New Lovejoy paper says the ‘pause’ is ‘not so unusual’ & ‘no more than natural variability’
Shaun Lovejoy has published a new paper which cites his prior claim of 99.9% confidence that one of the two temperature graphs below is your fault, and the other due to natural variability.
Paul Homewood puts the claim to the test below.
Both graphs are half-century plots of HADCRUT4 global temperatures. Both use exactly the same time and temperature scales. Can you tell with 99.9% confidence which one is 1895-1945 (Nature’s fault), and which is 1963-2013 (Your fault)?
FYI according to Lovejoy’s claims, the top graph (1963-2013) is man-made, the bottom graph is due to natural variability.
In Lovejoy’s new paper, he acknowledges a ‘pause’ in global warming since 1998, says it’s “not so unusual” and concludes “the pause is no more than natural variability.” Indeed, the pause is due to natural variability that has not been accounted for by climate models, and thus invalidates attribution claims that the past 50 years of temperature variations are necessarily due to man-made CO2. Furthermore, prior work by NOAA and others has found ‘pauses’ of 15 or more years are indeed unusual and would suggest the climate models are overly sensitive to CO2. According to RSS satellite data, the ‘pause’ has lasted almost 18 years.
The Paper:
Return periods of global climate fluctuations and the pause
S. Lovejoy
Abstract:
An approach complementary to General Circulation Models (GCM’s), using the anthropogenic CO2 radiative forcing as a linear surrogate for all anthropogenic forcings [Lovejoy, 2014], was recently developed for quantifying human impacts. Using pre-industrial multiproxy series and scaling arguments, the probabilities of natural fluctuations at time lags up to 125 years were determined.
The hypothesis that the industrial epoch warming was a giant natural fluctuation was rejected with 99.9% confidence. In this paper, this method is extended to the determination of event return times. Over the period 1880-2013, the largest 32 year event is expected to be 0.47 K, effectively explaining the postwar cooling (amplitude 0.42 – 0.47 K). Similarly, the “pause” since 1998 (0.28 – 0.37 K) has a return period of 20-50 years (not so unusual). It is nearly cancelled by the pre-pause warming event (1992-1998, return period 30-40 years); the pause is no more than natural variability.
Wait a second, I thought we were the ones pointing to natural variability? It seems like all the points the skeptics have been making for the last 10 years are now being trotted out to explain the pause…When do we get our apology? (For that matter, I’ve been waiting for my “big oil” check for a long time. When do we get that?)
Shouldn’t they maybe “pause” in their quest for more of my money confiscated through taxation, at least until they get their models sorted out?
Oh, but that’s the thing about having government do the confiscating, isn’t it? Your excuses can be pretty flimsy. Or nonexistent.
Ha ha ha ha ha. Tee hee
SteveT
The IPCC suggests -0.1 to +0.1 of natural variability on the attribution chapter of the AR5. Saying the pause exists out of natural variability is a cop-out.
I wonder how they account for better recording equipment and automatic recording since the seventies?
The science was settled.
Natural variability was ruled out, but now it’s back in.
It wasn’t the sun, but maybe now it could be.
Sea ice was melting, melting I tell you. Now it’s at a satellite-era record.
It was CO2, but now it’s probably CO2 but could also be stadium waves, stronger winds, softer winds, dodgy satellite data, coincidence! Whatever.
The heat was over-powering, now it’s missing and probably hiding at the bottom of the ocean.
The models were fine, now they’re um, er, er…..
Not looking so great for this ‘settled’ science, is it?
Pretty much everything else in climate change dogma is “unprecedented”. But The Pause is nothing special
If we get to choose I say it’s a man-made pause and I declare victory over climate change.
Let’s see now. The warming period was 100% man made.” This non-warming period is 100%
natural variability. I wonder how he can tell which is which?
The obvious question:
If the pause since 1998 is caused by natural variability, how much of the preceeding rise was caused by natural variablity?
Sounds like climate science is more variable than the weather….just wait a few days and we will have a new system. I think if skeptics just stand still, climate scientist’s Political Decadal Oscillation will come around to our view.
It is all because of Al Gore. Every damn place he goes, it gets so damn cold. It’s bloody freezing here right now. Can Al Gore please stop jetting around and just let the planet warm up?
Nostradumbass school of retro-diction.
Obama and his EPA know that answer and we must be regulated according to their beliefs! Even the Supreme court has sided with this fools tax. We are the fools and they are taxing us. There will be no pause to the regulation and taxes.
… the ‘pause’ is ‘not so unusual’ & ‘no more than natural variability’
I agree 100% with this. The ups and downs of climate since the Little Ice Age (and yes, there was one “Dr.” Mann) have all been natural variability. The impact of man’s activities (as verse Mann’s activities) have had vanishingly small and negligible impact on climate.
Can we declare victory in the debate now? They are saying that climate and weather are natural phenomenons. Can we not all agree with them on that?
Of course pauses have happened in the past. And yes, they were due to NV. And they are happening now. So his reasoning is they are also due to NV? Which would indicate that so is the warming (absent any disproof of the null hypothesis).
His problem is that none of the models model the pause! Back to the drawing board for him!
As for the 2 graphs, it is easy to tell which one is the “man-made” one. It is the one with a pause at the end (the 1900-45 does not have one).
the bottom one seems to have a pause at the beginning…
…the top one at the beginning and end
but none of that really matters anyway…..temperature history is a guess at best….and all temperature reconstructions show ups and downs…when the overall trend is still down
http://www.foresight.org/nanodot/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/histo3.png
Cheshirered, you mentioned their line about heat trapped at the bottom of the ocean but you left out that they claimed it was being released with methane as the Arctic ice melts. Otherwise, you nailed it.
Don’t you just love this? The ‘pause’ is due to natural variability but the 20 year warming wasn’t and was all due to the scourge of the planet–man.
Of course it’s “not so unusual”. No one said it was. But then, neither was the 20-year warming period from the late 70’s to late 90’s, supposedly manmade, “so unusual”.
What was and is so unusual about that warming period was all the fuss, hullaballoo, and hand-wringing about it.
The increase in SST was due to insolation, not any greenhouse gas effect. IR radiation cannot penetrate water. This increased insolation accounts for all of the late warming trend circa 1977-97. CO2 has never been shown and cannot be shown to be the cause of this late warming trend. The global warmers have only unsupported theory, but in fact this theory is a foundering hypothesis, refuted by empirical data- the temperature record of the last 17 years. Thus such papers as this which argue tenously and with faulty logic, which is the best that the global warmers can do.
Actually suppose the current “pause” is also attributed to human activity? See for example this image: http://thinkprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/chinacoaldemand-638×419.jpg
One can easily assert that the increase in particulate matter (soot) is leading to cooling — at least, if all you want to do is compare graphs.
“not so unusual”
Excellent . . . climatology as per Tom Jones. 😉
If the “pause” is natural variability, perhaps so is the “warming”.
Once again, to repeat what is now the best response ever:
The Roy Spencer Response: Well. DUH!
Nuff said