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.
Prehaps an image might help this discussion on a few fronts?
http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/pr/pr_images/glacier.jpg
RichardLH, yes, that is the point. Neither RSS nor UAH is “right” or “wrong”, but they differ, so if someone picks the dataset that provides the strongest support for their argument and ignores the other, that is pretty much the definition of cherry picking.
Well I would like any warmist to explain how the increased heat from CO2 mostly went into the atmosphere from 1980 until 1998, and then suddenly decided to bypass, not only the atmosphere, but the first 700 meters of ocean?
:Steven Mosher says:
December 16, 2013 at 3:40 pm
‘Absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation. ”
wrong.”
Implies absence of DOMINATING absence of causation, and since CO2 by CAGW narrative is THE dominant forcing, his statement is correct, though incompletely stated.
Doug Proctor, GHGs may be the dominant forcing according to mainstream science, but that does not mean that it dominates internal variability (e.g. ENSO) over the short term, so Steven Moshers criticism is still valid.
I was intrigued by Monckton of Brenchley’s logical proof that lack of correlation implies lack of causation, given that timetochooseagain and Richard D and dikranmarsupial have provided counterexamples.
I believe the resolution of this contradiction lies in the difference between the natural language meaning of implication and the formal logic meaning. When we say “correlation does not necessarily imply causation”, we mean that there are sometimes cases where you have correlation but not causation, but we are not excluding cases where you have causation but not correlation, or both, or neither. But for the formal logic statement “NOT(corr IMP caus)” to be true, you must have correlation and not causation in every case – it excludes the other cases. They are not equivalent statements. This is covered by the “relentlessly unreliable” Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradoxes_of_material_implication , paradox #6.
So Monckton of Brenchley’s logical proof is valid, but it is not a proof of the natural language assertion that “since correlation does not necessarily imply causation, absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation”.
Richard111 says:
December 16, 2013 at 11:41 pm
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?
Be more precise.
it depends how it is irradiated, it depends of its shape , if depend of its matter, it depends of the assumption that it can or not back radiate to the source of incoming radiation, and it can take billions of years to reach equilibrium… (the most bizarre hypothesis would be a uniform radiation on its surface)..and its depend on how you define equilibrium…there may be and equilibrium but first because it is not a thermodynamic equilibrium , there is no defined temperature and it is even very unlikely that the object would be in an homogenous state of excitation (‘ just imagin a long cigare shape object irradiated on its edge)…so there would be many way to define a pseudotemperature of the object.
correlation – causation – statistics
http://xkcd.com/552/
My bet is that the upward adjustments have not stopped at all, they are still artificially moving the “GAT” higher a tiny bit every month and those charts should already show a downward trek since about 2005. These upward adjustments are nearly linear and have been applied since the 40s in one form or the other.
Re; dikranmarsupial December 17, 2013 at 7:05 am
So you’re a bit thin skinned then, eh?
Try this for rational; if Y is uncorrelated to X, can Y be the cause of an increase in X in lieu of an intervening superseding factor?
I want you to show how an uncorrelated Y can drive X higher, since that is the point you wish to stand on.
If you choose to abandon the discussion because I dared impugn the character of some unnamed climate scientist, I think you prove where your heart really lies;
On this side, I have watched people be accused of being in the pocket of big money interests in an effort to avoid debate on the actual science. People who are skeptical (in the most scientific sense) are routinely called deniers simply for raising valid questions. I’ve watched as “scientists” conducting research paid for with government grants have obfuscated their data and claim their data was “proprietary” in the face of the owners of the data claiming that it was not. I have observed scientists using lawyers to avoid legitimate FOIA requests, claims that resources provided by public moneys were private information, one attempt to claim attorney client privilege where clearly none existed and one guy claiming he won a Nobel Peace Prize when the Nobel committee says, unequivocally that he did not. This is not science.
I am sorry to have impugned the character of High Priests everywhere.
But if that is your excuse why you don’t want to entertain the discussion, so be it. At least I now have an understanding of what you believe in.
dikranmarsupial,
Well, we don’t know if this was consistent with Steven’s argument, since he did not elect to make an argument beyond his flat assertion.
This aside, we are reaching the point in our observations where we can start to say with confidence that our understanding of warming due to GHG forcings and internal variability is wrong, if GCM’s embody our understanding.
We can entertain ourselves all day long by looking for obscure exception cases or (IMO) misinterpreting what the statement ‘causation implies correlation’ is supposed to mean, but with respect to this specific problem / climate change, the IPCC expected to see some .2C warming per decade that hasn’t shown up – in THIS case certainly, it was our mainstream best science understanding that causation would imply correlation. Maybe Steven’s criticism is valid. It doesn’t appear to me to be particularly meaningful.
Bob Kutz wrote “So you’re a bit thin skinned then, eh?”
not particularly, but as I said life is just to short wasting it on rhetorical arguements when we could have a rational productive discussion of the science without the name calling etc. You response (above) just confirms that you are are one of those primarily interested in rhetoric and not worth responding to further.
@Dikranmarsupial – yet you did respond. Perhaps you are not so allergic to idle rhetoric after all.
henry says
clearly, I have shown you that there must be something wrong with UAH as it is the only one out of 5 data sets ( 6, if you include my own) that shows the wrong directional trend from 2002?
That’s only 80% – anything less than 97% signifies nothing 🙂
“Absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation. ”
Why this blog continues to provide a platform to Monckton is beyond me.
We have had higher temps in this and many other Holocene’s with no link to CO2. What is more AGW would cause the Troposphere to heat up…no trace despite the best efforts of the Aqua Satellite and milions and millions of weather balloons. With CO2’s ability to create heat being logarithmic it cannot overheat the planet. The reason whey the AGW scientists and believers can’t face their own ignorance is that they are finished…some of them should face prosecution.
PJ Clarke says:
December 17, 2013 at 12:45 am
Oh, and the UAH analysis of the same source data is definitely NOT flat, leading his Lordship open to the charge of cherry-picking.
On the other hand, if we plot the combination of HadCRUT3, UAHversion5.5, RSS and GISS which is what WTI allows, then the slope is 0 for exactly 13 years, since December 2000. See:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/from:2000.9/plot/wti/from:2000.9/trend
Granted, this is not 17 years and 3 months, but 13 years is still long enough that one can still ask:
“Whither went the warmer weather?”
Furthermore, it is quite possible that if we were to find the point at which this 13 years shows no warming at the 95% certainty level, it could in fact be 17 years and 3 months.
Dear Jiuice, December 17 at 8.81 am: IIt has nothing to do with Monckton. It has to do with a conglomerate of more or less analytical brains (science) which are trying their best to understand where (if this is at all possible) the climate is going. The reason why this is of any importance (to you) is that models, the virtual worlds, are at odds with the real world, measurements. The current grip of the “modellers” on politcal decision making is costing societies billions, if not trillions of counting units (euros, dollars or bitcoins). We (societies) appear to be in the grips of science activitists, which I think is not a good thing!
Gavin says
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/12/16/whither-went-the-warmer-weather/#comment-1504811
Henry says
let me think
including my own data set
(unless you can prove it is worthless)
that is 5/6
=83%
Care to take a bet on who is right and who is wrong here?
Joe Born says:
Or with the valid proposition that p -> q is equivalent to ~q -> ~p.
who says?
I think -> I am
I am not ->
Absence of correlation necessarily implies absence of causation.
<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
In fact, he is right. Look up the meaning of “implies”.
Care to take a bet on who is right and who is wrong here?
In case there’s any doubt, I’d bet on you but I doubt I’d get good odds.
Mark Bofill;
Spencer says this is possible, though he doesn’t buy it.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/04/more-on-trenberths-missing-heat/
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Spencer provides a scenario by which a series of rather improbable events could all be occurring at the same time, then points out how improbable that is, and that there is no physical evidence to corroborate any of the possible drivers that must be present for any of it to work. But you missed my point. If CO2 in fact injects such large amounts of energy into the oceans, then why does it NOT do the same over land? Does the CO2 shine only over water? Since land can NOT mix energy downward by ANY series of improbable events, the temperature rise over land would have to be much higher for the same radiance over water. The only way to get around this is to assume one set of highly improbable events with no corroborating evidence is in effect over water and that a DIFFERENT set of highly improbable events that we can’t even come up with a THEORY for and which have no corroborating evidence are in effect over land.
Mike says
I think -> I am
I am not ->
Henry says
I am afraid that there are some here who really do not appreciate the fact that the probability that there is in fact no God is just about like being zero, just like me calculating that the probability that we exist at all is just about zero…
David,
That’s true. Thanks.
Re causation and correlation.
I am not sure our Noble lord is correct.
Let us take a data set:
A white swan
A black duck
Let us say that “being a swan” is S & “being white” is W.
Then causation would be written S -> W (being a swan implies it is white)
Whereas correlation would be S = W (The colour is determined by whether or not it is a swan)
So we have two possible instances of lack of correlation.
The first is a black swan. The other is a white duck.
So if we find we have a black swan in our sample then it is true that ~ ( S->W) (that being a swan no longer implies the bird is white). So, yes lack of correlation means lack of causation.
However if we take the white duck, the statement “If its a swan it implies it is white” is not negated by finding a white duck.
So the lack of correlation does not necessarily imply lack of causation.
I believe the route of this is that if S-> W (if its a swan it is white), doesn’t tell us anything about the world if it isn’t a swan. So ~S -> ?