Time to sweep away the flawed, failed IPCC
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
HadCRUT4, always the tardiest of the five global-temperature datasets, has at last coughed up its monthly global mean surface temperature anomaly value for June. So here is a six-monthly update on changes in global temperature since 1950, the year when the IPCC says we might first have begun to affect the climate by increases in atmospheric CO2 concentration.
The three established terrestrial temperature dataset that publish global monthly anomalies are GISS, HadCRUT4, and NCDC. Graphs for each are below.
GISS, as usual, shows more global warming than the others – but not by much. At worst, then, global warming since 1950 has occurred at a rate equivalent to 1.25 [1.1, 1.4] Cº/century. The interval occurs because the combined measurement, coverage and bias uncertainties in the data are around 0.15 Cº.
The IPCC says it is near certain that we caused at least half of that warming – say, 0.65 [0.5, 0.8] Cº/century equivalent. If the IPCC and the much-tampered temperature records are right, and if there has been no significant downward pressure on global temperatures from natural forcings, we have been causing global warming at an unremarkable central rate of less than two-thirds of a Celsius degree per century.
Roughly speaking, the business-as-usual warming from all greenhouse gases in a century is the same as the warming to be expected from a doubling of CO2 concentration. Yet at present the entire interval of warming rates that might have been caused by us falls well below the least value in the predicted climate-sensitivity interval [1.5, 4.5] Cº.
The literature, however, does not provide much in the way of explicit backing for the IPCC’s near-certainty that we caused at least half of the global warming since 1950. Legates et al. (2013) showed that only 0.5% of 11,944 abstracts of papers on climate science and related matters published in the 21 years 1991-2011 had explicitly stated that global warming in recent decades was mostly manmade. Not 97%: just 0.5%.
As I found when I conducted a straw poll of 650 of the most skeptical skeptics on Earth, at the recent Heartland climate conference in Las Vegas, the consensus that Man may have caused some global warming since 1950 is in the region of 100%.
The publication of that result provoked an extraordinary outbreak of fury among climate extremists (as well as one or two grouchy skeptics). For years the true-believers had gotten away with pretending that “climate deniers” – their hate-speech term for anyone who applies the scientific method to the climate question – do not accept the basic science behind the greenhouse theory.
Now that that pretense is shown to have been false, they are gradually being compelled to accept that, as Alec Rawls has demonstrated in his distinguished series of articles on Keating’s fatuous $30,000 challenge to skeptics to “disprove” the official hypothesis, the true divide between skeptics and extremists is not, repeat not, on the question whether human emissions may cause some warming. It is on the question how much warming we may cause.
On that question, there is little consensus in the reviewed literature. But opinion among the tiny handful of authors who research the “how-much-warming” question is moving rapidly in the direction of little more than 1 Cº warming per CO2 doubling. From the point of view of the profiteers of doom (profiteers indeed: half a dozen enviro-freako lobby groups collected $150 million from the EU alone in eight years), the problem is that 1 Cº is no problem.
Just 1 Cº per doubling of CO2 concentration is simply not enough to require any “climate policy” or “climate action” at all. It requires neither mitigation nor even adaptation: for the eventual global temperature change in response to a quadrupling of CO2 concentration compared with today, after which fossil fuels would run out, would be little more than 2 Cº –well within the natural variability of the climate.
It is also worth comparing the three terrestrial and two satellite datasets from January 1979 to June 2014, the longest period for which all five provide data.
We can now rank the results since 1950 (left) and since 1979 (right):
Next, let us look at the Great Pause – the astonishing absence of any global warming at all for the past decade or two notwithstanding ever-more-rapid rises in atmospheric CO2 concentration. Taken as the mean of all five datasets, the Great Pause has endured for 160 months – i.e., 13 years 4 months:
The knockout blow to the models is delivered by a comparison between the rates of near-term global warming predicted by the IPCC and those that have been observed since.
The IPCC’s most recent Assessment Report, published in 2013, backcast its near-term predictions to 2005 so that they continued from the predictions of the previous Assessment Report published in 2007. One-sixth of a Celsius degree of warming should have happened since 2005, but, on the mean of all five datasets, none has actually occurred:
The divergence between fanciful prediction and measured reality is still more startling if one goes back to the predictions made by the IPCC in its First Assessment Report of 1990:
In 1990 the IPCC said with “substantial confidence” that its medium-term prediction (the orange region on the graph) was correct. It was wrong.
The rate of global warming since 1990, taken as the mean of the three terrestrial datasets, is half what the IPCC had then projected. The trend line of real-world temperature, in bright blue, falls well below the entire orange region representing the interval of near-term global warming predicted by the IPCC in 1990.
The IPCC’s “substantial confidence” had no justification. Events have confirmed that it was misplaced.
These errors in prediction are by no means trivial. The central purpose for which the IPCC was founded was to tell the world how much global warming we might expect. The predictions have repeatedly turned out to have been grievous exaggerations.
It is baffling that each successive IPCC report states with ever-greater “statistical” certainty that most of the global warming since 1950 was attributable to us when only 0.5% of papers in the reviewed literature explicitly attribute most of that warming to us, and when all IPCC temperature predictions have overshot reality by so wide – and so widening – a margin.
Not one of the models relied upon by the IPCC predicted as its central estimate in 1990 that by today there would be half the warming the IPCC had then predicted. Not one predicted as its central estimate a “pause” in global warming that has now endured for approaching a decade and a half on the average of all five major datasets.
There are now at least two dozen mutually incompatible explanations for these grave and growing discrepancies between prediction and observation. The most likely explanation, however, is very seldom put forward in the reviewed literature, and never in the mainstream news media, most of whom have been very careful never to tell their audiences how poorly the models have been performing.
By Occam’s razor, the simplest of all the explanations is the most likely to be true: namely, that the models are programmed to run far hotter than they should. They have been trained to yield a result profitable to those who operate them.
There is a simple cure for that. Pay the modelers only by results. If global temperature failed to fall anywhere within the projected 5%-95% uncertainty interval, the model in question would cease to be funded.
Likewise, the bastardization of science by the IPCC process, where open frauds are encouraged so long as they further the cause of more funding, and where governments anxious to raise more tax decide the final form of reports that advocate measures to do just that, must be brought at once to an end.
The IPCC never had a useful or legitimate scientific purpose. It was founded for purely political and not scientific reasons. It was flawed. It has failed. Time to sweep it away. It does not even deserve a place in the history books, except as a warning against the globalization of groupthink, and of government.
Unfortunately I dont believe any of the above data. Recently someone posted here on WUWT a compilation of world reliable class 1 rural surface data worldwide from 1640 showing a 0.46C “warming” per 100 years which absolutely mimicked CET(which I’ve always maintained is the ONLY reliable surface data + Armagh). This I do believe and 0.47C change over a 100 years might as well be 0C in my books! LOL
KevinM,
A good place to download data in chart form is at the WoodForTrees site. He is completely neutral, and does not take sides. As a result, WFT data is accepted and used by both sides of the debate.
“””””…..James Abbott says:
July 29, 2014 at 3:58 pm
Very interesting. Not only is Lord M moderating his language on the science, he is also being more accurate about the pause. ……””””””
Well James, YOU need to be more accurate about YOUR claims.
Christopher’s regular post on “the pause” is based simply on the RSS satellite data set; that is a well known fact.
He has also shown in the past, what happens, if he replaces RSS, with UAH, HADCrud, or GISS, or anything else, and obtained similar results.
He states quite clearly in the present post that he took the average of five data sets.
When you change the data; you change the statistics result.
What is so difficult to understand about this concept.
Statistical results are the immutable exact output obtained by applying standard statistical mathematics algorithms to ANY data set.
It can be your back yard temperature at noon for the last 15 years, or it can be the real telephone numbers in the Manhattan telephone directory, or the number of animals per square km , or even the numero-alphabet character at the right of the top line, on each page of an original edition of “Gone with the Wind.”
Once the dataset is known, the statistics are exactly determinate.
You are welcome to calculate the result yourself, since M of B has told you what the data set is.
Gotten
As past participles of get, got and gotten both date back to Middle English. The form gotten is not used in British English but is very common in North American English, though even there it is often regarded as non-standard. In North American English, got and gotten are not identical in use. Gotten usually implies the process of obtaining something, as in he had gotten us tickets for the show, while got implies the state of possession or ownership, as in I haven’t got any money.
Although the British stopped using the past participle gotten about three hundred years ago, the American colonists and their descendants–especially in New England–still tend to use it. Some English teachers have tried to ban its usage to make American English conform to British English, especially during the nineteenth and early twentieth century when there was a movement to purify English. Others are just not used to its use because it is not used in their region and hear it as an error. Ultimately, language is convention. If you are writing for a formal audience outside of New England, you might want to use the simple past form got instead. It is like the dictum to never end a sentence with a preposition because that is something some people just will not put–ummm–up with which some people just will not put! Yes. For example: “Since I last saw you, you have gotten big!” Gotten is correct, and very old. In England many people wrongly assume that gotten is a modern Americanism, but the truth is the English more-or-less stopped using it, and have forgotten (!) that they used to use it. That said, “gotten” isn’t good English. In most cases other, more precise and meaningful words should be used in its place. While “have got” sounds wrong to American ears, “have gotten” can usually be replaced by “have become”, and “have been able to” or “have had the chance/opportunity to” would make better sense in other situations.”You would have got along with him” is proper English.
In the UK, the old word “gotten” dropped out of use except in such stock phrases as “ill-gotten” and “gotten up,” but in the US it is frequently used as the past participle of “get.” Sometimes the two are interchangeable, however, “got” implies current possession, as in “I’ve got just five dollars to buy my dinner with.” “Gotten,” in contrast, often implies the process of getting hold of something: “I’ve gotten five dollars for cleaning out Mrs. Quimby’s shed” emphasizing the earning of the money rather than its possession.
Phrases that involve some sort of process usually involve “gotten”: “My grades have gotten better since I moved out of the fraternity.” When you have to leave, you’ve got to go. If you say you’ve “gotten to go” you’re implying someone gave you permission to go.
In increasing order of prevarication the scale goes: lies. damned lies, statistics, and government reports. UN and NGO reports are completely off theprevarication scale, but it would look like a hockey stick at the right end.
I would note that almost the entire range of the IPCC’s 2005 prediction is below that of the 1990 prediction range, yet still above that of reality.
Excellent article Christopher Monckton, excellent.
TinyUrl for this article, http://tinyurl.com/nowarming13yrs4mos.
leftturnandre says:
July 29, 2014 at 2:44 pm
What’s your opinion on ill-gotten
The “17 years” claim refers (or should refer) to “no significant warming.”
====================
I don’t think increased taxation is the main motive. Those in attendance at the SFP meeting are not primarily politicians, but emissaries of the Environmental departments of their governments. (In countries with proportional representation systems, the Greens are usually given control of the Environmental Department as their payoff for being part of a coalition government.) As such, they are full-fledged alarmists, and they are less cautious than scientists about going beyond the data. That is why the final SFP is more alarmist than the draft versions, and omits the embarrassing charts in the earlier drafts, and is more alarmist than the base document.
Hot d@mn, my tomato plants on the subtropical Fraser Coast are stunted weeds, because the weather has been too cold for them to grow. I was hoping for at least a *little* global warming this year… 🙂
The debates shifted to the ocean.
Hmmm…13 years four months = length of “the pause” using tampered,fudged, and warm-biased data sets vs 17 years 10 months using a single pristine data set. Which to choose?
Decisions decisions.
dbstealey you “explain” nothing. What Phil Jones said in 1999 is completely irrelevant to the content of Lord M’s interesting article – which happens to back up what I have been saying for some time (ie the pause started in 2002) – and which you (along with others) have regularly attacked.
george e. smith you miss the point entirely. Lord M’s (more realistic) analysis is based on taking the 5 data sets together which cover both satellite and terrestrial temperature measurements – as opposed to the single RSS data set (satellite sensing of atmospheric temperature in various altitude bands) which happens to give a favoured result for those looking for the least warming.
Gotten
AS a matter of historical interest, the use of the word gotten has an honourable mention in one of the finest examples of sublime English Language, The Book of Common Prayer of 1662.
In the rubrics at the end of the Order for the Administration of the Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion the following instruction is given: “And to take away all occasion of dissension and superstition, which any person hath or might have concerning the Bread and Wine, it shall suffice that the Bread be such as is usual to be eaten; but the best and purest Wheat Bread that conveniently may be gotten.”
I am sure the Pilgrim Fathers would have taken many Lincolnshire words and phrases which have survived in the current American culture.
Harry Minns, North Street, Caistor.
http://www.scunthorpetelegraph.co.uk/Gotten-dates-Middle-English/story-11178748-detail/story.html
The term: THE GREAT PAUSE is stupendous. It implies that it will continue,
because this pause will be really great and long….. see my references JS
I admire the IPCC. There would hardly be a debate or skeptics without them. And look how much we’ve learned.
@dbstealey – WFT is indeed used by both sides – at least those concerned with data. I have found most alarmists quote authority and ignore the data.
Lord Monckton said, “It [IPCC] does not even deserve a place in the history books, except as a warning against the globalization of groupthink, and of government.”
My response, ” Hear, hear!!! Well done!!”
I have two beefs with these data-sets. The first one is that it is asinine to draw a straight line through the data from 1950 to 2014. If you want to show this temperature range, don’t be lazy and analyze the the temperature changes taking place in this temperature regime. As a corollary, there is not sufficient detail visible to do it well because the horizontal scale is too compressed. The second one is that all three ground-based data-sets still feature the phony computer processing traces I have from time to time pointed out. What happened is that the three global temperature sources considered in this article have been cooperating to fix the global temperature curve to their liking. Their first move was to change an eighteen year temperature stretch in the eighties and nineties from no warming to warming and dedicate it as “late twentieth century warming. Satellite data show that there was no warming from 1979 to 1997 but their temperature curve shows a rise of 0.1 degrees Celsius between these two points. That they cooperated in fixing this temperature came out accidentally because they screwed up. What happened is that they used computer processing on all three data-sets using the same equipment. As an unanticipated consequence of this operation it left traces of itself in the finished product. These consist of sharp upward-pointing spikes at the beginnings of years in their published curves. You are showing all three data-sets as well as UAH and RSS satellite curves in this article You should have no trouble recognizing these inserts by comparing satellite and ground-based data. The most prominent of these phony spikes in GISS are located at years 1987, 1990, 1995, 1998, 1999, 2002, 2007, and 2008. There are others harder to find. They happen to be at the exact same locations in all three databases. The ones at 1998 and 1999 are attached to the super El Nino of 1998 which becomes a tenth of a degree higher than it is.
This kind of manipulation is exactly what Michael Crichton was afraid of would happen when he spoke to the United States Senate in 2005: “…let me tell you a story. It’s 1991, I am flying home from Germany, sitting next to a man who is almost in tears, he is so upset. He’s a physician involved in an FDA study of a new drug. It’s a double-blind study involving four separate teams—one plans the study, another administers the drug to patients, a third assess the effect on patients, and a fourth analyzes results. The teams do not know each other, and are prohibited from personal contact of any sort, on peril of contaminating the results. This man had been sitting in the Frankfurt airport, innocently chatting with another man, when they discovered to their mutual horror they are on two different teams studying the same drug. They were required to report their encounter to the FDA. And my companion was now waiting to see if the FDA would declare their multi-year, multi-million-dollar study invalid because of this contact.
For a person with a medical background, accustomed to this degree of rigor in research, the protocols of climate science appear considerably more relaxed. A striking feature of climate science is that it’s permissible for raw data to be “touched,” or modified, by many hands. Gaps in temperature and proxy records are filled in. Suspect values are deleted because a scientist deems them erroneous. A researcher may elect to use parts of existing records, ignoring other parts. But the fact that the data has been modified in so many ways inevitably raises the question of whether the results of a given study are wholly or partially caused by the modifications themselves.”
PS to my comment of 4:41 pm above. All the governmental delegates at the Summary For Policymakers meetings who come from developing nations (a majority of delegates) have an additional motive for alarmism: the transfer payments they hope to get from the knock-on effects of an alarmist report.
Bloomberg’s Roston tries a new tack!
29 July: Bloomberg: Eric Roston: Ten U.S. Cities Where Flooding Is Much More Common
Those who dismiss global warming projections might at least note that change has already become a nuisance…
(LIST OF CITIES FOLLOWED BY FINAL SENTENCE)
Enjoy climate change while it’s still a nuisance.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-07-28/ten-u-s-cities-where-flooding-is-much-more-common.html
[IPCC AR5] conclusions have been reached with high statistical confidence by a working group made up of many of the world’s leading climate scientists drawing on areas of well-understood science – UK House of Commons report on IPCC AR5.
What is a statistical confidence? In science you determine it in two steps:
1. Form a hypothesis (“conclusion” in IPCC jargon).
2. Test it against available data. The more data you have the more confidence you may get. There are formulas to compute a confidence level from a number of observations supporting or opposing the hypothesis.
Please note that a statistical confidence has nothing to do with a size of a working group, or the number of leading climate scientists in it. “IPCC confidence” might be a better term.
And this reckoning is based on admitted fiddling of the temp record that is presently built into the algorithms of the main record keepers. Temperatures a hundred years ago are likely >0.3 C and climbing warmer than the reworked figures.
“Get” also has roots in old Norse and German words having similar meaning. The global spread of English is due in part to its large vocabulary which comes from the lack of strict rules for admitting new words into the dictionary – like the French tend to do. An ugly, but complex grammar also may help the spread of English as it facilitates expressing complex thoughts.
I will go along with thirteen years, four months. I always wondered why others wanted to include the period covered by the super El Nino of 1998 because it is simply a different kind of temperature regime. If you study the satellite data carefully you will see that on both sides of the super El Nino are narrow La Nina valleys. The one on the right starts to form a new El Nino peak but strangely overshoots its mark and ends up a third of a degree higher than I expected. This is an unexpected step warming that created the no-warming platform we now inhabit. And instead of another El Nino peak we got a seven year, basically flat, temperature platform until the La Nina of 2008 finally showed up. (That is the one that Trenberth did not understand!). I put it all down to the extra warm water which the huge super El Nino brought over but the flat mean temperature persisted and here we are, trying to understand why the temperature did not go down when the century started.