Guest essay by Andy May
Many writers, including Professor Richard Lindzen and Ed Caryl have noticed the remarkable similarity in global warming observed from around 1910 to 1944 and 1975 to 2009. The similarity in slopes exists in all global surface temperature datasets. Figure 1 shows the HadCRUT version 4 dataset and the NASA GISS land (GHCN v3) and ocean (ERSST v4) temperature dataset. We’ve identified the two periods of interest on the figure. All datasets also show some cooling between 1945 and 1975.
Figure 1
Figure 2 shows the two periods overlain with data from the HadCRUT version 4 dataset. This display is scaled to actual average temperature. Unlike Figure one this figure and the next one use smoothed monthly data. In that way, we can see some of the variation within each year.
Figure 2
The left side of Figure 2 represents 1910 for the blue line and 1975 for the orange line. On average the earlier blue line is 0.36°C cooler than the later line. The later line also has a steeper slope, the earlier represents 0.144°C of warming per decade and the later line shows 0.192°C warming per decade. Figure 3 shows the same HadCRUT v4 data, but it is shown as anomalies from the mean and the two means are forced to be the same.
Figure 3
Now we can easily see the similarity in the two warming periods. The vertical scale is expanded and means of the two records are overlain, so the similarity jumps out at us. Yet the IPCC in their AR5 Summary for Policy Makers states on page 17:
“It is extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together.”
On page 14 of the Summary for Policy Makers they provide a description of the anthropogenic “radiative forcing” from man’s emissions and other actions. This is shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4
At the bottom of the figure the total IPCC estimated anthropogenic climate radiative forcing is given for three years 1950, 1980 and 2011. The IPCC man-made radiative forcing for 2011 is 4 times the forcing for 1950. According to the IPCC, CO2 and methane (CH4) are the primary influences on climate. Land use change and variations in solar irradiance are very minor in their estimation. Soon, Connolly and Connolly (SCC15) and others have criticized this view and think that solar variability could play a larger role in climate change. One problem is the long term variation in total solar irradiance and in the amount of that radiation that reaches the earth is unknown at this time. Many different estimates have been published. Unfortunately the IPCC only chose four low variability estimates (as identified in SCC15 in their Figure 8) and ignored the others. Further they assume that the only natural influence on climate for the whole period of the IPCC study (roughly 150 years) is the variation in solar radiation, ignoring episodic volcanism. This assumption has been criticized by Professor Judith Curry and others. Variations in the strength of the sun’s magnetic field, the Earth’s orbit and inclination may be important. Very long term cycles in ocean currents might also be affecting this relatively short 150 year period.
The change in slope between the earlier HadCRUT line and the later line (see Figure 2) is about 0.05°C/decade. The later rate of 0.192°C/decade represents an increase of about 33% in the warming rate. So we are comparing a quadrupling of man’s influence to a 33% change in the rate of warming assuming that the natural forces were the same in both warming periods. It is understandable if this doesn’t make sense to you. Below we discuss this conundrum at more length.
The warming in the early 20th century has always been a bit of a mystery. Attempts to model this warming event have mostly failed. An excellent overview of the peer-reviewed literature on this warming period by Ari Jokimaki can be seen here. Generally it is considered to be natural and roughly equivalent to the warming since 1950, at least in the northern hemisphere and particularly north of 60°N. We have some indications that warming in the United States was more severe in the late 1930’s than today. In particular 1936 has the most US all-time records for daily maximum temperature and 1930 is second.
Measuring the global average surface temperature accurately is problematic. Land based measurements are affected by weather station siting problems and the changing environment around long term weather stations as people have become more urbanized. Attempts at “homogenizing” the temperatures can induce a warming trend because urban areas are warmer than rural areas and many previously rural weather stations have had urban areas surround them over time. In Connolly and Connolly (2014) they point out that the unadjusted US climate network data (their Figure 5) shows that the 1930’s were at least as warm as today. However, once the data are homogenized by the National Climatic Data Center, the 1930’s are suddenly cooler (Connolly and Connolly 2014, Figure 20) than today. Further, most weather stations in the world between 1850 and the present day are in urban areas. For example, only 24.7% of the GHCN network is fully rural.
Only 30% of the surface of the Earth is on land. Oceans cover the largest area and have a correspondingly larger effect on the average temperature. Here the problem is the ocean skin effect. The temperature difference between the air just above the water, the temperature at the surface of the water and the temperature just below the surface is often large. On “average” the temperature of the mixed layer (roughly the upper 50 meters of the ocean) is very similar and slightly higher than the temperature of the air above the ocean. But, the ocean mixed-layer temperature varies much more slowly due to a higher heat capacity. The mixed layer heat capacity is almost 23 times the heat capacity of the entire atmosphere.
Of necessity, the surface temperature over the oceans is not actually measured. Instead the global average surface temperature datasets use temperatures measured with ARGO floats and at the water intakes of ships. The depth of the water intake ports varies making these measurements problematic. Older measurements, especially before World War II, include bucket samples. Bucket samples are taken over the side of a ship. A thermometer is placed in the retrieved bucket to obtain a water temperatures. All of these methods are perfectly adequate for ballpark estimates of the ocean surface temperature +-2°C or so. But, we are interested in very small changes in temperature of only +-0.2°C. None of these methods, with the exception of the ARGO floats, is that accurate. To make it worse, the highly accurate ARGO float data has been adjusted to the ship measurements, not the other way around. As a result, as more ARGO floats are deployed the “average” ocean surface temperature goes up artificially because 0.12°C is added to the measurements. Two hypothetical temperature profiles of the upper ocean are presented in Figure 5. These are from Dr. Peter Minnet, Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Science at the University of Miami. As you can see the upper layer of the ocean is almost always 0.1K to 0.5K cooler than the immediate subsurface water because the ocean is normally warmer than the atmosphere, but this varies a lot depending upon weather, time of day and cloud cover.
Figure 5
Besides an informative discussion of surface temperatures, SCC15 also provides a new land only northern hemisphere surface temperature dataset based mostly upon long term rural temperature stations. A comparison of the early 20th century and the later 20th century using their dataset is shown in Figure 6.
Figure 6
The difference in the two lines is reduced from the HadCRUT value of 0.36°C to 0.02°C. Probably, this is mostly due to using rural data and minimizing the processing and homogenization. But, this dataset is also northern hemisphere land only and not directly comparable to the HadCRUT or NASA datasets. Although the means have moved closer together, the difference in the slopes is similar. The HadCRUT increase is 33% and the mostly rural increase is 29%.
Both the HadCRUT v4 and the SCC15 records agree that the rate has increased.
Figure 7
In Figure 7, the NASA GISS data also shows an increase in the slope from the first period to the second. Here it increases 0.0046°C/year or 0.046°C/decade. This is very similar to the increase of 0.048°C/decade for the HadCRUT v4 dataset and not too different from the northern hemisphere, rural, land only difference of 0.07°C/decade observed with the SCC15 dataset. Like the HadCRUT dataset, this one shows a large offset (0.44°C) between the periods.
The ultimate, presumably natural, cause of the early 20th Century warming is unknown. But, Wyatt and Curry have observed and documented a series of cyclical patterns in numerous climatic records that they collectively call a “Stadium Wave.” This wave is illustrated in Figure 8. They believe that these cycles act in concert, like a stadium wave, to form our current natural climate cycle. The reverse could also be true, a single factor may be causing all of these observed effects, but with different time delays.
Figure 8
The climatic records they used include the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), and various sea ice records. The curves in Figure 8 are normalized climate indices created from the records. They are presented so that up (positive) is warmer and down (negative) is cooler. The various indices are derived from records of atmospheric, oceanic and sea ice data gathered since 1900. The two most important components turned out to be the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation and the sea ice extent in the western Eurasian arctic. Since the Little Ice Age, which ended around 1850, we have been in a period of long term natural warming. The stadium wave periodically enhances or dampens that trend. As the figure shows, from 1910 to 1940 it was enhancing the warming trend. From 1940 to 1970 the trend was dampened, warming resumed in the 1970’s. This corresponds well with the temperature records. For an explanation of the “segments” I, II, III, and IV I refer you to the paper. Figure 9 shows how Wyatt and Curry interpret the various records in terms of climatic effect:
Figure 9
They place the start of early 20th Century warming at about 1918 and the start of the most recent warming at 1976. These dates are not very far from what we picked off of the actual global temperature records. This is a statistical study and it has extracted a cyclic pattern from observations. It does not offer a cause for the pattern.
We can speculate that the natural forces causing the warming trend in the early 20th century are about the same as those acting on us from 1975 to roughly 2009. If this is true, then the increase in warming rate (roughly 30% or 28%-33%) might be due to man’s influence. The extra radiative forcing estimated by the IPCC (bottom of Figure 4, 1950 to 2011) is about 1.72 Watts/m2. They have also estimated that more than half of the warming since 1951 was due to man. No warming occurred between 1945 and 1975, so we are really talking about 1975 to 2009. The increase in the rate of warming from the HadCRUT record is 35 years x 0.0048°C or 0.168°C. The NASA GISS dataset gives us a virtually identical 0.0046°C increase in slope. We assume that the natural influences from 1910 to 1945 were the same as those from 1975 to 2009. We further assume that difference in the two slopes is due to man’s influence. The actual temperature increase from 1975 to 2009, from the best fit line to the HadCRUT record, is 0.672°C. So using our estimate of man’s contribution of 0.168°C, we can estimate that man’s contribution is 25%, much less than half.
SCC15 provides another record based mostly on rural northern hemisphere (land only) weather stations. Here the difference in the two slopes is 0.0074°C/year. So for 35 years the difference is 0.259°C, a little more than the HadCRUT difference. The total temperature change, from the best fit line, is 1.165°C from 1975 to 2009. SCC15 then suggests that man’s contribution is 22%. Very similar to the estimate using the HadCRUT record.
Discussion
The temperature records, except for SCC15, and Wyatt and Curry’s stadium wave are presented here as global. But, in reality all of these records are based mostly on northern hemisphere data. We simply have very little climate data for the southern hemisphere prior to 1979 when satellite microwave sounding units were first put in orbit. We have made our estimates of man’s influence on climate by comparing two 35 year periods of time out of a total record of 136 years. Our sole reason for choosing the two periods is that they looked similar and the earlier one was before man could have had much influence on climate. Choosing one short period as our example of a “natural” warming cycle is very speculative. Then comparing it to a later period and assuming that the entire difference is due to man is even more speculative. All we can say is this scenario is plausible given the data we have today. We would need much longer and better records of our climate and the solar climate to reach a firmer conclusion.
But, the same uncertainties exist for the IPCC’s estimate that man is causing more than 50% of current warming and their estimate that man’s radiative forcing is 4 times what it was in 1950. They picked only one natural radiative forcing, variations in solar irradiance and they picked only low variability total solar irradiance (TSI) records. They ignored equally well supported high variability TSI records. In one respect the estimate presented in this paper is superior to the IPCC estimate. In our estimate we used actual data for the calculation. The IPCC estimate of more than 50% is based only on unvalidated computer models. They are unvalidated because they have not successfully predicted the Earth’s climate to date. Therefore their results should not be used in calculations. A detailed description of their calculation can be found in IPCC Report Chapter 10, page 879. A more compact description is half way down “Facts and Theories.” You can see in the IPCC figures 10.1a and 10.1b how poorly their model reproduces the warming from 1910-1945. Yet they still ascribe nearly all of the warming from 1950 to 2014 to man. This is illogical.
Given the 20th century temperature record, the IPCC summary is internally inconsistent when it claims that man has increased his radiative forcing on the climate 1.72 Watts/m2 from 1950 to 2011 and has caused more than 50% of the warming since 1951. It is very difficult for both of these statements to be true. A rise of 1.72 Watts/m2 represents a global average temperature increase of 2°C using the conversion (1.18°C per Watt/m2) from section 5.1 of SCC15. But, temperatures have only risen 0.57°C in that period using SCC15’s record and 0.55°C using the HadCRUT record. If we cherry-pick the maximum warming in the period (1955 to 2006) we get a maximum warming of 1.1°C from the SCC15 record. The HadCRUT cherry-picked maximum warming is 0.62°C. So, we can get man’s influence to be over 50%, barely, by assuming no natural warming and using the cherry-picked warming from the SCC15 record. But, this is not reasonable. The actual warming from 1951 to 2011 is likely under 0.6°C. If we assume the radiative forcing values from IPCC AR5 Chapter 10 and that man’s influence is greater than 50%, then we would expect more than 1°C of warming, even if there were no natural warming, which is unlikely.
The early 20th century warming is very similar to the warming from 1975 to 2009 and no warming occurred at all from 1945 to 1975. Wyatt and Curry have shown that (statistically) a similar long term climate pattern existed in the two periods.
It is very hard to claim that mostly natural forces caused the warming from 1910 to 1945 and mostly man-made forces caused the similar warming from 1975 to 2009. The simplest explanation, given the data before us, is that the natural forces were the same in the two periods. That being said and accepting that man does have some influence on climate today with his CO2 and methane emissions, it seems more likely that our influence is in the 22% to 25% range. “More than half” is not credible to this observer.
” That being said and accepting that man does have some influence on climate today with his CO2 and methane emissions, it seems more likely that our influence is in the 22% to 25% range. “More than half” is not credible to this observer.”
Maybe just me, but I’d rather you said”…our influence may be in the 22% to 25% range….”
You say ‘may be’, I say ‘seems more likely’, let’s split the whole thing in half.
=================
That seems more likely that it may be a good idea.
::grin::
====
I’d accept localized anthropogenic influence based on changes in land usage leading to the urban heat island effect for example, or from a region of greening, or conversely deforestation. The theoretical and illusive degree (dT) of anthropogenic influence upon the atmosphere by the trivial demons of CH4 & CO2 is yet to be determined, if it is indeed shown to exist. So far, my understanding is that it cannot be detected above the cacophony of natural variation.
And that is “rock solid” understanding on your part.
But the majority gets their Slide Rule out and calculates how much “warming” the CO2 in the atmosphere is causing and their Slide Rule results tells them its gettin hotter n’ hotter …… and they believe it and start sweating profusely.
I’d add:
‘anthropogenic influence based on changes in land usage ‘
I’d add:
‘anthropogenic influence based on changes in land usage exacerbated by poorly sited measurements and misuse of spatial error estimates’
Sorry – poor used of tags
Samuel C Cogar:
I suspect that those of us who actually know how to use a slide rule are most likely to be skeptics. The GIGO ivory tower computer modellers OTOH …
@ Samuel CC
Slide Rules!? – I wish! – The current generation of CAGW “scientists” generally do not possess a sixth sense for orders of magnitude that slide rules provided those of us who used them in our university math and physics courses during the 50s and 60s. When I was first confronted with the question of whether or not we could measure the amount of climate change caused by man, that sixth sense for orders of magnitude quickly provided me with the answer of “NO!”
OOPS, …. Sorry bout that ya all, ….. it was meant to be a little satire directed at the computer modeling climate scientist “claimers”.
A long time ago I was a novice user of my Keuffel and Esser SR ….. but I dun forgot it now.
How does Phil Jones come up with these numbers? http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8511670.stm
John, consistent with that finding is a calculation of 19% as the most that CO2 could contribute to temperatures warming since 1895. That’s when you compute the effects of ocean and solar cycles integrated over time to show accumulations and losses of heat content.
https://rclutz.wordpress.com/2016/06/22/quantifying-natural-climate-change/
Thanks for the link, a good post.
+1
I have a hunch that the AGW effect will be most notable in periods of natural cooling. As Andy points out the early and late 20th century warming periods are statistically indistinguishable. However, the mid 20th century and early 21st century cooling or hiatus periods are quite different. The mid 20th century cooling was so pronounced that atmospheric CO2 stopped rising for about 20 years, despite an acceleration of emissions (most likely due to cooling of the southern oceans). The early 21st century hiatus, might very well have mimicked the mid 20th century cooling without AGW… and that cooling triggered warnings of an impending “ice age.” Which is kind of funny because Earth is still in an ice age.
Since the greenhouse effect doesn’t really cause warming (it retards radiative cooling), it only makes sense that its effects would be most pronounced in natural periods of cooling. Since cooling is bad, AGW, to the extent it exists, is a definitional good thing.
David, we’re just getting started on this 30 year period of cooling, give it time! Also, thanx much for all your wonderful posts— you use a lot of really nice graphs. (yours are the only posts that i ever bookmark) THANX…
Coming from the Fonz, that’s a huge compliment…
We’re 13-18 years into this 30-yr cooling period. I think, but don’t know, that we should have already bottomed out.
The true test of AGW as “friend or foe” will come when the millennial cycle switches from warm to cold. This could happen anytime from now until the early 22nd century.
☺
“We’re just getting started on this 30 year period of cooling.”
Tell me about it in 30 years.
Climate “skeptics” have been predicting cooling for decades. And they complain about computer models.
Who the hell are you that anyone would tell you about anything in thirty years anyway? You’re just a light weight troll coming over here with your alinsky radical mind games. Go back to the cold dark cave that you came crawling out of…
So sayith: David Middleton – August 22, 2016 at 4:17 pm
Tain’t nuttin “most likely” about it. The temperature of the southern hemisphere ocean water is the atmosphere’s “CO2 thermostat”.
When the ocean water temperature “cools”, …. atmospheric CO2 ppm decreases.
When the ocean water temperature “warms”, …. atmospheric CO2 ppm increases.
And that is a scientific fact because the steady and consistent bi-yearly cycling of atmospheric CO2, ……. as defined by the Keeling Curve Graph, ….. cannot be logically or intelligently defined or explained by any other means than the “changing of the equinoxes”. To wit:
http://i1019.photobucket.com/albums/af315/SamC_40/keelingcurve.gif
Samuel, i have to agree with “Ferd the Nerd” on this one. (not that i matter, i’m just a guy in a tee shirt and leather jacket…) Note the (very) wide swings in the northern hemisphere land data. Note also how the swing decreases the further south it goes. Let me know what you think (go slow…) as you have an interesting point of view.
fonzie
It is more likely that northern hemisphere summer shows that growing vegetation is a major carbon sink, than that Henry’s Law can have this large an effect in the mixed layer, which is only 50-150 meters deep depending on wind and wave.
“atmospheric CO2 stopped rising for about 20 years”
I must have missed that in your graph.
afonzarelli – August 23, 2016 at 9:06 am
Fonzie, the above graph you posted is awful purdy ….. but other than that I see no use for it.
First of all it doesn’t show CO2 ppm quantities or seasonal CO2 distribution …… other than the “red” sawtooth line on the right for 1979 to 1991 which I assumes represents part of the Keeling Curve (Mona Loa) data.
Secondly, there is no, per se, northern hemisphere (CO2) land (near-surface) data …. except for specific measurements in specific locales.
To obtain reliably accurate atmospheric CO2 ppm measurements one has to get above the “atmospheric H20 vapor” ….. because the H2O vapor in the near-surface atmosphere is constantly changing and whenever those lightweight but “big” H2O molecules flow into an area (called a low pressure) …….. they PUSH those heavyweight but “little” CO2 and Nitrogen molecules out of the way …… resulting in more “noise” than data.
And that’s why a “low pressure area” is a sign of cloudy skies, rain, thunderstorms and hurricanes …….. and a “high pressure area” is a sign of blue skies and Sunshine. And that is exactly why Charles Keeling built his laboratory high atop the Mauna Loa volcano and began recording accurate CO2 ppm quantities for the 1st time in 1958. To wit:
Afonzarelli also said:
Fonzie, iffen you are referring to that grid line that is labeled “January 1979” then me thinks that it is little more than someone’s imagination of what they were wishing was true.
The data “points” on that grid line ….. makes no sense at all ….. simply because it is in violation of the “gas laws” ….. because the “gas laws” don’t give a “hoot” about latitudes …… but do care about altitudes.
Me thinks whoever “composed” that grid line ……. desperately wants you to believe that the “greening” of the Northern Hemisphere is directly the cause of the Summertime decrease in atmospheric CO2 ppm. But “sorry bout that”, Fonzie, because that is a biological impossibility.
The Spring and Summertime outgassing of CO2 by the decomposing dead biomass is equal to, if not greater than the ingassing of CO2 by the live biomass. And there is very little to zilch Fall and Wintertime outgassing of CO2 simply because it would VIOLATE the Refrigerator/Freezer Law that retards/prevents microbial decomposition of dead biomass. Here, click n’ read what the USDA Food Safety rules say.
I hope the above was enlightening, if not, ask again. SamC
So sayith: ristvan – August 23, 2016 at 11:56 am
Ristvan, the summer growth of NH vegetation is a per se, major carbon sink. BUT, that is only relevant iffen when the “observer” is looking at the CO2 ppm problem with “tunnel vision”.
Being a learned Biologist I will attempt to enlighten you on the scientific-FACTS-of-the-matter.
First of all, the “greening” growth of NH vegetation is “latitude dependent”. Now what that means is, ….. springtime biomass growth from Texas to Florida begins in January …… and springtime biomass growth from Maine to Montana won’t begin until mid-April to May. Click to see US Planting Zones Map
And secondly, those springtime “warming temperatures” …..in their respective Planting Zones ….. will jump-start the microbial decomposition of the dead biomass thus generating a massive outgassing of CO2 … which will ALWAYS precede, from one (1) to three (3) weeks, any ingassing of CO2 by the live biomass. The initial growth or “greening” of the live biomass in the springtime is the sole result of the stored sugars/nutrients in the root system of the plant ….. and NO ingassing of atmospheric CO2 is possible until there are fully formed “green” leaves/foliage with functioning stomata.
And thirdly, from mid-August thru mid-September the NH “green” growing biomass starts “shutting down” production because of the decreasing hours of daily Sunshine and the decreasing of nighttime temperatures. And because of the lack of Autumnal moisture/rainfall and the decreasing temperatures of September and October the microbial decomposition of dead biomass pretty much comes to a “stop” …… because said microbes require “moist” dead biomass and temperatures above 40F, and ideally above 60F. (That is why dried apples, raisins, prunes and pemmican are not subject to microbial decay)
And ristvan, if you can associate and/or correlate the above stated “randomly occurring” scientifically factual commentary ……. with the “steady & consistent” 58 years of “bi-yearly atmospheric CO2 cycling” ……. as defined by the Keeling Curve Graph and/or the Mauna Loa official CO2 ppm record …. then I would be greatly interested in what you have to say.
Also ristvan, there are “fourthlys” and “fifthlys” that I can write about but my finger is getting tired from typing and therefore I cease for now and await your response. Sam C
@Yushchyshyn,
Are you genetically obtuse?
Allow myself to repeat myself..
It’s “most likely” the southern oceans because it is possible, but unlikely, that the carbon sink was on land.
Plant stomata reconstructions (Kouwenberg et al., 2005, Finsinger and Wagner-Cremer, 2009) and contemporary chemical analyses (Beck, 2007) indicate that CO2 levels in the 1930′s to early 1940′s were in the 340 to 400 ppmv range and then declined sharply in the 1950’s. These findings have been rejected by the so-called scientific consensus because this fluctuation is not resolved in Antarctic ice cores. However, MacFarling Meure et al., 2006 found possible evidence of a mid-20th Century CO2 decline in the DE08 ice core…
From about 1940 through 1955, approximately 24 billion tons of carbon went straight from the exhaust pipes into the oceans and/or biosphere.
Figure 4. Oh where, oh where did all that carbon go?[/caption]
Figure 5. Natural sources probably account for 40-60% of the rise in atmospheric CO2 since 1750.[/caption]
Figure 6. CO2 from plant stomata: Northern Sweden (Finsinger et al., 2009), Northern Spain (Garcia-Amorena, 2008), Southern Sweden (Jessen, 2005), Washington State USA (Kouwenberg, 2004), Netherlands (Wagner et al., 1999), Denmark (Wagner et al., 2002).[/caption]
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="479"]
If oceanic uptake of CO2 caused ocean acidification, shouldn’t we see some evidence of it? Shouldn’t “a large additional sink of ~3.0 PgC yr-1” (or more) from ~1940–1955 have left a mark somewhere in the oceans? Maybe dissolved some snails or a reef?
Had atmospheric CO2 simply followed the preindustrial trajectory, it very likely would have reached 315-345 ppmv by 2010…
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="479"]
Oddly enough, plant stomata-derived CO2 reconstructions indicate that CO2 levels of 315-345 ppmv have not been uncommon throughout the Holocene…
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="480"]
So, what on Earth could have driven all of that CO2 variability before humans started burning fossil fuels? Could it possibly have been temperature changes?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/07/a-brief-history-of-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide-record-breaking/
“Are you genetically obtuse?”
He’s as thick as a brick…
It’s “most likely” the southern oceans because it is possible, but unlikely, that the carbon sink was on land.
Plant stomata reconstructions (Kouwenberg et al., 2005, Finsinger and Wagner-Cremer, 2009) and contemporary chemical analyses (Beck, 2007) indicate that CO2 levels in the 1930′s to early 1940′s were in the 340 to 400 ppmv range and then declined sharply in the 1950’s. These findings have been rejected by the so-called scientific consensus because this fluctuation is not resolved in Antarctic ice cores. However, MacFarling Meure et al., 2006 found possible evidence of a mid-20th Century CO2 decline in the DE08 ice core…
From about 1940 through 1955, approximately 24 billion tons of carbon went straight from the exhaust pipes into the oceans and/or biosphere.
Figure 4. Oh where, oh where did all that carbon go?[/caption]
Figure 5. Natural sources probably account for 40-60% of the rise in atmospheric CO2 since 1750.[/caption]
Figure 6. CO2 from plant stomata: Northern Sweden (Finsinger et al., 2009), Northern Spain (Garcia-Amorena, 2008), Southern Sweden (Jessen, 2005), Washington State USA (Kouwenberg, 2004), Netherlands (Wagner et al., 1999), Denmark (Wagner et al., 2002).[/caption]
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="479"]
If oceanic uptake of CO2 caused ocean acidification, shouldn’t we see some evidence of it? Shouldn’t “a large additional sink of ~3.0 PgC yr-1” (or more) from ~1940–1955 have left a mark somewhere in the oceans? Maybe dissolved some snails or a reef?
Had atmospheric CO2 simply followed the preindustrial trajectory, it very likely would have reached 315-345 ppmv by 2010…
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="479"]
Oddly enough, plant stomata-derived CO2 reconstructions indicate that CO2 levels of 315-345 ppmv have not been uncommon throughout the Holocene…
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="480"]
So, what on Earth could have driven all of that CO2 variability before humans started burning fossil fuels? Could it possibly have been temperature changes?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/07/a-brief-history-of-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide-record-breaking/
David,
Forget the historical data compiled by the late Ernst Beck: most were taken over land where one can find 200-500 ppmv, depending of time of the day, wind speed and sunlight… The 80 ppmv “peak” in Beck’s compilation around 1942 is the equivalent of destroying 1/3 of all land vegetation and restoring it both in a few years… Moreover, the much beloved other proxy by some skeptics – stomata data – don’t show such a peak, neither do the 13C/12C ratio data in leaves or in coralline sponges or the high resolution (less than a decade) Law Dome ice cores: these show even a small drop in CO2 in the period 1940-1945, opposite to Beck’s “peak”. See my comment on the historical data at:
http://www.ferdinand-engelbeen.be/klimaat/beck_data.html
If oceanic uptake of CO2 caused ocean acidification, shouldn’t we see some evidence of it?
The earlier (glass electrode) measurements were simply not accurate enough to detect the extremely small change in pH (about 0.1 pH unit over the period 1850-2000). Recent colorimetric measurements have sufficient resolution to show a real drop in pH at several fixed stations (and ships measurements) all over the world.
Had atmospheric CO2 simply followed the preindustrial trajectory, it very likely would have reached 315-345 ppmv by 2010
Not possible, as the oceans follow Henry’s law (no matter if that is static or in this case dynamic): not more than 16 ppmv/K up or down. As the emissions in the period 1945-1960 were about 43 GtC or ~20 ppmv as CO2, plus the fact that the increase of CO2 pressure in the atmosphere of that period was already good to remove half of the yearly emissions into the oceans, you only need a -temporary- drop of 0.6°C in average seawater temperature to explain the non-increasing levels…
Stomata data are CO2 proxies, not measurements, with their own problems: they grow by definition on land, where average CO2 levels are biased high compared to the bulk of the atmosphere. That can be compensated for by comparing to … ice cores CO2 over the past century, but nobody knows how much the local bias changed over the centuries because of changing landscapes in the main wind direction, even the main wind direction may have changed with climate (MWP-LIA)…
Simply said: if there is a difference between the average CO2 level in stomata and ice cores over the period of the resolution in the ice cores, then the stomata data are certainly wrong and should be corrected for a changed bias…
Figure 5 shows no significant CO2 variability before 1800.
Plant stomata can close during droughts to conserve water.
Figure 4 shows CO2 leveling for 10 years, not 20 years.
Ferdinand Englebeen said:
” the high resolution (less than a decade) Law Dome ice cores” – the measurement of greenhouse gases from the bubbles in the Law Dome ice cores do not have resolution of less than a decade. According to Etheridge et al (1996):
If there is no air mixing past the sealing depth, the air age spread will originate mainly from diffusion, estimated from the firn diffusion models to be 10-15 years……..It is seen below that a wider air age spread than expected for diffusion alone is required to explain the observed CO2 differences between the ice cores.
Thus, the resolution of the temporal accuracy of the greenhouse gas concentrations from the Law Dome cores are 10 – 15 years at best, and a wider spread is likely. The same goes for the measurements of methane taken from those cores.
Etheridge, D. M., Steele, L. P., Langenfelds, L. P., and Francey, R. J.: 1996, ‘Natural and anthropogenic changes in atmospheric CO2 over the last 1000 years from air in Antarctic ice and firn’, J. Geophys. Res. 101, 4115–4128.
Great post, David M.
Now ya all take notice and react accordingly, because it is MLHO that …… Ferdinand Engelbeen “talks a good talk” that make one think it verges on the “believable” …… but Ferdinand doesn’t believe that refrigerators and/or freezers are capable of preventing microbial decay (rotting) of dead biomass (foods).
And anyone that would claim that the Ice Core CO2 Proxy data is highly more accurate and believable than is the fossilized Stomata CO2 Proxy data …. is either a biological science illiterate or extremely biased due to a funded interest association or connection.
Plant stomata, when controlled for other variables, are accurate proxies for past CO2 changes. This has been demonstrated dozens, if not hundreds of times, in peer-reviewed scientific publications. And… gas bubbles in ice cores are not direct measurements of past atmospheric CO2 levels. The measurements have to be adjusted, according to models, in order to replicate past atmospheric CO2 levels.
Generally speaking, the stomata and high-resolution ice cores are fully compatible. The stomata chronologies have much higher frequency content than even the most high resolution ice cores; therefore they have much higher resolution than ice cores. However, due to their higher frequency content, the stomata have a much lower signal-to-noise ratio than ice cores do.
Stomata data are simply an inconvenient, high resolution, but noisy, record of global changes in atmospheric CO2.
Regarding the resolution of the DE08 core at Law Dome. The delta between the gas age and ice age is the minimum resolution (about 30 years). Deconvolution and other signal processing methods can boost that resolution to about 10 years, assuming the firn densification models are accurate.
However, the point here is not the validity of stomata and other inconvenient pre-industrial CO2 proxies. The point is that the mid-20th Century cooling period was so pronounced, that the Earth (most likely the southern oceans) absorbed all of the anthropogenic carbon emissions (possibly even more than all of) over a rough 20-yr period.
David “I have a hunch”
Why would you expect any 2 periods to be similar and of course because your hunch tells you they are not it must be CO2 that done it. Its natural variation and it is not predictable even by your magic hunches.
While the processes are very stochastic, the Earth tends to do things in a generally cyclical manner. There is a very clear roughly 60-yr signal in Holocene temperature records… Alternating ~30-yr periods of warming and cooling. I “expect” consistency. When I don’t see consistency, I have an anomaly which begs explanation.
The ~60-yr cycle is the peak at about 15 cycles/1,000 yrs…
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/04/27/a-geological-perspective-on-lovejoys-99-solution/
The early and late 20th century warming periods are nearly identical, hence no anomaly.
The mid-20th century cooling and early 21st century hiatus periods are quite different, hence an anomaly.
But the mandate of the IPCC is to deal with man-made global warming, so they will find man-made warming whether it is there or not.:-)
Since that’s the only kind they are looking for, that’s the only kind they will find… it’s like only looking for your lost car keys under streetlights because it’s the only place you can see… 😉
Give the crooked gatekeepers at GISS, NOAA and HadCRUT a few more years to cook the books, and the early 20th century warming will turn into cooling.
The first two criminal enterprises will however be shut down should the US elect a President Trump and return a GOP Senate.
Meant “Given”.
Wouldn’t trust the gatekeepers as far as I could adjust them. Forgot to mention BEST. All you can do is shut them all down and start over from scratch. With Steve McIntyre in charge.
With Bob Tisdale’s revelation of model tampering, past data tampering is so passe. They are using model manipulation to tie discrete weather events to climate change. Those turgid government climate assessments need something to support their political speculations. Need a nap? Read one.
Data going forward will retain their massaged nature, but they should give us a believable trend for the early 21st Century. The period up to mid-2020’s should settle the AGW debate. RSS, UAH and radiosondes have already spoken, in my estimation. But they are discounted because the run counter to the AGW meme.
As long as GISS and its unindicted co-conspirators are allowed to exist, they will keep cooking the books, for the past, present and future. The supposed temperature series are politically-motivated works of science fiction for advocacy, not in any way, shape or form science.
So, you want to let politics control the data, not science.
Jim Y is a real study. Taken at his word, he believes science is “untainted” by politics. Somehow science is divorced from real world pecuniary and emotional/ego human failings.
I discern from the totality of his statements here that he believes there are no legitimate questions of current climate orthodoxy. Theory trumps observations. Denial, confabulation or silence meet reasoned arguments. It’s all OK. Sad.
Likely Gorebot. Top of the class at school, and still naive because they’ve been lied to.
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SKS stinks, Jim, because too often they pervert a skeptical argument into a strawman and then high five each other when they burn down their fantasy. You’ll learn.
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kim says:
“SKS stinks, Jim, because too often they pervert a skeptical argument into a strawman and then high five each other when they burn down their fantasy…”
One of kim’s better posts, out of many excellent comments over the years. Props & kudos!
‘estimated” really means ‘made up”. They’ll never admit it, but they really don’t have a clue, and this whole hysteria is based upon figures pluckes out of some warmist technocrat’s @rs3
BTW An informative and easily understood article. Thank you Andy.
My punctuation and spelling in my last comment were terrible.
It’s my fat fginres on my tlpeonehe kyaepd taht are ciuansg the pborelm.
teh horror
Curious what the correlation between the sets in Figure 3 is…
Dang. Annual anomaly correlation = 0.81, r-squared = 0.66.
Interestingly, if I sort each of those sets from smallest to largest, correlation = 0.98, r-squared = 0.97.
Thanks, I should have included that in the post.
Michael Jankowski: I just computed the correlation coefficient for the monthly data (11 month running average) and got 0.86. Using the raw month-month data I got 0.99. I suspect that the month to month is driving this. In other words the January to December variablity is dominating the statistic rather than the year to year. Your number is more appropriate since the monthly variability is removed and you are looking at year to year. So, 0.81 it is.
“Of necessity, the surface temperature over the oceans is not actually measured. Instead the global average surface temperature datasets use temperatures measured with ARGO floats and at the water intakes of ships.”
Wrong.
Go download ICOAADS. you will find Marine Air temperature.
or
https://www.bodc.ac.uk/data/information_and_inventories/edmed/report/368/
I like the note from the link you provided:
“Instruments… Inapplicable”
So, I guess they do not use any instruments in measuring the air temperature over oceans (?)
During the mid 1960s when I was serving on cargo ships which were “weather reporting vessels” , every 6 hours we measured the sea temperature in the engine cooling water intake where it came into the engine room, usually between 15 and 30 feet below the surface, and we measured the air temperature using thermometers, wet and dry, housed in a Stevenson Screen on the weather side of the bridge, usually 40 to 55 feet above the sea surface.
So temperatures of air and water were taken although not at the sea surface.
Janus100 said:
““Instruments… Inapplicable”
So, I guess they do not use any instruments in measuring the air temperature over oceans (?)”
You need to look at the sources they reference.
“Global analyses of sea surface temperature, sea ice, and night marine air temperature since the late nineteenth century”
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2002JD002670/full
“File not found” for the data website link.
Perhaps Jones has lost the data again?
In defense of Mr. Mosher, the anomalies are temperatures… They are the difference between measured temperatures and a climatology baseline.
That said, while there are some actual measurements of marine air temperatures, most of the historical marine air temperature record is extrapolated from sparse water temperature readings taken from ships, either through drop buckets or engine intakes. These sparse extrapolated data points are calibrated with actual measurements and then interpolated by Hadley or fabricated by NOAA & GISS. Yet they are supposedly accurate.to +/-0.1 °C… or some such ridiculous accuracy claim.
Steve:
wrong.
I looked at the link you so kindly provided.
It was totally non relevant to question at hand.
It provided no detail whatsoever beyond the notation that the time series was based on “in-situ observations”
Thanks for linking to dead end.
Did you even look at the link?
“measured with ARGO floats and at the water intakes of ships.”
… which provides the opportunity for an additional adjustment.
Steve, actually MOHMAT is not a component of the HadCRUT v4 dataset I used, or the NASA dataset. The Hadley centre explains why: “Why are sea surface temperatures rather than air temperatures used over the oceans?
Over the ocean areas the most plentiful and most consistent measurements of temperature have been taken of the sea surface. Marine air temperatures (MAT) are also measured and would, ideally, be preferable when combining with land air temperatures, but they involve more complex problems with homogeneity than SSTs (Kennedy et al., 2011). The problems are reduced using only night marine air temperature (NMAT) but at the expense of discarding approximately half the MAT data. Our use of SST anomalies implies that we are tacitly assuming that the anomalies of SST are in agreement with those of MAT. Kennedy et al. (2011) provide comparisons of hemispheric and large area averages of SST and NMAT anomalies.” I don’t think that marine air temperatures are used in any global temperature record. Perhaps they are used to help correct deeper measurements to a surface reading somehow. There are just too many problems measuring air temperature over an ocean.
Karl used truncated NMT data to adjust SST. In the process, an obsolete climate model (different correlation parameters for NMT vs. SST than current models) was used. Even then, Karl used statistical outliers.
Subsequent observed NMT deviated from observed SST.
Please, in the future do not reference SST (models or observations) without first reading Bob Tisdale’s various works. His is fact driven, not opinion.
Dave Fair
I’ve always wondered how the accuracy of data can ever be greater than the accuracy of the instruments taking the readings.
Even without factoring in the contamination factors and the horrendous lack of data coverage.
Forrest Gardener on August 23, 2016 at 6:44 am
David, with respect anomalies are not temperatures.
Sorry: this is the signature of a person who does not understand very much about temperature measurements.
This statement is really strange when we think that ALL institutions measuring temperature (i.e. not only NASA, NOAA, HadCRUT, BEST, but of course UAH and RSS as well) publish their results in form of anomalies.
And what happens when we don’t care about that? We look at charts like this [1]
http://fs5.directupload.net/images/160712/fzo8skcq.jpg
instead of looking at charts like this [2]
http://fs5.directupload.net/images/160712/ncr2ir4g.jpg
And what would happen when we would use absolute temperatures instead of anomalies (which after all are nothing else than deltas wrt the mean value of a reference period)?
We simply would not be able to see even chart [1]. Because
– the average temperature at Earth’s surface is around 15 °C;
– the average temperature at the troposphere level measured by e.g. UAH in 2015 is 264 K, i.e. -9 °C.
And thus we never could be able to compare surface data with troposphere data as shown in chart [2].
Temperature anomalies also hide models’ abysmal representation of actual weather and climate processes. Kindly pardon the following rant.
Explain to me, please, cloud formation with “actual” temperatures plus or minus 3 degrees C or more (in the models). I could go on listing temperature dependent physical processes, but my point is, no matter Gavin Schmidt’s old apologia, real temperatures mater when discussing or modeling real world physics.
Models do not explain the lack of tropospheric humidity increases in response to a warming surface. Humidity should increase, according to our betters. Satellite humidity estimates are consistent; stable (no increase) tropospheric humidity levels, contrasted with increasing(?) surface temperature estimates of late. Bite me if you think I am wrong in believing the most up-to-date humidity estimates from those expensive satellites. Karlized temperature estimates are beyond parody. Read Bob Tisdale!
Current popular climate science estimations of radiation physics DEMAND a tropospheric response. Massive 21st Century increases in atmospheric CO2 DEMAND an increase in global tropospheric humidity and temperatures. It’s simple physics, plebian clod.
To me, a fairly (haw, haw) educated and knowledgeable technocrat by most definitions, radiation physics as understood by its practitioners does not seem to encompass other knowledge disciplines. I assume that their calculations would accurately emulate a blackbody emitting in a vacuum. The earth’s chaotic system? Go suck a popsicle. Scr%w your theory, I’ll take the objective facts.
Modelers are always playing a catch-up game. Change in true knowledge is episodic in any given discipline, notwithstanding a pile of “scholarly” papers expanding on genius. Just one example: Newtonian physics fell to the Einsteinian.
In over 30 years, our budding geniuses have failed to resolve the fundamental cloud formation and evolution processes. Notwithstanding government propaganda, it is not “basic physics” nor “settled science.” Every new paper shows the evolving nature of our understanding of what is actually going on out there. Even IPCC AR5 has to fudge the model outputs and substitute unidentified experts’ opinion in forecasting mid-term global warming.
Natural climate processes are not understood and are not reflected in AGW “science” models. Fer Christssakes, even model hindcasts before 2005 can’t get it right! Some studies have shown the climate models driven by SST alone (no “CO2 forcing”), get land temperatures close to actuals. I don’t believe that is indicative of any fundamental truths, however, any more than I believe any other 100-year computer game speculation.
I do believe that oceans responding to various solar-driven processes (modulated by coupled atmospheric dynamics) determine our weather and, ultimately, our climate states. I don’t claim to understand it, but then again, no one else has proven to me they do understand the complexities. The data indicates cycles, but it remains to seen in the mid-2020’s if anybody, model driven or not, has a line to Delphi.
So, justify all the temperature anomalies graphs you want. I, instead, will use real measured stuff on the ground locally to describe real physical properties as they occur. Those describe the past and the present local/regional temperatures and our limited understanding of their drivers.
Who the h##l knows what will happen in the future. Use a model? Cast the ancient runes? Both will give you the accuracy you want, if actual model results are any measure.
See you in 2025!
Dave Fair
Mr. Mosher, I think the people on this thread would benefit from a real world exercise of your “Wandering in the Weeds” magic.
Bob Tisdale, in some detail, deconstructed Karl’s 2015 adjustment of SSTs based on NMT.
I encourage you to apply your keen wit and discerning eye to Bob’s four or five posts on the topic. If you are truly able to tease out the fundamental truth and relationship of the various data series, determine the felicity of using an old climate model and parse the applicability of Karl’s statistical methods, then we might know if Karl’s manipulations are a valid representation of “the truth.”
Sick’em, Torquemada! If not, maybe you are not the scourge you claim and I hope you to be.
Dave Fair
@ Dave Fair, aka: dogdaddyblog
Hey, …. no pardon necessary or needed, ….. you keep posting those “rants” because I like the way you think.
Its “old school” commentary that appears to me to be based in/on a learned knowledge of the subject matter and derived via common sense thinking, logical reasoning and intelligent deductions.
@Forrest Gardener,
The anomalies are still temperatures…
x °C – Baseline °C = Anomaly °C
Or more accurately…
x K – Baseline K = Anomaly K
This amazing corner of the thread I had completely forgotten…
So it seems that while if you put 17 kg on a balance and take 15 kg away, 2 kg remain and thus 17 kg – 15 kg = 2kg is a measureable weight and quite similarly 17 mph – 15 mph = 2 mph is a measureable speed, 17 °C – 15 °C = 2 °C is no measureable temperature.
Great. An advance in science. Amazing.
I did a back of the envelope computation about 5 years ago and got similar results. Also keep in mind the 22-25% also includes the millennial cycle influence on temperatures.
” A rise of 1.72 Watts/m2 represents a global average temperature increase of 2°C using the conversion (1.18°C per Watt/m2) from section 5.1 of SCC15. But, temperatures have only risen 0.57°C in that period using SCC15’s record and 0.55°C using the HadCRUT record.”
This is wrong in many ways. The 1.18 factor is a regression slope of NH temperatures (not global) against TSI for particular times. It doesn’t relate equilibrium conditions, so you can’t apply it to a change over different periods. You have to take account of the time varying issues. It takes time for fluxes to heat things. Plus of course, that Soon’s ratio is hardly the only (or best) choice. As they point out, it is about twice that of another paper.
Dr. Soon’s calculation is only one of many. It is high to be sure, but not as high as some of the IPCC estimates. If we assume no feedbacks at all and use lambda zero, we get ( 1.72 x 0.312) a number like 0.54K. Interesting, right? That happens to be about what one would calculate with the data alone! Perhaps the net feedback is actually zero. In that case the IPCC has no reason to exist.
Lambda zero + feedback has been estimated at anything from zero (even negative) to over 1.5. I used SCC15’s estimate because it is based on real data, even though it is a bit at the high end.
“use lambda zero, we get ( 1.72 x 0.312) a number like 0.54K. Interesting, right?”
No, it’s not interesting. Again, it’s Monckton’s fallacy. The 0.312 is an equilibrium response to a steady forcing. Here the forcing is not steady (increases over a period), and the temperature is not equilibrium.
There is no point in just plucking wrong figures out of the air and saying “Interesting?”.
Mr. May, Dr. Spencer stated not too long ago that he thinks that about half of recent warming is anthropogenic. And he made sure to add the caveat, “BUT, I can’t prove it”…
btw, don’t feel bad that you can’t write as well as Spencer. NOBODY CAN !!!
“There is no point in just plucking wrong figures out of the air and saying “Interesting?”.”
Self awareness is no longer a desired trait amongst climate scientists.
Nick Stokes: You are correct that Lord Monckton derived 0.312 as the Planck parameter. However, as you can see in AR5, WG1, Chapter 9, page 818, that is exactly the value used by the IPCC models. The give the Planck Feedback value which is the inverse of the Planck parameter. Their value is 3.2 Wm2/(deg C), inverted to (deg C)/Wm2 that is 0.3125. Still interesting in my opinion.
“Still interesting in my opinion.”
You are totally missing the point. I’m not disputing that 0.312 is the Planck parameter. I’m pointing out that the Planck parameter is the ratio of the eventual equilibrium temperature to a sustained flux. You can apply it to such a situation. But not here. The 1.72 is not a sustained flux, but the peak flux reached just at the end, and the 0.54°C is not an equilibrium temperature, but the temperature at an intermediate stage of the warming process.
I was under the impression that radiation response was instantaneous and non-cumulative.
Nick says “There is no point in just plucking wrong figures out of the air and saying “Interesting?”.”
Yet you have no issue you with your “we are not at equilibrium” wish fest BS.
Nick Stokes: It doesn’t relate equilibrium conditions,
What exactly is the relevance of that, given that the climate system is never in equilibrium conditions, or even in steady-state, but is always fluctuating (apparently within a range, at least since the end of the last Ice Age)? What exactly is the best approach to treating the case that the early 20th century warming was entirely “natural” and the late 20th century warming included anthropogenic effects?
You have to take account of the time varying issues. It takes time for fluxes to heat things. Has anybody in fact done that well? What is the lag, in years, between a change in forcing and the occurrence of 90% of the hypothetical “equilibrium” response at the surface? 4 years, maybe? If so, Andy May’s calculations are reasonably accurate.
A certain amount of alarmism is built on the assumption that the temp rise since 1975 is entirely anthropogenic, even entirely due to anthropogenic CO2 — how reasonable is that?
“What exactly is the relevance of that, given that the climate system is never in equilibrium conditions”
Because the definition of ECS relates to equilibrium conditions. That may be hard to observe. But that doesn’t mean you can say that because it’s hard, you can accept any half-baked (literally!) thing instead.
I’ll return to my swimming pool analogy. What temperature rise can you sustain with, say, 100 kW heating? That’s an important figure for a manager. But a swimming pool isn’t in equilibrium either. There is diurnal; even an intermittent presence of warm bodies. You just have to estimate properly. And applying 100 kW for an hour isn’t the way to do it.
“What is the lag, in years, between a change in forcing and the occurrence of 90% of the hypothetical “equilibrium” response at the surface? 4 years, maybe?”
Lord M likes and cited the result of Roe:
It’s a lot more than 4 years. Even a century only gets to about 2/3 the limit.
Nick
So all the feedbacks till equilibrium are positive? Your spewing BS.
Nick Stokes: But that doesn’t mean you can say that because it’s hard, you can accept any half-baked (literally!) thing instead.
Thank you for your response.
The problem is not that estimating the equilibrium is “hard”, the problem is that an equilibrium does not exist. The calculated result does not refer to anything in the climate system. The climate system is a high-dimensional (i.e. more than 3 dimensions), non-linear dissipative system. It does not even have a steady-state (because of the constantly changing inputs), but might have an approximate steady-state trajectory within an attractor.
What is the best approach to combining the claims that the early 20th century increase is 100% natural and the late 20th century rise is due entirely to anthropogenic CO2?
“the problem is that an equilibrium does not exist”
Thbis stuff gets silly. ECS has been around forever – it is a useful measure. It is equivalent to talking about DC gain, say, in electrical circuits. It is a limit concept. It gives a calculated value for how much temperature rise doubling CO2 would give if then held fixed for a long time. Of course, CO2 won’t be held fixed either. It’s a scenario. If you don’t like it, you can use notions of transient climate response, or effective CS. TCR tracks a 1% rise over 70 years. That doesn’t “exist” either. But its easier to calculate.
“What is the best approach to combining the claims that the early 20th century increase is 100% natural and the late 20th century rise is due entirely to anthropogenic CO2?”
Whose claims? CO2 was increasing in early 20th Cen. It rose 10 ppm from 1910 to 1940 (Law Dome). It rose 48 ppm from 1975 to 2005. The IPCC says it is very confident that at least half the later warming was AGW. It’s best estimate was that the AGW component matched the total.
Nick, Dr Spencer stated that the ipcc ignores natural internal variability in his 2008 testimony before the senate. (he then called it the “800 pound gorilla in the room”) In light of the obvious, then, what merit has your appeal to ipcc consensus?
“Nick, Dr Spencer stated that the ipcc ignores natural internal variability in his 2008 testimony”
Well, I don’t know what he actually said. But that statement is obvious nonsense. AR4, for example, has a chapter on “Understanding and Attributing Climate Change”. That is all about quantifying natural variability, and working out what goes beyond it. Other IPCC reports have similar. An early para says:
“Internal variability is present on all time scales. Atmospheric processes that generate internal variability are known to operate on time scales ranging from virtually instantaneous (e.g., condensation of water vapour in clouds) up to years (e.g., troposphere-stratosphere or inter-hemispheric exchange). Other components of the climate system, such as the ocean and the large ice sheets, tend to operate on longer time scales. These components produce internal variability of their own accord and also integrate variability from the rapidly varying atmosphere (Hasselmann, 1976). In addition, internal variability is produced by coupled interactions between components, such as is the case with the El-Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO; see Chapters 3 and 8).”
Nick, please show us how the IPCC’s pile of bureaucratic words explains early 1900’s cooling and warming episodes. It sure wasn’t transient weather phenomenon.
The IPCC knows large-scale natural processes are at work, they just can’t describe them nor model them. All the words in the world can’t dance around that fact.
Nick Stokes: ECS has been around forever – it is a useful measure. It is equivalent to talking about DC gain, say, in electrical circuits. It is a limit concept.
High dimensional, non-linear, dissipative systems do not have equilibria. Even with constant input, such systems have oscillations, not limits. Physically, the climate system does not have something equivalent to the DC gain in an electrical circuit. You can read up on this in, for example, Modern Thermodynamics by Kondepudi and Prigogine, the last few chapters.
Nick, you slid around the “natural vs. anthropogenic” question. We all know the IPCC AR5 said warming from 1950 was estimated to be all anthropogenic, but that is was certain that at a minimum it was more than 50%.
We all also know that the early 1900’s cooling and warming was most likely natural. You can argue for some anthro, but it is meaningless in the overall scheme of things.
Looking at climate model outputs vs. actual temperatures, early 1900 cooling and warming periods are not modeled accurately. Even knowing that such periods occurred, modelers were unable to program in such events. Wildly varying ECS and aerosol parameters between models indicate a lack of understanding of the “it’s just the physics.” Some models even calculate a negative energy balance, while at the same time showing surface temperature increases.
AR5 model results comparing “natural” with “anthro” temperatures from 1950 is epitome of institutional hubris, if not outright deception. The IPCC KNOWS it cannot model natural climate variations. That knowledge is implicit in its decision to ignore model outputs in estimating mid-term warming.
Given available data. neither you nor I nor anybody else can know what percentage of late 1900’s temperature rise was natural. We do know, though, that significant prior warming and cooling periods during the instrument record occurred naturally. Additionally, paleoclimate studies confirm natural warming and cooling periods.
If the above is not sufficient argument that there are unknown climate forces in action, then discussions with you are impossible.
Dave Fair
matthewrmarler
“Even with constant input, such systems have oscillations, not limits.”
We’re used to handling much bigger oscillations – diurnal and seasonal. There is still a climate. Time averaging. As, say, with mean turbulent flow.
“Kondepudi and Prigogine”
Well, Prigogine became famous starting 60’s for nonequilibrium thermodynamics. But there was already an ancient and entirely useful theory of equilibrium thermodynamics. And it didn’t just apply to strict universal equilibrium.
The thing is, it’s all about time scales. A dynamic equilibrium in chemistry just means that the reaction kinetics is faster than the timescale of the changes you are considering. It doesn’t mean you can’t be altering the equilibrium, as in practical chemistry you often are. And so it is here. Talking about climate means a decadal scale at least. On that scale, feedback processes are fast enough that you can take them to be instant. Diurnal, annual and even (mostly) ENSO oscillations average out. But the slow processes of diffusion of heat into ocean depths are a non-equilibrium effect. ECS assumes they too have gone to completion, and that is why you can’t use ECS numbers before the process is complete. Unless you do accounting for such flows, as in effective sensitivity, or some kind of advance estimate estimate of the endpoint, as in numerical accelerated convergence.
Nick;
You nor anyone else have a clue what the long term equilibrium feedbacks will be. it is just as likely if not more so that the long term response to “rapid” initial positive changes is negative counter forcing. As for the “long term diffusion of heat into the ocean” no one has established that atmospheric CO2 can warm the oceans and certainly no one has or can establish that CO2 is warming the oceans without first warming the atmosphere. It is pretty simple to establish though that a warming ocean does warm the atmosphere. You have past the point of credulity and have entered the world of make believe.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzf6z-oHP8U
“They have totally ignored the 800 pound gorilla in the room, natural internal chaotic fluctuations in the climate system.”
“It seems that the IPCC leadership has a history of ignoring natural climate variability.”
Nick, o.k., fine, they’ve got sections on natural variability, but then they go on to claim that were it not for human emissions we would have been experiencing slight cooling. How realistic is that in light of the fact that we seen (30 year) warming/cooling cycles throughout the entirety of the temperature record? (what good is your appeal to consensus here when the consensus is clearly wrong?)
Nick, my wife’s chickens are as adept as you in scratching and flinging dross in the air.
Nick, my wife has corrected me. She points out that scratching and flinging is what chickens are supposed to do! She told me she assumes you are not a chicken, although hunting and pecking on the keyboard might be indicative of such propensities. She defends you!
Phil Jones told this to a journalist years ago. In fact there are three periods of temp rise with similar slopes, one back in the Nineteenth Century. The cycle is approximately 60 years and once convinced me that the PDO was the capo de capos of the climate capers.
Similarly, the slopes of the two intervening periods are also similar, as may well the third which is just now well under way.
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http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1850
Thanks. Not quite as similar as I remember it, but it’s there, approx. 1850 to 1880.
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YES, kim, we have had three incarnations of the so called “jesus cycle” of 30 year periods of warming (since 1850). If there is one thing that the pause in warming should be telling us, it’s that the recent warming is just a part of a larger cycle of warming (/cooling). This seems to be getting lost, not only on warmists, but also on many a skeptic as well…
Oh, yes, Beth persistently adores my ‘Ignore the millennial at your perennial’, and it warms my heart.
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The assumption that the underlying natural warming since the LIA is continuing is extremely attractive. Nonetheless, it could well be wrong.
Here we are barely risen above the lowest depths of the Holocene and barely hanging on despite pouring all that plant food into the sky. And at half precession.
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Also, your calculation, heh attribution, of 22-25% is entirely dependent upon that natural warming being steady, too, otherwise your attribution calculations would vary above and below, depending upon whether warming decreased or increased.
We don’t know the natural trend. We oughta. How long have they been after this? The IPCC should have been mandated to understand natural first. Heh, it’s not too late, and by golly, it’s important.
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The sillies. How could you possibly know man’s contribution without knowing nature’s? These monumental fools are truly epic.
===============
kim, Dr Spencer referred to this (unaccounted for) natural internal variability as the “800 pound gorilla in the room” in his ’08 testimony before the u.s. senate. (and, no, he was not metaphorically referring to senator boxer who was “in the room” at the time… ☺)
Mama Gaia peered at my ‘whether warming decreased or increased’ and insisted on the right of warming to decrease into cooling.
If in fact we’re at or past the peak of the Modern Warming Period, sensitivity is higher and still we’re barely holding on with temperature. We only have so many more fossils we can burn.
The above is all conjectural, but the rate of natural warming since 1850 is unlikely to stay steady for long. How long? I dunno. But the next direction it is likely to turn is to lower, it seems inevitable.
There are important questions to answer about climate science, and this dithering at keyboards and models is tragically wasteful. Burning sun time, as one of friends used to say.
And the sun may well be setting on the Holocene.
============
http://www.grida.no/publications/other/ipcc_tar/?src=/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/figspm-4.htm
Formerly climatology was regional, as defined by Koppen and others, notably Trewartha.
The paper by Belda et Al (2014) is probably the best to date in reconstructing the Koppen-Trewartha climate classification map from modern datasets.
The Belda maps show the climate regions of the world (except Antarctica) for two periods, 1901-1931 and 1975-2005, based on a 30 minute grid, average area about 2500 km2, (About 50,000 grid cells cover 135 million km2, the land area of the Earth except Antarctica.)
Belda confirms what H.H. Lamb said about climate chant between the beginning and end of the 20th century: there was not much change. Lamb wrote, “In fact, from about the beginning of this century up to 1940 a substantial climatic change was in progress, but it was in a direction which tended to make life easier and to reduce stresses for most activities and most people in most parts of the world. Average temperatures were rising, though without too many hot extremes, and they were rising most of all in the Arctic where the sea ice was receding. Europe enjoyed several decades of near-immunity from severe winters, and the variability of temperature from year to year was reduced. More rainfall was reaching the dry places in the interiors of the great continents (except in the Americas where the lee effect, or ‘rain-shadow’, of the Rocky Mountains and the Andes became more marked as the prevalence of westerly winds in middle latitudes increased).” (end of quote) Climate,
H. H. Lamb, History and the Modern World Edition 2, Routledge, 1995
The Belda maps show that between the two periods separated by 75 years, 8% of the cells changed climate type. When you plot a scatter diagram of distributions for the two periods, you will find there is little divergence from the straight line passing through the origin and with slope unity. R-squared is 99.5.
The paper does not discuss error bars. However, the CRU (UK) has revised the climate data to remove wet bias, an adjustment that would increase R2, indicating even less change than these maps show.
In any other field of Earth science, using data with similar precision, we would claim confirmation of the null hypothesis that the two data sets separated by 75 years are not significantly different.
So yes, the Earth has warmed a little and most people worldwide are better off than their parents and grandparents. The people benefiting the most are those on the margins of steppe to desert and those on the margins between ice and tundra.
Climate classification revisited from Köppen to Trewartha, Belda, M. et al, Climate Research, 2014
The ‘Big Lie’ is that warming is dangerous and harmful. I don’t believe, personal opinion, but slightly informed, that we cannot warm the earth enough for the amount to be harmful.
Paleontology always shows the benefits to the biome of warming, with no upper limit ever yet demonstrated for the warming. Paleontology also always shows the detriment of cooling, and it is immediate and from any level.
We have been so desperately foolish to believe in this catastrophism. Whatever the reason, and there have been many, to believe it has certainly created a climate of fools.
If it warms, our grandchildren will be glad. If it cools, and catastrophism has economically crippled them, our grandchildren will curse our foolishness.
===============
er, that’s supposed to be ‘that we can warm’ in the first paragraph. Gad I hate saying exactly the opposite of what I mean in the middle of a rant.
=============
There was no permanent ice in the time of the dinosaurs. Put the continents back to where they were, and everything shall be fine.
Where they are, when all the ice melts, Florida will be under water.
Silly, the Holocene is over long before all the ice melts. Your alarmism is just plain stupid.
========
Kim
Thanks for showing that all you have to respond to my comment is personal attacks.
Oh, you delicate flower. Can’t respond to the point of the comment, eh?
==============
Kim, Hubert Lamb was making the same point as you make.
Thanks for the reference the paper looks excellent. I will study it.
All politics (climate) is local.
In finding this similarity you, Andy May, and others using these data are victims of IPCC fake temperature curve. I have complained about it but they are so big that they think they don’t have to listen to me. What they have dine is to cover up a hiatus in the eighties and nineties and substitute a fake “late twentieth century warming” for it. It does not exist but it makes a nice upward slope of the same angle as the other one (1910-1944). What is hidden is a hiatus that starts in 1979 and ends in 1997, an 18 year level platform. It is shown in my book “What Warming?” asa figure 15. To change your figure 1 to resemble the real temperature curve you would have to lower the eighties and nineties to create a common horizontal platform. That would eat an 18 year wide step into that beautiful upward trend and spoil your parallelism of slopes. That is the end of your hypothesis, I am sorry to say.The arrogance of these guys has lasted for 26 years now. In any normal laboratory the supervisors would not let that happen but here they seem to be either unconscious or approving of the kind of scientific forgery that goes on.
“To change your figure 1 to resemble the real temperature curve you would have to lower the eighties and nineties to create a common horizontal platform.”
And to resemble the real temperature curve, they would also have to put 1936, on the same horizontal line on the graph as 1998, and 2016.
Western Canada here! Beautiful summer here with bumper crops after a very mild winter. It couldn’t be any better (well, maybe a little warmer would be nice). Record high temp.? 47C in 1937!
Reblogged this on Climatism and commented:
If human CO2 influence was negligible during early 20th Century warming, what influence (if any) did CO2 have in late 20th Century warming and any future theorised warming?
CO2 sensitivity – the great unknown and unanswered climate question, yet we base trillions of dollars of taxpayers money on radical climate policy and climate fixes (wind/solar), based on predictive models that assume CO2 is the fundamental ‘climate control knob’.
Doesn’t sound very sciency or smart to me. Though, welcome to “Climate Crisis Inc.”, the trillion dollar eco-crisis we had to have to satisfy a multitude of political and professional ambitions.
“CO2 sensitivity – the great unknown and unanswered climate question”
If you see an electrical cable lying around, assume that it is live.
If we don’t know CO2 sensitivity, we must assume that it very high.
“Trillions of dollars of taxpayers money” is only money. If you want to put a price on human lives, become a hit person for the mob.
Example of Climate alarmism that has cost taxpayers billions:
Australia’s x4 mothballed desal plants placed along Australia’s eastern seaboard and SA at a cost of $12Billion.
Most of Australia’s dam reservoirs are currently near full.
The “mothballed” desal plants are costing taxpayers $1 million per day for not producing a drop of water, all based on the hyper alarmist global warming fear spruiked by warming alsrmists like Tim Flannery who blabbed “So even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and our river systems” (2007)
Sydney’s main reservoir Warragamba dam is currently around 97% full.
Yes, I do care about other peoples hard-earned money being WASTED away at the expense of hyperventilating climate alarmists sitting on the eco-pulpit of moral virtue.
https://climatism.wordpress.com/2015/04/22/the-legacy-of-tim-flannery-white-elephant-desalination-plants/
As for CO2 sensitivity, it ranges from 0.1C to 4C (RCP8.5) by 2100 – that’s some “settled science” you can bank on.
Climatism does not address “trillions of dollars of taxpayers money” does not address it only being money.
Jim Yushchyshyn
the “liberal” politicians want their 1.3 trillion in new carbon taxes – available ONLY if they can maintain the CAGW fear and hysteria.
Their supporting banks want their share of the 31 trillion in carbon futures trading.
Their supporting “scientists” want their share of the continued 92 billion in grants and subsidies and salaries and travel allowances and labs and programmers and research funding – that is also dependent on these “scientists” delivering only the results these same bureaucrats and politicians want.
The donors and unions who support these liberal/socialist politicians was their share of the millions spent back into the companies started and continued only to continue sucking their share of the politician’s money. “I donate to you, you send money my way.”
yes, it is about the money. The power. The control. The religious zeal and mental rewards of CAGW.
Jim Y, you are a scary dude. You don’t seem to realize that those “trillions of dollars” could be better spent in relieving poverty, disease and early death in the third world. In your (assumably) comfortable lifestyle, misallocated investments won’t result in your starvation. Posterity, though, will be much poorer.
Dogdaddy
If you want to help solve poverty, disease and early death in the third world, there are plenty of relief organizations that would gladly accept your money.
Jim Y, your response supports the thought that you are a master of the non sequitur.
Governmental misallocation of scarce resources is the point.
Why should we assume it’s high?
Doing that has cost the world trillions in treasure and possibly millions of lives.
Jim, [trimmed. not needed. .mod]
Gabro
How, exactly, has assuming climate sensitivity to be high cost millions of lives, or even one life?
You can break it down for me.
How many people have died because of solar power?
How many people have died because of wind power? Or are you talking about birds?
How many people have died because of hydroelectric power?
How many people have died because of nuclear power? Before you start talking about Fukushima;
Natural gas and coal more harmful than nuclear power
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/briefs/kharecha_02/
An unbiased source about supposed Fukushima deaths
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/31/experts-foresee-no-detectable-health-impact-from-fukushima-radiation/?partner=rss&emc=rss
Jim Yushchyshyn: “How many people have died because of hydroelectric power?”
In fact, hydro power is responsible for several orders of magnitude more deaths than nuclear power. Take the Banqiao Dam disaster, for example:
Casualties
According to the Hydrology Department of Henan Province, in the province, approximately 26,000 people died[14] from flooding and another 145,000 died during subsequent epidemics and famine. In addition, about 5,960,000 buildings collapsed, and 11 million residents were affected. Unofficial estimates of the number of people killed by the disaster have run as high as 230,000 people
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banqiao_Dam
Or the Sichuan earthquake, perhaps:
BEIJING — Nearly nine months after a devastating earthquake in Sichuan Province, China, left 80,000 people dead or missing, a growing number of American and Chinese scientists are suggesting that the calamity was triggered by a four-year-old reservoir built close to the earthquake’s geological fault line.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/06/world/asia/06quake.html?pagewanted=all
Green alarmism artificially raising the price of energy is already killing third worlders and it will worsen as the artifice rises. You need to get out more.
==========================
Jim Yushchyshyn: “How many people have died because of wind power?”
http://www.caithnesswindfarms.co.uk/accidents.pdf
kim: “Green alarmism artificially raising the price of energy is already killing third worlders”
Green alarmism is already killing first worlders too, specifically the elderly and infirm, the most vulnerable members of society.
The scandal of Britain’s fuel poverty deaths
Thousands of people die each winter in the UK as a result of being unable to heat their homes. Are we doing enough to help them?
The social cost of fuel poverty is massive, and growing. In the winter of 2012/13, there were 31,000 extra winter deaths in England and Wales, a rise of 29% on the previous year. Around 30-50% of these deaths can be linked to being cold indoors. And not being able to heat your home also takes a huge toll on health in general: those in fuel poverty have higher incidences of asthma, bronchitis, heart and lung disease, kidney disease and mental health problems.
https://www.theguardian.com/big-energy-debate/2014/sep/11/fuel-poverty-scandal-winter-deaths
Although as Jimbo is almost certainly little more than an adolescent, I doubt very much he is even slightly concerned about the deaths of a few old, sick people.
Mid fifties, and usefully naive.
========
Using Hadcrut, which is known to have warming “adjustments” (or past cooling “adjustments”), makes this sort of analysis very iffy at best.
I meant, “using HadCrut and GISS” which are known… etc.
Any evidence that the unadjusted data is more valid than the adjusted data. If so, publish a paper in Nature.
Karl did his dirty deed and then vanished.
================
Why don’t most of the graphic data show that the 1930’s were warmer than today?
It was more than just in the USA…
No it wasn’t….
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/2007/Fig4_correction.gif
An honest comparison would have the temperature scale on the Y Axis the same on both graphs
Didn’t Gavin Schmidt once make a fatuous comment about people being concerned only with the climate in which they live, discounting tropospheric measurements? Well, the U.S. temperature profile would show that my climate hasn’t changed in 100-plus years.
Chew on that for awhile and spit out the standard “yes buts.”
Dave Fair
Well, according to the Climate Change Gurus, the U.S. temperature chart is the actual global temperature profile, since it shows the 1930’s as being on the same level as 1998, and 2016 (or close enough for government work).
The U.S. temperature chart shown is the *real* global temperature profile. The Climate Change Gurus said the 1930’s was hotter than 1998, and the only chart that represents that profile is the U.S. temperature chart.
The global temperature chart is a joke. A bad joke. An expensive joke. A trauma and mental illness causing joke (on the part of the Alarmists).
TA
“The U.S. temperature chart shown is the *real* global temperature profile. The Climate Change Gurus said the 1930’s was hotter than 1998, and the only chart that represents that profile is the U.S. temperature chart. …
“The global temperature chart is a joke.”
Only because 1998 being hotter than the 1930s does not fit the agenda of certain people.
So sayith: Jim Yushchyshyn – August 24, 2016 at 7:56 pm
Sorry, Jim Yu, but the fact-of-the-matter is, … the global temperature chart/record is a joke, ……. ESPECIALLY the pre-1960 temperature data contained therein or on.
Here ya go, Jimbo, educate yourself as to the accuracy of the US Temperature Record from the beginning of the NWS ….. and then extrapolate your new-found knowledge to global coverage for the same time period of 1870 to present.
The beginning of the National Weather Service
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/pa/history/index.php
History of the NWS – 1870 to present
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/pa/history/evolution.php
This link shows what you were after J. Phillip Peterson. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gh-DNNIUjKU
The main reason is many like to use anomalies which are not temperature but changes relative to another point in time. Change the base, change the anomalies. Add to that the data adjustments and you have a complete obtrusion of the real picture.
We have the same issue in Australia where any history prior to 1910 is ignored – Why because that is when our BOM was created even through we had Stevenson screens in operation up to 60 years earlier which highlighted some of our hottest periods. Now conveniently pushed into the back ground. As a side issue the 1930’s were hot here as well.
One would have to ask Tom Wigley what happened to the inconvenient 1940’s peak.
IPCC: “It is extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together.”
The IPCC simply cannot say this about CO2 pre-1958, nor NO2 before 1978, nor CH4 before 1983. There were only sporadic direct measurements of these three “greenhouse gases” made before these dates. The data the IPCC are using come from Antarctic ice cores. These are no better than 20 year weighted averages of the gas concentrations and cannot be used to compare with annual temperature data.
is strongly indicating rising temperatures from 1910 to 2009 are due to natural behavior of climate, starting before industrial revolution – e. g. no correlation with changing parts of ‘greenhouse gasses’ of the atmosphere.
The Industrial Revolution proper ended before 1850, but your point still has merit.
v’
except Johann, atmospheric CO2 increased almost 10% from 1870 to 1944, with more than half of that being from 1910 – 1944 alone, so it wasn’t all ‘natural behavior of climate, starting before the industrial revolution’. And if you extend your 1975 Hadcrut4gl trend line out to 2016 (now, instead of 2009) you have an +.25*C per decade increase in global temperature since 1975, which correlates v well with the extra amount of CO2 we’ve put in the atmosphere since then too.
woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1975/to:2016
This has been known for some time, and will remain the case unless and until the temperature data sets are rewritten/revised.
One should see the BBC interview of Prof. Phil Jones of CRU.
See: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8511670.stm
Q&A: Professor Phil Jones
Phil Jones is director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA), which has been at the centre of the row over hacked e-mails.
The BBC’s environment analyst Roger Harrabin put questions to Professor Jones, including several gathered from climate sceptics. The questions were put to Professor Jones with the co-operation of UEA’s press office.
Question – Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?
ANSWER:
An initial point to make is that in the responses to these questions I’ve assumed that when you talk about the global temperature record, you mean the record that combines the estimates from land regions with those from the marine regions of the world. CRU produces the land component, with the Met Office Hadley Centre producing the marine component.
Temperature data for the period 1860-1880 are more uncertain, because of sparser coverage, than for later periods in the 20th Century. The 1860-1880 period is also only 21 years in length. As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below).
I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998.
So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.
I would suggest that this observational data itself suggests that Climate Sensitivity to CO2 in real world conditions of planet Earth’s atmosphere, if any at all, is low. Especially if one also considers the post 1940s cooling.
Nice, and thanks.
=======
Great interview, thanks for posting the link.
Richard
I am waiting for Nick Stokes to say “but its not at equilibrium yet!”
” We assume that the natural influences from 1910 to 1945 were the same as those from 1975 to 2009. We further assume that difference in the two slopes is due to man’s influence. ”
.
These seem to be huge assumptions. My guess is that the probability of natural warming in those two periods being precisely equal is virtually zero. Investors who make similar assumptions will probably lose their money.
.
Human emissions massively increased around the end of the last century, probably thanks to China. And yet this century has been dominated by a complete lack of warming which, until the recent el nino, had lasted for almost two decades. With the el nino out of the way, I wouldn’t be surprised if Christopher Monckton will be able to report, in a couple of years, that the pause is no longer a teenager!
.
My guess is that man’s influence is less than 5%.
Chris
YES, the “pause” will not only be old enough to vote, it will be old enough to have a drink!
There is no pause
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1985/plot/gistemp/from:1985/to:1998/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1998/trend/plot/uah/from:1985/plot/uah/from:1985/to:1998/trend/plot/uah/from:1998/trend
Even RSS only supports the notion of a pause if specific cherry picked dates are chosen.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1985/plot/rss/from:1996/trend/plot/rss/from:1999/trend
We know that you dolt! (pull your head out of your back side and read chris’ comment again, this time with your glasses on…)
af
You are certainly talking a lot about a supposed pause which you know does not exist.
i think you should need glasses Jim and read carefully the definition of the “pause”: “its the trackback to the date where the slope is zero” or in short: how far can you go back and keep the trend line at zero?
if you can track back 18 years that’s something significant.
if that is cherry picking for you i would say that the whole global warming is cherry picking: when we compare it with the 430.000 year long ice core reconstructions nothing is happening as all other interglacials of that record were hotter then this one.
so taking the last 100 “official years” stating there is CAGW is also cherry picking compared to a reconstruction of 430.000 years of temperature data which shows interglacials with sea levels 6 meter higher then today and temperatures 4°C higher then today.
when we just look at the last 10000 years the LIA is only overclassed by the 8.2 Kyr event so what are we actually seeing?
looking at the holocene bond events, nothing unusual is happening: we’re half way towards a new “medieval warm episode” – like optimum which we may call in the future “the Modern warm period”.
that is if the sun keeps on doing it’s job…
Frederick Michaels
“i think you should need glasses Jim and read carefully the definition of the “pause”: “its the trackback to the date where the slope is zero” or in short: how far can you go back and keep the trend line at zero?
“if you can track back 18 years that’s something significant.
Where did you get that definition from? Monckton of Benchley? The planet between Saturn and Neptune?
“if that is cherry picking for you i would say that the whole global warming is cherry picking: when we compare it with the 430.000 year long ice core reconstructions nothing is happening as all other interglacials of that record were hotter then this one.”
Were people driving SUVs 430,000 years ago? Or do you mean 430 + 0/1000 years ago, as you typed out?
You also need to learn to use your shift key.
Jim Yushchyshyn
Well Jim, evidently you have conclusively and absolutely proved both your lack of experience and lack of social judgement. That is the exact and actual definition of the “pause” as we use it in discussing your CAGW theory and its errors.
With, or, without, the, comma. Which, is, also, a, pause.
RACook
You attack me, but say nothing about the source of Frederik Michiels definition of pause.
Plays dumb, where’s the good faith?
========
So sayith: Jim Yushchyshyn – August 24, 2016 at 7:13 pm
Jim Y, me thinks it is quit juvenile of you to be, per se, DEMANDING a “source reference” for anything and everything that you are told that is not of your liking.
Ells bells, iffen you had ask me to define “the pause” I would surely have told you the “same thing” but via use of different verbiage.
Me thinks that you are displaying the personality of a semi-permanently nurtured (brainwashed) adolescent who would be silly enough to DEMAND that Einstein provide you with a “source reference” for his definition of “special relativity” (E=MC2).
“DUH”, its truly sad that the majority of the younger generations have no conception of “original thought” ….. and it boggles their brain activity whenever they are subjected to said.
Samuel C Cogar: “Me thinks that you are displaying the personality of a semi-permanently nurtured (brainwashed) adolescent”
If this is him, you’re pretty damn close.
https://www.facebook.com/jim.yushchyshyn
Class of 2015 · Bachelor of Science, Biology · Edmonton, Alberta
A wet behind the ears kid with a nice shiny certificate that he hasn’t yet discovered doesn’t mean he knows everything, trying to teach his grandmother to suck eggs.
Jim Yushchyshyn:
“The Pause” is accepted science. Only folks who are still trying to argue that CO2 is the ‘control knob’ of global temperatures would still claim that “There is no pause”.
If “There is no pause” is the hill you’ve chosen to take a stand on, that’s up to you. It fits in with the rest of your comments.
But I’m curious, who’s giving you all your misinformation? Saying “there is no pause” is just an assertion, which has been thoroughly deconstructed by a mountain of evidence.
For example, the following list goes through 2015, the year the latest ‘pause’ ended. If you disagree you can argue with the folks named below. But here, we’re long past arguing about something that is accepted by just about everyone else:
Even Michael Mann has admitted that the ‘Pause’ was factual. Just put “pause” into the search box on this site. You will find reams of evidence like this:
And this:
Next time you’re tempted to make a baseless assertion, you should do a search first. It would help to avoid embarassment…
Dbstealey, you need to update your graphic to include recent data.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1996.75/plot/rss/from:1996.75/trend/plot/uah/from:2005/plot/uah/from:2005/trend
“Beaumont Vance” (that’s your newest fake screen name, is it?) says:
“you need to update your graphic to include recent data.”
No, I don’t, and it’s not my data. It’s real world data that conclusively shows “the Pause”.
You’re not NASA/GISS, so you don’t get to ‘adjust’ the past temperature record.
Rational readers here can see that there was no global warming during most of the past twenty years. You’re not one of them.
So the warming is 100% carbon soot altering planetary albedo. first from steam locomotive driven industry and later from massive increases in industrialization and jet air travel.
Obviously CO2 can influence across time as well as distance.
The historical climatic record showing this period of time in the climate is in no way unique while changes in CO2 concentrations having no correlation in leading to resultant climate changes.
Now how the cooling evolves will have to be monitored. The cooling by the way has began.
yup i agree this year we had more coldest days then hottest days. we had in belgium the coldest 10th august ever, and it was just 0.1°C shy of the coldest august day ever recorded since 1833.
note maybe we’ll get our first official heatwave. It’s about time
(note for belgian standards a heat wave is 5 days of 25°C with 3 days with 30°C, as our climate is a temperate climate. I know that for a lot of readers their region this is considdered normal summer temp)
Belgium is not the whole world
Finally, something Jim says that I can get behind.
============
I believe that the origin of the similarity between the two periods can be found in in the ENSO record.
Both periods (1900-1940, and 1980-2010) represent periods in which the Nino 3.4 values are generally positive, and follow periods in which Nino 3.4 values were generally negative (1870-1900 and 1950-1980).
This effect can be quantified by passing the monthly Nino 3.4 values through an exponentially weighted moving average (EWMA) filter, and correlating the filtered Nino 3.4 series with the global temperature record.
The filter is as follows
EWMA (t) = EWMA (1-t) * (1 -FC) + Nino3.4 (t) * FC
where FC is a filter constant.
The correlation is in fact bi-modal. At filter constant (FC) values of approximately 0.1, there is a significant correlation. This represents the well known concurrent effects of El Nino on global temperatures, such as in 1998 and 2016.
However the much more significant and important correlation, largely unrecognized by climate scientists, is evident at filter constant values of 0.02 to 0.01. At these filter values, the higher frequency changes in the Nino 3.4 record are removed, and the low frequency (i.e. longer term) trends of ENSO are revealed. These low frequency trends in the ENSO record are highly correlated with the temperature movements that are presented in the paper.
So, maybe the PDO is the Capo de Capos after all. What about the AMO?
=========
AMO also correlates with the EWMA of NINO3.4 (with a filter constant of about 0.01).
Woof, and thanks.
======
It would sure be nice to know how that happens, both basins correlating with a phenomenon in one.
===========
El Nino events generally enhance the AMO. This tends to support the concept that El Nino may be related to rotational factors as is the AMO.
A good point would be to use this on all known ocean shifts. (ENSO AMO PDO,QBO,IOD,…)Ten add them up to a “single resultant graph, then track the solar intensity graph with it, and make a new resultant. i dare to bet that this would correlate pretty neatly with the temperature graph.
i would not be surprised to see positive and negative resonance episodes which would explain the current holocene temperature fluctuations.
I doubt it.
But, if it does, prove it.
I would like to know, what other than greenhouse gases, have shown a positive trend over the past 44 years.
Very nice guest post. Bookmarked. The delta slope of the two periods is a clever approach to the attribution problem, AFAIK not done before anywhere.
AND if true, ECS would be nowhere near the values of 1.5C – 1.8C. (more like the Lindzen value of 0.6C)…
Well, Rud, I roughly noted it years ago, and given the low sensitivity speculated that feedback might be negative.
I was roundly ridiculed over at Climate Audit years ago for saying that not only do we not know the magnitude of feedback, we are not even sure of the sign of it.
================
Heh, ‘years ago’. Why such nostalgia for the past? Why years ago I had the whole climate thing figured out, but have since forgotten. My joke with moshe is that you have to read the blogs.
===========
Andy May, thank you for the essay.
Good study but you must redo it using NASA data pre-2000! Hansen made an adjustment between 1999 & 2000 data sets that lowered 1934 (and basically all 1920-1950 data) by 1C! 1934 was still warmer than 2000 and Hansen couldn’t leave his job until he corrected that TRUTH!
Historical data is sacrosanct unless there is mass sensor systemic error which can be proven by multiple researchers! Hansen did it all by himself and there was no righteous outcry from the climate scientists! Proves fabrication and collusion!
Your comment is nothing but a personal attack against James Hansen and other honest scientists.
Jim Yushchyshyn
This is true: There is a significant difference between Jim Hansen and honest scientists.
RACook
“There is a significant difference between Jim Hansen and honest scientists.”
James Hansen has a lot more integrity than “scientists” who global warming deniers call “honest.”
RE: James Hansen It is the minor little matter of his making short term temperature and sea level rise predictions that just didn’t happen, and his subseqently ignoring his own failures. Evangelical preachers claiming Jesus will come back by a certain date at least act embarrassed past that date.
Jim, did Hansen do the adjustments?
dogdaddy
I’m not aware of anyone, Dr. Hansen or anyone else, denying that he uses adjusted temperature data. But, people should not just assume that he has ulterior motives for using adjusted temperature data. And I don’t deny that someone has some ‘spaining to do. But, before we condemn anyone, let’s give them a chance to do their ‘splaining, by following this link.
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/monitoring-references/faq/temperature-monitoring.php
Virtually indistinguishable?
Except for the cause.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1910/to:1944/scale:200/plot/gistemp/from:1910/to:1944/trend/scale:200/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1910/to:1944/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1910/to:1944/trend/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1910/to:1944/scale:50/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1910/to:1944/trend/scale:50
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1975/to:2009/scale:200/plot/gistemp/from:1975/to:2009/trend/scale:200/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1975/to:2009/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1975/to:2009/trend/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1975/to:2009/scale:50/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1975/to:2009/trend/scale:50/plot/esrl-co2/from:1975/to:2009/offset:-320
http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1850
If it wasn’t natural cyclical warming, then it wouldn’t be maintaining its 30 year warming/cooling “fingerprint”. If there is one thing that we should be understanding in light of the pause, it’s that recent warming is part of a larger cycle…
Your Hadcrut4 graph shows more pronounced warming in the most recent era than in the early 20th century.
And, you have no scientific basis to presume a “30 year warming cooling ‘fingerprint.'”
A repeat in the shape of a curve does not mean a repeat of the cause.
Explain it, then Jimboy.
When the 30 year half cycle commences for the SIXTH TIME, then we have a basis…
It has to commence the first time.
If the absorbed W/M^2 isn’t linear for CO2 PPM, why should temperature changes due to CO2 be linear?
Some time ago I looked at CET and CO2. Here is what I found:
http://www.leif.org/research/CETandCO2.pdf
“It seems hard to ascribe the 0.171º/decade warming during 1971-2008 solely to CO2 when a much smaller increase in CO2 during 1908-1945 had a 0.162º/decade warming trend.”
The Sun and PDO
Whatever that means.
Thanks Leif for the info.
Time will tell. If this is a natural warming cycle, it will become evident over the next few decades. If temperatures cool again, warmunists will go into hibernation until the next warming cycle begins. Then they will crawl back out of the woodwork with renewed cries of gloom and doom. That’s because they can never turn down an opportunity to blame humans for a coming potential crisis even if it’s merely a repeat of a natural cycle.
As I (and a number of others) pointed out years ago, the 1915-1945 warming is almost identical to the 1979-2000+ warming, clearing showing that you don’t need any CO2 increase at all to get that kind of warming. And it is no coincidence that both periods correspond to warm PDO periods. A nearly identical situation occurred in the preceding century–a warm period from about 1850 to 1880, followed by a cool period from 1880 to 1915, similar to the 1945 to 1977 cool period (before it was erased by NASA and NOAA).
So the question became, how long have these 25-30 years alternating warm/cool periods been going on? I plotted up the GISP2 oxygen isotope measurements of Stuiver and Grootes for the past 500 years and found a pattern of regularly alternating warm/cool periods with an average duration of 27 years (you can find this curve in several of my publications–just google my name to find them).
This regularly repeating pattern of warm/cool periods of 25-30 years, long before CO2 entered the picture, shows that these climate changes have nothing at all to do with CO2 . And because the past is the key to the future–we can extrapolate this ongoing pattern into the future (which I did in 1999 when I predicted global cooling for the first two decades of this century). The so-called ‘pause’ in recent global warming is not a pause at all, it’s just a continuation of the same pattern that has been going on for 500 years.
Same thing with BEST and CET temperatures:
http://www.leif.org/research/FFT-BEST-CET.png
PDO from 1910-1944
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1910/to:1944/scale:200/plot/gistemp/from:1910/to:1944/trend/scale:200/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1910/to:1944/scale:50/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1910/to:1944/trend/scale:50
PDO from 1975-2009
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1975/to:2009/scale:200/plot/gistemp/from:1975/to:2009/trend/scale:200/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1975/to:2009/scale:50/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1975/to:2009/trend/scale:50/plot/esrl-co2/from:1975/to:2009/offset:-320
Showing a plot without an explanatory text is pretty useless. What conclusion do you peddle?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/plot/jisao-pdo/from:1900/scale:50
Jim, a wider view here of the pdo gives us a better picture of what’s going on. It’s so easy to cherry pick trend lines at wft…
PDO for the last century looks pretty flat, unlike temperature.
And 1910-1944 and 1975-2009 are time frames selected by the author.
Interesting. Thanks for plotting these.
Don Easterbrook August 23, 2016 at 1:35 pm
As usual, again and again the same blah blah about the 1945 to 1977 cool period (before it was erased by NASA and NOAA).
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/from:1900/mean:120/plot/gistemp/from:1900/trend/plot/gistemp/from:1940/to:1975/trend
The “better” cooling period was from 1940 till 1975. In fact, using Thomas R. Karls infilling temperature series at
http://www.ysbl.york.ac.uk/~cowtan/applets/trend/trend.html
you see that the “coolest” interval in fact is 1941-1965. Karl’s infilling shows even more cooling there than do GISS or NOAA. Yes: that’s the true, real face of the so-called “karlization of data”.
Feel free to enter your 1945-1977, and compare! Maybe one day you understand 🙂
The data you cite has been so corrupted by NASA and NOAA that you can get totally different curves by choosing graphs at different years. The end of the cool period happened in a single year 1977-78,but the onset of the warm period is not so well defined–you could use most anytime between 1945 and 1955. But be aware that NASA/NOAA have almost completely erased a well-defined cool period.
Every NASA/NOAA chart you show Don, clearly shows the 1945 – 1977 leveling/downturn in global temps except you keep repeating that they have somehow erased it? The problem you have is they didn’t ‘erase’ it, its still clearly there, you’re just making it up as you go along.
there’s also the AMO cycle and PDO and AMO create resonance waves: we got a pause as the negative PDO is “canceled out by the positive AMO. it’s only with PDO- and AMO- that the cyclic downward moton is achieved.
i always found your graph very “correct” but i would have shifted it 20 years further: the predicted cooling will only start in 2020 with solar cycle 25 and the negative AMO
Global climate has been cooling for the past decade–not a lot, but cooling, not warming.
There is no evidence for that.