No global warming at all for 18 years 8 months
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
The Paris agreement is more dangerous than it appears. Though the secession clause that this column has argued for was inserted into the second draft and remained in the final text, the zombies who have replaced the diplomatic negotiators of almost 200 nations did not – as they should have done in a rational world – insert a sunset clause that would bring the entire costly and pointless process to an end once the observed rate of warming fell far enough below the IPCC’s original predictions in 1990.
It is those first predictions that matter, for they formed the official basis for the climate scam – the biggest transfer of wealth in human history from the poor to the rich, from the little guy to the big guy, from the governed to those who profit by governing them.
Let us hope that the next President of the United States insists on a sunset clause. I propose that if 20 years without global warming occur, the IPCC, the UNFCCC and all their works should be swept into the dustbin of history, and the prosecutors should be brought in. We are already at 18 years 8 months, and counting. The el Niño has shortened the Pause, and will continue to do so for the next few months, but the discrepancy between prediction and reality remains very wide.
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 8 months since May 1997, though one-third of all anthropogenic forcings have occurred during the period of the Pause.
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 8 months since May 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).
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 now beginning to reflect its magnitude. If past events of this kind are a guide, there will be several months’ further warming before the downturn in the spike begins.
However, if there is a following la Niña, as there often is, the Pause may return at some time from the end of this year onward.
The hiatus period of 18 years 8 months is the farthest back one can go in the RSS satellite temperature record and still show a sub-zero trend. The start date is not cherry-picked: it is calculated. And the graph does not mean there is no such thing as global warming. Going back further shows a small warming rate. The rate on the RSS dataset since it began in 1979 is equivalent to 1.2 degrees/century.
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 has continued on average to lengthen.
The UAH satellite 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 May 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 (even if it had occurred) would not be cause for concern.
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 311 months January 1990 to November 2015 (orange region and red trend line), vs. observed anomalies (dark blue) and trend (bright blue) at just 1 K/century equivalent, taken as the mean of the RSS and UAH v.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.
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.
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 224 months from May 1997 to December 2015 – more than half the 444-month satellite record.
Ø There has been no warming even though one-third of all anthropogenic forcings since 1750 have occurred since 1997.
Ø The entire UAH dataset for the 444 months (37 full years) from December 1978 to November 2015 shows global warming at an unalarming rate equivalent to just 1.14 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 little more than 1 Cº per century. The IPCC had predicted close to thrice as much.
Ø To meet the IPCC’s original 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 as 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
I see the Pause in the UAH dataset merits only half a sentence.
I’m not surprised because you can find a negative trend in this dataset if, and only if, you start your analysis in December 1997, Next month it will be gone
The RSS Pause should hang on until March
Yes, MoB uses a method that is the very definition of how to pick the best cherry … pointing that out, of course, causes vehement denial of having done so – always good for a laugh. As soon as you step beyond the 97/98 E.N. peak the pause goes into hiding. As you say, in a few months he’ll have to search for another non-robust messaging device to emphasize. It’s the way of his type.
This pause is really bugging you blokes isn’t it? Why has there been ~80-odd, peer-reviewed studies released in the past 5 or so years trying to explain this pause? Every excuse from aerosols, volcanic activity to ‘the heat is hiding in the oceans’ has been used by ‘climate science’ authors such as Mann, Schmidt and Trenberth et all.
You guys don’t have a clue, do you!
Just a reminder, this pause has been bugging you lot since at least 2009:
One of the authors who has written a couple of ‘peer-reviewed’ papers trying to explain ‘The Pause
As soon as you step beyond the 97/98 E.N. peak the pause goes into hiding.
No, it doesn’t. Skip the 1998 El Nino — and the 1999-2000 La Nina — and you get this:
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:2001/plot/rss/from:2001/trend
“The RSS Pause should hang on until March”
Maybe, or earlier. Here is what is really going on with these “Pause” calculations. The graph below shows plots of the trends from the year on the x-axis to now. It is shown for each of the main surface indices, and for UAH V6 and for RSS. The lowest curve is RSS, which is the one favored here. The “Pause” is dated from when the RSS curve crosses the grey trend=0 line, which I’ve marked with a red circle. As you see, none of the surface indices comes close to a pause (zero trend, grey), and UAH only just. And RSS has only a very brief passage below the line, and then another (brief) around 2001.
http://www.moyhu.org.s3.amazonaws.com/2016/1/trend0.png
With warm present months, these curves are all rising. Within a month or two, the 1997 dip will be gone. The 2001 dip might hold for another month. Then it’s all the way back to 2009, and even that won’t last.
Here’s how the plot looked three months ago. The rate of rise is proportional to the excess warmth of current months, so if Jan is warmer than Dec (for RSS a good bet), then the rise of the curve will not only continue, but will accelerate.
http://www.moyhu.org.s3.amazonaws.com/2016/1/trend3.png
Well presented, Mr Stokes. That has to be a bracing splash of reality to the face of many on this forum. Perhaps it provides the regulars with a truer sense of the fragile nature of MoB’s monthly PR posts on the subject. I’m sure MoB will have other equally robust and “informing” PR devices to unveil in the coming months.
John@EF,
You know, you can always submit an article just like Lord Monckton and lots of others do. Nick Stokes can, too.
But you don’t, and I know why: you would get ripped to shreds because the facts show you’re wrong. Planet Earth is falsifying your beliefs.
But prove me wrong, write that article…
dbs,
“because the facts show you’re wrong”
I’ve just drawn a graph. Where do you think the graph is wrong?
But I’ll make a prediction. By May, at the latest, with the April RSS results included, this “pause” will be no longer than a month or two.
Nick Stokes,
Here’s another graph, from 1880:
What do you see? Do you see “accelerating” global warming? No. You see natural global warming, and if the “pause” stops pausing, it will be as natural as when it paused. Here’s another chart, from the mid-1800’s.
See, global temperatures don’t rise in a smooth, straight line. That wouldn’t be natural. That would only happen if human CO2 emissions warmed the planet like you claim. Instead, global T rises in fits and starts:
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/hadley/Hadley-global-temps-1850-2010-web.jpg
The warming from CO2 has already happened; the saturation is almost complete, and even another 50% or 100% of CO2 emissions wouldn’t make a measurable difference.
Just extrapolate a doubling of CO2 from the current 400 ppm, and tell us how much global warming would result:
You’re trying to sell a pig in a poke, Nick. You know better. Why are you still trying to claim that CO2 causes dangerous global warming?
I am afraid Nick is correct about the fragility of the pause. If RSS continues in 2016 as it did in 1998, the 18 year pause is history. However a La Nina might come later in 2016 and restore the pause.
Argue about the fact that the El Nino is natural and not due to CO2, or as you see fit. But the RSS pause is on shaky ground right now.
The “the discrepancy between prediction and reality remains very wide” will remain a valid point to bring up though.
Nick,
this is fascinating stuff. Thanks for those informative graphs. Of course, the temperatures are expected to continue to rise within the next few months, and this could (and most likely will, depending on the temperatures) jeopardize the Pause.
The Viscount Monckton has acknowledged this, (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/05/the-pause-lengthens-again-just-in-time-for-paris/) saying that he suspects that the Pause may disappear altogether for a time because of this El Nino, but he suspects that it may return after that.
Nick, please explain why the current Holocene (Modern Warm Period) has the lowest temperature, yet the highest CO2 levels in the past 400,000 years?
http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh154/crocko05/Temp%20vs%20CO2%20-%20400000%20years_zpskyy0qvra.jpg
Here is what is really going on with RSS.
The mean monthly anomaly for the past 18 years is 0.251 (til 2015.93). For the first 9 years it was 0.266 and for the next it was 0.237. If its extended to a 20 year period, it only went up by 0.006 from the first 10 years to the next 10.
The latter corresponds to the temperature difference between your feet and testicles on a dry day.
“Within a month or two, the 1997 dip will be gone.”
Take a closer look at the temperature graph at the top of the article. The descent has already started. There’ll be no wiping out of temperature records.
Mr Stokes has long been anxious to explain away the Pause. Soon – for about a year, at any rate – he will not have to do so, for, as this monthly column has frequently pointed out, the effect of the current strong el Nino will be to extinguish the Pause unless and until a countervailing la Nina occurs (which may or may not happen).
However, the Pause is indicative of a far more serious problem for the true-believers: the growing discrepancy between the exaggerated predictions of the climate models and the far less exciting observed reality.
It is now 15 years since the Third ASSessment Report of the IPCC in 2001. So we now have a long enough stretch of observational data to verify the medium-term predictions made in the First, Second and Third ASSessment Reports. In all three reports, the predicted trends have proven to be far in excess of observation – so far, indeed, that it is becoming very difficult to maintain that manmade global warming will be at all likely to prove significant, let alone damaging in net terms.
Even if the Pause disappears, these monthly columns will continue, but there will be a greater emphasis on the continuing growth in the discrepancy between exaggerated prediction and unexciting reality.
The point is simple. The international totalitarian Left, in order to get the climate scam going, had to make exaggerated predictions. By now, though, enough time has passed to demonstrate compellingly – and perhaps conclusively – that those predictions were indeed wild exaggerations.
Of course, we shall have to wait for the retirement or death of the current generation of politicians before we can succeed in persuading governments to change what passes for their minds on this subject. In the meantime, as people throughout Africa and India and in large parts of South America and even China are denied coal-fired electricity – or any electricity – some 10-20 million a year will die before their time. Their deaths will have been caused, in no small part, by the utter refusal of the totalitarian Left to admit its profitable but evil error.
If the discrepancy between wild prediction and unspectacular reality in the temperature record continues to widen, as I expect it to do, there will come time when the world will turn on the totalitarian Left and drive it into permanent, unlamented extinction. The totalitarian-left ideology has been responsible for 75 million deaths under Nazism, 150 million and counting under Communism, 50 million and counting from the green Left’s ban on DDT just at the point where malaria might have been driven to extinction, 40 million and counting because the homosexual Left campaigned against the usual public-healh measures to contain HIV when it first emerged, and now 10-20 million a year because the environmental Left opposes fossil fuel corporations on no better ground than that they have always been donors to anti-Left political parties worldwide.
In the end, the Left will rue the day they decided to adopt the pseudo-science of allegedly catastrophic global warming. For it is my hope, and that of others who have studied the emergence of this scare, that it will prove to be the Left’s undoing. They have tried to repeal the laws of science itself: and those laws, like it or not, are beyond our power to amend or to repeal.
You’ve only demonstrated that you can’t or refuse to comprehend such a simple thing.
If I were to ask, how long ago can you go back before seeing global average temperatures as high as today, you would determine that 18 years and 8 months ago was warm as today, according to RSS. This is what the hiatus in global temperatures is. This is why there are nearly 100 papers discussing the hiatus.
And if the pause is “on shaky ground” it is so because the 20 year temperature trend may be negative by mid 2017. At the rate of heating from the decay of this El Nino, looks like it might raise temperature to the same levels of 1998. That would not erase the hiatus, it would shorten it back to 17 years.
If tropospheric temperatures during a major El Nino in 2016 matches tropospheric temperatures from a major El Nino in 1998, then what does that tell you about the trend in global temperatures?
If you wish, the time for no statistically significant warming can also be brought up.
Presently from:
http://moyhu.blogspot.com.au/p/temperature-trend-viewer.html
Temperature Anomaly trend
May 1993 to Dec 2015
Rate: 0.772°C/Century;
CI from -0.030 to 1.574;
t-statistic 1.886;
Temp range 0.125°C to 0.299°C
That is 22 years and 8 months of no statistically significant warming for RSS.
Being longer than NOAA’s 15 years, that is still important.
Nick Stokes January 10, 2016 at 6:18 pm
“But I’ll make a prediction. By May, at the latest, with the April RSS results included, this “pause” will be no longer than a month or two.”
Tell you what, I’ll make a prediction too.
Not only will your prediction fail miserably, but in accordance with the current negative phase of the ~60 year cycle that appears to correlate fairly well with the NAO, in about five years – perhaps less – it will become abundantly clear to all and sundry that despite the beast efforts of the Government’s hired climate “scientists” to Mannipiulate the temperature databases that the Earth’s temperature has in fact been dropping since ~2000, and will continue to do so until ~2030.
What do you say, Mr. Stokes?
You two idiots fail to understand the method. I’ll try to explain in terms my 11 yr old grand daughter would understand.
There is not cherry picking unless to call starting rom the most recent ta and going backwards is cherry picking because that is what Christopher has do. ou see that’s who it HAS to work in order to define th length of pause.
Right on cue …. hahaha
And what happens to the pause when you go just a couple months on either side of the monster e.n. peak? And what happens when over the course of just a few coming months when the pause duration starts getting slashed significantly? Perhaps your granddaughter will whisper to you that it doesn’t mean much other for PR purposed.
The point here that has been well made many times is the answer to the question:
“how far back can you extend the trend and not find any statistical cooling or warming?”
This is not “cherry-picking”, it is something even worse for CAGW supporters: it is an application of common sense.
Johnwho that isn’t quite right…if you extend this back a few months or a year…or some other time the trend will be positive… So in fact it’s slightly cherry picked. But….that said there does exist a point of considerable time period with no increase…the important aspect is that the overall trend does not indicate a serious problem
John@EF, why do ALL of the sea-ice charts start in 1979, when satellites have been measuring sea-ice extent since 1972?
http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh154/crocko05/SeaiceextentIPCCAR1_zps93416e03.jpg
@Jamie
Yes, if you extend it or shorten it the trend may be positive or negative.
Doesn’t alter the answer to the question:
“how far back can you extend the trend and not find any statistical cooling or warming?”
What you seem to miss is from a scientific view the pause is much longer. You know, considering error bands. Why is it you true believers ignore the scientific viewpoint?
The pause will not go away for many months and then will appear again in spades as the very likely La Nina kicks in. What are you going to be claiming when it goes over 20 years?
Have no fear, they’ll think of something. None of us are supposed to be here anyway …… according to Earth Day 1970!
That’s the problem with short data runs – it invents cherries for picking.
The longest continuous instrument record we have are the Central England Temperatures [CET] from 1659.
Xmetman has produced continuous charts for the 4 seasons + Annual mean –
https://xmetman.wordpress.com/2016/01/09/long-term-seasonal-trends-in-central-england-temperatures/comment-page-1/#comment-2893
The Annual chart shows a 0.95°C warming trend over 356yrs. (0.027/dec);
But also shows some other trends & puts them in context, like the rapid drop from 2002 -2012.
Check out the peaks in 1734, 1830, 2002, all have similar shapes.
Climate is a long term thing therefore ONLY long term data tells us any thing useful & it removes cherry picking.
OK this is only Central England but is probably indicative of a wider area.
Xmetman has a lot of interesting stuff on his site worth looking at.
Sorry for the double post
Why do supposedly intelligent people not “get” this. The “cherry-picked” start date is now, today, whenever the analysis is done. Then you work BACKWARDS to the time when there is no pause. This is equivalent to saying Manchester United/Denver Broncos (put any team in) haven’t scored a goal for x minutes – you work back to the last goal – no cherry picking involved.
How hard is that?
SteveT
A rather belated reply to Mr Barraclough, who states, inaccurately, that there is only a Pause in the the UAH dataset from December 1997. In fact, the Pause in the UAH data begins in July 1997, only two months shorter than the RSS dataset.
And a rather belated reply from me, as I have been refreshingly out of internet range for a couple of weeks.
Apologies Christopher Monckton.- I was looking at the wrong month. Yes, as of December’s update, there are actually 7 months in which you can start the Pause – July 1997 until January 1998. I was looking at my projections for January 2016, on the assumption that the anomaly will remain about the same. Then you will have to start only in December 1997 to find a Pause.
If next month’s anomaly is 0.48 or above, the UAH Pause will have vanished.
“The Pause” will always be that portion of the data that showed a statistically flat trend. It would only be while we are in “The Pause” that it will be meaningful to show that it extends from the present back.
The last month slight rise could be the beginning of the end of “The Pause” or it could be just a bump and following months bring the trend back in line with “The Pause” or we could even have a downturn showing a period of cooling. Check what has happened before since 1850 and you’ll see we’ve had a couple of “The Pause” periods.
Most importantly, as pointed out, is the separation between the World-ending projections/predictions of the IPCC and reality coupled with the lack of evidence that human CO2 emissions are having an observable effect on the atmosphere.
It may also be of interest to note that, unlike the strident claims in the media recently, 2015 was NOT the hottest ever. 1997 was, by a large margin. 2010 also beat 2015 by a smaller margin.
Given that the graph shows a downward trend at the end of 2015, it is extremely unlikely that 2016 will beat it. But that hasn’t stopped the media from starting to promote it as yet another “hottest ever”.
” 2015 was NOT the hottest ever.” It depends where you live. If you live on the surface, it was. If you live in the troposphere, it wan’t.
Good review posting.
A carbonist will look at you funny and say, “Hey man, it’s a greenhouse gas, it HAS to cause warming”. Such is state of their high school physics. You just have to tell them that the reason CO2 is not a significant governor of climate at any scale is that when it takes a big bite out of outgoing radiation, its four front teeth are missing.
I love this site and have followed it for some time. I have seen enough to know both sides of the AGW issue have difficulties with even basic statistics.
When performing a Least Squares Regression on a time series, specific rules should be followed and often this type of regression is not valid.
I am curious, is anyone checking the statistical methods of the anti-AGW publications just like those wonderful Canadian guys (forgot their names) are doing with the pro-AGW scientists?
Statistics are nearly worthless when applied to such rough data compilations with no margin of error specified.
All you need is two eyeballs and a chart.
In the past 20 years the average temperature (assuming that is a meaningful statistic, which I doubt) has increased slightly, remained the same, or declined slightly.
The measurements are not accurate enough for anyone to be sure.
There is certainly nothing to get excited about in the data.
Since 1880 the average temperature trend is unknown, but probably up.
If not up, then it must be down!
Earth’s temperature is always changing.
Since the beginning of this planet, about 4.5 billion years ago, the average temperature TODAY is most likely near the coolest it has ever been.
Pick any two start and end points, and the average temperature between them will be in an uptrend or downtrend — none of the trends have been permanent so far.
Surface measurements are so haphazard, and non-global, that we can guess the change since 1880 ranges somewhere between zero (no change) degrees and +2 degrees C., .
I’m assuming a conservative margin of error (+ or – 1 degree C.) which is especially needed for 1800s measurements, when thermometers tended to read low, and measurements were far from global.
I don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows … or to tell me how little Earth’s climate has changed since I was born in the 1950s
If any aliens landed on this planet and found out many people here were VERY concerned about a slight change in the average temperature since the 1800s, and many people thought CO2 was an evil gas (rather than plant food), i think they would shake their heads and assume there were many “village idiots” living on Earth!
Again, the post is very specific about creating the trend line using LSR which carries with it R squared, SE implications as well.
I believe that in this case the method to be erroneous. There are rules of data independence that need to be addressed. The stickiness of the year to year data suggests LSR to be improperly applied.
I only mention it because I do cost forecasting for a living and would not use LSR to forecast the future of a time series until I was assured of the independence of each data point.
But that is just me and I am sure that there are much smarter people on this site than me.
Also, in response to the other replier, yes it is McIntyre and McKitrick that I could not remember their names. They do wonderful work. Frankly, there should be a Nobel Award for Statistics and they deserve it.
You forgot to mention that there is no such thing as “the Earth’s temperature”. It’s not like there’s a thermometer stuck into one of the poles, after all. What climate “scientists” do is add up all the various little thermometer measurements from all over the world, “homogenize” it, weight it (to adjust for the fact that thermometers are close together in civilized parts of the world and far away in Australia) and finally do a quality check. The quality check consists of making sure the end result is a 0.12 degree per century warming rate.
In response to David, I did not merely assume that the monthly global temperature data were auto-correlated: I checked. In fact, although regional data are of course auto-correlated for seasonal reasons, there is no particular aotocorrelative signal in the global data (the summer in one hemisphere coincides with the winter in the other). Besides, like it or not, least-squares regression is the method repeatedly used by the IPCC and recommended (in a climategate email) by Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia. In short, it is Their method. And if Their method shows little or no warming on any dataset over the past couple of decades, then, Houston, They have a problem.
With response to Monckton …
Of course they (the IPCC) have a problem and the data clearly has correlation problems, almost all time series data does. For the most part, the people that you mention are statistical nitwits and you should not follow their course.
This is why if one is going to perform LSR, then they should probably plot Temp as a function of CO2. One would do this for any time window but I suspect a clear negative correlation during the pause and further as the pause could disappear soon, this method would be much more reliable.
Do you mean Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick?
The Durbin Watson statistic on the global anomaly dataset I calculate is 0.252. This means it is very highly positively autocorrelated as it is much less than 1.
the most disconcerting thing for me is that for over 18 years mother nature has falsified the “increasing atmospheric co2 levels will have a corresponding rise in global temperatures hypothesis” , yet very few people in the official climate science community appear to have noticed this.
It has been noticed! And Karl actually did something about it.
“yet very few people in the official climate science community appear to have noticed this.”
It has been noticed. Why do you think they are so frantically rewriting history to remove the inconvenient truth?
Isn’t it a warmist argument that there’s a delay in the feedback that would result in further warming “in the pipeline” despite a radiative-imbalance value considerably smaller than the assumed forcing? If so, the following passage may not be as compelling an argument as it seems against the cited forcing estimate:
Also, can anyone speak authoritatively about those imbalance measurements’ reliability? I vaguely recall having heard that they are wildly inaccurate, but I admit that I may be confusing those measurements with something else.
Actually, since the ocean’s store more about a gazillion times more energy than the atmosphere, if we don’t know ocean temperatures we don’t know nothing…. And how man bazillion years will it take for the ocean to reach equilibrium from a transient? At least 3 turnovers, maybe 150 years…. is there a “lapse rate” for the oceans?
Just a thought: the first figure should have the arrow pointing backwards if it is a regression starting NOW and extending into the past.
As always, Christopher, I enjoyed the post. Thank you for the kind words about my series about the current El Nino.
Cheers.
“The hiatus period of 18 years 8 months is the farthest back one can go in the RSS satellite temperature record and still show a sub-zero trend. ” Your language implies that you agree that the pause is a hiatus? Do you rule out that this levelling out represents a high point before the beginning of a decline. Do you think we know whether “the pause” is a hiatus or a high point?
Of course, we do not know. Time will tell. At some stage, the temperatures will either begin to rise, or begin to fall. In a sane world, we would simply wait and see what happens since this ought to advance our understanding of the system. But we are in an insane world where those governing hold the view that we must act, even though no one knows what is going on, or why.
in which case using their word hiatus is to cede our honest point of view to their dishonest hype
Julian Williams in Wales,
Exactly.
This hiatus/ pause terminology is misleading because as you pointed out those terms presume (have some premises on) the past behavior versus future behavior.
It should just be called what it is, a period of no (or not significant) change in global average temperature.
John
Could, should, expect, etc. The only sane thing is to wait and see as Verney says.
Probably a local high point. Whether that becomes the last high point in centuries is still unknown.
if it is local high point it is not a hiatus, it is local high point, the crest of a small, short and insignificant wave. It is only a hiatus if if starts rising again at roughly the same rate as it left off about 20 years ago
Would anyone like to have a stab at:
— projecting forward some likely figures (based on what the current El Nino will produce); and then
— see what happens to The Pause in that scenario?
I don’t have the mathematical/statistical chops for this task, but I’d be interested to know how The Pause would be affected. How short might it get? Would it disappear altogether? If so, when?
Stephen,
The “pause” itself is merely a convenient/effective way of highlighting the lack of scary increase in temps since satellite measurements began. It would not matter all that much if one used the entire satellite record taken as a whole (which eliminates the “pause” technically speaking), there simply has not been total warming anything like what the IPCC predicted if CO2 emissions continued unabated.
The pause is a period of no rise at all, but if warming resumed for a century at the rate indicated by the complete satellite record, it would still be no big deal.
If coincident with this current strong El Nino there is a long lasting step change in temperature, as there was such a step change (of about 0.27degC), coincident with the Super El Nino of 1997/98, the ‘pause’ will be eradicated.
If on the other hand, there is no long lasting step change, but rather a short term spike, much like the one that accompanied the strong 2010 El Nino, then for the first 6 months or so of 2016, the ‘pause’ will shorten (possibly substantially), but then it is likely that the following La Nina, in late 2016/early 2017 will bring the temperature anomaly back down, at which time the ‘pause’ will begin to recover, ie., head towards the 18yr 9 month duration, and if following that La Nina temperature re-stabilise at around the 2001 to 2003 temperature anomaly level, the ‘pause; will lengthen beyond 18yrs 9 months in duration and heading into 2019, when AR6 is being written, it will by then be over 21 years in duration.
So the issue is simple. Will there be a long lasting step change in temperature coincident with this current strong El Nino(just like 1997/98), or not? If there is such a long term step change in temperatures, the ‘pause’ will be busted. If no such long lasting step change, it would appear probable that the ‘pause’ will shorten for a short period before beginning to grow and extent over 19 yrs in duration.
There are a number of IFs because the future is not known and has yet to reveal itself. Nature will in time tell us the answer.
Excellent points!
I just want to add that “we” are often criticized for starting the pause right before the super El Nino of 1998. Whatever the merits of this assertion, should the 2016 El Nino eradicate the present pause for good, we can always claim that we did have a pause of at least 15 years that goes right between the 1998 and 2016 El Ninos. And unless RSS is Karlized, this will never go away.
Take it from 2001, after the Nino/Nina swing. RSS is flat-to-cooling.
To quote Sir Winston Churchill;
It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link of the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.
and
It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.
and
Vi>A politician needs the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month, and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn’t happen.
Although certain of the cited papers seem to provide ample reason to believe that climate sensitivity is relatively modest (to extent that the climate-sensitivity concept means anything at all), I feel compelled again to caution readers against relying on the head post’s following passage as evidence for that proposition:
That paper can be said to have “found” such a sensitivity value only to the extent that “found” means “pulled out of thin air.”
The truth is that the “model” upon which the authors based their “finding” is just this: 0.26 K per W/m^2. That’s it. You multiply a forcing trend by that value to get the resultant temperature trend. That value is the sole basis for the projection in their paper’s signature Fig. 6, the one on which they base their claim of model skill.
It is said that the paper’s “irreducibly simple” model was “developed over eight years.” Yet anyone who has a modest command of math could come up with a “model” at least as good before breakfast by just putting forcing and temperature data on a spreadsheet. All you have to do is divide an observed temperature trend by the corresponding trend in forcing.
Of course, Lord Monckton argues that the authors’ approach was different:
I have no doubt that similarly low sensitivity values can be arrived at by what could indeed be justifiably characterized as “using physics.” In the case of the Monckton et al. paper, though, what in the authors’ view apparently passes for “using physics” is merely their unsupported opinion that “810,000 years of thermostasis suggest” a [-0.5, +0.1] range for the loop gain fg in the closed-loop-gain equation h = g / (1-fg).
Sure, the mean of that range does cause a 1 Cº value to result from an assumed 3.7 W/m^2 doubled-concentration forcing-change value if the IPCC-suggested value of 3.2 W/m^2 per kelvin is used for the reciprocal of open-loop gain g. But what is it about that “thermostasis” that suggests Monckton et al.’s range instead of, say, a range of [-2, -1] and thus a mean sensitivity of 0.5 Cº, or, for that matter, a range of [+0.5, +0.7] and thus a mean sensitivity of 3 Cº? Where are the calculations by which the authors arrived at their range from the observed “thermostasis”?
They have shown none. The sum total of their support for that range is the bald assertion that “Fig. 5 and 810,000 years of thermostasis suggest” it. (Fig. 5 is nothing more than a closed-loop-gain-equation-illustrating hyperbola on which they placed the “process engineers’ design limit” that Lord Monckton has flogged for years without providing any basis.)
In other words, the authors just made the range up.
It’s as though I said that my “finding” of a 50º F. outside temperature is based on physics because I contend that melting icicles suggest a Celsius range of [8º C., 12º C.]. It’s physics, I suppose, that the 50º Fahrenheit value corresponds to the mean of the [8º, 12º] Celsius range, but why would melting icicles suggest [8º C., 12º C.] rather than, say, [1º C., 5º C.]? However true my estimate may ultimately turn out to be, it’s still just conjecture. The same is true of the sensitivity value that the authors “found.”
For evidence that climate sensitivity is low, one is well advised to rely on other papers.
Rely on other papers? Which papers don’t involve making up a range, as you put it? Did God report on this matter recently? ; )
Those who would like to see whether Mr Sour Grapes Born, who was caught out lying when he had first ineptly attempted to criticize Monckton of Brenchley et al. (2013) and has griped ever since whenever the paper is mentioned, will be able to find the paper at scibull.com, the website of the Science Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, where the paper is – by a factor of ten – the most downloaded in the entire 60-year archive of that learned journal.
Professor Monckton,
I am unable to locate the expected verb for the clause introduced by the conjunction whether in the above paragraph. Beware of hypotaxis.
: > )
Typical Monckton response. All bluster, no substance.
Note that he is unable to address why the data require his range rather than any other. He has similarly evaded addressing the numerous errors in physics and math with which his paper is replete. This is the sign of a lightweight.
[? What the specific “errors in physics and math”? .mod]
Don’t whine. Mr Born made several allegations about our paper in Vol 60 no 1 (January 2015) of the Science Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, but they were comprehensively answered in earlier postings here. Mr Born lied to the effect that I had refused to supply data to him when he had in fact sent me no request for it. He was roundly criticised for his lie by other commenters, and has been whining ever since. Discredit his nonsense as a proven liar’s sour grapes.
Mr Born lied to the effect that I had refused to supply data to him when he had in fact sent me no request for it.
If anyone is a liar here, it’s Lord Monckton.
The basis for his allegation is a passage in which I referred to a post of mine as a request and to his reply post as turning it down.
The issue was the contents of Monckton et al.’s Table 2. That table’s caption claims that all of its entries, which Monckton et al. refer to as “transience fractions,” were “derived from” a paper by Gerard Roe. Unless “derived from” means “inconsistent with,” however, that caption is a falsehood. Roe’s Fig. 6 shows that at every point in time after t = 0 the response value for a higher-feedback system must exceed that every lower-feedback system’s response value. In contrast, the Monckton et al. table’s first-row entries dictate that in the early years the lowest-feedback system’s response exceed higher-feedback systems’.
Readers before me had placed those quantities at issue in blog threads in which Lord Monckton participated. Characteristically, however, any answers he gave were at best evasive; even in the face of objections that such values appeared to be non-physical he failed to explain how he could possibly have inferred from Roe et al. that the zero-feedback values would be unity for all time values.
To elicit a clear explanation, therefore, I cranked up the volume: I wrote a post specifically entitled “Reflections on Monckton et al.’s Transience Fraction.” In that post I explicitly stated that the manner in which Monckton et al. inferred that table’s values had not been made entirely clear.
So it was hardly a stretch for a subsequent post of mine to refer to that earlier post as a “request for further information about how the Table 2 ‘transience fraction’ values . . . were obtained from a Gerard Roe paper’s Fig. 6.” Nor was it inappropriate for me to characterize as turning down that request a reply post in which Lord Monckton merely repeated the paper’s contention that “The table was derived from a graph in Gerard Roe’s magisterial paper of 2009 on feedbacks and the climate” without explaining, as I requested, how that could possibly be true.
Nowhere did I say that the authors needed to supply data in order to give the explanation (which could simply have been, No, we didn’t really derive that row’s values from Roe; we just made them up). Nowhere did I state or imply that I had made a request through any channel other than that post. Indeed, by hyperlinking the word “request” to it, I explicitly identified that post as the request. I similarly hyperlinked “turned down” to his reply post. No one who knows how to click on a hyperlink could have had any excuse for not knowing what those terms referred to.
Such is the forthright, above-board, completely transparent behavior that Lord Monckton has chosen to characterize as a lie. That he would thus resort to slander is an indication of how desperate he is to avoid a technical discussion, in which it would be apparent to anyone conversant with feedback theory and electrical circuits that in writing about them Monckton et al. had ventured in way over their heads. His doing so is of a piece with the posts in which he claims to have “comprehensively answered” the technical issues: it continues his practice of distortion, evasion, and misdirection.
[? What the specific “errors in physics and math”? .mod]
Even in a complete head post it would be hard to cover all of the paper’s problems. But one can get a sense just from considering Monckton et al.’s Equation 1.
To appreciate how ludicrous Equation 1 is, think of a simple system like a bathtub with a slow drain. If you open the faucet, the tub fills until it reaches a level at which the drain flow, which increases with increasing water depth, equals the flow from the faucet. Think of the faucet flow as the forcing (delta F in the equation), and think of the resultant water level as temperature (delta T in the equation); its evolution in time after the faucet is initially opened is represented by curves something like those in the Roe diagram, i.e., in the diagram that the Table 2 values were supposed to represent. (Greater feedback values correspond to a slower drain.)
Now suppose you suddenly close the faucet. Does the accumulated water disappear instantaneously? Of course not. But that’s what Monckton et al.’s Equation 1 says would happen. Look at the equation: delta F = 0 means delta T = 0.
If you accept, despite your everyday experience, that the accumulated water would disappear instantaneously, then you’ll see nothing wrong with Equation 1. Otherwise, you should question it and much else that’s in that paper.
Also, if you know anything about electrical circuits, you know that “the voltage transits from the positive to the negative rail” when loop gain exceed unity makes no sense.
Mr Born now admits to his lie by conceding that, contrary to his statement that he had “requested” me to supply data that I had “refused” to supply, he had not in fact sent me any request for it, nor had I issued any statement refusing it. The data were in fact supplied in the paper he presumed – and presumes – to criticize without actually having read it.
He whines – for that is the usual tone of this particular troll – that we had said that we had derived certain values for our transience fraction from a graph by Dr Gerard Roe when in his opinion we had not done so. Our method, however, was made entirely explicit in the paper, so he is merely quibbling in his usual futile fashion.
Then he tries, again futilely, to attack our equation 1 on the ground that – in effect – it is too simple. Well, the main points of that equation are in the IPCC’s documents, so if he is criticizing our equation he is criticizing the IPCC too. A feature of our approach was to use its methods and to show where they led.
How vexing it must be for him to learn that the paper he loves so little is now, by an order of magnitude, the most-dowloaded paper in the entire 60-year archive of the Science Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Let him pick nits all he likes: the paper was very thoroughly peer-reviewed, and it does provide a clear description of some of the reasons why climate sensitivity has been overstated in the models.
I have told him before, and must instruct him again, that the paper made it quite clear that the values we had chosen for the inputs to our simple climate-sensitivity model were our choices, and that anyone was free to choose his own values and run the model for himself. So whining about our choice of values for the initial conditions does not constitute a criticism of our model itself, which is based closely on equations to be found in the documents of the IPCC, which he would do well to read so as to inform himself of how climate sensitivity is determined.
He should also go and consult a competent electronic engineer for information on what happens in an electronic circuit when the loop gain is driven above unity. He may like, in particular, to make himself better informed about what is known as “feedback-induced oscillation”, and about how that oscillation is induced by increasing the loop gain transiently above unity and allowing it to relax back below unity. He is ill informed but pretends to be well informed. Let him do more homework and less whining.
Meanwhile, it is becoming apparent to all – and even to him – that climate sensitivity is, as we have found it to be, likely to be a great deal less than the canonical value. That is the main point, from the policymaker’s point of view.
Lord Monckton clings to his position that the closed-loop-gain equation depicted in his Fig. 5 is descriptive only of circuits, not of a feedback-implementing climate system. He seems to base this view on interpreting the unity-loop-gain transition in his Fig. 5 from positive infinity to negative infinity as meaning that voltage “transits from the positive rail to the negative rail.” That’s not what it means. It means that the equilibrium state is negative above unity loop gain and positive below it, not that increasing loop gain would cause the system to transition to that equilibrium state.
And that equation does indeed apply to climate. The reasoning couldn’t be simpler. If a system’s equilibrium open-loop gain is g, i.e., if its equilibrium open-loop response y to a static stimulus x is given by y = gx, then adding feedback fy simply means replacing x in that equation with x + fy: y = (x + fy)g; that’s the definition of feedback. So, if the climate system implements feedback, it by definition has to obey that equation—as well as Fig. 5’s closed-loop-gain equation y = gx / (1 – fg), which that equation becomes when y is isolated. Contrary to what the Monckton et al. contend, therefore, the closed-loop-gain equation is not “the wrong equation” to use in a feedback-implementing climate model.
Mindlessly invoking “feedback-induced oscillation” doesn’t change that. Look, I was consulting electrical engineers, and discussing feedback as well as oscillation, when Lord Monckton was still a teenager. Take it from me, there is nothing in the closed-loop-gain equation that requires a circuit to “transit from the positive to the negative rail” at unity loop gain.
From his statement that “oscillation is induced by increasing the loop gain transiently above unity and allowing it to relax back below unity,” it appears that Lord Monckton consulted engineers but didn’t understand what they told him. Lord Monckton’s error probably results from hearing about circuits whose equilibrium, “DC” loop gain is less than unity but whose AC loop gain at some frequency is unity. Such a circuit would indeed oscillate, i.e., repeatedly “transit,” as Lord Monckton puts it, but the circuit needs the right reactances to make that happen.
Without such reactances, unity equilibrium loop gain would cause an electronic circuit to peg at one rail, not spontaneously transit to the other. In the first of my above-mentioned posts I demonstrated that fact: without more a circuit whose loop gain starts above unity and is allowed, as Lord Monckton expresses it, to “relax back” to below unity, would not “transit from the positive to the negative rail.” And Lord Monckton has never been able to demonstrate anything wrong with that analysis. Nor will he; circuits such as flip-flops routinely exhibit such behavior.
If a system implements feedback, it has to obey the feedback equation. Lord Monckton’s going on about oscillators doesn’t change that.
Others may disagree, but I share Judith Curry’s opinion that the Monckton et al. paper doesn’t provide any new insights into why the GCM outputs disagree with observations.
The equation’s parameters’ may have been obtained from the IPCC’s documents, but I am unaware of the IPCC’s having embraced that equation’s main innovation, which is the preposterous notion that the response of a memory-implementing time-invariant system can reliably be obtained by treating it as a memoryless time-variant system.
Ah, Christopher Monckton, you have to love him; he’s the Humpty-Dumpty of climate science.
What the paper says of the method is that low-feedback-system values “derived from” Roe can “safely be taken as unity.”
That makes his method “entirely explicit” only if (1) from the statement that the first-row values were “derived from” Roe one understands that he adopted values inconsistent with Roe and (2) from the statement that the low-feedback values could “safely be taken as unity” one understands that if you use those values the equation will erroneously depict low-feedback Roe-type as initially producing higher responses than higher-feedback ones.
Apparently, words in Lord Monckton’s head mean what he chooses them to mean.
It is indeed vexing to have so mathematically incoherent a paper seen so widely as exemplifying the quality of skeptic thought.
All through the history of science, you will find people that found the right result by the unconventional methods. It was discovered that CO2 ice will cause rain because the scientist threw a whole bunch of things into a humid oven and checked it it caused rain.
So don’t criticize Monkton for getting the right result by the “wrong” method. Instead criticize those that got the wrong result by the “right” method.
I believe that equilibrium climate sensitivity is low, but I don’t know everything, so I’m still accumulating evidence, and I look to papers to find it. Monckton et al. purported to provide such evidence, but when I investigated I found that they just went through a lot of verbiage to hide that the only basis for that conclusion was that it was their opinion. To me that isn’t evidence. It shouldn’t be for you, either.
Besides, how do you know they got the right result? Their demonstration of skill (Section 9) was bogus.
Since I am unaware of having contested any “initial condition,” I assume that Lord Monckton intended to reprise his refrain that my criticism of the transience fraction is directed mainly to his choice of values. Although I do criticize how falsely he characterized his particular choice, the reason that I focus on transience fraction is that its usage in Equation 1 betrays a profound misunderstanding of the relevant mathematics.
That equation was presented as a way to study climate models on which the IPCC and others rely. If the model being studied is memoryless—and almost none is—then the transience fraction is an unnecessary but harmless complication to his “irreducibly simple” model. But, in the more typical case of models that are not essentially memoryless, using transience fractions as Equation 1 does produces results that can differ wildly from those of the model it’s supposed to approximate.
For example, if one uses the equation to determine what equilibrium climate sensitivity a high transient climate response implies in accordance with the Roe response curves, the value that Monckton et al.’s equation gives is less than a third of the value that those curves actually imply, as I demonstrated by reference to a previous post’s Fig. 7.
Mr Born is well off topic. Besides, the Roe response curves are based on the assumption that the CO2 radiative forcing is 4 Watts per square meter per doubling, whereas even the IPCC only thinks it is 3.7, and if soon-to-be-published research on the Lorentzian and Voigt equations in the models proves correct, that should be only 2.6. The transience ratio can in any event be adjusted to take account of whatever sort of model the user desires to emulate. Mr Born, as always, is futilely picking nits.
Hardly. It was Lord Monckton who brought up the question of whether I was criticizing the model itself. That’s the question I addressed. Answers are not off topic just because Lord Monckton says they are.
Ah, more of Lord Monckton’s cargo-cult logic. He spouts a lot of irrelevance, safe in the knowledge that to those unable to follow the substance it will appear that he has made a relevant reply. He hasn’t.
For one thing, it’s a little late to complain about the Roe curves; those were Lord Monckton’s choices, not mine, and most if not all of his paper’s calculations were based on them.
More to the point, the issue was whether Monckton et al.’s Equation 1 would fairly estimate the responses of models from whose step responses given transience-fraction values were taken. Independently of whether transience-fraction values are taken from Roe or some other family of curves, I demonstrated that Monckton et al.’s Equation 1 can lead to results that are off by as much as a factor of three or more from what the chosen curve would dictate.
That’s not nit-picking. It’s the heart of the matter. It shows that Monckton et al. had no idea of what they were doing; they attempted mathematics that was beyond their competence.
My guess is still that much of this warming is caused by albedo, not CO2. All the interglacial warmings max out at about the same temperature, because that is when albedo cannot reduce any further. And if albedo cannot reduce further, the globe cannot warm more.
But in the modern era, dust from Western and now from Chinese industry is leaving deposits on the winter snows. So although northern hemisphere snow extent has been increasing for three decades, it has been melting quicker in the spring. Quicker melt, equals a lot more insolation absorption – as much as 250 w/m2 extra, regionally, during those important spring months.
Ralfellis:
Everyone’s eyes see a different thing when looking at graphs. You can represent the same data with different kinds of graphs and get people to see different things. A straight line drawn on a graph implies a trend.
But when I look at your snow graph, I see two distinct periods that I could draw FLAT lines through. The first from 1967 to 1989 (22 years). And a second FLAT line from 1990 to 2012 (another 22 years). You can pick your points but what it looks like is for 20 years we had and average of 30+- an for 20 years we had an average of 29+- million square km. Is that unusual? Will it go back up to 30+ ? Yeah, it will. But it may be 20 years, 50 years, 100 years or a thousand years from now. The declining trend line is really meaningless unless it s in context. How much snow coverage was there from 1930 to 1950? Might it have been lower than 1990 to 2012?
Not being critical. We all draw these lines. But we have found recently that lines in the sand are just that: lines in the sand that will disappear with the next strong wind.
Now I have to go find my remote so I can watch football.
Have a great Sunday afternoon.
I’m pretty sure it’s a high point and we will soon experience global cooling.
http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/global_warming/images/temperature_trends_1880-2009.png
You forgot the trend lines 1910 – 1940 Barry.
Lord Monckton, thank you as ever for your efforts. There’s something about what you are doing that I don’t quite understand. I raised it here with somebody a little while ago, thought I’d got it from his reply, and then realised that I hadn’t.
I understand the outcome of your calculation. You can go back about 18 years and find that there is no average upward trend over the period from that time to the present. Go back any further and you find there is. I think that’s what you are saying.
However, I’m trying to imagine how, given the data, I would write a program to do this calculation. I would start with the most recent data, for 2014, say, and work my way backwards in time year by year. But then I would find (I believe) that 2013 was cooler than 2014, and my program would have to stop at the point. So my question is: What principle is getting you past that point?
Apologies if I’m being thick about this and have misunderstood it.
Simply tell your program to check at 1 year, then 2 then 3 all the way 20 or 30, then give you the results for each stretch of time..Example..2014 to 2013, 2014 to 2012 all the way to 2014 to 1990…
..TO 20 or 30 …
Thanks Marcus. Yes, I figured it must be that about a minute after I pressed the send button. Basically you throw away the periods where the trend was increasing, and retain the longest period for which it was not increasing. I guess that’s what you mean too? Don’t know why I had such trouble with it.
Nothing is ” Thrown Away ” !!
Marcus:
Unless it concerns ‘climate science’ when you are told to wipe your hard-drives!
Marcus, you say “Nothing is ” Thrown Away ” !!”
Isn’t it? What happens to it then? I just assumed that such periods would be of no interest with regard to the target of the calculation. Am I still missing some point here?
“Is the ocean warming” – The mystery of ocean warming, if caused by down welling IR radiation, is not how the heat got to the lower regions, but how it got into the ocean at all.
The preferred hypothesis of the CAGW brigade is that the down welling radiation changes the temperature gradient in the thin film surface layer, which is measured in microns, and reduces heat losses from conduction through that layer. In other words CO2 does not cause any direct heating of 75% of the earths surface, but supposedly reduces the loss of heat caused by insolation.
Some experiments with a NZ research ship indicated that down welling radiation from clouds could affect surface temperature by this mechanism but I have never seen any reference to a paper that attempts to quantify this effect from CO2. It is simply assumed that CO2 adds heat directly to the ocean by calculating area and multiplying by the forcing, which has to massively overstate any ocean warming contributed by the gas.
If I recall correctly, that paper is not a peer reviewed paper, and the evidence was questionable.
There was a paper published in 2000 on the RV Tangaroa experiments, presumably peer reviewed, but I have seen nothing since that even attempts to quantify the heat retention effects of CO2 forcing. It has to be far less than simply assuming that it equals the heat gained if the forcing directly warms the Ocean – which it cannot.
This seems to me quite fundamental to the quantification of ocean heat gain, and yet it has not been addressed. This enables alarmists to continue with the ‘it’s in the ocean’ argument.
It is also not reasonabla to call the answer to a question a cherry pick if the question is reasonable. How long has the earth gone without warming?; is a reasonable question.
If the proponents of CAGW notice, after a very warm El Nino, that the trend is greatly shortened, they will not be calling a reasonable question a cherry pick.
I personally think that answering the question, what, in the satellite record,
is the warmest year the earth has experienced? is a reasonable question. By now over 50 percent of all years should exceed 1998. So far, and likely to continue in 2016, zero do.
C.M. demonstrates that according to IPCC climate models, and assuming IPCC projected harms as accurate, (a large assumption) even if 2016 exceeds 1998 by say .05 degrees, we will still not be warming at anything but a beneficial rate of about .3 C per century, comparing the warming trend from super El Nino to super El Nino, still well below all IPCC computer projections.
Can someone explain Fig T10, Top of Atmosphere Imbalance, Stephens et al. 2012
Each one of the imbalances show a plus/minus error anywhere between 3 and 17 w/m2. Yet at the top in bold it states top-of-atmosphere imbalance of 0.6 plus/minus 0.4 w/m2. How can there be such a small error bar here when all the others are magnitudes larger?
Duncan,
I believe the TOA error bar is based on measurements actually made at the TOA by satellite, not an amalgam of other measurements/estimates made below. From the abstract;
“At the top of the atmosphere, this balance is monitored globally by satellite sensors that provide measurements of energy flowing to and from Earth. By contrast, observations at the surface are limited mostly to land areas. As a result, the global balance of energy fluxes within the atmosphere or at Earth’s surface cannot be derived directly from measured fluxes, and is therefore uncertain.”
Thank-you John
Curiously, a pause does not shorten but “the pause” does. If you look back over the historical temperature record, you can see lots of pauses of various lengths. They are still there, and they never change (unless someone changes historical temperatures). “The pause”, however, is the pause that ends today. It changes every month because it is a different entity each month. [“month”, because temperatures are reported monthly].
In years gone by, in the land based thermometer record there was a noticeable cooling between ~1940 to early 1970s. Now, that cooling has all but disappeared, and instead of a negative temperature trend, the temperature trend is now almost flat. This, of course is due to the repeated adjustments to the record that have gone to cool the past and warm the present. Now that is something to be rightly concerned about since we have now so badly bastardised the temperature record that it is not fit for scientific purpose and can tell us nothing of significance.
richard verney,
But as we get older and die off, few will remember how the temps really were. And worse, I don’t think you could prove what the record used to say anymore. The “record” is now just a myth that tells the tale the government wants told.
@ Forrest Gardener
The part that you seem to be missing is that we only know the exact length of a pause when we know that such a pause has definitely ended. The reason “the pause” continues to change lengths is because we don’t yet know when the end of it as been reached and as such each month we look at it as if the current month is the end. It’s only in hindsight, once the pause has ended and becomes a historically fait accompli that we will know the exact length that the pause was.
@Mark, Hansen et. al 1981 is still on the NASA website.
I’m sure Hansen had already started fudging the temperature by that time.
Thanks, Christopher, Lord Monckton, for bringing data to the debate.
The temperature trend for RSS MSU lower tropospheric global mean from 2002 to 2014.92 was -0.59°C per century.
See http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1979/to:2014.93/plot/rss/from:1979/to:2002/trend/plot/rss/from:2002/to:2014.93/trend/plot/rss/from:1979/to:2014.93/mean:13
The RSS temperature trend from 2002 to 2015.92 was just -0.16°C per century, due to the 2015 El Niño.
See http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1979/to:2015.93/plot/rss/from:1979/to:2002/trend/plot/rss/from:2002/to:2015.93/trend/plot/rss/from:1979/to:2015.93/mean:13
The Earth is now cooler than it has been since the “Little Ice Age” ended, and it keeps on cooling.
I see a lot of argument over graphs, statistics, theory, computer models, all over a tiny interval in Earth’s history. Richard Lindtzen has called Climate Science “a science in its infancy.” The thing to do is go out and gather more data all over the Earth, both present observations and on paleoclimate, not quibble about graphs that aren’t statistically significant anyway, or build models that don’t work. Fixation on the global average temperature on a yearly scale in tenths of a degree is a ridiculous reductio ad absurdum for a hugely complex system that’s been around for billions of years. Only when we have enough data on all the possible influences on climate and how they interact, will we have a real science.
Here it is:
Temperature fluctuations over the past 17,000 years:
http://www.oarval.org/Foster_20k.jpg
Temperature fluctuations over the past 17,000 years showing the abrupt cooling during the Younger Dryas.
The late Pleistocene cold glacial climate that built immense ice sheets terminated suddenly about 14,500 years ago [12,500 BC], causing glaciers to melt dramatically.
About 12,800 years ago [10,800 BC], after about 2,000 years of fluctuating climate, temperatures plunged suddenly and remained cool for 1,300 years.
About 11,500 years ago [9,500 BC], the climate again warmed suddenly and the Younger Dryas ended.
Also showing the Holocene Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period and the Medieval Warm Period compared to today’s small rise in average temperature.
See “Geologic Evidence of Recurring Climate Cycles and Their Implications for the Cause of Global Climate Changes” Don J. Easterbrook (2011). Department of Geology, Western Washington University, .pdf
And “The Intriguing Problem Of The Younger Dryas – What Does It Mean And What Caused It”, at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/06/19/the-intriguing-problem-of-the-younger-dryaswhat-does-it-mean-and-what-caused-it/
This graph is incorrect, the date axis is wrongly annotated and the line labelled ‘Present Temperature’ is misplaced.
One of the most misleading thing that can be put on a graph is a trend line. And when only two points are considered, a trend line is totally useless.
Mr. Layman here.
The fundamental “point” is the claim that Man’s CO2 will lead to the “C” in “CAGW”. Hansen, Mann, “et al” have made that claim and the climate models politicians’ use to justify their policies are based on that.
The rise in CO2 and the lack of a rise in the “projected” temperature points to the simple fact that the claims of Man’s CO2 leading us to Catastrophe and the need for political control of said Man’s CO2 are WRONG.
Good or bad, the climate may not be a non-problem. But climate is beyond our control.
According to Merriam-Webster Dictionary and Thesaurus:
Simple Definition of trend : a general direction of change : a way of behaving, proceeding, etc., that is developing and becoming more common.
Ask says: A trend in mathematics is a pattern in a set of data points. Knowing the trend allows outcomes to be predicted by a mathematical model. Estimating the trend of data requires a technique known as regression or curve fitting.
Can you see the differece?
A simple straight-line trend is all about the past, not a predictor.
Mr Denio seems to be suggesting that the headline graphs in this monthly series are determined from only two data points. Not so. They are determined from all of the monthly mean global lower-troposphere anomalies, using the usual equations for determining the slope and y-intersect of that straight line that minimizes the sums of the squares of the residuals (the differences between each data point and the line).
No predictions can be made on the basis of a past trend on a stochastic dataset. However, the fact that there has been a long pause when much warming had been predicted suggests that Monckton of Brenchley et al. (2015a), in the Science Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, may have been correct to find climate sensitivity to be of the order of 1 K per CO2 doubling rather than 3 K.
It can be indicative or misleading. Depends on how you do it.
“I propose that if 20 years without global warming occur, the IPCC, the UNFCCC and all their works should be swept into the dustbin of history, and the prosecutors should be brought in …”.
=======================================
Quite so. Twenty years would be, and should be, an important watershed.
There was a temperature peak around the late ‘30s – early ‘40s then a dip; the length and depth of that dip is uncertain because the data has been mutilated by ‘activist’ scientists.
Added to the 1950 — 1980 temperature stasis (HadCRUT4) it would mean that during the so-called ’anthropocene’ the temperature has been unaffected by CO2 emissions over 70% of the time, data fiddling notwithstanding.
Lord this dangerous AGW hypothesis is a non sequitur minefield, of course during the periods of stasis the effect of increasing CO2 emissions could have been countered by other unknown factors, factors which the IPCC dismiss, but unknown factors could equally have augmented CO2 forcing during periods of rising temperatures.
I think one has to argue against the IPCC Climate Change™ science on its own terms.
The fact remains that the IPCC had predicted global warming that has now been absent for almost two decades. I refuse to do science the intergovernmental way. I start with the data, not with a preconceived notion to which the data must be tortured to conform.
Chris Hanley:
You say
Viscount Monckton has very reasonably maintained his consistency by saying
OK. That being so, I write to provide the relevant argument “against the IPCC Climate Change™ science on its own terms” which you say you want.
Box 9.2 on page 769 of Chapter 9 of IPCC the AR5 Working Group 1 (i.e. the most recent IPCC so-called science report) is here and says
GMST trend is global mean surface temperature trend.
and
A “hiatus” is a stop.
Firstly, it is important to note that the quoted IPCC Box refers to a “hiatus” and not a “pause”. This is important because the commonly used word “pause” is a misnomer. The word “pause” misleads by suggesting the present cessation of discernible change to linear trend of GMST is an interruption to global warming although this cannot be known: the lack of discernible change to global temperature trend at 95% confidence will end with global warming or global cooling and nobody can know which until it happens. The IPCC rightly calls the “pause” a “hiatus”; i.e. a stop to global warming.
Secondly, the quoted IPCC Box provides two definitions of the misnamed ‘pause’; viz.
(a) The ‘pause’ is “a GMST trend over 1998–2012 that is higher than the entire HadCRUT4 trend ensemble”.
And
(b) The ‘pause’ is “the observed GMST trend hiatus”.
The quoted IPCC Box states that the ‘pause’ exists according to either of its definitions.
Definition (a) is most serious for the ‘consensus science’ because it demonstrates that the climate models provide wrongly high indications of global warming (i.e. GMST trend).
Viscount Monckton is addressing Definition (b); i.e. “the observed GMST trend hiatus”.
This consideration is important because in 2008 the US Government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reported
Ref. NOAA, ‘The State of the Climate’, 2008
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/climate-assessment-2008-lo-rez.pdf
Hence, if “zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more” exist then that creates “a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate” provided by the climate models.
In his above essay, Viscount Monckton reports
Hence, according to IPCC Climate Change™ science, the data provided by Viscount Monckton demonstrates “a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate” provided by the climate models. Or, to put that in plain language, Viscount Monckton has provided data that – according to IPCC Climate Change™ science – shows the climate models don’t work and provide indications which are wrong.
Richard
One of the problems with the entire CAGW debacle is that so much circumstantial data (much of it manipulated) is continuously thrown up to obfuscate the issue. From a scientific point of view the ACW proposition can be stated very succinctly as follows;
Mans use of of fossil fuel is raising atmospheric CO2. CO2 is a green house gas and the action of greenhouse gases reduces the rate of energy loss to space for a given temperature. That, coupled with constant insolation creates an energy imbalance which causes earth to warm until equilibrium is re-established.
Can we test this hypothesis? Well there is one very simple unequivocal test. If true, Earth’s energy loss to space (in the form of outgoing long wave radiation – OLR) should be falling in line with rising CO2. This has been measured since 1978 by satellites and NOAA has published the data (note; NOAA is hardly a skeptical organisation). It shows that OLR has been rising not falling since 1978. One clear unequivocal fact is enough to destroy an hypothesis – this is it.
This data indeed destroyed the original thesis but the response was to modify the thesis. Now the claim was that the rise in CO2 caused an initial drop in OLR and some warming but that raised water vapour levels in the atmosphere and because water absorbs near infrared energy it meant that some of the insolation that was otherwise reflected back out to space was instead absorbed. Thus the warming was perpetuated by more solar energy being absorbed while OLR in fact rose because the temperature of the Earth was rising.
This new thesis can also be readily tested on two fronts. Firstly, absorbing energy results in warming, if extra solar energy is being absorbed by water vapour in the atmosphere then that must warm the atmosphere. For the energy to be transferred from the atmosphere to the surface there must be a temperature gradient meaning that the atmosphere must be warming faster than the surface (second law of thermodynamics). This is the basis for the claim of a mid troposphere hot spot in the tropics and the model claim that the atmosphere in this region should be warming about two times as fast as the surface. But both satellite data and 1000’s of balloon flights show there is no hot spot. The second test is wrt OLR. If the thesis is true the change in OLR should be the rise due to the temperature increase of the planet (easily calculated from the Stefan Boltzmann law) less the fall due to the rising green house gas concentration. The net could be a rise or a fall but one thing is certain, if it is a rise the rate of rise MUST be less than predicted by the SB law alone. Unfortunately the rate of rise is greater than predicted by the SB law.
These two tests utterly destroy the new hypothesis. It does however raise the question as to why Earth is warming if OLR is rising. If OLR is rising faster than predicted by the SB law it means earth’s emissivity to space is increasing. Green house gases reduce the effective emissivity for long wave radiation and so do clouds. GHG concentrations are clearly not falling but If cloud cover was reducing then Earth’s emissivity would rise. Reducing cloud cover would also reduce Earth’s albedo which would mean a greater fraction of incoming solar energy would be absorbed. The latter dominates over the former so reducing cloud cover will both raise OLR and cause Earth to warm. Svensmark’s theory is that increasing solar magnetic fields reduces cosmic rays which reduces cloud seeding and thus cloud cover. This is at least consistent with the above observations.
Michael Hammer:
No hypothesis can be falsified when post hoc excuses are used to evade its falsification by confounding data.
Richard
Michael Hammer’s analysis is interesting and worthy to be amplified to are a head posting.
Monckton of Brenchley proposes
Seconded!
Richard
Seconded a Second time !!!
The length of the pause for UAH6.0beta4 is 18 years and 6 months from July 1997 to December 2015:
Temperature Anomaly trend
Jul 1997 to Dec 2015
Rate: -0.009°C/Century;
CI from -1.129 to 1.111;
t-statistic -0.016;
Temp range 0.141°C to 0.139°C
This is from:
http://moyhu.blogspot.com.au/p/temperature-trend-viewer.html
Werner, and all, consider that T is independent of past and future; it is what it is, it was what it was. A cogent question is what is the warmest year in the satellite record?
The clear and undisputed answer is 1998, and not by a little. Both years, 2016 and 1998 will have had comparable El Nino’s. Therefore a logical case can be made that the affect of CO2 can be partially gauged by comparing the two. IMV it is extremely likely that 2016 will not exceed 1998 in either satellite data set.
But, just for drill, let us assume it does by .05 C degree. Then, outside of ENSO conditions the atmosphere will have warmed at a rate of about .3 degrees per century. The catastrophe is where?
Which agrees with the long term CET
https://xmetman.wordpress.com/2016/01/09/long-term-trends-in-seasonal-cet/#comment-2893
I said this on the previous post here at WUWT.
It seems to apply here. The politics is the fuel that keeps CAGW burning.
Politics, greed, envy on national levels … not an honest consideration of the facts. Some of “the logs” thrown on the fire fall into the pride category. (Think tree rings.)
How much of the 1.1°C per century rate of warming is attributable to El Nino’s. Alarmists will agree that global warming is down to co2 and El Nino’s. If we tale El Nino:s out then what have they got left to attribute to co2, not a lot I would think.
I do not know if a program can be written, but there is a very easy way to do it using Nick’s program here:
http://moyhu.blogspot.com.au/p/temperature-trend-viewer.html
There are different ways to approach this. If you know the start time last month was May 1997 and the end was December 2015, then
Click RSS
Choose: 1989-now
Use the blue to make the period end at December 2015.
Use the red to make the start point at May 1997. If you were to do this, you would see:
Temperature Anomaly trend
May 1997 to Dec 2015
Rate: -0.038°C/Century;
CI from -1.064 to 0.988;
t-statistic -0.073;
Temp range 0.252°C to 0.244°C
Clicking a start of April 1997 gives a positive slope.
When the January 2016 number comes in, use the blue to make the period end at January 2016. Use the red to make the start point at May 1997. If the trend is negative, then see what happens a month earlier, etc. If the trend from May is positive, see what happens with a start month one month later, etc.
However if you have absolutely no clue what the pause length might be, put the blue dot at the latest month and the red dot at the month before the last. Then click the red < to go back a month at a time and see if the trend is negative. With RSS, the trend will switch from positive to negative to positive to negative until May 1997 is reached. Before May 1997, you will never see a negative slope at the present time.
For a good break-down of the ‘pause’ in UAH regions, kenskingdom is a good place to go: https://kenskingdom.wordpress.com/
UAH global: 18y; 6m.
UAH SH: 19y; 6m
UAH Tropics: 19y
UAH Tropic Oceans: 22y; 10m
UAH North Polar: 14y; 8m
UAH South Polar: 37y; 1m (the entire length of UAH record)
UAH Australia: 18y; 1m
UAH USA (49 states): 18y
The UAH NH is a strange one, the pause appears to be ‘hiding’ in the oceans (see Ken’s site).
BruceC — Please see some of my opinions on your points — I have gone through the website. I worked on Northeastern Rainfall [the government wanted commercial agriculture but failed] for my Ph.D [CSIRO & ANU] with the TheAustralian National University, Canberra . Through my analysis found there is wide variation in rainfall with space and time [in terms of amount,distribution, starting time — highly variable]. I also subjected the data for soil-water balance model and compared with the historical Sorghum crop yields.
I used the concept of cube root of rainfall as a function of global solar radiation and net radiation and evaporation for the northeast Brazil and later to Mozambique & Ethiopia — which indirectly reflect the temperature.
Even in India, the annual rainfall deficit and surplus followed the opposite to annual average at all India level — 2002 & 2009 were drought years at all India average and the corresponding temperature rise is 0.7 & 0.9 oC. Based on such experience I looked at the rainfall 60-year cycle [souhwest monsoon] with temperature — followed a riiverse pattern. This is indicated in my book on Climate Change: Myths & Realities [2008].
Regarding the satellite and ground data — the website looked in to one country [Australia]. At global scale ground based data covers only 20 to 25% of the globe and that too periods differ. Also, majority of the met stations are located in urban areas for convenience of measurements. Rural areas are not covered with such density. The averaging part is trial and error — interpoation& extrapolation. Also, there are several other lacunae in ground based data. In the case of satellite data this is not so. Naturally the satellite data should be lower than the surface data as it gives equal weightage to all areas. That is exactly what is now seen. If we have good network of met stations covering climate system, the ground based temperature as such should be lower and matching the satellite data.
Dr. S. Jeevananda Reddy
CO2 emissions are up sharply, agricultural production has boosted noticeably and temperatures have been the same for 18 years 8 months while the oceans have warmed insignificantly. No big temperature change has occurred for 8,000 years. What’s not to like about all that?
It just starts a bit later, but it is still over 15 years:
Temperature Anomaly trend
Nov 2000 to Dec 2015
Rate: -0.011°C/Century;
CI from -1.124 to 1.103;
t-statistic -0.019;
Temp range 0.250°C to 0.248°C
The above is from:
http://moyhu.blogspot.com.au/p/temperature-trend-viewer.html
Why are we and the Alarmist so concerned about the “cherry pick” of 97/98???the only reason there is a spike there is because it was a very strong El Nino! Which is entirely natural event! The debate is about Man Made Global Warming…..which has no effect on the ENSO events…or have i missed somethingalong the way???
Mycroft wrote:
Why are we and the Alarmists so concerned about the “cherry pick” of 97/98?…
Arch-Alarmist Dr. Phil Jones was the one who first established the benchmark year of 1997-98. In a later interview, Jones stated that global warming had only been stopped for a short time, and that at least 15 years would be necessary to show in a statistically meaningful way that warming had stopped. Jones designated the ’97 – ’98 season as the starting date.
Well, that 15 year time frame has come and gone. No doubt Jones felt confident at the time that warming would resume shortly. He was wrong, and he should acknowledge it.
Instead, Jones and most of the alarmist crowd is still trying to argue ‘dangerous AGW’, as Nick Stokes keeps trying to do here. Nick was also wrong. But he can’t admit it any more than Michael Mann can admit that he fabricated a bogus chart that erased the MWP and the LIA.
At this point, they’ve all gone way beyond simply being in error.
Forrest, if I may – we are missing the tree because of the forrest.
The current pause, labeled “The Pause” by MoB can certainly be considered a new “The Pause” since it is a just slightly overall warmer pause than the previous “The Pause”. These “The Pause”-es will continue to fluctuate, it would seem.
If there is a resumption of warming or we begin to cool for a long enough period that a new trend is proclaimed, what was called “The Pause” will then be shown as the longest time of statistically flat temps before either that warming or cooling trend began.
Well, that make sense to me anyway.
BTW, if the pattern holds similar to past El Ninos, can now exact 3 to 4 years of cooling.
Does anyone know how well this correlates with atmospheric temperatures?
http://ggweather.com/enso/oni.jpg
NOAA’s ONI is of only the Nino 3.4 region. The 1997-1998 El Nino was stronger east of the Nino 3.4 region than the current El Nino.
Something else that intrigues me. We talk glibly about trends in the global average temperature but look more closely at the peak in 1998. In just 1 year the GLOBAL average temperature rose by 0.7C equivalent to 70C per century. Temperature is simply a measure of the internal energy of a system and an 0.7C rise means a heck of a lot of energy and there must be a mechanism to explain it. It cant come from a change in energy distribution because by measuring global temperature we are measuring global energy. It has to be coming from outside the measured system. I can think of three possibilities, two internal to the planet and one external.
Firstly (internal to the planet) a change in ice and snow levels, since that releases the latent heat of fusion without appreciable change in temperature it would explain the observation but that implies that during an el nino the amount of ice on earth would have to increase (to release the energy that caused the warming). When I look at the WUWT plot of global ice levels I dont see a rise in the 1997/8 time frame. Too small to measure? Maybe but I do see clear changes in other years eg: a rise in 2003 and a drop in 2006/7 so ice levels can change fast enough to be visible on a 1 year time frame. If the impact of the el nino was so large and ice was the source of the energy change I would expect to see a peak.
Secondly (internal to the planet), that the heat is coming from the oceans. Since their thermal capacity is so much greater than that of the air/surface a small change in their temperature could lead to a much larger change of atmospheric temperature. But it would mean that during an el nino the oceans would have to cool – giving up energy in order to warm the atmosphere. It could be either the surface ocean (increased evaporation) or the deep oceans (reduced convection). When I look at the NASA GISS global ocean temperature it shows a peak during the el nino not a dip, hmm suggests the heat is not coming from the ocean surface in fact quite the opposite, the change in ocean temperature adds to the energy abnormality. Could be the deep oceans and indeed I have read about this as an explanation. But that would mean the planet is pumping more energy OUT of the deep oceans not putting more energy into it, at least during an el nino. Remember the deep oceans are surrounded on all sides by warmer regions so there must be an active heat pump in operation keeping the deep oceans cold which is exactly what Earth’s weather system does.
Thirdly (external) an el nino could increase the fraction of solar energy absorbed by reducing Earth’s albedo (by reduced cloudiness for example) or reduce the long wave energy loss to space. A reduction in albedo would increase the long wave energy loss to space but the change in absorbed solar energy would be significantly larger.
My main point however is that here is a clearly natural phenomenon that can change Earth’s temperature at a rate of 70C/century yet warmists claim that AGW must be true because there is no other possible explanation for the “unprecedented” warming of about 1-2C/century we have been seeing. How do we know for example that the same instability that causes el ninos does not have a much longer time constant component (eg: pacific decadal oscillation) which is doing the same thing over longer time periods. Or maybe many components with a range of time constants. For example, if that natural phenomenon had the same overall magnitude but with a 20 year time constant instead of a 1 year time constant the rate of rise of temperature would equate to 70/20= 3.5C per century. What el ninos are showing is that an entirely natural phenomenon is capable of generating effects 30-50 times larger than the changes we insist “prove” AGW. To me that makes a mockery of the claim that AGW must be true because there is no “natural” explanation for a 20 year period of warming.
Is there evidence of a geothermal cycle?
If by geothermal cycle you mean one involving heat transfer from the hot core of the Earth I don’t know but it would anyway serve to warm the deep oceans. My point was that the deep oceans are surrounded by the hot core of the Earth below and the warm surface above both of which are warmer than the deep ocean itself yet the deep ocean remains cold and have remained cold for an extremely long time. This can only be the case if there is an active heat pump keeping it cold and indeed there is. Warm surface water flows to the poles where it cools due to the very low solar influx at the poles ie: it radiates its energy away to space. This very cold water descends to the depths while some of the deep water which has warmed a bit circulates back to the surface – conventional convective overturning. It may not seem like it at first but its pretty close to a refrigeration cycle. Net effect (although I admit it may not seem so) is that the deep ocean convection pumps net heat OUT of the deep oceans keeping them cold. If you need further explanation – the descending water is colder than the upwelling water even though both are cold relative to the surface water near the tropics. Given that, its a little surprising that AGW supporters are claiming the missing heat during the “pause” is flowing INTO the deep oceans (that would mean the descending water at the poles was warmer but that would reduce the deep ocean circulation by reducing the convective driver) while at the same time they claim that the warming during an el nino is due to reduced deep circulation so less cold upwelling water cooling the surface. This reduced deep ocean circulation both warms the surface and cools the surface depending on what effect one is trying to explain. To me that’s rather a conundrum.
I know their explanations look entirely plausible but when looked at in the above light, the fact that the deep ocean remains cold generates a serious conflict and suggests their explanations are somewhat superficial.
Michael Hammer:
You say
No. In just 1 year the GLOBAL average temperature ANOMALY rose by 0.7°C.
In each year the GLOBAL average temperature rises by 3.8°C during 6 months (January to June) and falls by 3.8°C during the other 6 months (June to January).
And global temperature is highest when the Earth is most distant from the Sun during each year.
The seasonal effect is because water is a better heat sink than land so oceans vary temperature less than land with the seasons. There is more land in the Northern Hemisphere (NH) than the Southern Hemisphere (SH)
Therefore, NH summer average temperatures are hotter than SH summer average temperatures.
And
NH winter average temperatures are colder than SH winter average temperatures.
But global temperature is the average of NH and SH average temperatures.
Use of anomalies hides much information.
For example, alarmists often say ‘global temperature rise must be kept below 2.0°C’ and they are shocked to discover that global temperature rises by nearly double that during each year while nobody notices.
Richard
Richard Courtney, as always, makes a fascinating point. The fact that global temperature varies but about twice as much each year as the UNFCCC’s 100-year 2 C target is one that should be replayed often to put things in perspective.
Monckton of Brenchley:
Yes, I agree. And the seasonal variation of global temperature also puts another matter “in perspective”.
Global temperature is highest when the Earth is most distant from the Sun (i.e. when radiative forcing is lowest) during each year. This suggests that variations to global temperature are more powerfully determined by internal variability of the climate system than by variations to radiative forcing.
Richard
Yes, variations of some 70 plus watts per sq meter increased radiaton resulting in atmospheric cooling. I wonder how the IPCC models handle this??
1) CO2 blankets the globle, so it is hard to blame CO2 for a temperature differential. CO2 400ppm both N and S Hemi, yet there are different temperature variations. In every model I’ve ever created or regression I’ve run, constants don’t cause variations, that is why they are called constants.
2) We’ve put plenty of huge black body radiators in the N Hemisphere called an Interstate highway system. While the urban heat island effect is well known, I’m pretty sure highways in the deserts store a lot more heat than the surrounding sand.
3) Instead of CO2 trapping heat, we should be looking at how many more heat radiators we’ve been adding to the N Hemisphere.
If we truly want to stop global warming, we should be painting our roads and rooftops white.
Richard Courtney suggests that global temperature is greatest when the Earth is farthest from the Sun each year: however, my own tests for seasonal autocorrelation do not show very much month-to-month variability.
Monckton of Brenchley:
You say
I suspect you have tested monthly global temperature anomaly data and not monthly global temperature data.
The monthly variation of the global temperature data is very marked. Please read this and take especial note of its graph of monthly hemispheric and globval temperatures.
Richard
Regarding: “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”:
It appears to me that Bob Tisdale says otherwise in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2015/11/17/is-the-current-el-nino-stronger-than-the-one-in-199798/
especially with figure 4.
Australia’s BoM regards the current El Niño, one of the top three strongest El Niño events of the past 50 years.
They also state;
They expect neutral ENSO conditions around May.
4 of the 5 NINO regions have fallen since their peak in Dec 2015. NINO 1 has been falling since July 2015 (from a peak of ~2.3C to 0.63C).
MoB (hope you don’t mind the abbreviation), can you supply a RSS+UAH+CO2 graph like your figure 1b?
To the best of my knowledge, this is where the AGW signal should be the strongest (even Gavin Schmidt admits this, and AFAIK, the IPCC).
M’dear Lord Monckton, awesome hero:
No Paris was NOT worse than we thought. Oh yes, it has the expected emissions garbage in it and no sunset. None of that matters. It’s not binding. We aren’t getting rid of this hellish nonsense until they let go of it, anyway. And Paris contained the road to that.
The environazis went home from Paris very happy with a breakthrough: an agreement to work toward fixing carbon in the soils through Regenerative Agriculture. And THAT is a life-enhancing and very positive thing.
One thing Climate Alarmists and skeptics agree on is the Keeling curve. We know that more carbon dioxide means more plants and more total life. The alarmists would seem to hate Life, and most of them admit that they do indeed hate human life–“overpopulation.”
Now, everybody is attached to what is best in themselves, and you have a marvellous scientific and mathematical mind combined with formidable wit. When you are that good, it is hard to let go of it and do something else. But the alarmists are fighting the very basis of Life as well as the economy and WINNING is much more important than proving for the 17,243rd time how smart you are.
PARIS LETS US WORK ALONGSIDE THE ALARMISTS. They have figured out that Regenerative Agriculture will sequester the carbon dioxide into the soil–where it really came from in the first place. The loss of soil organisms due to poison-based agriculture is enormous, and it is not really controversial that this threatens our existence and civilization. Everybody knows about earthworms, in particular. If you drop the subject of temperatures, they can drop it, too, and become much more useful and productive.
Well, there is a use for that keen intelligence–learning about the various forms of agriculture. Start with Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” then read a book or two by Joel Salatin, one by Elliott Cole. I am sure a Viscount has estates to try things on. Here is a vital one that improves nutrient levels as well as yields: http://www.originalsonicbloom.com which is a ton of fun and has an inexpensive kit you can buy and see for yourself. Then websearch permaculture and read Schwartz’s “Cows Save the Planet.”
And if you love to attack evil, there are corporations making money poisoning the planet. Try telling the truth about those and suddenly many alarmists may love you as much as we do.
Lets try 20 years no significant global warming …..
It is not just mathematically estimating that you go back with 18 years and 8 months of RSS data to get a zero or negative warming coefficient by single variate linear regression. Confidence matters. I would guess it goes back further in time if looking for a coefficient statistically significant from zero as opposed to zero or negative coefficient. It is like flipping coins and saying a coin is weighted based on 2 of 3 tosses heads versus same with 33 out of 99 flips heads, same coefficient, former is insignificant abet with a non-zero correlation, yet idiots will think global warming exists if you poll them on a above average hot day which is also the former. Curious how many years back need to go if run regression with data till t-ratio pops above 2 for 95% confidence, likely more than 18 years and 8 months.
Note as said, “The hiatus period of 18 years 8 months is the farthest back one can go in the RSS satellite temperature record and still show a sub-zero trend.” and “The RSS satellite dataset shows no global warming at all for 224 months from May 1997 to December 2015”
OK – I just ran the RSS TLT temperature numbers from http://data.remss.com/msu/graphics/TLT/time_series/RSS_TS_channel_TLT_Global_Land_And_Sea_v03_3.txt myself which go Jan. 1979-Dec. 2015.
I can verify. I get an insignificant coefficient of -0.00038 (or -0.0038 Cº per decade) with a t-ratio of 0.19 if starting with May 1997 RSS temp data (224 months). And also from 1979 onward for full data set get +0.01228 (or +0.12 Cº per decade) with 95% significance by t, however we know it was a tad on the cold side in Jan. 1979 (same for sea ice area anomaly data by satellite being above average in 1979 when the accurate satellite data series starts cherry picking by accident http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/global.daily.ice.area.withtrend.jpg ), and yet for 1979 on temperature trend as Christopher Monckton correctly contends, “global warming at an unalarming rate” which i would concur since just a tad above 1 degree C per century rate based on data sets, not a hill of beans nor catastrophic [and still not any evidence of AGW, and aside I would contend GW if it exists, natural or AGW, such would be beneficial and global cooling would be the catastrophic at polar opposite of group think, mindless politicians, and IPCC], not that worried.
However, also I did the regressions for prior years to May 1997, the coefficient for “warming” does go positive but still insignificant past the last 18 years and 8 months now so called “hiatus” or “pause.”
If I look at t-ratios, get them under 2 until end of 1995.
Thus running the data set from January 1996 to December 2015, get a “warming” coefficient of +0.00372 (+0.372 Cº per century) with a standard error of 0.00186 on it for a t-ratio of 1.996 (R sq of .12).
Thus instead of saying “no global warming for 18 years and 8 months,” I can say with standard 95% confidence that there has been no statistically significant global warming for 20 years [and zero months]. Adding the qualifier, “statistically significant,” pushes it back 16 months.
Anyone can run the same numbers, and RSS data set link above.
It is not just how far back you go for a negative (cooling trend) coefficient to document the “pause,” it is how far back you go for a statistically significant coefficient, and that is exactly 20 years.
…… …
[And also could throw in other variables like El Niño Index, particulates in upper atmosphere (or at least crude dummy variables for volcanoes and ENSO years/months), cloud cover, variations in solar irradiance, and CO2 (logarithmic transformation better due to saturation and electromagnetic wavelength band absorption ability), etc. or all the likely suspects, even better break up by latitudes as opposed to global, yet more noise in pole data aside. I have not done the statistics, but would suspect by adding variables and looking at our real world data which is a true experiment, that there is weak or little evidence going past 20 years for any CO2 link with warming (except for ice core data in very long series before humans where there is a lag as warmer oceans can hold less CO2 after natural warming due to other natural causes). As for IPCC theoretical scare forecasts now proved incorrect, they do not hold up to science. We have data which is better than hypothetical theories which let some feed at the AGW gov. funding/propaganda trough. I would even go past no statistically significant warming for 20 years, and say likely no pause or hiatus since nothing from which to pause, it is colder today than 1,000 years ago or 2,000 years ago, Ok cherry picking, but how long the natural “pause” from global cooling? I like the warm weather more than an ice sheet which reaches all the way into Pennsylvania and covers Chicago with a mile of ice. Amazing how much people will read into a very short temp record and just ignore the many natural variations and cycles jumping to conclusions on spurious correlations where there is no causality, you might as well do a statistical analysis of global warming and organic food consumption as opposed to CO2.]
http://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/1WZ6h.png
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-emPQTP4zI84/VWCtR3UFvqI/AAAAAAAABkk/DPHybYgMxKY/s1600/clip_image006_thumb1.jpg
From:
http://moyhu.blogspot.com.au/p/temperature-trend-viewer.html
Temperature Anomaly trend
May 1993 to Dec 2015
Rate: 0.772°C/Century;
CI from -0.030 to 1.574;
t-statistic 1.886;
Temp range 0.125°C to 0.299°C
That is 22 years and 8 months of no statistically significant warming for RSS.
Werner,
Thanks for checking significance too.
I ran the RSS TLT data May 1993-Dec 2015, and get
Rate: +0.771421523 °C/Century; that correlates with you perfectly, must be same.
Standard Error on yearly rate coefficient is 0.001544126,
thus t-ratio or statistic is 4.995846245.
R Squared: 0.084616925, 272 monthly observations.
Rate same, but not significance by t-ratio for same series.
Are you doing a one sided test? Null to reject is rate = 0 versus rate > 0?
[Or did Bill Gates do something since I am using MSFT Excel and he supports AGW?]
Is it May 1993 – 22 years and 8 months of no statistically significant warming as you stated, or just 20 years and since January 1996 to December 2015 as I calculated?
[Late night anthropogenic heat in Cologne Germany on NYE by harassment and fireworks and high metabolism rates does not count since half in 2016 by a hair, RSS TLT data set rises a bit above those low standards by hPA, and do not know how far the thermometer is from the train station or cathedral or if “adjusted” by Galvin at GISS and not in RSS data despite, but I guess others have blamed EU migration crisis on AGW.]
Different people may do things differently. I am just using Nick’s program. Perhaps he will answer you.
The test for significance takes account of the autocorrelation of the monthly data. It uses an Ar(1) noise model, as explained here, for example.
Let me correct myself ..
It is not “20 years no significant global warming,”
but current state rather is
20 years [exactly] no significant change in global temperature.
For statistical purposes, neither warming nor cooling at 95% confidence.
Nick Stokes wrote upthread:
I’ve just drawn a graph.
Then Nick goes on to argue his conclusions. Can I do the same thing?
(I would like to interrupt myself for a moment, and say that Michael Hammer has made some excellent comments here. So have many others.)
Nick S. thinks the so-called “pause” will un-pause by May. It may. But that’s predicting the future, which is always risky. Nick avoids the fact that we’ve just observed close to 20 years of contrary indications that demolish all the endless predictions of ‘dangerous AGW’ that infested the media in the late ’90’s. In alarmist land, the ‘pause’ doesn’t count.
The planet has never warmed or cooled smoothly. But it would warm steadily if human CO2 was the cause of the pause. And interestingly, we’ve observed almost exactly the same pattern before man-made CO2 was a factor:
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/hadley/Hadley-global-temps-1850-2010-web.jpg
I argue with Nick that human CO2 emissions cannot be a measurable factor now. The reason is made clear in the radiative physics calculations, which show that even if CO2 doubled from the current ≈400 ppm level, any global warming from that forcing would still be too small to measure. This chart (which I didn’t draw myself) shows it clearly:
Extrapolate out from the current 400 ppm to where you think 800 ppm would be. How much warming would result? It would be too small to measure with current instruments.
Nick Stokes must be aware of these facts, and those posted by Mike Hammer above. I’ve asked him before without getting a specific reply (or any reply), but I’ll try again: Nick, what would it take for you to admit you’re basically wrong about your “dangerous AGW” argument? Would mile-thick glaciers have to cover the US midwest again? Or, can you never accept the possibility that your argument is all blown out of proportion, and that human CO2 emissions are a net benefit to the biosphere?
Some folks complain (correctly) that there are no error bars in many charts, so here’s one that should make them happy:
(OK, they’re not exactly error bars, but they make the point that there’s nothin either unusual or unprecedented happening.)
If there was truth to the claims that human CO2 emissions will cause runaway global warming (or even regular strength global warming), the onus is on them to prove it, or at least, to produce some convincing evidence. But they haven’t. Their argument, like Nick’s, is based mostly on assertions.
Everything the alarmist crowd claims and predicts is contradicted by observations. Nick is certain that human CO2 matters. Show us in this chart where you see it, Nick:
http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/guest/de/temp-emissions-1850-web.jpg
Really, Nick, show us where human CO2 begins to have a measurable effect:
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-lPGChYUUeuc/VLhzJqwRhtI/AAAAAAAAAS4/ehDtihKNKIw/s1600/GISTemp%2BKelvin%2B01.png
Because with all the (harmless, beneficial) CO2 being emitted, surely global T should be skyrocketing if you’re anywhere near correct. But…
http://www.co2web.info/C-atm-vs-human.jpg
Show us the CO2 warming, Nick. Where is it?
Very grateful to DB Stealey for his interesting graphs, which reinforce the central message of these monthly updates: the rate of global warming is so far below prediction as to discredit the models.
It seems that arguing for catastrophic has been replaced with arguing for microscopic. Now CO2 is credited with causing severe weather, or abnormal weather, without any scientific justification as to how this might occur. There seems to be no effort to try to separate out what changes are occurring naturally.
One technical question:
If you start at the beginning of the satellite data, what trend is shown up until the point where the 1998 El Nino kicks in?
If you ignore the El Nino data points in 1998, it would seem that the whole series could be modeled by no trend, followed by a jump, then no trend after the jump.
Here is another interesting scientific paper,
which in my opinion calls into doubt exactly
what the IPCC are saying about these “Mauna Loa”
measurements of the Scrips institute, because in
this 2001 paper, we see that they are saying the CO2
measurements are meant to show the Volcano’s Outgassing.
Ryan, S. (2001), Estimating volcanic CO2 emission rates
from atmospheric measurements on the slope of Mauna Loa,
/Chem. Geol., 177/, 201-211.
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/obop/mlo/programs/esrl/volcanicco2/Estimating%20Volcanic%20CO2%20Emission%20Rates%20from%20Atmospheric%20Measurements%20on%20the%20Slope%20of%20Mauna%20Loa%20(2001).pdf
So is this really what we are seeing – MAUNA LOA’s emissions !
It is what they set out to measure in the first place, and no doubt
convenient then to subsequently pretend it was about the IPCC
AGW pseudo-science project, because that is very convenient
when it comes to asking for Government funding.
This CO2 measurement was meant to be part of the early warning
system for residents of Hawaii, and this chart shows the location
of all the seismometer & etc the position of the CO2 sensor is shown.
Do any of you really think this sensor measures Global Average CO2 ?.
http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/maunaloa/current/monitoringNetwork.jpg
In reply to Climate Change Chronicle, Mauna Loa is by no means the only site at which atmospheric CO2 concentration is measured. There are now sites all over the world, and they are quite well inter-calibrated. For instance, a test that I performed some years ago showed that the amplitude of the seasonal variation tended to increase the farther from the South Pole the measurements were taken. My conclusion is that the CO2 concentration is respectably measured at Mauna Loa and elsewhere, and it is rising. And, pace Murry Salby, the most likely reason for the increase is the rate at which we are emitting CO2.
Monckton of Brenchley remarked :
“Mauna Loa is by no means the only site at
which atmospheric CO2 concentration is
measured. There are now sites all over the
world, and they are quite well inter-calibrated. ”
Here is the official map of CO2 monitoring sites by Scripps :
http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/sites/default/files/sampling_stations_scripps_o2_co2.png
We can see from this map that though there are
more than one measuring point, these are not by
any stretch “all over the world”. They are in a line
mostly vertical from the South Pole to Alaska in the
north, and with a few outliers on the edge of the
Pacific rim. In fact only one out of the eleven cited
staions is NOT in what could be described as the
Pacific Ocean region, and that is the flask collection
station at “Alert”, in the Nunavut territory.
Actually the explanation at the Scripps website
makes it plain that at many of those sites the gas
is not measured as such, and in their own words :
“The primary (in situ) record from Mauna Loa is
based on measurements made with an analyzer
at the site. At all other stations, the records are
based on flask samples returned to our La Jolla
laboratory for analysis.”
So then these are not worldwide measurements.
These are not instantaneous or even synchronised
analyses. Mauna Loa remains the sole continuous,
in situ 24hrs per day 365 days per year measurement.
The other “worldwide” collection points, are a poor
representative sample of “the World”.
See the full explanation at Scripps website :
http://scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/research/atmospheric_co2
There are however a vast number of observation sites
which are really “Worldwide”, though with a predominance
in western and developed nations, and in populated areas.
Though very many of those sites do also collect flasks of
gas, these are never analysed by Scripps or included in
the official IPCC statistical record for CO2 gas concentrations,
and they still do always only show the chart for Mauna Loa alone.
This business of saying that, the eleven official CO2 “points”
are a good proxy for the entire planet, and then saying that
these eleven are only a test to see whether Mauna Loa is a
good proxy for all of those, and thus then only showing the
Mauna Loa “in situ” measurement to the public and generally,
is a deception in my earnest opinion.
So in conclusion M of B has been duped in to believing that
because NOAA has 214 sites in 51 countries, that these are
all in fact used to measure CO2 for the official record, but alas
this is not the case as we have seen. Even so the vast majority
of those 214 sites are in and around the Pacific Ocean, with
just a few in Continental Europe, Russia and elsewhere.
See the official table, but note that just the eleven stations
marked on the map were actually only used to verify the “in situ”
record at Mauna Loa, which is still the sole official live record !
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/dv/site/site_table2.php
How many people understand that this is the contorted process
which is used to create the Man Made CO2 hypothesis of “CAGW” ?
Where on earth did you get this nonsense graph from?
http://www.co2web.info/C-atm-vs-human.jpg
So 600GT of atmospheric C out of the total 800GT was human emissions?
Note in the graph of total atmospheric carbon and human emissions, the human emissions (whose flatline should be zero) is the annual figure.
[Reply: Thanks for helping ‘Phil.’ understand that chart. –mod]
Of course, if somebody didn’t already mention it in the comments,
in just a couple of years when the 1998 el Nino disappears off the
left hand side of the chart, there will then be a cooling trend, even
if the planet cools no further, due to la Ninas or whatever reason.
Many people do however expect that we shall see temperatures
fall much further, in line with the predicted grand Solar minimum.
Whatever the case this has virtually nothing to do with human
CO2 emissions. We are still using the “measurements” from the
side of Mauna Loa volcano, and extrapolating this to be the same
as an average of all atmospheric measurements from around the
entire globe, monitored 24 hours a day (even if that were possible).
Plainly that is not the same, I pronounce the Scrips Mauna Loa
standard is therefore utter balderdash – so there !
Keeling, yah, boo, sucks !
What if the 1998 El Nino doesn’t disappear from the graph and it remains the highest point in sat records?
BruceC …
The 1998 el Nino MUST disappear off the left hand side of the chart,
if the chart measures only the past 20 years, since this is the goal
as declared by Lord Monckton. In 2018 therefore the 1998 peak
will vanish and by the end of 2018 we shall certainly see a relative
downtrend, whatever might otherwise happen. The 1998 event was
itself unusual, however many factors now point towards a cooling
over the next 30+ years. Frankly I’d rather have the warming, AND
more CO2 in the atmosphere for our great friends ….. The Plants !
The CO2 at the slopes of Mauna Loa continues to rise, and for me
the only thing which that might indicate is some overdue eruption
might take place sooner, rather than later. Signs look ominous ?
… and I might add, please stop foisting your
CO2 fantasies on the rest of the World !
read more….
http://hvo.wr.usgs.gov/
Here’s another graph for you Nick;
http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh154/crocko05/Past%20400000%20year%20temps_zpsmqmty7yo.jpg
When using a 1961-1990 global mean temperature(*), only 20% of the past 400,000 years rises above that average …. with the current ‘unprecedented’ modern warm period being the LOWEST.
(*) Which raises another question:
Where in the peer-reviewed literature does it state what the global mean temperature should?
Oops, should be?
Bruce C has asked an important question. Previous warm periods used to be called climate optima, for good reason.
According to the IPCC the rise of the mean global temperature (as BruceC said, what does this number mean. It is not a temperature) from 1950 up today is determined by CO2, but if you look closer to the data, you see no rise between 1950 and 1976 and the rise of 0.18°C in 1976 is determined by the pacific global shift, which has nothing to do with CO2. So there is no rise between 1950 and 1986 for 36 years.
They are throwing the ball in the right direction. But they are overthrowing it.
The same old Gish Gallop. The “pause” that never was. It gets old after a while.
Same old Harry,who fails to provide a counterpoint to the post or the many comments in reaction.
H. Twinotter,
You are such a clueless imbecile it’s hard to imagine you eating without a bib. The gov’t spends millions every year to maintain the two satellites that accurately measure global temperature. But you don’t like their data, so your reaction is the same as usual:
http://www.moonbattery.com/kathleen-backus.jpg
(Please use only one screen name. Pick this one or ‘Svante Callendar’, and stick with it. -mod.)
[Comment deleted. Identity thief post. ~mod.]
M. Palmer,
Yes, and a mercury thermometer measures the expansion of an element, not temperature.
Yep, Harry. Much like the “linear trend” that has no meaning. Do you suppose Monkton might be quietly pulling your leg with the r^2 value quoted on those graphs, regardless of any “pause”?
After all, what has a straight line drawn over a time series of some aspect of a chaotic non-linear system got to do with anything? What does it tell you about natural variability and therefore the existence or otherwise of net CO2 induced warming? Does this inappropriate “trend” of yours have any predictive skill? If you were actually interested in warming/cooling you’d look at the signal directly, not the damned temperature over some indeterminate period via the contortions of wholly inappropriate linear regression.
That is, the evolving rate of change in context. For example:
http://s11.postimg.org/t2gkaercx/Rss_Rates.png
Those are annual signals derived from monthly anomalies over the entire RSS record. Using simple, time-honoured statistical norms like standard error, this is what it shows:
Northern Polar: +0.269 ±0.394 °C/decade – NOT SIGNIFICANT
Northern Mid Latitudes: +0.183 ±0.207 °C/decade – NOT SIGNIFICANT
Tropics: +0.117 ±0.185 °C/decade – NOT SIGNIFICANT
Southern Mid Latitudes: +0.065 ±0.132 °C/decade – NOT SIGNIFICANT
Southern Polar: +0.004 ±0.286 °C/decade – NOT SIGNIFICANT
If you mash it all together globally you get: 0.126 ±0.113 °C/decade. But it’s blatantly autocorrelated like some drunk at a lamppost. We start and end at the top of short warming spurts. You can draw straight lines anywhere you like; any “trend” is still NOT SIGNIFICANT in its own context.
The clue is in the terminology, Harry. Linear trends have no meaning in non-linear time series. Period.
If there is net CO2 induced warming it clearly cannot be discriminated from natural variation. If you can’t measure it, you can’t quantify it. If you can’t quantify it it’s not science and must remain conjecture – ECS, TCR and all the rest (regardless of meaningless confidence intervals).
Conjecture that’s unfortunately not idle, still costing billions of dollars per annum; distorting political discourse at every level and having a detrimental effect on collective human psyche. To which this entire thread bears testament.
Linear-regression trends have their limitations, but they are a reasonable method of getting some idea of whether a stochastic dataset such as global temperature has been trending upward, downward or not at all over any sufficiently long period of interest. They are used here because they are standard methodology in the documents of the IPCC and in the analyses that appear in the reviewed journals. The absence of any linear trend over as long a period as getting on for 19 years, when a rising trend is expected, does cast some doubt upon the scientific basis (if any) for the exaggerated predictions made by the modelers.
The monthly global temperature data are not strongly auto-correlated; nor, over a sufficiently long period (>15 years) are they much influenced by the occasional outliers caused by el Nino/la Nina events.
Finally, when a linear trend on a stochastic dataset is zero the correlation coefficient is also likely to be at or close to zero. Sure enough, the r^2 on the RSS data for the last 18 years 8 months is close to zero, as expected.
The fact is that these monthly exposes of the discrepancy between prediction and observation are the one serious wound that skepticism has inflicted on the South Sea Bubble that is the global warming scam. The sheer number of papers attempting to explain away the Pause, and the sheer number of tamperings with the terrestrial data to try to get rid of it, show how worried the true-believers are. And they are worried because, in these monthly columns, I use their own data and their own methods.
“The monthly global temperature data are not strongly auto-correlated”
Maybe, but the evolving rate of warming/cooling clearly is. And that is what we’re interested in.
AJB.
You would sound more convincing if you drop the rhetorical questions.
Someone should calculate the confidence interval of this so-called trend line sometime.
I don’t know whether Harry has ever flown in a Twin Otter, but it is time that he put up or shut up. His allegation that the head posting is a Gish gallop implies that it contains a rapid succession of statements of apparent fact that are actually false. Which of the facts in the head posting does the pseudonymous Twit Otter challenge, and on what basis?
Lord Mad Monk.
I am glad you provided a definition of a Gish Gallop, you helped prove my point.
HT,
What is it about “put up or shut up” that has you baffled? You have been challenged by someone who has forgotten more than you will ever learn about this subject, so it’s no wonder you avoid the challenge.
Go back to the peanut gallery where you belong.
Harry is galloping with only twin legs.
This horse will not win a race to the truth,
against a thoroughbred stallion like the
Viscount of Veritas.
Harry is a frequent contributor
to the Warmista Trolling Website,
Hotwhopper run by the professional
whinger, Miriam O’Brien (a.k.a.
Sou from Bundangawoolarangeera).
Miriam is a person who has conducted some
longtime vendetta against WUWT, and maybe
A.W. will not allow even this short explanation
to pollute his blog. However I think we should all
be aware that the vast majority of her postings
are highly critical of ANYTHING written on WUWT,
and in particular A.W. himself.
Google Search for his Posts on Miriam’s Trollsite
( I found about 30 pages of fatuous arguments )
Go away “white kitty”, you are wasting your
time in here, and take all your sock puppets
with you please. Thank you.
Climate Change Chronicle.
So you are stalking me? That makes you, Smokey and that Vlad person.
Honestly bud, you need to get out more 🙂
CCC,
Hairy can only troll because he has no credible facts.
for me it’s simple
The current El nino will shorten the pause as it now is. but seen the fact a strong cold kelvin wave is forming this will be followed by a La nina for sure which will give an equilibrium in the long run.
some are missing the point and mix “how long can you go back in time in the data whilest having a zero trend” with cherry picking: the first will make the pause shift in length making it shorter or longer as the data comes in
cherry picking would just give a fixed start date and not a shifting one. and the trend then would change as new data would follow.
especially important when considdering the greenhouse warming theory: we would have to see the troposphere warming up faster then the surface, while the opposite seems to happen. that means CAGW theory is blatantly flawed.
but i am sure the pause will resume and lengthen when this el nino turns into a la nina which would balance out the current spike we will see.
Folks, the science is settled, and we – the anti-CAGWs – won. It’s not a matter of science, and hasn’t been, for a very long time, if it ever was. It’s a matter of influencing public perception for political purposes, and in that arena, to put the most optimistic possible face on it, we have a long, hard fight ahead. Much as I am loath to diminish the sincere hard work of those who continue to make the scientific case, I fear that at this point it is doing little more than legitimizing the delusion that the CAGWs have one.
Dav09.
Arguing a Conspiracy Theory is not very helpful.
Is you definition of “won” the fact that many heads of government signed the COP21 treaty? If so, it is a strange usage of the word “won”.
Harry Twinotter:
Only you has suggested a “conspiracy theory”. A bandwagon is not a conspiracy, and a coincidence of interests usually has a more powerful effect than a group of conspirators.
But you warmunists like to imagine conspiracy theories because it avoids needing to think (warmunists would be realists if thinking were not hard for them to do).
The Chinese defeated the AGW-scare in 2009 at the CoP in Copenhagen. It was then decided that there would not be a binding Treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol. This defeat for the warmunists was confirmed by the so-called ‘Treaty’ that was adopted in Paris in December 2015 and which binds nobody to anything.
Richard
Well that’s broadly correct Dave09.
original article (in German) :
http://www.nzz.ch/klimapolitik-verteilt-das-weltvermoegen-neu-1.8373227
For the record, Edenhofer was co-chair of the IPCC’s Working Group III, and was a lead author of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report released in 2007 which controversially concluded, “Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”
As such, this man is a huge player in advancing this theory, and he has now made it quite clear – as folks on the realist side of this debate have been saying for years – that this is actually an international economic scheme designed to redistribute wealth.
—
As recent as last year :
original article
http://news.investors.com/ibd-editorials/021015-738779-climate-change-scare-tool-to-destroy-capitalism.htm
And Harry. this is NOT “Conspiracy Theory”,
it is however “Conspiracy Fact”, or Fraud actually.
Conniving with others to deliberately mislead the
Public and Politicians, and cause some to suffer
a loss and others to make a gain, as a result of
deception. These are Criminal Acts.
You want to associate yourself with people who condone
Criminal Acts? Then eventually you may be cited as an
accessory before and after the fact. This is no joke.
Climate Change Chronicle:
Thanks for the info about Edenhofer, et al. I didn’t know that . . . and that’s the point I was trying to make. Just about everyone capable of being convinced by the scientific argument has been convinced by now, and there aren’t enough of us to make any difference, anyway. Very many more are capable of understanding the facts you cite, and very few of them know those facts exist. We will gain far more ground in the fight against the warmunists – to pinch Richard’s humorously apt term – by publicizing such facts than by endlessly rehashing a debate that has long been conceded by anyone honest.
Climate Change Chronicler.
“You want to associate yourself with people who condone
Criminal Acts? Then eventually you may be cited as an
accessory before and after the fact. This is no joke.”
If you are the new attack dog on this forum, they are paying you too much.
Question: Why only show average ocean temperature increase for the first 1,900 meters when on average the ocean is 6,400 meters deep?
Answer: Because the ocean between 1,900 meters and 6,400 meters is barely warming at all. So if you average the top 29% with the bottom 71% to REALLY see how much the ocean is warming overall, the numbers are only 1/3 as scary… as if a few hundredths of degrees is even scary at all.
To be fair, the ARGO bathythermographs are not capable of going to greater depths than 2 km. The pressures below that depth would compromise their ballasting system, requiring a very much greater expense than the $1 million each that the buoys now cost.
Regarding this:
“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 8 months since May 1997”
I just noticed that this says “surface temperature”. What’s up with saying that about the satellite-measured lower troposphere, about half of which by mass is 2 km or more above sea level? The weighting curve peaks a little more than 2 km above sea level. See Figure 1 in http://www.remss.com/measurements/upper-air-temperature
My bad. I meant lower troposphere.
how can they claim you cherry picked if you go back any further than 1997, you’ll run into the rise after the coldest point of 1983. These discussions need to include the big chill that apparently took place from the 30’s to 83, eh?
Today’s climate models do not “predict” but rather “project.” Unlike a “projection,” a “prediction” is an example of a proposition. That a “prediction” is a proposition ties a model that makes predictions to logic. That a “projection” is not a proposition divorces a model that makes propositions from logic. In persistently conflating projections with predictions Monckton of Brenchley has thus far proved incapable of owning up to his own mistakes.
Oops: In typing “divorces a model that makes propositions from logic” I should have typed “divorces a model that makes projections from logic.”
Mr Oldberg’s usual waffle has come too late to disrupt this thread. The IPCC, in its 1990 First Assessment Report, plainly uses the words “We predict …”. If Mr Oldberg thibnks the IPCC should have used a different word for the sake of some obscure and pointless semantic quibble, then let him take the matter up with the IPCC, which will pay no attention.
Terry, you have been protesting too much this difference between projection and prediction on every thread that comes up with this. Initially, I thought it was because you were an over-educated, nice, but gullible fellow with an inflated view of himself, talking down to the plebes. IPCC used to use prediction until they were all failing so miserably that someone in the establishment advised they use ‘projection’ to extricate themselves from this pickle. You are a longtime IPCC mogul aren’t you? You seem to take possession of the idea. I suppose if I use the term Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, you would be quick to correct me and explain it’s Climate Change (what else could one do when CAGW stopped). Now Climate Change has also stopped. There is a fearful new term trying to form in your minds that you are all resisting strenuously these days.
1) Q: How does CO2 400 ppm in the N Hemi and 400 ppm in the S Hemi result in a temperature differential bewtween the Hemis? A: It doesn’t
2) Q: What causes the difference? What is different? The N Hemi is largely land, whereas the S Hemi is largely H2O. H20 is an infinitely more uniform heat absorber than land.
3) Q: Has anything happened since the 1950s that could cause the N Hemi land mass to alter the climate and temperature? A: Yes, there are far more trees increasing the H2O in the atmosphere, and we now have miles and miles of blacktop and roads where green fields used to exist.
4) Isn’t the real signal of CO2 warming at night? CO2 is transparent to incoming radiation, so daytime temperatures are caused by visible light. A: Yes, those videos of an egg cooking on a side walk prove the incoming radiation is warming the earth surface, and that has nothing to do with CO2.
5) Are desert nightime temperatures increasing when adjusted for the daytime peak temperatures? A: I’ve found no evidence of that.
http://theinconvenientskeptic.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Final-BW-Print-Version-TIS_html_5f0398df.png
BTW, look again at this chart. The hottest hemisphere also is the coldest, proving that the atmosphere doesn’t trap much heat, and it is the black body radiator that is most important. In the N Hemi the surface goes from temperature extremes. In the summer you can fry and egg on the highway, and in the winter it is covered in ice. Because the earth surface doesn’t have the heat storing capacity of the oceans, as it cools, so does the atmosphere above it. If CO2 was the cause of the warming, you wouldn’t see such a drop off in the winter. In the S Hemi you have a constant thermostat called the oceans, and as the sun warms them, the oceans warm the atmosphere above them. As they cool, you will see the atmosphere above them cool as well. Clearly, if you explain what is warming the radiating black body you can explain what is warming the atmosphere above it, and warming the black body radiator has absolutley nothing to do with CO2. Everyone agrees, daytime temperatures are warming. If that is so, visible light, not CO2 is the culpret.If CO2 was the cause the slope of the nigth time would be greater than the daytime. It isn’t.
http://fas.org/irp/imint/docs/rst/Sect9/originals/Fig9_45.gif
http://theinconvenientskeptic.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Final-BW-Print-Version-TIS_html_5f0398df.png
CO2islife, I have maintained there is much which we can learn from the seasonal response where the atmosphere cooks in January despite a 90 watt per square meter increase. Thank you for illustrating this.
A question which I have not found an answers to is; does the earth, (land, oceans and atmosphere as a whole) gain or lose energy during the S.H. summer?
### damm phones, atmosphere cools in January, not cooks.
David A:
You ask
The answer is ‘both’.
However, I suspect that by energy you mean ‘net energy’. It would be interesting to know why you ask because the considered time scale affects calculated changes to net energy.
Richard
Q: How does CO2 400 ppm in the N Hemi and 400 ppm in the S Hemi result in a temperature differential bewtween the Hemis?
Because its mixed with unicorn dust….don’t you know anything !!!
Forecast of pause length 2016-2018
I am now forecasting that the pause will end in November 2016 and return again to more than 18 years in December 2017. In November 2017 it will almost completely disappear to less than 1 year in length.
I created 2 models of the RSS dataset for 2016 to 2018. One was 1998-2000 spliced onto the end of the latest RSS dataset and the other was 2010-2012 spliced on instead. I think it is a reasonable assumption that 2016-2018 will be something between those periods. The main point you will see in the graph below is that it doesn’t matter a whole lot between them the results are very similar.
http://s28.postimg.org/5nbqmq63x/Pause_length_2016_18.jpg
Edit: It will disappear in Nov 2016 not ’17 and will return somewhere between Dec 2017 and March 2018
Sorry another edit! Looking at the graph I couldn’t understand how the pause was not increasing after it recovered. I had forgotten to include the months after Dec-15 in the calculation of the length of the pause as I wasn’t doing any slopes within the period 2016-18 itself. For every month from Dec-15 to Dec-18 trends are calculated for every month from Jan-79 to Nov-15. It is now forecasting the pause to exceed 20 years sometime between January and March 2018. Basically, it looks like the AGW true believers will get all of 2017 to say the pause has ended in the troposphere! Then the sceptics get to gloat in 2018! As I said before, for two quite different el nino/la nina periods the pause lengths end up being quite similar.
This is the corrected graph:
http://s18.postimg.org/hrrynyh7t/Pause_length_2016_18_2.jpg
A further thing to note in the results is that they are predicting the pause to exceed 19 years this year in the July to September period.
@ Hoplite
This is all pure speculation
actually nobody can really say whether
2016 will be warmer or colder than 2015
This is why your local bookmaker will be going
on a luxury cruise this summer, and not you !
😉