Richard Kerr (Science) in 2009: Warming ‘Pause’ About to Be Replaced by ‘Jolt’
Guest essay by Robert Bradley Jr.
“Pauses as long as 15 years are rare in the simulations, and ‘we expect that [real-world] warming will resume in the next few years,’ the Hadley Centre group writes…. Researchers … agree that no sort of natural variability can hold off greenhouse warming much longer.”
– Richard Kerr, Science (2009)
That’s Richard A. Kerr, the longtime, award-winning climate-change scribe for Science magazine, the flagship publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The article, “What Happened to Global Warming? Scientists Say Just Wait a Bit,” was published October 1, 2009.
The article is important in the history of climate thought because it captures neatly the (over)confidence of the scientists who turn to models to justify their faith that past overestimation will soon be reversed. Judith Curry’s recent discovery of F. A. Hayek’s Nobel Prize Lecture in Economics, The Pretense of Knowledge, marks a new front in the mainstream climate debate. [1]
Secondly, today’s explanation for the “pause” (a term used in Kerr’s 2009 article) is not mentioned back then—ocean delay.
Third, Kerr frames the debate in political terms with Copenhagen just ahead—and fails to interview or include the contrary views about how climate sensitivity might be less than the climate models assume in their physical equations.
Here is the guts of the Kerr article as the 5th year anniversary comes this year:
The blogosphere has been having a field day with global warming’s apparent decade-long stagnation. Negotiators are working toward an international global warming agreement to be signed in Copenhagen in December, yet there hasn’t been any warming for a decade. What’s the point, bloggers ask?
Climate researchers are beginning to answer back in their preferred venue, the peer-reviewed literature. The pause in warming is real enough, but it’s just temporary, they argue from their analyses.
A natural swing in climate to the cool side has been holding greenhouse warming back, and such swings don’t last forever. “In the end, global warming will prevail,” says climate scientist Gavin
Schmidt of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City.
The latest response from the climate community comes in State of the Climate in 2008, a special supplement to the current (August) issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Climate researcher Jeff Knight and eight colleagues at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter, U.K., first establish that—at least in one leading temperature record—greenhouse warming has been stopped in its tracks for the past 10 years.
In the HadCRUT3 temperature record, the world warmed by 0.07°C±0.07°C from 1999 through 2008, not the 0.20°C expected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Corrected for the natural temperature effects of El Niño and its sister climate event La Niña, the decade’s trend is a perfectly flat 0.00°C.
So contrarian bloggers are right: There’s been no increase in greenhouse warming lately. That result came as no surprise to
Knight and his colleagues or, for that matter, to most climate scientists. But the Hadley Centre group took the next step, using climate modeling to try to quantify how unusual a 10-year warming pause might be.
In 10 modeling runs of 21st century climate totaling 700 years worth of simulation, long-term warming proceeded about as expected: 2.0°C by the end of the century. But along the way in the 700 years of simulation, about 17 separate 10-year intervals had temperature trends resembling that of the past decade—that is, more or less flat.
From this result, the group concludes that the model can reproduce natural jostlings of the climate system—perhaps a shift in heat-carrying ocean currents—that can cool the world and hold off greenhouse warming for a decade. But natural climate variability in the model has its limits. Pauses as long as 15 years are rare in the simulations, and “we expect that [real-world] warming will resume in the next few years,” the Hadley Centre group writes.
And that resumption could come as a bit of a jolt, says Adam Scaife of the group, as the temperature catches up with the greenhouse gases added during the pause.
Pinning the pause on natural variability makes sense to most researchers. “That goes without saying,” writes climate researcher Stefan Rahmstorf of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany by e-mail. “We’ve made [that point] several times on RealClimate,” a blog.
Solar physicist Judith Lean of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., and climate modeler David Rind of GISS reached the same conclusion in a peer-reviewed 15 August paper in Geophysical Research Letters. They broke down recent temperature variation into components attributable to greenhouse gases, pollutant aerosols, volcanic aerosols, El Niño/La Niña, and solar variability.
Combined, those influences explain all of the observed variability, by Lean and Rind’s accounting. But unlike the Hadley Centre’s model-based analysis, this assessment attributes a good deal of climate variability to variability in solar activity. That’s because most models can’t translate solar variability into climate variability the way the actual climate system can (Science, 28 August, p. 1058), Rind says.
Researchers may differ about exactly what’s behind recent natural climate variability, but they agree that no sort of natural variability can hold off greenhouse warming much longer. “Our prediction is that if past is prologue, the solar component will turn around and lead to rapid warming in the next 5 years,” says Rind.
Climate modeler David Smith of the Hadley Centre, who was not involved in the State of the Climate analysis, says his group’s climate model forecasts—made much the way weather forecasts are made—are still calling for warming to resume in the next few years as ocean influences reverse (Science, 10 August 2007, p. 746). Whether that’s in time to boost climate negotiations is anyone’s guess.
The ball is back in Richard Kerr’s court. Dr. Kerr, let’s have a five-year update for Science with a headline like “What Happened to Global Warming: Can Mainstream Climate Science Regain Its Footing?” His update might well take into account Judith Curry’s current post, IPCC AR5 weakens the case for AGW), that documented “several key elements … weakening of the case for attributing the warming [to] human influences:
- Lack of warming since 1998 and growing discrepancies with climate model projections
- Evidence of decreased climate sensitivity to increases in CO2
- Evidence that sea level rise in 1920-1950 is of the same magnitude as in 1993-2012
- Increasing Antarctic sea ice extent
- Low confidence in attributing extreme weather events to anthropogenic global warming.”
———–
[1] Curry cited this quotation from Hayek’s 1974 lecture: “I confess that I prefer true but imperfect knowledge, even if it leaves much indetermined and unpredictable, to a pretence of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.”
– See more at: http://www.masterresource.org/2014/01/kerr-science-2009-pause-jolt/#sthash.WL2iT5vI.dpuf
The BAMS State of the Climate, 2008 referenced in the article is available here …
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/bams-state-of-the-climate/2008.php
@Steve January 14, 2014 at 1:53 pm: Steve, I agree that “climate science” is rife with a misuse of statistics. However, (at least some) climate models attempt to seriously solve the underlying physical processes. Unfortunately, even there a desire to get expected results sometimes trumps the honesty:
http://judithcurry.com/2013/06/28/open-thread-weekend-23/#comment-338257
Five years really isn’t a very long time span. Kerr might possibly be correct (though, if so, likely for the wrong reasons). As Yogi Berra reputedly said, “Predicting is hard, especially about the future”.
Richard Kerr has a long standing interest in declaring the empirical validation of AGW theory and of affirming modelling predictions. In the mid-1990s, along with NYT writer William Stevens, he played an avant guarde role in the promotion of the idea that AGW had been detected. They used leaking information from drafting documents of the IPCC 2nd Assessment to make the claims. Moreover, Stevens and Kerr can be seen as putting pressure on the IPCC to push though these claims that Ben Santer was trying to get up on the basis of his recent unpublished work (he was the coordinating lead author of the detection chapter). In Sept (?) 1995 Kerr wrote an article saying that detection had been agreed by the IPCC experts, but that this result was still ‘semi-official’. Then, after the Madrid plenary of the IPCC WGI, Kerr proclaimed: It’s official: the first glimmer of greenhouse warming seen [Science 8 Dec95, p1565]. Indeed, even then it was not official, as the IPCC meeting to accept the report began in Rome a few days later.
These guys have no shame.
They claimed that nothing could stop the relentless warming. Then they retrofitted the pause, which could well be a peak rather than a pause. Then they retrofitted natural causes to explain it, then they say they are not surprised, it is what they expected.
They have no credibility either.
When is the end?
Here is a little something from our Gavin of NASA. The people made up of the right kinda stuff.
Gavin must have missed the Circumpolar Vortex, melting Arctic making it colder and the missing deep sea heat.
Scute’s comment on “It would be interesting to see how many times and for how long they had to run the model they used back then to get a 17 year pause. It should be simple enough to do.” made me think a bit more.
So I looked at the Science article again — the longest period of stasis they obtained in the 700 years of model running was 15 years.
It isn’t clear to me how many years each run of the model cited in the paper can actually encompass. We do know the accuracy of weather prediction declines the farther out it gets.
It certainly should be possible to take the model used back then in the Science paper and run it over and over with today’s more powerful computers and see just how often the current period of stasis (17+ years and counting) occurs (assuming it can be run for 20 or more years at a stretch).
From google scholar
Science 8 February 2013: Vol. 339 no. 6120 p. 638 “Forecasting Regional Climate Change Flunks Its First Test” by Richard A. Kerr “The strengthening greenhouse is warming the world, but what about your backyard, or at least your region? It’s hard to say, climate researchers concede. Modelers have sharpened their tools enough to project declining grape yields in a warmer, drier California wine country and to forecast that the Mediterranean region will be getting drier in coming decades. But just how reliable such localized projections might be remains unclear. Now, a group of global, rather than regional, modelers has tested a widely used regional model by simulating climate change, not just static past climate. Preliminary results show that the model improved little if at all on the fuzzy view of future climate provided by a globe-spanning model.”
and
Science 22 November 2013: Vol. 342 no. 6161 p. 918 “Humans Fueled Global Warming Millennia Ago” by Richard A. Kerr “People were already pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere 5000 years before the Industrial Revolution, air bubbles in Antarctic ice suggest. The new evidence supports a paleoclimatologist’s provocative idea that humanity began warming the world early, as methane bubbled out of early rice farmers’ paddies.”
From Google:
“Science’s Richard Kerr Wins Planetary Science Journalism Award” 17 July 2013 “Richard Kerr, long-time reporter for Science, has received an award from the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences (DPS) recognizing his broad coverage of planetary science research, including a 2012 article on gravity studies of the moon.”
Looks like a man avoiding the inconvenient truth of climate model failure.
Normally in science, when the models and reality diverge, it’s not reality that’s wrong.
When theory fails to predict real world results, it’s not the real world that’s wrong.
But apparently, when enough grant money is at stake, science can be quite flexible.
One might well question the intelligence of someone who admits that his model did not predict the current state but is still full of confidence that its predictions for the future are ironclad (although in this case very fuzzy – “a few years or so”). His “evidence” seems to bethat “all thescientists believe this will happen.” Of course, “all those same scientists” had formerly believed that a pause of this magnitude was “near impossible.” Gooney birds don’t look so inferior, by comparison.
bbc more interested in PERCEPTIONS than PREDICTIONS lately. a new meme is developing – scare people with crazy geoengineering stories & they’ll beg for carbon dioxide emissions reductions:
Andrew Luck-Baker still stuck in Antarctica, so his Discovery Programme yesterday was hosted by GAIA VINCE! the much-published Gaia:
Wandering Gaia: About Me (Gaia Vince)
This is a uniquely critical time in our planet’s history, in which climate change, globalisation, communications technology and increasing human population are changing our world as never before. The developing world is experiencing these impacts more obviously and sooner than the rich West – they are already feeling the effects of biodiversity loss, erratic weather patterns, glacial melt and forced migrations, for example – and I am documenting these impacts, talking to ordinary people, scientists and heads of state as I travel in the Anthropocene…
I am the opinion, analysis and features editor for the journal Nature Climate Change, which publishes the latest research in the field. I also write for a variety of different outlets, including the BBC, The Guardian, New Scientist, Australian Geographic, Science, Seed, and I do pieces for radio. Before I set off on this journey, I was the news editor of the science journal Nature. And before that, I was an editor at New Scientist magazine. You can see some of my recent work that’s relevant to this trip on the sidebar under ‘Me Elsewhere‘…
http://wanderinggaia.com/about-me/
listen from 12 min in, for Naomi Vaughan of UEA:
26:30: BBC Discovery: Geoengineering
Gaia Vince explores the process of putting chemicals in the stratosphere to stop solar energy reaching the earth…
Another idea is to spray seawater to whiten clouds that would reflect more energy away from the earth.
Gaia Vince talks to the researchers who are considering solar radiation management. She also hears from social scientists who are finding out what the public think about the idea and who are asking who should make decisions about implementing this way of cooling the planet…
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01p2pf4
(PARAPHRASING NAOMI VAUGHAN: SOME OF THE PEOPLE WHO LEARN ABOUT GEOENGINEERING PLANS VIA NAOMI’S WORKSHOPS ON “PERCEPTIONS”, HAVE A PERCEPTION THAT, IF THIS IS WHAT SCIENTISTS ARE LOOKING AT, THINKING ABOUT, THEN THIS CLIMATE CHANGE MUST BE A REAL PROBLEM & I MUST DO MORE.
GAIA VINCE: SO IRONICALLY, TELLING PEOPLE ABOUT GEOENGINEERING MAY MAKE THEM MORE LIKELY TO USE LESS FOSSIL FUELS.)
Science Direct: October 2013: Messing with nature? Exploring public perceptions of geoengineering in the UK – (Elsevier’s) Global Environmental Change Vol 23, Issue 5
Authors: Adam Corner , Karen Parkhill, Nick Pidgeon, Naomi E. Vaughan
Participants raised serious concerns about the safety of SRM technologies, and a strong preference for more conventional, mitigation options over geoengineering techniques tended to be expressed…
3. Methodology
Following a pilot study in Cardiff, four one day deliberative workshops were conducted in four different cities in the UK: Birmingham, Cardiff, Glasgow and Norwich…
Each workshop was attended by 11 participants. Participants were recruited through a professional recruitment agency…
The workshops were facilitated by the authors and took place over the course of one day. There were several stages to the day including: (1) an overview of climate change involving a presentation by facilitators and a whole group discussion by participants; (2) World Café style small group discussion of responses (i.e. mitigation followed by adaptation followed by geoengineering) to climate change…
One unexpected aspect of the debates about geoengineering and nature was the particular salience of concerns about the increasing materialism of modern society. Perhaps, they represent a deeper expression of concern about the continuation of an industrial project that is now known to have had a significantly negative impact on many aspects of the ‘natural’ environment…
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0959378013001015
Matt McGrath building the meme a week ago:
8 Jan: BBC: Matt McGrath: Geoengineering plan could have ‘unintended’ side effect
However some researchers have questioned the experiment and the findings.
“I know of no serious scientist who would advocate introducing 100 megatonnes of sulphur dioxide in a four degree warmer world,” said Dr Matt Watson, from the University of Bristol, who was previously involved in a British project to test this concept.
( Prof Piers Forster, from the University of Leeds)”At present, these injection technologies do not exist, even on paper, and this precludes an evaluation of realistic effectiveness or side effects.
“If we want to suppress global warming the only game in town at present is reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25639343
OK, here it is again. Here is the list showing the history of global warming standstill angst. It starts with our dear Professor Phil Jones (the slippery snake).
I will have to add some for 2014, but I will have to wait a few months maybe.
“a pretense of exact knowledge that is likely to be false.”
Here is another quote they can mull over while they wait for the magic molecule to come to their rescue:
“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.”
Sherlock Holmes Quote
-A Scandal in Bohemia
The model predicted that the airplane could take off from our 5,000 foot runway. I know it’s out in the weeds somewhere but it’ll be flying real soon now. Can I get you a cup of coffee while we wait?
“But along the way in the 700 years of simulation, about 17 separate 10-year intervals had temperature trends resembling that of the past decade—that is, more or less flat.”
They’d have to be negative at least .2C/decade to “offset” the supposed “accelerating” warming. If you assume accelerating warming, which is required for global warming to ever be faster than what is beneficial, we’d need to be looking for far longer periods than 10 years being flat, since it should be increasingly steep.
Here is why I create my lists. It shuts up persistent Warmists who insist on one thing or another. Rather than make claims and counterclaims I point them to what the climate scientists said or published – allowing Warmists an opportunity to challenge the climate scientists instead. It is a great strategy for me and save me time.
(I was referring to looking for evidence natural variability in the historical record.)
It does not really matter what happens in the next several years, warming, cooling or flat. The whole CAGW model is already broken. There was never any contention on the direct impact of increasing CO2, which is a moderate and uniform warming contribution. The C in front of AGW entirely hinged on amplification of the effects of CO2. To make that argument fly, it was necessary to demand that the albedo element in the earth energy balance equation to be essentially steady from other factors. Only CO2 induced warming can cause this to vary significantly (excepting of point events like volcanos). If albedo has natural variability, then the whole amplification argument evaporates. Since natural variability has already caused a hiatus in GW, the amplification element of AGW is no longer viable.
Global temps have not increased … but Arctic and sub Arctic temps have … what is going on? Even now the average temp above 80 degs north remains above the average (albeit a small data set).
We’ve been waiting….. 17 years.
Five years really isn’t a very long time span.
But add it to 12 years and it starts to get significant.
Thanks Robert, good article.
Only the future will tell. I’m watching for ENSO to resolve the hiatus into a peak (cooling follows) or a pause (warming resumes).
Thanks for the compilation Jimbo. Very useful. The number of people who like to say there is no pause seems to be increasing.
Jimbo says: January 14, 2014 at 3:49 pm
OK, here it is again. Here is the list showing the history of global warming standstill angst.
And I do agree with Joe Chang that “The whole CAGW model is already broken”.
But along the way in the 700 years of simulation, about 17 separate 10-year intervals had temperature trends resembling that of the past decade—that is, more or less flat.
But this is sleight of hand. We are now at 17 years. How many of the 17 had that long a period of more or less flat?