Guest essay by Eric Worrall
From the “we have one US Presidential cycle to save the world” department.
New climate predictions assess global temperatures in coming five years
8 July 2020
Geneva, 9 July 2020 – The annual mean global temperature is likely to be at least 1° Celsius above pre-industrial levels (1850-1900) in each of the coming five years (2020-2024) and there is a 20% chance that it will exceed 1.5°C in at least one year, according to new climate predictions issued by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).
The Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update, led by the United Kingdom’s Met Office, provides a climate outlook for the next five years, updated annually. It harnesses the expertise of internationally acclaimed climate scientists and the best computer models from leading climate centres around the world to produce actionable information for decision-makers.
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“This study shows – with a high level of scientific skill – the enormous challenge ahead in meeting the Paris Agreement on Climate Change target of keeping a global temperature rise this century well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees Celsius,” said WMO Secretary-General Petteri Taalas.
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Read more: https://public.wmo.int/en/media/press-release/new-climate-predictions-assess-global-temperatures-coming-five-years
The executive summary of the study;
Global Annual to Decadal Climate Update
Target years: 2020 and 2020-2024
Executive Summary
This update presents a summary of annual to decadal predictions from WMO designated Global Producing Centres and non-designated contributing centres for the period 2020-2024. Latest predictions suggest that:
- Annual global temperature is likely to be at least 1°C warmer than preindustrial levels (defined as the 1850-1900 average) in each of the coming 5 years and is very likely to be within the range 0.91 – 1.59°C
- It is unlikely (~20% chance) that one of the next 5 years will be at least 1.5°C warmer than preindustrial levels, but the chance is increasing with time
- It is likely (~70% chance) that one or more months during the next 5 years will be at least 1.5°C warmer than preindustrial levels
- It is very unlikely (~3%) that the 5 year mean temperature for 2020-2024 will be 1.5°C warmer than preindustrial levels
- In 2020, large land areas in the Northern Hemisphere are likely to be over 0.8°C warmer than the recent past (defined as the 1981-2010 average)
- In 2020, the Arctic is likely to have warmed by more than twice as much as the global mean
- The smallest temperature change is expected in the tropics and in the mid-latitudes of theSouthern Hemisphere
- In 2020, many parts of South America, southern Africa and Australia are likely to be dryer than the recent past
- Over 2020-2024, almost all regions, except parts of the southern oceans are likely to be warmer than the recent past
- Over 2020-2024, high latitude regions and the Sahel are likely to be wetter than the recent past whereas northern and eastern parts of South America are likely to be dryer
- Over 2020-2024, sea-level pressure anomalies suggest that the northern North Atlantic region could have stronger westerly winds leading to more storms in western Europe
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Read more: https://hadleyserver.metoffice.gov.uk/wmolc/WMO_GADCU_2019.pdf
I guess it is time to ditch all those floating European offshore wind turbine plans, if storms in Western Europe are about to get worse.
But on a serious note, it would actually be great if every year for the next four years is 1.5C above pre-industrial; climate scientists would then have the difficult task of explaining why the end of the world was indistinguishable from business as usual.
Sadly I doubt this hope will be realised, unless climate record keepers rewrite history again.
The future is certain; it is only the past that is unpredictable – old Soviet joke.
“The future is certain; it is only the past that is unpredictable – old Soviet joke.”
They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work. – old Soviet Joke too.
There were two state sanctioned news outlets in soviet times. Pravda (‘Truth’) and Izvestia (‘News’). The problem was that there was not much izvestia in Pravda and no pravda in Izvestia.
and what they Choose Not to tell us is that a 1.5C Rise from ‘pre-industrial’ temperatures will mean that Earth has Finally Escaped from the Cold Temperatures of the Little Ice Age and might just manage to get back to the Benign Warmth of the Medieval Warm Period.
Old England, your comment is right on! Somewhere there are closet skier nazis trying to keep it cold, and it doesn’t look like they are winning. Sign me “waiting for global warming in Argentina”. The sight of snow on palm trees is disturbing.
The saying was actually funnier. It was “there’s no truth in Pravda and no news in Izvestia”.
+100
Trouble seems to be that with this lot unreal results get paid for in real money
Yes, OUR money!
“with a high level of scientific skill”
WTH is “scientific skill”?
I’m guessing in climate science it seems to be the ability to pull stuff out of one’s ass and make it look like science. Sort of like the social science’s junk. But it’s still crap beneath whatever veneer they apply.
WTH is “scientific skill”?
You just had to ask.
“Scientific skill” is the ability to accurately make a non-trivial prediction in a scientific field.
It seems to me that a fair number of the predictions made in the executive summary are fairly trivial and would not bolster anyone’s claims of “skill”. These would include:
As far as the non-trivial predictions go, so far WMO and the AGW crowd in general have been consistently *wrong* about *everything*. If they suddenly start showing some skill, it would be a momentous change. Indeed, Climate Science will have taken a Quantum Leap in it’s capabilities. For sure such an advance in the state-of-the-art would justify more than one top post here at WUWT.
On the other hand:
Any one correct prediction would tarnish their perfect record of absolute failure.
“Even a broken clock is right twice a day.”
If they make enough predictions then one being accurate has no more meaning than random chance.
I had to take a leak after reading that.
Is it just me or does this report get you all hot and bothered, too?
LOL!
Yeah…1.5 C since 1850, the end of the Little Ice Age. Not enough heat to get all hot and bothered about, unless you are at a topless beach in the south of France. Then it might feel a little hot.
The temperatures my not be going up like they predicted but the level of Climate Alarmists insanity certainly is.
It has taken billions of dollars to generate delusion on this planetray scale.
“World Could Hit 1.5C Global Warming by 2024”
SO WHAT !!!
I’ll bet you it isn’t even the “world”. I’m sure there are plenty of places that haven’t warmed at all over the last 150 years.
It is likely (~70%) that everything we have written here is nonsense.
Covered by Paul Homewood yesterday. More fake BBC alarmism exposed.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2020/07/09/bbc-worry-that-1-5c-target-might-be-breached/#comments
Yesterday Al Gore was pontificating on the BBC and told us how good the U.K. climate policies were, telling us that we had 60 days recently when we used NO coal .🤯 I daily look at Wind power provision in the U.K. but don’t bother recording it (too lazy). Often there is barely enough to boil my kettle when you divide the output by the number of households supplied. Even when there is lots it would certainly not keep me warm or, heaven forbid, charge an EV if I had one. Perhaps I should start recording it🤔
There aren’t any archives?
Can such archives be trusted since the advent of the adjustocene?
Yes. Drax Electric Insights posts the current breakdown but you can access a graph for the day and the graphs for earlier days going back quite a few years.
Four years? But AOC said we had 12 years, and that was only 2 years ago!
Four years, why does that ring a bell…..
Oh, right! Way back in 2008 when Prez Obama was elected, climate experts said he only had four years to save the world from global warming. (Wolf! Wolf!)
Back when I was a child, I heard some of Aesop’s fables and the lessons they contained. I guess these experts were sick at home the day that was taught.
Art, my parents read Aesops Fables to me and siblings, and these stories have a wide spread in cultures. I did my thesis work in the Seven Devils Mountains of Idaho, named after an Indian boy tending sheep in the mountains and running down to the village to say he saw a devil, and it wasn’t until the Seventh report that they figured out he was a Future CAGW Expert! Go figure!
Maybe, possibly, perhaps in the next 4 years they will find the tropical hot spot that used to be a certainty ………. until it wasn’t.
4 years certainly looks like an appeal for the coming US elections to go the way they would like so the GBD is brought in.
The WMO used to be a Meteorological Organization. Now it is an agency of the UN. It takes its orders from Antonio Guterres the climate guy.
https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/03/31/wmo/
https://tambonthongchai.com/2019/09/25/wmo2019/
Just as WHO used to be more concerned with health than politics.
No-one knows what the 1850-1900 average annual global temperature was:
It looks like Tokyo was one of the weather stations in 1900, the Tokyo-Yokohama-Kumagaya-Maebashi conurbation has warmed 2C-3C since then while Katsuura on the coast about 50 kms away there has been no net warming:
No one knows what it is now, because there is no such thing, apart from a bogus number made up out of whole cloth.
“Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?” – T. Sowell
Such certainty. How can they wait until 2024? Is should be next year, or even imminent like tomorrow.
Yes, “WMO: World Could Hit 1.5C Global Warming by 2024”
could hit 1.5C or not. I could win 1.5 million in the lottery – or not!
That something could happen means nothing at all.
“The annual mean global temperature is likely to be at least 1° Celsius above pre-industrial levels (1850-1900) in each of the coming five years (2020-2024)”
So, what will the annual mean global temperature be? They always talk about differences compared to a certain baseline, but they never tell us what the real temperature will be. Why???
I am quite sure that more than half of the people who claim that “climate change” © is an issue do not know this pre-industrial temperature or the current annual mean global temperature.
Mean global temperature is a fantasy number, has no meaning in the real world.
“So, what will the annual mean global temperature be? They always talk about differences compared to a certain baseline, but they never tell us what the real temperature will be.”
There was an article published at WUWT some months ago that claimed the hottest year evah!, the year 2016, reached a temperature that was 1C above the 1850-to-present “global average”. That’s the only real number I’ve ever seen put on it.
The year 2020 is currently 0.3C cooler than the 2016 highpoint
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/UAH_LT_1979_thru_June_2020_v6.jpg
The year 1934’s hottest part (USA) was 0.4C warmer than 2016, so to reach the 1.5C temperature prediction means the Earth’s temperature would have to increase to the level of the very hot 1930’s, within the next four years.
Now I would be willing to bet some money that’s not going to happen.
I would be surprised if we see the temperatures get back up to the 2016 high in the next four years, and that is still about 0.4C lower than this prediction that temperatures will climb to 1.5C. To do that the global average would have to increase by 0.7C from now until 2024.
Is it just coincidence that ths report comes out now, just in time for the presidential election? I don’t think so. More talking points for Joe China, I suppose. These new claims are about as over-the-top as the new computer models the UN IPCC has come up with. Complementary I imagine.
Peter-
Reference: ” Estimating Changes in Global Temperature since the Preindustrial Period”
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 98(9) · January 2017 (13 Authors, including Phil Jones)
Here is a quote from the abstract of the referenced paper:
“The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) process agreed in Paris to limit global surface temperature rise to ‘well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels’. But what period is ‘pre-industrial’? Some-what remarkably, this is not defined within the UNFCCC’s many agreements and protocols. Nor is it defined in the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) in the evaluation of when particular temperature levels might be reached because no robust definition of the period exists.”
This is what I mean. They have set a goal, but they forgot to clearly define this goal.
” ….. produce actionable information for decision makers.”
Does that mean we can sue them when (not if) they get it wrong?
You can get a good idea of the temperatures in the pre-industrial era by looking at all those lovely Christmas cards with Robins sitting on a branch against a background of a snow covered church with good christians all muffled up to keep out the cold, warbling carols.
Oh I forgot: what about that one with people skating on the Thames and eating hot dogs?
To be serious; why is there not an official pre-industrial temperature published for All to see? Why is the published science so shy about this?
My granny could be a bicycle, if she had wheels. Oh, and if she was still alive. I like how they still use that “above pre-industrial” metric, trying to pretend that man had something to do with the initial warmup. They know it’s dishonest, but they just can’t help themselves!
Don’t they ever get tired of polishing up horse manure ?
Why? Hockey sticks and horse pucky go great together!
“The future is certain; it is only the past that is unpredictable – old Soviet joke.”
That would be funny if it were not becoming true here in the the U.S. At least the rewriting of history will keep the book publishers busy for the next few years (Mom taught me to always look on the bright side).
The first part of the WHO prediction is very likely as we’re not far from one degree higher now. The solar cycle onset El Nino for 2020/21 I expect will be part of that. Their second prediction is too soon.
2024 may be too early for their second prediction as SC25 is starting out slow. Four years past the solar minimum isn’t long enough for the major warming effect of the solar cycle to have peaked either. The SC24 analog year four years after its minimum was 2013, three years before the solar-driven 2016 El Nino major temperature spike.
I doubt they saw my Dec 2018 AGU poster prediction regarding the solar cycle influence (Fig14c):
SC25 actually started many months later than as postulated so there will be at least a several month delay in my prediction window, and as indicated actual solar activity will vary the arc and peak of the solar curve.
HadSST3 for SC24 indicates by 2013 it still hadn’t climbed back to 2009 solar minimum level.
2009 0.395
2010 0.406
2011 0.290 La Nina
2012 0.346
2013 0.376
2014 0.477
2015 0.592
2016 0.613 El Nino
2017 0.505
2018 0.480
2019 0.582
Based solely on the ocean, the WHO second 1.5C prediction will likely be wrong – too early. There’s going to be a La Nina before 2024 ala 2011 that could be deep from low solar activity (presuming a low cycle). But the summer land temperatures are going to be high from high UVI (fewer clouds) as they are now in the USA and elsewhere, working in their favor. Their best hope to make their 2024 1.5C prediction is a very fast strong start to SC25, like in SC23, but that isn’t on the radar today.
Comparing to SC24, we’re in the cold winters – hot dry SW US summers sun-climate analog phase:
World lower tropospheric temperature is assumed to be 287K at 1850-1900 and 288K now.
Atmospheric CO2 concentration is assumed to be 280 ppm base period and 415 ppm now.
ECS is delta K for a doubling of the CO2 concentration.
Using the values above: ECS*(log[base 2] 415- log[base 2] 280) = 1K
log[base2] x = ln x/ln 2
ECS*(8.7 – 8.1) = 1
0.6 = 1/ECS
ECS= 1.7
This is very close to the Lewis & Curry value, and miles from the CIMP6 models.
Your method is correct only if the whole of the 1 deg of warming is attributable to the increase in CO2 or feedbacks arising from it. But that can’t be true. The temperature history of the Holocene is one of alternating episodes of warming and cooling, each lasting several hundred years. Throughout this period, CO2 levels are alleged to have been stable. These earlier warmings and coolings would not have happened if CO2 were the main driver of temperature.
This is a problem which I have with Lewis & Curry and similar papers. They implicitly accept that the climate models are correct in principle but just need their inputs and parameters to be improved. I maintain that there are fundamental climate processes which are omitted from the models and that warming caused by these processes is misattributed to CO2. Exhibit A : the fact that the models consistently predict 2-3 times as much warming as seen in observations.
A prediction of global temperature is meaningless if global temperature isn’t changing systematically.
https://youtu.be/b1cGqL9y548?t=15m56s
“Could” + “Experts” = BS
Look I am not a weather expert by any means. I am just a person that has lived it for 65 years across 2 continents, of which about 60 I can remember to some point.
I have lived mostly in North and Middle Ga. We have weather cycles. About every 6 or so years we have a ICE storms, Snow Storms, a good Heat and/or Cold wave.
Sometimes these break 100+ year old records. To me its just a weather cycle, Not Man Made on a global scale.
One of my kids once came to me excited that a 100+ year old weather record had been broke. I sent him to Google to see when the US Officially started recording weather nationwide and OCONUS data. When he came back I asked him what the temp was 100 years before that? He quickly understood the point of my question. An then he start digging deeper than the alarmists for profit were feeding his social media with.
But with all that said, I always wondered if the increasing number of human bodies that each produce 7,200+ BTU’s daily along with the use of HVAC units displacing 100’s billions of Sq./ft of heat and cold could be increasing metro area misleading temp readings? Note I said Metro and not Global. Because in the last 50 years (for me) it seems Metro areas are now generating their own weather patterns and poorly placed Temp sensors could account for a lot of erroneous data .
The Urban Heat Island effect (UHI) and Land Use Change (LUC) can be huge local heat sinks. Some large cities are 6-8-10 degrees hotter than the outlying rural areas, all from these accumulative effects like UHI and thermal heat creation of one type or another. Every BTU adds up, wherever it comes from. And it is usually the adverse weather that gets noted, in areas that are occupied by humans, some of which is massively high density with a lot of concrete and asphalt. That is probably the majority of heat retention in UHI, but the thermal heat from car tail pipe exhaust from a million cars/trucks for e.g. isn’t even discussed anywhere by anyone, and as you say, each human body is a mini heat engine too. 25 million people in Tokyo has to have some effect on the local temperature and what that does to local weather. Even the CO2 is a lot higher in big cities, but I doubt that has much local effect.
The owner/publisher of this blog, Anthony, discovered that the old white washed weather stations has a slightly different temperature differential than the newer painted Latex ones. Which was what got me thinking 28-29 years ago about the accuracy of climate monitoring when I got my first 386 computer, and the first scientific article I ever downloaded was that discovery by an obscure meteorologist. That really got me thinking way back then. That was well before the politico’s got hold of the climate narrative. Plus we were measuring local UHI and LUC, with a lot of these weather stations being sited very badly, and that they may have once been more rural, and now the cities surround the old weather station site. Or the airport expands, more black tarmac, and the weather station now closer to the asphalt, or in some cases in close proximity to a parking lot or even an air conditioner exhaust. Very enlightening.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the wacky weather we do get, isn’t made worse by UHI and LUC locally, which is where we take a lot of the measurements, and/or record with video a lot of weather events now that everyone has a HD camera in their phone. Things like local hail storms that are part of massive supercell thunderstorms and rain down golf ball sized hail or larger, are probably made worse by the large thermal updrafts from a large city surrounded by a lot of land use change, which changes albedo and plant respiration, (and vehicle exhaust has a lot of water vapor) making more water vapor available and heat to make it worse, but only locally where we really take note of all this, but then they extrapolate that to the entire planet, which is where the major error comes from.
But the sad part is that the adjustments that climate modellers make, is to adjust the entire global temperature record, when in reality, it is a smaller fraction of the good Earth’s surface that is actually influenced by UHI and LUC. And it is the adjustments that are making new records every year, not actually the entire global temperature. But that doesn’t fit the alarmist panic, so all this climate change narrative just keeps getting worse and worse every year.
The Heat Island effect isn’t just a dome of temperature over a city, it’s different everywhere you measure it in the city. It is a local effect – local to the urbanization in and around the city. That is what makes it so difficult to actually quantify.
The only place you NEED to accurately quantify it is at the temperature measuring stations. And doing so is very difficult. The additional heat can be from nearby man made surfaces, changes to foliage, waste heat from electrical or industrial (jet engines) machines. It can be affected by air flow, and even air direction. Nearby water sources can also play a role. A single station could be impacted by everything above.
This is why temperature measurements from urban areas should be discarded from measurements of climate (long term) temperature change. The urban measurements are just too noisy and contaminated to serve the purpose of measuring climate change – the noise amplitude far exceeds the accuracy needed for the measurements. Don’t attempt to fix them – discard them.
Discarding the bad data, you end up with far less temperature change – about 50% less I believe. This is completely in line with the normal temperature increases occurring before CO2 levels could have had any affect.
Ditched the WHO, time to do same with WMO.
I would still like to know what the origins of this 1.5 deg. C temperature threshold is — and the 2.0 deg. C temperature threshold. Where did they come from? Where is the peer-reviewed scientific study or literature that made these temperature threshold claims? What data are they based on? What observations? Who did the study or studies?
Did those studies conclude that the Medieval Warm Period and Roman Warm Period were cooler than today? Did they get to 1.5 deg. C warmer than pre-industrial times back then? I seriously would like to know if anyone out there has answers to these questions. I appreciate any replies that answers them. It would also be nice if a future WUWT post attempted to answer them.
It wasn’t a study, from Schelllnhuber, I think, but a guide board, or better, crash barrier.
From a ‘Der Spiegel’ Article,
But this is scientific nonsense. “Two degrees is not a magical limit — it’s clearly a political goal,” says Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). “The world will not come to an end right away in the event of stronger warming, nor are we definitely saved if warming is not as significant. The reality, of course, is much more complicated.”
Schellnhuber ought to know. He is the father of the two-degree target.
“Yes, I plead guilty,” he says, smiling. The idea didn’t hurt his career. In fact, it made him Germany’s most influential climatologist. Schellnhuber, a theoretical physicist, became Chancellor Angela Merkel’s chief scientific adviser — a position any researcher would envy.
“A Superstorm for Global Warming Research“
Spiegel Online
Von Marco Evers, Olaf Stampf und Gerald Traufetter
01.04.2010, 17.00 Uhr
“Yes, I plead guilty,” he says, smiling. The idea didn’t hurt his career.'”
So it sounds as though there was never any science behind the temperature threshold numbers. Just an idea from one man — Schellnhuber. He pled guilty. That’s all I need to know.
Schellenhuber is also the Wormtongue who corrupted the Catholic Church.
He epitomizes the climate hypester strategy of using deception and manipulation.
Let’s see . . . the yearly-average temperature difference between Earth’s northern hemisphere (avg = 15.2 C) and southern hemisphere (13.3 C) is about 1.9 C (ref: http://profhorn.aos.wisc.edu/wxwise/AckermanKnox/chap14/climate_spatial_scales.html ). It does not appear that there has been a panic and mass migration of people from above the equator to below the equator based on it being “too hot” in the NH.
Based on this simple fact, do humans really no to worry about a keeping the global climate from having a 1.5 C temperature increase over the next 80 years? Not that humans are in any way capable of controlling global temperatures to target values.
Uhhh . . . first sentence of my last paragraph: “need”, not “no”
Mea culpa.
Actually, we *could* lower temperatures – the question is should we. Mankind is perfectly capable of adding aerosols or particulate matter in the atmosphere (or the particulate even in space) blocking some percent of the sunlight reaching Earth.
This would likely lead to the greatest man-made disaster ever, so I hope the crazy-clowns of climate change never achieve enough power to try to do this.
RoT, I was careful to state “controlling global temperatures to target values”. So, how many megatons of particulates—and of what composition and particulate size distribution—to lower global LST by, say, 1.5 ± 0.5 C?
Furthermore, there is the law of unintended consequences: to what degree might adding the above-estimated quantity of aerosols or particulate matter into Earth’s atmosphere change global rainfall patterns, global air circulation patters, global ocean circulation patters, the current “greening” of Earth, ocean chemistry, ocean life biology, the albedo of snow and ice, etc, etc. Will the complex interactions and feedback loops support global cooling, or actually result in just the opposite effect? And how long will such forced-blocking of sunlight persist? . . . after all, haven’t you heard that winter (aka another LIA) is coming to Earth? . . . the Sun is currently warning us of such. 🙂
I’m in complete agreement with you that any human attempt to modify Earth’s climate over centuries, let alone over a decade or less, is likely to result in the greatest man-made disaster ever.
Temperatures, if reported accurately, would lowered immediately.
Good to see them post these predictions. Imo, they are in for a real surprise as the years pass. The next La Nina will develop when sunspots return later on this year. It should be a prolonged and deep La Nina which will last around 2.5 years. Global temps should fall below the zero trend line as seen on the satellite graphs similar to what happened in 2008/09 and in 2010, and might fall even lower to the level of the mid 1980s at -0.5C.
Exactly, I love they actually made this prediction. The AU BoM is predicting a 50% chance that La Nina forms by November as the IOD also flips. http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/enso/
A PDO flip would put the nail into climate madness.
Why are we not taking about the made up BS? Once you show there is no real scientific basis for the 2 degree limit their argument falls apart. Come on man really?
Why are we not taking about the made up BS? Once you show there is no real scientific basis for the 2 degree limit their argument falls apart. Come on man really?
Why are we not taking about the made up BS? Once you show there is no real scientific basis Why are we not taking about the made up BS? Once you show there is no real scientific basis for the 2 degree limit their argument falls apart. Come on man really? for the 2 degree limit their argument falls apart. Come on man really?
WMO should merge with WHO.
Five warm or cold years is not climate change in any scientific or historical sense. Five years is weather.