By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
For 223 months, since January 1997, there has been no global warming at all (Fig. 1). This month’s RSS temperature shows the Pause setting a new record at 18 years 7 months.
It is becoming ever more likely that the temperature increase that usually accompanies an El Niño will begin to shorten the Pause somewhat, just in time for the Paris climate summit, though a subsequent La Niña would be likely to bring about a resumption and perhaps even a lengthening of the Pause.
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 7 months since January 1997.
The hiatus period of 18 years 7 months is the farthest back one can go in the RSS satellite temperature record and still show a sub-zero trend. The start date is not cherry-picked: it is calculated. And the graph does not mean there is no such thing as global warming. Going back further shows a small warming rate.
The Pause has now drawn blood. In the run-up to the climate conference in Paris this December, the failure of the world to warm at all for well over half the satellite record has provoked the climate extremists to resort to desperate measures to try to do away with the Pause.
First there was Tom Karl with his paper attempting to wipe out the Pause by arbitrarily adding a hefty increase to all the ocean temperature measurements made by the 3600 automated ARGO bathythermograph buoys circulating in the oceans. Hey presto! All three of the longest-standing terrestrial temperature datasets – GISS, HadCRUT4 and NCDC – were duly adjusted, yet again, to show more global warming than has really occurred.
However, the measured and recorded facts are these. In the 11 full years April 2004 to March 2015, for which the ARGO system has been providing reasonably-calibrated though inevitably ill-resolved data (each buoy has to represent 200,000 km3 of ocean temperature with only three readings a month), there has been no warming at all in the upper 750 m, and only a little below that, so that the trend over the period of operation shows a warming equivalent to just 1 C° every 430 years.
Figure 1a. Near-global ocean temperatures by stratum, 0-1900 m. Source: ARGO marine atlas.
And in the lower troposphere, the warming according to RSS occurred at a rate equivalent to 1 C° every 700 years.
Figure 1b. The least-squares linear-regression trend on the UAH satellite monthly global mean surface temperature anomaly dataset shows no global warming for 18 years 5 months since March 1997.
Then along came another paper, this time saying that the GISS global temperature record shows global warming during the Pause and that, therefore, GISS shows global warming during the Pause. This instance of argumentum ad petitionem principii, the fallacy of circular argument, passed peer review without difficulty because it came to the politically-correct conclusion that there was no Pause.
The paper reached its conclusion, however, without mentioning the word “satellite”. The UAH data show no warming for 18 years 5 months.
Figure 1c. The least-squares linear-regression trend on the UAH satellite monthly global mean surface temperature anomaly dataset shows no global warming for 18 years 5 months since March 1997.
For completeness, though no reliance can now be placed on the terrestrial datasets, here is the “warming” rate they show since January 1997:
Figure 1d. The least-squares linear-regression trend on the mean of the GISS, HadCRUT4 and NCDC terrestrial monthly global mean surface temperature anomaly datasets shows global warming at a rate equivalent to a little over 1 C° per century during the period of the Pause from January 1997 to July 2015.
Bearing in mind that one-third of the 2.4 W m–2 radiative forcing from all manmade sources since 1750 has occurred during the period of the Pause, a warming rate equivalent to little more than 1 C°/century is not exactly alarming. However, the paper that reported the supposed absence of the Pause was extremely careful not to report just how little warming the terrestrial datasets – even after all their many tamperings – actually show.
As always, a note of caution. Merely because there has been little or no warming in recent decades, one may not draw the conclusion that warming has ended forever. The trend lines measure what has occurred: they do not predict what will occur.
Furthermore, the long, slow build-up of the current el Nino, which has now become strongish and – on past form – will not peak till the turn of the year, is already affecting tropical temperatures and, as the thermohaline circulation does its thing, must eventually affect global temperatures.
Though one may expect the el Nino to be followed by a la Nina, canceling the temporary warming, this does not always happen. In short, the Pause may well come to an end and then disappear. However, as this regular column has stressed before, the Pause – politically useful though it may be to all who wish that the “official” scientific community would remember its duty of skepticism – is far less important than the growing divergence between the predictions of the general-circulation models and observed reality.
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, continues to widen. If the Pause lengthens just a little more, the rate of warming in the quarter-century since the IPCC’s First Assessment Report in 1990 will fall below 1 C°/century equivalent.
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 307 months January 1990 to July 2015 (orange region and red trend line), vs. observed anomalies (dark blue) and trend (bright blue) at just 1 K/century equivalent, taken as the mean of the RSS and UAH v. 5.6 satellite monthly mean lower-troposphere temperature anomalies.
Figure 3. Predicted temperature change, January 2005 to July 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 v. 5.6 satellite lower-troposphere temperature anomalies.
The page Key Facts about Global Temperature (below) should be shown to anyone who persists in believing that, in the words of Mr Obama’s Twitteratus, “global warming is real, manmade and dangerous”.
The Technical Note explains the sources of the IPCC’s predictions in 1990 and in 2005, and also demonstrates that that according to the ARGO bathythermograph data the oceans are warming at a rate equivalent to less than a quarter of a Celsius degree per century.
Key facts about global temperature
Ø The RSS satellite dataset shows no global warming at all for 223 months from January 1997 to July 2015 – more than half the 439-month satellite record.
Ø There has been no warming even though one-third of all anthropogenic forcings since 1750 have occurred since January 1997, during the pause in global warming.
Ø The entire RSS dataset from January 1979 to date shows global warming at an unalarming rate equivalent to just 1.2 Cº per century.
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 global warming trend since 1900 is equivalent to 0.75 Cº per century. This is well within natural variability and may not have much to do with us.
Ø The fastest warming rate lasting 15 years or more since 1950 occurred over the 33 years from 1974 to 2006. It was equivalent to 2.0 Cº per century.
Ø Compare the warming on the Central England temperature dataset in the 40 years 1694-1733, well before the Industrial Revolution, equivalent to 4.33 C°/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 warming trend since 1990, when the IPCC wrote its first report, is equivalent to 1 Cº per century. The IPCC had predicted more than two and a half times as much.
Ø To meet the IPCC’s central prediction of 1 C° warming from 1990-2025, in the next decade a warming of 0.75 C°, equivalent to 7.5 C°/century, would have to occur.
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 15 years that has been measured since 1950.
Ø The IPCC’s 4.8 Cº-by-2100 prediction is 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 buoys, are warming at a rate of just 0.02 Cº per decade, equivalent to 0.23 Cº per century, or 1 C° in 430 years.
Ø Recent extreme-weather events 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 fact of a long Pause is an indication of the widening discrepancy between prediction and reality in the temperature record.
The satellite datasets are arguably less unreliable than other datasets in that they show the 1998 Great El Niño more clearly than all other datasets. The Great el Niño, like its two predecessors in the past 300 years, caused widespread global coral bleaching, providing an independent verification that the satellite datasets are better able than the rest to capture such fluctuations without artificially filtering them out.
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 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, since summer temperatures in one hemisphere are compensated by winter in the other. Therefore, an AR(n) model would generate results little different from a least-squares trend.
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 almost entirely 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 terrestrial datasets to the satellite datasets. The UK Met Office, however, uses the satellite data 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. The el Nino may well strengthen throughout 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 medium-term Scenario-A estimate of near-term warming, i.e. 1.0 [0.7, 1.5] K by 2025.
The IPCC’s predicted global warming over the 25 years from 1990 to the present differs little 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.
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. Here, too, all of the predictions were extravagantly baseless.
The overall picture is clear. Scenario A is the emissions scenario from 1990 that is closest to the observed CO2 emissions outturn.
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 0.27 Cº, equivalent to little more than 1 Cº/century. The IPCC’s central estimate of 0.71 Cº, equivalent to 2.8 Cº/century, that was predicted for Scenario A in IPCC (1990) with “substantial confidence” was approaching three times too big. In fact, 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 takes just three measurements a month in 200,000 cubic kilometres of ocean – roughly 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.
Unfortunately ARGO seems not to have updated the ocean dataset since December 2014. However, what we have 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, equivalent to 0.2 Cº century–1.
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” of which the climate-extremist websites speak 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 Kelvin that were originally measured. NOAA’s conversion of the minuscule warming 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 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 Pause were correct (and it is merely one among dozens that have been offered), 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.
Why were the models’ predictions exaggerated?
In 1990 the IPCC predicted – on its business-as-usual Scenario A – that from the Industrial Revolution till the present there would have been 4 Watts per square meter of radiative forcing caused by Man (Fig. T7):
Figure T7. Predicted manmade radiative forcings (IPCC, 1990).
However, from 1995 onward the IPCC decided to assume, on rather slender evidence, that anthropogenic particulate aerosols – mostly soot from combustion – were shading the Earth from the Sun to a large enough extent to cause a strong negative forcing. It has also now belatedly realized that its projected increases in methane concentration were wild exaggerations. As a result of these and other changes, it now estimates that the net anthropogenic forcing of the industrial era is just 2.3 Watts per square meter, or little more than half its prediction in 1990:
Figure T8: Net anthropogenic forcings, 1750 to 1950, 1980 and 2012 (IPCC, 2013).
Even this, however, may be a considerable exaggeration. For the best estimate of the actual current top-of-atmosphere radiative imbalance (total natural and anthropo-genic net forcing) is only 0.6 Watts per square meter (Fig. T9):
Figure T9. Energy budget diagram for the Earth from Stephens et al. (2012)
In short, most of the forcing predicted by the IPCC is either an exaggeration or has already resulted in whatever temperature change it was going to cause. There is little global warming in the pipeline as a result of our past and present sins of emission.
It is also possible that the IPCC and the models have relentlessly exaggerated climate sensitivity. One recent paper on this question is Monckton of Brenchley et al. (2015), which found climate sensitivity to be in the region of 1 Cº per CO2 doubling (go to scibull.com and click “Most Read Articles”). The paper identified errors in the models’ treatment of temperature feedbacks and their amplification, which account for two-thirds of the equilibrium warming predicted by the IPCC.
Professor Ray Bates gave a paper in Moscow in summer 2015 in which he concluded, based on the analysis by Lindzen & Choi (2009, 2011) (Fig. T10), that temperature feedbacks are net-negative. Accordingly, he supports the conclusion both by Lindzen & Choi (1990) (Fig. T10) and by Spencer & Braswell (2010, 2011) that climate sensitivity is below – and perhaps considerably below – 1 Cº per CO2 doubling.
Figure T10. Reality (center) vs. 11 models. From Lindzen & Choi (2009).
A growing body of reviewed papers find climate sensitivity considerably below the 3 [1.5, 4.5] Cº per CO2 doubling that was first put forward in the Charney Report of 1979 for the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, and is still the IPCC’s best estimate today.
On the evidence to date, therefore, there is no scientific basis for taking any action at all to mitigate CO2 emissions.
Finally, how long will it be before the Freedom Clock (Fig. T11) reaches 20 years without any global warming? If it does, the climate scare will become unsustainable.
Figure T11. The Freedom Clock
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Remember Global Warming? That was funny, wasn’t it?
Brian G Valentine, aka David Socrates, aka a host of other ponderous pseudonyms, made a big deal on a past thread that the start date had been cited as both Dec 1996 and Jan 1997. As was pointed out to him there by an astute reader, he’s quibbling over labels that both mean the beginning of 1997.
“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”
Well then, let’s think one up. Deep ocean water originates in the polar regions when seawater freezes and traps freshwater as ice. The salt stays behind in the liquid and forms a cold, dense brine that follows the ocean floor into the deep water reservoir. The deep ocean will be seen to be cooling. When the sea ice melts this flow is interrupted and the deep ocean will be seen to be warming, produced by mixing between layers as the thermohaline circulation encounters certain choke points. So expanding sea ice causes deep ocean cooling; melting sea ice cases warming.
Pochas:
A very odd series of events resulting in? A deep ocean that is slightly warmer than -1.8° C (28.8° F)?
Some issues with your postulation.
Sea water does freeze, with salt content. Yes, when the temperature hovers just below the freezing point of water, salt will be excluded and partially fresh water ice will form.
However when low temperatures sweep in, very little salt is excluded. Even the highest levels of salt water content will freeze in temperatures below -21 °C, or about -6 °F. Regular ocean salt water freezes at warmer temperatures, including sea salt.
Arctic explorers discovered this and preferred to source their drinking water from icebergs. Icebergs calved off of glaciers are generally pure freshwater.
Your supposition about sea ice melting and interrupting the ocean conveyors is similarly false.
Open sea water transfers a lot of heat to the atmosphere. When sea ice covers ocean water, this heat transfer is interrupted as well as evaporation. Without the heat transfer there is much less cold dense water sinking into the depths.
While expanding sea ice might increase the amount of high saline cold water sinking into the depths, large expanses of sea ice block polar heat transfer and greatly reduce the amount of cold dense water sinking.
Melting sea ice, just melts.
To remark on both trends and the pause — the fundamental problem with considering either one is that the climate as represented by any of the global anomalies is not a stationary process, and the timescales (plural) of its/their variation range from months (the granularity of updates, usually) to the length of the entire thermometric record (and possibly beyond, with substantially lowered precision). Oh, and let’s not forget the horribly underpresented amplification of precision as one looks further into the past. Finally, Steven Goddard did a fit of the “adjustments” of NOAA against CO_2 concentration and found an almost perfect linear correlation, which is very nearly infinitely unlikely for any set of instrumentation making good faith measurements, which is just one tiny piece of the statistical evidence that the global anomalies we are relying on as “evidence” of climate change are themselves almost certainly and deliberately biased, rendering them even less suitable for driving any quantitative conclusion whatsoever concerning the climate.
As Mr. Monckton very clearly stated, there is no good reason to think that the world is not warming, and little reason to think that humans have made no contribution to that warming by burning coal to make electricity. However, when one considers the full thermometric record, with or without worrying about bias in the anomalies or reasonable error bars for determining a global anomaly (say) 165 years ago let alone 200 or more years ago, It is simply impossible to conclude that the total response to a doubling of CO2 is larger than 2 C. Climate sensitivity is in freefall at this particular time as it is quite clear that it has been overestimated — substantially and consistently — in the Assessment Reports for the IPCC.
This is hardly a surprise at this point, even to the IPCC. Look at the systematic reduction from AR1 through AR5 (using a consistent scheme to name them). The essential impact of “the pause” isn’t to prove that CO2 doesn’t cause warming, but rather than natural variation is much larger than previously acknowledged, the impact of aerosols and other greenhouse gases besides CO2 totally incorrectly parameterized and included in the computations (that is, they got both the physics and the projections wrong) and that every year the climate/anomaly continues on its current slowly rising path — assuming that it really is slowly rising and that this is not the result of “adjustments” that one cannot even pretend to be without bias — the best-fit sensitivity to all the data with no cherrypicking at all continues to diminish.
Personally, I have no idea what to think any more. One of the many problems introduced by the latest “correction” is that before I could kind of squint a bit and convince myself that HadCRUT4 had finally transitioned to being an unchanging measure. Half of the problem is that if you keep changing the algorithm you use to process data, and if the changes produce a nearly perfectly monotonic set of changes favoring a political trend rather than bounce around the way one expects random errors to good faith data to proceed, you can’t rely on conclusions drawn from the data. If I fit CO2 to HadCRUTN where N systematically increases, I just find a total climate sensitivity with version to version deltas on the overlapping data that is a monotonic function of N. This is absurd. The problem is even worse with GISS. NOAA was (for a while) not playing along, but now they are in front of the pack.
You cannot keep changing the algorithm you use to transform hard data into an average trend to fit a prior conclusion you wish to see drawn from that data and still claim to be doing science. I’d rather see the algorithm being used frozen even if wrong so that one can work on understanding a consistent mapping of the thermometric data into some average result than to see the algorithm change, data selection processes change, and so on. As it is, HadCRUT is changing its temperature series by a substantial fraction of its total acknowledged modern day error. And I’ll bet that they manage this without increasing that error estimate.
What’s the world coming to.
rgb
The problem is the quality of data which is so poor that one cannot draw any firm conclusion. It is simply not fit for purpose and is being over extrapolated.
Even today, there are substantial swathes of this planet which are not measured by ground based thermometers, and the suggestion that we have a worthwhile thermometer record of global temperatures going back to 1850 is risible, and wholly unscientific.
I consider that all one can say about the land based thermometer record is that there is much variability in the record and globally we do not know whether it is today warmer than it was in the 18880s or 1930s, but as far as the US is concerned it is probably cooler today than it was in the 1930s.
Whether the land based thermometer record supports (in the sense that it is consistent with) the proposition that manmade emissions of CO2 have driven warming is moot since (I) temperatures appear to have fallen as soon as CO2 emissions began to rise substantially in the 1940s, (2) aerosols have always been a fudge since we simply have no hard data for aerosols between 1940 to 1980, (3) Michael Mann’s/Briffa’s tree rings show no substantial temperature rise in the 1970s to early 1990s, (4) the satellite data shows a flat temperature trend from launch in 1979 through to the onset of the Super El Nino in 1998, 95) the satellite data shows a flat trend post the 1998 Super El Nino to date, (5) in the satellite data there is merely a one off single an isolated warming event coinciding with the 1998 Super El Nino such that there is no first order correlation between satellite temperatures and the rise in CO2; and (6) the satellite temperature record suggests that the land based thermometer record has been corrupted/polluted by station drop outs, homogenisation and UHI
The only important metric is ocean temperatures but unfortunately prior to ARGO we have no data worth a pinch of salt and ARGO has many problems such as (i) it lacks spatial coverage, (2) is too short in duration, and (3) may be biased by the free floating nature of the buoys which are themselves swept along currents that are density/temperature dependent, and (4) as soon as it was rolled out, the buoys that showed cooling were disregarded on the belief that they must be faulty to show cooling without any attempt being made to ascertain whether there were similar faulty buoys erroneously showing warming. The technical fault with these ARGO buoys has never been adequately explained, and if there are technical issues then a proper and full investigation of all the buoys should have been conducted.
The upshot is that due to the poor quality data, we are yet to observe and measure climate sensitivity (if any) since no signal to CO2 can be extracted above the noise of natural variation bearing in mind the true error bounds and limitations of our best measuring equipment.
As the ‘pause’ continues it must be the case that CO” is not dominant over natural variation such that the role of natural variation has been underestimated, and hence that climate sensitivity (if any) is becoming lower and lower.
Even today, there are substantial swathes of this planet which are not measured by ground based thermometers, and the suggestion that we have a worthwhile thermometer record of global temperatures going back to 1850 is risible, and wholly unscientific.
For the most part I agree and say as much, repeatedly, in forum comments. However, I would phrase it a bit differently. The problem isn’t that we don’t have worthwhile thermometric records at many locations, the problem isn’t that we can’t use them to estimate global temperatures — it is:
* The probable error in the estimates made is absolutely absurd. HadCRUT4, for example (where I have the full dataset, with its total error estimate, as of a few months ago on my computer as I type) acknowledges a probable error at the 95% confidence level of around 0.1 C as of 2014/2015. Curiously, this error is (or was) just about enough for HadCRUT4 to reject GISS as being wrong at the 95% confidence level — yet another in a long line of absurdities when the spread of “independent” (not!) estimates of the global anomaly is the close order of the supposed 95% confidence level. HadCRUT4 acknowledges only around 0.3 C as of 1850. Oh. My. God. In 1850 no human had set foot inside Antarctica’s shores. Large parts of Africa were unexplored. China was closed. Siberia was the wild west. The wild west was — wait for it — the wild west. The entire Amazon basin was terra incognita. Large swaths of the ocean had literally never been traversed by humans (or if they were, it was by pirates, whalers, and polynesians in wooden canoes). ENSO was totally unknown. The Arctic was unexplored and inaccessible. But hey, none of that matters! we still know today what the global temperature anomaly was back then to within 0.3 C even though we are still making adjustments to the temperature record of that order on top of a base of data pulled from the most advanced instrumentation the world has ever built.
Right.
* Don’t get me started about “the anomaly” and the mountain of assumptions that go into presumptive statistical computations of a susceptibility using raw absolute data. Such as the notion that the climate has been a stationary process so we can use contemporary data to extrapolate measurements from a handful of stations to cover absolutely immense amounts of surface area at almost no cost in cumulative errror!
Sure, there is absolutely no chance that global temperature patterns were different 100+ years ago. Heck, why even bother with a sampling of local measurements at all? A single thermometer is obviously a valid proxy for the entire world.
Right.
rgb
I really recommend that you look at Geocarb III. An summary of the model and methods was published in 2001 (American Journal of Science, Vol. 301, February,2001,P.182–204) and it can be downloaded as a pdf from Yale’s geology page. This offers the best estimates available on atmospheric carbon over the last 600 MY with error estimates. It appears, based on that model, that natural carbon sources cannot quite keep up with carbon fixing processes. There is no evidence of any “stationarity” in CO2 levels. They tend to decline, except possibly in the aftermath of major extinction events. I would suggest that the apparent “stability” seen over the Pleistocene is really due to a break-even level reached between available carbon sources and primary producers. Atmospheric CO2 cannot drop much without adversely affecting plant growth (an observation supported possibly by recent satellite imagery). Reduced plant cover will permit a partial recovery of the atmospheric carbon levels through natural, and now anthropogenic sources. Of course reduced plant cover means less available for primary consumers and that will echo up the food chain.
So you want me to talk to people to get anecdotal evidence? Wow, that sounds useful. All three of these things areconfounding, no doubt, but the effect of CO2 on the agricultural biosphere is one of the more studied aspects of the entire subject and one doesn’t have to rely on anecdotal evidence or assert that no controlled studies have been done or could be relevant. I’m happy to direct you to DOA bulletins on the subject that would disagree and review papers that would disagree. I know the Department of Agriculture isn’t up to the level of “talking to farmers in California”, but…
Seriously, this isn’t even a question in greenhouses, for example — greenhouses are usually boosted in CO2 because it has a directly visible, cost-beneficial, positive ROI effect on yield well worth the hassle and expense of installing the automated equipment. It has this effect in spite of the confounding effect of irrigation, genetic fertilization, and nitrogen fertilization.
But people who disagree with the assertion do need to get their stories straight. The last alarmist I communicated with asserted that CO2 is irrelevant because most agriculture is rate limited by water and nitrogen. Now you are telling me that when nitrogen and water are plentiful, CO2 is irrelevant. I think I’ll just go with the literature on this one, which suggests that CO2 is relevant for most C4 species and many C3 species pretty much across the board, although one can find regimes for some species where it is neutral or even seems to have a negative effect. For example, boosting CO2 around a heavily fertilized C3 plant that is also in a drought state is not helpful. But then, fertilizing a plant without adequate water is usually a bad idea independent of CO2.
But I do agree with your in one place. CO2 fertilization of trees is supported by substantial evidence, both in the lab and in the wild due to atmospheric CO2 increases over the lifetime of the trees (see the fairly recent study at the University of Exeter, for example, that found increased growth rates in trees literally all over Europe that could be connected with the increasing atmospheric concentration). This — and this is far from the only paper I’ve read on the subject, this is a widespread and common result from many studies, that almost always show some positive response and often show a large positive response for some species — does act as a confounding problem for dendroclimatology, to give it its two-bit name. Not that the subject lacks for confounding effects, but one can literally walk through papers that looked at tree rings for evidence of negative climate impact, found growth rates/ring widths completely disconnected from the (measured, known) local temperature or (measured, known) local rainfall that systematically increased in time.
rgb
If it is true that higher CO2 levels enable plants to make more efficient use of the water that is present, then higher CO2 levels will aid plants that are water limited.
+1
I’ll do that, although I think I’ve already seen its primary figure. I’ve been looking heavily into the CO2 fertilization issue recently — as this is one thing alarmists love to debate, claiming that there is no such thing, that in nature plant growth is water or nitrogen limited — in spite of the fact that almost every study that has ever been done shows a positive, often strongly positive, response both in the lab and “in the wild” to the extent that such a thing can be investigated, to increased CO2. Trees and C4 plants in particular do well, and (quite the opposite of what is often argued) plants that are resource contrained often do well because increased CO2 decreases sensible water losses in respiration, increases photosynthesis efficiency, and increases the rate of nitrogen fixation in nitrogen fixing species. This is observed over and over again in the lab, as is a strong response in almost any plant that is not resource constrained, such as is the case in modern agriculture where the whole point of irrigation and fertilization is to grow plants that are, in fact, limited by CO2. IMO there is substantial evidence that:
a) Trees, in particular, are growing anywhere from 10 to 25% faster at 400 ppm than they did at 280 ppm, all things being equal. Responses of over 50% to 600 ppm are common in a lab setting, and lab settings are (paradoxically) resource and root constrained compared to the wild, not the other way around. Higher CO2 is generally believed to favor tree growth over grassland.
b) Agriculture in all but the very poorest countries has benefitted substantially from the extra 120 ppm of CO2 added in roughly the last 165 years. It is not at all unreasonab/le to assert that close to a billion people a day dine on food grown courtesy of the extra CO2 through its impact on crop growth in cultivated environment, more in some species than in others.
There is also reason to believe that we barely dodged a mass plant extinction event in the last (Wisconsin) glacial period, when CO2 levels dropped to a level around 180-190 ppm, just over the 160 ppm partial pressure that would have wiped out whole species of plants from CO2 starvation. Nature doesn’t give a s**t about causing, or preventing, mass extinction. It just is.
If humans knew in 1700 what we know today about the effect of CO2 on climate — that going to 400 ppm would grow 10-15% more food in any cultivated environment outside of borderline desert, that the planet would be 0.5 to 1 C warmer (than it was in 1700!), that human civilization itself would be built using the electrical power generated by its release there isn’t the tiniest chance that they would have enthusiastically voted to remain poor, diseased, starved, and cold all of the time. There isn’t the slightest chance that India is going to vote to remain poor, diseased, starved, and hot all of the time, or that China is going to “vote” (be told) to remain poor, diseased, starved, and unemployed all of the time hot or cold, just to avoid raising CO2 still more and making plants grow even better in an even more benign environment. I would bet they would still do so if they knew for a fact that it would wipe out whole shellfish species and raise sea level by a meter — in/by 2100.
Increased CO2 may more may not prove to be totally benign to the human species and general biosphere. Changing it rapidly, as we are indeed doing, may cause extinctions mass or otherwise. It might — although there is almost no evidence that it is — raise sea level by “dangerous” amounts at “dangerous” rates. It may well melt most of the world’s glaciers. It might do all of these things are still be worth it, if one sensibly compares the cost of human misery, morbidity and mortality associated with the alternative. And it is by no means certain that it will do any of these things. And even if we do nothing to “ameliorate” the use of coal as a fuel by way of legislation, onerous taxation, regulation, subsidy of alternatives, highway robbery and open piracy, we may stop using coal as a fuel anyway in 1 to 2 decades, simply because alternatives mature technologically to where they are more cost effective. Fusion could bring about the end of coal in a decade. Thorium fission could (if unopposed by watermelon nutcases) could bring about the end of coal in twenty years and provide us with rare earth metals needed to produce energy efficiently by all means available. People will likely pursue both not to save the world but to get rich.
rgb
~Snip~ –mod.
Well said.
Had the last glaciation lasted longer and CO2 levels dropped into the death zone for C3 plants, C4 and CAM plants might have taken up some of the slack, but they generally don’t do well in cold climates.
I think that mass extinctions are the results of “suitable” conditions plus a trigger. We don’t what the Permian extinction was triggered by though there are lots of ideas. At the end of the Wisconsin we see extinctions in some regions but not others. North and South America are one region that was hit pretty hard. It is common recently to blame the late Pleistocene arrival of humanity, but that doesn’t explain how species like elephants survived in Africa, where humanity continued to hunt then to the present. Elephants are now definitely under pressure from humans, but at the end of the Pleistocene? I doubt that. They may have put the finishing touches on though. The abrupt interruptions of the Younger Dryas would have been especially problematic catching partially adapted communities and reversing field very quickly (in geological terms).
Great comment.
The following is not related to what you wrote, but as I know you have made your own estimates, I just wonder if you are familiar with the following paper? (I ´m not myself capable to evaluate the paper.)
Greenhouse Effect and the IR Radiative Structure of the Earth’s Atmosphere, Ferenc Miskolczi
http://atlatszo.hu/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/article.pdf
“According to the simple-minded or ‘classic’ view of the greenhouse effect the global average greenhouse temperature change may be estimated by the direct application of the Beer-Lambert law moderated by some local or regional scale weather phenomenon (R. Pierrehumbert, [2], A. Lacis, [1], A. P. Smith,[24], H. deBruin,[17], J. Abraham et al., [25] ). This is not true. If the τ A constant, then there is no AGW, there is no climate sensitivity and there is no H2O feedback of any kind. All non-radiative atmospheric processes are contributing to one overall purpose, namely to keep the extropy (τA ) constant and convert as much SW radiation to LW radiation as possible while maintaining the radiative energy balance and the minimum gravitational potential energy.”
I’m familiar with the paper, which is out there in the “high iconoclast” regime of the science. Which I am not prepared to judge either — partly because it invokes a self-organizing principle and it is very difficult indeed to isolate some sort of conclusive signal of this in a chaotic nonlinear multivariate system. That is, it could be right. It might not be right. I’m somewhat more inclined towards Lindzen and Choi’s not entirely unrelated result that suggests a real greenhouse effect, but one that is reduced by feedback instead of augmented. This seems more plausible (to me, again) and is in better agreement with the anomaly data, although with the tampering that has at this point reached the point of absurdity it isn’t easy to know how seriously to take this.
Alternatively, the sensitivity indicated in the top article by Mr. Monckton isn’t terribly out of line with L&C, and isn’t TOO far out of line with my own best one parameter fit of HadCRUT4. Of course, HadCRUT4 (like NOAA an GISS) just changed everything, so my old best fit probably won’t work any more. Which has no real effect on my argument but to lower my trust in HadCRUT4, but you see the problem. Without reliable data to work with, it is very difficult to even know what to believe. It is the saddest, sorriest aspect of this whole topic.
rgb
It’s even more significant, that according to UAH 6.0 beta there was no warming in the lower troposphere over oceans for the last 21 years (since August 1994).
Yep, none of it adds up does it? We’re supposed to believe projections from models that are known to be flawed and stated as such in the literature. Now that really is a sad and sorry state to be in.
You think? Speculate all you want about cyclone activity, if we can’t explain the entire temperature gradient all the way up, we don’t understand incoming/outgoing energy difussion. Let alone what causes it to adopt a marginally different profile over time. Radiative myopia writ large.
Just to illustrate what we’re talking about here:
http://s14.postimg.org/61425j3wv/Uah_Vert_Sig.png
My only issue with showing model spaghetti graphs compared to observations is that each spaghetti “random initiating parameters” run has equal probability to every other run (the mean is a meaningless metric). The obvious fall-back position of the warmists, should they choose to use it, is that this is not the decade and a half, by chance, to use to disprove or prove their theory. Indeed, our current regime (which appears to be an overall flat period of stability) is an equal chance random walk as well and could, in an alternate but equal world, be warmer, cooler, or the same. The final proof that the null hypothesis must be kept, will be one of these: The overall stable flat trend continues for a total of 30 years (what I consider to be a “regime”), or a downturn to a colder regime commences and it continues downward for 30 years (same reason).
Mmmmm, spaghetti.
Personally I think what when we give this time of the pause, we should have two different numbers. One that includes the peak in the late 1990s and a second that is AFTER this peak. As I recall there was an article about that some time back.
Are you referring to my article here?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/04/09/rss-shows-no-warming-for-15-years-now-includes-february-data/
See:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1997/plot/rss/from:1997/trend/plot/rss/from:2000.1/trend
The slope now is negative from January 1997 as well as from March 2000.
Of course the calculated date shifts. The temperature isn’t sitting still.
Neither is time. It moves forward at a rate of exactly one month/month. Can you not figure that out Brian ? When you have new starting conditions in science, it’s pretty rare that you don’t have a different end result.
“Neither is time. It moves forward at a rate of exactly one month/month.”
I find that rather inconvenient. Can’t we adjust it, somehow?
Actually there are many pauses. The current one is the August 2015 pause. Last month we had the July 2015 pause. None of these change. There is no shifting. What might be interesting is for someone to compute a pause trend, that is, how have the lengths of these defined pauses changed over time. I think what we’d find is the lengths are increasing.
The insistence of everyone arguing about the sign (+/-) of a trend is innumerate. It’s the amount of the trend that matters compare to the model. I would not concern me one bit (scientifically speaking) if the trend flipped from -0.01 to +0.01 degC because of El Nino. Continuing this innumeracy only helps the warmists.
I’d like to see the pause defined as “how long have models deviated from actual measurements by some amount”. Given the yellow confidence area in Figures 2, and 3, the models are out of date about 1 year after they are published…
Peter
Peter, that wouldn’t be a pause. A Pause is when something stops happening (ie warming or cooling stops) for a period of time. What you describe is the very opposite of a pause, something that continues to happen (as you note the deviation from actual measurements happens shortly after publication and keeps on going)
So a change from -0.00001degc to +0.000001degC negates the pause? Because of a sign change even though that change is far far below the measurement noise floor?
That’s patently absurd. It’s innumerate.
A pause in the predicted warming is pause if the actual temperature is below the 95% confidence interval of the prediction in warming. Which happens, according to LM’s graphs, about 2 years after the prediction is made…
Peter
No, it would just move the start of the pause date ahead one month unless there was a very strange coincidence.
So if it’s not warming, what’s causing all these glaciers to melt?
The same thing that was causing them to melt just before the pause. Not warming is not the same thing as cooling. warming means temps are increasing, cooling means they are decreasing. A pause means they’re staying where they already are neither increasing nor decreasing.
But the rate of glacial melting is increasing. How can that be if the temperature stays the same and ocean warming is negligible?
Aran … there are lots of things that affect glacier melting including geothermal heating from below and increased flow speed which can happen for many reasons. You really should expand you view. Antarctic glaciers melt when the temperature is below freezing when they flow into the ocean.
Aran – because you are talking about bulk quantities. Some glaciers are melting. Some are expanding. Some areas of the globe are getting warmer. Some are getting colder. The global temperature anomaly is the average of all of them. And, that measure has not been rising for 18+ years.
Aran: That is a claim, unproven, without global or even multiple regional evidence.
There are many claims floating around the blogosphere, published by the compliant alarmist media and touted by those seeking to frighten the gullible. That does not make any of the claims true or even partially true.
Start with the whole history of any particular glacier. Many of today’s glaciers only started re-growing during the last couple of millennia. This is easily proved by soil samples and carbon dating from under the glaciers; but oddly ignored by alarmists far and wide who only care about the last thirty years.
I base my claim on the results of the WGMS, not on blogosphere or alarmist media:
http://wgms.ch/latest-glacier-mass-balance-data/
I agree that not every glacier in the world is monitored, but the results paint a very coherent picture and the probability for this to be a chance result due to under-sampling are incredibly tiny. I don’t know much about how glaciers have grown or melted during the last millennia. I posted my original post, because it seems odd to me that the rate of glacial decrease is accelerating while there has not been any warming for two decades.
Aran
Why do you believe the rate of glacier decrease is increasing? Today’s glaciers have retreated back to where they were BEFORE – back to where they were in the 1200’s – 1400’s in Europe/Alps, back to where they in the 800’s in South America.
Look for instance at figure 2 in the link to the WGMS.
Where they were is not relevant to my point. My point was that an acceleration in melting seems to be at odds with two decades without warming.
@Bart If I may refine your statement: Almost all of the monitored glaciers are retreating. The few that are not (there is actually only 1 out of 81 that is showing statistically significant growth) show at least a deceleration in growth. Overall they show a significant downward trend that is accelerating.
AFAIK the situation with global temperature is similar. Apart from a region below Greenland and a region around Antarctica, temperatures are rising. Yet somehow the UAH measurement seems to defy all that. I’d like to know how that is possible.
You see, CO2 is magical, and it chooses certain areas of the globe that it warms. I couldnt care less, i live in the mountains. The summers are hot every year and the winters are cold every year. If the magical CO2 has warmed the planet a few tenths of a degree, I say that it is not enough. I would like to keep my garden blooming year round. Most sane people like the warmth of the sun. And dislike the bitter cold. That is why most do not live at the poles, and tend to holiday in the tropics during winter in the NH. Warm is good, or should I say better, than cold.
More mis-information, twisted reasoning and irresponsible leaps of logic Aran?
From your link to WGMS: – my bolding and italics.
The ‘reference’ glaciers total 37 glaciers located in ten mountain ranges with nine of thse ranges located in the Northern Hemisphere. Three Canadian ‘high arctic’ glaciers are the only glaciers near the polar areas.
Can you say ‘confirmation bias’ reference glaciers?
Also note that some glaciers are still accelerating. Either ‘global’ means globally all glaciers are retreating, or global means someone is stretching the truth. Aran!? Or is that wee willy con man Connelly?
Sea level rise is not accelerating.
During a significant portion of those thirty years the standards and methods for measuring and estimating glacier mass balance underwent multiple updates and changes. Meaning that the alleged record of measurements is a series of stitched patchwork independent measurements. No continuity or consistency.
Direct and undelayed is an interesting description of a five year cycle of glacier measurements and estimates.
From one of the ‘Glacier Mass Balance Measurements’ field manuals
In other or simpler words.
The ‘glacier’ measurements are taken by hand and eye estimation then extrapolated to the entire glacier.
Can you understand overstatement!? All these researchers are capable of stating and tracking their ‘best’ estimate. That is science in action, but the results are not accurate. Certainly not accurate enough to state that the world’s glaciers are losing mass.
You can take some sentences out of context, cast doubts on huge amounts of research and argue about inconsistencies all you like, but the fact remains that almost all glaciers show retreat (these are way more than just the 37 reference glaciers by the way) and only one shows significant growth. The probability for such results to be random is incredibly small. The claim that the results are not accurate enough to state the worlds glaciers are losing mass is simply completely wrong. The vast majority of glaciers that are monitored show mass loss and this mass loss is statistically highly significant. You are entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts.
The SUN.
Solar activity has been stable or even decreasing somewhat over the past decades
Solar activity has been demonstrably not stable over the past decades.
They aren’t all melting.
Other factors besides average global air temperature affect the waxing and waning of montane glaciers, ice sheets and sea ice.
The East Antarctic Ice sheet, depository of 61% of the freshwater on earth, is gaining substantial mass.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v491/n7425/full/nature11621.html
Sea ice around Antarctica sets new records for the satellite era every year.
But despite the growing in the East the total Antarctic Ice sheet is also waning, as shown in figure 2 of the article you linked to. So the Antarctic Ice sheet shows a similar behaviour to the glaciers. The nett effect is melting, with some spatial variation.
The Western Antarctic Ice Sheet was losing mass because of a sub-ice volcano. That has stopped.
The total amount of melting was almost not measurable.
Some glaciers are gaining and some losing. It has nothing to do with the largely imaginary warming since 1977, which in any case owes practically nothing to CO2.
Can you back your statements up with actual data? I have found nothing in the literature supporting your claims. The melting in the West was statistically more significant than the gain in the East. I have seen no indication of melting in the West decreasing let alone stopping. The article you linked to does not mention any volcano. I have found no evidence of increased volcanic activity, let alone any evidence that shows the melting was caused by volcanic activity.
As for the glaciers the world glacier monitoring service clearly shows that the vast majority of the glaciers being monitored is melting. There is a very strong and significant decrease.
Finally, claiming the warming over the last decades to be imaginary is simply denying vast amounts of observations that show otherwise. Claiming it not to be caused by CO2 raises the question of what other cause can account for it.
Of course I can back up my statements. I wouldn’t make them otherwise.
I’d have posted a link, but thought, apparently wrongly, that all readers of this blog were aware of the subglacial volcanism discovered under the WAIS in 2013.
http://www.livescience.com/41262-west-antarctica-new-volcano-discovered.html
I am aware there are volcanoes beneath the ice. Your link does not back up your statement that the volcano caused the melting. If anything it disputes it:
Also it does not back up your claim of the melting having stopped, the melting being almost not measurable (which is disproved by the Nature article you linked to earlier) or the warming since 1977 being imaginary.
All you have backed up is that there are indeed volcanoes under the ice. Your other claims are either doubtful or even contradicted by your own links.
From the Nature article:
If the whole continent were losing mass, you’d have a case, or at least something that needed explaining, Aran. But, it isn’t, so you don’t.
Oh right, I get it now. It has to happen everywhere or else we can ignore it. Highly scientific. By that logic we might all start smoking again because Jeanne Calment smoked cigarettes for nearly 100 years and became the oldest person in the world.
“It has to happen everywhere…”
Well, yeah. You can’t just cherry pick a few sites that seem to support your hypothesis and proclaim it validated.
If you don’t like that, I’m sorry. If you find the scientific method frustrating, maybe you should get involved in less demanding activities.
Yet that is exactly what you did when pointing to East Antarctica.
Moreover, I did not even make any hypotheses yet. I stated that overall Antarctica is losing ice, which is supported by the data. Same for the glaciers. I tried to do the opposite of cherry-picking. To look at the complete picture. The focusing on East Antarctica is cherry-picking. Just like focusing on one or two glaciers that are growing. Overall, the ice mass is reducing and the sea levels are rising, yet according to Lord Monckton the temperatures are not increasing. I seriously wonder how that can be possible.
Except this year
“Yet that is exactly what you did when pointing to East Antarctica.”
No. The G in AGW stands for global. To confirm it, the effects have to be global. To disconfirm it, we note that the effects are not global. Globally, average temperatures have been steady for almost two decades. Globally, there are as many places getting colder as there are getting warmer.
Bart,
Nobody claims that global warming means temperatures have to rise everywhere on the planet with no single exception. So your claim that some parts are not warming is correct, but if you think this disproves global warming you are wrong. Would you eat food that was found to give a disease to 9 out of 10 people who ate it, simply because there was one person who did not get ill, so the theory that the food could have caused the disease is disproven?
So if it is warming what’s causing the Antarctic to get icier/snowier?
Antarctic Ice overall is reducing. See the link from Sturgis Hooper. There are some locations that are growing, but the total amount of ice is getting smaller.
Not any more it isn’t. The WAIS has stopped losing even the tiny bit that it was from the volcano under one of its glaciers.
This “tiny bit” was significantly more than the increase in the East
It was tiny. Practically a measurement error.
Absolutely nothing to be concerned about.
And what is causing record breaking lake ice and snow cover?
I don’t know about these things. So no idea really. If you can point me to sources of information I’d be very grateful.
Probably the same thing that causing all those other ones to grow!
Still the measurements have shown that overall there is a melting trend. Quite strongly even. And the few that grow show a deceleration in growth, so their change is in the same direction
Yes, overall montane glaciers have receded since the end of the Little Ice Age. And this is surprising, why exactly?
Most of the average retreat was before CO2 took off after WWII. Not surprising, since the first 30 years after the war were in a cooling trend, despite zooming CO2. Then for about 20 years rising CO2 happened accidentally to correspond with allegedly rising GASTA, but for the past approximately 20 years, the world has stopped warming, and in fact cooled lately, again in spite of monotonously rising CO2.
The surprising part is that it seems contradictory to the claims that it hasn’t warmed for 18+ years and that the warming before that was imaginary. There is to my knowledge no evidence of stronger retreat before WWII. If anything measurements will have been sparse. The statement that the world has stopped warming is not backed up by data. Even in this article, the increase in heat content of the oceans is very clear. There is no statistically significant indication of warming being halted.
The data are in the satellite plots of tropospheric temperature, and they cover the entire globe.
What you have is anecdotal evidence of ice shelves in a particular, constrained area. This is not a global phenomenon. This is not even a wide area phenomenon. This is a specific phenomenon confined to a specific area on the westernmost corner of the continent.
Your knowledge would be expanded by looking at even the highly fictionalized so-called record from GISS, HadCRU or NOAA, all of which still show plainly, despite having undergone extensive cosmetic surgery, that the world cooled during the period roughly 1945-77, after having warmed during the previous decades, c. 1918-44.
The cooling was so pronounced in the 1960s that it caused Callendar to abandon his hypothesis from the 1930s of man-made global warming from CO2.
I know about all this. Except the Callendar part, but it is good to see you value his opinions.
With the addition that the cooling after WWII was not statistically significant
You’re not discussing science or theories. Instead you are twisting the responses where people are trying explain answers to your questions.
Then you pop out with this announcement of knowledge along with a condescending remark.
You purposely ignore the details that disagree with your assertions and happily hammer details you pretend are wrong because you’re willfully ignoring evidence.
Meaning, you are only here to divert discussions and waste responsible commenter time.
Willfully wrong con man Connelly uses similar tactics?
Wow, those are a lot of accusations.
Let me start by saying that I have no intentions of being condescending. If any of my posts have been perceived as condescending I apologise. I do feel this is a place where one does not have to speak in euphemisms. If I disagree with someone I feel I can say it outright. Even the people writing the articles here use pretty strong terms and do not hold back when talking about other scientists. However as I said, if I have hurt someone’s feelings, I apologise. That is not my intention. English is not my first language so maybe I don’t express myself in the right way sometimes.
Other than that I find it hard to see where your accusations are coming from. I try to stay focused on the science, which is why I am asking for statements to be backed-up by data. I try to respond to all the points that someone makes. I try not to divert. The diversions to Antarctica or to lake ice and snow cover etc. have not been made by me. The latter I know nothing about by the way, and I am not afraid to admit that, so I can’t really go into that.
If I have been ignoring evidence or details it definitely has not been willfully or purposely.
Maybe you can give me some examples of where I have missed, diverted or ignored something. I’d be happy to rethink my posts and I hope to learn. That’s one of the reasons I am here.
Aran,
It is commonly observed in Canada that snow and ice accumulate gradually and erratically over the months that we call “winter”.
Fortuitously, the departure of the accumulated snow is not quite so “glacial” (ha,ha,) and Spring is, mercifully, not quite as protracted as the frigid season.
After many years of watching ice melt, we can assert that the daily reduction in size of a large pile of ice, expressed as a percentage of its mass, is considerably less than the diminution of a small pile of ice.
You can count pixels or take some pixel-counter’s word for it, or you can hang around a parking lot in Moose Jaw and witness the extravaganza of a 100% ice disappearance in just one night in May.
Ladies and Gentlemen: “Brian” and “Aran” are paid operatives of Hillary Clinton. They make it up rather than look it up. Even well-known data must be “sourced” for them. Note how they know nothing of the building ruins now being exposed in Switzerland and Greenland. Note they know nothing of the actual observations of ice increases at the poles including the establishment of new observational records in Antarctica.
Since these tactics, including pretend data, pretend incomprehension, pretend observation and pretend logic are hallmarks of the left the most likely explanation for both is that George Soros, the DNC or the Comintern are paying them to waste your time. I wish you would ignore them.
I am reading this because many of you possess knowledge and skills I admire. Educate me, and each other. You folks can entertain yourselves by elevating the debate and accelerating the rate of scientific progress. Let Hillary argue the Federal Government needs more money and control. Let you argue for freedom of research, freedom of knowledge and the freedom to constructively dissent.
Thanks for what you do. I am frequently humbled by your intellects and knowledge.
Aran
August 6, 2015 at 6:22 pm
The cooling c. 1944-77 most certainly was significant. The fiction-writing gatekeepers have been busily cooling the preceding warm period, c. 1918-44 or so, while warming the following cool phase of the natural roughly 30 year cycles.
But in reality the 1960s and early ’70s were decidedly cold. That’s why scientists then feared that the big ice age was returning. It’s why, as noted Callendar, like a real scientist, changed his mind about AGW (which he considered beneficial).
Look at untampered records. The cold record for Washington State was set on a day in December 1968 which I well remember, as I do the frigid decade that followed before the PDO shifted in 1977, another memorable WX year, especially for a wheat farmer.
John H. Harmon
August 7, 2015 at 4:54 pm
You’re right. I should have ignored them.
Appears that Aran was a drive-by shooter from the hip anyway.
@John H Harmon:
I would very much appreciate it if you did not tell lies about me or make assumptions about me. I do not live in the US, I have no connection with any US politician. I did not make up any data, but you surely made up your claims about me.
Also you are wrong about polar ice increase.
@Sturgis:
Actually if we were to look at the “untampered” raw data the warming would have been even stronger. If anything the so-called “fiction-writing gatekeepers” have reduced the rate of warming. With respect to the cooling past WWII, I meant it being statistically significant. I don’t think it was, but it could depend on the data set and the exact period you choose, so I don’t want to make any fuss about it and am happy to agree there was some definite cooling during those years. The ice age fear has been greatly exaggerated though.
Lack of precip, soot, dust, local albedo mods, local AW.
Those are some important factors.
Also a cooler world is windier, which increases evaporation and deposits dust from distant sources.
Lower humidity in the troposphere…increases sublimation.
Glaciers retreated in Africa because of deforestation, not global warming, as falsely asserted by Fat Albert. In fact, temperatures hadn’t warmed in the vicinity of Mt. Kilimanjaro, Prince Albert’s bogus example.
Aran, if I drop ice cubes on my kitchen floor, and they just keep melting…does this mean my kitchen is warming?
Snip. ~mod.
The ice sheets started accumulating when Antarctica was cut off from South America and Australia by deep ocean currents in the Oligocene, around 34 million years ago.
@Menicholas: Not necessarily, but as already pointed out, nobody is dropping anything here. Definitely not at the time scales we are concerned with. However, to stay with your analogy for arguments’ sake, If you were to measure the rate at which the ice was melting and found it to be accelerating, that would be an indication the kitchen is warming. As it happens that is exactly what has been measured for the glaciers.
Brian, do you know how much of Antarctica ever gets above freezing? And for how long? And how cold it is everywhere but the coast, even in Summer?
How long does it take new snow in a glacial accumulation area (neve) to make it’s way to the terminus? If snowfall increases at the top, does the terminus advance the next day? The next week? Month? Year? Varies, depending on how long the glacier is and what else is affecting the ablation rate?
If the globe warms for thirty years, then cools for thirty, does every glacier in the world advance for the first thirty years, and recede during the second thirty?
Does it mater if the net warming is due to an increase in overnight lows, rather than daytime highs?
What if it gets colder but drier?
Or warmer and wetter? What if the mountain is so high, it is always way below freezing up there, so it even snows in summer? Does that matter?
Is water locked up in mountain glaciers, which are growing, serve as a valuable resource, or a detriment, since it may be centuries before any of it melts?
If a glacier which has been melting, and providing a supply of water all summer long to the valleys below, then begins to melt less, and hence advance, cutting off the supply of needed water, is it a blessing, because at some point in the future it may melt? Is a similar valley a thousand miles south, which has no glaciers but instead has thickly forested slopes with healthy soil horizons, worse off because all the rain which falls percolates into the soil and rocks and provides streams and springs all year round?
And I’ll betcha ten bars of gold-pressed latinum that it was the Ferengi. Those evil bastards!
Snip. ~mod.
Snip. ~mod.
Aran, glaciers are dependent upon renewal. No snow, no new ice. Glaciers and ice in general not only melts, it also sublimes going from ice directly to vapor in dry, freezing air. Read about Mt Kilimanjaro’s declining ice fields for instance, which are not melting, but are disappearing. Some glaciers are indeed receding, but if you run a search you will find that there are also advancing glaciers; sometimes they are right next to each other. Then too, look at the Antarctic and Arctic. Sea ice around Antarctica is far above normal, and Arctic sea ice is well above the minimum it reached in the mid 2000s. In fact global sea ice, which showed a definite decline between about 2005 and 2012, has been looking pretty much average since then.
Also, you are assuming that glaciers are highly dynamic. They aren’t. The ice melting now formed centuries to millennia ago. The “Ice Man” was buried in snow on open, ice-free ground. That snow buried him and stayed there, turning to ice until it was once more melted and revealed a Chalcolithic cold case – pun intended, so that ice was at least 5,000 years old, but it accumulated on open ground. So, apparently the ice encasing him formed in situ then, and the world only just rid it self of that ice in that location. We’ve no idea what that really means in terms of the long term mass balance.
Looking at WGMS “seems” like a reasonable action, but it uses only 37 glaciers as a reference and nearly all of them are in the northern hemisphere, in fact all but one. There are numerous glaciers and an entire ice sheet in the southern Andes and the WGMS monitors one. There are glaciers in New Zealand and the WGMS monitors NONE. There hundreds in the Himalayas and apparently again, none are monitored. There are even a few in Africa that apparently aren’t monitored. That leaves one asking just how “representative” is the reference sample used by the WGMS.
“Then too, look at the Antarctic and Arctic. Sea ice around Antarctica is far above normal, and Arctic sea ice is well above the minimum it reached in the mid 2000s. In fact global sea ice, which showed a definite decline between about 2005 and 2012, has been looking pretty much average since then.”
Umm, this statement is …. well …. wrong. Antarctic sea ice is now very much normal for this time of year
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/antarctic.sea.ice.interactive.html
and the arctic is very low
http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/arctic.sea.ice.interactive.html
It may not break the all time low record, but it is not out of the question either….
The statement Duster made is not wrong Simon.
Antarctic sea ice is a little lower than last year, but last year was a record…most ice EVAH(!)…by which I mean since the satellite record began.
EVAH!
And the Arctic has seen a rapid rebound in the amount of multiyear ice it has…and is about to undergo a huge increase in that number, as the official “birthday” of the ice is approaching.
Arctic ice is increasing, from a low level…exactly what one would expect for a multi-decadal cycle which has just reached a minimum, and reversed trend, and is hence on the way back up.
Funny how warmistas wail and moan about melting ice, but have little to say when it refreezes, is it not?
No, it is not funny at all. It is pathetic!
And anyway, what is the advantage of having large swaths of frozen wasteland covering our planet? How on God’s green Earth is it a good thing when more of it becomes completely unlivable, and treacherous to visit, and nearly impossible to traverse?
What is it about desolate and barren ice field that we are supposed to find so great? So great we will dismantle our economy on the off chance some of it may melt forever?
Please, tell us.
I await with baited breathe the prospect of understanding why we should be cheerleaders for greater desolation in the world.
Menicholas
Did you not look at the graphs? There is no way the arctic is rebounding…. no way. It is still in big trouble. And oh what a lovely world it would be if we all thought as simply as you. If we lose the ice on the planet then the seas rise. If the seas rise we have less land to live on. If we have less land to live on we struggle to feed ourselves. And that is just the humans. Many other animals and plants struggle on a quickly warming planet.
Simon, just how much land do you believe we are going to lose from a 1 foot increase in sea height over the next 100 years?
We aren’t struggling to feed ourselves now, and most of the world is still using agricultural technology that is decades behind state of the art.
Food production the world over is at record highs and growing fast. This is true on an absolute basis, and also on a per capita basis, even as population grows rapidly.
If the ice all melts, we will have vast new continents, and large amounts of existing continents open up to habitation.
A big if, considering that sea level rise has been very constant for a very long time in the places it is rising.
There is no acceleration.
And since it has always fluctuated, what gives you the colossal arrogance to imagine that we can determine what level we prefer and lock it in, in any case?
Men
“If the ice all melts, we will have vast new continents, and large amounts of existing continents open up to habitation.”
Ohh please!!!! Do you believe this nonsense or are you trying to make us laugh? Tell me where these vast new continents are? Are we talking Mars?
Duster,
You are wrong. We are not just talking about the 37 reference glaciers. The WGMS monitors many more, including two in New Zealand. Furthermore we are talking about the retreat of glaciers which happens at the base. The renewal you mention happens at the top of the glacier. Finally, I am not assuming glaciers to be dynamic, the data show that they are. I suppose I should try to avoid a semantic discussion here about the definition of dynamic. What I mean by that statement is that the mass loss they show is statistically significant and that it appears to be happening all over the world with only one or at max (depending on your definition) a few exceptions. Again these are more than the 37 references. The whole list is something like 100 (didn’t count exactly and again some ambiguity since some glaciers have multiple branches), including New Zealand, Nepal and Kenya. So they are dynamic at the moment in the sense that they are showing a clear, measurable change all over the world.
Oh and as regard for the statement about sea ice: The total volume of ice at the poles is decreasing. Sturgis Hooper actually posted a link to a nature article showing this. That the extend (i.e. surface area) of sea ice is increasing could well be a consequence of the melting. As land ice melts it releases cold water into the ocean. There are discernable cold spots south of greenland and around antarctica which indeed can increase the potential for sea ice to grow.
Some glaciers are melting. Some glaciers are growing. Some glaciers aren’t doing much of anything at all.
But the undeniable trend is down….Most are melting and some are growing. Provide evidence that says otherwise and I will listen.
“So if it’s not warming, what’s causing all these glaciers to melt?”
Why does ice melt? Is it thermal conduction from the surrounding air. Is it radiation from the surrounding air. Is it radiation from the sun? Is it conduction from the underlying rock, is it radiation from the underlying rock?
Likely all of the above. Your question as elucidated by subsequent comments is, “how can there be an acceleration of melting if air temperature is flat?” A reasonable question. Assuming your acceleration is real, the answer is that the acceleration is caused by one of the factors besides the temperature of the kitchen air. But you have to be careful to distinguish between the acceleration of the melting from the linear base rate of melting resulting from the fact that the kitchen air is warmer (but not increasing)than it was at the last glacial maximum.
It is also possible that there is a lag in the melting response and/or the relationship between the melting factors and melting is not linear.
Thank you. That is a reasonable and well written response. The lag could make sense and even though the melting signal is very strong, it is indeed the acceleration part that matters and that is less obvious over what is still quite a short time scale. I am still worried whether or not the UAH and RSS measurements may have been a bit on the conservative side. There is no need to prove global warming does not exist, just to show that it is not as strong as is proclaimed at the moment
I am happy to have finally received a serious and reasonable answer. I don’t understand why some people seem so reluctant to face that there has been some warming and that the effects of that are measurable. Such behaviour just gives people the ammunition to call us deniers rather than skeptics.
Brian G, the line wiggles; it is a natural fluctuation. Take the endpoint as the present (it won’t be the present next month – hence the ‘calculation’ has to be updated each month- comprendez?). Take the data from the endpoint and execute a regression on the trend back to a point where, any further back, there will be a slight upslope. This horizontal line is the trend of the data to that point – no warming for 18yrs 7mos. Now the next month might be a bit higher, this means your horizontal trend might go back to a point that is less than 18yrs 7mos. If the following month it plunges notably, the the horizontal trend might reach back to 18yrs 10mos, even though we’ve added only one more month. Is it clear why the calculation must be redone each month?
About 18 years 7 month before present, dopey !!!
We don’t have to pick a certain dataset and backtrack in time to find a pause, it is of no consequence. Changes nothing. Why don’t we play by their game, look at the whole trend and just point out how far below the “dangerous” warmth we actually are?
The “pause” is used by the other side as much as it used by this side, to point out how data is being looked at with a bias in mind.
Monckton himself states that there is small warming, does anyone actually believe that the pause will last forever? If no then why is it will being calculated?
Falsifying a failed theory, which is giving license to certain politicians and bureaucrats to enact insane and economically destructive policies, is one reason.
How many would you like?
I would never call it a license. I think that is disingenuous. It would seem to me that we would want our politicians to act according to the best science available. If we were told by scientists that an asteroid was going to hit the earth in 2100 would you want to give them the license to act to deflect it or would you want to insist they act to deflect it?
I would prefer they not build temples to the asteroid gods and order us all to attend daily services. In other words, proposed responses should have a legitimate chance of improving the outcome and not merely be a quasi-religious “feel good” effort.
davidgmills says: “If we were told by scientists that an asteroid was going to hit the earth in 2100 would you want to give them the license to act to deflect it or would you want to insist they act to deflect it?”
Well if it’s an asteroid they’ve been tracking for decades and predicting it’s path for decades and yet each year the divergence between their predicted path and the actual path keeps growing, I’d seriously question thier year 2100 impact prediction rather than blindly believing.
davidgmills
August 6, 2015 at 9:14 pm
I would never call it a license. I think that is disingenuous. It would seem to me that we would want our politicians to act according to the best science available….
Exactly the best science. However, when you look at the IPCC and the AGW “teams” you must ask, “what science?” Mathematics, as Kurt Goedel showed before WWII, is not a “science.” Consequently, although it is an immensely useful set of tools, mathematics remains a creative enterprise that cannot fully explain itself let alone the rest of reality. Models do not produce “data” in the scientific sense. As it is we have politicians like Gerry Brown asserting that “the whole state could burn.” His understanding of science, let alone the “best,” is highly colored by his political promises.
If the evidence that the asteroid was going to hit us was based on a model that had never been proven and failed every test ever put to it, I certainly wouldn’t want those scientists to beggar the entire world prior to proving that there actually was a danger that needed to be avoided.
Both the pause, and the models running way to warm are simple points to make and illustrate. The alarmist will cry “warmest year ever”, no matter what.
” does anyone actually believe that the pause will last forever?
=================================
Nothing lasts forever, but cooling may be as likely as warming.
The Starting Point has always been the same, i.e. the most recently released RSS monthly average; the end point has always been the same, the last month that can not be shown to have statistically significant warming.
Brian,
Can you really be this mathematically challenged? Or are you just pretending to be obtuse for fun?
Chris runs a linear regression from the latest month back to the point in time in the data series at which there is still no statistically significant warming.
The plateau, hiatus or pause will start at whatever point the regression finds. It can change depending upon the latest data.
What is so hard about this simple procedure for you to grasp? Even without undergrad level statistics, the concept should not be difficult to grasp.
[snip -fake commenter using assumed name -mod]
Snip. ~mod.
Snip. ~mod.
I know I should just ignore the troll, but here goes anyway
Brian says ” the start date of “The Pause” is not fixed, but changes. That in and of itself tells me that the procedure is flawed because it gives inconsistent results.”
The problem you have, Brian is that the start and end dates of a pause are only fixable *after* the pause ends. until the end of the pause you only have part of the data. What Lord M is basically doing each month is telling you the length of the pause (and thus the “start date”) would be if one assumes that the pause ended at the present day. But as each new month of data comes in, we see that the pause hasn’t ended yet (and thus the length needs to be recalculated to include the added months worth of data)- and depending on what the most recent data is the pause length will lengthen or shorten or even remain unchanged, but what remins the same is: the pause continues to exist and continues to be over half the satelite record.
Git; you are beginning to sound like the proverbial parrot with limited speech.
You’ve had multiple commenters explain the whole topic over several threads/days.
Instead of reason or discussion you’ve turned a blind eye to all responses and then you pipe up with the “polly want a cracker” endless refrain of yours where you insist on posting your confirmed bias.
Brian G Valentine.
I am not sure if this will help you. First, forget about player winning streaks starting at a certain time. Instead take a trip in a car:
As passenger in the rear seat of a car looks back, as the car travels forward, he can see there are hills and curves behind him. Sometimes he can see a few hundred yards, sometimes just a few yards. As the car travel forward, the passenger can see varying distances back. Then all of a sudden the car climes a hill, and the passenger sees back several miles… WOW! Then the car reaches the crest, and the view is gone.
How far back he can see, is based on where the car is, not where it was!
Monckton’s algorithms, which I have not looked at, simply does that. It provides a line of sight, that looks back. So, one moment it can see some 18 years back, another moment slightly different length of time.
Now for your persistence on this issue, I give you an A+, but you never bother going back and checking yourself. Each report that he present, had a different end date!! The car was at different points in its journey. You knew this, but ignored it.
Above and below Figure 3; I believe this should be UAHv6 to agree with the diagram.
And time keeps marching forward. I guess that means that there is no such thing as the present, is there?
Just one long, everlasting now.
No, now.
Oh, wait…now.
NOW!
NOW
Now
now
So, what used to be now, is now (huh?) the past!
Might as well throw away all those useless calendars and clocks.
Dang things cannot make up their mind!
In case no one understood what I was getting at, it was that Mr. Obtuse seems to fail to understand that the present is a moving target.
He also seems cometely oblivious to the random nature of short term fluctuations, and how these affect temperature trends, when calculated from the “present”.
If we freeze the moment in time called the present, then the problem he wants to invent would disappear.
Likewise if there were no fluctuations, but instead a smooth line from month to month on temperature trend charts.
Anyone who pretends to, or actually does not, understand that filtering randomness out of the analysis requires constant recalculation as new random fluctuations are introduced, is plainly not worth attempting to educate or enlighten.
For one who is honestly baffled, the only solution is to start way back in the science and math education process.
And for one who is pretending, the above string is exactly what he was hoping for.
As everyone who is honestly trying to understand what the data is showing knows, the only real question is which direction is the climate system of the Earth heading, and at what rate is it doing so?
Those who wish only to obfuscate, rather than elucidate, deserve a heap of scorn and then the silent treatment.
I have a one word description for anyone who never has anything interesting, funny, or intelligent to say, and yet continues to blather on…that word is BORING.
Back to school, listen and learn, or shut the hell up.
Of course the calculations are reliable, silly child. What you do not realize, being used to the clockwork certainly of model outputs, is that Lord Monckton is working actual data…and as more data become available, the calculations based on those data will very likely change.
It’s really easy. Brian wants to be Peter Pan and never get older. (or wiser).
If you look at figure T1 above. The models show the temperature following the el chichon and piñatubo eruptions. So they had to adjust the aerosols to do that. Thereafter no aerosol adjustment (they don’t know when futures eruptions will happen). However it appears that the aerosols lowered the trend. Since they don’t have very good estimates for average aerosols to account for major eruptions, did they subtract pinatubo and el chichon from future aerosol factors. My guess is that they didn’t. So if they never knew about those eruptions the models would be running hotter than they presently show.
I think the standard alarmist talking point is (a) nobody cares about what happens in the troposphere because nobody lives there and (b) the deep ocean is warming out of control and we’re all going to die.
Do not forget about our vast stretches of frozen wasteland…which are in danger of becoming slightly less frigid, somewhat less instantly fatal to a human stranded in one, and which may *shudder* shrink at the margin due to becoming, instead of perennially frozen, only seasonally so. Oh, the horror! The humanity! We must act with all haste to dismantle civilization in order to preserve the useless and barren ice fields!
We have no time to be sure it even will help to do so…we must recognize that no harm is too great to endure, in order to lessen the unlikely prospect of thermageddon!
Excuse me, I need to go call the fire department now and tell them to rush over here to my house and pump it full of water, just in case I have a fire next week. Then I am going to go pay my hundred thousand dollar insurance premium on my seventy five thousand dollar shack.
Just been announced record production of food in the world.
I don’t know anybody who lives in the deep oceans either.
Brian G Valentine; The question is, “how long is the pause?” Every month when new data is available one can and make a new calculation. If the new month is very hot, the length of the pause will be zero months. If the new month is very cool, say as cool as 1970, the pause will be much longer, and the starting date will move into the past. It’s a simple question and a simple calculation. I fail to see how you can fail to see that.
Aran; Menicholas August 6, 2015 at 6:40 pm answered your question better than I could. I’d like to see any historical annual data for global glacial mass that you know of. I look for ten minuets at the link you provided but didn’t find any.
You are absolutely correct – no reliance can be placed on terrestrial data-sets. They started their fakery in 1979 and covered up an entire hiatus in the eighties and nineties. I got satellite data which fortunately showed that this hiatus had lasted 18 years. I have been pointing it out this fact periodically and was simply ignored. I discovered this while doing research for my book What Warming? in 3008. The graph of the hiatus ois figure 125 in my book. I also discovered the role of HadCRUT3 in the coverup and that is shown as figure 24. I even put a warning about it into the preface of the book but nothing happened. Later I found that GISS and NCDC were co-conspirators in this enterprize. The connection is through common computer processing. Unbeknownst to them the computer left its footprints in all three temperature sets, all in precisely the same locations. After wiping out the hiatus they just continued exaggerating the slope as your figure 1d shows. I note also that you are trying various time periods to bring out the mean temperature. I suggest that if you do not include the super El Nino in the graph and start counting time from, 2002 you will get a physically more meaningful slope value. That is because 2002 is the point where the step warming of 1999, the one that raised the twenty-first century temperatures by a third of a degree Celsius, finally petered out. As best as I can tell, the slope of the mean temperature line drawn from that point on is actually slightly negative. Looking at some other stuff you included, I note that the graph by Mears is on the wrong track, Neither El Chichon nor Pinatubo whose cooling he identifies created any volcanic cooling. I have proved that any and all so-called “volcanic cooling” temperature dips shown on temperature charts are nothing more than misidentified La Nina valleys. Whether and how much of such “cooling” is shown in each case depends on where the timing of an eruption falls in relation to the ENSO phase. If it falls on top of an El Nino peak it is followed by a La Nina valley which is then recruited to serve as its cooling. But when the eruption falls in the middle of a La Nina valley it is followed by an El Nino peak and this leaves it without any cooling dip to follow. The two volcanoes identified in his chart are examples of this. The Pinatubo “cooling” there is nothing more than misidentified 1992/1993 La Nina valley. El Chichon, on the other hand, lacks any cooling dip whatsoever because it happened to land right smack in the middle of a La Nina valley. Read pages 17-21 in my book.
I have to agree.
Apart from the step caused by the NON-CO2 forced 1998 – 2001 ocean cooling event, which raised atmospheric temperatures by about 0.26C, there is basically NO WARMING in the entire satellite record.
The very slight warming before is basically cancelled by the slight cooling afterwards.
There is ABSOLUTELY ZERO CO2 WARMING SIGNATURE in the whole of the satellite data record.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1979/plot/rss/from:2001.2/trend/plot/rss/from:1979/to:1997/trend/plot/rss/from:2001.2/trend/offset:-.26
That´s how it looks to me too.
Watch out for somebody to screw up the satellite record as well, here, is another guy expressing himself in unscientific ways:
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.”
I am still not convinced that a real el Nino is developing. Usually before an el Nino is a La Nina-like dip – how often does an el Nino develop from sustained slightly-above-average Pacific temperatures?
Do high east Pacific SSTs always mean el Nino? In this case “el Nino” simply means “high east Pacific SSTs”.
However there is a specific process and mechanism involving transient positive feedback between Peruvian upwelling and the trade winds – the Bjerknes feedback. In my understanding “el Nino” means warm east equatorial Pacific SSTs caused by the Bjerknes feedback, not just warm east equatorial Pacific SSTs in any circumstances.
My guess is that the current high SSTs in the Pacific generally – including the north – are primarily caused by slowed poleward transport of equatorial heat, not the Bjerknes feedback (which is still not happening) and thus not el Nino, in its true sense.
The Peruvian anchovy fishery still signals robust upwelling.
July satellite figure comes in with a not inconsiderable drop from June despite burgeoning El Nino conditions.
Yet no blogs seem to be interested in discussing this anomaly?
Perhaps this is the reason:
The daily anomalies meander up and down within a range of about 0.4 deg C, with a typical period of a couple of weeks. July had more “down” meanders than June, and August will probably have more “up” meanders, and will therefore be warmer again.
Indvidual months can therefore be expected to be up or down by 0.1 to 0.2 degrees just by chance, and without any great signifificance being attached to it.
Although the equatorial Pacific is 1 to 2 deg warmer than normal as a result of the developing el Nino, this covers too small a proportion of the globe to be reflected in the global anomaly – at least, as long as the rest of the world isn’t affected in some way.
The July downturn in temps may well be real. Away from the Pacific and recently adjusted-behind-the-scenes SSTs, many parts of the world are experiencing anomalous cold conditions.
Say, they’re jest gonna hafta’ do a ‘tjinder’ on the models!
beththeserf.