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
@ur momisugly 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),