by Judith Curry
The buzz is intensifying about 2014 possibly being the warmest year globally in the historical temperature record.
The spin
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) issued a Press Release on 3 Dec: 2014 on course to be one of the hottest, possibly hottest, on record. Excerpts:
WMO’s provisional statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 2014 indicated that the global average air temperature over land and sea surface for January to October was about 0.57° Centigrade (1.03 Fahrenheit) above the average of 14.00°C (57.2 °F) for the 1961-1990 reference period, and 0.09°C (0.16 °F) above the average for the past ten years (2004-2013).
If November and December maintain the same tendency, then 2014 will likely be the hottest on record, ahead of 2010, 2005 and 1998. This confirms the underlying long-term warming trend. It is important to note that differences in the rankings of the warmest years are a matter of only a few hundredths of a degree, and that different data sets show slightly different rankings.
“The provisional information for 2014 means that fourteen of the fifteen warmest years on record have all occurred in the 21st century,” said WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud. “There is no standstill in global warming,” he said.
“What we saw in 2014 is consistent with what we expect from a changing climate. Record-breaking heat combined with torrential rainfall and floods destroyed livelihoods and ruined lives. What is particularly unusual and alarming this year are the high temperatures of vast areas of the ocean surface, including in the northern hemisphere,” he said.
“Record-high greenhouse gas emissions and associated atmospheric concentrations are committing the planet to a much more uncertain and inhospitable future. WMO and its Members will continue to improve forecasts and services to help people cope with more frequent and damaging extreme weather and climate conditions,” said Mr Jarraud.
The provisional statement was published to inform the annual climate change negotiations taking place in Lima, Peru. WMO also updated its acclaimed Weather Reports for the Future series, with scenarios for the weather in 2050 based on the Fifth Assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, which is co-sponsored by WMO and the UNEP. Newly added reports are for Peru, France, Viet Nam, Spain, Canada and Norway, painting a compelling picture of what life could be like on a warmer planet.
Matt Ridley has a subsequent article in The Times: Beware the corruption of science. Subtitle: Environmental researchers are increasingly looking for evidence that fits their ideology rather than seeking the truth. Excerpts (from the GWPF article):
Second example: last week, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), a supposedly scientific body, issued a press release stating that this is likely to be the warmest year in a century or more, based on surface temperatures. Yet this predicted record would be only one hundredth of a degree above 2010 and two hundredths of a degree above 2005 — with an error range of one tenth of a degree. True scientists would have said: this year is unlikely to be significantly warmer than 2010 or 2005 and left it at that.
In any case, the year is not over, so why the announcement now? Oh yes, there’s a political climate summit in Lima this week. The scientists of WMO allowed themselves to be used politically. Not that they were reluctant. To squeeze and cajole the data until they just crossed the line, the WMO “reanalysed” a merger of five data sets. Maybe that was legitimate but, given how the institutions that gather temperature data have twice this year been caught red-handed making poorly justified adjustments to “homogenise” and “in-fill” thermometer records in such a way as to cool down old records and warm up new ones, I have my doubts.
Most of the people in charge of collating temperature data are vocal in their views on climate policy, which hardly reassures the rest of us that they leave those prejudices at the laboratory door. Imagine if bankers were in charge of measuring inflation.
Typically, Michael Mann responds to Ridley’s article with this tweet:
Michael E. Mann: Latest #climatescience smearer @mattwridley has a disturbing record of disinformation & denial. Via @SourceWatch: http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Matt_Ridley
Data and uncertainty
Last week, I received the following query from a reporter:
I’m covering the release of the WMO’s provisional climate statement for 2014. It says 2014 is on track to become one of the hottest, if not the hottest, years on record. A lot of people here at the UN climate talks in Lima say this shows there is no slowdown in warming. What is your take?
My response:
We won’t really have a good assessment on the temperatures for 2014 until about March 2015, when all of the observations have been assembled and quality controlled. The different temperature datasets and analyses give different results, which reflects the uncertainties in the data and analysis methods. Even if one or several data sets do find 2014 to be the hottest year, given the uncertainties one can only conclude that this is one of the top 5 or so warmest years.
The real issue that is of concern to me is the growing divergence between the the observed global temperature anomalies and what was predicted by climate models. Even if 2014 is somehow unambiguously the warmest year on record, this won’t do much to alleviate the growing discrepancy between climate model predictions and the observations.
If it does turn out to be the hottest does that indicate the pause is over?
One year won’t really make a difference, unless it is extremely warm. And then 2015 would need to be even warmer than 2014. So declaring the pause to be ‘over’ will require continued warming. Again, the pause itself is not of such great significance; rather it is the growing divergence between climate model predictions and the observations – one warm year isn’t going to really change this.
—-
The differences among the different global surface temperature analyses are illustrated by this figure that Steve Mosher provided for my recent Senate testimony:
From the main text of the WMO report:
Global average temperatures are also estimated using reanalysis systems, which use a weather forecasting system to combine many sources of data to provide a more complete picture of global temperatures. According to data from the reanalysis produced by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, the January to October combined land and ocean global average temperature would place 2014 as third or fourth highest for this dataset, which runs from 1958. Based on these lines of evidence it is most likely that 2014 is currently one of the four warmest years on record, but there is a possibility that the final rank will lie outside this range.
The reanalysis systems have been underutilized for estimated temperature trends, warmest years, etc. Because of changes to observing systems, the reanalyses have generally not been used for trend analyses. However, particularly for examining recent trends (e.g. the pause), I would say that the observing systems have arguably been sufficiently homogeneous since 1989 for this purpose. The great advantage of using the reanalyses is that ‘infilling’ for regions without observations is accomplished through data assimilation using a numeral weather prediction system (for details, see previous CE post reanalyses.org). This ‘infilling’ is done in a dynamically consistent way, which IMO is much better than the various statistical infilling or kriging strategies.
With regards to ‘warmest year’, Gavin Schmidt tweeted an interesting graph that illustrates record warmth estimates, although it is not clear what constitutes the distributions. In any event, it is seen that 2014 has a similar distribution to 1998, 2005, 2010. With this visualization, it is seen that 1998 clearly stood out as ‘warmest year’ at the time.
Implications for the pause
Well, ranking 1998, 2005, 2010 and 2014 as the ‘warmest years’ seems very consistent with a plateau in surface temperatures since 1998. Even if 2014 maintains its status among the top 4, how does this impact the ‘pause’ narrative?
RealClimate, Tamino, and probably others are busy trying to convince that the pause doesn’t exist. The preferred data set for such analyses is Cowtan and Way; I am not a fan of this dataset owing to concerns about how they treat the Arctic [link]. Statistical games can be played, and you can infer that there is a pause (or not).
The real issue is the growing divergence between climate model projections and the surface temperature observations, illustrated in this diagram by Ed Hawkins:
You can see that using the Cowtan and Way data set doesn’t help much with regards to the discrepancy: Cowtan and Way is within the error bars of HadCRUT4.
Updating this diagram to include 2014 is going to increase the discrepancy between the models and observations, because the climate models show an inexorable warming.
JC summary
Focusing on the ‘warmest year’ is a pointless exercise, unless the warm anomaly is as large as 1998. Focusing on the ‘pause’ is mainly significant in context of the comparison between climate model projections and surface temperatures.
Attempts to spin 2014 as a possible ‘warmest year’ is exactly that: spin designed to influence the Lima deliberations. While the WMO report was not unreasonable, their press release was a clear attempt to influence the Lima deliberations in the direction of being ‘alarmed.’
I’ll be waiting until HadCRUT and Berkeley Earth have provided their final 2014 temperature analyses (which will probably be sometime late winter). Particularly with regards to the recent temperature record and the ‘pause’, I think more scrutiny should be given to the various reanalyses, which in principle is probably the best way to provide a truly global analysis.
Wait a minute, I thought that surface temps (land and sea) were a terrible way to measure globalclimatewarmingchange?
Is Jonathan Gruber running the WMO now?
Welcome to Gorebbels’ just like Venus Gorebull Warming Propaganda…!
See another Orwellian reply below: “CO2 itself isn’t classified as an air pollutant — CO2 emissions are.”
Five years of such official responses to Climategate revelations of fraudulent temperature data confirm the addictive delusion of power in politicians and their science advisers.
Truth may yet be revealed by another traumatic event, like
_ 1. The destruction of Hiroshima in August 1945
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/The_FORCE.pdf
_ 2. Sudden exposure to a cosmic ray burst in 775 AD
Usoskin et al, “The AD775 cosmic event revisited: The Sun is to blame,” Astronomy & Astrophysics Letters 552, L3 (2013): http://dx.doi.org/10.1051/0004-6361/201321080
_ 3. The event Isaiah 40:5 described ~2,500 years ago
“The glory of the Lord shall be revealed
And all flesh shall see it together;
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”
Dr. Oliver must surely realize the Warmist conspiracy built Hadrian’s Wall to keep arctic air from spoiling XIV and minus XIV’s claim to be the two warmist years on record?
Why else would Classical authorities have noted the controversy?
XLV is the Key: The Birth of False “Consensus Science!”
Climate skeptics focused on scientific illiterates like Al Gore and a recent graduate named Michael Mann, allowing real leaders of the climate movement, like NAS President – Climatologist Ralph Cicerone – to continue directing federal research funds to support an unannounced 1945 social geo-engineering experiment to save themselves and the world from possible nuclear annihilation.
http://www.nasonline.org/about-nas/leadership/president.html
Ralph Cicerone is a member of the Geophysics Section of NAS – the same section that championed the 1945 Geophysical Social Geo-Engineering Experiment to save the Earth and its inhabitants from nuclear annihilation by hiding the source of energy that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki,.
Speaking of Cowtan and Way…it doesn’t look like 2014 is gong to be record in their compilation.
See this Tweet from Robert Way: https://twitter.com/LabradorIce/status/527692706529943552
-Chip
chip, thanks for spotting this
Oh, the irony! :^)
https://twitter.com/PCKnappenberger/status/540236637293527041
I posted that here more than a week ago. Steven posted it here before I did.
Thanks for the tweet Chip – that was funny,
But you can see that C&W succeeded in having 2010 hotter than 2005 hotter than 1998. So watch out for 2015.
That tweet is from October, and has data to August only. September and October were pretty warm.
It seems to me that most of these organizations, governmental and non-governmental, have a vested interest in creating the perception that CO2 is driving global temperatures to dangerous levels. I simply do not trust them to be honest and objective, especially when it comes to reporting temperature readings.
Most of us have seen the work of Tony Heller in pointing out what he claims is blatant manipulation of past and current temperatures by NOAA/NCDC. He seems to make a very good case.
The people who control the data can make global temperatures anything they want them to be. They also do not have a satisfactory answer, in my opinion about the 18 year hiatus in global temperature rise. The CAGW models are wrong. Therefore the hypothesis is disproven. Let’s have some real science from now on.
This is why Gavin has his current job, it is like stacking judges.
The true effects of global warming:
Global efforts have halved the number of people dying from malaria – a tremendous achievement, the World Health Organization says. It says between 2001 and 2013, 4.3 million deaths were averted, 3.9 million of which were children under the age of five in sub-Saharan Africa.
The complete opposite of the IPCC Spin predition.
http://www.bbc.com/news/health-30375202
Pingback: 2014 will be the hottest year on record! Except for the details, which ruin that narrative. | Fabius Maximus
I was just starting to get used to using ocean heat content as the metric too!
He should have stayed out and never made Godfather III.
The Empire Strikes Back
Real Climate seems to have awoken from its slumber to push the meme that only ground-based thermometers can provide an accurate measure of climate change:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2014/12/the-most-popular-deceptive-climate-graph/
And that satellite data are inherently suspect due to the process of determining a temperature from their measurements.
Seems to me that the ground based record (as Matt Ridley and many others have pointed out) is only better because it offers so much more opportunity for mischief. Infill, homogenization and urban heat islands to the rescue (if outright fraudulent data manipulation aren’t also at play)!
The previous Real Climate post has a nauseatingly smug description of how there is no pause–warming continues unabated since 1998!–as long as you ignore the lack of significance of the trend. (0.116 +/- 0.137 °C/decade). There seems to be some confusion between error and confidence intervals. That trend is clearly driven by some cooler years in the early 2000s.
The two posts argue between one another about the utility of satellite data and plotting results monthly or less frequently. Seems a desperate bunch posting to reassure the collective in Lima.
No mention of the satellite temperature datasets?
Real Climate has a recent post: ‘Recent global warming trends: significant or paused or what?’ A number of comments address, Why no satellite data? We don’t live where they measure. They don’t do well with El Ninos. I think the satellite data has some advantages. Uniform coverage except for around the poles. Un-monitored locations are largely monitored with a satellite.
The 14 year pause presents a problem.
Since 2000 the ocean has been absorbing about 0.75 W/m2 so the ocean must be getting warmer.
If the global temperature isn’t changing – that means the land temperature should be slightly cooling (if anything). .
This would indicate that the satellite data sets are more accurate than the playfully adjusted land data sets.
The satellites did not capture this.
Well, not exactly.
https://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/figure-122.png?w=640&h=429
The satellites show 1998 as much warmer with temperatures cooling since then.
The land data sets show 1998 as not so warm and temperatures increasing since 1998.
The satellites (to my knowledge) don’t correct for UHI so the satellite data should be on the high side. The land sets would have to completely remove UHI to give an honest representation since it has nothing to do with CO2 warming. Any place with more than 100 people per kilometer is over 1°C warmer. Just 20 people per kilometer raises it 0.77°C.
If we completely abandoned urban areas and painted them neutral colors (to compensate for canyon effect and albedo) they would be 2°C cooler or more..
The 2014 surge started in 2013, and it has been driven primarily by a rapid increase in SST just about everywhere except ENSO world.. That’s called the surface of worldwide oceans. Boats float on it. Stuff like that.
Well, the recent temperature shift appears to have been driven by a decrease in clouds.
We’ll see. If the clouds come back it will be cooler.
Some people say the post 2013 warming is a resumption of warming, some people say it is the prelude to cooling, some people say the pause will continue.
I’m pretty sure somebody will be right.
The satellites (to my knowledge) don’t correct for UHI so the satellite data should be on the high side.
On the high side of what?
Are you saying that satellites slow down when they pass over cities? Maybe to stop in for a drink or a movie?
A satellite that samples Earth’s surface uniformly should give an unbiased estimate of global mean surface temperature. The UHI complaint was that there were more thermometers in urban areas than outside, thereby artificially weighting areas of urban heat. Satellites supposedly overcome that concern about UHI by sampling uniformly in order to give a true estimate of global mean surface temperature.
“The satellites (to my knowledge) don’t correct for UHI so the satellite data should be on the high side. The land sets would have to completely remove UHI to give an honest representation since it has nothing to do with CO2 warming.”
Surely the surface temperature should include man-made heat from fires, factories, machines, traffic, russian-ice-breakers, aeroplanes, cutting-down-forests, etc.? Has anyone calculated what proportion of the Earth’s infra-red output comes from human activity?
PA, the satellite data is comprehensive in area and covers a significant depth of the atmosphere, so I don’t think the urban heat island would be significant. The urban heat island disipates with altitude. I’m not sure it’s something we would want to correct for, but it would be good to compare temp changes in land to changes in truly rural areas distant to any developement.
aaron,
Roy Spencer has some old charts of warming vs people/sq km.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2010/03/global-urban-heat-island-effect-study-an-update/
@anng: Surely the surface temperature should include man-made heat from fires, factories, machines, traffic, russian-ice-breakers, aeroplanes, cutting-down-forests, etc.? Has anyone calculated what proportion of the Earth’s infra-red output comes from human activity?
World power is currently around 15 TW (1 terawatt = 10^12 watts), see e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_energy_consumption
http://science.howstuffworks.com/environmental/green-science/world-power-consumption.htm
Essentially all of this is converted to heat.
OLR (Earth’s outgoing longwave radiation or infrared output) is about 120,000 TW, see e.g. the top right corner of Figure 7 of
http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/papers/KiehlTrenbBAMS97.pdf
showing 235 W/m2 of OLR and multiply that by 510 square megameters (area of Earth’s surface) to get 235*510 = 119850 which rounds to 120,000 TW.
To avoid boiling the oceans, OLR needs to be very close to heat absorbed from the Sun. So we can get essentially the same thing by multiplying the solar constant of about 1360 W/m2 by the area of the Earth’s cross-section, namely exactly 400/π square megameters (assuming a perfectly circular cross-section of circumference exactly 40 megameters), and multiply that by 0.7 (taking 0.3 as Earth’s albedo) to give the absorbed power as 1360*400*0.7/π = 121212 which rounds to 120,000 TW, sufficient precision for your question.
So the proportion is 15/120000 or 0.012%.
For comparison, geothermal heat, the heat from Earth’s hot interior leaking out through the crust, is about 45 TW or three times the direct heating effect of human activities.
(Obviously the precision of 400/π doesn’t bear on the precision of the final answer, given that some of the other numbers are only given to two or three decimals. However that and 20/π = 6.366 megameters as the Earth’s radius give a handy way of remembering those quantities, good for about three decimals. The basis is the French definition of the meter intended to make the distance from the North Pole to the equator via Paris exactly 10 megameters, which it failed to do at the time largely on account of a small arithmetical error that was not noticed before the meter was cast in brass (later a platinum-indium alloy). The Earth’s oblateness is of course another significant source of error in applying that distance to area and volume calculations, and moreover the pole-equator distance itself varies with time due to the Earth not being totally rigid.)
Thanks Vaughan,
I won’t worry about it then.
“Spinning” you would think “science” humiliation of having peers use this word would spark something in the community?
It’s been this way from the inception of the “cause”, Climate science is one notch above/below Washington Press core in objectivity and motives.
@ cwon14
“……Climate science is one notch above/below Washington Press core in objectivity and motives.”
No it isn’t; they are BOTH subsets of the DNC, which would make them co-equals in objectivity and motives. I. e. the objectivity and motives are the same for both groups.
Not one topic down Dr. Curry is endorsing “bi-partisan” regulatory gruel filled with unverified “Climate Change” assumptions. All linked (cleverly) to black soot issues and other more populist Green concepts. She’s on board and the board quibbles details.
Climate science as it gets close to “policy” is 95%+ spinning for the past 40+ years. Dr. Curry occasionally recognizes it but never under any circumstances links the full source of the statist, U.N. socialist agenda and its U.S. operatives (left-wing democrats). She’s put up several appalling narratives of late…..”Ending the War on Skeptics” in November again filled with Greenshirt victory laps but the adoring board treats her like a skeptical hero.
I’m sure there are, deep in the stacks of University life for example, a few who are interested in weather and climate as a serious science pursuit. They are dominated by the climate porn leadership parroting a dream of global government to regulate a problem unverified by classical science evidence. Their silence, absurd posturing (Dr. Curry a perfect example) and complicity deserve contempt. So Dr. Curry connects one dot to “spinning” today while remaining silent on a thousand other dots with the same obvious problem. This makes her heroic?
Judith said: “Focusing on the ‘warmest year’ is a pointless exercise, unless the warm anomaly is as large as 1998.”
——
Discussion of “warmest years” without discussion of ENSO activity and long- term trends is disingenuous at best. 2014 will be the warmest non-El Nino year. That is a significant point. The divergence of the temperture trends from models is interesting but says absolutely nothing about whether those models have the basic AGW physics correct. The “hiatus” says more about natural variability then whether the models are right.
Calling 2014 a non-El Nino year is disingenuous. NOAA predicted an 80% chance of El Nino and we got about 80% of an El Nino.
The El Nino kelvin waves came and went. Because of the trade winds didn’t .cooperate. So the ocean surface was warmed in the east Pacific but there wasn’t the eastward slosh amplification of El Nino per se.
Err, that should have been:
“The El Nino kelvin waves came and went. But the easterly trade winds (Hadley circulation) didn’t cooperate for (insert reason here). There were only furtive attempts at formation of westerly winds to drive west Pacific warm water to the east. So the ocean surface was warmed in the east Pacific but there wasn’t the eastward slosh amplification of El Nino per se.”
There is nothing disingenuous about it at all. ENSO ONI has been neutral throughout the entire year to date. There has been no El Nino so far. It is possible one could have its start in December. The Eastern Pacific has been cool for most of the year.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf
“ENSO ONI has been neutral throughout the entire year to date. ”
That isn’t true either. ENSO ONI for SON was 0.5°C. The OND value will be significantly above 0.5°C since it has been flirting with 1°C for most of the period.
It looks like this second attempt at El Nino will die off like the one mid-year did.
For Judith to mention 1998 without mentioning the super El Niño of that year is what is disingenuous. For 2014, as an ENSO neutral year to beat out El Niño years is worth noting and discussion.
Nope not really. The issue is the growing discrepancy between the climate models and observations, and the claim by Santer and others that under conditions of AGW, that any period of no warming or cooling beyond 17 years is very unlikely. Doesn’t matter when you choose the beginning and end point of the time series, or whether or not an El Nino is involved.
=> “Doesn’t matter when you choose the beginning and end point of the time series, or whether or not an El Nino is involved.”
Interesting. And there I though the uncertainties related to possible underestimation of the role of “natural variation” was important.
Talk about irony.
Dr Curry, the mean model surface temperature trend estimate is ~0.20C/decade compared to Cowtan and Way ~+0.17C or GISS ~+0.16C (both attempting improved Arctic representation). Considering the effect of uncertainties in aerosol load, ocean heat uptake and so forth, it is not yet clear to me that there is a significant issue between climate models and observations where the trend is concerned – and in the longer term it is the trend that will matter.
Amongst others, John Nielsson Gammon, Foster and Rahmstorf, CSALT, Kosaka and Xie use models of varying sophistication that yield temperature evolution consistent with natural variability superimposed over a positive trend. You have argued for a greater role for natural variability, and yet I find all these models make genuine attempts to include both its timing and magnitude. Consider the 1998 super El-Nino anomaly of ~+0.3C above trend. Here we are 16 years later with essentially the same anomaly under *neutral conditions* – an upward movement of ~0.18C/decade entirely consistent with the models presented above.
the claim by Santer and others that under conditions of AGW, that any period of no warming or cooling beyond 17 years is very unlikely
Santers claim was that you could not derive a linear trend that showed no warming >17 years, that is constrained by observations in the SH.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4sh/from:1996.6/mean:12/plot/hadcrut4sh/from:1996.6/mean:12/trend
Judith said: “The issue is the growing discrepancy between the climate models and observations.”
—–
This is a complete red herring. Every single professional working with climate models knows and states quite repeatedly and openly the models will always be wrong. The reasons are many, but the impossibility of modeling natural variability is among the most important, and among a key reason why the “models are always wrong.” Thus, like the impossibility of modeling the exact path of even a single dust particle as it floats in your living room, as it truly is beyond the power of our best supercomputer, the exact path of the climate can never be exactly modelled, yet we know that tables get dusty, and we know that climates warm when GH gases continually increase. The long- term trend and reasons for that trend are what the models are good at telling us. In this regard, they are quite useful, and record warmth in 2014 is quite consistent with what the models tell us to expect more and more of in the coming years.
“Calling 2014 a non-El Nino year is disingenuous.”
—-
Nope, it’s accurate. There has been no official El Niño this year. We have however had record ocean SST’s and heat content globally. This non-El Nino ocean warmth has played a big part in 2014’s near record warmth.
‘Uncertainty’ is always spelled the same so Joshua would have it mean the same thing too? A Newbie but Goodie? Keep ’em comin’, Joshua.
=====================
“This is a complete red herring.”
RG – it looks like you are the one doing the fishing.
Nino 3.4 for most of 2010
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_Ofc9vJoG0ns/TMl6j-_C7CI/AAAAAAAAG-c/rNBzQqMRy4Y/s1600/Clipboard02.jpg
Nino 3.4 for 2014
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/enso_advisory/figure2.gif
The integral of the 2010 Nino 3.4 index was less than zero (the year finished at -1.5°C)
2014 spent much more time in positive territory. 7/12ths of 2010 (over half the year) was a strong La Nina.
You appear to be trying to make a point without having a point to make.
PA,
Not sure you intended to make my point about Judith not talking about ENSO, by talking about ENSO, but regardless, thank you. Officially, this has not been an El Niño year, yet, as you nicely pointed out, we’ve had record warm oceans. This, more than anything else is the proximal reason behind 2014’s very warm troposheric surface temps. Given that it is all eventually going to come back to the issue of the gradual gain we’ve been seeing in ocean heat content over many decades, the most accurate thing we can say is that 2014’s warmth is very consistent with the general accumulation of energy in Earth’s climate system caused by increasing GH gases and is well accounted for dynamically in global climate models.
These are the ONI numbers for 2014:
-0.6
-0.6
-0.5
-0.1
0.1
0.1
0.0
0.0
0.2
0.5
Not even a hint of reaching El Nino. An EL Nino is defined by ONI:
The U.S NOAA definition is a 3 month average warming of at least 0.5 °C (0.9 °F) in a specific area of the east-central tropical Pacific Ocean
PA et al… You guys seem completely oblivious to the fact that there is a 4-6 month lag between El Nino and surface temps. To make a proper comparison for 2014 you have to go back an additional 6 months and look at the ONI index at that time.
When you account for this lag, then 2014 is clearly an ENSO neutral year. And moreover, you should be preparing yourselves for the likelihood that 2015 will be a new record breaking year.
R.Gates 9/14/9:28
“and we know that climates warm when GH gases continually increase.”
This appears to be a fail. We know of ONE period during which man-made emissions of CO2 are correlated with an increase in atmospheric CO2- ~1981-2000. A similar period wit similar warming occurred between 1912-1925 when man-made emissions have been deemed insignificant. Add to that the period between 2000-2014 with little or no change in global estimated temperatures, despite a large increase in atmospheric C02. (http://www.examiner.com/article/noaa-reports-global-temperatures-for-october-highest-on-record). That temperature record and similar ones from other sources do not constitute proof that “climates warm when GH gases continually increase”.
It does show that we simply don’t know how the climate system works and do not have a long enough record to understand the climate and have done virtually no research into how the climate actually works. Due to the IPCC most of the research has been focused on how humankind has made changes that warm the climate. If you do not understand how the climate works you can’t evaluate how changes that might affect it work. In addition, the numeric computer modeling used simply cannot produce determinant results because the climate is so large that models that might work are many orders of magnitude too coarse.
Add to that, as you say, the climate is a chaotic system(per the IPCC) and cannot be modeled in a definitive way. The most definitive results to date show, as our moderator has pointed out, that climate modelling has consistently predicted more warming than has occurred and the predictions of all but the least warming model are now higher than the data.
Phil C
Mr. Gates, I am extremely curious as to why you would call Dr. Curry disingenuous because she didn’t include your favorite metric of the day. She didn’t write about a number of things. She summarized quite succinctly an ongoing discussion in the media. For you to label her disingenuous is disingenuous. But then we’ve come to expect that from you.
Actually, gatesy muttered that Judith’s not mentioning the El Nino of 1998 “is disingenuous at best”. The little scoundrel implies he’s being charitable. Joshie is not half as clever.
Let’s go back to Judith’s actual words: ‘Focusing on the ‘warmest year’ is a pointless exercise, unless the warm anomaly is as large as 1998.”
——-
Judith wants to compare 2014 to 1998. Fair enough. Let’s compare it to 2010 as well. Everyone knows exactly why 1998 and 2010 spiked to record warm years. Two words– El Niño. Anyone care to dispute this? In 2014, we’ve not had an official El Niño. But we’ve had record warmth in oceans globally. So, my point is yes, please DO compare the ENSO neutral year of 2014 to the two closest competing warm El Niño years of 2010 and 1998. Let’s also talk about then fact that the last La Niña year (normally a cooler year) was the warmest La Niña year ever. Then let’s talk about record warm oceans and true energy imbalances going on in the climate system.
1998 was at around solar minimum,2014 is a solar cycle max
“maksimovich | December 9, 2014 at 9:18 pm |
1998 was at around solar minimum,2014 is a solar cycle max”
—–
ENSO is far more influential in record warm years than solar maximums. Case in point– 2010.
“She didn’t write about a number of things.”
—–
Indeed, she did not, and having any legitimate scientific conversation about record warm years without discussing ENSO is an error of omission that should not be coming from a scientific authority. Everyone knows the proximal causes as to why 1998 and 2010 spiked to record troposheric warmth, so if you want to talk about 2014 in the same statement, then to not discuss the role of ENSO is a pretty flagrant omission.
“Don Monfort | December 9, 2014 at 8:49 pm |
Actually, gatesy muttered that Judith’s not mentioning the El Nino of 1998 “is disingenuous at best”. The little scoundrel implies he’s being charitable. Joshie is not half as clever.”
—
At worst one could say it was an error of omission, and those errors are the feedstock for the half-truths that pseudoscience breeds on.
What insults do you have between your best and worst, gatesy? You might as well embarrass yourself a few more times. Nasty little twit, at best.
Is all you have is ad homs there Don Monfort? Seems to be the last refuge when pseudoscience collapses into a pile of inconsistent half-truths. Judth was remiss- committed a gross error of omission, in mentioning 1998 without talking about the proximal cause (i.e. A super El Niño) for the record warmth that year. How could she hope to compare the warmth of 2014 to 1998 without talking about the reasons for the warmth of 1998!? It would be pseudoscince at best.
Gates may have set a record himself.
Highest number of posts before using his new fav term pseudoscience.
I am not talking about science, gatesy. I am calling you out on your poor manners. You are a p_nk. Are we clear now?
ENSO is far more influential in record warm years than solar maximums. Case in point– 2010
Large El ninos tend to occur at solar minimum,under a decrease in solar forcing.Both poles had large polar vortex operating due to decreases in O3.,with the winter night jets acting as transport barriers.
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4sh/from:1990/mean:12/normalise/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1990/mean:12/normalise
“I am not talking about science, gatesy. I am calling you out on your poor manners. You are a p_nk. Are we clear now?”
—-
Nothing I did not know before about you Don. When you’ve got no understanding of the issues you can only resort to name calling. Very clear.
I suspect it was so obvious they were El nino years she did not think she needed to mention it.
R Gates please try to keep up.
December 12, 2014 8:49 AM EST
An El Niño weather pattern had finally emerged in the Pacific Ocean, first in five years, the Japan Meteorological Agency announced on Wednesday.
http://au.ibtimes.com/articles/575688/20141212/el-ni-o-pacific-japan.htm
DD More,
Nope. No official El Nino yet. Pseudoscince is characterized by trying to rename something, or trying to mix up concepts . Do try to keep up on the latest El Niño data. We’re still in ENSO neutral conditions.
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf
DD
One more arrow knocked out of the quiver of the warmists. They have to feel things are slipping away from them very fast.
She also didn’t discuss how to re-shoe a Unicorn. So what.
Have I missed something?
Shouldn’t a half-decent climate model be able to accurately forecast this El Nino stuff as well as the ‘it gets hotter because of the Devil Gas’ idea?
If it can’t – and if the Nino is really understood, then isn’t the model incomplete?
A truly useful model should account for everything…not just one aspect of climate.
And along the same lines. shouldn’t a decent model be able to forecast deep ocean temperatures and Antarctic ice and all the other guff that people handwave about to explain their abject failure to get the primary variable of interest – temperature – anywhere near right.
It is pretty obvious from the sidelines that the models aren’t doing a good job of forecasting anything at all.
They’re fine and dandy right up until that tricky bit that Prof. Feynman describes as:
‘Compare it directly with observations or experience to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it’s wrong’
They’re wrong.
Shouldn’t a half-decent climate model be able to accurately forecast this El Nino stuff as well as the ‘it gets hotter because of the Devil Gas’ idea?
If Sky Masterson is a half-decent craps shooter, shouldn’t he be able to accurately forecast snake eyes?
It would be perfectly reasonable to carp on about those who claim to “be able to accurately forecast this El Nino stuff” when they fail. But reserve your fury for them, don’t pick on those who make no such claim.
@vaughan pratt
‘ But reserve your fury for them, don’t pick on those who make no such claim.’
I think that you are going a roundabout way to agree with my observation that the models are incomplete.
Excellent!. We are making progress.
More and more are realising – as does Vaughan – that the much vaunted models – basis for nearly every conclusion and forecast in ‘climate science’ – ain’t very good at actually forecasting/predicting/expecting. They have no proven track record of any predictive skill at all .
Somebody will now, no doubt, come out with the hoary line ‘all models are wrong but some are useful’. Perhaps we could also ask them to detail, with supporting evidence, exactly which climate models have been found to be useful.
“A truly useful model should account for everything…not just one aspect of climate.”
—–
This displays a complete lack of comprehension about both models and the nature of reality.
@R Gates
‘This displays a complete lack of comprehension about both models and the nature of reality’
An Oracular pronouncement from our resident enigmatic guru.
Pray explain, O Great One, in words that mere mortals can understand without needing to play semantics.
I take as my example our model of celestial mechanics. It is good enough that we can successfully land a fridge on a comet after a journey of 500 million miles lasting 4000 days.
How well do our climate models compare with that achievement?
The world awaits your clarification…….
R. Gates –
Just came across this, FWIW…
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/dec/10/first-el-nino-in-five-years-declared-by-japans-weather-bureau
http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/elnino/outlook.html
Gates: you assert that the models are good at getting the long term trend right but there is not even a theoretical proof of this, it is just a belief. When they can’t do a single detail right (polar ice, ENSO, precip, jet stream, blocking, ITCZ, tropical tropo hot spot…..) how are we to be assured that they get this right? And especially since the models tend to drift (those runs are dropped from public view) and do not agree on absolute GMT by about 3 deg C (that is the range of the models). If they get the absolute temp wrong, then they disagree on the physics or have numerical problems. The concern about what they can’t do does not represent merely a quibble.
Craig,
The models certainly do not contain all the dynamics, nor all the correct feedbacks, nor will they ever have natural variability. But what we can have some confidence in is general trends. Adding GH gases will add net energy to the system. This is basic physics. Will we will see 3C rise within 50 years of 560 ppm of CO2? This number is still quite valid. The range from 2C to 4C is still quite valid. The models and the paleoclimate data keep 3C quite in play. The rate of GH gases being added is just as important as getting to 560 ppm. The Earth has not seen this kind of GH gas surge in 55 million years at least, and major climate changes occurred then.
R Gate says, “Adding GH gases will add net energy to the system. This is basic physics.”
Am I the only one that finds this egregiously stupid to the point of being anti-science? I’m not saying I’m right but that it just seems to me to be beyond the pale of reasoning to take experiments in a lab and then make a wholesale ‘assumption’ that what you found in the lab works exactly the same way in the atmosphere where the number of variables that might interact to change things is enormous.
If I’m wrong then I’d appreciate someone telling me why laboratory experiments on CO2 are invariant over atmospheric conditions.
Thanks.
Daniel,
Two things I don’t understand: “R Gate says, “Adding GH gases will add net energy to the system. This is basic physics.”
Now I’m not even close to a scientist but wouldn’t adding GH gases add zero energy, but may change how energy acts?
And 2nd, we know NOT (fully) how the system responds to changes in energy but can observe the results.
Keep in mind I’m a false scientist if you respond so some of the words will be harder for me.
R. Gates, “Adding GH gases will add net energy to the system. This is basic physics. Will we will see 3C rise within 50 years of 560 ppm of CO2.”
Nope. The basis physics is that adding GHg to the atmosphere will allow the atmosphere to retain more heat by about 3.7 Wm-2 per doubling. Then depending on what surface you use as a reference the “basic physics” implies a net warming of ~0.8 to 1.2 C per doubling.
The 3.0 C is not physics but the average of SWAGs. If you want to use the average of SWAGs, then the Annan and Hargreaves Bayesian approach would require using all the SWAGS. The current average of the SWAGs is in the 2.0 C range decreasing towards 1.6 C per doubling.
It might be nice for someone to develop a SWAG index widget for Climate Etc.
I think i’ll trust with what JC says.
How can educated people not know the difference between the words, then and than?
I fear that the “spin” is a juggernaut that can’t be stopped
few know or care about the details of this subject
I live in a highly affluent urban area, cheek to jowl with a major science oriented university
I know no one who doubts the “consensus”
the “man as scourge of nature” religion rules
few are a aware of the hiatus, those that are consider it Koch and fossil fuel industry propaganda
sigh…
the voices here are, for me, a glimpse of light and reason
I guess we are about to endure a media barrage
thanks Dr. Curry, I’ll re-read this post once in awhile during the blitz
‘Yes we have no hiatus,
we have no hiatus at all.
We’ve the world’s greatest warming,
predictions alarming,
and seas that are rising so fast,
so yes, we have no hiatus, we have no hiatus at all.’
To believe we know a global temperature to hundredths of a degree back over a century is hubris.
It is likely however that there has been a long term warming as noted by Berkeley for some two centuries and by central england temperatures for some 350 years. To me this long term trend is a more interesting area of research than what has happened over the last decade
Tonyb
Tonyb
CET is interesting
trend has to go up or down
history seems to show more abrupt changes difficult to attribute to human activity
industrial period stable
having a hard time believing that the sky is falling
.0 and .00 accuracy for global constructs…?
anyway +1
Agree Tony
Research efforts would be better spent trying to falsify the hypothesis that we are simply coming out of the LIA and moving up to levels in proximity of the MWP. Of course that would require some deductive reasoning and curing the pandemic of inductitis which has hampered the thinking of much of the warming community.
Have you ever looked at reanalysis data sources…
Roof top thermometers.. High school systems
Systems by roads.
Of course you can’t look at all of it because some
Subnets they use are not public.
So better method(assimilation) but cloudy data sources.
Hard to be certain that it is better
Mosh,
Are you into haiku now? There’s something off about your syllabic five, seven and five “on” meter.
Jarraud has been warming and spinning his “There. Is. No. Pause.” line (aided and abetted by WGII Co-Chair, Chris Field) since at least March of this year.
There was an IPCC Press Conference on March 31, and – as I had noted (thanks to Alex Cull’s awesome transcript) – together, Jarraud and Field were doing their best to toss the pause ball into the dustbin! Excerpts:
Followed by Jarraud’s warmed-over word-salad (my bold -hro):
Amazing, eh?!
The use of the words “pause” and “hiatus” by the skeptic community is unfortunate, as both terms intrinsically assume that what came before will resume. An assumption for which on the basis of best available empirical data, there is no evidence.
I prefer to use the term “flat lining” as that is what the data graph shows us and is value neutral.
I look at it a little differently.
The 2005 to 2013 OHC warming rate of 86 zettajoules per decade is a net energy transfer at the ocean surface of 0.75 W/m2.
It takes 130 W-Y (watt-years) to raise the temperature of the top 700 meters 1 Kelvin.
So.173 years from now the top layers of the ocean will be 1°C warmer (if the trend continues).
It isn’t really a pause – just a very very slow ramp.
This is not good news for global warmers because the mid to high end estimates of 2100 temperature are off the table, and the missing 2.25 W/m2 of GHG forcing went back into space.
Perhaps so, tetris. However I was simply … uh … following the “lead” of the U.K. Met Office (aka ‘the jewel in the crown of British and global science’) whose denizens produced not one, not two, but three papers circa July 2013 (perhaps too late for inclusion in any relevant IPCC report?!) with the following titles:
as I had noted in my post at the time these papers were released.
I guess James Hansen didn’t get the talking points. He says there’s a pause. Hiatus. Whatever. Gee. Should we collect all mentions of the two terms by establishment climate scientists and communicators and post them? Would that bring this discussion back to something approaching reality?
There has been a pause in global warming after a record was reached. This is not controversial. It is not even new.
As Dr. Curry opines, what is relevant is the divergence between model and reality.
Indeed, Global Warming is flat-lined. Is it not time to embalm it and inter it with the Piltdown man?
R. Gates,
“The “hiatus” says more about natural variability then whether the models are right.”
Seems there are some assumptions built in here, so please correct if I misunderstand.
Are you thinking that nature has taken on CO2 and won? Are you thinking we do not understand the nature vs. CO2 (GHG) dynamics? Are you saying the models were correct, but some unknown (nature) was not taken in to account or modeled for correctly? If so, then do we now know what we didn’t know before and the next model run won’t miss?
If model “A” says “X” will happen, and “Y” actually happens isn’t that a pretty clear indication of a problem with the model? Quite obviously, the models didn’t predict the hiatus, therefore the models were inaccurate. If the physics was modeled correctly, and the observable result did not match projections what does this tell us?
If nature had taken on CO2 and “won” the GMT would be back to 1970 levels. Nature took on CO2 and got its ribs bruised, its kidneys bruised, and it has a walking wobbly concussion.
Hmm. GHG (the CO2 + forcing ensemble) is only delivering 0.75 W/m2 to the ocean. GHG isn’t much of a fighter and only throws baby punches.
If Nature got beat up it was tag-teamed by someone else.
There simply isn’t enough energy being delivered to the ocean to cause significant warming but it is warming enough so that you can’t claim it is cooling.
The mother nature nasties were the PDO, the AMO, and the napping sun. All big wimps and all at once. Puzzies.
JCH,
Help me with this, please. Why 1970’s? Asking as there seems to be an equally (to CO2) coincidence with the Clean Air Act possibly removing aerosols affecting (hiding?) heat that may have been occurring all along. Am I off base here?
“There simply isn’t enough energy being delivered to the ocean to cause significant warming.”
—-
Complete nonsense. Really, this statement is so absurdly wrong that it doesn’t even qualify as pseudoscience, but as science fiction.
Danny, the models may have correct physics (although I have only dug deeply into NCAR CAM3). They still cannot simulate crucial essential features, so have been parameterized to ‘fit’ past data (in CMIP5, the experimental hindcasting protocol was from about 1975 to 2006). And the hindcast assumtion is all CO2, no natural variability. So of course run hot, and being falsified by the natural variability inherent in the paise, as Judith points out up thread.
The finest gridcells in the CMIP5 ensemble are 110km on a side. Most are about 300 km. Making them smaller is computationally intractable. Not only are there more cells, but the timestep must also shrink correspondingly, a double hit beyond the capability of the most advanced supercomputers for at least several more decades, if ever.
Yet to model tropical comvection cells (Tstorms) responsible for Lindzen’s adaptive IR iris, grid cells need to be on the order of 10 Km (and certainly finer than 30). This is IMO why models don’t get upper troposphere humidity, precipitation, and clouds right. And why the CMIP5 models produce an upper troposphere hot spot when nomemexists in reality. See essays Models all the way Down, Humidity is still Wet, and Cloudy Clouds in ebook Blowing Smoke for illustrations, details, and references.
Rud,
Thank you for that; very informative. Could the computer limits be mitigated by concentrating on regional climate change rather than global climate change?
Regards,
Richard
“Are you thinking that nature has taken on CO2 and won? Are you thinking we do not understand the nature vs. CO2 (GHG) dynamics?”
—–
Nature is not “taking on” CO2. There is no “nature vs. CO2” dynamics. These are your own fabrications. Nothing further needs to be said.
There is if there are as yet unknown mechanisms which rejected the heat expected from CO2 rise as predicted by the erroneous models (I.E. the pause). How else is that divergence explained? Either there is an unknown mechanism, or CO2 doesn’t do what you think it does.
The discrepancy between surface station indices, especially BEST’s, and the LT satellite record is gradually becoming as egregious as their discrepancy with model projections. This curious development will continue as long as UHI-corrupted data is indiscriminately employed in constructing the indices.
What is wrong with RSS?
How they’d know or why we should care must remain mysterious. The world temp can only head up or down at any time – it can’t play the recorder or tap-dance – so some warming, even if established, means nothing. Just like some levelling or cooling would just mean we’re living through same-old same-old.
Still, cooking up stats and graphs for “statements” must be far less exhausting, bewildering and confronting than the investigation of the natural world and cosmos. Who’d want that job?
Moso,
How wrong can you be yet again.
‘You wake me up early in the morning to tell me that I’m right? Please wait until I’m wrong.’ John von Neumann’s headstone
While we are with John von Neumann – here’s your wake up call.
‘With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make him wiggle his trunk.’
Now how does this apply to climate?
‘Atmospheric and oceanic computational simulation models often successfully depict chaotic space–time patterns, flow phenomena, dynamical balances, and equilibrium distributions that mimic nature. This success is accomplished through necessary but nonunique choices for discrete algorithms, parameterizations, and coupled contributing processes that introduce structural instability into the model. Therefore, we should expect a degree of irreducible imprecision in quantitative correspondences with nature, even with plausibly formulated models and careful calibration (tuning) to several empirical measures.’ http://www.pnas.org/content/104/21/8709.full
Obviously there is a great deal of elephant wiggling going on – and it is evident that we can project this wiggling into x dimensions to produce x-2 degrees of freedom in the temperature phase space.
If you actually had an education – rather than an indoctrination into a dissolute and more than faintly ludicrous sub-culture – you mightn’t need such frequent wake up calls from me.
Sorry, but I wouldn’t get out of bed to talk to a common hydrologist. Let me know when you’re a CITIZEN hydrologist.
Cooling may leave poor Rob waiting at the alter. Hopefully, he hasn’t put money on cooling, and all he will lose is face if he has any face left to lose.
I wonder if the timing of the announcement is meaningful. Is the conclusion forgone? Climate reparations are nice if you can get them.
Dr. Roy Spencer finds:2014 a record warm year? Probably NOT.
Nicola Scafetta’s 2000 global temperature predictions continue to range within global fluctuations and to do better than the IPCC’s.
Satellites don’t measure temperature
Boltzmann would be shocked to hear that. Perhaps you mean that satellites don’t measure temperature directly. Of course, given the right mindset, neither do thermometers.
Thermometers don’t measure temperature either, if you want to make the claim that satellites don’t measure temperature.
Steven is correct but in being correct you have to interpret his words carefully.
Nothing measures temperature is what he means.
Every measuring device used is really only estimating a guess as to what the true temperature of the true substance you are measuring is and it can never be correct because of the errors present in all measuring devices, the errors present in defining the substance being measured, and measuring that, and the the time lapse which means that what you were measuring was changing while you measured it and cannot be proven correct then , now or in the future.
His point is extremely valid and measurably useful, for the point of making stirring comments.
And deflecting attention to the measurements that contradict Cowtan and Way’s badly modeled pseudo data sets.
Angech almost won a prize.
But he took one non skeptical step.
He is learning. But still a little slow.
Hint. No such thing as correct.
2014 is not going to be a warmest year C&W, so it’s nice to know that’s an error!
Heh, a better temperature estimation than surface thermometers measure.
=================
Mosh:
The philosophical and sematic fly f….ng aside, if there is no such thing as correct, why is it that globally we are today spending something close to $1 trillion on “mitigation” policies to address a purported problem [CAGW/CACC], the purported sole cause of which [anthropogenic CO2 emissions] we have no verifiably correct proof for? Certifiable behaviour?
Meanwhile, to Judith Curry’s point: no matter how you cut it, the empirical data is clearly more correct than the increasingly incorrect and “incredible” 170plus IPCC GGCMs.
If there is no such thing as correct, why does he keep on correcting everybody ?
Bob Tisdale quantifies:
“RSS and UAH “Meteorological Annual Mean” (December to November) Global Temperatures Fall Far Short of Record Highs in 2014…”
A good description of what is wrong with them, but when are they going to fix it. Either fix them or admit, as RSS has done, they are not accurate at measuring the surface air temperature.
not picking up surface warming in ENSO neutral conditions during 2013 and 2014
JCH “A good description of what is wrong with them, but when are they going to fix it.”
What’s to fix? Satellites are estimating temperature based on energy and “surface” temperatures are estimating temperature based on a combination of various instruments, averaging and interpolation methods.
When the “surface” temperature methods include wider ranges of temperatures they are less likely to accurately agree with changes in energy. The more very low temperature estimates/interpolation involved in the “surface” records the less likely they will agree with satellite measurements.
“Forcings” are all energy estimates with SWAGs of temperature impacts. You have a bit of a fruit salad situation.
If the surface air temperature warms because of an El Nino, or cools because of a La Nina, they’re all over it.
Both of them: El Nino and La Nina. Not just one of them. Both of them. They suddenly have super huge agreement with Mosher’s thermometers. So much they add some oomph to them.
If the surface warms, or cools, because of the PDO and the AMO (the rest of the oceans), they don’t appear to detect it. They’re suddenly exceptionally unenthusiastic about Mosher’s thermometers.
You want it both ways because politically you like that result.
If the thermometers are understating La Nina and EL Nino effects, because the satellites almost always show lower GMT for La Nina events and higher GMT for El Nino events, how can the thermometers suddenly not exist when it’s the rest of the oceans driving the change in direction of the GMT?
starts 2010 higher than GISS because of the El Nino. Dives to the bottom because of the two La Nina events in 2011 and 2012, both of which it is oomphin’. It is possibly exaggerating the effects of El Nino and La Nina on the surface air temperature.
JCH, thermometers exist, Satellite data exists, interpolated data is a bit “novel”.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/plot/uah/plot/hadsst3gl/from:1979/normalise/plot/hadcrut3gl/from:1979/normalise
Hadcrut was picked on for the “pause” because the METoffice made some claims that didn’t materialize. The slowdown, hiatus, flatline generally compares models with any of the surface temperature/satellite data sets.
“pause” is political, the rest are more “scientific” If you want to stick with “scientific”, Satellites are not measuring the same thing as “surface” stations+buckets/ships, but the two agree very well when you consider the different things they are measuring. When you interpolate very cold polar regions with the “surface” stations/satellites, they agree less well, but are still in a reasonable margin of error. If you are more concerned with global changes in energy, stick with satellites, if you are more interested in press releases, pick your favorite.
The only way for the satellite series to get back into agreement with the thermometers after the 2010 to 2013 overshoot demonstrated in the above graph is for them to exaggerate the surface air temperature in the next El Nino. If 2015 is another ENSO neutral year, the divergence will spread.
That will happen when they’re not measuring the surface air temperature, which why UAH has no clue as to whether or not 2014 is the warmest year, but he likes to be political.
JCH, “The only way for the satellite series to get back into agreement with the thermometers after the 2010 to 2013 overshoot demonstrated in the above graph is for them to exaggerate the surface air temperature in the next El Nino. If 2015 is another ENSO neutral year, the divergence will spread.”
Actually when the warming/cooling is more “global” they will tend to agree better. Surface stations would tend to over weigh colder lower specific heat regions. Surface stations would also tend to underweight ENSO/tropical regions. Roy Spencer is probably aware of that and the WMO appears not to be.
Now if you happen to think that winter temperatures in the high Arctic “jumping” from -35C to -30C is a clear signature of global climatgeddon, then sound the alarm. In the real world 0.05C is pretty much insignificant.
if ENSO neutral persists throughout 2015, one: it’s likely there would be back-to-back warmest years; and two: it’s almost impossible for RSS to achieve agreement with thermometers. Look at their trend over two ENSO neutral years.
Because they are not measuring changes in the GMT, they have not a clue in the world whether or not 2014 is the warmest year. NOAA, GISS, BEST, C&W, HadCrut4? They do. They may not all agree that 2014 is the warmest year, but they all agree completely that RSS is dead wrong on 2013 and 2104 – which just so happen to be ENSO neutral years.
JCH, ” but they all agree completely that RSS is dead wrong on 2013 and 2104 – which just so happen to be ENSO neutral years.”
They are all wrong. Use the average if you are looking for something less wrong. RSS is probably a bit wronger, but that is because they set out to “prove” UAH was wrong.
Now if you happen to “believe” that Nino3.4 is the magic T-spot of climate I hate to break this to ya, but it probably ain’t.
I don’t “believe” anything. The graph is data. If ENSO neutral were to persist for years, RSS would diverge to the point of ridiculousness. That is obvious. One can sift through their data and find multiple examples of this. Either LA Nina saves their bacon or El Nino saves their bacon. They have only one way to correct for the current error, and that is the next El Nino.
JCH – if you actually knew anything about it, you would know that the sat data WILL NOT measure the same temperature as at the surface. In fact, the sat lower trop TREND will be less, up or down, than the surface. BUT, a positive sat trend will also be a positive surface trend, likewise for a flat or negative trend.
So, since the sat samples much more of the globe and the readings have been confirmed by radiosonde – a fact you have completely avoided to explain – the sat data rules.
JCH, “Either LA Nina saves their bacon or El Nino saves their bacon. They have only one way to correct for the current error, and that is the next El Nino.”
They can always “adjust” :) You know, discover” they over corrected for drift, send Spencer and Christy a nice little letter with frowny faces. Then if they are pretty sure their method is right, it should hover around the uncertainty estimates they made and agree better with the other sets when there is less regional variability.
As far as lower troposphere goes, the ratpac, UAH, RSS, CERES and the rest are in the same ballpark which is about as good as you should expect.
David L. Hagen: “… why have world governments chosen to rely on surface thermometers…?
The answer is “power”. Political, not electrical.
I hope while they are in Peru they have been celebrating the good weather the country has been having resulting in –
” Peru’s 2013/14 crop was raised 121,000 tons to a record 2.16 million tons based on information from the U.S. Agricultural Office in Lima reporting a record yield”
My issue with the whole “warmest year on record” trope is that it is intentionally misleading.
Your average non-expert does not understand that the “record” is actually quite short, and that temperatures have been generally increasing since the LIA. Instead, they probably imagine a scientifically-produced temperature record that goes back at least hundreds of thousands of years.
The implication of the words is, IMO, intended to convey that misleading impression. In actual fact, current global temperatures are not unprecedented, and responsible scientists should not imply that they are.
That’s not to say that the recent temperature record doesn’t contain some anthropogenic signal. It’s just that by intentionally misleading the public, scientists are further eroding the possibility of public trust.
Well, the MWP had 6 inch higher sea levels, the arctic forests were further north than they are today, and they were growing barley in Greenland.
So… the modern warmth isn’t unusual, yet.
==> “The implication of the words is, IMO, intended to convey that misleading impression.”
Yes, indeed. Certainly it’s an easy thing to determine when a lack of specificity betrays an “intent” to mislead. Judging “intent” is simples.
Why can’t we just have more people who carefully construct their statements so as to make sure that they don’t mislead?
But of course, we should make exceptions, you know, like Judith’s buds Matt Ridley or David Rose, who talk about how “global warming has stopped.”
Or even our illustrious host, who testifies before Congress that because there has been a short-term flattening out of a longer term trend of rising increase in temps, therefore there is a “hiatus” in “global warming?”
‘Cause if someone interpreted their statements to “intentionally mislead” they would obviously be wrong. You see – I can always tell what someone’s intentions are. If I agree with them, they have bad intentions and if I agree with them, they have good intentions.
Although whether I agree with them is just a coincidence, of course.
But of course, we should make exceptions for Matt or David when they say that “global warming has stopped.”
Or even our illustrious host, who testifies before Congress that because there has been a short-term flattening out of a longer term trend of rising increase in temps, therefore there is a “hiatus” in “global warming?”
‘Cause if someone interpreted their statements to “intentionally mislead” they would obviously be wrong. You see – I can always tell what someone’s intentions are. If I agree with them, they have bad intentions and if I agree with them, they have good intentions.
Although whether I agree with them is just a coincidence, of course.
Just ’cause everyone was waiting for Part II, that was it.
Of course if you invent idiot readers who think there are records that go back thousands of years you can concoct an intent to mislead.
Even with hide the decline where people wrote what they were thinking.. We don’t want to dilute the message..
I’d say that talking about intentions is unnecessary.
given that you think the audience is stupid a stop sign could be read as misleading.
Since the beginning of this ‘warmest year’ and ”warmest decade’ meme about four or five years ago, it has been a hallmark argument for an alarmist who thinks skeptics are stupid, and for an alarmist who can’t recognize the implicit recognition of the pause within.
So it’s fairly amusing to see this obviously awkward spin promoted as one of the last gasps, the death rattle, of the alarmist political drive. But who is left to be considered stupid? Certainly not the skeptics who saw through this ploy in moments.
Heh, the stupid ones are the alarmists who think they can sucker the marks with this sort of idiocy.
This way to the flamingoes. We got unicorns and green blobby elephants, too, whitewash spattered enough to be going wanting at the market
================
Steven Mosher-“invent idiot readers”? I see expert climatologists with charts showing global temperatures for millions of years. They seem to present it as single lines, so, I assume the SD = 0. Are you suggesting that anyone who believes this are idiots?
Of course if you invent idiot readers who think there are records that go back thousands of years you can concoct an intent to mislead.
Like, for example, FOMD, who has written that recent years have been “the warmest ever?” If a denizen of this blog (OK, a dishonest one, but not an idiot) can get the wrong impression, then I would expect that lots of non-scientists would as well.
You’re right, though, that the issue here is not so much about motives as it is about eroding public trust in the science.
“… it has been a hallmark argument for an alarmist who thinks skeptics are stupid…”
—–
Real skeptics are not stupid and even pseudoscience takes a lot of creativity to fabricate.
Thank you Mr. Gruber.
Alas, Kim. Gruber has company.
Steven, not talking about “intentions” is the broadest for of stupid skeptics often come to table with. AGW agenda is driven more by politics than any science that can even be speculated upon. So it’s all about intentions obfuscated by phony technical debates that large numbers of the public accept as validating a partisan science consensus. Willfully ignorant or not such as the clowns all over this blog and the host herself.
So Twitter is filled with insider hating today because Dr. Curry used the word “spin” as if this was the first time the king was observed with no clothes. That the entire profession is almost nothing but spin the protocol (political correctness) will be maintained. More pointless insider prattle that most “skeptics” here conform to with little dissent.
“Form”
Regarding Schmidt’s plot: https://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/gavin_page_1.png
It may be read as confirming the pause I think. The brown peaks advance to the right. Those are the warming regime ones. The red peaks hardly advance to the right. They are focused. So looking at what’s different between the two sets we have a healthy advance and then a lackadaisical one. It’s a good plot. Some of us take in visual information better than other types.
http://papundits.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/climateresearchheat_9-12-04-digest-cartoon-1.jpg?w=594
good one :) i’ll add this to the post
Ok :-)
Should I be pleased that finally the pause is being widely acknowledged and the implication that the climate models were wrong is finally being accepted.
Or should I be really miffed that it’s taken 7 years of denial and insults from academics and the greenblob for them to finally start listening to us sceptics?
Either way, the reason for the pause has always been obvious to me (at least since I created the climategate petition in 2009)
http://scottishsceptic.co.uk/2014/12/09/natural-habitats-of-1f-noise-errors/
“… the implication that the climate models were wrong is finally being accepted.”
—–
Completely silly. The model makers themselves will tell you the models are always wrong. A model will never ever get natural variability correct.
Not useful for making decisions other than for climate research.
Is there something arbitrary about a calender year – as opposed to a 12 month running mean?
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:12
Perhaps we can make some educated guesses about the global energy dynamic? Is there extra energy in the Earth system and why?
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/ceres_ebaf-toa_ed2-8_anom_toa_net_flux-all-sky_march-2000toaugust-2014.png
http://lasp.colorado.edu/data/sorce/total_solar_irradiance_plots/images/tim_level3_tsi_24hour_640x480.png
But the really interesting thing is can we reasonably expect the pause to end anytime soon?
https://watertechbyrie.files.wordpress.com/2014/06/swanson-realclimate1.png
‘If as suggested here, a dynamically driven climate shift has occurred, the duration of similar shifts during the 20th century suggests the new global mean temperature trend may persist for several decades. Of course, it is purely speculative to presume that the global mean temperature will remain near current levels for such an extended period of time. Moreover, we caution that the shifts described here are presumably superimposed upon a long term warming trend due to anthropogenic forcing. However, the nature of these past shifts in climate state suggests the possibility of near constant temperature lasting a decade or more into the future must at least be entertained.’ http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008GL037022/full
It is of course purely wishful thinking to imagine that ‘the pause’ won’t persist for a decade or more yet.
I’ve got a graph just as good but mine is 6 years older than yours:
http://uclimate.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/temp.jpg
http://scottishsceptic.co.uk/2014/01/14/the-global-warming-scam-2008/
I pretty much think mine’s bigger than yours.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2007/11/enso_variation_and_global_warm.html
The graph from Kyle Swanson in 2009 also projects forward – with some actual science involved.
It was just a plot of CO2 scaled to fit on the same graph as the temperature. But it shows the essentials of the pause: CO2 rising and temperatures failing to follow suit.
But if you want a scientific prediction of climate try this:
http://uburns.com/img/uBurns1.png
This is my new “97% accurate” climate forecast which I completely guarantee is accurate over the 100 years (if not I’ll swim the Forth in a pink tutu).
However, as I say on the site (http://uBurns.com) the forecast is 97% accurate for the current data but it obviously has to constantly readjusting to take account of the data manipulation and so it might vary slightly between views :)
The pause is sort of like a spot in the road where everyone gets jolted and some lose hubcaps. Eventually someone looks down and sees that there is a pothole in the road.
We have gotten to the point in the climate story where everyone agrees there is a bump in the road (the pause). Now if just someone would look down find reason.
It is hypothesized that persistent and consistent trends among several climate modes act to ‘kick’ the climate state, altering the pattern and magnitude of air-sea interaction between the atmosphere and the underlying ocean. Figure 1 (middle) shows that these climate mode trend phases indeed behaved anomalously three times during the 20th century, immediately following the synchronization events of the 1910s, 1940s, and 1970s. This combination of the synchronization of these dynamical modes in the climate, followed immediately afterward by significant increase in the fraction of strong trends (coupling) without exception marked shifts in the 20th century climate state. These shifts were accompanied by breaks in the global mean temperature trend with respect to time, presumably associated with either discontinuities in the global radiative budget due to the global reorganization of clouds and water vapor or dramatic changes in the uptake of heat by the deep ocean. Similar behavior has been found in coupled ocean/atmosphere models, indicating such behavior may be a hallmark of terrestrial-like climate systems [Tsonis et al., 2007].’
Clouds or oceans – or both – it’s not as if there are a lot of options.
That was a quote btw – http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2008GL037022/full
Guaranteed 97% accurate aye? I’ll take some of that action.
But let me give you a science tip. Label the axes.
The axes are kind of arbitrary.
You have to click on http://uBurns.com a few times to understand the nature of this forecast.
The ranking of warmest years appears to usually be done according to NOAA data only.
The timing of the announcement is suss and recorded data is way too short to derive any conclusions one way or the other about a time series millions of years old. Climate/weather is subject to sudden shifts upwards or downwards but with long periods of comparatively stable regional trajectories in between.
Peter –
==> “…recorded data is way too short to derive any conclusions one way or the other …”
What do you think is a sufficient time period to use – not for “deriv[ing] any conclusions, but for assessing probabilities with the inclusion of CIs – so as to evaluate different policy options for addressing risks in the face of uncertainty?
Anything less than millions of years?
Judith seems to think that a relatively short slow down in the longer-term trend of rising SATs is sufficient (even though we lack a mechanistic explanation for that relatively short-term slowdown) Do you agree with her?
Or would you agree that it is more advisable to use trends evident over the entire period that we’ve been emitting CO2 as a more reliable guidepost?
Joshua,
I agree absolutely. Let us by all means use the longest time period we have.
Creation of the the Earth to now is about as long a period as I can find.
Temperature then – very hot.
Temperature now – not nearly so hot.
Conclusion? Much cooling. Do you not agree?
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Mike –
Obviously, time periods prior to significant amounts of ACO2 emissions are of value for assessing the impact of ACO2 emissions. But you need to distinguish those time periods in your assessment. Lumping it all together into one package doesn’t seem particularly useful to me.
Of course, I’m neither as smart or knowledgeable as you.
Joshua | December 9, 2014
“What do you think is a sufficient time period to use – not for “deriving any conclusions, but for assessing probabilities
Judith seems to think that a relatively short slow down in the longer-term trend of rising SATs is sufficien”
What exactly do we mean by SAT ? NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) A. I doubt that there is a general agreement how to answer this question. [see Mosher above]
The sufficient time period to use is one that proves your own point of view.
Judith has you on the short side. Mike has you on the long side.
What’s your favorite poison [sorry, guess] Joshua?
angech –
==> “The sufficient time period to use is one that proves your own point of view.”
That assumes you’re looking for proof. What if you’re looking to assess probabilities so as to do risk assessment while developing policies in the face of uncertainty?
Under those circumstances, I would say that evaluating the three time periods mentioned above are important, and as such there remains a rather high degree of uncertainty w/r/t “fat tail” large-scale impact on our climate as the result of BAU.
I’m reflexively skeptical when someone isolates one time scale without direct and explicit reference to the others.
Hence my question to Peter.
Joshua,
Thank you for telling everyone here that you are not as smart or knowledgeable as I am. I knew that, but I wasn’t sure that you did.
You might care to tell me whether you are concerned about surface temperatures or CO2 emissions, or pollution in general. There is not necessarily correlation between them, obviously, and Warmists tend to jump from alarmism about one, to predictions of doom about another, depending on which particular straw man suits their current situation.
All joking aside, if it is impossible to determine an accurate global of any sort now, how is it possible to establish a more accurate one in the past?
This whole exercise seems a remarkably pointless exercise leading nowhere. Do you disagree?
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Mike –
==> “Joshua,
Thank you for telling everyone here that you are not as smart or knowledgeable as I am. I knew that, but I wasn’t sure that you did.”
How old are you? I’ve told you that before. I wonder if you’re having some memory issues? Besides, it is so blatantly obvious, even people as thick as I am could never question that. It would be like questioning whether Don Monfort or Einstein were smarter (although obviously the comparison is much, much closer).
==> “You might care to tell me whether you are concerned about surface temperatures or CO2 emissions, or pollution in general.”
Do I have to pick one? Can’t I be weight the probabilities of each – especially given that CO2 emissions are inextricably linked to environmental impact such as particulate matter and geo-political impact such spending billions to keep oil flowing and enriching oppressive regimes while doing so?
==> “There is not necessarily correlation between them, obviously, ”
Necessarily? Perhaps not. But I’m not interested in absolutist arguments. I”m more interested in how we can assess probabilities so as to perform risk assessment and develop policies in the face of uncertainty.
==> “and Warmists tend to jump from alarmism about one, to predictions of doom about another, depending on which particular straw man suits their current situation.”
I’m not particularly interested in your demons, Mike. Why would you be asking me to address your demons?
==> “All joking aside, if it is impossible to determine an accurate global of any sort now, how is it possible to establish a more accurate one in the past?”
Again, I’m not interested in absolutist arguments. “Accurate” is always a relative term – but you are describing it in absolutist terms. There’s no where for me to go with that. My interest is in dealing with the measurements we have, so as to inform probabilities, so that risk assessment can be performed, so that policies can be developed in the face of uncertainties.
If you want to argue with people about the “accuracy” of global temps, present day and in the past, I think that you should take that up with someone like Judith, who thinks that the records are accurate enough to determine that there has been a trend of rising global SATs that has “paused,” and that the measurements are accurate enough to determine a “wave,” and to determine a range of the climate’s sensitivity to ACO2.
==> “This whole exercise seems a remarkably pointless exercise leading nowhere. Do you disagree?”
No, I agree. I have yet to see any of these discussions lead anywhere. The vast majority of it looks to me like rather juvenile identity-aggressive and identity-defensive behaviors.
That doesn’t mean that I think that mature people can’t, under the right circumstances, engage in productive risk assessment so as to develop policies in the face of uncertainties about the impact of ACO2 on the climate. But I think the starting point needs to be a commitment to that goal.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.”
Nonsense question.
Joshua,
I hope you don’t mind if I don’t divulge my age. I have no wish to embarrass you. If you do mind, I don’t care.
I let others judge the relevance of your Warmist WeaselWords – more or less.
You wrote –
“My interest is in dealing with the measurements we have, so as to inform probabilities, so that risk assessment can be performed, so that policies can be developed in the face of uncertainties.”
I would normally be tempted to say “Surely you’re joking”, but I suspect you actually believe what you wrote.
Good luck with that particular fantasy. At least it should keep you busy and off the streets. Please do keep us all informed of your progress – estimates will do, if you have no substantive measurement to monitor movement towards your eventual goal, undefined as it is.
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
Joshua, that comment is disingenuous. Judith was clear. NOAA State of the Climate 2008 said 15 years, Santer’s paper said 17 years of ‘pause’ (no statistically significantwarming) would falsify climate models. McKitrick’s new paper uses advanced (taking temperature autocorrelation into account) found no SS warming for 16, 19, and 26 years depending on which temperature series.
Claiming 2014 to be the hottest by a smidge when the year is not over is an effort to pretend the pause (lack of ss warming) does not exist. When it does-just eyeball Mosher’s chart for Judith’s Senate testimony, above. There have been other more overt recent efforts using improper methods like CPA at places like Real Climate, or Mann with a bogus temperature graphic in Scientific American in April.
Bett’s twitter attack on Ridley yesterday (see Bishop Hill for details) is more evidence that the pause is panicking warmunists. Their ‘science is settled ‘ stuff is all going up in smoke.
Rud Istvan | December 10, 2014 at 12:54 pm |
” Santer’s paper said 17 years of ‘pause’ (no statistically significantwarming) would falsify climate models.”
A quote would be nice.
Fair question Joshua. Trendololgy tends to be what Matt Ridley had alluded to as bias looking for confirmation in the field of climate research and this is the reason why climate science is IMO way too normative.
The appropriate time period to be used for evaluation of the risks underlying climate change and for the development of policy responses and assessment of costs and benefits of each option appears to be more in terms of a hundred years or thereabouts. Why a hundred you might ask? Because this period seems to reflect the recently discovered climate cycle in this report. http://www.whoi.edu/oceanus/feature/pco which seems to be a reasonable period to evaluate the impact of modern mankind on our climate.
So in this context I disagree with Judith and lean toward your suggestion that, in your words “it is more advisable to use trends evident over the entire period that we’ve been emitting CO2 as a more reliable guidepost”
My response to you is in moderation Joshua. Dunno why, it must have been my use of your name perhaps :)
The blog filter be hungry tonight, Peter.
Peter,
try substituting putz for Joshua. That should get you past mod filters.
Yes, Judith, we are not going to be stampeded because the world was one hundredth of a degree warmer this year than last even if it were true. The reality is that the warmists are grasping at straws, so long as their models are so demonstrably poor.
In my opinion this charade will continue until the IPCC has the courage to look inside the CO2 molecule. Then they might discover that the molecule has vibration modes that can be turned on or off and so vary the amount of heat it can adsorb. Forget ‘the science is settled’ dictum, be a bit more adventurous, rebuild your models with the new knowledge. In particular avoid assuming that one CO2 state fits all.
See my theoretical model underlined above.
Alexander –
FYI – you might want to know that Judith has said that she doesn’t listen to people of your opinion – no matter how many of them post comments on her forum for “extended peer review.”
And Alexander – did you mean an actual underline? ‘Cause I didn’t see one.
Joshua, the Newbie, doesn’t know to click on names. Knows Judy’s mind to a fare thee well, though, in his mind anyway.
===========
So the WMO report refers to sea level changes: “over the satellite
altimetric record”, and tropical cyclones: “in the modern satellite era”.
But satellite temperature records showing nothing even close to a temperature record don’t get a mention.
Hmm. I’ve already drawn some preliminary conclusions about that.
Do not the ice core records show quite abrupt climate swings almost as the norm?
Do the models give any hint of such discontinuities or is everything just based on linear responses?
Does it even make sense to look for smooth changes here?
When it comes to feeling the heat of global warming, emotional and social intelligence motivates us to abandon practical intelligence.
These environmental activists are mental monoliths with unlimited ability to ignore the facts at all cost and do it with a straight face. They refuse to recognize or engage or communicate with anyone performing “fact speak”. No dialog no common understanding no facts.
==> “These environmental activists are mental monoliths”
I wonder how many such insightful comments we will see in this thread?
Yes, those who disagree with majorx are mental monoliths.
Indeed, where would we be without the insight gained from Judith’s “extended peer review,” where name-calling and tribalism are so prevalent?
Thanks god for Judith’s “extended peer review.” How much poorer we’d all be w/o folks like majorx to protect us from “mental monoliths.”
Remember, it’s pointless to talk about warming. Because, well, because… Someone will get back to us on that.
“Remember, it’s pointless to talk about warming. ”
Well, the data from Argos using a network of relatively similar devices show s that the ocean is absorbing about 0.75w/m2 at the surface.
So the ocean is warming … but not very quickly.
There is a problem that doesn’t get a lot of attention – the lack of an incentive to deploy homogeneous devices in a network for climate purposes.
It is somewhat frustrating. Sometimes you just have to shoot the climate scientists I guess. Yup, new Argos floats can be deployed with new sensors and capabilities. However the experience with land sensors is that the climate scientists that deploy the new sensors won’t intercalibrate the new devices to the previous devices prior to deployment, but deploy them in the field and go “whoops – they read different – we need to adjust the data”. Congress should demand that any future Argos deployments produce data that intercalibrates with the existing sensor data regardless of any new capabilities.
The “whoops we can adjust it” attitude toward land sensors should be legally banned for Argos.
Nice point, PA, but the horses may be out of the barn already. The ocean data already tells a pretty compelling story.
Still, it may be amusing to see if such manipulation is attempted in the case of further pausing or more evident cooling.
===============
“Indeed, where would we be without the insight gained from Judith’s “extended peer review,” where name-calling and tribalism are so prevalent?”
Joshua, you have mentioned this a couple times in this thread now. Is it really the blog comments that JC meant as ‘extended peer review’? I thought it was more like blog posts that provided alternative viewpoints to peer reviewed articles… Clearly comments to posts will have much more variability wrt thoughtful reasoning compared to the posts themselves, so why you would descend to the lowest level as an example of what she probably means by extended peer review is… er, well as someone I know likes to say…. a little selective?
John –
Fair point.
Not sure I go with the posts vs. comments distinction, but sure, I am cherry-picking w/r/t comments. On the other hand, I think that the value of Judith’s input would be enhanced if she did more to identify the tribalism seen so often in the comments here and throughout the “skept-o-sphere.”
So I’m cherry-picking to make a point.
She turns a blind eye to the lack of respect for uncertainty we see from folks like Ridley and Rose, as well as in the comments in these threads that talk of “economic suicide” – based on unvalidated and unverified economic modeling.
And then, like many “skeptics,” she turns around and hides behind the “skeptics” aren’t monolithic argument, or “skeptics” aren’t subject to groupthink arguments, even as she downplays the % of “skeptics” who flat out reject that there’s any GHG effect or who make arguments that aren’t logically consistent with the protestation that “we don’t doubt that the climate is warming or that ACO2 contributes to that warming, we only question the magnitude of the contribution.”
Criticizing “realists” is fair game, IMO. But the standards to be applied should be consistent. If she, herself, doesn’t clarify which elements of “blog science” really merit the descriptor of “extended peer review,” why should we do it for her?
John –
Fair point.
Not sure I go with the posts vs. comments distinction, but sure, I am cherry-picking w/r/t comments. On the other hand, I think that the value of Judith’s input would be enhanced if she did more to identify the tribalism seen so often in the comments here and throughout the “skept-o-sphere.”
So I’m cherry-picking to make a point.
She turns a blind eye to the lack of respect for uncertainty we see from folks like Matt R. and David R (her favorite journalist who shares his name with a type of flower), as well as in the comments in these threads that talk of “economic suicide” – based on unvalidated and unverified economic modeling.
And then, like many “skeptics,” she turns around and hides behind the “skeptics” aren’t monolithic argument, or “skeptics” aren’t subject to groupthink arguments, even as she downplays the % of “skeptics” who flat out reject that there’s any GHG effect or who make arguments that aren’t logically consistent with the protestation that “we don’t doubt that the climate is warming or that ACO2 contributes to that warming, we only question the magnitude of the contribution.”
Criticizing “realists” is fair game, IMO. But the standards to be applied should be consistent. If she, herself, doesn’t clarify which elements of “blog science” really merit the descriptor of “extended peer review,” why should we do it for her?
Josh,
mental midgets would be appropriate in your case, but since Marv Lewis just got in PC penalty box for the term, I’ll refrain.
PA
“However the experience with land sensors is that the climate scientists that deploy the new sensors won’t intercalibrate the new devices to the previous devices prior to deployment, ”
WRONG.
the biggest change in the US network was the deployment of MMTS
of course side by side studies were done. some continue today
https://ams.confex.com/ams/15AppClimate/techprogram/paper_91613.htm
That’s how the MMTS adjustment was developed.
And 10 years with the deployment of CRN.. same thing. side by side studies
Joshua
you keep speaking of tribalism
and name calling
I try to read Sks and RC, which are among the main consensus forums as far as I know
no name calling there (excepting “denier”)
no tribalism (cause skeptics are “deniers”)
censorship disguised as decorum
Judith strikes a good balance
as good as it gets
unilateral disarmament?
your tribe first
if you think Judith is “hiding”
you might not be very good at hide and seek
BTW, you, Mosher, Gates and the other pro voices on CE, are IMO better representatives of the consensus side than what I read on the above mentioned sites … one of the reasons I’m here
“Not sure I go with the posts vs. comments distinction”
Seems like a pretty big distinction to me. Where the line is drawn is not clear. Clearly there are folks that have better, deeper understanding of subject matter than others. Part of following climate discussions, for me at least, is to evaluate arguments made by various individuals at the different levels where they participate. In general, I think it is safe to say that those who go to the length of writing a post on some topic have spent considerable time researching it. That is not to say they do a balanced job at researching or even do a good job at presenting, but they have put time into the effort. In other words, posts are not off the cuff remarks. Comments to posts are off the cuff remarks. They are reactions to the post, or other comments and are immediate. Much less time goes into the content of a comment. Evaluating the difference between folks that both post topics and comment vs those that just comment has been interesting for me. In general I find that ‘commentors only’ offer less deep knowledge on subject matter than on ‘poster and commentors’…. in general…. and there are exceptions to my rule. So over a long period of observation of different arguments by different individuals, I begin to see and then predict how some people will likely respond in comments. I have a mental ranking of different commentors and I watch for their comments when I tune in. Some I always read, others I never read. Some I check here and there to see if anything has changed. With that as a backdrop, do you think that someone like Judith might employ a similar filter? Do you employ one? How many others do you think would? I think it likely that most people employ some kind of filter and I know you agree with that. Lets say that we all might have some kind of ‘extended peer review’ filter we employ to distinguish those we recognize as having a deeper understanding of certain subject matters. So why would she bother correcting a vast majority of commentors that might not get through her own ‘extended peer review’ filter? Matt R and David R, fair game for you to criticize about ‘extended peer review’… majorx… ??? Well, you get my point.
John Carpenter –
==> “Seems like a pretty big distinction to me.”
Sure, on average there’s a distinction between posts and comments – even though some posts seem to me to have highly flawed foundations (Scottish Skeptic’s post comes to mind, as does the post by that dude who wrote about memes).
And I agree with the rest of what you wrote about that.
==> “Lets say that we all might have some kind of ‘extended peer review’ filter we employ to distinguish those we recognize as having a deeper understanding of certain subject matters. So why would she bother correcting a vast majority of commentors that might not get through her own ‘extended peer review’ filter? Matt R and David R, fair game for you to criticize about ‘extended peer review’… majorx… ??? Well, you get my point.
Yes, I get your point, and I think it is valid…
But what I meant is that I don’t see Judith as extending a uniform criterion for determining what does or doesn’t = “extended peer review.” We might have a post by Rud which seems sophisticated in its analysis (even if potentially analytically flawed) which is then followed up by his highly tribalistic comments related to the politics associated with climate change science. I don’t see Judith making a meaningful distinction between those two, or acknowledging the potential linkage – yet she makes it a fundamental plank of her advocacy to talk of such links on the other side of the debate. So her discussion of the influence of tribalism on “peer review” is selective – it seems to matter to her when the peer review takes place in journals but perhaps not when it takes place in the “skept-o-sphere?”
Comments abound that are made by smart and knowledgeable people that think that there is no GHE and other comments abound that are made by smart and knowledgeable people who are certain that a GHE exists (they only question the magnitude). She describes the general process as “extended peer review” yet completely dismisses those smart and knowledgeable people who think there is no GHE. So what is the standard? Does she reverse engineer to determine what is or isn’t valuable as extended peer review? Smart and knowledgeable people are contributing to “extended peer review” as long as they agree with her technical analysis? Smart and knowledgeable people are influenced by “tribalism” and “groupthink” only as long as they are “skeptics” who aren’t publishing in established journals? What are the standards?
Judith is obviously influential in the climate wars, but the impact of her lack of consistent standards, as an individual, is limited. The point is that it is part of a pattern. People argue without defining their terms. WTF is “extended peer review?” The pattern is where folks leverage the what might be of value (in this case open forum debate – which I think is of some value) to advance their advocacy, but fail to note the “uncertainties” involved. They fail to identify the reasonable and likely parameters of that value. They fail to attempt to qualify or quantify that value. Instead, they use concepts selectively, as a rhetorical tool – emphasizing the value when it strengthen their argument and ignoring the demerits when it weakens their argument.
So back to this comment:
==> “Matt R and David R, fair game for you to criticize about ‘extended peer review’… majorx… ??? Well, you get my point.”
Sure – I could assume that Judith considers Matt and David to be part of “extended peer review” and majorx not – for a variety of reasons (the depth of their reasoning, the reach of their influence, etc.). It would be “charitable” to do so. But the discussion in general would be advanced, IMO, if people start being explicit about their standards. IMO, that would then begin to look less like just more same ol’ same ol’ identity-aggression and identity-defense.
Judith – as a “thought leader” has an opportunity to turn the discussion in a more productive direction.
she doesnt need a standard.
you really don’t get it do you Joshua. Go back to ground zero for Judith.
She invited McIntyre to speak about Methods. Not climate change. Not GHE. Not policy. Methods. Statistical methods.
And of course pressure was brought to bear both before and after the event.
It reminded me of the days when we tried to organize a debate on divestment in south Africa. Some on campus decided that there on only one side that could talk. So, they stole all the school newspapers advertising the event. They tried to shout down the speakers. You know the drill. Thankfully, folks eventually were able to sit there an listen. Separate the good arguments from the bad, and decide for themselves using their standards.
The next “event” to remember is the appearance of Ravetz on the scene and the discussion of post normal science. His suggestion was that peer review need to be extended to all stake holders. However, there are no real guidelines for how this happens. At the core: let people speak. Let them comment. Discuss the topics that have previously been out of bounds. one of the consequences of the belief that truth is socially constructed is a call to dialogue. Another response, of course, is to trust experts. That is, those socially designated as experts should take the lead in the construction of truth.
Judith doesn’t need a standard for extended peer review. I imagine one could evolve over time. So yes, when you open up the floor and let anyone speak you will get all manner of nonsense. Maybe a couple of good insights. But you will get cranks, and nannies, and diverters, jokesters,
etc. The range of response is considerably wider than what you see
in “pal” review. So what?
For me it’s pretty easy. I look through the comments. I want to hear what R Gates has to say. I want to hear what Pekka has to say. I want the perspective of the historian, tonyb. I want to hear what Mahler has to say.
I used to want to hear what Webby had to say, before he got all pissy.
I know what you say. its boring. I know what wagathon, and all his types will say. Very quickly I can separate the thoughtful and mindful from the
bots. You are a bot.
She dosent need standards. you are the standard. read. look for the good. the bad is easy to spot.
“However the experience with land sensors is that the climate scientists that deploy the new sensors won’t intercalibrate the new devices to the previous devices prior to deployment, ”
WRONG.
Huh?
http://www.homogenisation.org/files/private/WG1/Bibliography/Applications/Applications%20%28F-J%29/hubbard_etal.pdf
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2010/a-cooling-bias-due-to-mmts/
The performance characteristics of a LIG/CRS and an MMTS are completely different. The MMTS high is lower by as much as 3.5 °C degrees, the low is up to about 1.5°C high, the difference is dependent on conditions (such as wind) and time of year.
The MMTS are located near buildings because of cable limitations and remote MMTS have a solar panel located under the sensor.
The HO-83 hygrothermometer introduced in the 1990s read as much as 3°C higher than prior instruments.
It would be difficult to field more incompatible instruments if you were doing it deliberately.
It is inexcusable that homogeneous replacement instruments are not used. This contempt for continuity is inexplicable and it should be stopped. But that would remove yet another opportunity to adjust the temperature.
The instrument temperature record really isn’t much different than tree proxies. With tree proxies you look at the bark and guess what the temperature was. With land instruments you look at the data and guess what a real thermometer would have measured.
PA you still dont get it.
The bias can be identified BECAUSE the did side by side testing.
And the bias can be corrected accordingly.
That is intercalibration.
Sensor X is the historical baseline
you want to introduce sensor Y
You run them side by side and find that Y is on average .2c warmer.
Its the same problem that Spenser has to solve.
Its the same problem that TSI measurments have to solve.
Its the same problem that EVERY long term observation system has.
Go read more and comment less
“It is inexcusable that homogeneous replacement instruments are not used. This contempt for continuity is inexplicable and it should be stopped. But that would remove yet another opportunity to adjust the temperature.”
Stupidity.
So when you get a better sensor, you continue to use the old one.
When the old sensor goes out of production you stop recording.
Should we stick with the sensors first used in the 1700s?
by your reasoning yes.
You like UAH and RSS? they use sensors on satellites . These are never the same. Should be go back to sensors used in the early 80s?
you are fired.
“The bias can be identified BECAUSE the did side by side testing.
And the bias can be corrected accordingly.
That is intercalibration.”
Well gee. The intercalibration studies occurred after the MMTS was released. And the studies continue.
The studies and the corrections resemble artillery fire. An new instrument is deployed. After a while they need to warm the temperatures so they so a study, whoops, that new sensor we deployed reads a little low (can’t have low – that would reduce global warming). When they need more warming they do another study – whoops that sensor even after adjustment is a little low – we need to adjust it some more, etc. etc.
Climate Scientists don’t appear to be interested in accurately measuring temperature. There is no reason there is not a testing standard for outdoor weather stations that specifies performance under all conditions known to affect measurement. +/- 3°C from the previous sensing station is a joke.
The Best approach (as I understand it) of treating a replaced sensor as a new station is at least half a loaf.
i see PA has changed his tune.
musta been he didnt understand that UAH and RSS have to stitch together different records from different sensors.
Also, he’s still wrong on MMTS.
read mo, comment less PA
“musta been he didnt understand that UAH and RSS have to stitch together different records from different sensors.”
That is actually a different discussion.
The radiosondes are used to validate the Satellite TLT.
They have gone through a number of types of radiosondes and the satellite data would indicate the measurement change with the new device since the new radiosondes wouldn’t match the satellite data and the old radiosondes would This is the same problem – mandatory objective environmental test standards would give historic continuity.
The people in charge of the surface stations and the data adjusters don’t seem to understand that from a perspective of the climate history having any real utility in indicating a “global temperature trend” their sensors need to report the same values regardless of a change in technology.
http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/91613.pdf
“At the time, many climatologists expressed concern about this mass observing change. Growing concern over potential anthropogenic climate change was stimulating countless studies of long-term temperature trends. Historic data were already compromised by station moves, urbanization, and changes in observation time. The last thing climatologists wanted was another potential source for data discontinuities. The practical reasons outweighed the scientific concerns, however, and MMTS deployment began in 1984.”
There engineering adage that should have been applied to sensor technology a long time ago:
“It is better to be consistent, than be right.”
Continuiit is better to be consistent
GHCN-M is doing their part in the effort to set a new record. Between 11-21 and 12-09 they deleted 66 stations from their adjusted database and added 63 others which weren’t in the 11-21 adjusted database.
Seven stations were added to the unadjusted database during that time-period with each having one month of data for the year. Only one of those made it into the adjusted database though.
month to month changes in the sources are COMMON.
there are at least 14 different sources of data many of them overlapping.
providers are doing the kind of QA that skeptics demand.. cleaning up, removing duplicates.
Nasty frickin job that no skeptic will take on.
Steven,
That is nonsense. GHCN-M adds station data to the unadjusted file giving it a source from which they received that data, such as Met Office or MCDW. By their own rules they are supposed to change the source and value of an individual station’s data if they get info from a higher quality source. They aren’t at all consistent about upgrading by quality. They are still using Met Office data for Australia from 2003 even though they consider MCDW a higher quality source, and MCDW has had that data available for years.
Three or four months ago I pointed out to them they had lost three entire months of data for the whole continent of Australia in 2011(Sep-Nov). Data they previously held which has now been missing for three years. Nothing has been done to correct the situation. Again, MCDW has the data. As does Met Office in their CLIMAT reports.
Those are not related to the adjusted data file i was talking about. They regularly remove entire lines present in the unadjusted file from the adjusted file leaving no indication why the data was removed, all the while inserting other lines previously deleted from the adjusted file. Does that sound like good practice to you?
As to removing duplicate data, the only duplicate data they remove is within a station’s own record.(They also do a poor job of that) They make no effort to remove it when it is between stations within a single country. There are numerous instances where two stations have identical data for up to a decade and yet the use it. I found 184 entire years with identical data. Most in the anomaly periods. I pointed this out to them a while ago and am waiting for them to do something about it.
Does this sound to you like a group of people working hard to produce the most accurate temperature dataset they are capable of creating?
I understand they are releasing v3.2.3 later this month. I expect they will continue to ignore the problems with their data.
I still am hung up on the idea that energy in equals energy out , constant source sun variables in solar power and distance and albedo effects* means that the patterns we see, El Nino , transient global atmospheric warming etc are not reflective of any true gain of heat in the system, just variability in where the heat is distributed and that there can be no true storage of extra heat in the oceans. The same amount of heat goes out as comes in there is no extra heat to store.
The pause is just a phase the SAT is going through. It can go either way from here and will.
Albedo with cloud cover etc is the most important definer of how much energy enters our system. All the CO2 and water vapor in the world cannot hold heat that does not get in. 2 billion years of life suggests that feedbacks of water vapor to increasing heat retention ,eg rising CO2, counteracts it completely.
Firmly Agree… the fact that the earth did end when CO2 was very high in the past is a big indicator that it will not end with the small increases occurring in modern times.
cheers
Jim
Presumably you mean “did not end….” The Sun’s irradiance increases with time, and was dimmer in the past. That must be considered when looking at CO2’s in the deep past. In any case, no one expects AGW to end the Earth.
Ok David…
to clarify
there are no mass extinctions shown in the fossil record that are related to CO2 levels being high(some of the wilder claims by those that advance CAGW)…
There is no evidence that higher atmospheric CO2 had any impact on the oceans (becoming less alkaline)
i.e. it wont be catastrophic… it will be beneficial for the foreseeable future
however the reverse, (declining levels of CO2) would be catastrophic.
“In any case, no one expects AGW to end the Earth.”
—–
The Earth will go on quite nicely with or without us, and with or without the effects we bring.
If you are interested in climate change their base time of 1961-1990 is entirely wrong and stupid. That is because everything before 2002, with the exception of 1998, is below the twenty-first century temperatures. There was a global warming spurt of three years that started in 1999. It raised global temperature by a third of a degree Celsius, and then settled down into the present hiatus/pause. That warming spurt is the only warming we have had since 1979.The eighties and the nineties before the appearance of the super El Nino pf 1998 had no warming at all. They were dominated by an ENSO oscillation that brought us five El Nino peaks, with La Nina valleys in between. All three ground-based temperature curves falsely show this temperature stretch as a rising temperature region. It is easy to prove them wrong simply by comparing their version to satellite version which has not been doctored like theirs. Without this phony warming there no justification for using this region as part of the baseline they draw. To talk about records is stupid because only a few hundredth pf degrees have changed since the beginning of this century. In no way can these few hundredths of degrees be held responsible for “…Record-breaking heat combined with torrential rainfall and floods…”
“If you are interested in climate change their base time of 1961-1990 is entirely wrong and stupid.”
Wrong. The is a practical matter that you dont even understand.
read more comment less.
Steven Mosher | December 10, 2014 at 1:14 pm quotes this sentence from me: “If you are interested in climate change their base time of 1961-1990 is entirely wrong and stupid.” And then the arrogant fool gives this judgement of it: “Wrong. The is a practical matter that you dont even understand. read more comment less.”
I don’t know where to start. First, he says I am wrong because “The” is a practical matter I don’t even understand. True. I have no idea what “The” is. Perhaps it would help if he used English. But then again, he does not even know enough English to capitalize beginnings of sentences. As to his objection to what I said, it is apparent that I have to draw a picture. To see why the choice of 1961-1990 is is bad you have to know what the temperature graph has been doing on this interval and then justify its use in the twenty-first century. It is not a secret that this temperature interval includes two segments that do not belong together. The first segment, from 1961 to the end of the seventies consists of recovery from the catastrophic temperature fall in 1940 that introduced the Second World War. By 1979 or 1980 this recovery has reached the level it was at in 1940 and the the temperature rise stops there. There is no temperature rise from that point on to the arrival of the super El Nino of 1998. This period exhibits a well developed ENSO oscillation which makes it easy to determine that global mean temperature did not change for an entire 18 year period. If you wonder how I know, it makes use of the fact that the midpoint between an El Nino peak and the bottom of its neighboring La Nina valley defines global mean temperature. And 18 years happens to be equal to the duration of the current hiatus/pause. However, in order to see it you have to use the satellite temperature curve because ground-based curves – GISS, NCDC and HadCRUT – are showing a temperature rise instead of a temperature standstill there. I spotted that two years ago and even put a note about it into the foreword to my book but nothing happened. They carried this fake warming on to the twenty-first century with the absurd result that the 2010 El Nino in their graphs is now shown higher than the 1998 super El Nino was. At any rate, there is no justification for taking these two temperature segments that meet at an angle, draw a straight line through them, and calling it a baseline for the twenty-first century. What makes it seem feasible is the fact that the land-based temperature curves referred to have angled up the standstill in the eighties and nineties so it looks like a continuation of the rise in the seventies. This is totally phony. Goes to show the importance of using temperature curves that have not been manipulated. And these three have been manipulated. All three were subjected to secret computer processing. They screwed up, however, because unbeknownst to them the computer left its footprints on all three publicly available temperature curves. These consist of sharp upward pointing spikes at the beginnings of years. There is one even on top of the super El Nino, making it taller. They are easy to spot in comparison with satellites that do not have this junk. They are all in exactly the same locations in all three curves. And by coincidence (?) the three curves show identical temperature histories. This is not unimportant because temperature is used in planning climate policy.To avoid errors from this, use satellite data whenever available.This should be enough to explain why their baseline is wrong. If you do need a twenty-first century baseline, however, use the twenty-first century itself. Simply forget about what went on before. It is really boring, but that’s the way I like it.
not gunna do your home work for you son.
read mo comment less.
Steven Mosher | December 10, 2014 at 1:14 pm first quotes this sentence from me: “If you are interested in climate change their base time of 1961-1990 is entirely wrong and stupid.” And then the treats us to his opinion of the quote: “Wrong. The is a practical matter that you dont even understand. read more comment less.”
I don’t know where to start. First, he says I am wrong because “The” is a practical matter that I don’t even understand. True. I have no idea what “The” is. Perhaps it would help if he used English. But then again, he does not even know enough English to capitalize beginnings of sentences. As to his objection to what I said, it is apparent that I have to draw a picture. To see why the choice of 1961-1990 is is bad you have to know what the temperature graph has been doing on this interval and then justify its use in the twenty-first century. It is not a secret that this temperature interval includes two segments that do not belong ttogether. The first segment, from 1961 to the end of the seventies consists of recovery from the catastrophic temperature fall in 1940 that introduced World War II. By 1979 or 1980 this recovery has reached the level it was at in 1940 and the the temperature rise stops there. There is no temperature rise from that point on till the arrival of the super El Nino of 1998. But there is a well developed ENSO oscillation there which makes it easy to determine that global mean temperature did not change for an entire 18 year period. If you wonder how, it makes use of the fact that the midpoint between an El Nino peak and the bottom of its neighboring La Nina valley defines global mean temperature. And 18 years happens to be equal to the duration of the current hiatus/pause. However, in order to see it you have to use the satellite temperature curve because in ground-based curves – GISS, NCDC and HadCRUT – they are showing a temperature rise instead of a temperature standstill there. I spotted that two years ago and even put a note about it into the foreword to my book but nothing happened. They carried this fake warming on to the twenty-first century with the absurd result that the 2010 El Nino in their graphs is now shown higher than the 1998 super El Nino was. At any rate, there is no justification for taking these two temperature segments that meet at an angle, draw a straight line through them, and call it a baseline for the twenty-first century. While this is wrong, it is made feasible by the fact that the land-based temperature curves referred to all have angled up the standstill segment so it looks like a continuation of the rise in the seventies. This is totally phony and qualifies as scientific fraud. Goes to show the importance of using temperature curves that have not been manipulated. And these three have been manipulated. All three were subjected to secret computer processing. They screwed up, however, because unbeknownst to them the computer left its footprints on all three publicly available temperature curves. These consist of sharp upward pointing spikes at the beginnings of years. There is one even on top of the super El Nino, making it taller. They are easy to spot in comparison with satellites that do not have this junk. They are all in exactly the same locations in all three curves. And it is not likely that temperature data from two sides of the ocean can accidentally fall into coincidence.This fact is not unimportant because temperature is used in planning climate policy.To avoid errors from this, use satellite data whenever available.This ought to be enough to explain why their chosen baseline is wrong. But if you do need a twenty-first century baseline, why not use the twenty-first century itself? Simply forget about what went on before. It is really boring, but that’s the way I like it.
I had a little play earlier. I took the HADCRU4 global monthly data and compared the last 45*12 months against the past, moving one month at a time. The present against near preasent of course gives a large Rsquared, but then again, so does 63-67 years ago.
http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w318/DocMartyn/RSqoflast45yearsvspastusingHADCRU4Global_zps4cfea2f7.png
Now if you plot 2014-1969 against 1947-1902 the offset should be due to the ‘forcing’ by GHG. The temperature offset between the two series is 0.413 degrees; for 300 to 400 ppm.
So, given the log ratio of 280/560 to 300/400 is 2.41, we get a ECS of almost one degree.
If the temperature post 2014 follows the post 1947 lineshape, which the analysis suggests, then it is going to be mostly flat until 2050.
400 ppm. It’s not going to happen.
Periodicity of some 60 Years. Interesting!
ECS? i can guess is some kind of estimation of climate response in global temperature of CO2.
Good playwork!
I’ve done my bit for Hansen.
Due to my sterling and unstinted efforts, none of my grandchildren have experienced any global warming at all!
I want my Nobel Prize! I want my Nobel Prize!
If I don’t get a Nobel Prize, I’ll cry, and throw a tantrum!
Live well and prosper,
Mike Flynn.
That’s what it is – I was thinking it was 18 years since something and somehow thought that was since the CRU said “soon children won’t know what snow is”.
those poor kids in NY
the last snow they will see was 6 feet
and caved in the roof of their house
they’ll miss it so
angech | December 9, 2014 at 8:20 pm says: “…2 billion years of life suggests that feedbacks of water vapor to increasing heat retention ,eg rising CO2, counteracts it completely.”
You are exactly right – that is what Miskolczi greenhouse theory (MGT) actually predicts.Miskolczi theory differs from Arrhenius in that it can handle more than one greenhouse gas simuultaneously absorbing in the infrared. Arrhenius can handle only one – carbon dioxide – and is incomplete. Accordibg to MGT, carbon dioxide and water vaor jointly dorm an optimal absorption window in the infrared. Its optical thickness is 1.87, determined by Miskolczi from first principles. If you now add carbon dioxide to atmosphere it will start to absorb, just like the Arrhenius theory says. But this will increase the optical thickness. And as soon as this happens, water vapor will start to diminish, rain out, and the original optical thickness is restored. The introduced carbon dioxide will of course keep absorbing but the reduction of water vapor keeps the total absorption constant and no warming is possible. This warming that did not happen because we are not using the Arrhenius theory any more would have been called greenhouse warming. It follows that anthropomorphic greenhouse warming that supposedly is caused by the greenhouse effect does not exist.Hence AGW is nothing more than a pseudo-scientific fantasy, dreamed up by over-eager climate workers to justify their greenhouse hypothesis. And since it does not exist, all moneys spent for emission control, windmills, and solar panels are a total waste.
Arno, thanks for this insight.
It is odd that you’d thank Armo for a pseudoscience lesson.
Arno: If you now add carbon dioxide to atmosphere it will start to absorb, just like the Arrhenius theory says. But this will increase the optical thickness. And as soon as this happens, water vapor will start to diminish, rain out, and the original optical thickness is restored.
Is that it? That is totally implausible: there is no reason that increased CO2, having raised the troposphere temperature, will cause water vapor to diminish.
Matthew R Marler | December 11, 2014 at 2:32 pm brings up the question of increased tropospheric CO2 and the question of warming etc.
Matthew – you are of course right to question claims made by scientific theories. In this particular case I was at fault for shortening the explanation to the point where you could make your argument. First of all, you are wrong to assume that increasing tropospheric carbon dioxide content will cause warming. This is the BIG LIE that is constantly spread by IPCC and their hangers-on. Eventually your quest will embrace the existence of the greenhouse effect that is considered sacrosanct by warmists. I could not have said this only five years ago but observations and theory dictate it now. Let’s start with carbon dioxide. You may be aware that there is no warming now and that there has been none for the past 18 years. This, by itself, tells us nothing. But if you realize that during these 18 years the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide steadily increased it puts a different spin on it. There is no doubt that the increase of CO2 is real because it is recorded in the Keeling curve at Mauna Loa. Now according to the Arrhenius greenhouse theory, increasing carbon dioxide content must cause greenhouse warming. But during every one of these 18 years Arrhenius theory has been predicting warming and getting exactly nothing. If you are a scientist and your theory predicts warming but you get nothing for eighteen years in a row you are justified in dropping this theory into the waste basket of history. There is a place for it right next to phlogiston, another failed theory of heat. Supposedly Arrhenius theory is built upon the radiation laws of physics but either radiation laws of physivs or Arrhenius must be wrong. I vote for Arrhenius being wrong. We need a greenhouse theory that is not in conflict with laws of physics and this means Miskolczi greenhouse theory (MGT). Whenever Arrhenius predicts that phony warming MGT predicts what we see: no warming despite constant increase of carbon dioxide. His theory came out in 2007 but such experimental proof was not available then. By 2010 Miskolczi had found proof by using NOAA records of radiosonde measurements going back to 1948. He was interested in the absorption of infrared radiation by the atmosphere over time and discovered that absorption had been constant during the previous 61 years. At the same time, atmospheric carbon dioxide content went up by 21.4 percent. This is an exact parallel to the hiatus/pause of today where carbon dioxide increases while absorption stays constant. The most obvious consequence of this is that the greenhouse effect as used by the IPCC does not exist and AGW is nothing more than a pseudo-scientific fantasy, dreamed up by over-eager climate workers anxious to support their greenhouse hypothesis. Should you wish to go further you must delve yourself into the published work of Dr. Ferenc M. Miskolczi which is highly mathematical. Considering that he has a master’s degree in nuclear physics, a Ph.D. in astrophysics, and another Ph.D. in earth sciences you may need to take some courses before you tackle his work.
Arno Arrak: He was interested in the absorption of infrared radiation by the atmosphere over time and discovered that absorption had been constant during the previous 61 years. At the same time, atmospheric carbon dioxide content went up by 21.4 percent. This is an exact parallel to the hiatus/pause of today where carbon dioxide increases while absorption stays constant.
Now that you are warmed up, how does that produce a reduction in the atmospheric water vapor? If a constant temperature is the result of increased CO2, why does water vapor decrease?
I am finding that the more I read the more I come toward the conclusion that we cannot actually tell with reasonable certainty whether increased CO2 has or has not warmed the Earth surface. The article by Kelly and O’Grada in the Annals of Applied Statistics (2014, vol 8, p. 1372) made a credible claim that the only “change-point” that is detectable in the temperature record occurred about 1900 (I called it “credible”, but I would stop short of “decisive”); high-dimensional non-linear dissipative systems have non-intuitive responses to steady input, and Earth does not even have that; all together, the evidence supports the possibility that the “stair-step like” (or linear plus sinusoidal) increase in temperature since then is the result of extra accumulation of energy in the system induced by increased CO2.
With that as preamble, does Miskolczi have an explanation for 20th century warming and its “stair-step” appearance?
Matthew – don’t put words into my mouth. I am not “warmed up.” To understand why water vapor decreases consider what observations of nature tell us. We know that right now, there are two greenhouse gases – carbon dioxide and water vapor – absorbing in the IR and thereby generating heat. But even their combined absorption is not sufficient to raise the global temperature as the existence of the hiatus/warming proves. Why not, you might want to know. We know that the amount of carbon dioxide is constantly increasing, hence it has to heat the air but it isn’t. It follows that this increased absorption by carbon dioxide must be accompanied by decreased absorption by water vapor. That is a mystery to Arrhenius because water vapor does not exist to it. But Miskolczi theory can explain what happens because it can handle absorption by both carbon dioxide and water vapor at the same time. As I mentioned, his explanation is that water vapor absorption which parallels carbon dioxide absorption, steadily decreases as the vapor rains out and thereby compensates for the increase in carbon dioxide absorption. That is an observed fact, based upon the existence of the warming halt. This observation so bothers some “scientists” who refuse to accept the evidence of their own eyes, never mind Miskolczi theory. There is a growing literature whose sole aim is to explain away this hiatus. By November 9th this year the number of such peer-reviewed, scholarly articles had reached 66. You probably understand that they cannot all be right. To me, 97 percent of them are probably trash. There are some fascinating proposals there, even some that are looking for that “missing heat” in the ocean bottom. That is not the same lost heat, however, that Trenberth was looking for, for that one was eaten up by the Argo buoys. Sad to say, search of the ocean bottom still has not revealed the hiding place of that lost heat. Lets see if we can do something to find it. The answer to where the heat goes is actually in that sentence you copied from me. Water vapor just rains out to restore the optical thickness that was pushed out of balance by addition of carbon dioxide. It is neither in the ocean bottom nor in the atmosphere which did not even get warm. With that, we eliminate the oceans and the atmosphere, but what is left? What is left is the outer space. The earth radiates the solar energy it receives from sunlight into space as OLR, Outgoing Longwave Radiation. According to the Arrhenius greenhouse theory some of it gets absorbed by atmospheric carbon dioxide as the radiation passes through it on the way out. And this absorbed portion is what warms the air and creates greenhouse warming. According to Miskolczi, the reduction of water vapor evens out the total absorption so that no extra absorption takes place from added CO2, and OLR has a clear path to the outer space. But these people do not believe this and insist that radiation was captured but the heat from it is just hiding somewhere. I feel sorry that there are so many delusional “scientists” who really believe this nonsense. To summarize, first atmospheric carbon dioxide and water vapor form a joint absorption window with a fixed optical thickness. Addi ton of anthropogenic carbon dioxide to air changes the optical thickness. Optical thickness is restored by removal of water vapor that rains out from the air. If you wish to learn more, I suggest that you get hold of Miskolczi’s latest paper that brings it all together. It appeared in “Development in Earth Science,” Volume 2, 2014, pages 31-52. It is freely available to all.
You also bring up some other questions in your comment. You are unsure, for example, about whether increased CO2 has or has not warmed the earth surface. You have to distinguish between the original CO2 and the added CO2. Addition of CO2 causes the so-called “enhanced” greenhouse effect and this is the only one IPCC talks about. They decided to drop “enhanced” in their writing because it bothered them to keep repeating it. And in answer to your question, there is no enhanced greenhouse effect as long as there is water on earth. This of course contradicts what IPCC says. When Arrhenius came out with his theory in 1896 he calculated that doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide will raise global temperature by four-five degrees. Today’s calculation with more accurate values for parameters gives about 1.1 degrees for doubling. This is not enough to scare anybody so they cooked up water vapor as assistant to CO2. It goes like this. First, carbon dioxide warms the air. Warm air can hold more water vapor. This additional water vapor also absorbs IR and this extra warming gets added to the original warming from CO2 alone. They figure it will increase the original CO2 warming by a factor of two or three, and that will bring it above the two degree danger point that politicians say must be avoided. It sounds feasible if you are ignorant of the Miskolczi theory. The argument is used in all IPCC reports. As to the existence of “change points” I don’t think they know what they are talking about. The only point that would qualify for it would be 1940 where a severe temperature drop put an end to thirty years of warming. And here we are up against the wrotten quality of temperature records we have to deal with. If you look at all temperature curves of the era you will note that the forties were the tip of a heat wave. That is complete nonsense.
Global temperature dropped precipitously in 1940 and it stayed cold for the duration of the Second World War that followed. 1947 after the war was stil cold enough for the blizzard of 1947 to immobilize New York City for almost two weeks. WWII had started in 1939 When Hitler and Stalin made a pact to divide Eastern Europe between themselves. As a part of this pact, Finland was assigned to Stalin’s rule. The Finns would not surrender and the Finnish Winter War followed. Of interest to climate was the battle of Suomussalmi in January 1940. It is in the middle of Finland and Stalin had dispatched two divisions plus a tank column there to cut Finland in half. The battle was fought at minus 40 Celsius in meter-deep snow. The Finns had no anti-tank weopons so they improvised by throwing gasoline bottles with a fuse attached at Russian tanks. It worked and they wiped out the tank column. They also wiped out the infantry divisions who lost 9000 dead and ran back to the border as fast as they could. This was the first use of the Molotov cocktail in warfare. The Russians were so impressed by its effectiveness against them that later when Hitler and Stalin had a falling-out Russians adapted it for use against German tanks. That cold spell lasted through the war while our temperature charts show it after the war was over. It was partly responsible for Hitler’s defeats in the east.
As to that “stair-step” idea, it is completely non-sensical. It is quite true that an apparent stair-step does exist at the beginning of the twenty-first century but it is not part of anything except that the large amount of warm water brought across the ocean by the super El Nino raised the new century a third of a degree higher than the eighties and nineties had been. This way we end up with two horizontal steps, both eighteen years long, one consisting of the eighties and nineties and another one a third of a degree higher and encompassing the twenty-first century and its hiatus/warming. The super El Nino of 1998 sits in the middle and separates them. And by the way, you can’t see the step in the eighties and nineties in ground-based temperature curves like GISS, NCDC, and HadCRUT. They have tilted up the ground and are cheating again.
Re Arno: Miskolczi theory in “Development in Earth Science,” Volume 2, 2014, pages 31-52.
a) It is not-peer-reviewed non-journal; everything goes. No submitted / accepted date.
b) Miskolczi calculates the longwave transparency of longwave-opaque (cloudy) atmospheric profiles. This is meaningless.
c) Therefore, all of his ‘quasi all-sky’ data, incl. all of his taus, and the graphs, are meaningless. The only correct way of calculation would be to compute real clear-sky transmission on real cloudless vertical profiles. This is definitely not what he does. Even if he did, he would have results for the cloudless subset, not for the global cloudy average.
d) His global energy balance model is wrong.
e) His understanding of the problem of surface temperature discontinuity is a complete failure.
f) His usage of the rules of Kirchhoff, virial, or ‘extropy’, is absurd.
g) His set of ‘observed empirical facts’ is an artificial nonsense.
h) He may have a working radiative transfer code, but his physics is rubbish.
‘Miskolczi Greenhouse Theory’ does not exist.
‘That doesn’t mean that I think that mature people can’t, under the right circumstances, engage in productive risk assessment so as to develop policies in the face of uncertainties about the impact of ACO2 on the climate. But I think the starting point needs to be a commitment to that goal.’ Joshua
Talk about unintentional irony.
The reality seems more likely to be that if we don’t agree with Joshua it is not a mature approach. The sad thing is that there is not much to distinguish Josh from the bulk of the dross masquerading as rational comment here.
Nope, no warmest year ever around the troposhere.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/uah
This is nonsense. It least RSS is honest about it.
This is not nonsense. The radiosonde data agree with the satellite measurements. All the calculations are published.
I think this is just an inconvenient truth for you. You are a D-NI-ER!
Two meters above the surface. They admit it the thermometers are more accurate. You’re political; you can’t admit it.
ouch
Ahhh … the pot calls the kettle black. The radiosonde data confirm the sat results. It doesn’t matter what they say. It’s an inconvenient truth for them, too, apparently.
If you can’t argue the climate then you argue the weather.
In science there must be independent verification of an experiment and/or measurement. Where is that second set of surface thermometers that validate this contrived surface warming? The satellite measurements are validated by independent balloon measurements.
The WMO’s warmest year is now in competition with EPA’s dangerous air pollutant and FDA’s GRAS:
Carbon dioxide (CO2) – the gas that plants use as fuel to grow food like tomatoes and corn – is now classified by EPA as a dangerous air pollutant.
Ethylene (C2H4) – the gas used to make green tomatoes turn red before maturity and make consumers think they are ripe, nutritious food – is now classified by the FDA as GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe):
http://www.catalyticgenerators.com/whatisethylene.html
SUCH IS LIFE IN ORWELL’s 1984: True Fiction and Phony Facts
CO2 itself isn’t classified as an air pollutant — CO2 emissions are. The Clear Air Act defines “air pollutant” as “any air pollution agent or combination of such agents, including any physical, chemical, biological, radioactive . . . substance or matter which is emitted into or otherwise enters the ambient air”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_v._Environmental_Protection_Agency#Opinion_of_the_Court
Appell,
Appell, I guess one requires your genius to make sense of this comment.
or be a bureaucrat .
“Emitted” is by the hand of man. Natural CO2 isn’t.
Earth’s mantle contains liquid CO2 under high pressure and emits CO2 to air in volcanic eruptions and in some volcanic xenoliths that spontaneously fracture at Earth’s surface.
In 1971 we first identified the decay products of extinct I-129 and Pu-244 in a giant bubble of mantle-derived CO2 that is trapped closer to Earth’s surface in New Mexico. That CO2 is used to make “Dry Ice.”
We later identified decay products of these same extinct radioactivities in bubbles of CO2 trapped in a xenolith ejected in an Hawaiian volcano.
High-pressure CO2 is in the Earth’s mantle and emitted in volcanoes.
Don’t forget the worst air pollutant, water vapor.
“Emitted” is by the hand of man. Natural CO2 isn’t.
wow…”natural” CO2
where can I get some “organic” O2…? (gluten free too, I’ll pay extra)
is the CO2 I exhale a controlled pollutant?
how ’bout my personal methane production?
neither requires my hands…hmm
it is amazing to me the secular progressives consider the “hand of man” a special category
pray tell, what magic spirit in the sky grants this sanctified status?
unholy and requiring exorcism
Danny Thomas asks on December 11 at 11:18 am:
What’s “just right”?
____
Danny, it depends on the crop.
If you want to grow bananas, the optimal growing temperature is 70-86F.
If you want to grow corn, the optimal growing temperature is 68-73F.
Corn is a far more important food crop than bananas, which means we shouldn’t think a warmer world will be a better world.
Atmospheric plant food.
It’s not as simple as “CO2 is atmospheric plant food.” Some crops lose minerals and nutritional value when grown in enhanced CO2:
“Increasing CO2 threatens human nutrition,” Samuel S. Myers et al, Nature 510, 139–142 (05 June 2014)
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v510/n7503/full/nature13179.html
“Nitrate assimilation is inhibited by elevated CO2 in field-grown wheat,” Arnold J. Bloom et al, Nature Climate Change, April 6 2014.
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2183.html
David – please identify your paywalled references as such; I don’t intend to spend $64 on your two links. Could you please tell me how much nutrients and minerals those crops lose? Did authors attempt any remedy, like a fertilizer?
Bill Clinton once called Carbon Dioxide “Plant Food”, but only once. I suspect he couldn’t restrain himself from a little dig at Gore. This was years ago, and I’m still waiting for him to say it again.
Heh, he could speak power to truth.
==========
Greenhouse operators give their plants lots of CO2, because it’s plant food, and all the water the plants want. Greenhouse operators also heat and air-condition their greenhouses because plants don’t think cooler or warmer is better. Plants prefer Goldie Locks conditions, everything just right.
Everyone knows too much human food is not good for a humans. What happens when plants get too much CO2 food? I don’t know. What happens when plants get too warm or too cold? They get sick and die.
Max,
Goldilocks:
“this porridge is too hot”
“this porridge is too cold”
“this porridge is just right”
What’s “just right”?
Everyone knows too much human food is not good for a humans. What happens when plants get too much CO2 food?
I knew it – plant obesity!
There’s an answer, though – plant aerobics!
and 1, and 2, and 1, and 2 – reach for those toes, ladies.
We need to be surrounded by air that is cooler than our body temperature by just the right amount so that heat flows away from our bodies at the same rate rate we generate it. That temperature is 72 degrees F.
http://www.pa.msu.edu/sciencet/ask_st/031297.html
The red rose
needs
ter touch
its toes,
all those
daffodils exercise
with bar-bells
strenuously,
tubby buttercups
do at least
a century
of push ups,
fer, hey,
when that
C O 2 goes
bananas,
making hay
while the
sun shines,
everything
grows.
I put a reply to Danny Thomas in the wrong place, so I will repost it here.
Danny aked on December 11 at 11:18 am:
What’s “just right”?
____
Danny, it depends on the crop.
If you want to grow bananas, the optimal growing temperature is 70-86F.
If you want to grow corn, the optimal growing temperature is 68-73F.
Corn is a far more important food crop than bananas, which means we shouldn’t think a warmer world will be a better world.
http://www.pecad.fas.usda.gov/highlights/2013/05/br_15may2013/images/1_brazilcornaypchart.jpg
I wouldn’t worry about maize too much.
Brazil went from being under 6% in the 90s to 22+% of world corn exports in 2013 (both Argentina and Brazil exported more corn in 2013 than the US).
Three things PA may not know about corn:
1. As more corn is planted, more corn is harvested.
2. As technology in agriculture advances, corn yields per acre rise.
3. Unfavorable weather for corn can work against 1 and 2.
Judith Curry wrote:
“The preferred data set for such analyses is Cowtan and Way; I am not a fan of this dataset owing to concerns about how they treat the Arctic [link].”
Yes, but why are GISS, HadCRUT or NOAA’s infilling schemes better? Cowtan and Way utilize satellite data in the Arctic; The three standard sets have no data for that region, and either interpolate or take the average. In their paper Cowtan & Way found their method was better by comparing how each model reconstructed areas where they pretended there was no temperature data.
DA, ‘riddle me this’. One of C&W ‘improvements’ on HadCruT kriged UAH lower troposphere to HdCru ‘missing’ surface, infilling the Arctic.
But UAH showed Arctic latitudes without warming, as well as the planet average. C&T took HadCruT before ( no warming), krigged in ‘missing Arctic’ from UAH (itself showing no warming in those latitudes) and produced net warming.
The riddle: how does data showing the pause, krigged to satellite data showing the pause, result in warming rather than pause?
No wonder C&W are famous contributors to SKS.
Rud Istvan,
Since C&W released their data and code if there is a problem with it that must be knowable. If it is wrong, I would assume there was either mistakes made or some inherent problem with the method as releasing code and data would indicate they didn’t cheat.
I’m guessing that the reason it runs hot is that they did use the arctic surface that was available and the arctic was still running hot. In fact it was running hotter as demonstrated by two big ice melt years and less sea ice extent in general. There is also a slight upward trend in Hadcrut from 1998.
The fragility is in the vagaries of the winds, and more; oh, Maria.
===========
Here’s the question – is arctic sea ice decline the result of global warming?
I read the Manabe 1980 paper recently:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/JC085iC10p05529/abstract
It’s the one people cite as the identification of ‘Arctic Amplification’. Remarkably, Manabe identified the shape of warming from Arctic sea ice loss:
maxima in autumn through spring, minima in summer.
This was because thin sea ice allowed for greater heat from the ocean.
You can see the effect in the trend since 1979 here:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/cdrar/do_SCmap.cgi
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/tmp/modelE/scmap/tmp.sc.4_obsLOTI_ER_2_1979_2013_1951_1980-0/scmap.gif
But, and it’s a big butt, you can see the same pattern in the 1910-1945 warming:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/tmp/modelE/scmap/tmp.sc.4_obsLOTI_ER_2_1910_1945_1951_1980-0/scmap.gif
So, there remains a possibility – rather than warming causing sea ice loss, sea ice loss is causing warming. I’m not claiming it is, but I’m not sure that’s been ruled out, either.
Are you saying if the sea ice is an insulator between the water below and the air above, and the water is warmer than the air (warm enough to melt the ice), the melting ice would have a warming influence on the air above, and possibly could be the cause of all the warming of the air?
If that’s what you are saying, it’s an interesting take, but I’m not sure about saying the “sea ice loss is causing warming.” Wouldn’t the ice loss just be a result of the warming water?
I’m sorry if I misinterpret what you are saying
If that’s what you are saying, it’s an interesting take, but I’m not sure about saying the “sea ice loss is causing warming.” Wouldn’t the ice loss just be a result of the warming water?
I’m sorry if I misinterpret what you are saying.
You raise a salient point – ostensible oceanic heat content is increasing and an ice forcing alone would probably indicate a decrease instead.
The similarity of the pattern with the early twentieth century warming is interesting though. It at least suggests that the Arctic lost sea ice during that period as well – a loss that may have reversed during the 1945-1975 period:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/tmp/modelE/scmap/tmp.sc.4_obsLOTI_ER_2_1945_1970_1951_1980-0/scmap.gif
Does such a reversal await us? And cause a global cooling?
Sven, this is about what you are saying. Sea ice is lost due to increasing ocean heat transport into the arctic and the resulting loss of ice causes the atmosphere to warm.
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-11-00466.1
Well, it is my understanding that Dr. Curry thinks half of it melted and half of it flowed to the south.
If you watch the NRL Hycom animations (sequences of daily arctic ice concentration) or look at velocity maps, a lot of the arctic cap flows south.
Swen:
If the North Atlantic circulation reaches further into the Arctic ocean it could melt more sea ice mostly from below. The open ocean would then vent heat to the atmosphere. Arctic atmospheric temperatures would rise as they have. But it seems that’s measuring the Earth cooling itself. Differences in albedo are significantly offset by the Arctic’s inability to retain Summer heat gain more than a few months without the help of sea ice. It seems the open water can only short term store heat their. While this is a simplification of lake ice:
http://www.waterontheweb.org/curricula/bs/student/water/temp.gif
we can get an idea of ‘defensive’ ice. Warming the turtles and frogs as best it can under the ice. Having 2 states. I’d say loss of ice are the oceans thinking they are too warm. Rebuilding ice are the oceans thinking they are too cold. If we look at both glacials and interglacials, that’s what the sea ice seems to do, and it seems to have worked. Earth’s first job was to protect sea life. Protecting land life is secondary. The oceans may not be passive heat sinks put there for our benefit, but actively using ice to protects its life. To answer your question. Yes it is, in my opinion. The system is working at intended.
Also with biomic sinks and feedbacks, unthought of let alone monitored.
GCMs got ’em? Yeah, sure.
=========
I’m amazed by the ability of climate scientists to (a) declare a warmest year before it’s over because we assume the last couple months will be warmer; (b) use land based temperature measurements that can’t resolve better than 0.1°C; (c) have big chunks of missing data/no measurements that are estimated and end up with data that has 0.01°C resolution with no error estimates. Then, without doing any means testing make the positive statement for the press that this is the warmest year without any hint of equivocation or doubt.
It would seem that when such declarations are made the data treatment and statistics should be a bit more rigorous.
It’s possible GISS could end up 2nd warmest, or no better than a tie with 2010.
NOAA looks like a lock, and NOAA is the series that appears to be used to determine the warmest year. DO a search for warmest year. The source is almost always NOAA.
But I agree. With the jet stream behaving the way it does, cold air could sweep down this month and play havoc with the warmest year talk.
All the datasets I know of have error estimates. They’re usually discussed in depth in the papers that accompany new versions of the datasets. For example
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/docs/2010/2010_Hansen_etal_1.pdf
(see especially Table 1).
Table 1 is the error due to limited spatial coverage and not the temperature variance. In other words, that just covers the guestimation of missing stations and no data. This article is his justification for adjusting temperatures.
The NCDC web pages don’t give estimates of variability, just the numbers. I suppose databases contain error estimates, but I see no evidence of the variability estimate being used. The average temperature for November 2014 was 39.33°F (no variance). Do you suppose that was statistically different from 2013 (42.31°F)? And on what basis would your answer be made.
So, when I hear that 2014 is the hottest year, I don’t hear anything about statistical significant difference. That makes it a statement without much merit.
The “warmest year on record” statement is indeed suspect because (a) not all data has been compiled and validated; and (b) the timing coincides with the annual climate change negotiations taking place in Lima, Peru.
The lack of rigour of many of the alarmist prognostications is a feature of the current AGW MSM literature, which has been mirrored more often than not by sceptical commenters.
Sir
if you know this place where rigor (no u, I’m American), even handedness, not to mention an agreed upon data set exist…please point me in that direction
Science, as far I can see
looks like a full contact sport… therefore fun
+1. Apt.
I appreciate your commentary John but no +1 this time for your implicit agreement with my POV because to do so would be tantamount to patting oneself on the back.
An excellent comment. Don’t drink a liqour and drive a motour vehicle.
When a record is so short, speculative and uncertain, anyone who uses an expression like “warmest year on record” without immediately explaining and qualifying the terms used is being manipulative. Every time. Manipulative. A bloke in a pub shouldn’t do it.
And I say this as someone who could not care less if this year has been hotter globally than 1998 or 1934 or any other year. Why should there not be a warming trend when there has been nothing but warming trends and cooling trends ever? What trend is expected, except one of those two? Do you toss a coin and express amazement when heads come up? And why should this trend (if real) not do what every other trend has ever done in the long existence of our planet: namely, END?
By all means make your claims about GHGs. Personally, I doubt that a planet behaves like the inside of a glass receptacle – but knock yourselves out. Just don’t tell me that something common and typical of our holocene age is freakish.
Above all, don’t tell me that snow is flood-risk or unprecedented precipitation or Lake Effect or Polar Vortex.
It’s bloody snow.
“The lack of rigour of many of the alarmist prognostications is a feature of the current AGW MSM literature, which has been mirrored more often than not by sceptical commenters.”
Well, kind of. Given the length of the pause and the slow death of CAGW as a theory, there is some rigour in alarmist prognostications, but it is mostly “rigour mortis”.
Climate science … So many ass-umptions
slouching towards Bethlehem to be born.
Surely a revelation is at hand?
W/apologies ter W.B.Yeats.
Reblogged this on JunkScience.com.
Matt Ridely of the Times believes true scientist shouldn’t burden the public with context. “True scientists would have said: this year is unlikely to be significantly warmer than 2010 or 2005 and left it at that.”
An objective post on this would have started by showing the annual temperature trend, such as this with 2014 short-term averages added in
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:12/from:1950/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1970/trend/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:2014/mean:3
We would note that the trend is 0.16 C per decade since 1970, that the temperature mostly does not follow the trend but oscillates equally to about 0.1 C on each side, and that 2014 has returned to the long-term trend line in much the same way as several other cooler periods have. You might go on to say models may have had average trends of 0.2 C per decade, but skeptics were not expecting anything more than 0.1 C per decade and are only getting somewhat further from their expectations being fulfilled at this point. That would be what an objective look at the facts looks like.
Jim D – I agree, but did you notice that the HadCrut4 data on WfT’s for 2014 ends at 2014.42? Gistemp is current through October.
Yes, OK, the 3-month average ends at 2014.42, but it accounts for 2014.5. Hopefully they will update it soon.
Here’s the same thing with GISTEMP
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/mean:12/from:1950/plot/gistemp/from:1970/trend/plot/gistemp/from:2014/mean:3
I agree with Jim D. Let’s call a spade a spade.
I do somewhat agree with JC that 2015 is where the rubber will meet the road. The rate of warming since the end of 2012 is aggressive. If it were to continue through 2015, it would be an earthquake in the blog science world.
Aggressive? Really?
You can’t explain why this “aggressive” warming doesn’t show in the satellite data. The most thoroughly sampled data set on Earth.
RSS says the thermometers are more accurate at measuring the surface air temperature. How many readings do the satellites take at 2 meters above the land surface?
We can also add the expected effect of CO2 since 1970 from Lewis and Curry (TCR=1.33 C per doubling, purple line), and ask how well that is panning out.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/gistemp/mean:12/from:1950/plot/gistemp/from:1970/trend/plot/gistemp/from:2014/mean:6/plot/gistemp/from:1970/trend/detrend:0.35
I would say that it is not doing as well as the models with LC having a 50% underestimate compared to a 25% overestimate. Maybe they still hold out hope that the temperature curve will stop diverging so quickly from their estimate, but so far that is not even close to happening. It would look even worse if you started out back in 1900.
Jim D: That would be what an objective look at the facts looks like.
All of these trend estimates depend on where you put the left-hand starting point. An “objective” look would discuss lots of different starting points, beginning possibly with 1790. This time you chose 1970, when scientists were still warning about the threat of imminent cooling.
I don’t think the people talking about the “pause” care much about starting points. This is for them, and is already a much broader perspective. 75% of the CO2 added has been since 1950 leading to 2/3 of its effect.
Jim D: I don’t think the people talking about the “pause” care much about starting points.
Maybe, but you and I care. You make a case for 1950 being a good left-hand end point. A recent paper in Annals of Applied Statistics made a case for near 1900 (I posted a link a few days ago.) You made no case that 1970 was an “objective” choice.
Talk of the “pause” was inspired by the disparity between model outputs and actual mean temperatures. Since Santer et al (the 17 year paper), discussion has focused on starting with the latest temperature means, and seeing how far backward a trend line has an estimate close to 0.
The “pause” does not by itself discredit the CO2 hypothesis, but it does discredit claims of much imminent warming.
AGW mainstream scientists would say that before 1950 CO2 contributed about 0.3 C of warming, which may be hard to see against the background, but after 1950 it is more like another 0.6 C on top, that was as expected, which is rather easier to see. Having seen no surprise in this signal, they have moved on. The “skeptics” meanwhile don’t understand this extra 0.6 C that they see in these charts and are still searching for an explanation.
Jim D: but after 1950 it is more like another 0.6 C on top
It would be more consistent for you to stick with 1950 as your left-hand end-point, or 1900, instead of choosing 1970 and others ad lib.
I usually plot temperature from 1950, but it makes less sense to draw a straight line from 1950 because the rate has sped up a lot since then. If I could draw a curve, I would because that is what the forcing was doing too.
1970 as a start date introduces an additional problem, insofar as we have now the additional forcing from ozone perturbation and its different time histories.
Prevdi and Polvani (2014) suggest quite convincingly that this is a significant constraint in the use of external mean global radiative forcing.
The largest forcing change by far is from CO2, which is already nearly 2 W/m2 and now increasing by 0.3-0.4 W/m2 per decade.
The largest forcing by far in the SH is the solar annular mode from orbital differences, being greater then 120 wm^2 and tends to reoccur each year.
maksimovich, yes, you can take things out of context, so in what context was your ozone important then, or did you just change your mind about it?
O3 perturbation in SH spring,allows around 1.2 wm^2 of shortwave to enter the SO,in addition wind forcing from poleward contraction of the westerly wind belt injects around 10 wm^2 into the SO 45s to 70 s ,
The question is will this persist under a decrease of halogen forcing.Schindell and Schmidt (2004) suggested this was an additive forcing ( ghg + CFC= sh warming) As halogen loading is now constrained,the future of the SH response suggests a different future.
I think some attention should be paid to growing divergence between land-based and satellite records, too.
There is more of a growing divergence between the two main satellite records themselves (RSS and UAH). Among all the main land based records (NOAA, GISSTEMP, HADCRUT4, C&W) and the two satellite records, over the duration of the pause, UAH shows the largest warming trend and RSS the lowest. They are the two outliers, on opposite sides.
On what planet is that Pierre? Not on Earth. Here’s the real deal, not the unicorn temperature series you apparently use.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/rss/from:1980/trend/offset:0.15/plot/uah/from:1980/trend/offset:0.25/plot/hadcrut4gl/from:1980/trend
NOAA et al are not records, they are statistical models and questionable ones at that. There is no record of pre-satellite global temperatures, because there was no way to measure it.
Pingback: Spinning the ‘warmest year’ * The New World
Perspectives (from Met Office website)
tie the error, is bigger than the difference in years temp rankings
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2014/2014-global-temperature
The final value for this year will be very close to the central estimate of 0.57°C from the Met Office global temperature forecast for 2014, which was issued late last year.
Colin Morice, a climate monitoring scientist at the Met Office, said: “Record or near-record years are interesting, but the ranking of individual years should be treated with some caution because the uncertainties in the data are larger than the differences between the top ranked years. We can say this year will add to the set of near-record temperatures we have seen over the last decade.”
Hi Mr. Woods,
RC’s Bore Hole, where many of my comments took a permanent residence, is depository for the ‘undesirable’ posts.
thoughtful comment by Richard Black (ex BBC environment correspondent, now ECIU – funded by European Climate Foundation) on why to be cautious about ‘warmest years’
A hot year doesn’t prove climate change, just as a cold one doesn’t disprove it = By Richard Black, ECIU Director
http://eciu.net/blog/2014/one-hot-year
Richard Black:
“……So while NOAA currently has 2014 as the warmest on record, NASA’s equally valid global dataset has it in second place. The third major record, maintained by the UK Met Office and the University of East Anglia, puts 2014 in third position.
In addition, all of them come with margins of error. NOAA’s record for the year so far to October, for example, gives a margin of plus or minus 0.11C.
By comparison, from the same record, the annual average temperatures for all the years between 2001 to 2013 fit within a range of 0.10C.
Often, then, claims of record-breaking need to be caveated with words such as ‘probably’, ‘appear to be’ and ‘within limitations of the data’ – which automatically make them seem less than earth-shattering.” – ECIU
Our most powerful supercomputer could not predict the exact path of a particle of dust, yet we know tables get dusty because of the forcing from gravity. Real climates are like particles of dust– they move from forcing, but exact paths are inherently unpredictable– hence models will always be wrong. Suggesting the climate’s divergence from models is “the issue” is simply wrong thinking. 2014’s warmth is consistent with GH gas forcing the climate warmer.
http://thabto.files.wordpress.com/2013/11/dust-motes.jpg
I don’t see how the dust analogy addresses the principle of feedbacks. If the dust landing on the chair creates more dust and the dust landing on the floor creates less, then it matters if the path of the dust is properly modeled.
While appropriate in terms of models being able to predict their exact paths, the dust particle/climate system analogy should not be taken too far. Yes, climate systems have feedbacks- both positive and negative, and these can represent additional reasons why models will vary from reality.
I recently rolled my window down while driving on the interstate and blew as hard as I could. It actually made me change lanes, I was surprised. I figured the internal state of the system was more stable than that… But then again I should probably get new tires….
If we’re going to make analogies, lets at least make ones that arent inane….gravity does what now?
http://media.defenceindustrydaily.com/images/AIR_MV-22_Downwash_Dust_Cloud_lg.jpg
Nickels,
Your failure to understand how the evolution of a real climate system can be like a particle of dust is the failure of your imagination, not mine. Tables get dusty, climate systems warm, and both can be impossible to model exactly, even if the basic physics are known, and the general forces involved well understood.
Gatesy is the king of inane analogies. He analogizes bullets that kill and small fires that can spread to the deadly effects of elevated co2 levels.
Gates,
There is a whole realm of mathematical error analysis which pertains to estimating the computability of quantities within the context if a math model. The only thing your analogy has right is that, yes, averages can be easier to compute than pointwise trajectories. However, its not a garage sell, take whatever you like… Averages can diverge from the truth more slowly, but once your model has 100% error (which a climate model will have in month or two) no quantity will be accurate.
This type of analysis for climate models? MIA. No interest. No knowledge of these techniques…
The analogy is inane because it pretends the climate is a quiescent room and has no dynamics other than forcing. Kind of like Mann’s 1d energy model.
Its really easy to show lots of things when you assume your model is something convenient rather than a reflection of reality. Enter the ol curve fit to make it look plausible, and…..boom Alice in Wonderland.
If all we know from the models is the direction (ie, it will get warmer) then they are useless. We need to know the magnitude. And IPCC and activists are claiming to know the magnitude. Please notify them that they can’t do this.
We have a reasonable idea of the magnitude but this much GH gas had not been added this fast since at least the PETM and it was a big event.
and please confirm that it will be catastrophic otherwise we are wasting our time and our money…
“Suggesting the climate’s divergence from models is “the issue” is simply wrong thinking. “. Please give me an example of a right thinking.
“2014’s warmth is consistent with GH gas forcing the climate warmer.”
Right… you’re the guy who is the El Nino denier…
http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/elnino/outlook.html
,”A weak El Niño event is considered to have persisted since the Northern Hemisphere summer.”
No El Niño so far this year. For some actual science on this versus pseudoscince spin, see:
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/analysis_monitoring/lanina/enso_evolution-status-fcsts-web.pdf
Achieving the warmest year on record shouldn’t be that hard.
After all the Australian BOM have been caught, one could say, severely fiddling the figures. Just one blatant example. Homogenising the station Rutherglen, that has a century long record, has never been moved that the BOM can prove despite claims from the BOM. The old hands who took the temperatures in the past verified that the Rutherglen station was were it still is but still the BOM took another 17 stations including Hillston some 300 kms plus straight line distance away to the north in much hotter surrounds and changed the Rutherglen data to fit the homogenised and higher temperatures.
And thats just one such instance. Their new ACORN station data sometimes bears no resemblance to the real world data.
JoNova’s; http://joannenova.com.au/?s=rutherglen
And then we have NIWA in NZ who from their dramatically upward adjusted station data, anybody would think that NZ must have a few big Cat Diesel marine engines installed down at the southern tip all busily engaged in driving NZ north towards the hotter regions of the Equator at a fair rate of knots.
Now why is that important?
Well if you take a good look at a globe of the Earth you will see this immense expanse of water in the South Pacific and the Southern Ocean.
And the land masses in that roughly one quarter of the globe, south of the Equator down to close to Antarctica and between say longitude 80 degrees East, down through the guts of the Indian ocean, on eastwards across the Australian Continent and NZ until the mid Pacific longitude of around 140 degrees west, a span in longitude of about 140 degrees.
The only land masses of any consequence in this vast area of at least one fifth of the entire globe is New Zealand and NZ’s West Island, Australia.
So Australia’s BOM data and NZ’s NIWA data, both “adjusted” out of their cotton picking minds whether needed or not and generally butchered [ and thats being polite,] around with until it bears little relationship with reality accounts for at least one fifth and close to nearly one quarter of the total global land surface temperature data.
So we here in Oz can proudly claim that our temperature data adjustments are worth close to four times your northern hemisphere temperature data adjustments in the global land temperature stakes.
Not hard to get a record global temperature when you have not much data to fiddle but it’s data that has a profound effect because there is no other competing data to compare it with .
So the data stands whether corrupted and severely compromised or not.
And so do the “record” [ !!!? ] global temperatures.
At least until,the next lot of “adjustments” are done.
ROM +1
ROM, fellow farmer, it isn’t just NZ NIWA and the BOM from your ‘West Island’ [hey, even some us upside down NH folks appreciate the banter between your two wonderful down under countries…].
It is everywhere you look. Luling Texas is a NSW Rutherglen example from the other hemisphere. Checkout Maine after the US conversion to ‘nClimDiv’. All documented in essay When Data Isn’t in ebook Blowing Smoke, foreward and recommendation from our gracious hostess.
Yes, all a vast conspiracy no doubt as that’s all pseudoscience is left with.
RG, the plainly documented temperature fiddle facts from respective government websites are reproduced in essay When Data Isn’t in ebook Blowing Smoke (yup, another boring plug). Please refer to footnote 25 for some ‘confirmation bias’ errors that that do not require a conspiracy…
Although that is not ruled out by the facts presented. Merely a less likely explanation for an inexcusable reality. No pseudoscience except in the pretend ‘final’ temp records documented therein.
R.G, Another member or the vast conspiracy to attribute everything to conspiracy ideation.
R.Gates, is that why so many warmistas are fixated on the Koch brothers.
there are a fair few fantasists on the warmists side including so called scientists.
If one year (potentially 2014) doesn’t end a faux pause, it’s not clear to me why one year (1998) should start one. When I look at the graph included in the posting, and visually remove 1998, it looks like a pretty consistent, and steady, upwards trend,
JWhite,
Your point is a good one and has been made by many others. But the “pause” was a real event– there was a flattening to the rise in tropospheric temperatures. This natural variability tells us little about the efficacy GHG warming, as the system as a whole continued to gain energy quite robustly during this “pause”.
Arguing whether the pause is real or illusory seems to me like mere semantic quibble. In their respective contexts, both claims can be true. People who deny that the pause is real either are stressing that the underlying long term surface temperature trend, and/or the rate of accumulation of energy into the climate system, are unchanged (the latter claim entails the first.) Those who are claiming that the pause is real can be stressing that there are well understood causes of the short term variation in the rate of surface warming (solar, ENSO, etc.)
Hence the ‘pause deniers’, and the ‘pause acknowledgers’ often are agreeing with one another on all issues of substance. The insistence by some that there is an inconsistency between those two attitudes just stems from a failure to acknowledge the proper context and significance of the claims. It can also amount to a rhetorical ploy to make it appear like there is a controversy when there is none.
The other point of course is the IPCC acknowledges it is real.
Also, all the scientists that have advanced explanations for it acknowledge it is real… so go figure…
It’s not just one year – the ‘pause’ is roughly 10 – 17 years long, depending on the temperature index. Here for example the WFT temperature index (mean of HADCRUT3, GISTEMP, UAH and RSS), with the ~13 years long and RSS with the ~17 years long ‘pause’.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/plot/wti/from:2001/trend/plot/rss/from:1997/trend
The pause was caused by the back-to-back La Nina events in 2011 and 2012, and is only three years old. It is largely lifeless at the end of 2014. Th elite sucked out of it by 22 months of ENSO neutral, which just has this bad-butted reputation for thumping the dog stuff out mother nature.
JCH, clearly not – the ~ 13 to 17 years linear trends are flat! You can’t deny that.
Edim, What you point out is true for the most part. The exceptions being C&W and Best’s combo land and sea sets. I’ve never really been a fan of the ‘pause’ rhetoric for the same reason I don’t like the ‘warmest year ever’ bit as I see it is disingenuous. Not only has the earth been warmer in the past many times it is within the margin of error in the recent past and it is just, as I say, a rhetorical devise FTW (or the spin).
If you look at the 35 year trend it is up:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/wti/plot/wti/from:1980/trend/plot/rss/from:1980/trend
Sorry, I guess I was just repeating what P-N said above (should have scrolled up a bit).
Doug McNeall shimes in:
https://twitter.com/dougmcneall/status/542624285169569792
Typically, it’s all about Mike instead.
ya, Nic Lewis was about mike… folks dont like his cricticism
ah the nasty reviewer we had … he didnt like our criticism.. not about mike.
mckittrick on UHI… not about mike.
Watts on everything NOAA, not about mike.
Lucia on the models, not about Mike.
There is so little about Mike to criticize. As gavin admits Mikes work isnt of any interest
Here’s the relevant bit:
> Matt Ridley has a subsequent article in The Times:
This is followed by
> Typically, Michael Mann
Read harder.
Jim Boudin On Dendro… booted from RC.. not about mike
Tol. not about Mike
2035 glaciers, not about mike
Judith on attribution, not about mike
They LOVE having Mike as a whipping boy. His silly mistake sucks all the oxygen from the room..
Mike Who?
========
The Mann I presume! He is punching well below his weight it seems.
Dr. Curry, you now say “the pause” does not matter but have before said “the pause” significantly influenced your thinking on AGW. How do you reconcile these contradictory statements?
Matt Ridley is right: “Environmental researchers are increasingly looking for evidence that fits their ideology rather than seeking the truth”. An example is Reto Knutti cited in a twit by Ed Hawkins. Reto says that feedbacks change with time, but he is still the responsible of Chapter12 in AR5 (a chapter against science as I prove in my “Refuting …” document stored at: docs.google.com/file/d/0B4r_7eooq1u2TWRnRVhwSnNLc0k/edit). And Ed compares CMIP5 models with updated observations; but instead of evidencing the “pause” some researches keep watching that figure as an evidence of global warming. I.e., Matt you are right: climatic science is corrupted.
Antonio –
==> Matt Ridley is right”
How do you go from an example to determine a trend among “environmental researchers” (as a group)?
I’m not a scientist, but I thought that to determine a trend you need longitudinal data that quantifies the relevant variables over time. I also thought that to generalize you need a representative sample.
Please explain – because while I’m not a scientist, or even “somebody who has championed science all his career,“, it does appear to me that Ridley’s conclusion is not scientific in the least, and most probably just naked tribalism.
Joshua, I have contacted directly with Reto Knutti, Mathew Collins and Thomas Stocker: authors of IPCC’s AR5. I have also contacted directly with the following “environmental researchers” (or climate experts) from the web RealClimate: Rasmus Benestad, Ray Bradley, Gavin A. Schmidt and Michael Mann. In none of these emails (some of them with Judith Curry as witness) I got a scientific debate. And the scientific debate is THE key to reach the scientific truth.
To be honest, Joshua, along all my emails: there was only one researcher, Andrew Lacis (at NASA), that wanted to argue with myself. And I admit that his individual contribution to the climate science, about CO2 concentration and HITRAN database, is admirable.
And to be even more honest, Joshua, I do not know Mr Ridley’s scientific work, I only say that his conclusions agree with mines.
42 of the last 62 years of my life have been the tallest, but Jarraud remains convinced I’m still growing…
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-fvriUN1RZqE/T3qE6LmllKI/AAAAAAAABpc/yqKxozlTKM0/w551-h243-no/age.gif
Gras –
Interesting scale along the independent variable axis.
I wonder, however, if the visual you present is really analogous to the temperature record over the period of time that humans have been emitting significant amounts of CO2? I notice on your graph that the flat period is roughly equally as long horizontally as when the trend was rising (even though it covers a period of 2X as many years). I’m not that familiar with the science, so maybe you can help me out. Is that the case, also, with global temps plotted over time (during the period of CO2 emissions)?
Thanks god for the scientific contributions of folks like Gras!
Josh, I like the idea of plotting human height and cumulative growth hormone against age.
Doc, evidencing that you really are one.
Hope your cancer researches go well. A very tough slog with some recent hope in re (very) expensive antibody ‘ immune brake release’ (heck, description proves I am not a doc) therapies like PD-1 antagonists.
Highest regards. Hope you like my new book on energy and climate.
BTW, you are cited and referenced in the essay Sensitive Uncertainty.
I don’t have your book yet
Here are my most recent patents
http://www.google.com/patents/WO2013052158A2?cl=en
http://www.google.com/patents/WO2013151584A1?cl=en
We have three more very nice MAO-B activated pro-drugs.
The nano-syringes cross the blood brain barrier and we have licked the drug-pump chemo-resistance mechanism.
well done Doc :)
Part III:
… that knowledgeable about the science, so maybe you can help me out. Is that the case, also, with global temps plotted over time (during the period of CO2 emissions)?
Thanks god for the scientific contributions of folks like Gras!
Ah, ok, maybe this is it….
I guess I can’t include “famil*ar” in a comment because the word “l*ar” is moderated by the blog filter?
familiar?
Here’s an even more bizarre one.
Try typing in the last name of Judith’s favorite failed bank chairman/science writer/concerned citizen…
Matt. R.
WTF would his last name trigger the filter?
That would explain why Matt Ridley is now whining about scientists calling a spade a spade when describing the warming in 2014. He wants scientists to say less about this warming or stop talking about it altogether, instead of saying things that could make him look wrong. I can’t say I blame him for wanting to avoid embarrassment, but he may just be getting himself in deeper.
“The preponderance of evidence is that the events of the last three winters 9[drought in California] were the product of natural variability.” ~ Tim McDonnell, Mother Jones (2014/12/8)
When a scientist says “The preponderance of evidence is …” I see a red flag pop up, and I grab my skeptic cap.
The usual threading problems I see.
So here we are again. The lack of quality control results in the burying of anything of interest or substance in a pile of manure. It is certainly not worth wading through it.
I’m sorry your “comment of substance” got buried in the manure pile. Your comment must be well camouflaged, because I looked through the manure and couldn’t find it. Of what substance was your comment?
The global warming alarmists believe in Salem Justice –i.e., give the witch a dunking. Death by drowning is evidence of an absence of witchcraft.
When your right your right.
https://evilincandescentbulb.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/familiar.jpg?w=300
This is absurd. The filter shouldn’t take parts of words or if it does then something needs to change.
I can’t do that, Dave.
HAL.
The sort of thing that might happen in Phu King, China?
On a Typepad blog we call it Typhus.
============================
Say “fibber.” It’s softer, less pejorative.
Outlier!
Outfibber!
Like John Smith says, “this is kinda fun”.
Well, if there ever was a discussion of Australian PM Gillard on the blog – they may have adjusted the filter.
Very witty and possibly insightful. Thanks! If only the army of snarling trolls would sometimes show a sense of humour.
That is a great demonstration!. Thanks!
“I’m not that familiar with the science”
So you keep telling us.
Andrew
The whole purpose of wanting to say that it is the warmest year is so it can be added “there is no standstill in global warming”. In this way politicians can say quote it in support of there position much like Obama quoting Cook on the 97% consensus. Mission accomplished! What significance it has is in the eyes of the beholder.
“Updating this diagram to include 2014 is going to increase the discrepancy between the models and observations, because the climate models show an inexorable warming.”
_____________________
How so, if 2014 puts observations back inside the 5-95% range?
Here’s an up-to-date comparision:
https://twitter.com/ed_hawkins/status/542637005201756160/photo/1
Early days, but looking likely to put observations back inside the 5-95% range. Still on the low side though.
Even so, still don’t see how adding 2014 observations “is going to increase the discrepancy” with the models.
Wrong error bars, use 55.3% confidence intervals for the real and the model, so that 22.36 of the distribution is above and below the CI. Where an upper and lower IC band cross you have (0.2236)^2, hence a p<0.05.
Doc, this kind of plot is easily fudged because models and temps are forced to agree over a certain time period (1990+ is 0 anomaly? Seriously?). I believe Lucia is more interested in looking at the difference in trends for this reason.
What these plots always fail to show is that forcing agreement between temperature and models in the latter part of the century necessarily throws them way off in the former half. This is never plotted. I don’t expect megamind to understand the significance of this, or spend any time questioning it, however.
David, referencing the latest updated Ed Hawkins graphic you’ve posted here, let’s look at how graphical spin doctoring might be applied as it concerns a series of recurring peak temperature years, each of which might be factually described as “the hottest year on record.”
Assume strictly for purposes of argument the following scenario: Peak temperature years occur periodically every four years between 1998 and 2028, with seven of these peak years occurring over this thirty-year time frame. Each peak year is slightly warmer than the last.
For purposes of the scenario, the hypothetical calculated trend line for those seven consecutive peak years is chosen to run at +0.03 per decade starting from 1998, thus producing the “seven consecutive hottest peak years on record” between 1998 and 2028.”
See the following graphic for a visual illustration of this scenario, which is derived from the one you posted above:
http://i1301.photobucket.com/albums/ag108/Beta-Blocker/GMT/IPCC-CMIP5-Hypothetical-Scenario-1998-2028_zpsa6f8bf30.png~original
QUESTION: If this hypothetical +0.03 C per decade trend line for the seven hottest peak years on record between 1998 and 2028 stayed within the CMIP5 min-max boundary line, as shown on the above graphic, could climate scientists justifiably claim in the year 2028 that “global warming” a.k.a. “climate change” had occurred on schedule according to AR5’s climate model predictions?
Beta and David:
Charts showing “All RCPs” are an incorrect comparison.
The emissions are above the RCP8.5 scenario so only the RCP8.5 scenario should be used (as by Dr. Spencer).
If you bisect the “CMIP5 min-max for all RCPs” and only use the upper half that is approximately the min-max range for the RCP8.5 scenario.
PA, asking you to take a quick guess at it, in roughly what year would a flat trend line originating at the 1998 peak temperature value, and then moving forward in time, make its intersection with the lower boundary of the RCP8.5 min-max range?
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/CMIP5-90-models-global-Tsfc-vs-obs-thru-2013.png
Well, there are two outlier models that make that a difficult question. Right now we are below over 97% of the models (the 97% consensus is wrong).
By 2020 we should be down to 1 model. By 2024 or so we should be completely under of the CMIP5 RCP8.5 model portfolio.
Those that claim 2014 is the ‘warmest year’ on record, it’s better to be predictable about many things or even unpredictable about most things, than being a propagandist for global warming establishment, no matter what. That essentially is what Dr. Tim Ball was saying when he took heat for comparing the tactics of global warming alarmists to those of Nadolf Nitler.
Well, ranking 1998, 2005, 2010 and 2014 as the ‘warmest years’ seems very consistent with a plateau in surface temperatures since 1998.
____________________
Am I right in saying that 2014 is the only one of those years not to be directly impacted, at least in part, by ‘official’ El Nino conditions?
If so, is that not significant in itself?
“Well, ranking 1998, 2005, 2010 and 2014 as the ‘warmest years’ seems very consistent with a plateau in surface temperatures since 1998.”
It’s more consistent with rising temps since 1998, since the gap between warmest years goes 7-5-4.
Temps have remained high after these el Ninos, particularly the super el Ninos, so the variation that gets us just over the max temp is not very large even for a non-el Nino year and doesn’t say anything about trend. Nothing about these shifts are explained by models and suggest that the models do not produce usable information (how weather will change with rising temp, and the rate of rising temps).
Perhaps this has been questioned before but from a retired high school teacher I have this question to ask.
We have the sophistication of some three thousand argo floats which periodically rise to the ocean surface and then send temperature and salinity data to satellites.
Now, as I understand it, we have infilling, as much as 40%, in some areas from thermometers over the land surface which have remained in place for extended periods of time with cities gradually engulfing some of them and which are read by humans. Also involved is the time of day of measurements.
If in fact, our understanding of the fate of the world as some would like everyone to believe rests to a large degree in the data gathered from these temp measuring devices, would it not be plausible to have land measurements capable of the same degree of precision as those denizens of the deep are purportedly capable of giving.
It seems that data which could be transmitted 24/7 would be much preferred.
Just Asking!
Indeed it is possible … and these measurements are publicly available.
http://www.earth.lsa.umich.edu/climate/map5.gif
These measurements are called “borehole temperature profiles“ … and they have great accuracy because (like the ARGO floats) they are well-buffered from diurnal fluctuations in sun and wind.
http://www.intechopen.com/source/html/19838/media/image10.jpeg
Summary Global borehole measurements independently and strikingly affirm the 20th acceleration of a Mann-Hansen “hockey stick blade” of global warming.
Good on `yah, borehole scientists!
Are those the same boreholes that indicate 2C warmer at the Holocene Optimum?
Looks like our ancestors kinda liked global warming.
Fan oh fan, those ol’ borehole measurements showing
warming, 1900 et Al, came too soon fer AGW, decades
before a mann came along and, er, measured (?) er,
temperature spike, hockey sticks(?) from a few tea le…,
er, tree rings.
https://www.google.com.au/search?q=hockey+stick+graph&biw
…yeah, it looks like catastrophic global warming began May 23, 1850 when the USS Advance put to sea from New York to search for John Franklin’s Arctic expedition which as it turned out was locked in the ice years earlier, in a search of the North-West Passage.
Fan, perhaps you can help me with three questions I have regarding the graph.
1) Did we have bore hole information beginning in 1500?
2) The graphs turn upward beginning in about 1850 plus or minus, was our ghg emission significant then?
3) With the exception of Cosmopolis, all the graphs turn downward in about 1950, would that indicate that it warmed (dramatically) from 1850 to 1950 and has been cooling since then?
What happened in the 1800s to make all those borehole profiles go bump? Maybe the fun police were right about the dangers of that new dance craze, the Waltz.
Looks like the Cakewalk and the Charleston only made things worse.
Notice the borehole measurements are headed down. WUWT?
At least FOMBS didn’t hide the decline.
fear of heights…?
THE WORLD CONGRATULATES JAMES HANSEN
who rightly called “pause-end” last January!
http://llnw.wbez.org/main-images/james%20hansen.jpg
Good on `yah James Hansen (and colleagues), for scrupulously polite,science-respecting, carefully reasoned, predictively accurate, well-documented, open-to-the-public climate-discourse … sustained by personal commitment over many decades!
Having fun today?
I’d take it a little easy on the victory laps.
The ocean is slowly warming but far less than needed to support the models.
Less than 2°C by 2100 is not a cause for concern and it looks like we won’t even make 1°C.
Why? When our climate-science understanding is “blazing along … like a tremendous machine“?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoFquax2F-k
Whereas the credibility of climate-change denialism has … well … kinda paused, isn’t that right PA?
Everyone can see that, eh Climate Etc readers?
Sorry, unsound in wind and limb.
===========
“Less than 2°C by 2100 is not a cause for concern and it looks like we won’t even make 1°C.”
——
The finest example of pseudoscience of the day. Congratulations!
“The ocean is slowly warming but far less than needed to support the models.”
——
Another kookie pseudoscience moment.
“Whereas the credibility of climate-change denialism has … well … kinda paused…”
—–
Can something go below zero credibility?
You have
But of course, for every El Nino, there is an El Nino end.
The biggest spin by far is the implication that there is a pre-satellite record of global annual temperatures. The records in question are individual stations (of questionable accuracy). The rest is just goofy statistical modeling. There is no record.
Grossly mistaken belief by David Wojick, scientific correction by FOMD!
http://ns.umich.edu/research/climate_08/img/pollack6.png
Good on `yah, diligent borehole scientists!
Fan
We have had this discussion about borehole several times and as a result i had several email discussions with the author.they confirm a global warming trend since 1600 closely following cet.The warming trend is not a recent one. We can also observe it warming through the 1300 to 1380 period and again in the first half of the 16th century. Prior to that we had a strong warming commencing in the ninth century
Tonyb
Using accurate language would solve 95% of the spin problem. The various data sets are commonly adjusted. Thus, they are clearly estimates and not precise measurements. Therefore, the way that they should be discussed is to state, for instance, that estimated Hadcrut temperature for 2013 is [ + or – degrees] from the estimated temperature for 2014. Or, one could say that the estimated GISS temperatures for 2013 are [+ or – degrees] compared to the estimated Hadcrut temperatures for 2013.
If people used the accurate “estimated” language, it would be obvious to everyone that very small temperature differences really could not be accurately compared to each other.
JD
Very true, but unfortunately the statistical models that operate on these data sets are so elaborate and nonstandard that there is no way to estimate the plus and minus range. Confidence intervals cannot be computed for averages of averages of averages based on area grids with interpolation. Statistical sampling theory has been left far behind.
NOAA Alert — ENSO Alert System Status:
https://twitter.com/richardabetts/status/542729959937429505
All about Mike.
So typical.
Let’s Change the Dialogue
The past five years of global climate debate have convincingly shown:
1. Society lives inside a worldwide Matrix of Deceit, built in 1945 to save the world from possible nuclear annihilation [1].
2. Delusions of power in members of the NAS and other science advisers to politicians have become addictive – beyond control of the addicts.
3. Now sixty-nine years after WWII ended in 1945, world leaders are themselves trapped inside the Matrix of Deceit and need help to escape.
We have instead vilified politicians like Gore, Obama, et al., without admitting that we could not do a better job if we had to rely on advice from NAS’s self-perpetuating network of scientists – descendants of those who tried to save the world in 1945 by sacrificing the veracity of their advice to world leaders – who now review and advise Congress on budgets of research agencies.
I.e., our critical comments should be answered, not by politicians, but by their science advisors that continued to deceive world leaders on nuclear and stellar physics after 1945 [2].
1. Aston’s Warning & Promise (Dec 1922); CHAOS & FEAR (Aug 1945) https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/CHAOS_and_FEAR_August_1945.pdf
2. “Solar energy,” Advances in Astronomy (submitted 1 Sept 2014) https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10640850/Solar_Energy.pdf
Surface T records, 10 year averages, November 1964 through October 2014. Each decade is warmer than the previous. Latest decade is warmer than the one before, which included 1998.
Individual years can be ‘spun’ according to personal preference. This is not so easy for decades.
Well, it’s easy to spin decades if you lop off a few years here and there and just use the 10-year periods you like. Also, you can choose periods too short to be statistically significant, and imply putting them together doesn’t give statistical significance either.
Oh, what to do when the “spin” might lead to good results. i.e. reducing the impact of floods, drought and storms on the poorest nations of the earth. It is an ethical dilemma for me.
Warmer by how much?
Unless it is greater than 0.2 deg C (2xsigma) it is statistically meaningless.
Since 1850, the inter-annual oscillation of the global mean temperature has been +/- 0.2 deg C as shown below:
http://orssengo.com/GlobalWarming/GlobalTemperaturePattern.png
Source:
http://woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:300/plot/hadcrut4gl/compress:12/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:300/offset:0.2/plot/hadcrut4gl/mean:300/offset:-0.2/plot/hadcrut4gl/scale:0.00001/offset:1.5
The spin is on.
WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud. “There is no standstill in global warming,”
So yet another pause denier! When the vast majority of scientists are wondering….why is this pause happening? Some overwhelming consensus this is – the error bars go from yes to no!
And if you are measuring from 1980 then satellite data are the only reliable datasets because they just cannot fiddle one year relative to another the way Giss/Had/CW do. Any other dataset that does not reconcile the satellite data is of no use whatsoever; ie Best:Worst.
“And if you are measuring from 1980 then satellite data are the only reliable datasets because they just cannot fiddle one year relative to another the way Giss/Had/CW do. Any other dataset that does not reconcile the satellite data is of no use whatsoever; ie Best:Worst.”
WRONG.
Both RSS and UAH have gone through major revisions, changing the past
As your only quali is in English lit it’s really appalling you can’t manage to read what is written…
1. The sat. corrections affect every result equally. No fiddling; just data-blind corrections that might affect cooling or warming equally – as noted in your list. Can you tell us the last Giss/Had adjustment that produced a net cooling to the overall trend? Of course not – they don’t exist! That alone makes the sat. data more trustworthy to people who have actually collected data!.
2. Your notion of ‘model’ for satellites is what other people call simple data postprocessing using a validated formula. Your obvious strawman argument is to use the catch-all word ‘model’ to discredit the satellite data by comparing this simple, validated sat. code to the monster, spaghetti, unvalidated code of GCM’s – which objective observers know are inadequate for policy. Many of my models are in fact 99% accurate: Because many complex things are still relatively easy to ‘model’, but global climate isn’t remotely in that category.
3. See 1. The corrections pan out to be half cooling, half-warming. That’s what you expect in normal science! Everyone should mistrust a warming bias in data corrections. Do you?
Bottom line. You have never collected data or done real science in your life. Go and do something useful and reconcile the quality satellite data, which is real data with perfect coverage and small errors – not sparsely sampled, improperly collected & improperly averaged readings taken in a typical Siberian winter through goggles or reproduced from buckets thrown over the side of ships or just not collected at all for vast swathes of the world. Sat. data has no bucket adjustments, no ‘guessed’ TOBS adjustments, no creating data from thin air, no dogmatic, policy-driven bias and it agrees with the independent sonde data. The other recons were originally just to complement the superior sat. data for years before 1979 – not to replace them!
Steven, that is a non-sensical answer. You are not giving a reason for us to think that these revisions are anything more than needed adjustrnents for instrumental reasons. That is quite different than the criminal manipulation of data by ground-based data sources.
History of changes/adjustments to UAH.
http://www.skepticalscience.com/pics/UAHcorrections.jpg
1. People dont fiddle with the data year you year. MONTH TO MONTH new stations get added and old stations get dropped/combined/ qc’d.
2. Satillite measurements depend upon explicit physics models. They measure brightness and INFER temperature.
3. Sat sensors drift and change over time. The source datasets for UAH and RSS go through several version, and UAH and RSS add corrections. remove corrections, update corrections.
Bottom line. Anyone who makes a blanket statment about the reliability of the various records, hasnt really looked at them
NCDC Releases November 2014 U.S. Climate Report
“November 2014 U.S. Divisional Average Temperature Ranks Map
During November, the average contiguous U.S. temperature was 39.3°F, 2.4°F below the 20th century average. This ranked as the 16th coldest November in the 1895-2014 record. This was the coldest November since 2000.”
__________
WHAT ! Give me a break. When are those guys at NCDC gonna start acting like true scientist and stop treating mole hills like mountains. True scientist would have just said temperatures in November 2014 were not a lot different than November temperatures in any other years. Better yet, since there was no difference worth mentioning, the scientist at NCDC should have just kept their mouths shut. I’m sure they would have received their paychecks anyway. Why do scientists think they always have to be saying something?
Max –
Notice the timing of the report…
No doubt, this report about the the 16th coldest recorded November was a “clear attempt” to “spin” and influe…..
Oh…..
Wait…
Nevermind.
I think the solution is to muzzle scientists. Then they couldn’t say things that get the public upset. Moreover, we could stop paying them. On second thought, maybe we should keep paying them just for being quiet.
I think your first idea is better. The only way to stop these McCarthyist scientists who are shutting down debate is to muzzle them. How else can we protect ourselves from the alarmists who are steering us towards economic suicide?
No Max, they should give them plenty of air time to make sure everyone gets to hear about it. I mean we don’t want to confuse the public with ‘da hottest year evah’ by not broadcasting everywhere, ad nauseam, 16th coldest year in the US…. Oh wait, strike that… Just move along now.
O say have yer heard that the over heating discrepancy
betwixt models and surface temperatures in 2014 was
the FOURTH HIGHEST in RECORDED HISTORY? OMG!
http://climateaudit.org/2014/12/11/unprecedented-model-discrepancy/#comments
I’m sure they would have received their paychecks anyway
No, if they do not support the Alarmism, they will not receive their paychecks anyway. Without the alarmism, the money will stop.
And you wonder why no one is alarmed about ‘da hottest year evah’! Go figure. Sheesh.
Lost in all the comments on CO2 plant food and nitrate starvation (most important point of this blog is we should agree to cut all the mindless banter), Judith Curry said: “Focusing on the ‘warmest year’ is a pointless exercise, unless the warm anomaly is as large as 1998. Focusing on the ‘pause’ is mainly significant in context of the comparison between climate model projections and surface temperatures…Attempts to spin 2014 as a possible ‘warmest year’ is exactly that: spin designed to influence the Lima deliberations….in the direction of being ‘alarmed.” Judith you are too kind it’s an understatement to say the least.
1. The rallying cry against carbon dioxide emissions is the long term labeled-as-“forecast” of >2oC global mean temperature rise in 100 years.
2. In AR5 IPCC chose to arbitrarily define the forecast to have even greater probability-likelihood-certainty having > 95% confidence as compared with previous ARs having lower certainties. Done to bolster the rallying flag against manmade GHG/CO2.
3. The assignment of probability-likelihood-certainty is not statistically based on data, rather it is subjective opinion – of one or several IPCC leads – who in fact totally control of report content (…although government final reviewers also have final call / edit of the IPCC report).
4. Judith is right, “warmest” year is much less important than would be (but missing) validation of IPCC conclusion (actually hypothesis begging testing) that “the global mean temperatures will > 2oC in the next 100 years.
5. If global mean temperature measurements during the next several years continue to significantly miss the IPCC forecast this severely undercuts IPCC basis for the past 25 years and therefore the entire raison d’etre of the IPCC. In this sense the IPCC and climate consensus have oversold their case. There is ZERO CORRELATION between CO2 ppm and global mean temperature since ~ 1998. http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/09/12/a-look-at-carbon-dioxide-vs-global-temperature/
6. Because of the growing awareness of actual global temperatures data grossly underperforming vs. the IPCC models i.e., forecasts/predictions are not just wrong but also invalidate the model tuning to CO2 there is a risk that IPCC and the climate consensus have “bet the company” therefore they must do everything to finally get a deal signed at the COP21 summit at Paris-Le Bourget.
WMO goes too far in its support the IPCC to ignore factual evidence, so no surprise to see this latest memo which is to pitch, resist, maneuver, propagandize, at each-and-every opportunity to politically sell the case and nurture the baby.
More spin- Politico invited a whole bunch of green and democratic party activists (and Lomberg) to assess Obama’s green legacy. One got it right.
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/12/how-green-is-barack-obama-113397_full.html#.VInGmlfF-vd
This could help some of you guys trying to pick out the warmest year EVAH.
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-hLjhTAWy9lw/VInZKzo3-vI/AAAAAAAAL6E/zVCKFoenPgM/w615-h445-no/baseline.png
Since there really isn’t that much difference you can use baseline period to give you a little edge on the competition. Using a “satellite era” baseline is pretty boring since it is about “normal”. You can shift to a Hansen baseline for a little boost or a Hadley baseline if you have a particular year in mind. All it is the correlation of the seasonal cycle with the long term average seasonal cycle. When you remove the seasonal cycle for a particular baseline period you can hedge your bet a touch.
Changing the baseline period won’t change the longer term trends one bit, but a 0.03 C or so shift could change the payout line for a shorter wagering period :)
Danny Wolfe
“There is ZERO CORRELATION between CO2 ppm and global mean temperature since ~ 1998.”
there’s that inconvenient truth again
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New study: California’s epic drought probably wasn’t caused by climate change http://bit.ly/1ud8hfD …
But could have worsened it’s impact, the study said.
…perhaps with the help of aliens!
Some unicorns may be going thirsty about now.
New study: flooding in California that hasn’t happened yet is due to global warming.
I think it’s happening now!
Amazing that anyone could consider drought in California, however severe, to be some kind of aberration. It seems that anything current or recent is considered to have exotic causes while anything more remote…well, it just kinda happened.
There is every reason to believe that the last major warming (the medieval one, which actually happened, in the vague. uneven way the present one is happening) made California a desolation for centuries.
It all comes down to the fact that we live on a restless, active planet where stuff changes, often suddenly and in a big way. Conservation will help; the mass neurosis known as Environmentalism will hinder.
As for climate science…first catch your climate scientist.
The rains of 1916 broke the five year drought. It’s not just a legend: you can can read about in wiki –e.g., Google, Charles M. Hatfield the rainmaker.
The San Diego City Council badly wanted water: the people needed Hatfield. Their recently finished reservoir had lain bone dry for three years; and, they agreed to pay Hatfield $10,000 to fill it up — no rain, no pay, no risk: what could go wrong? Hatfield took the job. If successful the fee would’ve been like receiving $230,000 today. With his little brother’s help he built a 20-foot tower where he mixed and burned a secret mixture of chemicals, shot off bombs into the skies and lo, Hatfield caused it to rain. The people wanted rain and it did.
For weeks it poured rain. About twenty miles long and a mile wide from El Cajon to the ocean, Mission Valley — which is now filled with freeways, overpasses, office towers, shopping centers, condos and restaurants — flooded bank to bank. Fed by the cloud bursting torrents of rain in the Cuyamaca and Laguna Mountains the San Diego River — that in earlier days flowed past the home of Father Serra and his first mission in California, and an Indian village and later on, San Diego’s Old Town, which was at Presidio Hill where Spaniards garrisoned up to about 1800 — overflowed.
It was the worst rain ever — worst flood in the county’s history. Rivers rose, water topped and broke through dams, communities became islands, roads, bridges, rails and farm animals were washed away, houses floated down the river and out to sea, settlements disappeared and many people died in the Hatfield Flood. Murder charges against Hatfield were considered. Lynching was threatened. Rather than receiving a fee — that he walked 60 miles over broken roads to collect — the ex-sewing machine salesman turned moisture enhancer, Hatfield was forced to flee.
Very interesting yarn, Wag.
When Eastern Australia’s climate got a lot wetter in the 1950s, the locals blamed Sputnik, and those ‘haitch’ bombs. Of course, we are now more sophisticated in laying blame on humans for climate disasters.
But why burn chemicals in towers when you can just spend a few trillion on white elephants across the globe? That’ll stabilise your climate, no worries.
There are many similarities and differences between pluviculturists and climatistists but, both bilk the public, as follows:
Similarities
• Government involvement and funding are key elements
• Fear is a key element (i.e., fear of drought/fear of warming)
• Vagary of nature is a key element
• Proponents are good marketers of their product (make rain/stop warming)
• Weatherpersons consider both products illusory
Contrasts
• Hatfield used secret chemical formulas to attract rain.
• Gore used opinions of government scientists whose work cannot verified
• The practice of rainmaking is more art than a science
• The practice of stopping global warming is more politics than science
• Making rain is local
• Stopping warming is global
• Rainmakers are positive blaming neither man nor nature for a lack of rain
• Warm stoppers are negative blaming humanity for causing warming
• Rainmakers do not get paid if they do not produce
• Warm stoppers are paid to create alarm about warming
So here we are again. The lack of quality control results in the burying of anything of interest or substance in a pile of manure. It is certainly not worth wading through it.
From the WMO report quoted above:
“What we saw in 2014 is consistent with what we expect from a changing climate. Record-breaking heat combined with torrential rainfall and floods destroyed livelihoods and ruined lives”.
So the world is already way too hot – perhaps these prophets of doom would like to tell us what the optimum temperature of the world is.
Well, to give a silly answer to a silly question, I would say the optimum temperature of the world is what it was in 1995 because that was a lucky year for me.
Here’s some other silly questions:
What is the optimum years of life for a human?
What is the optimum speed for a car?
What is the optimum alcohol content of beer?
Max_OK, citizen scientist: Well, to give a silly answer to a silly question, I would say the optimum temperature of the world is what it was in 1995 because that was a lucky year for me.
I don’t agree that it is a silly question. There is an implicit claim that 1C cooler than now was better than now; and explicit claims that 1C or 2C warmer than now will be worse than now. How exactly do they know that 1C warmer or 2C warmer will not be better than now? All they know is that they will be different, at least in some not yet known ways — claims have been contradictory, and in some cases contradicted to date by events. The “Holocene Climate Optimum” was warmer than now.
adjustments
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-13-00767.1
This warmest year stuff is just more reprehensible progressive bull ticky. To better understand the objectives of the Green Machine and the progressive elite read Joel Kotkin’s “The New Class Conflict”. An article by George Will in NRO the other day turned me on to this book. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/394080/government-strongest-and-richest-george-will
Climate Change is something to be distorted and exploited in order to advance an anti growth sustainability meme.
I’m waiting for his next big book, “The Secret Lives of Progressives and Dreams from My Racist Baptist Pasteur,” by Barack Obama
So you had a racist Pastor, Wagathon. Seems you learned much from it.
“God Bless America”. No, no, no, not God Bless America. God damn America — that’s in the Bible — for killing innocent people. God damn America, for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America, as long as she tries to act like she is God, and she is supreme. The United States government has failed the vast majority of her citizens of African descent.” ~Jeremiah Wright
You’ll find that in wiki under, “Confusing God and Government.”
Would he and Barack and all of the haters of America in the UN have the guts to say that about Allah?
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Curry, what is your take on chemtrails? Why don’t they make them pink? I love pink. Why?
FINA.
This is priceless :: ))
Royal Society guide aims to remove bias from climate science
The Royal Society has produced a 60 second video and guide on climate change and its effect in an effort to remove bias and spin from climate science, instead focusing on what the experts say.
http://blueandgreentomorrow.com/2014/12/11/royal-society-guide-aims-to-remove-bias-from-climate-science/
In this climate, even a minute of BBC storm is heavy weather.
===========
The broadcaster is having a tempest fit. Or temper fit, the poor miserable thing.
=============
Good point. America is not simply causing regional warming or even global warming. America is guilty of, Climate Change!
I have a forthcoming post on this, next week
Will look forward to that :)
cheers
brent
2.6 to 4.8 C. At least now we know who the human subjects were for the LSD experiment.
I listened to the video. It wasn’t bad. Although I am not sure where the 2.6C to 4.8C number comes from for warming by 2100. I have seen a lot of studies lately with a lot lower numbers than that. It must be ECS and it must be from the IPCC report – not the current studies which all seem to be in the range of 1.5C to 2.9C.
What is the purpose of positing a number for ECS? We will never be at equilibrium and even if we ever did arrive – wouldn’t it be hundreds of years after 2100? I prefer transient, because at least you have a shot at figuring out who was right or wrong in 2100.
Just saying.
The paleoclimate record as presented in IPCC AR5 fig 5.3 suggests based on a repetitive cycle it will get a bit warmer before a big cooling off. We are near the cyclical peak now.
The whole “climate science” warming debate seems much ado about bad science.
Blouis79,
Really? Wow. There are fiction blogs you could take your posts to.
Why don’t you stop (pa)trolling everyone, Gatesy? Don’t have anything else to do? You’re a real bore.
Jhprince,
Someone needs to point out pure pseudoscience here. But thanks for your suggestion. I’ll be sure to file it,
Louis
You of course are absolutely correct. Real scientists, not the wannabees, have figured that out. In 5 to 10 years this will become all all the more clear that natural variability is driving the warming.
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Thank you Doctor Curry for your very informative blog. I commend you on your courage in the face of rabid alarmists.
I have been studying climate change for quite some time now and have some concerns:
1. Many warming alarmists in the blogosphere believe that AGW began around 1850.
2. Many warming alarmists in the blogosphere believe that all global warming is anthropogenic.
I believe that climate scientists as a community have a duty of care to dispel these myths.
3. I can see no statistically significant difference between the rate of warming of the late 1800’s, early 1900’s and between 1975 and 1998. There is no “signature” for CO2 “forcing” in the temperature record.
4. Warming alarmists like to talk about us pumping BILLION OF TONS OF CO2 into the atmosphere, because big numbers sound scary. The fact is however that human emissions today are less than 4% of total CO2 emissions, the remaining 96%+ being natural emissions from the biosphere. I see the human contribution being within the bounds of natural variation and do not believe it’s effect could be positively measured.
5. Considering that 1/4 of all human CO2 emissions since The Industrial Revolution have been since 1998 and correspond with “the pause”, don’t you think that it is high time for climate scientists to fall back on the null hypothesis and admit that the warming has been natural?
Nuff said
http://rabett.blogspot.com/2014/12/plenty-of-trend-at-bottom.html?showComment=1418462735353#c6012722957985121338
”it is seen that 1998 clearly stood out as ‘warmest year’ at the time.”
98 was the ”warmest” year, for two reasons: #1: it was the year after the Kyoto Conference – they were too ambitious and ”massaged” the data to appear that the heat was rapidly increasing.
#2: by 99 those same manipulators realized that CO2 will keep increasing; if they keep increasing the temp accordingly – secular ”Skeptics &Warmist” people on the street will notice that: the real temp is still the same – so, the prudent Swindlers lowered the temp.
The truth: the overall temp is always the same; all proven, beyond any reasonable doubt!
I’m reading a lot about the “pause” since 1998 regarding global warming.
As a meteorologist with 24 years of operational experience, including having attended climate seminars at NCAR back in the day, I can laughingly say anyone trying to make a point that there is no warming because of a “pause” is out to lunch scientifically in a number of ways.
First and foremost, if you look at the global records of temperatures for the past 100+ years (below) you will notice that there have been several “pauses” during the whole uptrend of the past century and a half. There was a big one from 1880-1910 that was actually a cooling trend (albeit not is string as the uptrends. Then after the next big upsurge of warming there was a slightly shallower/ less shallower downtrend from 1940-1950 along with a slight uptrend from 1950-1980, followed by a much more pronounced uptrend 1980-1998. This most recent “pause” as skeptic-land giddily refers to it is not even a pause. If you take out outlier El Nino years that are beyond 3 standard deviations that would take the 1997-98 El Nino. Without that one outlier year, skeptic-land would have no pause.
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs_v3/Fig.A2.gif
But even leaving the 97-98 El Nino in, you can see any recent “pause” is much shallower…DEFINITELY NOT a pronounced cooling like the last 2 pauses in the past 100 years. What any atmospheric scientist knows (I suspect even Judith knows this) is that these brief shallow “pauses” in-between the stronger upsurges are noise from the periodic decadal and multi-decadal oscillations (PDO, AMO) plus strong ENSO years.
The undeniable fact is that there has been NO record cold year globally since about 1910. But there have been numerous record warm years, including most likely the one we are about to finish. So my question for “skeptic-land” is WHERE ARE THE RECORD COLD YEARS OVER THE PAST CENTURY?
Sorry for the “inconvenient” piece of truth
To bring you up to speed, see my recent invited talk on the pause at the American Physical Society meeting:
http://judithcurry.com/2014/03/04/causes-and-implications-of-the-pause/
My, that’s a big jump in the early 1900s…and again after 1930! Of course, those are the practise jumps the climate needed to do before it got carbonised post-1980. Climate must have known what we were about to do.
We have World Cricket and World Soccer and Le Tour
de France, say, why can’t we have the Climate Olympics?
Too many dodgy officials. And can you imagine the power bills if Lima is anything to go by? The limo shortage at Copenhagen was bad enough. These climate botherers don’t party like they preach. (From my toff POV, I suppose that’s their one good point.)
O but yer could invent such great new sporting events …
*Tipping Point and Spinning Contests.
*Temperature Rise Track ‘n Field.
*Deep sea diving heats ‘n such.
Well, BD….
The TSI has been higher since the LIA and higher still for the last century. Since this is going to slowly warn the ocean – the lack of record cold years globally isn’t terribly surprising.
As Dr. Curry points out, a 20 year pause indicates severe model problems. We just have to kick back a couple of years and see what happens.
There is some natural influence ala “stadium wave”, there is some solar influence, and then there are GHGs.
Dr. Curry’s presentations feature a long list of things that are not well understood or modelled badly.
And my graph shows more warming in the early part of the 20th century than your graph (the moving target problem):
http://www.ecy.wa.gov/climatechange/images/Global_Temps_08.gif
1935/1936 still holds a lot of records for hottest temperatures. CO2 can’t take credit for much of the 20th century warming any more than it can take credit for the MWP. The 20th century was still exiting the LIA, so it got warmer. I guess you are trying to say 2000 is warmer than 1900. Most people would agree that it got warmer. They just wouldn’t agree that CO2 was driving the change “inconveniently” or not.
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Dr Curry,
Thanks for sharing your APS presentation, I found it quite interesting and I found your graphs of the AMO and PDO (which were nicely lined up btw) basically telling the whole story.
Seems that the most recent warming trend that begins just past the max trough of the Atlantic Multi-decadal lines up with the warming of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation during two of the main multi-centenial warm surges, the first one from about 1910-1940 and the 2nd stronger one from about 1970-2000.
The “cooling periods” in between were obviously not as steep nor as long duration as the warm steps, the last one being from the mid 1940’s-mid 1960’s. However this likely puts us already 14 years into the cooling period but there has been no “cooling”. Now with the PDO just turning positive in the past few months it is very likely that another multi-decadal upswing should ensue. Matter of fact, it already has, with 2010 being the warmest year on recod (or similar to 1998 depending on which dataset one prefers), and 2014 about to become the warmest year of all.
So unlike other 15-20 year shallow cooling trends of the past, this one has no discernible cooling at all. Just a brief “pause”. Why any serious scientist would attempt to use this pause, natural in the climate cycle, as some sort of vindication that climate models don’t work is puzzling. Climate models that project decades into the future are simplified models and are not built to predict when PDO’s and ENSO’s occur or how strong they will be. Their outputs are always smoothed, similar to 10-20 year running means.
But another explanation for the “pause” is to simply ask “What Pause”?
In climate, it is pure folly to base an assertion on one years data. It would have been ridiculous to use he 97-98 Record El Nino as being the start of “runaway warming” and it is equally ridiculous for anyone to begin drawing a trendline from 1998 to attempt to “manufacture” a pause or cooling. Here’s something interesting…using either HADCRUT4 or NASA/GISS data, redraw an 1880-2013 global temperature graph MINUS the record warm 1998 signal (and if you want also take out the following 1999 cold phase as well since it is all part of one ENSO wave). Any long term trend will not be phased much by doing that, if anything you are cleaning your dataset of a record ENSO outlier. Now draw your annual and 5 year running means, and tell us when the “pause” began. If removing one ENSO event removes most of the “pause’ then…well…
“Laissez les bon temps roules!!!” The world would be a very dull place if youse could agree.
Thanks Dr Curry for this interesting insight about growing divergence between models projections and observations.
Yet I wish you had also address the issue of growing divergence between HADCRUT4 and HADCRUT3 data, over the last year.
Now that HADCRUT3 data set is stopped, I’m afraid HADCRUT4 will turn out to be just another “trick to hide the decline”, by manipulating the data and applying undue and opaque corrections.
Indeed it really looks like HADCRUT4 data corrections have been designed to reduce the gap with GISS/NCDC data, and of course to significantly reduce the decline of warming rate over the past 20 years.
Experts shall pay more attention to the validity of this new data set that is very questionable.