Guest post by David Middleton
The folks at the logical fallacy factory must be working overtime…
According to Nasa, in 2016 the Earth’s surface temperature shattered the previous record for hottest year by 0.12°C. That record was set in 2015, which broke the previous record by 0.13°C. That record had been set in 2014, beating out 2010, which in turn had broken the previous record set in 2005.
If you think that seems like a lot of record-breaking hot years, you’re right. The streak of three consecutive record hot years is unprecedented since measurements began in 1880. In the 35 years between 1945 and 1979, there were no record-breakers. In the 37 years since 1980, there have been 12. The video below illustrates all of the record-breaking years in the Nasa global surface temperature record since 1880.
Firstly, according to the satellite data, the record had stood since 1998 and 2016 was technically a statistical tie with 1998…
Globally, 2016 edged out 1998 by +0.02 C to become the warmest year in the 38-year satellite temperature record, according to Dr. John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville. Because the margin of error is about 0.10 C, this would technically be a statistical tie, with a higher probability that 2016 was warmer than 1998. The main difference was the extra warmth in the Northern Hemisphere in 2016 compared to 1998.
Secondly, “in the 35 years between 1945 and 1979, there were no record-breakers” because the Earth’s climate was cooling…
Thirdly, from 1937-1945, there were four “record-breakers” in 1937, 1941, 1943 and 1944. Back then, we were breaking global temperature records once every two years…
Conclusion
So what? Even if we were “now breaking global temperature records once every three years,” it wouldn’t be unprecedented and we actually had more frequent record breaking at a time when atmospheric CO2 levels were in the range of 305-310 ppmv…
- Record pace of record-breakers with 305-310 ppmv CO2
Could someone please explain the eemian interglacial period when co2 levels were half the level of today. Temperature was 7 or 8C warmer than today. This was 115000 years ago and lasted for 30000 years. Surely this fact makes so called global warming and climate change insignificant today.
The Eemian (AKA Sangamonian) was 5-10 C warmer in the Arctic. Globally it was only 1-5 C warmer.
Some Late Pleistocene interglacial stages were warmer and some were cooler than the Holocene. This is the nature of stochastic quasi-periodic fluctuations.
All other things held equal, 400 ppmv CO2 will yield a warmer bulk atmospheric temperature than 280 ppmv. The observations indicate that 1) all other things are never held equal and 2) the transient climate response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 is probably less than 1.5 C. So, the odds are that 130,000 years into the future, the Holocene will look just like a typical Late Pleistocene interglacial stage, apart from elevated CO2 and other atmospheric gasses.
question in the historic sens did they have the ability to measure to a ‘ few hundreths of a degree Celcius’ ?
second question if was an actually experiment , would you say that given the range of possibility even now they have the ability to measure the WORLDS temperatures to a a few hundreths of a degree Celcius?
If the answer to either of them is no , then this is not a known measurement at all , it is a guessed one .
We tend to forget that our ability to know or measure elements of the climate are not much better in this era of ‘settled science ‘ than in the era of ‘it may or may not rain tomorrow ‘
Indeed is one reason you cannot get a weather forecast worth a dam for more than 72 hours ahead with more accuracy than ‘in winter it will colder than in summer ‘
A cornered animal has one of two responses: take flight or fight back.
President Trump has pretty made it clear by his actions that the gravy train is over. He has cornered the environmentalists. They can do one of two things: take flight into another career choice that will likely require more work for less pay or fight back and become more and more shrill. I expect a lot of caterwauling the next several months. They will carefully word things to play the victim. i.e. They won’t say “the new administration wants all communication to come from official channels only”; they will say “Donal Trump is gagging us!” A cornered animal is the most dangerous, so the environs can do a lot of damage in their desperate attempts to keep the high life alive. Their only hope is if DJT backs down.
And let us be honest. The people who voted for Trump care not one bit about what Big Green thinks. The people who voted against are the ones who do care. So he isn’t going to lose any political points by keeping the fight. So the environs are going to fight, but they have no advantage. No matter how many “think of the children!” logical fallacies they use, it won’t sway the minds of Trump supporters. So there is no risk in fighting. I don’t think Big Green knows that yet.
An animal has two choices, fight or flight. A cornered animal has only one choice – fight, because it cannot flee.
Trump and the rest are cornered by the evidence, so must fight back if they want to continue. That is why we are seeing unprecedented shutting down of communication from Government departments. If you can’t fight the data, prevent it being communicated.
For those that are interested in a copy of the article, if you search in bing climate change chilling possibilities, the top link is to a pdf of the paper. Science News Volume 107. Follow the link.
https://www.sciencenews.org/sites/default/files/8983
Think of how many “hottest years ever” have occurred since the end of the LIA.
🙂
How many “Coldest days evah!” have we had in the last 2.6 million years?
Executive Order – The NOAA/NCDC is ordered to stop all new temperature adjustment algorithms until we can figure out what has been going on.
This year the record was 0.12C above the previous record?
Karl 2015 – “Buoy SSTs have been adjusted toward ship SSTs in ERSST.v4 to correct for a systematic difference of 0.12°C between ship and buoy observations. Although buoy SSTs are more homogeneous and reliable than ship observations, buoys were not widely available before around 1980.” ???
It is not a “temperature record”, it is an “adjustment record”.
What is even worse the 0.12c above the record will be adjusted again numerous times in future down the line to show what would have not been record temperatures back then. Further to support more warming in future because the past had been cooled. It is not actual changing global temperatures, but adjustments to show manufactured short term trends for the moment, still far from supporting the alarmist warming memo.
Posted by someone else on another site, this struck me as both funny and true:
Somerton’s Law: If the solution to global warming and climate change was lower taxes, fewer regulations and less intrusive government, the issue would vanish overnight.
But Somerton’s Law is easily disproven, since lower taxes, fewer regulations and less instrusive government is the solution to allegedly catastrophic climate change. And the issue has not yet vanished.
If the solution to poverty was less money, the problem would vanish overnight.
MarkW
You wrote “So what’s the causation. It can’t be CO2 because over the last 100 years temperatures have gone up, gone down,and stayed the same while CO2 has been going up”
It’s actually caused by the removal of SO2 aerosols from the atmosphere. Google “Climate Change Deciphered” for the analysis.
Human SO2 aerosols only affect regional low levels of atmosphere and have a very short life.
For example, it would had been expected in this case for temperatures to decrease in China during the increasing pollution from also increased coal factories. In fact the opposite has occurred and China has actually warmed.
https://briangunterblog.wordpress.com/2016/10/14/china-mongolia-temperatures/
Matt G
You wrote “Human aerosols affect regional low levels of atmosphere and have a very short half life”
This is true of intermittent emissions ONLY. The bulk of emissions (such as from power plants) come from sources which are constantly being renewed, and as such have essentially an infinite lifetime, ending only when the are modified to reduce emissions, or are shut down. This allows emissions to spread from local sources and affect the entire global climate.
That this is true is shown by the temporary rise in average global temperatures whenever there is a business recession, due to fewer SO2 aerosol emissions into the troposphere because of the attendant reduced industrial activity. This has occurred for both depressions and all 31 of the recessions over the past 160 years,
Google “Climate Change Deciphered” for supportive analysis.
You also said “China has actually warmed”. So has the whole world, although their emissions have helped to reduce the amount of warming that would otherwise have occurred…
Firstly short life not short half-life, the latter refers to radioactive material.
Power plants are constantly renewable, but the SO2 aerosols are washed out of the local atmosphere every time with significant water vapour and especially rainfall. Every time this happens the process starts again and never gets chance to anywhere remotely affect global climate because they never really get chance to reach above the troposphere. SO2 aerosols have a life time of only a few days.
The graph below shows how SO2 levels have no trend in the stratosphere. All peaks that are fairly noticeable are down to volcanic eruptions that caused SO2 to enter the stratosphere.
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/strataer/
During World War II production increased rapidly, yet there was no change to SO2 in the above graph and in the troposphere global temperatures warmed. Virtually all the small noticeable short rises in global temperatures have been down to ENSO with El Nino’s. The last recession occurred around 2008-9, yet global temperatures were still not warming at that time.
The warming there has been greater than numerous other parts of the world at similar latitudes.
“There is evidence of temperature rises of around 1.5-2.0 deg C since around 1970, but that a cyclical peak occurred around 2010.”
Matt G.
You said “SO2 aerosols………never gets chance to anywhere remotely affect global climate because they never really get chance to reach above the troposphere”
There is no need for them to ever reach the stratosphere. The climatic effect of stratospheric and tropoospheric SO2 aerosols.is identical, as I prove in my “Climate Change Deciphered” post.
The referenced graph is applicable only to stratospheric aerosols.
Figure 4 in my post shows increased anthropogenic SO2 emissions into the troposphere during the World War ii era, but, again, your graph is just for stratospheric aerosols,.and the anthropogenic emissions are not shown.
Yes, China may be warmer than other parts of the world, as you say, but we are looking AVERAGE global temperatures.
What is INESCAPABLE is that temporary warming always occurs whenever there is a business recession.. This can only be due to fewer SO2 emissions into the troposphere–which implies that industrial emissions are not immediately washed out of the air, as you claim, but have a very long “effective” lifetime.
And of course, when anthropogenic SO2 emissions are deliberately reduced due to Clean Air efforts, warming will naturally occur (which is so large that there can never have been any warming due to CO2)
(There was much volcanism in the Earth’s past, which would have led to the various ice ages. When it ceased, the resultant warming would melt the glaciers, allowing forestation to re-occur, and explaining why warming always preceded rises in CO2 emissions)…
“Firstly short life not short half-life, the latter refers to radioactive material.”
Sorry please ignore that, was being too picky and can represent other half-life’s not necessarily radioactive.
“SO2 aerosols have a life time of only a few days.”
This refers to only in the troposphere of course and can last a few years in the stratosphere.
NASA GISS has been a lying worthless sh**h*l* for 30 years.
GW:
Actually, their reported anomalous temperatures are surprisingly accurate, at least with respect to satellite measurements.
NASA/GISTEMP anomalies are with respect to the average of a 1951-1980 base period..
Satellite measurements, on the other hand, currently use a 1981-2010 base period.
I recently wondered what the later NASA/GISS anomalies data would look like if also used a 1981-2010 base period.(the average turned out to be 0.45 deg. C.)
Using the latest copy of “UAH Satellite-Based Temperatures of the Global Lower Atmosphere” graph, I plotted the departures from 0.45 deg. C. for the years 1981-2016.
(The graph includes a line for the “running centered 13-month average”)
To my surprise, the majority of my plotted points lay directly on the “average” line.with the others about .02 deg. C.from the line (except for 1998 -1999, and as noted below)
NASA normally reports data with 1200 km smoothing. but it is also available with 250 km smoothing (see the monthly GISTEMP maps). Since about 2009, the 250 km data has been closest to the “average” line, with the 2500 km data being about 0.1 deg. C warmer
But all in all, the two data sets are essentially identical. .
“But all in all, the two data sets are essentially identical.”
You can do those plots interactively here, with the 1981-2010 base. A screenshot is below. I have included UAH 5.6 as well. Yes, GISS (red) and UAH 6 (blue) are not so far apart. Where they do differ, in recent years, UAH5.6 (green) is closer to GISS than it is to UAH 6. And the trend is much closer, though all trends are decidedly up.
Nick:
Thanks for the graph.
However, my method showed a much closer agreement between GISS and Satellite data.
Since the 1997/98 El Nino there are far apart as shown below.
http://i772.photobucket.com/albums/yy8/SciMattG/GlobalvDifference1997-98ElNino_zps8wmpmvfy.png
Putting so much emphasis on a single number — the average global temperature — is only useful for propaganda purposes. If we really want to understand what is happening, we have to look at changes in both high and low temperatures. Also, we should be comparing the changes in climatic regions so studiously characterized by physical geographers before it became fashionable to focus on a single number.
“we have to look at changes in both high and low temperatures”
I was thinking that exact same thing today. Which are going to be more accurate: the average, or the highs and lows? The spread between the 2 on even one station over time is heck of a lot more interesting than an ‘average’.
Averaging station 1000km apart and adjusting ocean temperature and using water temperature from buckets lifted from the sea 100 years ago to adjust buoy measured temperature destroys current data.
There is no way to be “accurate” using this catastrophic global warming measuring system.
Clyde Spencer on January 25, 2017 at 8:56 pm
Why are you ‘focusing on a single number’ ?
No provider of temperature data does: NASA GISTEMP, HadCRUT and UAH for example have gridded data out of which anybody on Earth can construct any subset.
Some of their data unfortunately is stored in huge files using the NetCDF format; but many datasets are available in simple text form.
For example: GISTEMP zonal data
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/ZonAnn.Ts+dSST.txt
For example: UAH’s zonal data
http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tlt/uahncdc_lt_6.0.txt
I never mind about their ‘single number’ mania… simply because it is by far more interesting to compare different datasets in different zones of the Globe.
Very good presentation by David Middleton. Led to interesting discussions.
Lots of human change to environment in the preparation / execution of WWII:
Maybe. Or, it was a random event. Or, perhaps the record keeping suffered under a wartime economy with higher priorities, or key people left for more urgent tasks. There’s no telling. What happened ’36-’38?
The Arctic temperatures still had data from them during World War II with significantly less environment change there.
http://i772.photobucket.com/albums/yy8/SciMattG/ArcticTempsSurface1936_zpspod7pd2i.png
High latitude warming is not a problem.
Phew Brian, that’s reassuring. But low latitude is a problem? Darn, that’s where I live.
There is no low latitude warming either. Tilt another windmill. This one’s dead.
I think I read somewhere you mentioned English is not your native tongue (apologies if that is incorrect). If it is the case, I can forgive you for failing to pick on my sarcasm. I refuse to write /sarc.
Brian H on January 25, 2017 at 10:54 pm
High latitude warming is not a problem.
Could you explain what you exactly mean?
The supposed “high latitude warming” that has been measured is not an increase in the highs. It is a decrease in the extent of the lows. There is no measurable libido feed-back mechanism in sub-zero decrease of low extents.
Note that during the last glaciation, much of Alaska was ice free. If the North starts to actually warm, that will signal the end of the Holocene. Up until the late seventies the scare-mongering was around freezing, not warming. Pay no attention to the Chicken Little types. They will always be clucking about something.
There is no measurable libido feed-back mechanism in sub-zero decrease of low extents.
Nah, cold weather doesn’t help me much either.
Looking at the link that D.I. provided: http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/abs_temp.html
I was amazed to read this NASA web page admitting that to calculate a global average temperature in absolute terms is nigh on impossible!
My bold of their page follows:
“The Elusive Absolute Surface Air Temperature (SAT)
The GISTEMP analysis concerns only temperature anomalies, not absolute temperature. Temperature anomalies are computed relative to the base period 1951-1980. The reason to work with anomalies, rather than absolute temperature is that absolute temperature varies markedly in short distances, while monthly or annual temperature anomalies are representative of a much larger region. Indeed, we have shown (Hansen and Lebedeff, 1987) that temperature anomalies are strongly correlated out to distances of the order of 1000 km.
Q. What exactly do we mean by SAT?
A. I doubt that there is a general agreement how to answer this question. Even at the same location, the temperature near the ground may be very different from the temperature 5 ft above the ground and different again from 10 ft or 50 ft above the ground. Particularly in the presence of vegetation (say in a rain forest), the temperature above the vegetation may be very different from the temperature below the top of the vegetation. A reasonable suggestion might be to use the average temperature of the first 50 ft of air either above ground or above the top of the vegetation. To measure SAT we have to agree on what it is and, as far as I know, no such standard has been suggested or generally adopted. Even if the 50 ft standard were adopted, I cannot imagine that a weather station would build a 50 ft stack of thermometers to be able to find the true SAT at its location.
Q. What do we mean by daily mean SAT?
A. Again, there is no universally accepted correct answer. Should we note the temperature every 6 hours and report the mean, should we do it every 2 hours, hourly, have a machine record it every second, or simply take the average of the highest and lowest temperature of the day? On some days the various methods may lead to drastically different results.
Q. What SAT do the local media report?
A. The media report the reading of 1 particular thermometer of a nearby weather station. This temperature may be very different from the true SAT even at that location and has certainly nothing to do with the true regional SAT. To measure the true regional SAT, we would have to use many 50 ft stacks of thermometers distributed evenly over the whole region, an obvious practical impossibility.
Q. If the reported SATs are not the true SATs, why are they still useful?
A. The reported temperature is truly meaningful only to a person who happens to visit the weather station at the precise moment when the reported temperature is measured, in other words, to nobody. However, in addition to the SAT the reports usually also mention whether the current temperature is unusually high or unusually low, how much it differs from the normal temperature, and that information (the anomaly) is meaningful for the whole region. Also, if we hear a temperature (say 70°F), we instinctively translate it into hot or cold. But our translation key depends on the season and region; the same temperature may be ‘hot’ in winter and ‘cold’ in July, since by ‘hot’ we always mean ‘hotter than normal’, i.e., we all translate absolute temperatures automatically into anomalies whether we are aware of it or not.
Q. If SATs cannot be measured, how are SAT maps created?
A. This can only be done with the help of computer models, the same models that are used to create the daily weather forecasts. We may start out the model with the few observed data that are available and fill in the rest with guesses (also called extrapolations) and then let the model run long enough so that the initial guesses no longer matter, but not too long in order to avoid that the inaccuracies of the model become relevant. This may be done starting from conditions from many years, so that the average (called a ‘climatology’) hopefully represents a typical map for the particular month or day of the year.
Q. What do I do if I need absolute SATs, not anomalies?
A. In 99.9% of the cases you’ll find that anomalies are exactly what you need, not absolute temperatures. In the remaining cases, you have to pick one of the available climatologies and add the anomalies (with respect to the proper base period) to it. For the global mean, the most trusted models produce a value of roughly 14°C, i.e. 57.2°F, but it may easily be anywhere between 56 and 58°F and regionally, let alone locally, the situation is even worse.”
So there we have it.
NASA states the most trusted models produce a very rough temperature output, +/- 1 degree F, but we have had the hottest year again.
Whats a millidegree or two between friends?
What’s melting the ice steve? Millidegrees?
“What’s melting the ice steve? Millidegrees?”
El Nino heat is melting the ice.
El Nino heat will eventually work its way out of the system and then the arctic will freeze up again. I think it already is. I haven’t seen a graph of arctic ice from Griff in a while, so the ice must be growing.
Definitely the warmer oceans due to ENSO and the phase of AMOC influencing conditions when AO or NAO are either positive or negative. The atmosphere has been far too cold up there to cause less ice generally, so must down to far higher energy stored in water from below.
http://old.wetterzentrale.de/pics/Rtavn065.gif
We are in an inter-glacial. During inter-glacial periods, ice tends to melt. But, year over year, the Antarctic ice extent seems to be growing.
We are in an ice age, going back, what 2.6 million years? Most of that time was spent in glacial advance. By all available evidence, the Holocene (this inter-glacial) is coming to a close. Nothing about today’s “warming” is unusual. Nothing about ice melting today is unusual.
Nothing about Quixotic windmill tilting is unusual either. I would find it amusing if it weren’t that energy costs have been unnaturally driven up. Take your broom-stick lance and go tilt somewhere else.
Thanks for that illuminating post, steverichards.
steverichards1984 on January 26, 2017 at 1:05 am
So there we have it.
NASA states the most trusted models produce a very rough temperature output, +/- 1 degree F, but we have had the hottest year again.
Sorry Steve. There is some evidence that you did not understand what is meant in
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/faq/abs_temp.html
What you manifestly have understood is that NASA is able to calculate the GAT with an accuracy of at best ± 1 F.
But this is not at all what they wanted to express (but yes: did not succeed in).
What this quoted text means is that whereever you want to reconstruct an absolute temperature out of an anomaly, you can’t do it by simply adding the GAT to it.
You have to identify the anomaly’s exact temporal and geographic context, and to reproduce the absolute temperature out of the context. Sometimes the original data isn’t available and must be reconstructed. This has nothing to do with NASA or any other temperature measurement provider.
And… what in the world does anybody want to do with absolute data?
Here is a comparison of
ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/DATASETS/NOAA/G02135/north/daily/data/
with column 21 of
http://www.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tlt/uahncdc_lt_6.0.txt
http://fs5.directupload.net/images/170126/nknizmee.jpg
Do you really want me to show you the absolute data the two plots in the chart are originating from?
To provide absolute extents out of colorado.edu is no problem, and getting absolute K data out of UAH’s directory isn’t as well. But what is it for? What might we see? dbstealey’s style I guess 🙂
The parading “scientists” should have each of their foreheads tattooed with the amount of $$$ OPM MONEY they have received from the great Global Warming Gravy Train.
Let the waling begin !
GLOBAL TEMPERATURE DOES NOT EXIST (by Micheal Winston) – typing is correct.
Extract …
[ In the final analysis, it is no more meaningful to calculate an average temperature for a whole planet than it is to calculate the average telephone number in the Washington D.C. phone book. Temperature, like viscosity and density, and of course phone numbers, is not something that can be meaningfully averaged. “Global temperature” does not exist.
and also …
Even if you could calculate some sort of meaningful global temperature statistic, the figure would be unimportant. No one and nothing would experience it directly since we all live in regions, not the globe. There is no super-sized being straddling the planet, feeling global averages in temperature. Global warming does not matter.
… and also …
As Jay Lehr, science director of the Chicago-based Heartland Institute said, “It is a scam that dwarfs all others that have come before.” ]
END OF PASTE.
What’s up with that ?
Warren Latham on January 26, 2017 at 2:07 am
GLOBAL TEMPERATURE DOES NOT EXIST
http://propagandaguard.blogspot.com/2015/08/global-temperature-is-meaningless.html
https://www.google.de/?gws_rd=ssl#q=Micheal+Winston&nfpr=1
http://propagandaguard.com/
Wow !!! I’m incredibly impressed. Amazingly scientific profile of a propagandamaniac.
Warren Latham, I guess that a real science man like Roy Spencer knows by far far more about that than your Micheal Winston, and that the presence of a globewide time series with its trend in the UAH data certainly is not a hint on any kind of allegiance to the warmists.
The ref to the “Chicago-based Heartland Institute” tells me everything.
What’s up with that ?
Nothing.
Ok both of you, cool it. This is now wildly off-topic.
The records do not go back very far. Our modern warm period is still not as warm is it got during the previous Medevial Warm Period. The previous intergalcial period, the Eemian, was warmer than this one with more ice cap melting and higher sea levels yet CO2 levels were lower than today.
Well at least you people are finally accepting that climate change is actually happening. Now starts the denial that it’s a bad thing. At least it’s a baby step towards sanity.
[???? .mod]
There are no means in definition for or against that distinguishes with any scientific evidence in ‘climate change’ from normal climate change. Thank the alarmists for this as they blame everything for it thanks to their agenda.
The argument against climate change has always been about huge exaggeration directly related down to computer models that do not represent the plant Earth correctly at all.
So what are people finally accepting what is happening?
1) Strong El Nino’s caused by climate change?
2) Humans adjusting their global data sets cause climate change?
3) There has been no yearly records without previous adjustments to the data sets just before it since 1998.
@tony mcleod January 26, 2017 at 2:54 am
What’s melting the ice steve? Millidegrees?
Summer, quickly followed by winter when it refreezes.
Also!!!!
Maybe one year this may actually happen based on the same control and not due to being adjusted recently before, so later would have warmed even if it stayed the same as previously.
Hence, not seen since 1998 a yearly record occur without human adjusted interference just before.
Can we get an actual record leaving things as they were?
The signs are they have been fabricated to show confirmation bias.
Of course, those three consecutive years with slightly higher temps than the year before couldn’t possibly have been related to The Blob and a slow developing but eventually record breaking El Nino now could it? Strange how after they both dissipated, the temps dropped like a rock. Nope, couldn’t possibly have anything to do with them, pffttt… Crazy talk.
If all the average temperature graphs were drawn to scale with the Y axis starting at absolute zero, I imagine most people would be amazed at how constant the temperature has been. But, if you change the scale to hundredths of a degree and plot the change from the average, it looks like the climate is very unstable.