RSS considers the cause of a Pause now half the satellite record long
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Times are not easy for true-believers just now. The RSS satellite lower-troposphere temperature anomaly for March, just in, shows no global warming at all for 17 years 8 months. This remarkable 212-month period, enduring from August 1996 to March 2014, represents half of the entire 423-month satellite record since it began in January 1979.
Figure 1. The remarkable 212-month absence of global warming, notwithstanding a record rate of increase in CO2 concentration. The Pause – the least-squares trend on the data for the past 17 years 8 months – now extends to just over half the entire 423-month Remote Sensing Systems satellite record since January 1979.
Yet we should not crow. A strongish el Niño – we are rather overdue for one – may well shorten the Pause quite a bit, but probably only until the subsequent la Niña a year or two later, whereupon the Pause may resume and perhaps continue embarrassingly to lengthen for a decade and more. Or so my model tells me, and that means it must be right. Right?
To appreciate the sheer magnitude of the credibility problem the modelers and their host of fawning apologists now face, we can look at the crisis faced by the paid propaganda merchants at “Skeptical” “Science”. They are proud of their tacky little alarmo-ticker, which – so they assert – demonstrates how many “Hiroshima bombs” of global-warming energy have been trapped in the atmosphere since – for some reason – 1998.
The labeling of that useless widget with the word “Hiroshima” is a downright offensive and insulting exploitation of the death and acute suffering of hundreds of thousands of innocent, non-combatant citizens of Japan in one of the most disgraceful atrocities in the dismal history of warfare.
It is all of a piece with the characterization of scientific skeptics as “climate deniers”, a hate-speech term that maliciously invites comparison with the most disgraceful atrocity in the history of warfare – the slaughter of almost six million innocent, non-combatant citizens of Europe by Hitler’s goons.
For this reason, let us talk no more of “Hiroshima bombs”. Let as talk, as followers of the scientific method should, of the radiant energy theoretically retained in the atmosphere by the influence of Man on the climate – and not just since 1998 but since the Pause began in August 1996.
CO2 concentration in 1996 was about 363 ppmv. Now it is more like 398. We may assume either that temperature feedbacks are net-zero or that, over so short a timescale as 17 years 7 months, they will not have had much opportunity to operate.
In that event, using the IPCC’s method, the additional radiant energy retained in the atmosphere thanks to CO2 is 5.35 times the logarithm of the proportionate CO2 concentration change in Watts per square meter, divided by the fraction of total anthropogenic forcing represented by CO2, which the IPCC reckons at 70%. That gives 0.704 Watts per square meter.
All of this is mainstream IPCC climatology. No ifs or buts. That, at minimum, is the quantum of anthropogenic radiative forcing that should have warmed the system since September 1996 – if the IPCC were right. According to NASA the volumetric mean radius of the Earth is 6371 km. Surface area, then, is around 510 Tm^2. So the additional energy flux in the Earth-atmosphere system since the Pause began is close to 360 TW. That’s a lotta Watts.
In a zero-feedback regime the instantaneous and equilibrium warmings are equal. By the IPCC’s own method, then, the central estimate of the global warming that should have occurred since September 1996 is 0.313 x 0.704. That works out at 0.22 Cº. But the observed, real-world outturn is 0.00 Cº. So, where on Earth did all those terawatts go? RSS have been working on that. This is what they report [with comments from me in square brackets]:
“Over the past decade, we have been collaborating with Ben Santer at LLNL (along with numerous other investigators) to compare our tropospheric results with the predictions of climate models. [Three cheers: they’re doing some good, old-fashioned science, checking the models’ output rather than just believing it].
“Our results can be summarized as follows:
“Over the past 35 years, the troposphere has warmed significantly. The global average temperature has risen at an average rate of about 0.13 Kelvin (0.23 Fº) per decade. [Actually, make that closer to 0.12 K/decade: the Pause is long enough to slow the rate a little more].
“Climate models cannot explain this warming if human-caused increases in greenhouse gases are not included as input to the model simulation. [But the warming is well within natural variability, so the inability of models to “explain” the warming without Man merely shows how bad they are at representing natural influences].
“The spatial pattern of warming is consistent with human-induced warming. See Santer et al., 2008-12, for more about the detection and attribution of human induced changes in atmospheric temperature using MSU/AMSU data. [Note the use of one of the usual suspects’ favorite weasel-phrases, “consistent with”: the spatial pattern of warming is also “consistent with” natural variability, and an honest scientist would have said so].
“But the troposphere has not warmed as fast as almost all climate models predict. [Their emphasis. Hurrah! Some intellectual honesty about the Pause at last].
“To illustrate this last problem, we show several plots below. Each of these plots has a time series of TLT temperature anomalies using a reference period of 1979-2008.
“In each plot, the thick black line is the measured data from RSS V3.3 MSU/AMSU temperatures. The yellow band shows the 5% to 95% envelope for the results of 33 CMIP5 [Climate Model Inter-comparison Project, version 5] model simulations (19 different models, many with multiple realizations) that are intended to simulate Earth’s climate over the 20th century.
“The mean value of each time series average from 1979-1984 is set to zero so the changes over time can be more easily seen.
“For the period before 2005, the models were forced with historical values of greenhouse gases, volcanic aerosols, and solar output. After 2005, estimated projections of these forcings were used. If the models, as a whole, were doing an acceptable job of simulating the past, then the observations would mostly lie within the yellow band.
“For the first two plots, (Fig. 2 and Fig 3), showing global averages and tropical averages, this is not the case. Only for the far northern latitudes, as shown in Fig. 4, are the observations within the range of model predictions.
“Figure 2. Global (80S-80N) mean TLT [tropical lower-troposphere] anomaly as a function of time. After 1998, the observations are likely to be below the simulated values, indicating that the simulation as a whole are predicting too much warming. [Honesty again].
“Figure 3. Tropical (30S-30N) mean TLT anomaly as a function of time. Again, after 1998, the observations are likely to be below the simulated values, indicating that the simulation as a whole are predicting too much warming. [Yet more honesty].
“Figure 4. Northern Polar (55N-80N) mean TLT anomaly as a function of time. For this latitude band, the observations remain within the model envelope. [But latterly on the low side].
“The reasons for the discrepancy between the predicted and observed warming rate are currently under investigation by a number of research groups. Possible reasons include increased oceanic circulation leading to increased subduction of heat into the ocean, higher than normal levels of stratospheric aerosols due to volcanoes during the past decade, incorrect ozone levels used as input to the models, lower than expected solar output during the last few years, or poorly modeled cloud feedback effects. It is possible (or even likely) that a combination of these candidate causes is responsible.”
Just a little honesty there, too. Just one off-the-cuff suggestion (volcanoes, which have not been particularly active globally in the past decade), but no fewer than three possible modeling errors are suggested.
At last, at long last, the Pause is having its effect. The modelers, and those – such as the IPCC – who have until recently placed a naïve and complete faith in them to which no mathematician would have subscribed for an instant unless he had been very well paid to do so, are beginning, just beginning, to wake up and smell the coffee. Will somebody tell the politicians before they squander any more of your money and mine?
Forgive me if the answer is obvious to everyone else, but – on another blog – someone tried to point out that the straight line on this chart is at the 0.23 or 0.24C level for the past 17+ years. My assumption was that – during this period anyway – actual temperatures have stayed flat (on average) over the reference period, whenever it was.
What these bloggers are claiming instead is that the 0.23C number actually represents the annual INCREASE in temperature, which would be revealed if absolute temperature numbers were used on this chart, instead of anomalies. I think that they are probably full of sh*t, but I have made mistakes myself in the past by assuming I know what the numbers represent.
Can someone clarify, please? 17 years at an annual increase per year of 0.23C would result in a crazy high temperature increase, so that CAN’T be possible, right?……..
“It matters not one jot whether the people of Hiroshima were combatants or not, it was a means to an end.”
“So a fine patriotic man like yourself would have had no qualms about point-blank execution of those same civilians, women and children too, to bring an end to the war? Or is it different when you do it from the air with bombs and the ugly details are not in your face?”
Two extreme views. The middle ground – of course it matters whether the people of Hiroshima were combatants or not, but choices are often made not between a perfect idealistic situation and one which is clearly immoral but between the lesser of two evils or bad situations.
I think Pete’s high and mighty sarcasm and posturing is misplaced. Would he have been one of those who would have rushed to the Japanese mainland to be slaughtered by a highly motivated national population if given the chance? Probably not. More likely would have soiled himself and hidden behind some woman’s skirt.
SIGINT EX says:
April 5, 2014 at 7:16 pm
The Gas Laws show how temperature is coupled to pressure and they are coupled to concentration of chemical component.
Thus, we can lower pressure and achieve boiling at room temperature, and increase pressure and achieve freezing at room temperature !
No we can’t, look at the phase diagram!
Mike says:
April 6, 2014 at 7:47 pm
Can someone clarify, please? 17 years at an annual increase per year of 0.23C would result in a crazy high temperature increase, so that CAN’T be possible, right?
Please check the top graph again. The flat line starts at 0.23 in August 1996 and it is still at 0.23 in March 2014. So there has been no increase in over 17 years and 8 months.
Answer the question, Richard. It is quite straightforward. You can potentially save 100,000 GIs by killing a large number of enemy non-combatants and you have to do it face to face. Do you pull the trigger or not? I see you chose not to answer and attacked me instead. Now who’s hiding. I smell a hypocrite.
A better solution would have been to demonstrate the power of nukes by dropping them in an area with few inhabitants and let the Japanese know what might come next.
Me? I would rather attack the mainland and take my chances than kill civilians. Fighting is for soldiers. If not, you can’t criticise any terrorist for striking at “soft” targets either.
Lord Monckton says the global temperature in the last ice age was 10-12 C colder than present temperature. He seems to base this on the Vostok ice core data from Antarctica. I doubt it represents global temperature because Antarctica is the coldest place on earth and it represents only 2.7% of earth’s surface area. The rest of the world is warmer. Sea surface temperature at mid-latitudes is 5-10 C. If it is true global temperature in the last ice age was 12 C colder than today, then the mid-latitude Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans would have been completely frozen. My Lord can walk from Japan to California on the frozen Pacific Ocean. But we know only the Greenland Sea and Labrador Sea were frozen in the last ice age.
The temperature reconstruction of C. R. Scotese is more reliable. It is based on paleoclimate data from different places around the world. It puts the global temperature in the last ice age at around 12 C. Temperature today is about 14.5 C. Is it surprising we are only 2.5 C warmer than the last ice age? Not at all because we are still in an ice age. That’s why we still have permanent polar ice in Antarctica, Greenland, Arctic Ocean and Southern Ocean. Moreover, 43% of all land is still covered with snow and ice during winter. This is almost the same land ice coverage in the last glacial period except it was all year-round.
We often hear the “tipping point” to unstoppable global warming. We are far from it. When the Polar Regions were ice-free, global temperature was 22-26 C. If such tipping points exist, we are closer to a glacial period tipping point. Perhaps the global cooling hype of 1970s was more sensible than today’s global warming hype.
To
The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley says:
April 5, 2014 at 11:25 am
…and to all the others who posted similar responses, may I say HEAR! HEAR!
A reading of 0.108 might stretch the cooling period to almost 19 years! (The average of the previous 15 months before the cooling trend began.) There’s really nothing between 0.1 and 0.2 that would lengthen the trend beyond the trivial 1 month.
In fact, it was the abnormally cold June 1996 that halted the back-trend.
Why does the calculated global average suddenly jump 0.3 deg in 2001? The AQUA satellite was launched, it had better equipment and it’s own propulsion so it can maintain a proper orbit. With a 1 deg per km temp variance all measurements were calculated per AQUA. Post AQUA launch the other satellites were corrected upwards 0.3 deg, but NOT the previous measurements. So in the data there’s a 0.3 deg shift up in 2001. Of course this gives the alarmists thier HuGE evidence on a pathetically small temp scale. Considering the equipment error of margin is at least 2 deg and that the measurements are an average of a non static globe with a range over 100 deg (-60 to +40)
The atom bombs I understand stopped the war. Brought it to an abrupt end which also brought an end to the further fighting and killing and misery and the atrocities committed by the Japanese. Bombs kill people indiscriminately. I’m sure the bombing of Pearl Harbour killed some civilians too.
Fortunately most of the deaths were sudden and swift. What you are advocating is killing a few numbers of civilians to save many deaths rather than a large number. The moral dilemma is the same. It may not have worked if the bombs had been dropped on the countryside killing a smaller number of peasants. I think it was touch and go as it was and also I believe they had only 2 bombs and the threat of further bombing was a bluff.
PS Your analogy with terrorists striking “soft” targets is incorrect. Their motives are different, not to end misery but to cause it. Moreover many terrorists because of their ideology think innocent civilians are not innocent and are legitimate targets and their ultimate goal is not to end war and have a just peace but to subjugate. So their end is not justified by any means and certainly not by mass murder and causing terror.
“Dr Strangelove” offends against the Eschenbach Rule by saying I had said the difference between ice ages and interglacials is 10-12 K. It may be that much at the poles, but they are subject to the polar amplification of temperature change (up or down) that arises from the advection of heat from the tropics to the poles via the baroclinic eddies that prevail in the extratropics. That makes the difference between the last ice age and the current interglacial about 6 K.
The Scotese graph to which “Dr Strangelove” refers is insufficiently well resolved to permit him to draw the conclusion he has drawn from it.
On the question of Hiroshima, I did not want to cause offense to anyone, and I do understand the reasons why the Allies (Britain, too, was part of the decision) decided to drop the two bombs. It is indeed possible that more lives were saved by the two bombs than were destroyed by them. That said, anyone who has studied the medical effects of the radioactive fallout from Hirosihma – or, for that matter, from Chernobyl – cannot, if he be human at all, regard the indiscriminate nuclear bombing of entire cities as anything other than atrocities.
But, as a moderator pointed out, my reference to Hiroshima as an atrocity was made in passing. The main point was that the cruel and childish exploitation of the deaths and suffering of hundreds of thousands of innocent, non-combatant Japanese by the unspeakable Cook et al. at “Skeptical” “Science” is an altogether unacceptable method of conducting scientific discourse. All the commenters here who hooted and hollered about my having made a single reference to Hiroshima while remaining silent about Cook’s daily exploitation of the fate of those who died should be ashamed of their lack of due perspective. “A false balance is abomination to the Lord,” as the Good Book says, “but a just weight is His delight” (Proverbs, XI:1).
Thank you for the explanation. I agree with you after reading this.
People are responsible for the actions of their governments, and that includes the people of Hiroshima ca. 1940. No one here is disagreeing that the SkS graph is in bad taste and an exploitation of the suffering of the people that went through that, but calling it “one of the most disgraceful atrocities in the dismal history of warfare” is flat out not true.
They say history is written by the victors… the Brits must be the only victors to cast themselves and their allies as the bad guys.
Pete says:
April 6, 2014 at 9:32 pm
I’ll take a swing at your question.
yes i would. in a minute, probably more time than it took japanese military commanders to order the rape of nanking.
war inevitably results in the murder of noncombatants…if it isnt worth killin grandmothers pregnant women and babies, the dont go to war.
the japanese were responsible for the murder of a half million chinese civilians in nanking alone…they enslaved korean women to serve as “comfort women” to be gang raped by japanese soldiers.
and you have the energy to cry over hiroshima and nagasaki?
the japanese reaped what they had sown.
grow up,
I have a model. Take the ensemble and compare it to the actual record. From this comparison create the “we’ve been this wrong” factor and include it in your model. Call this the “Trenbreth’s Missing Heat” model.
The whole Hiroshima-Dresden-internment thread has very little to do with climate issues, but I’ll throw in my two bits and point people at California historian Kevin Starr.
His works on the Japanese-American WW2 internment noted that American Federal Government’s motivations for internment included a very large fear of having to interpose Federal troops to stop vigilante attacks on Japanese-Americans.
Vigilante attacks incited by a disgraceful hate campaign of the Hearst newspaper chain on the American West Coast.
On second thought, the “Warmista” insistence on using “Climate Denier” hate speech has a strong historical parallel with the misconduct of the WW2 era Hearst newspaper chain.
Nicolas you seem to live in a fantasy world of delusion. War is serious business and your silly comments about UN or League of Nations rules are laughable. “Necessity knows no law.”
Monckton’s comments were made in ignorance not malice, I believe, but all too many people
have forgotten the necessity and only remember their silly untested values made in the smug days of peace.
As Nicholas aptly wrote: “The conventions of war do not allow a utilitarian weighing of civilian lives against the possibility of saving combatant lives”
Those who argue otherwise are either inhuman (willing to execute non-combatants) or hypocrites (approve of intentional targeting of non-combatants but cannot peronally kill them).
Don’t get me started on the US drone attacks. The days of Anglo-American air gangsters are clearly not over. Better to let those civvies die than to lose combatants.
The end justifies the means, no matter what those means might be?
Monckton of Brenchley says:
April 7, 2014 at 8:25 am
Have you in fact studied the medical radiological effects of bombing the two Japanese cities? I doubt it very much.
If so, explain please how those effects differ from the effects of systematic burning alive of German civilians by Bomber Command. By this slur, you have given up any right whatsoever to claim to reason from a position of morality.
There is no doubt whatsoever that the number of Japanese & Allied lives saved by the atomic bombings is an order of magnitude greater than what would have been the cost of life on both sides in invading the Home Islands.
I respect the military records of your father & grandfather. But you don’t deserve to own their decorations.
Shame on you, Lord Monckton. Shame.
Do you know who Paul Fussell is, Lord Monckton?
If not, educate yourself:
http://croker.harpethhall.org/Must%20Know/History/AtomBombFussell.pdf
The list of later famous Americans, productive members of Western Civilization, who would have died in the invasion of Japan is long. The number of Japanese civilians who would have died & their descendants who would never have lived is even longer. Much longer.
Your ignorance & glib misuse of “atrocity” are atrocities. Clearly you, unlike your esteemed forebears, have never been in a war.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
April 7, 2014 at 8:25 am
[Snip. This thread is not for the purpose of re-fighting the war. Please stay on point: global warming has stopped for 17+ years. That goes for everyone. Thanks. ~ mod.]
Lord Monckton
Where did you get 6 K? It’s not on Scotese graph and not on Vostok data. That would still freeze the Pacific, Atlantic and Indian oceans above 50 degrees latitude. Less than 5 K is more likely. This is in mid-latitudes. In the tropics it will be lower still. Since the tropics account for 40% of earth’s surface area, the global average will be 2.5-3.5 K.
Catherine Ronconi says:
April 7, 2014 at 7:44 pm
Monckton of Brenchley says:
April 7, 2014 at 8:25 am
[Snip. This thread is not for the purpose of re-fighting the war. Please stay on point: global warming has stopped for 17+ years. That goes for everyone. Thanks. ~ mod.]
—————————
I appreciate Christopher Monckton’s regular updates on the lack of warming since the late 1990s, & all else he has done to promote genuine climatological science.
But IMO he does grievous harm to his case by bandying such calumny inappropriately, & even more so if he really believes that America’s actions to end the war were atrocities, which stopped the atrocities of Imperial Japan, which cost millions of innocent Asian civilians their lives, liberty & property.
I exist today because my father did not have to land on what would have been the hell on earth of Kyushu beaches, had he even made it that far, through the hell on sea that would have been the East China Sea approaches to those beaches. Untold numbers of Japanese similarly live now or have enjoyed life who otherwise would have been destroyed in hellish war or starved to death without the air attacks that showed the Emperor & his even more unwilling to surrender military leaders that resistance was useless.
When you have charged a heavily defended & fortified beach, then you have a right to judge, Christopher Monckton.
OK, I’m still off topic. You were right, Moderator to snip my name calling. But this site is devoted to science. “Atrocity” is an much a semantic transgression as the “Hiroshima” equivalents of the CAGW crowd. Requiring linguistic precision is IMHO on topic. Snip if you must, sir.
Next, let’s start a discussion of just and unjust war. Let’s start with the Opium Wars.