Paper: Long 'pauses' in warming will soon be 'a thing of the past'

warming-thing of the pastEric Worrall writes: The Sydney Morning Herald has a hilarious article claiming that one day, long embarrassing pauses in the global temperature record will be a ‘thing of the past’.

According to Nicola Maher, a UNSW PhD-candidate and lead author of the paper “When it does cool, it will not be enough to overcome the warming.” … By 2100, assuming greenhouse emissions continue to build at the present rate, “even a big volcano like Krakatau is very unlikely to cause a hiatus”, Ms Maher said.

Excerpts:

Global temperatures have largely plateaued during the past 15 years as natural variability – including oceans absorbing more heat and volcanic activity – have acted to stall warming at the planet’s surface.

However, such “hiatuses” are increasingly unlikely if carbon emissions continue on their present trajectory, and will be “a thing of the past” by the century’s end, according to a paper published in Geophysical Research Letters.

“From about 2030, it’s highly unlikely that we will get one of these cooling decades,” said Nicola Maher, a UNSW PhD-candidate and lead author of the paper. “When it does cool, it will not be enough to overcome the warming.”

The researchers used about 30 models to simulate different events, including volcanic eruptions of the size of Krakatau, the Indonesian island that erupted in 1883 with an explosion so loud it was heard almost 5000 kilometres away.

By 2100, assuming greenhouse emissions continue to build at the present rate, “even a big volcano like Krakatau is very unlikely to cause a hiatus”, Ms Maher said.

The full story is here

When I first read the article, I thought it was a spoof of the infamous “snowfalls will be a thing of the past” claim  – but no, these are serious deep greens, trying to stoke the dying embers of global warming alarm.

UNSW is also the home of Chris Turney, lead idiot of the ship of fools.

The paper: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL060527/abstract

Drivers of decadal hiatus periods in the 20th and 21st centuries

Nicola Maher, Alexander Sen Gupta and Matthew H. England

Abstract

The latest generation of climate model simulations are used to investigate the occurrence of hiatus periods in global surface air temperature in the past and under two future warming scenarios. Hiatus periods are identified in three categories: (i) those due to volcanic eruptions, (ii) those associated with negative phases of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO), and (iii) those affected by anthropogenically released aerosols in the mid-twentieth century. The likelihood of future hiatus periods is found to be sensitive to the rate of change of anthropogenic forcing. Under high rates of greenhouse gas emissions there is little chance of a hiatus decade occurring beyond 2030, even in the event of a large volcanic eruption. We further demonstrate that most nonvolcanic hiatuses across Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 5 (CMIP5) models are associated with enhanced cooling in the equatorial Pacific linked to the transition to a negative IPO phase.

==================================

Note that one of the co-authors, Matthew England is one of the “scared scientists” who wrote:

MATTHEW ENGLAND

Oceanographer, Climate scientist,

University of NSW, Sydney

FEAR: CLIMATE INDUCED GLOBAL CONFLICT

Accelerated warming and expansion of water in the oceans, and increased melting rates of glaciers and ice caps are expected to increase sea levels by a metre or more over the next 100 years. This will pose a decisive threat to the existence of human settlements, infrastructures and industries across the world that are close to the shore lines. Those environmental degradations will aggravate global conflict as tens of millions of people migrate and their food supplies become threatened.

We need to understand that the cost of solving the problem is so much less than the cost of dealing with it down the track; that cost is going to be huge for future generations. Not dealing with it is selfish, short-sighted, narrow minded and obscene. It represents such a level of injustice as those that are going to be impacted are not playing a role in the decisions that are being made now.

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Clovis Marcus
August 28, 2014 6:49 am

Let me see if I can get this right…models cannot predict pauses but they can be used to predict the lack of pauses.
Someone’s pulling my leg, surely.
(BTW it is only a pause if it resumes)

richard
Reply to  Clovis Marcus
August 28, 2014 7:16 am

Climate models cannot predict the events they predict will not happen., There’s some kind of “back to future” thing going on here,

Mark
Reply to  richard
August 28, 2014 10:30 am

You may as well stop at “Climate models cannot predict”. Since this sums up the situation.
Whilst it may be possible to teak the models to match the records (either the real ones or the “adjusted” ones) the only way to possibly tell if they have any predictive value is to wait.

Reply to  richard
August 28, 2014 3:31 pm

The head of Lawrence Livermore’s Climate Modeling effort told me years ago that PDO/AMO would not happen anymore. He was wrong. I still do not understand the reason for his and this Nicola Maher prediction of the end of PDO/AMO. He never explained it. He simply stated it as fact which of course it wasn’t.
I guess Nicola is not saying necessarily that it is the end of PDO/AMO. He’s saying that he believes the effect will be small compared to the heat from CO2. The problem with this argument is that the heat has been going into the ocean not into the atmosphere and I guess I wonder why it isn’t just as likely that the heat into the ocean goes on for 100 years without CO2 making a damn bit of difference. After all the heat capacity of the ocean is 1000 times that of the atmosphere. The ocean could absorb 10C of heating of the atmosphere from CO2 and change temperature by 0.01C. So, the ocean could absorb all the CO2 heat without the slightest noticeable effect on anything. It is important to note that nobody has been able to explain WHY the heat is going into the ocean, why this cycle exists, what is going on that causes it and potentially other cycles they didn’t know about 10 years ago. For all we know we could be on a curve to another LIA. They don’t know anything. Their ability to make statements when they clearly have no proof behind their statements is damning and evidence of a scientific malfeasance in my opinion. Scientists should NOT say things to layman press they don’t know without giving proper context of their opinion vs actual KNOWN facts. It is a discredit to all scientists when some say things which go on to discredit all scientists.

Nylo
Reply to  richard
August 29, 2014 1:38 am

Spot on, logiclogiclogic.

mjc
Reply to  richard
August 29, 2014 6:53 am

Basically, the only way to stop/get rid of the present cycles would be to eliminate Central America, so the Atlantic and Pacifc oceans would have near equitorial mixing. That wouldn’t eliminate all cold/warm cycling…just change it to something not recognizable, today.

Reply to  richard
August 29, 2014 12:41 pm

@logic^3:
“They” didn’t even know the PDO existed until c. 1997.

Reply to  richard
August 29, 2014 9:55 pm

@ milo… I don’t know if you are kidding or not, people interested in climate have known about the PDO for a lot longer than since 1997.

Sun Spot
Reply to  Clovis Marcus
August 28, 2014 8:09 am

I know my leg is hurting

Reply to  Clovis Marcus
August 28, 2014 8:13 am

Brilliant!
The IPCC GCM models are correct and we will suffer for being so incredulous, and the evidence is the IPCC GCM models themselves,

Resourceguy
Reply to  Clovis Marcus
August 28, 2014 9:34 am

Australian science is already in a quality down spiral and the reporters are cheering all the way down.

The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley
Reply to  Clovis Marcus
August 28, 2014 10:58 am

Clovis, you are after my own heart. It is, indeed, not a ‘pause’. For a ‘pause’ indicates (yes I will repeat it ad nauseam) that you know what the future event is.
Can I make an appeal here? At least twice, I’ve seen people come on here using the analogy of a video recorder. One contributor said that he could pause a video, and decide not to watch it! Incredulous! If you don’t go back and watch it then you ‘stopped’ it. Just because you press the button that the Japanese manufacturer has placed the word ‘Pause’ on, doesn’t mean you have indeed paused it…if you don’t ever resume watching it!!! The Japanese manufacturers are not the czars of the English language. What will some (even on this wonderful forum) of our fellow sceptics call it if it starts to cool? The word can be applied if the time-frame is very short – a rocket pauses in flight upward before it starts to descend. But to those who still struggle with my determination to keep plugging away that this isn’t a ‘pause’, I say this: What do you call it if no warming carries on for fifty years? Will you still refer to it as a pause? NO! By then it would be separate periods of warming. Please, I beg all of you still using the word (and I know I have some converts), see that the word you are using is quite simply wrong. Of course, if it starts warming again, then you are correct and I am wrong. But that’s a future event you cannot possibly know now, so the word ‘pause’ is incorrect.
But anyway, my sincere hope is that the coming drop in the AMO will see global temps actually start to fall. I say that in hope, because I want to finally stop people on this wonderful forum from using the word ‘pause’, quite apart from the fact that I want to see so many people who call themselves scientists look ruddy idiots.

Scott Scarborough
Reply to  The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley
August 28, 2014 11:22 am

I would like to see it warm up a couple of degrees. It would be good for us.

F. Ross
Reply to  The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley
August 28, 2014 1:18 pm

What will some (even on this wonderful forum) of our fellow sceptics call it if it starts to cool?

How about “negative warming”? As in antarctica is presently experienceing a prolonged period of negative warming.
🙂

Colin indge
Reply to  The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley
August 28, 2014 9:35 pm

On ‘the pause’ – Yesterday it was raining. Today it isn’t raining.
Has the rain paused?

Richard G
Reply to  Clovis Marcus
August 28, 2014 9:34 pm

As long as those models continue to use Co2 as the main forcing for temperature they will never be right. It’s GIGO and any studies using those models are also GIGO.

eDeaRL
Reply to  Richard G
August 29, 2014 7:56 am

“It’s GIGO and any studies using those models are also GIGO.”
HAHAHHAHAHAAAAAA! Well played. ~m

Mark Bofill
August 28, 2014 6:53 am

“From about 2030, it’s highly unlikely that we will get one of these cooling decades,” said Nicola Maher, a UNSW PhD-candidate and lead author of the paper.

Careful Nicola! You’re not even a PhD yet and you’ve just put an expiration date on your reputation of 16 years! That’s no way to play the climate game!

DD More
Reply to  Mark Bofill
August 28, 2014 9:27 am

Richard Betts, who heads the Climate Impacts area of the UK Met Office, claims his areas of expertise as a climate modeler and was one of the lead authors of the IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report
(WG2). Says –
“Everyone (Apart from a few who think that observations of a decade or three of small forcing can be
extrapolated to indicate the response to long-term larger forcing with confidence) agrees that we
can’t predict the long-term response of the climate to ongoing CO2 rise with great accuracy. It
could be large, it could be small. We don’t know. The old-style energy balance models got us this
far. We can’t be certain of large changes in future, but can’t rule them out either.”

So your study is based on “We Don’t Know.”

Scott Scarborough
Reply to  Mark Bofill
August 28, 2014 11:25 am

The more wrong predictions he makes the more esteem he will have in liberals eyes. Look at Paul Ehrlich.

Reply to  Scott Scarborough
August 28, 2014 9:31 pm

Paul Ehrlich is always right! It’s just that nobody notices half the world population starving to death in the 80’s because Regan had us all under his evil mind control spell!

mjc
Reply to  Scott Scarborough
August 29, 2014 7:14 am

Well…in a way, Erhlich was right. He can claim victory BECAUSE the population didn’t double and then starve to death, since he made his ‘predictions’. He can claim that it was because he wrote that book it didn’t. And then there is the whole, ‘it’s going to happen anyway’, because the population is still growing, but since it slowed down, it’s just going to take longer to get there. We just haven’t done enough, yet.
The poiint is, no matter how long delayed, falsified or otherwise debunked, these predictions are never wrong. They take on a life of their own and become etched in stone to happen ‘someday’. ‘Someday’ pushes them from the realm of scientific prediction firmly into the realm of prophecy.

Leigh
Reply to  Mark Bofill
August 28, 2014 2:58 pm

“There is little chance of a hiatus decade occurring beyond 2030”
The thought immediately crossed my mind, how old is Nicola?
She could quite possibly be like the rest of these crystal ball gazers in comfortable retirement by then.
There is a lot of these warmists who “repent”……..after they are of the teat.

Peter Stroud
Reply to  Leigh
August 29, 2014 4:04 am

Assuming she is in her early twenties, she will still be working, in the 2030s I hope she has a sceptical co worker, around the same age, who will bring out a copy of her thesis and compare her predictions with fact, in, say 2035.

dan
August 28, 2014 6:54 am

We just need to take the long view… as the maunder minimum and the Australian cooling trends have shown, eventually this pause will turn out to not have existed at all, it will eventually be adjusted away by those living in the cold, crop-failed future.

ConfusedPhoton
August 28, 2014 6:56 am

“According to Nicola Maher, a UNSW PhD-candidate”
In my day (before climate scientivism) PhD’s were worth having.
But nice to see Ms Maher following in the footsteps of fellow academic Chris Turney (i.e. Captain Ahab searching for his big white continent).

Specter
Reply to  ConfusedPhoton
August 29, 2014 9:18 am

I think they should wait to award her PhD until her thesis is proved.

kingbum
August 28, 2014 6:57 am

This article is just idiotic….something that 0.0375% of the atmosphere is going to have a bigger effect on the climate than the sun is laughable….

Alberta Slim
Reply to  kingbum
August 28, 2014 7:39 am

Right… AND the human induced part is about 3% and the fossil fuel part is about 50% of that.
So…. 0.0004 x .03 x .5 = 0.000006
Therefore 0.000006 parts of CO2 are going to cause all the polar ice caps to melt; the polar bears to die; the sea level to rise 10 feet or more. etc., etc., etc., ……..
And the sun; Milankovitch cycles continental driftt volcanism etc., are insignificant.
Well, the Alarmists aren’t going to convince this cowboy….

SonicsGuy
Reply to  Alberta Slim
August 28, 2014 11:38 am

You are only including half of the carbon cycle….
[mod: sorry; that address must have disappeared. Fixed now.]

Mike Smith
August 28, 2014 6:58 am

So the authors are predicting a hiatus in the hiatus!
Phew, I guess that means we’re all safe then.

Andy
August 28, 2014 6:58 am

Is this what their models have told them? Oooooh i’m so afraid.

SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 7:00 am

There is no pause, just a bit of a slowdown — which also happened several times last century. Warming always resumed. It will again.
Cowtan & Way, the best surface dataset out there, shows 0.18 C of warming in the last 15 years. No pause.

Mark Bofill
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 7:09 am

SonicsGuy,
There are numerous problems with your claim, but completely ignoring them and taking you at your word, you are claiming .18C in 15 years. This would be 1.2C per century, or an increase of 1.03C by 2100. Are you aware that this is emphatically not what mainstream climate science predicts given our current emission trajectory?

SonicsGuy
Reply to  Mark Bofill
August 28, 2014 7:19 am

Mark Bofill wrote:
“Are you aware that this is emphatically not what mainstream climate science predicts given our current emission trajectory?”
What does it predict, recognizing that CO2 is not the only influence on surface temperatures?

Mark Bofill
Reply to  Mark Bofill
August 28, 2014 7:38 am

SonicsGuy,

What does it predict, recognizing that CO2 is not the only influence on surface temperatures?

I’ve got no interest in wasting my time walking you through the literature. I’ll give you the two references I could come up with in under 30 seconds, I assure you, if you give it due dilligence you will find countless others:
“Spread in model climate sensitivity traced to atmospheric convective mixing” Sherwood et al 2013, 4C by 2100.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/07/29/nasa-predicts-8-degrees-of-warming-in-the-us-by-2100/ (This is F, so call it 4.4C)
Knocking over straw men might seem like a great use of time for you, but I’ve got bigger fish to fry.
Cheers.

mouruanh
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 7:13 am

Does that mean you’re denying robust climate science? Shocker!

SonicsGuy
Reply to  mouruanh
August 28, 2014 7:38 am

I’m presenting the numbers I calculate. Are they wrong?

Eric
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 7:15 am

The new format appears to have resurrected some trolls. Would the be the Cowan and Way you are referring to? http://climateaudit.org/2013/11/18/cotwan-and-way-2013/

Eric
Reply to  Eric
August 28, 2014 7:17 am
SonicsGuy
Reply to  Eric
August 28, 2014 7:21 am

Why is presenting facts “trolling?” I’m simply presenting the science here as best I can discern it. If something in that is wrong, let me know.
PS: Are they any peer-reviewed criticisms of Cowtan & Way? If so, what’s the citation?

SonicsGuy
Reply to  Eric
August 28, 2014 7:31 am

On your first link, McIntyre is wrong (more incomplete) when he writes, “Up to the end of 2005, there was a zero trend between the two; the difference has arisen entirely since 2005.”
C&W and HadCRUT4 have differed in past years; the 10-yr moving average of the difference is 0.06 C in 2014, and 0 in 2005. But it reaches 0.02 C in the 70s, and almost 0.04 C in the 1940s, and -0.05 C around 1870 and 1890.
So I don’t see that his statement in any way invalidates C&W.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  Eric
August 28, 2014 11:28 am

Geoff: Actually solar irradiance is quite high for the last 200 years. Here’s a graph:
http://spot.colorado.edu/~koppg/TSI/TIM_TSI_Reconstruction.jpg
[Note: Continuing to use a bad email address will result in your comments being deleted. This is your fourth and final warning. ~ mod.]

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 7:16 am

The pause is real. Mainstream Science says (Quoting IPCC AR5 Box 9.2)

Fifteen-year-long hiatus periods are common in both the observed and CMIP5 historical GMST time series. However, an analysis of the
full suite of CMIP5 historical simulations (augmented for the period 2006–2012 by RCP4.5 simulations) reveals that 111 out of 114 realizations show a GMST trend over 1998–2012 that is higher than the entire HadCRUT4 trend ensemble (Box TS.3, Figure 1a; CMIP5 ensemble mean trend is 0.21°C per decade). This difference between simulated and observed trends could be caused by some combination of (a) internal climate variability, (b) missing or incorrect RF, and (c) model response error. These potential sources of the difference, which are not mutually exclusive, are assessed below, as is the cause of the observed GMST trend hiatus.

So it is real.
It is acknowledged by the IPCC.
It proves the models are wrong.
It proves the models are all wrong in the same way – too warm.
It proves that the models are too biased to be useful.
It proves that the attribution of the warming to AGW is unjustified.
It proves that you backed the wrong horse.

Cheshirered
Reply to  M Courtney
August 28, 2014 12:30 pm

Yeah Mr Courtney.
So it is real.
It is acknowledged by the IPCC.
It proves the models are wrong.
It proves the models are all wrong in the same way – too warm.
It proves that the models are too biased to be useful.
It proves that the attribution of the warming to AGW is unjustified.
It proves that you backed the wrong horse.
But apart from all that what do you have, eh?
Eh??!

jayhd
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 7:21 am

Sonics, 0.18 C in 15 years is no warming. That can be considered a rounding error. There is no way any sane person can justify spending hundreds of billions of dollars, if not trillions, because of an increase of 0.18 C.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  jayhd
August 28, 2014 7:44 am

No, it’s not a rounding air. It shows that, even as more of the heat is going into the ocean lately, the surface is still warming too. (Ice melt and SLR show this also.) And this is just the warming for the last 15 years. In 4/2007, the 15-yr warming was 0.48 C. But that was back when everyone disputed the station data (which now seems fine to work with).
Over the more climatologically relevant interval of 30 years, C&W show 0.58 C of warming.

Edward Richardson
Reply to  jayhd
August 28, 2014 7:46 am

0.00 C in 15 years is no warming, 0.18 C in 15 years is 1.2 C in 100 years

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 7:52 am

Fanatic alert!
“I have no idea how one deals with this– to be candid, McIntyre or Watts in handcuffs is probably the only thing that will slow things down.” – Robert Way in the exposed secret forum of John Cook’s site.
The satellite data itself that Cowtan & Way used to up-adjust the global average T falsifies their continued warming result! And you *know* this since everybody knows it, undeniably. What a joke it is to deny this fact of life!

Reply to  NikFromNYC
August 28, 2014 8:00 am

The satellite data is some of the most peer reviewed data in all of science, you must admit, given how many billions of dollars of funding hinges on trying to falsify it. This space age data that NASA itself ignores, by two independent teams, falsifies climate models, do they not? What madness is it that makes people cite Cowtan & Way, a bizarre Frankenstein monster data set? Popularizing it only sets you up for a bigger backlash and growing public ridicule. Any school child can spot the falsity of it when you show the pause containing satellite data being used to destroy a pause in the spotty ground station plot!

SonicsGuy
Reply to  NikFromNYC
August 28, 2014 11:31 am

C&W use UAH data to validate, right? UAH LT shows essentially no change in its long-term trend, over the last 15 years: 0.13 C/decade.

bit chilly
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 9:14 am

it may well be the best, it still is not worth the paper it is written on. factor in the true error margin and the trend is statistically insignificant .

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 9:22 am

Sure. Only problem is the the Pacific is now in its multi decadal cooling period (PDO) and in a few years the Atlantic (AMO) will move into its multi decadal cooling period. Solar activity is the lowest in almost two centuries (400 years of observation shows the close relationship between solar activity and temperature).
Solar activity was the strongest in 8,000 years according to the Max Planck Institute during the 1980s and 1990s which explains the slight warming we had. Temperatures have only warmed in two of the past seven decades.

whiten
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 9:31 am

Hi SonicsGuy.
“There is no pause, just a bit of a slowdown — which also happened several times last century. Warming always resumed. It will again.
Cowtan & Way, the best surface dataset out there, shows 0.18 C of warming in the last 15 years. No pause.”
—————————–
Do you think you are the first or the only one to see or find out that some surface datasets show a warming of around 0.2 c for the last 15 years!
Do you think that all of the Phd guys from the AGW clan that accept and consider the last 15 years as a pause or a hiatus are wrong or maybe gone crazy! Do you think the famous IPCC is wrong while it considers it a hiatus or a pause…….or maybe you are wrong and with your “naivity” can’t be able to see why….
Have you not heard or being aware of the strugle lately of how to justify or explain a hiatus that may last for decades, at least up to 30 years, at the very least!
Let me give you one simple reason why you maybe wrong, there still could be many more similar reasons.
Using your logic and rationale, if in 10 to 15 years from now the best surface datasets, probably the same one as the one you rely upon now, start showing a period of 15 years with a -0.18C (cooling) then will be right to call that period not a pause or a hiatus but a cooling period.
I think that is what your best minds on AGW are trying to avoid. Better a 30 years or more of a pause or hiatus than 10 to 15 years of a slowdown of a warming, as you call it, and then facing to accept a cooling period.
Under the circumstances is very feasible to consider that in the next 10 to 15 years the datasets you refere to may show a 0.18C of cooling, at the very least.
Now to be fair, I know nothing about this particular dataset you mention, but taking your word for that I will not doubt what you are stateing or claiming about the 0.18C to be a mistake or a figment of imagination.
Before you start arguing I sugest you check again the same dataset in the same way as before, but this time keep in mind that if the first part of the 15 years( let s say the first 9 years) show a significant higher warming than 0.18C, somewhere at about 0.25C, then you should start to consider that claims such as this of yours maybe spoiling the waters much worse for the AGW and the 97% consensus.
While I do consider being wrong with my argument to your claim, I still think I will be right and correct with my 97% certanty of the IPCC being far more correct and a much matured and a much more careful expert than you in this particular subject of “hiatus or not a hiatus”
Please please please do not keep spoiling it for the AGW.. 🙂
Please do ignore my typos or errors in writing, you may find in my reply.
cheers

SonicsGuy
Reply to  whiten
August 28, 2014 11:23 am

I’m sorry, I don’t understand what your point is.

whiten
Reply to  whiten
August 28, 2014 1:21 pm

‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand what your point is.”
—————————-
Of course, you are not the first or the last (I guess) not getting my point made in a reply.
Let me make it clear to you what my main point was on that reply to you.
“you do not seem to understand why almost every one else concerned with the matter calls it a pause or hiatus what you seem to consider a slowdown of warming.”
Put in the most layman format:
“who bets on the both possible outcomes, stands a better chance to win than who bets on only one possible outcome.”
You see, all you call sceptics or whatever, that challenge and disagree with AGW are only “betting” with cooling as it seems, while the Phd AGWers or the wana be ones are playing it both ways, the cooling and the warming.
But going a bit further than my other reply to you, I bet you also do not understand how hilarious your claim of a certain resumed warming is, in a context of relying only in data and facts as you put them, without a theory like ACC or AGW.
The facts and the data-numbers you bring in your argument only show a natural gw which possibly is dying out. That’s all about it if you leave ACC-AGW out of the picture.
Hope you understand this much.
If you still fail to understand this much I suggest you start considering that either you really really naive or willfully playing the troll…
cheers

looncraz
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 9:44 am

Having, somewhat extensively, studied Cowtan & Way’s results I can emphatically tell you it is garbage. It shows rapid warming in the NW U.S. where cooling has occurred and project temperatures over hundreds of kilometers without any reason for doing so (though they do support this rather well for sub-arctic regions, the arctic system is very different and it has not been shown that what works in Texas works in the arctic… and it can’t be shown due to the lack of data).
In fact, I have been writing software to replicate – and probably refute their findings. I will also be doing runs with unadulterated data (do you know how hard it is to find that!?!).
On that note, anyone with historical precipitation and ice cover data in an easily digestible data format, please let me know! I have the raw station data from ~1850 to ~2013 as well as many copies of adjusted datasets. What has caught me off guard, so far, is how blatant and targeted some of the data changes are. The very first station I compared had only one adjustment – of ~1.2C for the month of February – just enough to pull it out of a cooling trend as it turned out (sorry, don’t remember which station off hand).

Scott Scarborough
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 11:28 am

That means that it will be over 150 years before it will get comfortably warm!

Richard G
Reply to  Scott Scarborough
August 28, 2014 10:46 pm

In 150 years I’ll be comfortably numb.

TomT
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 2:01 pm

A brief reminder.
A huge portion of C&W’s trend comes from infilling antarctic station drop out. The reason for this dropout? Too much ice.
Think about that when SG calls C&W the best surface data set out there.

Eugene WR Gallun
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 7:28 pm

SonicsGuy
You state that ” the heat is going into the oceans” as if that was a proven fact. No one has ever offered any data that such a thing is actually happening. Repeating something over and over again does not make it true.
You forget that part of the “Big Lie Technique” is to keep repeating the Big Lie over and over again. Fill people’s ears with it and eventually they began to accept it. Such, unfortunately, is a weakness in human nature.
Unless you can produce some proof that the heat is going into the deep oceans then you should admit that you yourself are a victim of a “Big Lie” You kept hearing and hearing it — and now you believe it.
So where is your data that proves the heat is going into the deep oceans? After all we can’t even measure what is going on down there. Did you know that? We have no data therefore no knowledge.
Try to think for yourself instead of falling for Big Lies.

Tom T
Reply to  Eugene WR Gallun
August 29, 2014 11:03 am

Its both a big lie con and a pig in a poke con at the same time. I’m rather certain that SonicsGuy actually thinks that there is real data for this claim. Trenberth and his teem have been playing pretty good word games to make it sound like a reanalysis is actual data. If you don’t know what a reanalaysis is someone like SonicsGuy is probably going to assume its real data given how Trenberth’s team has chosen to present it coupled with SonicsGuy’s own personal bias.
Running a reanalysis and doing your best to make the model output appear to be actual data is called a pig in a poke. You sell someone a bag that you claim contains a valuable piglet and its really just a cat.

Reply to  Eugene WR Gallun
August 31, 2014 9:07 am

Eugene, you are so 100% right.
A) WE HAVE ALMOST ZERO DATA SO ANY STATEMENTS OF SURETY ARE BY DEFINITION COMPLETELY MADE UP
B) THERE IS NO PROOF HEAT FROM CO2 HAS GONE INTO THE OCEANS
C) THERE ARE APPARENTLY CYCLES OF MOVEMENT OF OCEAN HEAT THAT MAY HAVE PREEXISTED that accounts 100% for what they are calling storing CO2 heat, i.e. all we are seeing is a natural phenomenon repeated over and over of warm water moving down and up. The data i’ve seen says there is little or no downwelling radiation for the oceans to absorb nor a mechanism for how warm surface water would get down to deep ocean simply because of CO2. The currents must have prexisted and if they preexisted then they did this because of temperature differences which is how currents are created. Cloud cover has increased which explains 100% for the lack of warming. Possibly clouds increase during the +PDO phase because of warm surface water. Frankly, it’s surprising we didn’t ASSUME there were such cycles. Furthermore there doesn’t have to be one mode of cyclic operation. There could easily be other modes of longer duration as well. Why do they assume there is only one mode? If they finally get that there is a cycle they should then do a thorough analysis to see how many modes there are not assume that’s the only one. That’s stupid. Show me wrong once and I’m wrong. Show me twice and I’m an idiot. It’s also possible /likely that the sun is partly responsibile for the ocean cycles or possibly deep ocean mantle exposure, that the change in temps at the surface affect clouds in ways that weren’t considered and numerous other things that they have ignored.
They said all along that if temps went up humidity would climb. It hasn’t. If it had then it is possible cloud cover would increase canceling the heat. They always said cloud cover dynamics were poorly understood. For instance that higher humidity might increase clouds? No, couldn’t be. !!! Stupidity. It doesn’t take a climate scientist to see all the stupidity of these people or to understand all the things they disregard. How do we know deep in the ocean connection with cracked mantle is heating some portion of the ocean causing currents? How do we know that accumulation of cycles of the sun somehow play into this? Their surety in the face of obvious simple considerations says they are stupid as well as deceitful. They should all be fired. This is NOT GOOD SCIENCE. It is disreputable science.

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 29, 2014 12:59 pm

Earth has been a long term cooling trend for over 3000 years, so it’s wrong to say that warming always returns. Cooling always returns until the next glaciation.

GoFigure560
Reply to  milodonharlani
August 29, 2014 2:23 pm

13 ice ages in the last 1.3 million years, each averaging 90,000 years, and the intervening warm spell averaging 10,000 years, and the weenies out there claim the past few years of warming will continue when not one of them can evem provide evidence that co2 variation has any effect on global temperature. Amazing.

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 29, 2014 6:14 pm

Call it whatever you want. You don’t have to call it a pause. The fact is that the temperature is NOT rising as fast as they predicted.
The period 1940-1975 saw a dip in temperatures. This was the postwar period with booming that saw a rapid acceleration and accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere and for this 35 years there was no temperature increase.
Prior to 1940 from 1910 there was a period of as rapid increase in temperatures as 1975-1998 and yet there was NO increase in CO2.
From 1998 to 2014 there has been no increase in temp even though there has been a huge increase in CO2.
Between 1910-2014 we have had 4 eras. You can say there were no pauses It was pretty much always roughly getting warmer. The problem is that for half that time CO2 wasn’t even climbing and half the rise in the whole time period is during this period when there was no CO2 increase!!! Also, half of the time CO2 was barreling ahead there was no temperature movement. Only 1/4 of the entire 100 year history acts like the “theory” says. For other time periods they have explanations. They are not consistent in what I’ve read on why 1910-1940 went up. They generally ascribe aerosols to why 1940-1975 went down. They have several explanations for why there is a current “slowdown”.
Until 10-15 years ago they barely acknowledged PDO/AMO existed. Then they said it was an annual unpredictable thing that had no lasting value. When people point out the cyclical nature they reject it and say it will stop. Why? Because their models don’t have it. Why don’t there models have it? Because it is based on something they didn’t think of. They didn’t think deep ocean currents operated in cycles. They didn’t know anything about the ocean even though it has 1000 times the heat capacity of the atmosphere and is in direct contact with the atmosphere over 70% of the earths surface but they minimized it. They thought it was minimal. Now one of the theories for why the temperature has slowed down is because it’s going into the ocean. This is probably bogus but it is pathetic they won’t admit they made a HUGE error in their estimation of what they knew. They forgot the ocean could have cycles. There are many more GOTCHAS they have simply discredited for NO GOOD REASON because they really don’t know and they act completely high and mghty like they know everything when it is perfectly obvious to a typical MIT student such as myself that they are lying through their teeth.
Why is the ocean theory bogus?
Extensive studies have now shown that as CO2 built up and AMO went into positive cycle cloud cover increased. There is indisputable evidence of this. Therefore the heat never happened. Other studies have proven there is no increase in downwelling radiation from CO2 that was expected. So the oceans can’t be storing energy it isn’t getting. The CO2 is being masked by clouds. They have no explanation for why cloud cover has increased.
Again we are faced with what appears to be gross malfeasance and stupidity on their part. Everybody has admitted that cloud cover is a huge variabe and that they don’t understand cloud dynamics. They have stated that cloud cover is a huge impact like the ocean. A small change would overwhelm ALL CO2 input. They never considered that cloud cover might increase. They have no idea if it would, why it is, when it will stop. Why it would stop?
There is another thing they keep pushing away. LIA/MWP/Climate optimum. Temperatures were clearly warmer thousands of years ago, probably on a cycle. Maybe this is related to ocean again, maybe to sun cycles, maybe to earth crust cycles. We know SO LITTLE. Yet they went out and said they had 95% certainty. It’s maddening they aren’t fired. It’s so evil to say things like this when they had every reason to know what they were saying was completely unprovable malarky. In my opinion the whole bunch should be fired and we should find another group of climate scientists who will take the science seriously.

Reply to  logiclogiclogic
August 29, 2014 6:24 pm

The term PDO was coined around 1996 by Steven Hare of the University of Washington. He, along with Nathan Mantua, Yuan Zhang, Robert Francis & Mike Wallace discovered the pattern as part of their work on fluctuations in Pacific Northwest salmon populations.
The Atlantic multidecadal oscillation (AMO) was identified by Schlesinger & Ramankutty in 1994.
So oceanic oscillations were at best dimly viewed until 20 years ago. It has taken CACA pushers all that time to try to fit them into the GIGO computer models they’ve been hawking since the 1980s, but only because the GCMs have failed so miserably to predict even what has happened since 1996.
How then can these worse than worthless models forecast what will happen by AD 2100? Billions if no trillions in treasure & thousands if not millions of lives have been lost due to the criminal negligence & malpractice of CACA “scientists”.

AndyL
August 28, 2014 7:01 am

Five years ago we were told there is no such thing as the pause
Now it’s on the endangered list because it might never happen again!

Resourceguy
Reply to  AndyL
August 28, 2014 10:06 am

Good one!

Moru H.
August 28, 2014 7:06 am

We further demonstrate that most nonvolcanic hiatuses across Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 5 (CMIP5) models are associated with enhanced cooling in the equatorial Pacific linked to the transition to a negative IPO phase.
The results show that a slow-moving current in the Atlantic, which carries heat between the two poles, sped up earlier this century to draw heat down almost a mile (1,500 meters). Most of the previous studies focused on shorter-term variability or particles that could block incoming sunlight, but they could not explain the massive amount of heat missing for more than a decade.
“The finding is a surprise, since the current theories had pointed to the Pacific Ocean as the culprit for hiding heat,” Tung said. “But the data are quite convincing and they show otherwise.”

http://www.washington.edu/news/2014/08/21/cause-of-global-warming-hiatus-found-deep-in-the-atlantic-ocean/
Tune in next week: “Fugitive heat spotted deep in the Indian Ocean.”

Reply to  Moru H.
August 31, 2014 9:27 am

This points out that the theory they had that the main reason for the 1940-1975 cooling was in fact NOT aerosols as they thought. Again, ERROR! Their previous estimates were based on assumptions that were wildly wrong. They thought aerosols were powerful enough to cause a cooling from 1940-1975 now we see they weren’t, in fact given the magnitude of current reduction in heat it is unlikely aerosols have much impact at all. Why don’t people understand that error compounds error? Serious Error means they were wrong seriously. Why would you then take any confidence in new predictions?
I’m just saying real scientists would admit this is a nascent field and many things are unknown that these are all speculation and ideas with very little data to back them up. It’s not unlike physicists arguing string theory. It could be right but no physicist even a string theorist would say they have it nailed with 95% confidence. You cannot be a scientist if you can’t admit what you know and what you don’t know, what is proven and the data supports and what you don’t know. Most climate scientists will say that there are a lot of things they don’t know. Then they say those things don’t matter much. The forcing from the sun is minimal so even though we don’t know about it much we can ignore it. No you can’t because we are talking about a complex system operating over millions of years. All kinds of things could be happening in cycles and in ways we don’t understand that make what seems like a small effect much larger. The fact is we don’t know why the ice ages happen precisely in the cycles and times they do. Milankovic cycles are highly correlated but the sun impact seems smaller than could account for the changes. Nobody understands how that could be. The AGW’ers put all the blame on CO2 but there are problems with this analysis and it isn’t consistent. It is very clear from the record that CO2 has never in all the history of the earth led a change in temperature up or down. It is ALWAYS something else which causes a movement and CO2 seems only to be affected after whatever caused the change. Similarly the reverse change is never instigated by a drop in CO2 for instance. The temps change for some reason which apparently dominates climate and CO2 is obviously to me a minor player because these other factors force CO2 not the other way around. For most of the history of the world we only can create rough proxies for a few variables over a small set of samples of the earths surface. It is very likely key factors are not known but because they can recover a couple variables they assume they can construct a theory based entirely on those variables they happen to have proxies for. That is apriori unlikely.

Tilo
August 28, 2014 7:09 am

So pitifully wrong. Since temperature will adjust to new levels of CO2, the new temperature base at any point in time would make the occurrence of a flat period just as likely. In order to overcome that problem USNW would have to predict an exponentially increasing CO2 level. Not only that, but the increase would have to be exponential enough to overcome the logarithmically decreasing effect of adding CO2. This paper is so obviously a case of modeling using the garbage in garbage out method that is is hardly worth consideration. And it is certainly not worth a Phd.

Auto
Reply to  Tilo
August 28, 2014 12:29 pm

I’ve modelled the next eighteen Epsom Derbies (horse races, held annually – and run by three-year-old horses only). My conclusions are that brown colts will win 66.667% of those races. I don’t expect UNSW to award me a PhD. Indeed (as I will not share my data, methods, al-gore-isms or potential biases) I don’t expect even a DuD.
Auto

stuck-record
August 28, 2014 7:09 am

So, the message is now: ‘It hasn’t cooled, but if it did it wouldn’t last more than a few years, but if it did then definitely not a decade – or two – or maybe three, but after that it’s going to get REALLY hot and not stop. Ever.
Just like we predicted accurately back in 1987’.

Tucker
August 28, 2014 7:09 am

Should a “lack of hiatus” be added to the list of things caused by global warming/climate change/climate disruption??

August 28, 2014 7:09 am

It’s worth noticing that the “pause” is not a slowdown or a decline – it is an exact balancing of the effects of increasing CO2.
So the natural variability must be either:
1) Incredibly, luckily hitting the effects of increasing CO2 every year – winning the jackpot every time.
2) Related to the effect of CO2 in some way e.g. coupled in a negative feedback.
3) Virtually non-existent which happens to balance the effects of increasing CO2.
If they thought Option 1 was right they wouldn’t wait 20 years for the lucky streak to end.
If they thought Option 2 was right they wouldn’t expect the lucky streak to ever end.
So they must think that Option3 is right and are betting on the way it breaks.
Unless anyone can think of a 4th Option.

Bill Marsh
Editor
Reply to  M Courtney
August 28, 2014 7:20 am

Gaia is tricksy, yessss, she is.

Mark
Reply to  M Courtney
August 28, 2014 10:58 am

Alternativly CO2 isn’t the major factor that it is required for climate models to “work”. Other, possibly unknown, factors are far more important.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  Mark
August 28, 2014 11:41 am

“Other, possibly unknown, factors are far more important.”
How did you reach this conclusion?

Reply to  Mark
August 29, 2014 10:46 pm

@ Sonic , Since the IPCC has ruled out all other options for climate models to work, It has to be co2. So therefore, it has to be unknown. Name a process and I have argued it. I can’t think of one process that was overlooked by the IPCC as having anything other than a very minor impact on climate.
If you can agree that a pause has happened, then the models are wrong, and by extension that co2 isn’t the driver. I’ve posted the math many times that they use to prove run a way global warming. In fact IF AGW is a climate controller, then the actual temperatures have dropped alarmingly, which puts most AGW Theory in direct opposition to reality. It can’t be both. The IPCC spent considerable time and effort to disprove everything but co2 caused the warming. I see some effort as saying that they didn’t know certain things like the PDO. The PDO has been known since at least the turn of the last century (19th/20th). I knew about it. It was part of the research in the 1970’s. The IPCC scientists are so enamored with the math that they never thought they could be wrong.
Name a process and I can tell you why it is unimportant according to AGW. (other than co2) And if I really felt like it, provide supporting studies. 15 years of retained heat at 240watts/m^2 at least ( and it should be approaching the tipping point since so much co2 has been added since that measurement was made .. no heat escaping). Where is it? You do remember that, don’t you?

Michael
August 28, 2014 7:12 am

It is very sad that PhD students are being coerced to write this sort of vacuous crap in order to get their degrees. The UNSW supervisors should be ashamed of themselves.
As a recently retired Oz academic, who has held positions of Head of School, Dean, Pro-Vice-Chancellor, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Professor in an engineering discipline, I am appalled by the behaviour of the academic climate mafia. UNSW has an especially bad case. The fellow travellers in the BoM and CSIRO are academic lightweights – believe me, I have seen their CVs.
The CAGW hypothesis is built on very shaky foundations. The smearing ad hom attacks from the likes of Karoly are indicative of this.
Regards,
Michael

SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 7:12 am

Here is what I find for the warming over the last 15 years. Verifications or falsifications requested:
UAH LT: 0.20 C
RSS LT: 0.03 C
GISS: 0.13 C
HadCRUT4: 0.10 C
NOAA: 0.10 C
Cowtan & Way: 0.18 C
World Ocean, 0-700 m : 69 ZJ

mouruanh
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 7:16 am

Try here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/trend.php, and report again. Also, no error bars? How anti-science.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  mouruanh
August 28, 2014 7:46 am

I download the numbers every month and so my own calculations. Do they differ from SkS’s?
What kind of error bars do you want? Statistical with no autocorrelation? With rank-1 autocorrelation? With Foster & Rahmstorf’s ARMA(1,1) autocorrelation?

SonicsGuy
Reply to  mouruanh
August 28, 2014 7:47 am

PS: Werner B never presents error bars.

Werner Brozek
Reply to  mouruanh
August 28, 2014 9:05 am

I “cover” error bars in my section 2. The latest for 95% significance is: UAH: March 1996; RSS: December 1992; Hadcrut4: November 1996; Hadsst3: August 1994; and GISS: October 1997. So the shortest time, GISS, is almost 17 years of no statistically significant warming.

Chuck L
Reply to  mouruanh
August 28, 2014 12:43 pm

If Skeptical Science was a newspaper, I wouldn’t even use it in the bottom of a bird cage.

mouruanh
Reply to  Chuck L
August 29, 2014 7:54 am

‘Precautionary principle’, if sks-tools show no statistic warming, then nobody could claim the data shows it’s really there. But it’s all redundant now. David Appell tried to pull a Gleick.
I learned my lesson.

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 7:21 am

Trying to add a picture for the first time.
Let’s just see if it is zooming up or actually wiggling flat like the IPCC says it is.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_January_2014_v5.61.png

Reply to  M Courtney
August 28, 2014 7:25 am

Yep, the IPCC got this right.
Sorry, SonicsGuy.
Still, it was a good month to go for.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  M Courtney
August 28, 2014 7:51 am

Here’s an interesting fact for you:
Over the last 15 years, UAH LT shows a trend of +0.13 C/decade.
Over its entire dataset since 1979, it shows +0.14 C/decade.
Where is the pause?

Reply to  M Courtney
August 28, 2014 11:14 am

A a straight horizontal line from Jan 2014 intersects at Jan 1998. I think that is a zero trend line for 16 years. Zero.
Let me try that again: ZERO

SonicsGuy
Reply to  M Courtney
August 28, 2014 11:43 am

“A a straight horizontal line from Jan 2014 intersects at Jan 1998. I think that is a zero trend line for 16 years. Zero.”
Sorry, that’s not how trends work. Lookup “linear regression.”

stan stendera
Reply to  M Courtney
August 28, 2014 5:03 pm

Figgers lie and liars figger. Misspellings intentional! Looking at you SS.

stan stendera
Reply to  M Courtney
August 28, 2014 5:04 pm

Correction: SG not SS.

Bill Marsh
Editor
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 7:22 am

Error range makes ‘increases’ or ‘decreases’ in those ranges statistically insignificant.

Venter
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 7:26 am

Quick, call up all you pals who have given 39 different reasons for the hiatus and tell them that there is no hiatus and that you have found warming. Go on, quick. You need to save the world.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  Venter
August 28, 2014 7:55 am

But there is a slight slowdown, and nothing says it has only one cause. It doesn’t.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  Venter
August 28, 2014 7:58 am

And by the way, this is an excellent example of how science works — when data and theory disagree, examing each closer to find out why. Examining the data shows that large stationless regions are not properly treated, hence C&W. Examining the theory leads to these many ideas you’vfe alluded to. Theory seems to be honing in on more ocean heating and volcanoes as the reason for the discrepency. Now modelers will take this information and try to make better models, as they have been doing for over 50 years.

Reply to  Venter
August 29, 2014 11:13 pm

Among other arguments about station data, the US which has the most and longest recorded temperatures, comprises only 2 % of the surface. The other data is from proxies Generally, they started from 1979 when satellites started measuring.
This has not been an excellent example of how science works. It is, however, an excellent example how politics work. All of the ideas that you refer to have been refuted. I have pages of it. Are you saying the theory is in error? By the way, in the last 50 years not one model has come close. If you want to start convincing me of the value of AGW start by modeling the LIA and the MWP, which the IPCC denied existed except at a local level. ( both shown to be world wide since) Shall we refer to the graph with the relative flat levels of co2 and temperatures during those time periods produced by the IPCC?

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 7:32 am

Clever trick, start in a cool year 1999, see M Courtney’s graph, and hope nobody notices!

mouruanh
Reply to  Paul Matthews
August 28, 2014 7:38 am

I figured SonicsGuy has used 99 as the start date, his numbers are still wrong. Even overheated Cowtan & Way shows little to no warming for this century.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  Paul Matthews
August 28, 2014 7:54 am

1999 just happens to be where 15-years starts.
By the same argument, you can’t begin at the top of the 1998 period and claim cooling.
Over the more climatologically relevant interval of 30 years, C&W show 0.57 C of warming.
How’s that?

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 7:40 am

World Ocean, 0-700 m : 69 ZJ
With 50 ZJ accounted for in the splice/change-over from ALACE to ARGO
19 ZJ for 0-700 amounts to less than 0.02 deg C, with one ARGO float for every 240,000 cubic km of water, or less than 0.001 degC / year,

SonicsGuy
Reply to  Stephen Rasey
August 28, 2014 8:10 am

And of course, that is corrected for in Levitus et al GRL 2012, via Gouretski & Koltermann GRL 2007.
ALACE casts made up only 0.3% of all profiling casts, according to NOAA’s publication “World Ocean Database 2013.” See Figure 6.1

Reply to  Stephen Rasey
August 28, 2014 9:42 am

But ALACE to ARGO makes up MOST of your 69 ZJ.
You’ve just proven that the start of your trend is poorly sampled. GIGO.

Auto
Reply to  Stephen Rasey
August 28, 2014 12:55 pm

An interesting fact:
– 1 Argo buoy for every two-hundred-and-forty-thousand cubic kilometres of [salt] water.
Please note this.
Hmmmm – a moment of reflection.
The whole human race – say 7,5 billion people [ish: http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ gives 7.257 billion now (1955 Z. 28th August 2014)], at an average of 120 Kg each – would fit into one cubic kilometre – cosily, true, but fit in. That is – one.
And, even in my XXL trousers, I suggest that the global average human weight, despite the flood tide of obesity, is less than half of 120 Kg; remember, I include a l l humans; under fives, over-eighties etc.
And one Argo buoy for a quarter [probably a half? ?] of a million times that volume . . . .
Do we truly believe we can calculate global temperature [even surface temperatures, let alone depth weighted ones] to one (or two!) decimal places of a degree Celsius [of a Kelvin]??
Auto

Reply to  Stephen Rasey
August 28, 2014 2:19 pm

12:55 pm
Eschenbach’s Decimals of Precision makes the astute observation that if you can believe 3000 ARGO buoys can determine the temperature change of the whole ocean to 0.02 C, then we should be able to determine the temperature change to 0.2 deg C of accuracy with only 30 (1/100th) of those buoys.
Reducto ad absurdum.

Edward Richardson
Reply to  Stephen Rasey
August 28, 2014 2:42 pm

[Snip. Invalid email address. ~mod.]

Reply to  Stephen Rasey
August 28, 2014 10:26 pm

Richardson.
An ARGO buoy is a device that makes a SET of observations. A profile in time every 10 days. If you have 3000 Buoys, you get about 100,000 profiles per year. It is still 1 buoy per 240,000 km*3.
However much data that is, if you feel you have the ability to determine the average temperature of the worlds oceans from 0-2000 m to an accuracy of 0.02 deg C, then it follows from the n*2 term of the mean standard error, to get the average temperature uncertainty to 0.20 deg C you would only need 30 ARGO buoys. 30 Buoys (1000 profiles/yr) spread over the North West Pacific, Gulf of Alaska, Central Pacific, Offshore Western Mexico… you get the idea. Absurd.
Not absurd enough? If 30 ARGOs can get you 0.20 deg C uncertainty. then 3 ARGOS (100 profiles / yr) would be good enough for 0.70 deg C.) in a temperature field with a range of 30 deg C with a complex variation by depth, Lat, Long, season, year, and ENSO cycle, current and weather noise, and unknown unknowns.

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 8:07 am

You have chosen such a short period that it amounts to an arbitrary one dominated completely not by trends but by chaotic noise. No wonder they are all over the map.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  NikFromNYC
August 28, 2014 8:12 am

I agree — I”m just using short intervals because everyone else is.
Over the more climatologically relevant interval of 30 years, C&W show 0.57 C of warming. UAH LT shows 0.51 C of warming, and RSS LT shows 0.43 C.

Reply to  NikFromNYC
August 28, 2014 8:18 am

But the pause is related to the expected warming form the models.
Of course the thermometers haven’t frozen perfectly still. If they had we would guess they were broken.
But the pause is real. The IPCC acknowledges it. The pause is real relative to what the models said would happen.
That is not bad news for the pause or the thermometers.
It is bad news for the models and thus the attribution of global warming to CO2.
And that is why it is newsworthy. Who could tell if the temperature changed an nth of a degree. That’s not news.
But the models being wrong – that is news.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  NikFromNYC
August 28, 2014 8:30 am

“But the pause is real. The IPCC acknowledges it.”
THe 5AR was written before Cowtan & Way. So they weren’t using the most recent data, which has changed since the 5AR was written.

Reply to  NikFromNYC
August 28, 2014 12:49 pm

C&W is one paper with a lot of issues.
You’re a long way from mainstream science if you pluck one paper and say “HA! The IPCC are all fools!”.
I know you’re not doing that but… you are pinning a lot on this one paper of dubious credibility.
(Infilling the poles with a few scarce readings and then extrapolating. Did they learn nothing from the Steig Nature Debacle?)

mouruanh
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 8:13 am

@SonicsGuy
Doesn’t matter what method you use to test for statistical significance, as long as the method is scientifically sound.
Do you realize you’ve commented to a post about a study that discusses the very thing you say doesn’t exist? If the ‘pause’ isn’t real, why bother studying it. Even former ‘pause denier’ Matt England has finally come to terms with reality (sort of).
You know, you’re per definition a skeptic, if you disagree with published & peer-reviewed science. Welcome aboard in that case.
But your numbers are still incorrect, you might want to check again and find the error.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  mouruanh
August 28, 2014 8:29 am

Yes, it does matter what method you use for statistica significance, depending on the noise in your system.
“Do you realize you’ve commented to a post about a study that discusses the very thing you say doesn’t exist?”
So. Is there something about my numbers that is wrong?

mouruanh
Reply to  mouruanh
August 28, 2014 8:47 am

@SonicsGuy
Yes, it does matter what method you use for statistical significance, depending on the noise in your system.
Then choose the method that is appropriate in the case at hand.
So. Is there something about my numbers that is wrong?
You’re missing the point, but yes, they’re are wrong. You even reported different numbers for the same data set.
Little hint, Matt England also uses Cowtan & Way data in his studies.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  mouruanh
August 28, 2014 10:17 am

“Then choose the method that is appropriate in the case at hand.”
If I choose Foster & Rahmstorf’s ARMA(1,1) method, I get a 15-yr warming for HadCRUT4 of 0.10 +/- 0.15 C. SHORT INTERVALS ARE RARELY STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT, so cannot be used to draw conclusions about climate.
“You even reported different numbers for the same data set.”
Where?

mouruanh
Reply to  mouruanh
August 28, 2014 10:59 am

SHORT INTERVALS ARE RARELY STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT, so cannot be used to draw conclusions about climate.
Cowtan & Way, the best surface dataset out there, shows 0.18 C of warming in the last 15 years. No pause.
Then stick with one argument and don’t try to have both ways. If the period is too short then don’t draw any conclusions.
But you’re still missing the point, even using Cowtan & Way the models still overestimate the warming over the last 15+ years and the divergence is growing progressively over time.
http://web.science.unsw.edu.au/~matthew/nclimate2106-incl-SI.pdf
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2014/how-or-ar5-models-doing-end-of-2013/
I said:
“You even reported different numbers for the same data set.”
You asked:
Where?
Here:
But UAH shows 0.20 C of LT warming over 15 years.
Over the last 15 years, UAH LT shows a trend of +0.13 C/decade.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  mouruanh
August 28, 2014 11:47 am

“If the period is too short then don’t draw any conclusions.”
I’ve been consistently telling everyone that 15 or 17 or 18 years is not statistically significant or climatologically relevant. But that, even then, there is little evidence for a pause.
PS: Even at 0.10 +/- 0.15 C/decade (95% C.L.), warming is still likely — 82% statistical significance, assuming the errors follow a normal distribution.

mouruanh
Reply to  mouruanh
August 28, 2014 12:09 pm

I’ve been consistently telling everyone that 15 or 17 or 18 years is not statistically significant or climatologically relevant. But that, even then, there is little evidence for a pause.
Then you are consistently wrong, just like the models, but at least you’re consistent.
No comment why you’ve reported two different trends for UAH?

Dave in Canmore
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 8:33 am

I don’t see warming here I see a trivial, cherry picked increase imperseptible to flora and fauna. Seriously, I am supposed to get bent out of shape over .03 degrees over 15 years? Here in Alberta during a chinook, both plants and animals experience temperature change over 600 times this in 15 hours! If you think this trend will continue and that plants and animals can’t adapt to this rate, you need to get outside and study nature more.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  Dave in Canmore
August 28, 2014 8:42 am

But UAH shows 0.20 C of LT warming over 15 years. Who to believe, UAH or RSS? They are both (almost) measuring the same thing — RSS exclused areas around the poles. So who is right? Why present only RSS’s result and not UAH’s as well, and admit there is a big difference?

rogerknights
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 8:33 am

If your “last 15 years” began the trend in the anomolously low year of 1999, of course there’s an uptrend. The more reasonable contrarian commenters say that the trend has been flat for the last dozen years, or in the 21st century, and that there has been only insignificant warming for the last 17 years.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  rogerknights
August 28, 2014 8:39 am

Those starting points are even more of a cherry pick. A “cherry pick” is when you pick the starting date to give the numbers you want. The proper way to do it is to first agree what time interval is representive of climate (and hence its changes), but not oceanic weather (ENSOs, etc.) which can mask GW in the “short” term, and then calculate trends.
Most people pick 30 years, but ~ 50-60 years might be better, since it averages over a (more or less) complete cycle of the PDO and AMO.

Reply to  rogerknights
August 28, 2014 11:23 am

SonicsGuy
You write

Those starting points are even more of a cherry pick. A “cherry pick” is when you pick the starting date to give the numbers you want. The proper way to do it is to first agree what time interval is representive of climate (and hence its changes), but not oceanic weather (ENSOs, etc.) which can mask GW in the “short” term, and then calculate trends.
Most people pick 30 years, but ~ 50-60 years might be better, since it averages over a (more or less) complete cycle of the PDO and AMO.

Yes! “A “cherry pick” is when you pick the starting date to give the numbers you want.”
So, why did you do it by starting at the cold year of 1999?
The correct start is as used by all serious analysts of the data sets such as Werner Brozek. The correct start date is now and the data is analysed back from now.
The data is then analysed to determine the period until now which provides no linear trend discernibly different from zero at 95% confidence. The data defines the length of time and not the analyst. Of course, you don’t use this correct procedure because it prevents you “cherry picking” the data to get the result you want.
And your “cherry picking” is how you obtain your untrue suggestion that global warming has not stopped.
Richard

Mary Brown
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 10:41 am

Wood for Trees, up about .10 deg C since 1999. Flat since 2001
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/from:1999/to:2014/plot/wti/from:1999/to:2014/trend

TomT
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 3:05 pm

The problem with 15 years is that every month 15 years moves one month. Currently 15 years is the peak of the 98/99 ENSO la nina. I’m personally very critical when skeptics start trends in 98 especially when you consider that you don’t need to and still get a flat trend if you start your sample before the 98/99 ENSO.
Personally I put absolutely zero credence in any trend that cuts and ENSO in half be it from skeptic or warmmonger.

rw
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 29, 2014 12:47 pm

How about taking a walk outside, for Christ’s sake. At present it’s distinctly colder on both sides of the Atlantic than it was 10 years ago – and it’s been that way for 5-7 years. At the turn of the century both sides of the Atlantic seemed to be in synch with an overall warming trend. Now, somehow, that trend continues despite the colder temperatures outside. Has the eastern US and the European coast somehow been disconnected from the global climate system? And what about Australia (cold winter this year, snow in Canberra in recent years – which I know from experience would have been unthinkable 30 years ago)? Or the Arctic (coldest summer temps in 45 years)? Have they separated too?

steveta_uk
August 28, 2014 7:13 am

Hiatus periods are identified in three categories: (i) those due to volcanic eruptions, (ii) those associated with negative phases of the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO), and (iii) those affected by anthropogenically released aerosols in the mid-twentieth century.

Oops – must have written this up before the Atlantic/Southern oceans became the favourite excuse.

August 28, 2014 7:15 am

lies, damn lies, statistics, and GCM outputs

SonicsGuy
Reply to  Joel O’Bryan
August 28, 2014 8:13 am

Which of my numbers is wrong?

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 9:06 am

SonicsGuy:
Your start point is wrong. Your start point should be today. Not 1999, 2011 or any other year in the past. You start today and work your way back. Starting today, what is the trend for the last week, month, year, decade. What is the 1 year average, 3 year centered moving average, etc., etc. Are your trends within 3 standard deviations of the predicted trends? The models predicted today’s temperature 15 years ago. How does today’s temperature compare to the modeled prediction? Make sure you don’t use “homogenized” data that converts cooling to warming without justification. I’m guessing your vaunted C & W did use it. And if Mosher / Stokes read this, we will all believe that the homogenization algorithm is valid if you can show as many stations that cooled as those that warmed. Given that it is a nearly universal adjustments to create “warming” where none occurred, well of course C&W found warming. The data has been tortured to the degree that warming exists no matter what the actual trend. See Jennifer Marohosy for references. On the side bar to the right.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 10:14 am

John, what you describe is a cherry pick — picking the beginning data to give you the result you want, whether it’s climatologically meaningful or not. First you have to decide what interval IS meaningful, and then calculate that. Shorter intervals are then about noise, not climate.
PS: ALL data is “homogenied,” in all the sciences.
PPS: If there’s no warming, why is the ice melt accelerating, and the ocean rising?

Heber Rizzo
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 10:19 am

As you said, your number are based on Cowtan & Way.
This paper by C. E. Chung, H. Cha, T. Vihma, P. Räisänen, and D. Decremer (2013)
http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/13/11209/2013/acp-13-11209-2013.html
shows Cowtan & Way are wrong, So your numbers are wrong, too.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 11:49 am

Heber: I don’t see any way in which that paper proves C&W wrong. How so?

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 29, 2014 5:37 pm

SonicsGuy,
Your numbers aren’t wrong, and I do appreciate your civil tone. You’re starting date is arbitrary, and as Mary Brown shows above (not to mention the IPCC!) a slightly later starting date gives less warming and a close to flat trend line. Why is it so important to you to show warming? And another point about your (and others) contention that the heat is going into the oceans. Besides the lack of any known mechanism for GHG to heat the oceans directly, there is an easy way to check and see if the warming bypassed the atmosphere and went directly into the oceans. It’s the rate of sea level rise. There’s been no acceleration, so no unprecedented heat going to the oceans, just the ongoing long term warming by the oceans (whose temperatures are a lagging indicator) to reach equilibrium with the atmosphere.

Scarface
August 28, 2014 7:16 am

He may want to apply at the Onion.

Bill Marsh
Editor
August 28, 2014 7:17 am

My first thought was ‘snow will be a thing of the past’.
I am continually amused by the ‘scientific’ use of unvalidated models as though they were authoritative. Those models will always show CO2 ‘overwhelming’ natural variability. They’re built to do just that.

August 28, 2014 7:21 am

The momentum of Global Warming caused by the build up of greenhouse gasses…..
What ill-chosen words.
Are they back to using “Global Warming” again?
Is “Climate Change” in a wetter Australia a losing argument?
If “Global Warming” has paused, then it has NO momentum.
Maybe Global Warming as much inertia.
Maybe Carbon Dioxide build up creates more Forcing.
But the only momentum in sight is that of the Global Warming political movement which is diminishing in size and strength with every election.

August 28, 2014 7:24 am

Wait:
““When it does cool, it will not be enough to overcome the warming.”
In that case, it isn’t cooling, is it?

Venter
Reply to  JohnWho
August 28, 2014 8:13 am

ROFL, JohnWho. They are so wrapped up in their fantasyland that even plain english eludes them.

August 28, 2014 7:25 am

One of my favorites from Dr. Spencer:
95% of Climate Models agree: The observations must be wrong.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2014/02/95-of-climate-models-agree-the-observations-must-be-wrong/

SonicsGuy
Reply to  Mike Maguire
August 28, 2014 8:35 am

Spencer re-basellined in order to maximize the visual appearance of a discrepancy. (In othere words, it wasn’t an honest comparison.) This post gives the exact details of how Spencer created his graph and why it is misleading:
http://ourchangingclimate.wordpress.com/2014/02/22/john-christy-richard-mcnider-roy-spencer-flat-earth-hot-spot-figure-baseline/
PS: Think Spencer will submit his graph to peer review, or present it at a conference?

steveta_uk
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 8:42 am

That lie has been repeated so often I’m surprised that it still occurs, but I’ll correct you anyway.
Dr. Spenser did not re-baseline anything – his charrt shows 100% of the satelite record – no cherry picking of dates before or after – so the baseline was quite simply the entire data set.

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 8:43 am

On the link you give, the most favourable chart (for the models) is this.
It shows a comparison of annual data, using a 1986-2005 baseline.
http://ourchangingclimate.files.wordpress.com/2014/02/jos-hagelaars-comparison_cmip5_hadcrut4_uah.png
It still looks pretty bad for the models.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 8:46 am

As the Verheggen post shows, the only way they could replicate Spencer’s results is by re- baselining. (See the last graph in the link.)
Can you do it without baselining? I”m interested in seeing that….
Of course, if Spencer had published his results in a peer reviewed journal, his methodology would be explained and there wouldn’t this problem. Or even if he did so on his blog. Do you happen to know why he didn’t?

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 8:54 am

M Courtney: How does that “look bad” for models?
HadCRUT4 is below projections in 2014 by about 0.15 C in 44 years, or 0.03 C/decade.
How good does a model have to be? How *can* it be good when no one knows the emissoins pathway the world will follow, which volcanoes will erupt, how many ENSOs there will be, and what changes will take place with solar irradiance.
Meanwhile, since 1970 HadCRUT4 shows about 0.17 C/decade of warming. You’re dismissing that and focusing on the 0.03 C/decade miss, which in the broader context matters little compared to how much warming has happened (and is expected to happen in the future).
Climate sensitivity is still only know to about plus or minus 50%.
So how good does a model have to be, and why? It is a serious question.

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 9:04 am

Sonicsguy, I have a serious answer.
The models have to be randomly wrong. It can be out by a bit, of course, but not out systematically.
The models show, and provide a test for, an understanding of how the climate works. The understanding is that, for a known amount of CO2 emissions, the world will warm – other things being equal. And they were equal.
There were no big volcanoes or meteorite strikes.
CO2 emissions were not constrained.
And yet the models (almost) all over-estimated the warming.
The sensitivity cannot be “plus or minus 50%”.
It can be “minus 50%”.
And that makes the whole AGW is dangerous thing a non-starter. More, it makes the search for the speck of “anthropogenic” global warming even harder.
Sorry, have to go now so won’t be able to reply for a few hours. Please don’t take this as me being deliberately rude.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 9:24 am

“And they were equal.
There were no big volcanoes or meteorite strikes.
CO2 emissions were not constrained.”
There were volcanoes in the last 15 years (see Santer et al Nature 2014), and especially some significant ENSOs.
How would the models know how to account for these?
And which IPCC scenarios did all the GHG emissions follow exactly?

Mary Brown
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 10:44 am

Forecast minus observed is pretty simple. The models are now 2 std deviations wrong. In other words, they were 95% sure it would be warming now than it is. They need smaller feedbacks or bigger errors bars. If not, they should be ignored going forward.

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 11:41 am

Sonicsguy, I’m back. Sorry about that.
Well, we will have to say that “all other things being equal” is very subjective then.
There is always a background of small ENSOs – nothing like the 1997 one has occurred since.
There are always small volcanoes – no Mt St Helens has occurred this millennium,.
The models are tuned on this background. All other things being equal means (to me) something unusual.
If the models only model a world that isn’t Earth – with no sea movements or volcanism at all – then they have been misnamed. I don’t think that that subjective interpretation counts.
Nothing special has happened but the models still got it wrong.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 11:52 am

“nothing like the 1997 one has occurred since.”
No — the 2010 La Nina was quite strong. And then it was followed by another La Nina.
With the 1998 El Nino, it’s easy to see how natural variability has a negative trend for the last 15 or so years. And yet recent months have seen new highs in SSTs, and top-5 rankings in global temperatures.

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 12:56 pm

We’ll agree to disagree on the reasonableness of the models coping with (very common) ENSO events.
If the models aren’t meant for this planet then they have no value anyway.
If they were then Mary Brown’s comment, just above, wins the thread.
The question is, Has the volcanism and ENSO been so extraordinary this millennium that the models couldn’t possibly have been expected to deal with it?
I say NO.
You seem to say YES (?)
Let’s agree to disagree. Anyone can look and see.

Jim G
August 28, 2014 7:29 am

“However, such “hiatuses” are increasingly unlikely if carbon emissions continue on their present trajectory, and will be “a thing of the past” by the century’s end,”
Let’s hope so or all of our crop growing seasons will begin to move south. That is, of course, unless the real scientists who work on crop yields and adaptation can keep up the good work they have been doing for decades now. And remember, Mark Bofill, anyone with the time and money can get a PHD, even these imbeciles.
As far as, “CLIMATE INDUCED GLOBAL CONFLICT” , that has most often historically been the result of cooling, not warming. Where will Russia grow its wheat? Maybe in the Ukraine? For a while anyway. And Canada will be in really deep do-do. How about China? Nothing like a lack of food to get the populace whooped up for war.
So let’s hope the warming comes back and stays a while.

August 28, 2014 7:32 am

This idea would carry more weight if it had been mentioned before the so-called “pause” started. A theory that claims to be perfect and able to explain everything shouldn’t really need to be changed ever. That is, adding tweaks and exceptions for every new event it comes across seems to be casting doubt on its “the science is settled” meme, They can’t do both and claim to be scientific. But I quests we are way beyond that point by now.

Reply to  Fred W. Manzo
August 28, 2014 7:52 am

It is like how hurricane predictors get to revise their wild guesses half way through the season.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  Fred W. Manzo
August 28, 2014 9:43 am

“This idea would carry more weight if it had been mentioned before the so-called “pause” started.”
How would modelers know what to assume for ENSOs, volcanoes, and solar irradiance in the future?

Mary Brown
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 10:55 am

“How would modelers know what to assume for ENSOs, volcanoes, and solar irradiance in the future?”
They don’t have a clue about these things. So, the output from the models simply boils down to how they turn the knob on feedback. Clearly the knob is turned too high yet no one will turn the knob to match observed reality.
In weather forecasting, raw models make the same errors. Then model output statistics are used to adjust for biases and uncertainty. The old LFM model had a huge “wet” bias. It always forecast too much rain. No worries, though. The MOS simply cut it in half and then more for time uncertainty.
Same for climate models. Cut the forecast in half and then add more uncertainty. Then you will have a decent and possibly reliable forecast

Heber Rizzo
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 11:28 am

They didn´t, and they don´t; that is the point. And because of that (for lack of knowing) their models are wrong and useless.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 11:53 am

“So, the output from the models simply boils down to how they turn the knob on feedback.”
They don’t “turn” any knob. They solve the PDEs that describe the physics.

Mary Brown
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 12:43 pm

“So, the output from the models simply boils down to how they turn the knob on feedback.”
They don’t “turn” any knob. They solve the PDEs that describe the physics.
………………
But they do “turn the knob”. Water vapor feedbacks are simply not known. They are assumed. The assumptions are “turning the knob”.

John Finn
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 4:28 pm

Regarding volcanic activity. This link includes a graph which shows stratospheric Aerosol Optical Thickness since 1850.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/strataer/
Note the Pinatubo eruption in 1991 which is the last major spike. Since then – nothing. There have been volcanoes since 1998 but none which could significantly climate.

Chuckarama
August 28, 2014 7:33 am

Their models, which run simulations against other model predictions, predict that the predicted heat will overwhelm the predicted cooling.
I predict they don’t know what they’re talking about.

Gary Pearse
August 28, 2014 7:36 am

I never thought I would hear another prediction by climaty folks like Dr.Viner’s (snow will be a thing of the past). A weird sociologically politically incorrect puzzle to me is why all the recent papers coming from Univ. students are from women? Is this a stage in the cycle of this discipline? I’ve noted this several times before. Cli Sci used to be largely a mannly pursuit.

Reply to  Gary Pearse
August 28, 2014 7:43 am

It’s not a Cli Sci thing It is a University thing.
For the UK the statistics show that Universities are becoming increasingly distaff.
I guess it is the same in Australia.
The exceptions are the physical sciences, computer sciences, maths and engineering. But Environmental studies is surely nearer to biology and the social sciences, no?

SonicsGuy
Reply to  Gary Pearse
August 28, 2014 8:18 am

“While most areas in the Northern Hemisphere will likely experience less snowfall throughout a season, the study concludes that extreme snow events will still occur, even in a future with significant warming.”
– MIT press release, 8/27/14
https://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/global-warming-snowstorms-0827
regarding
O’Gorman, P. A.
Contrasting responses of mean and extreme snowfall to climate change
Nature 512, 416-418 (2014)
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v512/n7515/pdf/nature13625.pdf

rogerknights
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 8:44 am

Could be. There’s a case for it. But the climate system has unpredictable wrinkles. EWe won’t have a good handle on it for a century.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 8:58 am

Right. And with significant warming expected this century, we will have to make decisions about what to do (or not do) in the face of considerable uncertainty. It is the nature of the problem.

deebodk
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 10:21 am

“And with significant warming expected this century”
Significant warming projected by models; models that have failed and continue to fail to reflect reality.

Mary Brown
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 10:58 am

“While most areas in the Northern Hemisphere will likely experience less snowfall throughout a season, the study concludes that extreme snow events will still occur, even in a future with significant warming.”
– MIT press release, 8/27/14
………………….
Except that it hasn’t happened. Snowfall is flat or up. Snowpacks in the west are generally trending higher.
Studies conclude things. Reality concludes things. Better if they match.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 12:01 pm

“Snowpacks in the west are generally trending higher.”
Where are those data? Because this presentation says otherwise:
http://www.slideshare.net/ecowest/eco-west-climate-trends-snowpack-white

rogerknights
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 12:43 pm

Sonicsguy says:
Right. And with significant warming expected this century, we will have to make decisions about what to do (or not do) . . . .”
Asia is saying, “Who’s ‘We,’ white man?”

stan stendera
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 6:06 pm

Guys and Gals I have been around this blog longer then any of you (judging by the posting names). My seniority in both time on the blog and age gives me the right to announce Stan’s law. DON’T FEED THE TROLLS. I’m looking at you SG.

Mary Brown
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 6:34 pm

I said…
“Snowpacks in the west are generally trending higher.”
Sonic said…
Where are those data? Because this presentation says otherwise:
http://www.slideshare.net/ecowest/eco-west-climate-trends-snowpack-white
………………………………
I looked at it more closely and I think the preponderance of data supports Sonic on this one. I recently read a SNOTEL trend study for the Pacific Northwest that went back to 1984. All the trends were higher.
However, many other studies since dating to the 1950’s generally show slightly declining snowpacks in the American West.
The data is not clear cut for every region every time period but I have a hard time sticking with the claim that …
“Snowpacks in the west are generally trending higher.”
Rutgers has some nice data on snow cover…
http://climate.rutgers.edu/snowcover/

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 29, 2014 11:39 pm

If MIT had published that in 2004, they would have been hooted down as skeptics. Let’s discuss a little science per AGW. When it snows or rains the latent heat that is released is retained in the atmosphere. Where does that heat go, and why isn’t it melting the snow almost as soon as it hits the ground? Moves off? Where? In fact except for local events only, it shouldn’t snow at all. Do the math on the release of heat on 30 cm of snow over several hundred sq km. It doesn’t get boiled off into space per AGW and it isn’t getting sucked up by the oceans right away is it? I’m just pointing out that extreme snowfalls at the present levels of co2 should not and can not happen.

Bill Illis
August 28, 2014 7:40 am

It took them long enough to recognize there even was a plateau or an hiatus and, of course, some don’t even want to face that. Some want to even rewrite old temperatures downward so that there is less of a plateau.
Its a theory. It needs to be tested. Just be an objective person and face the facts. It should not be a religion where the dogma cannot even be questioned.

August 28, 2014 7:41 am

You know when I was a boy I would build models, I wasn’t very good at building models, but I built them anyway so I could play with them afterwards. I would pretend that the models were real ships or planes, but I alway knew they weren’t even close to real ships or planes.
For some reason these people can’t seem to tell the difference between a climate model and the real climate.

rogerknights
Reply to  Anthony Watts
August 28, 2014 8:46 am

Seconded!

SonicsGuy
Reply to  Tom Trevor
August 28, 2014 8:21 am

“All models are wrong, but some are useful.”
– George Box, Empirical Model-Building and Response Surfaces (1987)
“Models are always wrong, but skillful — you have more information than you did otherwise.”
– Gavin Schmidt, TED talk (2014)

mouruanh
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 8:31 am

But the models aren’t at ‘skillful’, that’s point. Are you sure you taking the whole thing seriously?
There are now ( i lost count) dozens of papers trying to explain why the models are failing. What’s you’re favorite explanation?

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 9:00 am

Look at the models Gavin Schmidt presents in his talk, and then tell me the models aren’ skillful. They reproduce atmospheric features and changes very clearly. Manabe’s 1967 model predicted the average temperature of the surface. Can your model do that?

Mark Bofill
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 9:09 am

Still trolling huh.
The models are not reproducing surface temperature trends properly, which lest we forget, is why we care about the darn models in the first place. Properly speaking, we can reject at the 95% confidence level that between 15 and 17 models in the IPCC ensemble correctly model the observed Earth trends.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 9:20 am

“The models are not reproducing surface temperature trends properly.”
How good do the models have to be? (Give us a number.)
How do models know how to account for ENSOs, volcanoes, solar irradiance changes and the exact emissions pathway?
PS: Stop the name calling.

Mark Bofill
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 9:28 am

Stop the name calling? Don’t you mean, stop the name calling you dirty d*nier?
Your posts are on this thread are numerous, all over the place in topic and largely specious in nature. I’m not calling you names, I’m calling you a troll, because what you are doing is called trolling. You’re posting with no evidence purpose except to distract from and derail discussion on the thread’s topic.

Edward Richardson
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 9:31 am

Mark Bofill
“I’m not calling you names, I’m calling you a troll ”
Mr Bofill, “troll” is a name, and you are in fact calling Mr SonicsGuy names.
Try addressing the facts and the logic instead of calling him a “troll”

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 9:41 am

“because what you are doing is called trolling.”
I’m presenting the science as best I understand it. And doing so politely. Calling me a troll is, as it always is, an attempt to dismiss my arguments without actually engaging them.

Mark Bofill
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 9:46 am

Edward Richardson, the wingman, am I right?
If you two have some problem with calling things by their right names, I don’t care. If you think that simply because SonicsGuy feels like talking about whatever the heck he wants to talk about that that means people have to address his issues, I still don’t care.
You show a default disrespect of the readership here by bombarding the thread with your garbage, and if getting called on it bothers you, good.

mouruanh
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 9:48 am

Can your model do that?
We’re playing this game again. Can yours?
I’m not claiming to have a model which can, with reasonable accuracy, simulate the observed climate system. Climate scientists do, and these claims can be tested. The result of these tests show that models show no skill in simulating the observed surface temperature change for exactly the period where greenhouse gases should have the strongest effect on surface temperatures.
The big question is now, what could be the explanation for the mismatch between models and reality. What’s yours? You have about several dozens to choose from.
On a general note.
You started out by claiming the pause isn’t real anyways, so there’s nothing to explain. You’ve then switched positions a number of times, reiterating the usual boilerplates we heard so many times in last 2+ years.
It’s pointless and waste of time to try and have any meaningful discussion when the goal posts are constantly being being moved.
.

Edward Richardson
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 9:53 am

Mr Bofill,
..
You show a default disrespect of the readership by resorting to ad hominem name calling. Most readers of these comments recognize this fact.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 9:57 am

“Climate scientists do, and these claims can be tested.”
Climate models don’t make predictions. How would they know what to assume for coming ENSOs and volcanoes and changes in solar irradiance? Or exactly what emissions pathway the world will follow?

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 9:59 am

“You started out by claiming the pause isn’t real anyways, so there’s nothing to explain.”
I’ve consistently said “slowdown,” not a “pause.” I don’t see any evidence of a “pause,” except in one of 7 datasets.

Mary Brown
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 11:01 am

“How good do the models have to be? (Give us a number.)”
Observations within 2 standard deviations of the forecast would be a start.

mouruanh
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 12:05 pm

I’ve consistently said “slowdown,” not a “pause.” I don’t see any evidence of a “pause,” except in one of 7 datasets.
Doesn’t matter what you call it, but you’re claim is nonsense. I don’t know what you do when you calculate your trends, but your numbers are off.
Except for Cowtan & Way and UAH, all other data sets show a non-statistically significant temperature change over the the last 15 years, using 1999 as the start date. The trends are practically flat for this century, including Cowtan & Way.
If you want to argue again that the period is too short, go ahead. But then don’t make any statements as to whether the surface is still warming or not.
Climate models don’t make predictions. How would they know what to assume for coming ENSOs and volcanoes and changes in solar irradiance? Or exactly what emissions pathway the world will follow?
You really need to stop with the circular arguments. If the models are doing just fine in tracking the observations over the last 15+ years, there is no need for an explanation. But then all the papers trying to explain the mismatch between models and observation start out from a completely wrong premise.
Despite the continued increase of atmospheric greenhouse gases, the annual-mean global temperature has not risen in this century, challenging the prevailing view that anthropogenic forcing causes climate warming. Various mechanisms have been proposed for this hiatus of global warming, but their relative importance has not been quantified, hampering observational estimates of climate sensitivity.
http://scholarspace.manoa.hawaii.edu/bitstream/handle/10125/33072/Kosaka&Xie2013.pdf?sequence=1
Despite ongoing increases in atmospheric greenhouse gases, the Earth’s global average surface air temperature has remained more or less steady since 2001. A variety of mechanisms have been proposed to account for this slowdown in surface warming.
http://web.science.unsw.edu.au/~matthew/nclimate2106-incl-SI.pdf
Global mean surface warming over the past 15 years or so has been less than in earlier decades and than simulated by most climate models. Natural variability, a reduced radiative forcing, a smaller warming response to atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and coverage bias in the observations have been identified as potential causes. However, the explanations of the so-called ‘warming hiatus’ remain fragmented and the implications for long-term temperature projections are unclear.
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v7/n9/full/ngeo2228.html
___________________________________________________________________
Five years and counting, when do you think it is time to finally admit the fundamental and systematic flaws in climate models?
The pause in warming is real enough, but it’s just temporary, they (climate scientists) argue from their analyses. A natural swing in climate to the cool side has been holding greenhouse warming back, and such swings don’t last forever. “In the end, global warming will prevail,”says climate scientist Gavin Schmidt of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York City.
Researchers may differ about exactly what’s behind recent natural climate variability, but they agree that no sort of natural variability can hold off greenhouse warming much longer. “Our prediction is that if past is prologue, the solar component (!) will turn around and lead to rapid warming in the next 5 years,”.

http://eesc.columbia.edu/courses/v1003/readings/Kerr.Science.2009.pdf

Jimbo
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 29, 2014 6:42 am

Gavin says skillful. He doesn’t seem to have any WORRIES NOW. This is what happens when you dig a hole in 2007.

Real Climate – December 2007
Daniel Klein asks at #57:
“OK, simply to clarify what I’ve heard from you.
(1) If 1998 is not exceeded in all global temperature indices by 2013, you’ll be worried about state of understanding
(2) In general, any year’s global temperature that is “on trend” should be exceeded within 5 years (when size of trend exceeds “weather noise”)
(3) Any ten-year period or more with no increasing trend in global average temperature is reason for worry about state of understandings
I am curious as to whether there are other simple variables that can be looked at unambiguously in terms of their behaviour over coming years that might allow for such explicit quantitative tests of understanding?”
————
[Response: 1) yes, 2) probably, I’d need to do some checking, 3) No. There is no iron rule of climate that says that any ten year period must have a positive trend. The expectation of any particular time period depends on the forcings that are going on. If there is a big volcanic event, then the expectation is that there will be a cooling, if GHGs are increasing, then we expect a warming etc. The point of any comparison is to compare the modelled expectation with reality – right now, the modelled expectation is for trends in the range of 0.2 to 0.3 deg/decade and so that’s the target. In any other period it depends on what the forcings are. – gavin]
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/12/a-barrier-to-understanding/

pwl
Reply to  Tom Trevor
August 28, 2014 10:40 pm

“Two important characteristics of maps [or models] should be noticed. A map [or model] is not the territory it represents, but, if correct, it has a similar structure to the territory, which accounts for its usefulness.” – Alfred Korzybski
Unfortunately the climate scientists are not good at building models or maps.
It is an impossible and futile task after all, to model the climate that is. Why?
Due to the climate systems being systems that generate INTERNAL randomness it will NEVER be possible to predict climate systems.
The nature of all systems that generate internal randomness is that the only way to see what happens next is to observe them in real time.
This discovery was made by Stephen Wolfram in his ground breaking book, A New Kind Of Science; see Chapter 2 for the mathematical (and computer science) proof.
All climate models will always fail due to this newly discovered INTERNAL randomness.
Then there is the external randomness that comes from Chaos Theory.
That’s two kinds of randomness, internal randomness and chaos randomness, that mean that it is not possible to come up with an accurate prediction of the Earth’s climate.
The only way to know what the climate of the Earth is going to do is to observe and measure it as it actually happens in real time.
As a result climate models will always fail due to first principles of chemistry, physics, computer science, mathematics, and due to the fundamental laws of Nature.

Latitude
August 28, 2014 7:45 am

brought to you by the same people that didn’t see this one coming…….

tom s
August 28, 2014 7:50 am

Oh, ‘CARBON EMISSIONS’? Dark sooty and dirty CARBON EMISSIONS? Or does the good DOCTORATE mean CARBON DIOXIDE EMISSIONS? You know, the virtually odorless, colorless plant loving gas essential for life on earth? I detest these people.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  tom s
August 28, 2014 8:27 am

“Carbon” is the relevant term, because it is the carbon atoms that cycle around in the Earth’s carbon system, as CO2, maybe later CH4,or then H2CO3 or CaCO3 after weathering. That’s why scientists refer to “carbon.” Of course, in emissions and in the atmosphere it’s mostly CO2, which can easily be calculated given the carbon emissions or amounts.

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 8:32 am

I agree that it was clear that Carbon meant CO2. Well done for keeping a level tone.
But I do question how CO2 can be easily calculated given “the carbon emissions or amounts”?
How do we know the sequestration into reservoirs (oceans, trees, soils) and on the other hand the other natural emissions as well?
This may be off topic.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 9:02 am

All I meant is that carbon emissions can be converted into CO2 emissions by the ratio of their molecular weights, 44/12.
You’re right, determining where the carbon goes is still very difficult, and science does not haver a good handle on it yet. Estimates exist, of course, but it’s a very difficult problem with a lot of uncertainty. And likely will be for the foreseeable future.

August 28, 2014 7:59 am

M Courtney August 28, 2014 at 7:43 am
“…But Environmental studies is surely nearer to biology and the social sciences, no?”
——————-
Environmental studies would seem to be nearer Marketing or Creative Writing.

Reply to  John The Cube
August 28, 2014 8:04 am

Very droll.
But I was actually (for once) not being cynical when I wrote that.
My thought was that the motivation and tastes of the applicants would be similar.
In practise – you are right though.

hunter
August 28, 2014 8:00 am

This seems to be following the arc of other prophetic pop social manias. The early days of unchallenged credibility, lofty rhetoric, prophecies of doom right around the corner. Then time goes around the corner and the prophecies fail and the excuses begin. This article is a good example of the excuse making phase.

Reply to  hunter
August 28, 2014 8:17 am

Also known as the bargaining phase in the stages of grief, soon to be followed by depression.

hunter
Reply to  NikFromNYC
August 28, 2014 9:20 am

lol. Go over to ClimateChange Nation (which is run, allegedly, by ‘climate scientists’ but is a 501c3- nice money machine iow) and see the koolaid dealers dispensing their wisdom.

Justthinkin
August 28, 2014 8:07 am

Good grief.Are they giving Phds out on the internet now? What needs to be done is to shut down ALL non-scientific courses,except the true sciences(i.e. medicine,engineering,physics,chemistry,etc )

Reply to  Justthinkin
August 28, 2014 8:09 am

Now that’s a bit philistine.
We need better universities not narrower universities.
Let’s keep (most) of the same subjects and just let fewer people study there.

Typhoon
August 28, 2014 8:08 am

And children in England will have never seen snow . . .

August 28, 2014 8:10 am

They know they are liars.

Reply to  fobdangerclose
August 28, 2014 8:21 am

Indeed for they alone, outside of the skeptical community are most privy to evidence of hockey stick team fraud. Not mistakes, but brazen and outlandish fraud. Acceptance of graphs of virtual sea level being labeled “sea level.” In a real sense they are self-interested investors in Enron writ large as the crony capitalist progressive party in politics.

August 28, 2014 8:10 am

I wonder what he thinks happened during the Andean-Saharan ice age 460 to 430 million years ago wiht CO2 levels > than 10 times present levels?

SonicsGuy
Reply to  John Leggett
August 28, 2014 9:16 am

The Sun’s irradiance increases by 1% about every 110 million years. So 4.5 Myrs ago it was about 4% less. At the surface, that’s 14 W/m2, assuming the same planetary albedo (which is unlikely, since the continents were in different places and of different sizes).
Compare that to GHG forcing today: only 2.9 W/m2, according to NOAA, with aerosols at about -1 W/m2.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/

August 28, 2014 8:10 am

They know they are getting away with it.

August 28, 2014 8:11 am

They get paid well for the lies and they only ask,, “Whats no to like?”

Steve Oregon
August 28, 2014 8:18 am

How foolish Sonicsguy is to be denying the hiatus Maher even admits.
Maher is also essentially saying that even if the hiatus or cooling continues for another 16 years to 2030,
representing a 33 YEAR length of time that exceeds the so-called AGW warming of late 70s to late 90s,
he somehow confident that pauses are likely to be a thing of the past?
How obtuse is that?
Imagine the year 2020, with still no warming and how grand mal climate science will be if the Mahers and Manns are still coming up with tall tales.
Will Maher revise his 2030 idiocy?
What difference does it make?
These Children of the Corn climate scientists will never stop the cult mission they are on.

Reply to  Steve Oregon
August 28, 2014 8:26 am

The main Greenland ice core destroys his argument:
http://i61.tinypic.com/2cxbxw4.jpg
Given how Arctic temperature dominates debate, this temperature proxy going back thousands of years that shows a warmer past means their alarmist claims fails even the laugh test. They all know this by now too, for by what mechanism could they by now still not know it?

SonicsGuy
Reply to  NikFromNYC
August 28, 2014 9:06 am

How does this lessen concern about AGW in any way? I don’t see that it does, just because it’s been warming in the past. Everyone knows that. The relevant question is, can we (and the other species) adapt to the changes taking place?

hunter
Reply to  NikFromNYC
August 28, 2014 9:23 am

sonicsguy,
Somewhere in your mind was a critical thinking skill at one time. Find it and redeploy it. Think: Since the predictions by the climate hypesters about today are failing , and they are fibbing about the [past]- it was much warmer with no global catastrophe- then perhaps your blind acceptance of their apocalyptic claptrap is not something they deserve. Even Richard Betts admits the GCMs are worthless for policy making. You are being played for a fool. Why tolerate it?

SonicsGuy
Reply to  NikFromNYC
August 28, 2014 9:28 am

hunter: Define “fail” as it relates to a model.
It doesn’t matter if the climate was warmer in the past — it matters if we and other species can adapt to the changes talking place. Serious extinctions have occurred in episodes of past climate change, and ours is changing significally faster than those.
“then perhaps your blind acceptance of their apocalyptic claptrap.”
Who said I see a coming apocalypse? I certainly didn’t.

deebodk
Reply to  NikFromNYC
August 28, 2014 10:40 am

“and ours is changing significally faster than those”
Where are you getting this information from? You keep claiming that you’re presenting the “science” as best as you understand it, but you’ve made it rather clear that your understanding is sorely lacking. Individuals are trying to help you on here but you’re making it rather difficult with your combative stance and constant gainsay. You also keep asking people to prove your numbers wrong. That’s not how it works. The onus is on you to prove that they are right.

Mary Brown
Reply to  NikFromNYC
August 28, 2014 7:28 pm

“The relevant question is, can we (and the other species) adapt to the changes taking place?”
……………………………………………………………………………………………
If humans never walked the earth, temps would be perhaps 0.5 deg C cooler and sea level 2″ lower.
Can we adapt to those kind of changes in 60 years ? Of course. Simple. Easy.
In fact, we had those same kind of changes from 1908-1941 when fossil fuels were not a factor. Other than a couple of world wars, the earth fare fine.
We’ve had far worse temp changes in urban areas from UHI. Yet the humans thrive and so do the urban flora and fauna
The natural systems are far more robust than given credit. Where do we get the idea that everything is so fragile? I think the opposite is true. Nature evolved to this point by shaking out the weak and those that can’t adapt. Most that have made it this far are remarkably resilient.

Reply to  Steve Oregon
August 28, 2014 8:26 am

In fairness to Sonicsguy he has consistently put his case that the world’s temperature hasn’t frozen still.
He just misses that the pause is relative to the expected warming in the models.
Everyone (even the IPCC) acknowledges that the pause is real, relative to the expected warming in the models.
But Sonicsguy is talking about something else.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  M Courtney
August 28, 2014 9:12 am

What is the “expected warming” in the models?
How did the models know what to assume for ENSOs and volcanoes and solar irradiance changes?

Reply to  M Courtney
August 28, 2014 11:43 am

M Courtney
Your attempt to provide “fairness to Sonicsguy” is an error because this is the second WUWT thread that he/she/they/it has trolled.
As Mark Bofill observed upthread, this troll ONLY attempts disruption, and the troll’s response to your attempt at “fairness” demonstrates that.
If this thread is to be saved – not lost as the other has been – then don’t feed the troll.
Richard

Mark Bofill
Reply to  M Courtney
August 28, 2014 11:52 am

Richard,
Regarding not feeding the troll, you are correct as usual. I’ll try to behave. :> The business about the GCM’s not being falsifiable somewhere on this thread was just too much for me, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.
Regards sir.

stan stendera
Reply to  M Courtney
August 28, 2014 6:21 pm

I am beside myself with joy that Richard Courtney agrees with Stan’s Law: Don’t feed the trolls. When I wrote that I was not aware that this particular troll had disrupted another thread. I seem to recall that unthread the moderators warned him/her/it for posting from a non valid E-mail.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  Steve Oregon
August 28, 2014 9:04 am

Then tell me which of my numbers are wrong. Please.

Werner Brozek
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 9:31 am

The issue is not that your numbers are wrong. 15 years ago just happens to be in the middle of a steep La Nina. If we choose WTI which combines 4 data sets, then the time for no warming is actually since January 2001 or 13 years and 7 months.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 9:39 am

Werner, you are cherry picking — choosing a starting date to give the result you want, whether it’s climatologically relevant or not. It’s classic cherry picking.
And you never address questions of statistical significance. Ever.

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 10:24 am

You just made the clearly false claim: “Serious extinctions have occurred in episodes of past climate change, and ours is changing significally faster than those.”
Both the proven falsity of the latest Mann promoted Marcott 2013 hockey stick and the above Greenland ice core temperature record make a mockery of your naked lie about rate of change, as if fraud created real facts just because peer review has been corrupted by activists. There is no blade in any of the input data of the latest promotion by the well known hockey stick team at the center of climate alarm. You know this to be so! I could barely buy a better clown than you to disgrace climate alarm. What a gift to skepticism it is to have the scammy face of it so clearly exposed as you offer here.
-=NikFromNYC=-, Ph.D. in carbon chemistry (Columbia/Harvard)

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 10:42 am

“Continental-scale temperature variability during the past two millennia,” PAGES 2k Consortium, Nature Geosciences, April 21, 2013
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n5/abs/ngeo1797.html

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 10:44 am

Tingley, Martin P. and Peter Huybers. A Bayesian Algorithm for Reconstructing Climate Anomalies in Space and Time. Part 1: Development and applications to paleoclimate reconstruction problems. Journal of Climate, 2010

sinewave
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 11:42 am

Please tell me what the point of your numbers is. Are you saying there’s really no pause so we should be alarmed about increasing CO2 in the atmosphere or are you just saying “this is the data I see, sorry to spoil your pause opinion”?

Werner Brozek
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 11:55 am

I would love to be able to pick a time where the slope is flat for 15 years on all 4 data sets, but that cannot be done. Starting with the most recent month, we can only go back to January 2001 to when the slope is negative.
As for your other point, I will repeat my reply above. (With the new reply feature, I know it is easy to miss a new reply.)
I “cover” error bars in my section 2. The latest for 95% significance is: UAH: March 1996; RSS: December 1992; Hadcrut4: November 1996; Hadsst3: August 1994; and GISS: October 1997. So the shortest time, GISS, is almost 17 years of no statistically significant warming.

tadchem
August 28, 2014 8:20 am

““When it does cool, it will not be enough to overcome the warming.”
(rolling on the floor laughing my atmosphere off)

August 28, 2014 8:24 am

This article is just more pie in the sky. The article males all assumptions in addition to not looking at the data objectively which pretty much tells us AGW theory is wrong and is not currently happening nor will it in the future.
The excuses for the current pause they mention have no merit from anthropogenically released aerosols to volcanic activity. If one looks at the data showing volcanic aerosol optical thickness (I will try to send a chart later) one will see since the turn of this century it has been at very minimum levels in contrast to what they are suggesting.
In addition the basic premises AGW theory is based on have not happened which called for a more zonal atmospheric circulation and a lower tropospheric hot spot near the equator and less emissions of OLR out to space. Not to forget the pause in the global temperature rise which they did NOT call for.
In the meantime the stage is set for global cooling due to very weak solar conditions with the associated primary and secondary effects, the earth’s weakening magnetic field which will enhance solar effects, and Milankovitch Cycles which favor cooling now and for many years to come.

August 28, 2014 8:36 am

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/strataer/
Here is the data which shows their claims are false.

TRM
August 28, 2014 8:43 am

“even a big volcano like Krakatau is very unlikely to cause a hiatus”, Ms Maher said. ….
Hubris, just total hubris that one is. Talk about tempting fate! Keep in mind that Krak was baby bro, with big bro being Tambora and big daddy being Toba. Pray that big daddy stays asleep.
Do they really think mankind’s contribution to a trace gas can overcome what nature can throw at us? Have they no sense of geological history at all?

Bruce Cobb
Reply to  TRM
August 28, 2014 9:08 am

History schmistory! They’ve got models!

SonicsGuy
Reply to  TRM
August 28, 2014 9:08 am

“Do they really think mankind’s contribution to a trace gas can overcome what nature can throw at us?”
Not ANYTHING — like a supervolcanic eruption or a meteor or comet strike — but for large volcanoes, the answer is yes. Pinatubo only cooled the surface for about 2 years. Tambora perhaps a couple more. But those effects are temporary, whereas CO2-warming will take place essentially forever.

TRM
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 10:40 am

I’m willing to make 2 predictions:
1) CO2 will continue to increase because China and other countries don’t care about real pollutants much less CO2.
2) Temperatures will fall for the next 2 decades with or without volcanoes.
Why? Well there are scientists who have correctly forecast climate. You may want to look into the work of Dr Libby and Dr Easterbrook. Their models have been able to predict the current stop in warming. Their models have proven accurate for 30+ years in Dr Libby’s case and 12+ in Dr Easterbrook’s. Neither has CO2 as the main control and rely on natural cycles in climate. So far they are correct and the IPCC models wrong.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 10:52 am

I’m not impressed by Easterbrook. He has made predictions that are already wrong. His entire department wrote a public statement that they disagreed with him.

Bill H
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 6:52 pm

“But those effects are temporary, whereas CO2-warming will take place essentially forever.”
Now you have my undivided attention. What a crock of B.S. The earth has had times of CO2 levels above 7,000ppm yet there has been NO RUN AWAY WARMING! This is where the alarmist crowd sends me over the edge. The Earths temp has fluctuated between 22 Deg C and 12 deg C average temp for eons. It has NEVER run away.
The rate of rise today is less than the historical rise.
I am curious how you are alive today with such dire levels of CO2 previously..? If we believed the rhetoric being spewed by alarmists, we should all be dead already or never have been alive.
Bill

David L.
August 28, 2014 8:46 am

Of course the so-called pause will end, to be followed by a downward trend as is typical of any complex cyclical behavior.

GuarionexSandoval
August 28, 2014 8:52 am

Oh, Nicola, as a Ph.D. candidate, you should be paying more attention to the literature about the history of CO2 concentrations throughout earth history and less attention to breathless predictions based on a minute change over a very brief period of time. Even a doubling of the current amount of CO2 would put us at a level that is less than 1/3 the average of 150 million years ago, but throughout that time, especially recently over the past 3 million years there have been dramatic 100,000 year “pauses” in warming. And the trend of the past five “pauses” and the past five warm periods in between has been to colder cold periods and cooler warm periods. Even in the current 10,000+ warm period, the trend in temperature has been downward for the past 7,000 years with the cool periods getting colder and the warm periods getting cooler.
Whatever it is you’re doing to get your Ph.D., it isn’t science.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  GuarionexSandoval
August 28, 2014 9:30 am

What matters isn’t the absolute temperature, but our (and other species) ability to adapt to those changes (which are much faster than earlier periods of natural change).

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 10:51 am

Several economists have pointed out that taxing the economy to provide welfare to developing nations now will retard the economy enough to hinder exactly the hard science R@D that might allow adaptation and both geoengineering and low emissions energy advances. That future generations will be much richer in absolute terms and thus better able to pay to solve problems without causing huge hits to the economy. You are, after all, promoting artificially high energy prices, a directly damaging economic policy. Don’t think normal people don’t fully understand the deceptiveness of claims that high energy prices won’t hurt the poor and struggling people of the world. Only an emergency can thus justify it, and sorry, but it didn’t warm as predicted so there is no more excuse to not simply downgrade climate sensitivity in the models, eh? The big lie is that the measly greenhouse effect itself, the basic physics of it, that provides alarming predictions. No bigger lie was ever told. The destruction of integrity in scientific peer review alone represents a major threat to progress. Turning top journals into Stalinist lie factories is simply evil. And the Steig red Antarctica cover of Nature along with the media sensation of the bladeless Marcott 2013 hockey stick in Science means our culture has quite simply gone temporarily insane, for normal competent peer review is now proven to be lacking in our very top scientific journals, defended by nearly all of our scientific academies. Well that’s not historically sustainable, since new generations are now all exposed to an open Internet where false facts can and are successfully debunked. What’s so amazing is how terribly many people willfully ignore whistleblowing about false claims, yourself included. You have convinced nobody here today with your false facts, such as activist produced and pal reviewed Cowtan & Way, especially since it was Way himself who was revealed in secret forum statements to admit that Mann’s work was both bogus and also known to be bogus yet still promoted as being vindicated:
“MBH98 was not an example of someone using a technique with flaws and then as he learned better techniques he moved on… He fought like a dog to discredit and argue with those on the other side that his method was not flawed. And in the end he never admitted that the entire method was a mistake. Saying “I was wrong but when done right it gives close to the same answer” is no excuse. He never even said that but I’m just making a point. What happened was they used a brand new statistical technique that they made up and that there was no rationalization in the literature for using it. They got results which were against the traditional scientific communities view on the matters and instead of re-evaluating and checking whether the traditional statistics were valid (which they weren’t), they went on and produced another one a year later. They then let this HS be used in every way possible (including during the Kyoto protocol lead-up that resulted in canadian parliament signing the deal with many people ascribing their final belief in climate change being assured by the HS) despite knowing the stats behind it weren’t rock solid. Of course someone was going to come along and slam it. In the defense of the HS method they published things on RC like what I showed above where they clearly misrepresented the views of the foremost expert on PCA in atmospheric sciences who basically says that Mann’s stats were dubious.” – Robert Way

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 10:57 am

“That future generations will be much richer in absolute terms and thus better able to pay to solve problems without causing huge hits to the economy.”
The present is already much richer than the past (in the US, real per capita GDP is 3.0 times larger than it was in 1960). The US is easily rich enough to now generate its energy cleanly, and subsidize the poor who cannot afford that. The rest of the US can certainly afford it.
I expect people in 2068 will say the same thing: “Future generations will be much richer in absolute terms and thus better able to pay to solve problems without causing huge hits to the economy.” Why wouldn’t they?

LogosWrench
August 28, 2014 9:02 am

Good grief. I guess the saying is true. Some things are so stupid you need a PhD to believe them.

August 28, 2014 9:12 am

No matter what reality does, they can’t leave their models. At what point do they finally recognize reality? Is it going to take full-on glaciation?
Somehow, I don’t think even that will do it.

ShrNfr
Reply to  TonyG
August 28, 2014 9:21 am

Sadly, given the bleating over at The Economist over the latest “missing heat has been found” article in Science, I tend to agree with you.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  TonyG
August 28, 2014 9:31 am

How would you project future changes, if not with a model?
PS: Science is nothing *but* models…

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 9:35 am

For one thing, I would throw out a model that made incorrect forecasts. The model IS NOT reality.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 9:37 am

Define “incorrect.”

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 9:47 am

“The model IS NOT reality.”
Everyone — absolutely everyone — knows this. So what?

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 9:55 am

Sure doesn’t seem that way.
If a model forecasts X and you get Y, you don’t get to keep saying that X is correct.
Back to my original question: At what point to you give up on the models? How much must reality diverge from the forecasts to accept that the models don’t work? If there are glaciers covering Ohio while CO2 is > 400ppm, would you then be willing to admit that the models were wrong?

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 10:02 am

“If a model forecasts X and you get Y, you don’t get to keep saying that X is correct.”
But that’s not what models do. They *project* X given assumptions A, and get Z.
Unless A is accurate, Z cannot be, except by chance.

Reg Nelson
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 10:40 am

Projections are not science, predictions are.
How do you predict future changes? Gain an understanding of the science and describe it mathematically in a way that is verifiable, testable and repeatable.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 11:00 am

Reg Nelson wrote:
“Projections are not science, predictions are.”
Climate models can’t make predictions, because no one knows the future of ENSO, volcanoes, solar irradiance, PDOs and AMOs, the exact emissions pathway the world will take. Projections are the best that can be done.
[Please use a verifiable email address. Yours is bad. ~ mod.]

The Ghost Of Big Jim Cooley
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 11:04 am

SonicsGuy, as TonyG says, when would you start (personally) thinking the models are no good?

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 11:08 am

Benzene is a hexagon. That’s not based on a model any more. Not at all. You can touch it now, with an atomic force microscope probe, even feel it with a haptic feedback stylus. No, your bold statement is false. Models yield to hard physical reality in all but the very limits of instrumentation such as the elusiveness of string theory. Science is no more than finding facts and patterns, no more than one day using Scotch tape to discover single layer graphite, no models being used at all, no assumptions being needed any more than you need a model to view blood cells under a microscope. You seem to be either a foolish cult member or a meter maid who has learned how to make meters run too fast, to your great bonus earning advantage.

deebodk
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 11:40 am

SonicsGuy wrote:
“Climate models can’t make predictions, because no one knows the future of ENSO, volcanoes, solar irradiance, PDOs and AMOs, the exact emissions pathway the world will take. Projections are the best that can be done.”
If you can’t subject the models or their outputs to the scientific method then they are not science. They’re voodoo alchemical garbage. Thanks for confirming that science has nothing to do with it.

sinewave
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 11:50 am

The problem is that public policy has been made all over the world based on models that now look biased toward warming. The argument seems to go like this: It’s warmer now than in the past and these models say it is going to warm out of control so we have to do something now to address the problem.

ShrNfr
August 28, 2014 9:18 am

The continued bleating of the cargo cult is getting tiresome: We have predicted that planes would land if we built airfields and made “earphones” out of coconuts. They haven’t but that is just because they are in a holding pattern and stacking up air traffic.
Yes, airfields and control towers were correlated with aircraft landing and air dropping “goodies”. But creating them did not bring them back, and they were not stacked up awaiting clearance to land.
“Truth is what works.” – The models simply don’t. Not to say we should not expand our knowledge of why they don’t, but we should begin to accept the fact that their predictions are just plain wrong at the moment and have no predictive ability.

August 28, 2014 9:23 am

My house is a closed system, I have good insulation a sophisticated climate control system, that being said, if I walk from room to room or floor to floor there are temperature changes of 1-2 C, sometimes 4-5 from upstairs to the basement. This range is right now, not in a decade or a century but instantly in a closed controlled system. The fact that the “global” temperature is so stable is a miracle, especially when it is a tiny sphere in space with temps that are close to 0K, when mapped on a Kelvin scale the temperature record is flat, less than 1% per millenium.

rabbit
August 28, 2014 9:24 am

Given that climatologists are not sure why the current hiatus is occurring (numerous theories are being thrown about) it seems reckless to claim it won’t happen again. Certitude in the face of ignorance is no virtue.

John C
August 28, 2014 9:30 am

After following the warmists arm waving and curling up in a corner hiding from heat that isn’t here for as long as Wattsupwiththat has been around, I am amazed at the efforts the AGW crowd exert. Critical thinking seems totally lacking. When we came out of the last ice age some 12,500 years ago, the most likely reason was solar events as many papers and studies are slowly finding. When it’s humid the temperature holds on retaining heat built up during the daylight hours. Regardless of CO2, when the night comes, if humidity is low, temperature drops rapidly. This small fact seems to evade the models. Sometimes it just seems there are too many people without a clue.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  John C
August 28, 2014 9:34 am

“This small fact seems to evade the models.”
Weather models don’t accurately predict nighttime tempertures? I think they do a pretty good job of it.
BTW, why doesn’t the surface cool rapidly, with ~ 12 hours of no solar radiation?

jayhd
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 10:27 am

Sonics – Have you been in the desert lately? Believe me, it cools rapidly when the sun goes down. For example, today’s forecast for Barstow, California is a high of 103 F during the day and a low of 72 F tonight. As pointed out by John C, humidity plays a large part of heat retention.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 10:39 am

Why doesn’t it cool much further? With no sunlight, the air would seem to be getting little-to-no solar energy for many hours. It should quickly drop below freezing…

John C
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 10:39 am

Perfect example of the lack of critical thinking. Sonicguy doesn’t get how a solid might retain heat better than gas….but jayhd gets it. I’m in the desert so it’s obvious to me as well especially during the southwest monsoon season. There isn’t enough CO2 at almost any level to keep dry air warm after the sun goes down. But water content does a marvelous job. Rocks and buildings help, but CO2 alone does little.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 11:02 am

“There isn’t enough CO2 at almost any level to keep dry air warm after the sun goes down.”
Do you know that the surface gets about twice as much energy from the atmosphere as it does from the Sun?
[Please use a verifiable email address. Yours is bad. ~ mod.]

alacran
August 28, 2014 9:31 am

Models can’t explain the pause(s) in warming,- but their consequences? Ooops Ms Maher, go, tell it to the mammoths!

SonicsGuy
Reply to  alacran
August 28, 2014 9:36 am

Models that, by chance, align with recent ENSOs do project pauses (Risbey et al, Nature Clim Chg 2014)
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2310.html

mouruanh
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 10:22 am

How would you know, you’ve only read the abstract? But ‘we know’ it’s not ENSO or natural variability in the Pacific as per Chen & Tung et al.
“The finding is a surprise, since the current theories had pointed to the Pacific Ocean as the culprit for hiding heat,” Tung said. “But the data are quite convincing and they show otherwise.”
They can’t be all right at the same time, because each study is effectively quantifying the mismatch between models and observations.
Your arguments are all over the place, could you please stick with one narrative so it is at least possible to have a meaningful discussion.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 10:30 am

“How would you know, you’ve only read the abstract? But ‘we know’ it’s not ENSO or natural variability in the Pacific as per Chen & Tung et al.”
I’ve read the paper. ENSOs have global consequences, and they’re not inconsistent with Chen & Tung’s conclusion. That’s not to say ENSOs *have* caused more heat in the N Atlantic depths. I don’t think anyone yet knows why Chen & Tung is happening, just that it seems to be happening based on their results.
Science is difficult. You usually can’t get immediate answers, and in some cases it’s taken decades to sort out. That’s its nature.

EternalOptimist
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 10:44 am

If ‘Science is difficult. You usually can’t get immediate answers, and in some cases it’s taken decades to sort out.’ how would you go about falsifying the models?
What would you regard as a good enough set of evidence or events to convince you they were totally useless ?

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 11:16 am

“How would you go about falsifying the models?”
The models cannot be “falsified,” and never will be. There will only modifications to the existing way they portray the physics (and changes in GHG radiative forcing are very unlikely to change; as they are probably the *best* know parts of the problem).
The climate models of 2061 will be in the same relation to today’s as today’s are to Manabe’s 1967 model — faster computers, incorporation of more physics, solving the PDEs on smaller grids. They will give about the same projections as they do today, once you factor in the unknown ENSOs, volcanoes, and solar changes, but with a little more precision.
Future models will include all the GHGs that they include today. The absorption spectrum of CO2 will be the same, as will the quantum laws of radiation. Faster computers mean the Schwarzschild equations can be solved with more precision, but the problems of climate models (clouds, deep ocean dynamics, changes in ocean cycles and circulation) are not related to the way they calculate GHG forcings.
CO2 will always be a heat-trapping gas. That’s simple physics. Above pre-Industrial levels it is now understood to be pollution, and that will never change.
[Third warning: per site policy, you must use a verifiable email address. ~mod.]

Mark Bofill
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 11:22 am

The models cannot be “falsified,” and never will be.

priceless.
I guess you hadn’t heard. For a theory to be considered scientific instead of, say, religious or philosophical theories, did you know that it has to yield testable predictions?
If climate models cannot be falsified, regardless of the observations, that’d mean the climate models have nothing to do with science, right?

mouruanh
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 12:58 pm

I’ve read the paper. ENSOs have global consequences, and they’re not inconsistent with Chen & Tung’s conclusion.
That would be the first factual statement (the ENSO part) where probably most here will agree with you. But if you did in fact read the paper, you should know that the claim these tests show that climate models have provided good estimates of 15-year trends, including for recent periods and for Pacific spatial trend patterns. is unsupported by their own results.
You can find two excellent discussions about the study right here at this blog. Contrary to their claims, the climate models they’ve used were not able to simulate the observed Pacific spatial trend patterns and did not provide good estimates of 15-year trends.
But you’ve missed the point again. Each study that claims to have found the cause for the discrepancy between models and observation, had to provide a quantification for the mismatch in order to get through peer-review.
Anything else would have been pointless anyways. Logic alone dictates they can’t be all right at the same time.
Science is difficult.
The science is settled. Models cannot simulate the observed climate system.

Ben Wilson
August 28, 2014 9:41 am

I’m surprised that everyone is missing the real thrust of the paper. . . .
“We need to understand that the cost of solving the problem is so much less than the cost of dealing with it down the track; that cost is going to be huge for future generations. Not dealing with it is selfish, short-sighted, narrow minded and obscene. It represents such a level of injustice as those that are going to be impacted are not playing a role in the decisions that are being made now.”
In other words. . . .”Listen, you selfish, shortsighted, narrow-minded and obscene Philistines. . . . .give us more money and power or the children are going to suffer!!!”

SonicsGuy
Reply to  Ben Wilson
August 28, 2014 9:50 am

The money is for dealing with the issue…. If all climate scientists wanted was more grant money, they would be stressing how *uncertain* they are about climate change. Yet every IPCC AR has claimed *less* uncertainty in its conclusions. How can that be?

Ben Wilson
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 10:10 am

Really? There are “climate scientists” that are saying “Since the science is settled, there’s no reason to spend any more money on climate research. . . . ???
I don’t know how many of them still “practice”, but at least a few decades ago there were a number of people in the Philippines who billed themselves as “psychic surgeons”. . . . and claimed supernatural ability to perform surgery on people without the terrible bother of either making or suturing an incision. In truth, they were neither psychics nor surgeons, but were merely con artists practicing some rather mediocre slight of hand solely for the purpose of deceiving desperate and gullible people.
I would not be terribly surprised is some of the former “psychic surgeons” have now become “psychic scientists”, at least in the climate field, since the climate models seem to be ever bit as validated as psychic surgery ever was. . . . .

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 10:25 am

“There are “climate scientists” that are saying “Since the science is settled.”
SOME of the science is settled (that warming is manmade, and more is bound to come), but many details are still uncertain. If you read an IPCC AR, they are very clear about this. There are still important questions about aerosols, clouds, deep ocean heating, and the consequences of a rapidly melting Arctic. CO2’s climate sensitivity is only known to about +/- 50%. These are important to answer, and it takes money to do research. But we know enough now to understand we need rapid and significant cuts in CO2 emissions.

Mary Brown
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 11:11 am

“But we know enough now to understand we need rapid and significant cuts in CO2 emissions.”
No we don’t. Humans have made the world perhaps half a deg warmer in my long lifetime. If everyone in the whole USA completely quit using fossil fuels, then the temperature might be lowered .08 deg C by 2050.
The cost benefit ratio is ridiculously poor. Fossil fuels have given rise to a century of wealth, health, discovery and abundance. Sure, they create problems. But I prefer to keep them and learn to adapt to another tenth of a degree next decade.

SonicsGuy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 11:20 am

“No we don’t. Humans have made the world perhaps half a deg warmer in my long lifetime.”
And that’s a geologically huge rate of warming.
“If everyone in the whole USA completely quit using fossil fuels, then the temperature might be lowered .08 deg C by 2050.”
I don’t know about that number, but yes, the problem is huge and requires international attention.
“The cost benefit ratio is ridiculously poor.”
Are you thinking only of yourself? Most scientists economists who have looked seriously at the problem disagree — they see the possibility of large costs under AGW, that last essentially forever, especially in the risk of a long-tail.

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 11:24 am

Oh silly! When skeptics point out uncertainty they are loudly labeled “merchants of doubt,” which you are only too well aware of, and when academics do so they are attacked and even fired due to intense campaigns by the hockey stick team mafia.
Here’s what you are doing wrong that comes off as trolling: using cult member support group defense mechanisms that place mere peer review above and beyond logic and reason based scientific criticism of results, but putting this sort of intellectual bubble content into the midst of seasoned skepticism. You cannot use peer review alone to support arguments, not here you can’t, not where members are fully aware that peer review is garbage in climate “science” where false results are not retracted as they are in normal fields like genetics where fraud is also common. You’re no different from some doctor who still promotes the old carbohydrate bomb Food Pyramid based on similarly corrupted “science” with its own single bullet theory of heart disease that carried on for decades after it was disproven. Well now we have the Internet, and so reason is defeating you scammers.

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 12:06 pm

SonicsGuy
It is hard to know which is the most stupid of your comments intended to troll this thread from its subject, but this has to be a contender

“No we don’t. Humans have made the world perhaps half a deg warmer in my long lifetime.”

And that’s a geologically huge rate of warming.

Say what!?
0.5°C rise in global temperature in 50 years is NOT “a geologically huge rate of warming”: it is trivially small.
Global temperature rises by 3.8°C in six months each year (and falls by the same amount in the other six months).
Richard

Edward Richardson
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 12:22 pm

richardscourtney
August 28, 2014 at 12:06 pm
“Global temperature rises by 3.8°C in six months each year (and falls by the same amount in the other six months”
Citation?

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 12:33 pm

Edward Richardson
From the previous thread I know you act as the trolling wingman for Sonicsguy.
And from that thread you know that I have learned to regard you with such contempt that I have refused – and refuse – to engage with you.
In this case if you know so little of how the global climate system varies with the seasons that you need a citation then clear off until you know enough to comment.
Richard

Randy
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 12:34 pm

Bias obviously. Less uncertainty with over 30 DIFFERENT attempts at explanations to save the theory co2 is a major climate driver?? More certain as reality and the models diverge ever further? How can that be?
It seems many let the precautionary principle push them into being fanatics during a period we simply did not have enough data to make any solid claims. Except as we started getting the needed data and of course time passed and things didnt materialize, instead of following the data they became more steadfast in trying to save their precious.
I used to be very worried where this would lead, with so many political ramifications hanging in the balance, and other very real enviro issues half ignored in favor of fighting c02. Lately though reading the published work has just been hilarious. The intellectual dishonesty is alarming and obvious. No doubt this phenomena will be studied for decades.

Edward Richardson
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 12:38 pm

Mr Courtney,

Could you please provide me with a citation for your statement,
“Global temperature rises by 3.8°C in six months each year (and falls by the same amount in the other six months”

I’m interested in learning which mechanism causes this.

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 12:44 pm

Edward Richardson, thaks for giving me a chance to put one over my father.
You see, I thought it was about 2.5°C. And this link (juvenile but seemingly educational) says 2.3°C – which means I’m about right..
Now, while that is less than 3.8°C it is still substantially more than 0.5°C in half a century.
When you think about it, it is obvious that the North and South heat differently because they have different land and sea distribution. Therefore summer and winters are different in each half of the year.
Quite a fun fact.

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 12:53 pm

Edward Richardson
Search the WUWT archives because I and others have explained the matter repeatedly: Also, there are web sites devoted to the subject. Hint, water and land have different thermal properties and there is less land South of the equator than there is North of it.
Your request for a citation in this thread is similar to your ignorance of reasons for sea level rise in the other thread: stop trolling about things of which you know nothing. I will NOT assist you to troll this thread from its subject: look up the issues for yourself.
And please do not think my providing a hint for you in this thread is a change to my policy of reacting to my disdain for you by refusing to interact with you. This helpfulness is to avoid you and your trolling partner repeating your behaviour on the other thread where you tried to pretend that I am as ignorant of these matters as the pair of you.
Richard

Edward Richardson
Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 12:58 pm

Mr Courtney,

Can you please point out to me the +/- 3.8 degree C swing in these plots of global data for the past 4 years?
..
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:2010/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2010/plot/gistemp/from:2010

I don’t even see a swing of more than one degree.

Reply to  SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 11:57 pm

mouruanh
Yes, your linked graph shows and references Jones et al. providing a seasonal variation of global surface temperature being (as I said) 3.8°C. Your posting it no longer matters, but I am pleased you did not post it earlier.
I was trying to keep the trolls looking for the information instead of disrupting every attempt at discussion in the thread.
We now know the trolls were fakes trying to wind-up our host. So, a ‘holding action’ to constrain their disruption of the thread is no longer needed.
Richard

Resourceguy
Reply to  Ben Wilson
August 28, 2014 10:26 am

Yes, except the children are just stage props, like veterans.

Reply to  Resourceguy
August 28, 2014 11:05 am


SonicsGuy
August 28, 2014 at 10:25 am
SOME of the science is settled (that warming is manmade, and more is bound to come),

No.
While SOME of the science may be settled, the idea that warming IS manmade is not part of that settled science.
Better, perhaps, is that “some of the warming may be manmade”. However, there is nothing settled about the actual amount of the manmade warming or if it is even discernable with modern technology, nor is there certainty that more is bound to come.
If we are going to base our opinion on “settled science”, then currently the best general conclusion would be:
“There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.” (Oregon Petition Project)

SonicsGuy
Reply to  Resourceguy
August 28, 2014 11:21 am

“the idea that warming IS manmade is not part of that settled science.”
It certainly is, and the IPCC 5AR was (yet again) even more certain of that. Sorry.

Reply to  Resourceguy
August 28, 2014 11:34 am

SonicGuy asserts: “It certainly is, and the IPCC 5AR was (yet again) even more certain of that.”
But that greater certainty is simply laughable since the temperature stayed flat even longer between edition 4 and 5. You know this. We all know this. Logically, thus you know the claim is ridiculous, and citing the IPCC is like citing a study by Enron or a profit projection by Solyandra, or good old Soviet farm science. It comes from the exact same hockey stick team that Robert Way himself debunked as being scammers. Robert Way, who you cite above. Way also admitted in secret that Climategate was a real scandal:
“Similarly, with regard to “hiding the decline” in Climategate, I am left with the impression that the real question is, Why would you believe the tree-ring proxies at earlier times when you KNOW that they didn’t work properly in the 1990s? I guess there is a good answer to that, but no one has ever given it to me.”

Edward Richardson
Reply to  Ben Wilson
August 28, 2014 12:50 pm

Mr Son of Courtney,

While you are at it, you can also use this link
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/uah/from:2010/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2010/plot/gistemp/from:2010

And ask him to point out the +/- 3.8 degree C annual fluctuation.

Reply to  Edward Richardson
August 28, 2014 1:05 pm

Nah, sorry.
Hadcrut is lower troposphere. The difference in heating during the seasons comes from the different thermal capacities of liquid water and solid rock.
Most of the Ocean is in the southern hemisphere. And being liquid tends to be near the surface due to gravity.
I’ll have to take a rain check on that one.

John Finn
Reply to  Edward Richardson
August 28, 2014 5:00 pm

I suspect you are plotting anomalies and not absolute temperatures. The anomalies are values relative to the long term average (usually 30 year) for that month/season/year.
The Courtneys are correct there is an annual variation of a few degrees (can’t remember exactly) in the average global temperature. I’m not sure it’s terribly relevant though.

Edward Richardson
Reply to  Edward Richardson
August 28, 2014 5:08 pm

[Snip. Invalid email address. ~mod.]

Reply to  Ben Wilson
August 28, 2014 12:57 pm

M Courtney
According to Hadley temperature determinations the variation is 3.8°C. But that is not important.
Please do not feed these two especially unpleasant trolls.
Pater

Mark Bofill
Reply to  richardscourtney
August 28, 2014 1:08 pm

Gah I can’t restrain myself. I’m dropping thread for awhile.

Matthew R Marler
August 28, 2014 10:09 am

The likelihood of future hiatus periods is found to be sensitive to the rate of change of anthropogenic forcing. Under high rates of greenhouse gas emissions there is little chance of a hiatus decade occurring beyond 2030, even in the event of a large volcanic eruption.
I thought that was a clear-cut prediction, but the “little chance” qualification means that a hiatus decade after 2030 would not cause them to lose confidence in their prediction.

Jbird
August 28, 2014 10:16 am

Once again, this piece of “research” just goes to show that you don’t have to be the sharpest tool in the shed to become a PhD candidate at some institutions. How did this get by his committee?
It also shows you a little something about how poor standards are for accepting papers at many of the so-called “scientific journals” these days. It’s all quite shameful and disgraceful.

August 28, 2014 10:27 am

Long pauses and snow. yea, I will wait on that.

Tim Obrien
August 28, 2014 10:29 am

…and wishfull thinking will bring rainbows and unicorns..

August 28, 2014 11:01 am

sonicsguy says:
SOME of the science is settled (that warming is manmade, and more is bound to come)…
What a mental delusion. The science is anything but settled, on either assertion.
First, there is no empirical evidence measuring the fraction of a degree of global warming attributable to human CO2 emissions. None. It is not just that there is scant evidence; there is no evidence at all. No such empirical measurements exist. Therefore, to falsely claim that “the warming is manmade” indicates either prevarication, or delusion. Possibly both. Probably both.
Next, to assert that “more is bound to come” implies that the future can be seen. If that were so, the anonymous commenter would be wasting his time here, when there is a stock market to successfully predict.
This is the level that the climate alarmist crowd has devolved to. They have been flat wrong every step of the way. The planet is falsifying all of their predictions. So now they make ridiculous assertions, like “the science is settled”.
Of course, the science is not settled, it is never settled, and the more we learn about the climate the more we see that we do not know nearly enough to predict it. What we do know is this: EVERY alarmist prediction has failed, from declining Polar bear populations, to corals being wiped out from bleaching, to decimated frog populations, to accelerating sea level rise, to vanishing Arctic ice, to the ocean “acidification” scare, to increasing extreme weather events, to runaway global warming itself. All alarmist predictions suffer the same fate: they have been proven to be flat wrong.
When one side in a debate is 100.0% wrong in every prediction they make, why would rational people still listen to their nonsense? Good question. And the proof that rational folks are rejecting the global warming scare is everywhere: read the public’s comments in any average newspaper or magazine. We see a dramatic turnaround from just a few years ago. Now the public is laughing at the alarmist contingent. Climate alarmist are being universally ridiculed. Nine out of ten comments are making fun of the “carbon” scare and everything associated with it. ‘Runaway global warming’ is on the ropes, and it is going down for the count. Why? Because there is no global warming. Global warming stopped, many years ago [but some deluded folks cannot accept that fact, because their egos are too tightly intertwined with their CAGW belief].
Like the lying shepard boy, the alarmist crowd can only cry “Wolf!” for so long, until their scare becomes stale. That is happening. The public is tired of their endless false alarm. And it will only get worse for those purveyors of pseudoscience, whose ‘warming is manmade’ claims are increasingly ridiculous, as the planet continues on without the predicted runaway global warming.

hunter
Reply to  dbstealey
August 28, 2014 12:05 pm

Well stated.
The alarmists even admit that the GCM’s are worthless for policy making but still smirk at the skeptics.

Edward Richardson
August 28, 2014 11:19 am
Reply to  Edward Richardson
August 28, 2014 11:34 am

It’s funny that this graph claims that I’m “here” in 2012. Do any other months, other than September, exist?

lee
Reply to  Edward Richardson
August 28, 2014 10:44 pm

A one year trend is weather.

george e. smith
August 28, 2014 11:22 am

Long pauses already have been things of the past; so what is new about that, other than, NOW is very new, in fact, NOW just got here.

August 28, 2014 11:24 am

SonicsGuy, the models were most certainly meant as predictions. They have failed.
“” They *project* X given assumptions A, and get Z. “”
Yes, and they claimed that assumptions A were the right assumptions to be making. They have failed. But if you’re admitting that modelers still don’t know how to provide proper assumptions, then welcome to the club.

george e. smith
August 28, 2014 11:27 am

Am I the only one getting pop up adds top and bottom and right, all the time; they never stop, from NIKON advertising $6,000 up to as much as $18,000 NIKKOR lenses, complete with price. I don’t have 18,000 pennies to spend on fancy NIKON lenses

Reply to  george e. smith
August 28, 2014 2:26 pm

I am not getting ads, popup or otherwise. But I have placed some sites on my Restricted Sites list.

Katherine
Reply to  george e. smith
August 28, 2014 7:10 pm

I’m not getting pop-ups. And I don’t use any sort of ad blocker.

August 28, 2014 11:31 am

Is SonicsGuy actually trying to claim that no pause exists simply because he can cherry pick a time period which shows warming? I think we should merely let him fight it out with the authors of the paper and other warmists that admit that a pause exists.

Steve R
August 28, 2014 11:32 am

“When it does cool, it will not be enough to overcome the warming”
So we have found a way to avoid the next ice age? Sounds sweet! Throw another tire in the bonfire.

John C
August 28, 2014 11:40 am

So the lefty sonicsguy says “There isn’t enough CO2 at almost any level to keep dry air warm after the sun goes down.”Do you know that the surface gets about twice as much energy from the atmosphere as it does from the Sun?”
I would love to take him out to the desert for an overnight in January. He can bring as much hot air as he can carry and I’ll bring a box of hot rocks. Which of us would you like to be in the tent with?

Edward Richardson
Reply to  John C
August 28, 2014 11:46 am

“Which of us would you like to be in the tent with?”

That would depend on solely on if there is a XX-XY chromosome differentiation.

John C
Reply to  Edward Richardson
August 28, 2014 12:00 pm

Nice one! Wasn’t thinking in that direction. But I bet if it’s cold outside most will want to cuddle with the rocks!

hunter
August 28, 2014 12:03 pm

There is another way to think about this bit of arm waving: If the temps are still diong a plateau in 30 years to going down, no one will cause that a ‘pause’ so in a way the ‘study’ is correct, like so many AGW defense studies, no matter the outcome.

MikeN
August 28, 2014 12:14 pm

Our children just won’t know what a long pause in warming is.

Petrino's Your Daddy (@CardsFanTX)
August 28, 2014 12:27 pm

We’re in an interglacial. Of course the planet’s long-term trend is warming. The key point here is that virtually all of the relied-upon models failed (most utterly failed) to predict the very slow pace of warming in recent years, if there has truly been any at all.
In science, when your predictive models fail, you have an obligation to be skeptical about your input variables, at the very least, if not your entire hypothesis. But that’s not what the IPCC and associated CAGW believers did. Their reaction is the most telling thing in all of this debate. It simply is not science any longer when you take a decidedly anti-science approach to legitimate criticism. It’s more akin to religion if you are not duly humbled and refuse to question your basic premises.

KNR
August 28, 2014 12:40 pm

By 2100, when I will be dead and therefore not around to be remind of my BS claims .
Climate ‘science’ has been be the easy area to work in , all you have to do is claim it ‘must happen ‘ but I can’t tell you how far into the future it will be when it does . And bank the money .

August 28, 2014 12:44 pm

I notice that ‘sonicsguy’ has posted here far more than anyone else.
When someone clutters up the thread that much, a couple thoughts come to mind:
First, his insecurity. Endless nitpicking means he is trying desperately to convince rational folks here that Down is Up, Ignorance is Strength, and Global Warming is Gonna Getcha. But of course, that scare is a dead horse. Flogging it is a waste of time.
Next, sonicguy, like every alarmist around, cannot ever give an inch. That’s because his belief is religious, not scientific. In religion, you are an apostate if you waver. So sonicguy is in the silly position of claiming that global warming is still continuing — when every professional organization admits that it has stopped. They may use Orwellian terms like “Pause” and “Hiatus”. But those terms mean that global warming has stopped. Only the despearately deluded try to convince folks here that global warming is still chugging along. It’s not. It stopped, years ago. In turn, that has deconstructed the entire belief system of the dwindling alarmist clique. Now they are just a small handful of crazies, head-nodding to each other and arguing incessantly with the rational folks here.
Finally, either sonicsguy is unemployed, or he is cheating his employer — unless his employer likes the fact that he posts here all throughout the workday, 24/7. But if he’s on the dole, I encourage him to get productive. Pay taxes, instead of collecting them. Why waste his life trying to convince people who know better that he’s got the answers, when the ultimate Authority, Planet Earth, is debunking his nonsense?
Intelligent people listen to what the planet is saying. Soncisguy should, too.

Edward Richardson
Reply to  dbstealey
August 28, 2014 12:46 pm

Intelligent people discuss the topic of the thread and do not comment on the participants.

Zeke
Reply to  Edward Richardson
August 28, 2014 12:59 pm

dbstealey actually provided a simple analysis of several quantifiable habits of the poster, sonicsguy:
1. number of comments on the thread by him or addressed to him
2. times of day the posts are made – in this case, all – which reflects possibly no work schedule
3. euphemistic language used to describe a halt in “global warming”
So he has not been as personal as it appears.

Mark Bofill
Reply to  Edward Richardson
August 28, 2014 1:04 pm

So, you’re basically saying “hands off, this is my threadjacking”, right? Well, yours and Sonics mostly.
Tough break buddy. People don’t respect anything these days, do they.

Mark Bofill
Reply to  Edward Richardson
August 28, 2014 1:07 pm

Sorry if my remark was unclear, I was address Edward. 🙂

Edward Richardson
Reply to  Edward Richardson
August 28, 2014 1:09 pm

The topic of this thread is “Long ‘pauses’ in warming will soon be ‘a thing of the past’”

Nowhere in the article is “SonicGuy” mentioned.
Dbstealey is off topic, and practicing ad-hominem, as evidenced by:
” his insecurity”
“the silly position”
” is unemployed”
“cheating his employer”
” he’s on the dole, I encourage him to get productive”

Reply to  Edward Richardson
August 29, 2014 12:51 pm

Nowhere in the article is DBStealey mentioned either. Yet you cannot seem to stop thinking about him.

Mark Bofill
Reply to  Edward Richardson
August 28, 2014 1:12 pm

Sure Edward, I get that. But it’s every bit as on topic as what Sonic has been talking about, which is to say not at all. So, is the issue that this is Sonics threadjack and we should all respect that for some reason?

Mark Bofill
Reply to  Edward Richardson
August 28, 2014 1:18 pm

BTW, Stealey isn’t saying Sonics arguments are wrong because of all of these things. That would indeed be an example of ad hom.
I think it’s more of what I’ve been doing, pointing out that Sonic is a loser because he’s disruptive and annoying (I.E. threadjacking). If this discourages Sonic from threadjacking, so much the better in my book.

sinewave
Reply to  Edward Richardson
August 28, 2014 2:17 pm

You just commented on the participants, as am I now. Let’s all form a support group for non intelligent people.

Reply to  Edward Richardson
August 29, 2014 12:38 pm

Yet you just commented on the participants. Interesting.

Reply to  dbstealey
August 28, 2014 1:07 pm

From my count of number of comments…
I’m quite offended.
But I have had fun.

August 28, 2014 12:50 pm

wobble says:
Do any other months, other than September, exist?
Edward Richardson cherry-picks September because that is the annual low for Arctic ice. But viewed on a yearly basis, Arctic ice is recovering very strongly. Thus yet another alarmist prediction is falsified by Planet Earth:comment image

Edward Richardson
Reply to  dbstealey
August 28, 2014 1:26 pm
Reply to  dbstealey
August 28, 2014 1:56 pm

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Bill 2
Reply to  dbstealey
August 28, 2014 6:19 pm

This is a graph of Antarctic sea ice anomaly
[Nothing visible, nothing linked? .mod]

Reply to  dbstealey
August 29, 2014 12:40 pm

He also stopped at 2012 and said “you ARE here”. The correct nomenclature is we WERE there. I guess some people forgot to turn their calendar.

PMHinSC
August 28, 2014 1:14 pm

I feel like I just lost an hour of my life reading some of these comments which try to explain away the obvious. I tend to associate word parsing with legal not scientific discussions. Richardscourtney is right: “don’t feed the troll.” I think I will now go do something constructive.

EternalOptimist
August 28, 2014 1:21 pm

I am no scientist.
but sonicsguy says the models cannot be falsified and never will be.
He keeps asking us to dispute his numbers and seems to get frustrated that we don’t even enter that arena.
I think he should understand that we have been here before. Erlich made some pretty outrageous predictions and challenged people to dispute the numbers in his ‘arena’
We know now that he was woefully wrong. I wonder if sonic supports Erlichs position and predictions.
I know that Erlich is still feted in some places

August 28, 2014 1:36 pm

Edward Richardson,
PIOMAS is a continuing source of amusement here. Their wild-eyed charts are constructed for propaganda, not for calm, reasoned science.
But that chart does show that your other wild-eyed chart upthread cherry-picks September — the month of the lowest Arctic ice. Now, why would you pick that one month out of 12? We’re not even in September yet.
Earth to Robert: the ‘Arctic ise is disappearing’ scare is debunked nonsense. What we are observing is normal cyclicality. CO2 has nothing to do with it, either.

Edward Richardson
Reply to  dbstealey
August 28, 2014 1:43 pm

[Snip. Invalid email address. ~mod.]

rogerknights
August 28, 2014 1:36 pm

@SonicsGuy
If I say, “it’s been five days since it last rained,” I’m not cherry-picking.
Similarly, if I say, “it’s been a dozen years since temperatures stopped rising,” I’m not cherry-picking.

Mark, PhD 93
August 28, 2014 1:58 pm

Darn. I should have done my doctoral work at UNSW in Climate Sciences. It would have been so much easier just to model some models to show that the modeled-models don’t predict the lack of something that they didn’t predict in the first place, all the time having a like minded group of supporters. But no, I had to conduct real original research at a Tier 1 school, and actually defend the work in front of 4 guys who had some thoughts that were contrary to my own, (actually they were highly complimentary of the final dissertation after they attacked me like a pack of wolves during a public defense). Geez, science just seems to be so much easier these days

sinewave
August 28, 2014 2:24 pm

SonicsGuy says “CO2 will always be a heat-trapping gas. That’s simple physics.” The Earth’s climate is a really complex system. It takes more than one simple physics principle to explain it. Even though it looks like SonicsGuy has disappeared, I just had to say it.

Reply to  sinewave
August 28, 2014 3:01 pm

In fairness to Sonicsguy, whom I’ve disputed all thread, he has to sleep sometime.
He’s hardly run away from debate.

John Finn
Reply to  M Courtney
August 28, 2014 5:13 pm

Agreed. I disagree with a few of his points but he’s made his case clearly and politely and tried to back it up with evidence. He’s not a troll as some have tried to suggest. Personally I’d welcome more exchanges of this kind. I was just a bit too knackered tonight to join in.

exSSNcrew
August 28, 2014 2:56 pm

That pesky Second Law of Thermodynamics hasn’t been repealed yet, has it? I mean, how does heat energy get into the deep ocean without the atmosphere and the ocean surface temp rising first?

george e. smith
Reply to  exSSNcrew
August 28, 2014 9:13 pm

You’re not paying attention. It isn’t “heat energy” that gets into the deep oceans. It is middle of the spectrum solar EM radiant energy, which is NOT “heat energy”.
And the middle of the solar spectrum, about 500 nm wavelength has a 1/e absorption depth of 100 meters, which means 99% is absorbed in 500 meters, and 95% is absorbed in 300 meters, that’s about a thousand feet. Some of that radiant energy is subsequently wasted as “heat energy”, but a lot of it is turned into bio-mass, and the ocean is full of it. Has nothing to do with the second law. Solar radiation can go anywhere it wants to.

Admin
August 28, 2014 3:14 pm

SonicsGuy
“How would you go about falsifying the models?”
The models cannot be “falsified,” and never will be. There will only modifications to the existing way they portray the physics (and changes in GHG radiative forcing are very unlikely to change; as they are probably the *best* know parts of the problem). …

Nuff said 🙂 – if it can’t be falsified, it isn’t science.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsifiability
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/15/why-deniers-are-always-wrong-models-cant-be-falsified/

Mark Bofill
Reply to  Anthony Watts
August 28, 2014 6:24 pm

Huh. I’d have thought David Appell would’ve put up a better fight than that.
Whatever…

Reply to  Anthony Watts
August 28, 2014 7:22 pm

The creep mentioned me by name! I could not be happier. That means I got to him — and his proxy nanny, “Edward Richardson”, who might even be the same sockpuppet.
I would say, “Stay classy, David Appell”. But there’s no way, is there? ☺ 

Reply to  Anthony Watts
August 28, 2014 11:21 pm

Friends:
Our host reports that “sonicsguy” is a fake who claims to have been “messing with {our host’s} head”.
Well, that seems to be a complete answer to the resident troll, John Finn, who wrote of “sonicsguy” at August 28, 2014 at 5:13 pm saying here

I disagree with a few of his points but he’s made his case clearly and politely and tried to back it up with evidence. He’s not a troll as some have tried to suggest. Personally I’d welcome more exchanges of this kind. I was just a bit too knackered tonight to join in.

There is a recent practice of trolls operating in packs or as tag-teams to disrupt threads. It is not clear if this results solely from those such as John Finn deciding to “join in” or is encouraged by decisions of troll paymasters.
Richard

Admin
Reply to  Anthony Watts
August 28, 2014 11:29 pm
Reply to  Anthony Watts
August 29, 2014 6:25 am

He wasn’t messing with anyone’s head except his own. This note of his shows just how pathetic his actions are. Sad.

Reply to  Anthony Watts
August 29, 2014 6:32 pm

@richardscourtenay:
There is another alternative. The “two” trolls could well be one & the same troll using different but valid email addresses, pretending to support “each other”.

Reply to  Eric Worrall
August 29, 2014 4:18 am

Ooh, David Appell is a professional.
And he just got a bottom-spanking (most politely by most of us) by the commenters here, many of whom are amateurs.
I got him to agree that the models can’t replicate the real world – thus he will always have to concede that they have no predictive power and AGW can be ignored.
Climatology is in trouble, isn’t it?

jim
Reply to  M Courtney
August 29, 2014 3:09 pm

That creep (Appell) infests our local newspapers with multiple sock puppets. I wonder if he is doing thousands of posts all over the country and one of only a few actual believers that keep up the fraud.

Robert of Ottawa
August 28, 2014 3:20 pm

Nicola Maher, a UNSW PhD-candidate
I think that says it all. You don’t get your PhD by disagreeing with the establishment. But he has let the genie loose. If natural cycles can account for cooling, why not warming?

climatologist
August 28, 2014 4:43 pm

2030 – is too short a time. Why not 2060 when everybody here is dead and cannot verify your forecast? The only safe long range forecast is a very long range forecast.

Arno Arrak
August 28, 2014 5:02 pm

So, cooling and warming are fighting each other but she thinks warming will come up ahead? An interesting fairy tale, not science, especially since it comes from modeling. They had thirty of those models, presumably because there is no way that just one model can fit the data. With thirty you get a variety of outcomes to choose from, some of which just may cast a future you like.
These people are dreaming if they think multiple ‘hiatuses’ are ahead. First, There is no reason whatsoever to attribute periodic nature to this hiatus/pause phenomenon we are experiencing now. This does not mean that it has not happened before without their knowing. An example is the eighties and nineties before the arrival of the super El Nino.
Global mean temperature was constant from 1979 to early 1997, an 18 year linear stretch. If the super El Nino had not arrived in 1998 this and the present pause/hiatus might have merged. Of course they have no idea what happened in the eighties and nineties because ground-based temperature curves show this period as a warming they like to call “late twentieth century warming.”
Check out the satellite view of this period in Figure 15 of my book and you will see just how outrageous their fakery is. Their concepts of what may cause this hiatus are also ridiculous. For one thing, it has nothing to do with volcanism. Volcanic cooling that is on many temperature charts is imaginary and has nothing to do with volcanism either.
These coolings are created by renaming La Nina valleys that are part of the ENSO oscillation. It is simply a misuse of a volcano’s name to appropriate a La Nina cooling in a convenient location as volcanic cooling created by that volcano. But an El Nino is just as likely as a La Nina to be sitting there. If by chance your volcano picks an El Nino instead of a La Nina to settle down with there will be nary a sign of that volcanic cooling they expect to see.
For some reason volcanologists are still scratching their heads about it if all they had to do was to read my book. Pinatubo was lucky to pull a La Nina this way but El Chichon was not so lucky. It pulled an El Nino instead and was left without any cooling to call its own. I showed representative alleged volcanic coolings in Figure 10 of my book “what Warming?” on a background of ENSO oscillations.
First, it is obvious that not one of them has any influence on the El Nino peaks and La Nina valleys that are part of ENSO. Of the whole lot, Pinatubo has the best La Nina valley cornered for itself. Krakatoa, the one whose explosion was heard across the ocean, has a miserably small valley dedicated to its volcanic cooling because its explosion timing coincided with the down-slope of a La Nina.
Katmai-Novarupta, alleged to be the most powerful eruption of the twentieth century, shows no volcanic cooling whatsoever because of its poor timing. Unadvisedly, it picked the rising flank of an El Nino for his eruption and just as I expected, an El Nino peak and not a volcanic cooling followed. And El Chichon is in the same situation, what with its eruption timed exactly at the center of a La Nina valley, with temperature nowhere to go but up.
There are various predictions in this paper that seem a waste of time and not worth taking seriously. Among them is the promise that hiatuses will be a thing of the past by century’s end. The number of attempts to end the hiatus(es) was recently raised up to 39 but I am not sure theirs is important enough to call it number 40.
[Note: Comment broken into paragraphs to make it more readable. Also, the number of excuses for global warming stopping is now up to 52. ~ mod.]

wayne
August 28, 2014 6:10 pm

Adjustments on the way….
or
Adjustments to the rescue!!! Well, soon.
or
We don’t pay attention to this pause, it’s still warming though nothing shows it.
or
I know it has been cooling but it is still warming. Climatologists tell me so.
I like the term Bozos and that sure applies here. Thanks for the term.
Keep punch’n!

August 28, 2014 6:49 pm

Has anybody done any research into how many Climate Scientists are also Freemasons?

Mary Brown
Reply to  nargun
August 28, 2014 7:32 pm

What is a Freemason? I had someone explain it to me for an hour once but I still have no clue.

David Ball
August 28, 2014 7:19 pm

Hello David Appell !!! How have you been ol’ chump? Still skulking around I see.

August 28, 2014 8:08 pm

Indeed Dave Appell widely promotes the willful slander that climate model skepticism amounts to greenhouse effect denial:
“Are they? Are Anthony Watts and Marc Morano and Tom Nelson and Steve Goddard smart enough to be guilty of climate crimes?
I think so. You can’t simply claim that CO2 isn’t a greenhouse gas.
I think they’re crimes will be obvious in about a decade.
When I profiled Michael Mann for Scientific American, he said he thought it would eventually be illegal to deny climate change. I had doubts about that, but maybe.”
davidappell.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-charlesh-problem.html

stan stendera
August 28, 2014 8:11 pm

David Appell is a hyper troll.

Mary Brown
August 28, 2014 8:48 pm

I didn’t know David Apple was still with us. He was a pleasant weatherman back in the day in Portland.
http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=36253783

Reply to  Mary Brown
August 28, 2014 8:53 pm

Now that’s funny. I mean sad about David Apple, but funny about the troll-goon.

Mary Brown
Reply to  milodonharlani
August 29, 2014 12:22 pm

I don’t think he’s a troll. He shook the place up. He used science. He wasn’t all wrong. That’s good. Otherwise, we become groupthink like those ‘other’ people.

Reply to  Mary Brown
September 2, 2014 10:16 am

Appell is a stalker. If he cannot convince you he starts stalking you.

Reply to  milodonharlani
August 29, 2014 12:52 pm

Mary Brown,
Didn’t you read Anthony’s post above? Appell emailed Anthony:
Anthony, it’s always fun messing with your head.
Appell is a despicable troll. That is how he “shook the place up”. You can argue that he used science, but I disagree. His purpose was exactly what he admitted: “messing with your head”. He constantly changed the subject, cherry-picked random facts, and kept moving the goal posts. That is not debating in good faith.
Apparently he has nothing better to do than waste his time and everyone else’s being a site pest. He is not honest, instead, he uses a sockpuppet identity [more than one, I would bet] to get away with his deception.
Plenty of other, sincere warmists argue the same points as Appell, so there is no danger of “groupthink” here. That is the problem at alarmist blogs, which quickly censor comments that are not in agreement with their groupthink. But Anthony does not censor, rather, he invites all points of view. One of his rules, though, is no sockpuppetry. Now you can see why.
Any comments posted in good faith are always welcome here. Skeptics are kept on their toes by having to confront, and deal with different points of view. That’s a good thing. But what Appell did was not good. It was devious, dishonest, and nothing but an unwanted prank.

August 28, 2014 9:49 pm

milodonharlani,
Unfortunately, of course, that’s a different David Appell. The one posting here as Sonicsguy is clearly a sociopath. Anyone familiar with Appell knows him to be a truly despicable human being.
I did like the way commenter “mouruanh” had him on the ropes earlier in the thread, though.
I have my doubts about “Edward Richardson”, too. That is too whitebread a name. Easy to hide behind. I think he’s either another troll, or he is another sockpuppet of Appell.
What say you, “Edward”? You aren’t really “Edward Richardson”, are you?

Heber Rizzo
August 29, 2014 12:09 am

“While most areas in the Northern Hemisphere will likely experience less snowfall throughout a season, the study concludes that extreme snow events will still occur, even in a future with significant warming.”
– MIT press release, 8/27/14
So, if it snows, it is global warming, and if it doesn´t, it is global warming. Not science but dogma.

Patrick
August 29, 2014 12:42 am

Did SonicGuy really say CO2 traps heat?

William Holder
August 29, 2014 2:04 am

You won’t find a bigger fan of this website than myself and I appreciate SonicsGuy’s comments. I wish we had more believers commenting here – it makes for a much better discussion.

Reply to  William Holder
August 29, 2014 2:08 am

I quite agree.
We don’t have to accept their views but we ought to be polite and engage.
After all, no-one can be entirely wrong all the time.
And no-one can be entirely right all the time.
Let’s be welcoming or this site will suffer from a decline into introspection (like the Guardian is doing).

Patrick
Reply to  William Holder
August 29, 2014 2:26 am

Maybe. However, when someone states CO2 traps heat you know they are talking crap.

Reply to  Patrick
August 29, 2014 5:18 am

Got a reference for this, I wonder? Sounds like a creationist scoffing at irreducible complexity, in other words sounds like a losing argument to just call widely accepted theory crap, as if that’s how science works, by visceral expression of disgust.

Patrick
Reply to  Patrick
August 29, 2014 5:57 am

CO@ cannot trap heat. Simples. (Mods i am not sure how this will appear in thread).

Reply to  William Holder
August 29, 2014 5:13 am

William Holder
You say

You won’t find a bigger fan of this website than myself and I appreciate SonicsGuy’s comments. I wish we had more believers commenting here – it makes for a much better discussion.

You “appreciate SonicsGuy’s comments”?!! Did you read them?
People who want to only hear their own views talk to mirrors.
Therefore, people who provide a different view are useful and interesting.
But trolls have no interest in providing a different view, and SonicsGuy is an extreme troll. Indeed, we now know SonicsGuy was a pretend person only constructed to be a troll.
A troll attempts to PREVENT rational discussion, to PREVENT mutual exchange of ideas and opinions, and to PREVENT anybody learning anything. Trolls consider disruption success and SonicsGuy was so extreme an example that he was a caricature of a troll. He only provided disinformation and he presented it as a method to astonish, to offend and to enrage.
Richard

Mark Bofill
Reply to  richardscourtney
August 29, 2014 6:33 am

Look, I have to second Richard here.
I love a good clean argument with somebody who actually has a point they’re arguing. It’s interesting, I learn something, and everybody has a good time, win lose or draw. I’ll freely admit I don’t mind going off topic to indulge in debate.
But when a troll comes in with superficial stupid crap like Appell did, it’s not a pause it’s a slowdown, roy spencer rebaselined his chart, models cannot be falsified, there’s no substance. He’s just blowing smoke all over the place. When every fourth comment is his on a thread of over a hundred comments, that’s a lot of smoke. I don’t see anything productive, educational, or fun about that.

Reply to  richardscourtney
August 29, 2014 6:39 am

Mark Bofill
Yes, and it was the second thread where SonicsGuy behaved like that.
I can understand people being fooled once by that, but twice!
Richard

Reply to  richardscourtney
August 29, 2014 10:02 am

I second Richard and Mark. There is a big difference between a site pest who only wants to cause trouble, and people who still believe in CAGW. The former are no good, but the latter keep us on our toes.

Reply to  richardscourtney
August 29, 2014 6:02 pm

BS – He, SG, makes the kind of points regularly found in discussions at other climate sites or following news articles on climate change. I don’t believe he’s right but he’s not a troll or if he is I must be a troll every time I spew my denier babble on other blogs. We can’t be a site where someone is called a troll for putting up a strong argument in favor of his beliefs. SG backed himself up with a well known study and he fought tooth and nail to overcome the regulars here – I respect that and it made for a learning experience.
Any believer who might have stopped by here saw himself in those comments and may have been swayed by our arguments – until we called him a troll which seems dismissive and shallow. This allows the warmist to dismiss us and our arguments and go back to his little warmist cabal sure that we are idiots.

Reply to  richardscourtney
August 29, 2014 11:58 pm

William
Your claim that SonicsGuy was not a troll is daft.
Appell admitted he invented this fictitious character of SonicsGuy for the sole and specific purpose of “messing with the head” of our host.
We need opposing viewpoints so all views can be debated.
We do NOT need – and should excoriate – trolls whose intention is to destroy rational debate. Such trolls include anonymous posters who write to pretend that blatant trolling is merely a different viewpoint.
Richard

Mark Albright
Reply to  William Holder
August 29, 2014 7:31 am

Someone needs to tell SonicsGuy the Pacific Northwest snowpack is not decreasing. The trend has been UP over the past 31 years:
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/marka/swe.pnw.may.1984-2014.png

Editor
August 29, 2014 7:59 am

However, such “hiatuses” are increasingly unlikely if carbon emissions continue on their present trajectory, and will be “a thing of the past” by the century’s end…

…say the climate models that have already been falsified by the current hiatus.

beng
August 29, 2014 8:30 am

I guess for sonicsguy, david appalling, edward richardson, whoever that excrement really is, mission accomplished, since he’s paid by the word from the taxpayer-trough.
Anth*ny prb’ly should’ve shown his email address, but he’s too fair-minded.
[Note: “Edward Richardson” has been using a fake email address. Draw your own conclusions. ~mod.]

Sciguy54
August 29, 2014 8:53 am

I am but a retired engineer, but the whole concept of this claim puzzles me:
“From about 2030, it’s highly unlikely that we will get one of these cooling decades,” said Nicola Maher, a UNSW PhD-candidate and lead author of the paper. “When it does cool, it will not be enough to overcome the warming.”
If I fully accept the main premise of the IPCC, that increasing atmospheric C02 caused by man-made C02 is the only important “new” climate driver.
And I assume that this effect is superimposed on top of the natural PDO/AMO cycle.
Then we should continue to see a stairstep or sawtooth pattern with long term upward trend of yet undetermined slope. Why would this pattern stop?
if I also assume that temperature sensitivity decreases as the C02 concentration increases, then the long term pattern should flatten over time, not become so steep as to obfuscate any short term PDO/AMO downtrend.
So where am I going wrong, or should Nicola Maher be denied her PhD on the basis of this paper?

Tom T
Reply to  Sciguy54
August 29, 2014 11:10 am

You do know that the IPCC juggernaut of CO2 being the driver started before anyone even knew what the PDO was. The PDO was named in 1996. In the 80s and early 90s as CO2 being the driving force moved from science to gospel how exactly do you think they accounted for this yet unknown and unquantified phenomenon? Time travel?

Ralph Kramden
August 29, 2014 9:59 am

Didn’t this guy read the WUWT article, “Global Warming ‘Pause’ Could Last for 30 Years“. I’m glad the science is settled.

Matt G
August 29, 2014 1:58 pm

“From about 2030, it’s highly unlikely that we will get one of these cooling decades,” said Nicola Maher, a UNSW PhD-candidate and lead author of the paper. “When it does cool, it will not be enough to overcome the warming.”
It is a fact that this statement is wrong due to the logarithmic behavior of CO2 gas. They said this would happen for the last decade or so, but were wrong. The more CO2 gas you add to the atmosphere the less temperature increase results for temporary retention.
https://sp.yimg.com/ib/th?id=HN.608049992216676708&pid=15.1&P=0comment image
The fact is now it is cool enough to overcome warming and the same cycle occurring in future with similar or slightly higher rate of CO2 will have less affect than it does now. How can people in climate science miss the basics so easily? It’s highly unlikely the increasing rate of CO2 will be high enough during this time to overcome the cooling phase.
That’s without even bringing into it the ocean cycles, previous decline in global cloud and the missing heat that is nowhere to be found.

August 29, 2014 8:28 pm

So it turns out that “Edward Richardson” is erstwhile commenter “H Grouse”. And “chuck”.
No wonder he argues incessantly.

philincalifornia
Reply to  dbstealey
August 29, 2014 8:45 pm

Are you serious ? That’s the same turd I pwned on carbon dating of tree stumps and Austrian glaciers with 30 seconds of Googling a week ago ?
I knew zero about about tree stumps and Austrian glaciation before the 30 seconds of Googling.
Not earning his filthy lucre is he ?

Reply to  dbstealey
August 30, 2014 12:14 am

dbstealey
You report

So it turns out that “Edward Richardson” is erstwhile commenter “H Grouse”. And “chuck”

and

Now it seems that ‘Edward Richardson’ is probably David Appell. Anthony flushed him out on another thread.

Well, that explains why I reached the stage of refusing to engage with him. As I said e.g. in this thread at August 28, 2014 at 12:33 pm here

Edward Richardson
From the previous thread I know you act as the trolling wingman for Sonicsguy.
And from that thread you know that I have learned to regard you with such contempt that I have refused – and refuse – to engage with you.

Of course SonicsGuy and Edward Richardson operated in a despicable concert when they were the same person pretending to be two different people as a method to mislead others!
Richard

Steve Oregon
August 29, 2014 9:23 pm

Folks,
Just so you get the crystal clear picture:
David Appell is a prolific sock puppet here in the Portland media appearing in multiple forms to soil the commons.
He’s the ultimate serial troll of the worst kind who’s resorted to vile behavior in personal emails lately.
He appears to be getting rather volatile as he panics to get his fix for whatever climate trip he is after.
He may have invested his soul in AGW and is now feeling like a reject from the Adams Family casting call.
He is also the ultimate example of how the internet age can enable the small and disturbed minded to participate, incognito, in discussions with regular folks who have no idea how messed up the person and his motivations are.
He should find something else to do. But will not.
Leopard spots.

Reply to  Steve Oregon
September 2, 2014 10:24 am

Worse yet, the lame, laughable, lying, lifeless loser loon appropriated the name of a deceased weatherman in the Portland market.

Reply to  Steve Oregon
September 3, 2014 5:19 am

He is going national. On a national forum, Appell claimed that CO2 was NOT a trace gas. I have him several opportunities to walk it back, but he never did. I have the link if anyone wants a laugh.

August 29, 2014 9:49 pm

Now it seems that ‘Edward Richardson’ is probably David Appell. Anthony flushed him out on another thread.

Patrick
August 29, 2014 10:50 pm

Another article by the same person which pretty much confirms what we alredy knew, renewable energy systems cannot operate without a Govn’t subsidy.
http://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/australias-solar-installers-face-another-boom-and-bust-20140829-10a17h.html

August 30, 2014 12:43 am

Richard Courtney,
Correct as usual. I should resist the urge to engage, but David Appell has a way of goading readers here in a way that many of us can’t resist, and I was one of them. No doubt he got lots of practice, according to other readers’ accounts.
At least I had the pleasure of seeing that it was mutual, when Appell complained about me by name to Anthony. ☺

richard
August 30, 2014 6:33 am

One day the world will get much hotter and one day it will get much colder. The only thing worth worrying about is what will we do if it happens, the co2 global warming is irrelevant and a nonsense in itself but it should flag up the what would we do if the climate naturally changes for the worse.

September 2, 2014 10:38 am

rishrac
August 29, 2014 at 9:55 pm
The term PDO was coined in 1996:
http://jisao.washington.edu/pdo/
I can link to the paper if you want.
Some researchers may have an inkling of its existence, but the oscillation certainly was not factored into the GIGO models ginned up to try to support CACA in the 1980s & ’90s. In fact, it still isn’t.