From the University of Edinburgh:
Warming slow-down not the end of climate change, study shows
A slow-down in global warming is not a sign that climate change is ending, but a natural blip in an otherwise long-term upwards trend, research shows.
In a detailed study of more than 200 years’ worth of temperature data, results backed previous findings that short-term pauses in climate change are simply the result of natural variation.
The findings support the likelihood that a current hiatus in the world’s year-on-year temperature increases – which have stalled since 1998 – is temporary.
Scientists from the University of Edinburgh analysed real-world historic climate records from 1782 to 2000, comparing them with computerised climate models for the same timescale.
They were able to separate the influence on climate trends of man-made warming – such as from greenhouse gas emissions – and of natural influences in temperature – such as periods of intense sunlight or volcanic activity.
This showed that random variations can cause short term interruptions to climate patterns in the form of a pause or surge in warming, in both the real data and in the models, typically lasting up to a decade. Extreme natural forces, such as strong volcanic eruptions, were shown to disrupt climate trends for decades.
The research highlights the impact of volcanic eruptions on climate, when particles produced can reflect sunlight from Earth, causing long-lasting cooling. The eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 was among the biggest in recent times, causing a so-called year without summer. Scientists estimate that, if it occurred today, it would cause a 20-year climate hiatus.
Their study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, was supported by the European Commission.
Dr Andrew Schurer, of the University of Edinburgh’s School of GeoSciences, who led the research, said: “Human activity is causing the word to warm, and natural variability can cause this trend to slow down or speed up. Our study backs scientific understanding that climate change can experience periods of hiatus, but the overall trend is towards a warmer planet.”
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This has to qualify as one of the worst press releases we’ve ever seen via Eurekalert. The don’t give the name of the paper, the DOI, or any links to it. We are required to look it up, because, you know, these people are just too busy saving the world to stoop to such serf-like tasks.
Determining the likelihood of pauses and surges in global warming
Andrew P. Schurer, Gabriele C. Hegerl and Stephen P. Obrochta
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2015GL064458/full
Abstract
The recent warming “hiatus” is subject to intense interest, with proposed causes including natural forcing and internal variability. Here we derive samples of all natural and internal variability from observations and a recent proxy reconstruction to investigate the likelihood that these two sources of variability could produce a hiatus or rapid warming in surface temperature. The likelihood is found to be consistent with that calculated previously for models and exhibits a similar spatial pattern, with an Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation-like structure, although with more signal in the Atlantic than in model patterns. The number and length of events increases if natural forcing is also considered, particularly in the models. From the reconstruction it can be seen that large eruptions, such as Mount Tambora in 1815, or clusters of eruptions, may result in a hiatus of over 20 years, a finding supported by model results.
Key Points
- The recent hiatus is not unusual in the context of the last 230 years
- Models agree with observations regarding likelihood and pattern of events
- Likelihood increases if natural forcings (e.g., volcanic) are also considered
Figures as they were provided in the preview, no captions given.
I’d tend to believe them more if they could actually show a Tambora style eruption that has occurred in the last 15-20 years, and also explain why the effect of Pinatubo was so short lived if in fact volcanoes are affecting global climate as they say.
I think Willis does a far better job of explaining it here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/25/stacked-volcanoes-falsify-models/
So, the models that were said to be proven false if there was a ten…. err, no, 15…. uhm gulp… 17 year hiatus are now being used to prove that the 18 year hiatus is natural.
And you have to ask the obvious question, if the hiatus is natural, why wouldn’t any other trend period of similar length also be natural, whether warming, flat or cooling?
Ding! ding! ding! We have a winner!!
“In a detailed study of more than 200 years’ worth of temperature data, results backed previous findings that short-term pauses in climate change are simply the result of natural variation.”
Oh, a DETAILED study! That’s different.
I wonder, did they study original data, or the highly massaged, manipulated, homogenized and “adjusted” data?
How exactly is anyone supposed to believe that in the year 2015, all we really needed to finally understand it all was one more “detailed study” from these whiz kids?
Stop calling me Shirley!
‘…..not the end of climate change’, has anyone on this blog ever claimed that climate change is NOT changing or are these scientists trying to put into our mouths?
They’re putting anything of theirs into my mouth…
My word, Freudian predictive text slip:
They’re NOT putting anything of theirs into my mouth…
I predict a consensus will settle on a possible hiatus long enough to cover the current generation of scientific management’s careers.
Sorry, they did their analysis with old data. NOAA tells us that the record had to be modified because it had so many errors. Go back, start over.
Jack Mayhoffer
July 20, 2015 at 4:55 pm
Uh… Yeah… Volcanoes… that’s it… Volcanoes… Yes…
.
Superb….Almost destroyed my laptop with tea but would have been worth it still..
Cheers.
So Tambora , if it happened today, would cause a 15 – 20 year hiatus in warming.
Where was the Tambora-sized eruption around 18 years ago ?
I’m sure someone might have noticed it……….geologists perhaps, or people living near or surviving the eruption.
Hmmnnn..
That is one of several things about this fuzzy theory/hypothesis known as Climate Change that cause me to scratch my head. Natural climate variability can slow the warming of the climate, but it can not accelerate it. That HAS to be CO2. Why? Because the models say so. They can’t model the plateau at all, but they can model the upward trend badly. So the models must be right! I am so confused…
No need to worry, unless and until all of the warmista shenanigans start to make perfect sense to you.
When that happens, be worried. Very worried.
The only cure is talking to people who know a bung hole from a barrel stave.
…. or buy some rubber sheets to put under your regular sheets, and try not to drink as much liquids as usual before retiring to your nocturnal anguish.
Menicholas,
There are a few definitions for “bunghole”… Usually referring to a 55 gallon steel drum here in the U.S. Perhaps you are talking about an older, European definition? I would suppose that would be a wooden spirits barrel, with a wooden stave. As the stave is soaked in the spirit it expands, increasing its sealing capacity for long term storage and aging.
Is this knowledge a cure? If so, we need to let as many people know about its curative effect and publish it. ASAP.
Without the prove global warming is caused by Co2 Grant money, the warmist drooling dival would dry up to a trickle. Without Tax Money, Money, Money paying the bills. there would not be Climate conferences – Oh what a lovely world that would be!
Not only are they using the models to prove that something can happen that they previously said would falsify the models if it did happen, they are now claiming that there is a natural cause for something that NOAA just proclaimed not to exist.
Can’t make this stuff up.
Are we at peak dissonance yet? Not even close.
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Schurer’s 2015 paper seems to be a speciic application of his 2013 paper (“The proxy reconstructions tend to show a smaller forced response than is simulated by the models. This discrepancy is shown, at least partly, to be likely associated with the difference in the response to large volcanic eruptions”) to the hiatus problem although it seem curious that the 2013 paper does not mention or predict the pause. I would be interested to see his response to the very credible analysis by Willis showing that (1) the response of the climate system to volcanism is short lived and (2) climate model responses to volcanism don’t match the data because the models are too tightly controlled by the CO2 sensitivity to be faithful to the damped oscillation response of nature to a pulse input (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/05/25/stacked-volcanoes-falsify-models/). I emailed the Willis 2013 analysis to Andrew Schurer hoping that the wuwt signature in the link will not prevent him from reading it.
Forget the pause, for get the hiatus, it is the crawl. You see, climate change went drinking at a bar with a particular sign on the door. The sign says “Please don’t throw cigarette butts on the floor, our patrons burn their elbows and knees leaving”.
So the much reported fires in the Pacific Northwest which are being blamed on global warming are sending particular matter into the air resulting in… By the way a strong El Nino likely means LOTS of rain for California. We are likely to hear about it as a tragic, unseasonable, flooding.
“A slow-down in global warming is not a sign that climate change is ending, but a natural blip in an otherwise long-term upwards trend, research shows.”
Actually, a true statement. Even I know the earth has been warming for 300 years since the unwinding of the LIA; this is without having to do any paid research. All natural variability within climate cycles.
Kokoda:
Quite right. Who’s to say that the real status quo wasn’t actually the MWP? And that after the intervening disruptions of the LIA etc, we are not now returning to that balmy climate that was so good for the world back then? But, we need a name for it, an identifier, rather like the MWP….
Hmmm, how about “Post-Victorian Climate Recovery” (PVCR)? One too many terms to be really snappy, I suppose, but that’s my shot.
What gets me is the simplistic and child-like equivocation of “climate change” and “upward temperature movement”. The remark “A slow-down in global warming is not a sign that climate change is ending”. Well D’UH. For some unknown reason, they seem to thing that SOMEBODY thinks climate change is at an end…so they must assert…”but it isn’t!” And so the story mumbles on, after studying 200 years of temperature data. 200 years. A record so tainted that “studying” it is all but pointless. And so tainted that the best they can come up with is that Climate Change hasn’t ended. Aw, gee. My old curmudgeon scientist inside cries foul. These people have nothing to do, except troll for grants from a prebiased authority.
Blecch.
Reminds me of the following pearl of wisdom:
Die Wissenschaft hat festgestellt
dass der Arsch die Beine haelt.
Die Beine, die sind so gestellt
dass der Arsch nicht runterfaellt.
Loosely translated:
A scientific research mission
has found that the ass keeps the legs in position.
The legs in turn act as a brace
to keep the ass in its proper place.
Heh. And people say Germans have no sense of humor.
Abstract “From the reconstruction it can be seen that large eruptions, such as Mount Tambora in 1815, or clusters of eruptions, may result in a hiatus of over 20 years, a finding supported by model results.”
There’s been no Tambora since…well 1815. Pinatubo was about 25 years ago. You cant say “Tambora” and then blame a few little eruptions while whistling and looking at your feet. Jones said that it was statistically unlikely a hiatus would be longer than 17 years. Now its 20 years? Plus?
Fail.
This is just getting embarrassing for the Warmunists….
Even after the Warmunists arbitrarily Karl2015ed (now officially a verb) the global temp data, they still can’t explain the huge discrepancies that exist between RSS, UAH 6.0 and radiosonde global temperature data vs. HADCRUT4 and GISS LOTI data.
Sure, if the Warmunists arbitrarily add +0.12C/decade to ocean buoy temp data, they can easily make the “hiatus” disappear, but they still can’t absolve the HUGE discrepancies shown in the lower troposphere global temp data.
Now the Warmunists have yet another paper proposing increased volcanic activity over the past 20 years is causing the “hiatus”, even though there haven’t been any eruptions which come close to the size and magnitude of the 1991 Pinatubo eruption.
Warmunists are simply creating talking points for feckless politicians and MSM hacks to keep the CAGW hypothesis going for as long as possible.
It’s becoming increasingly clear that AMO/PDO warm/cool cycles, ENSO flux, Little Ice Age recovery and solar activity have been the primary driving forces behind climate since 1850. CO2 has perhaps increased global temps by around 0.2C over the past 165 years, but who the heck cares? That is absolutely NOTHING to be concerned about.
The strongest 63-year string of solar cycles in 11,400 years took place from 1933~1996. When these strong solar cycle ended in 1996, so did the global warming trend:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1996.6/plot/rss/from:1996.6/trend/plot/esrl-co2/from:1996.6/normalise/trend/plot/esrl-co2/from:1996.6/normalise
There hasn’t been a global warming trend in 19 years, despite roughly 30% of all manmade CO2 emissions since 1750 being emitted over just the last 19 years. That’s pretty solid evidence that CO2 is not the driving force behind climate. The longer the “hiatus” lasts, the higher the probability that the CAGW hypothesis is a complete bust.
There is a high probability that global temps will continue to stay flat or even fall for the next 15 years given the current weak solar cycles, PDO’s 30-yr cool cycle which started in 2005, and the coming AMO 30-yr cool cycle starting around 2022. There is also an increasing chance that a 40~80 year Grand Solar Minimum could start from 2022, which would likely cause global temps to fall for the next 80 years if it occurs.
It’s time for the Warmunists to call it day and admit the CAGW hypothesis is a complete bust. Any further delay by the Warmunists in not officially disconfirming the CAGW hypothesis is bordering on criminal malfeasance of public funds.
NONE of CAGW’s hypothetical projections are coming even close to matching reality, so under the rules of the Scientific Method, the Warmunists must call it day….
Doubt they will ever freely admit to any notion that they are wrong. We need a ‘big’ incorruptible character to publicly challenge them. Step forward please Mr Trump. After all, this is about politics and has never been about the science.
“For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert.”
Great bumper sticker!
Put 10 experts in a room and you will have 20 answers as to the best solution.
For all those wiseguys telling us there was no volcano activity in the last 2-3 decades to explain the hiatus: Of course there was! You just did not see them since they were hidden in the oceans!…
See, I combined 2 theories in one. I can be a climate scientist too! 🙂
Is any study that covers a span of less than 10,000 years, preferably 20,000, nothing but “cherry picking”?
I think so.
Why do climastrolists ignore history?
Actually, there is real progress. Elite climatologists are discovering that climate can change without man having anything to do with it. Now, let’s all count ten while these elite scurry to get the word out to hoi polloi, journalists and politicians. There should be some urgency about it; they don’t want them to find this out for themselves.
What, you say? Too late? Oh, I’m dying laughing.
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So poignant for them to say climate change hasn’t ended. Sure it hasn’t, but the end of their credibility is upon them.
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Climate is always changing ….except when it isn’t…and …uh….we know…er think…it might… its the oceans….Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation-like structure, although with more signal in the Atlantic, maybe…but not all the time….if it changes….or something else occurs….natural….
That’s how I understand it.
When I see “Their study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, was supported by the European Commission.”, my mind immediately switches off. If the EC/EU ‘support’ something regarding climate, it’s for entirely political purposes. Nothing more, nothing less.
The Earth has been warming since the end of the Little Ice Age.
200 years of “real-world historic climate records” confirm this.
Sometimes “natural variability (perhaps volcanos)” slows this down.
Which surprises the bejesus out of the models because that sort of “natural variability” is pretty darned random.
So the current hiatus/pause/cessation of warming – which Dr. Karl says does not exist and is merely an artifact of incorrect measurements – is a “to be expected” result of hitherto undetected volcanic eruptions which secretly occurred around 1997 and have been throwing off just enough aerosols ever since to stop temperature rise, except this year when there is one of those El Nino things which models can’t be expected to predict because, well, natural variability.
Got it. Makes total sense. Obviously CO2 is to blame because it is impossible to find any other explanation.
Except of course: WITCHES!
I’m kinda partial to the witch’s thing.
That sounds about right.
A lot of parallels with the 16 and 17 century witch scare. I’m convinced that humans, even highly educated humans, crave a steady diet of fear. Where no danger exists, they will invent reasons to be afraid. Oh how skillfully do the demagogues bend and twist this craving.