by Judith Curry
Two new papers were published last week of relevance to the hiatus.
For background, see my invited presentation to the American Physical Society on this topic: Causes and implications of the pause.
First, lets take a look at the ‘spin’ surrounding this issue and these papers:
- Climate Central: Looming warming spurt could reshape climate debate
- Scientific American: The pause in global warming is finally explained.
- Quartz: Scientists now know why global warming has slowed down and its not good news for us
The titles pretty much speak for the articles: The inference is that hiatus has now been explained; and that it should end soon with a warming ‘burst.’
And now for the spin-free zone. Lets take a look at these two papers and see what we can actually infer and and learn from them.
Quantifying the likelihood of a continued hiatus in global warming
C. D. Roberts, M. D. Palmer, D. McNeall & M. Collins
Abstract. Since the end of the twentieth century, global mean surface temperature has not risen as rapidly as predicted by global climate models (GCMs). This discrepancy has become known as the global warming ‘hiatus’ and a variety of mechanisms have been proposed to explain the observed slowdown in warming. Focusing on internally generated variability, we use pre-industrial control simulations from an observationally constrained ensemble of GCMs and a statistical approach to evaluate the expected frequency and characteristics of variability-driven hiatus periods and their likelihood of future continuation. Given an expected forced warming trend of ~0.2 K per decade, our constrained ensemble of GCMs implies that the probability of a variability-driven 10-year hiatus is ~10%, but less than 1% for a 20-year hiatus. Although the absolute probability of a 20-year hiatus is small, the probability that an existing 15-year hiatus will continue another five years is much higher (up to 25%). Therefore, given the recognized contribution of internal climate variability to the reduced rate of global warming during the past 15 years, we should not be surprised if the current hiatus continues until the end of the decade. Following the termination of a variability-driven hiatus, we also show that there is an increased likelihood of accelerated global warming associated with release of heat from the sub-surface ocean and a reversal of the phase of decadal variability in the Pacific Ocean.
Published in Nature [link].
The paper is further explained by
- Co-author Doub McNeall’s blog post
- University of Exeter press release
JC comment: I think this paper is a useful contribution, and I have no concerns/questions about the methodology they used. The interesting result is that once you have a 15 year hiatus (something that is already pretty unlikely), then according to climate models, the probability of it continuing another 5 years is 25%.
Atlantic and Pacific multidecadal oscillations and Northern Hemisphere temperatures
Byron A. Steinman, Michael E. Mann, Sonya K. Miller
Abstract. The recent slowdown in global warming has brought into question the reliability of climate model projections of future temperature change and has led to a vigorous debate over whether this slowdown is the result of naturally occurring, internal variability or forcing external to Earth’s climate system. To address these issues, we applied a semi-empirical approach that combines climate observations and model simulations to estimate Atlantic- and Pacific-based internal multidecadal variability (termed “AMO” and “PMO,” respectively). Using this method, the AMO and PMO are found to explain a large proportion of internal variability in Northern Hemisphere mean temperatures. Competition between a modest positive peak in the AMO and a substantially negative-trending PMO are seen to produce a slowdown or “false pause” in warming of the past decade.
Published in Science [link].
The paper is explained by:
- Michael Mann at RealClimate: Climate Oscillations and the Climate Faux Pause.
- The press release from Penn State: Ocean Oscillations caused false pause in global warming.
JC question to Michael Mann: How can the pause be both ‘false’ and caused by something?
Bob Tisdale critiques this paper in two posts at WUWT:
- Michael Mann and company redefine multidecadal variability and wind up illustrating climate model failings.
- Another couple of notes about Michael Mann’s faux pause post and Steinman et al. 2015.
Punchline: The Steinman et al. (2015) analyses do not explain the slowdown and stoppage of surface warming in the Southern Hemisphere…and, as noted in the earlier post, they had to redefine multidecadal temperature variability to try to explain it in the Northern Hemisphere.
JC comment: I agree with Bob Tisdale’s comments on this paper. I do not regard the Steinman et al. paper to be a useful contribution owing to methodological problems in ‘reinventing’ the AMO and PDO indices; this issue was discussed in these previous posts:
- Critique of Mann’s new paper characterizing the AMO
- Two contrasting views of multidecadal climate variability in the 20th century
Interestingly, they create a new index the NMO, which is the average of their AMO and PDO; sort of like a ‘poor man’s stadium wave.
JC reflections
I found the Palmer et al. paper to be interesting, in that given a 15 year hiatus, that the models predict a 25% chance of 5 more years. My take on how the pause will play out is summarized in the stadium wave post: I expect that the natural variability will contribute to a continuation of the hiatus into the 2030’s, with solar and volcanoes being a wild card.
With regards to the Steinman and Mann paper, they state in the Penn State press release:
Using a wide variety of climate simulations, the researchers found that the AMO and PMO are not significantly correlated; they are not part of the global “stadium wave” oscillation, as some researchers had claimed.
Their arguments are based on the assumption that model simulations provide ‘correct’ estimates of both the forced signal and the correct level of intrinsic multidecadal variability. The Kravtsov et al. paper shows that this assumption is not justified.
Brilliant to use climate models that don’t correctly simulate internal variability, particularly the PDO, to claim that the AMO and PDO aren’t correlated and not part of a stadium wave oscillation. /sarc The stadium wave paper showed that it is the lag that gives rise to maximum correlation between the AMO and PDO. Steinman and Mann conclude that the linear detrending is likely to cause artificially high observed (lagged) correlations between the AMO and PDO in the stadium wave.
So where does all this leave us? Internal variability only partly explains the pause – how big that part is remains somewhat unclear, but there is growing evidence that it is the major cause of the pause. The critical issues are how long will the pause last, inability of climate models to simulate a pause beyond 20 yrs with increasing CO2, and what will happen once the internal variability flips to a warming situation.
Is there a looming ‘warming spurt’ at the ‘end’ of the pause? Maybe, but it depends on what is going on with the sun. Many solar scientists expect a coming solar cooling. How increasing CO2, solar cooling and internal variability will play out in terms of influencing the global climate over the next several decades is of central importance to our understanding of the climate system, which still has substantial uncertainties (no matter what the IPCC, EPA etc say).
Bottom line: The pause in global warming is NOT finally explained.
Thank for this. Much appreciated.
I’ll be 100 in 2051, ready to verify all these projections. Hopefully we will figure out better ways to measure what actually happening on this planet!
“The pause in global warming is NOT finally explained.”
But…but…Scientific American said it was!
Ergo, you must be in the pay of Big Oil. QED
/sarc (just in case)
P.S. Isn’t it amazing how a new paper, with entirely novel definitions and methods, is immediately accepted as the the incontrovertible truth by certain parties? Especially when it conforms to prior beliefs.
Let’s look at what this new paper says : “Although the absolute probability of a 20-year hiatus is small, the probability that an existing 15-year hiatus will continue another five years is much higher (up to 25%).”. Take the first part first – the probability of a 20-year hiatus is small: Well, the probability being small is one of the least important things about it. The real item of interest is that a 20-year hiatus would demonstrate a discrepancy in the climate models (http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/climate-assessment-2008-lo-rez.pdf – find “discrepancy”). Actually, you don’t need 20 years, you only need 15, and we have got that already (the “existing 15-year hiatus” referred to in the new paper). That means that the computer models are no longer credible, they are not reliable, their predictions are not usable. So their estimate of the probability of another 5 years is equally incredible, equally unreliable, equally unusable. So the reality is that we don’t have any probability estimate at all. We are in uncharted territory, and the computer models can simply be thrown away.
But it allows well funded smart people another five years to tweak models to slowly deflate and keep coming closer to reality. As long as the funding keeps coming in and reality is kept in the deflating 95% bound, who the heck would remember the 2000s.
To me the most interesting piece was that they use the 0.2K figure which seems in tatters.
Second through probability jumbo jumbo, they gave Trnberth’s 17 year figure a new short lease on life.
Thirds they moved the beginning goal post to 2000′ from 1998
This is like they’re saying the odds of flipping heads 15 times in a row is very small, but the odds of flipping heads 5 more times is 1 chance in 32, therefore the odds of flipping 20 in a row is 1 chance in 32.
Somebody at ATTP suggests the probability of a 15 years hiatus in the Palmer et al analysis would be around 1.5%, making the present hiatus unlikely. It makes you wonder why they didnt publish a probability for 15 years given that is the length of the present hiatus!
Well, what it really means is there is a 25% chance a 1% probable event will occur.
We are at or past the 2 sigma point for the hypothesis the models are wrong. In 5 years we will start approaching the three sigma point. How much evidence do they need to start revising the models?
A act of congress that defunds all GCMs that don’t reproduce the pause would resolve the situation, and it does appear it will take an act of congress.
“…. a variability-driven 10-year hiatus is ~10%, but less than 1% for a 20-year hiatus. Although the absolute probability of a 20-year hiatus is small, the probability that an existing 15-year hiatus will continue another five years is much higher (up to 25%). Therefore, given the recognized contribution of internal climate variability to the reduced rate of global warming during the past 15 years, we should not be surprised if the current hiatus continues until the end of the decade. ”
There’s some serious logical gymnastics going on here.
Firstly they don’t state what the probability of the “existing 15-year hiatus” is but tell us about 10y hiatus which is long gone. Strange omission.
Now supposing there is a further 5y continuation in the hiatus and that we are “not surprised”, they will then apply the same logic to show that given a 20y hiatus, yet another 5y hiatus has a probability of 25% and we “should not be surprised” it if happens, despite the “absolute probability” of a 2y hiatus being maybe 0.2%.
At what point are we allowed to be “surprised” and conclude that their models are not worth squat?
Assuming Roberts et al are using standard conditional probability, their probability for a 15yr hiatus can easily be calculated.
If P(20yr hiatus|15yr hiatus)=0.25 and P(20yr hiatus)=0.01, then
P(15yr hiatus)=0.01/0.25=0.04.
In statistical vernacular, the p-value for ‘an existing 15yr hiatus’ is less than 0.05 – significant at the 5% level. There is wriggle room of course in these probabilities (and they do not specifically claim a 15yr hiatus). But still, a bit of a chuckle – they appear to be rejecting the model(s) from the observed data.
As I emphasize once again, everyone seems to widely ignore the big pause from 1941 to 1976: 25 years long. The current pause is not the first pause, far from it. And the thing that characterizes both pauses is a lack of continuing El Ninos.
“…1941 to 1976: 25 years long.”???
Gnashing at fleas while swallowing camels
And the thing that characterizes both pauses is a lack of continuing El Ninos.”
And the thing that characterizes the warming periods is a surplus of El Ninos?
Gnashing at fleas and swallowing camels
Probably not the last pause either, but all you get between is rises of increasing magnitude.
The Steinman et al. paper is available here.
Thx for the link
I wonder how many papers on the pause are possible if it lasts until 2080 or so…?
At least two or three a year just to say that computer models show that the pause could go on n years and still not be wrong, with n incrementing by +1 each year.
A few volcanic eruptions and quakes along the way, during the course of a natural cooling trend, could trigger a poignant departure from global warming to a mass mania about a summerless future.
We need help with the vaccination team, Wag, before thar she blows.
========================
Plateau, everyone, plateau.
Millenial odds are for ‘peak’.
=====================
Stasis, actually
Faux plateau.
I like it.
The counter-notion being the fake uptake.
The pause is due to one reason, and one reason only. It all has to do with superimposed natural cycles. and thus we know the pause will continue to about the year 2028. Long-term (~500 year) cooling will not start until after 2059. The proof is here and most readers of this blog need to catch up on the 21st century breakthroughs in physics which enable us to completely refute the greenhouse conjecture..
We like plurals. Are there at least one of you?
The attribulation continues.
Excellent neolog. I’m jealous.
=============
Yes.
The best I can do is ‘Fry alls and attribulations’, but it looks a lot like I’ve just spilled paint on his gorgeous lily.
====================
A Neolog
for a Climate
Idealogue,
An Air on
a G – String
played in
minor chord.
Kim;
Were you a fan of P.D.Q. Bach? Replacing a G-String with a Bach’s hair…
Attribulation: Burnout, physical, mental, and emotional exhaustion that attribulate to work- related stress. Catastrophic Thinking, unrealistically pesimistic appraisals of stress …
I found the Palmer et al. paper to be interesting, in that given a 15 year hiatus, that the models predict a 25% chance of 5 more years.
5 more years of this, and then the pause ends?
2011 – 2015.08: slope = 0.0492 per year, aggressive warming
2012 – 2015.08: slope = 0.0668563 per year, aggressive warming plus
2013 – 2015.08: slope = 0.0969231 per year, aggressive warming plus plus
2014 – 2015.08: slope = 0.133846 per year, aggressive warming plus plus plus
And it is likely going to get worse from now until at least July. The RSS anomaly for Feb 2015 is more than twice as high as Feb 2014.
2015.08? Where did you get that data from?
More seriously, today was 0.001372 higher than yesterday, that’s 0.501123 per year. That’s more than aggressive warming plus plus plus plus, it’s the end of the world in a decade.
Seriously seriously, your analysis is nonsense. By using small periods like that you are extrapolating noise. And even if you use longer periods, without a mechanism extrapolation is unreliable.
You’ll have to ask wft. From 2011 becomes 2011- 2015.08. It’s not one day, it’s 49 months: 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, and Jan 2015.
Bingo, I think you are on to something
2014 as an ENSO neutral year is back on the long-term trend line. The pause is a little hard to discern here, but if you start at the peak of 1998 and continue to now, you can see what they are making a fuss about.
https://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/tempcp3.png
The peak temperature was well above the trend line during the last maximum, and this time the peak temperature barely touches the trend line. So id doesn’t look persuasive to me we’re out of the warming slump yet.
https://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/giss2.png
Agreed, but 59 days later the peak is likely above the trend line, and with the ENSO watch back in place, it’s likely going well above it in the coming months.
Click on May and June.
An El Nino does not have to materialize. The current heatwave will continue with ENSO neutral above the ONI zero line.
Why does that trend line start at 1970?
On the surface of the earth.
Watch the pause happen; then watch it unhappen.
You saw it here first
JCH, you refer to a tiny fraction of a degree increase in average global temperature anomaly as a ‘heatwave’
And yet you wonder why so many people are sceptical.
“Why does that trend line start at 1970?”
Because it is the only way to make it look linear. Of course if 1970 is supposed to be artificially cooled by aerosols as climate scientists previously tried to sell to us then you have to correct for that. Otherwise if we are now supposed to be affected by pdo cycling then 1970 was at the bottom of a cycle and you need to include the entire century. But then that has already been done by Swanson and Tsonis in 2007 and the real overall trend becomes 0.6K/century.
@ thisisnotgoogtogo
“Why does that trend line start at 1970?”
Well, as a first guess I would suspect that starting in the 1970’s, when all the usual suspects were citing the record cold, record (and expanding dangerously) Arctic ice, growing glaciers et al as ominous warnings of an approaching ice age, would maximize the slope of the trend line, thus confirming the threat of near future thermogeddon. The same reason that they DON’T start the trend line in 1998.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/01/global-cooling-compilation/
You will note that the Arctic ice cover of the 70’s, indicative at the time of catastrophic cooling, is now the ‘optimum’ against which the reduced Arctic ice cover of today is compared to certify ACO2 driven CAGW.
The common threads are impending doom requiring ‘vigorous, decisive government action’, the roster of individuals and organizations who agree on what immediate action must be taken to stave off thermogeddon (positive or negative, as the case may be) and that ‘the science is settled’.
And by the way, a surprising number of the government policies that were required in the 70’s to thwart ‘freezeogeddon’ are now required to thwart ‘toastogeddon’.
JCH:
No, we’ve had to endure an endless stream of people playing silly games with trend lines for years now.
I agree. The pause was a silly trend line drawn by David Rose.
No, the silly trend lines are those which you apply to anomaly data and pretend that they mean something.
Do you imagine that the actual global temperature really shoots up and down by several tenths of a degree within a few months or less, like the anomaly data appears to indicate?
“The peak temperature was well above the trend line during the last maximum”
The last “maximum” was the 1998 el nino. The current temperature is not a peak, it’s not even an el nino.
> The pause …
As I’ve commented above, stasis, actually, although calling it a “pause” may make you feel better
Unless you wish to make a testable PREDICTION …
It is a 45-year rise that is continuing. Statistically, I think that longer trends will trump shorter ones on significance tests.
Interesting the rising trend between 1910 and 1940. Was it Henry Ford or Al Jolson did that?
The dip in 1910 looks to have been solar.
The sun? That old thing?
Not a lot of people know that.
Holy Smokes, the sun can do that? Why don’t all the people know that?
============
Shhh.
They’ve got that in the models, right Jim D? Or are the modelers among the ‘not a lot of people’. Hey, can’t blame them, as anthropocentric as they’ve been commanded to be by the IPCC.
===========================
Don’t mind a haltin’ Dalton. But when it Maunders…
That’s not where the line used to be with earlier climate models. Of course it is possible to push the trendline down to keep a good fit as data pile up, but that “damages” the trend. In case of this graph, there is 0.6 C increase over 37 years (1976-2013), that corresponds to 1.6 C increase over 100 years. Not scary anymore.
Did they mention the sensitivity of the models that had a 25% chance of continuing for another 5 years? The high sensitivity models can’t even go 15 years without warming.
“The interesting result is that once you have a 15 year hiatus (something that is already pretty unlikely), then according to climate models, the probability of it continuing another 5 years is 25%.”
This happens all the time. The average life expectancy for a man in the USA is about 78 years. Yet a 90 year old man still has life expectancy of almost 4 years. A variation of “inertia” seems to be at play here; if something is working beyond expectations it will continue to do so.
I don’t take models seriously, as long as they don’t correct their physics. http://judithcurry.com/2013/06/28/open-thread-weekend-23/#comment-338257
It’s just you.
What’s interesting to me is that we have had no end of people that there is
no pause and now we have 2 papers trying to explain why the pause
has occurred. This is too funny and it is not yet April 1st.
the Mann article on RC starts “No, there is not currently a “pause” in global warming.”
even the guy who explained away the hiatus says theres no hiatus. Go figure.
It doesn’t matter if there is a pause or not. What I see is pretty nonalarming rise at 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 and 120 year scale. It is not so bad we thought.
Nobody has proved that the earth even should be in a perfect radiative balance at any time scale. So I’m gonna relax.
Both papers are interesting and contibute to the overall understanding of the flattening of the rise in troposperic temperatures over the past fifteen years or so. This flattening of the rise, or “pause” really is more accurately called a faux pause as of course the climate system has continued to gain energy quite robustly over this period, and it has only been the variability of ocean to atmosphere latent and sensible heat flux that has given rise to discussion about this pause at all. From a total climate energy perspective, the relentless march upward in GH gas concentrations has been closely paralleled by a relentless and continuous gain in climate system energy.
If it’s there in the oceans, it’s staying there until we need it.
=================
Nonsense. The energy stored in layers that are moved around by ENSO contributed to the warming from 2012 to present.
Of course energy never “stays in the ocean” as there is a continual flow of it into and out of the ocean. Natural variability will dictate the rate into and out of the ocean, and this seems to be the main source of the “pause”. An external forcing such as from astronomical cycles, volcanoes, or of course GH gas changes will dictate the long-term net gains or loses in ocean heat content.
Gone to the deep will stay there until we need it. It doesn’t seem to be anywhere else. Gee, I hope it’s there.
=====================
It’s not in the monitored ocean. It’s not in the atmosphere. If it’s in the deep ocean it’s staying there. If it’s with the stars, it’s staying there.
Show me, for Gaia’s sake, the catastrophe.
You can’t, but I can show you one.
=====================
Part of missing heat was reflected back to space; part of it was found in the oceans.
I would really love to hear you explain how diffused heat coming out of the deep ocean is going to be useful to humans on the surface when the TOA imbalance goes hard in the other direction. They’re shivering, and then they get even colder.
JCH, it’s a travesty that you haven’t told Kevin Trenberth that the heat is no longer missing.
I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to explain to you how stored heat can be useful when glaciation returns. Perhaps it will come out if we pray. Mebbe invoking thermodynamic gods.
====================
The deep ocean is near freezing. It can be used for cooling. Last time it was warm was 35 million years ago.
JCH, you can talk to R Gates about whether it’s paused or not.
Me, I think the missing modeled energy is wending its way stellarly, bounced out by clouds.
Too bad. We could use that heat when it gets cold. Gad, I wish it would hide out in the deep oceans for the nonce.
===============
“Anthropogenic climate change is about changes to Earth’s energy balance.”
No, it’s not. It’s about changes in climate. Funny how 2 words mean something entirely different to the human volcano of nonsense.
tingtg, +
R Gates:
Sorry, but “pause” refers to temperature and not to energy gained (robustly or otherwise), so calling it a “faux pause” is to simply not understand how modifier words work.
To say it was a “faux pause” signifies there wasn’t really a reduction in the rate of warming. But we know there was a reduction in the rate of warming, because we can measure it.
Anthropogenic climate change is about changes to Earth’s energy balance. Very little of that energy is in the atmosphere. There was no reduction in energy gain. No pause where it matters, and only a slowdown in the rate of flow from ocean to atmosphere. But heck, AGW ” skeptics” need some glimmer of hope. Take it.
There’s lots of hope if the missing heat is going into the ocean, where it will stay until cooling brings it out. But your ‘glimmer’ is past Alpha Centauri by now.
================
R. Gates, The only way one could be so sure about the heat in the ocean is if one were sure that we could accurately measure the oceans to within a few hundredths of a degree. Odd, that no one cared about this metric until the pause occurred. Reeks of desperation to me.
That’s not what TOA energy analysis suggests.
Unfortunately, heat accumulation error bars are wider than this thread is long. And there is no heat in any location that could plausibly ramp up warming much past the benign (likely beneficial) historical rates.
@ Bill_W.
“R. Gates, The only way one could be so sure about the heat in the ocean is if one were sure that we could accurately measure the oceans to within a few hundredths of a degree. ”
Bill, Bill, where HAVE you been!
We have been able to plot the ocean heat content with a resolution of 1e22 joules since 1955. See the official anomaly plots here:
http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/
To do so REQUIRES that we have been able to measure the ‘annual temperature of the world’s oceans’, within a few THOUSANDTHS of a degree, not a few hundredths of a degree, over the entire interval for which the data is plotted.
As we used to say in the Navy: ‘Modern science knows no limitations!’
R. Gates:
Oh good grief. Me noticing you are butchering language doesn’t make me a skeptic. You calling me a skeptic for pointing out you are butchering language, well…that’s something else, but I’m being moderately polite here, so…
Warming refers to temperature. Heating refers to heat energy exchange.
We infer the heat energy exchange by looking at the change in temperature. The problem is we’re looking at a very small portion of the climate system by just averaging near surface air temperature.
So just because that metric isn’t warming at the say rate it was 20 years ago doesn’t mean the system isn’t still heating up.
But you saying that we know the system is robustly gaining energy is just nonsense.
There isn’t a single metric that demonstrates the system is robustly gaining energy. Because the system is complex and nonlinear, there is no physical law that says it has to be gaining energy at the same rate in the last 15 years as in the previous 20 before that.
And simply noting that doesn’t make me a skeptic. It makes me grounded in reality, rather than in stupid tribalistic lore that you sorts pass around to each other under the delusion that this is how science really operates.
Carrick,
You know deep in your heart of hearts that you are a skeptic… at least of the non-scientific nonsense Gates continuously spouts. How dare you act like a real scientist? ;-)
Warming of the world’s oceans accounts for more than 90 per cent of additional energy accumulated from the enhanced greenhouse effect, making this one of the most important measures for monitoring and understanding climate change.
The ocean today is warmer, and sea levels higher, than at any time since the instrumental record began.
Ocean heat content is a key indicator of heat accumulated in the oceans, and is measured in units of energy known as joules. The upper layer of the ocean, from the surface to a depth of 700 metres, has increased its heat content by around 17×1022 joules since 1971, accounting for around 63 per cent of additional energy accumulated by the climate system. Warming below 700metres over the same period accounts for approximately 30 per cent of additional energy. The remaining 7 per cent has been added to the cryosphere, atmosphere and land surface. … – Ocean Heat Content
==> “There isn’t a single metric that demonstrates the system is robustly gaining energy.”
1. Do you doubt the GHE of ACO2 emissions?
2. Are we increasing the rate of CO2 emissions?
3. Do you think there is some mechanism by which the climate is losing more energy relative to previous decades? If so,what is that mechanism?
JCH | March 7, 2015 at 12:13 am |
…
Ocean heat content is a key indicator of heat accumulated in the oceans, and is measured in units of energy known as joules. The upper layer of the ocean, from the surface to a depth of 700 metres, has increased its heat content by around 17×1022 joules since 1971,..
Well, that is a change of about 0.15 K over 34 years for the top 700 meters or 0,0044 K per year. That does not seem to be a particularly large change.
You want it bigger?
Carrick,
Thus, a mere reduction in the surface warming trend below the median trend for a given time period is now supposed to be a “pause” (from what?). That is, we have a “pause” about 50% of the time. And what is it called the other 50% of the time?
Also, I don’t remember that the ones who are insisting on the reality of a “pause” of global warming were equally insisting in 2007 that there was an “acceleration” of global warming between 1992 and 2007. I wonder whether it’s just my memory. Let’s see what they are going to say when we have the next “acceleration” and what they are going to conclude from it. Somehow, I anticipate that we won’t have to wait many years to get the opportunity to observe this.
PA,
According to my back on the envelope calculation, this is an amount of accumulated heat that would warm the total mass of the atmosphere by about 30 Kelvin, if it were to be released into the atmosphere all at once. I guess you don’t see this as a particularly large change.
No it wouldn’t, because it would disappear off into space just as quickly.
Jan P Perlwitz | March 7, 2015 at 3:39 am |
“Well, that is a change of about 0.15 K over 34 years for the top 700 meters or 0,0044 K per year. That does not seem to be a particularly large change.
if it were to be released into the atmosphere all at once. I guess you don’t see this as a particularly large change.
” If ifs and buts were candy and nuts we would all have a merry Christmas.”
And a very merry Christmas to you.
Jan Perlwitz
You said;
‘According to my back on the envelope calculation, this is an amount of accumulated heat that would warm the total mass of the atmosphere by about 30 Kelvin, if it were to be released into the atmosphere all at once. ‘
Please clarify how that would happen, and whilst you are about it please explain how and why it switched from warming the ocean and atmosphere to just disproportionately warming the ocean.
tonyb
Jan P Perlwitz | March 7, 2015 at 3:39 am |
PA,
“Well, that is a change of about 0.15 K over 34 years for the top 700 meters or 0,0044 K per year. That does not seem to be a particularly large change.
According to my back on the envelope calculation, this is an amount of accumulated heat that would warm the total mass of the atmosphere by about 30 Kelvin, if it were to be released into the atmosphere all at once. I guess you don’t see this as a particularly large change.
The correct response (apparently) is:
and monkeys could fly, nobody mentions that either
And since this is reality, not a Hollywood disaster movie, no it wouldn’t.
According to Savethesea the average temperature of the ocean is 2°C (274.3K). If all the ocean heat content were released into the atmosphere at once the 314 yottajoules of energy would raise the temperature of the atmosphere (by your computation) to 55700 K, for a very brief and rather disturbing period. So compared to the current energy in the ocean these few zettajoules of post 1971 warming aren’t even chicken feed.
The majority of the ocean heat loss is through latent heat loss (evaporation). Particularly in the tropics. So only a minority of the heat will actually warm the atmosphere (at least the lower troposphere) anyway. The radiative forcing is Planck/Wein (black body) which is driven by the about 0.3°C change in sea surface temperature since 1971.
http://hadobs.metoffice.com/hadcrut3/diagnostics/HadSST2_bar.png
The actual ocean surface temperature (like the heat content of the top 700 meters) hasn’t changed much since 2005. The air/ocean system has been more or less in equilibrium for about a decade.
PA
Are you American? Can you get over to Hollywood and pitch the disaster movie; ‘The Day the oceans boiled.’
We can share the film rights and Jan could be a technical adviser.
tonyb
tonyb | March 7, 2015 at 5:11 am |
PA
Are you American? Can you get over to Hollywood and pitch the disaster movie; ‘The Day the oceans boiled.’
We can share the film rights and Jan could be a technical adviser.
tonyb
I’ll see what I can do.
It would be an exciting film. 55700K temperatures would be like sitting on your porch watching a nuclear detonation at the neighbor’s house across street.
How long would the 55700 degree impulse last before, devoid of all energy, the entire surface, atmosphere, everything, froze to around 2K?
A few hours? Minutes? Seconds?
R Gates:
er, isn’t that how warming happens?
A slowdown in the rate of flow from the atmosphere to space, resulting in a slowdown in the rate of flow from ocean to atmosphere, resulting in the ocean warming?
JCH—the problem with OHC is there is no such thing as an OHC meter, and measurements at depths below 2-km are generally absent. So while you might be able to argue that the upper layer (with some unstated systematic error) is increasing in heat content, saying that the system as a whole is heating up remains inferential.
That is hardly a “robust result”, note it is the word “robust” which is what I was objecting to with R. Gates arguments. It is very plausible that our system is heating up, but this remains an inferential observation, especially for relatively short period measurements
Other indirect evidence such as sea levels have the same problems with natural variability as surface air temperature, but are more poorly characterized. Again not a “robust indictor” IMO.
==> “Again not a “robust indictor” IMO.”
So here we see what was absent before. Opinion instead of fact.
And so now we can ask (although it probably won’t get answered) what is, in your opinion, the criterion for applying the label of “robust.”
==> “It is very plausible that our system is heating up, but this remains an inferential observation,”
Is it only inferential that as we add ACO2 the climate system warms?
Joshua
[If you object to people ignoring you when you are just being argumentative, there is a cure for this, but the cure comes from you.]
I’d use the engineering definition here: A robust result is one that is insensitive to particular underlying choices of the data used to validate that result.
Examples: Cherry picking the interval 1998-2014. Choosing just one data set of many.
To put this in context, one of the slams on Klonzbach is they didn’t look at other intervals to test the robustness of their results to the selection of intervals.
Over short enough periods we know the system actually cools (e.g. annual cycle), even as we add CO2. So not only is it not inferential that the system warms, it’s actually wrong.
Over periods of roughly a decade, delta-CO2 represents a small perturbation to the system, so it wouldn’t be surprising to see it get occasionally overwhelmed with other sources of variability.
See e.g., this:
https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/sites/default/files/styles/node_lightbox_display/public/key_figures_134?itok=qDLjnldU
Here’s the link for Argo OHC converted to a viewable image:
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4520911/Climate/OHC/OHC_Argo.jpg
This is for 10-1500-m as explained here. Note this is roughly the top 1/4 of the ocean depth (the average depth is about 3700m.
Jan P Perlwitz:
The data feature people are discussing, which is related to a slow down in rate of warming, is real and not fake.
If you disagree with their terminology, the way you should describe it as the “inaptly named pause”. Saying it is a “faux pause” indicates to most of us (and also to you I think) that the feature doesn’t exist simply because the descriptor used poorly fits the feature they are trying to describe.
That’s not a good argument. If they define the thing they are measuring, then you have a reference for interpreting their meaning and there is no purpose served in trying to wave aside an argument simply because you don’t like (or even if you can’t stand) the word choice used.
If you want to use better terminology (and I’m all for better terminology when it’s apt), I’d call it a global warming slowdown or even period of temperature deceleration. I’ve suggested other places using temperature acceleration as an objective metric for testing the significance of the change in rate of warming (it has better properties for statistical study than differences in trends).
This discussion has lead to an great series of posts by Nick Stokes starting here, which you might want to read, if the signal processing aspects are of interest to you.
Anyway hopefully this clarifies what I am objecting to.
Carrick,
I feel much more comfortable with “slowdown”. I would add “statistically not significant” as long as statistical significance of such a slowdown hasn’t been established. The term “The Pause” was created outside of the realm of science and, IMHO, for the reason to transport a politically and ideologically motivated message that is not based on scientific evidence.
Unfortunately, a number of scientists have a bit uncritically adopted the term “pause” in recent term, even without actually intending to suggest that the physical process of global warming had “stopped/paused” or something like that. Well, I guess, a title for a paper that says something like “Causes for the pause” sounds more sexy and gets more attention than a title “Causes for recently observed statistically not significant trend fluctuations around the median global warming trend”, even if the actual analysis in the paper is the same and fine. Sigh.
That was supposed to say, “in recent years”, not “in recent term”.
phatboy | March 7, 2015 at 6:04 am |
How long would the 55700 degree impulse last before, devoid of all energy, the entire surface, atmosphere, everything, froze to around 2K?
A few hours? Minutes? Seconds?
1. Not the surface just the ocean. The land surface was assumed to be bebopping along at 282K (Berkley) or whatever.
2. The ocean would be a cake of supercooled ice many miles inland (6% expansion).
3. The atmosphere would have 14.6 times more energy per kilogram than TNT.
It is safe to say that the earth would be treated like a nuclear pit, the turbulence would make a dynamite blast look like a mild breeze, and the moon may gain some atmosphere. The instantaneous 190 times increase in atmospheric pressure at all levels would have some interesting effects. The almost 3000 PSI at the surface would be equivalent to less than 1.5 inches away from a pound of TNT (1 inch = 7000 PSI) and there may be significant additional pressure from the surface vaporization.
The initial planck-wein peak would be in the X-ray range (0.05-0.06 microns) with quite a bit of gamma radiation, and the atmosphere is opaque to x-ray and gamma radiation. Also the plasma from vaporizing the land and the ocean ice contact surfaces would tend to insulate the atmosphere from surface cooling. I’ll have to give some thought to the energy loss scenarios.
Carrick –
==> “If you object to people ignoring you when you are just being argumentative, there is a cure for this, but the cure comes from you.”
I don’t “object” to you or anyone else ignoring me. Don’t be such a drama queen.
==> “Over short enough periods we know the system actually cools (e.g. annual cycle), even as we add CO2. So not only is it not inferential that the system warms, it’s actually wrong.”
Your answer after a discussion of cherry-picking and robustness? Interesting.
Jan P Perlwitz:
Yeah I agree—and the statistical significance question is a tough one to crack. I’m going to jump on the soap box for a minute, sorry.
The problem is you can’t simply pick an interval (e.g., 1998-2014) then use statistics that are designed for an arbitrary (as opposed to selected) interval to compute the statistic significance.
Secondly our ability to measure temperature is much better than our ability to infer the secular trend uncorrupted by short-period unforced variability.
Because the short-period variability contains autocorrelation this leads to the practical reality that you can generate a wide range of features that we can recognize visually in the data, but the feature can amount to little more than a particular phase relationship among the various components of the unforced variability.
Thus, we can all clearly see a slowdown in trend for say 1998-2014 and the slowdown is real. And yes this trend does translate into a change in other physical variables—remember even this is due to unforced variability, unforced variability is not a measurement artifact, so the laws of physics negotiate how that slowdown in trend occurs. If it’s due to natural variability, energy has to be conserved etc.
But what we can’t easily infer is how frequently this sort of slowdown for this period occurs.
To this point, I haven’t seen anything that convinces me we’ve really reached true significance, where the result can’t be explained in terms of natural variability.
Certainly there is nothing here to suggest to me that there is a problem with the overarching theory of AGW. Possibly it suggests a somewhat smaller number for CO2 climate sensitivity, but a larger number for natural variability.
Even then, because natural variability is even harder to model than CO2 climate sensitivity, this isn’t good news, because less predictability means more uncontrolled risk not less.
Joshua, not being a drama queen, just pointing out why you get ignored.
This has nothing to with cherry picking. Cherry picking involves interval selection based on characteristics of the data.
What I am saying is, or short enough periods, regardless of the interval selected, natural variability will overwhelm the relatively modest forcing from CO2. It’s a question of time scales, and so yes, it is a robust result too.
Your 10:22 is very clear, Carrick. In my opinion, it argues for adaptability, and also brings in the possibility of cooling in the category of increased uncontrolled risks.
================
And so far as temperature goes, which way would you prefer that the uncontrolled risks ultimately end us?
=============
kim:
I’d prefer it move things cooler, because that’s at least partially explored territory.
Speaking of explored space, paleontology clearly shows the benefits of warming to the biome, and the detriments of cooling. Choose wisely, my friend.
============
Remember too, that uncontrolled risks to the high side, ie high sensitivity, would mean that only man is keeping the earth from plumbing the coolest depths of the Holocene, and we can’t keep up such heavy lifting for long.
==================
R. Gates | March 5, 2015 at 11:20 pm |
This flattening of the rise, or “pause” really is more accurately called a faux pause
I wonder if the same PR guy who changed “global warming” to “climate change” is responsible for changing “pause” to “faux pause?” Can we just shorten it to “faux pas?”
‘Gaining energy’ and ‘warming’ are not exactly the same thing. Thanks to thermal capacity of oceanic waters, we may continue ‘gaining energy’ for hundreds of years before we get any perceivable warming.
This is a huge fallacy that seems to be even circulated by some misinformed scientists. The facts are, warming oceans are already having impacts:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-06/researchers-shed-light-on-why-ice-shelves-shrinking-faster/6280404
@ Kasuha
“‘Gaining energy’ and ‘warming’ are not exactly the same thing. ”
Yes it is. The only way to determine if a chunk of water is ‘gaining energy’ is to plot the time history of its temperature and calculate the change in energy from the measured change in temperature, the mass of the water, the heat capacity of water.
The much quoted change in heat of the upper 2000 meters of ocean is usually plotted in units of 1e22 joules. To know that the heat content has changed by 1e22 joules over a period of a year REQUIRES that you determine that the temperature of the top 2000 meters of oceans–all of them–changed by roughly 3 millidegrees over that same time period.
Not an easy trick.
I suspect that Gates, Jim D & JCH (among others) listen to the Naughty Boys a lot.
“I say la, la,….la la la la la la”
Kasuha is exactly right here when he says
Gaining (heat) energy means heat energy is increasing.
Warming means the temperature is increase.
Just to give a completely obvious example, if I take a block of pure ice water at 0°C and add energy to it, the temperature will stay constant until the ice block begins to melt.
Heat energy and temperature are different physical variables and we need to apply thermodynamic laws and state information to make sense of the relationship between them.
@ Carrick
“Just to give a completely obvious example, if I take a block of pure ice water at 0°C and add energy to it, the temperature will stay constant until the ice block begins to melt”
Very good. Now how about providing a non-obvious example of a large body of liquid water above the melting point (a decent description of a generic ocean, which was the subject under discussion) gaining energy without warming. .
And how do you determine that it has gained energy without measuring its before and after temperature?
Bob Ludwick:
No, the topic is the Earth’s climate, part of which is a large body of liquid water, part of which is a small mass of air, plus other components in the system like clouds, which affect heat stored versus lost.
Since the temperature isn’t uniform, and you’ve only measured a small portion of the system, you can neither infer the rate of heating from the rate of change in temperature of that subsystem, nor can you infer the rate of heating of the full system from the rate of change in temperature of that subsystem.
In the case of the ice cube, if you know how much heat energy was introduced into the system and if you know the rate at which it releases heat energy, you can still infer the change in heat energy even though the temperature hasn’t changed.
R. Gates | March 6, 2015 at 8:36 am |
This is a huge fallacy that seems to be even circulated by some misinformed scientists. The facts are, warming oceans are already having impacts:
https://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/heat_content55-07.png
What warming? Since 2005 not much has been happening.
And what are these dread impacts?
> In the case of the ice cube, if you know how much heat energy was introduced into the system and if you know the rate at which it releases heat energy, you can still infer the change in heat energy even though the temperature hasn’t changed.
That relationship might be “robust” even when the variables can’t be determined with contrarian-proof precision, as in the case of the earth climate. If that relationship is robust, then our knowledge of “global heating” should also be quite robust too.
***
Too bad Frank Luntz has not polled “global heating” instead of “global warming.”
willard:
The relationship between surface air temperature and rate of increase in heat energy is robust only if you measure over a long enough time period with a continuous forcing that relatively short-period variability doesn’t significantly affect the outcome.
If we believe that the Earth is heating (I do) and if we think that the rate of warming for the last 15 years is not consistent with the prior 20-years (I’m on the fence on this one), then we can conclude that 15-years is not long enough of a period to use the relatively weak metric of surface air temperature as a proxy for rate of global heating.
> If we believe that the Earth is heating (I do) and if we think that the rate of warming for the last 15 years is not consistent with the prior 20-years (I’m on the fence on this one), then we can conclude that 15-years is not long enough of a period to use the relatively weak metric of surface air temperature as a proxy for rate of global heating.
Thank you, Carrick.
Your conclusion makes me contemplate the possibility that we need all the metrics we can get our hands on to measure the warming we should expect to follow from the heating.
If that’s correct, then I think R. Gates had a point.
willard,
I happen to think he has a valid point too.
In particular, I agree with focusing on better metrics for demonstrating the presence of AGW forcing than short-period variability in surface air temperature trend.
Laboratory atomic physics (line spectra) measurements are one. Radiative physics analysis of a column of atmosphere are another. This paper, which even Anthony Watts seemed excited about, is much more direct evidence.
I’m sure people can think of others.
willard, please read this as :
In particular, I agree with focusing on better metrics for demonstrating the presence [or absence] of AGW forcing than short-period variability in surface air temperature trend.
I think the people focusing on short-period variability in surface air temperature trend are arguing variability, therefore not warming. I don’t think the people who are arguing in favor of the AGW theory of climate change are going to point towards the variability as evidence in favor of their theory.
” then we can conclude that 15-years is not long enough of a period to use the relatively weak metric of surface air temperature as a proxy for rate of global heating.”
____
Bingo!
But the noisy surface air temperature metric that is subject to the natural variability of ocean to atmosphere latent and heat exchange gives faux-skeptics all the cover they need to continue with their pseudoscience.
However, you concede the point with accepting Carrick’s ‘not consistent’ at 3:42.
===========
er, Carrick’s 3:49.
=============
Why blame the models for 15 years when they do OK for 60 years including that 15. This should be a red flag for skeptics that 15-year trends are not representative enough of the model behavior to draw any conclusions from. This is an AR5 graph that gets too little attention.
http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/wp-content/uploads/cw_101013_fig2.jpg
What’s that old saying? Oh yeah, hindsight is always 20/20.
This point, taken in totality, I can accept just fine: (with caveat noted below)
“If we believe that the Earth is heating (I do) and if we think that the rate of warming for the last 15 years is not consistent with the prior 20-years (I’m on the fence on this one), then we can conclude that 15-years is not long enough of a period to use the relatively weak metric of surface air temperature as a proxy for rate of global heating.”
______
That the term “rate of warming not consistent” seems to imply that the climate system itself has not been gaining energy consistently – which it has Despite pseudoscientific claims otherwise, GH gas changes are ultimately a climate system energy imbalance issue and not strictly about surface temperatures. The reduction in the rate of flow of energy out of the system can be stored in a variety of ways in the system, and of course ocean heat is the largest single climate system energy storage location.
Try again, R Gates. You miss the point. Review the meaning of the highlighted part.
============
Jim D:
The problem with this argument is models were tuned for that 60-year period to match the surface temperature data. While it would be a really bad thing if they couldn’t reproduce the 60-year trend, simply reproducing it doesn’t demonstrate the models “got it right”, but are simply able to replicate what we already know.
A posteriori comparisons of a model against a data set is known as “verification”. It does not “validate” the model. When validating models, you always prefer to look at “out of sample data” when possible, but at the least data which were not consciously used to tune the model output.
That’s why recent 15-years of data are somewhat interesting, but I as I’ve commented above, I question the ability of the models to resolve features with that short of a duration.
If we focus on other data, such as ENSO statistics on mean absolute temperature, most of the models fair pretty poorly. So it looks to me like there is a fair amount of develop required.
Really you should have been alerted there’s a problem with your logic by the fact that the models have such a large range of climate sensitivity. There’s no way to reconcile that models with a sensitivity of 2°C/doubling with one that is 4°C/doubling. Clearly one of those models is flat wrong.
> Clearly one of those models is flat wrong.
I’d even go so far as to say they’re all wrong. Taken together, they’re useful. Which is why playing some against others is wrong, this time the wrong kind of “wrong.”
Yet we lukewarmingly see that kind of gerrymandering all the time. Nic is due for another round on this very Bat channel. Probably after the new show of invisible hands will subside.
R. Gates:
Well the problem with this cognate is the system doesn’t gain energy consistently, at least over short enough periods of time (pulling a number out of a hat “less than 10 year” intervals).
The Earth is not a closed system, and it is not a simple open system like a heated tea kettle.
As a result both the amount of radiant heat energy that makes it into the system and the amount of radiant heat energy loss vary over time.
And over short enough time periods (a few years) there are measurable periods with heat energy loss.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/4520911/Climate/OHC/OHC_Argo.jpg
Now this is the sort of variability driven by atmospheric-ocean oscillations. (My speculation is the primary driver for changing the short-period energy balance is probably cloud albedo modulated by these oscillations.)
Beyond that, “Alex I’ll take what the topic is a major tropical volcanic eruption for 1000 dollars.”
:-)
willard:
Um no.
They aren’t all wrong on ECS. Some of the models are certainly right, and others just as certainly wrong.
But you’ve missed the context here. JCH was basically claiming all of the models were “right” because they were consistent over a 60 year period that they should have been consistent with because they were tuned to it.
He should have realized that ECS is the primary predictor of temperature change, and by having models that vary between each other by this amount, that the amount of agreement he was getting between the models had to mean something else besides model validation.
Which was the point of my comment.
Heh. It looks like you got your initial thesis wrong, then ran off into the land of cluelessness with it.
My view is these tribalistic outbursts on your part are not only wrong, they aren’t even useful.
Decadal changes in cloud cover have been observed. A decrease in cloud cover in the tropics is consistent with ocean heat transport models and just happen to match up with temperature changes fairly well.
http://www.climate4you.com/images/HadCRUT3%20and%20TropicalCloudCoverISCCP.gif
Carrick, what doesn’t do well for the last 60 years is a model with little or no sensitivity to GHGs. In fact, their central effective TCS near 2 C per doubling would be a good takeaway as a guideline for planning. This still underestimates the land warming rate, so some caution would be advised in that direction, if any.
> They aren’t all wrong on ECS. Some of the models are certainly right, and others just as certainly wrong.
Just like we can be sure that there’s an odd or an even number of grass leaves on my lawn. All we need is to count them. And then there are audits.
In case of climate models, this accounting is looser. We must allow for some kind of margin of exactness. Right and wrong might as well be replaced with more right and more wrong.
And all this depends on our ability to determine ECS. Considering that models themselves are used for that task, this assumption is far from being trivial.
If bivalence is the hallmark of realism, realism is more plausible regarding true or false than right or wrong.
willard:
Heh.
I wasn’t discussing grass blades. I was discussing ECS, an essential emergent property of climate models.
You’re just being a bit too much of a simpleton for me to find this interesting, but thanks for playing.
Carrick – did I really say all models are right? I’m seldom that intelligent!
Jim D:
Yep that’s correct. The range of variability for ECS peaks around 3°C, though the recent slowdown in warming is maybe pulling it down closer to 2°C. I was only cautioning against the use of verification data for the purpose of validation, not utilizing some nefarious tactic.
And as I’ve pointed out, if the ECS (and TCS) end up being lower, it’s probably at the expense of increased natural variability. As I said above:
I’ve commented a bit on this too here.
JCH:
Well played. :-D
Sorry I meant Jim D.
Seemed to have broke the link:
Comment on natural variability.
Taking 60 years instead of 15 years removes natural internal variability that can’t trend much on average, and leaves solar variability and volcanoes. Solar forcing, if anything, declined meaning that again we need to view 2 C per doubling as a possibly low estimate. This effective TCR would have predicted a 0.7 C rise between 1950 and now, and therefore passes the first basic test that you would use. There are reasons this might be an underestimate, the sun as I mentioned, land warming faster as I mentioned, possibly less aerosols in the future as we move from coal, etc., and maybe there are offsetting factors too, but I think as a number this one is good enough, and there is no justification for more precision than just 2 C per doubling.
JimD, “Carrick, what doesn’t do well for the last 60 years is a model with little or no sensitivity to GHGs.”
I don’t know, the highly complex model appears to be hard to beat :)
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-h1bi_MVZFa0/VP3ZpOV22cI/AAAAAAAANGA/1SBYZTpUV3U/w671-h419-no/simple%2Blinear%2Bregression.png
1.6 sigma is 0.5 C
captd, a straight line is not much good, is it. Try a log fit. This one from Lovejoy gives 2.33.
http://www.rcinet.ca/en/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2014/04/LOVEJOY-WARM-GRAPH.jpg
JimD, “captd, a straight line is not much good, is it. Try a log fit. This one from Lovejoy gives 2.33.”
As usual you miss the point. If the climate models cannot out perform a simple linear regression they don’t deserve to be considered for anything, especially policy.
> I wasn’t discussing grass blades. I was discussing ECS, an essential emergent property of climate models.
I wasn’t discussing grass blaces either, but that your argument relies on realism and some kind of verificationnism, both of which are implausible in the model wars. I could discuss essentialism too, now that you used “essential emergent property,” which sounds as strange as Jim D’s use of one of the V&V words, which was what you were discussing actually, and not CS directly.
***
> He should have realized that ECS is the primary predictor of temperature change, and by having models that vary between each other by this amount, that the amount of agreement he was getting between the models had to mean something else besides model validation.
Even if we could reduce what Jim D’s claim to correctness it would still be quite useful:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verification_and_validation_of_computer_simulation_models
In that case, what would obtain is just another parsomatic exercise of the kind as the heating/warming a few days ago. I don’t think Jim D referred to this process at all. Therefore something’s amiss.
***
The assumption that we ought to reject models that have the “wrong” ECS falters on the simple observation that having the “right” ECS does not make a model right. This assumption may very be what justifies the addition of “essential” qualificative. The “but the modulz are all tuned up” cuts both ways.
In the end, holism wins.
Jim D:
I absolutely agree. I’d say 60 years is the minimum period we should be looking at.
IMO, 15 years isn’t long enough a data period to reliably study low-frequency secular variation such a AGW.
While uncertainty in solar variability and volcanos remains, we can at least identify these as the source of variability over those frequencies, even if there remains open questions about their impact on climate.
JimD, Here, let’s make it more fair for the high skilled and intelligent climate modelers of the world.
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-1blMRN-SQ9Y/VP3hRP3125I/AAAAAAAANGU/3MmXLuNxmn4/w675-h417-no/simple%2Blinear%2Bregression%2B3mma.png
13 month moving average and one sigma simple linear regression versus climate model mean.
willard:
Model Tuning is not what people think it is.
a couple samples: read the few papers on the subject.
question for next week.
List all the models and describe their tuning process. I dont know is an acceptable answer.
“Formulating and prioritizing our goals is challenging. To us, a global mean temperature in close absolute
agreement with observations is of highest priority because it sets the stage for temperature-dependent processes to act.
For this, we target the 1850–1880 observed global mean temperature of about 13.7°C
these guys do it differently
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/2011JCLI4083.1
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/2010JCLI3679.1
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2010JCLI3679.1
A new version of the atmosphere–ocean general circulation model cooperatively produced by
the Japanese research community, known as the Model for Interdisciplinary Research on Climate (MIROC),
has recently been developed. A century-long control experiment was performed using the new version (MIROC5)
with the standard resolution of the T85 atmosphere and 1° ocean models. The climatological mean
state and variability are then compared with observations and those in a previous version (MIROC3.2)
with two different resolutions (medres, hires), coarser and finer than the resolution of MIROC5.
A few aspects of the mean fields in MIROC5 are similar to or slightly worse than MIROC3.2, but otherwise
the climatological features are considerably better. In particular, improvements are found in precipitation,
zonal mean atmospheric fields, equatorial ocean subsurface fields, and the simulation of
El Niño–Southern Oscillation. The difference between MIROC5 and the previous model is larger than that between
the two MIROC3.2 versions, indicating a greater effect of updating parameterization schemes on the model climate
than increasing the model resolution. The mean cloud property obtained from the sophisticated prognostic schemes
in MIROC5 shows good agreement with satellite measurements. MIROC5 reveals an equilibrium climate sensitivity of 2.6 K,
which is lower than that in MIROC3.2 by 1 K. This is probably due to the negative
feedback of low clouds to the increasing concentration of CO2, which is opposite to that in MIROC3.2.
The strategy of the model tuning follows that adopted for developing MIROC3.2 and is conventional. Specifically,
the model’s time-mean states are compared at every 5 yr in addition to monitoring the global mean time series of several
important quantities [e.g., SST, surface air temperature (SAT), and the top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiative fluxes].
While we have not employed a quantitative metric to rate the model’s performance (Reichler and Kim 2008), the biases
of many atmosphere and ocean variables are evaluated in terms of their global means and spatial patterns at each tuning cycle.
This type of tuning is sometimes criticized because the same set of observational data is used for tuning and validation.
However, the bias structure is complex, as will be shown later, and the parameter values are uniform both in time and space.
Thus, we cannot control the model biases in an artificial manner when the global means of the primary variables
(i.e., radiative budgets and temperature) are tuned to be close to the observations.
Steven Mosher, yeah model tuning is very complex and difficult to objectively evaluate for climate science. I’ve mostly used Mauristen as a guide for how they do it, but it’s worth nothing that nobody is going to publish a model result where the model strongly deviates from the historical temperature record.
So suppose somebody had 9 model outputs that diverged and one that is close, how many model outputs do you suppose they will report on (I think the answer is “one”)?
Thanks for the pointer to MIROC5. I like this comment from the quoted material:
…though probably they mean what I mean by “verification”. Technically, you can’t validate using the same data set you used to model your data. All you can do is verify you can replicate features in the data.
With climate data it’s pretty much impossible to not use the same data set to verify because the time scales of observation are long compared to the time scales for modeling.
For comparison, you talk about on the order of 1,000,000,000 data points for surface temperature over ~120 years of large scale measurement. I get more than 5,000,000,000 data points in a day (over an area roughly the size of New Mexico) with my environmental observational measurements (and we just finished a 80 day measurement period).
In a case like this, the rate of data collection swamps the rate at which the researcher can parse the measurements, model tuning is virtually impossible, even though most of the data you collected involves “signals of opportunity” rather than artificially generated ones.
while you are correct it doesnt help to redefine the “pause”
The “pause” in the global temperature Index is “real.:, requires explaining.
That pause is a slowing of the rate of warming as measured by that index.
while that metric has showed a slackening of warming, other metrics do not. This last point, is besides the point.
That pause has the following implications.
1. It should temper our use of global indices as diagnostic metrics
2. It indicates that our ability to understand and predict the evolution
of global temperature indices is somewhat lacking.
trying to define the problem away or shift focus, is a fun debate tactic.
Bullseyes, heh.
===========
Mosher
“It should temper our use of global indices as diagnostic metrics”
Thank you for that knowledge; been thinking it myself and now can rest with the confirmation of an expert.
Regards,
Richard
that is unusually informative post, steven.
Carrick explains it far better than I do,
I’ve always been troubled by the use of an index that is a composite of sea surface temperature and land air temperature.
This is like combining data on red delicious apples and tomatoes to create a “red fruit index”.
While you have the historic information to create the index, and generate it with increasing accuracy, the utility of the index is a different matter.
Measuring land temperatures at intervals to a depth of about 100 feet and combining that with Argo measurements would actually be a global warming index.
Steven Mosher,
“That pause has the following implications.
1. It should temper our use of global indices as diagnostic metrics
2. It indicates that our ability to understand and predict the evolution
of global temperature indices is somewhat lacking.”
And in light of those observations, what is a reasonable course of action? Reduce fossil fuel use at all costs? Wait until our abilities to understand and predict are better? Some other alternative? Faced with very poorly defined long term risks, and somewhat uncertain but certainly huge costs for immediately reducing fossil fuel use, what policies make sense?
==> “and somewhat uncertain but certainly huge costs for immediately reducing fossil fuel use, what policies make sense?”
Interesting treatment of uncertainty:
…”somewhat uncertain but certainly huge…”
Sheeeesh, it’s ‘huuuuggge’. Without the error bars it’s ‘uuuggg’.
==================
“And in light of those observations, what is a reasonable course of action?”
huh.
I think the work done in 1890’s is good enough to base policy on.
I think the pm25 is a good enough argument to move quickly away from coal.
i dont need any temperature data.
Mosh
Moving away from coal is fine but what fuel source do you move to bearing in mind the unique circumstances of each country?
For example solar power is crazy in the UK but might be a great idea in the mojave desert
Tonyb
moshe, how much cooling, or pausing, before you’d reconsider?
=============
This is an excellent point Steven and understanding the flattening of the rise in global surface temperatures is a valid scientific question which many scientists have been pursuing. It is the conflation of this flatten in the rise into the suggesting that CO2 increases are not “warming the planet” that the trouble begins. For of course, the planet’s biggest energy reservoir, the ocean, has seen no such flattening. Precision of terms and understanding of dynamics is what all honest scientists should strive for.
r. gates, ” It is the conflation of this flatten in the rise into the suggesting that CO2 increases are not “warming the planet” that the trouble begins.”
If that is you opinion perhaps you should visit sky dragon sites to straighten them out. Here most are of the opinion the “pause”/”slowdown” just indicates that CO2 impact is not as bad as estimated and that natural variability/uncertainty is much greater than “projected”.
The original “pause” was coined to show that MET office “projections” were total garbage. When hype gets toned down you can start having a rational discussion, Mr. Human Carbon Volcano.
“Here most are of the opinion the “pause”/”slowdown” just indicates that CO2 impact is not as bad as estimated.”
_____
As long as one chooses to focus myopically on the near-surface temperatures over short-term time frames, rather than on the dynamical and physical factors that drive near-surface temperatures over short term periods. The “hiatus” tells us more about natural variability and ocean to atmosphere latent and sensible heat flux than about impacts from CO2. You know this, or ought to, but continue on with your misinformation campaign as desired.
r gates, “The “hiatus” tells us more about natural variability and ocean to atmosphere latent and sensible heat flux than about impacts from CO2. You know this, or ought to, but continue on with your misinformation campaign as desired.”
SSW and AWW increase is transfer of heat to space i.e. cooling. The hiatus is a combination of increased OH uptake and radiant loss. So instead of babbling you should look at the evidence.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-va92eFb49dY/VPyM_B7lZSI/AAAAAAAANDY/PMsw5YoWo4g/w893-h505-no/3030sst%2Bv%2B0-700%2Bvta.png
SST and OHC has a close relationship. Showing the bazilla-Joules without a reference is just plain unethical.
https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/-FgR7waujnjI/VPyOdtGCwtI/AAAAAAAANDo/rFmoeLEVUJQ/w691-h473-no/3030sst%2Bv%2B0-700%2Bvtahigh%2Blatitude%2Bfluctuation.png
Since you have publish on SSW events, the “unprecedented” warming in the higher northern latitudes is a indication of heat loss. What happens to the 30-60 N rate of ocean heat uptake?
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/inodc_heat700_0-360E_-30-60N_n.png
Well it pauses as well doncha know.
https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/09/comic_rollercoaster_610.jpg
You earn another award.
captn. D,
Net energy in the climate system has seen no “hiatus”. That’s the bottom line result we seen and expected from increased forcing from the rapid spike in GH gases we’ve seen. You can dance around this issue all you like, but the data (and the additional energy in the system) won’t just go away by your side stepping. This additional energy has real and measurable impacts on the system with longer-term surface warming only being one.
r.gates, I am a lousy dancer. While there is still some net increase in energy the accumulation rate has reduced. That means “sensitivity” to CO2 is less than estimated and touted by policy oriented putzes.
Fine tuning that estimate is the goal not creating some corporaphoiba society of pinheads.
“…the accumulation rate has reduced.”
_____
Linky? With the global ocean recently hitting the highest OHC on record, please let me know what metric you are using to make this claim of “the accumulation rate has reduced.” Even total global glacial ice mass has continued consistently down (a good measure of latent heat of fusion). Tropospheric heat content is puny compared to OHC.
Most logical conclusion: GHG forcing is likely overwhelming all natural forcings and energy accumulation continues in the system as it has for many decades without a hiatus. A myopic focus on the short-term ups and downs of tropospheric temperatures tells you very little about longer-term climate system energy accumulation.
R. Gates: A myopic focus on the short-term ups and downs of tropospheric temperatures tells you very little about longer-term climate system energy accumulation.
At the risk of sounding petulant, I do wish that climate scientists had discovered and popularized that about three decades ago, instead of only after the “hiatus” in surface and tropospheric warming had been well-established. Think of all the hysteria about “[the end of snow as we know it]”, “death spiral of Arctic Ice”, “[Katrinas every year]” , “[imminent end of the Maldive Islands]” and such might have been avoided.
If the rate of surface warming ever reverts to what it was in 1978-1998, will the warnings about short-termism be forgotten again? Will Santer’s “17 years” bite the dust after 4 years of unambiguous surface warming? Will the (recently “redefined”) ocean temperature oscillations be ignored?
r. gates, “…the accumulation rate has reduced.”
_____
Linky?”
You really shouldn’t need one. That 30S-30N SST versus OHC is a large portion of the ocean with the greatest energy. Reduction in the slope would be a reduction in the rate of heat uptake. The Rosenthal et al paper implies there is still some OHC increase required to get back to MWP conditions though if that is what you are looking for.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-hVnd1uOfaiQ/VKcIuuh2W_I/AAAAAAAAMD0/E7s1oqFYxok/w971-h515-no/lamb%2Bwith%2Boppo.png
Oh, I forgot, you are a Marcott kinda guy
Captain
As previously noted there was a late burst of LIA type cold
https://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/slide5.png
Combine this with a veil of volcanic dust that our friend Mr Gates is so keen on and the oceans will take a long time to warm up from their low point and reach the high point of the end of the MWP?
Tonyb
Here’s a good representation or proxy for what the general energy of the Earth climate system has been doing during much of the “hiatus” in “global warming”:
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n11/images/nclimate2387-f3.jpg
What we see is up up up goes the energy.
Rosenthal’s comparison with Mann and Moberg
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~blinsley/Dr._B._K_Linsley/Indonesia_%26_Pacific_Intermediate_Water_files/droppedImage_3.jpg
http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/~blinsley/Dr._B._K_Linsley/Indonesia_%26_Pacific_Intermediate_Water.html
They note that the increase in IWT is “possibly” due to the current radiant imbalance. As you know though the Volcanic forcing situation is far from being settled. If you assume that 1700AD was normal, then worry. If you assume pre-1200 AD was normal, not so much to worry about. Mann-o-nites and Marcott followers should worry because everything will be “unprecedented” compared to nothing. However, if the precessional solar cycle has any impact, things look about normal.
r gates, “up up up goes energy.”
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n11/images/nclimate2387-f3.jpg
while,
http://climexp.knmi.nl/data/isstoi_v2_0-360E_-30N_n_2000:2010a.png
flat flat flat goes temperature.
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-C8dZYrqYGB8/VP2e55wqGdI/AAAAAAAANFQ/QwnwK2lPelw/w789-h497-no/0-2000%2Bmeter%2Bvta.png
But energy does keep accumulating causing the deep oceans to warm at a rate of about 0.035 C per decade, 0.35 C per Century, perfectly consistent with long term recovery.
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/-4NOhaf24yrY/VPaY58vRvUI/AAAAAAAAM9c/Db4o-rwVC40/w843-h401-no/past%2Bclimate%2Boppo%2Band%2Bslr.png
By the way, perfectly written Steven. I could not have said it clearer.
Tony
“Mosh
Moving away from coal is fine but what fuel source do you move to bearing in mind the unique circumstances of each country?
Is this a real question? do you really want a list of every country and what I think?
Nope you dont want that.
What you want to do is make a point.
let me show you how
“Mosh, I agree that we should move away from coal. However, I think that different countries may have different time scales and different replacement options”
And I would Agree.
The point is at this stage I would humbly suggest that the best way forward is to work on broad agreement. Like agreeing to transition away from coal. Of course many people want the details worked out before the agreement. which means there is no progress.
Baby steps should have started 20 years ago.
For around 50B dollars you could take over all the coal business in the US, pay the employees a stipend and keep the coal in the ground And In CA we will spend 60B on a fast train. weird huh?
Mosh
I have no problem keeping the coal in the ground for that sort of money as we too are contemplating a high speed train in our tiny country costing 50 billion£..
However if the coal is kept in the ground WHAT will replace it? Nuclear is still unpopular with many. I like the idea of using wave energy in our country where nowhere is more than 70 miles from the sea but it would take many years to develop. Practical cost effective energy Options are limited.
tonyb
“However if the coal is kept in the ground WHAT will replace it?
##################################
other energy sources.. of course. That really isnt your question.
Nuclear is still unpopular with many.
Yes. hip hop music is also unpopular with many.
I like the idea of using wave energy in our country where nowhere is more than 70 miles from the sea but it would take many years to develop. Practical cost effective energy Options are limited.
Agreeing to moving away from coal does not commit you to a timeline.
Steven Mosher: I think the work done in 1890’s is good enough to base policy on.?
Does that not exclude the whole nuclear power thing, and ignore also the non-radiative transfers of energy from the surface to the troposphere, and ignore also the knowledge of natural climate oscillation? What exactly is your evidence that all of them are ignorable?
And what policy? How is that justification to avoid new large scale water projects and build bullet trains instead?
Steven Mosher: Agreeing to moving away from coal does not commit you to a timeline.
Indeed. That is the “business as usual” view: business as usual will move to alternatives as they are made cheaper.
“That is the “business as usual” view: business as usual will move to alternatives as they are made cheaper.”
That is different from agreeing to end the use of coal.
Matthew
“Does that not exclude the whole nuclear power thing, and ignore also the non-radiative transfers of energy from the surface to the troposphere, and ignore also the knowledge of natural climate oscillation?
Yes. It ignores them all.
What exactly is your evidence that all of them are ignorable?
The fact that I can ignore them is evidence they are ignorable.
What is your evidence that policy requires people to consider them?
And what policy?
Simple. A policy to limit emmissions.
How is that justification to avoid new large scale water projects and build bullet trains instead?
Its not. why would you think it was?
mosh said in reply to my comment
Nuclear is still unpopular with many.
—- —
Yes. hip hop music is also unpopular with many.
—– —
yes, but hip hop artists aren’t in control of the nations energy strategy are they? There are many in govt- and organisations who influence govt thinking- who will not commit to nuclear energy. There needs to be some alternative to coal and the other energy fossil fuel sources that would then immediately go into the firing line once coal was off limits.
I agree with your overall proposition (or at least I can see the sense of it) but without an alternative and a timeline it can’t happen.
tonyb
tony
“yes, but hip hop artists aren’t in control of the nations energy strategy are they?
########################
No. But your claim was that nuclear was unpopular with many.
Now, you seem to be making a different claim in the form of a question.
Do not make claims disguised as questions.
There are many in govt- and organisations who influence govt thinking- who will not commit to nuclear energy.
############################
Maybe. Not sure what that has to with commiting to an end for coal.
There are some who do support nuclear. There are probably some who could be convinced to change their views. One can never be certain,
#################################
There needs to be some alternative to coal and the other energy fossil fuel sources that would then immediately go into the firing line once coal was off limits.
###################
that’s an odd prediction and seems unduly alarmist.
I agree with your overall proposition (or at least I can see the sense of it) but without an alternative and a timeline it can’t happen.
##################
once again, a false sense of certainty. where’s your skepticism?
First you agree to end reliance on coal.
Then you negotiate a deadline.
Going forward if that needs to change, you change it.
Steven Mosher: Its not. why would you think it was?
I agree it is not, and I did not say that it was. But that is the policy choice made by California.
Mosh
I think we are sort of agreeing, albeit you seem to be in an argumentative mood today
There are very many in positions of govt who are against nuclear energy and it will take a great deal to change the minds they made up thirty years or more ago.
PersonalIy I would like to see an international CERN or Apollo type project that was sufficiently well funded for sufficient years in order to research and develop existing and new renewable energy technologies, battery storage and other related energy matters.
That would provide a consistent focus on energy that is currently lacking and help to drive it forward. Buying up coal fields might well be part of that international effort when the time is right, as an aspiration I could sign up to it.
. Tidal technology is decades behind that of solar and wind and has enormous potential so I would include that in the mix.
Tonyb
Steven Mosher: That is different from agreeing to end the use of coal.
No it is not, unless you assert that BAU will not eventually shift away from a finite finite energy source. We agree that a finite energy source requires an eventual shift away from it, do we not? Without an a priori timeline, we can agree to leave the timing to businessmen, engineers, investors, and customers.
Steven Mosher: The fact that I can ignore them is evidence they are ignorable.
That’s a good one. You are a science “ignorer”.
The evidence that they non-ignorable to the public at large is frequently discussed here: unknown to the late 19th century scientists (like plate tectonics), is the possibility that the present warming has occurred via processes independent of CO2. And more.
Seeing this discussion, this would be a great question for Judith to pose to her skeptics and herself. If it was free, would you reduce fossil fuel emissions by, for example, 30% by 2030. If so, why? If not, why not? This separates two distinct classes of skeptics. Those who see the problem but are only hindered by economic alarmism, and those who don’t even see the possibility of a problem, and are happy with burning everything, and finding more ways to recover and burn what is left.
Jim D: If it was free,
one could say anything and not be held to account.
Could you be satisfied with a conversion away from coal that took 50-100 years, a time span that you once mentioned?
Jimd
As you may have noted I have no problem with your proposition A.
However you have to replace coal with something, which seems to be the sticking point.
To that equation I would add cost. Your energy costs in he US are absurdly cheap by European standards. Do you move to our level of energy pricing? Do we aspire to move towards yours or do we exect to meet in the middle?
Tonyb
Matthew Marler, a linear reduction of 10-20% of current emissions levels per decade would achieve stabilization at or below 500 ppm, and, yes, that would be good. It is not impossible, and is not far from what the IPCC wants to start a path towards.
Mathew
The evidence that they non-ignorable to the public at large is frequently discussed here: unknown to the late 19th century scientists (like plate tectonics), is the possibility that the present warming has occurred via processes independent of CO2. And more.
##################
That’s not evidence that they are non ignorable. That’s evidence that some havent ignored them. That evidence that some think you need to understand more before making policy. What you mean to argue is that policy should or must consider these things.
Well. in a word, no. you dont get to decide what people choose to ignore when making policy.
Tonyb, a decades-long program to reduce and replace fossil fuels is what the IPCC aims for too. Their economics estimates put the cost in the noise level of future GDP growth uncertainty. Mitigation is far from the dominant factor in GDP growth, while adaptation has some more obvious costs associated with near-sea-level population centers that may be hard to avert anyway.
Matthew
“No it is not, unless you assert that BAU will not eventually shift away from a finite finite energy source.
Yes it is different. in simple years if BAU was shifting away from coal
in 30 years, i would suggest a limit of 29. In short, a timeframe that
is by definition not BAU.
We agree that a finite energy source requires an eventual shift away from it, do we not? Without an a priori timeline, we can agree to leave the timing to businessmen, engineers, investors, and customers.
We can agree that a finite source will be finite.
It does not follow that businessmen, engineers investors and customers
decide. In fact, they won’t decide. Obama has a pen and phone.
In fact the two observations are not connected at all.
We know enough about pm25 to end coal sooner than businessmen, engineers, investors and customers would like it to.
Steven Mosher: Well. in a word, no. you dont get to decide what people choose to ignore when making policy.
I think this is one of those days when you try to be “As dumb as Sen. Inhof”. If you ignore enough of the solid science you become a dunce.
Steven Mosher: Yes it is different. in simple years if BAU was shifting away from coal in 30 years, i would suggest a limit of 29. In short, a timeframe that is by definition not BAU.
Ah. You really do want a time frame.
It would be very easy to interpret Mann’s statement about the slowdown in such a way that he could see a turnaround as late as 2030. It seems like I remember a few years ago anyone saying the same thing being roundly criticized as being a denier. My, my, how things have changed.
I wonder what the probability would have been just a few years ago of Mann having said just what he said.
I see a few denizens haven’t gotten their orders from the main Mann. Better shape up or ship out.
Not the first, Julia Slingo – Chief scientist at the Met Office, comments at the Royal Society 2 day climate event in 2013:
“…it’s a great presentation about 15 years being irrelevant, but I think, some of us might say if you look at the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and it’s timescale that it appears to work, it could be 30 years, and therefore I think, you know, we are still not out of the woods yet on this one. …
and playing devils advocates (not necessarily believing it, she asked)
“…. If you do think it’s internal variability, and you say we do think the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is a key component of this, and it’s now in it’s particular phase, but was previously in the opposite phase, could you not therefore explain the accelerated warming of the 80s and 90s as being driven by the other phase of natural variability?”
audio here: (Q/A at the end – about 44 mins – 45 secs – Gavin asks a question as well, not enough aerosols)
reported here: (Trenberth saying something similar) :
http://notrickszone.com/2014/01/10/oops-trenberth-concedes-natural-ocean-cycles-contributed-to-1978-1998-warming-after-all-co2-diminishes-as-a-factor/#sthash.W4p10FCx.dpuf
Royal Society event here:
https://royalsociety.org/events/2013/climatescience-next-steps/
Mann will no doubt claim he predicted everything correctly, all the way up until his retirement (what ever happens to global temps)
A few years ago anyone who suggested warming had paused, however briefly, was a flat-out denier. Now they’re all writing papers about it. It’s a fine illustration of how quickly the pendulum can swing.
And it’s still swinging.
The temperature record has a lot of flat spots. It only has one that developed around 7 years after a record El Nino. Fooled a lot of people.
The temperature record goes up and down and round and round, but only one group of people insisted that in future it would only go one way.
Then they denied it wasn’t.
Now they write excuses for why they were wrong.
The pause is a period of warming.
Actually it’s a period of insignificant warming. The warming is less than margin of in measurement. Below 0.1C/decade is not significant.
Linky: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8511670.stm
Interview with Phil Jones of University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, publisher of one of the most looked-at temperature series CRUTEM.’
Q: Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?
Jones: So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.
Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming
Jones: Yes, but only just.
http://sd.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk/i/keep-calm-have-another-summit.png
Whats really interesting here is that no one has even mentioned that in fact temperatures could DECLINE for the next 25 years or so let alone there be a pause ect…
and monkeys could fly, nobody mentions that either
Incoming from the West.
===============
They can fly. They just haven’t perfected landing yet.
“and monkeys could fly”
Data, methods and code, please.
Andrew
They have Steven.
Made into space before man.
From the article:
…
Five species of acrobatic monkey that have long flown under the scientific radar have been named in South America.
These “flying monkeys,” or sakis, are notoriously shy and hard to study in their vast Amazon rain forest homes, where they’re known to sail quickly from treetop to treetop.
…
http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2014/08/29/animals-science-new-species-flying-monkeys-amazon-south-america-sakis/
What odds you’d give me, if you’d be a person to bet on it?
Old Ralph Mitchell ran a zoo,
Able was he ere Able was she.
=======================
That’s an ad Tolinem, Big Dave.
Did I mention that We know we are in a glacial period?
Fortunately, monkey herds fly from advancing glaciers.
=================
Flying monkeys have as many Nobel prizes as Mann.
MM @ er … Real Climate: ‘Climate Oscillations and the
Climate Faux Pause’ :
JC question to MM: How can the pause be both ‘false’
and caused by something?
Hey. it’s a faux pas.
Gates, heh I could have written that for you. I guess we need reminding. Although I tend to agree with you and Jim Ds schpeal and handy dandy multiple pauses chart above. At least for now anyway. The upcoming solar minimum may write a new chapter.
It seem AGW skeptics are putting a lot of hope in some Grand Solar Minimum somehow preventing the 21st century from becoming the warmest of the Holocene and probably the warmest since the mid-Pliocene. The odds are greatly against them.
You who place undeserved faith in the ocean balancing your unbalanced energy budget should look at the ocean heat content through the Holocene. It’s been a gradual decline curve for most of it. So where are you going to get the highest temperatures, atmospherically, of the Holocene, when the ocean is that much cooler?
=================
No Gates. The end of the Modern Solar Grand Maximum should do the trick.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_Maximum#mediaviewer/File:Sunspot_Numbers.png
Now please
http://sd.keepcalm-o-matic.co.uk/i/keep-calm-and-collect-more-data-1.png
In the Roman Optimum, the Claudian invasion of Britain came ashore where now you’d have a stiff hike to make. So we may have a way to go.
And since there are no simplistic levers or switches boosting or tripping the climate (even the ones with their own acronyms), I wouldn’t count on a Grand Max or Grand Min to do what Game Boy science anticipates. If the seas go up some more, or down, it’s all happened before, and very recently in climate terms.
Me, I have no trouble with pause, cooling or warming, since that’s what the entire Holocene has consisted of (not much pausing though). This is a huge fact universally accepted not that long ago, and still not refuted – just dodged.
Such generalizations are inaccurate. There’s no consensus among skeptics.
“So where are you going to get the highest temperatures, atmospherically, of the Holocene, when the ocean is that much cooler?”
—–
You seem to unaware that the current rate of ocean warming is unlike anything the planet has seen in at least 10,000 years.
R Gates faith is from magic thermometers.
============
Gates, link to the fastest rate in the last 10,000 years. I assume you are citing the same paper that states the LIA was the coldest period in that same 10,000 years and that the oceans haven’t caught up with the MWP yet?
rgates,
is there a global temp record of the holocene that works on a centennial timescale?
Ok Im going to directly call you out. There is no temperature reconstruction where you could compare the 21st century with all other centuries in the holocene ( ignoring the fact that we’ll all be dead before the 21st century data is in. You’re making stuff up for the sake of dramatic statements.
The Holocene Max lasted thousands of years.
If human civilization advanced as much in the next 100 years as it did during the Holocene Max, we’d be very fortunate.
HR
Call him out completely. There was a paper a few months ago that said there were several times in last 10,000 with warmer OHC than now. There was no discussion about rate of change. Impossible to do with any confidence level. Just another bluff by Gates.
R. Gates says:
“You seem to unaware that the current rate of ocean warming is unlike anything the planet has seen in at least 10,000 years.”
What are you smoking and where do I buy it? On what data, exactly, are you making this preposterous claim?
http://shpud.com/Science-2013-Marcott-1198-201.pdf
You talking about Marcott, above? Which makes all sorts of statements in comparing multidecadal and centennial time periods while at the same time stating their reconstruction does not resolve variability at less than 2000 years. I guess RGates should be forgiven for taking the lead from that sort of investigation.
HR
Gates may be referring to alarmists spin on Rosenthal et al 2013. The central conclusion of that paper was that the Pacific Intermediate Water Temperatures were warmer during the MWP than today and that those temperatures reflect he global temperatures. There was a secondary conclusion that recent warming is accelerating, but that conclusion was exaggerated by alarmists; stating that recent warming is 15 times greater than any other period of time – Rosenthal made no such claim and the data does not support the claim. CA examined the claim in Nov 2013.
Cheers
Richard
Actually I have no such ‘hope’ I’m just watching the same as you. Also I wasn’talking about just a grand solar minimum, I was talking about the current minimum we are coming up to:
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/ssn_predict_I.gif
My key word was ‘may’
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/images/ssn_predict_l.gif
The odds (according to the alarmists) were greatly against the Hockey Stick being spectacularly wrong……go figger!
“If human civilization advanced as much in the next 100 years as it did during the Holocene Max, we’d be very fortunate.”
_____
Too funny! The Holocene “Max”, or more properly called the Holocene Climate Optimum, was around 9000-5000 BCE, and temperatures had already begun the long slow decline through the rest of the Holocene (until the current warm period spike), by the time civilization really began to blossom:
http://historyohya.wikispaces.com/file/view/timeline%20chart.png/354620142/739×409/timeline%20chart.png
Though of course the some pseudoscientists don’t want to acknowledge the current modern temperature spike (or hockey stick blade), it is rapidly taking us back to Holocene Climate Optimum temperatures, which, again, occurred prior to the real rise of civilization.
Pingback: 2 new papers on the ‘pause’ | Climate Etc. | john namnik
“Given an expected forced warming trend of ~0.2 K per decade, our constrained ensemble of GCMs implies that the probability of a variability-driven 10-year hiatus is ~10%, but less than 1% for a 20-year hiatus. Although the absolute probability of a 20-year hiatus is small, the probability that an existing 15-year hiatus will continue another five years is much higher (up to 25%).”
Dr. Curry finds this interesting, I find it hilarious.
The issue is properly stated – there is a 1% chance of a 20 year pause, based on the GCMs. Thus a 20 year pause suggests the GCMs are pretty much garbage at predicting future temps to their claimed accuracy.
It is simply irrelevant what the GCMs predict as to the probability after 15 of the 20 years regarding the last 5 years.
I suspect the probability of a single year of continued hiatus after 19.years is much higher. And what does that tell you about the predictive capacity of the GCMs? Absolutely nothing.
I don’t think anyone knows the GAT anyway, so I have never been impressed by how long the pause/hiatus is. I know that some day the reported temp trends will again trend upwards. I know that the CAGW movement acolytes will then declare with absolute certainty (again) the impending thermageddon.
But the only point that is relevant to me is that the warmists own temperature reports are producing results that may shortly be in the 1% probability range of their GCMs predictions.
What this means is that IF you accept5 the temp reports as accurate, then those numbers are becoming ever greater evidence that the GCMs are useless for predicting long term temps with any useful accuracy at all.
Which will mean nothing to the warmists. Their is nothing in the physical world that they will accept as inconsistent with their religion belief in globalclimatewarmingchange.
It isn’t science, but it is fun to watch their intellectual contortions.
Consensus Climate Theory requires the climate temperature to rise as a function of CO2 and CO2 has been rising for seven thousand years. it has risen much faster in recent years. Temperature keeps doing what temperature did for the past ten thousand years and it is not going up with the CO2. The Little Ice Age started and completed while CO2 was going up. The cold period between the Roman and Medieval Warm periods started and completed while CO2 was going up.
http://popesclimatetheory.com/page38.html
Consensus Climate Theory does not have the sixty year cycle and it does not have the thousand year cycle. It can only match real data sometimes when the natural cycle is going up. It misses all the pauses and it misses all the down cycles.
Consensus Theory and Consensus Models are really lame. They forecast what they want to happen, they do not even match what they can see is happening. When you forecast what already happened and get that wrong, the king really has not clothes on. I hope you have heard and understand that story.
And what does that tell you about the predictive capacity of the GCMs? Absolutely nothing.
NO, that tells us absolutely everything. the GCMs should not be used for decision making.
As the “angels on the head of a pin” discussion about the pause/ faux pause continues, the more scientific and open minded of you probably will want to read this:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-06/researchers-shed-light-on-why-ice-shelves-shrinking-faster/6280404
This is yet one more reason that warming oceans matter.
The so called antarctic peninsula warming is restricted to a small area and is not without precedence.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v489/n7414/full/nature11391.html
Over the last millenia or so,the antarctic has cooled.
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v4/n7/carousel/nclimate2235-f1.jpg
Rgates
Interesting link. Thank you. The modern era seems to be closely reflecting the events of the early 1920’s when an arctic ice patrol was set up to warn vessels of icebergs brought down from Greenland due to the great warming there. I linked to a news reel film of it yesterday. However the warming in the Antarctic can be traced further back. This from my extended article ‘Historic variations in arctic sea ice Number two’ which contained hundreds of scientific and observational reports on the rapidly receding glaciers which have been melting in part since 1750 and generally from 1850.
“In a (1947) speech…the Danish Prime Minister said:
“In the last generation changes that have had a decisive influence on all social life have occurred in Greenland. …These changes are primarily due to two circumstances. Firstly, the Greenland climate has changed, and with it Greenland’s natural and economic prospects…”
“…herring catches off the north coast of Iceland have greatly diminished in the last seven years, possibly because of changes in the sea currents connected with the present climatic fluctuation. Herring has become an open sea fishery; its 1952 season was extended to November instead of ending as usual in August.”
“…the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea adopt(ed) the following resolution at its meeting in Denmark in 1948: “Having considered a number of lectures on climatic fluctuations, the Council recommends that these important and far reaching problems ought to be more closely investigated, and that these investigations might be adequately supported by the Governments in the different countries”
Also this;
“This 1932 article demonstrates that, unlike the modern era, the warming affected both poles whilst highlighting the continued retreat of the glaciers generally and in Greenland and Alaska specifically;
http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/23150667?searchTerm=greenland%20%20melting&searchLimits=
“Some great world change is taking place on the Antarctic Continent. Its glaciers are shrinking. L.A. Bernacchi, who visited the South Polar land 30 years ago, says that the Great Ice Barrier which fronts the continent with a wall of ice for 250 miles has receded at least 30 miles since it was first seen and surveyed. Sir James Ross…on the earliest Antarctic expedition of the nineteenth century, and those who followed him, left clear descriptions of this tremendous ice frontage and its position. It was a cliff 150ft. high and 1000ft. thick. But now it appears to be continuing its century-long process of shrinking; and that process may have been going on for centuries. It might imply, unless it is offset by some increase of ice in another less explored part of the Antarctic, that the climate of the South Pole is changing and becoming warmer. The shrinkage of the Alpine glaciers of Europe is a well-known and carefully measured fact. Professor Buchanan, of Edinburgh, drew attention to it twenty years ago, and showed from old and accurate drawings of (many) that they were retreating rapidly. This led to the continuous measurement of the Swiss glaciers (and) examination of other glaciers of the Northern Hemisphere, Greenland, Alaska, and elsewhere. Prom these measurements many geologists concluded that the northern part of the globe was still recovering from the last of its Ice Ages, of which the more southerly of its glaciers in Europe were a relic. If all the glaciers of the Southern Hemisphere as well as those of the Northern are shrinking, the geologists would have a new problem to examine. It would be whether, instead of areas of cold and ice having shifted on the earth, the whole globe is growing warmer. Even if that could be shown the change might prove to be temporary.”
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/08/22/historic-variations-in-arctic-sea-ice-part-two/
We must stop thinking this is all a new phenomenon. It has been going on for many decades or centuries. The planet appears to have been gradually warming since 1690 after reaching a previous peak sometime in the early sixteenth century. Why?
tonyb
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_image.aspx?image=ps236098.jpg&retpage=16632
Oscillation and disarray.
In Hokusai’s wood-block print,
Ejiri in Suruga Province,
Nature in playful mood
blows the leaves from trees,
sends scribes’ papers sailing
sky-wards, snatches hats
from the heads of peasants
who react with strange
physical contortions,
clutching flailing clothing,
grimacing into the wind.
bts.
Interesting how some threads fill up with “skeptics” telling us that there’s no such thing as global temps, and that even if there were they can’t be measured, and that surely anyone who isn’t a crook or a li*r or as d*mb as a rock can clearly see that it’s obvious that claims of increased global temperatures can only be shown by fra*d and/or deceit.
And some threads fill up with “skeptics” telling us that there’s no doubt that there’s been a “pause” in global warming (which is the term that advocates use to describe a short-term slowdown in a longer term rate of increase in surface air temps, which of course, is limited in usefulness for evaluating climate change as it doesn’t include SSTs).
It’s why I love the “skept-o-sphere,” folks.
Joshua, why would you expect/assume uniformity of views, even among people sharing a related scientific/intellectual outlook??? What seems to you to be evidence of something disturbing strikes me as independent minds working stuff out for themselves. Why should that distress or amuse you?
It often seems that Joshua and others want to portray any variations of views in the “skept-o-shere” (if such a thing exists) as evidence of contradiction and incoherence. In reality, there is no reason to expect uniformity of claims among a diverse group of thinkers working through highly complex issues.
Skiphil –
==> “Joshua, why would you expect/assume uniformity of views, even among people sharing a related scientific/intellectual outlook??? .”
I don’t expect uniformity of views across a given group of people that might be completely different from each other in every way imaginable except that none of them are concerned about the potential risks posed by ACO2 emissions….
But if someone who has no such concerns (about ACO2) argues that there is no meaningful way to quantify any trends in global SATs, then I would expect that if that person is open to controlling for biases so as to remain logical consist, they might voice disagreement with someone who says that the trend of increasing global SATs has “paused.”
And if someone who has no such concerns (about ACO2) argues that there has been a pause in the long-term trend of increase in global SATs, then I would expect that if that person is open to controlling for biases to remain logical consist, they might voice disagreement with someone who says that there is no meaningful way to quantify any trends in global SATs.
And when I look at posts and threads in the “skept-o-sphere,” I note a broad lack of the outcomes that I would expect to see if ”
skeptics” as a group were being (internally) logically consistent.
A couple of related points:
IMO, when you have highly polarized issues where “cultural cognition” affects how people interpret evidence, it’s perfectly natural to expect that some individuals will hold a variety views that don’t form a logically consistent whole.
We see that all the time.
So certainly, we should fully expect to see that kind of selective (or “motivated, if you will) reasoning play out on a larger scale.
Accordingly, we should fully expect to see threads at Climate Etc. where “skeptics” who think that there’s no scientific way to identify trends in global SATs line up to express the view that climate scientists (who say that empirically controlling for biasing variables there’s valid evidence of a trend of increasing SATs) are wrong – without other “skeptics,” who think that there’s been a pause, expressing disagreement with their fellow (no meaningful trend in SAT) “skeptics” thesis.
Not only that, we should expect that in addition to not expressing disagreement with their fellow (there is not meaningful trend in SAT) “skeptics,” we wouldn’t see the (there has been a pause) “skeptics” attributing the beliefs of their fellow “skeptics” to fraud or stupidity or “noble cause corruption,” etc. – causality the often say explains the causality behind the difference in their views and that of “realist” scientists.
Likewise, we should fully expect inconsistency in behavior if we reverse the comparison between those two broad groups of “skeptics.”
And lo and behold, we can easily see what we should expect to see.
I don’t find that surprising.
What is amusing, although also not surprising, is how people who self-describe as skeptics, as a group, are so resistant to acknowledging the influence of “cultural cognition” on “skeptics” as a group.
Skiphil –
I’m sure that previous comment bordered on being completely incoherent, so let me offer a possibly, marginally simpler (and more coherent) description.
If we expect that “cultural cognition” will influence “skeptics” as a group, what kinds of behaviors might we expect to see relative to the issues of global SATs and “the pause?”
If we expect that “cultural cognition” will influence “skeptics” as a group, what kinds of behaviors would we expect that we wouldn’t to see relative to the issues of global SATs and “the pause?”
If we expect that “cultural cognition” will influence “skeptics” as a group, what kinds of behaviors would we expect to see w/r/t how they explain the differences in views among “skeptics” as a group relative to how they explain the differences between “skeptics” as a group compared to how they explain the differences between “realists” climate scientists as a group and “skeptics” as a group?
If we expect that “cultural cognition” will influence “skeptics” as a group, what kinds of behaviors would we expect not to see w/r/t how they (“skeptics”) explain the differences in views among “skeptics” as a group relative to how they explain the differences between “realists” climate scientists as a group and “skeptics” as a group?
Are we up to 100 reasons yet for the pause that five years ago was not happening? Uniformity indeed!
kinda stunning isnt it.
Not really, some people are wronger!!!
I would say kinda thorough. The trouble with warmists is they seem to be of a singular focus (e.g. splicing together a global mean temperature series as if the input data were truly of any value) versus skeptics who seem to me to be, well, skeptical of a broad array of items.
Basically, some skeptic’s BS detectors go off over here while others go off over there. If the warmists were paying attention they might realize that if so many intelligent people’s BS detectors are going off in so may directions that maybe “Houston, we have a problem.”
To me, it’s tunnel vision and group think. To warmists it’s “kinda stunning” and conspiracy theory.
What’s different between you and me? I have no dog in this fight. I’m a disinterested observe who, through a lot of reading, has come to the conclusion that not all is as the warmists say, or even close.
The biggest red flag is the preponderance of overly-confident proclamations made my warmists. The most recent example being that 2014 was the “warmest year ever”… not even the more correct “warmest year on record”… even when the chance it was was less that 50%.
Something is, my dear friends, rotten in Denmark.
That there is an abundance to be skeptical of seems hardly interesting Joshua. What many of us find interesting is how some seemingly bright people buy into many of the AGW memes hook, line and sinker.
So some think there is “no such thing as global temps”. Let’s consider this. Exactly what is a Global Mean Surface Temperature? Is it a physical parameter that can be measured? To me, it would be the average temperature over land measured at the exact same time of day. It is certainly not some conglomeration of (Tmin + Tmax)/2 spread like peanut butter then homogenized and sliced and diced.
On the other hand, if one looks at the fantasy that some call GMT, it is clear it isn’t going up these days.
So both skeptical viewpoints are quite consistent.
scott –
==> “On the other hand, if one looks at the fantasy that some call GMT, it is clear it isn’t going up these days.”
Notice how you changed the argument?
Why did you change the argument?
I didn’t change the argument because there isn’t “an argument”.
Note my first line “there is an abundance to be skeptical of”.
I could be, you know, that maybe, just maybe, there is more than one item spouted by AGW supporters for which there is a counter argument.
Last time I checked, there is no limit to the number of items an individual can argue against.
For Lordy sake Judith, stop calling it a pause or hiatus. Those words bogusly imply it’s a temporary halt (in warming) – which we obviously do not know.
All we can say at this stage, is that it is a plateau or levelling. Which may turn out to be a peak, for all climate science knows.
It’s stopped warming. That’s all. For scientists to be unable to say “stopped” is an indictor of how deep the rot is.
+1
We know that this is a warm period. We have data for past warm periods. We can look at the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods and use that information to forecast how this warm period will play out . We are in a pause or hiatus and we will likely get a little warmer, in phase with the 60 year cycle, or stadium wave, whatever you want to call it, but the Roman and Medieval Periods only got a little warmer than now and we will likely get only a little warmer this time. We are on a perfect path to repeat the past.
The Consensus alarmists say that Natural Variability Stopped, when we invented thermometers, and that now, climate can only do what it never did in the past ten thousand years.
That is total BS, climate will use natural variability to do just the same as it has done for ten thousand years. The not understanding of natural variability does not cause it to stop.
If any of you want to understand future climate, study and understand past climate, or give up, because, otherwise, you can’t get there from here.
Pope
That natural variability plays a part, does not rule out man also playing one.
It has been warming for hundreds of years and we are adding more CO2 so it is very likely it will start to warm again. So pause or hiatus is fine for now. Using those terms does not say how long they will continue or whether temperatures will do as they did in late 1800’s and in the 1970s and go from a pause into a slight cooling. Plateau or leveling are also good terms. But it is likely that the GCMs greatly overestimate the warming and even if they are only off by a little, it is unlikely that increases of even 2C will be harmful even though there will be obvious responses by nature. Changes of 1.0 C in a hundred years are no problem – we just saw that. The unknowns are 1. what effect, if any, will the weak solar cycle and the upcoming (drawn out) minimum have, 2. what effect will PDO and in a few years the AMO have, and 3. will there be any major eruptions of volcanoes.
“It has been warming for hundreds of years and we are adding more CO2 so it is very likely it will start to warm again. So pause or hiatus is fine for now.”
That’s using a prediction to describe the condition. They’re not supposed to be voodoo scientists, are they?
We know we are in a glacial period.
That looks like three strikes you’re out cold, but we’re waiting on the replay decision on foul tips.
=================
Following the termination of a variability-driven hiatus, we also show that there is an increased likelihood of accelerated global warming associated with release of heat from the sub-surface ocean and a reversal of the phase of decadal variability in the Pacific Ocean.
After showing that they don’t really understand the climate process and that they do not have a forecast with any skill, they continue to say they will eventually come out right. There is a good chance that there will be some more warming. We are early in a warm period that is similar to the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods. Those Warm periods did last a few hundred years and this warm period will last a few hundred years and it may very well top out a little warmer than now. Use past warm periods to forecast this warm period. Their forecasts have been wrong since they got the big computers and started believing the output from their computers and stopped really thinking. I don’t think that climate scientists have thought right since they threw out the wonderful Theory by Ewing and Donn in the 1950’s. You should never give people computers without teaching them how to use them. Computers take in the junk you give them and they output the junk that results. If you don’t know why there is a pause, you don’t understand something that is important. Go back and figure out caused what really happened or get out of the field. Don’t keep telling me that you are really right when your computer output keeps telling me that what already happened could not have happened. Don’t keep adjusting the data to show something really happening that really did not happen.
GET HONEST, EVEN IF IT HURTS.
In my opinion, the key is probably the Sun, but not via increased TSI.
Jasper Kirby pretty well nailed this on the first and second pages of his paper, Cosmic Rays, Clouds, and Climate.
http://rivernet.ncsu.edu/courselocker/PaleoClimate/Carslaw%201992%20Cosmic%20Rays,%20Clouds%20and%20Climate.pdf
The idea that TSI varies enough to cause climate change seems to me to be like flogging a dead horse. UV variation, yes. Magnetic variation, yes. Solar wind, yes. But TSI is not going anywhere.
One vital fact that I have not so far seen in cosmo-climatology papers is the discovery by NASA of the Local Fluff.
Voyager Makes an Interstellar Discovery: December 23, 2009: “The solar system is passing through an interstellar cloud that physics says should not exist.”
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2009/23dec_voyager/
This was reported in Nature in the Dec. 24 2009 issue.
Nature Letter: A strong, highly-tilted interstellar magnetic field near the Solar System, M. Opher, F. Alouani Bibi, G. Toth, J. D. Richardson, V. V. Izmodenov & T. I. Gombosi, Nature 462, 1036-1038 (24 December 2009)
Editor’s summary: Voyager 2, now on the ‘interstellar’ leg of its mission, entered the heliosheath, the region just outside the Solar System beyond the solar wind termination shock, in August 2007. The strength and orientation of the magnetic fields here are important factors in determining the evolution of gas clouds in the Galaxy, and a new set of Voyager 2 data provides the first in situ measurements of the deflection of the subsonic solar wind plasma flows in the heliosheath. The field strength in the local interstellar medium is greater than previous estimates, at 3.7 to 5.5 microgauss. The field is tilted at 20–30° from the interstellar medium flow direction and is at an angle of about 30° from the Galactic plane.
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v462/n7276/full/nature08567.html
Frederick,
Agreed. If you ask most climatologists (or Skeptical Science) about solar magnetic and wind changes they come back quoting figures for TSI.
I have a 1975 book which includes a New Scientist 1973 reprint by John Gribbin which says “the Sun’s slightest hiccup does affect the Earth’s atmosphere measurably.” e.g. increasing the size of Alaskan low-pressure systems, suggesting a trigger mechanism which occurs when there haven’t been many sunspots. Which I’m translating as some sort of a learning mechanism. Complex systems research was hardly off the ground in those days.
Did JG have any ideas about mechanisms?
======
JC comment: I think this paper is a useful contribution, and I have no concerns/questions about the methodology they used. The interesting result is that once you have a 15 year hiatus (something that is already pretty unlikely), then according to climate models, the probability of it continuing another 5 years is 25%.
Once you have a 15 year hiatus, (something that is really likely with the 60 year cycles) the probability of it continuing another 15 years is very likely.
If this was the first hiatus in the instrumented data, we should be surprised. This is not the first hiatus in the instrumented data and no real scientist should be surprised. The 97% clique is surprised. The skeptical majority are not surprised.
The thousand year cycle, with warm peaks in the Roman and Medieval and Current time period will most likely peak, a little higher, a couple hundred years later than now.
They accept that the ocean cycles can cause a ‘hiatus’ but don’t seem to accept that the ocean cycles have contributed to warming ever since the LIA.
Since the early 20th century warming was at much the same rate as the late 20th century warming it follows that increasing CO2 emissions provided little or no contribution.
What do they suggest was going on with the ocean cycles from MWP to LIA?
The truth is that global cloudiness changes over decades and centuries change the proportion of incoming solar energy able to enter the oceans to drive the climate system and that affects the relative balance between El Nino and La Nina events to cause net warming or net cooling of the atmosphere.
The cloudiness changes appear to be related to solar activity and I propose changes in the meridionality / zonality of the jet stream tracks rather than the Svensmark hypothesis which involves cosmic rays and cloud condensation nuclei.
Stephen
here is a chart showing (reconstructed) CET through the LIA from my recent article ‘The Little Intermittent Ice Age’.
https://curryja.files.wordpress.com/2015/02/slide2.png
The hiatus can be clearly seen in the last decade or two. Other periods of relative stability can be observed including the thirty years from 1922 when there were no overall very cold years and in the 1730’s and mid 16th Century.
As can be noted in the article, the long slow thaw from 1690 can be clearly seen. The descent to the low point in 1690 comes from another high point in the early 16th Century where preliminary research indicates the temperatures were broadly similar to today. This is prior to the MWP.
I would like to see explanations for these warm/cold periods and most especially the considerable Hockey stick from 1690 to 1740 noted by Phil Jones and for the general warming over the last 330 years or so. We concentrate too much on the present without first explaining the past which might have lessons for our understanding of the climate.
tonyb
Climatic science is a young science: many stupid theories came up (and will come up) before a clarified knowledge starts to settle down.
But we already have the epicycles lessons from ancient astronomy, so please “climatic experts”, think before writting a paper. Do you actually want that future generations laught at your name when talking about climatic science?.
The smart ones have already worked out the trick is make your claims for so far ahead in time you will not be around to be asked why you got it so wrong .
But by then you collected your cash and got your career shorted out so what is the real cost of doing it ?
Well in reality most papers will vanish into the black whole of time , a very few will be consider decades from now and fewer still will be held up has icons or comedy classics . And in fields where there is a lot of publishing, and climate science thanks it the bucket full of funding that seems to be available is one of them , this can happen much quicker than you think .
You have to face up to the fact that no matter how scientifically worthless or lie filed the papers are, most will have no long term affect at all on those that wrote them , while the short term benefits are clear both professionally and personal .
Refering now to Michael Mann: the scientific work of this lad is just for laughing. Please compare his hockey stick with his AMO-PMO-NMO “epicycles” (in fig.3). This is like Groucho Marx’s: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well, I have others”.
Pingback: Último descubrimiento calentólogo: La Pausa no existe, pero por fin hemos “comprendido” lo que la causa | PlazaMoyua.com
For those who thought the pause didn’t exist and must be wondering why these two papers are therefore addressing a fantasy, it is worth remembering that in 2013 the Met Office brought out three papers on the reasons for the pause. (the one that doesn’t exist)
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/news/recent-pause-in-warming
tonyb
The one that dare not say its name.
The spin of claims that we are about to experience a warming burst reminds me of the Lean & Rind (2009) paper which said that there would be a warming of 0.15C +-0.03 between 2009 and 2014. Climate scientists have, predictably, not discussed the failure of this prediction – it’s interesting that neither of the new papers mentioned here cite it.
The Lean & Rind paper led to one of my favourite Guardian headlines:
“World will warm faster than predicted in next five years, study warns.
New estimate based on the forthcoming upturn in solar activity and El Niño southern oscillation cycles is expected to silence global warming sceptics”
oops – just noticed Paul’s comment:
Can we all come back in 5 years, and see if the pause has continued, and there are any new papers saying, exactly the same…
LOL
From 2009:
27th July 2009 – Guardian – World will warm faster than predicted in next five years, study warns
“New estimate based on the forthcoming upturn in solar activity and El Niño southern oscillation cycles is expected to silence global warming sceptics ..”
“… The world faces record-breaking temperatures as the sun’s activity increases, leading the planet to heat up significantly faster than scientists had predicted for the next five years, according to a study.
The hottest year on record was 1998, and the relatively cool years since have led to some global warming sceptics claiming that temperatures have levelled off or started to decline. But new research firmly rejects that argument……”
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2009/jul/27/world-warming-faster-study
Pingback: Latest Attempts To Explain Global Warming Pause Fall Flat | The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
IMHO if this is a “pause” or an “hiatus” then likely every other point on what appears on a longer timescale to be a cyclical, almost sine-wave graph, would also have to be called a “pause”.
Acceding to the recent approximately 20year period of no warming being called an hiatus, plays into the hands of the warmists. For all we know, this “pause” is the precursor to a temperature descent, isn’t it?
Bobski
Judy?
Bottom line: The pause in global warming is NOT finally explained.
How explanations for/about
the previous, warming 1900-1930’s –
the previous pause/cooling 1940’s-1970’s,
the previous warming, late 1970’s -1990’s…..
he current pause (half way through.?)
and maybe future warming –
oceans seem to fit rather well.
second question how much (same as seen previously? )
or does this internal variability, only work in the future.. LOL
No explanations for those either. Basically, the IPCC has ‘explained’ the warming from 1976-2000.
And nobody is apparently worried that these ‘explanations’ contradict each other nor that we already had a similar failed prediction from Smith et al 2005 that the pause/plateau would end in 2009 and then shoot up? So is every science editor on the planet a complete sucker for BS or what?
Every 5 years they’ll extend the pause 5 years and say it was entirely expected because then they have 5 years more funding and you can always rely on the faulty memory of journalists & politicians. Only cooling will turn around this massive confirmation bias – maybe.
Dr. Curry — Have you ever given a presentation on what you think will happen when we come out of the “Pause”? (that “tables” Wildcards like the Sun)
I discussed how to approach this in http://judithcurry.com/2014/03/19/uk-us-workshop-part-v-broadening-the-portfolio-of-climate-information/
OT. I can’t remember having seen this before. What is remarkable is when it was written and who wrote it. Otherwise, it’s just alarmist boiler plate.
From the article:
Beginning in a decade or two, scientists expect the warming of the atmosphere to melt the polar icecaps, raising the level of the seas, flooding coastal areas, eroding the shores and sending salt water far into fresh-water estuaries. Storm patterns will change, drying out some areas, swamping others and generally throwing agriculture into turmoil. Federal climate experts have suggested that within a century the greenhouse effect could turn New York City into something with the climate of Daytona Beach, Fla.
http://www.nytimes.com/1985/05/12/weekinreview/ideas-trends-continued-a-dire-long-range-forecast.html
Does this mean Floridians will retire to New York?
I really liked James Gleick’s book about chaos back in the day. I didn’t realize he was Peter Gleick’s brother. Seems alarmism might run in the genes, eh?
So, around 1978, if someone had written the following statements he would have been considered scientific and correct?-
>>>
Looming cold spurt could reshape climate debate
The pause in global cooling is finally explained.
Scientists now know why global cooling has slowed down
<<<
This is not science in my opinion but a series of excuses in trying to defend the indefensible; that scientists have been awarded millions if not billions of dosh to develop a hypothesis (prophecy) that has failed dismally. They are defending the money that they got.
“How can the pause be both ‘false’ and caused by something?”
I love this line. The degree of selective memory on display regarding the pause is impressive even by Climate Change debate standards. Mann isn’t the only one to have dismissed the existence of a pause outright, take a great deal of time, come up with an excuse for it but never change his public stance that it doesn’t exist in the first place.
“I didn’t kill her, but if I did this is how I would have done it” seems apt here.
Attribulation: The unhappiness, pain, or suffering caused by attempts to determine the cause of global warming since 1900.
The first step is to admit you have a problem. And the initial problem for GCMs is that they fail to account for all forcing and feedback factors. “Internal variability” is largely (perhaps exclusively) the result of lagged feedback responses. Failing to account for this major feedback mechanism (i.e., internal variability) means that GCMs are incomplete. Redefining this flaw in the models as an exogenous random variable is essentially a magician’s misdirection technique to make the audience believe in the accuracy of the GCMs.
oh ye of little faith
the Messiah Heat will come
you non-believers will be made whole
unless you are consumed outright in Endofsnowmegeddan
The 15-year trend to 2006 was .26C. That’s less than ten years ago. Whatever caused the pause happened after 2005. 3 La Nina events, one of which was the 2nd strongest seen in the record versus one El Nino could fool anybody. So don’t feel bad.
The most real thing about the pause is the number of smart people it completely fooled.
smart people being fooled?
I thought that impossible in the new era of scientific consensus
Adopting the term “pause” without having properly defined what this alleged “pause” was and what criteria need to be fulfilled to call it a “pause” lacks scientific rigour. A “pause” from what?
Hint: global warming.
I suppose that this was the preconceived conclusion to be transported, by the ones who invented the “pause”-meme.
What is the definition of “pause”? What are the criteria to be fulfilled to claim a “pause”? How does a “pause” distinguish from a non-“pause”?
The definition of a pause would be a brief flattening of the GMT around 7 years after a record El Nino. That explains the “we got totally fooled” portion.
JCH,
that is not statistically distinguishable from the longer-term global surface warming trend which itself is statistically significant. Thus, we have global surface warming and an absence of global surface warming co-existent at the same time in such a case. However, a statement and its logical negation can’t be both true at the same time.
Jan/JCH
Do you believe that the current set of GCMs show sufficient accuracy to be relied upon to determine what conditions are likely to be in 50-100 years?
Simple question–will you answer?
Rob Starkey,
If you mean climate conditions with “conditions”, yes, with respect to the global mean surface temperature increase and some other variables, as well as for their large-scale pattern, under the condition that the forcings from the various climate drivers, which were used as input in the Earth system models for the projections, will develop similarly in the real world. I expect that the answers we obtain now with those models won’t change substantially by adding complexity and further improving the physics in those models, although magnitudes of the changes in these variables may be nudged up or down somewhat.
But not for all variables and features of the climate system. We are not able to simulate all features of the climate system with sufficient accuracy yet.
Rob – short of an actual, in the wold-fashioned sense of the concept, abrupt climate change taking place between now and 2100, GCM are up to the task with ease.
I’ve long since come to conclusion they bloody well can be. Just ditch the boolean logic, it is not always applicable. Boolean works only if you define your concepts, like ‘negation’, in its framework. Language does not always do that.
Jan – whatever the surface temperature of the earth is at 2050, it will be slightly less than it would have been if not for the 4 La Nina events since 2007 versus two El Nino events and the brief period when the PDO was actually below the zero line (which is likely over and done).
The Eastern Pacific, from South America to Alaska, was cold. Was.
And the negative phase of the AMO is not going to save them because the AMO is just going to hitch a ride on the upswing in the GMT that is being caused by the now very warm, and getting warmer, Eastern Pacific.
Watch the pause happen and unhappen.
“They’re actually giddy with excitement.”
Why would the be giddy with excitement with the Earth melting?
Andrew
I pledge allegiance to the pennant
Of the 50 low-carbon footprints of America
And to the totalitarian state for which it stands
one nation, under Gaia, with no liberty and no justice for all
The “pause” was given it’s name by the CAWGists that wanted to cover their arses. The pause, especially it’s length, is actually a contradiction – reductio ad absurdum – that is very inconvenient. Hence the panicked responses, such as: it isn’t happening, the heat is in the deep oceans, it’s natural variability (an argument not used when the trend shows warming), it’s gonna really get really really hot later, yada yada yada.
The CAWG team is collectively, no pun intended, twisting in the wind.
No, they’re not twisting in the wind. They’re actually giddy with excitement. Feb 2015 is possibly a record, and with certainty exceptionally warm. El Nino watch is back, this time with the BOM model fully on board. ENSO neutral in positive territory is assured for months in a row. 2015 stands a chance to be a warmest year. I put 1998 on this one so maybe you can understand how it completely fool people. The 10-year trend to 2006 is ,24C. The the La Nina dominance and brief spat of negative PDO index that caused the flattening happened.
And now it is unhappening.
It’s not waiting for 5 more years.
JCH: “They’re actually giddy with excitement.”
To me this cuts to motive. If CAGWists were actually rooting for humanity wouldn’t they be delighted to be wrong?
It’s not about science and it’s not about humanity. It’s about fear, guilt, greed, power, and money. Oh wait, that is humanity.
================
Oops, replace the redundant money with fame, and put the redundancy to my account.
=====================
Of course they would be delighted to be wrong. Unfortunately they’re not wrong.
Giddy with the excitement of not being delighted.
============================
JCH: “Of course they would be delighted to be wrong.”
Well then, how can they be “giddy with excitement” at the prospect of being right and we are all going to fry?
I commented on Doug McNeall’s hiatus paper at his blog on Feb 24th, but he hasn’t got around to clearing it from moderation yet. Maybe he’s busy. So I’ll repeat (part of) what I said there over here.
—
The high probability of a 15 year hiatus continuing another 5 years is not a big surprise to me. Consider the simple example of a sequence of events occurring independently with probability 0.82. The probability of 15 in a row is 5.1%. The probability of 20 in a row is 1.9%. The probability of 20 in a row given that 15 have already occurred is 37%, the same as the probability of 5 in a row.
Obviously, trends are not independent year to year, but going from a 5% probability to a 1% probability is not such a big jump – multiplying by an independent 20% event would do it.
Hi NiV, thanks for your comment, nice to see you commenting here.
Hi Judith, It’s good to visit, again.
I had thought Doug’s paper was interesting, largely because of figure S1 in the SI. It seemed to me that it told you which climate models predicted pauses of this length (and thus were not in contradiction to observation) and which were already in conflict with reality at the 95% or 99% levels. Given that the list was chosen from those not already eliminated by their failure to reproduce El Nino magnitude, this seemed like a useful way to make progress.
Make a bunch of different predictions, observe reality, eliminate the theories that predicted wrongly. We’ve always argued in the past that short-term trends were just weather, and insufficient to be able to reject models (and of course for a Bayesian, how much evidence is needed to reject depends on ones priors), but it seems to me that this work quantifies what the models predict, and we are reaching the point now where we have sufficient data. Climate scientists should be pleased!
Interestingly, it seems there are still about half a dozen models left that are *not* contradicted by the observation of the pause, at least, not so far. It would seem like an interesting thing to do to check what *else* they say. As far as studying the potential causes of pauses goes, surely models that predict such pauses are most likely to be informative? How were these models able to simulate such events where the others weren’t? Doesn’t that seem like a more interesting question to you?
Hi NiV, I have a post forthcoming that is related to this topic. Waiting for a guest post from Nic Lewis (which is waiting on publication of a paper), then my post will relate to the diminishing ‘fat tail’ of climate sensitivity, including a look at the few models that seem to be doing well (for right or wrong reasons, not exactly sure at this point).
I honestly do not see how a model that makes no attempt to predict the pause can be said to have predicted it. It’s serendipity.
Try this, JCH. I honestly do not see how a model that makes no attempt to predict can be said to have predicted.
==================
Judith,
I’ll look forward to it.
JCH,
Climate is the statistical distribution of the weather, and models only predict climate, not weather. No model will “predict the pause” in a specific sense, because that’s weather – random from run to run, depending on unknown initial conditions. The models don’t claim to be able to do that. But they *do* claim to be able to predict the *climate* under different circumstances (like with/without extra CO2). One specific pause can’t be predicted, as that’s not climate, but the *distribution* of pause lengths surely is.
NiV – thanks. That’s basically how I have been thinking about it.
Seems that some very precise definition for the end of the “pause” needs to be presented now. With 2014 at least tied for the warmest troposphere on record and 2015 very possibly warmer, what do AGW skeptics suggest is an appropriate definition for the “end” of the hiatus?
Should the temperature trend since 2001 should reach or exceed the temperature trend since 1979, ( around 1.5 K / century ) then there is no pause.
But even 1.5K per century rate is less than the 2K per century rate the IPCC AR4 promised, less than the AR4 low scenario, and less than Hansen C, so…
When the 30-year trend to present starts going back up. It’s currently .165C and dropping.
Let’s see:
The past decade was the warmest on record.
The past years was the warmest five year period.
2014 was at the minimum tied for the warmest calendar year.
The period of January 2014 through Jan 2015 was the warmest 12 month period.
Yet, the “hiatus” is not over.
An odd sort of “hiatus” from warming, when there has been so much, uh…warming.
==> “Should the temperature trend since 2001 should reach or exceed the temperature trend since 1979, ( around 1.5 K / century ) then there is no pause.”
Without a clear description that pinpoints a mechanistic change of the balance of factors that influence climate, why would a shorter trend be more meaningful than a longer trend?
I would say it barely not over. Like a smidgin. It can still put a spot of fog on a mirror. There’s either a pulse or it’s dead. I actually heard a doctor say that once.
I just checked it. By my definition, the pause went totally paws up on January 31, 2015.
R.Gates –
Re: your 2:09
Without a clear agreement about what the “pause” is, how could you expect to reach agreement about when it might be over?
You are suggesting weighting shorter-term time spans over longer-term time spans…seems problematic to me; but that same problem applies to the those who claim that there’s been “pause.”
Even JCH’s definition seems problematic, as it gives more weight to a shorter time period relative to a longer time period.
My time period is 30 years. Wanna make it 48 years, it’s probably even deader yet.
My point really is that there has been no let up in the accumulation of energy in the system, and the hiatus has proven to be more related to the impossible-to-model natural variability in ocean to atmosphere heat exchange rather than anything to do with an actual change in forcing to the system. But the “anything but CO2” crowd hates this kind of thinking as it takes one more pseudoscience outlet away from them.
JCH
Your beef is with your man, Mann. Give him the lecture. Tell him he’s wrong. Clearly, he has seen the light. Take off those Ray-Bans.
R. Gates,
“2014 was at the minimum tied for the warmest calendar year.”
So you buy into the hype that a ‘global average temperature’, calculated to within 2 hundredths of a degree, with 35% certainty, qualifies 2014 as “tied for the warmest calendar year?”
And whatever happened to the argument that global surface temps are a poor proxy for globalclimatewarmingchange?
How sciency of you.
http://i179.photobucket.com/albums/w318/DocMartyn/HADCRUandratewith361monthsmoothing_zps9c5006e5.png
The data on ocean heat contain being of very poor quality and quantity, we (including R Gates) have precious little reason to claim it is going up).
And with surface temperatures stubbornly going nowhere despite ever-increasing CO2 (which the models seme to give a 1/300 chance of happening), ‘precious little reason’ seems to be the basis of the Consensus in general.
Yes, but what could this mean in their paper: “Failure to adequately communicate this possibility could lead to allegations of overconfidence in GCM projections, especially if the existing hiatus continues until 2020 and beyond.” If you say that 5% probable, and the next several events are ~25% probable, so we mustn’t reject the hypothesis. Rather, we must be sure to communicate this possibility to others so that they don’t reject it either.” Am I reading this wrong?
Part in the middle didn’t come across well, because of the less than sign. It should say, If you say that the events so far are more than 5% probably, and…
The problem I have with CO2-Climate-Catastrophe – specifically that additional CO2 in the atmosphere will cause temperatures to jump 3,5, or even 7 degrees – is that we’ve already seen 50%/130 ppm increase in CO2 in the last hundred-ish years. The temperature increase in that time is about 0.7 degrees which correlates to a much lower temperature increase than noted above.
The real argument by the catastrophists is that there will be some form of massively positive feedback – and there’s no indications whatsoever of this.
Yes, simple correlation of temperature with radiative forcing, for the last third century, yields a low warming result:
http://climatewatcher.webs.com/TCR.png
Beyond that, global average temperature is just not that important to climate.
Fact is that all CO2-fired climate models had predicted a steady rise in temperature of between 4C to 6C above the norm within 100 years. But contrary to their predictions, during the first 20% of the purported 100 years we have seen 0% temperature rise. I do not know what to call this if not total predictive failure.
Alellul,
Not a fact.
Not a fact.
Not a fact.
I know how to call the stating of alleged facts that aren’t facts.
Say 2-4 degrees, interpret ‘steady’ over a century, and it’s close enough for government work. Now, answer the question?
====================
Jan responding to a series of assertions with ones of your own isn’t an argument…its a pissing contest.
You owe it to: yourself, the readers of your blog, and to the rest of the unfortunate people who get sucked into reading your effluvia to learn some rhetoric, and then employ it. Reading your responses is like listening to a second grader argue. Its sad really..
As for a working definition of “the pause” why not supply one yourself, and ask others what they think of your definition.
Here are some quick questions for you…questions which you haven’t engaged with yet, although you have been presented with them numerous times: it really shouldn’t take you more than a few minutes to give us your view.
Here goes Jan:
Please evaluate the GCM’s record for making accurate “projections” over the last three decades; do you think they exhibit any skill?
Just what features of climatic variance do you think the current iteration of GCMs do a good job of capturing?
ENSO?
Decadal variance?
warming in the early 20th century?
cooling in the 50’s 60’s and 70’s?
the recent (to be kind to advocates of these models) diminution in the rate of warming we are experiencing?
Do you not concede that the scale of the models is at least a few orders of magnitude to coarse to capture any of the emergent climate phenomena, like cloud formation, or rain?
Do you, with your background in mathematics and physics, seriously maintain that we have the ability to solve the coupled nonlinear differential equations that grossly describe climatic variance?
The pause is going to transcend into a down turn in global temperatures before this decade ends. I reach these conclusions based on past data , which I describe below.
Further the reason I think the pause will start to transcend into a down turn trend are two main reasons ,those being Milankovitch Cycles, and Prolonged Solar Minimum Activity, which are going to remain in a cooling phase going forward for sometime to come.
My thoughts on what drives the climate conform best to what the data shows(present/past), unlike AGW theory which totally ignores the data both present and past.
AGW theory wants the data to conform to what it suggest, not the other way around.
https://climateaudit.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/md99-2275_jiang2015_1.png
The above graph is more supporting data which shows since the Holocene Optimum from around 8000BC , through the present day Modern Warm Period( which ended in 1998) the temperature trend throughout this time in the Holocene, has been in a slow gradual down trend(despite an overall increase in CO2, my first chart ), punctuated with periods of warmth. Each successive warm period being a little less warm then the one proceeding it, and independent of CO2 concentrations.
My reasoning for the data showing this gradual cooling trend punctuated with warm periods during the Holocene ,is Milankovitch Cycles were highly favorable for warming around 8000 BC, and have since been in a cooling cycle. Superimposed on this gradual cooling cycle has been solar variability which has worked sometimes in concert and sometimes in opposition(warm periods) to the overall gradual cooling trend , Milankovitch Cycles have been promoting.
In order to get a further refinement of the historical climatic record the phases of the AMO,PDO and ENSO ,have to be further superimposed upon this record.
Not to mention volcanic activity which again data shows a strong correlation between it and prolonged solar minimum activity. That is what the data shows.
Finally an evaluation of the earth’s magnetic field strength should also be recognized, for it is a moderator of solar activity.
I feel very strongly that if all of the items I suggested in the above are evaluated properly they would account quite nicely for the historical climatic record and further will show us where the climate is heading from this point in time.
They are indicating cooler times ahead not warmer times, but then again this is only data which AGW enthusiast ignore if it does not fit into their scheme of things.
The policy of climate science today is to IGNORE past data and go with what the pathetic climate models predict. A big mistake.
More data below on my thoughts ,and how they conform to the climatic data.
http://www.murdoconline.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/gisp2-ice-core-temperatures.jpg
It’s all just natural variation.
I find the CET data rejects the hypothesis of “climate change” (>58%) & current “global warming” (>72%) and that overall global temperature has not changed significantly more than would be expected. I do however detect a marginally higher trend over a 50year period ending 2009 with about 2.5σ and a 35% chance of normally within the dataset. However this is inconsistent with an established trend as progressively shorter periods toward the present time tend toward lower trends (40yr: 1.7σ, 30yr: 1.3σ, 20yr: 1.6σ, 10yr: -0.9σ).
http://scottishsceptic.co.uk/2015/03/06/proof-recent-temperature-trends-are-not-abnormal/
In order to proof Fermat;s last theorem we run an ensemble of GNM (Global number model) to estimate the probability of such a theorem being true. Using an inverse Bayesian method and an independent application of the law of the iterated logarithm we find that there is a vanishingly small probability of this theorem being incorrect.
Dang, I should have gone into climate science, publishing a math paper is just way to hard.
I so cannot get my head around results like these.
A bit of Asbergers combined with a degree in math just leaves me with a blank stare when confronted with pseudo logic…
pseudo logic is probably too strong….
towers of assumptions….
“An issue here is that any non-linearities in the climate system might invalidate your stats”
you think?
“We did a considerable amount of new analysis (Rank histograms! Statistical tests!), and eventually convinced everyone that the assumption of linearity was valid for our analysis.”
scratch that
“of linearity was valid for our assumption…”
no wonder i have a blank stare….
https://dougmcneall.wordpress.com/2015/02/23/internal-variability-in-surface-temperature-and-the-hiatus/
And what exactly is the probability space here?
I dont mean to diss the results, but face it, its all just speculation.
Yet on they trudge, certain, blessed, wounded.
=====================
thx kim, Im tired of talking to this nickels dude….
Nickels
Keep writing, someone is reading. You have a point regarding assumptions of linearity. I wonder if that assumption is valid when considering time evolution of the dynamical system. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold…
H/t fellow Irishmen, or their progeny, and math pedigreed folks
Dumb question from a near mathematical illiterate:
If the probability of a given year being no warmer than the last despite GW is say 75%, the the probablity of 15 years of pause is .75^15, or .013 – 1.3%, pretty unlikely.
The probablity of just 5 years of pause, .75^5, is .237. or approx. 25% – not that unlikely.
But given that we’ve already had 15 years of pause, surely the probably of extending to 20 years is the same – .237 – so where is there anything remotely surprising and/or non-trivial about the following conclusion?
‘ from an observationally constrained ensemble of GCMs ‘
Translation : ‘We discovered this window thingie in the modelling office and thought we’d the be the first ever to take a look through it. Gosh’
Please hear the sound of one hand clapping
The more I follow this, the more I become convinced a lot of the “science” is little more than mathematical masturbation.
I bet I have a better chance of predicting the next Superbowl winner running simulated seasons of Madden NFL on my son’s X-Box than these guys do of predicting climate changes.
I’m glad that ‘Scientific American’ and Dr. Mann have confirmed that the Faux Pause is real, I mean just a slowdown, but then again the ‘pause’ was just a figment of my ‘denialism’, but, I mean, there is a ‘pause’ although it’s fake…and that when things are not as bad as predicted, it’s worse… and that sometimes anthropogenic looks natural…
Hysterical
forget ‘Housewives of Atlanta’
‘Climate Scientists of the Western World’ is way more entertaining
no offense
I can’t stop watching
http://www.c3headlines.com/are-todays-temperatures-unusual/
AGW theory needs to reconcile with the data in order to have any validity.
These two papers are examples of an interesting emerging taxonomy of ‘explanations’ for the pause/hiatus/plateau.
It used to be that pause denial was fashionable. The most recent such attempt was Mann in Sci Am April 2014. Steve McIntrye took that risable attempt apart. This seems to be a genre now going out of fashion, since it makes one look silly or worse.
It seems we have two remaining genre. Both result in logical contortions, putting CAGW fans a bit on the horms of a dilemma.
1. The first paper is the model ‘internal variability’ explanation genre. It is better than the Marotzke paper that Nic Lewis shot down over at Climate Audit, but is making the same basic argument. Model stuff just happens. But this genre undercuts IPCC faith in the models, and the projections from them as IPCC portrayed. Examples from AR5 WG1 SPM:
“Warming of the climate system is unequivocal”–why then the need to explain the pause?
“Total radiative forcing is positive…” — but the pause happened anyway.
“Climate models have improved since AR4. Models reproduce observed continental scale surface temperature patterns and trends over many decades…”–except for the last two, when they didn’t so we have to use this excuse.
“Observational and model studies of temperature change…provide confidence in the magnitude of global warming in response to past and future forcing.”–except when it doesn’t.
The other genre uses as excuses various natural variations ‘not well captured’ in models. Mann’s new paper is of this sort. But that is an admission that the models are at best incomplete. It directly undercuts the IPCC’ s anthropogenic attribution. Again from AR5 WG1 SPM:
“It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid 20th century.” Not if Mann’s new paper, or any of several others in this genre, are even half true. Since if natural variation can cool, it can also warm…like it did from about 1920 to about 1945.
Mother Nature is not following the IPCC script. Its too late to rewrite AR5 to do what should have been done to retain some shreds of credibilty–address the pause rather than obfuscate, obscure, and in some cases even hide it while asserting 95% confidence. See essay Hiding the Hiatus for examples.
This changing of sides by Mann is breathtaking. The world hasn’t seen a flip like this since Benedict Arnold.
I wouldn’t go so far as to say he’s changing sides. Just boxed in by nature but still fighting his corner.
The bride of Frankenstein.
“So where does all this leave us? Internal variability only partly explains the pause – how big that part is remains somewhat unclear, but there is growing evidence that it is the major cause of the pause. The critical issues are how long will the pause last, inability of climate models to simulate a pause beyond 20 yrs with increasing CO2, and what will happen once the internal variability flips to a warming situation.
Is there a looming ‘warming spurt’ at the ‘end’ of the pause? Maybe, but it depends on what is going on with the sun. Many solar scientists expect a coming solar cooling.”
I expect a sharp rise in negative North Atlantic and Arctic Oscillation episodes through the next ten years, which implies both regional cooling and drought. Globally though, the oceanic response of more frequent El Nino conditions/episodes and a renewed warming of the AMO, would initially raise the global mean surface temperature for a few years before it starts to fall.
At the end of the pause, or likely slow decline after an initial rise, there would be a temporary sharper decline for a number of years as increased solar activity turns the AMO colder, and increases La Nina. As in around 1910 and in the late 1970’s. Following a ~69yr envelope, the AMO would cool from the mid 2030’s, and reach its coldest point in the mid 2040’s.
From the frame of reference of oceanic modes being amplified negative feedbacks to the solar signal rather than internal variability, the pause is what would be expected. With the warming of the AMO since the mid 1990’s being an amplified negative feedback driven by increased negative NAO due to declining solar forcings, causing a sharper rise in the global mean surface temperature than any forcing can do, just like El Nino does over shorter periods. With the solar forcing being reduced, it would only be natural that temperatures would level off after rates of poleward ocean transport had reached a new balance.
> … more frequent El Nino conditions/episodes …
And what would cause that ? And more frequent than when,please ?
More frequent than the mean of course. There is a known association between negative North Atlantic Oscillation and El Nino, so increased negative NAO increases El Nino.
I do not see it the same way as Ulric who gives to many outs as to why maybe the decline in global temperatures in response to low solar activity may not proceed.
That is not to say a jig saw pattern will not appear but it is gong to be very apparent that the overall trend in global temperatures will be down and probably until 2040 or so when this prolonged solar minimum may end..
For more info. look at my post at 10:19am.
I suggested that there would likely be a slow decline in global temperature after an initial rise.
Re your 10:19 comment, Iceland and Greenland temp’s are essentially inverse proxies for rates of forcing of the climate. It makes no sense to relate their trends to global temperatures.
If the pause is not explained then the warming is also not explained. This means that all government regulation and tax based on the ‘CO2 Control Knob’ meme is totally unjustified, meaning this has been the biggest scan of all time.
As for Mann’s AMO –
A relative who only comes around once every 30 years walks into your dark living room and flips the first switch. Nothing happens. Then they flip the 2nd switch. The lights come on. A second relative, who only comes around a minute or so after the first relative, comes into your living room and observes the 1st switch is on and the lights are on, and there you have the discovery of the AMO.
You can flip it all you want, until somebody flips the real switch, ain’t nothun gonna happen. For the immediate future, the AMO is going wherever the GMT goes, which is up. The real switch is hooked up to the Eastern Pacific Ocean – power.
https://twitter.com/BigJoeBastardi/status/567779547237650432
Has the AMO flipped presently, time will tell.
In any event going forward I expect the PDO /AMO to be in cold phases and El Nino’s in response to the cold phase of the PDO to be weaker and less frequent.
In the coldest years of the Dalton Minimum (1807-1817), there were El Nino events on average every 2.4 years:
https://sites.google.com/site/medievalwarmperiod/Home/historic-el-nino-events
…2.2 years
You sure it isn’t 2.25 years? :)
There is a quasi-biennial oscillation that ranges between 28 and 29 months according the literature but looks like more in the 27 to 29 month range depending on length of solar cycle. There is a connection between QBO and ENSO which appears to be amplified at times depending on length of solar cycle.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2010JD014325/pdf
That study indicates shifts from 32 months for La Nino to 25 months for El Nino.
El Nino events normally occur every 3-4 years.
Ulric, “El Nino events normally occur every 3-4 years.”
With an oscillation you have the downside too, La Nina and the shift combination for La and El can give you a range from 2 to 7 years I believe. El Ninos are a bit weird because the big ones tend to be near a solar minimum and according to some papers non-linearly couple with the Schwabe cycle. Non-linearly coupled appears to mean PITA.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00024-014-0929-1?no-access=true
That is pay walled, but the abstract is pretty straight forward.
Woof, but no mechanism. The last line of your 9:11 comment is a great come on to click the link. I am thankful that so many Indians communicate so well in English, cuz now I needn’t spend $40.
===================
Kim, “Woof, but no mechanism.” But it’s non-linearly coupled :)
“..El Ninos are a bit weird because the big ones tend to be near a solar minimum..”
At the regular low in the solar wind speed a year or so after sunspot minima, as in 1997/98 and 2009/10. Also at sunspot maxima there is often a minimum in the solar speed.
http://snag.gy/hSqT4.jpg
The increased frequency of El Nino in the coldest years of the Dalton Minimum (1817-1817) was also marked by a zero Aurora sightings in most of the years:
http://www.leif.org/EOS/92RG01571-Aurorae.pdf
typo sorry.. 1807-1817.
I see no evidence that the El Nino period has ever been anything else but four to five years, going back as far as the CET. Each time there is a temporary disruption of timing this fundamental frequency returns after it is over.
Arno, see 1807 to 1817:
https://sites.google.com/site/medievalwarmperiod/Home/historic-el-nino-events
And fig here:
http://www.clim-past.net/6/525/2010/cp-6-525-2010.pdf
click on picture of AMO to get it in full.
From the stadium wave theory, and I agree with this when combined with the other climate variables I have mentioned namely solar/volcanic.
Which Dr. Curry did mention as wild cards.
The AMO sets the signal’s tempo, while the sea ice bridges communication between ocean and atmosphere.
“…while the sea ice bridges communication between ocean and atmosphere.” I like that description. A physical binary network switch that has a memory.
I agree with Bob Tisdale’s comments on this paper. I do not regard the Steinman et al. paper to be a useful contribution owing to methodological problems in ‘reinventing’ the AMO and PDO indices; this issue was discussed in these previous posts:
If the “forced component” is a linear function of the forcing, and if the model-based estimate of the forcing is accurate, then the Steinman et al redefinitions of the AMO and PDO indices are likely more accurate than the pre-existing definitions It remains to be seen whether the assumptions are in fact accurate, and whether the redefined AMO and PDO are in fact improvements.
What Steinman et al have shown yet again is that the consensus theory is sufficiently vague that it can always be redefined post-hoc to “predict” unforeseen climate data. The test of their conjecture will be future out-of-sample data.
Even assuming for the sake of derivation that their model of the forcing is accurate, why is the temperature a linear function of the forcing instead of the derivative of the forcing being a linear function of the derivative?
Time for nap. That is supposed to be “why is the temperature a linear function of the forcing instead of the derivative of the temperature being a linear function of the forcing?
Hee, hee, I knew it was wrong but couldn’t figure out just how. A nap won’t help me, I’m sorry to say.
============
Actually, I did substitute ‘temperature’ for ‘derivative’ and it made better sense than any of the other constructions, but I hadn’t followed your argument well enough to be sure. Now, in multiple retrospect, it is all much more clear.
=============
“No, climate change is not experiencing a hiatus. No, there is not currently a ‘pause’ in global warming.”
As I am sure you all know, this is the first sentence over at RC right now,
At least on my computer.
As best I can tell, this an anti-factual statement.
I suppose it would be against decorum to use another more simple word to describe it.
Relax, I’m only thinking ‘spin’.
Well, there goes my upthread hypothesis that pause denial was going out of fashion. I stand corrected by RealClimate, but not on the “since they would look silly or worse” part. Forget the silly. Its the worse. And yes, decorum prevents most more precise descriptions here, although there are several that would apply. Bazoonga comes to mind.
One of my late fathers favorite jokes. A politican comes to solicit votes on a SW US Indian reservation. ‘A chicken in every pot’! The Indians cheer in their language, Bazoonga! Encouraged, the politician says, ‘with your help, two chickens in every pot’! Bazoonga! Bazoonga! The politician was very pleased, and to schmooze yet more favor, on the way back to his limo complemented the Chief on the beautiful horses in an adjacent corral, asking if he could go visit them, too. The Chief smiled and said, ‘Sure, just don’t step in the bazoonga.’
“Anti-factual”. Permission to reuse? Quite a useful summation. Regards.
permission granted
as long as I can appropriate ‘warmunist’ (fair, in my mind, after Grijalva)
BTW, appreciate your informative comments, especially last couple threads, clearly stated stuff for someone new to this
Anti-factual for warmunist (which originates from former Czech president Vaclav Klaus in his 2007 book)… A fair trade. Done. And regards.
They need an anti-flatual over there.
===================
Gas-x anyone?
+1
The two new papers don’t explain the hiatus. Why? the Equipartion Principle is highly relevant, particularly in that part which describes when the Principle breaks down, such as in the troposphere. The number of neutrons in the CO2 molecule cannot be ignored in any accurate description of its heat absorbing powers. The climate modellers should know this and apply it. The singularity in global average temperature in 1940 would then be abvious as indeed would the subsequent 1970 to 1997 rise, via the oceans.
“So where does all this leave us? Internal variability only partly explains the pause – how big that part is remains somewhat unclear, but there is growing evidence that it is the major cause of the pause. The critical issues are how long will the pause last, inability of climate models to simulate a pause beyond 20 yrs with increasing CO2, and what will happen once the internal variability flips to a warming situation.”
Brilliant work once again. The Big Question for climate science is what are all of the natural processes that underlie the Stadium Wave and what are the phase durations of each. A scientist’s greatest virtue is humility.
Nothing would serve up a larger portion of humble pie than “the climate,” as presently measured, cooling during the remainder of this century. Meanwhile, all the efforts to change the measuring cup for the data to support the AGW narrative make for great vaudeville.
Someday I’m gonna have to tell you about the time Arthur Smith spent his precious time trying to find out the earliest I ever wrote ‘We are cooling, folks; for how long even kim doesn’t know.’ That was some slapstick, there.
=====================
“JC comment: The interesting result is that once you have a 15 year hiatus (something that is already pretty unlikely), then according to climate models, the probability of it continuing another 5 years is 25%.”
Mathematically this means the chance of any pause lasting 5 years for the models is [*up to] 25%.
Therefore for 10 years it is 6.25%
15 years 1.55%
and for 20 years 0.33%
So they are saying it is a 1 in 300 year chance of having a 20 year pause, or less*.
Models likely broken somewhere?
“JC comment “Internal variability only partly explains the pause – how big that part is remains somewhat unclear, but there is growing evidence that it is the major cause of the pause.”
No.
Internal variability is/are the unknown unknown[s].
If we knew the causes they would not be unknown.
Therefore we cannot have growing evidence that something unknown is causing the pause, we cannot measure growth in something unknown.
There is growing evidence that the models are wrong and Climate Sensitivity with all its feedbacks is much lower than we thought, even Judy’s level.
“The titles pretty much speak for the articles: The inference is that hiatus has now been explained; and that it should end soon with a warming ‘burst.”
How does this “burst” occur. How does the heat get back into the troposphere in light of the second law. If the lost energy is in the oceans then they have the lag function badly wrong.
Assume there is an imbalance in the amount of energy entering the system and leaving the system. More is being retained. For a period of time there is a balance between the amount of energy stored in the oceans and the amount of energy causing surface air temperatures to go up. Call this 1970 to 1999
Then for the period of time from 1999 to 2012 an anomalously larger amount of energy is being retained in the oceans and denied to the global mean temperature: the surface. Consequently the growth in the surface air temperature flattens.
Suddenly whatever was causing this anomalously larger amount of heat retention in the oceans reverts to the balance more like that which existed in 1970 to 1999, and the SAT resumes warming, only at a higher rate because the accumulation of ACO2 in the atmosphere is higher.
Of the increased amount of energy stored in the ocean by the anomalous conditions, some is in the layers moved around by ENSO events. During ENSO events some of this retained heat can be moved to the surface and moved to the atmosphere.
The vast majority of the new heat stored in the oceans cannot get back out until the TOA imbalance reverses. Because of the enhanced greenhouse effect, that cannot happen for a very very long time. Unless the sun is snuffed out.
JCH: Your remarks appear to assume that each molecule of CO2 always absorbs the same amount of energy from the earth’s IR. That is the same as assuming that the number of neutrons in a CO2 molecule is a constant yet we know that as a molecule ascends in the troposphere, it can lose a neutron in the much lower temperature (see the equipartion princviple breakdown at low temperatures), The neutron ie a heavy particle that readily vibrates absorbing energy asa it doe..Thr loss of a vibrating neutron could have caused the singularity in1940 and indirectly the present hiatus.
“Assume there is an imbalance in the amount of energy entering the system and leaving the system. More is being retained.”
No, the amount of energy entering and leaving a system like the earth is in balance. There is no stored energy. The energy in the system is distributed unevenly due to convection and currents and clouds and conductivity so some areas become and remain warmer or colder for a short while relative to their surrounds.
It is impossible for their to be an imbalance.
Anchtech : It is impossible for their to be an [energy] imbalance
Of course it is possible. Do you dispute the notion of a GHG?
Muon | March 7, 2015 at 6:55 am |
“Angech: It is impossible for their to be an [energy] imbalance
Of course it is possible. Do you dispute the notion of a GHG?”
GHG do not cause an energy imbalance.
The GHG retains more energy in the atmosphere than a non GHG atmosphere.
The energy coming in still equals the energy going out.
The energy is not trapped. It is just that different substances have their own reflective and absorptive properties so they do not all run along at the same temperature under a heat source like the sun.
One side of the earth is under the sun the other side is pouring energy into space and the earth is rotating..
Of course there are energy imbalances on the earth.
This is not due to GHG, it is due to the temperature differentials which a spinning earth [hence change in position relative to heat source] , moving atmosphere and ocean go through.
The energy out still equals the energy in.
Re JCH comment above
“Then for the period of time from 1999 to 2012 an anomalously larger amount of energy is being retained in the oceans”
There was a TV show called “the Dome” I think, which would be perfect for this line of reasoning. Someone put a dome over the surface of the sea trapping the heat for 13 years. Wonderful science fiction explanation.
The sun causes an energy input which has to flow back out. There are myriad channels but the end result is that the energy in equals the energy out of the system [earth]
Angtech:
The GHG retains more energy in the atmosphere than a non GHG atmosphere.
The energy coming in still equals the energy going out.
Here you flatly contradict yourself in two (consecutive!) sentences. Or is is that you didn’t know that CO2 is steadily rising?
Muon, do you agree energy in equals energy out?
of the earth as a system?
Your answer apparently is no.
Hard to argue with that sort of logic.
The earth can get hotter than the sun eventually if it keeps accumulating energy by your reasoning.
But, it isn’t.
As a non heat source * it can only reflect or absorb and irradiate the heat
Whether the surface is a vacuum, all water water with an atmosphere of GHG or non GHG gas there is a finite amount of heat coming in and that heat gets sent back out again.
Now as to the nature and temperature of the surface of said planet, different surfaces have different temperatures
There is a top of atmosphere where the heat in v heat is equal by definition.
At surface level the air with GHG is hotter than without GHG which implies that the Earth and water surfaces have less heat than they’d would otherwise have received.
* for the purpose of this discussion
Alexander Biggs,
98.44% of carbon dioxide molecules have 22 neutrons.
The chances of one of those emitting a neutron are non existent.
The other 1.56 % do not emit neutrons either, and the tiny fraction of those that do emit radiation emit betas.
Apparently you are the only one that knows that carbon dioxide molecules emit neutrons as they rise in the troposphere.
can you cite?
Does the 25% probability of a 15 year hiatus continuing for 5 more years imply that they treat each year as an independent event, or similar treatment?
Or is it a simple persistence model?
The unasked question is how much of the 1975 to 2000 warming, the 1945 to 1975 cooling, and the 1915 to 1945 warming were due to natural variability like that displayed by GCM’s. Determining whether the models sensitivities are too high needs to start with a reasonable estimate of historical warming absent natural variability. ‘The pause’ is just one piece of data; earlier variations in warming rate (both pauses and accelerations) provide additional data. A fair question to ask is if the variability displayed by GCM’s (both in magnitude and temporally) could plausibly lead to the apparent pseudo-oscillation in historical temperatures. I expect not 1 model run in a thousand would generate anything similar to the observed pseudo-oscillatory behavior since the late 19th century. That kind of behavior will only be present if the mechanisms for variation in the GCM’s accurately reflect the real physical mechanisms; I will venture a wild guess that they don’t.
AMO in negative phase and global brightening due to less sulfor in the air.
We will see cooling for another decade in the NH except in China and India.
You discuss the observed slowdown in warming, but together with this, on our opinion, it’s necessary to estimate the biosphere in the whole, in particular activity of the Yellowstone volcano (https://biosphereoftheearth.wordpress.com/2015/02/28/activity-of-the-yellowstone-volcano-as-refllection-of-modern-state-of-the-biosphere/).
So have I got this right ?
* The models say the liklihood of a 20 year period of no warming, is about 1%.
* The measured reality is that we have now had about 20 years of no warming.
* Therefore the models have a 1% chance of being realistic; put another way, a 99% chance of being unrealistic.
Mathematically this means the chance of any pause lasting 5 years for the models is [*up to] 25%.
Therefore for 10 years it is 6.25%
15 years 1.55%
and for 20 years 0.33%
So they are saying it is a 1 in 300 year chance of having a 20 year pause, or less*.
The reason why we can tell it’s not CO2 or any kind of atmospheric “surface radiative forcing” (SRF) causing ‘global warming’ since 2000 is that the global SRF has declined considerably over the period:
https://okulaer.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/lw-ned.png
There simply is no ‘extra’ energy provided by the atmosphere to the global surface of the Earth between 2000 and 2014 that could’ve caused any ‘extra’ warming. In fact, the global surface of the Earth has vastly strengthened its radiative cooling ability since 2000 (by 1.52 W/m2):
https://okulaer.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/net-lw-flux-all-sky.png
All the while, solar input to the global surface went up significantly …
https://okulaer.files.wordpress.com/2015/03/sw-ned.png
So much for the “enhanced greenhouse effect” as the driver of global temp trends.
“Following the termination of a variability-driven hiatus, we also show that there is an increased likelihood of accelerated global warming associated with release of heat from the sub-surface ocean and a reversal of the phase of decadal variability in the Pacific Ocean.”
You guys better explain how heat from deep ocean will warm the atmosphere in a matter of a decade or two. There’s a thermocline. Sea surface is around 15 C warmer than 1 km deep. You have a problem with 2nd law of thermodynamics. And thermohaline circulation takes 1,000 years. BTW reversal of PDO is natural and has been happening since time immemorial.
The elephant in room that everybody is ignoring is we are all saying natural variability, cool PDO, is the cause of the “pause.” But nobody is admitting that the same natural variability, warm PDO, is very likely also the cause of the 1978-1998 warming.
Exactly Strangelove. ENSO is the control knob ( and the Global Conveyor Belt driving ENSO) … CO2 fairly irrelevant to century long climate patterns.
Collating the data graphs from above that demonstrate there is no pause:
https://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/heat_content55-07.png
https://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/giss2.png?w=500
https://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2014/12/tempcp3.png?w=500
This one especially:
https://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/nasa4.jpeg
When the data since 2000 tracks a continuation of the pre-2000 trend. That aint a pause.
Has there been any statistically significant change in global temperature trend since 1998?
That’s the question skeptics won’t touch with a barge pole. They know the inconvenient answer.
So even though the thermometers haven’t budged for 20 years nearly (as even the rapid alarmists of the IPCC now finally admit), lolwot says there is no pause.
Pure genious. What else can be said?
Muon,
Who are those “ra[b]id alarmists of the IPCC” who supposedly “finally admitted” such a thing? Names, quotes, and proofs of sources, please.
Global surface temperature trends for the 20 years since 1995 (mean +/-2 sigma in Kelvin/decade):
GISTEMP: 0.112 +/- 0.093
NOAA: 0.093 +/- 0.089
HadCRUT4: 0.106 +/- 0.091
Berkeley: 0.129 +/- 0.088
HadCRUT4 krig v2: 0.14 +/- 0.096
HadCRUT4 hybrid v2: 0.146 +/- 0.105
(http://www.skepticalscience.com/trend.php)
Please, someone remind me. What again was the definition for “The Pause”? A “pause” from what?
Rabid alarmists, that should have read.
It’s the inconvenient answer that blinkered Pause-Deniers like lolwot won’t touch with a bargepole.
Has there been any statistically significant change in global temperature trend since 1998?
Hansen,Schmidt, Trenberth in various papers suggest No.
Schmidt (2014)suggested that both the absence of a statistical significant trend and the limitations in the CMIP5 models projections were problematic.
The global mean surface temperature trend was smaller between
1997 and 2013 (0.07±0.08 °C per decade) than over the last 50 years (0.16 ± 0.02 °C per decade), highlighting questions about the mechanisms that regulate decadal variability in the Earth’s temperature. In addition, the warming trend in the most
recent 15-year period is near the lower edge of the 5–95% range of projections from a collection of climate models that were part of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5).
Where is he wrong?
You don’t know how to do regression analysis. You just drew three lines on the graph and pretend they are regression lines.
The smarter committed alarmists having finally abandoned Pause Denial in favour of Pause Explaining (Away).
I didn’t draw them, professionals drew them. You don’t understand data analysis clearly. Regression lines by themselves are no use in determining if there’s been a change in a prior trend. You kind of need to actually compare WITH the prior trend, not just stick a regression line since 1998 and say DUH DUH PAUSE DUH.
Another one who imagines that all those peaks and dips in the data represents the actual movement of average global temperature.
They do not, and so any attempt to extract any meaningful trends is an exercise in futility.
Explaining the pause is like explaining a bigfoot sighing. The act of explaining it shows there was no bigfoot. Just like there is no pause.
If those four graphs above were financial indices concerning a company and you stood up in a meeting in front of the board of said company and declared the companies profits had stalled and it was heading for disaster, you’d be fired on the spot for incompetence.
Really? Aren’t profits per share projected at 0.20 but actual is about 0.08 per share. Slower than projected growth tends to turn off share holders. Are there some hidden expenses?
You at least picked the right business.
“OUR PROFITS HAVE PAUSED SINCE 1996”
http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DkJ4jhNMknc/U-RvG3Ks7wI/AAAAAAAAGM8/enYC5mqKr0w/s1600/GISTemp96.png
You’re fired!
So rising profits till about 2000, then flatlining. Yip, definitely fired.
“So rising profits till about 2000, then flatlining. Yip, definitely fired.”
Yep you would be.
2000 is on the 0.4 line.
2014 isn’t on there by the way and is higher than any of the other points.
Miniscule differences since 2000 (compared to what came before). A Pause for all practical purposes. As even the mainstream has conceded, and is now seeking to finding excuses/reasons for.
“Miniscule differences since 2000 (compared to what came before)”
Lets compare it then. Thick red line is what came before.
https://tamino.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/nasa4.jpeg
Data since 2000 follows the same trend that came before.
Arrhenius and co
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-Mg6w2etDPZY/VPr9B8TrenI/AAAAAAAAM_s/Mmo-e82DzVw/w971-h565-no/arrhenius%2Band%2Bco.png
I think they make typewritters
So that’s the DUH DUH PAUSE that even the alarmist industry has reluctantly taken on board. Your Nobel Prize and Political Correctness awards can’t be far off now.
they are debunking bigfoot sitings. You are the only one who believes in bigfoot.
not that skeptics do believe global warming has paused, they merely adopt the idea for convenience.
We already see a teaser with the 2014 breaking new records in GISTEMP and HadCRUT that climate skeptics will be very quick to switch back to denying the temperature records as soon as they can’t be used to promote a faux pause.
Yeah, sure. The whole of the IPCC and the rest of the alarmist industry have wrongly admitted there is a Pause. You are the only that pretends otherwise. For ‘bigfoot’, read ‘bigrise’ (in temps). It’s all a bigstory.
Such big foot prints though.
It’s funny how the only defence of the pause climate skeptics have is to appeal to the authority of climate scientists.
BUT THE CLIMATE SCEINTISTS BELIEF IT!!
Is that really the best they can do?
Do ANY climate scientists really believe that warming stopped 18 years ago? I doubt it.
But here’s something climate scientists do believe: the Earth is warming up due to human greenhouse gas emissions.
That there is a suspicion of temperature records being tweaked in an attempt to save global warming, in no way sugggests skeptics doubt the Pause. Why would they? Heck, even the top-ranking truebelievers ‘scientists’ of the ‘consensus’ believe it, as much as it galls them and harms the political cause they serve.
It’s a simple question of logic, lolwot, and following the money.
The climate establishment, being politically funded, is committed to a finding of alarmism, since that best serves the cause of politics (more taxes and bureaucracies etc to ‘fight’ global warming).
So the very last thing they would want to admit, is that warming has stopped. And so if even they – alarmists – are forced to concede a Pause, those of us here in the cheap seats can all be pretty sure there are good grounds for it. It’s like a Keynesian finally admitting that inflation is monetary phenomenon. Or Burger King admitting Macdonald’s is better.
Under those conditions, using alarmists’ authority against alarmism makes perfect sense. And anyway, close to 100% of money in climate science is in alarmists hands (as virtually all CS funding is political), so who else is there to reference?
lolwot | March 7, 2015 at 7:01 am | Reply
Collating the data graphs from above that demonstrate there is no pause.
First graph is Ocean heat content nothing to do with the pause which is atmospheric temperature,
NASA/GISS graph shows the pause beautifully, use your eyeballs and look, see, pause.
Third graph ditto but you go back to 1880, it is a good pause but it is not that long.
ASA again the pause is evident.
A trick you use is to say it falls in the trend lines for the graph.
Of course it does as the trend lines are done on the current data ending at the current time as midline on the trend.
If you start from a lower base than when the pause started you will always be able to show an upward, meaningless trend.
What you should do is show the trend to when the pause started,
and compare it to the trend since the pause started.
Those graphs are out there. They show the pause clearly and how much it deviates from what was expected.
lolwot | March 7, 2015 at 8:24 am | Reply
Lolwot provided graphs from 1970 showing no pause and he is in fact correct, which is unusual for an idiot, there is an ongoing long term warming trend perfectly visible in the temperature record.
His idiocy is revealed by his inability to see the real affect of such graphs, they completely overturn the idea that CAGW is happening and that there was a sudden perturbation to the Earth’s climate beginning in 1950.
We are told that the facts of this perturbation are visible to all in the temperature record and that only an idiot would say otherwise.
Well here is the temperature record from 1850, not cherry picked from 1970 and I would like all CAGW believers, lolwot, R Gates etc to verbalise and comment about what it as about these FACTS, not speculation that causes them to be so worried. Also to convince the rest of us that something really did happen in 1950 that is visible to them but apparently not to the rest of us.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1850/to:2013/compress:12/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1850/to:2013/trend/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1850/to:2010/trend/offset:0.4/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1850/to:2010/trend/offset:-0.4/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1850/to:2010/scale:0.00001/offset:-2
Alan
Okay ok fine, I don’t want to clutter with lots of comments so I’ll let everyone have the last (laugh).
Some believe in a global temperature pause, fine. Maybe you’ll luck out and one will actually happen next decade.
Some scientists like Dr Mann and Schmidt are now on record saying the world will continue warming, while others such as Dr Curry think the pause is real and could continue to 2030.
So everyone, including some scientists have made their predictions. Let their credibility rest on what unfolds in the coming decade. I for one look forward to the seemingly absurd prospect that ocean heat, global temperature and sea level will suddenly stop rising. Maybe CO2 will stop rising too!
Planets that shine like a sun. It can all be so confusing. And we were so close.
I made an error.
Mann is already ‘on record’ striking out spectacularly with his Hockey Stick, so he’s below the Mendoza line, climate science-wise.
harkin,
Are you talking about the Michael Mann who got awarded the Hans Oeschger Medal of the European Geoscience Union in 2012? This Mann?
The climate scientist community doesn’t seem to have got your memo about the low quality of Michael Mann’s science. This community apparently considers Michael Mann as someone who has greatly contributed to the science in the field. Perhaps, you should send out another one.
So, Jan, list his five greatest contributions. For balance, what do you consider his biggest mistake?
===============
So just ignore that the thing he is most famous for, the acclaimed Hockey Stick which was a complete bust?
“Perhaps, you should send out another one.”
Perhaps the IPCC should send Mann another ‘thank you’ note. He took a crayon to last one, wrote ‘NOBEL PRIZE’ on it and hung it on the wall.
harkin,
According to whom?
http://www.egu.eu/awards-medals/hans-oeschger/2012/michael-mann/
“According to whom?”
Dude, your own link ignores that actual temps shattered his hockey stick nonsense and moves the goalposts out to the future…..hoping against hope he might be right sooner or later. It also declares he was given the award not for good science but for his “courage”.
Well done! And you forgot to address his fake Nobel Prize – which caused his lawyers to scramble and re-write his legal brief.
There’s sometimes a very fine line between courage and foolhardiness. Perhaps that was his biggest mistake.
========================
lolwot
“I didn’t draw them, professionals drew them.”
You and your so-called ‘professionals’ don’t know how to do regression analysis. Plot your height in the y-axis and time in the x-axis since your birth. You will discover the trend line is always positive even when you’re 100 years old. You proudly announce to the world – I’m still a growing boy at 100! Anyone who knows how to do proper regression analysis will never arrive at this absurd conclusion.
“I for one look forward to the seemingly absurd prospect that ocean heat, global temperature and sea level will suddenly stop rising. Maybe CO2 will stop rising too!”
If only you realize the absurdity of linking ocean heat and sea level with CO2. Maybe you are just blissfully ignorant that ocean heat and sea level have rising since 18,000 years ago. It is called interglacial.
I’m stating a proposition (that I already had stated before in this blog some time ago) how a “pause” of the global surface warming trend could be scientifically meaningfully defined:
A “pause” is a statistically significant and statistically robust (i.e., not sensitively dependent on some outlier in the data) decrease in the global surface warming trend relative to the longer-term surface warming trend (which itself is statistically significant). One could similarly define an “acceleration” of the global surface warming trend.
According to this definition, for instance the time period between 1940 and 1970 was a true pause.
However, I’m quite sure that the fans of the “pause”-meme generally won’t like this definition, for obvious reasons.
So let’s make terms to “slowdown of global warming” just like Steinman and MM … http://www.sciencemag.org/content/347/6225/988.short . They explain also the reason for it: “Competition between a modest positive peak in the AMO and a substantially negative-trending PMO are seen to produce a slowdown…”. The “substantially” negative Pacific internal multidecadal variability in this paper is derived from models.
A brand new paper ( http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00382-015-2525-1 ) shows the real observed multicecadal variability there:
http://kauls.selfhost.bz:9001/uploads/tpi.png . ( From the supps, for Ines read Index, sorry). The difference after 2000 is the difference of Models to reality. :-)
Thanks for link to this new paper
mwgrant, Oh the 90% confidence range. That is the IPCC’s very likely or very high confidence ranges which they used for the ensemble model mean uncertainty among other things. Very likely is 90% confidence and very high confidence is 90% likelihood. The whole “pause” situation started with observations falling to the lower limit of that 90% range.
statistically significant and statistically robust”
Herein lie many problems.
“According to this definition, for instance the time period between 1940 and 1970 was a true pause.
Not really. You have not even specified or justified appropriate tests not to mention specifying a significance…and what is a representative sample [time interval]?
Where you want to go is is suggested but you are not there yet. Lots of back and forth over the last several years…no one has nailed it cleanly…lots of incomplete and/or poor statistics…if only scientists and critics were as good at statistics as they assume they are… ambiguous and/or terminology, comparing individual observations to a trend line (SLR line for the conditional expectation of the mean or to a confidence band (for a mean)…
Perhaps there is a hint of correctness in lolwot’s plots (NASA, NASA GISS) above with what appears to be a prediction band, but of course he did not specify what the outer lines are and he made the comparison to the trend line [sigh]. The story is in the outer dashed lines–if they are a prediction band (significance again not specified…pffft!) A link or two could of helped. Now about a representative sample or time interval…
oops on bold…
with what appears to be…
mwgrant, “appears to be a prediction band.”
An after the fact fit to natural variability. lolwat of course leaves out models which are part of the “hiatus” definition.
http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-3QXVw4rGgf8/VPtLMtUUp5I/AAAAAAAANBE/jzNY5NQIAa4/s1600/attempt%2Bat%2Buncertainty%2Bsst.png
You could do the same kind of thing with model projected SST and observation and show the models are doing great provided you include +/- 0.25 C of variability which is close to half of the warming :)
Then since scaling i.e. amplification factors are all the rage, you can end up with +/- 0.35 C for the combined land and ocean data. Unfortunately that is a bit more than the published 90% confidence range.
mwgrant,
I don’t think I have to make a normative statement what specific statistical test needs to be applied. I would leave this up to the ones who want to make a scientific argument that something substantial has changed in the climate system, regarding the global warming trend. A sufficient sample would be a time interval for which statistical significance of the trend change is achieved and this significance is statistically robust. This is something I would accept as some empirical evidence for claims that “The Pause” or a slowdown is real and more than just some trend fluctuation around the median trend, which is still just part of the trend distribution.
What I don’t accept as evidence are all the appeals to belief or to authority, which have been presented by others here.
Jan, “What I don’t accept as evidence are all the appeals to belief or to authority, which have been presented by others here.”
How is using the surface temperature data that is required to determine “sensitivity” to CO2 forcing an appeal to belief?
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-WbVV6EJcqx4/VPuQP6oBDeI/AAAAAAAANCU/3NQjwTy8UFQ/s1600/that%2B30-60N%2Bregion%2B1900.png
There is an obvious radical shift in the temperature trend in the 30 to 60 north region which had the highest rate of warming. It is not a “cherry picked” data set phenomenon either.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Flu-E4V9jK4/VPuREV5eBiI/AAAAAAAANCc/ZfQ0TeQfmAc/s1600/mo%2Bplateau.png
You may not like “pause” but hiatus, plateau, slow down, climate shift all could be substituted. Now if some metric other than “surface” temperature was allowed, you might have a point, but warming is defined by the surface temperature everyone is pretty much stuck with it.
CaptDallas:
To me the hint is use possible use of a prediction* band (constructed for comparison with individual observations) as opposed to a confidence band (on the conditional mean)…no more no less. I do not mean to suggest that either the particular model nor sample are correct (or incorrect). The comment is in reference to the particular type of interval (or here band) used.
BTW what specifically do you mean by a 95% confidence range?
Jan P Perlwitz: You wrote
“According to this definition, for instance the time period between 1940 and 1970 was a true pause.”
without any demonstration that the conditions of your proposed definition are met. Nor do you demonstrate that the time period you give is a representative sample.
A sufficient sample would be a time interval for which statistical significance of the trend change is achieved …
Join another ‘hunting’ club, huh? :O) Are you saying that after you’ve set the significance you select the/a sample that gives the result you want? Or are you saying something else? Also ‘sufficient sample’ is a bit ambiguous, possibly suggesting sample size and not sample representativeness.
mwgrant, “BTW what specifically do you mean by a 95% confidence range?”
I don’t recall using that, but it is typically 2 sigma. A touch abused in climate science though with so much unknowable smoothing involved, especially in paleo.
90% … my typo.
“A touch abused in climate science”
A touch? :O)
hmm, missed the mark or threading is off.
http://judithcurry.com/2015/03/05/2-new-papers-on-the-pause/#comment-681603
The point is made with respect to SLR applied to temperature anomaly ‘data’ and not to models or model ensembles. For comparison with individual observations the intervals of interest are prediction intervals and not confidence intervals or the regression linear. The lolwot images that caught my interest appear to illustrate simple linear regression (SLR) on GISSTEMP annual anomalies–they appear to have prediction bands” even though lolwot made his comparison with the trend line (again, sigh).
————
I use to term ‘band’ to stress that we have a conditional expected mean (dependent on year). The confidence band and prediction bands are are also conditional.
Clearly prediction bands are wider than confidence bands and clearly they more easily accommodate flattened stretches in the observed anomalies than the latter. In the end this may say more about inadequacies of simple approaches such as SLR. But when even such a simple tool is misapplied one can not be optimistic.
For comparison with individual observations the intervals of interest are prediction intervals and not confidence intervals or the regression lines. [auto-completion %^&#*!]
mwgrant +1. Your points on statistics and inference are well said. I too, have a problem with the way statistics have been misused (abused?) in the field of climate science. Without even defining the population and what seems to be an appropriate PDF for such a population, any error bands used on observations cannot be stated with any level of confidence whatsoever. IMO the population is non-ergodic and hence not statistically amenable in any case.
Hi Peter Davies
“Without even defining the population and what seems to be an appropriate PDF for such a population, any error bands used on observations cannot be stated with any level of confidence whatsoever. “
Absolute. At the very core of the process–first step.
“IMO the population is non-ergodic and hence not statistically amenable”
I agree. It is difficult to construe the system of interest as stationary and hence it could not be strictly ergodic. Weak stationarity, when suggested, might be exploitable but as is the case in geostatistics such assumptions and there limits have to be clearly quantified.
However, these days that is above my paygrade! :O)
mwgrant, “However, these days that is above my paygrade! :O)”
Pity, these after the fact prediction/error bands and adjustable anomaly baselines would make a great comedy. Have you ever looked at the Marcott masterpiece?
CaptDallas
“Have you ever looked at the Marcott masterpiece?”
No, I burned too much rocket fuel in the last decade before retirement. I’m littoral, not deepwater. Seriously, I am more interested in the nitty-gritty statistical and geostatistical methodologies and conceptual aspects of the ‘science’ than the ongoing hyped calculational efforts. (It used to be that when a paper looked relevant it was likely worth the significant effort required for reading. I do not have that feeling these days where due to words and numbers are too cheap.) Also in the last year I have had other priorities. However, I did notice the non-paywall link to it above, now is a better time, so…. BTW isn’t devising hockey sticks a form of necromancy?
mwgrant, “However, I did notice the non-paywall link to it above, now is a better time, so…. BTW isn’t devising hockey sticks a form of necromancy?”
necromancy, necrophilia one of the two.
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/339/6124/1198/suppl/DC1
That is a link to the supplemental material in an excel spreadsheet.
A pause is a flat line Jan, A decrease is a decrease, an increase is an increase and an acceleration is what a decrease or an increase can do but not a pause.
“Accelerating pause”, now there’s a concept
worth a * TM Angech but feel free to use it as a topic header, Judy.
Hey Jan:
I consider the greatest award that Mann received to be his bogus Nobel certificate…printed on an IPCC printer…a peace prize, not a nobel, in, say Physics, of example…
I put in in the same league as Kissinger, or Arafat.
I suppose you think the climatic optimum to be around that which all humans enjoyed circa 1810?
Putz.
So the outlier (1998) is data you would ignore when it comes to computing a “pause” but when it comes to computing temperature increases, of course that year counts.
Why dont you consider the period from 1975 to 1998 as an outlier? its the only period of significant temperature increase around two periods of relative stasis. why dont you?
Because youre invested in your outcome, thats why.
Jan…a reasonable protocol for dealing with outliers is established before the data is collected. Not after. This is but one example of an ex post analysis of data…it is the essence of data mining. If you guys employed professional statisticians, you never would have had these issues to begin with.
On the other hand, you wouldn’t have been able to enjoy the cherry pies you created from the cherries you picked.
People intimately involved in your enterprise (Santer, for one) identified a period of fifteen years without statistically significant increases to be an issue…the Ben moved the goal posts to 17 years.
BTW you really owe it to yourself to read a book on rhetoric…your posts are replete with the cheesiest form of argumentation, as well as full of misapprehensions regarding rhetorical technique.
This pause is pregnant with possibilities.
The Roberts, et al., paper notes that we should not be surprised by long pauses in warming,
Their major conclusion, based on probability theory, is that no one should be surprised if model inaccuracies continue for another 5 years. But that conclusion does not preclude the possibility that the models are just wrong and will continue to be wrong forever.
Even granting their probability calculations, their result gives me no confidence in the usefulness of model-generated future trends. As with the Marotzke & Forster paper, explaining away a model’s divergence from observation by reference to an “internal variability” that exactly matches model error is tautological.
The climate is chaotic. You have to watch it ever moment possible and in as many places as possible or you will miss the next regime shift. The last one took place in 2012 when the PDO signaled it was going positive.
They are off by 5 years. The pause either has the slightest possible pulse, or it died during January 2015. If it somehow did the General Franco two step and survived Jan 2015, the odds are exceedingly good Feb 2015 drove a wooden stake through its heart and it’s completely dead.
Ulric , El Nino events perhaps but with prolonged solar minimum conditions being constant lower overall sea surface temperatures on a global basis will be superimposed on those El Nino events. That was my point..
Lagged effects of depleted upper ocean heat content would have to bring down sea surface temperatures in time, but not immediately if the response is an increase in El Nino and a renewed warming of the AMO.
Many warmests deny the pause, are they deniers? Based on current weather, never mind a pause it may get a cooler, it will hard to deny the pause then, however there is so much money involved that cooling would easily be explained as temporary and climate change. I really find it difficult to take these believers seriously, they make circus contortionists look like amateurs. They have the money, they control the records..
“He who controls the present, controls the past. He who controls the past, controls the future.” –George Orwell
Indications are the AMO (stadium wave theory), and PDO will both be in a cold phase going forward for quite sometime. In addition, despite low solar activity ,the cold phase of the PDO should limit El Nino frequency and intensity (that is what the data shows).
Ocean Heat Content is already leveling off in response to very low solar activity post 2005 in general. The prolonged solar minimum has been in place for 10 years it is not just starting.
From Ulric, which I disagree with 100%.
Re your 10:19 comment, Iceland and Greenland temp’s are essentially inverse proxies for rates of forcing of the climate. It makes no sense to relate their trends to global temperatures
Tell me why them that the fastest rise on CET from the 1690’s to the 1720’s goes in the opposite direction on GISP. Most of the detail moves inversely to CET:
http://www.21stcentech.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Greenland-ice-core-data.png
The problem is of climate scientists rewriting history because of the warm spike in GISP around 1000 AD, and assuming that it was also warm in mid latitudes then. In fact the warmest MWP century for Europe was the 8th century, at a record low for Greenland. The cold Dark Ages were in the 4th to 6th centuries, the Roman Warm Period was in the 1st to 4th centuries, and the late Bronze Age cooling was around 1200 BC, when the Minoan civilisation collapsed:
http://c3headlines.typepad.com/.a/6a010536b58035970c0128766b0364970c-pi
Ulric, says below.
I say it is not going to go down in that manner. This period of solar activity is not going to like the period around 1910 or the 1970’s. I expect for example the solar flux to stay sub150 on a monthly basis for the rest of this cycle and all of the next cycle and maybe beyond.
.
Globally though, the oceanic response of more frequent El Nino conditions/episodes and a renewed warming of the AMO, would initially raise the global mean surface temperature for a few years before it starts to fall.
At the end of the pause, or likely slow decline after an initial rise, there would be a temporary sharper decline for a number of years as increased solar activity turns the AMO colder, and increases La Nina.
“This period of solar activity is not going to like the period around 1910 or the 1970’s.”
I never said it would be. I wrote above that I expect the next coldest point in the AMO in the mid 2040’s.
Grasping at straw models.
In Fyfe, et al., the null hypothesis (that models and observations are “exchangeable” with each other) was rejected for trends 1998-2012. (http://www.stat.washington.edu/peter/statclim/fyfeetal.pdf ) The intervening years have only strengthened that analysis.
The Roberts, et al., paper explicitly avoided retesting the same null hypothesis. As a result, they are able to claim models are just victims of bad luck (random probability distribution).
This is not to say that bringing models into better alignment with observations will be easy. And it is not to deny that such work is currently underway.
But for Roberts et al., to assert that (a) we don’t know precisely what causes models to diverge from observations today (“internal variability”) but (b) don’t worry, because we do know that the models will come back into agreement with observations in the future seems like unfounded optimism to me.
It seems that climate modelers are dealing with a quandary: How can we improve on the unsatisfactory results from climate modeling?
Shall we:
A.Continue tweaking models using classical maths though they depend on climate being in quasi-equilibrium; or,
B.Start over from scratch applying non-equilibrium maths to the turbulent climate, though this branch of math is immature with limited expertise.
In other words, we are confident in classical maths but, does climate have features that disqualify it from their application? We are confident that non-equilibrium maths were developed for systems such as the climate, but are these maths robust enough to deal with such a complex reality?
It appears that some modelers are coming to grips with the turbulent quality of climate due to convection dominating heat transfer in the lower troposphere. Heretofore, models put in a parameter for energy loss through convection, and proceeded to model the system as a purely radiative dissipative system. Recently, it seems that some modelers are striking out in a new, possibly more fruitful direction. The Herbert et al paper is one example exploring the paradigm of non-equilibrium steady states (NESS). Such attempts are open to criticism from a classical position, as NiV has demonstrated.
That is my layman’s POV. Here is the issue stated by practitioners, more elegantly with bigger words:
“In particular, it is not obvious, as of today, whether it is more efficient to approach the problem of constructing a theory of climate dynamics starting from the framework of hamiltonian mechanics and quasi-equilibrium statistical mechanics or taking the point of view of dissipative chaotic dynamical systems, and of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, and even the authors of this review disagree. The former approach can rely on much more powerful mathematical tools, while the latter is more realistic and epistemologically more correct, because, obviously, the climate is, indeed, a non-equilibrium system.” Lucarini et al 2014
thx, do you have a ref/link for the new lucarini paper?
Yes, the paper is:
Mathematical and Physical Ideas for Climate Science Valerio Lucarini,∗ Richard Blender, Salvatore Pascale, Francesco Ragone,† and Jeroen Wouters
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.1190.pdf
The published paper in Reviews in Geophysics is open access and has a significant introduction.
The Earth’s climate provides an outstanding example of a high-dimensional forced and dissipative complex system. The dynamics of such system is chaotic, so that there is only a limited time horizon for skillful prediction
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/enhanced/doi/10.1002/2013RG000446/
THANK YOU
maksimovich,
That paper includes about every non-linear approach I have seen mentioned on climate etc.
Someone could teach a semester or 3 just on this one paper. Incredible.
And as the authors pointed out, they left off a lot!
And yet Ron C has also found a classical GCM, a Russian model INMCM4, which doesn’t do badly compared with observations, containing, wonderfully, three outlying features for which skeptics have been crabbing for years.
Compared with the true complexity, has this simple GCM model with better parameters than the others, functioned somewhat as the Callendar or Monckton models do to the GCMs?
There’s a question I can’t figure out how to pose here, let alone answer.
=================
There’s an insightful comment by Nullis in Verba on this issue:
” It seems that climate modelers are dealing with a quandary: How can we improve on the unsatisfactory results from climate modeling?”
Excellent question! . . .
Well first, we need to keep working on basic mechanisms. Clouds are the big one, followed by ocean circulation and heat transfer, followed by biology (especially ocean biology, for the carbon cycle), followed by aerosols. Second, we need to collect better data. We need that to identify the physics, to provide the measured parameters and inputs, and to perform tests. We need to document the performance/accuracy of the current models and data – both what they get right and most especially what they get wrong, so we know exactly what goes wrong and understand as clearly as possible the problems we still need to solve. We need to explore a broader range of options and ideas – at the moment, all the models look much the same, and are mostly related to one another. Making them modular and mutually compatible so we can swap the best bits around would seem like a good idea. Validation and testing needs to be taken out of the hands of developers and done independently and externally. Rival research groups would be one possibility, if they hadn’t already demonstrated their inclinations towards pal review, so I’d suggest specialist scrutineers with a lot of sceptics on the staff. Their aim is to document the shortcomings, not to rubbish the models, so you need a mix from both sides of the debate. And you need to formalise the testing, auditing, and validation process so that governments cannot use them for any purpose they’ve not been demonstrated to be able to perform. If you don’t have a certificate for your models testifying to their ability to predict sea ice or hurricane strength a century in advance, then you can’t sell or use them for that purpose. That will then motivate and fund the development of demonstrably better models.
There’s tons to do, and no shortage of ideas for what could usefully be done. I don’t think that’s what’s getting in the way.
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/discussion/post/2471448?lastPage=true
opluso,
Fyfe et al. used a model themselves. They also used observations, but for a central aspect of their study, the contribution of ENSO variability to the global surface temperature trend, they used a model. According to their results, this contribution had been about Zero, even for the time period 1998-2012. This is quite in contradiction to other studies about the contribution of ENSO variability to the surface temperature variability from interannual to decadal time scales. If the ENSO-contribution to the trend between 1998-2012 was not Zero, but, for instance, I speculate, minus 0.07 Kelvin/decade instead, that would already have changed the results from the Fyfe et al. study, substantially.
No one has explained to me so far, what makes the model applied by Fyfe et al. so superior that this is a model to believe in, in contrast to all the other models. I thought we are supposed to dismiss everything that is done with models, if I listen to many of the “skeptics”.
No Jan. What a reasonable person would do is to look at each model, one at a time, judge its skill and its ability to emulate whatever climatic phenomena one was interested in. At least that’s one would expect a person in your position to do.
What a trained person wouldn’t do is dissemble, and engage in the lowest form of argumentation, the straw man.
Now, why dont you take a stab at explaining just why you dfeel the current generation of GCMs is superior to a naive model of simple persistence.
While youre at it…try to justify estimating global average temperature say, 500 years ago to a tenth of a degree celsius.
Really, your tripe is overcooked, and tired.
I believe Fyfe, et al., were attempting to test potential reasons for the discrepancy between observations and model output. Given that models utilize a simulated ENSO response to forcing that produces a lag in the modeled response, they were attempting to determine the amount by which this simulated ENSO (and other simulated events, like volcanic eruptions) could account for differences with observations.
The fact that Fyfe et al., actually tested a “legitimate” null hypothesis, without trying to reverse the burden of proof (a la Trenberth), is still quite impressive to me. In contrast, Roberts, et al., used an essentially irrefutable test — no matter how small your p value is, if it can possibly become smaller you don’t reject the null hypothesis.
davideisenstadt,
What is supposed to be my “position”. My “position” of someone who works in climate science? Or what? If so, davideisenstadt states here that he expects from everyone who works in climate science to spend his/her time with evaluating models, each at a time. Guess what. That is not the description of the project, for which we got the grant that is financed from your taxes.
How is my pointing out that the Fyfe et al. study, which is presented as study that tests models against observations and which is used as evidence against climate models, uses a model as well, a straw man argument?
How is my statement about the contradiction between the results from the Fyfe et al. study and the results from other scientific studies, regarding the contribution of ENSO variability to the observed global surface temperature trend (a contradiction that, I suspect, comes from the model used in the Fyfe et al. study), a strawman argument?
How is my argument that the results from the Fyfe et al. study would likely substantially change, if the contribution of ENSO variability to the global surface temperature trend wasn’t near Zero, a strawman argument?
I seems to me that it is davideisenstadt instead who is using the fallacy of falsely accusing the opponent of applying a logical fallacy as a mean to distract from what I actually said regarding the Fyfe et al. study.
answer the questions Jan.
Jan:
Since I originally raised the Fyfe, et al., study could you please provide me with citations to the contradictory studies you mentioned?
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with your suggested adjustments to the Fyfe, et al., treatment of ENSO, etc. But I do remain impressed by a researcher explicitly testing a null hypothesis rather than assuming it is confirmed. And that is the aspect of the Fyfe, et al., paper I would like to see refuted.
Admittedly, the idea that model simulations have diverged from observations doesn’t seem particularly shocking to me since perfectly modeling the climate is probably impossible. Therefore, the argument that models and observations haven’t “really” diverged (“the internal variability made me do it” defense) is a position that I believe downplays the gaps in our understanding of the climate system.
Jan,
There’s another related issue, I think, with Fyfe et al. As I understand it, what they did to get the observed trend and its uncertainty was to consider 100 (IIRC) ensemble member realisations of the HadCRUT4 data. Hence, their uncertainty is really the error on the mean of all 100 realisations, not the uncertainty in the trend for a single ensemble member. Their uncertainty is therefore, I think, smaller than it would be had they used the uncertainty in the trend for a single ensemble member, rather than the error on the mean for all 100 ensemble realisations. This, I think, is consistent with what you’re suggesting which is that they’re assuming that the mean trend is the actual forced and that it is unaffected by unforced variability.
So, as I see it, all they’ve really shown is that the mean trend in the HadCRUT4 data is barely consistent with the model trends, but they haven’t really shown that this is necessarily implies anything particularly significant, since they’ve assumed no role for unforced variability.
On a similar note, it is interesting that some use the large uncertainty in the trends to argue that we can’t rule out that there’s been no warming since 1998, and then, when doing a model-observation comparison, use the error on the mean (which is smaller than the uncertainty in the trend) to argue that the models and observations are inconsistent.
Jan you could of course simply take a stab at answering the questions. That would be a first step.
A second step would be to learn enough about the tool you use in your research, i.e. applied statistics to realize that the concept of an ensemble mean is bankrupt, and is supported by not a single bit of accepted statistical analytic techniques.
The models aren’t independent of each other; the individual models’ results are the product of different numbers of model runs, and there is no documentation made readily available to the public to allow one to determine just which model runs are included in individual model outputs.
That you and ATTP would spend time discussing ensemble means is only proof that you need additional training in statistical analysis.
As for someone in your position…I thought you weren’t employed by NASA (even though your online CV states that you are).
What I expect from someone in your position is considered thought about the utility and validity of the models that you, as a small cog in a large machine are responsible for producing.
BTW, Critical Thinking, by Paulsen is a book I recommend to undergraduates who wish to learn how to argue. Perhaps you should read it.
Jan –
(or Anders?) FWIW, as much as it is difficult to find within david’s hodgepodge of identity-aggression and identity-defense, I would like to see a (very dumbed down) response on the question about the validity of considering the mean of largely independent models.
Joshua,
What I would suggest is searching James Annan’s blog (or doing a Google search with “multi-model ensemble James Annan” or something like that). He covers this quite a bit and I think has been a critic of the whole multi-model ensemble strategy (I believe he gave a talk on this recently at the Met Office). I found a relevant post by him, but don’t think I could do it justice if I tried to summarise it myself.
See also my previous post on this topic
http://judithcurry.com/2013/06/30/how-should-we-interpret-an-ensemble-of-models-part-ii-climate-models/
I appreciate the insights into both the Fyfe, et al., study and the broader investigation into how well models reconstruct observed temperatures. But I’m still struggling to find any real value in using probability calculations to excuse the inability to model internal variability (and/or other model shortcomings). To paraphrase Galileo: “and yet it diverges”.
Thanks Anders.
Dear David,
I just noticed this:
Perhaps are you referring to Cederblom & Paulsen:
http://www.amazon.com/Critical-Reasoning-Jerry-Cederblom/dp/0495808784
I don’t think your performance so far has shown that you’ve read that book. Have you?
Please stick to waving your big arms.
Many thanks!
williard: from you thats a complement.
If it came from chuck Norris, David, what would that be?
As an argument, your remark would be invalid, BTW.
Ulric, Why is the AMO going to be in a renewed warm phase going forward when it is about to go into a cold phase beginning in the near future and probably lasting some 30 years?
Because the solar wind will be weak, and that will increase negative North Atlantic Oscillation states, which will increase poleward ocean transport. And going by the duration of the previous warm AMO period, this one has another ~15 years to run before cooling.
Note how the AMO is in phase with solar cycles in its cold mode, and out of phase with solar cycles in its warm mode. Temporary cooling of the AMO around this sunspot maximum follows that pattern:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-amo/from:1885/mean:13/plot/sidc-ssn/from:1885/normalise
“JC question to Michael Mann: How can the pause be both ‘false’ and caused by something?”
JC appears to have misunderstood what Michael Mann means by the term ‘faux pause’. The ‘faux pause’ is not a pause, that is why it is ‘false’.
Not a pause? How about plateau?
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-6WrdqAasQGY/VPtxvtqwynI/AAAAAAAANBc/0zkmqv0355w/w775-h498-no/plateau.png
How can surface air temperature stay flat while the ocean is warming? Perhaps the heat is going someplace else? Changes in sea ice extent and distribution along with changes in weather circulation patterns causing the pole to be a better heat sink perhaps. I think there was a stadium wave paper on the subject.
A slowdown is not a plateau.
harrytwinotter,
A slowdown can be a plateau, especially it the slow down lasts long enough. For the satellite era, 17 years of slow down is pretty much a plateau especially when the warming that did occur appears to be related to recovery from volcanic forcing.
I take it you are a glass half empty kinda guy so less than expected warming is ominous to you or your agenda.
See the article in the Variable Variability blog.
Of course it is not a pause. Judith should learn her catechism better.
harrytwinotter:
“JC appears to have misunderstood what Michael Mann means by the term ‘faux pause’. The ‘faux pause’ is not a pause, that is why it is ‘false’.”
It’s not Judith who’s missing something. Mann calls it a “slowdown” but he’s still admitting it exists. Judith’s question is entirely valid.
A slowdown is not a pause.
How about a ‘slowdown’ where the supposed surviving increase is an order of magnitude smaller than the error bar?
There’s gotta be a joke about a ‘California Pause’ in there somewhere, but from where I sit with the radar gun, the vehicle seems in reverse.
==================
Muon said:
“How about a ‘slowdown’ where the supposed surviving increase is an order of magnitude smaller than the error bar?”
Nice, Mann just can’t help himself. Wonder if this qualifies himself for his own list of “serial climate misinformers”. No wait, just like the swap from pause to slowdown, Mann has swapped “people who disagree with me” with SCMs.
But at least he has adoring fans like harrytwinotter willing to blow smoke and brag about his awards (both real AND fake).
Capt Dallas : How can surface air temperature stay flat while the ocean is warming?
Because the heat is staying below the surface, held down by some weird currents thing that defies the normal tendency of warmer water to to rise. Sayeth R Gates, I seem to recall.
By whatever name you choose to call it, something cannot not exist and also be caused by something
The faith that the climate models are as accurate as mathematical models of dice games or coin flips will be a frequent object of humor in the future, I predict.
I’m thinking the “frequent object of humor in the future” will be the blind faith in climate models that were 95+% wrong on the hot side.
The fact that the certainty increased as the reliability and accuracy decreased will also be a real hoot.
Judith wrote: “I think this paper is a useful contribution, and I have no concerns/questions about the methodology they used. The interesting result is that once you have a 15-year hiatus (something that is already pretty unlikely), then according to climate models, the probability of it continuing another 5 years is 25%.”
You really blew this one. Suppose we bet on the roll of a die that I provide. You win $5 when six comes up and I win $1 when it doesn’t. You have rolled the die 15 times and six has never come up. There is a 6.4% chance of that happening with a fair die, so you are naturally worried about whether I provided you with a fair die. I tell you not to be surprised if no six appears on the next 5 rolls – the chances of that happening are 40%. Would you think my statement of fact was intended to INFORM or DECEIVE you about the situation?
Climate scientists have provided ordinary citizens with climate models that predict that the chance of no warming in 5 years is 28%, roughly 28%^2 (7.8% vs their value of 9-10%) for 10 years, 28%^3 for 15 years (but they cleverly omit this value, 2.2% from their table). Skeptics are seriously worried that models are overestimating warming. Modelers now inform policymakers that climate models predict that the chance of observing no warming for the next 5 years is 25%. Don’t ask me to believe that the INTENT of their statement is inform the public about the reliability of their models. You know that 15 years without warming occurs 2% of the time in CMIP2 and 20 years without warming <1% of the time; AND THAT THIS IS THE RELEVANT INFORMATION POLICYMAKERS NEED TO KNOW to evaluate the reliability of climate models.
If it WERE really important that the public know that a 25% chance exists that there will be no warming in the next 5-year period, they should have been telling the public that since 1990. The same goes for a 9% chance of no warming over 10 years. However, short-term changes are meaningless; it made sense to ignore these possibilities in the past and TODAY. The real issue is whether warming from doubled CO2 will eventually amount to 2, 3 or 4 degC. Actually, the hiatus has pretty much eliminated the possibility of 4 degC – especially if sensitivity to aerosols is within the AR5's likely range.
With 2 minutes of thought, any climate scientist could have predicted the result of this study. We know that most, if not all, climate models show little persistence on a decadal time scale. Above, I could calculate roughly the correct probability by using the formula 28%^n (where n is the number of five-year periods), because each five-year period is effectively an independent event. No one had to waste their time analyzing the CMIP5 data to determine that the probability of the hiatus continuing for five more years would be about 25% (within error of the probability for observing the first five-years of no warming, 28%).
All of the BS from BOTH SIDES about the hiatus is driving me nuts. We have a 60+ year record of warming potentially-attributable to rising GHGs; 40+ years with satellite data. Any periods shorter than these usually are cherry-picking. The best estimate for ECS for this period is about 2 degC. Observations from ERBE and CERES show that climate models do a lousy job of predicting changes in SWR and LWR for clear and cloudy skies associated with TEN annual warming cycles of 3.5 degC in GMST. Manabe et al, http://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1216174110 . This is real temperature, not temperature anomaly, of course.) It's past time for modelers to get back into the business of building the best possible climate models. Their current models are clearly inadequate. You should recommend that government funding be directed only towards improving models – not generating meaningless results using inadequate models. How can you possibly judge this a useful contribution when you have asserted elsewhere that current models are inadequate??????
but different rolls of a die are independent of each other…climate isn’t its autocorrelated, that is tomorrow’s climate depends on todays……the trends established in one year tend to persist into another…
theres a big difference in the two scenarios.
+1
David: If one considers 5-year periods, there is little to no autocorrelation in the output from climate models. If we know the state of ENSO this year, that gives us little idea of what the state of ENSO will be next year and no idea of what El Nino will be two years from now. Nor can they produce long term oscillations like AMO and PDO: “Current climate models have not been able to predict the behavior of the AMO and PDO indices.” (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs00382-013-1933-3#page-2 Chylek et al Clim Dyn 43:119-129 (2014).
On Doug McNeall’s blog post, the probability of a five-year hiatus was given as 28%. Assuming 5-year events are independent, I calculate the probability of a 10-, 15- and 20-year hiatus as being 28%^2 (7.8%), 28%^3 (2.2%), and 28%^4 (0.6%). Using data from the CMIP5 models, Doug McNeall’s blog reports the probability of 10- and 20-year hiatus of 9% and <1%. (He cleverly avoided admitting that the the probability of the current 15-year hiatus is about 2%, but this seems to be a reasonable estimate given the other numbers. The probability of a 5-year hiatus immediately after a 15-year hiatus was found to be 25%, essentially the same as any other 5-year hiatus (28%). So autocorrelation appears to be irrelevant in this case.
Frank:
there is a fundamental difference between rolls of a die and climatic behavior, whether its two days in a row, or two years in a row or two decades in a row… Thats all Im saying. in fact, autocorrelation is probably stronger as the periods one observe get shorter.
If one has to bet on just what the climate will be tomorrow, probably the best bet is to say very similar to today.
It really isn’t like rolling dice at all.
Don’t be a dope, Frank. Antarctica is cold. Five years from now it won’t be a crap shoot whether it might become tropical.
David: Monthly average GMSTs show significant autocorrelation. If last month was unusually warm or cold, next month will be more likely to be warm or cold respectively. On the other hand, annual average GMSTs show almost no autocorrelation. Foster and Rahmstorf show the decay in autocorrelation for real (not model) temperature data in the appendix of this paper.
http://iopscience.iop.org/1748-9326/6/4/044022/pdf/1748-9326_6_4_044022.pdf
With only 0.2 autocorrelation left after 8 months, the idea 5-year hiatuses can’t be treated as independent events seems ludicrous. And treating them as independent events does afford the same answer McNeall reports at his blog.
TR…ATTP: Thank you for the gracious descriptor. The persistence of cold in the future of Antarctica certainly brightly illuminates the problem of assessing the likelihood of the hiatus persisting – especially since there has been a hiatus in warming in Antarctica (except for the Peninsula) since records began to be kept.
Frank:
the idea that one years GMT (whatever that is, I now…)temperature isn’t a factor in the next beggars belief.
What about the LIA…
did the world just jump out of it in one year?
periods of glaciation?
or the cooling associated with the YDB?
What youre citing is relatively benign, minor variation in climate.
In any case, climatic behavior really isn’t in any way like rolling a die, Im sure you agree.
I have to add that your points regarding climate modelers’ motives are correct, at least thats my opinion…I dont think its too hard to see the bigger point that your making.
i dont want you to think that Im picking nits, as it were.
;-)
David: Thanks for the reply. Much of what you say about persistence of climate on our planet is true, but climate models and the real planet differ in significant respects. And unforced variability is different from naturally-forced variability (solar and volcanic). In the case of the hiatus, McNeall is studying unforced variability in climate models (forced by historic and projected forcing).
You cited the LIA and ice ages. Both of these are probably examples of naturally forced variability, not unforced variability. ENSO, AMO and PDO appear to be examples of unforced variability, but climate models don’t produce an AMO or PDO. If one does spectral analysis on the output from climate models, there is some signal at all long periods (past ENSO), but none dominates. As I noted before, ENSO is not predictable by models a year in advance. As best I can tell, this year’s weather/climate has little impact on the weather/climate next year and no impact on the weather/climate two years from now.
IF I am correct, in climate models 5-year hiatuses are independent events. IF I am not, please explain why.
Judith wrote: “I do not regard the Steinman et al. paper to be a useful contribution owing to methodological problems in ‘reinventing’ the AMO and PDO indices”
ALL descriptions of phenomena like the AMO and the PDO are inherently circular. They require that we know “what would have happened” if these phenomena didn’t exist. We can assume what would have happened is: 1) no trend, 2) a linear trend, 3) changes matching output from climate models (Schlesinger and Ramankutty’s original method for the AMO), 4) change equal to that outside the region of interest (the PDO uses global SST’s outside the North Pacific), or 5) “adjusted” output from climate models (Steinman et al). We call the difference between “what would have happened” and what was observed “unforced variability” or (natural variability if volcanic and solar forcing haven’t been taken into account). Then Steinman et al claim that unforced variability explains most of the difference between model output and observations.
In the case of the AMO, the difference appears to be a regular oscillation of about 65 years. Given what we know about the behavior of chaotic systems and evidence for only two such oscillations, we have little reliable information about the nature of unforced variability in the Atlantic. (Think how little we would know about ENSO from only two La Nina/El Nino cycles and how our understanding would depend on what two cycles we analyzed first.)
Unless you completely discount paleo studies, there is evidence of a few more cycles than two.
http://www.nature.com/ncomms/journal/v2/n2/full/ncomms1186.html
http://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU2010/EGU2010-13508.pdf
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0022740
Steve: Thank you very much for the refs. The question of proxy data for the AMO crossed my mind as I wrote my comment.
The problem with your first reference is that one wonders how many other proxy records were tested that didn’t show periodicity of 60-90 years. Without that kind of candor (which is sadly lacking in climate science), one can’t interpret the chi-squared data the authors provide. If they looked at 50 records and selected these five …
Seeing the influence of AMO in Chinese tree rings (your third ref), simply proves to me that if you look at enough records you will find a correlation somewhere by chance – even on the other side of the world.
I’d love to see a study that began with an analysis of where we should and shouldn’t see the strongest influence of AMO. In what fraction of those locations do we see (AND NOT SEE) a signal that might be associated with the AMO. Using that strategy, I did a google search for CET and AMO and found a strong signal. The relationship between signal analysis and the temperature record was interesting.
http://www.pnas.org/content/110/6/2058.full
I’ll quit looking while I’m ahead – which is, of course, another way to create the illusion of statistic significant.
By chance maybe or maybe not. I have been favoring the Lee et al paper for where the extra warmth in the Atlantic comes from
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/phod/docs/Lee_etal_2011_grl_amoc.pdf
because it matches up fairly well with observations
http://www.met.reading.ac.uk/~ed/bloguploads/obs_yrem_sn1-2.png
In the 20-odd years of the alarmism push, it was never considered difficult to understand that temperatures were going up. Noone called for a complicated statistical definition of “increase”.
But now that that they’ve stopped going up, suddenly we need experts to explain this “pause” to us.
If I wasn’t such a trusting simpleton, I’d say there was some other agenda at work here.