Bishop Hill Obamas housekarls dance to his warming tune
Jun 4, 2015 Climate: Oceans Climate: Surface Over the last few days I have been copied in on a great deal of correspondence about a new paper in Science from Tom Karl and colleagues, which has "blatant act of political propaganda" written all over it. The claim is that the pause in surface temperature rises is an artefact of the data and that a great deal of jiggery pokery is peformed on the numbers it is possible to get a graph that shows continued warming. The pause is no more.
This could only be written with Paris in mind.
Fortunately, Science distributed the paper to journalists sufficiently early for it to be widely circulated and quite a few people have now had a look. Some of them have even stopped laughing for long enough to write down their thoughts.
GWPF have a lengthy press release here, examining each of the eleven (!!) errors in the surface temperature records that Karl et al claim that nobody else has noticed before. It points out that the authors have decided that Argo sea surface temperature data can be ignored because it's not surface data (it's taken at 5m depth). Instead they prefer measurements from buoys and ships (from up to 15m down!) which they then adjust. They also apply a completely implausible uplift to sea temperatures during the last few decades because, it is alleged, methods of SST measurement have been changing. To call the paper, as GWPF do, "a highly speculative and slight paper that produces a statistically marginal result by cherry-picking time intervals" seems to be a masterful piece of British understatement.
Meanwhile, stateside, Bob Tisdale and Anthony Watts are doing a splendid job in unravelling what is going on. In particular their Figure 4 showing how adjustments to the sea surface data are producing warming in the present and cooling in the past are astonishing, as is Figure 5, which shows how each iteration of the dataset gradually increases the amount of warming and cooling added. The also describe how the pre-hiatus period has been cooled, so that it looks like what was previously a hiatus is now a period of warming. Almost unbelievably, their largest changes to the data happen in the last few decades, when the raw data is best.
Desperate, desperate stuff and a sad day for science.
Reader Comments (194)
David Salt
Scientifically there is interesting work to be done on the short term effects of volcanoes , solar cycle, ENSO etc, which tend to affect the second decimal place in the anomalies, as internal variation.
From a long term viewpoint the exact numbers are less relevant than the fact that there is a long term trend.
Since internal variation creates a +/- 0.1C wobble in the trend, you can raise or lower the rate by 0.2C/ century by cherry picking dates. If you have no political axe to grind you pick the dates most likely to reflect the process. If you are doing politics you pick the dates that suit your agenda.😕
IPCC finds itself on the interface between the science and the policy. Its job is to summarise the science for the politicians who make policy. Since the pause is part of the discussion the IPCC would have to address it, but its impact is more political than practical.
The policy response is a political hot potato. This is probably why the propogandists turned "a temporary pause between 2002 and 2010" into "no warming since 1998" and then "global warming has stopped".
You see all three variants expressed here.
Golf Charlie
Finagle knows what the UK will get this year. Courtesy of the wobbly jet stream our weather seems even more uncertain than ever.
The Central England temperature record set a new record in 2014, but don't count on it meaning much for 2015.
Entropic Man, why should our wobbly jet stream be any more wobbly now, than 10, 100, 1000 years ago? It is another factor unheard of 100 years ago, first noticed in the 1960's (?) with regular trans Atlantic air travel, and has only been part of TV weather forecasts for 15 (?) years.
Yet when it was decided that CO2 was the only reason that the climate had warmed, no other cause was considered.
CO2 levels have continued to rise. Temperatures have not. (You can redefine the definition of a pause, stop, halt, hiatus for as long as it takes for temperatures to start rising, but how long will that take, if CO2 is the driving force?
I did see the Cray computer being installed in the Bracknell Met Office in 1987. Very impressive and expensive. I was full of National pride. Come 15/16th Oct 1987, it all went a bit wrong. What happened is now referred to as a "bomb", when a depression suddenly deepens. Clearly the Met Office, staff and computers, failed. It is good to know that they know better now.
What makes you so sure that CO2 drives the climate? CO2 theory does not explain the pause, and data fiddling is a bit ENRON/FIFA. You can put your faith in Skeptical Skience and 97%, but human observation suggests to me that would be a bad move. Your call of course.
One thing those in scientific research quickly learn is that many unexpected effects crop up as you go. This is why the most important expression in science is not "Eureka". It is That's odd". The wobbly jet stream is a " That's odd " outcome, not spotted in advance.
Where do you get the idea that CO2 is the only variable? What about solar insulation varying in 11 year and Milankovich cycles? What about aerosols and black carbon? from pollution and volcano's? What about increasing water vapour and methane,? What about ice albedo and ENSO?
All of the above have short term or long term effects on temperature. All are measurable and, alone or together, are insufficient to explain the warming.
CO2 theory, as you call it, is a necessary ingredient to provide enough energy to explain the observed changes. Level it out and the other effects do not provide enough energy to balance the books.
Do not expect it to be a steady increase. Sometimes the other variables are enough to damp out the rise temporarily Think of Pinatubo. It never lasts, at least not since 1910.
Entropic Man, I never came up with the idea that CO2 is the only variable. Climate scientists did. All the other variables you offer have been dismissed by the 97% of climate scientists according to Skeptical Skience.
According to the Hockey Stick Team, there is no other variable but CO2. According to the Hockey Stick there should be no pause. Mann cheered the Karl "no pause" paper for endorsing his Hockey Stick.
I am not a climate scientist, but most who claim to be, seem hell bent on proving CO2's guilt, or just spend their time on an expensive death sentence.
I am now chilled and relaxed about the climate. It is too. It is chillaxing, if you don't like the word pause.
EM:
Whence your "95% confidence limits" as straight offsets of 0.100 degrees? Doesn't accord with any statistics that I know, and there's an awful lot of data outside the limits...
It doesn't add up
The different datasets all reckon that their annual averages have 95% confidence limits around +/- 0.1C . Lacking the computer skills to calculate confidence limits directly I take their word for it. Statisticians such as Tamino include confidence limits of similar size.n their own trend lines.
One definition of 95% confidence limits is that 1 of every 20 datum points would be outside the 95% confidence limits.
Plotting a linear trend for 1910 to 1940 or 1970 to 2015: meets that definition. For the full 1910-2015 period a linear trend may be too simple a model, so 95% confidence limits around +/-0.2C might be more appropriate.
This would make it even harder to identify any pauses. The graph I gave David Salt was deliberately optimistic to maximise the chance of seeing significant pauses if they existed.
Golf Charlie
Perhaps you should stop quoting your own side's propaganda and read the science in the original.
Entropic Man. I am not quoting anyone's propaganda. Just making observations from the point of view of a country bumpkin. Country bumpkin science may not have split the atom, but can tell when snowdrops and daffodills first appear.
Country bumpkin science can not forecast based on the quantity of frogspawn. But climate science has done no better with the quantity of CO2.
EM:
It is plain you do not understand confidence bands in statistics. Here's an introduction to the topic:
http://www.real-statistics.com/regression/confidence-and-prediction-intervals/
You will note the bands are curves.
It doesn't add up
Fascinating. How much difference would you expect between the actual curves and my straight line approximation?
EM how much should temperatures have risen by now in accordance with CO2 and the Hockey Stick graph?
Your faith in the scientists at SS is endearing.
Regarding your conviction that there is no pause, the word you are searching for is denial<.a>.
Cheers,
Earle
Earle
I added the full 1979-present trend line to your grarh. Would you care to deny that the most recent temperature reading is above the 1979-present trend.?
This is why I regard your pause as noise.
EM would you care to deny the Hockey Stick graph?
Golf Charlie
No thank you. Subsequent proxy studies agree wit it.
EM thank you for sharing with us, the depth of your scientific understanding.
I reckon if you start with the same shonky proxies and apply the same shonky methods you are pretty likely to come up with the same shonky results.
But I never did post-modern physics, so what would I know?
Mike Jackson, some of us were never destined to award ourselves Nobel Prizes for Climate Science.
The character hidden under the EM moniker is a bundle of contradictions. Having made a fuss about a few months in 2015, he's told us that a decade is "noise". Ever the hair splitting nitpicker regarding the science, he's a self confessed Mann True Believer "because proxies".
At this rate he risks saying something skeptical. Avoid avoid avoid.
The fuss over the "now you see it now you don't" 20th Century warming trend and the " now you see it now you don't" 21st Century pause should be kept in perspective.
Deep Ocean water temperatures fell by 12ºC in the Eocene (52-33 mya) when there was no glaciation anywhere on the planet and atmospheric CO2 concentration was over 800ppm.
In the 175 year period between 118,225 and 118,050 years ago the average temperature rose from - 0.9 to +1.4ºC - 3x the total warming measured in the last 160 years and it happened during the post Eemian Interglacial cooling episode when over 11,000 years and the temperature fell by 11ºC
During the last Glacial temperature changes in both directions of up to 6ºC occurred in periods of as little as 150 years
In the Younger Dryas period the temperature fell by about 5ºC in around 400 years and then rose 5.5ºC in 600 years.
Vostok and EPICA ice core data both show that the last millennium is the coldest 1000 year period in the last 10,000 years.
The cooling episodes which terminated the 8 interglacial warm periods in the last 1.0 million years all started when atmospheric CO2 concentration was at a high stand.
Arguments about trends (in either direction ) of a few tenths of a ºC over a few decades or even 2ºC over a century or two (and about the influence of anthropogenic CO2 ), are reminiscent of debates about the numbers of angels who can stand on the head of a pin.
Paleoclimate Buff, but do the records show another period in time when hot water hid at the bottom of the ocean? This is the unprecedented event we are now expected to believe. I can certainly believe it has never happened before, and I am fairly sure it has never happened at all.
Golf Charlie
Cold water is dense and sinks while warm water is less dense and rises. As a result there is usually a thermal gradient with the temperature of the water being lower at greater depths. Warm water can be dense if it has high salinity and could sink below cooler but less dense water creating a temperature inversion and there are known examples of this. I do not know how water warmed by solar radiation and thus of low density at the surface could sink to the bottom of the ocean.
Omnologos
Most of my comments at BH are reactive. I enjoy pointing out the absurdities that you denizen produce in your attempts to deny the obvious.
I do regard the long term trend as more important than the short term, but when every twitch or apparent pause is proclaimed as the end of global warming, should I let the lies go unchallenged?
EM
If you regard the long term trend as more important than the short term why are you so convinced that the present short term warming trend of a couple of centuries is such an important feature of climate change when there have been numerous multi - century warnings of similar magnitude superimposed on the the long term trend of ten millennia of cooling?
Golf Charlie, Paloeclimate Buff
Your own terminology (hot water) is warping your thinking. The temperature differences involved are no more than a few degrees.
There are two areas where the interaction between salinity, temperature and density are influencing climate.
In the Greenland Sea warmer water transported from the Atlantic evaporates from the surface, increasing salinity and cooling. This is still warmer than the Arctic or the dep ocean water, but the increased salinity makes it sufficiently denser to sink to the bottom. This is the Arctic driver of the Thermohaline circulation.
In the Antarctic fresh water melting off the land and from increased glacier flow is forming a less dense cap over the surrounding ocean, trapping warmer and more saline water below. The consequence is increased Antarctic sea ice extent, increased basal melting of glaciers and less water entering the Thermohaline Circulation from the Antarctic.
EM
I am well aware of the dynamics of the North Atlantic end of the thermohaline circulation.
Your understanding of the dynamics of the Antarctic meltwater is based on a recent, and unproven, hypothesis that flies in the face of the history of the last 34 million years during which Antarctic meltwater has always been denser than the surrounding seawater and thus sinking to the ocean floor where it has progressively filled the deep ocean basins with cold water.
Will Entropic wonder well
When children know
To play in snow,
At the bell?
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Paleoclimare Buff
I think of climate as an energy budget. For the current climate we can quantify all the main components of the budget.
When you do the accounting the natural forcings (Milankovich, volcano'es, etc) are all negative. Sans humanity we would be dropping back towards a glacial period. Instead we are warming at an almost unprecedented rate into conditions not seen since the end of the Pliocene.
Courtesy of the USAF and others the physics of the CO2 greenhouse effect are very well understood. This and its feedbacks match the extra energy capture required to produce the observed rate of warming. The ancillary effects such as melting ice and sea level rise are also as one would expect from the observed energy imbalance.
I accept the AGW hypothesis because it fits the observations better than any other.
EM - when I myself point the inconsistencies on a warmist blog, I do state it clearly that there is no point in us discussing the science or the policy, as our thoughts are dramatically opposite on most of the related topics - this to avoid ending up making the same points over and over again.
There is also the invariable warmist mindset you have just displayed, unable to see the vast amount of disagreement among CAGW skeptics. Unlike alarmists, we do not have to believe, trust and support each other till the cows come home. Whatever any commenter says here or elsewhere cannot be taken as my thought or anybody else's, unless so explicitly stated.
This means you could find yourself forever busy as responding to anybody's argument here means nothing wrt somebody else's argument.
As for the twitches of temperature, I have from very good authority that climate sensitivity [...] is a function of time with feedbacks associated with different components acting on a whole range of timescales from seconds to multi-millennial to even longer. (Who said that? For the reader to find out).
This means that your "noise" is always somebody else "data", and your data just a "twitch" again. Rather than trying to absurdly convince people that the pause never existed, all you need to do is point them to the fact that, unless the timescale is agreed, there is nothing ever to talk about. This is very basic climate change science.
So why don't you do that?
EM For the current climate we can quantify all the main components of the budget
Caveat: every generation of climate scientists has declared that they could "quantify all the main components of the budget". However, science being science, today's quantification isn't yesterday's and most likely won't be tomorrow's.
There is no observation there. It's just estimates, only useful if not taken as true to the decimal. In turn, this suggests that any matching with warming is strongly dependent on the models being finely tuned post-facto.
In fact, there is no guarantee that any model that can best match observation over a certain period of time will still be the best model for any other period of time.
EM
Regarding climate as a response to an energy budget – you are finally on the right track.
Since 2002 there has been a 0.2ºC rise in the global average temperature. This has been accompanied by a ( satellite measured ) increase in Outgoing Longwave Radiation ( ORL) of 2 W/ sq.m.
The IPCC central projection for a rise of CO2 concentration to 600ppm is a forcing increase of 3.7 W/sq.m which is estimated to result in an increase of 3ºC in global average temperature. The OLR would increase by 7.5 W/sq.m and the Earth would then lose more than twice the amount of energy into space than the forcing effect of CO2. That ratio increases the more the Earth warms.
This feedback is a direct inverse response to temperature change and is independent of the cause of the temperature change. Since there is a lag in the Earth’s temperature response to the energy imbalance warming and cooling episodes of short duration ( a century or two) can occur even while longer term natural forcings such as the Milancovic cycles are resulting in long term cooling. It is irrelevant whether the late 20 th Century warming episode was the result of anthropogenic CO2 emissions, in total or in part, the warming itself will give rise to an increased energy gap which will result in an inverse effect on temperature in the longer term.
In the Phanerozoic Era atmospheric CO2 concentration has for most of the time been much higher than in the present Pleistocene/Holocene and has been as high as several thousand ppm but with the exception of ( geologically) brief episodes in the Triassic and the Paleocene/ Eocene Thermal Maximum ( PETM) temperature has generally been stabilised at around 22ºC – which is what it might be expected to return to after the end of the current glacial episode – which has now lasted 2.3 million years.
Paleoclimate buff
At equilibrium
insulation+forcing +feedbacks = OLR+albedo
The only physical system I can think of that gives increased cooling with increased energy input is a refrigerator.
Climate warms while insolation +forcings+feedbacks increase. When they stabilise, because of lags temperature and OLR continue to increase to equilibrium.
There is no mechanism by which increased forcing can have a net cooling effect.
If the system behaved as you describe it would be unable to warm and would run down to a snowball earth minimum.
Kim
The Earth is warming
You do not wish to believe
So deny, deny.
Kim
The Earth is warming
You do not wish to believe
So deny, deny.
Right lens RSS,
Left lens, UAH, a pair;
What a spectacle.
==========
EM
Equilibrium is never attained - there is always an overshoot because the OLR response is much faster than the temperature change . When cooling lowers the temperature sufficiently the OLR reduces and the temperature starts to rise again until the balance is reversed.
The geography of the Pleistocene/Holocene has most of the Earth's land mass in the northern hemisphere and an Antarctic continent thermally insulated from warm water by the Circum-Antarctic current. This results in an alternation between glacial eras with Northern hemisphere continental ice sheets and a dry,dusty low CO2 atmospheric state, and an interglacial eras with only South Polar and Greenland continental ice sheets and a warm, moist, high CO2 atmospheric state. The shift from one state to the other is likely triggered by fairy modest insolation changes at high Northern hemisphere latitudes resulting from the Milancovic cycles. Within each state the OLR response to temperature changes results in a temperature oscillation of a few ºC around a central mean ( +/- 8ºC in Glacials and +/-15ºC in Interglacials). Until there is some fundamental change, in Paleogeography, or attenuation or augmentation of solar radiation this situation will continue - ie as long as the Antarctic continent remains centered in the south polar region and unconnected with any other land mass in the southern hemisphere - a LONG time!
Before plate tectonic movement closed the Tethyan Ocean and the Panama Gap, put Antarctica in the south polar region and the opened the Drake Passage (34 my ago) there was a circum-equatorial warm current instead of a circum-Antarctic cold current and the temperature/ OLR feedback dynamic maintained a warm, moist high CO2 atmosphere in which temperature oscillated a degree or two around a 22ºC. In these benign conditions the Arctic Ocean was ice free all year with a climate was similar to that of the Mediterranean today and there were no continental Ice Caps anywhere - not even in the Antarctic. There were no Mountain Glaciers until the Indian sub-continent collided with Asia and raised up the Himalaya and the Tibetan Plateau.
EM's mention of equilibrium is seriously disappointing. If we need to talk about the most inanely simple points of science, there is no science to talk about.
I mean...this is unanimously agreed: "climate sensitivity [...] is a function of time with feedbacks associated with different components acting on a whole range of timescales from seconds to multi-millennial to even longer."
Now...who would be talking of "equilibrium" having understood the above? For example...what equilibrium? At the second level? Multidecadal? Millennial?
An imaginary and impossible state, this equilibrium, in which man might have been able to nudge the number higher. In the meantime, Nature plays with the whole range of temperature and other climate manifestations at her will, and the risks to man are immeasurably higher to the cold side.
Gaia flicks her little cloud finger, and behold: The CO2 effect is gone! Heh, the warming, not the greening. Little miracle worker that young domestic.
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Hi Paleo
There is something weird about the format of your posts. Unlike everyone else's they, do not wrap properly, which means to read them one has to continuously scroll horizintally back and forth. Spectacularly inconvenient.
Entropic Man : The Earth is warming. You do not wish to believe So deny, deny.
An example of the very fake certainty that characterises mainstream climate 'science'.
So while the earth now shows no signs of warming, you wish to beleive these signs. So you deny deny.
Oops, typo. I of course meant,
... you DON'T wish to believe the signs of no warming. So you deny deny deny the Pause.
Paleoclimate Buff: don’t waste your time. No matter what your own area of knowledge or expertise, Entropic Mann knows far more about it than you. Mind you, he is one of the few trolls who will actually read what you have written, though will then completely misinterpret it; others will only comment on what they think you have written, and even that will be misinterpreted.
Anyway, who is denying that the Earth has warmed, and may even continue to warm? None on here, that I can see, though there are a great many who admit that the warming has been, and in all probability will continue to be, variable in the short term, be it the “steep” rise of 1910 – 1940, the slight fall from 1945 – 1975, and the acknowledged rise from 1975 – 1998. Quite why anyone could get into such a lather, denying that there has been a plateauing of the temperatures is a puzzle.
What I hope is that the temperatures will continue their slow rise, with all the benefits we have had: milder winters, longer growing seasons, higher latitude and altitude arability, greater crop yields, reduced weather extremes, etc. What I fear is that this plateau is actually a peak, and we will soon suffer falling temperatures, and we lose all the benefits we have enjoyed, so far.
Radical Rodent
I am afraid you are right about EM and I fear you are right about the possibility that we are at or close to a temperature peak. The warming since the bottom of the LIA has been about the same as from the nadir of the Dark Ages cool period to the peak of the Medieval warm period. Also the quiescence of the sun beginning to look like a Dalton minimum and both these signs point in the same direction ie- towards cooling. Moreover each warming peak over the last 8 millennia has been lower than it's predecessor suggesting worse is to come.