Climate change now detectable from any single day of weather at global scale

Nature Climate Change volume 10, pages35–41(2020)Cite this article

Abstract

For generations, climate scientists have educated the public that ‘weather is not climate’, and climate change has been framed as the change in the distribution of weather that slowly emerges from large variability over decades1,2,3,4,5,6,7. However, weather when considered globally is now in uncharted territory. Here we show that on the basis of a single day of globally observed temperature and moisture, we detect the fingerprint of externally driven climate change, and conclude that Earth as a whole is warming. Our detection approach invokes statistical learning and climate model simulations to encapsulate the relationship between spatial patterns of daily temperature and humidity, and key climate change metrics such as annual global mean temperature or Earth’s energy imbalance. Observations are projected onto this relationship to detect climate change. The fingerprint of climate change is detected from any single day in the observed global record since early 2012, and since 1999 on the basis of a year of data. Detection is robust even when ignoring the long-term global warming trend. This complements traditional climate change detection, but also opens broader perspectives for the communication of regional weather events, modifying the climate change narrative: while changes in weather locally are emerging over decades, global climate change is now detected instantaneously.

The rest is paywalled.

From Nature Climate Change

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Andrew Kerber
January 8, 2020 6:04 am

I am trying to decided if this is hubris on a grand scale, or simple stupidity and self deception. Is there even a difference?

Matt
Reply to  Andrew Kerber
January 8, 2020 6:08 am

Or is it written by the Babylon Bee?

Geo Rubik
Reply to  Matt
January 8, 2020 8:43 am

If it’s the Bee we will have to wait for CNN to fact check it.

https://patriotpost.us/articles/67744-cnn-fact-checks-babylon-bee-satire-2020-01-07

Prjindigo
Reply to  Andrew Kerber
January 8, 2020 9:55 am

it is absolute proof that the author knows so little about mathematics and statistics that they should have any scientific degree revoked

Reply to  Prjindigo
January 9, 2020 7:05 am

Could be one o them economics degrees like AOC got from BU?

Walter Sobchak
Reply to  Andrew Kerber
January 8, 2020 10:43 am

Mathematical onanism. They should stop, or they will go blind.

Reply to  Walter Sobchak
January 8, 2020 5:15 pm

Apparently, they already have.
From programming onanistical models that cease processing mathematical formulae before reaching consistent replicable results good for everyone.

At this rate, they’ll be deaf before long.

ozspeaksup
Reply to  Andrew Kerber
January 9, 2020 4:14 am

I saw this on science alert com
they have a bit more there
it was SO utterly ridiculous I was amazed they managed to get it published
but then natureclimatechange prints anything it seems

Coach Springer
January 8, 2020 6:17 am

Propaganda to be repeated in talking points everywhere. Measurement for the express purpose of removing the context that is relevant.

John Bell
January 8, 2020 6:18 am

The claims get more and more shrill and grandiose every year, and now that they know that the world is not believing it any more they have nothing to lose by making the wildest claims. 2020 will be fun to see what claims they make.

Newminster
Reply to  John Bell
January 8, 2020 7:24 am

I’m not sure whether to compare them with skiers heading ever faster for a cliff edge or tourists on a bus ride (they think) which is about to turn into a roller coaster. I think our best option is to let them get on with it. The more they try to outdo each other the more ridiculous they look.

For UK readers it’s Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch in reverse. Sorry, I don’t know of a US equivalent.

Joe Crawford
Reply to  Newminster
January 8, 2020 7:59 am

I’m afraid the only thing we (i.e., the U.S.) have close to your Monty Python is Congress and their (financial) supporters on ‘K-Street’. They could give MP a very good run for the money.

Mr Julian Forbes-Laird
Reply to  Newminster
January 8, 2020 8:13 am

Presumably then, The Four Yorkshiremen of the Apocalypse?

Prjindigo
Reply to  Newminster
January 8, 2020 9:57 am

You had a comedy troop?!???

Rich Davis
Reply to  Newminster
January 8, 2020 10:01 am
Alan the Brit
Reply to  Newminster
January 8, 2020 11:23 pm

Eeee, you were lucky! We used to dream of having an equivalent!!!!

Ken Irwin
January 8, 2020 6:21 am

“Our detection approach invokes statistical learning and climate model simulations”

Pull the other leg, it’s got bells on.

“If your experiment needs statistics, then you ought to have done a better experiment” Ernest Rutherford.

Stewart Pid
Reply to  Ken Irwin
January 8, 2020 7:06 am

Climate science speak for polishing a turd!!

Fraizer
Reply to  Stewart Pid
January 8, 2020 8:51 am

Everyone knows you can’t polish a turd. But you can roll it in glitter.

Reply to  Fraizer
January 8, 2020 7:27 pm

coprolith?

LdB
Reply to  Ken Irwin
January 8, 2020 7:14 am

No seriously that is what it does look at the code it isn’t pay walled.

Anything that isn’t a statistical match to the model is defined as “climate change fingerprint”, there is just the rather humorous problem that an errors in the model are now called a climate change fingerprint 🙂

The model is perfect it’s just the observations which are climate change !!!!

FabioC.
Reply to  LdB
January 8, 2020 7:32 am

I gave a quick look at the code (it’s R after all): where is the damning part?

I realized already this work is just another way (maybe better in some fashion) to compare models to observations, but it seems you dug deeper than me.

LdB
Reply to  FabioC.
January 8, 2020 7:54 am

It’s not a single line the whole code is stupid all it does is work out how far the day values are from the model which it creates as a fingerprint value which it writes and plots. So the model is assumed to be the “real” and “correct” value. If you exceed a statistical deviation from the model that is a climate change fingerprint. It’s the same problem as attribution statistics it assumes the model is correct and the correlations in the model are real and had proper controls.

So you can create a funny sample make a straight line function and call the output CMIP5_mod and remove all the call to the actual model data under that name. Now any day data deviation from that straight line will write and plot as climate change fingerprint using that code.

mario lento
Reply to  LdB
January 8, 2020 9:12 am

I think that it should the following. The models show more warming SHOULD be HAPPENING. Therefore the actual temperatures are deviating running cold because of Climate Change…

nw sage
Reply to  LdB
January 8, 2020 5:36 pm

You mean it is REAL?? From the pseudo scientific double talk of the ‘summary’ I was, and am, convinced it is a satire worthy of the Onion.

Phoenix44
Reply to  LdB
January 8, 2020 12:19 pm

You don’t need to look at the code, that’s obviously what they are doing. They run a model and deviations from that must be Climste Change.

The fact that they have absolutely no ability to check their model – because the non-Climate Change weather didn’t happen – doesn’t seem to bother them.

It’s just a sophisticated way of Begging the Question. They assume their premise in the answer. It’s truly pathetic.

Rich Davis
Reply to  Phoenix44
January 8, 2020 2:44 pm

Kudos on the correct use of the phrase “begging the question”!

Alastair gray
Reply to  Rich Davis
January 8, 2020 3:25 pm

Shit is what happens when you had other plans
Shite is what trickles down your legs in incontinent momens
Shoite is a form of verbal diorrhea
The abstract of this paper contains no indication of methodology , data, reason or logic
Was this shit shite Shoialastairte peer reviewed?

Ken
Reply to  Ken Irwin
January 8, 2020 7:23 am

What I hear sounds more like the result of pulling my finger.

ozspeaksup
Reply to  Ken Irwin
January 9, 2020 4:17 am

actually the report I read said MACHINE LEARNING aka AI
and we know how well that doesnt work so far ,dont we?

commieBob
January 8, 2020 6:31 am

You only know what is different if you know what conditions should be. Given that we can’t reliably predict the weather beyond a few days, we can’t claim that we know what conditions would be absent any human influence.

These folks are claiming the impossible. It doesn’t help that two of them are named Nutty and Munchausen. Is this even real or is it a put up?

LdB
Reply to  commieBob
January 8, 2020 7:35 am

The more I read and looked at the code the funnier it got. I am torn if they are trying to be deceptive to make a media splash or just plain stupid. The funny thing is you sort of guessed what they did observations that deviate from the model are called “Climate Change ™”. We need the tm because it isn’t what you or I would call climate change and worse any model errors are now climate change ™.

However when you print it in media you can bet they don’t explain that there Climate Change ™ does not equal real world Climate Change.

NeedleFactory
Reply to  LdB
January 8, 2020 10:01 am

Thanks, LdB, for digging into the code!
You ask if they are deceptive or stupid. Perhaps the former, and possibly with an honorable reason. Ever since Alan Sokal stung Social Text we’ve seen several similar incidents where the clever, by getting a hoax published, have exposed the pretentious. Let’s hope this is that!

Reply to  commieBob
January 8, 2020 9:53 am

And commieBob–don’t forget the other authors
Fishier, Sippill, Sayschlli

Phoenix44
Reply to  commieBob
January 8, 2020 12:20 pm

They claim the know what the weather “should” have been on any day in 2012. It can’t be real.

January 8, 2020 6:31 am

The fingerprint of the climate buffoonery is now detected from any single climate change “scientist” statement.

And it’s a fat clown’s footprint rather than a fingerprint.

January 8, 2020 6:32 am

The climate changes? About as profound statement that the Sun rises in the East and sets in the West.

January 8, 2020 6:33 am

You can’t fix stupid and nothing cures arrogance!

H.R.
Reply to  Freddie Stoller
January 8, 2020 7:55 am

“Pride goeth before the fall”, so I think the fall cures arrogance. Well, it’s not so much the fall as the sudden stop.

Ewin Barnett
January 8, 2020 6:33 am

How does this claim relate to an all-time low temperature reading? That because the climate is warming, a record low should have been even lower? Or that all-time lows are defined as outliers, each and every one?

LKMiller
Reply to  Ewin Barnett
January 8, 2020 6:53 am

Ewin – Beat me to it.

+10

Phoenix44
Reply to  Ewin Barnett
January 8, 2020 12:23 pm

The whole record thing is preposterous. Were there no high records set before any CO2 was released?

Richard
January 8, 2020 6:43 am

In the ancient writings we read how ridiculous it was for people to handcraft their own idol and then offer it worship. Is it now much different to handcraft your own climate model, and then believe it?

HD Hoese
January 8, 2020 6:46 am

I saw that from another link. “ Our detection approach invokes statistical learning and climate model simulations…….while changes in weather locally are emerging over decades, global climate change is now detected instantaneously.” We must be open-minded, but those of us who know something about heat in the ocean have to laugh. Now weather is a longer feature than climate? My statistics instructor warned us about this sort of thing. Recall nothing about “statistical learning.”

This is interesting, great concern for universities whose libraries suffer high costs and too many journals. https://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2019/12/30/will-trump-smash-academic-paywalls/

Gary
January 8, 2020 6:50 am

Reminds me of an old obscure tv show called Name That Tune. Contestants bid the number of notes it would take to identify the song. The next climate paper will have to bid hourly detection to beat this one.

Bad Andrew
January 8, 2020 6:51 am

Again, the concept of climate is flawed to begin with.

It’s already weather.

All of this “climate science” is a hopeless confusion aimed at warping your thinking.

Andrew

S Snell
January 8, 2020 6:58 am

As a wise man once said: We see what we want to see.

January 8, 2020 7:04 am

Not more climate model simulations. GIGO is still in action.

Adamsson
January 8, 2020 7:08 am

It’s true absolutely any kind of weather is climate change and there is nothing that does not fit the theory.
Climate change cannot be disproved.
There used to be some idea that a theory that cannot be disproved was not scientific but this is heresy.

LdB
January 8, 2020 7:08 am

The code isn’t paywalled and you can see what it does
https://data.iac.ethz.ch/Sippel_et_al_2019_DailyDetection/code/_4figures/_plot_fingerprints_evaluation_4fig2.R

It takes the day weather data and compares it to the model output.

They have done a Nick Stokes redefinition trick and are calling any deviation from the model output as climate change … priceless 🙂

So now follow the logic, any deviation from the model is now climate change so the worse the models are the more climate change you have!!!!!!!!!!

Welcome to Climate Science people.

Reply to  LdB
January 8, 2020 8:05 am

LdB January 8, 2020 at 7:08 am

So now follow the logic, any deviation from the model is now climate change so the worse the models are the more climate change you have!!!!!!!!!!

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!
First chuckle of the day (-:

Curious George
Reply to  LdB
January 8, 2020 8:56 am

“From a single day of globally observed temperature and moisture … ” Any particular global observation dataset? Any particular model – and run?

LdB
Reply to  Curious George
January 8, 2020 10:03 am

CMIP5 I assume according to the source code naming but it’s just pulling from a file so they could change to any model.

John McClure
Reply to  Curious George
January 8, 2020 10:11 am

Agree, the abstract is so poorly written it’s impossible to take the concept seriously.

I liked the cartoon, cowboy painting targets on bullet holes.

Kurt
Reply to  LdB
January 8, 2020 3:28 pm

“It takes the day weather data and compares it to the model output.”

Which model, though? If different models produce different daily weather patterns, each based on a different set of assumed but not known initial conditions, any detected “climate change” is unquantifiable and therefore meaningless.

E J Zuiderwijk
January 8, 2020 7:14 am

Eureka! I’m going to be filty rich. I have now a program that tells me from observing for just one day how the stockmarket will fare ten years from now. It’s based on AI and my infallible stocktrading model and just counting the winners and losers at the end of today will do the trick. So, so long suckers, I’m off into the golden sunset.

But of course, this is an elaborate spoof.

‘Detection is robust even when ignoring the longterm warming trend.’

As they are detecting the warming trend, what they are saying is that ‘detection of the warming trend is robust even when ignoring the longterm warming trend’. Quite a feat.

Caveat Lector! Is what I always say.

richard
January 8, 2020 7:19 am

In the meantime-

“Greenland just set a new all-time record low temperature. Not only for January 2, not only for the entire month of January, not only at Summit Station, but for anywhere across the island, and for any month of the year”

Imagine if it was the hottest. It would be across all alarmist MSM.

Marty
January 8, 2020 7:21 am

The claim is sheer non-sense. Weather is a chaotic system. And if that weren’t bad enough we don’t really even understand the variables that influence the chaotic system.

The claim is the moral equivalent of children playing a game of poker without knowing how many cards are in the deck, how many suits there are, whether there are jokers in the deck, or even if the dealer has shuffled the cards. A nice game of Old Maid anyone?

niceguy
Reply to  Marty
January 9, 2020 11:09 pm

They might be playing “poker” with tarot cards. They get pretend “probabilities” that are even more ill defined than poker play odds (which are bogus, except those TV see all cards computer view computations, which are irrelevant from a player POV).

Mike Bromley
January 8, 2020 7:27 am

“Our detection approach invokes statistical learning and climate model simulations to encapsulate the relationship between spatial patterns of daily temperature and humidity, and key climate change metrics such as annual global mean temperature or Earth’s energy imbalance.”

I can’t even imagine how someone might spend their days thinking about this shytte, let alone submit it for publication…and have it published!

On the outer Barcoo
January 8, 2020 7:31 am

Not good enough! I demand an HOURLY update!

Jean Parisot
January 8, 2020 7:31 am

So, you draw a line and anything that moves off the line is called Change, OK. Since the data is Climate data, it’s Climate Change.

Can I get this published?

jono1066
January 8, 2020 7:45 am

Brilliant idea
but one small problem (for them)
climate change is a wobbly sort of curve with `up` bits and `down` bits at that sampling rate.
I would hate for them to have to report 50% of the time that climate change is slowing down and its cooling !
followed by the exact opposite 24 hrs later.

Anonymoose
Reply to  jono1066
January 8, 2020 8:07 am

“I would hate for them to have to report 50% of the time that climate change is slowing down and its cooling !
followed by the exact opposite 24 hrs later.”

They’ve probably already found that they’re having that problem every 12 hours.

Gus
January 8, 2020 7:51 am

“>>> Our detection approach invokes statistical learning and climate model simulations… <<<"

This is where the fraud happens, because, first, climate model simulations are Mickey Mouse cartoons, scientifically worthless, basically reproducing what their authors have coded into them, and, second, so is machine learning. The latter works as follows: you throw a lot of data onto your neural net, then train it by telling it when it's right and when it's wrong. So, again, you infuse your own opinions into the system. If you couple the two, namely, a neural net being trained by a climate model, which is wrong to begin with, you merely produce a self-perpetuating and self-justifying error.

rhoda klapp
January 8, 2020 8:19 am

It has occasionally occurred to me that there is a way to tell whether temps are changing. It is the frequency of records. Taking individual records at fixed locations on the same day each year, do the new records, whether high or low, increase in frequency or decrease. If the rate of increase is itself increasing, there is a movement in that direction. If new records are set further and further apart, that means no significant change. The data is there already, it just takes someone who knows how to do it statistically to do all the work..

Bob Vislocky
January 8, 2020 8:36 am

Event attribution to detect the climate-change component is statistically invalid simply because they are only looking at big events after the fact. For example, in hurricane season they might test to see how much stronger hurricane Michael was because of global warming, but they never test the opposite influence to see if a strong hurricane could have developed somewhere in the ocean without global warming. Perhaps excess warming in the wrong place caused nice weather instead of a potential strong hurricane. That’s why the only way to detect the influence of climate change is to look at long-term trends.

John F. Hultquist
January 8, 2020 8:45 am

ctm,
I did not see that anyone mentioned the Texas sharpshooter cartoon.

You get a gold star for that.

gmak
January 8, 2020 8:46 am

Nice. A single point can now be extrapolated into a 3-D surface extended forward infinitely in time. Next, how to sharpen knives by putting them under a pyramid.

Lind Dickson
January 8, 2020 8:48 am

Have you guys even read the title? I haven’t read the paper either. But have you ever considered that “at global scale” may mean something different than in your backyard? Why don’t you start by naming a date of in the last 5 years in which the global average near-surface air temperature was colder than on any day in the 1950s or 60s. And guess what, there is more than the weather in your backyard.

Reply to  Lind Dickson
January 8, 2020 10:11 pm

And guess what? There’s no such thing as “global average temperature”.

January 8, 2020 8:48 am

Cherry picked comparison baseline + clever abuse of autocorrelation = A Nature paper for the authors.

Junk science.

January 8, 2020 8:58 am

Readers may note this is the same article referred to in a post on WUWT five days ago.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/01/03/climate-signals-detected-in-global-weather/

The abstract posted here today gets the same response from me: Word salad.

Hokey Schtick
January 8, 2020 9:06 am

Reality itself is a climate change denier. Therefore, we need to replace reality with the models. Then we will have a robust predictable climate catastrophe we can be proud of, designed and maintained by humans, rather than one subject to the whims of the so-called natural world. Wait, what?

Carbon500
January 8, 2020 9:23 am

If you’re a rubbish scientist and not good enough for proper science, go in for ‘climate change’ – the way to go! 🙂

Martin557
January 8, 2020 9:32 am

Still no tropical hot-spot, catastrophe averted.

January 8, 2020 9:42 am

Back in the day when the scare was called “Global Warming” rather than “Climate Change”, record low temps were dismissed as being just short term local “weather”.
Now short term local weather IS “climate”?!

Michael Jankowski
January 8, 2020 9:53 am

“…and conclude that Earth as a whole is warming.”

Groundbreaking stuff.

-d
January 8, 2020 10:31 am

From the earliest days of computer processing, this is known as “Garbage In-Garbage Out.”

TomRude
January 8, 2020 10:35 am

This is a full set up for a straw man argument. The Figures shown demonstrate it is all models, and the usual GISS or NOAA global temperature curve. It is circular reasoning and nothing else can come out of this stuff.
Quoting Paul Courtney: “A medical doctor can take your temperature, but only a climate scientist can adjust it. They can average it with the other patients, find “gaps”, infill, and find that you are catastrophically warming.”
This paper is exactly that.

Steve Z
January 8, 2020 12:05 pm

The weather here right now is about 54 F (30 C) colder than it was six months ago. If “global climate change can be detected instantaneously”, based on this trend, the temperature here will reach absolute zero (-273 C) within the next 5 years, and all life here will die.

Never mind the fact that the sun was much higher above the horizon six months ago, and will be at that same angle six months into the future. Global climate change can be detected instantaneously. (sarc).

DocSiders
January 8, 2020 12:20 pm

There are still no CO2 warming signals responsive to changes in CO2 at any time scale.

There are however CO2 signals responsive to (therefore coming before) global warming and cooling AT ALL TIME SCALES…down to months.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/09/09/empirical-evidence-shows-temperature-increases-before-co2-increase-in-all-records/

Ed Bo
January 8, 2020 12:44 pm

In related news, Michael Mann could not recreate the AMO or PDO in the “control runs” (no “forcing”) of his climate models. He has therefore concluded that these oscillations are not real.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-13823-w

Krishna Gans
Reply to  Ed Bo
January 8, 2020 3:38 pm

Atlantic and Pacific oscillations lost in the noise
Manns models only produce hockeysticks, what else will Mickey Mouse find ? 😀

Gerald Machnee
January 8, 2020 1:09 pm

Are they using raw temperature observations?
Their “science” will fail as soon as the temperatures start decreasing.
But they could solve that by increasing the adjustments:
https://realclimatescience.com/61-fake-data/

F. Ross
January 8, 2020 1:10 pm

HOGSWILL!

Please excuse me for shouting.

Gerald Machnee
January 8, 2020 1:12 pm

They pulled this similar kind of attribution when they did a study of recent Canadian forest fires.
They only matched fires to temperatures when the temperatures are increasing and called it “attribution”. Then they did a similar stunt with Arctic ice.

Windsong
January 8, 2020 1:21 pm

William M. Briggs took a look at this paper a few days ago. He was unimpressed.
https://wmbriggs.com/post/28978/

Alan McIntire
Reply to  Windsong
January 8, 2020 3:23 pm

As Briggs said, all the paper does is measure deviations from “normal”. You can expect 5% of all days to be in the 5% of extreme warmest, 5% in extreme coolest, extreme wettest, extreme driest, etc,, Theyve discovered weather “variability” rather than detecting climate change in daily temperatures,

January 8, 2020 1:27 pm

The Climate Alarmists search for proof of any sort continues apace and has now reached greater heights of desperation and absurdity.

carbon-based life form
January 8, 2020 2:14 pm

Pull the other one…

January 8, 2020 5:04 pm

I think that finally the Western World has finally realised that the UN, the mostly 3 rd World members are in it for the money from the once rich nations.

Now while the Western politicians still make the talk to keep the Green voters happy, less and less money is actually going the UN way.

MJE VK5ELL

n.n
Reply to  Michael
January 8, 2020 6:19 pm

Redistributive change, diversity (e.g. racism), democratic gerrymandering, and [political] climate change.

Michael S. Kelly
January 8, 2020 9:50 pm

Heck, why not from one thermometer somewhere, read once a day?

Craig
January 9, 2020 12:03 am

Is this article a parody?

Ross Windsor
January 9, 2020 2:44 am

Micro-Statistics: One point of selective data = Very Concerning Trend

Hivemind
January 9, 2020 11:00 pm

I should have stopped reading when it got to ‘simulations’. What a waste of a perfectly good research grant.

Solomon Green
January 11, 2020 5:01 am

“Our detection approach invokes statistical learning and climate model simulations ….”

Having spent part of my career creating, examining and using models, I would like to know if anyone has ever produced a model that could produce accurate long-term (say >50 years) forecasts that worked in any discipline, let alone one like climate which is dependent on so many variables, both natural and, possibly anthropogenic.

Chaamjamal
January 13, 2020 4:28 am

“Our detection approach invokes statistical learning and climate model simulations to encapsulate the relationship between spatial patterns of daily temperature and humidity, and key climate change metrics such as annual global mean temperature or Earth’s energy imbalance. Observations are projected onto this relationship to detect climate change. The fingerprint of climate change is detected from any single day in the observed global record since early 2012, and since 1999 on the basis of a year of data”

Oh wow!
This is just amazing!
You guys are amazing.
Climate science is amazing!

https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/12/25/earth-day-wisdom/

https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/09/01/tipping-points/

Johann Wundersamer
January 21, 2020 2:01 am

You can have a, new, climate change every day by comparing deviations to weather.

– sadly 1: again it’s 60 years gone before daring to call that “climate”.

– sadly 2: you spoiled your data with basing on the, dayly, useless because unintended, uncontrollable dayly weather “data”.

The good news: You live a meaningless, fulfilled life.