The Battle For Truth And Credibility Over Global Warming Pause
A story in the Sunday Times confirms that the UK Met Office does not accept Karl et al.’s denial of the global warming hiatus and acknowledges that, ‘the slowdown hasn’t gone away.’ Writing in this week’s New Scientist, Michael Mann claimed that the pause is an ‘utterly debunked idea’ and ‘in the final analysis was much ado about nothing,’ and a ‘favourite climate contrarian talking point.’ The pause is real and it contains lots of interesting science, there are over 50 explanations proffered for it. But is also has another effect in that is shows the diversity of opinion in climate science, which on this important topic is certainly not settled. Who can deny that climate science is divided over this crucial issue? –- David Whitehouse, GWPF Observatory, 12 February 2017
“What you see is that the slowdown just goes away.” –Thomas Karl (NOAA), Science Magazine, 4 June 2015.
“The slowdown hasn’t gone away.” –Peter Stott (Met Office), The Sunday Times, 12 February 2017
Even the MO knows Mann is FOS …
“Michael Mann claimed that the pause is an ‘utterly debunked idea”
Scientists don’t talk about “debunking”, they disprove. They also win their own Nobel prizes, not lie about winning them.
It is not just debunking! While it is difficult to read and grade a lot of student reports you learn that too often words used have meanings unrelated to or even antithetical to the report. This seems to be common across disciplines, so evaluations of scientists should be able to detect such regardless of particular expertise.
“These results do not support the notion of a “slowdown” in the increase of global surface temperature.” From Karl, et al., 2015, Science, vol. 348m Abstract, p 1469. While a single word like notion (“general understanding; vague or imperfect conception”) does not prove a lot, I have seen such words used by others as a denigration of cited works that they did not bother with actual analysis. Words like denier are pejorative. Some papers deserve being put down, but you need analysis. Have not read the paper, but this could be a testable hypothesis. Any language scholars out there?
Didn’t Michael Mann write a paper last year arguing that the pause is real, and Karl et al are wrong?
“Any language scholars out there?”
I would say Mosher, but he can’t even form sentences with proper spelling, grammar, and punctuation. Ostensibly he blames it on his smart phone.
Auto correct will do that. I proof read my posts a couple of times. It still seems to change sometimes. The deletion of a ‘not’ ‘ or’ ‘ and’ has the changed my meaning entirely. Sometimes whole paragraphs are missing. Additionally, it will substitute a word for the word you might be trying to use. I have had to rephrase a sentence simply because it will not allow me to use the intended word.
It would seem Mann suffered a head injury when the Hockey Stick fell from the wall and stuck him on the head. Yeah! That’s the excuse!
“Didn’t Michael Mann write a paper last year arguing that the pause is real, and Karl et al are wrong?”
You mean this one? https://goo.gl/tRoXlU
Abstract: “It has been claimed that the early-2000s global warming slowdown or hiatus, characterized by a reduced rate of global surface warming, has been overstated, lacks sound scientific basis, or is unsupported by observations. The evidence presented here contradicts these claims.”
Wow!
Michael Mann saying the Pause is an ‘utterly debunked idea”. LOL
And the Hockey Schtick is…..?
Mr Incredibility himself. Little wonder the Met Office wants daylight between them and him.
Michael Mann’s whole career is “debunked”! The Mann is a fr@ud and should be prosecuted!
I think you mean “full of shit”. I do hope I am correct.
Regards,
WL
Has the Pause gone? Mike says ‘yes’, ‘no’ says MO. So that’s settled, then.
Geeze! I don’t believe either of these sources. Now what do I do?
I don’t believe either of those sources either.
I guess the cat is both alive and dead at the same time.
Schroedinger’s Climate?
Have you ever attended a liar’s club meeting?
depending on others to do your thinking creates dilemmas like that … you should try not too …
This alleged pause is just fear mongering by the CAGC crowd to eliminate climate change research grants and stop cushy foreign travel. Calm down, take a deep breath. Be assured that global warming will continue along safely as it has always done.
The climate will change as it always has. Always.
Up? Or down? That is the question. The true climate change deniers are those who deny any possibility that the current warming period could be natural.
Well, “warming…as it has always done.” – except when it was cooling.
/grin
“I guess the cat is both alive and dead at the same time.” The above cat is in fact a veritable Tiger, and it is loose. And it is hungry, as well as a Mann-eater…..
A Met Office research manager once told me that their climate models had predicted the pause. (Because it was within the range of possible error of their models.)
And I have a simple computer program which predicts the result of throwing a six sided die with equal reliability. [It invariably predicts that the result will be 3.5, with a prediction error of ±3]
Shouldn’t that prediction error be ±2.5 ? 😉
JB – no, my programming is not that good.
It would take massive supercomputing power to reduce the uncertainty to that precise a level. Maybe in sixty years we will be able to know for sure.
brokenyogi,
No problem, after sixty years, we will go back and adjust.
In CAGW, all the dice are loaded.
I’ll gladly accept any offers of multi-million pound research grants tp develop an improved model, with an error of only ±2.5…
Did you homogenize your raw data prior to running the program? I did that and my program predicted that six appears every time.
“I have a simple computer program which predicts the result of throwing a six sided dice with equal reliability. [It invariably predicts that the result will be 3.5, with a prediction error of ±3]”
That is not that far from what IPCC seem to have been doing 🙂
“The equilibrium climate sensitivity quantifies the response of the climate system to constant radiative forcing on multi-century time scales. It is defined as the change in global mean surface temperature at equilibrium that is caused by a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration. Equilibrium climate sensitivity is likely in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C (high confidence), extremely unlikely less than 1°C (high confidence), and very unlikely greater than 6°C (medium confidence)( Note 16 ).”
Note 16 “No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies.”
IPCC; WGI ; AR5; Summary for policymakers; Page 16
LOL … I have a dice with six on all sides … just like climate science !
http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/102468/21562145/1357505901940/902844-21562143-thumbnail.jpg
So the implied question is “Since they have corrected all the data that was previously used for all the climate science are their previous findings all in question?”
We now “know” there was no dip in global temperature after 1940 and no pause after 1998 but all the work that relied on the GISS record done before Karl thought there was. How can we trust that science? Don’t all the papers that relied on the “wrong” data have to be revisited or at least questioned? It isn’t just that their shenanigans make us question the veracity of this paper, if it is correct the base for much previous work is destroyed.
I question the use of the word “corrected”. The data have been “adjusted”, but there is no assurance that the “adjustments” actually resulted in correct estimates of what the data might have been.
Raw data must be more reliable than poorly adjusted data.
As soon as you adjust raw data, you are creating a potential error equal to the size of the adjustment/correction. Thus error bars should always increase in line with the maximum adjustment made.
Thus if in any land based data set, they cool past raw temperatures by say 1.5degC, one has automatically introduced a potential uncertainty in the resultant ‘adjusted’ data set of +1.5degC.
Raw data shows More warming.. sorry
No need to be “sorry”. Raw data are contaminated by UHI. However, after “adjustment” they cease to be data; rather, they become merely estimates of what the data might have been.
Steven Mosher — Please tell me more. I see posts here almost every week showing how the adjustments to some data set or another increased the warming (usually by cooling the past).
If you know of a counter-example, please post a link. If you really have a point, Anthony should grant you a guest post.
“Raw data shows More warming.. sorry”
Only when you illegitimately average different sites together. That’s a no-no.
The solution to this issue is “intuitively obvious to the casual observer”: COLLECT ACCURATE DATA. That is neither rocket surgery nor brain science. It is simply how science is supposed to be done.
adjusted = useless for anything requiring certainty
Arguably, as detailed by the Surface Stations project, much of the raw data is useless for anything requiring certainty.
Yes fire, me too. I would say the databases have been violated.
The taxpayers have been “violated” as well.
Mosh, Is there actual data for global temperature? or merely multiple assumptions>
No is the answer to your first question. None of the data used to create an average global temperature is fit for the purpose. Also, without at least ten (10) million more temperature sensors spread evenly around the globe, the idea of a global average temperature is a vain conceit on the part of those compiling it.
:No is the answer to your first question. None of the data used to create an average global temperature is fit for the purpose. Also, without at least ten (10) million more temperature sensors spread evenly around the globe, the idea of a global average temperature is a vain conceit on the part of those compiling it.”
Even then it wouldn’t be valid. Temperature is an intensive property of the point in space it was taken. Averaging that with the reading taken from another location is physically meaningless. But no one seems to care.
I’m not sure what pause they are talking about, since I am not clairvoyant enough to know that temps will resume their rise in the future.
Of course they will resume their rise in the future – you just have to be flexible about what you mean by ‘future’ and how far into it you are willing to wait.
True. When the Sun expands into a red giant in two billion years or so, temperatures on Earth will definitely increase.
Need Other Atmospheric Adjustments.
+100
Magic.
Auto. Don’t care – it is magic…
From the Sunday Times..
Huang and Thorne’s research suggests the reality is more complex. “There was a bit of a slowdown but it was smaller than we thought and explained largely by natural variability,” said Thorne. “The underlying trend for the world to get warmer is still strongly present in our research.”
Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the Met Office climate centre, said: “The slowdown hasn’t gone away . . . However, our confidence in a warming world doesn’t just depend on surface temperatures. It is seen in a wealth of indicators, including melting snow and ice, and rising sea levels.”
The acceptance by the NOAA that there was even a small “climate slowdown” may please sceptics. However, Bates is unlikely to be among them. He told The Sunday Times: “I do not believe Tom Karl was cheating and did not mean to imply he was. I believe the evidence supports climate change, and do believe the world is warming — and this could be a threat. The details are the difficulty.”
The Bates story is bad PR for Warmers no matter who recants/restates/clarifies/qualifies what. The more recantings/restatements/clarifiications/qualifications there are the worse it looks.
Oh did I imply X? I meant Y. There was never a pause because we adjusted it away with techniques that don’t affect anything, blah, blah, blah, Global Warming, NOAA version Z and Joe Blo 2015.
Someone should do A Day/Year/Decade/Century In The Life of a Temperature Record topic. I think it would be interesting to document all the steps from inital thermometer reading through the sausage grinder to out the Alphabet Soup Agency to heart-monitor beeping squiggle graphs. Has someone already done this?
Andrew
Tony Heller
http://www.realclimatescience.com
He does this every day.
Will change your life when you grasp the extent and thoroughness of his analysis.
I once collected as many GHCN-v3 1880-[MM/YYYY](meteorological stations only)
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata_v3/GLB.Ts.txt
web pages that I could find on the Way Back Machine
https://archive.org/web/
I have 87 of them and I looked just to see how many times they changed the entry for just January 1880. Turns out that of the 87 webpages, January 1880 was adjusted 27 times. That’s an easy 30% of the time or several times a year that any individual data point is adjusted. We know they adjust them all, as this chart of the last ten years of adjustment shows:
http://oi62.tinypic.com/qoeesn.jpg
And yes, Tony Heller does this sort of thing every day.
Also, around 2014, or so, we asked for very much like those details in a FOIA, including internal and external communications between NOAA/NASA employees and outside contractors involved in the “adjustments.”
They first said it was impossible to gather that information. Their next response was that they could provide that information, but that it would take something like 12 years, and they’d charge about $250,000.
A new profit center has been identified.
Once again, nobody is denying that the world is warming. The real questions are: 1) What is the actual rate of warming 2) What is causing the warming 3) What if anything to do about it, since the climate is always changing anyway.
I have no confidence in the temperature data sets, and, for a variety of reasons, I do not consider then fit for scientific purpose
There are multiple lines of evidence from raw temperature data, tree rings, glacier retreat that suggest that the Northern Hemisphere is no warmer today than it was in the 1940s. Obviously, if one goes back to the LIA, it has warmed.
Unfortunately, we have no worthwhile data on the Southern Hemisphere which is mainly ocean and not well sampled even today, let alone 50 or more years ago. Since we have no worthwhile data on the Southern Hemisphere, we do not know what has happened globally.
We only have useful information/data on the Northern Hemisphere, and it may well be that there has been no, or only very little, warming these past 75 years in the Northern Hemisphere.
“Obviously, if one goes back to the LIA, it has warmed.”
Too funny.
Reality seems to amuse you. Are you drunk?
Climate Science looked Keystone Koppish before, but this story REALLY Koocs the Kake.
Andrew
“Climate Science looked Keystone Koppish …”.
More like Duck Soup IMO, who are you going to believe Michael Mann or your own eyes?
http://www.climate4you.com/images/MSU%20RSS%20GlobalMonthlyTempSince1979%20AndCO2.gif
@ Chris, if instead of plotting the total co2 against the yearly temperature anomolies, plot the yearly co2 anomolies with the yearly temperature anomolies. That current graph is misleading. It becomes very clear that co2 follows temperature. Further, by correcting the graph to show total rise in temperature instead of yearly anomolies, the co2 rises with temperature. AGW is backwards.
This statement completely misses the credibility problems of climate science. Following the “Climategate” release of e-mails, climate scientists were accused of manipulating the data to support their conclusions.
The response was to improve their treatment of data to ensure better accuracy and public accountability.
https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Data+without+the+doubts%3A+the+climategate+furore+has+galvanised+the…-a0257556897
The articles by Bates are based on the systems that he established at NOAA to meet these data storage accountability. His criticism was that Karl bypassed these safeguards to publish the story of a scientific study which bypassed these safeguards in order to push his biases into climate science.
The issue is one of credibility. Thomas Karl damaged climate science credibility once again by putting his “thumb on the scale”. This doesn’t mean that he changed a flat line into a sloped line — nor does that even matter. It means that we cannot trust the reliability of this data set (which is one of the few major data sets used in climate science.)
Thanks, kentclizbe. I am aware of Tony Heller’s site. I want a comprehensive consolidation report of all that. And I know he doesn’t even cover it all.
Andrew
Actually Mosher and Stokes and Zeke could contribute to such an enterprise, because I don’t think any one person is aware of everything that happens/has happened/is supposed to happen and doesn’t, etc…
Andrew
“I don’t think any one person is aware of everything”
That’s an advantageous feature, not a bug, in a bureaucracy out to preserve itself.
Bates is trying to be some sort of hero without taking any risk. I’m sick of him already.
Me too. And it didn’t take long. I hear the usual pandering double-handedness concerning the relevant issues.
Bates says, “I believe the world is warming. I believe man contributes to that. I believe it could be a threat.” Thus he’s saying to the warmest. I”m one of you. But he’s a smart man, he’s also saying to the skeptics, I’m one of you too.
You can just hear the true blue pie in the sky warmers cheering with relief.
But who doesn’t believe those things? He’s just enumerated the reviled
(on that side) Judith Curry’s general position, point for point. But the warmers
never notice that. The warmers make it a practice never to notice anything
that doesn’t support them. It really is quite fascinating.
As for Dr. Bates, he reminds me in some ways of Muller at Berkely. They just want to be liked by
everybody.
I am not interested in his beliefs. I want to know what the data says and supports, not someone’s belief.
” I believe the evidence supports climate change, and do believe the world is warming — and this could be a threat. The details are the difficulty.”
Yes, a changing climate, either cooling or warming, “could be a threat” to some, somewhere, at sometime.
“The details are the difficulty.” Spoken like a true skeptic.
I too, believe the world is warming compared to early 1800 probably global temps.
However: how much warming? what is its cause? How much of that cause may be related to human activities? How much of that could be related to human CO2 emissions?
Yeah, details like that are difficult indeed.
It’s worse than we thought! Now ice and snow are melting at lower temperatures!
Somebody has been gotten at.
Martin this is exactly the same crock of shit they said in 2013 when they released a presser referring to three papers they wrote, because they were about to be sued by insurance companies for lying.
It’s named “About The Recent Pause In Warming” and it says exactly the same things. ”We know it hasn’t been warming for fifteen years, but evurthang jes- jis LOOKED so much like it was warming that we all just couldn’t resist saying it was warming, because – well, it shoulda been warming. But it wasn’t. We don’t use our thermometers we use all kinds of sophisticated stuff like ice warming and rising seas.”
A pure bullshit job designed specifically and solely, to ward off another round of lawsuits.
Later on, it’ll come out, that somebody has threatened to sue them just like last time so they’re vomiting this presser about how “we know we keep saying it’s warming but if you’re gonna sue us then no, of course it’s not f***g warming.”
It’s despicable but that’s an entrenched government employee system, and their worship rings. Translate that as “massive theft rings”
Still missing the point. “The Pause” is only valid if you accept the ridiculous concept of a global temperature. You can’t say “there was a bit of a slowdown” because there is no “there”. Some places warm, some cool, some remain relatively static. You can’t average them and come up with anything meaningful.
Met Office smart enough to know that if they say the science is settled, then they cut off the reason for future funding.
““The slowdown hasn’t gone away.” –Peter Stott (Met Office), The Sunday Times, 12 February 2017”
It may have been quoted by ST on 12 Feb, but it isn’t a new quote. HereHere is Stott quoted saying that on June 4 2015. It seems to be a comment on the Karl paper just then released, and goes on to say:
“The slowdown hasn’t gone away, however, the results of this study still show the warming trend over the past 15 years has been slower than previous 15 year periods.”
That was true then, but it got warmer.
but it got warmer.
Yes, because of El Nino
” does not accept Karl et al.’s denial of the global warming hiatus and acknowledges that, ‘the slowdown hasn’t gone away.’”
So I’ve been busy and now catching up on this subject and the quintuplet negatives in the sentence has me confused because I don’t know the predispositions of some of the players…
ie does not-> denial-> hiatus -> slowdown -> has not-> gone..??
Is this related to NOAAs number manipulation covered by Drudge yesterday? as it relates to the 17 to 20 year surface temperate halt in the warming record?
Nice to see consensus in the global warming enthusiast community…
All I can really say in the Met Office’s praise is this: “better late than never”.
UKMO is just weasel words. They need their honours and their funding.
Almost all the evidence points to the fact that it was cooler in the 1800s. The details are indeed the difficulty.
The world has been warming for more than 300 years, since the 1690s, in the Maunder Minimum depths of the LIA. Indeed, the early 18th century warm cycle following the Maunder lasted longer and warmed more than either of the two warm cycles in the 20th century.
But longer term earth has cooling since the peak of the Minoan Warm Period over 3000 years ago. That secular millennial-scale down trend is still intact, despite centennial-scale countertrend warm cycles such as since the mid-19th century.
And most importantly, in spite of any miniscule added amount of CO2.
There was a pause… no there wasn’t… yes there was…. no there wasn’t….
If sensitivity was so high as to be a danger to humanity, it would swamp natural variability to the point that it would be blindingly obvious and there would be no need to have this argument. That we are having this argument is strong evidence that sensitivity is low.
When something is so small that you cannot be sure if you are even detecting it or not, the logical conclusion is that there are bigger things to worry about.
Bingo!
So simple, but ideologically crusted eyes just cannot see. GK
davidmhoffer February 13, 2017 at 12:56 pm
Erm David, would mind not being so logical and rational please? You may well upset the Green Blob with such unapproved thoughts.
the world has been warming since the end of the little ice age, long before CO2 could have been the cause. So what caused this warming?
“Natural variability” is not an explanation for warming (or the Pause). It is simply a name that implies that you KNOW the statistical properties of climate. For The Experts:
1. Does climate have a constant (temperature) average? If so, what is it?
2. Does climate have a constant (temperature) variance? If so, what is it?
Unless you can answer those questions, any discussion about “Natural Variability” or “caused by humans” is nonsense.
The is why the IPCC relies upon “Expert Judgement”. They know that no scientists on the face of this earth can answer these questions reliably, thus no scientists on earth can calculate how much climate change is due to nature and how much is due to humans.
Phrases such as “more than half” are absolutely worthless as far as science is concerned. They as simply guesses. If we had the answers to 1 and 2, then any first year stats student could give you the precise odds of warming being due to nature or humans. There would be no need for “more than half (assed)” guesses by experts.
And as history repeatedly shows, experts have a worse track record than amateurs when it comes to guessing the correct answer, especially when it comes to their field of expertise.
Yes, we have no consensus.
They just can’t bring themselves to say the dreaded word “pause” or “hiatus”. So they call it a “slowdown”. Tough being being a Warmist.
Irving Langmuir wrote one of his signs of pseudoscience as being “the analysis of signals barely out of the noise level.” Global warming, with its “Yes, it does” — “No, I doesn’t” pattern of argumentation for the past 40 years seems to fit the bill, doesn’t it?
Exactly – except that with the temperatures we don’t even know the natural baseline, since there is no quantitative theory of natural climate variation. Even if we could believe that the tortured data are confessing the truth, we still wouldn’t have a frigging clue what the actual “anthropogenic” contribution to “climate change” really is.
My only issue is that in climate science, they are analyzing signals that are well below the level of the noise.
+1
And worse, they proclaim that there is no need to study the noise, since over time it will all average out anyway.
Pathological science as Languid called it – it meets many of his criteria.
The pause is still obvious in ENSO neutral satellite data for the past 20 years. The trend is .01 C/decade. It is not very scientific of these folks to ignore what is likely to be the best global data we have. How do folks in the Met Office explain away this obvious problem?
Debunk has been debased.
Yep, Caligula, Debunk is Debunkum.
Yes, to paraphrase Inigo Montoya, “they keep using that word. I don’t think it means what they think it means”.
These days it means “googling something, and taking the first hit that agrees with my viewpoint”.
If there is a signal that human activity plays a role in global warming, it remains undetected. Let’s move on.
The SETI folks definitely work on the cheap compared to these guys.
Here’s a SETI cartoon of mine:
http://www.maxphoton.com/the-search-continues/
Yeah they do, they also developed the BOINC softwate used by 36 project in various fields. 266,616 volunteers with 757,414 computers contributing 17.824 PetaFLOPS a day. They’ve provided us with a lot of bang for the buck.
TYPO: Anthony, change “is” to “it” (twice) in the following:
But is also has another effect in that is shows the diversity of opinion in climate science,
At last, the Climate Change debate finally gets under way.
If that is really what he said…
“The slowdown hasn’t gone away.” –Peter Stott (soon to be ex-Met Office),
The science with regards to “how much” warming is clearly not settled. The element that clearly exposes the non scientific attempt to sway emotions and manipulate the field towards one side are the false narratives that come with easy to debunk(using authentic science) “authoritative sounding marketing schemes.
1. The 97% of all climate scientists number for instance.
2. The rewriting of climate science history to eliminate the significance of the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period.
3. The increase in extreme weather/climate that includes hundreds of events which have all happened before………during the last 4 decades which have featured the best weather and climate for life in the last 1,000 years.
4. The dangerous threat to numerous animal species/life. When life does better at these temperatures, to a bit warmer and life does worse when its colder.
5. The projection of crop/food production losses. While the opposite happens.
6. The use of global climate model projections (without reconciliation to the observations) as evidence of a speculative theory.
7. The redefining of the beneficial gas, CO2 as pollution.
With the above items all being facts, any objective, critically thinking person using the scientific method, when suddenly reading that the well documented slow down in warming(or whatever you want to call it) for 2 decades has suddenly never really happened will be very skeptical.
More than anything, it makes complete sense. It fits in perfectly with all the other adjustments of previously known/accepted realities with an unrelenting assault to capture the minds of a massive audience to convince them of their view of climate science by spinning/manipulating data/facts.
Sad thing is that it’s become the “Boy who cried Wolf” syndrome. After awhile, we just don’t trust the sources anymore……..even though most of the work they do can be validated.
Much of their work would need to be redone, using trustworthy, authentic sources. Get rid of anything NOAA/GISS have done first.
One would have difficulty getting a 97% consensus from Evangelicals concerning the virgin birth, yet we are supposed to believe that the 97% for anthropogenic warming is accurate. This number continually promoted actually hurts their argument from anyone that has done any analysis.
But then that’s what they count on – the lack of “analysis.” I’ve got relatives who are “believers,” because they are immersed in the propaganda constantly and can’t be bothered to investigate it for themselves. And they don’t want to discuss it, either. That lack of engagement is exactly what the Eco-Fascists are looking to exploit. They WANT people to stop thinking and allow themselves to be blank billboards via which they can spread the message.
re a Met manager’s claim that their model predicted the “pause” (see Martain A’s 11:28am post at top of thread), I’ve just gone to the WUWT wayback machine for this:
“The Needle in the Haystack”: Pat Frank’s Devastating Expose of Climate Model Error
Eric Worrall / November 22, 2016
In a nutshell, it shows that properly calculated error bars ARE HUGE. With this level of uncertainty, the Met could literally claim anything they want (including existence of the tooth fairy).
By the way, when does having huge error bars mean you “predicted” everything that could have possibly happened within them? “Allowed” might be a better term; even better is “our models are such crap that we can’t tell if anything is happening”.
All good points. In fact, the reality is that these clowns can’t predict ANYTHING correctly!
They are fools indeed who take refuge in NOAA’s bark.
The CapeTown raw climate record recently discussed here at WUWT showed the same general rises and falls in the temperature visible on US, Greenland, Iceland, Siberia, Paraguay and some Australian records etc. – all had high 1930s temps and the same few cooling periods at the same times. If there was a serious planet threatening warming in the offing, I would say the raw data is sufficient for purpose. Ideally, a couple of dozen widely scattered records would be an acceptable early warning system. As for sea level rise, if the worry is several metres, why would it be necessary to be measuring with a micrometer every year. Tidal guages, even if parts of coastlines are tectonically up and down, would be good enough to alert us for accelerated sea rise and multi metre sea rise at the end of the century. A compelling reason for all the activity in adjustments and decommission thousands of climate stations and other interference is simply to control the story. Moreover, the task could be handled by a couple of dozen climate scientists (or even Boy Scouts). When the show got going in 1988 we could have set up state of the art units at these couple of dozen places and we would know without debate the nature of the trend to everyone’s satisfaction.
Prosperity makes monsters. Adversity makes men.
I can see why the UKMO would disagree with NOAA on this issue.
Here’s ERSSTv4 vs. HadSST3 (common baseline 1961-90, but calibrated to correlate), annual means of global SSTa, from 1970 to 2016:
Same, only from 1997 to 2016:
Those are quite frankly some striking (and pretty revealing, I might add) differences between two datasets that ought to be close to equal, considering they’re both adjusted upward using the very same 0.12K buoy-ship discrepancy argument (Kennedy et al., 2011 & Huang et al., 2015).
In fact, NOAA implement the entire +0.12K adjustment of their global SSTa dataset (ERSSTv4) from 1970 till today in just two (2) particular steps, one in late 1976 (a couple of years before buoys even had any share whatsoever in global SST measurements!) of +0.07K, and one in the first half of 2006 (+0.05K); nothing at any other time since 1970:
The 2006 adjustment seems completely arbitrary (seen nowhere else, in no other dataset), has the convenient effect, placement-wise in the record, of basically erasing “The Hiatus” (as Karl gloatingly pointed out), and makes NOAA’s official gl SSTa series all of a sudden disagree with NOAA’s official gl 0-100m ocean temp series, ARGO-based since 2003/2004:
Yes, NOAA have effectively painted themselves into a corner with their ERSSTv4 series.
Some extracts from the article in the Times – including Peter Stott’s full quote
A scientific controversy over the impact of climate change on oceans has taken a new twist with research suggesting they are warming more slowly than thought.
Scientists have analysed millions of readings from across Earth’s oceans between 2000 and 2015, finding that sea surface temperature is rising at 1.17C per century compared with the 1.34C per century of previous estimates.
The difference is tiny in everyday terms but is important because the oceans are so large that even a warming by a tenth of a degree represents a big increase in the energy they store — and the potential impact on climate.
It is also politically potent, especially in America where an increasingly climate-sceptic Republican party will see it as confirmation of a suspected slowdown in global warming and evidence that previous warnings were exaggerated.
“The reduced warming emerging in the latest analysis is due to several separate factors,” said Professor Peter Thorne, chairman of the International Surface Temperature Initiative and co-author of the latest research. “This includes corrections to historic data collected from ships and the inclusion of new data about areas covered by ice.”
The Republican-dominated congressional committee on science, space and technology has taken a keen interest in the “climate slowdown” between 1998 and 2012, when the rise in global temperatures appeared to fall from 0.12C a decade to 0.07C.
Its chairman, Lamar Smith, used this to claim that climate scientists had “greatly overestimated” global warming and was infuriated when, in June 2015, the NOAA published research suggesting that the apparent slowdown was down to data glitches — and the world had warmed as fast as ever.
This was controversial with scientists too — even Britain’s Met Office disagreed. Tom Karl, author of the NOAA paper, has been under attack ever since. Last week the pressure increased when John Bates, a former colleague of Karl’s who was a data manager at the NOAA until his retirement, wrote a widely reported blog post saying Karl “had his thumb on the scale . . . in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming hiatus”.
Huang and Thorne’s research suggests the reality is more complex. “There was a bit of a slowdown but it was smaller than we thought and explained largely by natural variability,” said Thorne. “The underlying trend for the world to get warmer is still strongly present in our research.”
Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution at the Met Office climate centre, said: “The slowdown hasn’t gone away . . . However, our confidence in a warming world doesn’t just depend on surface temperatures. It is seen in a wealth of indicators, including melting snow and ice, and rising sea levels.”
The acceptance by the NOAA that there was even a small “climate slowdown” may please sceptics. However, Bates is unlikely to be among them. He told The Sunday Times: “I do not believe Tom Karl was cheating and did not mean to imply he was. I believe the evidence supports climate change, and do believe the world is warming — and this could be a threat. The details are the difficulty.”
Anyone know how you define and measure ‘natural variability’?
Serious question.
I suspect if we understood *ALL* of the underlying mechanisms of weather and climate we could use stats, as we do know know *ALL* the mechanisms I suspect we can not use ‘normal’ stats.
Anyone know how you define and measure ‘natural variability’?
Damned good questions.
Along with “is the concept of ‘average’ meaningful in a chaotic system”?
And “what is unnatural about humanity as compared to e.g. grass”? (both of which have changed the planets ecosphere substantially)
And my putative response to Willis who once stated that all he was interested in was good science…
“What is ‘good’ science”?
Most people will say ‘dont be silly, those aren’t interesting or important questions’ and that is when you know they are arguing from preconceptions they dont even know they have.
To attempt to answer your initial questions, one would like to know what the climate could have done ex of humanity being involved. That I suppose is the best definition of ‘natural variability where mankind is defined as ‘unnatural’ It’s an impossible question, but the best answer is ‘pretty much the same’. I.e.natural variability could easily account for everything, but probably doesn’t quite. Its as silly to claim mankind has had no effect as it is to claim CO2 is the dominant player…
AS to measuring it, well that’s what all the proxies and weather stations, balloons, and buoys and satellites are supposed to be for..
This Met Office change in attitude was posted by a ‘Tallbloke’ regular who seems to have inside info, some weeks ago. Gave me hope, great to see some confirmation of a slow return to sanity is in progress.
I offer these postulates:
Science has always been conducted as though it were a fight between teenage girls.
The level of hysteria is directly proportional to the amount of money involved.
If the money went away, everyone would agree on everything.
Apologies to John Lennon…
I read the news today, oh boy
About a scientist who changed the record
And though the news was rather sad
Well I just had to laugh
I saw the squiggly line graph.
Andrew
In climate language you would say that the pause has collapsed.
We could need a new word for a real collapse, the one that happens in hours or faster, instead of these very slow glacier collapses the climateers so often speak of.
Six Climate Fallacies and Facts :
1. Climate changes Who knew . Would we be better off in a full blown ice age or in our nice cosy warming trend ?
2. The earth is warming . Yes thankfully and the point ? Name one plant that grows better in a bed of ice ?
3. Humans are causing the earth to have a fever . Sadly no or maybe a smidge but we could try a little harder .
4. New climate “records” are occurring . True… based on man made fake incomplete and manipulated data of less than 100 years of the earths 6 billion year history. All from temperature measuring stations that have been reduced by 75 % since the 1970 ‘s . Measuring the earths temperature at airports ? Why not on freeway asphalt too while most land and water is ignored ?
5.Humans can accurately calculate an annual earth temperature to within a fraction of a degree . Complete and utter rubbish . If not… prove how it is possible . The ultimate gullible test . Think about it .
Forget any warming or cooling lets see one scientific organization show how they can calculate the earths annual temperature accurately to within a fraction of a degree as claimed . USA – NOAA lets see it . Nah thought not . Where is all the other countries scientific proof supporting this scientific fable ?
6.. Global warming is bad . False . There are far more benefits to a warming world with much higher levels of CO2 as evident throughout earths history of climate change . Plants love CO2 and when plants are happy generally everything else is going to be fine .
Why would the world waste a $trillion dollars on a complete overblown scam ? No other real problems to solve ?
Well, I think you answered your own question with your last sentence. A trillion dollars.
And never had to produce anything.
Well, other than a digital model.