Satellites show no global warming for 17 years 5 months

“””””…..Gail Combs says:
February 7, 2014 at 6:22 am
Kathy says: @ur momisugly February 7, 2014 at 6:05 am
17 years and 5 months is an odd interval.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Kathy, go back and read Richard Courtney’s explanation of why the analysis starts in the present and goes back in time until the data says there is warming.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/02/06/satellites-show-no-global-warming-for-17-years-5-months/#comment-1561052…..”””””
Trust a farmer to be thinking straight.
Viscount Monckton, introduced us to this extended period of essentially zero slope, some time before it was even 17 years, as others had suggested 17 years as a minimum interval to be climatically significant.
Since then, Christopher has updated his extraction monthly starting as Gail says from the point in time where growth last showed up statistically, and has continued to do so.
I think that is a lot of work to go to, although I’m sure he has it automated, so he only needs to update the data set, as the numbers come in; and presumably at some future month, he will be able to say that a definite drop or a definite increase has appeared on the scene.
Besides those numbers like 17 years, and five months, are pure artifacts of our archaic time system.
Perhaps if Lord Christopher, would switch over to “star dates”, instead of earth years and months; then the texting nerds, might understand the numbers don’t really count that much it is the total elapsed time that matters.

per Mike Mellor.
“””””…..Anthony please stop accommodating Chris Monckton. There is one tiny part of the world stuck in a time warp where ancestral titles still mean something. The rest of the world is a democracy and we couldn’t give a rat’s about the man’s claims to superiority and nobility. …..”””””
Well Mike, I don’t know what planet YOU live on, but on the one I live on, democracies are rather rare.
For example, I live in a Country, a quite large one, that is a Republic; NOT a Democracy. And each of its several States, is Guaranteed by its Constitution, that they shall have a Republican form of government. Now I suppose they could themselves choose to amend their own State Constitutions, to convert to a Democracy; which is really a polite word for Anarchy.
But only a minority of the worlds people live in a democracy, or even enjoy ANY kind of self rule at all.
Dictatorships and oligarchys are far more common.
You sound like you live in a place, where nothing at all means anything to anybody. Why do you even have a name ? Surely a simple number perhaps in the range of 1 up to seven billion, should suffice to distinguish YOU from all the milling crowds on this earth.
For that matter; throw in the animals as well, and enumerate them too.
Or do you somehow feel that YOU deserve to be elevated above mere animals, as some kind of special case, of evolutionary superiority.
Certainly, intelligence has so far not proven to have any better survival characteristics, than simply being big and mean, and ugly. That suited the dinosaurs for about 140 million years or so, while intelligence maybe has lasted for 100,000 years, and doesn’t look like it will last much longer.
If your only criticism of Viscount Monckton’s statistical analysis of the RSS data set, is that he happened by accident, to inherit a Hereditary title; usually reserved for persons who have demonstrated high achievement, and service, then you perhaps would find it more comfortable for you somewhere else.
It is said that the Emperor Napoleon, crowned himself; couldn’t wait for the Pope I guess. I think maybe the same thing has happened in America, by the sound of things.
Christopher Monckton at least, was not a party to his becoming a Hereditary Viscount; it fell upon him, so to speak.
Perhaps you might read some history. Even on Wikipedia, it is possible to learn some interesting history.
Your comment says more about you, than it does about Christopher Monckton of Brenchley.

WD

You can see that easily here. The regions of near zero trend are marked in brown. You can click for details. It gives CI’s (85%) and t-statistics.
Wow, way cool, Nick! It takes a few minutes to figure out the triangle graphic, but once you do it is remarkably informative. Makes cherrypicking easier than ever before (just kidding, kinda, maybe:-)!
But yeah, it reduces searching for neutral to cooling trend times to a glance (and also redisplays the stretches of strong warming and cooling in an interesting way).
rgb

Events since that paper was published, including a continuing absence of warming, have tended to confirm the likelihood that sensitivity is low and that, therefore, there will be little warming this century. That is one reason why the IPCC has cut by almost half its prediction of warming over the next 30 years. The trolls are now out of line even with the IPCC.
Mr. Monckton, while I agree with most of your statements and understand your need to present a sane political position that is necessarily slightly overstated in order to counter the complete lack of objectivity and obvious scientific pandering the counter position, I would put it very slightly differently. The continuing absence of warming does not confirm low sensitivity (although it does as you note tend in that direction. What it does is allow us to fairly conclusively reject GCMs that predict (in my opinion, absurdly) high climate sensitivity and get them out of the ARn reports! To put it bluntly, any GCM that has predicted a mean warming of 0.5C higher than what has been observed over the last 20 years is almost certainly badly broken. So why are models in this general category still in AR5? Because they permit one to draw deliberately misleading pictures for policy makers in the SPM (e.g. figure 1.4) while still being able to make the lofty claim of scientific neutrality. Whether or not one “averages” the GCMs (an utterly meaningless abuse of the mathematical science of statistical analysis to produce a “mean prediction” that supposedly should have more weight than the individual GCMs that actually are not in terrible agreement with observation) the human eye and mind perceives the envelope of model results and by its nature averages it to produce a curve with extrapolated sensitivity in between none and the 5+C of the hottest running failed models.
The climate scientists that write the report can apparently do little better than the human eye, but dress up an indefensible statistical claim with indefensible assertions of “confidence”. Precisely what is the statistical basis of their “confidence”?
At the moment, the most accurate way of stating affairs is that the observational data does not support the claims for high sensitivity because it suffices to fairly conclusively reject the GCMs that predict it with a high degree of confidence. It substantially weakens the claims for intermediate (2-3 C) sensitivity — models that produce median sensitivity in this range probably do have more than 5% overlap in their Monte Carlo runs with observation, but not much more — they are models that should indeed be slated for rejection should the neutral trend continue. The data doesn’t really substantially constrain the models that produce comparatively low climate sensitivity (0-2C) — those models produce runs that are actually cooler than the present in reasonable abundance as well as those that are warmer. I wish that I had time to sort out CMIP5 models one at a time — I think it would be very revealing to apply a reasonable rejection criterion and write an alternative summary for policy makers from the same data, but with the statistical analysis done correctly and in a defensible way, backed up by a statistical report (not really a scientific report) laid out in detail. I think such a report could be placed head to head in competition with the official one and would convince even a lot of climate scientists that the AR SPMs are dangerously overblown and risk destroying the reputation and future of climate science itself as time passes.
I do not feel confident in personally even estimating the future climate sensitivity by year 2100 within any range that would be particularly useful. The data tells us that >3C is unlikely at this point, but not so unlikely as to be impossible. The data probably also suffices to exclude negative climate sensitivity, which is physically implausible anyway. However, the real problem here is that none of the GCMs are correctly capturing the split between GHG-forced warming, natural feedbacks, and natural variation where the latter is (again IMO) a much, much greater factor than AR’s SPM “confidently” states. Again, this is something that I think that even a lot of the climate scientists that have in the past made egregious claims about CO_2 forced warming are starting to face — they know the models are failing and really, they aren’t stupid, only misled by their own perhaps too-strong prior beliefs about linearized feedbacks against a flat natural background.
Michael Mann is not without a share of blame for this — he did the entire discipline of climate science a serious disservice when he “erased” all of the natural variation of the climate over the last 1000 years in the infamous hockey stick graph. If one weights the hockey stick strongly as a prior belief, the conditioned analysis of everything changes. It takes time and confounding data to overcome the bias this represents.
But to the extent that a nonlinear chaotic strongly couple system can be “split” into natural variation (utterly unpredictable within current models, not even particularly well representable) plus GHG+feedback forcing, a larger contribution from natural variation comes at the strict expense of a smaller contribution from GHGs. The problem is that I don’t think anybody has a defensible way to decompose climate variation on any climactically relevant timescale in this way. At the moment, natural variability could easily end up being a larger factor than GHG forcing plus feedbacks and we could all be actively misled about the future in either direction, because we cannot even begin to predict if natural variation will further warm the climate (independent of GHGs) or cool it (independent of GHGs) or what will happen when what would have been a warming or cooling trend> interacts nonlinearly with GHG forcing variation.
It is worth remembering that the climate has a known cold-cycle instability, and we do not, actually, have any clue as to what triggers it to produce cyclic glaciation, or when those factors align to make cold-cycle instability critical. A glance at the climate record of the Pliestocene in general and the Holocene in particular suggests that if anything, the geological time scale evolution of the climate is one of cooling towards the transition point to the next round of glaciation, which really would be something to panic over. So in spite of the fact that GHG-linked climate sensitivity is very likely to be (as you say) in the ballpark of perhaps 1-2 C averaged over and ensemble of possible unpredictable natural futures, the variation of those futures alone is likely commensurate. We could have anything from cooling over the whole next century (due to natural cooling that might have been much greater if it were not for CO_2) to double the warming that CO_2 might have produced if nothing else changed if natural warming adds to CO_2 in some way.
I suspect that we are roughly 20 to 30 years away from having the data alone needed to build successful climate models that can represent the natural vs forced split accurately. This isn’t an arbitrary number of years — we need a time span of accurate, satellite-based observations that includes at least one whole cycle of the PDO, and hopefully will include the phase transition in e.g. the NAO and other multidecadal cycles, as these cycles are strongly correlated with past climate shifts, have periods that are generally not integer multiples of each other and hence can constructively or destructively interfere in their effects. We simply don’t have any useful measurements of things like the jet stream in all of the different phase combinations, and variations of the jet stream or Hadley circulation patterns have large and “immediate” effects on the climate, not to mention the pattern of weather. We are also waiting for enough decades of ARGO data (ideally with a steadily increasing number of fixed and floating buoys, as the coverage is still far too sparse for 70% of the Earth’s surface), enough decades of satellite-based GRACE data and correctly adjusted SLR data — basically we are barely ENTERING the era where we might get accurate measurements in many dimensions needed to constrain the climate models to where they work.
If they can work at all at their current granularity. This all by itself is a serious issue. Climate models are literally blind to all sorts of short spatial wavelength phenomena, both horizontally and vertically. They perforce attempt to dynamically evolve with some sort of “average” over the short wavelength behavior, but in a highly nonlinear system with substantial feedbacks it is very difficult indeed to “renormalize” the dynamics to a macroscopic scale in such a way that it will reproduce even on average the time evolution of finer-grained trajectories. As Pielke, Sr. just presented on another thread (with admirable support from the literature) GCMs are failing badly outside of their glaring failure in global average temperature — they fail to accurately reproduce the climate at any length or time scale, getting countless things wrong and only a comparatively few things right. They have basically no skill out to a decade, and as we can see they have no skill (so far) out to nearly two decades in global average temperature. GCM defenders are reduced to claiming that they will only have skill out at 30 years or more, but while this might be true, it is obviously an easily doubtful assertion.
It appears that climate skeptics are at long last getting something of a hearing, motivated by the observation that they might be right after all and it wouldn’t do politically to appear overtly biased against the side that ends up being right after wasting a few hundreds of billions of dollars and diverting the energy of an entire civilization down the rabbit hole for two decades at the expense of solving the world’s real problems. It would be extremely wise to assemble a correctly done counteranalysis of the GCM data (which is, fortunately, freely available) and use that analysis to reject the failed models and thereby quantitatively moderate the egregious predictions and “confidence” assertions of AR5’s SPM.
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Believe these robots or your lying eyes; google-earth the 5 Molasses Keys (hint there are only 2 left from the rising Caribbean Sea) just off the 7-mile bridge, flooded during the same 17.5 years!

Sir Chris February 8, 2014 at 3:50 am
“I need note only that “Village Idiot”, though it says it regards itself as “clever””
No. I commented that you had attempted a “clever smear” with your comment:
“The “Idiot” – unless it is paid very well by those who spend so much time and money trying to discredit anyone who does not unquestioningly accept every daft tenet of the New Religion..”
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You write:
“I need note only that “Village Idiot”, though it says it regards itself as “clever”, was unable to refute a single one of my answers with any scientific argument.”
I’m just airing my views which you have counted. I think other Village residents can draw their own conclusions, though for reasons best known to yourself, you may prefer a protracted slanging match.
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Just one point. You say: “there will be little warming this century.” That’s a bit vague. Care to put even an approximate figure on it, what with you being so good at all those Statistics 101, math an’ all. 0.05 per decade? 0.1 per decade? Can you tell us (in laymans terms) how you reach that estimate or is it mere apriorism (look it up. You misused the term on me above).