A new temperature reconstruction, using proxy temperature measurements from locations in central Asia, has revealed that there has been no warming in the past 432 years.
by Vijay Jayaraj
The Global Warming “Hiatus” or Pause
The word “hiatus” became popular in recent years after the discovery of a pause or hiatus in global warming. There has been a lack of warming in the atmosphere since 1999, despite the predictions of computer climate models.
The theories that support a hiatus in global warming vary in their conclusions regarding the overall climate scenario. While some forecast that the hiatus will be brief, others say it represents a major shift in our climate system.
Regardless of whether there has been significant shift in the global climate trend, the word “hiatus” implies that there has indeed been a warming trend and that it has stopped—at least momentarily.
That is partly correct, as many well-established scientific studies indicate gradual warming since the end of the Little Ice Age in the 17th century.
It can, however, be declared with absolute certainty that there has been no dangerous warming in the past two decades, and even in the past 200 years. The post-Little Ice Age warming trend has been anything but dangerous, causing hardly any negative impact on the ecosystem or the life forms. Instead, it has brought lengthened growing seasons, more abundant vegetative growth, and more abundant food for people and everything else.
It Is More than Just a Hiatus: Long-term Stability, Followed by Cooling
But more and more studies are beginning to indicate that there has been no significant warming trend in the past five centuries.
Among them is the recent paper by Byambaa et.al., which reveals a lack of warming in Central Asia since 1580 A.D.
The paper used tree ring-width proxy temperature measurements to calculate the mean June‐July air temperatures for the period 1402–2012 and June–December precipitation for the period 1569–2012.
Figure 6: A graphical comparison of tree ring based temperature reconstructions from the southern Altai. June temperatures for the eastern Kazakhstan Altai since 1698 (a), mean May–September temperatures for the western Chinese Altai since 1639 (b), June temperatures for the middle Chinese Altai since 1570 (c), mean June–July temperatures for the eastern Chinese Altai since 1613 (d), mean June–July temperatures for the southern Mongolian Altai since 1402 (e, this study). Thin grey lines and thick black lines show the reconstructed temperature and 13‐year low‐pass‐filtered curve, respectively. (a–d) from Zhang et al. (2015). Dark and light grey bars show cold and warm periods. The cold periods of low solar activities are named by S, Spörer; M, Maunder, D, Dalton, and G, Gleissberg minima (Schwikowski et al., 2009) and triangles indicate volcanic eruptions (Briffa et al., 1998; Eichler et al., 2009)
The authors conclude that the past 5 centuries have been relatively cooler. They also find the 20th century to be slightly warmer, but the warming was discontinuous. However, the 20th century warming eventually collapsed due to late 20th century cooling, which they deem common across the mountains of China and Nepal. They also find that solar cycles and volcanic activity were the major reasons for temperature anomalies during the past 5 centuries—not carbon dioxide.
Numerous other studies have attested this recent cooling in Central Asia, especially China. Temperature readings from 118 national weather stations since 1951 in Northeast China reveal a remarkable and significant cooling in China since 1998, the same year since which global atmospheric temperature failed to show any significant warming. Other studies show this trend over all of China.
China is not the only country to experience this late 20th century cooling.
A dozen peer-reviewed scientific papers published during the past three years reveal that the Arctic ceased to warm and the Antarctic began to cool. Other papers report that the 20th century also saw a significant dip in global ocean temperatures.
For example, surface temperatures from Japan have shown no warming trend during the past 50 years and are now beginning to show a cooling trend. And scientists have warned that there might even be a 1-degree Celsius global cooling by the year 2100.
The emergence of these studies has particularly made climate scientists suspect that our climate system’s biggest influencer could be the sun, not greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide.
Hundreds of scientific papers support their intuition and document the natural variations in the climate system owing to the impact of the sun.
The recent cooling, as revealed in the studies mentioned earlier, coincides with the weakest solar cycle on record. The current solar cycle (number 24) is the weakest on record, and scientists have predicted that the next two solar cycles will be much weaker, resulting in more cooling.
In all likelihood, we will experience significant cooling in the coming decade, not a mere hiatus in warming.
Our understanding of the earth’s climate system is still in its infancy. With more and more empirical evidence, it will take us at least a couple of decades to develop a better grasp of how our climate system works.
Vijay Jayaraj (M.Sc., Environmental Science, University of East Anglia, England), Research Associate for Developing Countries for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, lives in Bangalore, India.
Since late Pliocene times, plate tectonic continental dispositions walling off Eastern from Western hemispheres have engendered cyclical global Ice Ages averaging 102 kiloyears, interspersed with median 12,250-year interstadial remissions, for the first time since pre-Cambrian Ediacaran eras over 500-million YBP.
Continental ice sheets vanished 14,400 YBP; skewed by the 1,500-year Younger Dryas “cold shock” (11,950 – 10,450 YBP), Earth’s latest Holocene Interglacial Epoch ended 12,250 + 3,500 – 14,400 = AD 1350. Precipitated by the Kambalny strato-volcano eruption in Kamchatka, the subsequent 500-year Little Ice Age (LIA) ended 1850/1890, succeeded by a 140-year “amplitude compression” rebound due to end with the current 20-year chill-phase from AD 2010 to 2030.
Regarding Industrial Revolution “anthropogenic CO2 emissions” from c. 1725, Australian researcher Robert Holmes definitively showed in December 2017 that all planets in Earth’s solar system exhibit global atmospheric surface temperatures (GAST) = PM/Rp, setting Atmospheric Pressure P times Mean Molar Mass M over its Gas Constant R times Atmospheric Density p. Applying this relation from Mercury through Neptune, zero error-margins attest that there is no empirical or mathematical basis for any “forced” carbon-accumulation factor (CO2) affecting temperatures on Planet Earth.
Now entering a 70+ year Grand Solar Minimum similar to that of 1645 – 1715, astro-geophysical patterns indicate that by c. AD 3500 or so, 40 – 60% of Planet Earth’s crop-growing habitable zones will lie beneath 2.5 miles of continental ice-sheets analogous to Würmian glaciations prevailing from 116,400 to 14,400 YBP. Having willfully sabotaged humanity’s coal, oil, nuclear defenses against Great Winter, death-eating Luddite sociopaths have much to answer for.
Keep very accurate records (might not be possible) of the earth’s temperature using the latest technology for the next 500 years and you might see a trend. On the other hand, you might not.
Another pronouncement of information less than the error bars.
We used to call this NOISE.
When using Tree Ring Proxies,the error is beyond calculation, when deriving a temperature.
Unfit for purpose.
For climatic conditions favourable to tree growth, not so useless.
However it is nice to see a contrary paper published in the face of todays mass hysteria.
The trend from the measured temperature data is a little more useful.
Such amazingly stable weather we have been enjoying, no wonder the political creatures are in crisis mode, such non dramatic climate records, obviously we must panic now.
Oh Dear! This data and analysis is sooooo unsettling to the ‘settled science’ of Climate Change fraud funding.
It is odd that we have never asked the big important questions of the temperature data to see whether it does or does not support CAGW.
Global warming is not global. If there was CAGW there would be observed global uniform warming.
It is a fact that we have experienced regional warming, with a 20 year pause and with significant cooling periods, not global uniform warming.
As CO2 in the atmosphere is well mixed, there should be little variation in the CO2 forcing with latitude all else being equal and the forcing if it was real is alway present so the temperature data should be a wiggly line that trends up.
All else being equal the amount of warming due to the increased in CO2 should be the most in the tropics as the tropics is the region that has the most amount of infrared radiation emitted to space.
http://www.physicalgeography.net/fundamentals/images/rad_balance_ERBE_1987.jpg
As noted in Roy Spencer’s graph there is three times less warming than predicted in the tropics which makes sense as the tropical tropospheric hot spot that CAGW predicts should occur is also not observed.
The tropical tropospheric hot spot was predicted to occur at roughly 5km above the surface of the earth in the tropics, due to the greenhouse warming of increased water vapour which the air could hold if the CO2 caused the 5km air to warm. The topical tropospheric hot spot was not observed.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/TMI-SST-MEI-adj-vs-CMIP5-20N-20S-thru-2015.png
The pattern of warming observed is high latitude warming (same as past cyclic warming that was not caused by CO2 increases) with most of the warming occurring in the Northern hemisphere and almost no tropical region warming.
If there was CAGW there would be global warming observed not regional warming and that stops and is followed by cooling.
This peer reviewed paper shows that the pattern of observed warming is not consistent with CAGW.
https://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0809/0809.0581.pdf
Limits on CO2 Climate Forcing from Recent Temperature Data of Earth
The atmospheric CO2 is well mixed and shows a variation with latitude which is less than 4% from pole to pole [Earth System Research Laboratory. 2008]. Thus one would expect that the latitude variation of ΔT from CO2 forcing to be also small. It is noted that low variability of trends with latitude is a result in some coupled atmosphere-ocean models.
For example, the zonal-mean profiles of atmospheric temperature changes in models subject to “20CEN” forcing ( includes CO2 forcing) over 1979-1999 are discussed in Chap 5 of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program [Karl et al.2006]. The PCM model in Fig 5.7 shows little pole to pole variation in trends below altitudes corresponding to atmospheric pressures of 500hPa.
However, it is noted that NoExtropics is 2 times that of the global and 4 times that of the Tropics. Thus one concludes that the climate forcing in the NoExtropics includes more than CO2 forcing. These non-CO2 effects include: land use [Peilke et al. 2007]; industrialization [McKitrick and Michaels (2007), Kalnay and Cai (2003), DeLaat and Maurellis (2006)]; high
Ridiculous. Everybody and their dog knows that there has been warming since the Little Ice Age. That’s why it is called that. Just look at this glacier shrinking between 1850 and 1900:
You can find scientists predicting one thing and the opposite. Quiet often they don’t know what they talk about. The next two cycles are scheduled to have more activity than SC24, not less.
This whole article is a shameful mess.
Ad hom much?
The paper specifically discusses the past 500 years, not warming since 1850. It does state: ” The post-Little Ice Age warming trend has been anything but dangerous, causing hardly any negative impact on the ecosystem or the life forms.” But I guess, in your zeal to rant about and trash what appears to be a solid paper you missed that.
It specifically says:
That’s pure BS. The last three centuries have shown a clear warming trend. We know from any imaginable source, from historical records, to proxies, to instruments.
I am not trashing any paper. I am trashing the WUWT article because it is worthless. As far as I know the paper mentioned speaks of a certain region of Asia with a certain proxy. Some people have problems to differentiate between local or regional and global, and to understand that the evidence from one proxy has to be confirmed by independent means (other proxies or records).
Ad hom? well if the author writes a worthless article, he should be prepared to be said so. The article is just one error on top of another.
“… I am trashing the WUWT article because it is worthless. As far as I know the paper mentioned speaks of a certain region of Asia with a certain proxy…”
Why is it worthless? Why is that as far as you know? Couldn’t you understand the WUWT article or be bothered to look at the paper?
“…The article is just one error on top of another…”
Yet you didn’t name one, except for maybe falsely claiming that the WUWT author had a problem differentiating between local, regional, and global and falsely claiming that these results were not confirmed by others.
And we agree that the words in your comment are “Worth Gold”
“The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, a network of over 60 Christian theologians, natural scientists, economists, and other scholars educating for Biblical earth stewardship, economic development for the poor, and the proclamation and defense of the good news of salvation by God’s grace, received through faith in Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection.”
Religion and science don’t go well together usually. I just wonder if this article marks a new anti-science low in the blog.
Come on Javier. Low blow.
Try to see the problem without emotion, comparing data to the CAGW theory. Any warming is not proof of CAGW.
There are more than a dozen independent observations (the missing tropical tropospheric hot spot, the lack of tropical warming, data that shows humans did not cause the CO2 rise, and so on) that support the assertion that there is no CAGW and that AGW is so small that it cannot be distinguished from noise.
If CAGW was real there should be global warming, that is a wiggly line up, not regional warming with a 20-year pause that looks very much like the end of warming, with a significant prior Northern hemisphere warming period, that was followed by a cooling period.
It is a fact that the temperature data in the last 100 years does not support CAGW or AGW.
An example are peer reviewed papers by Hansen and friends written before the cult of CAGW was formed which note the Northern hemisphere warmed 0.8C between 1880s and 1940s and then cooled 0.5C between 1940 and 1970.
There of course has been massive temperature data tampering to make that 1880 to 1940s Arctic warming go away as it completely disproves CAGW.
https://notrickszone.com/2017/01/16/massive-data-tampering-uncovered-at-nasa-warmth-cooling-disappears-due-to-incompatibility-with-models/
Here is another recent published paper that confirms the 1919 to 1930 Arctic warming (the 1930s Arctic warming was of course followed by Arctic cooling.) and references other recent papers that attribute most of the recent Arctic warming to natural cause rather than AGW.
https://rd.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00704-018-02763-y
I have already done it. That’s not the problem here. As an author of articles at WUWT I don’t like seeing such bad articles as this one published, because they reflect poorly on the site and make my contributions less acceptable. What’s going to be next? An article on creationism?
Skeptics have to meet the high standards they demand from CAGW believers. Articles such as this one should not pass the filter.
Javier, What does Tree Ring data have to do with Creationism? This article is free from philosophical arguments on the origin and evolution of the earth. Rather, it merely addresses the change in the climate. Skeptics have always had high standards, unfortunately, it is the CAGW believers who resort to logical fallacies and thread far away from the actual topic under discussion. Your argument that a Christian cannot make an unbiased comment on Climate is setting a dangerous precedent, for it restricts people’s participation in public debate purely based on their religious beliefs. I am sure you are aware of many CAGW believers who are actually Christians. Katherine Hayhoe is a Christian and wife of a Pastor, and she is a firm CAGW advocate. So please stop this nonsense about Religion and stick to climate, climate critique, critique on the article, etc. I live in a country with 1 billion plus people who are Hindus and we have huge number of young academicians who are now contributing to research in Europe and North America.
Javier, “Religion and science don’t go well together usually” – Can you defend this statement of yours with regard to the Modern Scientific Revolution. From my research experience in UK and Canada, I can attest to the fact that religious affiliation or non-affiliation was never a qualifier for doing science. Hundreds of my Hindu friends are researchers in U.S. universities and none of them was questioned on their religious affinity or the influence of their religious beliefs on their thesis or research project. The scientific method is objective enough to weed our biases and no university in the world selects a candidate for research based on religion. I think your opinion regarding science and religion does little to shed light on how my religious identity reflects on this article on tree-ring proxy data from different lot of people across the globe.
Anyone aware of the seeming very long term cyclic pattern might say that we are on the precipice of another ice age.
http://sppiblog.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/climate-history-ice-core.gif
The problem with climate science is that human history has not existed long enough to know what the heck is going on.
Within a few thousands of years. Don’t hold your breath.
I knew that, Jav. Not holding breath, for sure, because of CO2 build up. (^_^)
That’s one problem, yes, but the greater problem is that many scientists who know better (or should) are still pushing the CAGW myth for career advancement and government/NGO handouts.
Yeah, JB, it’s negligent “science”.
These northeast China tree ring samples infer a declining temperature trend recently…just like Mikey Mann’s proxy trees did (where he fraudulently– yes it was $Trillion fraud– spliced in increasing “thermometer” data in place of the declining “tree ring” data).
Sounds like a case of paradoxical simultaneous CO2 poisoning in both locations…or maybe just regional cooling in both locations.
The models do actually show some transient regional cooling. However, Climate models do not usually agree about what various regions do. This of course is just normal variability seen in settled science…as 97% of us know.
Would be interesting to see if any models match this (and/or Mikey Mann’s) tree ring data.
There are plenty of central Asian lakes that record great climate proxies and the one I bothered looking up confirms cooling in the region since 1990.
https://www.jlimnol.it/index.php/jlimnol/article/view/jlimnol.2017.1587/1383#figures
Though the authors of this paper, in classic climate pseudoscience fashion, are unable to apply basic elementary logic and understanding, and therefore are easily confused by their own data:
“Under the natural background, the ratio of precipitation to evaporation (P/E) is the primary control on lake levels, as well as the heavy-isotope enrichment of the lake water (Ma et al., 2011). A decrease in δ18O values largely reflects an increase in the P/E ratio within the basin, likely under wet climatic conditions with high precipitation and/or low evaporation. However, local meteorological data collected since the 1950s reveals that regional precipitation has been steadily increasing in both the mountainous and plain regions of the Ebinur basin. Thus, at face value, there appear to be an inconsistency between the isotopic composition and regional precipitation since the 1960s.”
The sun is pretty constant.
The climate on the Earth is defined by the oceans. We live on a Blue Planet!
There is certainly warming in the last half a century – we see it in the satellites like UAH data.
It is probably man-done. It is certainly not CO2 though. So, what could it be?
Most probably, it is the fertilizers.
They cause the sea water to flourish. As a consequence, the the water is less transparent and the surface is get heated by the Sun. We have warm upper water layers – and the “Global Warming”.
Wasn’t there a study over at NoTricksZone where they found all the warming was near the oceans? Areas protected from the ocean air saw little or no warming while areas next to oceans did see warming.
It would seem that central Asia would be fairly well protected from ocean air and thus might fit into the group that hasn’t seen much warming. This could be considered one verification of the study.
One has to be very careful about climate reconstructions from tree-ring data. The coherence with instrumented measurements is, at best, marginal. Moreover, there’s precious little protection against frequency-aliasing provided by monthly or seasonal estimates based on highly imprecise chronology. In contrast with yearly-average estimates that totally eliminate the annual cycle, any error in timing of proxy reconstructions produces entirely spurious offsets that directly affect the apparent rend.
The sad fact is that all of the evidence about a Cooling, will make no
difference to the CC myth.
Just as is with the Exon financial collapse, we have reached the point that no
big organization can be allowed to fall over.
Far too many people and organizations are involved, Media being one of the
biggest. The universities have become used to crying wolf to get their grants
from governments, who also benefit by keeping the people at least a bit
worried,
Fear about the future is a big factor too, we all want a reasonable length of
life and will tend to go along with the Propaganda.
Only when things stop working, such as the power systems failing, will
people start to think that its not a CC problem, and by then all of the
politicians will do a 180 degree, and will then promise to save us yet again.
Excluding the effects of the likes of Racial Carson, in 1960 its only been
since about 1995 that CC has really taken off. Its far too short a time to be
able to make any proper decision as to what the climate is doing.
Only a study of history can show that such changes are very slow , over many
years. For example the settlers on Greenland knew that the climate was
getting cooler, but it took a long time before they left, or if they stayed, they
died.
The Minion and Roman periods were for many years, the Romans about
600 , so any slight variation would simply be considered to be the weather,
which of course it was. The MWP likewise was a few hundred years, and
again they would have regraded any small variation as just the weather.
So why are we so worried about a so called warming, from about 1970 to
1997 ?, especially as the 1970 tees was going to be the next Ice Age.
MJE VK5ELL
I have cored thousands of trees, and the same tree could usually give you most any answer you wanted. You could core all the same trees again on the north side, and the data would show a cooling trend in the tree rings. South side would show a warming trend, on average in the NH. What about the temps in the winter? Tree rings don’t say much about this. Drawing a definitive conclusion like this ‘study’ did isn’t very conclusive about anything, except arriving at the answer the researchers wanted in the first place. Just like Mann.
“The paper used tree ring-width proxy temperature measurements to calculate…”
I think one point here to bear in mind is that data can be read in different directions, provided of course that the underlying science is solid.
This guy works at the University of East Anglia? Is he looking for another job now he’s fallen off the CAGW bandwagon?
I do not work there, I received my Master’s from there in 2009, the same year cliamtegate scandal broke out and most of my professors were from the climatic research unit
O/T Can somebody provide any links to criticisms of hockey stick results by researchers other than Mann? I invested about 30 minutes looking for such, and couldn’t find any.
Also, does anybody know if there is any such thing as a global temperature proxy, which is anything other than some sort of aggregation of local temperature proxies that comprise overlapping time intervals? I can’t even imagine such a thing.
The thing I can never understand from these proxy reconstructions is how the measurement error (which has to be very large) is accounted for, and how the reliability, hence the error bars, are validated.
A proxy measure from a single location is supposed to be able to “measure” the average temperature of the earth (which we can only guess at anyway) to within a few degrees Celsius? On what basis is this claimed?
And how reliable ( as measured by 1-correlation [squared] of different measures) are our alternative measures of past global temperatures, for which these measures are supposed to be a proxy? I never see any measures of the correlations between all these different proxies but it looks to me like it is low.
I keep getting the impression that the discipline of climate science is simply unwilling to acknowledge the huge uncertainties involved in measuring global temperature prior to satellite telemetry ( which itself has reliability and measurement error limitations).
Is anyone here able to help a (psychometrics) statistician out here?
Vijay! Good to see you over here!
Thanks Sheri
Tree rings do not measure temperature.
They measure rainfall, pests, disease, canopy cover, and nutrients. Oh, and right at the bottom, they may measure some temperature. But not if it is really hot and dry, because then they will show it was cold (thin rings)….
R
Co2 concentrations before temp too.
Vijay misleads us: “Numerous other studies have attested this recent cooling in Central Asia, especially China. Temperature readings from 118 national weather stations since 1951 in Northeast China reveal a remarkable and significant cooling in China since 1998, the same year since which global atmospheric temperature failed to show any significant warming. Other studies show this trend over all of China.”
If you READ Figure 4 of the linked paper, overall warming since 1951 is statistically significant since 1951, but the confidence intervals for the cooling from 1998 (an El Nino year) to 2014 (ending before the recent El Nino) all include zero (probably without correcting for auto-correlaton). This period includes an explosion generation of electricity from coal, so local cooling by aerosols is unrepresentative of the planet as a whole. There is no reason to pay attention to cherry-picked trends from the most polluted place on the planet.
Vijay continues: “A dozen peer-reviewed scientific papers published during the past three years reveal that the Arctic ceased to warm and the Antarctic began to cool. Other papers report that the 20th century also saw a significant dip in global ocean temperatures.”
THREE YEARS??? Only in the Arctic and Antarctica??? Shocking. The “significant dip in global ocean temperatures” appears to be only from 1968 to 1972 and only in the Northern Hemisphere.
Vijay continues: ” And scientists have warned that there might even be a 1-degree Celsius global cooling by the year 2100.”
This projection was made by fitting the monthly global temperature record since 1880 to function composed of 19 sine waves – a total of 39 adjustable parameters. Von Neumann famously said: “With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.” Why should we expect 39 parameters to be meaningful????
Jivay’s deceptions continue: “However, the 20th century warming eventually collapsed due to late 20th century cooling, which they deem common across the mountains of China and Nepal.
Jivay is referring to a LOCAL cool and wet period that occurred in many, but certainly not all years, from 1975 to 1995. See Figure 4 of the linked paper.
As mentioned in one of the earlier comments by James Clarke, “The biggest ‘cherry-pick’ in the history of climate science was when the IPCC took Mann’s hockey stick and put it on the front page of their report, and front and center of every news outlet in the world. The hockey stick was an outlier in the scientific literature then and now. It remains an outlier, not just in paleoclimate studies, but in tree ring studies.”
Vijay: Does the fact that the IPCC over-publicized the hockey stick two decades ago mean that skeptics should mis-represent the information in published studies today? Do two wrongs make a right?
The answer to the above question may depend on whether you consider yourself to be a scientist writing at a scientific blog, or a policy advocate writing about a non-technical topic.