Global temperature update: no warming for 18 years 4 months
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Since December 1996 there has been no global warming at all (Fig. 1). This month’s RSS temperature – so far unaffected by the most persistent el Niño conditions of the present rather attenuated cycle – shows a new record length for the ever-Greater Pause: 18 years 4 months – and counting.
This result rather surprises me. I’d expected even a weak el Niño to have more effect that this, but it is always possible that the temperature increase that usually accompanies an el Niño will come through after a lag of four or five months. On the other hand, Roy Spencer, at his always-to-the-point blog (drroyspencer.com), says: “We are probably past the point of reaching a new peak temperature anomaly from the current El Niño, suggesting it was rather weak.” I shall defer to the expert, with pleasure. For if la Niña conditions begin to cool the oceans in time, there could be quite some lengthening of the Pause just in time for the Paris world-government summit in December.
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 4 months since December 1996.
The hiatus period of 18 years 4 months, or 220 months, is the farthest back one can go in the RSS satellite temperature record and still show a sub-zero trend.
Given that the Paris summit is approaching and most “world leaders” are not being told the truth about the Pause, it would be a great help if readers were to do their best to let their national negotiators and politicians know that unexciting reality continues to diverge ever more spectacularly from the bizarre “settled-science” predictions on which Thermageddon was built.
The divergence between the models’ predictions in 1990 (Fig. 2) and 2005 (Fig. 3), on the one hand, and the observed outturn, on the other, also continues to widen, and is now becoming a real embarrassment to the profiteers of doom – or would be, if the mainstream news media were actually to report the data rather than merely repeating the failed predictions of catastrophe.
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), for the 303 months January 1990 to March 2015 (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.
Figure 3. Predicted temperature change, January 2005 to March 2015, 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 near-zero observed anomalies (dark blue) and real-world trend (bright blue), taken as the mean of the RSS and UAH satellite lower-troposphere temperature anomalies.
The Technical Note has now been much expanded to take account of the fact that the oceans, according to the ARGO bathythermograph data, are scarcely warming.
Key facts about global temperature
Ø The RSS satellite dataset shows no global warming at all for 220 months from December 1996 to March 2014 – more than half the 435-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 The oceans, according to the 3600+ ARGO bathythermograph buoys, are warming at a rate equivalent to just 0.02 Cº per decade, or 0.2 Cº per century.
Ø Recent extreme weather cannot be blamed on global warming, because there has not been any global warming to speak of. 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.
The RSS dataset is arguably less unreliable than other datasets in that it shows the 1998 Great El Niño more clearly than all other datasets (though UAH runs it close). 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. Besides, there is in practice little statistical difference between the RSS and other datasets over the 18-year period of the Great Pause.
Terrestrial temperatures are measured by thermometers. Thermometers correctly sited in rural areas away from manmade heat sources show warming rates below those that are published. The satellite datasets are based on reference 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.
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. T1:
Figure T1. 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.
Curiously, Dr Mears prefers the much-altered terrestrial datasets to the satellite datasets. However, over the entire length of the RSS and UAH series since 1979, the trends on the mean of the terrestrial datasets and on the mean of the satellite datasets are near-identical. Indeed, the UK Met Office uses the satellite record to calibrate its own terrestrial record.
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. It remains possible that el Nino-like conditions may prevail this year, reducing the length of the Great Pause. However, the discrepancy between prediction and observation continues to widen.
Sources of the IPCC projections in Figs. 2 and 3
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 – the most important of the “broad-scale features of climate change” that the models were supposed to predict – is now below half what the IPCC had then predicted.
In 1990, the IPCC said this:
“Based on current models we predict:
“under the IPCC Business-as-Usual (Scenario A) emissions of greenhouse gases, a rate of increase of global mean temperature during the next century of about 0.3 Cº per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2 Cº to 0.5 Cº per decade), this is greater than that seen over the past 10,000 years. This will result in a likely increase in global mean temperature of about 1 Cº above the present value by 2025 and 3 Cº before the end of the next century. The rise will not be steady because of the influence of other factors” (p. xii).
Later, the IPCC said:
“The numbers given below are based on high-resolution models, scaled to be consistent with our best estimate of global mean warming of 1.8 Cº by 2030. For values consistent with other estimates of global temperature rise, the numbers below should be reduced by 30% for the low estimate or increased by 50% for the high estimate” (p. xxiv).
The orange region in Fig. 2 represents the IPCC’s less extreme medium-term Scenario-A estimate of near-term warming, i.e. 1.0 [0.7, 1.5] K by 2025, rather than its more extreme Scenario-A estimate, i.e. 1.8 [1.3, 3.7] K by 2030.
Some try to say the IPCC did not predict the straight-line global warming rate that is shown in Figs. 2-3. In fact, however, the IPCC’s predicted global warming over so short a term as the 25 years from 1990 to the present are little different from a straight line (Fig. T2).
Figure T2. Historical warming from 1850-1990, and predicted warming from 1990-2100 on the IPCC’s “business-as-usual” Scenario A (IPCC, 1990, p. xxii).
Because this difference between a straight line and the slight uptick in the warming rate the IPCC predicted over the period 1990-2025 is so small, one can look at it another way. To reach the 1 K central estimate of warming since 1990 by 2025, there would have to be twice as much warming in the next ten years as there was in the last 25 years. That is not likely.
Likewise, to reach 1.8 K by 2030, there would have to be four or five times as much warming in the next 15 years as there was in the last 25 years. That is still less likely.
But is the Pause perhaps caused by the fact that CO2 emissions have not been rising anything like as fast as the IPCC’s “business-as-usual” Scenario A prediction in 1990? No: CO2 emissions have risen rather above the Scenario-A prediction (Fig. T3).
Figure T3. CO2 emissions from fossil fuels, etc., in 2012, from Le Quéré et al. (2014), plotted against the chart of “man-made carbon dioxide emissions”, in billions of tonnes of carbon per year, from IPCC (1990).
Plainly, therefore, CO2 emissions since 1990 have proven to be closer to Scenario A than to any other case, because for all the talk about CO2 emissions reduction the fact is that the rate of expansion of fossil-fuel burning in China, India, Indonesia, Brazil, etc., far outstrips the paltry reductions we have achieved in the West to date.
True, methane concentration has not risen as predicted in 1990 (Fig. T4), for methane emissions, though largely uncontrolled, are simply not rising as the models had predicted, and the predictions were extravagantly baseless.
The overall picture is clear. Scenario A is the emissions scenario from 1990 that is closest to the observed emissions outturn, and yet there has only been a third of a degree of global warming since 1990 – about half of what the IPCC had then predicted with what it called “substantial confidence”.
Figure T4. Methane concentration as predicted in four IPCC Assessment Reports, together with (in black) the observed outturn, which is running along the bottom of the least prediction. This graph appeared in the pre-final draft of IPCC (2013), but had mysteriously been deleted from the final, published version, inferentially because the IPCC did not want to display such a plain comparison between absurdly exaggerated predictions and unexciting reality.
To be precise, 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 and UAH monthly global mean surface temperature anomalies – is 0.35 Cº, equivalent to just 1.4 Cº/century, or a little below half of the central estimate of 0.70 Cº, equivalent to 2.8 Cº/century, that was predicted for Scenario A in IPCC (1990). The outturn is visibly well below even the least estimate.
In 1990, the IPCC’s central prediction of the near-term warming rate was higher by two-thirds than its prediction is today. Then it was 2.8 C/century equivalent. Now it is just 1.7 Cº equivalent – and, as Fig. T5 shows, even that is proving to be a substantial exaggeration.
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.
Actually, it is not known whether the ocean is warming: each of the 3600 automated ARGO bathythermograph buoys somehow has to cover 200,000 cubic kilometres of ocean – a 100,000-square-mile box more than 316 km square and 2 km deep. Plainly, the results on the basis of a resolution that sparse (which, as Willis Eschenbach puts it, is approximately the equivalent of trying to take a single temperature and salinity profile taken at a single point in Lake Superior less than once a year) are not going to be a lot better than guesswork.
Fortunately, a long-standing bug in the ARGO data delivery system has now been fixed, so I am able to get the monthly global mean ocean temperature data – though ARGO seems not to have updated the dataset since December 2014. However, that gives us 11 full years of data. Results are plotted in Fig. T5. The ocean warming, if ARGO is right, is equivalent to just 0.02 Cº decade–1, or 0.2 Cº century–1 equivalent.
Figure T5. The entire near-global ARGO 2 km ocean temperature dataset from January 2004 to December 2014 (black spline-curve), with the least-squares linear-regression trend calculated from the data by the author (green arrow).
Finally, though the ARGO buoys measure ocean temperature change directly, before publication NOAA craftily converts the temperature change into zettajoules of ocean heat content change, which make the change seem a whole lot larger.
The terrifying-sounding heat content change of 260 ZJ from 1970 to 2014 (Fig. T6) is equivalent to just 0.2 K/century of global warming. All those “Hiroshima bombs of heat” are a barely discernible pinprick. The ocean and its heat capacity are a lot bigger than some may realize.
Figure T6. Ocean heat content change, 1957-2013, in Zettajoules from NOAA’s NODC Ocean Climate Lab: http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT, with the heat content values converted back to the ocean temperature changes in fractions of a Kelvin that were originally measured. NOAA’s conversion of the minuscule temperature change data to Zettajoules, combined with the exaggerated vertical aspect of the graph, has the effect of making a very small change in ocean temperature seem considerably more significant than it is.
Converting the ocean heat content change back to temperature change reveals an interesting discrepancy between NOAA’s data and that of the ARGO system. Over the period of ARGO data, from 2004-2014, the NOAA data imply that the oceans are warming at 0.05 Cº decade–1, equivalent to 0.5 Cº century–1, or rather more than double the rate shown by ARGO.
ARGO has the better-resolved dataset, but since the resolutions of all ocean datasets are very low one should treat all these results with caution. What one can say is that, on such evidence as these datasets are capable of providing, the difference between underlying warming rate of the ocean and that of the atmosphere is not statistically significant, suggesting that if the “missing heat” is hiding in the oceans it has magically found its way into the abyssal strata without managing to warm the upper strata on the way. On these data, too, there is no evidence of rapid or catastrophic ocean warming.
Furthermore, 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.
If the “deep heat” explanation for the hiatus in global warming were 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.
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If trend lines are to have arrows, they should be at both ends.
“The fastest warming rate lasting ten years or more since 1950 occurred over the 33 years from 1974 to 2006.”
Is that what Lord Monckton really means? Wouldn’t any thirty-three-year interval other than one having an exactly linear progression necessarily include some ten-year sub-interval whose rate is higher? What am I missing?
[OK, enough about peerages and anything related. Stick to science. ~mod.]
To understand the reasons for climate change in the past then you need to understand what the weather was doing at the time. To me the extent of the ice sheets in the last ice age gives important clues to the general weather patterns at the time. The ice sheets in North America came down from the north. Which suggests that the “Arctic blast” winters that they have had for the last two years was a common weather pattern during the ice age. But in Europe the ice sheets came across from the NE or east not from the north. This suggests over europe there was a more zonal southern tracking jet stream weather pattern with frequent blocking highs sitting over northern most europe. With the Atlantic lows running along southern and central europe providing the snow for the ice sheets to form.
And once there was a two mile high dome of ice, that must have created effects of it’s own, from orographic enhancement of precipitation, deflecting the jets directly, etc.
The dome itself must have altered global circulation, and perhaps did so in unknown ways.
Yes l think the growing ice sheets over North America was the trigger for europe sliding into the ice age. Because of the effects it would of had on the northern Atlantic and the jet stream.
Reblogged this on The GOLDEN RULE and commented:
This significant to technical-minded people.
Apparently meaningless to the ‘warmist alarmists’ who live in a dream world. We were meant to be concerned about CO2 increases causing “global warming” effects that would be catastrophic to our way of life.
That “global warming” is not eventuating in the manner they assured us, what is their reaction? To blame predominately natural variations on this lack of global warming, call it ‘climate change’ due to carbon emissions.
A political excercise totally devoid of valid scientific foundation.
If you take a look at past Warm Periods, then notice how there is always a limit as to how high the warming reaches before it stops warming. After that point, even if the Warm Period carries on for another century or longer there is none or very little further rise in temperature values. To my eye, all of the previous Warm Periods show this feature. In that regard, it is very unlikely that there will be any further rise in the current Warm trend, even if lasts through the rest of this century before receding into the depths of the next cooling trend. Once again, historical data should take precedence over the warmists beliefs as to what is most likely to happen over the next century.
In answer to gold into, global temperature has been falling ever since the Holocene Climate Ootimum 10,000-6000 years ago.
I should have added a bit more description regarding what Warm Periods I was referring to. I meant the Medieval, Roman, Minoan, and similar Warm Periods. They last several centuries, but they reach their temperature peak fairly early in their development. After their peak the warm trend may continue for another century or longer without attaining a higher peak.
The longest and warmest of the warm periods in the present interglacial was the Holocene climate optimum, where (aside from a dip in the middle) temperature was uniformly somewhat higher than today and showed little trend for 4000 years. However, the trend since then has been a gentle decline. Let us hope it does not become a precipitate decline any time soon. Cold is a far greater killer than warmth. Warm periods were always called “optima” for that very reason. Now, of course, it is politically incorrect to call them “optima”.
Lest we forget, IPCC acknowledged in 2013 that the thermometer-based datasets show no trend from 1998-2012: “Regardless, all global combined LSAT and SST data sets exhibit a statistically non-significant warming trend over 1998–2012 (0.042°C ± 0.093°C per decade (HadCRUT4); 0.037°C ± 0.085°C per decade (NCDC MLOST); 0.069°C ± 0.082°C per decade (GISS)).” [AR5, WG1, Chapter 2, p. 194]
http://ipcc.wikia.com/wiki/152.4.3_Global_Combined_Land_and_Sea_Surface_Temperature
“El Ninyo or nyot?” What does “nyot” mean? That made me laugh out loud (in Spanish, of course 😉
MarkW sez (April 6, 2015 at 4:38 pm): “If you don’t know what the earth’s temperature was to a 1/10th C, then how can anyone claim with certainty that the earth has warmed by 0.5C?”
D’oh! That’s gonna leave a mark!
Great post.
But there is no such thing as ” p = .000″ –when the computer spits this out, we who unerstand what is really meant need to change it to “p <0.001" –with the "p" in italics – something I do not know how to do.
Off topic: below is a link about the China led AIIB to combat the US control of banking. Supposedly, the AIIB will make loans to develop coal facilities.
http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2015/04/the-asia-bank-freakout.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+powerlineblog%2Flivefeed+%28Power+Line%29
What does UAH show for the same 18 year 4 month period – sorry I couldn’t find it…?
In response to Mr Peterson, UAH shows 0.19 Celsius degrees of warming, which is equivalent to 1.05 Celsius per century – approximately in line with the centennial projection in Monckton et al., 2015, but about half the rate predicted by the IPCC.
Either added CO2 causes no detectable warming or those evil fossil fuels just prevented a slide toward another LIA, which is a very, very good thing.
OT but I’d like to say something about CO2. Life is its enemy. Since the Cambrian explosion, the trend has inevitably been downward as limestone from sea shells and fossil fuels from plants relentlessly build up. Sure, sometimes limestone and coal get subducted and belched out in volcanoes but they can’t keep up. Man to the rescue by burning fossil fuels. It almost makes one believe in divine guidance.
So to summarize, we have; no statistically significant change in temperatures while a statistically significant change in CO2 (that bas—d evil gas) has occurred, what to think, what to conclude, well… let’s try these possible conclusions;
1) A naturally occurring process (as yet not understood) has EXACTLY offset the Man Made Global Warming for 18 years, EXACTLY within a few tenths of a degree, YEAH RIGHT…..(look a unicorn, right there behind the squirrel).
2) The “greenhouse effect” has saturated and we can reasonably assume that no future additional warming can/will/might occur….. OH HAPPY DAYS our evil nemesis has been defeated without a single blow from our swords (or windmill blades, choose your weapons wisely young climate warrior).
OR
3) The greenhouse effect is NOW a dis-proven hypothesis…..
Nah, no way it could be behind door number 3, the fancy car is always behind door #1 or door #2, always….
Cheers, KevinK.
The strongest 63-yr string of solar cycles in 11,400 years occurred from 1933~1996.
When this strong string solar cycles ended in 1996, so did the global warming trend, despite 30% of all manmade CO2 emissions since 1750 being made just since 1996…
The PDO entered its 30-yr cool cycle in 2005, the AMO enters its 30-yr cool cycle from around 2024, the current solar cycle is the weakest since 1906, and the next solar cycle starting around 2022 is expected to be the weakest since the Maunder Minumum ended in 1715…
CO2’s paultry 2 watts/M^2 of forcing will not reverse the natural cooling factors currently in effect. CAGW erroneously overestimates CO2’s warming effect because the “runaway positive feedback loop” involving a rapid increase in water vapor isn’t happening.
Without this runaway water vapor feedback loop, CAGW projections will be off by a factor of 6~10…
CAGW is dead.
There is something else to note in that string of cycles. I mentioned this once before, and I still think the thought has merit. I noticed that during the intervals of the minima during those 6 cycles, the footprint of how many years the cycle stays at minimum was shorter than the minima of the 6 previous solar cycles by half approximately. During the period which you first point to the years at minimum is around 2 or less. In the previous 6 solar cycles, the minimum lasted approximately 4 years. The last minimum in 2008/09 returned to the longer minimum period of 4 years. Could it be that part of the natural warming is due to the Sun spending less years at minimum, and that cooling occurs when the minimum lasts the extra several years? In other words, 6 solar cycles of warming is then followed by 6 solar cycles of cooling. The depth of the cooling as well as the intensity of the warming would be influenced by the total current state of the climate system.
Lord Monckton you are my hero. Please take good care of yourself and watch your back!
“This is well within natural variability and may not have much to do with us.”
1. Anomalies
2. Rates
3. Kardashian Chaos (includes CO2).
For symmetric UAH alternatives, see here.
Having read most of the comments here for the past half hour, (like always) I come back to what SHOULD be said…
We don’t know.
We don’t know what dark energy is, or dark matter. We don’t actually know if dark matter actually is there at all. We don’t know if the Big Bang actually did occur. We don’t if there was sudden universal expansion three billion years after any Big Bang…or what caused it. We don’t know if there are parallel universes, how many, if they co-exist or are formed by actions. We don’t know if there are other dimensions, or how many. We don’t know if Pi repeats, or if we are living in a holographic universe. We don’t know if infinity is real.
All we know is that we will continue to kill each other based primarily on religious grounds, and that incompetent people will continue to rule our lives and tax us. Think on that while you start your day today.
“All we know is that we will continue to kill each other based primarily on religious grounds, and that incompetent people will continue to rule our lives and tax us. Think on that while you start your day today.”
Whoa. I’m new here. That’s heavy. Perhaps I shouldn’t hang around.
“History Repeats because the Passions of Man Never Change” …. Machiavelli
But hang on a minute. Last year Obama said that climate change was accelerating. He also said that scientists were surprised because there had been more warming than they expected.
Is it possible that the most powerful man in the world is confused and deluded about climate change? If so, then that is the real climate catastrophe.
Chris
Obama just bought a sea side mansion in Hawaii, that shows how much he is really worried about sea levels rising. Another liar at the public trough.
Why does that make him a liar? If he did buy that house that will eventually be affected by rising seas, that makes him a poor investor, not a liar.
It shows he doesn’t believe the stuff he’s trying to sell to the rest of us.
Last year Obama said that climate change was accelerating.
I think it is fair to say that the Climate Change movement is accelerating — all the way into Paris 2015. Data be damned, there are Government accomplishments at stake!
Mosher, what climate do climate models model?
Ask Monkton. He is the one peddling data that has been adjusted by the very models he criticizes.
Mr Mosher seems happy to accept the proven-erroneous predictions of the general-circulation models, but not happy to accept the RSS dataset, which is informed by a general-circulation model. Looks like cherry-picking to me.
And I don’t “peddle” the RSS or other temperature data. I merely plot it and determine elementary trends on it. For the reasons explained in the technical note, I think RSS is likely to be the best of the datasets: but, since 1979, it is not so vastly different from UAH, which has been running a little hot in the past decade or two.
As I understand things, v. 6 of the UAH data will reduce the hot running somewhat, bringing the dataset more closely into line with RSS. But all of the datasets are showing warming rates well below what the models predicted.
An imaginary one, useful for climateers, politicians, and others profiting from it.
RE: Accuracy of Argo (thread from April 6, 9:29
Taking the lesson from Willis’ Decimals of Precisions, For there to be a measured 0.02 deg C / decade, then it follows that there must be at no more than 0.01 deg C in error bar of any one year over an 11 year time span. We receive 100,000 Argo profile / year. It is not fair to say these are 100,000 measurements since there are many measurements per profile. But for the time being let’s stick with profiles for now.
If 100,000 profiles / year can give us 0.01 deg C accuracy, then
1,000 profile / year, 80 per month scattered around the globe, should give us 0.1 deg C accuracy. Does that seem reasonable?
If so, than 10 profiles / year, one random profile somewhere in the vast ocean every 5 weeks, will be sufficient to give the average temperature of the world’s oceans to 1.0 deg C. If you look at any of the Kelvin wave depth profiles, that accuracy seems to me to be wholly unrealistic.
If the last is unrealistically precise, then the first is unrealistically precise. 100,000 Argo profiles / per year is not enough to measure the worlds ocean average temperature (if conceptually there is such a thing) to an accuracy of 0.01 deg C.
Finally, the whole Decimials of Precision argument makes the OPTIMISTIC assumption that the measurements are independent of each other. The error bar gets bigger if there is autocorrelation between measurements — and with drifting thermometers, there is.
Obviously the AGW hypothesis is a complete scientific sham. And justifying spending hundreds of
billion to fight “nothing”. Well…
Common sense and logic tells you its for real but deny all you want more enlighted people are acting where you sit on your ass and botch about Obama night and day were not listening any longer.
The common sense and logic of a f*ckw!t may tell you that but, the scientific data doesn’t.
… which is quite possibly why more oil and gas is being, and is going to continue to be pumped out of the ground during this administration than ever before That’s how your enlightened people are acting.
It’s only one click away FFS:
http://shchurmoney.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/iea-forecast-of-us-oil-production-new-policies-scenario.png
U.S. oil production is up 16% year over year (2013 – 2014), thanks to fracking. This is a huge benefit for the country with no downside. But of course, there are always nay-sayers like Hood who want people to pay more for their energy use.
Mr Hood’s comment is strange. For the evidence presented in quite some detail in the head posting is that the specific short-term warming predictions made by the IPCC in 1990 and again in 2005 have not in fact come to pass, notwithstanding CO2 concentration rising at the IPCC’s “business-as-usual” rate. This information ought to indicate to an open-minded observer that some caution should be exercised before vastly expanding the State apparat and inflicting job-destroying costs on America that will not be inflicted on most of her competitors.
Tom Hood,
Aren’t you special! Tell us, who are the “enlightened” ones?
You? Your pals?
FYI: Obama and company are ‘acting’ contrary to the laws, the Constitution, and to the detriment of the U.S. of A.
Other than that, they’re a swell bunch of jamokes! Just like I’m sure you are.
Dear Lord Moncton:
Sorry, but there is no evidence for this pause. What there is evidence for is the early data being boiled down and the later data (to about 1998) being cooked up – that’s where the pre-pause trend comes from.
After about 1998 people like Mr. Watts made cooking the data a much higher risk proposition, and that’s the proximate cause of the pause; so, at least in that sense, climate change really is human caused.
The fun part is that the data may actually be showing a slow down in net longer term (1000+ years) change, but we have neither the definitions not the evidence needed to decide that one way or the other.
In response to Mr Murphy, even the late Dr Pachauri had gazed forth from his signal-box and noticed that the world was not really warming. In fact, in Melbourne in February 2013, a couple of months after the inadvertent delegate from Burma had told the Doha climate conference there’d been no warming for 16 years, Dr Pachauri said in Melbourne that there had been none for 17 years. Now it’s 18 years 4 months, according to RSS, and, as the head posting shows, the rate of warming taken as the mean of the RSS and UAH datasets is half of what the IPCC had predicted in 1990. And that’s even on the endlessly fiddled and tampered data.
The advantage of being able to demonstrate the failure of models even using the bent data is very great, because it removes one of the rat-holes down which these wretches would like to flee.
I’m very much looking forward to the long promised and much delayed v.6.0 of the UAH data, which – on early reports – was going to bring UAH (running rather hot in recent years) closer into line with RSS.
Of course, in all this the argument is about tenths and hundredths of a degree. That is why the slightest tampering on the part of the F. of D. makes such a large apparent difference. In the end, though, Anthony’s great work on the U.S. surface stations has indeed begun to introduce an element of honesty, though it is very sad that as yet the very small sums necessary to establish a global standardized network of high-quality, well-positioned measuring stations have not been spent. That would almost certainly show what the US climate-reference network is beginning to show: that there’s not very much warming going on.
Same applies in the oceans, where no one (till me) has begun to publish not merely the near-global ocean temperature anomalies but also the minuscule trend on those anomalies, brilliantly concealed by NOAA and other rent-seeking agencies by elaborately converting the bathythermographs’ temperature measurements to ocean heat content change, and then expressing that change in non-standard units designed to sound huge. In fact, as our technical note shows, the oceans – insofar as the ill-resolved ARGO network is capable of measuring the anomalies to a sufficient resolution – appear to be warming at the not particularly dizzying rate of 0.2 Celsius per century equivalent. The moment that interesting fact is made more widely known, there will be a lot less talk of how the “missing heat” is playing hide-and-seek with us and may come out and say “Boo!” one day.
There’s no substitute for the actual data in this debate. The very fact that so few of the graphs and data in these monthly reports appear anywhere in the Marxstream media tells you all you need to know about just how clearly they now realize the game is up and the scare is over. But that will not stop them making one last, vicious push towards establishing a totalitarian dictatorship on a global scale for the first time, coyly calling it a “governing body” but investing it with the tax-raising and regulatory powers of a global government. The Fascist Left want this very badly as payback for the defeat of the National Socialists in Germany and the International Socialists in the Soviet Union.
I shall be writing about the current Paris treaty draft shortly. It’s a lulu.
“But that will not stop them making one last, vicious push towards establishing a totalitarian dictatorship on a global scale for the first time, coyly calling it a “governing body” but investing it with the tax-raising and regulatory powers of a global government. The Fascist Left want this very badly as payback for the defeat of the National Socialists in Germany and the International Socialists in the Soviet Union.”
I don’t think this is what us climate hawks that are already being tangibly affected (see below for the description of my property) are looking for at all. We just think the shift to affordable clean energy makes sense and the time is now. It is not only cleaner, but (in the case of distributed solar in particular) represents a fundamental shift to a more independent life. With solar and electric cars the individual can get two monopolies off their back (electricity and gas) and literally empower themselves. This is now a cheap option that requires no dramatic R&D, just deployment.
Yes, it shakes the foundation of the most powerful entities of our modern world, and therefore I understand the false “debate”, but arguing this is about a socialist takeover is comical. Clean energy represents the exact opposite.
Paul Murphy says:
There is ‘no evidence’ of the 18 year pause in global warming,
That is only true if you refuse to accept satellite data — the most accurate data there is.
You’re a victim of your own confirmation bias. You refuse to face the fact that global warming has stopped. That makes you a charter member of the eco-religion of man-made global warming. The central tenet of that weird religion states that all facts and evidence contrary to your church’s teachings must be disregarded.
But this is a science site, not a religion blog, so you’re in the wrong place.