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.
richardscourtney: I’m happy to switch the conversation to “committed warming”
and happy to finally see concrete references. You may want to look at
http://www.skepticalscience.com/ipcc-overestimate-global-warming.htm
starting at the ‘Scorecard’ heading:
”
The IPCC AR4 Scenario A2 projected rate of warming from 2000 to 2012 was 0.18°C per decade. This is within the uncertainty range of the observed rate of warming (0.06 ± 0.16°C) per decade since 2000, though the observed warming has likely been lower than the AR4 projection. As we will show below, this is due to the preponderance of natural temperature influences being in the cooling direction since 2000, while the AR4 projection is consistent with the underlying human-caused warming trend.
”
In the GISS data
(http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts+dSST.txt)
you can see that there are ~0.3 C changes in temperature from year to year
(e.g. Feb 2001 is 0.46C, Feb 2002 is 0.74C). Using yearly averages, we have
0.40C for 2000 and 0.66C for 2010. Given the amount of noise in the data,
a prediction of 0.2C of committed warming per decade pretty much agrees with
what we are actually observing.
“Cesium62” ought to know better than to be discourteous from behind a furtive cloak of pseudonymity. My statement about the predictions made by the IPCC in 1990 referred, of course, to the IPCC’s 1990 First Assessment Report. “Cesium62” need only read the summary for policy-makers to discover that the IPCC predicted what I said it had predicted, and did so using the phrase “We predict …”, and also expressed “substantial confidence” that the models were appropriately representing the principal features of the climate system (though Mr Bickmore disagrees with the IPCC on this point, in that the models did not at that time reflect ocean circulation, and he considers that this should have been “obvious” to all, inferentially including even the admittedly dim IPCC).
The IPCC’s predictions, of 1.0 [0.7, 1.5] Celsius degrees of warming by 2025, would amount to 0.68 Celsius degrees by now, assuming a linear trend since 1990. The observed warming has only been 0.34 Celsius degrees in the quarter-century since 1990. And that, exactly as I said, is half the warming that the IPCC had then predicted, and below its least estimate. The models were wrong. Get used to it. The IPCC itself has had to reduce its near-term projection by almost half compared with 1990, and its present and 1990 projection intervals barely overlap at any point. On any objective test, the predictions that provoked the scare were so badly adrift that there is no longer any reason to be scared about global warming, and still less to spend any taxpayers’ or energy-users’ money on making it go away.
“Cesium32” seems to think that a prediction of 0.2 C/decade global warming is “consistent” with the outturn of no global warming at all in the past decade and a half. However, the combined measurement, coverage and bias uncertainties amount to only 0.15 C in total, whereas there should have been 0.3 C warming in the past decade and a half and there has not been any to speak of. The discrepancy between prediction and observation is, therefore, significant.
Since 1950 the mean rate of global warming has been less than 0.12 C/decade, well below the IPCC’s prediction of 0.2 C/decade. Whichever way one tries to rearrange or apologize for the numbers, the IPCC’s projections have been consistently and substantially on the side of exaggeration, and the IPCC has foolishly attempted to claim ever-greater “confidence” in its predictions even as the failure of those predictions becomes ever greater and more obvious to all.
cesium62:
Your post at July 31, 2014 at 2:40 am begins saying to me
Well, if you are “happy” to discuss “committed warming” I wonder why you did not. Instead, you suggested I “may want to look” at the contents of the cess pit known as SkS.
I gave you reference, citation, link and quotation which shows the IPCC predicted (n.b. predicted) ~0.3°C of global temperature rise from year 2000 until now. Even allowing for their stated error estimate, the rise should have been over 0.2°C by now.
I point out that this “committed warming” has not happened. And your reply is to say that “I may want” to dip into climate porn: I don’t!
Richard
Stephen Wilde said –
More people were killed or injured in the primitive 19th century UK coal mining industry than have ever been harmed by the nuclear power industry worldwide.
There certainly were – and well into the 20th Century too. When I went down the pit with my dad in 1956 there were 550 fatalities in UK coal mining and over 10,000 serious accidents that year, in 50 working weeks. This was typical. Do the Math, as our American friends say. Such a casualty record today is unthinkable, in any industry.
And to Lord Monckton, right on Milord, more power to your elbow – nuclear power and fossil fuel power preferably.
And to Anthony, what a fantastic website this is, required lunchtime reading for me every day – you should be knighted too!!. Please publicise your trip to UK so we can come and hear you and give you our support.
Brian j in UK.
richardscourtney (July 31, 2014 at 1:32 am). A null hypothesis can be whatever you choose. Typically, one would choose a condition that indicates no change, but no change in what sense? My point was that, for the global mean temperature series, you could choose no change in temperature the temperature, or you could choose no change in the slope if it’s been relatively consistent over a longer period. And whether or not choosing the second option fits with your philosophy of null-hypothesis-choosing, the fact remains that the 13-year slope is statistically indistinguishable from the 40-year slope. On this basis alone, it is dishonest to say warming “stopped” 13 years ago.
@ur momisugly Barry Bickmore says: July 31, 2014 at 8:00 am
No change in what you are testing! You are over thinking the null hypothesis.
cesium62 says:
July 31, 2014 at 2:40 am
Given the amount of noise in the data, a prediction of 0.2C of committed warming per decade pretty much agrees with what we are actually observing.
GISS is flat from November 2001, or 12 years and 8 months. See:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:2001.8/plot/gistemp/from:2001.8/trend
Monckton of Brenchley (July 31, 2014 at 3:06 am) says:
“Since 1950 the mean rate of global warming has been less than 0.12 C/decade, well below the IPCC’s prediction of 0.2 C/decade. Whichever way one tries to rearrange or apologize for the numbers, the IPCC’s projections have been consistently and substantially on the side of exaggeration, and the IPCC has foolishly attempted to claim ever-greater ‘confidence’ in its predictions even as the failure of those predictions becomes ever greater and more obvious to all.”
Given that the IPCC didn’t exist in 1950, I’m reasonably sure they didn’t predict a rate of 0.2 °C since then. Did you mean to say something else?
In response to Brian J in UK, I had great respect for the miners who went down Britain’s deep mines. They were dangerous, difficult, uncomfortable places to work. I thought of becoming a miner when I discovered they were paid three times what I was getting as a leader-writer on the Yorkshire Post. I went down a mine and took one look, and reckoned that they were a lot braver than I was.
It was a shame they were badly led by Communists trained in and funded by Moscow. If they hadn’t been used by Moscow as an instrument first to topple the Conservative government of Edward Heath and then to try (unsuccessfully) to do the same to Margaret Thatcher, the process of switching from dangerous, loss-making deep-mined coal to the cheaper and less life-threatening opencast would have been slower and more dignified, and the mining communities would not have suffered as sharply and painfully from the abrupt transition as they did.
It’s a shame that the Left, who once backed the miners because the miners were led by Communists, now oppose the miners on the bogus ground that coal emits dangerous quantities of CO2, when the real reason for Mr Obama’s opposition to coal is that coal corporations have traditionally been among the biggest donors to the Republican party.
When the history of the present age comes to be written, the cynical wickedness of the Left in exploiting and then in ditching the very workers for whom they claimed to speak will be exposed and recorded. But the deep miners of the UK, badly led though they were by the Communists who had captured their union, will always be the heroes of labor to me.
In case anyone doubts Christopher’s point about Moscow’s influence on the UK unions in the 60s and 70s, see here:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1218922/JACK-THE-TRAITOR-Special-investigation-reveals-Union-boss-sold-secrets-KGB-45-years.html
GISS is flat from November 2001, or 12 years and 8 months. See:
And if you plot the same metric, for the same length of time, but use 2006 as your endpoint, the rate is double the long term trend, and nearly 50% above the IPCC (1990) prediction. maybe the ‘pause’ is no more than regression to the mean?
A system that is “chaotic” exhibits unpredictable behavior in the short term, but long-term averages can still be quite predictable.
======================
define “long-term”.
based on the definition of climate as the average of weather over a 30 year period, then the period from 1950 until today is 64 years. About 2.5 data points on our climate sample. It is nonsense to talk about long-term averages with only 2.5 data points.
As a rule of thumb you need 1000 data points — 3000 years of climate data to get a long-term reliable average. I expect current temperatures are within the average +- 3 standard deviations of climate over the past 3 thousand years. As such, there is nothing unusual about current climate.
Stand on the beach. Every now and then a wave will come along bigger than all the rest. Does this mean the waves are getting bigger? Only if you stand there a very long time can you make that call. Looking at 10 waves or 100 waves isn’t enough. You need 1000 waves. 2-3 hours of watching to be sure. 64 years — 2.5 climate cycles — that is similar to watching 2.5 waves on the beach and concluding they are getting larger. It is a nonsense conclusion, because if fails to properly consider randomness.
average +- 3 standard deviations
===============
process control in modern manufacturing relies heavily on this definition. a process that is outside these limits is considered “out of control” — and thus needing corrective action.
true, by confusing weather with climate, and thus juggling the timescales, can one reach faulty conclusions. but this is an abuse of statistic. you cannot slide the 30 year ruler back and forth to create multiple samples within a period of 2.5 samples, and then try and attach significance to this.
3000 years of climate will at a minimum include the medieval and roman warm periods, which are well matched to the modern warm period within the limits of the available records. our current climate is an “in control” process.
Milankovitch forcing, and that isn’t large enough to explain the changes without some hefty positive feedback.
=============
not correct. every object has a natural frequencies at which it will resonate. when a forcing is in sync with these frequencies the object will resonate with a much greater amplitude than can be explained by the forcing.
explain why for example Venus always shows the same face to earth at the point of closest approach. the orbital forcings cannot explain this, yet the retrograde spin of venus is clearly synchronized to earth. but because this cannot be explained by science, the consensus view is that it must be coincidental.
like someone winning the lottery 10 times in a row, because it cannot be explained it must be coincidence. similar explanations were given for ice ages and plate tectonics. because we cannot explain the cause, what we observe cannot be due to cause and effect. it must simply be coincidence.
the more obvious answer is the one scientists never give — that we don’t know the cause. the reality is we can’t say it is due to co-incidence simply because we haven’t found the cause. that is like in times past, people saying god creates illness. or saying that humans cause global warming – because we can’t find any other cause.
ferdberple, if you agree that Milankovitch forcing is the cause of the glacial-interglacial cycle, but that the Earth has to “resonate” with it to obtain the observed response… then you just repeated what I said about positive feedback.
The reason for changes in the range of about 100 years is perfectly visible.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/Sg.htm
Barry Bickmore:
Your post at July 31, 2014 at 8:00 am begins by saying
NO! Bayesian priors can be chosen, but the scientific method defines the Null Hypothesis. Please see my explanation which you cite. It is here. It explains that
The Null Hypothesis says it must be assumed a system has not experienced a change unless there is evidence of a change.
The Null Hypothesis is a fundamental scientific principle and forms the basis of all scientific understanding, investigation and interpretation. Indeed, it is the basic principle of experimental procedure where an input to a system is altered to discern a change: if the system is not observed to respond to the alteration then it has to be assumed the system did not respond to the alteration.
The scientific method has provided many benefits and I see no reason to think that your desire to alter it should be accepted.
Indeed, your rejection of the scientific method gives me reason to reject everything you say.
Richard
But until 13 years ago the climate was warming at 0.16 degrees per decade. The NULL Hypothesis, therefore, should be that the climate is still warming at 0.16 degrees per decade (i.e. the system has not changed).
In truth, though. it doesn’t really matter what the surface/atmosphere is doing. Until we have evidence that the oceans have stopped warming then we can’t say global warming has stopped.
It seems that the apologists for the failed models have difficulty in understanding the basics of temperature change, just as the models themselves do. To establish the true trend, canceling out the warming and cooling phases of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, it is necessary to take periods of approximately 60 years. Since 1950, the year when, according to the IPCC, we might have begun to influence the weather, 64 years have passed. The rate of warming over that period has been less than 0.12 K/decade. The IPCC, however, has been predicting 0.2 K/decade – close to twice what has occurred.
If, however, the apologists prefer to reckon from 1990, the date of the IPCC’s First Assessment Report, then the rate of observed warming is still below 0.14 K/decade, compared with the 0.28 K/decade predicted by the IPCC. As I have said, whichever way one slices the numbers, the IPCC’s predictions have been relentlessly exaggerated when compared with real-world measurement. It is futile, as well as intellectually dishonest, to try to maneuver and wriggle, duck and dive, rather than having the scientific integrity to admit – as the IPCC itself has admitted – that the models were simply wrong.
“””””…..James Abbott says:
July 29, 2014 at 5:21 pm
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……”””””
Really; did I do that ??
……”””””” Lord M’s (more realistic) analysis is based on taking the 5 data sets together …..”””
Nah; didn’t miss that, I said that.
……”””””””as opposed to the single RSS data set ……””””
Nah, didn’t miss that, I said that.
Darned if I didn’t say he also had (in the past), tried his algorithm on each of the other data sets individually, and showed no great differences.
Only things I DIDN’T SAY, but are the results of your editorializing, are these two:
…..””””” (more realistic)…..”””””
…..””””” which happens to give a favoured result for those looking for the least warming…..””””
Now James, just what was the point you were attempting to make; since I missed nothing, that you claimed I missed.
Last time I studied statistics, about 60 years ago, if you used the same data set, and applied the same statistical mathematics algorithms to that, you (and anybody else) ALWAYS get the exact same results. Statistics is completely deterministic.
But if you change either the data set (for some reason), or the algorithm (for some other reason), the the output results will change as well.
Lord Monckton changed the data set; and got a different answer (to a different problem).
Furthermore, he correctly reported his results, in both instances.
Now if the five data set result had come out at 19 years and 7 months, would you now also be whining about the altered outcome.
Like I said, if you didn’t like his arithmetic; (statistics requires at least fourth grade arithmetic), then why not do the calculations yourself, and see if you get the same results.
I do know that summing a non absolutely convergent , convergent infinite series, will get you any positive or negative total sum that you like; depending on the order you do the summation.
But this is only finite data sets, so the result is pre-determined by the data, and the algorithm, and not by the person doing the computation.
So give it a go, and show us where Christopher (allegedly) went wrong.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
July 31, 2014 at 3:15 pm
If, however, the apologists prefer to reckon from 1990, the date of the IPCC’s First Assessment Report, then the rate of observed warming is still below 0.14 K/decade, compared with the 0.28 K/decade predicted by the IPCC.
===========================================================================
The IPCC’s 1991 First Assessment Report also states in the Executive Summary :
“Based on current models we predict………The rise will not be steady because of the influence of other factors.”
John Finn says:
But until 13 years ago the climate was warming at 0.16 degrees per decade. The NULL Hypothesis, therefore, should be that the climate is still warming at 0.16 degrees per decade….
After reading that, I see that John Finn doesn’t understand the climate Null Hypothesis.
=============================
george e. smith says to James Abbott:
So give it a go, and show us where Christopher (allegedly) went wrong.
I don’t make predictions. But if I did, I would predict that James Abbot won’t take George’s challenge. ☺
John Finn:
I see your post at July 31, 2014 at 3:04 pm demonstrates you have reading comprehension problems.
I suggest that you read my explanation again and – this time – attempt to understand this bit
Richard
I don’t think so and I’m not sure why you bang on about AGW later in your post. We are discussing the continuation or non-continuation of a warming trend. Whether that trend is due to AGW is irrelevant.
I maintain that there is insufficient evidence to conclude that the previous surface warming trend has stopped. I further maintain that global warming (for whatever reason) has certainly not stopped because the oceans are continuing to accumulate energy at the rate of ~7×10^22 Joules per decade.
In response to Mr Finn, the warming trend that was evident between 1976 and the turn of the millennium has manifestly ceased since, on all datasets. That is not to say that it will not resume in due course: we are continuing to add CO2 to the atmosphere and, all other things being equal, theory would lead us to expect that warming will resume.
However, one cannot safely pray ocean warming in aid. Sea level, according to the Envisat satellite, barely rose during its eight years of operation; and the GRACE gravitational-anomaly satellites showed it falling from 2004-2009, suggesting that any net accumulation of heat in the oceans must be small enough not to cause much sea-level rise. Unfortunately, the measurement of changes in sea temperature is insufficiently well resolved to allow us to be sure at what rate (if any) the oceans are accumulating heat; nor can we be sure how much of any accumulating heat in the oceans is attributable to warming of the atmosphere and how much to radiation from the Earth’s mantle.
The least ill-resolved record of ocean heat content we have is the 3500 ARGO bathythermograph buoys: but their resolution is the equivalent of taking a single temperature and salinity profile of the whole of Lake Superior less than once a year, as Mr Eschenbach, in one of his distinguished contributions here, has pointed out. What they indicate (and subject to concerns about their resolution) is that the oceans have been accumulating heat at a rate approximately one-sixth of that which the models had predicted. On should hesitate, therefore, to draw definitive conclusions about the continuance of global warming from the apparent heat content of the oceans. We cannot measure it accurately enough to be confident of any such conclusion.
Furthermore, the oceans are denser than the atmosphere by three orders of magnitude: therefore, a very large change in atmospheric temperature would be needed to bring about a very small change in ocean heat content. Yet for a decade and a half there has been no change in atmospheric temperature at all – and certainly not a large one. Therefore, if there has been an increase in ocean heat content, it is perhaps more likely to have come from below than from above.