Guest opinion by David Archibald
The global warming hysteria was reaching a crescendo in the lead up to the climate confab in Copenhagen in 2009 when a civic-minded person released the Climategate emails, deflating the whole thing. Those emails demonstrated that the science behind global warming was more like science fiction, concocted from the fevered imaginations of the scientists involved.
Nigh on 10 years have passed since then and we are currently experiencing another peak in the hysteria that seems to be coordinated worldwide. But why? Why now? The global warming scientists have plenty of time on their hands and plenty of money. Idle curiosity would have got some to have a stab at figuring out what is going to happen to climate. Do they see an imminent cooling and they have to get legislation in place before that is apparent?
The passage of those ten years has given us another lot of data points on the global warming. There are now 40 years of satellite measurements of atmospheric temperature and this is how that plots up for the Lower 48 States:
What the graph shows is the departure from the average for the 30 years from 1981 to 2010. The last data point is February 2019 with a result of -0.03 degrees C. So we have had 40 years of global warming and the temperature has remained flat. In fact it is slightly cooler than the long term average. Is it possible to believe in global warming when the atmosphere has cooled? No, not rationally. Is it possible for global warming to be real if the atmosphere has cooled? Again no.
Now let’s look at carbon dioxide which is supposed to be driving the global warming, if it was happening. A lab high up on Mauna Loa in Hawaii has been measuring the atmospheric concentration since 1958. As it is the annual change in concentration that is supposed to be driving global warming let’s see how that plots up:
What it shows is that the driving effect has been in a wide band from 1979 when the satellites to measure temperature went up but the trend is flat. Think about that – 40 years of forcing and no result in the actual atmospheric temperature. If it was ever going to happen it would have happened by now.
The opposite of global warming is global cooling. What are the chances of that? Pretty good in fact. Only one graph is need to show the potential for that – the aa Index which is a measure of the Sun’s magnetic field strength. Records of that have been kept since 1868:
The second half of the 20th century had a solar magnetic field strength that was 50% higher than that of the last 60 years of the Little Ice Age. That ended in 2006. We are now back to the solar activity levels of the 19th century and that may bring the sort of climate our forbears had then.
And so it has come to pass. January-February had record cold over North America. Seemingly the polar vortex was everywhere because Japan also had record cold.
Waiting for global warming to happen is like Waiting for Godot. It is never going to happen and the wait is getting beyond tedious.
In the meantime there is no evidence for global warming and the opposite is happening, as shown by the record cold we have just experienced. It is time to stop giving global warmers the benefit of doubt – they are loons. That includes Rick Perry.
David Archibald has lectured on climate science in both Senate and House hearing rooms.
NO, the satellites where sent up to measure cloud and rain. It was John Christy who realised, years later, that there was a means of extracting a “brightness temperature” from the microwave soundings.
No again. It is the log of the ratio of the total CO2 to the fictional “steady state” level of the pre-industrial optimum climate for the Earth which is supposed to drive warming. Who ever suggested it was the annual increase.
This is one of most silly and ill-informed articles I have seen on WUWT in a long time.
Scafetta & Wilson, 2019, Comparison of Decadal Trends among Total Solar Irradiance Composites of Satellite Observations
https://www.hindawi.com/journals/aa/2019/1214896/
discussed here:
http://notrickszone.com/2019/03/25/satellite-evidence-affirms-solar-activity-drove-a-significant-percentage-of-recent-warming/
“In a new paper, two astrophysicists shred the IPCC-preferred and model-based PMOD solar data set and affirm the ACRIM, which is rooted in observation and shows an increase in total solar irradiance (TSI) during the 1980-2000 period. They suggest a “significant percentage” of recent climate change has been solar-driven.”
Once again a good case is made that (yet another) sattellite dataset has been massaged into oblivion. Correction shows a very different picture.
Somehow my previous post disappeared. Second try.
http://notrickszone.com/2019/03/25/satellite-evidence-affirms-solar-activity-drove-a-significant-percentage-of-recent-warming/
Scafetta and Willson, 2019
In a new paper, two astrophysicists shred the IPCC-preferred and model-based PMOD solar data set and affirm the ACRIM, which is rooted in observation and shows an increase in total solar irradiance (TSI) during the 1980-2000 period. They suggest a “significant percentage” of recent climate change has been solar-driven.
Nigh on 10 years have passed since then and we are currently experiencing another peak in the hysteria that seems to be coordinated worldwide. But why?
Because over the last two decades, free-freer markets have reduced global poverty to new historic lows and a rising standards of living and new middle-classes are evolving in places that were only a generation ago considered terminally, hopelessly impoverished.
Affluent and self-sufficient citizens have limited desire or use for totalitarian government and in supposed democracies will resist socialism in its various forms. So those with statist ambitions need to create a crisis to goad citizens into acquiescing their freedoms to the state. And if the citizens refuse to vote to acquiesce, they’ll eventually use the impetus of a crisis to eliminate the need for a vote.
Since for the last 20 years, the climate has not cooperated with with the models said it should be, the advocates of this agenda feel as though they are running out of time. On the other hand, as more people become more affluent, they are beginning to realize that they have to loose and will fight back against this agenda.
David Archibald:
“The passage of those ten years has given us another lot of data points on the GLOBAL warming. There are now 40 years of satellite measurements of atmospheric temperature and this is how that plots up for the Lower 48 STATES:”
Are you critiquing global temperatures via comparison with the Lower 48 States? (rhetorical)
This is the plot for the GLOBE……
http://iwantsomeproof.com/extimg/uah_global_temps.png
Which is of course what needs to be used when talking of AGW.
The “G” bit.
Seems like a steady rise in a linear LS fit trend.
And of course that is not the surface, where most warming is occurring nocturnally over land.
It is also by far the coldest outlier of any global temp index.
“Is it possible to believe in global warming when the atmosphere has cooled?”
It is when you compare satellite measurements of the whole GLOBE (as seen in my above link).
And not just ~1.5% of it.
“No, not rationally.”
You got that right.
“January-February had record cold over North America. ”
No.
Only some of it.
For part of the time ….
Jan:
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/index_v3.html
Mmmm not Jan at all then.
In fact a large area of the highest warming percentile in the far NW
Feb:
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/maps/index_v3.html
OK so the NW states and W Canada.
On the warm said in the E/SE states.
A good bit of E/N Europe, an a big chunk of Siberia.
Plus the Arctic was a tad less cold than normal.
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/news/national-climate-201902
“The winter (December–February) average contiguous U.S. temperature was 33.4°F, 1.2°F ABOVE average, ranking among the warmest third of the record. ” (my caps)
So the point of your post seems a tad elusive to anyone who examines the claims you make.
Correction:
Jan:
Feb:
Forgot to add that this ….
“Seemingly the polar vortex was everywhere because Japan also had record cold.”
Briefly only it seems …..
(look at Japan in the above maps).
Warmer than average both months.
The graph of the ‘Lower 48’ is interesting but it is not clear that it is indicative of anything except that this very small region’s temperatures show no trend one way or the other. I wonder what all of North America looks like. Likewise, this current winters extreme cold and snow establish cold weather but in no way a cooling climate. Wishful thinking will not slay the AGW dragon; lets not fall into the selective sample trap.
Whole dairy herds froze to death in the Yakima Valley in February. Nature’s warning.
With limited attention to all this, I have heard something to the effect we have not warmed to within 2 degrees of the stated high during the medieval warming period.
Odd we started with a narrative that says we need to maximize spending and reaction cuz, 2 degrees is the end…
End of the cycle if it is the same as the last one? End of opportunity? Look how long it took to determine that cigarettes are or are maybe bad? So it will take like 20 or so years of cooling or non warming for one side to notice..
Over such short time frames as 100 years compared to 1000 years, with warming and cooling cycles of in some cases 25 to 40 years, it seems easy to show graphs covering a cooling then warming amo. Not sure but are we at the endish of that cycle now?
I am just saying, if they no longer believe we will make it the next 2 degrees, setting the bar lower to 1.5 would be expected. If we really don’t ever get to the same temps as the last cycle, I wonder what that means going forward.
Don’t greenhouses pump in co2 up to 1000 ppm or higher, since many plants benefit greatly from that? If I warm up water on the stove in a covered pan, won’t the co2 levels relative to oxygen increase dramatically, and then if I turn off the heat fall as the water cools? So was it co2 that warmed the water, or…?
I wish we had some sciency people explaining these things in ways non sciency people would find accessible.
Can someone post a comparison of the USCRN data through current and the UAH Lower 48 Sat data along with the following:
1) Regression results and confidence intervals for slope since 2004.
2) To what extent are they measuring the same result? How well does UAH Lower 48 Sat predict USCRN and vice versa?
3) Variance of UAH Lower 48 with NASA GISS Land?
4) How does USCRN compare to NASA Giss Land?
We should get a lot more statistics out there before we argue about what these results tell us. My feeling is that USCRN is pretty good data although there is still a tiny bit of warming bias in it due to land development and more people at the sites. USCRN shows no meaningful change in US temps since inception.
David writes: “What the graph shows is the departure from the average for the 30 years from 1981 to 2010. The last data point is February 2019 with a result of -0.03 degrees C. So we have had 40 years of global warming and the temperature has remained flat. In fact it is slightly cooler than the long term average.”
Please! Aren’t we past cherry-picking. One can pick starting and ending dates in your UAH data that produce 5 degC of warming or 4 degC of cooling. For the global UAH record, the OLS 40-year trend is +1.3 +/- 0.4 degC/decade or just over 0.5 degC of warming, Eyeballing the data suggests a similar trend is present in the data for the US alone. Of course, the temperature in any one month can be more than 1 degC warmer or cooler than expected assuming a long term linear trend. So the relatively cool temperature for Feb 2019 has no significance.
RSS produces a trend of +0.20 +/- 0.3 degC/decade from the same satellite data. Surface records show warming similar to RSS. Radiosonde records also show warming. IMO, saying that the atmosphere has been cooling (or “not warming”) for 40 years hurts the reputation of responsible skeptics.
Everyone else says the Little Ice Age ended before 1850, not in the 1930’s. As for your “New Cold Period”, the UAH trend for the last 10-years has been +0.27 degC/decade. It is greater than +0.20 degC/decade and statistically significant for all starting dates back to 2005. The trend approaches the 40-year trend as you incorporate more of the Pause.
There is some evidence that changes in non-TSI solar “activity” can influence climate, but even another Maunder Minimum probably wouldn’t negate the warming of the last half-century, much less the coming warming from 2XCO2. And no one knows when another Maunder Minimum might arrive.
Real Entropy: You ask some really good questions about USCRN. Unfortunately, too little time has passed to provide any answers. USCRN covers only the continental US. US temperature has risen an fallen more than 2 degC at various times. US land temperature is much more variable than global surface temperature. If we look at the latest 15-year trend for GISS land surface temperature, the trend is 0.27 +/- 0.11 degC/decade (95% ci). For the US alone, the uncertainty will be much greater, say ? +/- 0.25 degC/decade. In other words, US climate is so variability, we might not know if it is warming or not. Looking for a DIFFERENCE IN TRENDS with this much uncertainty to see if the USCRN trend is lower will almost certainly not show a statistically significant difference.
So someone will need to look to see if there is a TREND IN THE MONTHLY DIFFERENCE between what USCRN and other indices report for the US. That would be a non-trivial task with numerous questions. Do you correct for break point in non-USCRN records? How do you ensure both records cover the same areas.
My maxim is that:
“The only warrant for government action is existential peril.”
So, if you seek political power and there is no existential peril in sight, you have to make it up.
The aa-index was devised in 1969 to track hourly disturbances in the Earth’s magnetic field. It does not measure the “Sun’s magnetic field strength”. In fact, the aa-index is computed from the geomagnetic K-index, so it only produces a non-zero value when there is a _change_ in the horizontal component of the Earth’s magnetic field over a 3-hour period. Think of it as measuring tiny “geomagnetic quakes” in a compass needle.
http://isgi.unistra.fr/indices_aa.php
It was devised by Mayaud in 1969 to track long-term global geomagnetism activity. It makes use of geomagnetic readings going back to 1968 mainly recorded by Greenwich Observatory in the Northern Hemisphere the Melbourne Observatory in Australia. It measures disturbances in the geomagnetic environment, and yes, all of the geomagnetic indices, including aa-index, do show correlation to sunspot activity. No huge surprise there.
But does it affect weather/climate measurements in the Earth’s troposphere? Archibald seems to be claiming (in his aa-plot above) that the aa-index supports a “cooling period” since 2008.
But Svalgaard and others have pointed out that the aa-index suffers from an unstable calibration. So why doesn’t Archibald just use sunspot records or TSI to support his claim? The answer, of course, is that the climate record shows no overwhelming correlation to solar magnetic activity because TSI varies only by 0.1% over solar cycles. Not enough to make any significant (or even measurable) change in temperature.
So I think he espouses the aa-index, merely because it is more cooperative towards his wishful thinking of a cooler Earth.
oops, “makes use of geomagnetic readings going back to
19681868“Is nothing sacred? First of all Svalgaard came after the sunspot record and hammered it flat. Now according to your report he wants to fiddle with the aa Index. Next you are going to tell me you have a problem with the F10.7 flux. You are shameless.
Promise you will leave the F10.7 flux alone.
Solar Cycle progression
https://www.spaceweatherlive.com/en/solar-activity/solar-cycle
Well Ren that is interesting. Their sunspot number prediction has SC 25 ramping up fast from late 2019. Their prediction of the F10.7 flux has it flatlining with no turn up in sight. The two are incompatible. That’s ok, just observing, not complaining. So Ren what is your prediction of the shape and amplitude of Solar Cycle 25? Once again not complaining if you don’t want to tell us.
@Archibald
“The two are incompatible.”
Actually these are two different kinds of “prediction”. The red curves are the “standard curves” (looks like a simple cubic extrapolation or such), whereas the yellow (only shown for sunspots) is “combined methods”.
Perhaps Leif can fill us in on the details of these two methodologies.
Observed solar radio flux at 10.7cm from Space Weather Canada
Geomagnetic activity after 2020 will be low.
Equatorial dipole clearly weakens.
http://wso.stanford.edu/gifs/DipallR.gif
@Archibald
“You are shameless”
I think you are the one who should be ashamed, pretending to be a solar scientist, yet ignorant of how the geomagnetic indices work, and failing to understand the basic issues involved with sunspot counts that necessitated a recalibration to make them more consistent with itself and other time series, F10.7 flux for example.
Leif submitted a letter to Geophysical Research Letters almost a decade ago, where he asserted the primacy of F10.7:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1008.4832.pdf [Aug 2010]
Yes, the SSN recalibration generated some criticism (i.e. it was real science). Some of the biggest complainers were either those who thought sunspot counts were outdated, or those whose pet theories were demolished by the recalibration.
@Archibald
“The two are incompatible.”
Actually these are two different kinds of “prediction”. The red curves are the “standard curves” (looks like a simple cubic extrapolation or such), whereas the yellow (only shown for sunspots) is “combined methods”.
Perhaps Leif can fill us in on the details of these two methodologies.
“Nigh on 10 years have passed since then and we are currently experiencing another peak in the hysteria that seems to be coordinated worldwide. But why? Why now?”
They see the AMO heading towards negative territory?
David Archibald
“Next you are going to tell me you have a problem with the F10.7 flux. You are shameless.”
AsJohanus told you: you are the person behaving shameless, because you are merely guessing about the work done by Leif Svalgaard instead of presenting us a scientifically valuable contradiction of his work.
What now concerns F10.7 cm flux vs. SSN, Mr Archibald: here are facts vs. guessing.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ShXgzae4Fr_fOs9kWJiSzD8yXkcewQZY/view
Real Entropy
Can someone post a comparison of the USCRN data through current and the UAH Lower 48 Sat data along with the following:
1) Regression results and confidence intervals for slope since 2004.
2) To what extent are they measuring the same result? How well does UAH Lower 48 Sat predict USCRN and vice versa?
1. I didn’t process USCRN yet. Here is a recent graph comparing GHCN daily (thousands of US stations) and UAH 6.0 LT for CONUS+AK:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/19lNw8xq4H6IDqwfoq8nHXMaxoiOhsI_8/view
Linear estimates for 1979-2019 in °C / decade
– UAH49: 0.18 ± 0.02
– GHCND: 0.20 ± 0.03
2. While GHCN is a surface measurement and UAH measures in the lower troposphere at about 5 km altitude, the two can’t have much in common, their respective trends and amazingly similar running means excepted.
I was looking for comparison to USCRN because I believe the data there is better, even if the time frame is shorter.
Maybe one day I have time and interest enough to start CRN processing, in order to compare it with GHCN (V3, V4, daily). That might lead to a strange surprise for you… who knows.
The suggestion by David Archibald that the USA48 hasn’t warmed is nonsense. The linear trend of 0.18 deg per decade is included in the UAH dataset. Regional temperatures tend to be volatile which makes it harder to detect a trend by visual inspection.
https://www.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/v6.0/tlt/uahncdc_lt_6.0.txt
The bottom line is that the USA has warmed around 0.7 degrees C over the past 40 years.
John Finn. Many cities here in Northern California showed a cooling trend for a century per NOAA until 2012 – Santa Rosa and Ukiah were two of many – and then “homogenization” changed significant cooling to warming. Climate change with the stroke of a pen.
I am trying to replicate the aa Index, or find where it has been published
Perhaps Bob Mueller can find that missing heat for us?
I hear he needs a new gig these days.
Anyone who thinks any warming 1979-2019 is significant is in error. It covers just over a full (warming) half-cycle of the basic solar system mechanics cycle of c.63yrs. The cooling half is now in progress, but starts from the recent high point. Nothing to see there for those without an axe to grind, except normalcy.
The ‘Quiet Sun effect’ now in play however, may be a fish of a different scale…….. Brett
The temperature record since 1880 clearly shows a pattern of temperature change consisting of about 30 year periods of alternating steady increases in temperature and pauses in the rise. This appears to be a better tool for predicting future temperature levels than the many studies that have been “concocted” for that purpose. The use of portions of the temperature record as done in this article to prove a point is usually a prop for an invalid assumption. I am continually surprised at how little attention is paid to the importance of the pattern of change shown in the temperature record. It is an important argument against atmospheric CO2 being the cause of global warming and should repeated over and over at every opportunity instead of being diluted by other discussion.
“Waiting for global warming to happen is like Waiting for Godot. It is never going to happen and the wait is getting beyond tedious.”
Never really understood what is “Waiting for Godot” good for.
Thanks!
What was waiting to get understandable was
“Biedermann and the Arsonists”:
“The play shows how “normal” citizens can be taken in by evil.[3][4] As a parable, in a more general sense it may be considered to be descriptive of the gullible and easily manipulated aspects of the German Biedermann – the Everyman – who yearns both for a sense of shallow propriety as well as for a deeper sense of belonging, even if it comes at a great price, including that which is sensible or even necessary for his own survival.”
“Biedermann and the Arsonists” reminds on the cheers for the heroic tenor in Italian opera concert halls: bravo, assassino –
brave, murderer!