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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This is an ominous sign that no matter the reality of the science the UNCCC will strip all nations of sovereignty under legally binding contracts signed on your behalf by duplicitous corrupt politicians. The rise of the 4 Reich.
Stand by: We are currently adjusting your reality.
BBC are on the case already …
http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-33006179
[quote]A US government laboratory says the much talked about “pause” is an illusion caused by inaccurate data.[/quote]
An Illusion ?
To the Guest Blogger … In the context of your statement on significance, what do you mean by “normative”? Maybe the word “hardly” should be removed? Maybe you are trying to say the significance level is “hardly” positive or objective and is thus “normative”?
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.
Thanks for pointing to the main problems with Karl et al. 2015.
Actually, you killed it mercifully.
What this paper does is confirm the technical level at which so much so called ‘climate science’ reseach is conducted. The sort of wrods that might characterise that level range from amateurish for a lighter touch up to utterly incompetent for the harsher end of the technical integrity scale and from gormless out to utterly corrupt on the personal integrity scale.
As a cadet on a training ship 1952-1955 when on watch it was often my duty to read the sea temperature. This meant getting hold of the canvas bucket and the thermometer, chucking the bucket as far ahead as I could, allowing it to sink until the rope was taut, and then hauling it out, putting the thermometer in the bucket, filling the cup on the thermometer with water, then taking it out and trying to read the temperature, estimating as close as possible to the nearest 0.1 C. Easy enough on a nice sunny day, not so easy at night with the wind howling and sheets of rain. In the latter conditions, I would think that accuracy could well have been somewhat less than good.
As far as engine room intakes are concerned, remember that in the 1950s and 60s engine rooms were amidships, nowadays they are almost entirely aft. In addition ship sizes have generally grown. So in the 1950s and 60s the intake was about, say, 240 ft from the bow, now it could well be 800 ft from the bow. Remember that the intake sucks water from the layer of water very close to the shell plating, perhaps from 0 to 2″ wide. This zone is very turbulent as a result of the ship moving through the water. Energy is used to propel the ship – where does it go? Much into moving water away, much into creating waves, but a lot must be dissipated via skin friction and will appear as heat in the turbulent layer. The greater the distance from the bow, the more the temperature of the turbulent layer will be raised as cumulated energy is transferred to the water.
This is plausibly, I would suggest, a reason for adjusting the temperature when engine room intakes are used to guess the ‘sea surface’ temperature. In the past, with the shorter distances the heat transfer would have been less, so an upwards adjustment might be reasonable to the earlier records to make them comparable to current records. But this would result in less apparent warming as deduced from the adjusted records, or even an apparent cooling.
Question, has anyone actually tested this theory by measuring intake temperature from various points along a ship’s hull at a ‘average’ ship speed? If so, what were the results? If not, what was the logic behind the adjustments?
Oh, come now, we have had several posts this year on how downtreding cities have had ther data adjusted so that they are now in uptrends. So there certainly is some recent “warming” of the records, usually phrased as “cooking the books.”
I am surprised it is only “significant” at the .10 level (normally described as not statistically different).
Anyhow “statistically significant” only means a result is probably not due to chance. That does not say what it IS due to. In this case, it would be due to falsifying the data.
According to Figure 7 in http://www.drroyspencer.com/2015/04/version-6-0-of-the-uah-temperature-dataset-released-new-lt-trend-0-11-cdecade/#comments, radiosondes indicate the lowest part of the lower troposphere has warmed .02-.03 degree/decade more since the beginning of 1979 than the lower troposphere as a whole. Much of this difference is probably from areas losing snow and ice coverage. However, I don’t think this eliminates the pause. Instead, I think a period of no or extremely little warming started sometime in 2001. HadCRUT3 indicates no warming since sometime in 2001, and I don’t think HadCRUT3 has a cool bias.
I had to go research Karl’s background and his foray’s into Climate Change belief. I found this old Fox News article from 2010. Very illuminating.
http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/02/22/tom-karl-tried-to-suppress-data-critics-charge/
Here are the final paragraphs:
But why do people do this? There must be many people who know they are fudging the numbers. How can they sleep at night?
all it will take is one well placed leak, some emails, a folder or two of data that has been hidden, surely someone somewhere in the field has a concience ….perhaps not…the money is too good and who will pay the mortgage and the kids school fees once they make themselves unemployable by telling the truth
The leak happened. It was called “climategate” It was and is ignored by the CAGW proponents. Their thumbs are permanently in their ears while the wiggle their fingers at massive contrary evidence.
Let someone be called up to the floor of the Congress on suspicion of official malfeasance and misappropriation of taxpayer funds.
When jail sentences are looming, the rats will start jumping from the ship, and the truth will come out.
Can we expect to see retractions of the numerous articles explaining the now non-existent ‘hiatus’ and the authors of same looking for new jobs in a different field of endeavour for getting their ‘research’ so wrong?
Talking of about water sampling on ships. The British Royal Navy has records that go back hundreds of years. Unfortunately, they are not freely available to the public if I recall correctly.
Yup, the good old Gruaniad was beating the “Ain’t no pause” drum this mornng. But we really should have seen this coming. Afterall there have now been what 50 or is it 70 paid for papers on what could possibly cause this pesky pause, some more hilarious than others. But the pause was still there – so what next – “I know let’s make it go away”. It’s a bit like a kid frightened by imaginary monsters calling out “Mommy Mommy please make them go away”. So it’s up to the Sceptics to show that this is not an “imaginary” monster,
The press release for NOAA’s Karl et all paper reads as execrable tripe. The iniquitous intent and unconscionable abuse of scientific authority is despicable. You only need the least ability to think* to see it for what it is.
*A possible “bias” in my receptivity could be due to the fact that where I live (@ur momisugly 42 degrees South), “anomalies” of late, have been regularly reported as 8 below average for the state. We were less than one degree off the lowest ever recorded in my town and that was just the middle of Autumn, this year. Yesterday it didn’t reach five degrees C all day and we had a rare frosting from the ground to the top of the tallest trees. Yeah, don’t tell me, I know I know, the weather has got nothing to do with the climate 😉
There is another way of playing this game , given that the mass of politicians and media pundits will be immune to any sceptical response to this paper.
Give in .
Admit that, through the purchase and use of fossil fuels for the last 100 years the global temperatures have progressively increased. So now conduct a cost benefit analysis of what that expenditure has brought us , following a suggestion made by Paul yesterday :
“What about the problems climate change causes today? Can you name one? ”
Well in England, based purely on my experience, the change is to slightly warmer winters : good – , fewer deaths . fewer days lost by colds and flu, less loss of autumn sown crops. The summers , from experience going back to the 40s , no great difference England’s summers are now is as in the old saying: “a land with sometimes four seasons in one day “. Another benefit , claimed by the BBC , zero cost inflation at present due to drop in the cost of imported food , thanks to “bumper crops”.
The cost is actually self inflicted: diversion of money to inefficient renewables, an unrealistic and totally unaffordable Climate Change Act . The environmental and visual despoliation of the English landscape , with greater financial damage to come, hitting disproportionately the most vulnerable in the community .
Other posters can conduct a similar assessment (and of course it could be done more systematically with organisation and time) . Whether it will reveal similar conclusions I cannot say but I suspect that it might and a world view on the actual advantages and disadvantages might be a better way of instilling some common sense into the minds of our leaders than arguing about the technical paper , because frankly no one will listen to anyone but the Govt accredited researchers.
I assume you do not need my humble help to find what the Grauniad and Spiegel made out of this today….
It is not questionable, it is dishonest.
NOAA demonstrates that being stupid and evil are not necessarily mutually exclusive concepts.
Not exactly a major news story even in The Guardian. A small box with 3 lines of text tucked away at the bottom right of the Headlines section of their splash page. Weren’t they calling Climate Change the most important story in the world a couple of months ago? 🙂
IPCC AR5 says there was/is an hiatus. Stay tuned for revisionist AR6.
IPCC AR5 acknowledges the pause/hiatus.
WG1AR5_Chapter09_FINAL
Box 9.2 | Climate Models and the Hiatus in Global Mean Surface Warming of the Past 15 Years
“The observed global mean surface temperature (GMST) has shown a much smaller increasing linear trend over the past 15 years than over the past 30 to 60 years (Section 2.4.3, Figure 2.20, Table 2.7; Figure 9.8; Box 9.2 Figure 1a, c). Depending on the observational data set, the GMST trend over 1998–2012 is estimated to be around one-third to one-half of the trend over 1951–2012 (Section 2.4.3, Table 2.7; Box 9.2 Figure 1a, c). For example, in HadCRUT4 the trend is 0.04ºC per decade over 1998–2012, compared to 0.11ºC per decade over 1951–2012. The reduction in observed GMST trend is most marked in Northern Hemisphere winter (Section 2.4.3; Cohen et al., 2012). Even with this “hiatus” in GMST trend, the decade of the 2000s has been the warmest in the instrumental record of GMST (Section 2.4.3, Figure 2.19). Nevertheless, the occurrence of the hiatus in GMST trend during the past 15 years raises the two related questions of (1) what has caused it and (2) whether climate models are able to reproduce it.”
And two very good questions.
(1) Heat absorbtion by oceans, water vapor, clouds (-20 W/m^2), albedo, etc.
(2) Obviously no, no they haven’t and can’t.
People could soon refer to NOAA as the national inventor of ” flex temperature “. data sets. They can produce or flex any temperature data set to suit your pet theory. You want more warming they adjust the figures up. You want faster warming , they will lower the older figures. You want to eliminate a ” pause” , they will raise the temperatures of the pause It is a sad state of affairs when the government’s own official data collection arm acts like a weather vane with climate record rather than acting like a stable protector of national climate records . Once you go down this treacherous path , no will trust your data sets any more , and getting credibility back can take decades. I am glad we still have the satellite data sets
I regard this @NOAA paper as just another one of dozens attacking the existence of the hiatus from various unlikely directions. This time they have pulled out falsified data in a big way. It is not the first time that GISS, NCDC, and HadCRUT have falsified data to hide the presence of a hiatus. Their first time was at the beginning of the satellite era when global warming appeared to stop. What happened was that global temperature had just started to rise in 1976 and it looked like it was the warming they were waiting for. Except that it wasn’t. It stopped in 1979 and was followed by an 18 year standstill – a true hiatus, just as long as the current one has lasted. It is in my book [1] and I have tried to call attention to it but climate scientists just don’t do their homework and read it. This goes for you three too. But you have to use satellite data to see the hiatus because the ground-based temperature guardians above have over-written it with a phony warming called late twentieth century warming. The hiatus of the eighties and nineties lasted from 1979 to 1997. They cooperated in covering it up. Turns out that they all used the same computer program to synchronize their temperatures too. But unfortunately, unbeknownst to them, the computer left its footprints on all their publicly available, supposedly independent, temperature curves. These comprise sharp upward spikes in exactly the same places in all three data-sets. Two of them sit right on top of the super El Nino of 1998. The fun part is that the public does not know this is noise and treats it like a normal temperature curve. Satellites are free of this nonsense. I tried to find out recently what their excuse was for avoiding satellites. Pretty obviously they knew how satellite data differed from their own product. Steve Mosher came out the claim that they reject satellites because their measurements are more than two meters off the ground. What do you expect from people who use one tree from a Russian forest to set global history? In the eighties and nineties ENSO was active and produced a wave train of five El Nino peaks with La Nina valleys in between, right in the middle of the hiatus. This is fortunate because it self-calibrates the temperature trend. To find global mean temperature, put a dot in the middle of a line connecting an El Nino peak and its neighboring La Nina valley. If you do it to all possible combinations these dots line up in a horizontal straight line, proving absence of warming for 18 years. Anyone who has doubts about the existence of this hiatus can do it himself. What was done to hide it was to create a phony warming in its place. It is present in ground-based temperature records but not in satellite records because fortunately they still do not control satellites. The attack on the current hiatus is pursued with all their available tricks but they are silent about the eighties and nineties lest the public find out that there is yet another hiatus to conquer. Since we have these two hiatuses it behooves us to see what it means for climate science, First, the hiatuses cover a good ninety percent of the temperature field, This does not leave much space for any greenhouse warming the IPCC depends on for its existence. The only parts not covered by one or the other of these two hiatuses are the super El Nino of 1998 and a short step warming that follows it in 1999. This step warming raises global temperature by a third of a degree Celsius in only three years and then stops. It is the only warming during the entire satellite era. Since the temperature rise of the entire twentieth century was 0.8 degrees according to Hansen, 0.3 degrees is a substantial fraction of it. This warming is also responsible for raising all twenty-first century temperatures higher than the twentieth was (except 1998). I would bet that any real wildlife migrations attributed to temperature change will turn out to be twenty-first century phenomena.Any attempt to show temperature change graphically must not use a straight line to combine twentieth and twenty-first century values because this creates a false impression of warming that does not exist. Hansen noticed rhat twenty-first century was higher than the twentieth when the hiatus was ten years old and proclaimed the warning greenhouse which is impossible. Because of its abrupt starting and stopping the step warming it cannot be greenhouse warming and probably has an oceanic origin. We basically have two hiatuses at different levels now with a step warming creating that temperature difference, The warming in the late seventies could also be thought of as raising up the eighties and nineties the same way that 1999 raised up the twenty-first century. Could there be another hiatus lurking before the seventies? We would then have a global temperature plan of hiatuses connected by short tempeature surges, This is just a weird idea but would it hurt for someone to research it?
[1] Arno Arrak “What Warming? Satellite view of global temperature change” (CreateSpace 2010), figure 15.
Am I understanding this correctly?
They know and admit that measurements taken from ship intakes are warm biased. They then adjust the buoy temperatures up to match the warm biased measurements that had been taken from ships, and they say this is exactly what they did?
What else could we expect…. HilLIARY won’t give press conferences, The media is just now trying to dig up dirt on the Republicans, but there are too many targets, The media doesn’t want to speak to the massive violence taking place in our progressively run major cities or that the middle east, is on fire due to the failed foreign policy conducted by a progressive, running for President, or as The Perpetrator Of Terminological UnexactitudeS claims that GloBULL causes Islamic terrorists, terrorism, and is the greatest threat to the US out there. What else would you expect from NOAA and its chief blabbermouth who have been tasked to prove gloBULL….
♫When you want GloBULL
in your neighborhood…
Who Ya gonna call????
NOAA, Karl, and the GloBULLstoolsters♫
I am not sure why we should pay for an expensive fleet of super-accurate temperature-sensing buoys going forward. Based on the brilliant new methods described by Karl, I would propose the following:
1. On an hourly basis have each ship crew member record their guess as to local SST. Average the guesses and record along with ship position.
2. The NOAA will later compare each hourly ship-estimated SST to the nearest buoy measurement and record the difference.
3. On an annual basis average all of the resulting differences.
4. When ten years of “data” has been collected simply average the annual deltas to arrive at a single value.
5. Now that the bias has been “scientifically” obtained simply retire the expensive buoy fleet, continue to collect the ship SSTs, apply the bias, and viola, world SST data, yours for free!
It must be accurate because lots of “data” was collected and any errors surely would sciencemagically disappear when they were averaged over time and location, n’est–ce pas?