Guest “putting it in context” by David Middleton
Our friends at the CO2 Coalition have published another excellent report.
This white paper by Richard Lindzen and John Christy explores the global mean temperature anomaly record. Their focus isn’t on whether it’s right or wrong; it’s on its significance relative to natural variability and its inherently low signal-to-noise ratio. Here’s the executive summary:
STUDIES AND RESOURCES, WHITE PAPERS AND OTHER PUBLICATIONS
4 DEC, 2020
The Global Mean Temperature Anomaly Record
How it works and why it is misleading
by Richard S. Lindzen and John R. ChristyThe CO2 Coalition is honored to present this Climate Issues in Depth paper by two of America’s most respected and prolific atmospheric physicists, MIT professor emeritus Richard Lindzen, who is a longtime member of the Coalition, and University of Alabama in Huntsville professor John Christy.
Professor Lindzen has published over 200 scientific articles and books over a five-decade career. He has held professorships at the University of Chicago, Harvard University and MIT. He is a fellow and award recipient of the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union. He is also a member of the National Academy of Science and was a lead author of the UN IPCC’s third assessment report’s scientific volume. His research has highlighted the scientific uncertainties about the impact of carbon dioxide emissions on temperature and climate more generally.
Professor Christy, the director of the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville, began studying global climate issues in 1987. He has been Alabama’s State Climatologist since 2000 and a fellow of the American Meteorological Society since 2002. He and CO2 Coalition member Dr. Roy W. Spencer developed and have maintained one of the key global temperature data sets relied on by scientists and government bodies, using microwave data observed in the troposphere from satellites since 1979. For this achievement, they were awarded NASA’s Medal for Exceptional Scientific Achievement.
The purpose of this paper is to explain how the data set that is referred to by policy-makers and the media as the global surface temperature record is actually obtained, and where it fits into the popular narrative associated with climate alarm.
Executive Summary
At the center of most discussions of global warming is the record of the global mean surface temperature anomaly—often somewhat misleadingly referred to as the global mean temperature record. This paper addresses two aspects of this record. First, we note that this record is only one link in a fairly long chain of inference leading to the claimed need for worldwide reduction in CO2 emissions. Second, we explore the implications of the way the record is constructed and presented, and show why the record is misleading.This is because the record is often treated as a kind of single, direct instrumental measurement. However, as the late Stan Grotch of the Laurence Livermore Laboratory pointed out 30 years ago, it is really the average of widely scattered station data, where the actual data points are almost evenly spread between large positive and negative values.
The average is simply the small difference of these positive and negative excursions, with the usual problem associated with small differences of large numbers: at least thus far, the one-degree Celsius increase in the global mean since 1900 is swamped by the normal variations at individual stations, and so bears little relation to what is actually going on at a particular one.
The changes at the stations are distributed around the one-degree global average increase. Even if a single station had recorded this increase itself, this would take a typical annual range of temperature there, for example, from -10 to 40 degrees in 1900, and replace it with a range today from -9 to 41. People, crops, and weather at that station would find it hard to tell this difference.
However, the increase looks significant on the charts used in almost all presentations, because they omit the range of the original data points and expand the scale in order to make the mean change look large.
The record does display certain consistent trends, but it is also quite noisy, and fluctuations of a tenth or two of a degree are unlikely to be significant. In the public discourse, little attention is paid to magnitudes; the focus is rather on whether this anomaly is increasing or decreasing. Given the noise and sampling errors, it is rather easy to “adjust” such averaging, and even change the sign of a trend from positive to negative.
The common presentations often suppress the noise by using running averages over periods from 5 to 11 years. However, such processing can also suppress meaningful features such as the wide variations that are always being experienced at individual stations. Finally, we show the large natural temperature changes that Americans in 14 major cities must cope with every year. For example, the average difference between the coldest and warmest moments each year ranges from about 25 degrees Celsius in Miami (a 45-degree Fahrenheit change) to 55 degrees in Denver (a 99-degree Fahrenheit change). We contrast this with the easily manageable 1.2-degree Celsius increase in the global mean temperature anomaly in the past 120 years, which has caused so much alarm in the media and in policy circles.
CO2 Coalition
The full paper is here: Global Mean Temperature Anomaly Record 12.20
This is from their concluding remarks:
Indeed, the 1.2 degree Celsius global temperature change in the past 120 years, depicted as alarming in Figure 7, is only equivalent to the thickness of the “Average” line in Figure 9. As the figure shows, the difference in average temperature from January to July in these major cities ranges from just under ten degrees in Los Angeles to nearly 30 degrees in Chicago. And the average difference between the coldest and warmest moments each year ranges from about 25 degrees in Miami (a 45 degree Fahrenheit change) to 55 degrees in Denver (a 99 degree Fahrenheit change).
Global Mean Temperature Anomaly Record 12.20
Here’s Figure 7:
Here’s Figure 9:
I think an even better way to put the record of the global mean surface temperature anomaly into proper context, is to plot it at the same scale as a common household thermometer.
In the plot above 0 °C on HadCRUT4 is plotted at 15 °C on the thermometer, the approximate average surface temperature on Earth. Both have a range of 80 °C.
I’ve noticed one thing.
When one of the skeptics makes a ridiculous, unsupportable claim, there are usually several others who are willing to step up and show what the claim is ridiculous.
On the other hand, when someone likes Loydo makes the claim that 100% of the warming the world has enjoyed over the last 150 years is caused by man, none of the other alarmists ever contradict them.
Are they not actually interested in science, or are they more interested in presenting a solid front against the skeptics? If they are willing to let politics be more important than science, then they are proving that they don’t believe that science should be all that matters.
What Lyodo and other CAGW advocates forget is that a so-called Global Average Temperature (GAT) is not a description of climate and is therefore a useless concoction of very, very questionable calculations and measurements.
Climate is best described by the term biome. The earth has various and sundry different biomes defined by not only temperature but also rainfall, humidity, flora, soil composition, land or water, etc. A single GAT simply can not fully describe all these unique areas and determine what is happening in the different biomes. Many of them have already seen benefit from increased CO2 and yes, even increasing temperature.
A government single solution program to a problem is usually only based on the assumption that it will help someone. Generally, not most or even a majority, just some. Alarmists are the same. The same solution everywhere even if it doesn’t even help the majority. Complex problems like climate require complex solutions. Simple solutions like reducing CO2 generally have many unforeseen results. You’ll never see an analysis of these by CAGW adherents. Not even Lyodo is willing to admit that reducing CO2 will result in famine in some locations that result in many deaths.
Spot on Jim.
Interestingly, Berkley has this to say about one of the 6 types of biome – Marine –
“The world’s oceans have an even greater effect on global climate than forests do. Water has a high capacity for heat, and because the Earth is mostly covered with water, the temperature of the atmosphere is kept fairly constant and able to support life.”
https://ucmp.berkeley.edu/ucmp_oldsite_nonwpfiles/exhibits/biomes/
Read that last part again – ” . . . because the Earth is mostly covered with water, the temperature of the atmosphere is kept fairly constant . . .”
Berkley must be cancelled for writing such heresy, Shirley?
Jim
I strongly suspect that all of the Koppen climate regions are experiencing different rates of warming, which may even be different in the north and south hemispheres for the same classification. However, the only confirmation I have read is for the Arctic being different from the global average.
“Not even Lyodo is willing to admit that reducing CO2 will result in famine in some locations that result in many deaths.”
Even though he/she KNOWS that it would !! He/she JUST DOESN’T CARE.
He/she also knows that unreliable or overly expensive electricity supplies will also cause many deaths..
But JUST DOESN’T CARE.
All that matters is the AGW cult idiotology he worships.
“Almost Earth-like, We’re Certain” has cute images of thermometers showing how close Earth is to being “earth-like”.
Good post Dave.
From the Lindzen and Christy paper:
“In a logical world, it would be understood that the probability of the whole chain will be the product of the probability of each link, and so generally very small. And, of course, if any link is broken (i.e., probability zero), the whole chain is broken.
However, there is also the fact that in the world of environmental alarm, the above logic is turned upside down, and the existence of any link is held to imply the likelihood of the whole chain of inference —including the promotion of catastrophism”.
That is a nice summary of the current madness, it is as much a product of faulty reasoning as corrupt science, propaganda, politics, profit etc.
There is an inherent impermanence to the mean temperature anomaly. It changes. It changes every time you calculate it with new data. This means that it is not a record. Moreover, it changes in non-sensical and non-physical ways, and does so by definition. This year’s data changes last year’s anomaly. It changes all year’s anomalies. And not in the simple way one would expect.
Imagine that we measured our height every day and kept an average height for each year. Your average height for your 10th year will never change. Your average height throughout your life will change. The difference between the two will change over time. This is the simple way of looking.
The simple difference preserves relative differences. The difference between your height at 15, and your height at 10 will never change after you turn 16, and it will always be preserved in the simple difference even as the average lifetime height changes.
This is not true for this mean temperature anomaly. The relative anomalies between different years keep changing. This makes it a measurement of something that is not real.
Differences can be very useful tools. Finding small effects that are swamped by bigger effects can be very powerful. But seeing small effects that are caused by how you calculate your differences, and that change with each new calculation is worthless.
This field needs to make sensible redefinitions so that measurements and averages are properly recorded and never change. Of course if someone finds errors in how the temperatures were recorded or averaged in 1937, then change can be argued for. But, the temperature in 1937 should not change with a measurement in 2000. Nor should the relative temperature between 1937 and 1986. Once they are in the books, those things shouldn’t change. Not in 2000, 2010, or whenever. The temperatures should never change. Nor should the average temperature for a year. The difference between the average temperature and the changing total average will change, but it should change in a way that preserves the past record.
Only after they set their measurements to reality can one start to argue if the anomalies are real and important or real and unimportant or unreal.
I will ask a simple question. How much CO2 is produced by human respiration. The concentration of CO2 of intake air is ~0.038 vol% and exhaled air is 5-4.5 vol% (40000 to 45000 ppm). Apply this across average 38000 breaths per day and 7.8 billion persons. This is human produced CO2…. and then add in the rest of the animal world. Are we missing something here?
All that CO2 was already in the fast (active) carbon cycle.
While the annual contribution from fossil fuel combustion is tiny compared to natural sources, we are converting carbon from the slow (geological) carbon cycle into CO2 in the fast carbon cycle faster than it’s being returned to the slow cycle.
David
Is the cycle rate a distinction with a significant difference when the fossil fuel contribution is so “tiny?”
Compared to annual natural fluxes the human contribution might be “tiny”, but accumulating over decades the human contribution is now a third of the total and rapidly rising. There is nothing “tiny” about that, in fact I would have thought “large” is a more accurate.
You have NO EVIDENCE that they accumulate.
If they accumulate then they are overpowered by the 97% of natural emissions that would also accumulate….
…. or do you think that human released CO2 is treated differently (that would be TRULY DUMB)
The Earth is getting greener. And because of natural warming is also becoming more livable for a huge proportion of the planets creatures..
REJOICE for the extra CO2 and slight warming out of the COLDEST period in 10,000 years.
As you should be AWARE by now, that highly beneficial rise in atmospheric CO2 is a TOTAL POSITIVE for all life on Earth.
No downside anywhere or any how.
WHY do you HATE life on this planet so much ??
Or is it really just YOU that you hate so much. ??
I estimate the net CO2 from direct human respiration (exhale / inhale) is around 0.9 kg/person/day. The population has grown from around 2 billion in 1930 to currently 7.8 billion persons in 2020 and is projected to continue increasing to over 10 billion persons in the future. If correct, this corresponds today to a total CO2 of around 2.6 billion metric tons per year today increasing to 3.3 billion metric tons/yr in the future. The current fossil fuel CO2 emissions is around of 15 billion metric tons per year. This means CO2 from human respiration is around 17% of the current fossil fuel CO2 generation, and this will continue growing with future population growth. The argument is “but, this is from ‘slow cycle.’” If one accepts that “atmospheric CO2 concentration” is the key driver of global warming it seems one cannot ignore the CO2 in the atmosphere from human respiration just because it is from “slow cycle.” A CO2 molecule in the atmosphere doesn’t know if it comes from “slow cycle” or “fast cycle.” The focus on fossil fuels and clean energy seems to me at least to be an incomplete, inaccurate framing of the issue.
I think we should all be HIGHLY THANKFUL for the RE-INVIGORATION of the Carbon Cycle
It is a MASSIVE BENEFIT to all life on Earth.
And there is NO EVIDENCE of any detrimental effects WHATSOEVER.
If humans have even slightly contributed to the recover to more plant sustainable levels of atmospheric CO2, that is GREAT.
With China and other third world countries building more and more FOSSIL FUEL power energy systems, CO2 emissions will only continue to increase, leading to even further biosphere enhancement.
The atmosphere doesn’t have to know where it came from for the entire pool to be increasing.
Currently the banks and other financial institutions are at war with the energy companies to change their ways to get out of fossil fuels completely to focus on renewables. In essence they are mounting an attack on the fossil fuel producers by undermining their ability to finance current and future capital spending and operation if they don’t change their “harmful ways.” We know that some companies such as BP and Shell are already heavily invested in renewables “to do the ‘right thing’ for the planet.” Recognizing there are other greenhouse gases notably CH4, that contribute to the greenhouse effect, I ask how ignoring human respiration in the CO2 equation provides a complete characterization of the real war on CO2, esp. since it represents a significant and growing proportion of the CO2 entering earth’s atmosphere.
Because it’s not adding to the pool of CO2 in the fast carbon cycle.
Whereas, fossil fuel combustion is moving it from the slow carbon cycle into the active carbon cycle.
Regarding the war on fossil fuels… Since demand isn’t going away anytime soon, restricting access to capital will just lead to higher oil & natural gas prices… Which will drive some financial institutions back into fossil fuels.
“5he changes at the stations are distributed around the one-degree global average increase. Even if a single station had recorded this increase itself, this would take a typical annual range of temperature there, for example, from -10 to 40 degrees in 1900, and replace it with a range today from -9 to 41. People, crops, and weather at that station would find it hard to tell this difference.”
It seems that a linear trend has been taken here, but the fact that an average temperature has increased does not mean that the maximum temperature has increased, by definition, does it?
I am a layman, so I wonder what my reasoning error is , if there is any.