Global Warming Policy Forum | 1 Oct 2014
Global Warming Pause Comes Of Age
The Earth’s temperature has “plateaued” and there has been no global warming for at least the last 18 years, says Dr. John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center (ESSC) at the University of Alabama/Huntsville. “That’s basically a fact. There’s not much to comment on,” Christy said when CNSNews.com asked him to remark on the lack of global warming for nearly two decades as of October 1st. –Barbara Hollingsworth, CBS News, 30 September 2014
What will the Warming Pause do next? Get a job? Go on a gap year? Maybe go to college and rack up some proper student debt. Who knows, but it’s worth celebrating the good news that the planet’s temperatures are not accelerating to thermageddon. –Josh, Bishop Hill 1 October 2014
The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. OK it has but it is only 7 years of data and it isn’t statistically significant. –Phil Jones, University of East Anglia 5 July 2005
Bottom line: the ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried. -Phil Jones, University of East Anglia 7 May 2009
2014 will probably be in the top five warmest, but at the moment it will probably not turn out to be warmer than 2010. It is impossible for it to beat 2010 by a statistically significant margin, even if we define that as only one standard deviation above the decadal mean. Even if 2014 does beat 2010 it will only be by a statistically insignificant margin and well within the inter-annual error bars. In all probability 2014 will continue the global surface temperature standstill in a statistically perfect manner. When will the global surface annual temperature start to rise out of the error bars of the past 18 years? –David Whitehouse, The Global Warming Policy Forum, 28 September 2014
It’s fair to say that this pause is something of an embarrassment to many in the climate research community, since their computer models failed to indicate that any such thing could happen. Just how long the temperature pause must last before it would falsify the more catastrophic versions of man-made climate change obviously remains an open question for many researchers. For the time being, most are betting that it will get real hot real fast when the hiatus ends. –Ronald Bailey, Reason Online, 9 September 2014
Former United Kingdom environment secretary Owen Paterson launched an attack against the “wicked green blob,” saying policies to stop global warming might do more harm than good. “There has not been a temperature increase now for probably 18 years, some people say 26 years,” Paterson told an audience at the Conservative party conference over weekend. “So the pause is old enough to vote, the pause is old enough to join the army, the pause is old enough to pay its taxes.” –Michael Bastasch, Daily Caller, 29 September 2014
1) Happy Anniversary: 1 October Marks 18 Years Without Global Warming Trend – CBS News, 30 September 2014
2) Global Warming Pause Comes Of Age – Josh 295 – Bishop Hill, 1 October 2014
3) David Whitehouse: 2014 Global Temperature So Far – The Global Warming Policy Forum, 28 September 2014
4) Do Researchers Really Know Why Global Warming Is On Pause and When It Will End? – Reason Online, 9 September 2014
5) UK Enviro Minister: Green Rules ‘May Cause More Harm Than Global Warming’ – Daily Caller, 29 September 2014
1) Happy Anniversary: 1 October Marks 18 Years Without Global Warming Trend
CBS News, 30 September 2014
Barbara Hollingsworth
The Earth’s temperature has “plateaued” and there has been no global warming for at least the last 18 years, says Dr. John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center (ESSC) at the University of Alabama/Huntsville.
“That’s basically a fact. There’s not much to comment on,” Christy said when CNSNews.com asked him to remark on the lack of global warming for nearly two decades as of October 1st.
The “plateau” is evident in the climate record Christy and former NASA scientist Roy Spencer compiled using actual raw temperature data collected from 14 instruments aboard various weather satellites.
CNSNews.com asked Christy why the United Nations’ climate models, which all predicted steeply rising temperatures over the past two decades, were all proven wrong.
“You’re going back to a fundamental question of science that when you understand a system, you are able to predict its behavior. The fact that no one predicted what’s happened in the past 18 years indicates we have a long way to go to understand the climate system,” Christy replied.
“And that the way the predictions were wrong were all to one direction, which means the predictions or the science is biased in one direction, toward overcooking the atmosphere.”
Christy added that basing government policy affecting millions of Americans on “very poor” climate models that have been shown to be inaccurate is “a fool’s errand.”
“Our ignorance is simply enormous when it comes to the climate system, and our understanding is certainly not strong and solid enough to make policy about climate because we don’t even know what it’s going to do, so how can we make a policy that says ‘I want to make the climate do something’ when we don’t know what makes the climate do what it does?” he asked.
“A policy is supposed to have a goal. Well, if you don’t know how the system works, that means you don’t know how to make it go toward that goal. And that’s certainly the case now, since none of the climate models are able to tell us what the future is going to be. They’ve certainly failed in the past. And so the policy is really a fool’s errand at this point.”
However, he noted that “there is still a strong belief system that greenhouse gases control the climate, and so if that is your belief system, then it doesn’t really matter what the evidence shows.”
“I’m a climatologist, which means I’m driving the car and looking in the rearview mirror, not out the front windshield, so I don’t try to forecast,” he told CNSNews.com.
But earlier predictions that the El Nino will drive up temperatures this year were off the mark, he says.
“There was a big pulse in what was a precursor to the El Nino back in May, and so it looked like it was going to be a very strong El Nino, but that pulse of warm water in the ocean – the heat content, actually – just faded away, basically. And so this wasn’t going to be a 1997/98 El Nino again. I don’t think they’re going to see the big spike in temperature” that was originally predicted.
“But you know, El Ninos come and go, and they shouldn’t be factored in what the overall temperature does over decades.”
Christy countered claims by some climatologists that the satellite data doesn’t show an increase in surface temperature because the “missing heat” was absorbed by the oceans.
“That would require a change in wind speeds. It also means the climate models don’t have the oceans right,” he pointed out. “The other alternative is that the heat never was stored in the climate system, and that it escaped into space. That is just as plausible.”
2) Global Warming Pause Comes Of Age – Josh 295
Bishop Hill, 1 October 2014
What will the Pause do next? Get a job? Go on a gap year? Maybe go to college and rack up some proper student debt. Who knows, but it’s worth celebrating the good news that the planet’s temperatures are not accelerating to thermageddon.
3) David Whitehouse: 2014 Global Temperature So Far
The Global Warming Policy Forum, 28 September 2014
In all probability 2014 will continue the global surface temperature standstill in a statistically perfect manner.
Articles are starting to appear discussing the global average surface temperature of 2014. I am always reluctant to say too much about the final temperature of 2014 until its final month though my reservations are not shared by others. Part of the motivation for the current speculation is that August was a very hot month globally.
John Vidal writing in the Guardian points out August’s figures in Nasa’s Giss dataset. August has a temperature anomaly of 70, technically the highest August on record although four other Augusts are within 0.05 deg C of 2014 with 2011 being 0.69. However Vidal gets his one of his figures wrong when he says that August’s figure was very close to those of 2011 (69), 2008 (39), 2006 (66) and 2003 (65). After this Vidal cherry-picks his figures. According to the dataset he starts off with, Nasa’s Giss, May and August are the warmest months on record. May’s anomaly of 79 is the warmest by a considerable margin. However Vidal changes to the NOAA dataset to claim that May and June were the hottest ever.
NOAA’s dataset differs from Giss. NOAA has May the warmest on record with a temperature anomaly of 0.74 deg C. This was made up of land data (fourth highest May on record) and ocean data (highest May on record). NOAA has June as the hottest on record comprising the seventh highest land temperature for June on record, and the warmest June ocean temperature on record. In Giss June was third and equal to 2013 and 2009.
According to Giss for 2014 to be a record year, and technically beat 2010, the average temperature anomaly for the rest of the year must by 65. This is not impossible as the final four months of 2012 and 2013 achieved this because of warm Septembers and Novembers.
Regarding HadCrut4 August’s data has yet to be released. May and June were record months but May by only 0.002 deg C. July was not a record month being 0.549 against 2010′s 0.607. For 2014 to technically exceed 2010 the months August – December must have an average temperature anomaly of 0.562. Last year that average was 0.525.
Many have been waiting for an El Nino to start. This would certainly boost global temperatures possibly enough to provide a record this year and an accelerated start to 2015. But it would be wrong to equate this to overall global warming, it’s a different effect though to many looking for a record to attribute to global warming any record, however obtained, will do.
2014 is a warm year and the ocean over the past few months have broken records. Some have tweeted that this is what global warming looks like but in reality it’s not possible to say that. 2014 will probably be in the top five warmest but at the moment it will probably not turn out to be warmer than 2010. It is impossible for it to beat 2010 by a statistically significant margin, even if we define that as only one standard deviation above the decadal mean. Even if 2014 does beat 2010 it will only be by a statistically insignificant margin and well within the inter-annual error bars. In all probability 2014 will continue the global surface temperature standstill in a statistically perfect manner. When will the global surface annual temperature start to rise out of the error bars of the past 18 years?
4) Do Researchers Really Know Why Global Warming Is On Pause and When It Will End?
Reason Online, 9 September 2014
Ronald Bailey
The science is settled. Maybe. Let’s take look at some recent studies that aim to explain why projected increases in global average temperature have “paused” even as global greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere have been going up siginficantly. It has generally been acknowledged that there has been an “hiatus’ in warming that has lasted for the past 15 to 16 years so far. In August, Canadian statistician Ross McKitrick published a paper in the Open Journal of Statistics in which he lengthened the period of the pause:
In the surface data we compute a hiatus length of 19 years, and in the lower tropospheric data we compute a hiatus length of 16 years in the UAH [University of Alabama in Huntsville satellite data] series and 26 years in the RSS [Remote Sensing Systems satellite data]series.
It’s fair to say that this pause is something of an embarrassment to many in the climate research community, since their computer models failed to indicate that any such thing could happen. Spurred by the mismatch between computer projections and empirical data, lots of climate scientists have been trying to figure out why the average global temperature has not been increasing significantly.
For example, a 2010 study in Science attributed part of the temperature slowdown to decreases in stratospheric water vapor.
A 2011 article in Atmospheric Chemistry & Phyics suggested that a prolonged solar minimum combined with atmospheric aerosols left over from volcanic eruptions reduced the amount of heat reaching the surface of the planet.
But by far, the most popular explanation for why the atmosphere was not warming even as greenhouse gas concentrations were rising was that the excess heat is hiding in the oceans. Some researchers in March of this year argued in Nature Climate Change that the Pacific Ocean trade winds have speeded up thus pushing heat beneath the waves.
In August, other researchers countered in Science that the real reason the atmosphere is not warming is that changes in North Atlantic Ocean circulation are burying the extra warmth. The researchers reported that this process could go on for as long as another 20 years before the ocean begins releasing the stored heat, greatly boosting future rates of warming.
In late August, yet another set of researchers, in Nature Climate Change, suggested that natural variations in Pacific trade winds account for nearly half of the changes temperature seen over the past three decades. The bad news is that natural variation is now being overwhelmed by climate change caused by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. Consequently, they predict that man-made warming will dominate future temperature trends soon and the hiatus will end.
Also in August, researchers associated with the Pacific trade winds theory report inGeophysical Research Letters the results of 31 climate models. They find that “under high rates of greenhouse gas emissions there is little chance of a hiatus decade occurring beyond 2030, even in the event of a large volcanic eruption.”
Just how long the temperature pause must last before it would falsify the more catastrophic versions of man-made climate change obviously remains an open question for many researchers. For the time being, most are betting that it will get real hot real fast when the hiatus ends.
5) UK Enviro Minister: Green Rules ‘May Cause More Harm Than Global Warming’
Daily Caller, 29 September 2014
Michael Bastasch
Former United Kingdom environment secretary Owen Paterson launched an attack against the “wicked green blob,” saying policies to stop global warming might do more harm than good.
“There has not been a temperature increase now for probably 18 years, some people say 26 years,” Paterson told an audience at the Conservative party conferenceover weekend. “So the pause is old enough to vote, the pause is old enough to join the army, the pause is old enough to pay its taxes.”
Paterson was fired from his spot as the U.K.’s top environmental regulator during Prime Minister David Cameron’s cabinet reshuffle in July. Paterson had been criticized for being a “climate skeptic” by political opponents and for opposing some laws aimed at fighting global warming.
“We were never told the pause was coming along, there are – as I understand it – about 30 different explanations for it and nobody explains why the pause is suddenly going to disappear and we’re going to get back on the track upwards, Paterson added.
“So I’m concerned that the measures being taken to counter projected dangers may actually may be causing more damage now than those dangers,” he said.
When pressed if he believed whether mankind was responsible for global warming, Paterson said there an “element” of human-induced change.
