began. The two that became before it were A little stronger, but over all, before the solar minimum, the Sunspot cycles were in decline.
It now Appears the previous cycle from about 1996 to Dec. 2007 was more of a sustainment of global warming. Interesting.
In about five years, Al will need more than a massage.
Just read a blog that another study is out showing there was not a pulse. Can’t fix stupid.
Most Sincerely
Paul Pierett
Mosh…….. stick to journalism..
Science and logic alludes you !!!!
If one were to go to the NOAA web site and put in the dates Winter temps have been in decline since 2006.
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.
Lord Monckton says “The Long Pause just got three months longer.”
So how can a CAGW proponent argue against this? Simple. Just deny that it has happened (sorry, I though we were supposed to be the deniers!).
Exposed: The myth of the global warming ‘pause’
davidmhoffer says:
December 16, 2013 at 7:17 pm
I liked that – what you wrote. Crying in the wilderness. Suffering the children.
Fighting the elites who suck the blood out of the world’s economy.