Karl et al. do not know that we have two hiatuses, not one

Guest essay by Arno Arrak

Abstract

Karl et al. present data they claim denies the existence of the warming pasuse or hiatus that has existed for 18 years. It is characterized by the observation that while atmospheric carbon dioxide keeps ioncreasing there is no parallel increase of warming as demanded by the greenhouse theory of global warming. An examination of their data reveals that only two observed data points even show warming. This is not sufficient to even justify writing a paper about. This and other papers by like-minded pseudo-scientists are aimed at tearing down the existence of the current hiatus, but they have no idea that there was a similar hiatus in the eighties and nineties. The reason this is not known is that the guardians of global temperature made it disappear by over-writing it with a bogus warming called “late twentieth century warming.” It is much harder to deny the existence of two hiatuses than it is to deny one. The existence of this second hiatus argues against the claim made by Karl that hiatuses do not exist.

Introduction to Hiatuses

Hiatus in global warming is a cessation of warming, undefined in length and origin. The inplication that it may stop greenhouse warmimg makes it a threat to theories of global warming by the greenhouse effect. Karl and friends [1], as true disciples of this global warming theory, are doing all they can to deny the existence of the current hiatus which has lasted since about 1997 (or 2002 according to another version), While trying to deny that this hiatus is real, they are entirely unaware of the fact that there was another hiatus of equal length in the eighties and nineties. That is not very smart if you think of your paper as a hiatus killer. They do not know there are two because their friends working for GISS, HadCRUT, and NCDC climate oprganizations had decided to wipe that first hiatus off the map. They did this by over-writing it with a phony temperature rise called late twentieth century warming. It has been used by ground-based temperature sources but they could not control the satellites.That being the case, they simply pretended that satellites do not exist. As a result the hiatus of eighties and nineties is still available in satellite temperature records. I discovered it in 2008 while doing research for my book [2]. The word hiatus for a stand-still of warming had not yet been invented. ENSO was active at the time and produced a wave train of five El Nino peaks there, with La Nina valleys in between. Such a wave train is created by a harmonic oscillation of ocean water from side to side in the equatorial Pacific. As each wave washes ahore on the west coast of South America it spreads out north and south and warms the air above it. Warm air rises, joins the westerlies, and the rest of the world notices that an El Nino has arrived. In such a case, the global mean temperature is a point halfway between an El Nino peak and its neighboring La Nina valley. If you mark all such points on a wave train they will line up to define the trend of global mean temperature. In the case of the hiatus in the eighties and nineties this trend is a horizontal straight line. No warming for 18 years, it tells us. This also makes the graph of the hiatus self-calibrating: it cannot be monkeyd with by Karl or his friends.

Figure 1. This figure 15 from the book “What Warming?” [2], extended to the year 2012. Yellow dots mark global mean temperature. The blue lines, fitted to yellow dots, show existence of two hiatuses, with the 1998 super El Nino separating them. Steeply rising temperature just after it raised global temperature of the twenty-first century by a third of a degree Celsius in only three years.

Figure 15 above shows a temperature graph with two hiatuses. Figure 2 below shows how a HadCRUT3 plot, as modified by fake warming, can be used to wipe out a hiatus.

Figure 2. HadCRUT3 temperature data in 2008. Instead of a hiatus as in figure 15 it shows a fictitious late twentieth century warming on the left. Sharp spikes marked with red balloons are noise created by computer processing. This warming and the spikes are identically the same in all three datasets mentioned above. Note two noise peaks attaced to the super El Nino.

HadCRUT3 is just one of the temperature data-sets showing false warming in the eighties and nineties. There is no way this can happen without direct anthropogenic participation. The cooperation of the three temperature producers named sbove is revealed by presence of identical, unexplained computer processing traces in their data on both sides of the ocean. Unfortunately for them and fortunately for us the computer has left its footprints on all three, nominally independent, temperature curves. They comprise sharp upward spikes near the beginnings of years, marked with red balloons. Two of them sit right on top of the super El Nino of 1998.

What Karl wants to tell us

I regard the Karl et al. [1] article as just another one of dozens attacking the existence of the hiatus for ideological reasons. Like the others it has poor scientific support. They just know that the hiatus must be destroyed or else it will destroy them. While attacking the present hiatus full tilt they do not even lnow that there was another one in the eighties and nineties that we spoke of. For that ignorance they have to thank their friendly climate workers who arranged to have that hiatus over-written by a phony late twentieth century warming. Just before the hiatus started global temperature had begun to rise around 1976 and it looked like it was the global warming they were expecting to see. Except that it wasn’t. It stopped in 1979 and was followed by an 18 year temperature standstill – a true hiatus. Over-writing it may have started as an attempted error correction. But if year after year more corrections were needed these corrections became a scientific fraud. We are fortunate that they still do not control satellites or we would know nothing about this. We need to understand that while sea surface temperatures are integral to satellites they must be added to ground-based measurements from an external source. NOAA uses ERSST as a source while UK has their own HADSST3 for that. The latter is regarded as the gold standard of SST measurements. It is these ERSST sea surface values from NOAA that this paper uses to argue for the non-existence of the current hiatus. In their Ocean panel of figure 1 these are identified as “21st C” from 2000 to 2014 and “1998 to 2014” from 1998 to 2014. At the same time all land-based data in that figure show a uniformly small warming – an estimated 0.1 degrees Celsius per decade or less judging by their graph. All their new Global panel data also include the added temperature rise from ERSST. To use this as proof of warming is double dipping and must not be allowed. The Ocean base period and the second half of the twentieth century both show the same identically small warming as the ground-based warming does. The “Hiatus” of the IPCC period in the Ocean panel must likewise be excluded for double dipping because its data are fully included in the separate Ocean panel 1998 to 2014 measurements from ERSST. All other data including the absurd base period are either redundant or impermissible to use. The illegitimacy of using the ERSST data from NOAA is underlined by Judith Curry who opines that there was no reason for them to use NOAA’s data-set at all because the gold standard of SST data from the UK, namely HADSST3, was available. Included in their base period willie-nilly is the hiatus of the eighties and nineties. It must not be packaged as a part of promoting an imaginary warming curve as they do here. This error is made possible by their assuming that the so-called late twentieth century warming exists. It does not, it is phony, and it over-writes the first hiatus.

Figure 3. This is Figure 1 from “Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus,” in Science of June 4th 2015, by Thomas R. Karl, Anthony Arguez, Boyin Huang, Jay H. Lawrimore, James R. McMahon, Matthew J. Menne, Thomas C. Peterson, Russell S. Vose, Huai-Min Zhang. Note the numerous overlapping dates that amount to double-dipping. One result of this is that the data point “Hiatus” on the Ocean panel above is redundant, contributes nothing, and leaves the impession that they have more data than they actually do.

His grab for the Arctic

Further errors include their desire to include Arctic warming into their warming kingdom. It so happens that present Arctic warming is not greenhouse warming but is caused by warm water carried into the Arctic ocean by currents [3]. It was not always so. Prior to the twentieth century there was nothing there except for two thousand years of slow, linear cooling. Arctic warming started suddenly at the turn of the twentieth century as a result of a rearrangement of the North Atlantic current system. There was no increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide at the turn of the century which rules out greenhouse warming as a causative agent. Warming was irregular at first and halted for thirty years in mid-century. It resumed in 1970 and has been active ever since, The mid-century halt was actually a cooling period. Such ability to stop and start warming or cooling is another guarantee that Arctic warming cannot be greenhouse warming and must not be subsumed into his argument for AGW.

Warming effect

That step warming at the beginning of the 21st century raised global temperature by a third of a degree Celsius in only three years and then stopped. This third of a degree starts up from the level of the hiatus and is not spread out like the fake greenhouse warming is. It is the only warming during the entire satellite era. Since the temperature rise of the entire twentieth century was 0.8 degrees according to Hansen, 0.3 degrees Celsius is a substantial part of it. As a result of this warming all twenty-first century temperatures are now higher than the twentieth century was (except 1998). People like Hansen who did notice it want to claim it as due to greenhouse warming which it isn’t. This is one error that the fake warming promotes by hiding the existence of the step warming and thereby augmenting misinformation that comes from failure to check the facts about warming. Hansen noticed that twenty-first century was warmer than the twentieth when the hiatus was ten years old and quickly claimed it as greenhouse warming. That of course is impossible because checking the Keeling curve shows that carbon dioxide did not change. Prsence of the fake warming made it believable without checking what atmospheric carbon dioxide was doing. But then again, true believers like him do not even feel the need to check what carbon dioxide is doing because for them the science is settled. Fact is that we still don’t know the true cause of this step warming. Best guess is that it is oceanic but I don’t have any specific hints.

Global Climate Effect

Thanks to that step warming established a higher level for the 21st century temperature. we basically have now two hiatuses at two different temperature levels.It is worth our while to see how they correlate. First, the two hiatuses together cover more than eighty percent of the satellite era. Taking this to be synonymous with lack of warming we can immediately say that there was no greenhouse warming for more than 80 percent of the time during the satellite era. The rest of the era is taken up by the super El Nino of 1998 (2 years) and the short step warming that followed it (3 years). Neither one is a greenhouse-related feature. Hence, it follows that: there has been no greenhouse warming whatswoever durong the entire satellite era. With that, AGW dies.

Conclusions

And now we come to some impossible claims this paper makes. Their main claim seems to be that warming took place in the twenty-first century thanks to SST increase, recorded by NOAA. What they fail to do is to show that this warming tilted up the hiatus into a warming slope like the one shown in figure 2. We note also that at the same time that the sea urface was warming, their land-based temperatures did not follow suite. Since the land did not warm I am now confused about why they think SST has anything to do with the hiatus. Showing only two data points that are legitimate but not associated with progressive rise of temperature tells us nothing about what kind of warming happened where. If you want your warming to wipe out the existence of a hiatus you must show that these data mandate a progressine temperature rise as HadCRUT3 does in figure 2. People at HaDRUT3 understood this principle when they created their fake warming shown in figure 2. No doubt about it – that is how tou replace a hiatus with warming. Unfortunately Karl et al. simply don’t know that. They throw general warming into the air and have no idea where it comes down. Something like figure 2 is a sine qua non for wiping out a hiatus. But they have only two legitimate data points to show warming and these are just sea surface warming. And looking further into it I find that things are even worse than that. These two data points totally overlap in time: the one marked “21 st C” is completely inside the one marked “1998 to 2014” which means that there is only one legitimate data point in the entire paper. It is also non-localized, extending over a sixteen year period, and that makes it quite impossible to say whether or not any warming slope exists anywhere near a hiatus or not.. With these facts in mind, I am sorry to have to say that the aim of this paper has not been demonstrated. The authors, the editors and the reviewers of this paper have all shown total ignorance of the subject they have attempted to tackle. It takes a collusionary editorial process to get trash like this published and then follow it up with a world-wide promotional campaign geared to promote the false concept of anthropogenic global warming.

References

[1] Thomas R. Karl, Anthony Arguez, Boyin Huang, Jay H. Lawrimore, James R. McMahon, Matthew J. Menne, Thomas C. Peterson, Russell S. Vose, Huai-Min Zhang., “Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus” Science, June 4th 2015

[2] Arno Arrak “What Warming? Satellite view of global temperature change” (CreateSpace 2010), figure 15.

[3] Arno Arrak, “Arctic Warming Is Not Greenhouse Warming” E&E 22(8):1069-1083 (2011)