Spinning the climate model – observation comparison

by Judith Curry

In the past 6 months or so, we have seen numerous different plots of the CMIP5 climate model simulations versus observations.

The first such plot that I saw was produced by John Christy in his Congressional Testimony last August:

fig

The next time I encountered a similar diagram was in the leaked IPCC AR5 SOD, chapter 1, Figure 1.4.   I am not going to reproduce that figure here since I am not sure about the legal status of this situation in context of my agreement with wordpress.com, but you can find the link [here].    In short, the diagram shows, for the period 1990-2015,  the spread of FAR, SAR, TAR, AR4 and AR5 climate model simulations against the three main global surface temperature analyses.  The also include a gray shading that corresponds to observational uncertainty and internal variability (although I have no idea how ‘internal variability’ is taken into account).

I next encountered a version of this diagram at RealClimate, in a post dated 7 February 2013:

afig

.

Oops, the first time I glanced at this I had assumed that this was CMIP5, looks like it is CMIP3 instead.

I then spotted a version of this diagram on a post by Roger Pielke Jr, that came from a tweet by Ed Hawkins:

afig

This figure motivated me to head over to Ed Hawkin’s blog to see what he is up to, and I spotted this very interesting analysis that compares the CMIP simulations with observations, where the CMIP5 output is masked to eliminate regions where there is missing data from HADCRUT4:

aafigJC comment:  In his blog post discussing the data-model comparison, Gavin writes:

The conclusion is the same as in each of the past few years; the models are on the low side of some changes, and on the high side of others, but despite short-term ups and downs, global warming continues much as predicted.

The fact is that the comparison of climate model predictions with the last few decades of observations is dominating the public discussion of global warming (well, alongside the issue of global warming impact on extreme weather).

There is no simple way to interpret these comparisons.  I like the approach that Ed Hawkins is taking with the masking.  The range of model simulation results needs to be presented in several different ways to really understand the distribution of results:  spaghetti diagrams, pdfs, and block ranges for different sets of simulations and scenarios.

In the midst of substantial public interest on this issue, there is no published analysis that I know of that compares CMIP5 simulations to observations, although it looks like Ed Hawkins’ analysis is heading towards publication.  The IPCC process is actually slowing this down, since presumably those involved in producing these simulations or otherwise involved in the IPCC AR5 are holding these results until the final AR5 report so that some ‘consensus’ can be built in terms of how to interpret these results and ‘communicate’ the uncertainty to the public.  The leak of the IPCC AR5 SOD gives us a glimpse into what the IPCC is thinking, but the formal academic etiquette of citing or posting leaked information precludes their use in academic publications, blog posts (the timing of my wordpress blog crash occurred around the time of the SOD leak, conspiracy theorists have at it) and raises interesting ethical considerations in personal communication of such inform with a policy maker through a briefing or testimony.

I would be most interested in any other analyses model-observation comparisons that include CMIP5 simulations, please let me know if you have spotted anything.

1,225 responses to “Spinning the climate model – observation comparison

  1. Here’s my analysis of the problem:

    http://tinyurl.com/aynmbpv

  2. Dr. Curry,

    You have a few typos.

  3. “The(y) also include a gray shading that corresponds….”

    “leaded

  4. None of the models I have looked at (granted superficially) does not properly evaluate natural variability, perhaps a reminder is required:
    http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/EarthNV.htm

  5. This issue is almost irrelevant. We know that the wamists, led by the IPCC, will twist the data to show that their previous estimates are on track and completely valid. Whether this makes scientific sense will be ignored.

    Eventually, the hard measured data will tell us what is actually happening. I suspect the pause in global warming could increase from the current 17 years at a rate greater that 1 year per year. If the current trend toward lower temperatures persists, then previous years will become part of the standstill. When people make the sort of predictions that the warmists have made, then future data, over which they have limited control, acts like a Sword of Damacles; the predictors are hostage to future data.

    The same is true for the predicitons based on the idea that CAGW is real. For example, if Arctic sea ice were to make a complete recovery to 1979 levels, it could be difficult for the warmists to spin this to their advantage.

    One thing I have mentioned before several times. The weakness of the AR5 will not be on the question as to whether CAGW is real or not. The IPCC will ensure that the conclusions with respect to CAGW are restated in similar terms that have been used before. The weakness will be in the certainty with which the conclusions of previous SPMs were made. The data presented by our hostess will not undermine the warmists conclusion that CAGW is real. But it just might completely undermine the certainty of previous IPCC conclusions.


    • We know that the wamists, led by the IPCC, will twist the data to show that their previous estimates are on track and completely valid.


      The weakness of the AR5 will not be on the question as to whether CAGW is real or not. The IPCC will ensure that the conclusions with respect to CAGW are restated in similar terms that have been used before.


      The data presented by our hostess will not undermine the warmists conclusion that CAGW is real.

      Jim Cripwell – the world’s leading expert in climate science pre-crime.

    • Agree Jim, I say flat linear ~30-year trend by ~2020.


    • I suspect the pause in global warming could increase from the current 17 years at a rate greater that 1 year per year.

      That would be very impressive.

      According to the current “warmist” understanding of time, backwards-propagating pauses in global warming are even more improbable than forward-propagating ones!

      We could soon see the pause in global warming extending all the way back to the Cambrian era.

      And you thought climate scientists could do amazing things with data!

      It’s cosmic rays – Right?

      • Edim –
        Nice graph, to be sure.
        But I’m even more impressed at your implication that the GMO can reach into the past and extend the “pause” in global warming back into recorded history, a la Cripwell.
        I want some of what you and Jim are smoking.

      • heinrich, my implication (one of them) is that science should be consistent and logical.

        “The AMO signal is usually defined from the patterns of SST variability in the North Atlantic once any linear trend has been removed. This detrending is intended to remove the influence of greenhouse gas-induced global warming from the analysis. However, if the global warming signal is significantly non-linear in time (i.e. not just a smooth linear increase), variations in the forced signal will leak into the AMO definition.”
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_multidecadal_oscillation

        I would add that the postulated AGW got significant after ~1950. Before that basically zero.

        By the same logic we can take any global/regional/land/sea… temperature index, detrend it, and call it whatever multidecadal oscillation. So I defined Global Multidecadal Oscillation.

      • no heinrich it would be simple math. Jim is predicting that in a year
        the world will have cooled so much that the pause will go back more than 18 years. Just a consequence of math. not a time machine. Will it happen? I dunno. could it happen? sure. drop the temps enough and the pause will increase from 17 years as of now to something greater than 18 years in a year.
        Its just a queer way of saying “i expect a lot of cooling”. Is that likely?
        hard to say. But I would not say that cooling is impossible. would you?


      • By the same logic we can take any global/regional/land/sea… temperature index, detrend it, and call it whatever multidecadal oscillation. So I defined Global Multidecadal Oscillation.

        Sure.
        And you can define the orbits of the planets as circles and epicycles and call that astronomy.
        All you would be missing is the physics.

        There is a name for this curve-fitting approach: mathturbation.

        http://tamino.wordpress.com/2011/02/26/mathturbation/

        Not everything is an oscillation. Since, as you point out, most of the GHG forcing is post-1950 – frequency analysis is a BAD way to disentangle multiple effects – most of the relevant signal is at one end of the time series.

      • heinrich, ok then. That’s my point – it should be consistent and logical, now it’s not even wrong. AMO is, according to you, mathturbation.

      • heinrich, from your link:

        “In fact it’s astounding how much known physics has to be ignored. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, that’s no longer a matter of opinion. Sulphate aerosols cool the planet, we’ve seen it happen (from both factory emissions and volcanic eruptions), and we can model it with impressive accuracy. Solar changes have had a modest impact, and no recent trend, because solar changes have been modest, with no recent trend. And yes, Virginia, feedbacks really exist, like water-vapor feedback which is every bit as undeniable as CO2, while a notable increase in water vapor content has been observed.”

        No comment.

      • Mosher:

        …drop the temps enough and the pause will increase from 17 years as of now to something greater than 18 years in a year.

        17 years? I thought 1998 was the cherry-pick start-date of choice.

        Perhaps I am missing some ‘skeptical’ meme here – but how would a future drop in temperatures have any affect on the past temperature record? How much of a drop would be “enough” to do this? Would years’ worth of positive temp anomalies simply go away if we have a really cold March? Would the temporal speed of this backwards influence be limited by physics in any way?

        Ref to
        http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.A2.gif

        Lotsa interesting “pauses” superposed on a long-term trend.
        See the trees – see the forest.


        Its just a queer way of saying “i expect a lot of cooling”. Is that likely?
        hard to say. But I would not say that cooling is impossible. would you?

        Not impossible.
        But – If you “expect” something usually you are referring to the future.

      • heinrich, if the cooling really starts, we will be able to cherry-pick earlier and earlier start-dates to get flat trends.


      • AMO is, according to you, mathturbation.

        That is not what I said. Please read for comprehension.

        My point was that parsing the temp record into oscillations is folly, unless there is a physical basis for the cyclical behavior – especially if your objective is to determine superposed secular changes – especially, especially if the secular changes occur at one end of the time-series data.

        That is all.


      • heinrich, if the cooling really starts, we will be able to cherry-pick earlier and earlier start-dates to get flat trends.

        Why wait for cooling to cherry-pick?

        Since the Earth condensed out of a proto-planetary nebula about 4.5 Gy ago there has very certainly been a long-term cooling trend.

        See how easy that is?

      • heinrich, to have longer trends with no warming.


      • to have longer trends with no warming.

        You know what you want. That’s handy.

        Now all you need is for the temperature data to cooperate with your plan.

      • heinrich.
        You still dont get it.
        1. I am not a skeptic.
        2. The 17 years is a cherry pick
        3. You’ve missed Jim’s prediction,

        So, math test for you.
        right now the “pause” is 17 years or so. It doesnt mean anything, but there you have it. It wont be long and the warming will return. That is not the point. your stuck on stupid.

        Now, drop the temperature of the earth 30 C the next year.
        Get that?
        Now, calculate the pause. you know how.
        Wow, in one year the pause goes from 17 years to bunches of years.
        So, when Jim says the pause will increase by more than one year per year he is talking about that effect. its a stupid pet trick to be sure. but your inability to understand the math, is retarded.

        You’ll go away now.

      • heinrich
        “But – If you “expect” something usually you are referring to the future.”
        I expect you were dropped on your head.
        see easy. don’t be a tool.

      • heinrich

        It’s cosmic rays – Right?

        I’ve got an even sillier suggestion (one that Mosh will also like, because the models say so):

        It’s human CO2 emissions – Right?

        Duh!

        Max

        PS How ’bout we just agree we (including Mosh) don’t have any Earthly notion of what has caused the recent warming or current lack thereof? (Seems like the most logical solution.)

      • heinrich

        Listen to what Mosh and Jim Cripwell are telling you.

        If it continues not to warm, the period of “no warming” will not only extend beyond today, but will also extend into earlier years.

        Let me ‘splain.

        Using HadCRUT3 we have had no warming (= very slight cooling) since January 1998 or for 15 years.

        The average monthly temperature anomaly over the past 5-year period (2008-2012) was 0.398C.

        If the next 4 years (2013 through 2016) continue at this same anomaly, we will have had no warming since January 1997, or for 20 years.

        So we would have added four years in the future and one year in the past.

        Max

      • “Using HadCRUT3 we have had no warming (= very slight cooling) since January 1998 or for 15 years.”

        HadCRUT3 is now depreciated.

      • I hate when guys on my side are stupidier than the lamest skeptic.
        Sheesh, heinrich, hit the showers.

        @Manaker:
        PS How ’bout we just agree we (including Mosh) don’t have any Earthly notion of what has caused the recent warming or current lack thereof? (Seems like the most logical solution.)
        ##############################
        I would rarely make any kind of gross skeptical claim like that.
        Let’s stipulate that there has been a pause.. go figure.

        What “caused” the pause. There are only a few options.
        1. Changes in inputs ( solar )
        2. Changes in other forcings
        3. Internal unforced variation.
        4. Some combination of the three.

        So, we have earthly and solar ideas of what could cause it. The issue is parcelling out the blame. With 15 years or so of data, you can start by eliminating things. Like, hey there was no volcano. Changes in TSI?
        hmm not so much to look at there, maybe a little. Some other solar forcing? hmm good place to speculate. Changes in other forcings.. make a list and start going down the list. #3 the catch all explanation.

        Chances are one would need a few more pauses like this to start to understand how to untangle them exactly.

        The “recent” warming? If you mean the warming since 1750, that is entirely consistent with known radiative physics. More GHGs = warmer not cooler. Predicted over a hundred years ago before Al Gore or Jim Hansen. Does that prove that C02 dunnit? dont be silly, science isnt proof. Science is the best explanation. And the best explanation for 250 years of warming is GHGs. That doesnt mean the natural wiggles vanish. duh. and bigger natural wiggles doesnt mean that C02 cant warm. the two are orthogonal.

      • Heinrich – You seem to be arguing that a non-warming period can’t be extended by more than one year each year.
        Actually, it can, and the maths is quite straightforwrd. But it may be easier just to see it in practice:
        http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1910/to:1955/every/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1935/to:1948/trend/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1934/to:1949/trend
        In 1948, there had been no warming since 1935, ie. for 13 years.
        But in 1949, there had be no warming since 1934, ie. for 15 years (it actually cooled a bit).
        So in just one year, two years were added to the non-warming period.

      • Mosher
        Either forced or Internal unforced variation by chance are an inverse posed problem this also argues for a more constraining Null eg Ghil 2001.

        The global temperature increase through the 1990s is certainly
        rather unusual in terms of the instrumental record of the last 150 years or so. It does not correspond, however, to
        a rapidly accelerating increase in greenhouse-gas emissions
        or a substantial drop in aerosol emissions. How statistically
        significant is, therefore, this temperature rise, if the null hypothesis
        is not a random coincidence of small, stochastic excursions
        of global temperatures with all, or nearly all, the
        same sign?

        The presence of internally arising regularities in the climate
        system with periods of years and decades suggests the
        need for a different null hypothesis. Essentially, one needs
        to show that the behaviour of the climatic signal is distinct
        from that generated by natural climate variability in the past,
        when human effects were negligible, at least on the global
        scale. As discussed in Sects. 2.1 and 3.3, this natural variability
        includes interannual and interdecadal cycles, as well
        as the broadband component. These cycles are far from being
        purely periodic. Still, they include much more persistent
        excursions of one sign, whether positive or negative in global
        or hemispheric temperatures, say, than does red noise.

      • Steven Mosher

        You say we “know” the current lack of warming (i.e. slight cooling) was caused by

        What “caused” the pause. There are only a few options.
        1. Changes in inputs ( solar )
        2. Changes in other forcings
        3. Internal unforced variation.
        4. Some combination of the three

        Your logic is impeccable, Mosh.

        Problem is, we are unable to figure out which of the above and to what extent.

        In addition, “other forcings” might include things we haven’t even yet considered in the models, such as natural forcings by clouds with some as yet undefined solar mechanism (cosmic rays?), solar forcing of ocean current oscillations, longer-term cyclical variability, etc.. The distinction between “internal unforced variation” and “natural forcing” is a theoretical one, which doesn’t make much difference in actual fact. And the “combination” is the best of all.

        Conclusion: we (think we) can name (some of) the things that (might have) caused the past slight cooling despite unabated human GHG emissions, but in actual fact, we have no Earthly notion what caused this lack of warming or how long it will last.

        Right?

        Max

      • moshe, if GHGs caused all the warming for the last 250 years, where would be without that warming?

        Now I know you’re not certain that GHGs caused all that, that they are merely an ‘explanation’ among many, but think what you are saying when blaming man for the temperature rise out of the Little Ice Age. Wouldn’t you say praise instead of blame should accrue to man?

        This whole debate has been backwards from the gitgo.
        ===========

      • David Springer

        @Mosher

        Another few years like the last few years and the pause will stretch back 11,500 years to the the beginning of the interglacial. Warmists are clutching at what might well turn out to be just one little 25 year upward wiggle from about 1972 to 1998 out of many millenia. Almost literally clutching at empirical straws and broken climate models. Are we having fun yet? I sure am. LOL

      • Here’s moshe’s problem. If GHGs are responsible for all the warming of the last 250 years, where would we be without it? We would be just as cold as then. And if it were now as cold as then, then it would mean that the regular Holocenic alteration between climate optima and minima would have halted, at a minimum. And I don’t have to get explicit for people here to understand what that halt would suggest.
        =====================

      • Mananker. My logic is always impeccable. Yours? not so much.
        I’ll say it again. You are overstating the ratio of our ignorance to our knowledge for theatrical effect. not a good thing.

      • In an Oscar winning performance, the aerosol control knob plays the Deus ex Machina.
        ===============

      • moshe, what would that halt in the natural variability of the Holocene mean? Be as explicit as you wish.
        ===============

      • Mosher:

        I hate when guys on my side are stupidier than the lamest skeptic.
        Sheesh, heinrich, hit the showers.

        “Stupidier” – heh.

        Anyway – I get it now, I think.

        Let’s see…

        Look at a global temp versus time plot.

        Pick any year (or decade or month) and note the global average temperature.

        Pick another year (decade, month) when the global average temperature is roughly the same.

        Connect the two data with a line – and voila! A pause.

        If you want a longer pause – just look for a any pair of wiggles that go to roughly the same temperature – connect with a line.

        Clearly, it doesn’t matter at all if the intervening ‘pause’ is completely comprised of positive anomalies. Or negative anomalies. You can throw away all that intervening data – doesn’t matter to the math of the ‘pause’.

        It’s at 0 C today – and let’s say it will be the same temperature on October first. So – there is a ‘pause’ in warming during the summer months – even though the intervening temps are almost all higher than 0 C.

        So – if for some reason, global mean temps should return – of only for an instant – to the temps of the LIA, then we can claim there has been a ‘pause’ ever since then. That about right?

      • No Heinrich you still dont get it. First things first. I dont agree with a single thing Cripwell says, however, I do understand what he is saying.
        You on the other hand don’t understand what he is saying. It’s far more powerful to understand your opponent fairly and engage his actual point, rather than creating a false picture of what he is saying.
        Attacking strawmen is their game. Up yours. game that is.


      • No Heinrich you still dont get it. First things first. I dont agree with a single thing Cripwell says, however, I do understand what he is saying.
        You on the other hand don’t understand what he is saying. It’s far more powerful to understand your opponent fairly and engage his actual point, rather than creating a false picture of what he is saying.
        Attacking strawmen is their game. Up yours. game that is.

        Nice. I don’t “get it” and I’m stupid.

        Look – I’m glad you understand what Cripwell is saying enough to disagree with it.

        Apparently, my math skillz are not up to your level, much less Cripwell’s.

        These ‘pauses’ are very complicated. But I am trying.

        Indulge me.
        If you would care to illuminate the stupidity in my previous post – I’d be grateful.
        http://judithcurry.com/2013/02/22/spinning-the-climate-model-observation-comparison/#comment-298510

        What part of “a ‘pause’ consists in any interval of time between two equal temperatures” is wrong?

        What difference does any of the data between the chosen end-points make – if any?

      • Mosh

        One can discuss how much we know about what makes our climate behave vs. how much we do not yet know.

        You seem to believe that we know “most” of the answers.

        I personally think we do not know “most” of the answers.

        Which of us is right?

        No one can really answer this question, but maybe our hostess has an opinion.

        Max

      • Heinrich,

        I’m wondering simply, in your view, is there any observational data that would make you concede that models are flawed. It seems to me you are quite certain in your assessment. How certain?

        From my perspective, the only real question is whether drastic action needs to be taken immediately to prevent the threat of global warming. The only reason to do that is on account of lives and livelihood. How far are you willing to go?

        Would you be willing to invade China and India to prevent it and dominate them to reduce C02? How many lives are you willing to sacrifice due to your certainty?

        Is Nuclear a worse alternative to coal plants, and if so why? What number of lives/livelihood would change your viewpoint?


      • I’m wondering simply, in your view, is there any observational data that would make you concede that models are flawed. It seems to me you are quite certain in your assessment. How certain?

        All models are flawed by some measures. Newton’s law of gravitation has been falsified – but it is still a very useful approximation. Climate models are hypothetical approximations – and in that sense they are no different from any other scientific models.

        Do they work?
        http://www.aip.org/history/climate/GCM.htm


        From my perspective, the only real question is whether drastic action needs to be taken immediately to prevent the threat of global warming. The only reason to do that is on account of lives and livelihood. How far are you willing to go?
        Would you be willing to invade China and India to prevent it and dominate them to reduce C02? How many lives are you willing to sacrifice due to your certainty?

        False dilemma.
        Reducing CO2 emissions doesn’t equal killing people.
        On the contrary.

        FYI:

        China is planning to enact a carbon tax.
        http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/china/2013-02/19/c_132178898.htm

        China has already committed to never reach the per-capita emissions of the US.
        http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-15444858

        India has made an even stronger commitment – their emissions will at no time exceed the average of the per capita emissions of developed, industrialized countries.
        http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/indian-climate-treaty-negotiator-we-have-accepted-a-limit-on-our-emissions-a-590964.html

      • David Springer

        @heinrich

        Newton’s law of gravitation has not been falsified. It was subsumed by general relativity. In other words it was incomplete. General relativity itself is incomplete and must be subsumed by a quantum law of gravity which has yet to be successfully formulated. That does not equate to being falsified. Both Newton and Einstein’s description of gravity remain the law within certain limits.

      • Springer:

        Newton’s law of gravitation has not been falsified. It was subsumed by general relativity. In other words it was incomplete.

        Fail. Sorry. Newton’s law of gravitation is measurably false. If you have ever used a GPS device, you have, in effect, proven that Einstein was right.

        The older theory is not “fixed-up” by merely ‘adding’ something that Isaac didn’t put in. Relativity involves the introduction of space-time. The very definitions of space and time are incommensurate between the two theories, as are the operational definitions of mass and momentum.
        In one theory there are ‘forces’ acting instantaneously in Euclidian space – in the other, no forces, only the geometry of space-time.

        But – You can believe they are ‘both right’ if you like.

    • Yes Jim, I agree that future data is the Sword of Damacles.

      At some point the “adjustments” to the past will become incredible – “the 1930s were the coldest decade it the last millenium”

    • I make the argument that the ‘stall’ in warming will last another 10-15 years here: http://thelukewarmersway.wordpress.com/2013/02/19/the-next-60-years-of-lukewarming/

      Similar stalls in temperature records have occurred in the past century–why would this one be different?

      • because CO2

      • lolwot

        TWF2: Similar stalls in temperature records have occurred in the past century–why would this one be different?

        lolwot: because CO2

        CO2 has not prevented the current “stall” from occurring.

        Why would CO2 make it impossible for the current “stall” to continue for another 10-15 years as TWF2 suggests?

        Logic?

        Max

    • @Jim Cripwell:

      “……….; the predictors are hostage to future data.”

      Don’t forget Jim, the predictors are also the collectors, adjusters, publishers, and interpreters of the data.

      In other words, no matter what the actual thermometers say, anthropogenic CO2 is causing the Earth to warm at an unprecedented rate and the consequences will be catastrophic if governments do not take control of all energy production and consumption in order to drastically reduce or eliminate it.

      If, as seems likely now (see recent statements by Obama and Kerry), the government actually DOES proceed with drastic, mandatory CO2 reduction, within a year or so of the event the predictors, collectors, adjusters, publishers, and interpreters of the data will be happy to report that the efforts were successful–just in the nick of time–and that thanks to the courageous actions of the government in taking control, AGW no longer poses an existential threat to the biosphere at large or to humans specifically. And won’t as long as the government is ‘in command’.

      But there will be this OTHER problem that DOES pose an existential threat, which can only be ameliorated if government assumes absolute power over every activity related to IT. Immediately.

    • If Arctic sea ice makes a complete recovery to 1979 levels including sea ice volume as well as extent, I’ll admit CAGW is nothing to be concerned about, I have been totally wrong and I will STFU, (after spamming that I was wrong a bit).

      On the other hand, what will skeptics admit if Arctic sea Ice make new records this melt season (volume and extent)?

      I think this season is the one the Beaufort Gyre really speeds up and decimates teh little remaining sea ice.

      • Bob, you write “On the other hand, what will skeptics admit if Arctic sea Ice make new records this melt season (volume and extent)?“

        So far as I am concerned, Arctic sea ice extent is a regional effect. The global effect is total sea ice extent; Arctic plus Antarctic. This measure has decreased slightly in recent years, but is currently around the average for, I believe, 1979 to 2000. So until total sea ice extent has a substantial decrease, I dont think it tells us anything about any global effect of warming.

        However, the warmists have nailed their colors to the mast of only Arctic sea ice extent. That is the difference.

      • k scott denison

        Bob, I will call it normal, natural climate variation as there is ample evidence that the arctic has been free of ice before. That you would read anything from such a short period is very telling in my opinion.

      • Jim,
        Unfortunately, the sea ice extent of the northern and southern polar regions are not linked by any mechanism. If the Arctic sea ice extent is regional, so what, it affects the global energy balance in that areas of high albedo are being replaced by areas of low albedo, which is also a positive feedback.
        The “warmists” pretty much have an explanation for the trend in Antarctic sea ice, perhaps you have heard of it?

        K Scott,
        When again was the Arctic ice free again?
        I am a bluenose, so don’t refer to any pictures of submarines, been there done that.

        Last time it was ice free, about 8K years ago, give or take, sea levels were several meters higher.

      • There is a poor understanding of the antarctic sea ice expansion,O3 is not a get out of jail card as the models have initialization problems eg Zunz
        http://www.the-cryosphere-discuss.net/6/3539/2012/tcd-6-3539-2012.html

      • Bob, you write“The “warmists” pretty much have an explanation for the trend in Antarctic sea ice, perhaps you have heard of it?“

        Yes I have heard of it. In fact the warmists have an explanation for anything that is inconvenient. There is a pal reviewed publication in the literature that `proves` whatever the warmists want it to prove. Then they block the publishing of anything that contradicts their ideas. Look that happened to Livingston and Penn, Roy Spencer, and Anastassia Makerieva. So I take little notice of such publications.

        Just saying that the Arctic and Antarctic are not linked does not make it so. There is a perfectly plausible hypothesis that they are linked by clouds. Maybe you have heard of it. It has to do with the albedo of clouds being higher than the surface for all regions of the earth, EXCEPT Antarctica.

        So I will stick to my beliefs, and take notice of what is happening in the Arctic and Antarctic. I am an atheist, but in this instance, I will pray to all the Gods that there are that Arctic sea ice extent will recover very rapidly

      • k scott denison

        Bob, at the NSIDC site you will find the following:

        “We know for sure that at least in the distant past, the Arctic was ice-free. Fossils from the age of the dinosaurs, 65 million years ago, indicate a temperate climate with ferns and other lush vegetation.

        Based on the paleoclimate record from ice and ocean cores, the last warm period in the Arctic peaked about 8,000 years ago, during the so-called
        Holocene Thermal Maximum. Some studies suggest that as recent as 5,500 years ago, the Arctic had less summertime sea ice than today. However, it is not clear that the Arctic was completely free of summertime sea ice during this time.”

        Translation: the Arctic has been ice free and it might have been as recently as 8,000 years ago, and had less ices than now as recently as 5,500 years ago.

        When one only has DIRECT, OBSERVATIONAL data for < 40 years, it's hard to claim that an ice-free Arctic is unusual.

      • How could clouds in Antarctica consistently operate to increase sea ice in regions with strong winds blowing offshore, and decrease sea ice in areas that do not have strong winds blowing offshore?

  6. Popular alarm about human CO2 provides no gauge for determining the relative importance of things in ways normal people can readily appreciate. Climate change has become a manner of communication that is not so much calculated to provide meaningful information as it is to purposefully distract attention from a sleight of hand going on somewhere else. There’s a built-in basic inner dishonesty about global warming true believers’ true motives that amazingly they also seem to believe think they are hiding.

  7. The divergence will increase, the 30-year trend started decreasing in ~2004.
    http://img690.imageshack.us/img690/5111/30yeartrends.jpg

    • This is a good point that is often unappreciated. If you are using moving window averages and data through the length of the windows is average to lower than average, then you are looking at at least a time period of half the window size before the trend will move back up again.

      Some have used this to their advantage as the moving window average continued to increase through the recent plateau due to the old data inside the window (“global warming is still happening!).

      Well you have to pay the piper and the averages have a built in plateau coming up that is largely unavoidable.

      What to do? Well the politically motivated science discussion will the move the goal posts. A new method to show long term averages effectively weighting new data higher will be created, or we will see an attempt to standardize “corrected” temperature graphs such as the recent ENSO subtraction work over at RC.

      Watching this play out is how those with less than honest science intentions will reveal themselves.

      • A plateau on that graph means continued warming. The y-axis is trend, not temperature. If it levels out at 0.16C/decade, that isn’t going to mean warming stops.

      • lolwot

        ENSO’s another “slippery slope” for the CAGW aficionados.

        The shift from warming El Niño to cooling La Niña is now being blamed for the lack of warming despite unabated human GHG emissions and concentrations reaching record levels.

        But the fact that the 1980s/1990s had several major warming El Niños (including the one that led to the all-time warmest year, 1998) was never played up at the time – despite the fact that NASA data showed that close to 40% of the warming over those decades can be attributed directly to the strong El Niños back then.

        Strange, right?

        Max

      • lolwot

        In case you’re interested, here’s the link to that NCDC (not NASA) data on ENSO
        http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/1998/enso/10elnino.html

        Max

      • “The shift from warming El Niño to cooling La Niña is now being blamed for the lack of warming…..But the fact that the 1980s/1990s had several major warming El Niños (including the one that led to the all-time warmest year, 1998) was never played up at the time ”

        This doesn’t address the argument we are making.

        The first sentence is right. The second is not. Because we aren’t saying El Ninos create warming. If we had El Nino after El nino for 30 years that wouldn’t produce a warming trend. It would be as warm at the end as at the start. Flat trend. To create a warming trend you need an increase in ENSO. Eg a shift from La Nina to El Nino. Or a period of lots of La Ninas followed by lots of El Ninos. But the longer the period, the more they will average out and the trend will move towards zero.

        ENSO adjusted records show little contribution from ENSO over the 1980s and 1990s. FR11 even find a slight cooling from ENSO since 1979, because MEI trends slightly negative since 1979.

        However the period 2002-2007 had a number of El Ninos and then what followed were a number of La Ninas. Over such a short time period that’s enough to have a significant cooling effect compared to the expected warming over such a short period.

        The bottom line is that over a long period the GHG warming grows, but the ENSO influence shrinks. That is precisely why the 80s and 90s are irrelevant in terms of ENSO but post-2002 is not.

        ENSO in the top panel. Over the whole period it clearly trends very flat. Since 2002 there is a decline.

    • lolwot

      Duh!

      Of course the 30-year trend today is still positive.

      It includes the past 12 years or so of slight cooling and the previous 18 years of rapid warming.

      But, as you see, it is decreasing as more current years of cooling are added and older years of warming are removed from the 30-year average.

      Got it?

      Max

  8. How can anyone take Gavin seriously?

    Sorry, meant to say how can anyone take Gavin seriously when the RealClimate graph has error bars which stretch to nearly a degree, and we’re talking about movements of 0.1, 0.2 degrees? It’s a shame the inventor of etch-a-sketch has left us – he and Gavin could compare notes.

    Even economists now use graphs more like Hawkin’s, shading the likeliest and less probable outcomes. From his graph, reality is threatening to breach even the lowest 95% bar.

  9. http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/pip/2012JD017607.shtml

    Driscoll et al (2012)
    “Coupled Model Intercomparison Project 5 (CMIP5) simulations of climate following volcanic eruptions”

    Says that CMIP5 models do not correctly simulate climate response to volcanic forcing.

    • At Berkeley we have seen that going back to 1750. They get the response and recovery wrong in the same characteristic fashion through time. The look to over estimate the cooling and underestimate the recovery, and the recovery happens too fast. hmm

  10. The obvious analysis shows the observations are running lower than the projected trend.

    Now why this is so excruciatingly difficult for a climate scientist to say out loud speaks volumes for how politicized the debate has become, even inside the ivory tower.

    The response is usually is just to pretend the data doesn’t exist, or move immediately to OHC or ENSO or short term fluctuations, etc. We are now treated with ENSO “corrected” temperature trends over at RC. Where were these 20 years ago?

    I totally expect AR5 to brush over this, and not even mention it in the summary for policy makers. I have low expectations at this point. Introspection is non-existent in climate science, and the political pressure to keep the alarm ringing is immense.

    These projections were used to sound the alarm on global warming, and honest science says the assumptions should be revisited when observations don’t match theory.

    The trends may jump back up, or they may not, but anyone versed in data processing can assess the performance so far. Nobody in climate modeling is re-assessing climate sensitivity in their models? Nobody?

    • You wrote: These projections were used to sound the alarm on global warming, and honest science says the assumptions should be revisited when observations don’t match theory.

      I agree. We need to try a new theory. Actually this is an old theory. Ewing and Donn came up with this in the 1950’s.

      Albedo of Earth is higher during cold periods and lower during warm periods. Albedo was low during the Medieval Warm period and it snowed and then ice advanced and pushed earth into the little ice age. The oceans got cold and the snowfall slowed down and ice retreated and pushed earth into the current warm period. Oceans are warm now and the snow has started that will push us into the next little cold period.

      Climate scientists make earth warmer and then take away ice. Climate scientists make the earth colder and then add ice.

      That is backwards. Earth adds ice and uses that to make earth colder. Earth removes ice and uses that to make earth warmer.

      The data clearly shows that snow accumulation is higher when oceans are warm and is lower when oceans are cold.
      This keeps the temperature of earth bounded.
      Climate models need to properly use snowfall and albedo.

    • Tom Scarf,

      Nobody in climate modeling is re-assessing climate sensitivity in their models? Nobody?

      Is that true? If so, two on Earth are they getting away with it? What is the orthodoxy’s argument for why they are not updating their estimates of climate sensitivity?

      On a related matter, what are the climate scientist insiders, orthodoxy and IPCC lead and coordinating authors saying about any adjustments to climate sensitivity, especially given the criticisms of people like Nic Lewis? (By the way I am familiar with the the draft AR5 charts of climate sensitivity so no need to point me to that).

      • They are re-examing their models. They have to. But this takes a few years. Even if the old guard does not do this as completely or as quickly as some feel they should, other modelers (like younger ones making a name for themselves) will do it. And they have to pay attention to reality. They are scientists first (even if they seem to have forgotten that for a few years) and want to get it right. But the main reason they are and will continue to acknowledge the flaws in the models is that the climate is not changing as fast as predicted and if they stick to their old predictions and catastrophes, they will be ridiculed and lose all credibility. If the climate continues in the current direction or if it cools a tenth of a degree, they must change the theory and models to match reality. This is the way science works, even if it sometimes takes awhile.

      • Bill,

        Thank you for your reply. I wonder if you can answer this question I put to Nic Lewis on Bishop Hill (his reply did not really answer my question and then comments were closed before I could ask fro clarification):
        http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/1/12/lewis-on-schmidt-on-climate-sensitivity.html?currentPage=2

        Nic Lewis,

        For a non-specialsit with no understanding of the stats methods you are discussing, could you please explain what is the sensitivity of ECS (mode, median, mean and SD or whatever are the most important parameters to define the pdf of the estimates of ECS) to the various methods of calculating it that you have been discussing?

        Put another way, how much difference would using a ‘more correct’ analysis make to the mode, median, mean and range?

        Also, even if the statement of likely range is 2 C to 4.5 C and best estimate of 3 C is wrong, does that actually change the model projections? The reason I ask is because I understand the ECS figures are an output of the modelling not an input to the modelling. If my understanding is correct it would seem to me the figures quoted for ECS in IPCC AR5 might change but the projections would not.

        Could you please explain in a way a non-specialist can understand.

  11. What strikes me is that all these diagrams is that they all have a start point which is very low rising till it finally starts to plateaus out some 16years ago. If you went further back into the thirties where the temperatures were higher, would you find an oscillating high low of +/- 0.5 degC every thirty years or so

  12. I linked this on the open thread but I’ll link again since it seems to be on topic.

    http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/1/014024/pdf/1748-9326_8_1_014024.pdf

  13. Dr Curry – Lucia has some musings on the CMIP5 projections.
    http://rankexploits.com/musings/2012/new-projections/
    http://rankexploits.com/musings/2012/things-i-can-see-in-figure-9-8-of-the-ar5-sod/
    However, since some aspects of the posts may depend on the AR5 leak, I dunno whether this breaks any rules.

  14. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/11/28/1210514109.full.pdf

    Santer et al (2012)
    “Identifying human influences on atmospheric temperature”
    Says that CMIP5 models overestimate warming of the troposphere.

    • Mr David L Hagen

      Paul Matthews
      You understate Santer’s on overestimated warming. :)
      Per Fig. 3, Santer et al. observe:

      The multimodel average tropospheric temperature trends are outside the 5–95 percentile range of RSS results at most latitudes.
      The likely causes of these biases include forcing errors in the
      historical simulations (40–42), model response errors (43), remaining
      errors in satellite temperature estimates (26, 44), and an unusual
      manifestation of internal variability in the observations (35, 45).
      These explanations are not mutually exclusive.

      As David Stockwell summarizes:

      Where do the models fail?

      1. Significantly warmer than reality (95% CI) in the lower troposphere at all latitudes, except for the arctic.

      2. Significantly warmer than reality (95% CI) in the mid-troposphere at all latitudes, except for the possible polar regions.

      3. Significant warmer that reality (95% CI) in the lower stratosphere at all latitudes, except possibly polar regions.

      Answer: Everywhere except for polar regions where uncertainty is greater.

      If the IPCC’s CIMP5 models so thoroughly fail, why does Obama

      choose to believe in the overwhelming judgment of science — and act . . . .prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy.

      How do we restore the scientific method and fact based policies?

  15. http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/8/1/014024/

    Stott … and Hawkins (2013) published 3 days ago
    “The upper end of climate model temperature projections is inconsistent with past warming”
    Says what it says in the title!

  16. Matthew R Marler

    This illustrates what has been said before: in order for the difference between the observed and expected trends to be statistically significant at one of the conventional levels, the difference has to persist for a few more years.

    If the modelers had any confidence in the mean trend, that is if they really thought of the simulations as a random sample from the true population of possibilities, then they would compute the 95% confidence limits on the mean, rather than the quantiles of the distribution. Those limits are narrower than the grey shaded areas of the fourth figure, more like the dark grey shaded area, and the observed data trend is already outside those limits. Thinking of the data as known and the simulations as a random sample, the mean simulation is statistically significantly different from the actual data at one of the conventional significance levels, i.e. 5%.

    Not many people think of the data as fixed and the models as random, but Bayesians do (Kadane, Principles of Uncertainty, CRC Press, 2011; you can download the pdf from Prof. Kadane’s web page at Carnegie-Mellon University.) If you put a prior distribution on the models, say treat them as equally probable, then the posterior distribution is concentrated well below the mean of the simulations.

    The models will doubtless be improved to bring them more in line with the observed measurements. Then we’ll have to compare those model outputs to subsequent data.

    • Matthew – “The models will doubtless be improved to bring them more in line with the observed measurements. Then we’ll have to compare those model outputs to subsequent data.”

      Hmm. Doubtless. But that would mean reducing climate sensitivity, so far a no-go area for climate alarmists. The modellers would also have to explain why they keep having to ‘adjust’ their models, which would be embarrassing. I fear we’ll see little in AR5 which reflects real world observations, just the usual excuse that more decades are needed to invalidate them.

      • Matthew R Marler

        cui bono: But that would mean reducing climate sensitivity,

        It looks that way now, but we must not underestimate the modelers’ creativity. They can probably create models with high CO2 sensitivity if they find something that counteracted the CO2 effect over the last 15 years: perhaps particulate pollution and aerosols from developing nations like India, China, Brazil, Sudan and many others that have grown economically.

      • mathew its the aerosol knob.

      • Aerosol epicycle.

      • I’ve long had a guilty feeling that welikerocks and some other joker thought up the aerosol epicycle years ago @ The Blackboard. Certainly long before it started appearing in papers.
        ==================

      • Matthew R Marler

        St ephen Mosher: mathew its the aerosol knob.

        Excellent!

      • yes mathew just plot the sensitivity of the model in question against the assumed level of aerosol forcings. straight line– there abouts as I recall

      • Edim.

        You don’t know how epicycles work. In a theory, so you should probably study the logic of them a bit more.Epicycles come from fitting math functions to observations. Kind of what Scafffeta does. Typically this is done without physical law justification. Its something added just to make the data fit better. basically an explanation that explains nothing.
        You can think of skeptical appeals to “natural cycles” epistemically the same thing.

        With aerosols you have a different situation. You are not fitting a function. You are changing the value of a parameter.

        Lets see If I can give you a good example.

        lets suppose you tell me that you weighed yourself 100 times in the last hundred days. At the begining you weighed 200 lbs and today you weigh 195. So I calculate your rate of weigh loss. so 5/100 lbs per day.
        makes sense. easy. Then you tell me.
        Opps. sometimes I was barefoot and sometimes I wore big hiking boots. Crap. so your shoe weigh was somewhere between 0 lbs and 4 lbs. And then, you tell me that sometime you weighed yourself naked as a jay bird and sometimes fully clothed (3lbs). so, I have another set of uncertainties. And you cant recall whether you were naked and shoeless when you first weighed yourself.
        So. one case 200lbs could have actually have been 193+7lbs of crap
        and in another case it could be 200 lbs naked as a jaybird. and your recent 195 could be as low as 188 + 7lbs of crap. so you might have gone from 200 to 188.. or 193 to 200.

        If I wanted to use an epi cycle I might invent some crazy fuction to fit the observation and ignore the shoe and clothes issue.

        Anyway, we have a range of estimates for the excess crap you might have been wearing and we can bound our estimates using that.
        basically the same with aerosols. We dont have good measures, BUT we have estimates of the high and low bounds. When folks play with a parameter like this in modelling it is a sensitivity study to unknown parameter values. This is standard GOOD practice. Epicycles are different. epicycles are invoked ah hoc to explain KNOWN DATA that is in conflict with the theory. Typically they are fitting ad hoc function to data. go look at Vuk or scaffeta to get a flavor of what that looks like methodologically.

        With aerosols we know the range of historical observations, not the exact amount. You get to play with that knob.
        With epicycles you have exact observations that dont fit the theory, so you add more theory.

        utterly different process.

      • Mosh

        Either the aerosol knob or the tooth fairy.

        Or, hey, maybe it’s one of your unicorns!

        Max

      • Heh, a language lesson for moshe. Epicycles also mean embellishments added to a theory to keep it alive.
        ===================

      • In the example of the man who weighed himself and lost 5/100 lbs per day it could be that while many things on the list of events are unrelated, still, there may be something that unifies them. That is what the AGW theory is–it is a unifying theory.

        Using the example, the man sometimes wore shoes and sometimes didn’t. Sometimes the man didn’t even take time to put on clothes. The reason is sometimes the man had to take a piss. That unifies everything. So, by analogy, CO2 is like a man having to take a piss real bad.

      • No kim, epicycles have a logical structure in relationship to the underlying theory. They are theory alterations employed to preserve observations.
        retrograde motion was observed. To keep the model intact other theoretical entities are posited. In the case of aerosols NO additional theoretical entity is posited. There is no Unicorn created. The difference is between a fuzzy observation and a non fuzzy observation.
        Put another way; An epicycle would ADD A KNOB. The aerosol knob already exists. We know they play a role. How much? turn the knob to find out. Let me put it yet another way:
        Epicycles are about ontology.
        Knob tuning is about epsitemology.

        Epicycles make new things. ( oh maybe the sun has something we dont know about) Knob tuning adjusts the weight of things we know exist.
        Huge difference.

      • moshe, you are mathematically correct, and I am linguistically correct.
        ============

      • Mosher, educate yourself:
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epicycle

        Epicycles are ‘older’ than the Ptolemaic system. Aerosol explanation is a perfect example of epicycles, but if you don’t like it, how about ad hoc hypothesis?
        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hoc#Ad_hoc_hypothesis

      • Nobody mistook Edim’s powerful allusion, except one with a technical objection.
        ================

      • Kim, JC had a post called cyclomania. I think it’s time for a post with a title Epicyclomania.
        http://judithcurry.com/2011/07/27/cyclomania/#comment-90802

      • Edim, moshe might find the ‘Slang for Bad Science’ section in your first link instructive. I certainly did.
        =====================

  17. Roy Spencer Feb. 21, 2013 posts:
    Tropical SSTs Since 1998: Latest Climate Models Warm 3X Too fast
    See especially Fig Climate Models Warm the Tropics 3X Too Fast during 1998 through 2012

    Note that I have now averaged the monthly data to yearly, and this last plot also shows an average of 35 CMIP5 climate models SSTs during 1998-2012 for the same (tropical) latitude band, courtesy of John Christy and the KNMI climate explorer website. Also note I have plotted all three time series as departures from their respective 1998/99 2-year average.

    The decadal linear temperature trends are:
    un-adj. SST: = -0.010 C/decade
    MEI-adj. SST: +0.056 C/decade
    CMIP5 SST: +0.172 C/decade

    So, even after adjusting for El Nino and La Nina activity, the last 15 years in the tropics have seen (adjusted) warming at only 1/3 the rate which the CMIP5 models create when they are forced with anthropogenic greenhouse gases. . . .

    Why Have the Models Warmed Too Fast?
    My personal opinion is that the models have cloud feedbacks (and maybe other feedbacks) wrong, and that the real climate system is simply not as sensitive to increasing CO2 as the modelers have programmed the models to be.

  18. I agree with the natural-variation proponents who say that the solar slump and PDO have temporarily slowed global warming. Natural variations for sure have a place in this. Many “skeptics” have now implicitly decided these natural cooling factors have no part in the explanation by not mentioning them any more. We need an honest debate that weighs all these effects together.

    • Jim D

      I’d agree with what you just wrote, but would like to add that the “temporary” slowdown in global warming might last over the next twenty years or so, giving us a full 30+ years of slight cooling despite unabated human GHG emissions and their concentrations reaching record levels.

      In effect, we see that the models cited by IPCC are programmed to overestimate warming, and hence that any projections of warming based on these models are exaggerated.

      This would pretty much mean the end of the CAGW scare as outlined by IPCC in AR4.

      The problem is that IPCC will IMO most likely stick to its party line message from AR4 despite the facts on the ground, with the net result that they will have lost all remaining credibility.

      Do you think IPCC will face up to the new realities here, or rather that it will stick with the CAGW premise as outlined in AR4?

      Max

      • As you may not know, the models don’t account for the current solar slump or PDO phase in their long-range projections, so this alone is a major factor because between them they could account for about 0.1 degrees in a decade. Unless you know anything I don’t about the solar slump accelerating or the PDO not recovering towards a neutral state, what you wrote about the next couple of decades is not founded on facts.

      • Jim D

        Unlike IPCC (backed by the climate models) I do not make any predictions projections of future temperature.

        But I simply see that the projections made by the IPCC models have been exaggerated, apparently because of faulty model programming.

        This appears to be the result of programming in too high a 2xCO2 climate sensitivity = too high by at least 2x.

        Hansen’s model predictions of warming back in 1988 had the same problem = too high by a factor of 2x.

        Most recent estimates of 2xCO2 ECS (based largely on the actual past record) also suggest that previous estimates were high by a factor of 2x.

        Do you see a pattern here?

        (This is NOT a trick question, and it has nothing to do with solar cycle 24, PDO, ENSO, etc. – just about lousy model projections based on lousy assumptions on 2xCO2 CS.)

        This tells me that future IPCC model projections are also worthless.

        The real question now is whether or not IPCC is going to stick with its hard line on CAGW (as outlined in AR4) or whether it will acknowledge that the facts on the ground suggest a 2xCO2 ECS of around half of previous estimates with corresponding reductions in projections of future GH warming.

        This poses a real dilemma for IPCC with no easy choice.

        I personally believe that IPCC will stick with its hard-line ECS estimates and future projections, hoping people will not notice that these have failed, in order to keep the CAGW fear mongering factor alive.

        I also believe that this course of action will cost IPCC every bit of credibility it still has left today.

        It appears that we are witnessing the unraveling of a superbly framed and marketed sales pitch by the facts on the ground.

        Max

    • This is an implicit admission that natural forces are significant drivers of climate. I think many skeptics have been saying this for a long time. It was the other side saying they were insignificant during the recent run up of temperatures a few decades ago.

      We are now being effectively told that they have only acted to suppress temperatures recently, and that they have not acted in the other direction to juice up temperatures prior to this.

      If you want to have it both ways, you better have compelling evidence to back it up. You don’t have it.


      • This is an implicit admission that natural forces are significant drivers of climate.

        No credible climate scientists would say otherwise. Significant natural drivers do not preclude significant anthropogenic drivers. Imagine that.


        I think many skeptics have been saying this for a long time.

        Maybe – but since they never seem publish the data or the code, it’s hard to know who to pat on the back.


        We are now being effectively told that they have only acted to suppress temperatures recently, and that they have not acted in the other direction to juice up temperatures prior to this.

        That’s probably because the real world is not “fair and balanced”.

      • heinrich

        Tom Scharf has brought up a very valid point.

        We are asked, on one hand, to swallow the IPCC claim in AR4 that from pre-industrial 1750 to 2005 natural forcing factors only represented around 7% of the total (0.12 W/m^2), with anthropogenic forcing representing 93% (1.6 W/m^2).

        Yet, for the most recent 12-15 year period we are being asked to believe that these same natural forcing factors have completely overwhelmed the anthropogenic forcing, which is at its highest rate of increase ever.

        This obviously does not make sense.

        If natural factors are strong enough to completely overwhelm anthropogenic forcing today, then there is no reason to assume that they were insignificant over the previous 250 years.

        Can you try to explain this?

        Max

      • Captain Kangaroo

        Heinrich,

        You drop in with superficial comment indistinguishable from snark. The physical mechanism for warming and cooling is quite evident – http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=8703 – of not quite explicable.

        From peer reviewed literature –

        ‘Using a new measure of coupling strength, this update shows that these climate modes have recently synchronized, with synchronization peaking in the year 2001/02. This synchronization has been followed by an increase in coupling. This suggests that the climate system may well have shifted again, with a consequent break in the global mean temperature trend from the post 1976/77 warming to a new period (indeterminate length) of roughly constant global mean temperature.’
        Swanson and Tsonis (2009) – Has the climate recently shifted?

        The climate has shifted and the mechanisms seem to include cloud – as seems reasonable given that these are large scale changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation.

        ‘In summary, although there is independent evidence for decadal changes in TOA radiative fluxes over the last two decades, the evidence is equivocal. Changes in the planetary and tropical TOA radiative fluxes are consistent with independent global ocean heat-storage data, and are expected to be dominated by changes in cloud radiative forcing. To the extent that they are real, they may simply reflect natural low-frequency variability of the climate system.’ IPCC s 3.4.4.1

        There is of course low frequency climate variability and ‘if real’ all recent warming was quite natural.

        As for the future? It is absurd to think that the 20th century pattern will be repeated endlessly.

        ‘Figure 12 shows 2000 years of El Nino behaviour simulated by a state-of-the-art climate model forced with present day solar irradiance and greenhouse gas concentrations. The richness of the El Nino behaviour, decade by decade and century by century, testifies to the fundamentally chaotic nature of the system that we are attempting to predict. It challenges the way in which we evaluate models and emphasizes the importance of continuing to focus on observing and understanding processes and phenomena in the climate system. It is also a classic demonstration of the need for ensemble prediction systems on all time scales in order to sample the range of possible outcomes that even the real world could produce. Nothing is certain.’
        http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1956/4751.full

        Range of variability of the Pacific? Here’s a couple.

        http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view&current=ENSO11000.gif

        http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view&current=Vance2012-AntarticaLawDomeicecoresaltcontent.jpg

        The world is not warming for a decade or so hence – and warming beyond that is questionable as we pass the threshod of Bond Evet Zero.

        So Heinrich – I would suggest that you actually play the game and bring some science to the table or stfu.

      • Can you try to explain this?

        Start here:
        http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/publications/meehl_additivity.pdf

      • Captain Kangaroo

        Attibution is always the rub.

        http://www.image.ucar.edu/idag/Papers/Wong_ERBEreanalysis.pdf

      • Captain Kangaroo

        The world is not warming for a decade or so hence at least. You lose.


      • As for the future? It is absurd to think that the 20th century pattern will be repeated endlessly.

        That’s a relief. I was a bit worried about the 1980s coming back.


        So Heinrich – I would suggest that you actually play the game and bring some science to the table or stfu.

        Oh dear me…
        It appears I have incurred the wrath of Chief Poseur.

        Tell you what – The sandbox is all yours, CP. At least until it isn’t.

      • Attribution, she’s a bitch;
        Don’t know why just scratch that itch.
        Puff the Magic CO2
        Lived by its radiant tutu,
        Nature turned and bit him someplace rich.
        ===============

      • Stick around heinrich; you’ve got the whole shebang, yesterday’s science, today’s snark, and tomorrow’s ignorance. Who needs Mulberry Street when you’re on parade?
        =============

      • Captain Kangaroo

        So – Heinrich – you revert to type without actually saying anything meaningful.

        Let me conclude on the evidence that you are a cult of AGW groupthink space cadet.

        The world is not warming for a decade or so hence at least. Is that how long I have possesion of the ‘sandbox’? It ain’t a game – but thanks anyway – and you lose.

      • “We are now being effectively told that they have only acted to suppress temperatures recently, and that they have not acted in the other direction to juice up temperatures prior to this. If you want to have it both ways, you better have compelling evidence to back it up. You don’t have it.”

        Yes we do

        The data’s there. Why YOU can’t run trends through the solar and ENSO data and spot the sharp decline recently isn’t countered by a sharp rise in the past I don’t know.

      • Captain Kangaroo

        ‘Unlike El Niño and La Niña, which may occur every 3 to 7 years and last from 6 to 18 months, the PDO can remain in the same phase for 20 to 30 years. The shift in the PDO can have significant implications for global climate, affecting Pacific and Atlantic hurricane activity, droughts and flooding around the Pacific basin, the productivity of marine ecosystems, and global land temperature patterns. This multi-year Pacific Decadal Oscillation ‘cool’ trend can intensify La Niña or diminish El Niño impacts around the Pacific basin,” said Bill Patzert, an oceanographer and climatologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. “The persistence of this large-scale pattern [in 2008] tells us there is much more than an isolated La Niña occurring in the Pacific Ocean.”
        http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=8703

        The ‘pause’ in global warming – now that you have at long last stopped denying it – it is no accident and is not all that mysterious. It is the result in large part of large scale ocean and atmospheric patterns in the Pacific Ocean known collectively as the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO). This consists principally of cold water rising or not in the north-east Pacific and changes in the frequency and intensity of El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events.

        The warm and cool modes of the IPO last for 20 to 40 years each. A cool mode sees cold water rising in the north-east Pacific and increased frequency and intensity of La Niña – and the planet cools. A warm mode sees warm water in the north-east Pacific and more frequent and intense El Niño – and the planet warms. The mode shifted from warm to cool after 1998 – so the planet is not warming for a decade or so hence without much doubt.

        Beyond that it is not guaranteed ether that the current 1000 year peak in surface temperatures will ratchet up again from this natural variability. Perhaps it will – but the alternate natural warming and cooling we have seen for 150 years means that at most the anthropogenic component of warming is 0.08 degrees C/decade. Nothing that is that is at all alarming.

        But most of the ‘recent’ warming happened in 1976/77 and 1998. These are ENSO ‘dragon-kings’ at periods of climate shifts – defined as extremes at a time of chaotic birfurcation.

        I quote elsewere an article on non randomised medical studies being wrong 80% of the time. ‘Simply put, if you’re attracted to ideas that have a good chance of being wrong, and if you’re motivated to prove them right, and if you have a little wiggle room in how you assemble the evidence, you’ll probably succeed in proving wrong theories right. ‘

        There is much other evidence and relying on a single study is likely to be misleading. But the bottom line is not studies or theories but the reality that the world is not warming – you lose.

      • heinrich

        (This response to your post ended up in the wrong spot, so am re-posting)

        The Meehl et al.study you cited states:

        “The late-twentieth-century warming can only be reproduced in the model if anthropogenic forcing (dominated by GHGs) is included, while the” [statistically indistinguishable] “early twentieth-century warming requires the inclusion of natural forcings in the model (mostly solar).”

        Huh? Howdat? (Looks like kind of a forced fit rationalization to me.)

        And then there is the unfounded rationalization to cover the 30-year cycle of slight cooling in between with human aerosols.

        Gimme a break, heinrich.

        This is pretty weak stuff.

        Have you got something better or is that all?

        Max

    • As I mentioned, these long-term projections don’t include near-term natural variability like solar and ocean changes that might have an amplitude of 0.1 degrees. The ensemble averages these wiggles out. The fact that we have a PDO minimum and a solar reduction but still have had the warmest decade on record should cause the “skeptics” some pause, but no they happily assume they are right anyway. 0.1 degrees, which is the effect being discussed here, is apparently a big deal to the “skeptics” but in the long-term 2-3 C warming it will matter little.

      • Captain Kangaroo

        The direct solar effect is minor and we are at the peak of the cycle again. The ‘projections’ are chaotic and meaningless but some models do have the Schwabe cycle.

        The biggest ENSO events have a +/- 0.3 degree effect – but the longer term Interdecadal Pacific Oscillations (IPO)are both varying and indeterminate.

        Most climate change seems to be cloud –

        http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view&current=CERES_MODIS.gif

        http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view&current=tropicalcloud.png

        The world is not warming for a decade or more hence – you lose.

      • You can argue that the solar effect is minor with your other “skeptics” who think it is the one big thing. I have an intermediate view of its effect as solar 11-year cycles are seen easily in mean surface temperatures. Also the last decade didn’t include any big El Ninos, so the “skeptics” would be 0 for 3 (solar, PDO, ENSO) in trying to find a natural variation that fits with the warmest-decade info.

      • Captain Kangaroo

        I am not a sceptic – but you are a space cadet.

        I did say direct solar effect. The top down effects of solar UV/stratospheric ozone interactions may be more significant.

        ‘The Earth’s climate is driven by the net sunlight deposited in the terrestrial atmosphere, and so, climate is critically sensitive to the solar irradiance and the Earth’s albedo. These two quantities should be linked in any proxy effort to understand the role of a varying Sun in climate change. We need to understand why studies using solar activity as a proxy for net sunlight seem to have real value, even though we know that there are terrestrial imprints of the solar cycle when the implied changes in solar irradiance seem too weak to induce an imprint. These two climate fundamentals appear somehow linked, and it would seem that knowing the relative variations and connectivity of the irradiance and terrestrial reflectance is at the heart of understanding the Sun–Earth connection.’

        http://bbso.njit.edu/Research/EarthShine/literature/Goode_Palle_2007_JASTP.pdf

        The data is what it is. Marginal warming last decade in SW and very little happening in IR. The increase in SW outweighed the Schwabe cycle decline even at it’s low point. Why should the world cool? Indeed the deep ocean ARGO and CERES data shows remarkable consistency. But it is all tied into these large scale changes in ocean and atmospheric circulation. It is this that is setting the agenda for the next decades.

        You talk about these things but never look at the most relevant data. Again – the world is not warming for decades hence. You lose.

      • JimD, “You can argue that the solar effect is minor with your other “skeptics” who think it is the one big thing. I have an intermediate view of its effect as solar 11-year cycles are seen easily in mean surface temperatures. Also the last decade didn’t include any big El Ninos, so the “skeptics” would be 0 for 3 (solar, PDO, ENSO) in trying to find a natural variation that fits with the warmest-decade info.”

        That has been explained a number of times JimD. The oceans cover ~70% of the surface, store nearly 100% of the energy and are charged by the sun at depths greater than a 10 micron skin layer. You don’t use simple averages on a huge RC circuit with a somewhat sinusoidal power supply and you don’t consider just 2.5% of that heat capacity when looking for a 1% change in a system that receives its energy from the oceans and has only 0.01% of the heat capacity of the oceans. Thar be two greenhouses matey.

      • Indeed the effects explained by the captains may have mitigated climate change by a whole 0.1 degrees in the last decade, but it didn’t stop it from being the warmest decade somehow. Put this 0.1 degrees in the context of long-term climate change, people.

      • Captain Kangaroo

        That’s the trouble Jim – we have. Long term is a little difficult. Obviously short term is as well. Just how much was this greenhouse gas forcing worth? Very little it seems. How much was natural variation and where does this go from a 1000 year high as we cross the threshold of Bond Event Zero? Or even perhaps an abrupt shift in the MOC and sudden cooling into the next glacial in as little as a decade. Very, very difficult to say. Your 0.1 degree C – frankly is something you pulled out of your arse. We have already explained that the whole planet warmed a little in the decade – from cloud – but is not likely to warm much at all over decades more. Data Jim data – the interplay of reflectance and irradiance that explains most climate change. 85 W/m2 change from snowball earth to blue-green planet. It dwarfs these minor changes in CO2. For God’s sake wake up and see which way the wind is blowing.

        ‘Figure 12 shows 2000 years of El Nino behaviour simulated by a state-of-the-art climate model forced with present day solar irradiance and greenhouse gas concentrations. The richness of the El Nino behaviour, decade by decade and century by century, testifies to the fundamentally chaotic nature of the system that we are attempting to predict. It challenges the way in which we evaluate models and emphasizes the importance of continuing to focus on observing and understanding processes and phenomena in the climate system. It is also a classic demonstration of the need for ensemble prediction systems on all time scales in order to sample the range of possible outcomes that even the real world could produce. Nothing is certain.’ http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1956/4751.full

        I have shown you the proxies – the real deal changes even more forcefully then the model.

        But the next decade or so are surely not warming. So – again – you lose.

      • CK, if you think natural variations have cooled the earth by 0.2 degrees, fair enough. That only means the background global warming was even stronger to keep us from actually cooling. Are you even thinking about the numbers and how they add up to a total warming? What help is postponing a stronger warming to you? These variations don’t matter at all in the long term, but it looks like they are giving a false sense of security to those that haven’t noticed what the land and Arctic temperatures are actually doing themselves, and are myopically looking at the global mean (that they didn’t seem to believe until now).

      • Ready, aim,…..Hey, Don’t Fire!
        ==============

      • Captain Kangaroo

        So we have descended into incoherence – ?????

        ‘After reviewing evidence in both the latest global data (HadCRUT4) and the longest instrumental record, Central England Temperature, a revised picture is emerging that gives a consistent attribution for each multidecadal episode of warming and cooling in recent history, and suggests that the anthropogenic global warming trends might have been overestimated by a factor of two in the second half of the 20th century.’

        http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/01/22/1212471110.abstract

        At least by a factor of 2.

      • Chief, “At least a factor of two.” Yep

      • If I understand, they say that since 1910 anthropogenic warming has been steady at 0.07-0.08 degrees per decade, or about 0.7-0.8 degrees in the century, which is OK by itself, yet they assume it has been steady since 1910 which far exceeds what anyone said the early century effect should be. It is a far from steady 0.8 degree rise with more of it at the end. Do you believe the anthropogenic effect has been steady and large since 1910? Did it suddenly tick up to that value at 1910? Lots of questions here. Need to see the paper.

      • Captain Kangaroo

        ‘The observed global-warming rate has been nonuniform, and the cause of each episode of slowing in the expected warming rate is the subject of intense debate. To explain this, nonrecurrent events have commonly been invoked for each episode separately. After reviewing evidence in both the latest global data (HadCRUT4) and the longest instrumental record, Central England Temperature, a revised picture is emerging that gives a consistent attribution for each multidecadal episode of warming and cooling in recent history, and suggests that the anthropogenic global warming trends might have been overestimated by a factor of two in the second half of the 20th century.’

        Yeah right Jim.

      • CK, so you see how they did it. They increased the AGW warming rate at the
        beginning around 1910 to decrease it later, and end up with same
        anthropogenic total, which is about 100% of the observed warming in
        the last century. I am not sure this paper is making your case for you.

      • Captain Kangaroo

        The timing of the warming and cooling episodes are quite evident and indeed mirror other variabilities in ocean and atmospheric indices. The indices are best seen as nodes in the network of processes that are the underlying dynamic climate system. The decadal variability warmed and cooled alternatiely in the 20th century. It warmed in the period of global warming between 1976 and 1998 and has cooled since. That’s the meaning of these decadal processes.There is no guarantee that the next shift wont be to cooler still as we pass through a 1000 years high point.

        Here’s the AMO – http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view&current=Nigametal2011-midwesternUSdroughtandamo_zps6062d4b3.jpg

        To construct such a wildly unrealistic post-hoc rationalisation based on not even reading the paper borders on insanity. Really – wtf do you imagine you are doing?

      • Lags, Jim, lags. The ocean is a huge heat sink/reservoir. The climate will not respond instantly to changes in the sun or ocean cycles. Next ten years will be very interesting. I have no predictions except that I won’t be surprised if the CO2 sensitivity and the projections of future warming get lowered once again, closer to 1 to 2 C per century with a smaller upper limit.

  19. Paul Matthews

    Looks like the actual temperature record and the recent studies you cited are telling us that CMIP5 model simulations overestimate warming, IOW the projected warming from the models is not occurring in real life.

    IPCC apparently does not wish to address this problem head on in AR5, but rather to hold to the AR4 party line that human-caused global warming represents a serious potential threat to humanity and our environment.

    As a result the CAGW debate has moved from being a politically motivated debate on the science supporting the premise of human-caused global warming to a purely political debate, no longer related to the science at all.

    This is unfortunate.

    Max

  20. If trends continued we’d be wearing bell-bottoms as wide as cow paddocks. What happens, you see, is the trend just stops. Nobody knows why. It goes away. It shuffles off to Buffalo. And there’s a different trend for a bit.

    Things come round again, just like you get a new version of The Locomotion every fifteen years of so. (I think we’re due now, actually.) But climate’s not like Real Estate, where the long term trend is probably up, but only if you wait.

    So people need to stop drawing those silly lines to indicate stuff that hasn’t happened. Really. Just stop it. If that’s science, then I’m Kylie Minogue.

  21. Dr. Curry, here are a couple for you.
    Jiang et. al., Evaluation of clouds and water vapor simulations in CMIP5 using NASA A-train satellite observations, JGR 2011JD017237.
    Cessna and Chapfer, CMIP5 and cloud structure, GRL 2012GC053153.
    Still getting both wrong. Still almost all biased to overstate water vapor feedback and understate cloud cooling.

  22. The graphs can not be compared one with another, each uses a different base period.

    Christy uses 1979-1983, IPCC leaked graph uses 1961-1990, RealClimate uses 1980-1999, and Hawkins uses the 1961-1990 that the IPCC used.

    (I liked bell bottoms, and they are coming back into style, amongst the fashion literati — my 30-something daughter wears them).

    • Kip Hansen

      It’s true that the graphs are not directly comparable due to different baseline periods.

      But they do have one thing in common: they all show that the climate models exaggerate projected warming.

      It looks to me that, starting with Hansen’s now-famous 1988 projection, all these projections were exaggerated by around 2:1, pointing to an estimate for 2xCO2 climate sensitivity also exaggerated by a factor of 2:1.

      Since latest observation-based estimates for CS are also around half of the previous AR4 estimates, it appears that this is where the problem lies.

      Let’s see if IPCC corrects this in AR5.

      Max

      • Manacker ==> We are unlikely to see any change in the Exec Summary…as you probably already realize. Catechisms don’t change readily.

        I do hold out hope that the science chapters will change to come more into alignment with actuality.

        CliSci has been an interesting Social Science interest of mine for 33 years now….fascinating to see it grow and change — transmogrifying into a world destroying monster, more recently beginning to fade back into a ‘once-scary myth’, and, soon I hope, to come back down to Earth as a real scientific field of study.

      • What a long, strange trip it’s been.
        =================

  23. One thing that people need to realise is that the warmists are stuck with everything the IPCC has written in previous Assessment Reports. Canadians may remember the Meech Lake Accords, which were described as a “seamless web”. If you unpick any of it, the whole thing unravels, and becomes worthless.
    This is the situation with the AR5. If the IPCC and the warmists admit that any tiny little bit of what has previously been written is wrong, then the whole House of Cards that is CAGW will come crashing down. They have to maintain the fiction that EVERYTHING that has occurred since the AR 4 was written, 100% supports everything that was written in the AR4 amd previous reports. Once the admission is made that one tiny little thing is wrong, then the process of dismantling CAGW will not stop.

    This is why I keep emphasising the certainty expressed in the SPMs. This, IMHO, is the main weakness in the warmist position.


    • Once the admission is made that one tiny little thing is wrong, then the process of dismantling CAGW will not stop.

      There is a spelling mistake on page 117.

      There you go.
      Fill your boots, you climate-soldier-of-fortune.

      • heinrich. sarc on/ I searched page 117, but could not find the spelling mistake. What is it ? sarc off/

      • The tiny thing, confidence in attribution, won’t fit through the eye of Ockham’s needle. Well, you know, swords to plowshares and all.
        ===================

      • Kim – or hockey sticks into cricket bats? “To play with a straight bat” is a nice olde English phrase, implying honesty, transparency and decency. Sometimes lost in this modern age of hockey sticks. :-)

      • The wicked are being soaked with water.
        ==========

    • Unless AR5 addresses at least the main three issues at hand fully and up-front it will be a waste of time, trees and money.

      (1) The climate sensitivity, with full reference to recent empirically-derived (not model) lower estimates.
      (2) The 21st Century lack of warming, now acknowledged (sotto voce and with excuses) by Pachauri.
      (3) The hotness of models.

      They’re probably all related, and I wouldn’t expect the IPCC to volte-face over any of them. But let them put their arguments for the ‘consensus’ status quo in writing (ie: wrt Annan, no chummy in-house polls or lying).

    • Delusional. There is no one tiny fact nor one big fact that can unravel what we know about the climate: GHGs warm the planet, they do not cool it.

      • Steven, you write “Delusional. There is no one tiny fact nor one big fact that can unravel what we know about the climate: GHGs warm the planet, they do not cool it”

        So what? I, for one, would never say that what you have stated is wrong. The question is, how much does additional the CO2 added to the atmosphere from current levels, warm the planet, and what are the characteristics of all the known and unknown natural factors which warm and cool the planet? And how do these considerations affect the certainty with which the IPCC states it’s conclusions in the SPMs of the AR4, and, potentially, the AR5?

      • “GHGs warm the planet”

        Except when they don’t. Check the squiggly lines.

        Andrew

      • k scott denison

        Steven Mosher | February 22, 2013 at 9:49 pm | Reply
        Delusional. There is no one tiny fact nor one big fact that can unravel what we know about the climate: GHGs warm the planet, they do not cool it.
        ——–
        Yep, we’ve heard it over and over… all other things being equal GHGs warm the planet. Too bad for this meme that all other things are never equal.

        If the feedbacks to increased GHGs are net positive, why hasn’t temperature ever runaway in the history of the earth?

      • “GHGs warm the planet”

        I’m going to help Steven Mosher out here and suggest that in the future he would be closer to correct if he stated: “GHGs can warm the planet.”

        Yes, a tradeoff from being more “effective” to more “accurate.”

        But that’s what science is.

        Andrew

      • I’ve seen an old(’60s) video of Stephen Schneider in which he was honest about his ignorance of the direction of climate. I thought he was more effective then than since, but critics, bah.
        =====================

      • Sorry, posted this response in the wrong place: http://judithcurry.com/2013/02/19/adapting-to-climate-change-challenges-and-opportunities-for-u-s-business-community/#comment-298007

        With additional first para:

        Myrrh | February 23, 2013 at 2:37 pm | Reply
        Steven Mosher | February 22, 2013 at 9:49 pm |Delusional. There is no one tiny fact nor one big fact that can unravel what we know about the climate: GHGs warm the planet, they do not cool it.

        Water cools the Earth, by 52°C. Or are you excluding water vapour as a greenhouse gas?

        Certainly the real greenhouse gases nitrogen and oxygen which make up around 98% of the atmosphere – this heavy voluminous thermal blanket keeps the Earth from going to the extremes of heat and cold, as does the Moon, and prevents the heat from the surface heated by the radiant heat direct from the Sun from escaping too quickly – without these greenhouse gases our Earth would be -18°C, with them but without water, the temps would be 67°C.

        AGWScienceFiction’s giving the description of thermal blanket to a trace gas is quite frankly, idiotic. It’s the great, heavy real gas blanket of nitrogen and oxygen weighing a ton on your shoulders which reduces heat loss to 67°C, the Water Cycle cools this down to 15°C.

        A clever con man has bamboozled you, by taking out the water cycle and the real gas role of nitrogen and oxygen under gravity.

        You can believe in their AGWSF Greenhouse Effect manufactured science fraud illusion if you want, but you’re believing in something that is physically impossible – a world without a real gas atmosphere and without the Water Cycle for a start. You can hardly expect those that do know real basic physics to take you seriously.

        However much you and your ilk bluster.

    • “They have to maintain the fiction that EVERYTHING that has occurred since the AR 4 was written, 100% supports everything that was written in the AR4 amd previous reports.” That’s William Connolley’s job!

  24. Dr Curry

    the climate has not yet decided if its going to be warmer or colder in the year 2100. So how do you model that?

    Wait, the IPCC have the answer

    “In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the
    long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.” IPCC
    From the 3rd IPCC report, Section 14.2.2.2 “The Climate System”, page 774”

  25. Captain Kangaroo

    ‘Lorenz was able to show that even for a simple set of nonlinear equations (1.1), the evolution of the solution could be changed by minute perturbations to the initial conditions, in other words, beyond a certain forecast lead time, there is no longer a single, deterministic solution and hence all forecasts must be treated as probabilistic. The fractionally dimensioned space occupied by the trajectories of the solutions of these nonlinear equations became known as the Lorenz attractor (figure 1), which suggests that nonlinear systems, such as the atmosphere, may exhibit regime-like structures that are, although fully deterministic, subject to abrupt and seemingly random change.’ http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1956/4751.full

    The members of the ‘opportunistc ensembles’ are chosen subjectively from a set of solutions whose range remains unexplored and unknown. It seems less a serious scientific endeavour than a game of pin the tail.

    On the other hand – the world is not warming for a decade or so hence at least.

    • Exactly Captain K

      so given that it is impossible, how stupid do you have to be to sign the cheques to pay those who claim to have crystal balls – no offence meant Gavin

      • Cheque writer: “Ok so you got the white coat and I see that you have an Apple with a bite out of it on that computer thingy that you are carrying, so you are not only clever but also cool, but before I sign the cheque, and you gotta bear in mind I never heard of Lorenz and I always thought Chaos Theory were a punk band, you do know what you’re doing here. Right?

        Modeller: “Yeah, we got it down straight. It’s like physics and that. And equations and that.”

        Cheque writer: “Well, that’s all very re-assuring. How much do you want?”

        Modeller: ”What shall we say? How does a couple of mill sound? Yeah that’s great. Two million dollars. Great. And don’t forget to sign. Thanks. Ok I’ll be slipping off then. Probably back in a month or two so don’t lose the cheque book!”

        Cheque writer (to himself): “What an awfully nice chap. And a lovely pony tail. Look forward to seeing him again soon.”

        Modeller (to himself): “Hope that pillock never looks at Table 2.11 from the Fourth Assessment report of the IPCC”

        Editor’s note: just to refresh everyone’s memory Table 2.11 sets out the uncertainty assessment of forcing agents. Listed below are the agents and the level of scientific understanding

        LLGHGs – high
        Stratospheric ozone – medium
        Tropospheric ozone – medium
        Stratospheric water vapour from CH4 – low
        Direct aerosol – medium to low
        Cloud albedo effect (all aerosols) – low
        Surface albedo (land use) – medium to low
        Surface albedo (BC aerosol on snow) – low
        Persistent linear contrails – low
        Solar irradiance – low
        Volcanic aerosol – low
        Stratospheric water vapour from causes other than CH4 oxidation – very low
        Tropospheric water vapour from irrigation – very low
        Aviation induced cirrus – very low
        Cosmic rays – very low
        Other surface effects – very low

  26. Whatever the way you use to male a comparison, I find really hard to hide that while we are at the lower end of the model range of outputs, the supposed anthropogenic forcing is at its maximum. How does it fits with the current estimates of climate sensibility is a mistery.

    • You’ve hit the nail on the head, and my thumb. Distracted by the mister male I thought of the Obladeeblahdah Richard Windsor. Wincing at the sensitivity of my opposed digit, I saw stars and a chasm dissonant with echoes of science in it.

      Good aim!
      ===========

    • There has to be lags in the system, possibly up to 30 years, regardless of the direction of causation, the observations as yet do not fit any of the climate models in use.

      • sure they do. Look at the individual realizations

      • I agree with PD. There are clearly decadal lags in the system, though I would say 30 years was pushing the envelope.

        What caught my attention however was “the observations as yet do not fit any of the climate models in use.” Are we talking about 10, 50 , or 300 models here? And does anyone beside PD claim this, and if so for how many models?

  27. Next the modellers will be making “CLIMATE STATEMENTS”, scary ones.

    Yes, I heard it this a.m. on the shuttle ride from my mechanics garage. The good old Canadian CBC announcer stated the we should stay tuned for a “WEATHER STATEMENT”, that’s correct you heard it here first a “WEATHER STATEMENT”. That’s right you to will be hearing your MSM announcer making “WEATHER STATEMENTS” NOT “weather reports”, ooooh sounds scary. The very mature driver of the shuttle gave a hoot and stated he couldn’t believe his ears.

    P.S. someone should tel Joe Bastardi to get with the latest climatology jargon.

  28. David Springer

    Chickens coming home to roost.

    Gonna be a real angry public if it keeps cooling. Who will pay?

  29. I wonder if they can use Mike’s Nature trick to hide the decline/pause in surface temperatures? They can’t allow the divergence between the empirical data and the created data to distract from the revealed truth of CAGW.

  30. Why does Climate Scientists forecast that earth is warming at a dangerous rate and why does the actual data not support this.

    The climate theory that they use is flawed. It is as simple as that.

  31. David Springer

    Roy Spencer yesterday

    http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/02/tropical-ssts-since-1998-latest-climate-models-warm-3x-too-fast/

    Compares models to observations for tropical SST through 2012. 35 CMIP5 models forecast 0.3C warming. Adjusted SST data (ENSO subtracted) show 0.1C while unadjusted data shows 0.0C.

    Interestingly Roy grudgingly includes my hypothesis as the third (of three) possible causes for why CMIP5 models got it so badly wrong.

    3) Increasing CO2 doesn’t cause a radiative warming influence (radiative forcing) of the surface and lower atmosphere.

    I’m only including that last one because, in science, just about anything is possible. But my current opinion is that the science on radiative forcing by increasing CO2 is pretty sound. The big uncertainty is how the system responds (feedbacks).

    Well “it’s possible” is progress. I’m glad to see he thinks it possible enough to mention it in the top three possibilities. Maybe more possible than he cares to admit. This is the first time I’ve seen him say it was possible. He’s just dismissed it out of hand in the past. Oops.

  32. The very inconvenient truth is that models have predicted (and keep predicting) a warming rate of +0.2°C/decade whereas observational data show a pause over the past 16 years, while CO2 concentration has increased by 10%…

    Indeed, models have never been validated and they are definitely falsified by comparison with observations.

    • Eric Ollivet

      Indeed, models have never been validated and they are definitely falsified by comparison with observations

      Yes. This is true.

      CO2 end 1997 = 363 ppmv
      CO2 end 2012 = 393 ppmv
      increase of 30 ppmv out of total human CO2 of 113 ppmv (26.5% of total)

      Theoretical warming at 2xCO2 ECS = 3.2C (IPCC AR4)

      = 3.2*ln(393/363) / ln(2) = 0.37C (theo warming from CO2 at equilibrium)
      Assume 0.17C (net) goes “into pipeline” = 0.2C warming from CO2 alone

      (checks with IPCC projected warming of 0.2C per decade)

      Question: how many more years of “no warming” will it take until everyone agrees that the model projections have been falsified?

      5 years?
      10 years?
      Never?

      Max

      • Trend since end of 1997:
        0.068C +- 0.147C/decade

        That’s not “no warming”. It fits your 0.13C/decade figure (0.2C over 14 years), plus that figure has large +- error bars too. No model would predict exactly 0.2C warming over 15 years.

      • Captain Kangaroo

        Most of the recent heat is cloud changes.

        http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view&current=tropicalcloud.png

        http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view&current=CERES_MODIS.gif

        The planet will cool futher as the cool Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation mode intensifies over another decade or more.

        The coolth continues unabated.

      • lolwot

        Get serious.

        You show that “actual” warming (Skeptical Science) since January 1998 was

        HadCRUT3 shows cooling of -0.008°C±0.147°C per decade

        HadCRUT4 shows warming of +0.039°C±0.138°C per decade

        (not +0.068°C±0.147°C per decade as you wrote).

        But IPCC (TAR) projected warming of +0.225°C±0.075°C per decade

        And IPCC (AR4 WGI SPM) projected:

        For the next two decades, a warming of about 0.2°C per decade is projected for a range of SRES emission scenarios. Even if the concentration of all greenhouse gases and aerosols had been kept constant at 2000 levels, a further warming of about 0.1°C per decade would be expected.

        Ouch!

        The GHG emissions rose as projected, but the temperature did not rise “as expected”, because the model-simulated warming projections were obviously exaggerated.

        (Pssst, lolwot, in case you missed it, that’s what this post is all about.)

        Don’t be a “denier”.

        Max

      • Max, you’ve moved the goalposts. Your original claim was that 0.2C warming over 14 years. The data is compatible with this.

        You failed to apply any kind of uncertainty ranges to the data (even the climate sensitivity). If you do you’ll find they overlap.

        GISTEMP shows +0.068°C±0.147°C per decade and it’s scientifically superior to HadCRUT4 (the organization behind HadCRUT being tainted by climategate remember?)

      • k scott denison

        lolwot, I have a car I’d like to sell you. It’s got a big engine, 3.2 +/- 7.0 liters. You interested?

      • Manaker lets see if we can get the math done right.

        Additional Watts = 5.35ln(393/363) = .42 Watts
        Climate sensitivity from (1.5/3.7) to (4.5/3.7)
        or .4 to 1.2
        Expected warming at equillibrium: .16C to .5C
        Expected transient warming: maybe .08C to .25C
        Thats if all other forcings net to zero.
        That is. If sensitivity is at the low end of the IPCC range ( near the plank figure of .37), then C02 from 363to 393 puts maybe .08C to 1.6C into
        the pipe where it sits for a decade or more. Very hard to see that when it comes out. Especially if other forcing is changing.

        The problem is you cant falsify a equillibrium estimate over a transient time frame.
        Put another way. the claim you should focus on is NOT the claim that ECS is 3. But rather, focus on the claims about transient, Or focus on the claim that ECS can’t be lower than say 1.5 or 1.2.
        The claims about “mean” sensitivity are really squishy claims. So focus on the boundary claim. Sensitivity cant be lower than X. Put another way, you dont falsify the “mean” figure for ECS, the best you can do is show the tails are wrong.

        The other problem is you have to hold other forcings constant.
        So, if all .08C of warming goes into the pipeline and it 15 years long, you probably have to wait 30 years or more, assuming all other forcing stays constant, before you can detect the case required to reject the boundary claim. 15 more years of cooling ( assuming all other forcings constant ) just means the distribution of sensitivity shifts to the left.. as it should.
        30 more years will shift it further left.
        the skeptical case is Proven when the right hand tail is below 1.5 per doubling.

      • errata. .08C to .16 into the pipe

      • Mosher, The 1.5 to 4.5 is what is in question. So the math looks better with 1C to 3C with whatever confidence interval you can dream up. 4.5 was so 90s :)

      • Steven Mosher

        Yeah. If you start with a 2xCO2 equilibrium climate sensitivity of 1.5C to 4.5C, that’s what you get.

        But I think it’s better to start with the observed data and try to work out what the 2xCO2 ECS really is (as I did).

        IPCC AR4 tells us that 0.6C is still “in the magic pipeline” based on CO2 increasing from a “pre-industrial” 280 ppmv to 379 ppmv in 2005. And this is based on the 2xCO2 ECS value as assumed by the climate models cited by IPCC, or a mean value of 3.2C.

        Based on latest data it appears that this 2xCO2 ECS estimate is too high (apparently by a factor of around 2).

        So the “pipeline” estimate is also too high.

        The whole “pipeline” argument itself is based on some rather dicey circular logic:

        – our models tell us we should have seen warming of “X” since year “YYYY”.

        – the record shows us we have only seen warming of “Z”

        – therefore “X-Z” is still hiding “in the pipeline” waiting for “equilibrium”

        Ouch!

        But let’s accept the concept and simply correct the estimated amount of warming “in the pipeline” to correspond with the lower observed 2xCO2 climate sensitivity.

        And the figures tempterrain cited result in a 2xCO2 ECS of around 1.5C (similar to the latest observation-based estimates out there).

        Max

        PS When you “correct” someone else’s arithmetic, it’s best to start with what you want to correct, pointing out the specific errors you can identify. Just starting with a brand new calculation is simply a side track, Mosh.

      • Steven Mosher

        My bad.

        Thought you had responded to another post to tempterrain where I estimated the 2xCO2 ECS based on data he had supplied on past warming.

        Sorry.

        Only comment I would have is the same captdallas: the 4.5C end of the ECS range appears to be a thing of the past and fat tails plus error bars that exceed the estimate itself leave me cold (might as well just say “I don’t know”).

        Max

  33. Lets say you have a pair of dice and 11 climate models.

    One model predicts 2 and one predicts 3 and one predicts 4 all the way up to 12.

    And when the dice rolls and it comes up 1 and 2 and 3, the dice modelers say that observed data falls within the ensemble of models even though the data is lower than almost all the individual models.

    Sane people would say the models are a joke.

  34. I have no credentials.I find it fascinating to compare (contrast?) what the forecast models say about the next several days with what actually happens.

    As I learned along with learning to fly, long ago (no airplanes were NOT coal-fired then), what you see now has go a pretty good shot at being right, what the observer where you are going said last hour is believable, the 4-hour and 8-hour forecasts might be useful, the rest is reading tea leaves.

    In Southern California, what happened yesterday in Portland was some time useful info.

    • The first clue we’ve all been schrooled by academia should be that the findings of the climatists can never be replicated. And, all of the discoveries of government scientists always conveniently serve their interests —i.e., consolidation of more power and more taxes to pay for more votes. Government scientists falsely claim a consensus of opinion and the mainstream media never calls them on it. Rather the media will give over its front pages to a single study and sensationalize the findings and then when the research is soon debunked and after we learn the findings were of questionable significance from the get-go, the mainstream media is never there to follow-up on the consequences of the misrepresentation they participated in and gave wings to — and, there is never a mention of the the damage that was done to truth, to the credibility of science and the undermining of critical thinking or the use of the research by government to further undermine society and the culture for political purposes.

  35. You can forget about dodgy models. The UN climate chief, Dr Rajendra Pachauri has just acknowledged in Melbourne a 17 year pause in global temperature rise, confirmed recently by Britain’s Met Office.

    Dr Pachauri also said “People have a right to quwestion these things and science only thrives as a result of questioning”

    This seems to be a complete turnaround for the IPCC. We can only hope that we are now on a better path for the science

    • Alexander Biggs

      This seems to be a complete turnaround for the IPCC. We can only hope that we are now on a better path for the science.

      The proof will be whether or not IPCC acknowledge this “lack of warming” (and its earlier exaggerated warming forecast, along with the recent lower observation-based estimates for 2xCO2 equilibrium climate sensitivity and the resulting lower warming projections for the future.

      Although Pachauri gives lip service to the “lack of warming”, I believe IPCC is not likely to back off from its warming forecasts of several degrees C above 2000 values by 2100, rather than a bit more than 1C, based on the latest ECS estimates.

      But we shall see.

      Max

      • The IPCC will probably ask you to accept that natural variations like PDO, solar and lack of large El Ninos also have had an effect. It is kind of the other way round from usual in the previous decade where the “skeptics” promoted these things as important decadal effects.

      • Jim D

        What you have just suggested as a rationalization for IPCC for the lack of warming despite unabated GHG emissions is a “slippery slope”.

        It opens the following dilemma:

        If “natural factors” were strong enough to overwhelm a very strong GH warming signal over the past 12-15 years, could it not be that the same “natural factors” (in reverse) played a much larger role in past warming than just 7% of the total forcing, as estimated by IPCC?

        It seems to me that you can’t have it both ways, Jim D.

        Either natural factors play a major role (equivalent to that of net anthropogenic forcing) or they do not.

        Max

      • manacker, you are missing that everyone says the natural factors are
        cyclic and can’t lead to a net change over a long period (except perhaps
        if the sun goes into a long minimum that decreases temperatures by
        up to 0.5 degrees below what AGW increases them by). What is down now, is up later.

      • Captain Kangaroo

        These ‘natural factors’ have decadal to miilennial variability – I have shown several times millennial proxies.

      • Jim D

        “Natural factors are cyclic”.

        Sure.

        But how long are these natural cycles?

        The 30-year warming/cooling cycles are quite apparent in the modern temperature record, but we know (Roman Optimum, Dark Ages, MWP, LIA, CWP) that there are also longer cycles at work, for which we do not really understand the mechanisms.

        These could well have played a major role in the warming experienced since pre-industrial times, although IPCC only attributed 7% of this warming to natural forcing with the rest from anthropogenic factors.

        The point is simply: if one only attributes only 7% of all the warming since 1750 to natural factors it does not make sense to blame these same natural factors for completely overwhelming strong anthropogenic forcing over the past 10-15 years, does it?

        You can’t have it both ways, Jim, no matter how much you try to rationalize it.

        Max

      • No, that is it, but is no longer free on the internet. You have to be a subscriber.

        To be fair the the Australian has always been critical of global warming science.

  36. There are some ENSO model predictions and results here.
    Given that the Nino3-4 anomaly range is about +- 2 degrees
    most of the models are frequently wildly out in 3 or 4 months.
    The best appears to be the ESSIC Intermed. Coupled model.
    The site has model predictions going back to 2002 so you have to admire their perseverance if not their expert forecasting ability.

  37. IPCC’s multi-model mean for 2012 is about 0.64 deg C.

    IPCC multi-model compared to observation => http://bit.ly/SPzOHn

    The observation gives only 0.4 deg C. IPCC’s value is 0.24 deg C greater than the observation. This is a difference of 2.4 sigma (standard deviation of the random GMST is about 0.1 deg C) is outside the probability of 99.18%. With IPCC’s 0.2 deg C per decade warming but no warming in the observed data in the next five years will take IPCC’s models in the impossible range, and then they must admit their 0.2 deg C per decade warming projection was wrong.

    • A SCIENTIST

      “As he formulates his final theory, the scientist subjects it to intensive criticism. Seeking to make it as useful as possible, he asks himself: Is this proposed law universal throughout the extent of space and the passage of time? Does it lead anywhere? Does it predict one state of affairs as arising out of another? Can it be transposed from one frame of reference to another and still remain valid? And finally, because of his innate passion for orderliness, his aesthetic appreciation of things which are neat and fitting, he asks: Is this theory as elegant as possible? Could I formulate it more succinctly?

      Now comes the moment of verification and truth: testing the theory back against protocol experience to establish its validity. If it is not a trivial theory, it suggests the existence of unknown facts which can be verified by further experiment. An expedition may go to Africa to watch an eclipse and find out if starlight really does bend relatively as it passes the edge of the sun. After a Maxwell and his theory of electro-magnetism come a Hertz looking for radio waves and a Marconi building a radio set. If the theoretical predictions do not fit in with observable facts, then the theorist has to forget his disappointment and start all over again. This is the stern discipline which keeps science sound and rigorously honest.

      If a theory survives all tests and is accepted into the canon of scientific law, it becomes a fact in its own right and a foundation for higher spires of thought. Abstract though it may be, a theory which has been proved can suggest new hi-fl sets or hybrid cattle just as surely as do experiments with electricity or stock-breeding. It serves as a starting point for new theories just as surely as any experience on the plane of protocols. Galileo’s formula for the increasing speed at which a body falls freely near the surface of the earth became a single example of Newton’s law of gravitation. Newton’s law, in turn, became a single special case in Einstein’s theory that gravitation is a manifestation of the geometry of space and time. At this moment some child in a hamlet somewhere may be preparing himself for the work of constructing a “unified field theory” of both atom and cosmos, in which Einstein’s sweeping concepts of relativity will appear as mere details.”

      The Scientist
      Life Science Library
      By Henry Margenau, David Bergamini
      And the Editors of LIFE
      1966

      • Girma

        Interesting from your chart is that the actual temperature anomaly is below the “commitment” value (based on no further GHG emissions after 2000) – yet human GHG emissions have continued unabated since 2000 and concentrations have reached new record levels.

        Looks like the much touted “CO2 control knob” has lost its oomph.

        Max

  38. When you compare the assumptions used by Dr. Ioannidis (discussed in the previous topic) to what we see in climate science, the reliability of global warming research can be expected to be far worse and so it is. The bias of Western AGW researchers isn’t a tendency it’s a given so climate researchers will come up with wrong findings all of the time not just most of the time. And, among all of the possible the motivations the climatists are actually being paid out of the limitless purse of the government and academia’s promise of lifetime tenure to make evidence and models dance to any tune they wish to play and accordingly, the climatists will always succeed in “proving wrong theories right,” whatever it takes.

  39. Guys: It was Damocles who had the sword hanging over his head. NOT DamAcles.

  40. Well Judy, the way these things are done in other fields is to examine the difference plot. If the plot of (real-model) is information free, then you have captured a noisy series perfectly. A slope means that you have a divergence and an oscillation means you have missed an oscillation.
    it is clear that the data presented in your first figure would show a positive slop; meaning that all the models are running hot. They are running hot by about 1.4 degrees per century.

  41. Climate modellers in cloud towers
    spinning away the tenured hours,
    don’t see what’s goin’ down
    …outside their towers.

  42. For the next climate spin, mesdames et messieurs, faites vos jeux.

  43. MIchael Mann, Michael Mann, let down what’s left of your golden hair.

  44. Lol pokerguy, no rescue by Prince Charming fer Michael Mann.
    He’ll jest hav ter try an’ fly away on his hocky stick, whoosh.

    • Lol, Beth. I even made myself laugh.. Your hockystick witches broom brought another major guffaw. If you can’t beat ’em, then at least laugh at them -)

  45. Say, PD, ) have no wish ter deceive, enough con-fusion already.
    Was on me niece’s com-put-ah.
    Jest who is the red and who is the black, CK?

  46. Heinrich

    The Meehl et al. study you cited states:

    “The late-twentieth-century warming can only be reproduced in the model if anthropogenic forcing (dominated by GHGs) is included, while the” [statistically indistinguishable] “early twentieth-century warming requires the inclusion of natural forcings in the model (mostly solar).”

    Huh? Howdat? (Looks like kind of a forced fit rationalization to me.)

    And then there is the unfounded rationalization to cover the 30-year cycle of slight cooling in between with human aerosols.

    Gimme a break, heinrich.

    This is pretty weak stuff.

    Have you got something better or is that all?

    Max

  47. I’m really impressed at the level of excitement on this thread. It’s easily on a par with the Anastassia Makarieva thread a month ago, despite having nowhere near as many comments thus far.

    However this whole thread seems to be overlooking a basic fact about global warming that is best illustrated with these two graphs at WoodForTrees.

    The first one covers the 70 years from 1870 to 1940, namely 1870-1940.

    What we see here is that the odd decades (1870s, 1890s, 1910s, etc.) trend up while the even decades (1880s, 1900s, 1920s, etc.) trend down, relative to each other.

    The odds of this happening for seven consecutive decades is one in 2^(7-1) = 64. (Subtract 1 from 7 because the trend of the first of the seven decades is what the remaining 6 decades are being compared with.)

    Well, somewhat impressive odds but a 1/64 probability could perfectly well have happened so why is this so important?

    To answer this, look at the next seven decades, from 1940 to 2010, namely the second half of the 140 years.

    The next seven decades repeats this phenomenon!

    (1980-1990 doesn’t sag as much as the other even decades did because (i) that was when the huge decline in the AMO reversed and (ii) CO2-induced global warming really started to pick up then.)

    The odds of this perfect alternation happening are 1/8192. Those are crazy odds. This is obviously more than mere chance.

    But how is this relevant to the decade 2010-2020?

    Easy: if that decade follows the pattern of the preceding 14 decades, it will strongly reverse the relatively flat (if not exactly zero) trend of 2000-2010.

    (By cherry-picking the exact period one can make the trend-line slope either up or down; we’ve seen endless examples of this on Climate Etc. This is why I’ve been sticking to exactly 120-month periods starting with years ending in 0, which is what you get with e.g. From: 2000, To: 2010, using WoodForTrees’ convention as to what those limits mean.)

    Why is this alternation from one decade to the next happening? One suspect is the sunspot cycle, which since 1870 has been very close to a 10-year period. Each cycle the magnetic polarity of the sunspots reverses, which for reasons so far unexplained seems to impact global temperature. Svensmark has gained some notoriety for proposing cosmic rays as the catalyst, but the jury is still out on that one.

    Let’s see how this all pans out on January 1, 2020. I plan to be around then.

    • Vaughan Pratt

      Your statistical juggling comes up with a reversal of 2001-2010 cooling in the period 2011-2020.

      Well, you’ve got the first two years of this period with continued slight cooling, so the next 8 years are already starting off behind the 8-ball.

      (I’d guess that the Chief may be closer to right in saying that the current :lack of warming” will last another one to three decades.)

      But who knows what will happen?

      Max

      • @manacker: Your statistical juggling comes up with a reversal of 2001-2010 cooling in the period 2011-2020.

        Excellent point, very observant of you.

        The same thing happened for the even decade 1920-1930, and again for 1980-1990. In all three cases they were on a steep upward slope that overwhelmed the effect to the extent of making it false that every even decade cools.

        But that’s not what I’m claiming. What is true is that the slope of every even decade is less than that of each of the two odd decades on either side. Even 1980-1990 has a slope of 0.0067 degrees per year while for 1970-1980 it is 0.0087, a small difference that is hard to see by eye.

        (That the difference is so small can be explained by the fact that the the AMO bent the other way between those two decades.)

        Well, you’ve got the first two years of this period with continued slight cooling, so the next 8 years are already starting off behind the 8-ball.

        Now that the data for 2012 is in we actually have three years: the WoodForTrees definition of 2000-2013 includes 2000 but excludes 2013.

        For the period 1870 to 1933 the trend for the first three years of each decade correctly predicted the whole decade 5 out of 7 times (1870-73 and 1890-93 went down instead of up). This is somewhat better than chance.

        For 1940 to 2013 there were 3 wrong predictions out of 8 decades.

        But you may be right that 2010-2020 will cool. If it warmed then 1940-2020 would have 4 wrong predictions out of 8 decades. That’s no better than chance. But that’s very unlikely because one would expect some correlation between the whole decade and its first three years. How’s that for a convincing proof? ;)

        The other possibility is that the first three years simply aren’t a good predictor of the whole decade.

        (I’d guess that the Chief may be closer to right in saying that the current :lack of warming” will last another one to three decades.)

        Assuming the Keeling curve continues to curve more steeply upwards every decade, 15 more years of cooling with no obvious explanation (such as stratospheric dust kicked up by an asteroid hit) would convince me that CO2 does not have a significant impact on global temperature. (For 30 more years of cooling to convince me I’d have to live that long, which is very unlikely.)

        It would then just be an extraordinary coincidence that the planet got so hot right when the Arrhenius theory predicted it should. People would be relieved that Arrhenius turned out to be wrong.

      • David L. Hagen

        Vaughan Pratt
        Re: “15 more years of cooling with no obvious explanation (such as stratospheric dust kicked up by an asteroid hit) would convince me that CO2 does not have a significant impact on global temperature. ”
        “Significant impact” only means statistically significant distinguishable from the null hypothesis of natural long term warming from the Little Ice Age superimposed with oscillation such as the~60 year PDO. e.g. > 5% of total.

        The major scientific dispute is much more IPCC’s claim of Dangerous Anthropogenic Globa Warming (DAGW) that claims majority impact of CO2 greater than a null hypothesis of minor anthropogenic CO2 warming on top of natural warming. e.g distinguish CO2 warming is > 50% of total warming vs CO2 warming is 5% to 50% of total warming.

        This is epitomized by Roy Spencer’s Tropical SSTs Since 1998: Latest Climate Models Warm 3x Too fast February 21st, 2013

        The DAGW challenge is to explain why the IPCC CIMP5 models are 3x off where the Data Spencer shows much better fits the first challenge of distinguishing minor CO2 impact on top of natural warming and variation, vs statistically indistinguishable CO2 impact in natural warming and variation.

    • David Springer

      The difference in trend slope between some consecutive decades is slim to none while in others goes from large negative to large positive. The definition of “reversal” in this context is thus so loose as to lose all meaning. It doesn’t even rise to level of interesting much less being predictive. Moreover, it appears rather broken so far with a precipitous down trend in the first three years of the current decade which, according to your odd/even hypothesis, is supposed to be an up trend decade.

      http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1990/to:2000/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2000/to:2010/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2010/trend

      What you see in those 23 years is part of a sine wave with a period of about 60 years with the peak amplitude in the mid 2000-2010 decade and well into the descending phase thereafter. I noticed the fit to a 60-year sine wave in 2005 shortly after I became interested in the global warmning narrative and predicted at the time the crest and subsequent decline should becoming along real soon. And indeed it did. I’m batting 1000 so far. You?

    • David Springer

      By the way, it smacks of intellectual dishonesty to trim the period 1850-1870 from your graph.

      http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1850/to:1860/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1860/to:1870/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1870/to:1880/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1880/to:1890/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1890/to:1900/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1900/to:1910/trend

      The reason appears obvious. Your odd/even decade hypothesis doesn’t work for 1860-1800 as the two decades have identical sharply positive trends.

      Can you explain why you dropped those first two decades other than intellectual dishonesty?

      • David Springer

        type correction: “1860 – 1800” above should read “1860 – 1880”

      • Can you explain why you dropped those first two decades other than intellectual dishonesty?

        I believe you have that backwards. The calendar decadal alignment wasn’t true prior to 1870, so it would be dishonest of me to claim it was.

        The most likely cause of the effect is the magnetic component of the solar cycle, which is on a cycle that is slightly longer than 20 years, about 20.6 over the past century. By coincidence it drifted into phase with the calendar decades during the 20th century. By the middle of this century it should be well out of phase, just as it was prior to 1870.

        This is not the same thing as saying that this roughly-two-decade-period oscillation is dying down, only that it drifts in and out of phase with calendar decades. Also it’s only quasiperiodic, the period tends to vary. The Central England Temperature, CET, goes back to 1659 and prior to the industrial revolution the oscillation is clearly visible in the green curve in this plot. (The industrial revolution hit the Central England climate well before it hit the rest of the globe, obscuring the oscillation after about 1850, a good reason for not using CET as a proxy for 20th century global temperature. The global temperature, HadCRUT3, gives a clearer picture (orange curve) for the 20th century after detrending (i.e. subtracting) global warming and ocean oscillations.)

      • David Springer

        You’re prevaricating. I would certainly agree to the drift but drift moves the two signals (for want of a better word even/odd decades can be viewed as a square wave signal) slowly out of phase. It wasn’t a little out of phase 1850-1870 it was completely absent – two consecutive decades with very strong warming trends. The square wave skipped a beat. That’s not drift. In the rest of the decades the square wave is barely discernable in too many instances i.e. it very nearly skips a beat. Drift might account for a few of those but it’s a stretch to say all of them
        because and the discontinuities are too great from one decade to the next.

        At any rate it’s proven, inasmuch as the temperature record is accurate in the mid-19th century, that there can be consecutive decades with no change in trend. So out of 16 consecutive decades we find at least a few instances where two steep consecutive slopes have the same polarity and approximately the same slope. Therefore the decade we’re in now not falling outside the pattern is not very unusual.

        Try to focus on the main point of this article. The pause in warming extending beyond 15 years falls outside the 95% confidence interval which is indicative of a serious flaw in the assumptions underlying the confidence. Adding insult to injury the failed prediction failed on the low side of the projected warming i.e. there’s less warming than predicted not more which makes certain skeptics such as myself the ones who made the correct predictions. Maybe we just got lucky but on the other hand maybe we’re just better analysts.

      • @VP: Also it’s only quasiperiodic, the period tends to vary.

        @DS: I would certainly agree to the drift but drift moves the two signals (for want of a better word even/odd decades can be viewed as a square wave signal) slowly out of phase. It wasn’t a little out of phase 1850-1870 it was completely absent – two consecutive decades with very strong warming trends. The square wave skipped a beat. That’s not drift.

        As I said, the period tends to vary. If one cycle has a 25-year period, which seems to be what happened in that case, that’s enough to make the effect completely vanish prior to 1870 because it corresponds to a quarter-cycle phase shift (a half-cycle shift would have kept the effect but reversed the parity). When that happens the trend in those two decades will be that of the ocean oscillations, which declined in 1850-1860 and then increased in 1860-1870.

        @DS: You’re prevaricating.

        We see this in the media all the time. Whenever something unexpected or incomprehensible happens fingers are pointed and cries of “Liar!” are heard.

        In this case I’d guess the latter.

    • Vaughan, the Earth has a 23.5 degree tilt relative its orbit with more heat capacity in the SH than the NH. The “thermal equator” wrt the Sun is below the physical equator. The “thermal equator” wrt the atmosphere is above the physical equator. That causes your SAW and lag.

      So if you take the GISS LOTI 24S-44S regional band as your input and 24N to equ as your output, using RMS, since it is power with a “wiggle” after all, you would find a 4 to 6 year lag in transfer of energy from the south to the north. That would be a 4 to 6 year lag amplifying a 10 to 12 year cycle in the power supply.

      http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2013/02/battle-of-thermal-equators.html

      So since solar forcing likely has some significant influence on your SAW and lag, do ya think the prospects of a longer than normal solar minimum might impact your “prediction”?

    • VP very interesting analysis. What you have described seems to me to be while negative feedbacks have been occurring each odd decade since 1870, positive feedbacks in the even decades have been predominating, causing an overall upward trend.

      The latter two decades don’t show this phenomenon as much as the previous ones back to 1870 and the current odd decade has had a couple of flat years temperature wise so far.

      My bet is that the AGW hypothesis will by then be well and truly falsified and that CO2 is not a dangerous substance in an open system such as that we have in the troposphere.

      I too expect to be around in 2020 and look forward to VP and the other AGW folk shouting everyone their favourite tipple. Mine will be a glass of Australian red, preferably from a bottle in the $50-$70 range.

      • A comic interpretation, Peter Davies. You should be talking about natural variations rather than the actual feedback changing. Feedback is something that is relatively steady.

      • The whole exercise was comic JD. VP was not positing that the odd/even decadel switching was ever based on reality (apart from already known decadel solar oscilllations) because even an non scientist like me can see that time itself has no influence on climate.

      • I would say that natural variability can give precisely the kind of decadal behavior that VP was talking about. It is very easy for the ocean circulation to have this kind of variability that cancels on the longer term. Even some “skeptics” have in the past pointed to ocean variability, but are not doing so at the moment for some reason.

    • Brandon Shollenberger

      How in the world do you conclude there are even odds for which direction the next trend lean toward? That’s wrong on basic mathematical and physical grounds.

      Anyway, if you want to examine something like this, why take point estimates? You’re effectively just smoothing the data and taking non-overlapping samples. Whether or not one believes this form of smoothing is appropriate/meaningful, it’s much more informative to look at the entire smoothed series than to look at less than one percent of it.

      I get WoodForTrees doesn’t make that practical, but it only took me six lines of code to generate this graph. It applies the exact same smooth you used, but it shows the entire resulting series. As an added bonus, it even covers the data you excluded at either end of the series.

      • @BS: How in the world do you conclude there are even odds for which direction the next trend lean toward? That’s wrong on basic mathematical and physical grounds.

        Agreed. One would expect the next trend to be more likely to agree with its predecessor, at least slightly.

        But taking that into account makes the observed alternation even more improbable than 1/8192, not less.

        Anyway, if you want to examine something like this, why take point estimates? You’re effectively just smoothing the data and taking non-overlapping samples. Whether or not one believes this form of smoothing is appropriate/meaningful, it’s much more informative to look at the entire smoothed series than to look at less than one percent of it.

        Agreed again. But that’s how I noticed the effect in the first place. After subtracting the ocean oscillations and expected contribution of radiative forcing and then filtering out everything with period 11 years and shorter, what remained was the upper curve in this graph. A year after I’d done this (essentially that curve was in my 2011 AGU presentation) I noticed the excellent alignment with calendar decades and wondered whether this oscillation affected the trend of individual decades. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it did so between 1870 and now in a way that could be demonstrated easily with WoodForTrees.

        Of course the calendar alignment won’t keep up, but the oscillation seems to be of long standing as it can seen even in the 17th century, starting 350 years ago, as shown in the green CET curve here. More details in my reply above to David Springer.

        I get WoodForTrees doesn’t make that practical, but it only took me six lines of code to generate this graph.

        There’s a lot of ENSO and TSI type noise in your graph that a few more lines of code could have removed.

        It applies the exact same smooth you used

        While I’m not sure what that means, I’m guessing that you fitted a trend line to every 10-year window, not just the 16 calendar decades, and plotted their slopes. That’s why you’re seeing so much noise: that’s not a great filter for extracting a 20-year oscillation from the noise.

      • Brandon Shollenberger

        Vaughan Pratt:

        Agreed. One would expect the next trend to be more likely to agree with its predecessor, at least slightly.

        But taking that into account makes the observed alternation even more improbable than 1/8192, not less.

        Huh? Even if we accept your claim about what we’d expect (I don’t as it depends on the autocorrelation structure), I don’t see how we would reach the conclusion you reach. Saying we expect results to be similar to each other says nothing about which side of a result the next point will land on. Any basic random walk shows that.

        Unless you’re limiting yourself to particular autocorrelation structures or imposing boundary functions, your conclusions seem unsupportable. Seeing as you haven’t said you’re doing either… I can’t agree with you.

        There’s a lot of ENSO and TSI type noise in your graph that a few more lines of code could have removed.

        I’m not sure why you’d say that. I was showing your approach, not creating one of my own. I can’t think of a reason I’d expand your approach by adding in debatable steps in order to display the results one gets with your approach.

        While I’m not sure what that means, I’m guessing that you fitted a trend line to every 10-year window, not just the 16 calendar decades, and plotted their slopes. That’s why you’re seeing so much noise: that’s not a great filter for extracting a 20-year oscillation from the noise.

        I don’t see how else you could have interpreted my remark, but yes, that is what I did. As for how good or bad it is, you should take that up with yourself. You’re the one who created it. I just showed it in its entirety. If the results you showed provide insight, the graph I made should provide even more.

        If the graph I showed has “so much noise,” all that does is call your approach into question.

      • Captain Kangaroo

        TLet me be controversial. There is of course no direct correspondence with any solar phenomenon.

        http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_solar_cycles
        http://s1114.photobucket.com/albums/k538/Chief_Hydrologist/?action=view&current=Lockwoodtopdownmodulation_zps5bf0563e.jpg

        Looking for one is a waste of time. This is because the energies of the solar signal cascade through terrestrial systems captured in terms of indices of ocean and atmosphere which in turn modulate albedo and the energy budget of the planet. Solar periodicities are considerably modifed within the climate system. The more obvious changes in surface temperature, hydrology, biology, etc, follow the ocean indices.

        The current ocean conditions suggest a great deal about temperature and rainfall over the next decade or so.

      • @BS: Huh? Even if we accept your claim about what we’d expect (I don’t as it depends on the autocorrelation structure), I don’t see how we would reach the conclusion you reach. Saying we expect results to be similar to each other says nothing about which side of a result the next point will land on. Any basic random walk shows that.

        I fully agree. What you’re pointing out (very reasonably) here would seem to strongly support the idea that tossing a coin 14 times and getting a perfect heads-tail alternation every time ought to be highly improbable. Why do you believe otherwise?

        If the graph I showed has “so much noise,” all that does is call your approach into question.

        That would be a fair criticism if your method of analysis bore the slightest resemblance to mine. Since it doesn’t, all that does is to call your approach into question. You made no attempt whatsoever to suppress the considerable high frequency noise in HadCRUT3.

        “My approach” was to carefully filter out noise from irrelevant octaves in order to produce a reasonably smooth picture of the 20-year period oscillation.

        As far as the even-odd decades are concerned, I merely caricatured this picture with the point that, by chance, during the 20th century this oscillation was well synchronized with the calendar decades. That caricature holds neither of the first half of the 19th century nor of the second half of the 21st century, due to the inevitable drift of the 10.3 year solar cycle.

        You are trying to make far too much out of a simple caricature.

      • Brandon Shollenberger

        Vaughan Pratt:

        I fully agree. What you’re pointing out (very reasonably) here would seem to strongly support the idea that tossing a coin 14 times and getting a perfect heads-tail alternation every time ought to be highly improbable.

        All that excerpt said is you were (seemingly) wrong on one specific point. Specifically, I said a certain trait gives us no predictive information. This was the exact opposite of what you said about that trait. I can’t see anything in the quoted portion of comment that would “strongly support” that idea.

        Why do you believe otherwise?

        If I were married, I’d tell you if I had stopped beating my wife yet. Since I’m not, I’ll just point out I never said anything about how probable I think that pattern is. I’ve said your 1/8192 value is wrong because it was calculated in an inappropriate manner, but that’s it.

        That would be a fair criticism if your method of analysis bore the slightest resemblance to mine. Since it doesn’t, all that does is to call your approach into question. You made no attempt whatsoever to suppress the considerable high frequency noise in HadCRUT3.

        What in the world are you talking about? You posted a link to a couple graphs that showed non-overlapping point estimates from a smooth. I posted a graph showing all point estimates for the smooth. Not only does my “method of analysis” bear “the slightest resemblence” to yours, it is identical.

        The fact you’ve used a different method elsewhere doesn’t magically make the method you used here stop being what it is.

        You are trying to make far too much out of a simple caricature.

        You’ve said several different things about probabilities relating to the “simple caricature” that seem to be baseless, if not false. You shouldn’t be surprised I disputed them. You certainly should think I am “trying to make far too much” of anything when all I’ve done is try to get you to either explain or retract statements that seem wrong.

      • Brandon Shollenberger

        Now I’m considering what would happen if one created a series weighted toward a central value that had notable autocorrelation. I think it’d basically just be a tightly bounded Gaussian random walk. Assuming that’s right, I think it’d be a fair model for the non-deterministic portion of the temperature signal.

        (If that’s the case, it’d be difficult to imagine how one could extract oscillations from the signal as such can be generated by the noise structure.)

      • While I (believe I) understand the points you’re making, I would venture to say you don’t understand the points I’m making against them. I could try harder to make my points clearer, but it seems to me that at the rate we’re going this won’t get us even one iota closer to a mutual understanding.

        I therefore agree with you that you disagree with me, and propose to leave it at that unless you have a more constructive suggestion as to how to move forward.

      • Brandon Shollenberger

        Vaughan Pratt, I get what you said before our exchange started. I understand why you said what you said about the decadal trends and the apparent cycle within them.

        I therefore agree with you that you disagree with me, and propose to leave it at that unless you have a more constructive suggestion as to how to move forward.

        I disagree with two things you’ve said. First:

        Well, somewhat impressive odds but a 1/64 probability could perfectly well have happened so why is this so important?

        The odds of this perfect alternation happening are 1/8192. Those are crazy odds. This is obviously more than mere chance.

        I disagree with your stated probability. I don’t think it’s appropriate to treat the odds as a 50/50 coin flip. This isn’t a problem as you’ve acknowledged those probability calculations are inaccurate. On that much, we agree. We agree your initial comment used unrealistic assumptions for its probability calculations. Which brings us to the second point:

        Agreed. One would expect the next trend to be more likely to agree with its predecessor, at least slightly.

        But taking that into account makes the observed alternation even more improbable than 1/8192, not less.

        I don’t get this argument. I have no idea what your basis for it is. You stated it as fact with no explanation. It could be you’re right, but without any explanation, I have no idea why you would be. My instinct is that you’re wrong, but I could just be missing some reason you didn’t explain. That’s it. As far as what you said in your original comment, that’s the only point we disagree on. For the central point, we agree on everything except I don’t see how you justify that one claim.

        Aside from that, our disagreements lie on points unrelated to what started this exchange. As far as I can see, there are two. 1) I’ve never expressed an opinion about the probabilities around the pattern you found, but you’ve said I “believe otherwise.” I don’t have a belief. I have questions. 2) You claimed my method doesn’t have the “slightest resemblance” to yours. I used the exact the same smoothing methodology you used, but I showed the entire smoothed series rather than just ~15 non-overlapping samples. Otherwise, our methodologies were identical. You seem to dispute this similarity by referring to a completely different methodology you’ve used in other situations. That’s a total non-sequitur.

        If you want to end this exchange, you’re free to. However, our disagreements are simple. If we ignore the 1) and 2) I mentioned, the discussion boils down to me saying your 1/8192 value is inaccurate, and you’ve already agreed that is true. If we do consider 1) and 2), it seems you’ve simply misunderstood/misrepresented things I’ve said.

      • Brandon Shollenberger

        Separate from any disagreements we’ve had, I’d like to discuss something I’ve examined a bit. Perhaps it will even amount to a constructive suggestion. I’ve spent a bit of time today examining what happens when one has autocorrelation in a bounded series. What I’ve found is not exactly what one sees with Gaussian random walks, but there are similarities.

        To explain, I started by creating a series with autocorrelation. We know climatic data is influenced by past data, hence the autocorrelation. However, we also know there are boundaries on climatic systems. Those boundaries ensure there are no “runaway” situations in the system. To model this, I introduced a parameter which decreases the probability of a value based upon its deviation from a baseline. This forces stability into the system.

        The result is a series with counterbalancing forces. The autocorrelation ensures that once a trend begins, it is more likely to continue than not. The boundaries ensure no trend continues for too long. The result are series that have excursions toward boundaries than reverse direction toward the baseline.

        At that point, things get hairy. My results depend largely upon the autocorrelation model I use. A simple model based solely on the value of previous data (such as AR1) gives the coin flip result mentioned above. A more complicated model based on the trend of previous data gives an entirely different result.: It gives oscillations.

        To put it simply, we can have oscillations in data purely by assuming a particular structure of the noise in the data. Noise itself can create oscillations in data if the system has the appropriate characteristics. What this suggests is any pattern of oscillations we find in data could be an arbitrary construct of the noise in the system rather than a forced pattern.

        Unless I’ve messed up, that’s a provable mathematical results. And it has a significant impact on interpreting any oscillations one might find in a climatic series.

      • @BS: To put it simply, we can have oscillations in data purely by assuming a particular structure of the noise in the data. Noise itself can create oscillations in data if the system has the appropriate characteristics. What this suggests is any pattern of oscillations we find in data could be an arbitrary construct of the noise in the system rather than a forced pattern. Unless I’ve messed up, that’s a provable mathematical results. And it has a significant impact on interpreting any oscillations one might find in a climatic series.

        That’s a fair hypothesis. Much easier than trying to prove it mathematically would be simply to write a short computer program that generates random examples of the kind of phenomena you have in mind. Each example would be a time series of length 140. Fit a trend line to each block of 10 points and observe whether the 14 trend lines alternate in slope. Run the program on a million such random examples and count how many alternate perfectly.

        1000000/8192 = 122. I predict you will see fewer than 122 perfect alternations. The only way I can imagine getting more than 122 would be by careful tuning of the structure to bias it by making it prefer oscillations of period 20, which I think we would agree would not be in the spirit of this test.

        If you do find significantly more than 122, I will concede your claim that the presence of structure could increase the probability above 1/8192, which as I said was intended only as an upper bound. My main point was not to estimate the probability exactly but merely that such an alternation was extremely improbable even under the assumption of the sort of structure you have in mind. I expect considerably fewer than 122 (or 1220 if you do ten million examples).

      • Brandon Shollenberger

        Vaughan Pratt:

        Each example would be a time series of length 140. Fit a trend line to each block of 10 points and observe whether the 14 trend lines alternate in slope. Run the program on a million such random examples and count how many alternate perfectly.

        You want me to do a test with OLS calculations over ten points? That seems strange. I don’t even know what parameters I’d have to use to create that phenomena in such sparse data. Oh well. I guess I can do it.

        The only way I can imagine getting more than 122 would be by careful tuning of the structure to bias it by making it prefer oscillations of period 20, which I think we would agree would not be in the spirit of this test.

        I certainly don’t agree. The parameters I use are guaranteed to shape any periodicity I find. It’s like fitting a model. Why would I use random or bad parameter values rather than ones that give a good fit? If I did what you suggest, all it’d show is one noise structure can’t create the pattern you observe. It would say nothing about the multitude of other noise structures that could be used.

        Anyway, I’ve built a (crude) function to test for periodicity like what you found. I’m currently just using the arima.sim function from r to generate my time series. Do you have specific parameters you think I should/should not use? I’d rather use a different approach for generating the series, but this can work as a starting point.

        By the way, this examination isn’t just about increasing the odds. Unless I’m mistaken, some noise structures should make the pattern you found near-impossible to generate via noise. What would you say if I created a million series and none of them had the pattern you found?

        (I need to improve my function’s efficiency before trying things with a million series. At the current rate, it would take half a day to test with that many. As I said, it’s a crude function.)

      • Brandon Shollenberger

        Quick update. I’ve greatly improved my code’s efficiency. If I’m willing to make one somewhat iffy choice, it can do a million series in about half an hour. That’s not too bad.

        The iffy choice is using overlapping samples. Rather than create a million separate series, I create a single series long enough to have a million series within it, each beginning 10 points after the one before it.

        By using overlapping segments, I decrease the amount of data used by more than 90%. I think it is fine because the series is stationary and the persistence in the data is far shorter than the segment lengths, but I’m not positive. I may be missing something, and that could affect interpretations of any results.

      • Brandon

        Good to hear you have refined your system. Not sure that using less data is an advance but you can try to convince me.

        However the question must be asked as to how reliable the data is in the first place?

        tonyb

      • @VP: The only way I can imagine getting more than 122 would be by careful tuning of the structure to bias it by making it prefer oscillations of period 20, which I think we would agree would not be in the spirit of this test.

        @BS: I certainly don’t agree.

        Well, fine, but if for whatever reason your structure ends up favoring oscillations of period 20 over other periods then the odds of getting a perfect alternation could well increase above 1/8192. You would then have to argue why period 20 deserves to favored.

        What would you say if I created a million series and none of them had the pattern you found?

        I would say that was considerably less than 122, as I predicted. I wasn’t willing to go out on a limb and say you wouldn’t find any at all because I hadn’t calculated the odds of that happening.

        @BS: Quick update. I’ve greatly improved my code’s efficiency.

        I really appreciate that you’ve taken this challenge seriously. That sort of constructive response has been a rarity on this blog.

      • I am very pleased with the spirit of this exchange between VP and Brandon (BS does not work for me) and wish that there is more of it.

      • Brandon Shollenberger

        tonybclimatereason:

        Good to hear you have refined your system. Not sure that using less data is an advance but you can try to convince me.

        I’ve thought it over some, and I think it reduces the power of the test, but I’m not sure by how much. I decided to scrap the idea anyway as I found a much better solution. The amount of processing time for the calculations isn’t due to the amount of data. The amount of data only matters for creating those series. Once I split that part off, there was little benefit to using a shorter data series.

        However the question must be asked as to how reliable the data is in the first place?

        Reliable? They’re (currently) just basic ARIMA series. I don’t think reliabilit6y is an issue. They’re nothing like the “real” data, but that was never the point. They’re just noise.

        Vaughan Pratt:

        You would then have to argue why period 20 deserves to favored.

        The point is to see what noise structures can create patterns like what you observe. The reason to favor particular periods is to find out what noise structures can create it. That’s a separate issue from whether or not such a noise structure exists in the data you looked at.

        I would say that was considerably less than 122, as I predicted.

        Huh? You’re predicting I’d get fewer than I should with random noise? That seems to devalue any probabilities you could provide.

      • Brandon Shollenberger

        By the way, I found a much better way to improve the efficiency of my testing. It occurred to me there’s no reason to test for 14 perfect alterations in a row right now. Reducing the number of alterations I test for greatly reduces the processing needed. Since I’m just doing groundwork right now, that’s ideal. I can always change the amount I test for later.

        I still don’t think ten points is enough for this to be a meaningful test. There are 120 points in each period Vaughan Pratt looked at. That allows far more flexibility in noise structures. I think I’ll have to write a customized function for generating time series if I want to test what I actually have in mind. I’m starting to think proving this mathematically would be easier >.<

        By the way Peter Davies, I actually prefer people not refer to me as BS.

      • Brandon Shollenberger

        Well, I believe I have confirmed you can get substantially fewer perfect alterations than would be expected, and that’s just testing for eight alternations, The effect becomes more discernible the more alternations. I haven’t run a test for the full million at 14 alternations yet, but the results I have gotten so far are striking..

        To disrupt the pattern, all one needs to do is create an effect that impacts two/three consecutive periods. That’s relatively easy to do. Shifting the odds the other way is quite a bit more difficult. I’m pretty sure it is impossible given the current constraints. 140 points of data simply isn’t enough to create anything but the simplest of noise structures. Not only that, but being limited to 10 points per segment means the uncertainty in the OLS trends is so large it can easily overwhelm anything else.

        I’m not sure how much further I should take this. I think I can satisfactorily prove noise is capable of artificially decreasing the odds of that pattern happening. Proving the opposite (if possible) would be a much larger task. If it is possible, it would require creating more sophisticated noise, and it would require using a lot more data. It might be doable, but I hesitate to even try. It seems a very big task for what is a minor point of discussion. I find it interesting, but I don’t know if it’s worth pursuing.

    • “He has caused the spread of more pseudo-scientific incompetence on the subject of global warming (I’m sorry – climate change) than any climate scientist could possibly have ever accomplished.” ~Roy Spencer

      Who is Spencer talking about here… politician or an academic?

    • Vaughan, there’s almost no difference between AMO and any other global (land/sea) or even hemispheric/regional oscillation. It’s the same oscillation everywhere.
      http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-amo/plot/esrl-amo/trend/plot/hadsst2sh/detrend:0.71/plot/hadsst2sh/detrend:0.71/trend
      http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-amo/plot/esrl-amo/trend/plot/hadsst2nh/detrend:0.615/plot/hadsst2nh/detrend:0.615/trend

      • @Edim: It’s the same oscillation everywhere.

        We appear to have very different criteria for “same.” I was mocked for claiming millikelvin precision when it turned out to be only 1.5 mK precision. You on the other hand consider wildly different curves “the same” with no quantitative assessment at all. Come back when you can quantify “the same.”

      • @Edim: It’s the same oscillation everywhere.

        We appear to have very different criteria for “same.” I was mocked for claiming millikelvin precision when it turned out to be only 1.5 mK precision. You on the other hand consider wildly different curves “the same” with no quantitative assessment at all. Come back when you can quantify “the same.”

      • Brandon Shollenberger

        I always cringe when I see people claim they have “found” an oscillation. Quite often, “oscillations” people find are either artificial constructs of their filters, or they are mis-attributed. There are few things easier to find in data than an oscillation.

        Vaughan Pratt, did you ever examine the point I made on that post? I don’t have a working version of Excel at the moment so I couldn’t look at your work in much detail, but it seems to me showing your delay (I think it was termed AHH?) is more than an arbitrary fudge factor would be a necessary step in it. Even just an educated guess at the uncertainty in the effect of the parameter would go a long way. There’s nothing worse for an analysis than unquantified uncertainty.

      • @BS: it seems to me showing your delay (I think it was termed AHH?) is more than an arbitrary fudge factor would be a necessary step in it. Even just an educated guess at the uncertainty in the effect of the parameter would go a long way. There’s nothing worse for an analysis than unquantified uncertainty.

        You’ve singled out an important point about my poster, Brandon. I’d naively imagined that multiple regression would nail Hansen delay but for reasons detailed here this turned out not to be the case.

        It turned out that climate sensitivity and “Hansen delay” (per Hansen et al’s 1985 paper pointing out that the oceanic mixed layer would delay the impact of radiative forcing on observed surface temperature) were almost perfectly parallel (the opposite of orthogonal) coordinates in the 9-dimensional space my least-squares fit was maneuvering in.

        This was easily fixed by setting the delay to zero, corresponding to a climate sensitivity of 2.1 C/doubling while reducing the dimensions to eight. A delay of 11 years then corresponded to a climate sensitivity of 2.665 C/doubling, but deciding between these two was next to impossible (because of the parallelism) other than that the former gave an R2 of 99.991% and the latter 99.997% (so they weren’t perfectly parallel). Both were so close to 1 however as to make it hard to choose.

        Eliminating the 4th and 5th harmonics of my “quasisawtooth” further reduced 8 dimensions (parameters) to 5, namely three for the sawtooth (period, phase, and amplitude) and two for AGW (NatCO2 and ClimSens), with a further decrease of R2 from 99.991% to 99.97%.

        These simplifications of my model slightly mess up Figure 2 of my poster by making the multidecadal residual after subtracting the sawtooth from HadCRUT3 “wobble” slightly more. But even with the wobbles introduced by neglecting the 4th and 5th harmonics there remainsl a clear rise starting in 1850 that still matches predicted global warming pretty well, see Fig2rough.jpg. Even with these wobbles, that the rise starts as soon as 1850 remains clearly visible , which is much earlier than claimed by the IPCC.

        With only five parameters (sawtooth with 152.5-year period, amplitude of 0.177 C, and trigger at year 1924.6, AGW with NatCO2 = 287.4 ppmv and ClimSens = 2.1 C/doubling) it will be very hard for Mike Rossander to come up with an R2 of 99.97% using some other choice of five parameters.

      • Brandon Shollenberger

        Vaughan Pratt:

        You’ve singled out an important point about my poster

        I’m glad to hear that. I had hoped to examine your model in some detail, but I’ve been unable to since I lack a copy of Excel. I tried to contribute as much as I could given that limitation, and it’s good to hear I hit upon an important point: A ~25% difference in climate sensitivity is huge.

        For what it’s worth, I didn’t expect that large an impact. I had thought the issue I discussed would increase uncertainty by ~10-15%.

      • David Springer

        I have Excel. You didn’t miss much. Yeoman’s work with the spreadsheet as far as style and construction goes but the content not so much.

      • Vaughan, as they say, none are so blind as those who will not see. Of course there are minor differences (amplitude, phase…) between the various multidecadal oscillations (global, global SST, AMO, global land, NH, SH…), but they’re all VERY similar and that’s remarkable. There’s a Global Multidecadal Oscillation (GMO).

        I’ll leave quantifying to those who have time and are paid to do it.
        http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/best/from:1850/detrend:1.06/plot/best/from:1850/trend/detrend:1.06/plot/esrl-amo/plot/esrl-amo/trend

      • A certain blogger is fond of saying the AMO is temperature. So when you “detrend” the temperature of a significant part of the globe, you get, well, the AMO.

        If he’s correct, the AMO doesn’t drive anything. It is driven.

      • JCH, does Tamino ever explain why the temperature oscillates? Or does he disagree with the idea that there there is an oscillation and agree with the one paper I am aware of that says the AMO doesn’t exist and therefor the multitude of papers that state there is an oscillation are all wrong?

      • Steven – I’m not even a dentist who used to shoot gatling-type guns.

        As for the true nature of the AMO (or as I’d prefer to call it, the “AMF” for “Atlantic Multidecadal Fluctuation”), time — and nature — will tell. – Tamino

      • Yes, AMO doesn’t drive anything just like the other (global, global SST, global land, hemispheric…) oscillations don’t drive anything. It’s the ‘same’ oscillation everywhere.

      • Edim, “Yes, AMO doesn’t drive anything just like the other (global, global SST, global land, hemispheric…) oscillations don’t drive anything. It’s the ‘same’ oscillation everywhere.”

        Well, with different lags and amplifications, but yep. What could cause such a “global” oscillation? We know it cannot possibly be the sun and oceans since science says so :)

      • Capt, IMO it’s the solar cycle frequency. Higher frequency (shorter cycles) cause warming, lower frequency (like now, long cycles) causes cooling.

      • Edim, “Capt, IMO it’s the solar cycle frequency. Higher frequency (shorter cycles) cause warming, lower frequency (like now, long cycles) causes cooling.”

        You mean that varying the duty cycles of a pulsing AC input energy might impact the RMS value of the power applied? Fascinating!

        But that would make things complicated. Simple “averaging” is so much easier :)

      • Edim, oops, that should be duty cycle of the pulsing DC input.

        Of course for your theory to be correct, there would need to be a capacitance in the system, like say a BIG A$$ OCEAN! (sorry for shouting, that was not meant for you Edim.)

        https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-OKJZxn7l8sY/USt5tXUz66I/AAAAAAAAHVk/1RegK4DbpQY/s971/edim%2527s%2520duty%2520cycle.png

        Oddly, using a sine wave carrier with that odd Golden Ratio frequency so common in orbital cycles, the shifting pulse width of solar would generate an “envelope” like the orange curve. Since it takes roughly 5 years for the atmosphere/ocean to distribute solar energy accumulated below the true equator to equalize with the atmospheric “thermal Equator”, that residual created by internal transfer could increased the RMS value of the effective surface energy.

        Now how could Telescope Jockeys miss something so elementary to physics? Oh, that’s right, Radiant “shells” have no thermal mass!

      • Cappy Dick is foaming and frothing at the gills.
        Skeptics here are clowns at the circus.
        http://tinyurl.com/ClimateClowns

      • Webster, “Cappy Dick is foaming and frothing at the gills.” Naw, Cappy Dick is still just laughing at the Telescope Jockeys. Cappy Dick figure out e^-t/RC a while back and that C varies with the mixing efficiency. Dang multi-boundary layer problems. You remember that right, multiple thermodynamic boundary layers? Each with its own heat capacity and boundary transfer coefficients. Some with time scales of millennia.

        Since you figured out the ocean diffusion problem, there is a paper here to check your work. ” If the change in ) 14C from North Atlantic surface water to Pacific Deep Water was due entirely to radiocarbon decay (at ca. 11 per mil / century), this would imply a total age of ca. 1700 yr since the time when this water was last at the sea surface.”

        BTW, there is a 1700 year lag between North Atlantic SST and Atlantic deep ocean temperatures.

        http://www.onafarawayday.com/Radiogenic/Ch14/Ch14-1.htm

        That dang C14 is some useful stuff. Selvam found quite a few common frequencies in climate. She even thinks that Self Organizing Criticality might be a useful tool for climate science.

        http://amselvam.webs.com/earlsel/socpp.PDF

      • Webby, I like your decription of me, but I’m not Italian – I’m Bosnian. Furthermore, I only take the oposing premise if that’s really my point of view. For example I agree with you that the annual cycle in atmospheric CO2 is caused by the annual SST cycle. We’re both contrarians regarding this matter.

      • ” For example I agree with you that the annual cycle in atmospheric CO2 is caused by the annual SST cycle.”

        Don’t pull that on me. In the past, you have assigned the entire increase in CO2 to a temperature rise. That assertion is so wrong, a chemistry freshman gets this assigned as a basic homework problem. The activation energy would have to be huge for a 1C change to have this effect.

        Very few skeptical commenters have any expertise in basic science, I am afraid. But then again when they get paid by the Donors Trust Fund to spew FUD, it doesn’t really matter.

      • Webby, can you not hold more than one thought in your mind? It seems you cannot. We have one point of agreement – the annual CO2 cycle is caused by the annual SST cycle. That’s all there’s to it.

        Next point: I assign ALMOST the entire increase in atmopspheric CO2 to the temperature integral over the period of change (NOT temperature rise) – it doesn’t take temperature change to change atmospheric CO2, because constant temperatures cause CO2 change. The mechanism is a kind of a CO2 pump – the annual SST cycle pumps to CO2 into the atmosphere and the flow of the ‘pump’ is temperature dependent (looks linear). So, when the cooling really kicks in, the annual change will decrease and at some point, at sufficiently low temperatures, it will reverse.

      • That’s even worse gibberish by Edim.

        It’s impossible to put into words how completely misguided these tools are. The fantastical theories dribble out of their mouth like spew.

        Edim envisions an integral in his head and claims it is some sort of pump that accumulates the CO2.

        He might as well be talking about ghosts and goblins.

      • Webby, no I just follow the observations.

    • David L. Hagen

      Vaughan Pratt
      Your decadal trend inversions is interesting.
      However, I would think a full FFT analysis for oscillatory periods would be more useful with a simple 10 year oscillation. Compare the IPCC CIMP5 models with the empirical models of The Global Warming Prediction Project and
      Nicolla Scafetta

      Testing an astronomically based decadal-scale empirical harmonic climate
      model versus the IPCC (2007) general circulation climate models

      the proposed harmonic model (which herein uses cycles
      with 9.1, 10–10.5, 20–21, 60–62 year periods) is found to well reconstruct the observed climate oscillations from 1850 to 2011, and it is shown to be able to forecast the climate oscillations from 1950 to 2011 using the data covering the period 1850–1950, and vice versa.

      See the bottom of Scafetta’s page for current graphed performance vs prediction of Scafetta vs IPCC since 2000. Scafetta’s model is performing remarkably better. He expects an underlying upward trend from 2010 to 2015 followed by another decline.

      Scafetta, GWPP and IPCC CIMP5 are three major models against which to test your 10 year decadal oscillation prediction since 2000.

      As an research engineer, I find the GWPP and Scafetta’s models to be much more reliable in predicting consequent global temperature over the periods we have observed them. Note the ability of Scafetta’s model with four oscillatory periods (with minor anthropogenic warming) to forecast/hindcast from one half the data to another. That appears much more robust than predicting exponential warming only to find that 3x too high for the last decade.

      For the impact of CO2 on climate, note Scafetta’s recent paper where they find:

      “We have shown that the LOD and CO2 annual rates are well correlated to MEI.”

      Quantifying the Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI) coupling to CO2 concentration and to the length of day variations

      (PS the answer to your previous question is “understated” and “$30 trillion”.)

      • David Springer

        You’ve described epicycles. Epicycles work until they don’t then you add another epicycle, deferant, or equant to bring it back in line with observations. When you see something resembling that it’s a safe bet the underlying principles are wrong. You could simply come to me for predictions. I’m doing as well as Scafetta. I see a flat trend continuing for another ten years then a return to a rising trend with a net result of about 0.07C/decade background warming which I believe about half of which is anthropogenic warming and the remainder a continued rebound from the Little Ice Age. At some point the Holocene Interglacial will end. I suspect a confluence of strato-volcano eruptions and solar grand minimum will be the straw that breaks the Holocene’s back. The optimum alignment for axial and orbital precession favoring northern hemisphere glacier growth is 4000 years distant but we’re already over the hump and I don’t believe it needs to be precisely at the optimum it just needs a perfect storm to push it past the tipping point, a storm which could come along at any time now.

      • David L. Hagen

        David Spencer
        How do you distinguish epicycles from physics?

    • Vaughan, it is interesting and the probability of it being random chance is very small. The solar cycles do match up well. So far so good. The next question would be possible mechanisms? If you can find a mechanism and if the mechanism is such that a weaker solar cycle counters the previous results then that is the end of the pattern.

    • You are joking, right Vaughn? As you know, ten years is too short a time to look at. And 1920-1930 does not have a negative slope. If you look at 30 years, it looks as though 1880 to 1910 is downward and 1910 to 1940 is upward. From 1940 to 1980 it is fairly flat although you could easily find 25 years where it was negative. Then from 1980 to 2010 it is positive (but flattened out the last 10 years at least). I could see it staying relatively flat for another 20 years. The planet is warming since the 1750’s after all so I don’t necessarily expect a sharp downward slope but it did happen in the past (1880-1910). And CO2 may do some warming as well. If you add in errors to those temp.’s then many of those ten year periods could have positive or negative slopes. And the recent data from the sun may show that more than usual cooling could occur as well as the changes in the ocean cycles about now. Next 10-15 years will be very telling.

  48. Svensmark has gained some notoriety for proposing cosmic rays as the catalyst,

    The troublesome property is that it distracts from other viable CR mechanisms that have measurable properties for the interaction with climate and solar influences and indeed life on earth (chirality of amino acids)

    Whilst the magnetic reversals have the same periodicity as the rotation of Jupiter ,there are also effects from the Jovian magnetosphere that are well known but poorly advertised such as electron precipitation and and NOx eg Thorne 1977
    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17787812

    There are a number of schools of work on this Crutzens being one
    http://www.atmos-chem-phys.net/6/1835/2006/acp-6-1835-2006.pdf

    The Jovian magnetosphere being the primary reservoir of low energy electrons confirmed by pioneer and more recently the Pamela experiment.
    http://pamela.roma2.infn.it/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_view&gid=7

    The odd nitrogen also produce NO2 which blocks in the blue green spectrum ie in the spectrum of PAR.

    • Svensmark has gained some notoriety for proposing cosmic rays as the catalyst,

      It’s a possibility to bear in mind. From the Wikipedia article on cosmic rays, A role of cosmic rays directly or via solar-induced modulations in climate change was suggested by Edward P. Ney in 1959 and by Robert Dickinson in 1975. In recent years, the idea has been revived most notably by Henrik Svensmark; the most recent IPCC study disputed the mechanism, while the most comprehensive review of the topic to date states: “evidence for the cosmic ray forcing is increasing as is the understanding of its physical principles.” I don’t have better theories to offer myself (usually I can think of something but not in this case).

      Whilst the magnetic reversals have the same periodicity as the rotation of Jupiter

      Very interesting point! 10.3 years (20th century) vs. 11.86 years. Close enough for government work (some governments anyway). ;) Thanks very much for that tip!

      But 11.86 drifts out of phase with the calendar decades 6 times faster than 10.3, making Jupiter an unlikely candidate for the observed oscillation in HadCRUT3. And that’s Jupiter’s sidereal year—viewed from Earth instead of from the stars, Jupiter appears to orbit once in 11.86/(1 − 11.86) = −1.092 years. That is, the Sun moves through the 12 houses of the Zodiac 9.2% faster than Jupiter and the oppositions of Jupiter (closest approaches of Jupiter to Earth, essentially) occur every 1.092 years. Hence any impact we feel from Jupiter’s electrons should have a period of 1.092 years, not 11.86.

      There is however a slightly-less-than-11 (10.86?) year period in the distance to Jupiter at each opposition, varying between 3.95 and 4.46 AU, maximized at the 2005 and 2017 oppositions and minimized in 2010, due to Jupiter’s relatively eccentric orbit. While that’s closer to 10.3 years it still drifts out of phase with calendar decades 3x faster than 10.3, so I’m still dubious.

      • vp ‘ Hence any impact we feel from Jupiter’s electrons should have a period of 1.092 years, not 11.86.”

        Very good intuitive assumption and very close but for the wrong reason.The 13 month propagation and (modulation) of Jovian electrons into the earths radiation belts is because of the interaction on the direction of the Parker spiral.

        http://pamela.roma2.infn.it/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_view&gid=338

        The problem is the qualitative attributions to causal mechanisms such as odd nitrogen and interaction with relative species in O3 reduction etc and to separate from the solar cycle interplay,anthropogenic component etc ie the sum of the parts is greater then the whole.

      • @maksimovich: Very good intuitive assumption and very close but for the wrong reason.The 13 month propagation and (modulation) of Jovian electrons into the earths radiation belts is because of the interaction on the direction of the Parker spiral.

        Thanks, but how do you distinguish “the interaction on the direction of the Parker spiral” from the much simpler and more obvious point that Earth’s nearest approach to Jupiter is every 13 months? Are you claiming the spiral is independent of the oppositions of Jupiter? If they’re merely the same phenomenon with different names then we would have nothing to disagree about, which would not be in the spirit of Judith’s blog.

  49. One should not concentrate only on the recent period (> 1979) to assess climate models’ validity. One should also look at their ability to reproduce warming / cooling cycles since the beginning of temperature records.

    The general trend since 1850 is +0.45°C per century.

    On top of this background warming rate, one can observe that there is actually a 60 years warming / cooling cycle driven by multi-decadal oceans’ cycles, AMO and PDO mainly.
    Hence the warming rate is 0.045 ± 0.125 °C/decade.
    Up to +0.17°C/decade as observed during [1910 -1940] and [1970 – 2000] warming periods
    Down to -0.08°C/decade as observed during [1880 – 1910] cooling period, and -0.04°C/decade over [1940 – 1970] cooling period.

    None of the nice climate models has ever been able to reproduce these observed cycles. The warming rate calculated by models over [1910 – 1940] period is almost 3 times lower than observed.
    The physics in the models is corrupted because only / mainly [CO2] driven. And it is hereby falsified.

    • @EO: None of the nice climate models has ever been able to reproduce these observed cycles.

      I fully agree. Furthermore they never will until they start taking the core-mantle system of the Earth’s interior into account.

      This 2000 article by Oxford’s Raymond Hide et al describes a 65-year oscillation at the core-mantle boundary inferred from geomagnetic secular variation data. The article goes beyond my theory of transfer of angular momentum between the Moon, the mantle, and the core (the basis for my reasoning), to take into account such transfers within the core itself, which I’d been completely neglecting. Taking it into account may make it easier to flesh out my rough sketch of what’s happening with surface temperature.

      The physics in the models is corrupted because only / mainly [CO2] driven. And it is hereby falsified.

      Wait, what?

      I’m fine with “only”. Given that temperature rose very strongly between 1910 and 1940 while CO2 increased only very slightly, it should be obvious that CO2 can’t be the only driver.

      But you passed from “only” to “mainly” with nothing more than than a /. How is / an argument?

      The variance of AMO+PDO is certainly large, which I take to be your point. However the variance of radiatively induced global warming is several times larger. So while I buy your refutation of “only,” I don’t buy it for “mainly”.

      I’ve posted three times on CE, the third being this post. Boy did that post give me grief. Certain people so hated the idea that CO2 could be the principal driver without being the only driver that they demanded I retract my entire AGU poster! Apparently I’d hit a nerve there without taking the precaution of a novocaine injection.

      Global warming is nothing if not polarized.

      • Captain Kangaroo

        ‘Quantitatively, the recurrent multidecadal internal variability, often underestimated in attribution studies, accounts for 40% of the observed recent 50-y warming trend.’ http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/01/22/1212471110.abstract

        I think Tung and Zhou underestimate – and you sure do.

      • “But you passed from “only” to “mainly” with nothing more than than a /. How is / an argument?”

        genius. VP.

      • @CK: Quantitatively, the recurrent multidecadal internal variability, often underestimated in attribution studies, accounts for 40% of the observed recent 50-y warming trend.’

        Yes, you also said that yesterday. But what does it mean? 40% of variance, of standard deviation, of what?

        Unless there’s some correlation between natural and anthropogenic variability yet to be identified, one should be using variance in order that the variances of the parts sum to the variance of the whole.

        When variance replaces amplitude, 40% or 0.40 becomes its square, 0.16 or 16%. This is close to what my work over the past two years has concluded. In that case I would have no problem with Tung and Zhou’s estimate.

        I think Tung and Zhou underestimate – and you sure do.

        Fantastic! Something to sink one’s teeth into. Please elaborate.

      • Vaughan Pratt,

        The AMO and PDO are somewhat useful, but they are PSEUDO-CYCLIC and REGIONAL. They would likely be by-products of some larger system influence.

        https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-akfdjXCKVOg/UStkGk-uMTI/AAAAAAAAHUA/4FRkeYqbchY/s783/dfc%2520washington%2520state%2520versus%2520canada.png

        Since you like the Hale cycle, 21 year trail averages of the Diurnal Flux Change. (DFC) DFC would be the absolute energy variation involved with diurnal temperature change. The 1910 to 1940 peak tends to get smeared, but it looks a lot like SAW anyway. OMG! it looks like an irregular ~120 plus year pseudo-cycle! What could cause such a thing?

      • Chief Hydrologist

        My 40% claim comes directly from the Tung and Zhou – attribution of 40% of recent warming by regression. Simple enough?

        Much of the rest is cloud change associated with these low frequency variabilities – not been listening?

  50. “I hate when guys on my side are stupider than the lamest skeptic”

    Yes it is discouraging, Steven. Your approach of calling a (stupid) spade a (stupid) spade, when that is the only available description left to you, is understandable.

    However, I can’t help but observe that you often make an effort to engage with male peers who feel they are helpless to learn more.

    I like your insistence on self-efficacy. :-)

    • Poor moshe’s point for a squad forming a circle instead of stringing along behind.
      =========

    • David Springer

      Looks like Mosher’s comment you quoted got snipped and now the threading is broken again. Lovely.

      • David Springer

        Nevermind. Martha changed what Mosher wrote and put it inside quotes. Specifically Mosher spelled stupider “stupidier” so the search going off Martha’s quoted text failed. That’s one (among many) good reasons for not altering what is supposed to be a direct quote.

    • Sorry Martha. This is the internet. I make no assumptions about the gender of other parties who I haven’t met or don’t know. “heinrich” might be male or female and the same goes for you. For the record, “guys” and “folks” and “dude” are gender neutral in my work. get it dude? under stand sport?
      And I don’t think Ive ever met anyone who felt helpless to learn. I’ve met those unwilling to learn. unable to learn, those who thought they had nothing to learn, like you perhaps, but never onyone who was helpless to learn. perhaps ypu can point one out. frgive the spelling. small phone screen big thumbs. You know what that means. err spelling mistakes.

      • Sorry Steven, you miss the point. It was tongue-in-cheek. The point was that you dominate many interactions with verbal abuse when you do not feel the individual is appealing to your expertise.

        Interactions on the internet are often considered gender neutral. They are not. Further, climate issues and conversations are not gender neutral; and you are almost always speaking with other males, here.

        Haven’t I seen you quote the late, great Michel Foucault, with approval? Maybe not. Anyway, the internet is far from inherently democratic and Foucault would never be so clueless about power and gender on the internet.

      • She’s only a bird in a gilded cage.
        ==========================

      • Martha:

        “Sorry Steven, you miss the point. It was tongue-in-cheek. The point was that you dominate many interactions with verbal abuse when you do not feel the individual is appealing to your expertise.”

        I dominate when I think domination will work tactically. I don’t think I have any particular expertise, except perhaps on climategate. The tactics of domination are varied. Sometimes, one can dominate by superior command of the argument. When your opponent is beyond reason, then ridicule is always an option. you are not a very good study of all the modes of domination that folks choose to employ. If i don’t think domination will work, I might try comprimise. or I might play possum or lay a trap. Lots of different tactics.

        “Interactions on the internet are often considered gender neutral. They are not. Further, climate issues and conversations are not gender neutral; and you are almost always speaking with other males, here”

        Sorry but saying it doesnt make it so. I could give a rats ass what your actual gender is. I don’t consider it for a second. That said, I have pissed off a few guys by running their text through gender genie. At lease they said they were guys when the genie said otherwise. Secondly, you are wrong. Whenever you show up and say something I interact with you.
        And ask beth cooper. If she is a female, I interact with her. And Judith.
        Now if 99% of the posters here are male and 1% female, and I interact with 100% of the females, how can what you say be true?
        I interact with willard. is she a male? kim? is she a male? lolwot? male or female? Friend of more discourse? male or female. Your claim is either trivialy true, or wrong, or unverifiable. Choose dude.

        “Haven’t I seen you quote the late, great Michel Foucault, with approval? Maybe not. Anyway, the internet is far from inherently democratic and Foucault would never be so clueless about power and gender on the internet”
        dude. Im a student of derrida ( nice guy, actually ). Second, who said it was democratic. Third,
        you missed my point. try again

      • you are almost always speaking with other males, here.

        I’m torn between hee, hee, hee and ho, ho, ho. I’ll settle for chuckle.

      • I will add that Martha should meet my friend nicole daedone, and take a class. It’s life changing.

      • Vaughan I thnk Martha may be off taking those classes.
        Funny. Every time she shows up I interact with her. And then we have a back and forth about how I only interact with males.. err as I interact with her.. so I kinda had to wonder maybe she is a he.

  51. Hi Judith: You wanted CMIP5 model-data comparisons. Here ya go.

    A quickie model-data comparison of satellite-era sea surface temperature anomalies for the Pacific:
    http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2012/12/06/model-data-comparison-pacific-ocean-satellite-era-sea-surface-temperature-anomalies/

    Satellite-era precipitation versus CMIP5 hindcast/projections are here. Models simulate an increase in global precipitation but combined satellite- and rain gauge-based observations show a decrease:
    http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2012/12/27/model-data-precipitation-comparison-cmip5-ipcc-ar5-model-simulations-versus-satellite-era-observations/

    I did an early post (not all of the CMIP5 models were submitted yet) comparing modeled versus observed polar amplification. It also includes CMIP3 models. The model mean do not present polar amplified cooling during the mid-20th Century cooling period and they miss the polar amplified warming during the early warming period of the 20th century:
    http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2012/04/24/polar-amplification-observations-versus-ipcc-climate-models/

    And I did a land surface air temperature comparison for the individual continents using CMIP3 and early CMIP5 model outputs with masked GISS LOTI data here:
    http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2012/04/23/ipcc-models-vs-observations-land-surface-temperature-anomalies-for-the-last-30-years-on-a-regional-basis/

    I’m finishing up a post about modeled and observed marine air temperature and sea surface temperature. (I have to add the hyperlinks.) Due to the sparseness of the MOHMAT data, I had to limit the comparison to the period of Jan 1950 to May 2007 (end at MOHMAT Data at KNMI Climate Explorer) and for the latitudes of 30S-60N. Preview: Observed SST warms faster than observed marine air temp, while the models have it backwards:
    http://i48.tinypic.com/riawxk.jpg

    I thought I had taken a recent look at sea surface temperatures versus CMIP5 models, but I recalled that the KNMI Climate Explorer was experiencing difficulties with their CMIP5 archives when I prepared my last post. From what I’ve seen so far, the CMIP5 models have a higher trend over the past 30 years. Reason: Not all of the CMIP3 models included volcanic aerosols so the satellite-era trend of the CMIP3 model mean is biased downward by those models—that is, the dips in 1982 and 1991 aren’t as great. On the other hand, as far as I know, all of the CMIP5 models include volcanic aerosols, so the volcano dips of the model mean are greater, creating a higher short-term trend. With that in mind, the following CMIP3 versus SST comparison will give you a ballpark idea. The following post included satellite-era sea surface temperature anomalies versus CMIP3 TOS, presented globally, by hemisphere, and broken down into individual ocean basins:
    http://bobtisdale.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/model-data-comparison-sea-surface-temperature-anomalies-november-1981-through-september-2012/

    Regards

    • David L. Hagen

      Compliments Bob on your post:
      Another Model Fail – CMIP5 (IPCC AR5) Climate Models: Modeled Relationship between Marine Air Temperature and Sea Surface Temperature Is Wrong

      the marine air temperature anomalies warm at a significantly slower rate—warming at a rate that’s about 60% of the sea surface temperature datasets. . . .Modeled marine air temperature anomalies warmed at a rate that’s about 1.2 times faster than the modeled sea surface temperature anomalies.

      This time the models are only off by a factor of 2!

      This is equivalent to aiming for the Moon and thinking it was a lot hotter because you actually ended up on Venus.

      Whatever happened to the objective scientific method, validation, and then building engineering quality models that withstand any amount of “kicking the tires”? Time to bring in the Red Teams for a serious dose of reality with corresponding correction.

  52. And this says it all.

    Warming did not flatline in 1995. To the contrary the best fit to the data is a continuation of the pre-1995 warming trend. The flatline since 1995 model fails hideously.

    It’s pretty frickin simple. If you were sitting there in 1995, saw the warming to date, stuck a trend line through it and predicted that warming would continue, you’d be predicting an extrapolation of the trend line.

    The pretty frickin simple doesn’t seem to get through the skeptics though.

    • lolwot: You’re focusing so hard on a strawman that you can’t look at your own graph. It’s obvious that there’s a jump in 1998 and after that the actual temps reside almost entirely above your projection and are not increasing at nearly the same rate, if at all.

      You’re so obsessed with straight lines that you brought a straight line to a non-linear fight.

      • The skeptics claiming no warming since X are basing that on OLS trends wayne. So this is definitely a linear fight.

        By all means if you want to start another thread arguing that the data is non-linear go ahead. But I would ask you make sure to slap down the skeptics claiming warming has stopped, for they do so based on an assumption of linear trend.

      • Brandon Shollenberger

        Right… It’s okay to use arbitrary endpoints because it’s testing a specific claim about a specific period. That’s why you referred to a continuation of “the pre-1995” trend. Because “the” really means “a.”

        Seriously people, all you need to know is this. lolwot argues temperatures haven’t flatlined starting in a particular year without even looking at the temperatures of that year. He instead relies upon arbitrary values derived from regressions as the baseline temperature for that year.

        If you want to have some fun, try applying his methodology to other periods. The results will be fascinatingly nonsensical.

      • Brandon Shollenberger

        Oops. That should have been posted one node further down.

      • When I used the word “the” I was referring to the trend in my specific example of 1970-1995. I wasn’t saying that’s the only period of warming you could use to represent pre-1995 warming.

        “lolwot argues temperatures haven’t flatlined starting in a particular year without even looking at the temperatures of that year”

        I think it’s a mistake to look at temperatures of any particular year when you are supposed to be testing trends across much longer periods!

        You could take it a step further and demand we look at the last month of 1995. Or maybe I should be comparing temperatures with temperature anomaly of the last hour of 1995!

      • lolwot: So you ignore the substantive part of my comment in order to focus on the sentence paying homage to the famous “you brought a knife to a gunfight” quote instead?

        I’ll say it again: your linear projection obviously does not fit the data because of an obvious jump in 1998. Your projection straight line is Excel-kiddy stuff and shows no sense.

        On the flip side of the coin, critics use straight lines because true-believers like yourself are obsessed with them. And if you actually look at the data, there’s an obvious discontinuity in 1998 that could be fitted piecewise with two straight lines. It’s called poetic justice or something.

        Anyone who fits straight lines across the 1998 boundary, or who is not disturbed by a line starting in the 70’s and awkwardly “fitting” across the gap to the present has no feel for data.

      • “your linear projection obviously does not fit the data because of an obvious jump in 1998”

        I ignored it because it made no sense. A linear trend is an approximation. Saying it “doesn’t fit the data” is meaningless. It fits just fine. As a linear trend with the data varying above and below it at various points.

        I didn’t say it was perfect, but there you go.

        The departure in 1998 has an obvious cause: The super el nino, “el nino of the century” that happened in 1997/1998.

      • k scott denison

        lolwot, my understanding is the response of temperature to ncrease in CO2 is a logarithmic, not linear, function. So why would one expect to see a linear function? Why do you insist that a linear trend continues?

    • Brandon Shollenberger

      It’s remarkable you’d say something is “pretty frickin simple” while getting a basic average wrong. The flat line you show for 1995 temperatures (.228) is about a tenth of a degree too low if it’s meant to be the average 1995 temperature (.323). In fact, the value you used is lower than 10 of the 12 months in 1995.

      (And that’s assuming we should use the average of 1995. It could be argued a better choice is the maximum. After all, saying a flatline started in 1995 doesn’t specify a starting month.)

      • Brandon Shollenberger

        I just realized this is more remarkable than I thought. To create that flat line, lolwot added an offset value of -0.11. That’s right. He added an offset of almost the exact amount his line was wrong by!

        Manually altering a figure in a way that decreases accuracy and increases visual impact…

      • The answer is that it isn’t meant to be the average for the year 1995. It’s meant to be where the trend has reached in 1995.

      • One mistake I have made though is that I haven’t included 1995 in the period of warming. The claim “No warming since 1995” includes 1995 in the period of warming, ie the period of no warming starts in 1996-onwards. The trend drawn should be to dec1995 not dec1994. I have corrected this for a good reason that may be shown later, although it makes no material difference to anything I have said

      • Yes, that’s better.

      • Brandon Shollenberger

        Oh, right. Sorry. I forgot you do utterly insane things lolwot. Specifically, I forgot when you say things like “the flatline since 1995,” you aren’t actually referring to temperatures of 1995. You’re actually referring to arbitrary values derived from regressions because they’re… better than actual values?

      • Brandon,
        The subject is warming over the period 1970-1995 and whether that warming stopped or continued.

        I have done is approximated that warming with an OLS trend over the period 1970-1995. So what I am testing is whether that line continues upwards past 1995, or goes flat.

        Going flat is what I would expect of warming stopping.

        I wouldn’t fix the flat line to the 12 month average of 1995 anymore than I would fix it to the 24 hour average of 31st December 1995. Neither makes any sense because what is being tested is the trend representing the warming. Particular 12 year periods can obviously fall well above or below that trend.

      • lowlot wrote: “It’s meant to be where the trend has reached in 1995”
        ——————————————————————————————–
        Trends don’t ‘reach’ anything or anywhere, nor should they be expected to.

      • phatboy by trend I mean the trend-line.

      • I know what you meant

      • then I don’t see your point. Lines can reach values. For example a 0.2C/decade line will reach 2C warmer than today in 100 years time.

      • Trend lines are not temperatures. See: http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=5107

      • But they can model temperature.

        Did the warming from 1970-1995 stop after 1995? Model says No.

      • Brandon Shollenberger

        phatboy, don’t bother. I’ve shown lolwot why his approach is nonsensical before, and he refuses to deal with it. The reality is we can change the endpoint by changing what period the regression is calculated over. Start at 1965, and it will end at one spot. Start at 1975, and it will end at another. It’s completely arbitrary, and it’s completely meaningless.

        lolwot’s approach has no legitimacy, and he promotes it solely because he has no idea what he’s doing. You can’t fix people like that. You can highlight his problems for other people, but that’s it.

        (And even that is probably meaningless. Nobody on his “side” will condemn him, and nobody else will listen to him.)

      • “The reality is we can change the endpoint by changing what period the regression is calculated over. Start at 1965, and it will end at one spot. Start at 1975, and it will end at another. It’s completely arbitrary, and it’s completely meaningless.”

        That’s not meaningless. If you change the start point you are changing the hypothesis from ‘has 1970-1995 warming stopped?’ to ‘has 1965-1995 warming stopped?’

        There’s nothing wrong with the values being different if you are asking a different question!

        There would only be a problem if changing the endpoints slightly altered the result dramatically. The result being that the data better follows continued warming since 1995 than no warming since 1995.

      • lowlot wrote: “But they can model temperature”
        ———————————————————————-
        No they don’t. They model what you assume the temperature to be doing.
        If you tell a model to draw a straight line between two points, don’t be surprised if it does just that.

      • Which is why it’s an excellent test (and falsification) of skeptic claims that warming stopped in 1995. Because they are thinking in terms of lines too.

      • No. They can’t tell you anything about the data that you don’t already know – or think you know.

      • you are just being contrarian now

      • So you assert that trend lines model temperatures?
        Go back to your last WFT offering then.
        What was the temperature in 1970? Was it what the data says, or what the trend-line says?
        What was the temperature in 1996? Was it what the data says, or what the trend-line says?
        In fact, when does the trend line agree with the data except at the times when the two cross?
        Bottom line: the trend-line does not model the data.

      • Brandon Shollenberger

        phatboy, one can actually measure how well the trend models the data. It isn’t hard, and it at least gives an idea of how accurate the trend is. Of course, if you start doing that, you should look at the residuals too. At that point the OLS part doesn’t mean much.

      • Not the way lowlot’s trying to do it.
        An OLS trend only models the data well if the trend in the data is linear – in which case the trend is obvious, so you don’t need the OLS model to tell you.

      • Phatboy, take for example this graph. You complain the annual data doesn’t fit perfectly on the linear trend-line, but it doesn’t have to for the model to fit the data.

      • k scott denison

        What I find remarkable about your graphs lolwot is that the warming trend you point to is derived from EXACTLY 20 years, and the endpoints are neatly space on multiples of 5, 1975 and 1995. How does the temperature know to match up so well with an even number of years and to start on a multiple of 5? Why not 1976-1995 or 1973 to 1998?

        I guess climate is just so smart!!

      • Wow scott, it’s almost as if a human selected a period to draw a graph isn’t it? How fascinating!

        Tell you what, if you want to give me a different start year for the warming that you think stopped in 1995 I’ll be happy to use that as well to show you are wrong.

      • k scott denison

        You’re just not getting it lolwot. I never said warming stopped in 1995. I believe the earth is in a constant state of warming or cooling. Has been since the beginning.

        Given that temperatures have never runaway, even though we’ve seen very high concentrations of CO2, much, much higher than today, logic tells me there are feedbacks that help to dampen the effect of CO2 and keep the planet’s temperature in balance within a relatively narrow range.

        So, picking whatever starting, and ending, points you like, please show me when in history the planet’s temperature has runaway and why it will this time. Because if what you’ve got is a 0.03C / decade trend that isn’t statistically significant your firing blanks.

      • lowlot wrote: “You complain the annual data doesn’t fit perfectly on the linear trend-line, but it doesn’t have to for the model to fit the data”
        ——————————————————————————–
        I’m not complaining about anything – you’re the one who’s trying to assert that the trend-line == data.
        And then all you can produce is a graph which vaguely correlates the two.

    • It’s just the simplest test of continued warming to extrapolate the trend. I am not looking at the cause here, just whether it continues.

      • k scott denison

        How about the 1975 to 1996 trend? 1975-1997? 1975-1998? 1975.5-1995.5?

      • 1975-1996

        Same result. The data after 1995 follows the extrapolated trend, not the “no warming” flat trend. So claims that warming stopped in 1995 are simply false.

        The claim made scott is that warming stopped in 1995. So I don’t know why you are suggesting periods like “1975-1997”. To test whether the warming stopped in 1995 the trend has to be taken up to 1995, not 1997.

      • k scott denison

        I’ve made no clam as to when the temperature went through an inflection. I’m just asking questions. So what about 1975-1997 and 1975-1998 or 1974-1995 or 1973-1998… You seem to believe that temperature follows a linear trend, so let’s test that assumption, shall we?

      • 1975-1998

        Again the result shows the data best follows an extrapolation of the warming trend rather than a flattening.

        Have to go up to about 2002/2003 to reach an ambiguity between warming stopping and warming continuing.

      • Captain Kangaroo

        Anastasios Tsonis, of the Atmospheric Sciences Group at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and colleagues used a mathematical network approach to analyse abrupt climate change on decadal timescales. Ocean and atmospheric indices – in this case the El Niño Southern Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation and the North Pacific Oscillation – can be thought of as chaotic oscillators that capture the major modes of climate variability. Tsonis and colleagues calculated the ‘distance’ between the indices. It was found that they would synchronise at certain times and then shift into a new state.

        It is no coincidence that shifts in ocean and atmospheric indices occur at the same time as changes in the trajectory of global surface temperature. Our ‘interest is to understand – first the natural variability of climate – and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural,’ Tsonis said.

        Four multi-decadal climate shifts were identified in the last century coinciding with changes in the surface temperature trajectory. Warming from 1909 to the mid 1940’s, cooling to the 1976/77, warming to 1998 and at least non warming since. These ‘climate shifts’ are accompanied by changes in the frequency and intensity of ENSO events.

        ‘We construct a network of observed climate indices in the period 1900–2000 and investigate their collective behavior. The results indicate that this network synchronized several times in this period. We find that in those cases where the synchronous state was followed by a steady increase in the coupling strength between the indices, the synchronous state was destroyed, after which a new climate state emerged. These shifts are associated with significant changes in global temperature trend and in ENSO variability. The latest such event is known as the great climate shift of the 1970s. We also find the evidence for such type of behavior in two climate simulations using a state-of-the-art model. This is the first time that this mechanism, which appears consistent with the theory of synchronized chaos, is discovered in a physical system of
        the size and complexity of the climate system.’ https://pantherfile.uwm.edu/aatsonis/www/2007GL030288.pdf

        This work shows that climate is chaotic in the sense of theoretical physics. On decadal scales the system is pushed past a threshold and dynamically adjusts to a new emergent state as a result of interactions between multiple feedbacks. It is not the case that any state is possible as a result of climate shifts – simply preferred states and these have varied in the Quaternary from glacial to interglacial.

        The lessor shifts seen in ocean and atmosphere patterns last decade mark the end points of the periods we are interested in. This is around 1910, 1945, 1976/77 and1998/2001.

      • Captain Kangaroo

        Ah…last century…

  53. Here’s how they spin the models it at ‘open mind’:
    http://tamino.wordpress.com/2013/02/23/once-is-not-enough/#comments

    “I love this post.

    I think it will be “game over” when we get the next big El Nino. At that stage the “skeptics” will shut up, and we can somewhat belatedly start fixing the problem.

    [Response: I hope your optimistic expectation comes to pass.]”

    optimistic?

    • Optimistic in that the skeptics will probably just move on to claiming “No Warming since 2010!!”

    • Captain Kangaroo

      Well look for yourself – http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/ – La Nina dominant to 1976/77, El Nino dominant to 1998 and La Nina since. We are as likely to get a big El Nino in the next decade or so as the models are likely to be right. Cool PDO and more intense and frequent La Nina are the prevailing pattern.

  54. The correlation between observation and prediction/Scenario is an extremely important point. The snippiness and off-topic whining is amazing for those who consider CAGW, real or not, a global concern. And Steven Mosher: what is with the juvenile nastiness? If you were a child of mine, I’d tell you to grow up and enter into the adult world: nobody likes or needs a pissy smartmouth. Be part of the solution, not a continuing part of the problem.

    Jeez.

  55. Just curious lolwot, how do you square Pachauri’s recent admission that there’s been no additional warming in 17 years with your own steadfast refusal (inability?) to make that concession? Maybe you should call him and convince him he’s indulging in voodoo science?

    • He’s wrong if he said that.

      Not hard to square is it. If someone says something that is incorrect, they are wrong.

    • Audit time pokerguy,

      Can you give me the actual quote from Pachauri pokerguy that backs up your claim about what he said?

      • So far I’ve found three interviews with Pachauri in Melbourne on February 21, one by Simon Lauder reported verbatim here, one by Auskar Surbakti reported verbatim here, and “a widely-ranging interview” reported (and conducted? he doesn’t say) by Graham Lloyd, a number of verbatim Pachauri quotes from which can be seen here. The first two interviews are available in audio but unfortunately not the third even though it would surely have been taped.

        In none of these interviews, not even the one reported by Lloyd, does Pachauri say anything at all about a 17-year pause. Lloyd begins his article with “The UN’s climate change chief, Rajendra Pachauri, has acknowledged a 17-year pause in global temperature rises, confirmed recently by Britain’s Met Office.” Lloyd quotes Pachauri verbatim several times, but not when he writes “Dr Pachauri said global average temperatures had plateaued at record levels and that the halt did not disprove global warming” which is interesting: why no verbatim quote for the particular sentence headlined by the article?

        No one is disputing that the rise has plateaued so far this millennium. (One could say that except for the year 1997 we’ve been in a plateau since 1960, just not always the same one.) Lloyd can say “acknowledged a 17-year pause” without lying provided Pachauri acknowledged a pause that Lloyd believed referred to a 17-year pause.

        The current plateau can perfectly reasonably be called a 15-year one thanks to the remarkable spike in 1998 preventing its left end from sagging. However the average anomaly for that period is 0.411 whereas that of the preceding two years is 0.243, making it hard to justify counting those two years as part of a claimed 17-year plateau, which is what Lloyd has done here. It makes more sense to assign at least the first 18 months of those two years to the preceding plateau. (The remarkably rapid climb to the 1998 spike began in mid-1997 and peaked dramatically at 0.739 in February 1998. As a result 1997 doesn’t fit into the preceding or following plateau, it’s more like the riser in a staircase which is why I called it out as an exception in my four-plateau plot.)

        Had Pachauri himself ever referred to the current pause as a 17-year one his exact words would be all over the Internet!

        The other two interviews give a much more detailed idea of Pachauri’s position on many aspects of global warming. There’s nothing in those two interviews that even hints at what Lloyd implies Pachauri said in the third interview.

    • Larry can you point me to the quote from Pachauri where he acknowledges no warming for 17 years? Where is it?

      I don’t see anything in the WUWT article or in the Australian news piece to back up the claim he said that.

      • David Springer

        James Hansen and two colleagues acknowledges a 15-year pause here:

        http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2013/20130115_Temperature2012.pdf

        Global Temperature Update Through 2012
        15 January 2013
        J. Hansen, M. Sato, R. Ruedy

        Summary. Global surface temperature in 2012 was +0.56°C (1°F) warmer than the 1951-1980 base period average, despite much of the year being affected by a strong La Nina. Global temperature thus continues at a high level that is sufficient to cause a substantial increase in the frequency of extreme warm anomalies. The 5-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade, which we interpret as a combination of natural variability and a slowdown in the growth rate of the net climate forcing.

        Note a “5-year mean” requires 5 years of history to calculate it. So when he says the 5 year mean has been flat for a decade that means it was flat for that decade plus the five previous years required to calculate the mean on the first day of that decade. These are really weasel words that mislead some into thinking only the past 10 years were flat. The following two statements are equivalent, in other words:

        The 5-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade

        The annual mean global temperature has been flat for 15 years

        The only reason I respond to you, lolwot, is so that others may see that even James Hansen acknowledges a 15-year pause. Global non-warming denialists such as yourself and whatshisface Nucitelli @ Sketpical Science will not acknowledge what legitimate scientists are forced to acknowledge lest their peers roast them on a spit for lying.

      • Hansen said; “which we interpret as a combination of natural variability and a slowdown in the growth rate of the net climate forcing.”

        Hansen et used to say that natural variability wasn’t capable of stopping warming, now he says it does but in combination with “a slowdown in the growth rate of the net climate forcing”. co2 growth rate hasn’t slowed, but the sun has.

        Is he preparing the way for an about turn, just in case mother nature’s natural variability in the shape of the climate decides to go and make an even bigger mess of their multivariate nonsense climate models which in reality are single variate (co2) models, by entering a period of extended cooling.

      • “Hansen et used to say that natural variability wasn’t capable of stopping warming”

        Citation needed.

        Why do you skeptics find the need to fabricate what people have or haven’t said?

      • “The following two statements are equivalent, in other words:

        The 5-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade

        The annual mean global temperature has been flat for 15 years”

        Not so

      • Pachauri had no choice but to admit there’s been no warming for 17 years, the Met Office had finally made a statement and others like NOAA have had to admit it or look like total chumps.

        http://www.cfact.org/2013/02/23/pachauri-would-not-admit-over-a-decade-without-warming-when-cfact-asked-him-in-mexico-but-admits-it-now/

        But the scam goes on, the so called “scientists” perpetuating the global warming fraud first deny then move the goalposts, typical conman tactics. Pachauri now moves the goal posts to 30-40 years to show a trend, when as Eddy Aruda points out in the comments, this scam was kicked off by Hansen claiming imminent global warming apocalypse after ten years of warming. He did this at a senate committee sweltering in a room where he had earlier opened all the windows to break down the air conditioning.

        Liars and cheats the lot of them. And all who aid and abet them in the face of the mountain of evidence we have of their duplicity pushing fake fisics.

        http://joannenova.com.au/2013/02/pachauri-quietly-blows-goalposts-away-pretends-to-like-skeptics-its-all-pr-to-keep-the-gravy-train-running/

        Jo Nova: “Can’t we just pretend the IPCC predicted decades of global flatness?
        In 1990 the IPCC told global policymakers that even if they stabilized emissions, the world would warm by at least 0.2C per decade for the next few decades. That was their “low estimate”. Emissions didn’t remotely stabilize, so the warming trend “should” have been even more than that (they thought 0.3C per decade, maybe up to 0.5C per decade). Instead it warmed less.

        The pause became noticeable. The goalposts started shifting as the pause got longer. Nothing disproves a climate model (that’s a tautology, by the way).

        In 2008 NOAA said that pauses of 15 years or more didn’t fit with climate simulations (so if it went longer, the models would be wrong). Likewise James Hansen was caught in ClimateGate saying that ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’ When the pause got a bit longer still, Ben Santer said in a paper it really was 17 years we needed to see. That was 2011.

        By 2013, instead of admitting failure, changing the theory and thanking the skeptics, Pachauri now says we’ll need 30 -40 years of the IPCC being wrong before we can say they are wrong. Bold, very bold.”

        “They won’t make the mistake of making actual predictions again after they failed so badly in 1990. Now they predict warming, cooling, blizzards, droughts and unwarming. All roads lead to a crisis.”

      • “Pachauri had no choice but to admit there’s been no warming for 17 years, the Met Office had finally made a statement and others like NOAA have had to admit it or look like total chumps.”

        Myhrr this is a lie. The Met Office nor the NOAA have not made any such statement to that effect.

        Please stop helping to spread these falsehoods.

      • Oh wot lolwot? quibbling about the actual “quote” or number or years 16/17? Paraphrase as the Daily Mail has done is perfectly acceptable because conveying the same information. It appears you are being disingenuous here which makes you devious – as I’ve had experience before here of someone attacking me by taking something I said out of context. Not impressed.

        I’m not the liar here, those pushing the AGW fake fisics global warming scare are the ones shown time and time again to be the liars and the manipulators of data and they have to do this because they cannot prove anything of their AGW claim, not a thing.

        JoNova has written a good piece on the machinations of Pachauri and his ilk: http://joannenova.com.au/2013/02/pachauri-quietly-blows-goalposts-away-pretends-to-like-skeptics-its-all-pr-to-keep-the-gravy-train-running/

        I’m sorry if you see nothing amiss with our supposedly best “science” institutions.. : http://www.sott.net/article/256309-Global-Warming-Has-the-UK-Met-Office-committed-fraud

  56. lolwot, The Australian newspaper, 22/02/13 ‘The UN’s climate
    change Rajendra Pauchauri has acknowledged a 17 year pause
    in global temperature rises….’

  57. Let me make a stunning prediction:

    We’ll find out that Pauchauri DID NOT acknowledge a 17 year pause in global temperature rise. In fact we’ll find out Pauchauri never even said the number “17” in that interview.

    We’ll find out the Australian ascribed an acknowledgement to him he never made.

    And climate skeptics merrily went round the internet pushing this untruth. None of them questioned or perhaps even spotted the fact there is no direct quote of him saying what he is claimed to have said.

    But lolwot did. Only lolwot. Seems the real skeptic is lolwot.

    WUWT?

  58. Captain Kangaroo

    ‘The underlying net anthropogenic warming rate in the industrial era is found to have been steady since 1910 at 0.07–0.08 °C/decade, with superimposed AMO-related ups and downs that included the early 20th century warming, the cooling of the 1960s and 1970s, the accelerated warming of the 1980s and 1990s, and the recent slowing of the warming rates. Quantitatively, the recurrent multidecadal internal variability, often underestimated in attribution studies, accounts for 40% of the observed recent 50-y warming trend.’
    http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/01/22/1212471110.abstrac

    ‘Natural, large-scale climate patterns like the PDO and El Niño-La Niña are superimposed on global warming caused by increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases and landscape changes like deforestation. According to Josh Willis, JPL oceanographer and climate scientist, “These natural climate phenomena can sometimes hide global warming caused by human activities. Or they can have the opposite effect of accentuating it.”’ http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/IOTD/view.php?id=8703

    Hard to know how or why numbnut is denying this – but he obviously has little support and no credibility.

    • has no relevance to anything I have said.

      • Captain Kangaroo

        He said it would ‘need to last 30 or 40 years at least’ to break the global warming trend. So we are in this never never world of decades of cooling but it is still warming.

        We know there are decadal variations in climate – and centennial and millennial – but it is all irrelevant aye numbnut?

  59. Schrodinger's Cat

    lolwot, some questions for you.
    What proportion of the warming in the second half of 2012 was natural?
    How long has the current non-warming lasted?
    What happened to stop the warming that was predicted by the models?

    • sorry not interested in answering questions right now

    • @SC (addressed to lolwot who declined to answer): What proportion of the warming in the second half of 2012 was natural?

      In the Southern Hemisphere, presumably more than 90%. The Northern Hemisphere cooled during that period, also naturally.

      How long has the current non-warming lasted?

      Since 1998, a 15-year plateau. The average anomaly has been 0.411 C during that period. To make it a 17-year plateau requires including the preceding two years. However their average anomaly was 0.243 C. I don’t see any justification for calling those two years part of the plateau.

      What happened to stop the warming that was predicted by the models?

      To quote Mugwump, a fixture on Amazon climate blogs for some years, “It’s the Sun, stupid.” Specifically the 21-year magnetic cycle (lately more like 20 years), whose apparent impact on HadCRUT3 (orange curve) peaked in 2000. (Following Greg Goodman’s recommendation I’ve started truncating the ends of graphs produced by filtering as end effects make the ends meaningless.)

  60. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nothing-off-limits-in-climate-debate/story-e6frg6n6-1226583112134

    lolwot, not a quote but a published report of an interview with a claim
    that RP acknowledged that there was a 17 yr pause in warming.. If
    The Australian has mis-reported we would expect Pauchari to
    demand a retraction. Doesn’t seem to be a retraction so far.

    • And you think because the Australian made that claim without providing an actual quote we should assume it’s true?

      Not very skeptical Beth. A bit gullible in fact.

      • lolwot and Beth

        Let’s establish the “null hypothesis” here.

        Graham Lloyd, The Australian, 22 February 2013, has published an article stating that RP had acknowledged the 17 year pause in warming reported earlier by the UK Met Office, adding various comments by RP rationalizing the significance of the pause:
        http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/nothing-off-limits-in-climate-debate/story-e6frg6n6-1226583112134

        , confirmed recently by Britain’s Met Office, but said it would need to last “30 to 40 years at least” to break the long-term global warming trend.

        The story has “gone viral” (Canada, USA, Germany, etc.)

        There has been no demand for a retraction by Dr. Pachauri.

        How many days do we have to wait until the “null hypothesis” becomes:

        “The UN’s climate change chief, Rajendra Pachauri, has acknowledged a 17-year pause in global temperature rises”?

        Two more days?

        10 days after the first release?

        Whaddaya think?

        Max

      • Not until you can provide the quote of exactly what Pachauri said.

        The Australian is simply not a reliable source.

    • It’s voodoo, Beth. The 17 year pause can both be and not be.
      ===========

      • Captain Kangaroo

        More recent work is identifying abrupt climate changes working through the El Niño Southern Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation, the Southern Annular Mode, the Arctic Oscillation, the Indian Ocean Dipole and other measures of ocean and atmospheric states. These are measurements of sea surface temperature and atmospheric pressure over more than 100 years which show evidence for abrupt change to new climate conditions that persist for up to a few decades before shifting again. Global rainfall and flood records likewise show evidence for abrupt shifts and regimes that persist for decades. In Australia, less frequent flooding from early last century to the mid 1940’s, more frequent flooding to the late 1970’s and again a low rainfall regime to recent times.

        Anastasios Tsonis, of the Atmospheric Sciences Group at University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, and colleagues used a mathematical network approach to analyse abrupt climate change on decadal timescales. Ocean and atmospheric indices – in this case the El Niño Southern Oscillation, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the North Atlantic Oscillation and the North Pacific Oscillation – can be thought of as chaotic oscillators that capture the major modes of climate variability. Tsonis and colleagues calculated the ‘distance’ between the indices. It was found that they would synchronise at certain times and then shift into a new state.

        It is no coincidence that shifts in ocean and atmospheric indices occur at the same time as changes in the trajectory of global surface temperature. Our ‘interest is to understand – first the natural variability of climate – and then take it from there. So we were very excited when we realized a lot of changes in the past century from warmer to cooler and then back to warmer were all natural,’ Tsonis said.

        Four multi-decadal climate shifts were identified in the last century coinciding with changes in the surface temperature trajectory. Warming from 1909 to the mid 1940’s, cooling to the late 1970’s, warming to 1998 and declining since. The shifts are punctuated by extreme El Niño Southern Oscillation events. Fluctuations between La Niña and El Niño peak at these times and climate then settles into a damped oscillation. Until the next critical climate threshold – due perhaps in a decade or two if the recent past is any indication.

        James Hurrell and colleagues in a recent article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society stated that the ‘global coupled atmosphere–ocean–land–cryosphere system exhibits a wide range of physical and dynamical phenomena with associated physical, biological, and chemical feedbacks that collectively result in a continuum of temporal and spatial variability. The traditional boundaries between weather and climate are, therefore, somewhat artificial.’ Somewhat artificial is somewhat of an understatement for a paradigm shift in climate science.

        The fact that you don’t get it – JCH – seems more due to cognitive dissonance than anything to do with climate science.

      • Lol.

      • Captain Kangaroo

        It is a 20 to 40 year pause. I note that you have accused me elsewhere of peddling this rubbish for nearly a decade. You lose – so sad too bad. LOL

      • Captain Kangaroo

        I should add that it becomes more evident day by day to all but the most profoundly dissonant space cadets.

        ‘After reviewing evidence in both the latest global data (HadCRUT4) and the longest instrumental record, Central England Temperature, a revised picture is emerging that gives a consistent attribution for each multidecadal episode of warming and cooling in recent history, and suggests that the anthropogenic global warming trends might have been overestimated by a factor of two in the second half of the 20th century.’
        http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/01/22/1212471110.abstract

        At least a factor of 2 and cooling for decades. Cry baby cry.

  61. Judith: The NCADAC draft also had a few comparisons/projections in Deg F. Their figure 1 on page 23 for the U.S.:
    http://i47.tinypic.com/2r4309w.jpg
    And their Figure 2.3 (global) on page 35, with the observations ending in 2008:
    http://i49.tinypic.com/2rp7dxd.jpg
    Odd year to end the observations.

  62. Schrodinger's Cat

    Lolwot, you will never answer my questions.

  63. E purr so muove eh lolwot ?

    • @BC: E purr so muove eh lolwot ?

      Italian for (pick one):

      Lolwot is moved by Schroedinger’s pussy.

      Beth’s pussy is moved by Lolwot’s sweet nothings.

      Lolwot’s pussy is joining the immense raft of Youtube cat videos.

      • Captain Kangaroo

        I am sure it is nothing to do with quantum indeterminancy at all. More a matter of just the facts and less cognitive dissonance. You are entitled to your own opinion – Vaughan – but to your not to your own innuendo.

      • Captain Kangaroo

        You are entitled to your own cognitive dissonance but not to your own double entendre? I thought it deserved a do over.

        Always like a good line. Heard one yesterday. ‘A verb is a tragedy we can well do without.’ Someday I may discover what it means – in the meantime will enjoy the insousiance. Which I take to mean sans sous chef – which as I have just had a dinner of lean Aussie lamb and lashings of salad – I can take with equanimity.

        I shall have to write a poem with no verbs – and see if it is less tragic than losing your sous chef.

  64. I gotta take a break. The juxtaposition of Bob Tisdale and lolwot has overwhelmed me.
    ============

  65. Schrodinger's Cat

    lolwot, I’m not the troll, you are.

    While you never reveal your convictions it gives you the opportunity to rubbish every comment made by everyone else. As soon as you reveal your position, you become vulnerable to challenges, just like everone else.

    You are the troll and you waste everyone’s time. Go away.

    • So you didn’t like me “rubbishing other people’s comments”, AKA cutting through the BS of your fellow skeptics.

      So you set out to try and divert my attention into answering a bunch of questions instead.

      Sadly for you I saw through it. Your “some questions for you” act as the innocent questioner was quite obvious.

  66. For several people:

    I am only a nebish in the flatlands with no special access to the truth, but I have been an interested observer of the world and how it seems to work for most of 7 cycles, My training in observation is derived from a combination of listening to my mother–a farmer’s daughter, taking pilot training, and engaging in a number of activities (in the mountains, on the deserts, in the air, and on the seas) where guessing the future accurately is an important skill.

    As I mentioned, the search engines (Bing worse than Google, surprisingly enough) won’t show me much when I look for Dr. P and his pronouncements. I did see enough to suggest that his ethics and honesty raise the question “Why would anybody listen to him about anything?” and so we have to consider the possibility that he is lying about this matter.

    I did not find any references to ‘Dr, Rajendra Pauchauri said: “……..”‘ but I did see myriad references to “Rajendra Pachauri, has acknowledged a 17-year pause in global temperature rises, confirmed recently by Britain’s Met Office…” or words nearly exactly the same as that.

    It is interesting to note that among the places where I did NOT see anything interesting was the Met Office site.

    This discussion has rotted, as they always do, to warmist trolls grasping at imaginary or manufactured straws, and troll farmers feeding the trolls in response.

    So I am about to kill the subscription to this thread.

    If you will excuse me then I’ll see if I can get to the wood pile and back so I won’t freeze while I worry about my wife out driving on the icy roads.

    Spring in Nebraska is getting to be as bad as the winters.

    • “but I did see myriad references to “Rajendra Pachauri, has acknowledged a 17-year pause in global temperature rises, confirmed recently by Britain’s Met Office…”

      Because climate skeptics have copy pasted that false sentence all over the internet?

      “It is interesting to note that among the places where I did NOT see anything interesting was the Met Office site.”

      Because the Met Office aren’t a bunch of lying hack climate skeptics?

      • When you can see their sleights of hand to hide whatever is inimical to their global warming fear mongering in their reporting and statements, you’ll be less apt to take them at face value..

        Of course the Met Office isn’t going to trumpet that there’s been no warming for 17 years, their funding, and ideology, relies on keeping the scam going.

        http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2261577/Global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago-Met-Office-report-reveals-MoS-got-right-warming–deniers-now.html

        “Global warming stopped 16 years ago, Met Office report reveals: MoS got it right about warming… so who are the ‘deniers’ now?By David Rose
        PUBLISHED: 01:12 GMT, 13 January 2013 | UPDATED: 01:13 GMT, 13 January 2013
        ..

        Last year The Mail on Sunday reported a stunning fact: that global warming had ‘paused’ for 16 years. The Met Office’s own monthly figures showed there had been no statistically significant increase in the world’s temperature since 1997.
        We were vilified. One Green website in the US said our report was ‘utter bilge’ that had to be ‘exposed and attacked’.
        The Met Office issued a press release claiming it was misleading, before quietly admitting a few days later that it was true that the world had not got significantly warmer since 1997 after all. A Guardian columnist wondered how we could be ‘punished’.”

        The Met Office first tried to downplay it, typical conman tactics of the disingenuous.

        And typical “global warming devotees” response from the Grauniad – the tried and testing technique of calling for violence against those who oppose the memes of their religion.

        These are not scientists lolwot, why are you with them?

    • The article in The Australian does NOT provide a direct quote for the “17-year” pause.

      It says:

      ~~~start quote of article~~~

      “Dr Pachauri said global average temperatures had plateaued at record levels and that the halt did not disprove global warming.

      “The climate is changing because of natural factors and the impact of human actions,” Dr Pachauri said.

      “If you look at temperatures going back 150 years, there are clearly fluctuations which have occurred largely as a result of natural factors: solar activity, volcanic activity and so on.

      “What is quite perceptible is, in the last 50 years, the trend is upwards.

      “This is not to say you won’t have ups and downs – you will – but what we should be concerned about is the trend, and that is being influenced now to a large extent by human actions.”

      He said that it would be 30 to 40 years “at least” before it was possible to say that the long-term upward trend in global temperatures had been broken.

      “If you look at the last century, records tell you that the increase in average surface temperature has been 0.74C,” he said.

      “If you have five or 10 years when you don’t have the same trend, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you are deviating from the trend – you are still around the trend.”

      ~~~end article quote~~~

      Without Mr. Lloyd’s interview notes or interview recording, there is no way to know what, if anything, Lloyd took to be the basis of this lead-in ==> “THE UN’s climate change chief, Rajendra Pachauri, has acknowledged a 17-year pause in global temperature rises”.

      (It cost me a dollar to find this out — so now I have 27 more days of access to an Australian newspaper — what a treat! /sarc)

      • Captain Kangaroo

        I am sure that Rupert appreciates the business Kip.

        We have the data – http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1997 – we don’t need interview notes. Nor do we suggest it is all a right wing conspiracy. But clutching at straws is so unseemly

        The ‘pause’ in global warming – now that most of them have at long last stopped denying it – is no accident and is not all that mysterious. It is the result in large part of large scale ocean and atmospheric patterns in the Pacific Ocean known collectively as the Interdecadal Pacific Oscillation (IPO). This consists principally of cold water rising or not in the north-east Pacific and changes in the frequency and intensity of El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events.

        The warm and cool modes of the IPO last for 20 to 40 years each. A cool mode sees cold water rising in the north-east Pacific and increased frequency and intensity of La Niña – and the planet cools. A warm mode sees warm water in the north-east Pacific and more frequent and intense El Niño – and the planet warms. The mode shifted from warm to cool after 1998 – so the planet is not warming for a decade or so hence without much doubt.

        Beyond that it is not guaranteed either that the current 1000 year peak in surface temperatures will ratchet up again from this natural variability. Are we on the threshold of Bond Event Zero and centuries of cooling? Perhaps it will warm again – but the alternate natural warming and cooling we have seen for 150 years means that at most the anthropogenic component of warming is 0.08 degrees C/decade. Nothing that is at all alarming. It is the same system – by the way – that has brought decades of flooding followed by decades of drought to Australia as seen in our instrumental record. We are in for a decade or so more of intense and frequent La Niña and very much increased summer rainfall and cyclones. It is one of the systems bringing decades long drought to the US.

        I have been peddling this cr@p for nearly a decade now. It just keeps getting more obvious. But the best thing is – you lose.

      • @KH (quoting Pachauri): He said that it would be 30 to 40 years “at least” before it was possible to say that the long-term upward trend in global temperatures had been broken.

        In the dialect of my native country (which competes solidly with India in cricket), I would say Pachauri was being a piker on this point.

        Sticking my neck out here, fuggedabout 30-40 years. If the remaining 7 years of this decade (2010-2020) show a downward trend I would say the Arrhenius theory of global warming (his 1896 article) had been seriously called into question. There would be much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments in those circles that were convinced temperature was on the rise.

      • Captain Kangaroo

        Yeah – I imagine that holding out for 30 or 40 years is a bit ambitous. I doubt really that you need to throw away simple radiative physics – simply accomodate oceanography and hydrology.

      • Captain K –> I simply wanted to settled the point as to whether or not the author at the Australian was quoting the Pach-man or not. So many commenters here were going on and on, but no one was reading the “behind a pay-wall” article itself (a whole dollar, for heaven’s sake!).

        He wasn’t quoting, not in the article he wrote. So that itty-bitty point is settled….no direct quote given. Whether or not Pach-man “acknowledged” or not is not settled.

        Cheers, as I learned to say in Sydney.

      • Captain Kangaroo

        I read it in the newspaper over coffee. But there is nothing at all equivocal about the Met Office data.

    • I love it, the Nebish from Nebraska! A husky laugh for my corny joke. And listen, I swear I can leave these alarmists alone.
      ========

  67. Tick tock tick tock.

    Still no-one has provided an actual quote by Pachauri to back up the claim that he acknowledges no-warming for 17-years.

    • Captain Kangaroo

      Pay $1 for a 28 day subscription and read the article for yourself. Otherwise you are just flailing about in the dark as usual.

      • Let me make this easier for you captain:

        There is no quote by pachauri in the article to back up the claim.

      • Captain Kangaroo

        http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1997

        As I say – read the article. I have put a quote about the pause needing to persist for 30 or 4 years. The ‘pause’ is quite obvious to Pachauri and everyone else. Including the Met Office – data above.

        The question you need to ask yourself punk – is have temperatures increased by 0.2 degrees C per decade? Not even close. Furthermore -The world is not warming for a decade or so hence – because of the large scale ocean and atmospheric patterns discussed by NASA in the link you deemed irrelevant above. Get used to it.

      • Captain. You know there is no quote from Pachauri in the article even mentioning 17 years. I know it. You know it.

        So what is your motivation for obfuscating?

      • Captain Kangaroo

        ‘The UN’s climate change chief Rajendra Pachauri has acknowledged a 17-year pause in global tempeature rises, confrmed by the Britain’s Met Office, but said it would need to last for ’30 to 40 years at least’ to break the long term global warming trend.’ If you have a problem with the reporting tell the Australian Press Council. I suggest, again, that you first read the artice.

        Again – here is the Met Office data – http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1997

        This is quite obvious to everyone but you numbnut.

      • You still haven’t provided an actual quote of what Pachauri said.

        If you don’t think it matters, consider that the Met Office have not confirmed a 17-year pause in global temperatures as the Australian article claims.

        To be short the Australian’s journalism cannot be trusted.

        And the data you post do not show a pause for 17 years. Quite the contrary the trend is positive and the uncertainty range in the trend encompasses continued warming.

      • Captain Kangaroo

        You continue to go around in circles insisting that the reporter lied on the front page of the Australian. I am damn sure that he could not get away with that.

        I repeat;

        ‘The UN’s climate change chief Rajendra Pachauri has acknowledged a 17-year pause in global temperature rises, confirmed by the Britain’s Met Office, but said it would need to last for ’30 to 40 years at least’ to break the long term global warming trend.’ If you have a problem with the reporting tell the Australian Press Council.

        And the data is quite evidently not warming – 0.03 degrees C/decade from 1997. Something indistiguisable from zero. And while the data itself has an error the trend is merely least squares fitting of a line to data. Still indistinguisable from zero. It is confirmed by the Met Office both by their own calculation and the data.

        Why persist in your nonsense?

      • My curiosity is aroused. While I was willing to believe the claim that Pachauri had said something that was patently ridiculous on the face of it, my willingness has now been undermined by the inability of anyone to actually produce what he said.

        Ok, so what did Pachauri actually say?

        While I’m a great fan of climate skepticism to the extent that it can be demonstrated, I hate to say that if no one here can answer this question then climate skepticism is hereby rolled over by the steamroller of factual evidence.

      • Captain Kangaroo

        This is what the article says verbatim – as I have already quoted.

        ‘The UN’s climate change chief Rajendra Pachauri has acknowledged a 17-year pause in global temperature rises, confirmed by the Britain’s Met Office, but said it would need to last for ’30 to 40 years at least’ to break the long term global warming trend.’ As it appeared on the front page of The Australian and it seems millions of blogs wordwide. Has Pachauri denied it? Unlikely it seems.

        This is what the met office says.

        ‘Q.1 “First, please confirm that they do indeed reveal no warming trend since 1997.”

        The linear trend from August 1997 (in the middle of an exceptionally strong El Nino) to August 2012 (coming at the tail end of a double-dip La Nina) is about 0.03°C/decade, amounting to a temperature increase of 0.05°C over that period…’

        http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/2012/10/14/met-office-in-the-media-14-october-2012/

        Yeah right – 5/100’s of a degree whch numbnut insists is warming. It seems quite evident to so many. And of course you know what CERES says about the period?

        It doesn’r men much to me what any blog or newspaper says – I will go to science and data.

        http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1997

        Simple?

        Are you joining the cult too Vaughan. I do enjoy the cognitive dissonance of the space cadets – but watch out for the Kool-Aid.

      • ‘Then climate skepticism is hereby rolled over by the steamroller of factual evidence’. Giggle.

        Vaughn, I’d underestimated you. That one is pretty funny, indeed.
        =================

  68. Mark B (number 2)

    So, I have looked at the graph which went back to 1950. This shows that the temperature has increased by half a degree since then. So what? You wouldn’t notice it if it went up by half a degree in the next ten minutes. I certainly wouldn’t feel the need to take my coat off.
    How can this trivial amount, which you can only detect with an accurate thermometer, which has been well maintained and calibrated over a 62 year period, be responsible for anything.
    Mass extinctions, the end of polar bears, flooding, extreme weather, stuck weather systems, record rainfall, drought etc….absolutely ridiculous!

    • Brandon Shollenberger

      Make sure to remember that increase isn’t uniform across the globe. Some places have warmed more; some have warmed less.

      • David Springer

        You forgot to say some have cooled. You’re aware some have cooled, right? Ask Moshpit. Even he acknowledges that some sites have cooled since 1880. On average, after adjustments are applied in a valiant effort to make inadequate antique thermometers with inadequate coverage and amateur station-keepers across a small percentage of the earth’s land masses adequate to detect trends in the hundredths of a degree per decade… (whew) on average all stations consolidated into a single record together show some warming.

      • Brandon

        We did a study on places that are cooling which consists of around one third of the globe

        http://diggingintheclay.wordpress.com/2010/09/01/in-search-of-cooling-trends/

        They are cooling to varying degrees over different time periods and a proper criteria needs to be laid down to understand their significance

        Mosh is well aware of this from his BEST work and as he seems to be hanging around tonight thinking great thoughts he might like to expand on the theme

        Tonyb

      • Brandon Shollenberger

        David Springer, TonyB, I am aware of stations that show cooling, but I don’t know of any areas that have shown cooling since 1950. As Tony’s link shows, many stations that show cooling only show it for part of their record. That, and the lack of any specific areal examples made me not mention cooling.

        In other words, I didn’t want to say it without being able to provide specific examples.

      • Ya, I keep meaning to get back to that work.
        The number is less than 30%. The 30% number comes from considering all long series (70 years plus)regardless of their start date.

        Here is the state of what I found.

        For series going back to 1900.
        1. they needed 90% “coverage” or 90% of all values present.
        2. unadjusted data
        Findings:
        15% showed cooling
        A) Almost all were in the US with a smattering in australia and other places.
        B. Applying test of statistical significance reduced this below 10%
        C. When you change the “missing values” allowed from 10% to 5% to 0%
        the amount shrinks even more. This indicates a pattern in missing values ( Carrick had a thesis I havent tested yet)
        D) outside the US the stations tend to be coastal.
        E. Inside the US the stations I checked were all stations that had moved from cities to outlying airports..

        The bottomline is the result is basically un publishable. Nobody but netcitizens care about these interesting little quirks. I also had a few interesting cases of sites that changed because a dam was built nearby.
        Its a lot of work and 99% of folks just yawn.

      • Very helpful, moshe. I had believed the one third figure for cooling.
        ========

      • Kim

        Mosh made a good response but its somewhat more complex/confused than that as we all know.

        Verity and I did a study and coincidentally the BEST work was in the throes of collection and analysis around that time so I asked Richard Mueller directly, who came up with the 30% figure . This was slightly more than the estimate we had made but ours was on much less detailed/widespread sampling.

        Taking 30 years as a statistically meaningful time scale there was cooling at a wide variety of places not limited to the US or Australia for at least that timescale. UHI got in the way because many of the longer real readings (as opposed to interpolated/borrowed ones from elsewhere) were apparently affected by warming when other places nearby were cooling.

        We stopped our work because we didn’t want to be accusred of cherry picking, but there is undoubtedly an interesting study to be made using the latest data with agreed parameters i.e what consititutes cooling and what consititutes warming. There are also many places that are ‘neutral’ but that is a term you don’t often hear used.

        Here is CET which has shown a dramatic drop in temperatures over the last dozen years or so.

        http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/

        Not statistically meaningful, but in view of its longevity (and broad proxy as a global temperature) of particular interst and demonstrating that cooling as well as warming takes place on the globe at the same time. Will it continue? Don’t know.

        CET has been steadily warming for 350 years so it needs something dramatic to reverse the trend. I am currently working on ‘The long slow thaw’ Part 2 and looking for the transition from the MWP to the LIA. I’m not sure Lamb had this one exactly right but its early days .

        tonyb

      • Yes, you have both been very helpful. It looks like the problem is explicated but needs lots of work.

        Meanwhile, climate science is manipulating past European records. Hmmm.
        ============

      • Is there now going to be a serious discussion on the fact that the Earth is not in “thermodynamic equilibrium?” A real discussion about there being no single temperature for the whole thing? Will the discussion be about statistical hocus pocus that can never change that fact?

      • Brian, ” Is there now going to be a discussion about non-equilibrium Thermodynamics?”

        There always has been, the telescope jockeys just needed a face plant before it was taken seriously.

        http://landshape.org/enm/solar-supersensitivity-a-worked-example/

        Niche Modeling has an interesting discussion on how the gain changes with capacity limits. How accurate you want to get depends on how many boxes you want to include in your models. I have been saying the same thing, though without the math, since you will never get the accuracy required to assign attribution to small impacts like CO2, with the limited data we have.

        http://redneckphysics.blogspot.com/2013/02/layers-of-complexity.html

        In a bistable system, sensitivity in a transition phase is different than in control phases.

      • Ooh, I spy a dragon egg. What color is it? Should we eat it?
        ================

    • David Springer

      Mark B (number 2) | February 23, 2013 at 3:02 pm | Reply

      “So, I have looked at the graph which went back to 1950. This shows that the temperature has increased by half a degree since then. So what? You wouldn’t notice it if it went up by half a degree in the next ten minutes. I certainly wouldn’t feel the need to take my coat off.
      How can this trivial amount, which you can only detect with an accurate thermometer, which has been well maintained and calibrated over a 62 year period, be responsible for anything.
      Mass extinctions, the end of polar bears, flooding, extreme weather, stuck weather systems, record rainfall, drought etc….absolutely ridiculous!”

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPCC_Third_Assessment_Report

      Synthesis Report

      The TAR Synthesis Report includes a summary of the TAR’s main findings and uncertainties.

      “Robust findings” of the TAR include:

      Future warming will have both beneficial and adverse effects, but for higher levels of warming, adverse effects will predominate.

      Restated:

      Future warming will have both beneficial and adverse effects, but for lower levels of warming, beneficial effects will predominate.

      That report was made in 2001. Since that time the unexpected pause in global warming has made observation agree with the lower levels of warming. By IPCC’s own assessment and the data since then showing the lower levels were what actually transpired, expect beneficial warming effects to predominate.

      Now they seem at a loss as to what they should say. If they want alarmism to continue for political ends they must somehow not look like circus clowns by contradicting earlier findings saying ill-effects would only dominate at higher warming levels yet somehow still paint an alarming picture.

      Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive!

      The catastrophic global warming movement was literally banking on warming continuing. This pause is causing both intellectual and literal bankruptcy!

      It’s so great being proven right. It must really suck to be a CAGW’er right now. It’s only going to suck worse going forward. I love it so!

  69. Schrodinger's Cat

    lolwot, I don’t propose to spend any more time having pointless exchanges of comments with you.

    I hope our brief encounter will make others realise that you will argue with them regardless of what they say, provided you perceive their comments to question the warmist beliefs.

    You will never quantify your own position on these scientific questions, even if you, in fact, have such a quantified view, which I doubt.

    To engage with you is therefore completely pointless and I hope that others reading these threads will come to a similar conclusion.

    • “lolwot, I don’t propose to spend any more time having pointless exchanges of comments with you.”

      3 more paragraphs to go though? before you change your id.

  70. Schrodinger's Cat

    I point out to other readers that the three paragraphs referred to by lolwot were for the benefit of people who read this blog and who may take his responses seriously.

    The comment to which I make this reference is such a perfect example that I couldn’t pass up the opportunity. It was another unsubstantiated challenge.

    My advice to all is that we ignore this troll from now on.

  71. Before I leave, to avoid a valid fault-finding I saw up-thread referring to somebody else–my position as best I understand it.

    Warming is good. From what little I have been able to read of it, the history and the archeological records seem unanimous in finding that warm has been associated with wealth, prosperity, good health, and enormous progress. Cold is always associated with poverty, pestilence, famine, and dark times. Am I reaching when I observe that with gorebal warming we are seeing the religious persecutions and inquisitions of the Dark Ages?

    From that then it follows that money, energy, and talent spent trying to prevent warming is beyond stupid to criminally stupid, perhaps towards suicidal.

    Do I think it is warming now? On the the big scale, it looks like we were moving away from the last ice age–are we still? Don’t know–seems to have flattened out a bit, but it is way too soon to say for sure, but given the way the sun is behaving I think the young folks should be planning for a chill.

    Do I think humans have had no effect on weather and climate (and for the record, spare me the lecture–it is clear as day that “climate” is a statement of “average weather” and trying to persuade me otherwise is a waste of perfectly good air)—I got distracted….. Do I think humans have had no effect on weather and climate?

    Of course not, that would be a very silly thing to say, unless you have never spent much time in nor read about the Owens and San Joaquin Valleys of California, or the Great Plains.

    Do I think that is all good? Hell no. But I don’t think it is all bad either, and I see no reason at all to enrichen Al Gore and his Big Oil associates in the process of taking us back to the Dark Ages.

    • This is very eloquent, Larry; I’m sorry I missed it before you left. I hope that’s not you galloping off with four horsemen.
      =========

    • Warming is good.

      Excellent. Everyone turn off your air conditioners, you’ll save on electric bills while enjoying the warmth.

      From that then it follows that money, energy, and talent spent trying to prevent warming is beyond stupid to criminally stupid, perhaps towards suicidal.

      Indeed. Who in their right mind would waste money on air conditioning?

  72. David Springer

    lolwot | February 22, 2013 at 5:42 pm |

    “A plateau on that graph means continued warming. The y-axis is trend, not temperature. If it levels out at 0.16C/decade, that isn’t going to mean warming stops.”

    Interesting redefinition of the word plateau. A plateau isn’t really flat but a continuation of an upward slope minus, I guess, the actual upward slope.

    This is what real denial looks like folks. A plateau that’s somehow not flat.

    • A plateau in acceleration does not mean the car isn’t moving.

      • sorry I mean speed not acceleration

      • lowlot wrote: “A plateau in acceleration does not mean the car isn’t moving”
        ———————————————————————–
        Except in your world, you would just draw a trend-line through the entire journey and use that to claim that the car had in fact continued to accelerate.
        And before you claim that I’m misrepresenting you, if speed is analogous to temperature, then acceleration is analogous to temperature increase.

      • If you really think the car stopped moving in 1995 you are just deluding yourself.

      • A smart alarmist might try getting out of the car now.
        ==============

      • You said that, not me.
        Not continuing to accelerate is not the same as stopping.

      • David Springer

        lolwot | February 23, 2013 at 8:36 pm | Reply

        “A plateau in acceleration does not mean the car isn’t moving.”

        Correct. The earth still has a temperature. It isn’t absolute zero which is a stoppage of all motion. A plateua in acceleration means the speed isb’t changing. In your analogy speed equals temperature.

        You’re a lost cause I’m afraid if you don’t know the difference between speed and acceleration. What is the last grade you successfully completed?

  73. Judith and others:

    It really is a waste of time working with IPCC models because the underlying assumptions are so dramatically false that the models don’t have a hope of being correct in the long run. They completely disregard and ignore the entropy conditions of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. They consider only 24 hour means as if the Earth is flat, and so there is no representation of the obvious underlying supporting thermal plot in the atmosphere and sub-surface.

    I have written four very detailed comments (further enlarging on the content of about 20 pages in my paper) here …
    http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/02/tropical-ssts-since-1998-latest-climate-models-warm-3x-too-fast/#comment-70221

    If you read and study this you will find, like others who have read the initial version of the paper (November 2012) that you cannot fault the physics therein, simply because this is what really happens in planets in our Solar system. Take it or leave it – that’s your personal choice – but it is correct, and no one has proved otherwise.

    • Captain Kangaroo

      The models have day and night and seasons. They are built on a grid using discrete solutions of the Navier-Stokes to conserve momentum and other physical properties.

      Entropy is not intrinsic to the 2nd law – but is different for equilibrium and non-equilibrium systems. Non-equilbrium systems – such as Earth’s climate – have extensive properties that cause departure from the simpler conditions of equilibrium systems. Entropy production is not maximised. The 2nd law is a statement of net flow of heat from warmer to cooler. Nor does it need the invention of – what was your term – resonant scattering?

      Yours physics are simplistically wrong and wrong in detail. They are too simple to mean much at all in a very complex system.

    • Nor do the models have athe Water Cycle, nor do they have rain in their Carbon Cycle, nor do they have any atmosphere at all (they have replaced the the heavy real gas volume subject to gravity with empty space popululated by ideal gas with no mass, volume, weight, attraction), nor do they have direct heat from the Sun (one way or the other, either by claiming a magic barrier stopping longwave direct from the Sun reaching the surface, or, even more idiotically, if that’s possible, claiming that the Sun produces insignificant radiant heat, longwave infrared), with po faces they claim that visible light from the Sun is the major heat source land and ocean, how more stupid can their fisics get after that?

      All because, as Scrodinger’s Cat reminds us, they are so incompetant as scientists they couldn’t think of anything else it could be causing the warming except carbon dioixide, regardless of the irrationality in scale that CO2 is a trace gas and anyway always showing itself lagging temperature changes by hundreds of years so physically not even in the running as cause.

      These are not scientists, they’re completely oblivious to the real physical properties and processes of the world around us – which real physics does understand.

      They are priests of a religious belief system grounded in their own irrational imaginings which get more ludicrous every day as they try to maintain their credibility among the faithful when reality fails to conform to their predictions, and, they lie and cheat and advocate violence against unbelievers. At best they are despicable. At worst, they are ruining real physical understanding of the the world around us, hard won by real scientists in our recent past, by their infiltration of the general education system.

  74. Scrodinger's Cat

    I am no expert, but I understand that while the poles still have ice, we are still technically within an ice age and are therefore still warming from that ice age. That is to be expected.

    During the second half of 2012 the rate of warming increased significantly. This was probably a shock to our climate scientists who had been predicting a descent into another ice age up to that point.

    The scientists noted the correlation with the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration and concluded that the increase in temperature was CO2 driven. They ignored the fact that temperature leads atmospheric CO2 because CO2 is less soluble in warming oceans.

    An important point is that the scientists blamed CO2 because nothing else could explain the rate of increase or magnitude of the increase in temperature. At this point I have to mention solar UV radiation, clouds, cosmic radiation and other factors. The climate models ignored these because the scientists had no idea how to deal with them. I ignore completely the relatively massive ranges in temperature in geological timescales. I also ignore the 12 times levels of CO2 in earth’s past.

    So, the models were created with the main driver being CO2 and surprisingly, the global temperature according to the models, was found to be driven mainly by CO2.

    Factors such as clouds didn’t figure. Pity they were left out or given minimal weighting, since about 0.5 % change in clouds could explain all temperature changes.

    Now mother nature has moved on. Whatever caused the warming is sure as hell not causing it now. Is it CO2? The increase is still pretty linear, but the correlation with temperature looks like it might turn negative. We can’t possibly let it do that….

    If there was nothing other than CO2 that could explain the increase in temperature (remember this was the logic behind alarmism) then what can be causing the loss of warming for 10-20 years? (Let’s not waste time debating whether it is 15 or 17).

    By definition, nothing could cause such warming other than CO2 according to the models. So, the models are wrong, the assumptions are wrong. Something else is causing the cooling (or lack of warming) so something else could have caused the warming also.

    This is the mess we have today. Don’t let them persuade you otherwise without good data.

  75. Schrodinger's Cat

    Steven Mosher: Then go on, correct it bit by bit, but not in your usual cryptic way that is completely opaque to everyone else.

    I’m very happy to set up a target for the ordinary reader to consider. If you disagree, please do so in a manner that others can evaluate. Otherwise, your contribution is of no more value than loiwot’s. Having said that, I almost feel I should apologise, but I think you will respond in a positive way. I do really welcome a constructive exchange of views. The ones stated are mine, as a starting point.

    • Go S. Cat. Rare to see humility on the Internet. Not for nothing, but when you do see it, it’s usually on the part of a skeptic. What are we to make of that?

    • ah a reference to my crypticism. That tell me a lot.

      I will start with and couple and then tell you to unfool yourself. Its not my job to educate you. you can stay stuck on stupid for all I care.

      here is a couple to wind you up.

      “If there was nothing other than CO2 that could explain the increase in temperature (remember this was the logic behind alarmism) then what can be causing the loss of warming for 10-20 years?”

      1. The science does not argue that C02 alone can explain the warming.
      2. The temperature we see is the result of many factors INCLUDING
      GHGs and INCLUDING unforced internal variability.
      3. The slow down in the rate of warming can be a consequence of
      a) strong negative trends in unforced or internal variability
      b) changes in negative forcings, like aerosols.

      You seem to think that the science argues that T=f(co2). The science does not. The POPULARIZATION of the science focuses on C02, but changes in C02 account for only a portion of the human caused climate change. 25% of the change may well be down to land use changes. Go figure.

      Anyway. Here is a link to unfool yourself:
      http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch2s2-es.html

      Here is a Final thought. You get the history of discovery 100% wrong.

      “The scientists noted the correlation with the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration and concluded that the increase in temperature was CO2 driven. They ignored the fact that temperature leads atmospheric CO2 because CO2 is less soluble in warming oceans”

      Wrong.

      1 before the temperature increased the theory was formulated.
      2. You have the lead/lag wrong as well. C02 both leads and lags.
      read hansen. The increase fater warming was predicted before it was discover.

      unfool yourself: http://www.aip.org/history/climate/index.htm

      • Captain Kangaroo

        ‘Using data series on atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperatures we investigate the phase relation (leads/lags) between these for the period January 1980 to December 2011. Ice cores show atmospheric CO2 variations to lag behind atmospheric temperature changes on a century to millennium scale, but modern temperature is expected to lag changes in atmospheric CO2, as the atmospheric temperature increase since about 1975 generally is assumed to be caused by the modern increase in CO2. In our analysis we use eight well-known datasets: 1) globally averaged well-mixed marine boundary layer CO2 data, 2) HadCRUT3 surface air temperature data, 3) GISS surface air temperature data, 4) NCDC surface air temperature data, 5) HadSST2 sea surface data, 6) UAH lower troposphere temperature data series, 7) CDIAC data on release of anthropogene CO2, and 8) GWP data on volcanic eruptions. Annual cycles are present in all datasets except 7) and 8), and to remove the influence of these we analyze 12-month averaged data. We find a high degree of co-variation between all data series except 7) and 8), but with changes in CO2 always lagging changes in temperature. The maximum positive correlation between CO2 and temperature is found for CO2 lagging 11–12 months in relation to global sea surface temperature, 9.5–10 months to global surface air temperature, and about 9 months to global lower troposphere temperature. The correlation between changes in ocean temperatures and atmospheric CO2 is high, but do not explain all observed changes.’

        (Humlum et al 2013 – The phase relation between atmospheric carbon dioxide and global temperature – http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921818112001658)

        Cited just for interest – we will see.

        It is really just verbiage with you mosh – and wrong on all counts it seems. The video below shows the sales pitch that you deny. Although some of us understand that models are tuned – otherwise they diverge in all directions. So it seems like outright lies are used to sell a political message. And then you deny it with insults and mere verbiage. Why is that mosh? Are you a propagandist?

        http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9ob9WdbXx0

        And BS at that. The world is not warming for decades more at least from the natural causes that were overlooked. These are by the way associated with changes in planetary albedo – thus modulating the planetary energy budget. But the best thing is – you lose.

      • Captain. I have no patience for the propaganda put out by folks who want to oversimplify the story. I’m not responsible for the nonsense put out by some who believe in AGW anymore than you are responsible for the kooks on the skeptic side and their conspiritorial nonsense.
        The science, ya the actual science, has not blamed the rise in temps soley on c02. You know that. I know that and most honest skeptics know that. we can burn strawmen all day long here.

      • Captain has a something of a point I think. In the video, it sure looks like models overshoot badly on the down side what I assume must be volcanic eruptions. I was unconvinced that the early 20th century warming was shown in the model, it looked pretty flat to me. But I guess for “legendary” broadcasters this level of detail is too much for them to grasp or perhaps its just that the critical faculty is atrophying from disuse.

      • Captain Kangaroo

        ‘In summary, although there is independent evidence for decadal changes in TOA radiative fluxes over the last two decades, the evidence is equivocal. Changes in the planetary and tropical TOA radiative fluxes are consistent with independent global ocean heat-storage data, and are expected to be dominated by changes in cloud radiative forcing. To the extent that they are real, they may simply reflect natural low-frequency variability of the climate system. ‘ AR4 3.4.4.1

        This is the only reference to decadal variability in AR4 that I know of. The list of ‘forcings’ are well known and are mosly carbon dioxide. This was it seemed all of the recent warming and which would continue at 0.2 degrees C/decade.

        If real indeed. The next frontier is centennial and millennial variability.

      • “ah a reference to my crypticism”

        You’re not cryptic, Mosher, you’re incomprehensible. Describing you as “cryptic” is merely a kindness

      • moshe, insofar as climate science has blamed CO2 for the rise. So much for your strawman.

        And, you can’t half-heartedly defend Muller’s absurd attribution of temp rise soley to GHGs and strongly argue against the crux of S Cat’s point.
        =========================

      • Again no Water Cycle – the temp would be 67°C without water but with the rest of the real gas atmosphere in place, which is mainly the heavy voluminous fluid real gas ocean of nitrogen and oxygen under gravity – the real greenhouse gas thermal blanket around the Earth. Not the idiotic idea that a trace gas which is mainly holes in the atmosphere could be a thermal blanket..

        And just how stupid is the idea that clouds prevent “sunlight” from heating land and oceans by reflecting it away? So it can’t heat clouds which are water and particles of matter, but it is aborbed by land and ocean at the surface heating with such intensisty at the equator that it gives us our huge winds and weather systems??

        Put back the Water Cycle, and get a sense of scale, the “33°C warming by AGW greenhouse gases” disappears, because it’s an illusion.

        If you claim it isn’t, then damn well show how ir imbibing water vapour and trace gases which AGWScienceFiction calls “greenhouse gases” can physically raise the whole temperature of the Earth by 33°C from minus 18°C.

        You claim to be a scientist, you show how.

        Do not post a link irrelevant to my question.

      • Radiation balance models? LOL. There’s radiation balance at the Earth’s surface. Did these guys ever study (and understand) basic heat transfer?

      • There’s NO radiation balance at the Earth’s surface.

  76. Lolwot, I disagree with the fellow who thinks you should be ignored. You are in your blind intransigence, a great ally of the skeptics. Has it ever occurred to you there might be something pathological in your refusal/inability to ever concede….anything. In the two years or so you’ve been commenting on “Climate Etc.” I don’t believe I’ve once since the tiniest walk back from anything you’ve previously stated. Can you really be that smart?

    The current kerfuffle about the lack of a Pachauri quote really has no meaning for you ultimately, because even if you’re proven incorrect concerning your claim that he never conceded the pause…despite clear contextual evidence that he likely did…you’re still going to maintain that he’s wrong on the facts.

    Hypothetically, what are you going to do if some of the climate stalwarts start walking things back a bit? Will they be wrong too? What would ultimately convince you that perhaps you’re not 100 percent right about everything. I see Trenberth is beginning to soften his stance a bit in certain areas. Is he wrong too? Will lolwot be the last true believer standing? What about an ice age? Would that convince you? Or are you like one of those old Japanese soldiers living on some deserted island convinced that world war two hasn’t ended yet?

    I have an older brother with delusional disorder. He’s a bright guy like you. Likely brighter. And yet like you, he’s never, ever wrong. Evidence to the contrary is either made up, or wrong, or part of some obscure plot to undo him. You and my older bro seem to have quite a lot in common

    • Brandon Shollenberger

      pokerguy, I’ve seen lolwot admit he was wrong once. The last time I discussed his crazy trendology, he admitted one crazy methodology he used was nonsensical. I don’t remember exactly which it was, but it was worse than the nonsense he’s doing above (though not by a lot).

      • Ah, thanks for that Brandon. Credit where credit etc. Lw, I stand corrected. Fight on brave lolwot. Fight on.

    • “The current kerfuffle about the lack of a Pachauri quote really has no meaning for you ultimately”

      wrong. It reinforces my perception that climate deniers cannot be trusted. You can’t believe a word that passes out their mouths.

      • lolwot

        Before you get into too big a huff about “climate deniers that cannot be trusted” you should wait to see whether Pachauri asks “The Australian” to rescind that quote they attributed to him.

        You don’t know whether he actually said what they claimed he said or not.

        If you REALLY want to know, ask Pachauri yourself. Or ask “The Australian”.

        But, until you have gotten confirmation that he never said (or said) what the article claimed, you really don’t know one way or the other.

        The real difference is that “The Australian” knows for sure. And so does Pachauri.

        Max

        PS There are very few people who still have their heads in the sand on the recent pause. You are one. But you are part of a very small and dwindling group. A personally doubt that Pachauri, who after all is in the “climate biz”, still denies what has become obvious to one and all.

      • “you should wait to see whether Pachauri asks “The Australian” to rescind that quote they attributed to him.”

        You should wait for the Australian to provide exactly what Pachauri said. Until then, the claim the Australian has made is baseless.

        They didn’t attribute a quote to him. They merely asserted that “Rajendra Pachauri has acknowledged a 17-year pause in global tempeature rises, confirmed by the Britain’s Met Office”

        Considering the last part is known to be false, ie the Met Office have not ever confirmed any such thing, then why should we believe the first part is true? The Australian article is clearly agenda driven of a climate denier bent. It even includes a stupid statement about a record accumulation of arctic sea ice this winter.

        In sort it cannot be trusted.

      • Captain Kangaroo

        ‘Q.1 “First, please confirm that they do indeed reveal no warming trend since 1997.”

        The linear trend from August 1997 (in the middle of an exceptionally strong El Nino) to August 2012 (coming at the tail end of a double-dip La Nina) is about 0.03°C/decade, amounting to a temperature increase of 0.05°C over that period…’ http://metofficenews.wordpress.com/2012/10/14/met-office-in-the-media-14-october-2012/

        Damned – looks like confirmation of no warming from 1997 to me. La Nina will continue to increase in frequency and intensity for a while yet in the cool IPO. Just science – numbnut – get used to it. Or not – who really gives a rat’s arse as the whole world moves on.

      • Met Office: “for Mr. Rose to suggest that the latest global temperatures available show no warming in the last 15 years is entirely misleading.”

        Is as true today as it was 2 years ago.

        The Met Office does not agree there is a 17 year pause in global temperatures.

      • Captain Kangaroo

        It’s not that I don’t believe it – it’s just that it is nonsense ad conflicts with their own calculatons which are quite simple and based on the data.

        http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1997/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1997/trend

        Quoting a few words out of this context is more than just nonsense – it is lies and deception.

      • I about half bet that Pachauri told them of the Met Office confirmation.

        There, all tied up.
        ===========

  77. Steven Mosher said : ” It wont be long and the warming will return.”
    Got to admire your confidence, but you didn’t say when. 2050 perhaps ?

    Temperatures from here to 2030 are more likely to go down than up.

    The last 16 years standstill has been produced by a 50% reduction in sunspots and what is beginning to look like a drawn out solar cycle. co2 went up by 8% and falsified the climate models (Phil Jones). Once the solar cycle heads down-slope in a couple of years as it undoubtedly will, it seems unlikely that temperatures will start going up.

    And then we enter cycle 25…

    • Please back up your assertion that Phil Jones agrees the climate models have been falsified.

      • He actually said that none of the climate models had predicted the temperature standstill.

        It’s the same difference, failed prediction = falsified.

        He just didn’t use the accepted form of words, and being one of the original members of ‘the team’ hardly a surprise. Bring on some cooling and we may well see him use that ‘falsified’ word.

    • Any future warming, in the next hundreds of years, is unlikely to reach the heights of this period we’re in after the rise post LIA, hiccups of up and downs do not make a global warming trend when the temps have decreased from the Holocene Optimum.

      Some time or other, maybe sooner rather than later, we are going back into our Ice Age; for another 100,000 years of miles deep ice over most of the northern hemisphere. That is our reality check.

  78. batheswithwhales

    Mosher,

    you state that 1997 or 1998 or whatever year the pause may have started is cherry picking. How so?

    If the question is for how long the current pause has lasted, you start today and go back to the point where you get a ss warming. If that is 1997, then so be it.

    How can that be cherry picking?

    • Brandon Shollenberger

      It is cherry picking in the sense you’re looking for the period that optimizes your answer. Once you do that, it messes with any tests of statistical skill.

      • batheswithwhales

        I disagree. It is just answering a simple question in as rational a way as possible. warmists do it all the time: “it has been warming for x years..etc”

        Looking at global temperatures over the last 100 years, some distinct periods of warming and non-warming can be identified. Measuring the duration of these periods can be interesting for a number of different reasons. So can measuring the period which we are currently in.

        To do so, we need to find a breaking point from the last trend or mode. Going back from today to find the length of period without any ss warming is one way to find a starting point for the current period.

        I am sure there are other methods, but the one I outlined does not constitute cherry picking. It is not arbitrary.

      • Brandon Shollenberger

        If you specifically look for results, such as failures of statistical significance at a particular confidence level, you get an incorrect amount of false positives/false negatives. That means you can’t say your test at a 95% level actually gives results at a 95% level. That’s guaranteed to be true due to simple statistical properties.

        Any time you use overlapping periods is iterative tests, you have to adjust your test to account for the non-Independence of your results. If you do, fine. If you don’t, you’re cherry-picking.

  79. GaryM