Global temperature update: the Pause is now 18 years 3 months
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Since October 1996 there has been no global warming at all (Fig. 1). This month’s RSS [1] temperature plot pushes up the period without any global warming from 18 years 2 months to 18 years 3 months.
Figure 1. The least-squares linear-regression trend on the RSS satellite monthly global mean surface temperature anomaly dataset shows no global warming for 18 years 3 months since October 1996.
The hiatus period of 18 years 3 months, or 219 months, is the farthest back one can go in the RSS satellite temperature record and still show a sub-zero trend.
As the Pope unwisely prepares to abandon forever the political neutrality that his office enjoins upon him, and to put his signature to a climate-Communist encyclical largely drafted by the radical Prefect of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Mgr. Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, the Almighty continues to display a sense of humor.
We are now less than a year away the Paris world-government conference. Yet the global warming that the IPCC had so confidently but misguidedly predicted 25 years ago has stopped altogether.
Figure 2. Near-term projections of warming at a rate equivalent to 2.8 [1.9, 4.2] K/century, made with “substantial confidence” in IPCC (1990), January 1990 to November 2014 (orange region and red trend line), vs. observed anomalies (dark blue) and trend (bright blue) at less than 1.4 K/century equivalent, taken as the mean of the RSS and UAH satellite monthly mean lower-troposphere temperature anomalies.
A quarter-century after 1990, the global-warming outturn to date – expressed as the least-squares linear-regression trend on the mean of the RSS [1] and UAH [2] monthly global mean surface temperature anomalies – is 0.34 Cº, equivalent to just 1.4 Cº/century, or a little below half of the central estimate in IPCC (1990) and well below even the least estimate (Fig. 2).
The Great Pause is a growing embarrassment to those who had told us with “substantial confidence” that the science was settled and the debate over. Nature had other ideas. Though approaching 70 mutually incompatible and more or less implausible excuses for the Pause are appearing in nervous reviewed journals and among proselytizing scientists, the possibility that the Pause is occurring because the computer models are simply wrong about the sensitivity of temperature to manmade greenhouse gases can no longer be dismissed, and is demonstrated in a major peer-reviewed paper published this month in the Orient’s leading science journal.
Remarkably, even the IPCC’s latest and much reduced near-term global-warming projections are also excessive (Fig. 3).
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Figure 3. Predicted temperature change, January 2005 to November 2014, at a rate equivalent to 1.7 [1.0, 2.3] Cº/century (orange zone with thick red best-estimate trend line), compared with the observed anomalies (dark blue) and zero real-world trend (bright blue), taken as the average of the RSS and UAH satellite lower-troposphere temperature anomalies.
In 1990, the IPCC’s central estimate of near-term warming was higher by two-thirds than it is today. Then it was 2.8 C/century equivalent. Now it is just 1.7 Cº equivalent – and, as Fig. 3 shows, even that is proving to be a substantial exaggeration.
On the RSS satellite data, there has been no global warming statistically distinguishable from zero for more than 26 years. None of the models predicted that, in effect, there would be no global warming for a quarter of a century.
Key facts about global temperature
Ø The RSS satellite dataset shows no global warming at all for 219 months from October 1996 to December 2014 – more than half the 432-month satellite record.
Ø The global warming trend since 1900 is equivalent to 0.8 Cº per century. This is well within natural variability and may not have much to do with us.
Ø Since 1950, when a human influence on global temperature first became theoretically possible, the global warming trend has been equivalent to below 1.2 Cº per century.
Ø The fastest warming rate lasting ten years or more since 1950 occurred over the 33 years from 1974 to 2006. It was equivalent to 2.0 Cº per century.
Ø In 1990, the IPCC’s mid-range prediction of near-term warming was equivalent to 2.8 Cº per century, higher by two-thirds than its current prediction of 1.7 Cº/century.
Ø The global warming trend since 1990, when the IPCC wrote its first report, is equivalent to below 1.4 Cº per century – half of what the IPCC had then predicted.
Ø Though the IPCC has cut its near-term warming prediction, it has not cut its high-end business as usual centennial warming prediction of 4.8 Cº warming to 2100.
Ø The IPCC’s predicted 4.8 Cº warming by 2100 is well over twice the greatest rate of warming lasting more than ten years that has been measured since 1950.
Ø The IPCC’s 4.8 Cº-by-2100 prediction is almost four times the observed real-world warming trend since we might in theory have begun influencing it in 1950.
Ø From September 2001 to November 2014, the warming trend on the mean of the 5 global-temperature datasets is nil. No warming for 13 years 3 months.
Ø Recent extreme weather cannot be blamed on global warming, because there has not been any global warming. It is as simple as that.
Technical note
Our latest topical graph shows the least-squares linear-regression trend on the RSS satellite monthly global mean lower-troposphere dataset for as far back as it is possible to go and still find a zero trend. The start-date is not “cherry-picked” so as to coincide with the temperature spike caused by the 1998 el Niño. Instead, it is calculated so as to find the longest period with a zero trend.
But is the RSS satellite dataset “cherry-picked”? No. There are good reasons to consider it the best of the five principal global-temperature datasets. The indefatigable “Steven Goddard” demonstrated in the autumn of 2014 that the RSS dataset – at least as far as the Historical Climate Network is concerned – shows less warm bias than the GISS [3] or UAH [2] records. The UAH record is shortly to be revised to reduce its warm bias and bring it closer to conformity with RSS.
Figure 4. Warm biases in temperature. RSS shows less bias than the UAH or GISS records. UAH, in its forthcoming Version 6.0, will be taking steps to reduce the warm bias in its global-temperature reporting.
Steven Goddard writes: “The graph compares UAH, RSS and GISS US temperatures with the actual measured US HCN stations. UAH and GISS both have a huge warming bias, while RSS is close to the measured daily temperature data. The small difference between RSS and HCN is probably because my HCN calculations are not gridded. My conclusion is that RSS is the only credible data set, and all the others have a spurious warming bias.”
Also, the RSS data show the 1998 Great El Niño more clearly than all other datasets. The Great el Niño, like its two predecessors in the past 300 years, caused widespread global coral bleaching, providing an independent verification that RSS is better able to capture such fluctuations without artificially filtering them out than other datasets.
Terrestrial temperatures are measured by thermometers. Thermometers correctly sited in rural areas away from manmade heat sources show warming rates appreciably below those that are published. The satellite datasets are based on measurements made by the most accurate thermometers available – platinum resistance thermometers, which provide an independent verification of the temperature measurements by checking via spaceward mirrors the known temperature of the cosmic background radiation, which is 1% of the freezing point of water, or just 2.73 degrees above absolute zero. It was by measuring minuscule variations in the cosmic background radiation that the NASA anisotropy probe determined the age of the Universe: 13.82 billion years.
The RSS graph (Fig. 1) is accurate. The data are lifted monthly straight from the RSS website. A computer algorithm reads them down from the text file, takes their mean and plots them automatically using an advanced routine that automatically adjusts the aspect ratio of the data window at both axes so as to show the data at maximum scale, for clarity.
The latest monthly data point is visually inspected to ensure that it has been correctly positioned. The light blue trend line plotted across the dark blue spline-curve that shows the actual data is determined by the method of least-squares linear regression, which calculates the y-intercept and slope of the line via two well-established and functionally identical equations that are compared with one another to ensure no discrepancy between them. The IPCC and most other agencies use linear regression to determine global temperature trends. Professor Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia recommends it in one of the Climategate emails. The method is appropriate because global temperature records exhibit little auto-regression.
Dr Stephen Farish, Professor of Epidemiological Statistics at the University of Melbourne, kindly verified the reliability of the algorithm that determines the trend on the graph and the correlation coefficient, which is very low because, though the data are highly variable, the trend is flat.
RSS itself is now taking a serious interest in the length of the Great Pause. Dr Carl Mears, the senior research scientist at RSS, discusses it at remss.com/blog/recent-slowing-rise-global-temperatures.
Dr Mears’ results are summarized in Fig. 5:
Figure 5. Output of 33 IPCC models (turquoise) compared with measured RSS global temperature change (black), 1979-2014. The transient coolings caused by the volcanic eruptions of Chichón (1983) and Pinatubo (1991) are shown, as is the spike in warming caused by the great el Niño of 1998.
Dr Mears writes:
“The denialists like to assume that the cause for the model/observation discrepancy is some kind of problem with the fundamental model physics, and they pooh-pooh any other sort of explanation. This leads them to conclude, very likely erroneously, that the long-term sensitivity of the climate is much less than is currently thought.”
Dr Mears concedes the growing discrepancy between the RSS data and the models, but he alleges “cherry-picking” of the start-date for the global-temperature graph:
“Recently, a number of articles in the mainstream press have pointed out that there appears to have been little or no change in globally averaged temperature over the last two decades. Because of this, we are getting a lot of questions along the lines of ‘I saw this plot on a denialist web site. Is this really your data?’ While some of these reports have ‘cherry-picked’ their end points to make their evidence seem even stronger, there is not much doubt that the rate of warming since the late 1990s is less than that predicted by most of the IPCC AR5 simulations of historical climate. … The denialists really like to fit trends starting in 1997, so that the huge 1997-98 ENSO event is at the start of their time series, resulting in a linear fit with the smallest possible slope.”
In fact, the spike in temperatures caused by the Great el Niño of 1998 is largely offset in the linear-trend calculation by two factors: the not dissimilar spike of the 2010 el Niño, and the sheer length of the Great Pause itself.
Replacing all the monthly RSS anomalies for 1998 with the mean anomaly value of 0.55 K that obtained during the 2010 el Niño and recalculating the trend from September 1996 [not Dr Mears’ “1997”] to September 2014 showed that the trend values “–0.00 C° (–0.00 C°/century)” in the unaltered data (Fig. 1) became “+0.00 C° (+0.00 C°/century)” in the recalculated graph. No cherry-picking, then.
The length of the Great Pause in global warming, significant though it now is, is of less importance than the ever-growing discrepancy between the temperature trends predicted by models and the far less exciting real-world temperature change that has been observed.
IPCC’s First Assessment Report predicted that global temperature would rise by 1.0 [0.7, 1.5] Cº to 2025, equivalent to 2.8 [1.9, 4.2] Cº per century. The executive summary asked, “How much confidence do we have in our predictions?” IPCC pointed out some uncertainties (clouds, oceans, etc.), but concluded:
“Nevertheless, … we have substantial confidence that models can predict at least the broad-scale features of climate change. … There are similarities between results from the coupled models using simple representations of the ocean and those using more sophisticated descriptions, and our understanding of such differences as do occur gives us some confidence in the results.”
That “substantial confidence” was substantial over-confidence. For the rate of global warming since 1990 is about half what the IPCC had then predicted.
Is the ocean warming?
One frequently-discussed explanation for the Great Pause is that the coupled ocean-atmosphere system has continued to accumulate heat at approximately the rate predicted by the models, but that in recent decades the heat has been removed from the atmosphere by the ocean and, since globally the near-surface strata show far less warming than the models had predicted, it is hypothesized that what is called the “missing heat” has traveled to the little-measured abyssal strata below 2000 m, whence it may emerge at some future date.
The ocean “missing heat” theory is chiefly advocated by a single group in the United States. Meehl, Arblaster, Fasullo, Hu and Trenberth [7] say, “Eight decades with a slightly negative global mean surface-temperature trend show that the ocean above 300 m takes up significantly less heat whereas the ocean below 300 m takes up significantly more, compared with non-hiatus decades. The model provides a plausible depiction of processes in the climate system causing the hiatus periods, and indicates that a hiatus period is a relatively common climate phenomenon and may be linked to La Niña-like conditions,” while Balmaseda, Trenberth and Källen [8] say, “In the last decade, about 30% of the warming has occurred below 700 m, contributing significantly to an acceleration of the warming trend. The warming below 700 m remains even when the Argo observing system is withdrawn although the trends are reduced,” and Trenberth & Fasullo [2013], repeated in Trenberth, Fasullo & Balmaseda [9], say, “An inventory of energy storage changes shows that over 90% of the imbalance is manifested as a rise in ocean heat content (OHC). … Global warming has not stopped: it is merely manifested in different ways.”
The U.S. group is supported by a group at the Chinese Academy of Sciences [10]: “A vacillating global heat sink at intermediate ocean depths is associated with different climate regimes of surface warming under anthropogenic forcing. The latter part of the 20th century saw rapid global warming as more heat stayed near the surface. In the 21st century, surface warming slowed as more heat moved into deeper oceans. … Cooling periods associated with the latter deeper heat-sequestration mechanism historically lasted 20 to 35 years.” In [11] the academicians speculate that at some future date the hiatus may change its sign, leading to a further episode of perhaps accelerated global warming.
Yet to date no empirical, theoretical or numerical method, complex or simple, has yet successfully specified mechanistically either how the heat generated by anthropogenic greenhouse-gas enrichment of the atmosphere has reached the deep ocean without much altering the heat content of the intervening near-surface strata or how the heat from the bottom of the ocean may eventually re-emerge to perturb the near-surface climate conditions that are relevant to land-based life on Earth.
Most ocean models used in performing coupled general-circulation model sensitivity runs simply cannot resolve most of the physical processes relevant for capturing heat uptake by the deep ocean. Ultimately, the second law of thermodynamics requires that any heat which may have accumulated in the deep ocean will dissipate via various diffusive processes. It is not plausible that any heat taken up by the deep ocean will suddenly warm the upper ocean and, via the upper ocean, the atmosphere.
Even if heat is reaching the benthic strata without warming the near-surface strata on the way, the transient near-surface response is rather insensitive to rising atmospheric CO2 concentration. For this reason, resolving ocean thermodynamics and circulation dynamics is not a prerequisite to the empirical study of climate sensitivity by way of our simple model. If the “deep heat” explanation for the hiatus in global warming is correct (and it is merely one among dozens that have been offered), then the complex models have failed to account for it correctly: otherwise, the growing discrepancy between the predicted and observed atmospheric warming rates would not have become as significant as it has.
Since the complex models have failed in this respect, and since there are insufficient deep-ocean observations to provide reliable quantitative evidence of the putative heat accumulation below 2000 m, still less to determine the mechanism of the imagined heat transfer, still less again to apportion duly the respective contributions of anthropogenic, solar and subsea volcanic influences on the benthic heat accumulation, it is surely unreasonable for our simple model to be expected to do what the complex models have self-evidently failed to do – and what cannot be done by any model, simple or complex, unless and until measurements of far higher resolution than is now to hand become available at all points of the oceanic column. For instance, the 3500 automated Argo bathythermograph buoys have a resolution equivalent to taking a single temperature and salinity profile in Lake Superior less than once a year: and before Argo came onstream in the middle of the last decade the resolution of oceanic temperature measurements was considerably poorer even than that, especially in the abyssal strata.
The mean depth of the global ocean is 3700 m. As recently observed in [11], implicitly questioning the U.S. group’s assertions in [7-9], the resolution of samples at various depths and the length of the record are both insufficient either to permit reliable measurement of ocean heat content or to permit monitoring of oceanic radiative fluxes:
“Some basic elements of the sampling problem are compiled in Table 2. About 52% of the ocean lies below 2000 m and about 18% below 3600 m. By defining a volume as having been ‘probed’ if at least one CTD station existed within a roughly 60 x 60 km2 box in the interval 1992-2011 … [a]bout 1/3 (11% of total volume) of water below 2000 m was sampled … Of the [region] lying below 3600 m, about 17% was measured. … [M]any papers assume no significant changes take place in the deep ocean over the historical period … The history of exploration suggests, however, that blank places on the map have either been assumed to be without any interesting features and dropped from further discussion, or at the other extreme, filled with ‘dragons’ invoked to explain strange reports [in G. de Jode, 1578, Speculum Orbis Terrarum, Antwerp]. …
“[R]ecently, [60] offered estimates of abyssal changes with claimed accuracies of order of 0.01 W/m2 (0.0004°C temperature change equivalent over 20 years) below 700 m. If that accuracy has in fact been obtained, the sparse coverage, perhaps extended to the scope of WOCE hydrographic survey, repeated every few decades, would be sufficient.”
Furthermore, almost all current analyses of ocean heat content and budget lack an accurate accounting of spatial, temporal and other systematic errors and uncertainties such as those identified in recent works by a group at the Chinese Academy of Sciences [12]:
“In this study, a new source of uncertainties in calculating OHC due to the insufficiency of vertical resolution in historical ocean subsurface temperature profile observations was diagnosed. This error was examined by sampling a high-vertical-resolution climatological ocean according to the depth intervals of in situ subsurface observations, and then the error was defined as the difference between the OHC calculated by subsampled profiles and the OHC of the climatological ocean. The obtained resolution-induced error appeared to be cold in the upper 100 m (with a peak of approximately −0.1°C), warm within 100–700 m (with a peak of ~0.1°C near 180 m), and warm when averaged over 0–700-m depths (with a global average of ~0.01°–0.025°C, ~1–2.5 × 1022 J). Geographically, it showed a warm bias within 30°S–30°N and a cold bias at higher latitudes in both hemispheres, the sign of which depended on the concave or convex shape of the vertical temperature profiles. Finally, the authors recommend maintaining an unbiased observation system in the future: a minimal vertical depth bin of 5% of the depth was needed to reduce the vertical-resolution-induced bias to less than 0.005°C on global average (equal to Argo accuracy).”
Again [13]:
“… a new correction scheme for historical XBT data is proposed for nine independent probe-type groups. The scheme includes corrections for both temperature and depth records, which are all variable with calendar year, water temperature, and probe type. The results confirm those found in previous studies: a slowing in fall rate during the 1970s and 2000s and the large pure thermal biases during 1970–85. The performance of nine different correction schemes is compared. After the proposed corrections are applied to the XBT data in the WOD09 dataset, global ocean heat content from 1967 to 2010 is reestimated.”
A forthcoming paper [14], after properly accounting for some of the sampling biases and instrumental errors and uncertainties in the ocean heat content data (i.e., applying the new global ocean temperature dataset from the Institute of Atmospheric Physics), describes a vertical profile of ocean temperature change from 2004-2013, reporting a warming hiatus above 100 m depth and from 300-700 m. The two layers that show warming are 100-300 m and 700-1500 m. These warming strata show their own distinctive horizontal spatial patterns when compared to the non-warming stratum at 300-700 meters. This observational fact leads to the following conclusion:
“It is still unclear how the heat is transferring to the deeper ocean.”
Furthermore, the suggestion that heat accumulation in the deep ocean explains why there has been no global warming at all for up to 18 years is far from generally accepted in the scientific literature. A remarkable variety of competing and often mutually exclusive explanations for the hiatus in global warming, chiefly involving near-surface phenomena, are offered in recent papers in the reviewed journals of climate science.
In the literature, the cause of the hiatus in global warming is variously attributed to (1) coverage-induced cool bias in recent years [15], rebutted by [16] and, with respect to Arctic coverage, by [17]; (2) anthropogenic aerosols from coal-burning [18], rebutted by [19-20]; (3) decline in the warming caused by black-carbon absorption [20]; (4) emission of aerosol particulates by volcanic eruptions [21], rebutted by [22]; (5) reduced solar activity [23]; (6) effectiveness of the Montreal Protocol in controlling emissions of chlorofluorocarbons [24]; (7) a lower-than-predicted increase in methane concentration [24]; (8) a decrease in stratospheric water vapor concentration [25]; (9) strengthened Pacific trade winds [26] (previously, [27] had attributed weaker Pacific trade winds to anthropogenic global warming); (10) stadium waves in tropical Pacific circulation [28]; (11) coincidence [29]; (12) aerosol particulates from pine-trees [30]; (13) natural variability [31-32]; (14) cooler night-time temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere [33]; (15) predictions by those models that allowed for the possibility of a pause in global warming [34-35]; (16) the negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation [36-38]; (17) the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation [39]; (18) global dimming following the global brightening of 1983-2001 [40]; (19) relative frequencies of distinct el Niño types [41]; (20) surface cooling in the equatorial Pacific [42]; (21) Pacific cooling amplified by Atlantic warming [43]; (22) a combination of factors, including ENSO variability, solar decline and stratospheric aerosols [44]; (23) underestimated anthropogenic aerosol forcing [45]; (24) a new form of multidecadal variability distinct from but related to the ocean oscillations [46]; and (25) failure to initialize most models in order to conform with observation, particularly of oceanic conditions [47].
Finally, though the ARGO buoys measure ocean temperature change directly, before publication the temperature change is converted into zettajoules of ocean heat content change, which make the change seem larger. Converting the ocean heat content change back to temperature change is highly revealing. It shows how little change has really been measured. The increase in ocean heat content over the 94 ARGO months September 2005 to June 2013 was 10 x 1022 J = 100 ZJ (Fig. 6).
Figure 6. Ocean heat content change, 1957-2013, from NODC Ocean Climate Laboratory: http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT.
Conversion: 650 million km3 x 4 MJ per tonne per Kelvin: each cubic meter is 1.033 tonnes. Then:
100 ZJ increase in ohc 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 J
To raise 650,000,000,000,000,000 m3
x 1.033 te m–3 671,450,000,000,000,000 te
x 4,000,000 J te 2,685,800,000,000,000,000,000,000 J per Kelvin
Then 100,000 / 2,685,800 = 0.037233 K in 94 months is equivalent to 0.0475 K per decade. Accordingly, even on the quite extreme NODC ocean heat content record, the change in mean ocean temperature in the upper 2000 m in recent decades has been less than 0.5 K per century equivalent.
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richardscourtney January 4, 2015 at 6:40 am
Take a look at them Richard. You see there is a dip around 1900. To start there without taking any average at the beginning is really cherry picking.
http://woodfortrees.org/graph/hadcrut4gl/mean:13/plot/gistemp/mean:13/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1890/to:1920.9/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1940/to:1983.6/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1860/to:1931/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2001/trend
Where have you found this theory? Can you please give me a link?
Hm, no I find that rather implausible.
Richard, I think it is ok to use such a rhetoric one time, I can tolerate some sarcasm, but two times in a row starts to look rather inane to me.
/Jan
Jan See
http://www.scirp.org/journal/PaperInformation.aspx?PaperID=50837#.VE9LlFfivOU
Jan, Norman Page provided you with the link.
The study is based on indisputable data.
Decrease in clouds—>decrease in cloud albedo—>increased insolation which more than accounts for the late warming trend circa 1980-97.
This study utterly demolishes all argument for AGW.
So, relax, have a beer or sip some vin by the fireside and reflect on the blessings of increased atmospheric CO2 and enjoy a longer, happier life.
That is a strong claim, but I don’t think the paper proof anything at all.
First of all, the paper is written by John McLean who also predicted that 2011 would be cold:http://climaterealists.com/index.php?id=7349
This paper concludes with claiming that:
However, no cause is given for why there has been a shift in the Enso conditions or cloud cover.
I remind that Enso refers to the effects of a band of sea surface temperatures which are anomalously warm or cold for long periods of time.
How can anyone think that the reason for the long term trend in the temperature increase of the air and sea is that the sea temperature is increasing?
That is pretty like saying that the sea temperature increases because the sea temperature increases. So now we know.
Perhaps you can also find a study which says that the reason for the high air temperature we record is that the air temperature is high nowadays.
John McLean may have right here that the cloud cover has decreased and the Enso has shifted, but makes no difference. He has to find the underlying causes for those changes before he can say that this is an alternative explanation to the warming.
/Jan
Jan,have you ever had a frontal lobotomy?
Mpainter….
…
Doesn’t a question like that, pointed directly at a commenter violate the policy of this site?
…
Specifically…“Respect is given to those with manners, those without manners that insult others or begin starting flame wars may find their posts deleted.”
..
http://wattsupwiththat.com/about-wuwt/policy/
” …. may find their posts deleted …. ” suggests a certain … flexibility … in the policy. Like guidelines as it were.
Because Jan, if you haven’t, you might consider getting one; it couldn’t hurt and it might help.
Jan Kjetil Andersen
Please explain why you questioned me on a statement I made in A DIFFERENT SUB-THREAD. It is only by chance that I noticed your questioning here, and my failure to answer could be misunderstood as inability to answer.
I thank Dr Norman Page for his provision of the answer.
Your reply to that answer says
So, not being right about one thing means a person is wrong about another. Well, that means we can reject all the works of Albert Einstein!
Not content with that, you continue your ‘moon is made of green cheese’ type of argument saying
No! The fact that there was more heating from MEASURED changes to cloud cover IS A COMPLETE EXPLANATION of the global warming for the reason you are challenging; i.e. I wrote
Importantly, I made a point of logic and repeated it and I have again repeated it in this post. That point is not “rhetoric” and is not “sarcasm”. It is a demonstration of your irrational assertions which induced mpainter to question your brain function.
I note that your apparently insane comments are supported by David Socrates, and that support combined with your starting another sub-thread induces me to wonder if that apparent insanity is pretended.
Richard
Sorry for that Richard, the only excuse I have is that I am not so used to using this new thread format.
Einstein was brilliant. I think his Nobel Prize winning paper about the Photoelectric effect is one of the most elegant bits of research ever. A quite simple experiment, which proved that x-rays exhibits the properties of particles. He later drew the conclusions from, among other the Lorentz transforms, and formulated the relativity theory which changed physics forever.
On the other hand, the man behind this paper is known to have predicted that 2011 would be the coldest year globally since 1956. He based this prediction on a peculiar idea he has about the ENSO as a major contributor to recent trends in global temperature. This idea is not shared with many other scientists and it therefore came as no surprise that the 2011 prediction turned out to be utterly nonsense.
He therefore has a rather bad track record and a comparison with Einstein is rather unfair for both of them.
And what caused the cloud cover to change?
Are you calling me insane?
I think that is rather hash words Richard. Why start throwing insults? I cannot see that you have any reason for using that aggression. If I have insulted you please explain where. I hope you choose your words with more modesty when you talk to people face to face.
/Jan
Jan,
Sorry, fellow, your excuses about confusing the threads does not wash.
Unless you are a very confused fellow, indeed….hmmm
In fact, thinking about it, I accept the excuse that you offered to Richard Courtney as the truth.
Jan Kjetil Andersen
I have NOT thrown any “insults”.
You ask me
NO. Read what I wrote.
I have repeatedly pointed out that your illogical assertions are based on your insane claim that ‘when something “cannot be ruled out” then it must be true’. And I demonstrated that your claim is insane by pointing out that one cannot rule out that the center of the Moon is made of green cheese so – according to your claim – the center of the Moon must be made of green cheese. Subsequently, I have repeatedly called your arguments based on your insane claim ‘Moon made of green cheese’ arguments.
Importantly, I wrote
Your question I am answering twists my words from clear statement that “your comments are apparently insane” to being an accusation that I am calling you insane. NO! I clearly stated that I think the insanity of your comments is pretended; i.e. you are a disruptive troll posting only utter nonsense as a method to disrupt the thread.
And you provide another insane assertion when you assert that you consider the value of information is dependent on your opinion of who provides it. NO! Your opinion on such things is worthless because it is insane. Information exists to be challenged: insulting or applauding the provider of information says nothing about the worth of the information.
Also, your switching sub-thread ploy failed so your worthless and ridiculous comments have been completely refuted. Therefore, I suggest you troll somewhere else.
Richard
And in all of this Jan escapes from his initial unsupported and deeply wrong claim that CO2 caused an increase in extreme weather events.
————————————————————-
Jan, please show your evidence for the C in CAGW.
David A
You ask the troll
Indeed, but the troll made no claim that he has any such evidence. Instead, he here made this insane assertion
I refuted that saying
etc.
He had no evidence. He did not claim to have any evidence. And he has no evidence.
He has only provided insane assertions because that is all he has.
Richard
check & mate (-;
David A
Yes, check & mate, but refuting trolls is more important than a mere game: a troll cannot learn but onlookers may be informed.
In this case, the troll was pushing the “cannot be ruled out” ploy.
You and I may recognise that the ploy is a denial of rational consideration. However, many people think “cannot be ruled out” is cogent, and that is why they buy tickets in the National Lottery each week.
This troll needed demolition because he was promoting the insanity of thinking anything which “cannot be ruled out” requires action, and that insanity can seem cogent to many.
Richard
And, give us an “A,” too.
(as in the “A” in AGW) — thanking you in advance, O Jan.
Richard and David, good for you that you have found each other. Perhaps you should socialize in real life too? You know face to face and not in front of a computer. If you go out in the real world you may discover that people may roll their eyes when you claim that there is no evidence for human caused climate changes.
Because a benefit with visiting blogs and discussing topics you are interested in with people with similar ideas can also be a curse. The benefit is to meet similar minded people and you may find that stimulating, but the curse is that you may not recognize that you have been part of a very marginal group.
You meet others on a blog, cheering each other up and quickly biting off any opposable views as insane and the opponents as someone who need lobotomy. People who turn to that antisocial behavior tend to have used too much time in front of a computer and too little time with real people.
Let me also go back to the topic of discussion and state some facts:
1. It is a fact that the temperature has increased and that the last decades has been the warmest in several hundred years.
2. It is a fact that the CO2 level is the highest in at least 800 000 years, probably 35 million years.
3. It is a fact that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. If the Earth had no greenhouse gases the average temperature on Earth would be about 33 degrees Celsius lower than it is today.
Virtually all scientists in the world agree on the points above. As far as I have seen Lord Monckton and
Anthony also agrees on this. To call it insane doesn’t help. Most people just laugh of those who deny this.
I will not hold you here anymore because I find this discussion very tiresome and because I really mean you
should turn off the computer, go out and meet the world.
/Jan
Jan Kjetil Andersen January 6, 2015 at 11:56 am
If you go out in the real world you may discover that people may roll their eyes when you claim that there is no evidence for human caused climate changes.
—————————————————
Oh no, not this one again. On the other thread, where the appeal to authority was to “most people”, Jan came up with a computer model for concrete degradation. I kid you not.
Come on Jan, pray tell what is the evidence. Ask any of your eye-rolling friends for help, and when they can’t do it, please instruct them that eye-rolling does not count as scientific data.
I fully expect a stupid evasive response but, as Richard says, this is for onlookers watching you get your ass kicked, not you.
philincalifornia says: January 6, 2015 at 12:11 pm
Evidence for What?
I remind you that I started this thread by saying that I found Moncktons claim illogical , when he says:
This claim looks like an attempt to falsify of the theory that some of the recent extreme weather can be explained by global warming.
I do not need to prove that recent extreme weather has been caused by global warming to disprove Moncktons claim. I only have to prove that his claim doesn’t hold as a falsification.
My argument is that since we know that the last decade has been the warmest decade in several centuries we cannot rule out that there is a causal effect between the recent extreme weather event and this high temperature. The fact that the temperature rise in the last 15 years has been small, or nil, does not change this.
/Jan
philincalifornia
The strongest validation of an hypothesis is that it makes valid prediction.
Your hypothesis that the troll had pretended to have evidence which he lacks induced your prediction that said to the troll
That prediction was because the troll had written
and you had replied by quoting that statement verbatim and asking for its justification by writing
The troll began his stupid evasive response by asking
There could not be a more stupid and more evasive response from the troll than a question as to what the troll had said which had been quoted verbatim and the troll had been asked to justify!
Quad Erat Demonstrandum
Richard
A good debate can be inspiring, something to learn from, and perhaps others can learn from you.
This is the opposite. You seem not to understand my arguments and you don’t contribute with anything.
Throwing out words like “insane”, “stupid” and “troll” does not make up for and arguments with substance.
So have me excused, I have better things to do. I’m out of this.
/Jan
Jan,
Mr RichardSCourtney has yet to add anything positive to the discussions in this forum. All he does is play little word games with posters that do not toe the WUWT line. Take it as a honor to be called a “troll” by him. It means he has has resorted to his only means of argument, namely ad-hominen name calling.
Jan Kjetil Andersen
You say to me
Surely you jest!
You have only presented insane assertions and you have provided no “arguments” – none, zilch, nada – while I have contributed logical argument to refute each and every of the insane assertions.
My refutations induced David A to assess my logical demolition of your daft assertions by saying
As for you being supported by the ludicrous troll, David Socrates, I remind that I said to you
Importantly, you and that other troll ignore that you changed sub-thread in attempt to avoid discussion of my having cited albedo evidence when I wrote
Jan Kjetil Andersen, that is evidence. It is information people can learn from. It demolished your assertion. You tried a trick to avoid, it and you now insanely assert that I “don’t contribute with anything”.
You have provided your latest insane assertion – supported by Socrates – as a method to deflect from the fact that philincalifornia asked you a question about what you had written and he made this correct prediction
Onlookers can and will learn from your failure to answer the question from philincalifornia which was
Richard
“As the Pope unwisely prepares to abandon forever the political neutrality that his office enjoins upon him, and to put his signature to a climate-Communist encyclical largely drafted by the radical Prefect of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Mgr. Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, the Almighty continues to display a sense of humor.”
Though I do believe that God is, indeed, showing us his true sense of humor, I do not believe that the Roman Catholic Church, or any other church, has ever been very politically neutral irrespective of any of their stated internal policies. Depends upon who is running the show.
Thanks, Christopher, Lord Monckton.
On February 15 ’15 it will be 451 years from the birth in Pisa, Italia, of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642); The first scientist.
And the catholic church are about to make the same mistake again?
I’m one member they’re gonna loose.
BTW (off-topic):
http://sealevel.colorado.edu/ continues to be off-line. It’s now a couple of days.
This was another excellent post and monthly synopsis from Christopher Monkton, in a series I have been following for several months now.
Also a great read and some fascinating discussions in the comments.
The whole thing about global averaged temperatures and gridding, etc., has done my head in before so I won’t go there! Let alone now they’re bringing in different strata in the ocean which don’t thermodynamically communicate with each other. That’s like three dimesional nija chess man!
Personally, I’m always suspicious when something appears to defy the the laws of physics.
As for the pope, well… I think everyone who is anyone (hint: it’s not you and me) is jockeying for position in the next, new, shiny world-order banking system, government sytem, religion and monetary system. If climate change can become a world religion then surely all religious leaders of “all faiths” can “come together” and drink the Cool-Aid. It’s for the children!.
Bottom line: it doesn’t matter what you believe anymore. You just have to obey the new order. Got it?
With all due respect, I live just above ground, not in the troposphere (where only hot air baloonists spend some time, once in a while),
The troposphere extends to the ground, so you do live there, and the minor surface warming we have seen has been, in conjunction with CO2, hugely beneficial.
You live outside! Wow! Tropics? Most of us here probably live in a structure designed to protect us from the atmosphere. 🙂 Cave men as cave can be. Cheers!
I forgot to add that the headline graph is displayed and updated every month at my “workstation” over the last several months.
I like RSS because it is from space, platinum resistance thermometers, etc.. It is measuring the earth as a whole. What is there not to like? As another contributor mentioned, surely this should be the best test of the models – lower tropospheric hotspot and all that?
This kind of fact – the 18 year pause – is something that is, generally speaking, simply missing in the official climate narrative. Making people aware of this is something I do to the point it annoys them, and then I stop (I have to work with these people).But it has become a monthly ritual of late, to replace last month’s graph (at my workstation) with the latest from the good Lord Monkton.
Forget the pause follow the cooling trend see my earlier comment and just update the following graph monthly
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1980.1/plot/rss/from:1980.1/to:2003.6/trend/plot/rss/from:2003.6/trend
see my post
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2014/07/climate-forecasting-methods-and-cooling.html
for details and cooling forecasts.
What, do you think they dangle platinum resistance thermometers from space? They are measuring microwave data, which has to be calibrated based on surface or weather balloon measurements.
“platinum resistance thermometers”
Monkton is wrong. they dont use these to measure the temperature.
They dont measure temperature at all.
Gee, Mosh, we used PRTs in our metrology lab all the time to measure temperature. They are very accurate.
Mosher is correct. They use platinum resistance thermometers to measure the temperature of the immediate confines of the satellite, and then calibrate their microwave sensors against that, and against outer space itself. The temperatures reported by the satellite are derived from microwave emissions of oxygen molecules know to vary linearly with temperature in the atmosphere. So the satellite directly measures microwave emissions and calculates temperature from them, the PRT exists only to assist in calibration.
Surprisingly, the accuracy is only +/- one degree:
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/01/how-the-uah-global-temperatures-are-produced/
Neither do other thermometers, they measure the temperature coefficient of expansion of mercury or alcohol, or temperature coefficient of resistance or electron hole production in the region of a semiconductor junction.
More or less what david hoffer said, the PRTs are used to measure the temperature of the warm target (300K +/- 0.2 K) in the MSU/AMSU. The cold target is deep space (2.73K). The cold and hot targets are used to calibrate the microwave unit. That is only a tenth of it.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdr/operationalcdrs.html
Barry, Mosher, were did Monckton say that the RSS satellites dangled PRTs from them to measure T?
davidm, where do you get that. for these, http://us.flukecal.com/products/temperature-calibration/probessensors/5624-platinum-resistance-thermometer-1000-%C2%B0c?quicktabs_product_details=2
I show far greater calibration accuracy.
Reblogged this on leclinton and commented:
This should be spread everywhere THX Lord Monckton
I have to say that is only in the benefit of the large public to have more sides of the climate change story. And I am not sure that scientist even have the same opinion, so it is really great that more and more people share their views. My opinion is that oceans have a big contribution in the climate change and that, by affecting the oceans with their wars, humans affected climate (see http://www.1ocean-1climate.com). There are many that do not agree with me, but I think is it very important that people realize that global warming may be a problem.
diogenesnj January 4, 2015 at 6:48 am
Really? Is the GHCN data raw or based on adjusted data? I would hardly trust NOAA historical data based on the fact they scrub the past and “adjust” data to support the meme. Thank God for the wayback!
Actually the RSS temperature trend is 0.12 C/decade if you go back to 1980 (12-month moving average).
Barry for meaningful temperature trends see
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1980.1/plot/rss/from:1980.1/to:2003.6/trend/plot/rss/from:2003.6/trend
The warming trend 1980 – 2003 is about 0.16/decade. There is a slight cooling since then . I’m anticipating a sharper drop 2017-18. see post linked above at 9:13 AM today.
By COP15 in Paris, it should be 19+ years. Irony.
Lots of arguments, name calling,demonizing, professional jealously, posturing, turf protecting, useless charts and graphics, accusations, desperate mathematical juggling, face saving, money grabbing…all of which from a group who will not admit their 1980s prophecies grow cold. So tiresome and insignificant it is. Can anyone stand in their own place in life and see an ounce of catastrophic global warming climate change disruption? All mud throwing to see what sticks. Preach it till they believe it. Happy New Year! (debate blended Scotch vs single malt, its more fun) 🙂
The heat is hiding in the deep ocean contradicts the warmists assertion that there that there is very limited mixing of the deep ocean and the surface ocean. If there is significant mixing of the deep ocean and the surface ocean the anthropogenic emitted CO2 would be mitigated by the large deep ocean sink.
As noted in this thread summary there is no physical explanation as how heat could move into the deep ocean.
The warmists are ignoring an observational paradox. Atmospheric CO2 is increasing, planetary temperature is not. A plateau in warming, as opposed a reduction in the slope of warming creates the paradox.
There are periods in the paleo record of millions of years when atmospheric CO2 was high and the planet was cold and visa verse. That observational fact supports the assertion that there is something fundamental incorrect with AGW theory. (Part of the error is warmist assumption that the planet amplifies forcing changes (positive feedback). There is direct observational evidence that planet resists forcing changes negative feedback.)
The tropical troposphere at 8km has not warmed due to CO2 increase which supports the assertion that there is something in the upper troposphere that is inhibiting the AWG mechanism in that region of the atmosphere. The tropical troposphere warming is a key signature of AGW and is a major source of the AGW forcing. The tropical troposphere warming if it occurred would warm the tropics due to infrared downward radiation.
The CO2 mechanism is saturated in the lower atmosphere. The most amount of warming due to the CO2 increase was predicted at 8km in the tropical troposphere as there is less water higher in the atmosphere (water vapour reduces the CO2 forcing as it shares an absorption frequency band) and there are less CO2 molecules higher in the atmosphere initially due to the reduction in density with elevation.
To highfly 56433,
You are right, I live under the tropics (7° N), so does my garden, many plants there don’t like it when it gets too hot : 33° is fine, 36 is not, and they start wilting.
FTA: “It is still unclear how the heat is transferring to the deeper ocean.”
The Immaculate Convection. Every good religion needs a miracle or two.
+1 ^^
Priceless. I’m going to use that one!
Is THAT why the Pope is onboard?
To highflIGHT 56433 (sorry for the earlier typo).
Try it with rice : beyond 35°, grain filling is severely affected (impacted?).
Meanwhile down under, Antarctic sea ice is soaring way above 2SDs around the recent mean, just as the “hottest year on record” ends:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/S_stddev_timeseries.png
And the South Pacific looks set for a La Niña development in 2015.
Phlogiston, since we’re trusting the NSIDC today, what do they have to say about Arctic sea ice extent?
You won’t find anyone here who disbelieves recent Arctic ice decline. The record of this starts generally at 1979, conveniently for some since before that year it had been increasing for a couple of decades.
Phlogiston,
The NSIDC for the Arctic plot shows the same date range as the Antarctic, 1981:
http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png
KNMI has data back to November ’79 for both. I get losing the last two months of that year, but why 1980? Not full enough seasonal cycles that early in the record perhaps? Data quality?
Ancillary questions all. My main point is of course that once again we’re seeing opposite things at opposite poles and this year the Arctic trend looks to be headed toward peeking out of the 2-sigma envelope. As well, my obligatory warmista reminder that over the record from 1979 the net loss of ice area [1] is ~3% for both poles combined. The better comparator would be ice volume, but unfortunately there isn’t a readily available PIOMAS-like volume calculation for the Antarctic that I know of. I gather that this is because fancy robo-subs aside, Antarctic sea ice thickness is still considered too poorly estimated to publish a regular time series. Conventional wisdom still maintains that Antarctic sea ice is thinner by virtue of the fact that it’s not surrounded by land and is therefore much freer to spread out in extent in a way that’s not comparably indicative to the Arctic in terms of total actual ice.
I don’t know what the net loss figure would be if I had it at the ready, but for the Arctic it’s impressive: 40.5% estimated volume loss against a 14.8% estimated loss in area. The Antarctic gain in area is 11.0%, but the ice is maybe half as thick on average or less? I really do wish I knew that answer. [2]
Final nudge to not forget about the land ice. According to GRACE, the NH is still the hands-down winner with Greenland liquefying over three and a half times faster than Antarctica in terms of Gigatonnes of mass over the period 2004-2013 which is the latest data I can coax out of KNMI. It’s roughly 290 Gt/yr for Greenland, 80 Gt/yr for Antarctica. So, whatever confluence of factors is causing the Southern Ocean freeze more in the winter down under, just a tad further south where one would also naively expect things to be cooler, the ice shelves and fully landed stuff doesn’t seem to have gotten the memo.
——————
[1] Ice area, not ice extent. I’m not a fan of the ice extent calculation because it feels black box to me — if 15% of some unknown to me grid square is covered in ice, it’s counted as fully covered. I therefore consider the ice area figures to be the more conservative estimate, if not perhaps more accurate.
[2] It would be nice if I could get a whole-world ice index in comparable units of mass and/or volume, separated out by region, not anomalized so that I could do direct percentage comparisons like I can with PIOMAS. The ‘G’ in AGW stands for global, and I tire of the consensus team giving me partial data — either anecdotally by press release or in nasty unit conversion ways so that I can’t readily get the Big Picture view of what’s happening on balance. This drives me to nearly much distraction as contrarian tunnel vision of favored metrics. If I can’t find such an index, I may just have to roll my own.
Global temperature : Past, present and the future trends
http://www.capetown.travel/cache/ce_cache/made/TableMountain_580_387_80_s.jpg
Nice image of Table Mountain, thanks!
The same fractal pattern and process underlies both mountain profiles, coastlines and climate fluctuations.
So a great analogy.
Capetown!
But what’s the connection, Vuk?
Form of the Table Mountain’s silhouette, rise since 1970’s. 1998 peak, GT’s Grand Plateau (not a pause, please !) and inevitable cooling to follow.
Ah! Yes I see.
By the way, a very nice picture.
The historical climatic record and CO2 record very clearly show that there is NO relationship between CO2 concentrations and global temperatures. It can not be much clearer.
With Antarctica Sea Ice at record high deviation ,global sea surface temp. no longer rising especially S.H. global snow cover at least average, AGW in my opinion is already obsolete. Next shoe to drop will be a well definitive global temp. decline which will finally end this ridiculous stupid theory.
I expect a decline in global temperatures starting in year 2015 and continuing for several years to come in response to prolonged minimum solar conditions which should intensify going forward.
My Lord Monckton may wish to correct an error in “Reference 1” which currently reads “Accessed 1 July 2014” – a non-credible date, since Figure 1 (based on it) refers to December 2014 data – being 18 years 3 months since the start of October 1996.
Thanks again for the monthly update and with the la-nina that will probably happen in 2015 it will still be getting longer. All those hoping for a natural el-nino variation to save their models and break the run must be sobbing in their drinks.
Maybe in the future you could include a “How long has it been with temperatures falling” graph. Playing around with woodfortrees I’m getting 7-10 years depending on the dataset but I have not done the statistical significance part.
Thanks again.
PS. Might I suggest an elephant ride into Paris seeing as you’ve already done the sky dive thing 🙂
See
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1980.1/plot/rss/from:1980.1/to:2003.6/trend/plot/rss/from:2003.6/trend
What are the current pause lengths in the other 3 (UAH, GISS, HADCRUT)? If memory serves RSS is the longest, but the rest are over 13 years.
UAH version 5.5 is flat for 6 years and 6 months and version 5.6 is a few months less.
UAH 5.5 negative to June 2008
UAH 5.6 negative to December 2008
GISS is negative only since August 2014.
Hadcrut4.3 is negative only since March 2014.
Note that the above only go to November at this point.
If you are using such short intervals to determine trends, what’s your take on this?
..
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:2011/plot/rss/from:2011/trend
Below a certain number of years, any trend is meaningless. That is why I would say “The slope is not flat for any period that is worth mentioning.” in my own reports if the trend is flat for less than a year. And a period of 4 years that starts with either an El Nino or a La Nina is particularly meaningless.
In logic, trend following is the “hot hands fallacy”
When is one year, fractionally warmer then 1998 or 2010, statistically meaningful, and much more importantly, when is it meaningful to confirmation of the theory of CAGW?
A single hot year would not make a huge difference. See the following where the period of statistical significance for GISS is still going back to 2000.
http://moyhu.blogspot.com.au/p/temperature-trend-viewer.html
Mr. Monckton,
Could you expand on the bit at the end about ocean temperatures? You said that converting to temperature change is “highly revealing”, but did not explain what it reveals. All we are left with is the vague notion that perhaps a 0.037 K increase in 94 months (assuming your calculations are correct) is not that much, which, left unexplained, strikes a similar vein to the “CO2 only occupies x% of the atmosphere” argument as solely an appeal to small numbers.
Thank you.
It reveals that their is no “C” in CAGW. A 0.037 K increase n the ocean T, will not raise the atmospheric T by more then that. In the mean time the benefits of CO2 increase will continue.
I’m not so sure that one factoid alone can prove or disprove such a thing.
Perhaps not. But steadily increasing ocean temperatures does seem to reveal that global warming has not paused at all, does it not? Aren’t the oceans part of the globe? I think it would be even more revealing to compare Joules to Joules here, to account for mass and specific heat capacities.
In 2001 this paper was published (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/292/5515/267.short) finding anomalies of 18.2 x 10^22 J (ocean) and 0.66 x 10^22 J (air) from 1955-2001. Considering just these two things, the total heat imbalance then would be 18.86 x 10^22 J from 1955-2001, or about 4.1 x 10^22 per decade.
Mr. Monckton states that over 94 months 2005-2013 the oceans absorbed 10 x 10^22 J. So by his own figure (and assuming 0 warming of the atmosphere), the heat imbalance is now rising at 12.8 x 10^22 J per decade.
So by his own figure, global warming has accelerated, seemingly contradicting his opening statement “Since October 1996 there has been no global warming at all”.
Curiously enough, he left that last bit out of his post.
“Themaster15” should not be silly. The head posting chiefly concerns itself with the rate of global warming. If – and it is a big if – the rate of global warming during eight years of record global CO2 emissions is equivalent to just under 0.5 K/century, then there is no climate crisis.
Mr. Monckton,
Thank you for taking the time to respond. You may be correct that 0.5 K per century of atmospheric warming is nothing to worry about. It seems to me though that an accelerating intake of heat (my definition of “global warming”) cannot be good even if the oceans and ice sheets are absorbing it all at the present time. I am sure you can see why, from a thermodynamics perspective, the claim global warming has stopped while it has actually accelerated strikes me as odd.
“Themaster15” has failed to understand that there are fewer uncertainties in establishing global air temperature change than in attempting to estimate global ocean temperature change. Each ARGO buoy has to cover some 300,000 cu. km of ocean. As Willis Eschenbach has pointed out, this is equivalent to taking a single temperature and salinity profile of the whole of Lake Superior less than once a year and expecting to obtain reliable and useful results.
We have no idea whether ocean heat content is increasing as NOAA says it is, or at all. ARGO is the least ill-resolved method we have, and it does not show ocean heat content rising anything like as fast as NOAA would like us to believe. As the head posting points out, the NOAA estimate of ocean heat content change is extreme, and appears unwarranted by measurement. It seems to be the result of modeling, not of measuring.
At present we do not have enough resolution in measuring ocean temperatures to know whether they are increasing or not. However, if RSS are right in finding that there has been no global warming of the air for 18 years 3 months, then it is very likely that there has been no global warming of the oceans over the same period.
At 2:01 PM on 7 January, Monckton of Brenchley had observed:
Mr. Monckton seems to be putting it too goddam charitably. The NOAA claim that “greenhouse gas” thermal energy is somehow transiting the surface and photic levels of the ocean to descend, in the style of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms directly into the hadropelagic zone without raising the temperatures of the liquid volumes immediately beneath the keels of oceangoing vessels is…well, let’s say extraordinary, not to mention friggin’ preposterous.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence in order to be received as anything less than blowin’-it-out’n-yer-tochus fantasmagorical, right?
Given Mr. Eschenbach‘s homely but illuminating comment about the ARGO system’s coverage of the oceans’ 300,000 cubic kilometers of volume as being equivalent to checking one temperature reading and a single aliquot of the water off Thunder Bay, Ontario, for a measure of electrolytes and claiming that these measurements represent the whole of Lake Superior throughout the course of a year, and the ARGO buoy system gives NOAA the best possible instrumental assessment of deep-ocean temperatures and haline characteristics with THAT set of observations showing dit in the way of warming, then any allegedly competent technical “expert” on any federal government payroll who pushes a bootless, rootless, blankly unsupported claim of miraculous deep-ocean warming as if it’s a matter of fact is very likely committing malfeasance in public office, and should be investigated with an eye to prosecution.
I’d like see these critters constrained for ten or fifteen years to report temperature and relative humidity readings from secure residence within the penal facilities maintained by our federal government in Leavenworth, Kansas.
Given that the “global warming” lacks the properties of a measure in the mathematical theory of measure (see my Jan. 6 at 9:27 am post for proof ), does the claim that “there has been no global warming” mean what people think it means? I doubt it. I think people take the “global warming” to be an example of a measure for it sounds as though it is the difference between two temperatures and this difference is an example of a measure.
” does the claim that “there has been no global warming” mean what people think it means? ”
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You are confused about the misinterpretation.
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The RSS data shows “there has been no global warming”
The RSS data shows “there has been no global cooling”
The RSS data also shows you can’t say there has been anything.
In fact, at the 2-sigma level of confidence, the RSS data shows……. NOTHING
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If you go to 1-sigma significance the discussion changes.
Mr. Monckton,
I will certainly look into the methods and data collected by ARGO, as well as the climate records they used pre-ARGO. However, I think it is fair to say that we know ocean temperatures are increasing. We have sea level rise, arctic sea ice decline, Greenland ice mass decline, and despite some antarctic ice growth, there is a net decline in antarctic mass, all in addition to the ocean heat content data collected by NOAA. Thus it appears there is still a net heating of the planet, even (especially) since 1996.