No global warming for 17 years, 6 months

Unsettled climage divergance suspected.

By my count the downtrend is now statistically significant – the satellite is 95% certain that Global Cooling is Real and It’s Worse Than We Thought ™.

Plausible is all that was meant by my comment. The PDO+Solar is completely sufficient to explain all the changes in global temperature over the last 150 years. Each of the segments in this graph line up with a mode of the PDO. All upward trends are +PDO situations and all downward trends are -PDO. What are the chances of that happening by chance?
Pretty good, actually, but that is neither here nor there. To continue to pick nits — you observe that there is a strong gross correlation between PDO phase, and less convincingly solar state, and the general pattern of variation over the last 150 years. All well and good, and I agree. However, this does not explain them, sufficiently or otherwise. For example, it doesn’t extend still further in to the less-well-known past to explain the temperature variation over the last 400 years, 1000 years, 10000 years. It is by no means clear that it has predictive value into the indefinite future — we won’t know until the future happens. It could actually fairly easily be coincidence, or it could be causal but only causal when three other things just happen to be lined up perfectly, which was true for the last couple or three cycles but is no longer true starting tomorrow. It is a chaotic multivariate nonlinear system, so one almost EXPECTS transient quasi-patterns to briefly emerge and then disappear again, where the details of the “causality” are lost in a blend of multivariate coupled nonlinear phenomena.
However, we completely agree that it is absolutely not the case that it has been shown “necessary” to invoke CO_2-based additional warming to explain the current average temperatures. It is reasonably probable that CO_2 does contribute some fraction of the warming. It is almost certain that the lack of a UHI correction in HADCRUT4 contributes some fraction of the apparent warming. It is likely enough that a large fraction of the observed warming in the late 20th century was natural, not human-forced, and it is simply false to assert that the observed warming was in any way “unprecedented” or even unlikely based on the data in any statistically signficant sense — it isn’t even a significant outlier on the distribution of warming and cooling spells in the absurdly short thermometric record as represented by HADCRUT4.
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Steven Mosher says:
March 4, 2014 at 8:40 am
So, yes. there is an anomaly. Good thing is that its not being ignored as the Pioneer anomaly was for 14 years. Folks are working on it. This is normal science at work. Its always unsettled.

What makes you say that “Folks are working on it”?
All we hear is that it doesn’t really happening, or total silence, or misdirection. Which particular scientist from AGW camp honestly and openly acknowledges the anomaly and talks about it? In press?

Would those political and economic decisions then be to not waste time, effort, and money attempting to prevent something that we aren’t causing?
May not be causing, or aren’t causing all of. Most skeptics who are actually scientists in their own right (including myself) understand that CO_2 is, probably, a “cause” of some fraction of the current global average temperature, and agree further that it may have a differential impact and affect temperatures in some places more than or differently than others. But there is a really big difference between taking the average temperature rise from 1943 to 2013 (of around 0.4C/7 = 0.06C/decade) and attributing 100% of it to CO_2 and taking the average temperature rise from 1985 and 1998 (same rise, but now over only 13 years, so 0.4C/1.3 = 0.3C/decade) and attributing 100% of it to CO_2 and then asserting that this rise rate will be maintained for 100 years, unless it ends up being even higher.
At the point the temperature has been more or less stable for longer after this rise than the rise itself took, and the situation is even worse when one notes that over half of the total rise took place in a single two year stretch from 1996 to 1998 in association not with gradually increasing CO_2 levels, but in direct causally verified coincidence with a super-strong ENSO.
Do politicians ever do that?
Sure. Right after the voters throw the rascals out, which they do periodically. They recently did so in Australia. Many of the European countries are coming to realize that they’ve exhausted the appetite of their populations for artificially imposed economic hardship to solve a badly predicted problem that doesn’t seem to be occurring at all the way it was predicted to occur. And do not be deceived — not even all climate scientists, including many that will freely admit that CO_2 is likely to cause some warming relative to whatever the temperature might have been without it, think that the warming by 2100 will have catastrophic effects. I’m not certain that there is currently even a true majority. AR5 represents a bit of a sea change where uncertainty is finally being acknowledged. It’s just a shame that nature had to literally bust the authors in the teeth before they would let go of what was, most unfortunately, a very advantageous hypothesis to climate scientists!
If global temperatures stubbornly remain flat — where I personally have no more idea that they will or won’t than any other human being alive, but am perhaps more honest about my ignorance than most — it will be very difficult to see how this won’t go down as the worst case of the more or less deliberate corruption of the scientific process in post-Enlightenment human history.
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rgbatduke says:
March 5, 2014 at 7:35 am
Excellent!
Clear. Concise. No embellishment or equivocation.
Thank You!
Mac

Reblogged this on Truth, Lies and In Between and commented:
The science is settled. There is no global warming.

In that connection, you may find Paul_K’s post here of interest. If I read it right–and I’m absolutely inept at statistics, so maybe I didn’t–his reaction to claims that some temperature trend is significant is, What’s the null hypothesis?
Interesting. One can also do a credible job of fitting HADCRUT4 from 1850 to the present with a single linear term and a single sinusoidal term with a period around 60 years. But the problem with such fits is that they are all various sorts of “kerfluffle”. And note how the eternal issue of the error bars on the data were once again neatly sidestepped, as were all the unaccounted for sources of systematic bias in the process that transforms the data — especially the older data — into a global anomaly average. It is difficult to keep actual instrumentation from experiencing a drift of zero across a mere decade, let alone keep a temperature reconstruction model with hand-picked temperature series and ever-widening regions of spatial interpolation from ever less precise instrumentation correctly centered not just on a single temperature zero — something NASA openly acknowledges is impossible to do within one whole degree C either way — but on an anomaly in the absolute temperature from an arbitrary late 20th century, UHI-corrupted baseline.
Note well that the total warming evident in HADCRUT4 from 1850 to the present:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1850/to:2013
is roughly 0.7 C, 0.4C of which is late 20th century and 0.3 of which is early 20th century warming. Note well the change in the annual/monthly variance of the data as one goes back into the past. HADCRUT4 acknowledges an error of 0.15C at the right hand edge of this graph in the modern instrumental era. This error estimate is almost certainly artificially low as it exceeds the difference between HADCRUT4 and GISS LOTI for much of the last decade, and HADCRUT4 does not correct for the UHI and hence is reasonably certain to contain a warming bias from the left side of this figure to the right. If they make the assertion of 0.15C on the right hand side without correcting its UHI bias, they have to add this bias onto the total error estimate of the left hand side, that is, to temperatures in the 19th century and early 20th century. Furthermore, the error estimate correction they must add is asymmetric reflecting the asymmetric bias of the UHI in the first place.
I think it is safe enough to say that the error estimate without UHI is at least 3x 0.15C, and 4x is probably still more reasonable. That is, unbiased instrumental error in the first third of this graph is very likely at least 0.5C, maybe even 0.6C. At that scale, the error envelopes from the 19th century to the present almost overlap, making assertion of any warming at all on the basis of this data alone a bit problematic. Bear in mind that one part of the Earth can be warming and another cooling, and in the 19th century huge parts of the Earth’s surface including entire continents were completely unsampled as far as HADCRUT4 is concerned (and at best anecdotally sampled otherwise). It isn’t until the latter half of the 20th century, in particular the satellite era, that we began to have halfway decent coverage of global temperatures, and by then UHI is a serious concern.
If one considers the lack of UHI correction on top of the probable error, it is by no means clear that any warming at all has occurred from the 19th century to the present. Even a UHI correction of a few tenths of a degree overall (during a time that the world’s population increased by six billion people, with a very real possibility of spurious rural warming as an artifact as forests were cut down and turned into houses and farms to house and feed the extra six billion people) would drop the overall warming from 0.7C to 0.5C or 0.4C, with most of the change/error occurring, as one would expect, in the last fifty or sixty years of the curve. HADCRUT4 might well require correction by means of subtracting a term that is monotonic in global population that removes as much as 0.2C over the last fifty years alone, halving the nominal late 20th century warming of 0.4C in one stroke.
This illustrates two issues. Before one fits a curve to the data, it helps to remove the commensurate systematic biases because with them in place, your model fit is fitting the bias, not the data and your model based conclusions can evaporate in a puff of kerfluffle-gas once they are accounted for. Second, it is silly to fit nonlinear, non-flat model to the data when the probable error in the data is so large that it isn’t even clear that the first order linear trend is truly significant. A linear fit to HADCRUT4 yields an absolutely systematic trend:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1850/to:2013/plot/hadcrut4gl/trend
of 0.8C/16 = 0.05C/decade. This is remarkably robust — consider 0.4C from 1943 to 2013. The late 20th century adds perhaps 0.01 to the overall trend. This is a reasonable linearized assertion of the effect of increased CO_2 based on the unjustified assumption that all other things should remain equal — a whopping 0.01C of additional warming per decade. Hell, I’ll give you twice this — double it or treble it and I still don’t care.
To conclude, the comments made about “ignoring the physics” are entirely apropos, but they have to be moderated by the observation that one is rather justified in ignoring the physics as long as the physically based models get the wrong answer and fail to predict the actual variation of temperature. There is no guarantee that the physics used in the models predicting catastrophic warming is correct, complete, or being evaluated at sufficient resolution to have any predictive force whatsoever, and there is actual empirical evidence that they are actively failing to have correctly predicted the climate accurately over the interval following their reference period (basically, the model training set).
Looking at HADCRUT4 we can see why the models are failing — they selected a particularly poor interval to choose as a reference period. They would have done far better to select a much longer interval, one that included an entire 60 year cycle, and not just the short stretch in which all of the warming that was observed over the last 70 years occurred over a 15 year interval.
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rgbatduke,
Yes, the global temperature anomaly graph since 1880 looks like random noise. In fact I replicated the graph from 1950-2013 using a random walk function. The two graphs look almost identical. Further, the frequency distribution of the deviations from the mean value resembles a normal distribution. This is what you would expect from random variables. There’s no statistically significant deviation (2-sigma) in the anomalies, if you consider the data error range. Again this is the characteristic of random variables.
Does it mean global temperature is random? Not really. It means there’s no statistical proof that it is non-random. Consider coin flipping. We think it’s random. It’s actually deterministic and can be predicted accurately using Lagrangian mechanics. This is empirically proven by the mechanical coin flipper. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1697475
Climate is more chaotic than coin flipping but it is also deterministic. If we understand the physical causes, we can make predictions subject to probability theory. But the 95% certainty of IPCC is nonsense.