By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Another year, another failure of global warming to occur at even half the rate originally predicted by IPCC in 1990.
CO2 emissions have increased at a rate somewhat above the high-end prediction made in IPCC’s First Assessment Report. In 2013 our sins of emission totaled 10.8 billion tonnes of carbon; in 2014 the official estimate, in the annual paper published by le Quéré et al., was 10.9 billion tonnes:
It is debatable whether the true rate of emissions growth is anything like as small as 0.1 billion tonnes of carbon per year, given that China and now India are bringing coal-fired power stations onstream at a record rate. But the official storyline is that emissions growth has all but stopped. Nevertheless, emissions remain a very long way above any of IPCC’s CO2-stabilization scenarios.
On the business-as-usual Scenario A, IPCC (1990) predicted that global temperature would rise by 1.0 [0.7, 1.5] Cº to 2025, equivalent to 2.8 [1.9, 4.2] Cº per century. The executive summary asked, “How much confidence do we have in our predictions?” IPCC pointed out some uncertainties (clouds, oceans, etc.), but concluded:
“Nevertheless, … we have substantial confidence that models can predict at least the broad-scale features of climate change. … There are similarities between results from the coupled models using simple representations of the ocean and those using more sophisticated descriptions, and our understanding of such differences as do occur gives us some confidence in the results.”
Yet the rate of global warming since 1990 – the most important of the “broad-scale features of climate change” that the models were supposed to predict – is now below half what the IPCC had then predicted.
In 1990, IPCC said:
“Based on current models we predict:
“under the IPCC Business-as-Usual (Scenario A) emissions of greenhouse gases, a rate of increase of global mean temperature during the next century of about 0.3 Cº per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2 Cº to 0.5 Cº per decade), this is greater than that seen over the past 10,000 years. This will result in a likely increase in global mean temperature of about 1 Cº above the present value by 2025 and 3 Cº before the end of the next century. The rise will not be steady because of the influence of other factors” (p. xii).
Later, IPCC said:
“The numbers given below are based on high-resolution models, scaled to be consistent with our best estimate of global mean warming of 1.8 Cº by 2030 [compared with pre-industrial temperatures]. For values consistent with other estimates of global temperature rise, the numbers below should be reduced by 30% for the low estimate or increased by 50% for the high estimate” (p. xxiv).
In 1995 IPCC offered a prediction of the warming rates to be expected in response to various rates of increase in CO2 concentration. The prediction based on the actual rate is highlighted:
The actual increase in CO2 concentration in the two decades since 1995 has been 0.5% per year. So IPCC’s effective central prediction in 1995 was that there should have been 0.36 C° warming since then, equivalent to 1.8 C° century–1.
In the 2001 Third Assessment Report, IPCC, at page 8 of the Summary for Policymakers, says: “For the periods 1990-2025 and 1990 to 2050, the projected increases are 0.4-1.1 C° and 0.8-2.6 C° respectively.” The mid-range estimate was for 0.7 C° warming in the 36 years 1990-2025, equivalent to 1.9 C° century–1.
Table 1 summarizes these medium-term predicted global warming rates from the first three Assessment Reports:
It became rapidly evident that the business-as-usual global-warming predictions made by IPCC in the report that got the climate scare going were childishly wild exaggerations. The reasons for the exaggerations are many. Here are just a few. IPCC somewhat exaggerated the CO2 concentration growth to be expected in response to a given rate of emissions growth; it extravagantly exaggerated the growth of methane concentration; it greatly exaggerated the CO2 forcing; and it very greatly exaggerated the impact of strongly net-positive temperature feedbacks on climate sensitivity.
What, then, has happened to global temperatures in the real world since 1990? The answer, taken as the least-squares linear-regression trend on the mean of the RSS and UAH satellite datasets, is that the rate of global warming is less than half the mid-range rate originally predicted by IPCC in 1990, and well below even the low-end prediction:
The prediction zone in IPCC (1990) is shown in orange, with trend-lines in red. The real-world outturn is in dark blue and the trend on the real-world data is the bright blue line.
As far as I know, no mainstream news medium has reported this continuing and substantial discrepancy between the excitable predictions on the basis of which governments have squandered trillions for decades and the unexciting reality of a warming rate indistinguishable from natural internal variability.
It is worth looking at the entire satellite temperature record since 1979. First, RSS, whose inconvenient data showing far less warming than had been predicted are about to be revised sharply upward to bring the apparent rate of warming into accordance with the Party Line:
Next, UAH, whose dataset used to show a higher warming rate than all other datasets. However, adjustments were made last year when it was discovered that onboard instrumentation was heating the platinum-resistance thermometers, and UAH now shows a lower warming rate than all other datasets:
Taking the mean of the RSS and UAH datasets shows that the long-term rate of warming across the entire 39-year period since 1979 was just 1.3 C° century–1 equivalent, or less than half of IPCC’s mid-range prediction in 1990:
It is essential to the high-climate-sensitivity theory profitably advanced by IPCC that the rate of global warming should not decline as the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continue to accumulate, particularly where they continue to accumulate at a rate above IPCC’s original business-as-usual prediction.
A simple method of testing whether the rate of global warming has increased since 1979 is to determine the least-squares linear-regression trend on the data from a more recent starting date. I have chosen 1997, because that was just before the 1998 El Niño took hold. The mean of the two satellite datasets shows warming since 1997 at less than two-thirds of a degree per century, or just under half of the warming rate for the entire period since 1979.
Contrary to the high-sensitivity notion that continues to hold the international governing class in thrall (with the commendable exception of the incoming U.S administration), the rate of global warming is not accelerating. It is declining.
Some caution is necessary. At the turn of the millennium the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, an approximately 60-year cycle in ocean behavior which typically manifests itself as about 30 years’ warming followed by 30 years’ cooling, ended an unusually sharp positive (warming) phase and entered its negative (cooling) phase. It is possible, therefore, that some contribution from anthropogenic emissions is overlain upon this natural cycle, giving a false appearance of very rapid manmade warming from 1976-2000 and of little or no warming since.
What is now undeniable, however, is that the contribution of anthropogenic influences to global temperature is considerably less than had originally been predicted. How do I know this? Because IPCC itself has realized it cannot retain what little credibility it has left if it continues to make absurdly exaggerated medium-term predictions. It has all but halved them:
As every opinion poll shows that (as with Brexit and Trump) the people are no longer buying the Party Line, the only way They can now keep the dying climate scare alive is to leave Their long-term predictions unaltered, and to count on their poodles in the mainstream media to fail to report either the growing discrepancy between IPCC’s original medium-term predictions and observed reality or IPCC’s own near-halving of those predictions.
Mark Boslough, one of the few remaining climate extremists who has not yet slunk away into the long night, has provided an intriguing indication of the Party’s increasing desperation by offering $25,000 to anyone who will bet that GISS’ global temperature for 2017 will exceed that for 2016. There may be a la Niña this year, so that would be a bet worth taking – if, that is, one could trust GISS to maintain an honest global-temperature dataset.
It is not for me to cast nasturtiums at Dr Schmidt, so I shall say no more than that I’d happily take that bet if it were based on either the HadCRUT4 dataset now that the extremist Jones has gone or the mean of the RSS and UAH datasets even after Dr sMears has tampered with the RSS dataset to bring it into line with the tampering of the terrestrial datasets. But I shall take no decision based on any climate information from NASA until Mr Trump has reformed those racketeers.
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I read this blog most every day. I appreciate all the learned people who comment here like Mosher, Stokes, Zeke and a host of others who take the CO2 will kill us side; and many of the others like Lief, Andy May, Vukcevic, and others too numerous to name, each talking about their ideas. Some talk about long term trends and the geological record. But so much discussion is on short time frames that, in my opinion, are so short as to be meaningless. A 30, 60, 70 or 100 year period may give you an idea of whether you can grow a particular crop, tree or flower in a specific “climate zone”. But I honestly don’t those time frames, including the CET, RSS, UAH, or GISS tell us anything about LONG TERM Climate trends. The records are just to short. And we all know that extrapolation of a short series will get you in trouble.
I write notes to file for my children to read after I am dead – which given my age won’t be too long.
It will be interesting to see if my prognostications are anywhere in the ball park.
I have said to them and I say to you – we don’t know what the climate will be.
Here is an example, perhaps not worth the time of the many skilled science, computer, math and industry people on this site – but as an average ordinary reasonably well read person, this is what I think and what I think a whole lot of people like me think.
Climate Alarmism is a tempest in a teapot.
Note to my Children:
January 7, 2017
Note to file for my children:
Here is an interesting history of the determination of Ice Ages. Once it was thought there were only four major glaciations, now it may be that there were dozens or even hundreds. We are now in an “Inter-glacial” period of the current “ICE AGE”. We are in and ICE AGE now. A lot of people don’t know that. We happen to be in an inter glacial where much of the world is ice free. But the existence of Glaciers all around the world means we are still in an ICE AGE and when the current inter glacial wanes, it will get ugly. But that could be thousands of years from now. We are talking about geologic time frames, not a few generations of humans.
And that is the problem with “Climate Science”. The WMO (World Meteorological Organization) has decreed that “Climate” is defined as the average weather of a given 30 year period.
That is a joke. I am 70. The climate hasn’t changed since my great grand parents were wandering around the world 150 years ago. Climate changes slowly relative to human life times.
30 years is just variation in WEATHER. You can call it current climate if you want but large variations should be expected.
On the news and in “Climate Studies” they love using “Averages”. That too is a joke.
(The ice cores, sediment cores and orbital mechanics show periods of 19,000, 23,000, 41,000 and 100,000 years plus or minus – typically rapid warming followed by about 20,000 years of gradual cooling. We are about half way through a typical cooling cycle.)
Today on the weather they said the “AVERAGE” high temperature on this day in Calgary, Alberta was -3 C. Yeah sure. But what is the typical deviation – or even the measured range over the last 100 years or so of Calgary weather? It is from minus 40 to plus 20 or 60 degrees Celsius variation. And it varies tremendously in just 100 km. The mountains have much less variation. The high for today at my weather station is minus 18 with a predicted low of minus 25. Wednesday Calgary has a forecast for a high of minus 14 and a low of minus 29C The average of minus 3 is somewhat meaningless. To give the weather station credit, they also show the recorded minimum and maximum for the date so one can expect anything between these two numbers.
They do the same with Climate stuff.
What I am sure of, is that we really don’t know enough yet to be spending trillions of dollars on “Climate Change”.
When I was in grade school, the concept of tectonic plates and migrating continents was still in its infancy. I always thought it was known for a long time as we were taught it in school as you were most likely as well.
But when I looked up the history, the whole concept of plate tectonics wasn’t broadly accepted and proven until the 1960’s. That blew me away given that we had been taught an unproven theory as fact in school.
Kind of like the monkey trials in the US not so long ago when Darwinism and religion ran up against each other. Most of us accept evolution now. But in my grand parents’ time, it was in dispute.
History will judge how well humans figured out CO2/Temperature/Climate correlations but I will long be dead by then and probably so will your children. Geological/Earth Sciences discoveries take time.
You’ll see. Maybe.
http://history.aip.org/climate/cycles.htm
Quote from paper:
“It seemed that the climate system had two fairly stable modes, brief warmth and more enduring cold, with relatively rapid shifts between them. Warm intervals like the past few thousand years normally did not last long.”
Add another variable. The continents move. 3 million years ago, the isthmus of Panama closed and changed the ocean circulation and the entire climate of the planet. You don’t hear people talk about that much. The best ice cores go back around 800,000 years. A tiny fraction of what is seen and measured so we don’t know all the variables.
People who say they “know” are fooling themselves. They may have a decent approximation, but until we invent time travel, we can’t “know”. Even then there are constraints like confirmation bias.
Consider this:
“They ran a climate model to take account of variations in sunlight and the rise and fall of CO2, then took snapshots from this model and fed them into a model for ice-sheet behaviour and fed the result back into their climate model. The 100,000-year cycle was explained by the slow settling of rock under the colossal weight of the North American ice sheet. After several 23,000-year cycles the Earth’s crust sagged so far that the ice’s surface was at a low enough altitude to melt in summer — but only when orbital conditions brought increased sunlight in northern latitudes.(57a) This was a good start, but more work would be needed before the entire pattern could be well understood.”
“Another important clue came from some especially good Antarctic ice core records that timed precisely the changes in the levels of CO2 and methane. The levels apparently rose or fell a few centuries after a rise or fall in temperature. At first this lag puzzled scientists, but they quickly realized that this was just what they should have expected. For it strongly confirmed that the Milankovitch-cycle orbital changes initiated a powerful feedback loop. The close of an ice age came when a shift in sunlight caused a slight rise of temperature, and that evidently raised the gas levels over the next few centuries. “
People seem to think the climate moves steadily from one state to another. It doesn’t. It makes many swings, sometimes very large ones, in its journey from one state to another. If we think that studying the satellite record or even a couple of hundred years of temperature data will tell us what the future will bring, then we are fooling ourselves. Mother Earth doesn’t care what humans do nor does the sun or the other planets and space bodies that affect orbital mechanics and the wobble of the earth. The immense arrogance of climate scientists in believing they can predict how the universe will unfold is unbelievable… were it not for the political money trough they feed at.
See http://history.aip.org/climate/xcycle.htm
In the last three paragraphs they break with history and suggest that even though CO2 has always lagged temperature, they think that the current release of CO2 will cause a Temperature rise. I can understand why an increase in temperature causes an increase in CO2. But in spite of many people trying to show that CO2 increases from human activity can cause a rise in Temperature, I have trouble with CO2 being anything but a bit player on that side of the debate. I can boil water and create water vapour. But increasing water vapour won’t boil water. (Well, if you reduce the pressure to a vacuum) But that is an externality and that is what climate scientists know but fail to talk about – external forcings. They used to. Milankovitch cycles are still broadly discussed along with other externalities. But they don’t provide for political control. Calling a colourless, odourless, trace gas that is beneficial to plant life on land and in the oceans that some say man has some control over make for better politics and a huge flow of grant moneys and subsidies to GREEN energy. A Politician’s wet dream. What immense control over resources they can have if the dogma is reinforced. What immense control over voters, over industry, over the economy and the population.
Climate Scientists have unwittingly created a monster.
Someday the climate will inexorably get cold and they will look like fools. But these processes take thousands of years and by then, we won’t care as we’ll long be dead.
Meanwhile, burn wood, burn fossil fuels, and enjoy life. Life for us is very good right now but it won’t stay that way.
Love Dad.
Excellent letter.
“I read this blog most every day. I appreciate all the learned people who comment here like Mosher, Stokes, Zeke and a host of others who take the CO2 will kill us side;’
C02 will not kill us.
Here is what we know.
1. C02 is a ghg..
2. GHGs warm the planet they do not cool the planet, ask the man in the moon for proof.
3. Burning FF ads C02 to the amosphere.
4. We are burning FF
Here is what we dont know
A) how much C02 will we ad in the future.. This a partly under our control and partly a consequence of
past decisions. We can sketch out scenarios, but there is a lot of uncertainty
B) How much the planet will warm. Also an unknown, but we can constrain the estimate somewhat
Today, the best science says somewhere between 1.5C and 4.5C per doubling of C02.
This is an ACTIVE area of research and not much is settled beyond the crude boundary. Anyone who claims certainty about low
or high values for ECS is fooling you. Avoid them.
C) How much damage will this cause? Again, lots of uncertainty. Anyone who claims certain benefits
or harms is trying to fool you. Damages could be large or small, global or local or both. Benefits
are equally hard to quantify.
D) What should ‘we” do? depends on who ‘we” is.
Since there is a risk, however uncertain, we should look to first take some no regrets actions. These are actions that will reduce the risk, that we would do regardless.
Examples: We currently subsidize people ( rich democrats) to live in places that would be prone to flooding basically this involves insurance reform ( see the libertarian group called R Street)
Example: We hamstring Nuclear with excessive regulation when it is one of the safest forms of power generation. Stop that.
There are other examples, switching to NG, fighting black soot, land use changes.. all things we should probably do regardless of AGW.
Or you can scream fraud and hoax or write letters.
Thank you Steven. It seems my use of a bit of hyperbole has elicited and excellent response from you which pretty much sums up my views on the subject. The more we know, the more we know we don’t know.
Good comment. Thanks again.
Wayne Delbeke
Or, we can pollute and poison out-of-sight-therefore-out-of-mind regions with silicon tetrachloride and runoff from mining rare Earth minerals to build inefficient wind and solar farms providing intermittent pittances of power, destroying mass areas of habitat, and mincing rare birds and insect-controlling bats, for the enrichment of rent seekers and empire builders, and providing a net negative impact to the common weal, and the planet overall.
Mr Mosher says that today’s interval of climate-sensitivity oredictions is 1.5 to 4.5 K equilibrium warming per CO2 doubling. But that was the Charney report’s estimate 40 years ago. Trillions spent since, and this ridiculously broad interval is still trotted out, when it is known to be nonsense at the high end, where an entrenched but scientifically unwarrantable exaggeration persists.
“Mr Mosher says that today’s interval of climate-sensitivity oredictions is 1.5 to 4.5 K equilibrium warming per CO2 doubling. But that was the Charney report’s estimate 40 years ago. Trillions spent since, and this ridiculously broad interval is still trotted out, when it is known to be nonsense at the high end, where an entrenched but scientifically unwarrantable exaggeration persists.”
Science does not proceed by your schedule.
If you want a real treat look at how long it took to get a good estimate of the speed of light.
OR
How long it took to solve the Solar Neutrino problem where the data was misleading and the model was right.Even Feynman was stumped..
In what other field of science has there been 40 years of research, trillions of dollars spent and no progress whatsoever made on the basic tenet?
Is there a better illustration of abject failure?
Is there a better illustration of government waste?
And when the dust settles, after more than 40 years of having failed to narrow the range, it will probably be established that the true sensitivity is below the bottom of the range!! That will emphasise the failure of the science.
if only the theorists had opted for a range of -0.5 to +4.5degC per doubling they would have been on far firmer ground!
Mr Mosher is entitled to his religious – or, rather, superstitious – belief that the mere data are wrong and the “science-is-settled” models right. And I have long learned that trying to stand between a man and his superstition is a futile exercise.
However, it will soon be apparent to all that the absurdly broad and still unconstrained 3 K interval of estimates of equilibrium sensitivity arises from a mistake inserted into the climate journals a third of a century ago and thereupon incorporated into the model ensembles’ diagnoses of climate sensitivity. Once that error of mathematics – elementary but subtle – is eradicated, the high end of IPCC’s silly interval of predictions vanishes, and the warming that we are likely to see is small, harmless and net-beneficial.
Watch this space.
fantastic post wayne. i only disagree with the single word “unwittingly” and even then in only a small percentage of cases.
The article by Mr Monckton does not answer the titular question.
I am not a firm believer that the Earth’s atmosphere will continue to warm, but if someone tells me a “pause” is epistemologically significant, and the “pause” goes away, then he proceeds to tell me that the “pause” going away is not significant, I’ll call him out.
Contra the “pause” we have the highest data point in the chart being in the last 12 months, that is consistent with data one would see from a warming world and does certainly not falsify the warming hypothesis.
No El Nino and there would be no high point to show.
Afterthought has not perhaps read the earlier posts in ”tis series, where it was made plain that the Pause was unlikely to continue indefinitely, but that its length had had the effect of bringing down the longe-term warming rate.
The warming of the past year is not consistent with anthropogenic greenhouse-gas enrichment, which would not be expected to cause a sudden spike in the graph. It is consistent with a naturally-occurring El Niño southern oscillation. If the El Niño is followed by a La Niña this year and next, the Oause may well return for a time. By then it will be about 20 years in length.
goldminor on January 8, 2017 at 7:49 pm
No El Nino and there would be no high point to show.
Sounds exactly as if you would be an alarmist crowing
No El Chichon, no Pinatubo and there would be moch more warmth.
Same level of nonsense.
No it isn’t as there is a huge difference between a random volcanic eruption, and the different modes of the ENSO regions.
I made that point yesterday, but my comment did not get posted. Yesterday, I tried to comment as follows:
There appears to be quite some disconnect between the title and the article. Interesting as the article may be, it does not appear to address the question posed. Of course, no one knows the future so that any prediction rests a great deal upon speculation and conjecture. For my two pennyworth;
I do not like using hundredths of a degree. Essentially, during the first period of the record from inception at launch through to the run up of the 1997/98 Super El Nino there is a warming of about 0.1degC. Then following the 1997/98 Super El NIno through to the run up to the latest 2015/16 Strong El Nino there is no statistical warming at all. It is merely that coincident with the Super El Nino of 1997/98 there has been a long lasting step change in temperatures of about 0.3degC, the reason for which is unknown but such a step change cannot be explained by CO2.
The first period is dominated by the two well known volcano events and the recovery from those.
Why anyone would put a linear straight line through this record is beyond me.
It will be interesting to see what happens once the current ENSO completes. This cycle has not yet completed, and for that reason one should not pay much weight to the current uptick brought about by the strong 2015/16 El Nino.
The issue is quite simple. Will the strong 2015/16 El Nino result in a short lived spike as happened with the 2010 strong El Nino? Will the current ENSO cycle complete with a La Nina in 2017 and temperatures return back down to around the +0.2 degC anomaly level (UAH)? Or will there be a long lasting step change coincident with the 2015/16 strong El Nino as there was with the 1997/98 Super El Nino?
If there is no long lasting step change coincident with the strong 2015/16 El Nino that El Nino will be seen to be a dud. In this scenario, the pause is likely to make a reappearance in 2017/18 and will then be over 20 years in duration and cover a period when almost 40% of all manmade emissions of CO2 have taken place all without any signature warming.
The satellite data appears to be more sensitive to El Nino events than it does to La Nina events. This may be because of convection and warmth released by EL NInos. So even IF a La Nina does develop in 2017, unless this is a strong La Nina, or lasts a long time, perhaps a double one, it will take time to cancel out the high peak of 20/15/16, but it is quite conceivable that by the time AR6 comes to be written the pause will have made a reappearance, and there will be papers discussing ever lowering sensitivities for Climate Sensitivity to CO2, model divergence issues, and explaining the pause which did exist, then ceased to exist and once more exists. There could well be a lot of cartwheels, and AR6 could be particularly interesting especially with a sceptical Trump administration.
The article rightly notes:
Materially, one thing that appears clear from the satellite data and that is that there is no first order correlation between CO2 and temperature rise in the satellite data. That is a record of nearly 40 years, and about 60% of all manmade CO2 emissions.
A cold US winter will help the Trump administration. Whilst this is only weather, psychologically, recent weather has an impact upon people’s perception, and the general population are likely to be more receptive to Trump’s sceptism if they have just experienced a hard winter.
As they say, watch this space as 2017/18 could get very interesting.
richard says “Will the strong 2015/16 El Nino result in a short lived spike as happened with the 2010 strong El Nino?” In my opinion the reason why we will not see an upward step in temps with the passage of more years after this large El Nino is that the climate pattern shifted back to cool in the mid 2000s. That is why the 2010 El Nino did not lead to an upward step change. When the climate pattern is set on warm, then an El Nino can cause a step up in global temps. This of course is conjecture on my part, but I certainly have some ability at connecting the dots.
My outlook for the ENSO regions is continued negative conditions into 2018, from a prediction I made in early 2014. That plus the upcoming solar minimum will lead to temps steadily dropping.
That final graph, showing 1990 predictions, 2013 predictions, and reality, is 97% easier to understand than the speedometer thingy.
Yes, i found that “thingy” to be really rather unsettling. Can’t wait til Lord M. gets back to his good ol’ fashioned “pause posts”. (simple is better)…
Noted. Some prefer the speedometer, others don’t.
Mods
Yesterday I tried to place 3 comments on this article. None have been posted. I do not know why as no banned words were used. Today, I tried to repost one of these comments and again it has disappeared.
Please will you check the Mod bin and at least post the comment that I have just tried to make.
many thanks
In spite of so many scientific works-made on the basis of models, assumptions, measurement, and who knows what else, to date there is no real evidence of who caused climate change on our planet. Each of these articles carries little hint of the real causes, but it is only one dot in relation to the overall picture of these causes.
Once again I have to, again, draw the attention of everyone involved in this research, that almost all new way to deceive “knowing” the truth, using models and mathematics. Almost no one uses logic and consciousness, which are associated with the “warehouse” of all causes and knowledge of the true causes of any phenomenon.
If using logic and natural law, then it must reject the assertion that climate change and global warming resulting from human factors.
Climate changes are the consequences of interaction between the planet and the sun. But how ? That you should explore !!
Here, my help: change the magnetic fields of the planets and their variations caused by changes in temperature and planets themselves and their wrappers. Again, I should know how and why. If anyone is interested, we can bring about discussion.
If this does not happen, it means that everyone staying in positions for which no truth can get more money than the truth. Why? Therefore, the truth is one and few believed in it. There is much more money on combinatorics unknown quantities, as used by “experts” who have given today and wrote several million “evidence, valued at approximately $ 45 billion in the last 20 years (around 2 billion). Only set, and I submit that millions of not stating the truth, because you will lose profits if the truth wins
When? January 20, 2017
Other than demonstrating the models are imperfect, and, given the complexity of the climate system, it would be a huge surprise if they were not, what real purpose does this article serve? It certainly isn’t science. Does the error demonstrate the climate is not warming? No, it does not. Does the author offer possible improvements to the model being discussed or alternative models which produce more accurate predictions? Again, no.
The climate is a system with innumerable circulations and periodic, near-periodic, and aperiodic oscillations with scales from millimeters to thousands of kilometers and seconds to millenia, many of which are interdependent. Add to thatb inherent non-linearities such as phase changes of water and albedo changes due to cloud formation and precipitation, as well as random signal injections from events such as volcanism. Expecting a linear, or even smooth curve, response over the short or medium term from such a system is just shy of ridiculous. Interestingly, the author invokes one of the stronger of these signals, the PDO, with a period on the order of 60 years, to explain the warming prior to the year 2000, and then ignores the subsequent cold phase. What followed was not a period of cooling, but the so-called “pause”, ending with a “super” El Nino and the highest global temperatures in the modern record. What signal increased to negate the PDO cooling and produce this response? Instead of considering this, the pause is dismissed as insignificant, either from flawed logic or purposeful disingenuousness.
The article isn’t scientific commentary, it’s naysaying in a poorly fitted shirt of mathematics.
[snip – if you want to smear a person’s credentials, put your name to it, rather than hide behind a fake name – otherwise, be silent – Anthony]
interesting that Dipstick (inevitably supported by the tedious Limpalong) is made uncomfortable by the head posting’s straightforward comparison of the published satellite datasets of real-world measured temperature change and the wild exaggerations originally published by IPCC.
These climate extremists do not understand that the first step towards doing true science – rather than trolling for the Party Line – is examining the data. Observation first, conclusion second, and not the other way about.
The observations have been sufficiently adrift from the predictions that two things have happened. First, the HadCRUT, NCEI, GISS and ARGO datasets have all been adjusted after the event, with the effect of greatly increasing the apparent rate of global warming compared with what the original data showed. Secondly, IPCC has become so embarrassed by its original overconfident overprediction that it has all but halved its interval of medium-term predictions – a sufficiently clear admission that its original predictions were wild exaggerations.
It was the original predictions on which the lurid scenarios of 4-6 K global warming by 2100 were based. As it is, even the most tampered-with datasets show that the warming rate so far this millennium has been less than 2 K / century equivalent.
You can be sure that the Trump administration will be paying heed to these real-world observations, noting the systemic tampering with datasets and the very large fraction of “observed” warming that arises solely from that tampering, and consequently greatly reducing the amount it spends on making largely non-existent and harmless global warming go away.
So there’s no point in whining that I should do more research than I do. I have many interests, of which the climate is but one: nevertheless, I have a long track-record of publication in the learned journals, and a forthcoming paper will reveal the major error that accounts for the nonsensically broad official interval of predicted long-term global warming, and for the absurdly overblown high-end climate-sensitivity estimates on the basis of which governments are squandering trillions.
In the end, climate campaigners like the paid trolls who infest these threads will not succeed in preventing the true science from emerging. Propaganda has no place in science: data and sound theory will eventuall prevail over it, whether these two ill-informed and perhaps not well-intentioned campaigners like it or not.
“Observation first, conclusion second, and not the other way about.”
But if we do it that way, we might come to a conclusion we don’t like.
Looking forward to the paper – where is it to be published? Has it been accepted yet?
Well, to my humble laymen’s eye, beyond all the gobbledy-gook about arguing how many angels can dance on the end of a pin – what seems to me a remarkable preoccupation with inconsequential increments – ‘Global Warming’ amounts to two El Ninos , spaced two decades apart, and a lot of rationalizing in between to support an alarmist message – and continued funding – while nothing was going on.
And based on the last few years – somewhere around a hundred excuses for the Pause, which finally culminated in just simply changing all the data sets – the Pause will NEVER be allowed to resume (or continue) while the current institutional positions in media and academia are still filled by those who have a dog in the fight.
Do I dare hope that at least some of this last will change with the new administration?
GISS may go away, but in any case will be redirected from “climate change” modeling to actual “space studies”, as in its name.
That will still leave the usual suspects at NOAA, but maybe they’ll get the message that real science, as opposed to post-modern “climate science”, will once again be rewarded.
And in any case, the federal “climate science” budget will be cut, I hope by 90%, as suggested by Dr. Lindzen. And, ideally, US funding for IPCC zeroed out. The best thing that IPCC could do now would be to issue a final report, stating, “Oops! Sorry. Never mind. But thanks for all the moolah!”
Joel Snider on January 9, 2017 at 1:10 pm & Chimp on January 9, 2017 at 1:24 pm
Two typical comments written by persons I view as a kind of ‘ground zero’ skeptics.
No science, no knowledge, no arguments, no data.
Bare polemics output by people lacking what is intellectually needed for a proper evaluation of this difficult interface between science and politics.
Luckily there are lots of people who are half a galaxy away from all the nonsense told here in this more aggressive than argumentative ‘guest post’ and many comments.
It’s called sound skepticism. I like it. Gimme more of it here!
Yes, Bindidon, I sometimes wish I would have continued on from my humble B.S., to a total B.S., so I could properly engage with stuck-up smart asses such as yourself.
The fact is too many of these shenanigans in the climate industry are patently obvious. You don’t have to be a professional referee to know a foul is committed after someone bites another guy’s ear off.
Careful not to fall off your high horse. What a tragedy if you broke your neck.
Global cooling is here and you don’t need graphs and theories and degrees and arguments to know it. All you need to know is that a large number of scientists have for years been predicting the cooling could begin about 2015. In 2015 there were record low temps all over the planet in both hemispheres and that has continued until today.
There is no prediction or explanation of this within AGW.
Here are a couple of examples from the last two days.
http://dailynewshungary.com/low-temperature-record-28-1-c-hungary/
http://koin.com/2017/01/05/brrr-coldest-morning-in-2-years/
It is my belief that the reason they are falsely claiming that the amount of CO2 we are putting to the atmosphere is falling is because they have access to the raw data and they know cooling is happening. So they are going to provide an explanation for it. Reduced CO2 emissions..
Yes, but atmospheric carbon growth continues unabated…
Using the word “pause” implies the trend before the pause is going to return.
No one knows that.
So the word “pause” is wrong UNTIL it becomes obvious the prior rising trend has resumed — and that could take a decade.
Due to large margins of errors in measurements — far higher than scientists claim, in my opinion, there are only three possible average temperature trends:
Up
Flat
Down
There appears to be a rising trend since 1850.
Given large margins of error in surface measurements, especially prior to 1950,
it’s also possible the trend since 1850 was flat.
In the manmade CO2 era since 1940, I would describe the general trends as:
– Downtrend, from 1940 to 1975
– Flat trend from 1975 to early 1990s low
– Uptrend from early 1990s low to early 2000s high
– Flat trend since early 2000F
My “eyeball” trends ignore the huge 1998 and 2015/2016 El Nino peaks
because they have nothing to do with manmade CO2
and I believe any honest scientist would agree with that.
The way I describe the trends is to look at average temperature charts from a long distance in an attempt to find general trend lines EXCLUDING obvious EL Nino peaks.
Statistical analysis is not appropriate here because the temperature anomalies are too small relative to REASONABLE margins of error (I refuse to believe the false claims of a +/- 0.1 degrees C. margin of error).
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley:
The trend lines you show on charts, with hundredths of a degree C., are false precision.
I doubt if any measurements are accurate to the nearest 0.1 degree C.
More important is your trend lines on the charts capture El Nino peaks that we know have nothing to do with manmade CO2.
Most important is your trend lines obscure what I see with my own eyes:
A rise (step up) from the early 1990s to early 2000s.
It’s hard to see that because there’s a huge 1998 El Nino peak in the middle of the step up.
After that step up, the average temperature has been in a generally flat trend, if you ignore the 2015 / 2016 El Nino peak.
From my point of view, the only time in 4.5 billion years that man made CO2 and average temperature rose significantly at the same time, was from the early 1990s to 2000s
My next question is; Did CO2 cause that rise or not?
Since we had a flat trend from the early 2000s through today, while CO2 rose rapidly (ignoring the 2015 / 2016 El Nino peak), that suggests CO2 is not an important average temperature variable.
Then the mystery is to figure out why average temperature had a step up from the early 1990s to early 2000s, if CO2 was not the cause.
That may remain a mystery for a long time, but one guess would be the heat release from the 1998 EL Nino did not get reversed by the following La Nina — we took a step up in average temperature, followed by a half step down?
There may be other natural or manmade explanations that are better.
Perhaps measurement error?
Perhaps deliberate “adjustments” to raw data from warmunists?
I have noticed the average temperature went up faster when Al Gore was getting lots of face time on TV in the 1990s and early 2000s to scare people about global warming … then he seemed to disappear (to buffet restaurants, it appears) and the average temperature went into a flat trend.
Coincidence?
There are many people can view the average temperature,
and the most important decisions are the start point
and end point of the time period you chose to discuss:
Cooler than when the dinosaurs were here
Warmer than when Canada was last under ice
Warmer than in 1850
Flat since early 2000s, excluding El Nino peak in 2015/2016
Future climate unknown (unless you are a warmunist and can predict the future)
I believe the best time period to study
is from the early 1990 low to the early 2000s peak,
when the average temperature took a significant step up,
but then stayed in a flat trend for a while,
which means CO2 is not a good explanation.
I have a BS degree but have never worked as a scientist.
I just try to observe and apply common sense.
We have some questionable average temperature measurements.
We “infill” missing data, and a lot is missing.
We “adjust” data to show more warming and better match models.
We average data across the entire planet and say that represents the “climate”.
We look at tiny percentages of Earths 4.5 billion year history.
We draw trend lines.
We sometimes show temperature changes in hundredths of a degree C.
We claim the margin of error is +/- 0.1 degree C.
with no explanation of how that margin of error could be possible with the instruments we use.
And we still don’t know why the average temperature took a step up
from the early 1990s to early 2000s. and then stayed in a flat trend for a while.
And we certainly don’t know what causes climate change.
And you Mr. Monckton, want to know when the pause will return, as if anyone really knows?
I don’t get it.
Predicting the future climate is the warmunist’s world.
Skeptics need to deal with real measurements, not predictions.
If you delete the 2015 / 216 El Nino peak,
it’s not yet obvious that the flat trend since the early 2000s
has ever gone away !
A few years from now we may look at a chart and see the flat trend did not end.
But no one knows that now.
Climate Blog for non-scientists:
http://www.elOnionBloggle.Blogspot.com
One agrees that it is not really possible to determine a trend to within 0.1 K/century, given the uncertainties in the underlying data. One also agrees that there has been very little warming since 2000.
But the central point of the head posting was to demonstrate the continuing discrepancy between wild prediction and unexciting observed temperature change since 1990, a discrepancy that suggests the possibility of the Pause resuming if the current el Nino is followed – as about half of them are – by a countervailing la Nina.
If so, then the Pause will be close to 20 years long when it returns, and that will make it very difficult for the usual suspects to maintain the scare.
Thanks much, MoB…
“One agrees that it is not really possible to determine a trend to within 0.1 K/century, given the uncertainties in the underlying data.”
Indeed. Starting at 2000 you cannot determine it significantly to within 1.0 K/century – which makes the claim that there “has been very little warming since 2000” statistically unsupportable.
RSS 3.3 shows warming at the rate of 0.96 C/century since 2000, but with a 2 sigma value of 1.97 C/century. So temperatures could have been dropping by 1 C/century, but could have been warming at almost 3 C/century.
I suppose with a broader definition of “pause”, and a longer time period of observations and proxies, one could say there has been a climate change pause since 1850.
Since 1850, the average temperature stayed within a narrow 1 degree C. range — a trend that is flat compared with what we think we know about Earth’s climate history.
So I contend the pause really started on 1850, and since the climate is wonderful these days, we should hope it never ends.
Without your mathematical “work”, if one just observes the temperature charts and ignores the 1998 and 2015/2016 El Nino peaks not caused by CO2, the pause appears to be still in progress.
Predicting the future climate (and being wrong) is what left-wingers call climate science.
It’s not climate science, it’s climate astrology.
We deniers should stay away from their bad science to differentiate ourselves — that means we should stay away from climate predictions, and presenting temperature data with two or three decimal places.
Lord Monckton:
How can one measure “the rate of global warming since 1990” and why is this rate important?
Read the head posting. Temperature is measured by instruments in the oceans, on the surface, in the atmosphere and in space. The rate of global warming is determined by standard statistical methods. The rate of global warming since 1990 is important because that was when IPCC made its first, wild predictions, because it is half of what IPCC wildly predicted, and because it is slowing when IPCC had predicted it would get faster.
Change the starting and ending points by just a few years and a short-term average temperature trend can change significantly, especially if you cherry-pick the start and end points with bias.
Trend lines are often bad science because they obscure data details.
Temperature data are already obscured by inaccurate measurements.
Data are further obscured by infilling, adjustments, and global averaging.
Data are further obscured by viewing 0.0001% or less of Earth’s entire 4.5 billion year history.
Data can be further obscured by using trend lines for very short time periods, such as from 1979 to 2015, where changing the data start and data end years by just a few years, could turn a rising trend into a flat trend.
Monckton of Brenchley,
Could you provide more details on the statement “onboard instrumentation was heating the platinum-resistance thermometers”, and that this was resulting in spurious satellite data?
Bellman, i know you’re expecting royalty here and are none to happy about getting a hood in a leather jacket in his stead, but i’ve got a little something to add about your question here (as i used to “hang out” over at dr spencer’s blog)… A couple years ago, and months before dr spencer released version 6 of his satellite data set, two commentors at his blog alerted him to the fact that the land data had been showing spurious warming since 2005. Dr spencer said he would check it out and (low and behold), they were right. He said the satellite instrumentation was showing too great a sensitivity to the land signal. The corrections that he made to the data set were then about half from this error and also half from orbital drifting of the satellites. So the small correction that he was anticipating from just the orbital drift had doubled overnight with the additional correction for the land data. (the change from versions 5.6 to 6 thus became a sustantial downward change in temperature instead of his expected minor one)…
Forgive me if this comment is repetitious. I am troubled by trend lines that begin in the 1990’s and extend until the present. Such lines tend to obscure the beginning of the current pause in warming that began in 2002 according to my reading of the temperature graph. If a horizontal line is extended forward from the temperature for 2002 then it becomes obvious that most of the recent temperature activity appears to occur below that line. This is especially true if the temperature entries for years with recognized short term climate events such as El Nino or La Nina are ignored. Thus the pause does not have to return. It never left and if temperature history is any guide it should continue until about 2032.
Spot on, William, that’s my mindset exactly… Temps are right back down where they were in ’02. (not only satellites, but hadcrut4 as well) Until we see otherwise on an extended basis, we’re still in a hiatus. i think everybody is making to much of a fuss over minor changes in the temperature record. Relax (everyone), and see where temps go from here. None of us are going anywhere for a while (we all call earth home)…
While in Monckton’s threads ‘the pause’ has always been defined the same way: “the farthest back one can go in the RSS satellite temperature record and still show a sub-zero trend.”
Monckton’s definition may be consistent, but it ignores margins of error, so is wrong.
Monckton is consistent, but wrong, on four things:
(1) His trend lines obscure important temperature details visible on the charts,
(2) His statistical definition of a “pause” ignories reasonable margins of error,
(3) His use of two and three decimal places for average temperature data is false precision, and
(4) His misleading use of the word “pause” when no one has any idea if the prior trend will resume when the “pause” ends
Just like a “pause” button on a remote control, people know that pressing the play button will end the pause, and then whatever was happening before the pause will resume.
Since no one knows what the future temperature trend will be, it is impossible for anyone to know if the trend before the pause will resume. The warmunists want that trend to resume.
What was the trend before the “pause”.
Using a chart, and my eyes, will no statistics, I see a significant warming trend from the early 1990s low to the early 2000’s peak.
Then there was a flat trend after the early 2000s peak if I ignore the temporary 2015 2016 El Nino spike..
If that flat trend is followed by a continuation of the sharp rise from the early 1990s to early 2000s, then the word “pause”, as used today, would have been correct.
But no one knows that now.
v’