Guest essay by Eric Worrall
h/t The Register – the UK MET Office has published a report which suggests the pause in global temperatures might continue for many years to come. Or the pause might not continue. They’re not really sure.
According to The UK MET (talking about the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation);
Despite these signals it is not certain that there will be a shift towards cooler Atlantic conditions over the next few years. Temporary cooling has occurred in the past without leading to a sustained AMO shift. However, the current trends suggest that the chances of a shift in the next few years have increased.
…
The current warm phase is now 20 years long and historical precedent suggests a return to relatively cool conditions could occur within a few years (Knight et al., 2005). However, the short observational record precludes a confident prediction based on observations alone.
…
Observational (Folland et al. 2013) and model (Knight et al. 2005) estimates further suggest AMO shifts have an effect on global mean near-surface temperatures of about 0.1 ̊C. A rapid AMO decline could therefore maintain the current slowdown in global warming longer than would otherwise be the case.
Read more: http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/8/c/Changes_In_The_Climate_System.pdf
Lets not forget, what we are dealing with is settled science.
Settled science, indeed. Do any of the models predict the pause?
Jokes are easy, but the take-away is good. The Pause exists. The Pause may well continue. This is a mainstream outfit obviously, and they are saying things that are highly inconvenient for the warmist crowd.
The damage to the Scientific Method is the greatest problem here. And predicting that everything will happen is the biggest cop-out of all.
No it is not the damage to the scientific method but it is the damage to the scientists that have corrupted it.
What damage to scientists that have corrupted it are you referring to, Rebdel?
Seems to me they have (so far) made out rather well for the most part . .
I believe the Scientific Method has been damaged, in the sense that the “scientific community” has become a more corrupt community, which makes ethical use of the Method more difficult in general, for those so inclined.
The integrity of the “community” is prerequisite for the Scientific Method to function as a source for reliable knowledge, it seems to me, and at this point I have virtually no faith in the community as a whole to resist the temptations which so glaringly resulted in the “success” of those who succumbed in this particular field. The “art” of corrupting science has been advanced greatly I believe, and I fully expect the “artists” both in scientific disciplines and their “patrons” with serious money and power, to be emboldened by what has happened in this realm we are discussing.
Also, all that corrupt science means less legitimate science has been done, for lack of resources and attention, it seems inevitable to me. Faith in science among the general populace is way up (beyond anything rationally justifiable under the best of circumstances I feel), but it’s basically “blind faith” in those presented as experts in the mass media, which could result in a sort of “pause” of the Scientific Method itself, in terms of publicly revealed truly scientific inquiry. (The fake/show stuff will need to be protected, after all.)
Like all warmist organisations they can’t even predict the past.The only way they can get that right is to change it.Ironically it is only a few sceptics who notice this. With the help of a complicit and subservient media everyone else is blissfully unaware.
The one I like is the giant El Niño of 1998 which gets cooler and cooler as every year goes by, according to GISS that is.
https://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2015/09/16/all-warming-since-1997-is-due-to-government-fraud/
“Imaginary hiatus in global warming coming to an end, experts say”
http://www.newsbiscuit.com/2015/09/15/imaginary-hiatus-in-global-warming-coming-to-an-end-experts-say/
Strange article.
– Headed up with a graph that has nothing to do with the report.
– The header link is to an article in an IT news-sheet. The link to the original 20-page paper is included only in the footer.
– The first and last of the 3 quotations are taken from page 11. There was a paragraph between them, but this has been removed and replaced by a different paragraph from a different section, on page 9.
It’s unclear to me why the quotations have been manipulated in this way. I assume that replacing the middle paragraph, which contained numerous literature references, had the benefit of giving the impression that this report (with its 4 pages of detailed international references) was merely a rambling PR job, rather than the very serious and balanced overview that it actually was.
The whole paper looks like a rambling PR job to me. It has a list of References at the end. Why therefore does it litter, and detract from, the text by including in-line references?
It looks like it was written by committee to several different standards and published unedited.
‘I hope you’re not right about the lack of warming lasting till 2020 and beyond’.
Dr Phil Jones of CRU in a Climategate email.
They knew…even back in the day.
Met Office probability based forecasts are nothing more than a fail-safe so they can claim a fantastic level of accuracy. Which isn’t difficult when your seasonal forecasts are now nothing more than a three way 35/30/35% split of cooler than average, seasonal average, warmer than average. No forecast is wrong, at least technically, and more importantly when it comes to retaining government funding, legally.
Jog on.
The most interesting part is if the current strong El Nino will cause a step up in global temperature after the immediate La Nina? (like the 1997/98 El Nino)
I don’t know, but sooner or later these strong El Nino’s will have a cooling affect after, once the accumulated energy has been released larger than the net intake. It’s been a long time coming since 1997/98 and after this event we should learn a lot from it. This strong El Nino also puts some of the ideas previously about the PDO into the bin. Usually during a long term negative PDO period you get weak El Nino’s, but we are in a short term positive PDO at the moment.
The 30-yr PDO cool cycle already started in 2008, and the 30-yr AMO cool cycle will start around 2020. Moreover, the sun is entering a very weak phase, which may evolve into another Grand Solar Minimum…
There is a growing probability global temps may actually FALL 1C by 2100 should a GSM event occur, which would entirely wipeout the 0.85C of warming recovery experience since the end of the Little Ice Age in 1850….
The tiny amount of CO2 warming will actually mitigate some of the negative effects of a GSM, so ironically, manmade CO2 induced warming is a good thing. Moreover, the increased crop yields and forest growth will help offset the negative impacts of shorter growing seasons should a GSM occur.
Oh, the irony…. it cuts like a knife…
Some empirical evidence that the pause is a phenomenon and not natural variability within a warming trend
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2659755
The plot of annual values in figure 8 on page 9 strongly resembles the current thermometer-based temperature reconstructions. (In fact, if you showed me that graph without any labeling, I would say it looks like GISTEMP or HADCRUT with a lot of smoothing.) But it’s the AMO Index.
It seems to me that the correlation between AMO change and temperature change is much, much stronger than the correlation between CO2 change and temperature change. Folks without preconceived notions would call that a clue.
Or am I misunderstanding something?
I just noticed that the models mentioned in the graph are CMIP5 RCP 8.5. I think more realistic is an ensemble of the CMIP5 RCP 6 or maybe even the RCP 4.5 models. It seems to me that CO2 will increase less than predicted in the RCP 8.5 scenario, and methane is increasing a lot less than IPCC has predicted. Also, recent WUWT articles have mentioned a GMO rice and a dietary supplement for cattle that can substantially reduce methane emissions. If these methane-reducing technologies are widely implemented, then I expect the RCP 4.5 to use a fairly accurate radiation forcing from manmade greenhouse gases.
Even with those milder models, I expect some overprediction of future warming, because the models seem to be tuned to assume that multidecadal oscillations did not contribute to the rapid warming from the early 1970s to around 2004-2005.
The most important statement made by the Met Office in recent times is:
‘However, the short observational record precludes a confident prediction based on observations alone.’
At last, there is acknowledgement that the climate timescale unit of 30 years is a value considerably more than 30% of the time that accurate, globally uniform data collection about the earth’s climate has been taking place.
the models seem to be tuned to assume that multidecadal oscillations did not contribute to the rapid warming from the early 1970s to around 2004-2005.
That’s what it looks like to me.
That is exactly what the models assumed and why they have been wrong.
That graph by Roy Spencer is a cracker
Let us assume that the Met Office is correct and that there will be no resumption to warming for the next 10 years, what will that say about climate sensitivity assuming that we also see BAU CO2 emissions?
This is the problem for the IPCC. Already recent papers are suggesting Climate Sensitivity of below 2degC, some suggesting as low as 1.3degC. As the ‘pause’ continues and CO2 emissions continue to rise on BAU basis (or perhaps even steeper), there will be ever more papers suggesting ever lower figures for Climate Sensitivity. I envisage that by 2018, we will soon see many papers coming in suggesting a lower end range of 1.2degC (ie., the no feedback position), and some may well be suggesting a lower end range of 0.9degC.
Even by 2019, this will cause problems for AR6. What is the IPCC to do with the most recent papers say those appearing as from 2007 onwards suggesting ever lowering figures for Climate Sensitivity (none of which will be suggesting a sensitivity figure of more than 2degC)? What to do with the ever widening gap between model forecasts (projections) and observed reality (all models by then being outside the 95% confidence band)?
This is why Paris really may be the last ditch saloon. If nothing of substance is agreed at Paris, by the time AR6 comes around, it may be just too difficult to keep the wheels on the wagon.
Get the popcorn out.
The recent claim by the Met Office has ended any hopes they had, but at least they are little more honest. The natural multi-decadal cycle that warms and cools had been ignored and now there is no hiding. Lets face it we know the alarmists have failed a while ago, but they won’t have it yet. Global temperatures have been warming at a rate not high enough to be any cause for concern, even if they had behaved like a linear trend line shooting up off a sine-wave. The peak rate observed of 0.2 c per decade is 2 c over a century and that value despite the IPCC turnaround is not dangerous to the planet. Remember they were claiming 4c to 7c over a century as catastrophic global warming. To believe that you would have to be seriously living on the moon with the IPCC.
Based on RSS even claiming 0.1 c per decade seems too high.
The reason being during the ~30 year warming cycle only 13 years had any significant effect. During the ~30 year cooling cycle the trend per decade will be slightly negative at best. Therefore at a rate of 0.2 c per decade (like the 13 year warming period), only bit more than a sixth of the full warming and cooling cycle showed this maximum rate. Hence over ~ 60+ year period the trend per decade would only be about 0.043 c if using the cooling period being zero per decade.
BUT, it’s even worse than that because during this century, two cooling sine-waves will fit in it and not just one like last century. Thinking it can’t get any worse for the alarmists and then the sun activity decides to go to sleep, with the possibility in future of even quieter sun activity and the next significant cooling period. Where will that leave CAGW, consigned to the trash bin of Earth’s history?
On the other hand:
Next two years hottest, says Met Office
By Roger HarrabinBBC environment analyst
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-34226178
Very hypercritical report that one with blaming pause on PDO and AMO that have warming and cooling cycles, not just cooling Met Office. The terrible science continues still blaming humans for the period where warming cycles of the PDO and AMO existed. At least they have finally admitted they even exist now. The next 2 years might have one of them the hottest with the tamperature data sets because of the strong El Nino. Only take this serious if the satellites follow suit because they have a bigger response to ENSO than the tamperature sets. One day the tamperature data sets may actually show a record without changing them just before.
The AMO is screaming “Buy coats and sweaters now!”
Well, I guess it’s best for the MET to jump on the train before it leaves the station, even if they’re not sure which way it’s going.
Can anyone tell me if the programs used in security and military circles to look for patterns in signals are just not available? The graphs put up by vukcevic show such an obvious sinusoidal pattern superimposed on the basic rise that it must be the dominant variant but this part is ignored by just about every article.
There is such a clear cut cycle between sixty and seventy years that we can say with near certainty that the pause will end in about a decade and the global warming brigade will be able to say see we told you so, global warming is back.
The UK MET Office has published a report which suggests the pause in global temperatures might continue for many years to come. Or the pause might not continue. They’re not really sure.
They’re not really sure. What an incredible statement … not one you would expect from an organisation that spends nearly £170 million a year, has 1,500 staff and a team of scientists operating a £30 million supercomputer capable of 1,000 billion calculations every second, with a carbon footprint the size of a small town.
Dr Tim Balls recent article on this blog was spot on about climate models.
I noticed that Roger Harrabin’s report on this, on the BBC, started with the following statement:
“Planet Earth is the most complex thing in the Universe”.
Surely he should have added “that we know of”!
But I think there are probably more complex things.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-34242508
Climate has varied in the past and can be expected to do so in the future. Mankind has adapted
to both cool and warm periods, and trade and economic growth over the past 300 years has greatly
increased our ability to do so. In that context, forecasts of climate are of little value unless they are for a
strong and persistent trend, and are accurate.
The IPCC “forecasts” are for a strong and persistent trend, but they have been inaccurate in the
short term. Moreover, there is no reason to expect them to be accurate in the longer term. The IPCC’s
forecasting procedures violate all of the relevant Golden Rule of Forecasting guidelines. In particular,
their procedures are biased to advocate for the hypothesis of dangerous manmade global warming.
We found that there are no scientific forecasts that support the hypothesis that manmade global
warming will occur. Instead, the best forecasts of temperatures on Earth for the 21st Century and
beyond are derived from the hypothesis of persistence. Specifically, we forecast that global average
temperatures will trend neither up nor down, but will remain within half-a-degree Celsius (one-degree
Fahrenheit) of the 2013 average.
This chapter provides good news. There is neither need to worry about climate change, nor
reason to take action
http://www.kestencgreen.com/G&A-Skyfall.pdf