El Niño has not yet shortened the Great Pause
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Remarkably, the El Niño warming of this year has not yet shortened the Great Pause, which, like last month, stands at 17 years 10 months with no global warming at all.
Taking the least-squares linear-regression trend on Remote Sensing Systems’ satellite-based monthly global mean lower-troposphere temperature dataset, there has been no global warming – none at all – for 214 months. This is the longest continuous period without any warming in the global instrumental temperature record since the satellites first watched in 1979. It has endured for about half the satellite temperature record. Yet the Great Pause coincides with a continuing, rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration.
Figure 1. RSS monthly global mean lower-troposphere temperature anomalies (dark blue) and trend (thick bright blue line), October 1996 to July 2014, showing no trend for 17 years 10 months.
The hiatus period of 17 years 10 months, or 214 months, is the farthest back one can go in the RSS satellite temperature record and still show a zero trend.
Yet the length of the Great Pause in global warming, significant though it now is, is of less importance than the ever-growing discrepancy between the temperature trends predicted by models and the far less exciting real-world temperature change that has been observed.
The First Assessment Report predicted that global temperature would rise by 1.0 [0.7, 1.5] Cº to 2025, equivalent to 2.8 [1.9, 4.2] Cº per century. The executive summary asked, “How much confidence do we have in our predictions?” IPCC pointed out some 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.”
That “substantial confidence” was substantial over-confidence. A quarter-century after 1990, the outturn to date – expressed as the least-squares linear-regression trend on the mean of the RSS and UAH monthly global mean surface temperature anomalies – is 0.34 Cº, equivalent to just 1.4 Cº/century, or exactly half of the central estimate in IPCC (1990) and well below even the least estimate (Fig. 2).
Figure 2. Near-term projections of warming at a rate equivalent to 2.8 [1.9, 4.2] K/century , made with “substantial confidence” in IPCC (1990), January 1990 to June 2014 (orange region and red trend line), vs. observed anomalies (dark blue) and trend (bright blue) at 1.4 K/century equivalent. Mean of the three terrestrial surface-temperature anomalies (GISS, HadCRUT4, and NCDC).
The Great Pause is a growing embarrassment to those who had told us with “substantial confidence” that the science was settled and the debate over. Nature had other ideas. Though more than two dozen more or less implausible excuses for the Pause are appearing in nervous reviewed journals, the possibility that the Pause is occurring because the computer models are simply wrong about the sensitivity of temperature to manmade greenhouse gases can no longer be dismissed.
Remarkably, even the IPCC’s latest and much reduced near-term global-warming projections are also excessive (Fig. 3).
Figure 3. Predicted temperature change, January 2005 to June 2014, at a rate equivalent to 1.7 [1.0, 2.3] Cº/century (orange zone with thick red best-estimate trend line), compared with the observed anomalies (dark blue) and –0.1 Cº/century real-world trend (bright blue), taken as the average of the three terrestrial surface temperature anomaly datasets (GISS, HadCRUT4, and NCDC) and the two satellite lower-troposphere temperature anomaly datasets (RSS and UAH).
In 1990, the IPCC’s central estimate of near-term warming was higher by two-thirds than it is today. Then it was 2.8 C/century equivalent. Now it is just 1.7 Cº equivalent – and, as Fig. 3 shows, even that is proving to be a substantial exaggeration.
On the RSS satellite data, there has been no global warming statistically distinguishable from zero for more than 26 years. None of the models predicted that, in effect, there would be no global warming for a quarter of a century.
The Great Pause may well come to an end by this winter. An el Niño event is underway and would normally peak during the northern-hemisphere winter. There is too little information to say how much temporary warming it will cause, but a new wave of warm water has emerged in recent days, so one should not yet write off this el Niño as a non-event. The temperature spikes caused by the el Niños of 1998, 2007, and 2010 are clearly visible in Figs. 1-3.
Why RSS? Well, it’s the first of the five datasets to report each month, so it’s topical. Also, it correctly shows how much bigger the el Niño of 1998 was than any of its successors. It was the only event of its kind in 150 years that caused widespread coral bleaching. Other temperature records do not distinguish so clearly between the 1998 el Niño and the rest. It is carefully calibrated to correct for orbital degradation in the old NOAA satellite on which it relies. The other satellite record, UAH, which has been running rather hotter than the rest, is about to be revised in the direction of showing less warming. As for the terrestrial records, read the Climategate emails and weep.
Updated key facts about global temperature
Ø The RSS satellite dataset shows no global warming at all for 214 months from October 1996 to July 2014. That is more than half the 427-month satellite record.
Ø The fastest measured centennial warming rate was in Central England from 1663-1762, at 0.9 Cº/century – before the industrial revolution. It was not our fault.
Ø The global warming trend since 1900 is equivalent to 0.8 Cº per century. This is well within natural variability and may not have much to do with us.
Ø The fastest warming trend lasting ten years or more occurred over the 40 years from 1694-1733 in Central England. It was equivalent to 4.3 Cº per century.
Ø Since 1950, when a human influence on global temperature first became theoretically possible, the global warming trend has been equivalent to below 1.2 Cº per century.
Ø The fastest warming rate lasting ten years or more since 1950 occurred over the 33 years from 1974 to 2006. It was equivalent to 2.0 Cº per century.
Ø In 1990, the IPCC’s mid-range prediction of near-term warming was equivalent to 2.8 Cº per century, higher by two-thirds than its current prediction of 1.7 Cº/century.
Ø The global warming trend since 1990, when the IPCC wrote its first report, is equivalent to 1.4 Cº per century – half of what the IPCC had then predicted.
Ø Though the IPCC has cut its near-term warming prediction, it has not cut its high-end business as usual centennial warming prediction of 4.8 Cº warming to 2100.
Ø The IPCC’s predicted 4.8 Cº warming by 2100 is well over twice the greatest rate of warming lasting more than ten years that has been measured since 1950.
Ø The IPCC’s 4.8 Cº-by-2100 prediction is almost four times the observed real-world warming trend since we might in theory have begun influencing it in 1950.
Ø Since 1 March 2001, the warming trend on the mean of the 5 global-temperature datasets is nil. No warming for 13 years 4 months.
Ø Recent extreme weather cannot be blamed on global warming, because there has not been any global warming. It is as simple as that.
Technical note
Our latest topical graph shows the RSS dataset for the 214 months October 1996 to July 2014 – more than half the 427-month satellite record.
Terrestrial temperatures are measured by thermometers. Thermometers correctly sited in rural areas away from manmade heat sources show warming rates appreciably below those that are published. The satellite datasets are based on measurements made by the most accurate thermometers available – platinum resistance thermometers, which not only measure temperature at various altitudes above the Earth’s surface via microwave sounding units but also constantly calibrate themselves by measuring via spaceward mirrors the known temperature of the cosmic background radiation, which is 1% of the freezing point of water, or just 2.73 degrees above absolute zero. It was by measuring minuscule variations in the cosmic background radiation that the NASA anisotropy probe determined the age of the Universe: 13.82 billion years.
The graph is accurate. The data are lifted monthly straight from the RSS website. A computer algorithm reads them down from the text file, takes their mean and plots them automatically using an advanced routine that automatically adjusts the aspect ratio of the data window at both axes so as to show the data at maximum scale, for clarity.
The latest monthly data point is visually inspected to ensure that it has been correctly positioned. The light blue trend line plotted across the dark blue spline-curve that shows the actual data is determined by the method of least-squares linear regression, which calculates the y-intercept and slope of the line via two well-established and functionally identical equations that are compared with one another to ensure no discrepancy between them. The IPCC and most other agencies use linear regression to determine global temperature trends. Professor Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia recommends it in one of the Climategate emails. The method is appropriate because global temperature records exhibit little auto-regression.
Dr Stephen Farish, Professor of Epidemiological Statistics at the University of Melbourne, kindly verified the reliability of the algorithm that determines the trend on the graph and the correlation coefficient, which is very low because, though the data are highly variable, the trend is flat.
Barry (August 4, 2014 at 6:41 am) “We’ve seen about 0.8 C warming over the past century, due to CO2 levels rising from about 300 to 400 ppm.”
Neither part of your claim is correct. There is an alleged 0.8C warming based on inconsistent thermometer measurements. Natural temperature proxies generally show less than that rise.
Second, that temperature rise was partly from manmade CO2 and partly from the ending of the Little Ice Age. Just the rise in solar irradiance of about 1W/m2 can explain 0.05C rise per 1C of climate sensitivity. That does not include the geomagnetic and spectral effects of increased solar activity which affect prevailing weather and therefore climate sensitivity. There is no reason to believe that climate sensitivity is constant as the earth warms, so further increases in retained energy from manmade CO2 are unlikely to cause the same or higher equilibrium temperature response.
Barry:
At August 4, 2014 at 6:41 am you write
Surely you intended to write the truth which is
We’ve seen about 0.8 C of intermittent warming over the past century, while CO2 levels continuously rose from about 300 to 400 ppm and, therefore, it is not logical to assume the warming is directly due to the CO2 rise.
Richard
“Claptrap” says I am wrong to insist that those who deny that there is a greenhouse effect are not welcome here. However, for good reason, those are indeed the site rules. “Claptrap” says it does not like calling the greenhouse effect the greenhouse effect because it is not a greenhouse effect. Well, that is what it is called, rightly or wrongly, and I am not interested in semantic quibbling.
The point of the head posting was that there is a great and growing discrepancy between the global warming predicted by the models and the absence of global warming in the real world over the past decade and a half. That discrepancy arises not because there is no greenhouse effect but because the effect is small and may well be offset by net-negative feedbacks rather than amplified by net-positive ones. The true scientific debate about the climate centers on the magnitude and sign of the feedback sum, not on whether or not there is a greenhouse effect, nor on whether the greenhouse effect ought to be called a greenhouse effect.
Kristian says
I wasn’t making the argument the heat transfers from the atmosphere to the deep oceans I was just Stating the Technical argument in Roy Spencer’s post.
This argument may or may not be true but the transfer stated in Roy’s post would be local and on a irrelevant scale for ocean warming or Global warming in general. in essence I agree with You.
Sorry for the confusion.
– – – – – – – –
rgbatduke,
You say “a hard problem” to predict the climate.
I presume that you are not saying that it cannot eventually be done. Is my presumption of your position correct? If so what would the science community need to do / obtain to achieve a reasonable ability for prediction?
John
John Finn says
“How on earth can OHC not be relevant to “global” warming. Global warming happens when more energy enters the earth’s climate system than leaves it .The oceans are part of the earth’s climate system. The oceans which absorb more than 90% of incoming energy are warming. Therefore earth’s climate system is warming. Therefore global warming is still taking place.”
This is the whole point if the oceans are warming (as you say) and the atmosphere is not then something else is warming the oceans or the oceans aren’t warming at all!
Even taking your early point as gospel (which few here do) the atmosphere would still have to warm in conjunction with the oceans though it may lag in response! There is no evidence that the oceans are warming and there IS evidence that the atmosphere is Not!
If something else (i.e. the sun or geothermal activity) warmed the oceans you would expect to see a rise in global atmospheric temperatures, a lagging response increase in acidification of the oceans and a lagging response increase in atmospheric CO2. If the oceans started to cool you would see a lagging response in the opposite direction.
This is what we have seen in the warming phase as we have come out of the “non-existent” LIA. The evidence is now that this process has stop or even reversed and as has the rise in temperatures.
Ron House says, August 3, 2014 at 8:32 pm:
“I do wish people would read the comments they reply to carefully before resorting to insults.”
What insults? Ron, anyone reading my comment will see that there is nothing in there even remotely resembling any ad hominem attacks directed at you. Calm down, will you. This is a discussion thread. People tend to disagree. If you think I’ve misinterpreted what you said, then simply explain me how. No reason to go all pouty.
“My meaning is this: Given the radiation profile of the planet into space, there is an effective temperature at each frequency, which is the temperature of the radiating layer at which photons at that layer first get a ‘free line of sight’ to outer space. (You admit this when you talk of “radiating layers”.) Photons from layers inside this layer are effectively absorbed by molecules in the layers above. The Stefan Boltzmann law tells us what the temperature of that radiating layer has to be, for a black body, and can be adjusted to account for non-black bodies. Thus the temperature at that layer is “determined” (get it?) by the physical fact that it wouldn’t be radiating at that level unless it had that temperature.”
I’ve read this paragraph a couple of times now, and again I have to submit that you seem to have it all turned on its head. The physical temperature at any specific layer of air from the surface to the tropopause is determined by the surface temperature and the lapse rate climbing up from the surface through the tropospheric column, not by the radiation it ‘needs’ to emit. The emission comes after. The temperature is set first. Then the radiation. The radiative profile from the Earth to space is a result of the energy > temperature distribution of the Earth system. And the process maintaining this distribution (after the surface absorption of the solar input) is convection. The Stefan-Boltzmann law doesn’t tell us anything about what the temperature of each radiating layer ‘needs’ to be. The temperature is already known. Determined by the surface temp, by the lapse rate and by convection. Thermal radiation in the troposphere is a result of temperature, not a cause of it.
If you do in fact agree to this, then I have misunderstood you and in that case, I apologise.
“Next, given what we calculate the temperature must be at a certain height, we can calculate the maximum value it can be at the surface, because any gas at a temperature higher than that determined by the adiabatic compression of a parcel of gas descending from the upper layer to the lower one will be less dense than the gas at the temperature calculated from adiabatic compression. Being less dense, it will rise and the atmosphere will convect.
In none of this do I consider or assert which “end” of the system is driving the other. If I wanted to talk about that, I would use words like “cause” (meaning a physical process), not words like “determine”, which refer to fact-finding and drawing of conclusions.”
That’s fine. But then I don’t get your wording. Because the way you describe the ‘process’ very much give me the impression that you think – like the climate establishment – that the ‘atmospheric radiative GHE’ exists because the presence of the radiatively active gases in the atmosphere, like H2O and CO2, somehow forces the final radiative flux from Earth to space (239 W/m^2) to originate from somewhere high in the atmosphere where it’s cool (255K) rather than from the surface, and that the lapse rate moving down from this ‘determined’ temperature level will do the rest of the job – raising the surface temp to 288K. The whole ‘lifting the effective emission height’ charade.
Please tell me I’ve misinterpreted you.
“And your discussion of the mechanical aspects of it is pretty much correct and contradicts nothing I said, so your snide put-downs are neither required nor justified. Keep them to yourself and try to be civil in future.”
Again, Ron, in what way was I not ‘civil’? And where exactly do you find my ‘snide put-downs’?
Bob Boder says, August 4, 2014 at 7:42 am:
“This argument may or may not be true but the transfer stated in Roy’s post would be local and on a irrelevant scale for ocean warming or Global warming in general. in essence I agree with You.”
Good to hear. Yes, whenever the air has a higher temperature than the sea surface below, the heat transfer will indeed be from atmosphere to ocean. Normally, you’ll have fog.
But this situation is quite irrelevant to global averages which is what ‘global warming’ is supposed to be about. We still don’t see global tropospheric/surface temperatures rising while the bulk ocean temperature allegedly is. The suggested AGW mechanism for warming is simply absent …
Barry says:
August 4, 2014 at 6:41 am
1. In reality temperature hasn’t gained that much since 1900.
2. Only a minor part of the real gain is from higher CO2 levels.
3. The GHG effect is not linear but logarithmic. If a doubling of CO2 from 280 to 560 ppm produces a one degree C increase in GASTA, then most of that gain would already have occurred.
John Finn says:
August 4, 2014 at 2:02 am
That adjustments to temperature records are corrupt was obvious even before Climategate. Jones & Hansen have been forced to make public their secret algorithms, which show that indeed they adjust for the UHI by making the actual readings hotter, & Jones has admitted that he raises ocean T readings to bring them into line with his rigged land station “data”. For starters. You need to educate yourself before commenting.
Which goes double if you imagine yourself a student of the CET yet have never seen Lamb’s work. I found it ludicrous that you imagined there was no LIA in the CET data, since Lamb used them & his reconstruction to demonstrate both the LIA & the Medieval Warm Period. How could you have missed reading the works of the scientist who founded the CRU at East Anglia?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubert_Lamb
Tony Brown writes on this & other blogs often.
Do you like humiliating yourself in public?
Moving the goal posts at both ends?
Apparently we can’t link images here, or I don’t know how, but examine these two images carefully. This link is the 17 years, 10 months image from above.
Next is the 13 years, 4 months image from here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/07/29/temperature-analysis-of-5-datasets-shows-the-great-pause-has-endured-for-13-years-4-months/
Both show nice flat lines with a trend of zero. Both also show very different values in the Y axis for the trend line. WUWT?
Finally, some months ago the record was at 17 years, 9 months as seen here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/05/03/the-ocean-ate-my-global-warming/
It’s taken since April to go from 17 years, 9 months to 17 years, 10 months in July, but at least the temperature hasn’t changed noticeably over that period.
This probably needs explaining before someone becomes confused. Or is it too late? 🙂
Why was it obvious, you might ask, before Climategate?
To mention but two reasons, because of the blatant attempt to “get rid of the MWP” & because of the plainly visible retroactive cooling of older T records & boosting warming in the surface “record” as much as the watching satellites would allow, among others.
John Finn says:
August 4, 2014 at 2:02 am
An example of the painstaking work of Tony Brown:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/08/14/little-ice-age-thermometers-historic-variations-in-temperatures-part-3-best-confirms-extended-period-of-warming/
dp says:
August 4, 2014 at 10:18 am
It’s taken since April to go from 17 years, 9 months to 17 years, 10 months in July, but at least the temperature hasn’t changed noticeably over that period.
This probably needs explaining before someone becomes confused. Or is it too late? 🙂
The two most important numbers are the zero line for the data set and the latest anomaly. At the moment, the zero line is at 0.235. However all anomalies since April have been above this. So if the new anomalies are as much above the zero line as the other end is below the zero line, then the pause could stay at 17 years and 10 months for another year. In other words, when it hits the spike. Should the anomaly be high when the spike is hit, then there could be a sudden decrease of three years in the length of the pause. Exactly that happened with Hadcrut3 a few months ago.
rgbatduke on August 4, 2014 at 5:50 am
“. . . Predicting the future time evolution of a non-computable, nonlinear, chaotic, non-Markovian [climate] system of high dimensionality is (surprise) a hard problem, and the solutions proposed and conjectured might as well be coming off of a ouija board as from sober and properly cautious scientists.”
It is not only a hard problem – it is impossible if you try to compute it from the bottom up.
The modelling approach is inherently of no value for predicting future temperature with any calculable certainty because of the difficulty of specifying the initial conditions of a sufficiently fine grained spatio-temporal grid of a large number of variables with sufficient precision prior to multiple iterations. For a complete discussion of this see Essex:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hvhipLNeda4
Models are often tuned by running them backwards against several decades of observation, this is
much too short a period to correlate outputs with observation when the controlling natural quasi-periodicities of most interest are in the centennial and especially in the key millennial range. Tuning to these longer periodicities is beyond any computing capacity when using reductionist models with a large number of variables unless these long wave natural periodicities are somehow built into the model structure ab initio.
The core competency in the Geological Sciences is the ability to recognize and correlate the changing patterns of events in time and space. This requires a mindset and set of skills very different from the reductionist approach to nature, but one which is appropriate and necessary for investigating past climates and forecasting future climate trends. Scientists and modelers with backgrounds in physics and maths usually have little experience in correlating multiple, often fragmentary, data sets of multiple variables to build an understanding and narrative of general trends and patterns from the actual individual local and regional time series of particular variables. The value of the geologists’ approach to understanding the past is proven by the trillions of dollars spent by the oil companies to find and produce the millions of barrels of oil and billions of cubic feet of gas needed daily to fuel the world economy. It works!
Earth’s climate is the result of resonances and beats between various quasi-cyclic processes of varying wavelengths combined with endogenous secular earth processes such as, for example, plate tectonics. It is not possible to forecast the future unless we have a good understanding of the relation of the climate of the present time to the current phases of these different interacting natural quasi-periodicities which fall into two main categories.
a) The orbital long wave Milankovitch eccentricity, obliquity and precession cycles which are modulated by
b) Solar “activity” cycles with possibly multi-millennial, millennial, centennial and decadal time scales.
The convolution of the a and b drivers is mediated through the great oceanic current and atmospheric pressure systems to produce the earth’s climate and weather.
After establishing where we are relative to the long wave periodicities, to help forecast decadal and annual changes, we can then look at where earth is in time relative to the periodicities of the PDO, AMO and NAO and ENSO indices and based on past patterns make reasonable forecasts for future decadal periods.
In addition to these quasi-periodic processes we must also be aware of endogenous earth changes in geomagnetic field strength, volcanic activity and at really long time scales the plate tectonic movements and disposition of the land masses.
For forecasts of the coming cooling based on these general principles and chiefly on the 60 and 970 year periodicities in the temperature data see
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2014/07/climate-forecasting-methods-and-cooling.html
Figure 1: The horizontal axis has been cropped off.
Should show ‘YEARS’ from 1997 to present.
I understand how it works and after seeing a few examples some oddities popped out. How meaningful is a pause that pauses for a year? Would it not be more accurate to say the pause has ended, or at least has been interrupted and then show the interruptions? A record that depends upon freezing time within the period of the record only to steamroll through it when the math works again seems a bit odd. How is it different than a chain of pauses interspersed with out of band data? Why does one chart begin in October and another begin in August? To put it another way, if one were to plot the pause incrementing by month beginning at October 1998 to present you will see dozens of pauses, none of which would necessarily have the same value for the trend line anomaly. How is it a continuous pause if the zero trend line at 13 years 4 months is 0.2º different than the 17 year 9 month zero trend line?
I’ll repeat my earlier question – how is this different than cherry picking? I’m glad there’s a pause but I’m not too impressed with the evolution of it.
“dp” makes thing pointlessly complicated. The question I ask each month is how far back from the present can one go without showing any global warming. Since this is an el Nino year, it is no surprise that the pause is not lengthening. However, when the la Nina sets in, the pause may well lengthen again.
“dp” should not, however, concentrate only on the graph that shows the length of the pause. THere are two other graphs that show the discrepancy between the predictions of the models and the outturn in real life.
Of course the pause has upset many who had hoped that the mad official predictions might come true. But it remains startling that a decade and a half without warming can occur at a time when record amounts of CO2 are being added to the atmosphere. So let us not argue about angels on pinheads. Starting in October 1996, there has been no global warming for 17 years 10 months according to RSS. Starting in September 1996, there has been warming at a rate equivalent to – wait for it – 0.01 Celsius degrees per century. Not much difference, really.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
August 4, 2014 at 2:42 pm
Since when in the two satellite data series has there been cooling, whether statistically significant or not?
Thanks.
If the PDO entered its warm phase in 1977, as my vivid memories of weather that year suggest to me that it did, with a vengeance, then the cool phase should have started around 2006, give or take a year or two.
In answer to Milondonharlani, there was cooling in the first seven or eight years of the 21st century. The great climate shift that marked the abrupt beginning of the PDO’s warm phase was in 1976. It was a very hot summer in the UK. Even in Yorkshire, the grass went as brown as Cyprus, and the then Socialist government eventually appointed a minister for drought (whereupon the Gore Effect took hold and massive thunderstorms broke the drought).
The warm phase ended somewhere between 1998 and 2003 – hard to be exact, because in the index there was a lot of jiggling up and down for several years. But we’re in what should be the cooling phase now: yet temperature has really not changed since the current cooling phase began, suggesting the possibility that at the moment the weak signal from CO2 may be just enough to prevent the slight fall in temperature that might otherwise be happening.
But all the trends are so small that one can’t draw any definite conclusions, except that the world is certainly not warming anything like as fast as predicted.
I am now replying to you ignorant and ill-informed at August 4, 2014 at 5:27 am. I shall try to be patient, Richard, since it’s my experience that those who resort to labelling others as stupid generally suffer from a lack of understanding of the issues involved.
First, let’s looks at this WUWT post
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/09/even-more-about-trenberths-missing-heat-an-eye-opening-comment-by-roger-pielke-sr/
which includes this statement by Roger Pielke
Ok – got that, Richard. It is well recognised, that, by far, the best indicator of global warming (or cooling) is OHC. There is no debate or disagreement about it. If the oceans are warming then it’s pretty much a certainty that the earth is gaining energy. Now, I’m not too bothered about ‘your’ definition of global warming. If the oceans continue to warm then ultimately the surface and atmosphere will resume warming. If you don’t accept that then you have a fundamental lack of understanding of the physics involved. If you ask nicely I might just give you a little tutorial on how it all works
dp says:
August 4, 2014 at 2:31 pm
There are different ways to show what is happening. Two of the most common are to find the maximum length of time for which the slope is zero. The other is to show where warming is not significant at the 95% level. If you start at the latest date and go back as far as you can to find a slope of 0 or to find where the CI is negative for the first number, that is not cherry picking. If you set the ground rules a certain way, and give them Nick Stokes’ site here: http://moyhu.blogspot.com.au/p/temperature-trend-viewer.html
they will give the same answer, regardless what their predisposition may be.
NOAA has certain things to say about the 95% and 15 years, so if there is no warming for over 17 years, the models are more than falsified. It does not matter if the 17 years and 10 months lasts a year. The really important thing as far as climate science is concerned is that there is statistically significant warming over a period of less than 15 years. And this is not the case on any data set.
“… But we’re in what should be the cooling phase now: yet temperature has really not changed since the current cooling phase began, suggesting the possibility that at the moment the weak signal from CO2 may be just enough to prevent the slight fall in temperature that might otherwise be happening. …” ~ C. Monckton
And it is also very possible that we are, indeed, in a cooling phase and “adjustments”, infilling, zombie stations, and other data manipulations are hiding the decline. Imagine what would be going on now if we had 10 years of decline on the record. Just imagine.
Monckton of Brenchley says:
August 4, 2014 at 3:00 pm
The AMO & PDO might be half a year or a year out of synch. Plus, phase transition intervals might look like plateaus. We’ll see if the warming “pause” is a pause or a plateau. There’s also the question of data reliability, even with the satellites.
On the fundamental points we are in agreement: 1) net warming from human activities (if any) is slight & so far beneficial, as indeed is an increase in CO2 from c. 300 to 400 ppm (& beyond), & 2) that the CO2-reliant GCMs have failed miserably to predict climatic change & thus are worse than worthless bases upon which to formulate national or global policy.
milodonharlani says:
August 4, 2014 at 2:47 pm
Since when in the two satellite data series has there been cooling, whether statistically significant or not?
There has been cooling since February 2001. For RSS, the slope is -0.591/cent and for UAH it is +0.506/cent. So the negative slope is larger than the positive slope.