By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Now that the UAH satellite data are available, we can update the monthly Global Warming Prediction Index, a devastatingly simple measure of how well (or badly) the IPCC’s official predictions of global warming are doing.
The 2013 Fifth Assessment Report backdated the IPCC’s predictions to January 2005. The interval of predictions, equivalent to 0.5[0.3, 0.7] Cº over 30 years or 1.67 [1.0, 2.33] Cº per century, is shown in orange.
By now, as a central estimate, there should have been 0.15 Cº global warming since January 2005, a rate equivalent to 0.5 Cº in 30 years, or 1.67 Cº per century, gathering pace rapidly after 2035 to reach 3.7 Cº over the full century.
However, the trend on the mean of the monthly RSS and UAH satellite lower-troposphere temperature anomalies is, if anything, falling, leading to an over-prediction by the IPCC of 0.17 Cº – a sixth of a Celsius degree – in the 111 months January 2005 to March 2014.
The models’ overshoot over 9 years 3 months is equivalent to more than 1.8 Cº per century.
Though the IPCC has finally realized that the models are unreliable as predictors of global temperature change, and has slashed its 30-year projection from 0.7 [ 0.4, 1.0] Cº in the pre-final draft of the Fifth Assessment Report to 0.5 [0.3, 0.7] Cº in the published final version, it has not cut its centennial-scale prediction, an implausibly hefty 3.7 Cº on business as usual (4.5 Cº if you are Sir David King, 11 Cº and a 10% probability of the Earth not surviving the 21st century if you are Lord Stern).
It is also interesting to compare the IPCC’s original global-warming predictions in the 1990 First Assessment Report with what has happened since. At that time, the IPCC said:
“Based on current model results, we predict [semantic bores, please note the IPCC uses the word “predict”, and, if you don’t like it, whine to ipcc.ch, not in comments here]:
Ø “under the IPCC Business-as-Usual (Scenario A) emissions of greenhouse gases, a rate of increase of global mean temperature during the next century of about 0.3°C per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2 C° to 0.5 C° per decade). This is greater than that seen over the past 10,000 years. This will result in a likely increase in global mean temperature of about 1 C° above the present value by 2025 and 3 Cº before the end of the next century. The rise will not be steady because of the influence of other factors.”
The IPCC’s best-guess near-term warming prediction in 1990 was equivalent to 2.78 Cº per century.
Real-world temperature change in the 291 months since January 1990 has been spectacularly below what was predicted. There has been just 0.34 Cº global warming, equivalent to a mere 1.39 Cº per century. The IPCC’s overshoot since 1990 amounts to another 0.34 Cº, or more than a third of a degree in 24 years 3 months, equivalent to 1.39 Cº per century. It predicted double the warming that has actually occurred.
Once again, the IPCC’s interval of predictions for global temperature change since 1990 are shown as an orange region. The lower and upper bounds for its 1990 near-term warming estimate were 30% below and 50% above its central estimate, equivalent to 1.94 and 4.17 Cº per century respectively. The real-world outturn, equivalent to just 1.39 Cº per century, is appreciably below the lower bound of the IPCC’s very wide prediction interval.
In 1990 the IPCC’s “Executive Summary” raised the question “how much confidence do we have in our predictions?” It pointed out that there were many uncertainties (clouds, oceans, etc.), but concluded:
“Nevertheless, … we have substantial confidence that models can predict at least the broad-scale features of climate change. … There are similarities between results from the coupled models using simple representations of the ocean and those using more sophisticated descriptions, and our understanding of such differences as do occur gives us some confidence in the results.”
One look at the graph of projection against outturn since 1990 reveals that the IPCC has proven startlingly incapable of predicting the “broad-scale feature” central to the debate about greenhouse gases – the change in global temperature itself.
Here is a question that the legacy media should be addressing to IPCC director Pachauri, if they can distract him from authoring fourteenth-rate bodice-ripping pot-boilers for long enough.
Given global temperature rising for almost 25 years at half the central rate predicted by the IPCC in 1990, given no global warming at all for half the RSS satellite record, and given only 64 (or 0.5%) of 11,944 scientific abstracts published since 1991 stating that most of the global warming since 1950 was manmade, on what legitimate scientific or other rational basis did the IPCC recently increase from 90% to 95-99% its “confidence” that recent warming was mostly manmade? Answer me that.
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steverichards1984 says:
April 11, 2014 at 3:44 am
———————————
Well the answer to that is simple. In terms of net flux radiative gases emit over twice the amount to space than they absorb from surface IR and direct absorption of incoming solar radiation.
The net effect of these gases is clearly cooling of our atmosphere.
They are emitting to space not just the radiation the atmosphere absorbs, but all the energy the atmosphere acquires via surface conduction and the release of latent heat of evaporation.
Radiative gases cool our atmosphere at all concentrations above 0.0ppm.
Sorry for the slow response, but this will have taken a few hours to get through moderation…
steverichards1984:
Thanks a lot for the pointer. I’ll have to admit that I may have let the skepticism I’ve come to harbor regarding the meticulousness of Lord M.’s (otherwise admirable) efforts lead me to pass over that particular post of his at JoNova.
For my penance, I’ll commend that post to the attention of anyone still paying attention to this thread–but recommend that you first just skip down to the letter at the end and in particular to the table with the blue highlighting.
[snip . . posting on multiple identities is against site rules . . mod]
Thinking more about this ‘cooling effect’ of CO2,
We appear to have a body of evidence, some strong, some weak, some wrong, describing how CO2 etc interacts with radiation from the sun, causing the planet to warm.
I can not find, in the last hour, anything of note, describing how the Top of the Atmosphere (TOA) is couple to space for the purpose of dumping the suns thermal energy by radiation.
To me, this is crucial.
We need details of both ends of the cycle, energy in – energy out, and the thermal delay in between.
Does atmospheric CO2 concentration affect energy out at the TOA as it appears to affect energy in at the earths surface?
Does it self regulate? ie more in causes more out due to …….. ?
Does the ‘limiting’ ‘broadening’ and other phenomena give us our remarkably stable climate?
– – – – – – – – –
Joe Bastardi,
Yes, a simple but effective strategy.
It can be called the ‘unmask the chicken littles’ strategy.
It can also be called the ‘expose the exaggerationists‘ strategy.
I like the latter expression better.
John
[Two hours – Yet, are you complaining about chickens? Or eggs?? Mod]
They say patience is a virtue, perhaps I should have waited longer to check this 😉
Not all eggs hatch to be chickens, but those that do typically come home to roost.
For AGW believers and lukewarmers alike however, this may not be the case. The problem with the basic physics of the settled science is, as the old physics joke goes, it only works for spherical chickens in a vacuum. The problem with chickens in the hard vacuum of space is while they may rapidly become spherical, they don’t stay that way for long…
Monckton of Brenchley says:
April 11, 2014 at 3:29 am
“Konrad” says greenhouse gases have a cooling effect. They have a warming effect. It was demonstrated by experiment in 1859. Try to catch up.
———————————————————————-
Viscount Monckton,
while I may find occasional advantage in playing the fool, it does not necessarily follow that I am an idiot. I am well aware of Tyndall’ work. I am an empiricist, and unlike the Royal Society these days, I take no man’s word for it. Trust but verify. I have personally confirmed that CO2 can be heated with incident LWIR. Similarly I have confirmed that Tyndalls’s 1860 finding that gases can also cool be emitting LWIR. My most relevant combined experiment is here –
http://i49.tinypic.com/34hcoqd.jpg
Two identical identical chambers with double glazed IR transparent film. Matt black target plates under equal SW sources. In each chamber an air duct circulating air gas past a radiation shielded thermocouple. One chamber filled with air the other CO2. In this circumstance any warming of CO2 by radiation from the target plate is offset by its ability to radiate energy it has acquired by conductive contact with the target plate.
It should be further noted that standard NASA energy budgets show radiative gases emitting more than twice the net flux of IR to space than the net flux they absorb from surface or direct interception of incoming solar radiation.
But back to history –
In 1938 Callendar tried to breathe life back into the radiative GHE hypothesis with a paper to the Royal society. His paper was published along with the wise response of Sir George Simpson –
“..but he would like to mention a few points which Mr. Callendar might wish to reconsider. In the first place he thought it was not sufficiently realised by non-meteorologists who came for the first time to help the Society in its study, that it was impossible to solve the problem of the temperature distribution in the atmosphere by working out the radiation. The atmosphere was not in a state of radiative equilibrium, and it also received heat by transfer from one part to another. In the second place, one had to remember that the temperature distribution in the atmosphere was determined almost entirely by the movement of the air up and down. This forced the atmosphere into a temperature distribution which was quite out of balance with the radiation. One could not, therefore, calculate the effect of changing any one factor in the atmosphere..”
I believe these word are as relevant today as they were in 1938.
If you would be so good as to concede that radiative gases both warm and cool, I can take my horned cap and bells to other players, as I feel there are many far more deserving of a pigs bladder to the head.
knrad;
You have called me a “troll” and claimed debate will expose the weakness of my argument.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I did no such thing. I welcomed trolls and suggested that people like you who spout complete bull and repeatedly demonstrate that they cannot understand the simplest of examples that falsifies their exceedingly poor grasp of physics are what we need less of.
But I’ve tried to point you at the fats before, to no avail. Everyone once and a while i take a new approach in the hopes that you’ll pause to consider that you may be wrong and the millions of engineers that design products that work, all over the world, every day, based on the physics you claim are wrong, are possibly the ones that know that they are talking about after all.
The examples I provided don’t need to be restricted to cases where there is an ocean transferring energy in to the atmosphere to falsify your claim. But since you don’t understand the physics in the first place, you don’t understand that. But since you insist on that condition, I will point you to the ERBE data where you will find that in the tropics, over oceans, where water vapour (a radiatively active gas) is very high, the earth is a net ABSORBER of energy. Over oceans, in the arctic, where due to cold temps water vapour is very low, the earth is a net radiator of energy, winter and summer. If you were right, it would be the other way around.
– – – – – – – – –
Christopher Monckton,
As shown by your increasingly frequent WUWT posts on GASTA** and SLTTA***, I enthusiastically encourage your apparent strategy. I interpret that your strategy is to keep the awareness high on the fictional aspect of the surreal modeling art used in the intentionally exaggerated IPCC assessments(s) by contrasting it (the art) sharply with all the datasets of scientifically observed reality.
It is important to always keep the “bending over backwards to show how you’re maybe wrong” message of Richard Feynman in mind. So, Christopher Monckton, what “bending over backwards” have you done in your lead post to indicate possible quid pro quos, caveats, provisos and exceptions?
**GASTA = Global Average Temperature Anomalies
***SLTTA = Satellite Lower-Troposphere Temperature Anomalies
{apologies to Walt Disney for paraphrasing the expression of provisos and quid pro from their movie ‘Aladdin’}
John
@mod says: April 11, 2014 at 5:49 am
In which case please be so good as to reveal when “@jim Hunt says: April 11, 2014 at 12:38 am” was eventually released from your moderation queue.
davidmhoffer says:
April 11, 2014 at 8:32 am
“….people like you who spout complete bull and repeatedly demonstrate that they cannot understand the simplest of examples that falsifies their exceedingly poor grasp of physics are what we need less of”
————————————
I’m sorry David, your response was not entirely clear.
Are you claiming that given an atmospheric pressure of 1 bar, the net effect of our radiative atmosphere over the oceans is cooling of the oceans or warming of the oceans?
Jim s says:
The question becomes, how much warming does 400-500pm cause as appose to 280pm? Right now I am thinking not much.
This has been shown repeatedly. Please take this opportunity to bookmark these links, they come in handy when debating carbon alarmists.:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/heating_effect_of_co2.png
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0115707ce438970b-pi
CO2 causes warming. But at current concentrations and greater, not much. As we see in the charts, most of the warming effect took place in the first 20 ppmv of atmospheric CO2. At today’s levels, any warming from CO2 is far too small to measure. It is well down into instrumental noise.
Regarding your other comments, yes, CO2 was very high during past ice ages [although “high” is relative – look at the first link; ‘ice ages’]. And on all time scales, changes in CO2 are the result of changes in temperature. There is no evidence that changes in CO2 cause changes in T.
That is why the alarmist clique is wrong: they began with an incorrect assumption — that ∆CO2 caused ∆T, when in fact, ∆T is the cause of ∆CO2 on all time scales, from months, to hundereds of millennia. That is what the data/evidence tells us.
knrad;
Are you claiming that given an atmospheric pressure of 1 bar, the net effect of our radiative atmosphere over the oceans is cooling of the oceans or warming of the oceans?
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Every time I reply with a fact that falsifies your premise, you come back with another version of the question with another immaterial factoid thrown in. 1 bar wasn’t part of the discussion before, suddenly you’re trying to slip words into my mouth and pretend that is was.
Can’t help you bud. You’ve got the physics down to the type of thing Einstein used to call “that’s not right, that’s not even wrong”. But you don’t want to learn the physics, you don’t want to understand the very clear and simple examples I gave that falsify your premise, you don’t even want to have a discussion of the issues introduced already and discussed to death, you simply want to continually add yet another immaterial element to the conversation.
Done with you. When you are ready to learn something, then let me know. In the meantime, anyone who considers the examples i provided to you above will also see that you are wrong.
In response to Mr Whitman, my purpose in providing regular updates on global temperature trends is to report that which is so. My graphs are just about the only ones widely available that demonstrate two important facts for all to see. First, that contrary to suggestions that global warming is continuing it is not; and secondly, that the rate of longer-term warming is well below what was predicted. The IPCC itself, as the head posting points out, has accepted this by reducing its near-term global warming estimates. If Mr Whitman thinks it should not have done so, he should address his concerns to ipcc.ch.
I do not understand his question about offering one thing in return for another, or about ifs and buts. If he has any reason to doubt the methodology or conclusions in the head posting, let him make his reasons plain.
– – – – – – – – – –
Christopher Monckton,
I do not understand your reply “If Mr Whitman thinks it should not have done so, he should address his concerns to ipcc.ch.” in response to my statement to you “As shown by your [Monckton’s] increasingly frequent WUWT posts on GASTA** and SLTTA***, I enthusiastically encourage your apparent strategy. [. . .]” Please, would you advise as to what your reply meant?
In the spirit of Feynman’s “bending over backwards”, I was explicitly inquiring if you have additional aspects to what you wrote in your lead post that relate to alternate interpretation. You have answered without mentioning any, so I presume you have no unstated possible quid pro quos, caveats, provisos and exceptions. Your answer is sufficient to my question and I thank you for your answer.
John
From his statements, it appears to me that “John@EF” is essentially asking that Monckton only write about one subject.
Understandable, if you are only capable of following one subject. Most of us can understand that people can write posts/articles about different things.
Must be hell to read a magazine like that.
davidmhoffer says:
April 11, 2014 at 9:41 am
” anyone who considers the examples i provided to you above will also see that you are wrong.”
——————————————————————————————————————————-
Konrad asks you a question, and you respond by accusing him of putting words in your mouth. Your response does not seem warranted. Konrad has made good sense to me in his arguments, for as much as I am able to comprehend the issues.
John@ur momisuglyEF
When MoB posts repeatedly answers you with an explanation:
MoB, “John@ur momisugly EF, having been comprehensively answered, wonders why I regularly feature the RSS dataset. As I have previously explained, it is the first dataset to report each month. It is also the most accurate, in that it correctly represents the great El Niño of 1998 at its full magnitude.”
Why do you repeatedly keep asking why he used RSS?
It would be normal if you objected to his answer with some explanation.
Instead you keep reacting as if he never answered you.
That kind of behavior is not normal.
You must have some sort of ailment or derangement.
If you are just being a deceitful jackass then your affliction is worse than an ailment.
K*nrad asks you a question, and you respond by accusing him of putting words in your mouth.
>>>>>>>>>>>>
Because he did. And go back over the examples I gave him Are any of them wrong? No? If they are right, then K*nrad is wrong.
Here is a link to ERBE:
http://eos.atmos.washington.edu/cgi-bin/erbe/disp.pl?net.ann.
Note that those areas of the earth with very high water vapour (radiatively active) like over the oceans in the tropics, are net absorbers if energy. In other words, more comes in from the sun than radiates back out to space. Then look at deserts like north africa at about the same latitude. They are net radiators of energy. in other words less comes in from the sun than gets radiated out. Since you can compare over ocean and over desert at the same latitude fairly easily here, we’re talking about areas where the preponderance of the difference between the two is that the areas over the ocean have much higher concentrations of radiatevly active gas. So if radiatively active gasses served to cool the atmosphere, we would see the exact opposite. In terms of average temperature, sure the deserts have higher peak day time highes than do same latitudes over oceans, but the AVERAGE temperature over the oceans and in tropical jungles is not just higher than in deserts at the same latitude, it is a LOT higher. Again, if K*nrad was correct, we would see the lack of cooling from radiative gasses over desert cause the exact opposite effect.
Observations trump theory.
John at EF: I see you’re having difficulty with logic, too. Again, what justifies constantly changing the data sets used by MoB from one posting topic to the next when in each case all 4 major temperature data sets cover the timelines involved?
You missed the point about testing a prediction (IPCC wording) against the most relevant out of sample data.
davidmhoffer says:
April 11, 2014 at 1:31 pm
Because he did.
——————————
Perhaps in your mind it seems that he did, but as an outside observer I don’t see it that way. First he states that he is unsure about something you said, and then he asks the question. All that the question required was a yes or no answer, or perhaps a further explanation of what you meant originally. Instead you go on a mild rant.
davidmhoffer says:
April 11, 2014 at 9:41 am
——————————————
“In the meantime, anyone who considers the examples i provided to you above will also see that you are wrong.”
Well David, let me review some of those examples –
“I welcomed trolls”
“abjectly bad and demonstrably unsound science”
“people like you who spout complete bull”
“Now you’ve gone completely off the deep end”
“cannot understand the simplest of examples”
“exceedingly poor grasp of physics”
“since you don’t understand the physics”
“that’s not right, that’s not even wrong”
“But you don’t want to learn the physics”
“Done with you”
I think these examples speak loudly to your character and motivation, but far less to my understanding of physics or any weakness in my argument.
Other readers will note the claims I made that you chose to attack related directly to atmospheric cooling of the oceans. You claimed to welcome the chance to expose the weakness of the arguments of “trolls”. Instead you have become increasingly aggressive when I held you to task, to debate my claims about the primary cooling mechanism for our oceans, not some other topic of your choosing.
You cast unfounded aspersions against my understanding of physics yet repeatedly refuse to answer the following simple physics question –
Given an atmospheric pressure of 1 bar, is the net effect of our radiative atmosphere over the oceans is cooling of the oceans or warming of the oceans?
My claim is simple –
The sun heats the oceans.
The atmosphere cools the oceans.
Radiative gases cool the atmosphere.
Word count – 15
Your responses so far –
Word count – 505
“The most reliable sign of truth is simplicity and clarity. Lie is invariably complicated, gaudy and verbose.” – Leo Tolstoy
goldminor says:
April 11, 2014 at 2:37 pm
————————————
If you can see it, so will others 😉
David has the unfortunate task of defending the radiative GHE hypothesis at all costs. “Poptech” had a similar task, defending the lines “but it must be peer reviewed” and “but you have to be a qualified climate scientist”. “Poptechs” weasel recently popped, but David should make it a few more times around the mulberry bush.
Radiative gases cool the atmosphere.
>>>>>>>>>>>
No they don’t.
3 words.
goldminor
First he states that he is unsure about something you said, and then he asks the question.
>>>>>>>>>
This isn’t the first time I’ve gone around in circles with K*rad. You’re entering into the conversation in the middle. As for the rest of it, engineers design and build all manner of things that work precisely as designed based on the exact same physics I am explaining.
I no longer care about debating K*rad, he has learned nothing from the various highly credible scientists from both sides of the debate who have tried to talk some sense into him. When PhD physicists, engineers and others who are warmists say exactly the same as PhD physicists and engineers who are skeptics about this topic, it ought to give you some pause to think about it and to think through the examples I gave you. I raise the flag non him from time to time so that newcomers don’t accept what he says with blind faith.
Here is a series of articles you may wish to read through by a PhD engineer that use actual measurements to demonstrate that the explanation is proven by the measurements. You may want to slog through the comments where you will find plenty of engineers and physicists saying “yeah, that’s how it work, I design stuff using those exact formulas and my stuff works as designed”.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/20/visualizing-the-greenhouse-effect-a-physical-analogy/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/28/visualizing-the-greenhouse-effect-atmospheric-windows/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/03/10/visualizing-the-greenhouse-effect-emission-spectra/