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
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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.