Bishop Hill Sticking one's neck out
Jan 7, 2016 Climate: Surface 
I avoid making predictions about the evolution of surface temperatures over the period of a few years. Those who choose to do so frequently get themselves into trouble. James Annan lost his bet with GWPF's David Whitehouse and it looks as if GWPF's Sir Alan Rudge will lose out to Chris Hope on another wager.
.@stevebloom55 The bet is with Ian Plimer and Sir Alan Rudge. I win if 2015 not at least 0.1C cooler than 2008. @ruth_mottram
— Chris Hope (@cwhope) December 16, 2015
It's interesting therefore to see that some of the more prominent scientivists are loudly predicting that the current surge in global temperatures is not a simple Niño spike, but is instead the start of a sustained surge.
The effects of the PDO on global warming can be likened to a staircase, with warming leveling off for periods, typically of more than a decade, and then bursting upward.
“It seems to me quite likely that we have taken the next step up to a new level,” said Kevin Trenberth, a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
Given that El Nino seems to have peaked, I guess we will be able to tell if he's right in the relatively short term. I do love it when people stick their necks out like this.
Bishop Hill
John Christy's comments are worth reading. Expect a few more months of warming after El Nino's peak, as the oceans give up their heat to the atmosphere. After that it gets interesting.
Reader Comments (40)
El Ninos are just noise in the system
According to Greenland and other Ice Core data our Holocene Interglacial is now in decline.
The current, warm Holocene interglacial has been the enabler of mankind’s civilisation for the last 10,000+ years. It’s congenial climate spans from mankind’s earliest farming to the scientific and technological advances of the last 100 years.
But:
• the last millennium 1000AD – 2000AD encompassing the Medieval warm Period has been the coldest millennium of the Holocene interglacial.
• each of the notable high points in the Holocene temperature record, (the early Holocene Climate Optimum – Minoan – Roman – Medieval – Modern), have been progressively colder than the previous high point.
• for its first 7-8000 years the early Holocene, including its high point “Climate Optimum”, had virtually flat temperatures, an average drop of only ~0.007 °C per millennium.
• but the more recent Holocene, since a “tipping point” at ~1000BC, has seen a temperature diminution at more than 20 times that earlier rate at about 0.14 °C per millennium.
• the Holocene interglacial is already 10 – 11,000 years old and judging from the length of previous interglacials the Holocene epoch should be drawing to its close: in this century, the next century or this millennium.
• the beneficial warming at the end of the 20th century to the Modern high point has been falsely transmuted into being “the Great Man-made Global Warming Scare”.
• eventually this late 20th century temperature blip will come to be seen as just noise in the system in the longer term progress of comparatively rapid cooling over the last 3000+ years.
When considering the scale of temperature changes that alarmists anticipate because of Man-made Global Warming and their view of the disastrous effects of additional Man-made Carbon Dioxide emissions, it is useful to look at climate change from a longer term, century by century and also from a millennial perspective.
The much vaunted and much feared “fatal” tipping point of +2°C would only bring Global temperatures close to the level of the very congenial climate of “the Roman warm period”.
Were possible to reach the “horrendous” level of +4°C postulated by Warmists, that extreme level of warming would still only bring temperatures to about the level of the previous Eemian maximum, a warm and abundant epoch, when hippopotami thrived in the Rhine delta.
Global warming protagonists should accept that our interglacial has been in long-term decline for the last 3000 years or so and that any action taken by man-kind will make no difference whatsoever. And it’s implausible that any action by Man-kind could reverse the inexorable in the short period of the coming century.
Were the actions by Man-kind able to avert warming they would eventually reinforce the catastrophic cooling that is bound to return relatively soon.
see
https://edmhdotme.wordpress.com/2015/06/01/the-holocene-context-for-anthropogenic-global-warming-2/
I see the sun is very quiet today again.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/reference-pages/solar/
Perhaps the mini, or maxi ice age has started?
All talk of irreversible or "catastrophic" global warming OR cooling (such as "edmh" claims in his comment above) is shown to be misinformed by the Venus/Earth temperatures comparison I brought out 5 years ago:
The Awful Truth About Global Temperature Records
The 288K surface temperature in the century-old Standard Atmosphere (whose set tropospheric temperature profile is precisely confirmed by the Venus/Earth comparison) rules. It's as simple as that, "experts" on both sides.
The southern tip of Greenland is looking ripe for Norse colonization again.
Any takers ?
Mosquito plague in summer
Freeze your hole off in Winter.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fFihqt587gs
1971 expedition pictures for comparison.
http://greenlandexpedition.org/standrews1971.htm
Annan made a $10,000 bet with two Russian solar physicists in 2005 that global temperatures would be warmer in the six years 2012-2017, compared to 1998-2003. Unfortunately for the Russians, the bet was based on the NCDC data set, which Tom Karl has "adjusted," eliminating The Pause in that data set.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2005/aug/19/climatechange.climatechangeenvironment
The Dork of Cork
Have you tried
(a href="http://greenlandexpedition.org/standrews1971.htm")Click here for interesting link(/a)
where
( = <
) = >
resulting the clickable link below,
Click here for interesting link
net result only one person has to copy and paste.
Desperate warmists are shouting 'CO2hu akbar" and threatening thermageddon by sodium bicarbonate suicide belts.
I was more impressed with the Pat Michaels and Chip Knappenberger prediction in 1998..
"we would be willing to wager that the 10-year period beginning in January 1998 and extending through December 2007 will show a statistically significant downward trend in the monthly satellite record of global temperatures". This prediction of the hiatus/pause/plateau/slowdown was bolder and earlier than other skeptics afaik.
http://www.worldclimatereport.com/archive/previous_issues/vol4/v4n8/feature.htm
In reality there was cooling by 2008 but not statistically significant cooling. Still it's a lot closer than any consensus scientists who were uniformly predicting parabolic warming but now claim they expected a hiatus all the time or that the hiatus isn't really there if you data-massage it away or that the expected warming was masked by unexpected cooling from emissions/ocean-suck or that we need 15->17->30/->? years to disprove the hypothesis or whatever crap they come up with next to excuse their base inadequacy.
And of course this lack of warming is still with us 7 years later. My money would be on the exact opposite of what Trenberth says since he has a track record of being wrong all the time; ie the next la big nina will take us down a step.
Meanwhile satellites confirm 2015 as only 3rd warmest.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2016/01/07/2015-only-3rd-warmest-year-according-to-satellites/
Next year will probably end up slightly warmer, as John Christy suggests, but is unlikely to beat 2010, never mind 1998.
edmh
"Global warming protagonists should accept that our interglacial has been in long-term decline for the last 3000 years or so and that any action taken by man-kind will make no difference whatsoever. And it’s implausible that any action by Man-kind could reverse the inexorable in the short period of the coming century."
Hear, hear. We have had a climate for thousands of millennia (not sure if 'billennia' is a word!) so the alarmists are jumping the gun if they think that a few decades, or even centuries, are significant. Probably why geologists are more sceptical than most.
Would it not be more fun to establish which clique of climate scientists have been most successful and/or blatant in 'evolving' the past climate to match their modern day needs?
The likes of Gore, Oreskes, Kleine, Figueres, Stern, and other Green carpetbaggers, et al couldn't give a stuff for whether it's getting hotter or colder. They're not in this 'play' to give us all a comfortable living under a benign climate: they're in it to push their own particular societal beliefs. In the case of Gore and Stern, enrichment; in the case of Kleine and Figueres, a political change not unlike what Pol Pot was trying to do in Cambodia. They see us as their Sisyphus: they've presented us an un-falsifiable hypothesis and just toss us new directions whenever they feel the need to get us arguing again. Once is was AGW; then it was CC; followed by Carbon; and now, Sustainability - which I defy anyone to define to the satisfaction of the alarmists. We are being finessed. Our only hope is that edmh is spot on and that the proles will rise up when they see they've been well and truly shafted. Cold can do that. Napoleon and that mustachioed Austrian painter found out that the hard way.
OK....end of rant. For anyone interested, I've had a response to my FOI about greens infesting DECC - and how many. I'll put something in Unthreaded....
golf charlie
That is a deadly serious accusation. There is a limit to how far you can stretch elastic. I propose faux scientist James Hansen and his team of deep ecologists at NASA GISS.
0.1 deg C..WTF !!
"The 288K surface temperature in the century-old Standard Atmosphere (whose set tropospheric temperature profile is precisely confirmed by the Venus/Earth comparison) rules. It's as simple as that, "experts" on both sides."
I've got bloody 250K behind my balcony door and you don't get that from your Venus comparison. If you could increase it by 2K, be my guest, but I'm *afraid* it won't happen.
edmh
Your synopsis is right on except for the length of the Late Holocene cooling trend which the NorthGRIP ice core dO18: dO16 ratio indicates that late Holocene cooling may well have set in as long ago as 5,000 ybp.
It is also worthy of note that the highest interglacial temperatures were probably reached in the 2.2 mya interglacial followed by the 1.25 mya interglacial thermal peaks , both of which were very short and occurred before the Mid Pliestocene Revolution.
Since the shift of cycle length from 40,000 yr to 100,000 yr 1.0 mya the highest temperatures were probably attained at the height of cycles XI and VI, both of which were considerably warmer than cycle II ( the Eemian or Ipswichian in Gt. Britain ). It is perhaps interesting that after cyclee XI peak interglacial temperatures were lower each successive cycle until cycle V. Cycle IV reversed the trend which re established with both III and II having lower peak temperatures than IV. As you note it looks like that trend has continued into our one interglacial (cycle I )which looks to have peaked at a lower temperature than cycle II.
So if it is all down to the PDO, all this CO2 nonsense has been a complete waste of time. Climate scientists will want to build a dam from Hawaii down to Antarctica to stop it. Might be cheaper too, if we can ditch everything else they dreamed up for the last 20 years.
What a dumb bet ! .....With a background warming trend as we leave the ice age , they bet that temperature would surely fall between 2016 ! Not to mention that narrative bias might creep into the measurement systems, and the end year might be an El Nino year.
...Expect a few more months of warming after El Nino's peak, as the oceans give up their heat to the atmosphere. After that it gets interesting....
So... we should all start to place bets predicting global cooling in about two months time?
I prefer to bet on the ponies. There's less fixing.
Hope mentioned he has 3 bets in play
"If I win I will have to give some of it to @jamesannan who gave me good odds on the opposite bet" ..so does than mean Annan has lost in another bet ?
and back in 2013 someone warned about the risk of an El Nino year
But surely the same for warmists they could be unlucky if the year was a La Nina
Rudge & Plimer bet £1000 each It says in this article
Plimer is a great man BUT said
"I’m a market man, markets go up, markets go down. I think temperatures are going to go down in 2015.”
One of the biggest risk is the past becoming colder than it used to be (with some datasets)
"Global Temperature" is apparently now 1 deg C above "pre-industrial", however they wish to define it.
The EU version:
“The Information Reference Document Prepared and adopted by EU Climate Change Expert Group ‘EG Science’ 9th July 2008, 16:15 Final Version, Version 9.1, 9 ”
It says “Pre-industrial being defined as 1850-1899 average mean global surface temperatures”.
They also say, “The 2°C limit cannot be considered to be entirely ’safe’, as severe impacts are likely to occur increasingly as the global mean temperature rise approaches 2°C above pre-industrial levels.
(2008) "The global mean temperature has risen by approximately 0.8°C above pre-industrial levels (IPCC AR4 WGI SPM). Unless otherwise stated, all temperatures given in this paper refer to changes of global mean temperature relative to pre-industrial levels. Here defined as temperature change since 1850-1899 (beginning of instrumental temperature records). At that time the anthropogenic influence was small compared to natural variation;"
(I wonder can they give us the percentages on that?)
They then say: "temperatures in the late 19th century are in good agreement (order of 0.1°C) with conditions before the onset of industrialisation in 1750.”
So now we have another definition of pre-industrialisation. The first steam engine appeared in 1698, Abraham Darby was using coke to fuel his blast furnaces at Coalbrookdale in 1709. James Watt invented his steam engine in 1769, the first locomotive rolled out in 1804, so there was an ongoing process of increasing coal use.
In fact so much so that the idea of "Peak Coal" was floating around as expressed in the 1865 treatise by William Stanley Jevons, "The Coal Question: An Inquiry Concerning the Progress of the Nation, and the Probable Exhaustion of Our Coal-Mines" (http://www.eoearth.org/view/article/156524/), who said "Since we began to develop the general use of coal, about a century ago, we have become accustomed to an almost yearly expansion of trade and employment."
If we are to "limit" global temperature rise to 2 deg C, or now 1.5 deg C above pre-industrial, (as if we could), then are we to assume that pre-industrial temperatures are desirable, "the norm" to which we must aspire. Really?
It was pretty damn cold most of the time. This is what historian Brian Fagan says:
Fagan, “Floods, Famines, and Emperors: El Niño and the Fate of Civilizations” (Basic Books, 1999).
“Only 150 years ago, Europe came to the end of a 500 year cold snap so severe that thousands of peasants starved. The Little Ice Age changed the course of European history. Dutch canals froze over for months, shipping could not leave port, and glaciers in the Swiss Alps overwhelmed mountain villages.
Five hundred years of much colder weather changed European agriculture, helped tip the balance of political power from the Mediterranean states to the north, and contributed to the social unrest that culminated in the French Revolution. The poor suffered most. They were least able to adjust to changing circumstances and most susceptible to disease and increased mortality. These five centuries of periodic economic and social crisis in a much less densely populated Europe are a haunting reminder of the drastic consequences of even a modest cooling of global temperatures.
The Little Ice Age had more impact on history than its two predecessors, for it descended on the world after centuries of unusually warm temperatures. One can reasonably call it the mother of all history-changing events.”
Shouldn't we be just a little bit pleased that it's warmer again now?
Christy's report on Antarctic glacial ice melt release of CO2 is very interesting. It seems to support the temps-first-CO2-later position and go against (again) Al Gore's claim that the ice core data supports CAGW.
Do contrary reports make it into the IPCC or is there some filter?
@Dennisa
I seriously doubt a slightly colder climate altered the French wheat yield.
If anything it may have been beneficial to crop yields.
Those sort of climate changes typically affect the margins of the temperate zone rather then its core bread basket.
You must look deeper inside social and economic affairs.
The last remaining bits of feudalism in France died during the Fronde (Spain much much later)https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fronde
After this time a even deeper centralization of power took hold with all roads, rents and taxes leading to Paris.
For a time this appeared to work but slowly France became atrophied .
As for coal use , thermal rather then kinetic burn of coal/ peat was very extensive and intensive many 100s of years before the steam engine.
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/09/peat-and-coal-fossil-fuels-in-pre-industrial-times.html
Dork - if you want people to look at the links you post, suggest you make them clickable.
http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2011/09/peat-and-coal-fossil-fuels-in-pre-industrial-times.html
Good stuff as usual. I'm sure they'll massage the figures to prove themselves right though.
Dork:
"a slightly colder climate"? Cold enough:
"Whilst there was only an average drop of 4 ° Fahrenheit in temperature, it was enough to cause periods of massive rain, snow and cold. Glaciers expanded and torrential rains, followed by snow storms, hit Europe, ruining crops and starving the population. Colder temperatures across the world led to shifts in agriculture and surprising events in warfare and innovation." http://www.authorstream.com/Presentation/DavidRobarge-1092186-the-little-ice-age/.
Sorry MartinA, I haven't mastered the html either :(
And again:
"However, in the 1700s a 25 per cent population increase in France overstressed an already struggling agricultural system that could not keep up with demand. With even a 10 per cent decrease in a harvest, people went hungry. The winter of 1788-89 was especially brutal, freezing transportation canals and rivers solid so that food distribution slowed to a trickle. The spring thaw laid waste to newly planted fields, while a subsequent hailstorm flattened crops. The all-important wheat crop, on which the majority of the French peasantry relied for their dietary staple of bread, nearly failed. This cycle of bad weather and worse crops continued to plague the entire course of the Revolution."
http://www.ehow.co.uk/about_4572244_food-shortages-french-revolution.html
"As for coal use , thermal rather then kinetic burn of coal/ peat was very extensive and intensive many 100s of years before the steam engine."
Indeed, but that was not industrial. Wikipedia says: "Archeological evidence in China indicates surface mining of coal and household usage after approximately 3490 BC.
And: In Roman Britain, the Romans were exploiting all major coalfields (save those of North and South Staffordshire) by the late 2nd century AD.
Also: The earliest reference to the use of coal in metalworking is found in the geological treatise "On stones by the Greek scientist Theophrastus (c. 371–287 BC):
However, your response doesn't really address the point of my comment regarding the vagueness and selectiveness of the temperature records and chosen base lines and the impreciseness of the claims regarding the industrial revolution.
@Dennisa
My own theory for what was driving population change at this time was the need for wages or rent payment.
The previously feudal lord needed the increased rent to pay ever increasing taxes.
More babies were needed.
Reproduction became a production line.
Labour was perhaps the most important part of the capital structure in the pre steam engine period of capitalism.
Also what was driving lower yields was ranch rather then peasant agriculture.
It's hard for some people to grasp this but capitalism has nothing to do with production / consumption.
It's a game of how far you can push wealth concentration.
Near the end of its cycle it must destroy wealth to maintain concentration.
Initially France had its Sun King period of apparent success and then it all went pear shaped.
I disagree with this writer in many areas (she wants to introduce wages inside the family unit which is ironically super capitalist which is nothing knew under the Marxist sun) but she makes some valid points.
Something very profound happened to society in the early capitalist period .
Including the Catholic manifestation of capitalism , that is "every sperm is sacred".
At that time it was indeed sacred .......to the ranch owners.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-LCPnYprg8E
Medieval and proto - capitalist society was totally different in character.
It can be difficult to get your head around this but it is necessary.
I keep seeing references to the past warm periods and the comments about how can such be overlooked. Or the wondrous ones about how it's all about the money. I see another here referring to the fact that we are nearing the end of the interglacial, and implying in some way that those that are pushing "AGW" some how are blind to it. They're not blind to it at all. And it's not about the money - money is just a game anyway.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to find a map of the world as it is believed to be at or about glacial maximum, and it doesn't take a rocket scientist to conclude that if the edge of permafrost has moved 1000 miles south, the probability is good that the arable land boundary also has moved about the same. And one last time, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to realize that a very large part of the land mass that is supporting human life will not be doing so if we are, in fact, moving towards the end of the interglacial. So what does that mean?
That basically means that those regions that have produced the food that supports the population will not exist, and those people living in those regions will have to move south. But there are already people in the south, correct? What we need, then, is a culling of the excess population, and shutting down the energy generation capacity of much of the world is a very good way to start that culling. You get the opportunity to have them die off from hypothermia, which will leave basically only the hardy and healthy, and you will get a die off from starvation since adequate food cannot be produced. How great will the die off of the human race be is hard to say, but you can probably expect it to drop below a billion, and perhaps by a large margin.
Now currently, much of the land that will support what will remain of the human race is populated by the poor and struggling portion of humanity. If you allowed them to develop a more efficient civilization by allowing them to enjoy the benefits of "cheap energy," there might be a real problem in getting rid of them as those that will have gamed the world for money - for whatever it is worth, and like beauty, that is in the eye of the beholder - will have acquired their mercenary bands to insure they get their land and retain it. Sorry, but desperation will bring out the worst in human traits and your life will be meaningless to the person that has his eyes on that piece of land that will still be pleasant in the coming cold.
Most everyone that is talking renewed cold keep thinking in terms of a "mini ice age" more because the alternative to that is "the real deal." They are all hoping that on the other side of this downturn in temperature will be an upturn, but the heart and lack of soul of the AGW people KNOW that they have to plan on it being "the real deal" because if they aren't ready, it will be too late to get what they want. Which is another reason why you see the craziness towards terrorism and the push towards a possible nuclear war. For the most part, IF that war happens, the areas that will become unlivable will be under ice for 10,000 or more years and nuclear waste buried there will likewise, and by the time Earth gives that land back to mankind, the radiation levels will be down to a level where it probably won't matter.
For humanity to survive with the population any where near what it now would take a single minded effort to make it happen, and it doesn't start by "going green," unless you are talking about trying to find ways to grow algae that would feed the population of the world, and accepting that whether we like it or not there will mostly be apartment living in massive skyscrapers in huge cities for the population to remain. And then you actually have to have something for them to do, wouldn't you? Everything can't be manufactured by robots if you are going to have the 7 billion people living in 40% of the space that we currently use.
It would be nice if the race pulled together to find that second possibility, but we have been raised to be too self-serving to actually come to the decision that it's all for one and one for all. Since that won't happen, the most likely future will be that forced on us by the affluent and their armed guards, which, of course, is why governments every where are pushing so hard to take weapons out of the hands of the average person since owning a gun does, in a way, allow you to "vote" on who has a right to decide who lives and who doesn't.
"Never bet on anything that talks." said W.C Fields, presumably referring to jockeys (aka ‘little crooks’) rather than the horses.
The same advice applies to anyone contemplating a bet about movements in the alleged GAT as determined by HadCRUT or GISTEMP.
Dork
" InI seriously doubt a slightly colder climate altered the French wheat yield. If anything it may have been beneficial to crop yields."
Wheat was not the only and not iven the main cereal crop grown in pre revolutionary France. Also crop failure also Depends a lot on the actual crop; wheat, barley, oats, rye etc. all have different envelopes of moisture, wind and temperature tolerance and different optimal conditions. Same applies to a lot of different root and tuber crops. To all that differences in altitude, aspect, soil type wind exposure and latitude have to be taken into account.
Easy to oversimplify and make sweeping statements . Suggest you read HHLamb on Climate, History and the Modern World.
Both sides of this argument should not be over simplified
Spectator:
DNFTT, it will just go off on another totally irrelevant tangent.
Not trying to engage in oversimplification.
There is more to farming then climate.
There is the question of demand / real prices.
The mean standard of living declined in 1700s France.
Less demand required less food.
Remember it was now a money economy rather then a peasant economy.
People for some reason do not get this.
Profits will increase in a increasingly subsistence wage economy until collapse.
dennisa
http://www.w3schools.com/tags/att_a_href.asp
http://wattsupwiththat.com/test/
The 1998 Nino kicked us up onto a new temperature plateau which has lasted 15 years so it is not completely unreasonable to expect the 2016 El Nino (which is similar) to do the same. However I think you need to take the longer view. El Ninos are a short term phenomenon. What happens over the next 15 years has more to do with longer term factors influencing the climate. The sun for example is going to show us exactly what a maunder minimum type climate looks like. And we'll get to see how that works exactly by watching it play out in real time. It will be interesting for sure.
Harry Huffman,
Your (correct) observation about Earth and Venus does not rule out the work of others in their estimates of past temperatures or predictions of future ones, as you can't rule out the possibility that temperatures on Venus went up and down in sinc with Earth temperatures. In short, the distance ratio fit to temperatures on both planets can still be maintained whilst mean temperatures rise and fall.
James is doing rather well having won his bet with Chris Hope. Hope was hedging his bets with Plimer and Rudge. James' 10K bet with some random Russians appears in excellent shape.
Oh yeah, Roger Cohen from Exxon conceded on a 5K bet that 2017 would be colder than 2007