No global warming at all for 18 years 9 months – a new record
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
As the faithful gather around their capering shamans in Paris for the New Superstition’s annual festival of worship, the Pause lengthens yet again. One-third of Man’s entire influence on climate since the Industrial Revolution has occurred since February 1997. Yet the 225 months since then show no global warming at all (Fig. 1). With this month’s RSS temperature record, the Pause beats last month’s record and now stands at 18 years 9 months.
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 9 months since February 1997, though one-third of all anthropogenic forcings have occurred during the period of the Pause.
The accidental delegate from Burma provoked shrieks of fury from the congregation during the final benediction in Doha three years ago, when he said the Pause had endured for 16 years. Now, almost three years later, the Pause is almost three years longer.
It is worth understanding just how surprised the modelers ought to be by the persistence of the Pause. NOAA, in a very rare fit of honesty, admitted in its 2008 State of the Climate report that 15 years or more without global warming would demonstrate a discrepancy between prediction and observation. The reason for NOAA’s statement is that there is supposed to be a sharp and significant instantaneous response to a radiative forcing such as adding CO2 to the air.
The steepness of this predicted response can be seen in Fig. 1a, which is based on a paper on temperature feedbacks by Professor Richard Lindzen’s former student Professor Gerard Roe in 2009. The graph of Roe’s model output shows that the initial expected response to a forcing is supposed to be an immediate and rapid warming. But, despite the very substantial forcings in the 18 years 9 months since February 1997, not a flicker of warming has resulted.
Figure 1a: Models predict rapid initial warming in response to a forcing. Instead, no warming at all is occurring. Based on Roe (2009).
At the Heartland and Philip Foster events in Paris, I shall reveal in detail the three serious errors that have led the models to over-predict warming so grossly.
The current el Niño, as Bob Tisdale’s distinguished series of reports here demonstrates, is at least as big as the Great el Niño of 1998. The RSS temperature record is beginning to reflect its magnitude.
From next month on, the Pause will probably shorten dramatically and may disappear altogether for a time. However, if there is a following la Niña, as there often is, the Pause may return at some time from the end of next year onward.
The hiatus period of 18 years 9 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.
And yes, the start-date for the Pause has been inching forward, though just a little more slowly than the end-date, which is why the Pause continues on average to lengthen.
So long a stasis in global temperature is simply inconsistent not only with the extremist predictions of the computer models but also with the panic whipped up by the rent-seeking profiteers of doom rubbing their hands with glee in Paris.
The UAH dataset shows a Pause almost as long as the RSS dataset. However, the much-altered surface tamperature datasets show a small warming rate (Fig. 1b).
Figure 1b. 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 1.1 C° per century during the period of the Pause from January 1997 to September 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.
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.
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 discrepancy 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 309 months January 1990 to September 2015 (orange region and red trend line), vs. observed anomalies (dark blue) and trend (bright blue) at just 1.02 K/century equivalent, taken as the mean of the RSS and UAH v.6 satellite monthly mean lower-troposphere temperature anomalies.
Figure 3. Predicted temperature change, January 2005 to September 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.6 satellite lower-troposphere temperature anomalies.
As ever, 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. In a rational scientific discourse, those who had advocated extreme measures to prevent global warming would now be withdrawing and calmly rethinking their hypotheses. However, this is not a rational scientific discourse. On the questioners’ side it is rational: on the believers’ side it is a matter of increasingly blind faith. The New Superstition is no fides quaerens intellectum.
Key facts about global temperature
These facts 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”.
Ø The RSS satellite dataset shows no global warming at all for 225 months from February 1997 to Octber 2015 – more than half the 442-month satellite record.
Ø There has been no warming even though one-third of all anthropogenic forcings since 1750 have occurred since the Pause began in February 1997.
Ø The entire RSS dataset for the 442 months December 1978 to September 2015 shows global warming at an unalarming rate equivalent to just 1.13 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 close to thrice 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. The headline graph in these monthly reports begins in 1997 because that is as far back as one can go in the data and still obtain a zero trend.
Fig. T1a. Graphs for RSS and GISS temperatures starting both in 1997 and in 2001. For each dataset the trend-lines are near-identical, showing conclusively that the argument that the Pause was caused by the 1998 el Nino is false (Werner Brozek and Professor Brown worked out this neat demonstration).
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 Pause, 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.
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.
Figure T7. Near-global ocean temperatures by stratum, 0-1900 m, providing a visual reality check to show just how little the upper strata are affected by minor changes in global air surface temperature. Source: ARGO marine atlas.
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.
In early October 2015 Steven Goddard added some very interesting graphs to his website. The graphs show the extent to which sea levels have been tampered with to make it look as though there has been sea-level rise when it is arguable that in fact there has been little or none.
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. T8):
Figure T8. 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 (Fig. T9):
Figure T9: 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. T10):
Figure T10. 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. T11) and by Spencer & Braswell (2010, 2011) that climate sensitivity is below – and perhaps considerably below – 1 Cº per CO2 doubling.
Figure T11. 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. T12) reaches 20 years without any global warming? If it does, the climate scare will become unsustainable.
Figure T12. The Freedom Clock edges ever closer to 20 years without global warming
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Thanks, I always enjoy these monthly updates. It would interesting to also see the Global Forecast System based global temperature anomaly estimates included as well (also called CFSR) as provided by the University of Maine Climate Change Institute and/or WxBell. Interestingly, the UM CCI trend for the 21st Century so far is a rate of -1.68C/100 years (2001 through September 2015) as can be seen in the graph below.
You do realize the CFSR is modeled data, not actual observations, right?
timetochooseagain, all estimates of global temperatures are models. It is a concept and NOT a measurement. The GFS model initialization incorporates much more in the way of measurements than the GHCN approach and this modeling approach seems to work well for weather forecasting, at least out for two or three days.
You’re confusing fundamentally different types of “models”
One type of “model” is a statistical model, like and average. Over simplifying a bit, this is the kind of “model” that other datasets, like the satellite data represent: statistics calculated from observed data.
CFSR is based on observed data and an operational weather forecasting model. Where not constrained by information, it’s output is fabricated out of whole cloth. Nothing but a guess.
But it also a well established fact that spurious discontinuities and trends arise in reanalyses whenever new data become available to assimilate into the weather model
Your belief in the accuracy of this “data” should be equivalent to the faith you’d put in an operational weather forecasting model at best on a similar timescale.
CFSR is not observations. It is not a statistical model of observed data. It’s a chimera of real data and fake, made up data the accuracy of which as a guess cannot be verified.
• Atmospheric T382L64 (GSI) analysis is made at 0000, 0600, 1200, and 1800 UTC, using a coupled 9-h guess forecast. • Ocean and sea ice analysis (GODAS with MOM4) is made at 0000, 0600, 1200, and 1800 UTC, using the same 9-h coupled guess forecast. • From each of the four cycles, a 9-h coupled guess forecast (GFS at T382L64) is made with 30-min coupling to the ocean (MOM version 4). • Land (GLDAS) analysis, using observed precipitation with the Noah land model, is made only at 0000 UTC.
CFSR modeled data uses daily real observations and a coupled 9-h forecast. At 9-h forecasts it is accurate for atmospheric temperatures, but less so for surface temperatures over land.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/pdf/10.1175/2010BAMS3001.1
There is not too much difference between CFSR and RSS because CFSR also using different layers in the atmosphere not just near the surface.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:2001
Accurate, in this case, enough for operational use. Not accurate enough for reliable trend assessment.
Well may be the new November night min temp set here in Christchurch N.Z on the 5th 2015 prove that things are not warming up much at all.
UPDATE IT IS A RECORD FOR THE AIRPORT.
If you thought it was particularly cold and frosty in Canterbury first thing this morning, you were right.
Christchurch has had its coldest November temperature in more than 60 years, with a minimum of -2.8 degrees Celsius recorded at the airport.
Minimums around the city hovered between 0°C and -1°C.
MetService forecaster Georgina Griffiths said it might have been the coldest on record but it wasn’t the latest frost in the city.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/news/73704110/christchurchs-coldest-november-temperature-in-more-than-60-years
Markrust
So you think because you had frost on your toes in Chch that the rest of the planet is cold too? You need to travel a bit I think.
not warming in B.C. either so? pretty soon we run out of places that we are told are warming but aren’t.
Heat flux from the earth’s interior is 0.087 watt/square meter on average according to Wiki. That drops the imbalance by that amount to 0.53 w/m2^2. But what the heck is a ~14% error between friends anyway.
How long before the alarmists claim the “hidden heat” (that was never) in the oceans is manifesting as stronger El Nino’s?
So, if there is a renewal of any warming, I feel we should apply the same time frame standards the AGW proponents used to define the ‘Pause’.
15 years, 18 years,no, I mean 20 years of warming to certify statistically that the pause is over….now you know it never works like that , any time scale is good enough as ‘proof’ of climate doom , while the only time scale good enough for disprove of ‘climate doom’ is infinity plus .
“Paris and ‘The Inconvenient Pause'”.
That might make a good title for someone’s next post. 😎
Estimates of CO2 level and average global temperature trajectory (no sustained temperature change) for the last 500 million years is evidence CO2 has no effect on climate. This is demonstrated at Energy & Environment, Vol 26, No. 5, 2015, 841-845 & http://agwunveiled.blogspot.com
A co-plot of el Niño anomalies since 1964 from http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/ensostuff/ensoyears.shtml with all oscillations time-shifted so peaks align, indicates an el Niño with trajectory of the current one should have peaked in October. Unfortunately data points are reported more than a month after they occur so the first report of expected November downtrend will not be seen until January.
Also, the short-term uptrend (summer) in longer-term downtrend (since 2005) in AMO should have ended.
Combined with the predictive equation which has matched 97% with measured average global temperatures since before 1900 this all looks like a steepening downtrend of reported average global temperatures within a few months and accelerated increase of ‘months without warming’.
Usually, el Ninos peak in the first few months of the year. Therefore, we are unlikely to be at the peak yet.
My lord, allow me to quibble. Your graph above claims “one-third of all anthropogenic forcings have occurred during the period of the Pause”. I would argue that this is an indefensible claim. Add the word ‘known’ and we can agree.
There may be warming influences which we do not yet include; I would argue for a) ocean surface pollution by oil and surfactant causing mechanical reduction in aerosol production* b) dissolved silica altering phytoplankton balance and leading to diatom dominance lasting longer into the warming season (which also explains isotopic C changes) c) Haber process nutrient changes to the ocean which may decrease DMS production. Etc etc.
I could agree with the statement ‘One third of the known forcings have occurred in the last 19 years.’ I would add ‘which just goes to show that there is something going on which we have not included.’
Consider this question. Why the blip?
Julian Flood
*my explanation of the blip. I believe there was considerable pollution at that time.
Julian – The influence of all of those ‘not explicitly included’ factors must find room in the unexplained 3% in the analysis at http://agwunveiled.blogspot.com
It ought to be plain by now that my method is to use IPCC values for forcings etc. without warranting their accuracy. By this method one can show that the IPCC’s predictions are wrong without complicating the argument with pointless disagreements about whether all forcings are or are not known.
As it happens, IPCC overstates the CO2 forcing by 40%, but this thread is not the place for such considerations.
IPCC claims, based upon worse than worthless, massively failed, GIGO models, that the effect on temperature at equilibrium, of a doubling of CO2 levels in the air, is most likely a 3 degree C gain, with a range of 1.5 to 4.5 degrees C.
Since the real ECS is most likely 0.0 to 1.5 degrees C, IPCC must be off by more than 40%.
Solar winds blamed for turning Mars into dead planet ???
http://email.foxnews.com/t?r=6&c=40624&l=153&ctl=7C189:5EAF624A0052DD6E79207E5DD6289234&
If we look at Figure 1 — with such high inter-annual/inter-seasonal variations, how the global warming [if any] going to affect the nature as reported in media. Every other day hundreds of papers reports say so and so event was associated with global warming — though many of them shy of using the word global warming and instead use climate change.
After each sudden raise [may be El Nino affect] followes a sudden fall. Also before the steep raise there was a fall. So, on either side of the steep raise the steep fall in temperature. What will be the implications?
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
[Snip. Sockpuppet. -mod]
A test to establish whether there was a pattern of monthly or seasonal variability in global temperatures, by the simple expedient of averaging the values for each month, showed no pattern. For this reason, although AR(n) or polynomial fits will give lower RMS errors than linear regression, they will not exhibit markedly different trends over the past decade or two.
Use the Mk 1 Eyeball. It ought to be blindingly obvious that the trend is zero over the past 18 years 9 months, or very close to zero.
Feel free, however, to write to UEA, IPCC etc. to tell them to calculate trends differently.
I didn’t say that averaging the values would show a pattern; indeed, it would be more likely to wash one out. What I said is that there is strong autocorrelation, and that’s important because as someone else has pointed out in detail on this list, such series tend to exhibit trend-like or wave-like behaviour that means absolutely nothing. As for what the eyeball shows, it is obvious to everyone but an alarmist that you are 100% right (and alarmists can see it too, they just find accepting it intolerable). Write to IPCC? Surely they must have had hundreds of statisticians screaming at them already and must have deliberately ignored the advice. Because if they didn’t get competent statisticians to advise them, *that* would have been professional incompetence.
Richard A. O’Keefe writes: “Surely they must have had hundreds of statisticians screaming at them already and must have deliberately ignored the advice. Because if they didn’t get competent statisticians to advise them, *that* would have been professional incompetence.”
You have faith in statisticians! It’s not well placed but nevertheless gratifying. We are screaming and it has had very little effect.
Ah, just in time for the newly adult pause to have a baby.
I’d simply like to know exactly why so many people have to attend in Paris. 190 nations. So, in the usual run of things for business attendance at meetings lets say 3 reps (funded) from each nation. No, give it 5 to include bag carriers. So 1000 attendees at most.
SIF15 appears to be 5000 now: http://www.cop21paris.org/
You simply cannot take it seriously really. Trouble is with so many there it is a huge worry.
‘If it does, the climate scare will become unsustainable’.. sadly no in one form or others it will be with us for much longer , for you have patristic organisation like the IPCC that feed of it , while climate ‘science’ as little to offer without so will all that it can to keep the scare going and so the money flowing , and although whose have jumped on it for political reasons can always find a ‘new cause ‘ , as they often have in the past . This one has been the nearest they ever got to actually getting their mad ideas enforced , so they will not give it up easily.
I do not expect Paris to be the last COP , but it may well be the last COP that of this size and scope.
In answer to knr, the evidence of fraud right at the heart of the IPCC / UNFCCC process is being gathered. Before too long, the file will be passed to various national police and investigating authorities, and to Interpol.
I like to keep it as simple as I can; What if??? If Warmists had contracted with ” BIG OIL” to raise the
global temps by adding CO2 to the air, say 10 billion per degree, how much money would we be owing
to “BIG OIL”?????
The last 500 million years of no sustained temperature change is evidence CO2, in spite of being a ghg, has no effect on average global temperature. This is demonstrated at Energy & Environment, Vol 26, No. 5, 2015, 841-845 & http://agwunveiled.blogspot.com
Now the subject of the “pause” has come up again I’d like to ask a question that came up from the post a few weeks ago on it’s 18+ year duration.
I notice the measure used to show the pause is one of the RSS lower troposphere “products”, I guess either the TTT, TMT or TLT instruments/signals? Why was the lower trope chosen? I understood warming was predicted to happen in the upper trope by the IPCC models? Shouldn’t we be looking there for evidence of warming? Not that I haven’t looked already and not found it, but it seems that’s where we should be looking and also that the lack of evidence given by those data is even more pronounced (how can you express the magnitude of something missing? It’s like, *really* not there man! 🙂
So why use the lower trope? Seems like it detects things that aren’t interesting (the PDO for example) and is going to be more susceptible to regional ground clutter (cities, power stations, etc.)
The lower troposphere is where we live. It is the satellites’ equivalent of surface temperature. It allows direct comparison of IPCC predictions with observations, because IPCC predicts surface temperature.
There has been no warming of the mid-troposphere: nor would any such warming be expected if the lower troposphere / surface is not warming.
Catastrophic man-made climate change theory predicts that the air should warm more than and before the surface. Just the opposite has been observed.
The Warmaggedon hypothesis was born falsified and has continued to be show false based upon every prediction is has ever made, although its advocates resist making actual predictions by grabbing onto furniture and doorways while being dragged toward practicing the scientific method.
The issue here is whether the GHE and AGW is a top down effect or a bottom up effect.
If it a top down effect then the signs of the enhanced GHE due to manmade increase in CO2 emissions should show up first at the top. A liter, if it is a bottom down effect when observing surface response would be more informative.
All, a few years ago I decided to find out the truth about AGW and followed through a series of internet searches of relevant papers, articles etc. I also read all of the IPCC reports. Regarding published books I have yet to find one that is not seriously biased in one direction or the other.
The result is that, after about five years and probably 5000 hrs of reading, searching etc. I am not really any wiser than before. I have loads of ‘facts’ , my knowledge of the subject has been greatly enhanced, but still no wiser. I have a science based education which helps my understanding but obviously not enough to sort the wheat from the chaff 🙂
There are some pretty convincing arguments coming from both camps.
Does anyone out there have anything absolutely conclusive? Why do I feel that asking this question is akin to asking for proof of God?
Let me just add that I found this site through a shared facebook article. The quality of article and, more unusualy, the comments is excellent.
Monkton of Brenchley writes: “nor would any such warming be expected if the lower troposphere / surface is not warming.”
But is that finding consistent with the “mechanism of action” proposed by the theory of CO2 induced warming? It was my (perhaps distorted) understanding that CO2 acted to absorb and retain IR either passing through the atmosphere on it way to the ground, or reflected by the surface on it’s way back into space.
The argument is made that increased CO2 will result in heat retention as IR is absorbed on its way to the surface in case #1, therefore we should observe warming in the upper/mid trope as the inbound energy is absorbed.
In case #2 (reflected or “outbound” energy), IR passes through the CO2 layer and is absorbed progressively in transit.
In both examples, the direction of IR radiation absorbed determines (in theory) the direction of re-transmission; IR coming in from space absorbed by CO2 (or water) will be re-radiated with high probability towards the surface. Similarly, IR reflected by the surface will proceed (with high probability) towards space.
If we assume the surface isn’t a significant generator of long wave radiation (IR), and that a fraction of cosmic IR never makes it to the surface (even though it will continue in that direction with high probability, it’s just a high probability), wouldn’t we anticipate the majority of heating to occur in the atmosphere? Most particularly in the upper atmosphere? Unlike water vapor, CO2 doesn’t appear constrained by the tropopause, suggesting it may have an effect (if present) in the stratosphere as well as the troposphere? And shouldn’t absorption be progressive, with the majority of the “inbound” radiation being captured in the upper and middle atmosphere? Agreed, theory tells us the majority will be re-radiated in a downward direction, but certainly not all of it. Some will be effectively reflected and never make it to the surface. This being the case, net warming should occur in the atmosphere, not on the surface, and perhaps arguably in the upper atmosphere?
gazoopi asks: “Does anyone out there have anything absolutely conclusive?”
Wouldn’t that be nice? We could all move on, safe in the knowledge we understood everything and there were no doubts. The “science”, “philosophy” or “general attitude” would be stated, no more debate would be needed, and we could all go back to watching Walter Cronkite at 7. Life would be good and it would involve ice cream.
But it isn’t that way.
Go read Dr David Evans model at jonova blog site. Much more aligned with measurements. Ecs closer to zero than.0.6.
Dr Evans’ model is indeed very interesting, and supported by empirical evidence in the form of the predicted but absent tropical mid-troposphere “hot-spot”, which indicates either that global warming is not happening or that, if it is happening, the water vapor feedback is minuscule at most., Either way, climate sensitivity is likely to be as low as David says it is: his results are in the same ballpark as those of Professor Ray Bates, in an interesting talk in Moscow earlier this year, and also of Professor Lindzen and Dr Spencer. All of these find climate sensitivity to be 0.7 K or less per CO2 doubling. Ray Bates’ estimate is exactly the same as David’s – 0.4 K or less per doubling.
What is interesting is that David has assumed that the CO2 radiative forcing is correct (forthcoming research will show it to be overstated by 40%) and that the temperature feedbacks are correctly estimated by the IPCC (Bates, Lindzen and Spencer would disagree with that).
Allowing for these results, it is perfectly possible that the anthropogenic warming by the end of the 21st century will be just as it is to date: statistically indistinguishable from zero.
Here we are, one week into November. A week which brought us two major papers on Ice GAINS in Antartica. One from NASA and one from the American Geophysical Union and British Antarctic Survey.
At least, I keep checking for mention of these newsworthy revelations in the BBC website and find nothing.
For a moment I began to wonder if Antarctica was no longer welcome on the BBC.
At least my committed searching has revealed not one mention of any of this “science”.
Finally they have remembered the existence of antartica with this profoundly important article in the science section of their website. The place where they should ideally be reporting on major scientific discoveries:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11258989
Can nobody do anything about BBC bias? Censorship of inconvenient science, is clearly bias.
Thanks, Christopher, Lord Monckton.
I appreciate your updates.
Looking forward to what winter will bring,
I post this again as it was originally posted as a ‘reply’ to another comment. Sorry, still learning.
All, a few years ago I decided to find out the truth about AGW and followed through a series of internet searches of relevant papers, articles etc. I also read all of the IPCC reports. Regarding published books I have yet to find one that is not seriously biased in one direction or the other.
The result is that, after about five years and probably 5000 hrs of reading, searching etc. I am not really any wiser than before. I have loads of ‘facts’ , my knowledge of the subject has been greatly enhanced, but still no wiser. I have a science based education which helps my understanding but obviously not enough to sort the wheat from the chaff 🙂
There are some pretty convincing arguments coming from both camps.
Does anyone out there have anything absolutely conclusive? Why do I feel that asking this question is akin to asking for proof of God?
Let me just add that I found this site through a shared facebook article. The quality of article and, more unusualy, the comments is excellent.
Gasoline may like to read my next posting, on the collapse of climate sensitivity.
So sorry, the wretched spelling nanny got it wrong again. For gasoline read Gazoopi.
“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.” (German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, 1818)
This stuff got me to thinking. It’s a very common practice in engineering to bracket a problem with worst case analysis. If that shows you’re alright, then you stop, otherwise you try more and more realistic modeling to see if you really have a problem or not.
I can’t recall seeing one, although I’m sure it exists somewhere.
So I asked myself, what would happen if we burned all the known oil and coal and how much CO2 would it release?
So with a little web surfing and a spreadsheet for calculating how much CO2 is created by burning oil and coal:
1 barrel 317 kg CO2
reserves 1.32E+12 barrels
Oil CO2 4.20E+14 kg CO2
coal 3.667 lb CO2
reserves 984.6 billion tons
1.9692E+15 lbs
Coal CO2 7.22106E+15 lb CO2
total 1.63E+16 lb CO2
ocean 343,423,668,428,484,000,000.00 gal water
lb/gallon 8.552
lbs seawater 2,936,959,212,400,390,000,000.00
C02/seawater 0.000005552012
ppm 5.55 ppm in oceans
mas of atmosphere 5.1E+18 kg
1.122E+19 lb
co2 max theoretical atm 1,453.30 ppm
So if you magically convinced all the CO2 to be absorbed by the oceans it would cause a 5.5 ppm increase, or magically convinced all of it to stay in the atmosphere it would cause a 1453 ppm increase with no other factors considered.
If you add the mass of the atmosphere and oceans and divide you get 5.3 ppm (i.e. assume the CO2 is evenly distributed). So, duh, the oceans have a lot more mass than the atmosphere and CO2 capacity as well.
I’m not a chemist, so I’m not sure how the concentrations of CO2 would actually be distributed, and perhaps it doesn’t mix evenly in the oceans so the available ocean mass is much less than the number I used.
I’m not sure how to interpret this, because it says, at most, we can only increase CO2 by 5ppm and the current rise in CO2 must be caused by something else.
Well, speaking only anecdotally I’d guess it takes a bit of time for atmospheric gasses to reach equilibrium with dissolved ocean gasses. At least that’s the way it works in my garage experiments where I make carbonated water from spring water and CO2 at 20psi. It takes about 3 to 4 days before the water is sparkling. I could probably shorten that by increasing the partial pressure of CO2. I expect there’s a standard formula out there.
Try Henry’s Law.
His lordship is right as usual. The ice core records show that temperature drives CO2 rather than the reverse. There is a time lag of ~500 years which can be explained by means of Henry’s law and the huge thermal capacity of our oceans.
https://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2013/05/04/the-dog-that-did-not-bark/
Mummy kicks’ calculation is interesting, not least because it shows 1453 ppmv as the maximum CO2 concentration achievable by us. IPCC says 2000 ppmv.
“I’m not sure how to interpret this, because it says, at most, we can only increase CO2 by 5ppm and the current rise in CO2 must be caused by something else.”
You might ask the geologist
http://carbon-budget.geologist-1011.net/
Monkton of Brenchley writes: “Try Henry’s Law.”
I suppose I should have marked that as sarcasm.
Actually, he summated your observations in three words.
Lord Christopher, brilliant as always.
The question as I see it, is how to get the truth out to the apathetic masses who cower to the authority of the MSM?
If “big oil” was actually subsidizing the “skeptic underground movement”, then there would be a publicity war in progress. Billboards across the country would be questioning the meme. Celebrities would be hired to make commercials, who presently fund their own skeptic message (e.g. Penn & Teller).
Would be refreshing if Donald Trump funded a campaign for skeptic science and economics.
Isn’t ‘skeptic’ just another name for ‘conservative thinker’?
Bartley had speculated about whether there was a formula governing the relative partial pressures of gases such as CO2 in the atmosphere and the oceans. I answered the question straightforwardly.
mummykicks,
There have been some efforts to model the effect of burning all the available fossil fuels. Here is a link to a particularly absurd paper:
http://geosci.uchicago.edu/%7Earcher/reprints/archer.2005.trigger.pdf
Primates don’t do well during glaciations. The last one with a little help from Mount Toba came close to rendering Homo Sapiens extinct.
It would be wonderful if there was a grain of truth in the Archer/Ganopolski study. We would to be able to delay the next glaciation simply by burning fossil fuels. Don’t get your hopes up as there is plenty of evidence of glaciations when CO2 levels were ten times higher than today.