Jason Samenow sends word of a new article in WaPo that does some of the same sort of surface temperature analyses we see right here on WUWT. Seeing what a good job Matt Rogers did in his defense against claims of cherry picking, statistical significance woes, and Trenberthian masking, it made me wonder; “How long before he gets called into the chief editors office at WaPo and reassigned to be the correspondent covering Botswana?”
Global warming of the Earth’s surface has decelerated – Matt Rogers, Capital Weather Gang
The recently-released National Climate Assessment (NCA) from the U.S. government offers considerable cause for concern for climate calamity, but downplays the decelerating trend in global surface temperature in the 2000s, which I document here.
Many climate scientists are currently working to figure out what is causing the slowdown, because if it continues, it would call into question the legitimacy of many climate model projections (and inversely offer some good news for our planet).
An article in Nature earlier this year discusses some of the possible causes for what some have to referred to as the global warming “pause” or “hiatus”. Explanations include the quietest solar cycle in over a hundred years, increases in Asian pollution, more effective oceanic heat absorption, and even volcanic activity. Indeed, a peer-reviewed paper published in February estimates that about 15 percent of the pause can be attributed to increased volcanism. But some have questioned whether the pause or deceleration is even occurring at all.
Verifying the pause
You can see the pause (or deceleration in warming) yourself by simply grabbing the freely available data from NASA and NOAA. For the chart below, I took the annual global temperature difference from average (or anomaly) and calculated the change from the prior year. So the very first data point is the change from 2000 to 2001 and so on. One sign of data validation is that the trends are the same on both datasets. Both of these government sources show a slight downward slope since 2000:
You can see some of the spikes associated with El Niño events (when heat was released into the atmosphere from warmer than normal ocean temperatures in the tropical Pacific) that occurred in 2004-05 and 2009-10. But the warm changes have generally been decreasing while cool changes have grown.
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Read it all here, well worth your time – Anthony
Regarding how many data points here’s my two cents worth downed with a cold beer and warm bread:
Sufficient sample points depends on the nature of the covariates and your purpose in using a linear trend statistic. A quick exploratory looksee just to see if one model is better than another, 10 points may be enough. This is the case in many rate of improvement adjustments to treatment. After 10 data points, you can get a fairly reliable idea of your new intervention works better than the previous one in improving student learning. But if you want very reliable and valid estimates of the correlation and regression coefficients for the covariates you might want to pad it with more than 10 per covariate. It also depends on how noisy your data is with outliers. The number of data points you need may be determined by the error term.
Based on my use of linear trend coupled with number of covariates coupled with my error term, I usually stick with at least 10 data points to gain confidence in the slope of the trend.
I imagine that the WaPo article is going to cause a lot of warming hysterics in the NYC media to reach for the Charmin. WaPo had the smarts to hire a real meteorologist.
Brilliant observation.
A return to Science, not Money and Politics is going to be needed. That means educating the American public.
Essentially a Bob Tisdale moment of epiphany. You are now a member of the order of Tisdales, pending Bob’s approval of course. Cuz I’m just a whipersnaper (a cough-hack young and inexperienced person considered to be presumptuous or overconfident) wannabeintheclub fan.
Pamela Gray: “Regarding how many data points here’s my two cents worth downed with a cold beer and warm bread: …”
One hopes that is vegan bread and Irish beer. 🙂
Matt Rogers,
Thanks for your work and thanks for commenting here at WUWT.
I was curious about your statement in your graph…
“While the global temperature is still very warm…”
On what scientific basis do you make such a statement?
How much colder would you like the planet to be?
What IS the ideal planetary temperature for the denizens of the 3rd rock?
Thanks in advance…
Barium: “but the underlying global temperature trend remains clear.”
Yes. It warmed faster from 1900 to 1945 than 1945 to 2014 and 1945 is when man-made CO2 really started to climb. Therefore man-made CO2 has slowed the rate of warming.
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2014/04/15/could-co2-have-lowered-the-rate-of-natural-warming/
http://sunshinehours.wordpress.com/2014/04/17/could-co2-have-lowered-the-rate-of-natural-warming-in-the-oceans/
I believe that the graph is incorrect, it states that the change for 2000’s = +0.01C? I will read the article but….
It has been obvious from the start that the IPCC climate models are inherently useless for climate forecasting. Before disputing this statement readers are invited to take the time to watch the presentation at
The recent hiatus in warming, reviewed by Matt, is just now revealing to the general public the inevitable discrepancy between the real world and the IPCC fantasies which was bound to appear sooner or later because of their scientifically inappropriate approach to the complexity of the natural climate system.
A new forecasting method is required to provide that basis for rational discussion which is lacking in all the IPCC science and impact reports. For estimates of the possible timing and extent of the cooling trend which the earth is just entering based on the 60 and 1000 year quasi periodicities seen in the temperature data and the use of the neutron count and the 10Be record as the best proxy for solar activity see
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2013/10/co…
All this is discussed in detail in many posts at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com
What the hell is vegan bread? She said as she wipes savory venison juice off her chin.
@Pamela Gray – Bread made without eggs or milk.
“What the hell is vegan bread? She said as she wipes savory venison juice off her chin.
Why bread made without animal products, like egg. Or, money taken from vegans … I forget which.
Why so scathing about Botswana? Have you been there? It’s a fantastic country
This site is offering titbits of what is happening… its small but its becoming significant me thinks we are probably at the beginnings of a new ice age http://iceagenow.info/2014/06/snowing-bulgaria-june-20/
I still don’t understand why Cowtan & Way is given any credibility. They splice two data sets together, neither of which show an increase on their own, and use the spliced result to show an increase. Why doesn’t the satellite data show an increase *overall*? It seems much more likely to me that Cowtan & Way’s “increase” is in fact data-splicing artifacts and entirely spurious.
It’s encouraging to see this piece in the WaPo. I think Matt Rogers struck a very practical course and stayed within easily understood boundaries, which is important given what many people (mistakenly) believe. So it was a good shot of sobriety and it will cause deep and uncomfortable cognitive dissonance for many WaPo readers.
Matt, since you are here responding to comments, I was wondering if you could shed some light on what it was like for you to propose this story and shepherd it through the editorial process to publication? Did you get support or resistance? Your article will be a difficult piece for many WaPo readers, but isn’t it also going to be a difficult piece for many WaPo editors and writers as well?
Well, I’ll be damned. I’m eating vegan bread. All the recipes I have for beer bread do not have egg in them. But this recipe doesn’t need it. It is rich and buttery with a very nice beer finish. Because it is heavy, it takes an hour to bake at 350F. Trust me, that hour is as good as a day!
And now back to the pause. It’s also great open-fire pan fried in an elk camp setting. Oh my laaawwwwdddd good!
The increases in antarctic (cannot be manipulated) and arctic ice (obviously manipulated due to changing borders for each section to suit the AGW drivel) are a sign that we are entering possibly a cooling period.
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.recent.antarctic.png
The increase in Antarctica ice trend is highly significant and at this rate Antarctica will be 3 million square miles PERMANENTLY above anomaly in 2 years and 6 million in 5 years! That will start to affect temperatures in the SH. It is my belief that Arctic ice has been manipulated to such an extent that we are not seeing the real picture (its quite possible that it is also at an above average anomaly.
Well, I’ll be damned. I’m eating vegan bread.
Mmmmmm…. fresh vegans. 😉
Gee, I thought this was common knowledge. There has been no global warming for 17 years 9 months. I’m sure the New York Times will report on this… if they have a reporter who is brave enough. (Hmmm, I kind of doubt it). You just won’t see such an article in the NYTimes the Kool-Aid is just too potent there.
Read the article again. He’s plotting the anomaly differences from year to year, i.e. the “velocity” delta_A/delta_t. His trend line is the change in the differences over time, therefore an acceleration (in this case a deceleration).
@Eliza… Thankyou! Exactly what I have been wondering regarding what is really going on at the poles, who is telling the truth???
It’s ‘bread’ made by the inhabitants of the 8th planet from the star Vega. It has lots of flesh from life that we would consider ‘animal.’
I’m not sure why some humans are trying to reproduce the diet of the slime beings on that planet.
Global warming has not decelerated, it has stopped. The car is at the red light, it decelerated, then has to stop. It stopped.
Er, how and why exactly is Obama repeating the media meme ‘It’s warming even faster than the models predicted’? He has (and not for the first time, I have legally binding evidence) simply outed himself as a bald faced liar, as he did over the extreme weather which anyone can look up has no trend at all in any area, and he is ostensibly the most important person on the planet, and has told a lie so simple to expose he must be protected by Jesus himself otherwise people would laugh him out of office and ideally into a prison cell. Except they haven’t. So he is basically exposing the soft brains of the masses knowing 90% of the people haven’t a clue what the temperature is so accept it on face value.
Guys, we really must do better.