By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
The indefatigable Roy Spencer at the University of Alabama at Huntsville is the first to declare the global temperature anomaly for December 2017. As Fig. 1 shows, in the 39 years 1 month from December 1978 to December 2017, the planet has warmed by half a Celsius degree. But that is equivalent to 1.28 C°/century, or little more than one-third of the 3.3 C°/century predicted with “substantial confidence” by IPCC in 1990 and also by the fifth-generation general-circulation models of the Climate Model Intercomparison Project in 2013.
Fig. 1 The least-squares linear-regression trend on the entire UAH satellite shows monthly global mean surface temperature anomaly dataset shows warming at a rate equivalent to just 1.28 C°/century from December 1978 to December 2017.
Is the rate of global warming rising inexorably? The answer is No, as Fig. 2 shows:
Fig. 2 The least-squares trend on the UAH dataset shows warming at a rate equivalent to 0.85 C°/century from February 1997 to December 2017.
The warming rate in the 251 months of data that account for just over half the entire UAH dataset is not higher than the rate for the entire 469-month record. It is down by a third, from 1.28 0.85 C°/century. I chose the start date for Fig. 2 because it was also the start date for the longest period of the Great Pause, which – in the RSS satellite dataset – ran for a spectacular 18 years 9 months from February 1997 to October 2015, as Fig. 3 shows:
Fig. 3 The least-squares trend on the RSS satellite dataset shows no global warming for 18 years 9 months February 1997 to October 2015, the longest period of the Pause, though one-third of all anthropogenic forcings occurred during that period.
A little history. In preparation for a debate in the Senate at the end of 2015, Senator Ted Cruz approached the Heartland Institute to request its advice on the single graph that would most clearly encapsulate the climate-skeptical case. Fig. 3 was chosen, and Senator Cruz displayed it on the floor of the Senate, to the visible discomfiture of the Democrats. The late Bob Carter, shortly before his untimely death, wrote to me to say how pleased he was that we had added the line pointing out that one-third of Man’s entire influence on climate since 1750 had arisen during the Pause, but without causing any global warming at all.
In my report of the Pause in November 2017 at WattsUpWithThat, I predicted that the RSS dataset would swiftly be tampered with to try to eradicate the Pause. Just weeks later, Dr Carl Mears, the keeper of that dataset, who is prone to describe skeptics as “deniers”, announced that there would indeed be a revision, which, when it arrived, airbrushed the Pause away.
What is interesting is that the airbrushing – i.e., the alteration of data ex post facto to suit the Party Line – has continued. The dataset as it stood a few months back swept away the embarrassing zero trend over the 18 years 9 months of the Pause and replaced it with a trend equivalent to 0.77 C°/century (Fig. 4).
However, that tamperature change was not enough. The RSS dataset as it stands today shows a warming rate equivalent to 0.83 C°/century over exactly the same period (Fig. 5).
Fig. 4 The least-squares trend on the RSS dataset for the 18 years 9 months of the Pause, based on the data as they stood in mid-2017.
Fig. 5 The least-squares trend on the RSS dataset for the 18 years 9 months of the Pause, this time using the data as they stand today.
Contrast Figs. 4-5 with Fig. 6, the current UAH data for the 18 years 9 months of the Pause, which show the world warming at a statistically-insignificant 0.05 C°/century equivalent over the period of the Pause.
At the time of the Pause, the UAH data showed a higher rate of warming than RSS. Since then, the UAH data have been revised with the effect of reducing the formerly-evident small warming rate over the period of the Pause, while RSS has been – and continues to be – revised so as to increase the apparent warming rate over the same period.
On all of these data, it is evident that the rate of global warming is very considerably below what had originally been predicted. In a future article, I shall show just how large is the discrepancy between excitable prediction and unexciting observation, and just how false were the various artful claims in certain reviewed papers that IPCC’s original predictions were about right, and just how wrong those predictions – properly understood – truly were.
Finally, in due course I shall show exactly what error in the models has led to the extravagant over-predictions, and just how small the properly-predicted warming rate will be once that fatal error is corrected.
Fig. 6 The least-squares trend on the current UAH dataset agrees with the original RSS dataset in showing global warming at a rate statistically indistinguishable from zero in the 18 years 9 months February 1997 to October 2015.
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
If global warming/climate change/whatever is such a clear and urgent problem they wouldn’t have to monkey with the data.
Please Wake Up. http://www.aer.com/science-research/climate-weather/arctic-oscillation
Guys,
did any of you actually checked the temperature in your own backyard?
You might be surprised…
Concerned to show that man made warming (AGW ) is correct and indeed happening, I thought that here [in Pretoria, South Africa} I could easily prove that. Namely the logic following from AGW theory is that more CO2 would trap heat on earth, hence we should find minimum temperature (T) rising pushing up the mean T. Here, in the winter months, we hardly have any rain but we have many people burning fossil fuels to keep warm at night. On any particular cold winter’s day that results in the town area being covered with a greyish layer of air, viewable on a high hill outside town in the early morning.
I figured that as the population increased over the past 40 years, the results of my analysis of the data [of a Pretoria weather station] must show minimum T rising, particularly in the winter months. Much to my surprise I found that the opposite was happening: minimum T here was falling, any month….I first thought that somebody must have made a mistake: the extra CO2 was cooling the atmosphere, ‘not warming’ it. As a chemist, that made sense to me as I knew that whilst there were absorptions of CO2 in the area of the spectrum where earth emits, there are also the areas of absorption in the 1-2 um and the 4-5 um range where the sun emits. Not convinced either way by my deliberations and discussions as on a number of websites, I first looked at a number of weather stations around me, to give me an indication of what was happening:
The results puzzled me even more. Somebody [God/Nature] was throwing a ball at me…..The speed of cooling followed a certain pattern, best described by a quadratic function.
I carefully looked at my earth globe and decided on a particular sampling procedure to find out what, if any, the global result would be. Here is my final result on that:
Hence, looking at my final Rsquare on that, I figured out that there is no AGW, at least not measurable.
Arguing with me that 99% of all scientists disagree with me is fruitless. You cannot have an “election” about science. You only need one man to get it right…..
http://www.remss.com/research/climate/
But….
The troposphere has not warmed quite as fast as most climate models predict. Note that this problem has been reduced by the large 2015-2106 El Nino Event, and the updated version of the RSS tropospheric datasets.
http://images.remss.com/figures/climate/RSS_Model_TS_compare_trop30v4.png
the sats have the disadvantage of being exposed to the sun’s direct radiation.
It stands to reason that as the sun’s magnetic fields strengths have weakened over the years
http://oi63.tinypic.com/2ef6xvo.jpg
more of the most energetic particles are able to escape to destroy whatever you think is still measuring global T …
what version of UAH / RSS are we now?
As a petroleum geologist, a large part of my work has been to evaluate paleoclimate and climate change. The people collecting and interpreting data to evaluate future climate change, Mondale and people like him, would not have lasted long in a business where the company’s survival depends on correct predictions. Because their predictions are plain wrong. But we must remember that the objective of the climate panel is not correct predictons of the future climate. The climate panel’s objectives are the old fashion goals: Power and profit, to such an extent that nothing else matters.
It is a sad state of affairs when even Sir Monckton’s fine, clearly written and concise exposé of post-faco adjustments, along with his reasonable theory as to their motive… itself becomes a mind-numbing read. When you present graphs from ‘data as of x‘ you are at a disadvantage because people expect data to be revised over time, the scientists’ creed deserving of a benefit of healthy doubt. And the English language itself does not gift the writer with easy cross-cultural ways of communicating skepticism and calling motive into question. You either have to go direct, colloquial and simple almost to the point of insult, as Trump does in his Tweets… or risk losing the casual reader by being precise and somewhat pedantic. This is exactly what the AGW consortium is striving for, an ‘orgy of evidence’ that consists solely of 100% adjusted data. Un-adjusted data having proved to be an embarrassment to have lying around in the Internet age, they’re trying to normalize the idea that raw data lacks veracity until it has been adjusted, at least once.
It is a crisis of Orwellian scale.
We are on the verge of needing ‘gifted explainers’ to recursively present the output of our most gifted explainers.
Hocus Locus January 9, 2018 at 3:55 am
It is a sad state of affairs when even Sir Monckton’s fine, clearly written and concise exposé of post-faco adjustments,
Nothing wrong with ex post facto adjustments, in fact it’s hard to see that it could be otherwise. The satellite measurements are made using a series of different satellites, in order to correctly calculate the temperatures it’s essential to know what the orbit is for instance. Since the orbits change over time it’s hard to imagine how corrections could be made except ex post facto.
Ex post facto predictions such as Monckton made are a different matter!
Hocus: In addition to the changing satellites, there is the problem that temperature near the surface of the Earth changes about 10 degC between night and day. Satellites don’t pass over the same spot on the Earth’s surface at the same time. Imagine trying to construct a surface temperature record from temperatures recorded at different times, not the daily minimum and maximum. There could be more than one way to properly deal with all of the complications – making the difference scientific uncertain – or one way may eventually be recognized as superior.
Remember, we are only dealing with a trend difference of about 0.05 degC/decade. That is not an Orwellian crisis. And satellites, thermometers on the land, a variety thermometers in the ocean and the ARGO buoys below the ocean surface all say the planet is warming. Except for ARGO, the trend is uneven on a decadal time scale due to phenomena like El Nino.
Lord Monckton is focusing your attention on NOISE in the data. The surface trend over the last 40 years is +0.17+/-0.03 degC (95% ci) and all records are consistent with this value, including RSS AND UAH!