Excerpt from a story by statistician William M. Briggs
There are two stories floating around about the state of the earth’s atmosphere. Both are believed true by government-funded scientists and the environmentally minded. The situation is curious because the stories don’t mesh. Yet, as I said, both are believed. Worse, neither is true.
Story number one is that this year will be the hottest ever. And number two is that the reason it is not hot is because “natural variation” has masked or stalled man-caused global warming.
Which is it? Either it’s hotter than ever or it isn’t. If it is, then (it is implied) man-caused global warming has not “paused.” If it isn’t, if man-caused global warming has “paused,” then it is not growing hotter.
There are two things to keep straight: (1) why these divergent contentions are believed, and (2) why they are incompatible and individually false. The first point is easy. Climatology has become a branch of politics. And in politics, particularly in our rambunctious democracy, statements asserted in the name of some political goal are usually believed or at least supported by those who share the goal. It is necessary for global-warming-of-doom to be true in order to attain the government’s goal (of increasing in size and power), so any statement which supports global warming is likely to be touted by government supporters, even mutually incompatible statements.
Scientists — and some very big names indeed — who have made their living on government grants, and who provide arguments in line with the government’s desire that global-warming-of-doom be true, recently wrote a letter to the President and Attorney General asking these officials to criminally prosecute under the RICO Act scientists like myself and organizations that might fund me. Which scientists and organizations? Those, they say, who have “knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change, as a means to forestall America’s response to climate change.”
In other words, arguments put forth by independent scientists and organizations that do not support the government’s line cannot be considered science, but should instead be classified as criminal acts. Incidentally, it has come out that the scientist leading the effort to prosecute the innocent has “paid himself & his wife $1.5 million from gov’t climate grants for part-time work.” Climatology is thus a branch of politics. Quod erat demonstrandum.
I’m no politician and can’t predict what will come of this. But I am a scientist and know good physics from bad. To understand why the claims about the atmosphere mentioned above are false, it is necessary to grasp, at least in broad outline, some rather complicated statistics and physics. Let’s try.
Read the rest of the story here:
https://stream.org/climate-change-spin-hot-hottest-year-ever-inside-global-warming-pause/
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I have trouble placing any credence in claims of catastrophic global warming because there appears to warm bias in the way temperature is recorded. I’ve noticed from my daily monitoring of Gainesville Regional Airport’s weather station (KGNV) that all temperature records are rounded up to the nearest whole number, notwithstanding that the monthly departure from normal is reported in tenths of a degree. Normal daily temperatures currently are 68 F for the low and 87 F for the high. For some reason, however, the daily average is said to be 77 F. So, if the observed high and low for the day equal the daily normals, resulting in a daily average of 77.5, it is rounded up and the daily average reported on the F6 is 78 and a 1-degree departure from normal.
In addition, I notice that at least once a day the six-hour maximum or minimum exceeds the high or low reported at 53 minutes past the hour, depending on the season. I speculate that jet wash may be influencing the thermometer, which is in the between runways or taxiways.
So, when Dr. Roy Spencer says the satellites say the average world temperature is not anywhere close to the hottest ever, I believe that. I don’t believe NOAA’s estimate because it’s obviously at least 3 tenths of a degree on the warm side.
The satellites are measuring air temperatures only. NOAA is reporting temperatures that are for 70% consisting of ocean water temperatures at about 1,5 m depth. Their trends need not be the same as Christy et al. has demonstrated: Differential Trends in Tropical Sea Surface and Atmospheric Temperatures since 1979, GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 28, NO. 1, PAGES 183-186, JANUARY 1,2001
Article available here: http://tinyurl.com/nhgnckq
When the stories don’t mesh it’s “the shotgun effect” in action. Make contradictory statements that still point to the same claimed cause that needs to be “solved”. Whichever pellet hits doesn’t matter as long as those hit remain devoted to solving the “cause”.
Jack Barrett is a CAGW sceptic. His blog profile includes the following:
His interest in climate change developed with the 1992 Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [IPCC] (Cambridge University Press), not just because of the global importance of the topic, but because of his interest in the spectroscopy of small molecules which include the ‘greenhouse’ gases H2O, CO2, CH4, N2O and O3. He became sceptical about climate modelling and what seemed to him the exaggerated claims emerging from the computer programmes about our future global climate.
See: http://www.barrettbellamyclimate.com/page2.htm
Jack has been arguing against the climate change establishment for more than 20 years. He has authored around seventy papers on various aspects of the chemistry and spectroscopy of small molecules and has written ten textbooks. His main argument against the AGW crowd is not that more CO2 produces warming it’s that the warming projected by models is exaggerated. He addresses the “pause” in this statement:
.
The gradual and continual build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere should produce a gradual and continual warming of the surface and lower troposphere. That the warming is not continual, but is affected by other causes does nothing to destroy the basic physics of the greenhouse effect. Very little, if anything, can be concluded from a consideration of any 15-year period in the 162 year’s data. Viewed overall there is an underlying warming trend enhanced or enfeebled by natural causes, some of a ~30 year cycle and others of smaller duration that make the observed graph ‘jagged’.
And so say all of us. We are not going to see a continual monotonic increase in warming. There will be pauses and spurts in response to ‘natural variation’. The longer pauses simply suggest that Jack’s (and others) estimate of around 1.3 deg warming per 2xCO2 is more likely to be correct. There is absolutely nothing in any of the current temperature records which disproves basic AGW theory.
PS the barrretbellamy site is well worth a look for those who have an interest in the science.
Can anyone list the records for high temp for this year. I haven’t seen the list of locations, if they actually exist.
Another excellent contribution from William M Briggs. He’s one whose always worth reading because he doesn’t pull his punches, qualifies his claims with evidence and without fail eviscerates the charlatans on the other side. A joy to read.
>”They [Stephan Lewandowsky, Naomi Oreskes, and James Risbey] say that if these “causes” did not exist, the temperatures would have increased just as they were predicted to under the theory of enhanced-feedback carbon-oxide-driven (EFCOD) global warming.”
This is blatantly untrue and false i.e. a lie.
What they are referring to is an MDV-neutral spline through GMST:
1895
1925
1955
1985
2015
But the EFCOD profile, as implemented by the GCMs, departs from the MDV-neutral spline after 1955 and by 2015 is WELL ABOVE the observed GMST spline.
Lewandowsky, Oreskes, and Risbey are crooks, liars, and con men and women.
Foster and Rahmstorf (2011) approximated the most recent couple of decades of the MDV-neutral spline up to 2010 that Lewandowsky/Oreskes/Risbey refer to, and the IPCC cite F&R11 in AR5 Chapter 10 Detection and Attribution in support of a similar claim (lie) to what Lewandowsky/Oreskes/Risbey are making.
Except F&R11’s residual is not CO2-forced i.e. it does NOT conform to the CO2-forced Model Mean. Worse, their residual goes through 2010 when it should go through 2015.
In other words, the IPCC are complicit in disseminating the same lie that Lewandowsky, Oreskes, and Risbey are touting.
Yes, that first quote IS INDEED “blatantly untrue and false” … because that is NOT what “they” say! Briggs is creating a strawman by pretty much flipping what “they” say completely backwards.
“They” say that these other cause DO exist (not what might happen if they did not). “They” say “these causes” existed in the past and will continue to exist in the future, creating various fluctuations that can last on a decadal scale. What “they” actually say that there is no statistical evidence that the current fluctuations are any different from past fluctuations. As such, this “pause” is not actually statistical evidence that the long-term warming trend from the past 100+ years has stopped.
This is VERY different from Briggs’ interpretation that “[t]hey use the absence of predicted increases as proof the increases (from increasing CO2) were really there”. Rather the claim is that the absence of predicted increases is NOT proof that increases from CO2 are NOT there. The claim is that the data is perfectly consistent with (but not proof of) an increasing baseline modified by typical fluctuations.
The rest of Briggs’ article is laced with similar strawmen. As such, i am not especially impressed.
tjfolkerts
>”Yes, that first quote IS INDEED “blatantly untrue and false” … because that is NOT what “they” say! Briggs is creating a strawman by pretty much flipping what “they” say completely backwards.”
Rubbish. The Lewandowsky/Oreskes/Risbey rationale is that if you REMOVE natural variability (ENSO, solar, volcanoes, whatever) then what is left is the underlying residual global warming trend. But they neglect MDV as I show upthread and Dr Norman Page alludes downthread. MDV is Multidecadal Variation BTW (the 60 year climate cycle).
REMOVING natural variability (the “absence” of it) is what Briggs is getting at with:
The “causes” are natural variability causes as per Lewandowsky/Oreskes/Risbey. So their rationale is to REMOVE them.
Thing is, Lewandowsky, Oreskes, and Risbey are correct up to the point BEFORE theoretical EFCOD forcing is introduced. Foster and Rahmstorf (see upthread) did exactly what Briggs says Lewandowsky, Oreskes, and Risbey are advocating (although too short timeframe to remove MDV) i.e. they REMOVED natural variability (but not all of it). See full paper:
‘Global temperature evolution 1979–2010’
Grant Foster and Stefan Rahmstorf
Published 6 December 2011
http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/6/4/044022/meta;jsessionid=6B7EA4C9128102AC8A4397A53BCC98AB.c1
The IPCC cite this paper in AR5 Chapter 10 but they are just as wrong as Lewandowsky, Oreskes, and Risbey i.e. they lie too.
Problem is: the GMST residual AFTER removal of natural variability is NOT CO2-forced. The Foster and Rahmstorf (2010) residual is WELL BELOW the CO2-forced model mean.
tjfolkerts
You are, perhaps inadvertently, supporting my argument re MDV and that of Dr Norman Page downthread. No-one is arguing that the “long-term warming trend from the past 100+ years has stopped”. Problem is: that long-term secular trend (ST) is not CO2-forced (see below)
The “current fluctuations” of natural variability can be isolated as a signal that “existed in the past and will continue to exist in the future”. I agree totally. The signal exhibits as an oscillation with 60 year period i.e. MDV. This oscillation when added to the residual, but not CO2-forced, secular trend (ST) which is centennial/millennial scale, will reconstruct the GMST profile. This is the opposite to the Foster and Rahmstorf approach of removing natural variability. See Macias et al (2014):
Macias D, Stips A, Garcia-Gorriz E (2014) Application of the Singular Spectrum Analysis Technique to Study the Recent Hiatus on the Global Surface Temperature Record. PLoS ONE 9(9): e107222. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0107222
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0107222#pone-0107222-g005
But if you then add in a CO2-forced component (EFCOD) to ST + MDV, you will overshoot GMST – as the CO2-forced models have done.
And note the negative inflexion starting in the Macias et al ST i.e. the long-term trend is still increasing but the rate is considerably less than it was. This is at odds with the progressively increasing CO2 curve i.e. CO2 is not the driver of the GMST long-term secular trend (ST).
“They [Lewandowsky/Oreskes/Risbey] say that if these “causes” did not exist, the temperatures would have increased just as they were predicted to under the theory of enhanced-feedback carbon-oxide-driven (EFCOD) global warming.”
Richard, there is a second problem here that I did not address above. “They” make no claims (as near as I can see) about PREDICTIONS based on EFCOD. Perhaps you can find a place in their paper where they do (http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-D-14-00106.1). As such they are not predicting what would happen under any specific model.
Rather, they merely look at the data and see there is a warming trend. They see there is are fluctuations in this trend. Specifically, they see that the current “pause” is typical of previous fluctuations. As such, “the pause” is not evidence of a true pause. It is merely evidence of yet another typical fluctuation. maybe in a few more years this pause will grow to the level where it is noticeably different from previous fluctuations, but
“But the EFCOD profile, as implemented by the GCMs, departs from the MDV-neutral spline after 1955 and by 2015 is WELL ABOVE the observed GMST spline.”
As above, this is a separate issue.
QUESTION 1) Is the current pause consistent with a continued baseline warming trend modified by normal fluctuations?
QUESTION 2) is the baseline warming trend consistent with GCMs?
The Lewandowsky/Oreskes/Risbey is addressing Q1. You are addressing Q2. You could well be right about Q2 simultaneously with Lewandowsky/Oreskes/Risbey being right about Q1!
******************************
On a slightly different front, I am not a fan of the “preaching” that Lewandowsky/Oreskes/Risbey do about “contrarian memes” or “framing of issues”. I prefer sticking to science rather than musing about motives. Which is also a big reason that I don’t care for Briggs’ article.
Richard says: “The signal exhibits as an oscillation with 60 year period i.e. MDV.
Could you provide some links or evidence behind this? First of all, to see a 60 year period in noisy data, you would need a quality record going back 2 or 3 or more periods, ie 120 years or longer. But data 120+ years ago is probably not going to be reliable enough for such analysis. Yeah, there looks like there could be a peak now … and maybe a peak ~ 60 years ago … and if I squint hard enough there might be one ~ 120 years ago. But does something like a power spectrum using FFT show a significantly strong peak at 60 years?
Second, random walk data can often look like there is some period. Random fluctuations could make a peak somewhere … maybe it just happens to be about 60 years ago. It would be a whole lot more convincing if you had a theory that *predicted* a 60 year cycle, rather than seeing one peak about 60 years ago.
Thirdly, even if we agree there is a 60 year period, there is STILL a definite upward trend over the last 120 years (2 periods). So even including a 60 year period can’t remove the warming trend.
tjfolkerts
>”Richard, there is a second problem here that I did not address above. “They” make no claims (as near as I can see) about PREDICTIONS based on EFCOD.”
EXACTLY. Thank you TJ for “seeing” the issue. You seem to be about the only one, except perhaps Dr Norman Page, in this entire thread who does.
They SHOULD be making their claims in respect to EFCOD but they’re not. In other words, they are making their claims in respect to natural drivers i.e. they are conflating naturally driven trends with a theoretical EFCOD driven trend – this is the blatant lie.
>”Perhaps you can find a place in their paper where they do (http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/BAMS-D-14-00106.1). As such they are not predicting what would happen under any specific model”
Page 7 pdf, lines 104 and 105:
The secular trend (ST) of GMST (see Macias et al upthread and below) is NOT “the [theoretical] greenhouse-driven longer-term trend”. EFCOD is added to the natural components i.e. Theoretical man-made warming GMST = ST(natural) + MDV(natural) + EFCOD(theoretical CO2 forcing). This is the CO2-forced model mean which is WELL ABOVE the natural ST in GMST.
Lewandowsky/Oreskes/Risbey lie when they conflate the natural GMST secular trend (ST) with “the [theoretical] greenhouse-driven longer-term trend”
>”Rather, they merely look at the data and see there is a warming trend. They see there is are fluctuations in this trend. Specifically, they see that the current “pause” is typical of previous fluctuations. As such, “the pause” is not evidence of a true pause. It is merely evidence of yet another typical fluctuation. maybe in a few more years this pause will grow to the level where it is noticeably different from previous fluctuations,”
YES, YES, YES. They are referring to Natural GMST = ST(natural) + MDV(natural) i.e. they are NOT referring to Theoretical man-made warming GMST = ST(natural) + MDV(natural) + EFCOD(theoretical CO2 forcing).
>“But the EFCOD profile, as implemented by the GCMs, departs from the MDV-neutral spline after 1955 and by 2015 is WELL ABOVE the observed GMST spline.” As above, this is a separate issue.
You’re back to rubbish again TJ. This is the ENTIRE issue, i.e. the MDV-neutral spline (STnatural) in observed GMST does NOT conform, as Lewandowsky/Oreskes/Risbey falsely allude, to “the greenhouse-driven longer-term trend”. The former is natural and observed, the latter is theoretical and only appears in the CO2-forced GCMs.
>”QUESTION 1) Is the current pause consistent with a continued baseline warming trend modified by normal fluctuations?”
Yes. GMST(natural) = ST(natural) + MDV(natural). But this is NOT CO2-forced warming which is: Theoretical man-made warming GMST = ST(natural) + MDV(natural) + EFCOD(theoretical CO2 forcing).
>”QUESTION 2) is the baseline warming trend consistent with GCMs?”
No. GMST(natural) ST, which is the MDV-neutral spline that I’ve shown in this sub-thread header, departs negatively from the model mean after 1955 – it SHOULD’NT. The model mean is also MDV-neutral i.e. GCM’s do NOT model the MDV component in GMST. GCM sceptics complain that the models do not mimic the 1940s fluctuation – but they shouldn’t. the 1940s were maximum positive MDV, The models are MDV-neutral and the model mean crossed observed GMST at 1925 and 1955 and below 1940 i.e. the model mean is bang on the MDV-neutral spline.
>”The Lewandowsky/Oreskes/Risbey is addressing Q1.”
So am I. This is EXACTLY my point as above. This is where the Lewandowsky/Oreskes/Risbey lie emerges.
>”You are addressing Q2.”
In addition to Q1 but I’m addressing Q1 primarily. Q2 just proves my contention re Q1.
>”You could well be right about Q2 simultaneously with Lewandowsky/Oreskes/Risbey being right about Q1!”
EXACTLY (almost). Lewandowsky/Oreskes/Risbey are right about Q1 but in respect to the natural components of GMST. However, as I’ve laid out, they falsely allude that the observed natural ST of GMST is “the [theoretical] greenhouse-driven longer-term trend” – it clearly is not i.e. their contention is false, untrue, a big fat lie.
BTW TJ, to view the relevant graphs from the IPCC and Roy Spencer that support my case, go to this comment at Climate Etc (in other words I’ve already raked this over in a couple of blogs now so this is not a new issue):
http://judithcurry.com/2015/08/28/week-in-review-science-edition-19/#comment-727991
tjfolkerts
>”Richard says: “The signal exhibits as an oscillation with 60 year period i.e. MDV.” Could you provide some links or evidence behind this? First of all, to see a 60 year period in noisy data, you would need a quality record going back 2 or 3 or more periods, ie 120 years or longer. But data 120+ years ago is probably not going to be reliable enough for such analysis. Yeah, there looks like there could be a peak now … and maybe a peak ~ 60 years ago … and if I squint hard enough there might be one ~ 120 years ago. But does something like a power spectrum using FFT show a significantly strong peak at 60 years?”
I’ve already given you the link to the most recent literature TJ, Macias et al (2014) above but here it is again:
Macias D, Stips A, Garcia-Gorriz E (2014) Application of the Singular Spectrum Analysis Technique to Study the Recent Hiatus on the Global Surface Temperature Record. PLoS ONE 9(9): e107222. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0107222
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0107222#pone-0107222-g005
The 60 year oscillation can also be isolated by Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) i.e. there is a body of literature on this and you can get the same results by doing it yourself at home (I have by applying EMD to HasSST2).
>”Second, random walk data can often look like there is some period. Random fluctuations could make a peak somewhere … maybe it just happens to be about 60 years ago. It would be a whole lot more convincing if you had a theory that *predicted* a 60 year cycle, rather than seeing one peak about 60 years ago.”
It is NOT “one peak”, it is the atmospheric response to oceanic oscillations (i.e. fact, not theory). I’ve given you a link to a Climate Etc sub-thread in a previous comment TJ which deals with this in detail but I’ll repeat from that here:
It goes like this:
The MDV-neutral spline in observed GMST is central to this sequence:
1895 – neutral
1910 – MDV maximum negative (-ve)
1925 – neutral
1940 – MDV maximum positive (+ve)
1955 – neutral
1970 – MDV maximum negative (-ve)
1985 – neutral
2000 – MDV maximum positive (+ve)
2015 – neutral
2030 – MDV maximum negative (-ve)
This is in respect to HadCRUT4: http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl
More here:
http://judithcurry.com/2015/08/28/week-in-review-science-edition-19/#comment-727991
The GCM model mean conforms to the MDV-neutral spline until 1955 but after that it overshoots radically i.e. the model forcing is wrong (see graphs at Climate Etc link above).
>”Thirdly, even if we agree there is a 60 year period, there is STILL a definite upward trend over the last 120 years (2 periods). So even including a 60 year period can’t remove the warming trend.”
EXACTLY TJ. There are 2 components of GMST (see Macias et al above), ST and MDV i.e.
Observed GMST = ST + MDV
The ST is the “definite upward trend over the last 120 years” “warming trend” once the MDV signal is removed from GMST but it is clearly NOT “the [theoretical] greenhouse-driven longer-term trend” that Lewandowsky, Oreskes, and Risbey falsely assume.
>”The 60 year oscillation can also be isolated by Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) i.e. there is a body of literature on this”
See this paper for example:
‘On the trend, detrending, and variability of nonlinear and nonstationary time series’
Zhaohua Wu, Norden E. Huang, Steven R. Long, and Chung-Kang Peng
(2007)
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/38/14889.full#aff-4
The C5 curve in Figure 2 is the extracted signal of the atmospheric response to combined oceanic oscillations (MDV). In other EMD nomenclature (see paper) this is defined as Empirical Mode Frequency 5 (IMF 5).
Note that the residual secular trend (ST) which is C6 in Figure 2 now exhibits a recent negative inflexion by the addition of new GMST data since the Fig 2 HadCRUT3 series end in 2003 but the ST peak has not been reached yet. Look for that around 2020 or just after.
The difference between SSA and EMD is that the analyst selects appropriate “windows” in SSA (hence only 2 curves in Macias et al) whereas EMD extracts all the signals including the noise in C1 and C2. After that comes discernible interdecadal (although Wu et al say C1 through C4 is white noise) and multidecadal oscillations. By contrast, the imposition by an analyst of a single external extrinsic linear or polynomial trend say, is a subjective exercise. EMD is completely objective returning all the internal intrinsic signals and the analyst has no say in what signals are returned. SSA is perhaps a little more subjective than objective because specific signals can be targeted, but it is still far more objective than the subjective external imposition of extrinsic linear or polynomial trends.
Wu, Huang et al have gone on in subsequent papers to miss-attribute the residual ST from EMD analysis of GMST, or at least part of it, to CO2-forced warming, just as Lewandowsky/Oreskes/Risbey and Foster/Rahmstorf, and the IPCC have done or alluded. Note that Lewandowsky, Oreskes, and Risbey cite Foster and Rahmstorf (2011) in their paper (page 4 pdf).
The MDV-neutral spline in GMST (the secular trend, ST) that I’ve laid out upthread can be clearly seen in Wu et al Figure 3, which overlaid by the MDV oscillation reproduces GMST i.e. GMST = ST + MDV. The GCM model mean tracks the MDV-neutral spline until 1955 but goes horribly wrong after that once theoretical CO2 forcing (EFCOD) is added in. Tweaking after-the-event for volcanoes doesn’t work either evidently, post 1955. If MDV is neglected in the GCMs they should neglect the relatively short-term effect of known volcanoes too. And future volcanoes cannot be predicted anyway.
Richard, this is clearly a topic you have thought a lot about. And in many ways we seem to be quite close in what we are saying.
The one main issue between our positions that I see at the moment is your various claims like “They are referring to Natural GMST = ST(natural) + MDV(natural) i.e. they are NOT referring to Theoretical man-made warming GMST = ST(natural) + MDV(natural) + EFCOD(theoretical CO2 forcing).”
This seems like begging the question. It seems that you attribute the entire overall trend to some assumed “natural secular warming trend” that would have existed independent of any anthropogenic CO2 increase. And of course, once you assume that nature would have done this anyway, then there is no room for rising CO2 to play any role.
What physical reason can you give for a priori expecting a rising secular trend for the past 100 years? Why should it not have been cooling (like the overall trend that seems to have been happening for the last 5,000-10,000 years)?
I tend to start from the opposite perspective — that any climate change requires a driver. Certainly there are many natural drivers that have in the past (and will continue to in the future) caused natural variations in climate on scales from decades to eons. But there IS a driver. So I look for a driver. Sometimes either the data or my knowledge is lacking and I can’t find one.
But sometimes the answer seems pretty clear.For example: More CO2 should lead to warming. There is more CO2. There is warming. Occam’s razor suggests (but does not demand) that CO2 is involved (at least partially). This is much more satisfying to me than “there was coincidental warming during the past 100 years”.
There is a good chance that many models overplay the significance of CO2. But that does not mean that rising CO2 has no influence, as you seem to be concluding.
*******************************
We could also consider bigger trends than Lewandowsky/Oreskes/Risbey addressed. Rather than “was the ‘pause’ during the last ~ 15 years unusual compared to the past ~ 150 years” we could consider “was the warming during the past ~ 100 years unusual compared to the past ~ 10,000 years”. Of course, this gets cloudy because the temperature data is not nearly so good the farther back you go, but it does seem that the last 100 years
tjfolkerts
>”This seems like begging the question. It seems that you attribute the entire overall trend to some assumed “natural secular warming trend” that would have existed independent of any anthropogenic CO2 increase. And of course, once you assume that nature would have done this anyway, then there is no room for rising CO2 to play any role.”
EXACTLY, the CO2-forced GCMs are proving that. Look at the graphs I referred you to at Judith Curry’s Climate Etc blog link above (IPCC and Spencer graphs – models vs observations). The IPCC only makes anthro attribution from 1950 onwards but the CO2-forced models fail to mimic the MDV-neutral spline from 1955 onwards and are now way above 2015 observed GMST i.e. CO2-forcing is superfluous.
This is also proven by the IPCC’s primary TOA energy budget climate change criteria (critical, because it “controls” surface temperature i.e. temperature is a secondary climate change consideration). A valid climate change agent is one that moves the TOA energy budget from balance to imbalance (according to the IPCC), but CO2 is an ineffective climate change agent by their own criteria as follows:
Quoting from another sub-thread at Judith Curry’s Climate Etc.
The fact that the IPCC completely neglected to address their own climate change criteria in Chapter 10 begs two questions:
1) Was it just sloppy incompetence?
2) Or was it willful negligence?
tjfolkerts
>”What physical reason can you give for a priori expecting a rising secular trend for the past 100 years?”
The last 100 years is only about the last quarter of the most recent positive rising phase in the secular trend in GMST. Again, as upthread, the IPCC only makes an anthro attribution from 1950 onwards i.e. their theoretical CO2 forcing is ON TOP OF the already rising secular trend, but superfluous as I’ve shown above.
The physical reason is simply that the GMST secular trend tracks solar oscillation over millennia e.g. the Maunder Minimum was a solar grand minimum and we’ve just experienced the Modern Maximum. This is the driver of the secular trend after accounting for oceanic thermal lag and atmospheric response. Horst-Joachim Lüdecke, Dr. Alexander Hempelmann and Carl Otto Weiss demonstrate this over the last 2500 years in their latest paper ([3] below). See:
Study: German Scientists Conclude 20th Century Warming “Nothing Unusual” …Foresee “Global Cooling Until 2080!
http://notrickszone.com/2015/08/21/study-german-scientists-conclude-20th-century-warming-nothing-unusual-foresee-global-cooling-until-2080/#sthash.YazJW0c3.dpbs
[2] H.-J. Luedecke, A. Hempelmann, and C. O. Weiss: Multi-periodic climate dynamics: spectral analysis of long term instrumental and proxy temperature records, Clim. Past 9, 447 – 452 ( 2013 ); http://www.clim-past.net/9/447/2013/cp-9-447-2013.pdf
[3] H.-J. Luedecke, C. O. Weiss, and H.Hempelmann: Paleoclimate forcing by the solar De Vries / Suess cycle, Clim. Past Discuss. 11, 279 (2015); http://www.clim-past-discuss.net/11/279/2015/cpd-11-279-2015.pdf
>”Why should it not have been cooling (like the overall trend that seems to have been happening for the last 5,000-10,000 years)?”
It is cooling over a millennial timeframe. The trend in the Ljungqvist series over the last 2000 years is about -0.18 C/1000 years (this is the real overall secular trend). But within that overall cooling trend there is a large oscillation from positive to negative (see [3] above) that we have been referring to as our “secular trend”. Obviously your time horizon determines which trend is relevant to your consideration.
Once “our” relevant secular trend (ST) peaks just after 2020 it will go into a negative declining phase. However, MDV is already in negative phase now after peaking around 2000 i.e. the ST will be ABOVE the MDV curve AND the GMST profile from 2015 onwards for however many years it takes until the ST crosses the MDV curve again (as it is now in 2015). So to reconstruct the GMST profile after 2015 until the next cross, the MDV curve must be SUBTRACTED from the ST curve to give GMST. Prior to 2015 at say 2000 when MDV was maximum positive, MDV had to be added to the ST to reconstruct GMST.
Great article–read it at the site too. Clear explanations of the fallacies and the science, which I found refreshing.
That’s interesting.. knowingly deceived… they should be careful what they ask for, the tables could flip. In my view, AGW is knowingly deceiving a lot of people. From the research , not only me, but others as well, the sun is behaving exactly as forecast from the 1970s. My thoughts are that if it starts getting cold, crops fail, and the EPA among others, has shuttered reliable energy producing plants, who is going to bear the responsibility of turning scientific inquiry into a crime? Worse, how are they going to correct it?
They don’t intend to. Western nations are the enemy and if millions of us die, yea! CAGW people know exactly what they are doing. I also think they know AGW is a big lie, how could they not?
Many posts on WUWT keep on showing that the GCMs for a variety on different reasons are useless for climate forecasting. Yet most bloggers ,like the establishment academics,seem unable to give up their preoccupation with this naive reductionist approach and move to an entirely different way of forecasting – using the obvious 60 and millennial cycles so obvious in the temperature data.
With regard to the useless reductionist approach to complex phenomena n Harrison and Stainforth say in: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/eost2009EO13/pdf
“Reductionism argues that deterministic approaches to science and positivist views of causation are the appropriate methodologies for exploring complex, multivariate systems … where the behavior of a complex system can be deduced from the fundamental reductionist understanding. Rather, large, complex systems may be better understood, and perhaps only understood, in terms of observed, emergent behavior. The practical implication is that there exist system behaviors and structures that are not amenable to explanation or prediction by reductionist methodologies … the GCM is the numerical solution of a complex but purely deterministic set of nonlinear partial differential equations over a defined spatiotemporal grid, and no attempt is made to introduce any quantification of uncertainty into its construction … [T]he reductionist argument that large scale behaviour can be represented by the aggregative effects of smaller scale process has never been validated in the context of natural environmental systems … An explosion of uncertainty arises when a climate change impact assessment aims to inform national and local adaptation decisions, because uncertainties accumulate from the various levels of the assessment. Climate impact assessments undertaken for the purposes of adaptation decisions(sometimes called end-to-end analyses)propagate these uncertainties and generate large uncertainty ranges in climate impacts. These studies also find that the impacts are highly conditional on assumptions made in the assessment, for example, with respect to weightings of global climate models(GCMs)—according to some criteria, such as performance against past observations—or to the combination of GCMs used .Future prospects for reducing these large uncertainties remain limited for several reasons. Computational restrictions have thus far restricted the uncertainty space explored in model simulations, so uncertainty in climate predictions may well increase even as computational power increases. … The search for objective constraints with which to reduce the uncertainty in regional predictions has proven elusive. The problem of equifinality (sometimes also called the problem of “model identifiability”) – that different model structures and different parameter sets of a model can produce similar observed behavior of the system under study – has rarely been addressed.”
There is really no more to be said re the climate models – forget them and move on to the real world.
Progress will be made by understanding the timing and amplitude of the natural periodicities especially the 60 and millennial year cycles.
For forecasts of the timing and amplitude of the coming cooling using these cycles and the neutron count as the most useful measure for solar “activity” see
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2014/07/climate-forecasting-methods-and-cooling.html
and
for a simplified version see
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-epistemology-of-climate-forecasting.html
For those fixated on the processes involved it should be noted that it is not necessary to understand and quantify these in order to make useful , reasonably accurate , climate predictions. Obviously the main climate drivers are our orbital relationships with the sun and the relationship between these and solar activity variations .
The connection between solar “activity” and climate is as yet poorly understood and highly controversial. Solar “activity” encompasses changes in solar magnetic field strength, IMF, CRF, TSI, EUV, solar wind density and velocity, CMEs, proton events etc. The idea of using the neutron count and the 10Be record as the most useful proxy for changing solar activity and temperature forecasting is agnostic as to the physical mechanisms involved.
Having said that, however, it is reasonable to suggest that the three main solar activity related climate drivers are:
a) the changing GCR flux – via the changes in cloud cover and natural aerosols (optical depth)
b) the changing EUV radiation – top down effects via the Ozone layer
c) the changing TSI – especially on millennial and centennial scales.
The effect on climate of the combination of these solar drivers will vary non-linearly depending on the particular phases of the eccentricity, obliquity and precession orbital cycles at any particular time.
Of particular interest is whether the perihelion of the precession falls in the northern or southern summer at times of higher or lower obliquity.
Consistency check:
followed by:
Which (Fourier analysis and its generalizations) is not only a reductionist methodology, it is naive acausal reductionist methodology unlikely to apply to the chaotic weather/climate system. That is, one doesn’t make progress by throwing the baby out with the bath water, in this case by assuming that there is a stationary reductionist complex multivariate cause of distinguishable, stable, long period cycles — only we can’t say what that cause is.
Seriously, the problem is that the weather and the climate are chaotic. This is a simple fact. It has been known since Lorentz solved the very first elementary climate models on a glorified desktop calculator and tried to restart a model he had saved to less than internal precision. When the authors of the paper you cite — which is, BTW, saying very useful and correct things — talk about emergent behavior in the context of a chaotic system, they are among other things saying that you cannot rely on past periodic behaviors remaining so, especially when you give the knobs controlling the system forcings a good hard twist. The heart may beat rhythmically (even though understanding exactly how and why may be very elusive) right up to the point where it undergoes period doubling to chaotic defibrillation. Or perhaps more to the point, Laundau’s model of turbulence is wrong, not correct. Asserting that fourier signals in a chaotic system are stable modes with some predictive value is almost certainly incorrect, even though they might appear stable for a while.
The problem is that the system is currently in the neighborhood of some attractor, sure, but in this highly multivariate complex nonlinear chaotic system it is rather likely that solution attractors themselves form a dense set on some highly abstract space. As external forcings perturb the trajectory it is likely hopping all over, from attractor to attractor (where nearby attractors can have associated trajectories that fractally intertwine, make this enormously easy to do). When one does MORE than just perturb the forcings — when one cranks up CO2, for example — one almost certainly shifts the system across entire neighborhoods of attractors so that (for example) your 60 cycle (to the extent that it is real, given the extremely limited period of reliable data from which to abstract it) “suddenly” becomes a 20+40 year double cycle, which then becomes a 15 and 22 and 35 and 50 year quadruple cycle, etc into chaos without any real periodicity at all. Assuming there is any right now.
It is in this specific sense that the climate alarmists have a point. For better or for worse, we have yanked on the Earth’s chain by substantially altering its overall forcing as an open system. This could have lots of possible outcomes. It could make the system more stable, given that it was already at least globally bistable with glacial interglacial cycles in this deepening ice age. It could make it even less predictable than it was before, likely to rocket up or plunge down in temperature. It could produce almost no visible change, a trivial modulation of the climate we had in 1850. We just don’t know, and no, GCMs won’t tell us (or rather, the important part of what they tell us we are firmly refusing to listen to while focusing an enormous amount of energy and resources on the least important and reliable part of their results).
Right now the named quasi-stable modes of the Earth’s climate system are the (multi)decadal oscillations. They do not have much by way of fixed periods, but they have a structural cycle that is self-similar whatever the period, exactly as one would expect for a complex orbit associated with some attractor. But we are unbelievably ignorant of the general structure of the space of attractors itself — we don’t even know what the projective dimensionality is of the named oscillations, and we absolutely don’t know how they couple or how they respond to variations in drivings internal and external for a given non-Markovian state.
You want to assert that there are truly long term periodic modes — spatiotemporal climate structures that the Earth returns to quite regularly. I would strongly suggest taking almost any chaotic (model) system with a nontrivial set of attractors, running a differential equation solver to generate a family of solutions from trivially perturbed initial conditions in the chaotic regime, and then try to run a FT on the projection in some dimension. In e.g. the chaotic oscillators I’ve modeled in just this way, chaos is almost precisely the place where one does not get a meaningful FT signature of some dominant frequency or frequencies. That’s why chaotic iterated maps often make good pseudorandom number generators.
A nontrivial question that is far from being resolved is how much of what we perceive of as “climate change” is the accrual of what amounts to an unbiased random walk, how much is a biased random walk, how much is due to changes in forcings, how much is due to changes in attractors irrelevant to forcings. The solutions are not separable, so it is remarkably difficult to say.
rgb
I could follow that except for the co2 forcing of changing the climate. When they first started talking about the amount of co2 that was being created, I thought it was in whole percentages. I’m sorry the math just isn’t there to alter the climate at these levels of co2. Additionally, co2 may not be the controlling factor that many think it is. The tipping point on the current math has been reached several times in the past without a run a way greenhouse effect. I have it at most, it’s probably lower, co2 is responsible for only 3% of the 0.5 C rise…. background noise. That’s the big problem. Who is saying what and why. Let me tell why I think it’s wrong. It’s wrong because if the math was right about co2, the changes that were predicted, without a doubt, would have happened. Climate warmest jump from rock to rock in this stream. Former statements are forgotten with amazing speed, but live on as fact when it came out as conjecture. Oh look the warmest it’s ever been, 0.01 . Meanwhile they are adjusting the numbers like crazy to make that happen. For example, they already adjusted the numbers on the original data they threw away. That wasn’t good enough so they’ve adjusted them again.
It depends on the data sets you are looking at. For GISS and Hadcrut4, this is the warmest year in the instrumental record so far and there is no pause of zero slope for any time worth mentioning.
But for RSS and UAH6.0, the pause with a slope of zero is over 18 years and the ranking so far is 6th for RSS and 3rd for UAH6.0. Neither satellite record can even reach second warmest this year.
Personally, I switched off halfway through his article.
First, in order to refute the suggestion that this is not the hottest year ever, he goes back 100 million years. How fatuous is that? He knows very well that we’re all interested in the last few decades, or couple of centuries at most, as far as such claims are concerned.
And then he can’t resist making snide remarks about those with whom he disagrees – “gimmicked surveys”, “right-wing conspiracy”, etc.
If the facts speak for themselves, then let them do so, without running down other studies by the rival authors
Briggs is better than this. Assuming “the pause” has happened in the midst of historical high temps, you can have a maximum point within the pause that thereby becomes highest ever while being within a long-term trend of zero (or even negative) slope.
recently wrote a letter to the President and Attorney General asking these officials to criminally prosecute under the RICO Act scientists like myself and organizations that might fund me.”
The intent may ultimately be to prosecute, but all that the letter explicitly called for was an investigation. (Which would mostly vindicate our side.)
My suspicion is that the the letter from the “scientists” was conceived and orchestrated by the obama administration. Then dutifully carried out willingly by some and not so much by others who want to keep their paycheck.
Climate change is a religion and the government is not suppose to endorse or enforce any religious beliefs. They say man-caused climate change is fact but so does every religion on earth claim what they believe is fact. To use the term ‘denier’ proves climate change is a religion in which a person must ‘believe’ to be true or be ridiculed and punished or ousted, imprisoned, jailed or fined. I am a ‘denier’ for climatology, ‘heretic’ for Christianity and an ‘infidel’ when it comes to Islam. The fact is, religious people don’t like people who think for themselves based on personal study and decision making. Because the pope is getting involved in this, I don’t consider this political. These so called climate scientists with the pope are just a bunch of money grubbing religious nuts.. con-artists.
Reblogged this on ajmarciniak and commented:
There are two things to keep straight: (1) why these divergent contentions are believed, and (2) why they are incompatible and individually false. The first point is easy. Climatology has become a branch of politics. And in politics, particularly in our rambunctious democracy, statements asserted in the name of some political goal are usually believed or at least supported by those who share the goal. It is necessary for global-warming-of-doom to be true in order to attain the government’s goal (of increasing in size and power), so any statement which supports global warming is likely to be touted by government supporters, even mutually incompatible statements.
The Church has a very poor record with respect to meddling with science,
Cardinal Pell reminds the Pope of this.
http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2015/07/brave-cardinal-pell-challenges-pope-franciss-dogma-on-climate-change/
However the Pope is only following a well trodden path of well meaning non experts feeling obliged to say something ‘progressive’ in order for them to seem more relevant.
NOAA’s global temperature record is like Major League Baseball’s claim of a “World Series”; it’s not. They NOAA have no “global” temperature record, certainly not back to “1880” as they claim. And certainly not with the precision they claim with the “hottest August” beating the old record by .07F. LOL ….1/100th of a degree using a thermometer record that only recorded whole numbers is called a “rounding error” when the numbers were averaged; not a “whirled” “record”. How could possibly claim a record temperature derived from a precision that never existed in the original data that average was derived from?
With Pairs coming up 2015 was ‘always’ going be claimed has the hottest ever, it simple does no matter what the facts are, the political requirements overruled this and climate ‘science’ where more than happy to supply the numbers , which by ‘lucky chance ‘ benefited them to great extent .
It is said that
“arguments put forth by independent scientists and organizations that do not support the government’s line cannot be considered science, but should instead be classified as criminal acts.”
I believe that this argument is definitely invalid. On one hand, there has been a majority of works supporting global warming since at least the mid 80s, including in the US. On the other hand, the political orientation of those in charge in the government(s) has been switching repeatedly between left and right (we’re talking about a 30+ years period of time). How could one then argue that it is politics that dictates the way these scientists worked and published?
Specious argument. Why would the political beliefs of climatologists change depending on the political affiliations of the current federal administration? Also, why would the IPCC by affected by changes in the US government? (Actually, the insulation from such factors was one of the brilliant aspects of Maurice Strong’s overall strategy.)
That’s exactly my point. The author, like many “sceptics”, implies that the emergence and dominating character of the global warming theory is due to some governmental agenda. Obviously, we agree that this cannot be the case.
People like Mann who have such vociferous reactions to disagreement with their scientific ideas should not be taken seriously. And in a reasonable world Mann’s behavior would have long ago disqualified him from a position of any stature at a university or anywhere else in professional life.
Funny that governments falsify the effects of carbon dioxide and are supposedly saving the planet yet VW falsify those emissions and are fined billions. bonkers
The dishonesty between mixed messages with pause and record hot year is simply down to sampling.
GISS and HADCRUT4 only show warming because they have both recently changed the sampling method. Satellite data keeps the same sampling method all the time so still shows stability. If GISS and HADCRUT had kept the same sampling in the data, they also would have shown no warming or less warming. GISS has introduced infilling in data since 2001 only and causes a warm bias of 0.2 c. This is not based on science at all and just gives them more control on fiddling the data. The surface data sets are bad because no period of a few years or more have the same sampling method throughout the data sets. Each decade is like going through different comparable fruits with none being the same.
GISS corrected illustrates what it should have been like without all these changes.
http://i772.photobucket.com/albums/yy8/SciMattG/GISS-corrected2_zpssymskhge.png
There has been no record hot year in 2014 or 2015 so far with this corrected data set.
Nor with the RSS data
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gH99A8_0c6k/VexLL1zC7AI/AAAAAAAAAaQ/T50D6jG3sdw/s640/trendrss815.png
Like Tim Allen said in “Galaxy Quest,” “You don’t have to be a great actor to spot a bad one.”. The same with scientists.