Patrick J. Michaels
Richard S. Lindzen
Paul C. Knappenberger
A new paper published today by Science, from Thomas Karl and several co-authors[1], that removes the “hiatus” in global warming prompts many serious scientific questions.
The main claim[2] by the authors that they have uncovered a significant recent warming trend is dubious. The significance level they report on their findings (.10) is hardly normative, and the use of it should prompt members of the scientific community to question the reasoning behind the use of such a lax standard.
In addition, the authors’ treatment of buoy sea-surface temperature (SST) data was guaranteed to create a warming trend. The data were adjusted upward by 0.12°C to make them “homogeneous” with the longer-running temperature records taken from engine intake channels in marine vessels.
As has been acknowledged by numerous scientists, the engine intake data are clearly contaminated by heat conduction from the structure, and as such, never intended for scientific use. On the other hand, environmental monitoring is the specific purpose of the buoys. Adjusting good data upward to match bad data seems questionable, and the fact that the buoy network becomes increasingly dense in the last two decades means that this adjustment must put a warming trend in the data.
The extension of high-latitude arctic land data over the Arctic Ocean is also questionable. Much of the Arctic Ocean is ice-covered even in high summer, meaning the surface temperature must remain near freezing. Extending land data out into the ocean will obviously induce substantially exaggerated temperatures.
Additionally, there exist multiple measures of bulk lower atmosphere temperature independent from surface measurements which indicate the existence of a “hiatus”[3]. If the Karl et al., result were in fact robust, it could only mean that the disparity between surface and midtropospheric temperatures is even larger that previously noted.
Getting the vertical distribution of temperature wrong invalidates virtually every forecast of sensible weather made by a climate model, as much of that weather (including rainfall) is determined in large part by the vertical structure of the atmosphere.
Instead, it would seem more logical to seriously question the Karl et al. result in light of the fact that, compared to those bulk temperatures, it is an outlier, showing a recent warming trend that is not in line with these other global records.
And finally, even presuming all the adjustments applied by the authors ultimately prove to be accurate, the temperature trend reported during the “hiatus” period (1998-2014), remains significantly below (using Karl et al.’s measure of significance) the mean trend projected by the collection of climate models used in the most recent report from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
It is important to recognize that the central issue of human-caused climate change is not a question of whether it is warming or not, but rather a question of how much. And to this relevant question, the answer has been, and remains, that the warming is taking place at a much slower rate than is being projected.
[1] Karl, T. R., et al., Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus. Scienceexpress, embargoed until 1400 EDT June 4, 2015.
[2] “It is also noteworthy that the new global trends are statistically significant and positive at the 0.10 significance level for 1998-2012…”
[3] Both the UAH and RSS satellite records are now in their 21st year without a significant trend, for example
[NOTE: An earlier version of this posting accidentally omitted the last two paragraphs before the graphic, they have been restored, and the error is mine – Anthony]
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so why to take my entry out and leave this one in?
Martin. Alarmism/Alarmist is merely a description of someone(s) getting their knickers twisted.
The D word is used upon us BY the twisted.
This is veering off-topic, but if you are a person who is concerned that anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions will cause a climate catastrophe, what would be a polite way to refer to you? I’m interested because I don’t like the d word used to describe me or even “skeptic” since it has overtones that suggest I’m questioning something settled.
If you can’t detect the difference in tone, then I pity you.
Because it’s site policy to erase comments that label us nay-sayers as “d*niers”. The moderator explained that beneath your deleted entry.
The ‘D’ word also has fairly obvious (and odious) historical connotations, ‘alarmism’ has no such baggage, simple.
The use of the D word is to draw parallels with those who dny the Holocaust. The term ”alarmist” is used to describe someone who has a disproportionate fear of something, often unwarranted.
Eamon.
Perhaps because your only throwing a tantrum since your comment got moderated. If you want to call people the word you got modded for head over to SKS. Of course they won’t let anyone over there call them names either so hopefully you’ll be complaining equally on both forums about the double standard.
For the record I don’t think Alarmist or Warmunist or whatever is appropriate either. The issue people here have with the D word is the obvious allusions to Holocaust conspiracy theorists. Given that the word is used no where else in science in the same way it’s used and other prominent scientists use of imagery such as Death Trains to describe trains of coal it’s pretty obvious what they are aiming for.
In the same regard Warmunist does no better as it is simply an obvious allusion to apparently communist tendencies that have caused millions of deaths around the world.
I support an objection to the word Warmunist. I don’t support the juvenile reason you are making it.
Just because the snake oil show is in town (Paris), it doesn’t mean everyone watching is buying. Many just come for the show and will walk away chuckling to themselves and humming the Gershwin tune “It ain’t necessarily so”.
The goal has always been a revenue bonanza from a carbon tax, since the day the thermostat was tampered with in Congressional hearings. This is just another step in that political quest.
From the caption for the bar graph:
100% – 2.4% = 97.6%. Oh noes, another 97% solution!
I can understand the reason for the attempted NOAA (Karl, T. R., et al. 2015) strategy on hiatus removal is due to a simple sobering fact. That fact is that when the surface temperature records don’t support any significant global warming from burning fossil fuels then NOAA’s current global warming endorsing staff has lost scientific credibility to such an extent that entire careers are in question.
John
Yep,
There are very few true climate scientists. Few of these people got into the field becuase they actually enjoy the study of climate.
Watch Lindzen, watch Bastardi, these are true climate scientists. They actually love what they are talking about. Now go watch Gavin, or Hansen, or Mann. Their clearly don’t love it. Its not their passion. Now when the start talking about carbon taxes, oh then their eyes light up. Then they get passionate.
Climate science is a bloated field with a bunch of streetlight socialists feeding at the trough. They know that without AGW the field goes back to what it was. A small backwater of science that only appeals to a few select people.
I’m not sure saving your career by claiming past incompetence is a real good strategy, but let them go for it.
Reminds me of this part of Angels and Demons, now with rolls reversed.
“As has been acknowledged by numerous scientists, the engine intake data are clearly contaminated by heat conduction from the structure, and as such, never intended for scientific use.”
Makes sense.
Also I can remember an old physics experiment where we tested the temperature of water in a blender before and after operation. After the blender ran, the temps were higher just from mechanical turbulence. Could this ever be applicable to hull turbulence?
Not only can mechanical energy warm water but turbulance could mix surface water with deeper cooler water.
Max
And when measuring ‘sea Surface’ temperature does the data include the draft level adjustment.
http://images.gizmag.com/hero/cscl-globe.jpg
unloaded and still getting intake water. What level when loaded, lot closer to the green paint line.
Hey, maybe we should measure air temperatures by placing thermometers inside of the intakes to air conditioning units and power plants?
Or maybe the intakes in the jet engines of airplanes?
Seems roughly similar to using ship intakes.
Oops… maybe I should not give the warmistas any new ideas.
Maybe we should just stick to the satellites and their steady pouring of data?
No argument from me on satellites, Joel.
The warmistas seem to be fond of pointing out that “people do not live in the troposphere”, and hence satellites are measuring something that is irrelevant.
Pure hogwash, IMO, as the whole meme is based on a global view.
But using ocean water temperatures, and somehow blending that with land air temperatures, is beyond belief. Besides, how many people do they suppose are living out on the open ocean? Down a few tens of feet below the surface?
The depth and breadth of the selective attention that warmistas have makes it impossible to accord them even a tiny benefit of doubt.
They cannot be thought of as merely wrong, incorrect or mistaken. Not anymore.
It’s a pre-Christmas miracle.
To falsify thermalchemy is difficult when it is high in the political agenda.
Not sure about the part on engine intake data being contaminated by the structure. I served on two weather reporting vessels in the early 1960s and the depth of the intake varied from 16 to 32 feet depending on whether we were in ballast or loaded. At that depth the sea water cooling water intake temperature thermometer was right at the intake valve and I would have thought that there was no way that any heat from the engine room could be transmitted to the water before the temperature was taken.
More to the point, the thermometer was crude and uncalibrated and I would have thought that if it was accurate to +- 2 degrees it was doing well. Also the temperature was taken from well below the surface.
No question that the data was crude to say the least.
Hi
I did not read your comment.
I have made a similar comment suggesting that the typical depth at which water is drawn is 7 to 10 metres. 4 or so metres is possible if the ship is in ballast completely laden free, but ballast voyages tend to be short (for commercial reasons).
I have frequently commented that any ocean data pre ARGO is worthless; the error margins are huge. No serious scientific study could be based upon that data.
ARGO is of short duration, and unfortunartely shortly after it was rolled out it was adjusted because it was thought that it was running cold and was not showing that the oceans were warming. These adjustments removed the coldest reading buoys/buoys showing the most cooling. Further, of course, ARGO has not been evaluated for potential bias inherent in the free floating nature of the buoys that are swept along on currents (which currents are density/temperature related/dependent).
My biggest problem with Argo is that there are too few of them to tell us anything meaningful.
The second biggest problem is that they are free drifting, which means they will be pushed away from any region with upwelling waters. That alone would add a warming bias to the data. Additionally since they are drifting they end up measuring a different column of water each time they dive, which makes it difficult to compare data from a single probe over time.
Comparing measurements at different locations makes about as much sense as first taking a reading in Alaska, then taking a reading in Chicago and then claiming a warming trend.
If it’s not same time of day, same day in the year, same method of measurement and same location there’s nothing to compare. But they do anyways by taking a running log of random ocean temperatures and allegedly adjusting the randomness out of it.
The pause is deeply embedded in another set of the NOAA’s data.
NASA:
“Variations in Earth’s magnetic field and atmospheric circulation can affect the deposition of radioisotopes far more than actual solar activity. ”
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/08jan_sunclimate/
What could Dr. Tony Philips of NASA be implying?
Is it that the climate change is related to the variations in Earth’s magnetic field?
Let’ have a look at the two variables and a possible correlation.
Relevant Earth’s Magnetic field data from NOAA
http://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/geomag-web/#igrfwmm
The latest global temperature data from:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/CRUTEM4-gl.dat
When plotted together on visual inspection (‘wiggle match’) it appears to be some relationship.
This is also confirmed by the linear regression, giving correlation factor R2=0.81.. Result is presented here.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/MTC.htm
There is distinct 1940’s ‘bump’ and more importantly the PAUSE is there.
Eliminating the PAUSE from the geomagnetic data would not be matter of a minor adjustment.
Even having in mind well known maxim ‘correlation is not necessarily causation’ the above is unlikely to be just a coincidence.
Possible mechanism come to mind:
a) radioisotopes nucleation and the cloudiness albedo
b) secular change in the magnetic field is simply a proxy for the ocean floor tectonics.
I do not expect the distinguished guest scientists (Michaels, Lindzen and Knappenberger) to take much notice of the above, but it is an alternative perspective on the natural variability.
Am I not correct to say that at least one of those databases come from a model?
Does this mean that temperature measurements for the past 15+ years are wrong, and warming rate since 1950 is not scary?
These people don’t care one iota about scientific credibility – it is only about getting a message out to the public. Expect more of these shams as we get closer to the Paris festivities.
Because they will get a share of the tax money.
Bob, what role do you think the Russian steampipes play in this?
See Judith Curries blog just smashed this paper.
NOAAPRO: “Like it never even happened”.
Article V Project to Restore Liberty
43 mins ·
http://www.breitbart.com/…/harvard-syracuse-researchers-ca…/
Harvard, Syracuse Researchers Caught Lying to Boost Obama Climate Rules – Breitbart
Are we to believe that a group of researchers who had previously received some $45 million in grants from EPA, no doubt hoping for more in the future, could possibly not…
BREITBART.COM
I’m always amazed that this practice of adjusting historic temperature data is taken seriously. To me, the temperature record is a lot like an out of focus photograph. We took a snapshot of the temperature with the best equipment available at the time but we know it was not 100% accurate. We are only seeing an approximation of what reality was at the time. And just like the with the photograph, there is no going back. Any photographer will tell you that once you have an out of focus photograph there is no algorithm you can use to go and fix it. The information is just not there. How can anybody think they can go back and massage 20 year-old data in a way that is guaranteed to make it more accurate than the day it was recorded? It’s mind boggling.
Also, let’s just say for the sake of argument that this is possible. Isn’t it interesting that whenever these adjustment are done, they ALWAYS seems to find a greater warming trend. I mean, okay, so the original data has some error in it. We can all agree with that. But isn’t it quite a coincidence the original data always seems to UNDERestimate the trend? Why would that be?
“Out of focus photograph” is probably not the best analogy to use.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deconvolution#Optics_and_other_imaging
Yes various software solutions can sharpen a digital image, with results varying from poor to pretty good depending on the original image. Camera shake is the easiest to correct, out of focus or low resolution images the worst.
The major point is that in all cases detail that is not there cannot be added.
The exception being TV crime dramas where blurry low resolution video footage is “enhanced” to create a high resolution sharply focused image. Which is entertaining but farcical, kind of like climate science.
The blurry photo comparison is right on.
The strictly one-way bias that is seen in when one looks at all of the adjustments is indeed, as Frank Zappa might say, the crux of the biscuit.
This is how one can weed out warmistas, liars, and the irrational from clear thinking people with no agenda: Anyone who sees no problem with the adjustments, and/or attempts to explain or justify them, is in the former group, and anyone who sees this as clear evidence of biased chicanery is likely in the latter group.
JMO, of course. But it is not mine alone.
A p-value of 0.10 is a joke, and I would be ashamed to even write a manuscript based on such unconvincing statistics, let alone submit it for peer review. Based on their Figure 1, this paper is doubly offensive because their shiny new adjustment INCREASES the error of the estimates and widens the error bars, which should be viewed as a step backward.
Usually when people are trying to stretch their statistics they will use a less robust test to achieve 0.05 or less, and even that sets them up for legitimate criticism. To miss the standard level and then tell people that you consider 0.10 to be significant is something I might expect at a junior high school science fair, not from the director of a national scientific agency and Science/AAAS.
“In addition, the authors’ treatment of buoy sea-surface temperature (SST) data was guaranteed to create a warming trend. The data were adjusted upward by 0.12°C to make them “homogeneous” with the longer-running temperature records taken from engine intake channels in marine vessels.”
/////////////////////
I have examined many hundreds of thousands of entries in ship’s logs (possibly millions).
I have commented on this numerous times over the years. Engine intake is situated about 4 to 18 metres below sea surface (depending on ship design, conifiguration, trim, loading/ballasting etc.) Typically 7 to 10 metres might be expected.
So ships do not measure sea surface temperatures, but rather water temperature at depth. There is a notably tail off in temperature once at a depth of about 5 metres, Ship’s figures (using the temperature of water drawn from the water inlet manifold) therefore record a temeperature lower than sea surface temperature. It is important that that is understood and appreciated.
The adjustment made is arse about face; if anything, it is the wrong way around!
Yes, the sea temperature taken below surface is colder than at surface. There must be an adjustment for that dilemma.
Well since the data is collected randomly I imagine the only feasible correction is by random adjustments.
I would imagine that rough water would cause enough mixing between surface and deeper waters to affect inlet temperatures.
Not only do we need to know where the ship was when the data was taken, we would have to know whether it was sailing through a storm or through calm waters at the time the reading was taken.
Mr. Verney,
Could you tell us if these intakes are typically nearer to the bow of the ship or to the stern?
It seems to me that unless they are right up front, then they are necessarily contaminated by heat from the ship and from the effects of turbulence, no?
Further to my comment above here is the NASA info on ocean temperature profile.
http://disc.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/oceans/additional/science-focus/modis/MODIS_and_AIRS_SST_comp_fig2.i.jpg
Plot (a) is night, and plot (b) is day.
It will be noted that ocean temperature during the day varies quite significantly even as fro a depth as little as 1mm, but at night there is little variation between 1mm and 4 to 5 metres, whereafter it drops off rapidly.
How often are ships water intake thermometers calibrated? Are they high quality devices?
Did nobody ever teach these folks the first rule of holes?????
The science can never be “settled” as long as their methods of measuring global temperatures are so inaccurate that they require continual adjustments.
So true!
If 2000 or 2001 were cool years, that would increase the slope of the 21st century warming.
All the various adjustments are aimed at increasing warming in order to finally state the observable data meets the IPCC Model predictions (one or more of the Models and they will be ecstatic). Thus, they will announce victory as observable date agrees with predictions via the Scientific Method. They will make an excuse for Scenario A.