There was a recent article at WUWT, called Global Warming Stalled?, on various temperature data sets, showing both periods of “flat” growth, as well as periods of no statistically significant growth.
“4. For Hadcrut4, the slope is flat since November 2000 or 12 years, 2 months. (goes to December.)
…
For Hacrut4, the warming is not significant for over 18 years.
For Hadcrut4: 0.095 +/- 0.111 C/decade at the two sigma level from 1995″
Here is a nice summary of data, analysis, and presentation fudging by climate catastrophists. I’m pretty sure that nowhere does it say that 98% of climate scientists are fudging.



26 Comments

Instead of looking at what other people say about the data, I decided to look at, you know, the actual data, which is available here:
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcrut4/data/current/download.html
It took me 30 minutes to format and upload into an MS Access database, create a query to select the global data by month beginning January 1993, add a LogE trendline and export to an Excel chart and upload that picture to flickr – here:
The result is that the WND people are full of crap. The global temp is rising, end of story.
I will keep this data set to continually be able to firsthand refute your assertions.
How about that CO2? It is over 390 ppm, and rising. Metamars says CO2 does not heat up the atmosphere.
This is epic, a struggle for the future of us all. Metamars is an ally of Big Coal, Big Oil and Big Lies. We have seen so much of this propaganda. It is necessary for the Energy Cartels to destroy environmentalists. Perhaps armed Drones could be used by those corporations destroying the planet, against those defending the planet.
A most excellent job, Kelly…! *g*
You seem confused. The title of the WND article is ‘NO GLOBAL WARMING FOR 16 YEARS‘, not ‘NO GLOBAL WARMING FOR 20 YEARS‘. Furthermore, when you read the 1st sentence of the 2nd paragraph, you find
not
They are quoting Christopher Monckton, and from other things he has written, it’s clear he’s talking about no statistically significant global warming, wrt a linear trend of the HADCRUT4 dataset.
This diary’s source gives crunches of various datasets, including HADCRUT4. Here is a summary of all of them listed.
Why do you suppose it says,
and not
or
or
??
Doesn’t common sense suggest that, if it was true that
they would have just said so?
Even a reasonably smart 10-year-old could infer that the figures quoted are cutoffs, immediately beyond which the statements are false. I.e., my expectation is that the following are ALL FALSE:
So, you spent 1/2 hour of your life calculating something that you could have inferred, with a little more common sense.
Well, let me give you a chance to like, TOTALLY REDEEM YOURSELF! Why don’t you take the the true statement about the HADCRUT4 dataset
reminder: it’s this one….
and not this one….
and relate it to what climate modelers themselves have said about falsifying their models. Try not to deliberately ignore the ones who are most relevant, OK?
While you’re at it, why don’t you share with us your view about Popperian falsifiability. Do you think falsifiable theories are at least preferable to non-falsifiable theories? Here, let me give a quote that can help stimulate your thinking processes re this meta question. John von Neumann, one of the greatest mathematicians of the last century, said,
Inquiring minds would like to know.
I am shocked. A few hundred billionaires control the wealth of the world. These billionaires are cowards who secretly conceal their destruction of the Earth’s air, water and land.
Good stuff metamars. I’m sure everyone will henceforth come here and belittle you. Even the title of this study does not even one iota “deny” global warming. Man made CO2 is simply not the only thing driving “climate”. Even if global warming is “stalling” that does not imply it is not occurring. There is never going to be a straight line upward temperatures trend ever. I’m pretty sure you’ve only implied the possibility that it may not be “catastrophic” and I believe that’s a hard thing to say. I’ve always said one day weather forecasts are good, 2 days are pretty good, one week out…getting close to guess work, but I’m guessing firebaggers will come on here and state how bad even a one day forecast is, yet with regards to climate forecasting believe 100 percent how accurate a 50 to 100 year global average temperature forecast will be…..really???? Think about that for a few seconds
It’s hard for me to doubt that global warming is occurring. There are so, so many things that drive short term weather, which in turn drive long term climate, even with the occurrence of man made global warming, it’s a crap shoot on trying to forecast or guess long term temperatures.
The end result for me is that we need to start the process of weaning ourselves of oil as JamesJoyce on here always posts about, and global warming is neither here nor there to me. Oil addiction drives both our short term life and long term life. Once we truly start that process of weaning ourselves from it will things get better. Not sure how to do that.
Most so-called deniers do accept a greenhouse gas effect for CO2. They just don’t think it’ll amount to more than about 1 degree Celsius per CO2 doubling. That implies that there’s no positive feedback, which would be a tremendous worry, if it were a) true and b) severe enough.
Some warming would almost surely be very good for us. (Africa has been greening, btw, something that the politically driven and/or brainwashed eco types fail to mention….) Recent work by Lomborg shows positive effects for up to about 2deg C warming, negative effects starting beyond that.
Having said all that: The oil/coal/gas addiction actually does bother me. I’ve known that the auto industry has suppressed energy saving technology, since I was 17 years old. Very recently, I found out that the battery patents for the successful electric car that was featured in “Who killed the electric car” documentary were sold to Big Oil. I’ve described elsewhere suppression of photovoltaics based on polymers, which might have yielded 80% efficiency, rather than the still paltry 20%+ efficiency. (Google Dr. Alvin Marks, lumeloid)
I’m also concerned about “peak oxygen”, which some guy named Bill Deagle (who many would dismiss as a crank, to be sure) is always on about. The killing of oxygen producing algae in the ocean is partly a function of water pollution, but also is related to fossil fuel burning.
The green environmentalists are, I believe, mostly in a veal pen. If they weren’t, they’d be pursuing at least the truth, if not redress (such as nationalization), for technology suppression. We probably could have had carbon-free, big hot fusion, by now, if only it was properly funded. Also, I have posted many times on Focus Fusion, which has beat the big boys ito a max temperature parameter, at a fraction of their (inadequate) funding.
Ironically, one of the best things that may have happened ito humanity and fossil fuel consumption may have been the horrible air pollution that hit Beijing, recently. Beijing is the center of the Chinese government, and they have to be thinking bigger than “let’s install lots of scrubbers” to deal with their babies getting their lungs assaulted, developing asthma, etc. These are the people who built the Great Wall, after all.
Us green environmentalists gonna turn orange with envy!!!
Back it up a little. Before there was global warming, there was the little ice age, or actually little ice ages. 1550, 1750, and 1850 constituted coldness peaks. Given the larger cycles of warming and cooling, there was reason to interpolate that we were heading towards another real ice age, although it would not come on for real for another couple hundred years.
CO2 in the atmosphere has mucked that all up. However, we still have a downward trend fighting the upward trend.
Unfortunately, once you get above 375 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere, the climate charts going back 4 million years say that WARMING WINS, big time.
BTW, I am not only a (now orange but trending downward, colorwise, whatever) environmentalist, I am//was an aerothermophysicist for an aerospace company (not one of those evil guys working for a university). So that means I actually can interpret scientific models, understand the physics of the atmosphere, you know, all that stuff you think does not matter.
The earth is not only about to be swamped with garbage, experience more wholesale extinctions, get to hot to make ethanol from corn, …, etc., you’re going to cook, baby!!
Do we have enough resolution in the data to say that >375 ppm CO2 is reliably FOLLOWED (say within 1,000 years) by temperature increases? And even if we do, are we really in a comparable enough regime to make valid inferences?
The graphs I’ve seen of temperature vs. CO2, over geological times, shows practically no correlation between CO2 and temperature. More recent, but long term studies, ala Vostok ice cores, shows CO2 increases following temperature increases.
There’s an interesting paper out by Shakun that paints a more complicated picture. I haven’t kept up with it, but it was dissected in a lot of detail at WUWT.
Nice try. You do realize of course that the von Neuman quote cuts both ways, right?
Which is why I invite you to actually engage with the data itself, and produce your own graphic representations as I will continue to do here.
For you see, one of the issues I took was indeed using 18 years for a measurement period. Why? Why not some other period like 10 years or 20.
Because when you use 20, well HELLO DATA!, the picture is a bit different. That’s the reason I made that ballon box pointing out Feb 1995 as a significant data point; excluding data preivious to that period wrecks the claims in the articles you linked. Regardless about what you say of “years” and “significant.”
Let’s look at 50 years: month by month, so there is 12 months X 50 years = 600 measurement points. And then lets just draw a straight line through the median shifts. And project 5 years (60 months) into the future.
This is what you get.
Now for the folks playing along at home, a reminder of how you get to a σ (Sigma) value. That is actually a “Standard Deviation.”
How it is calculated is complex, but do-able. One takes the square root of the variance of a set of numbers. When one adds 2(σ) to the mean, that’s an Upper Limit, and when one minuses 2(σ)that’s a Lower Limit, and that band of limits should account for about 97% of the readings.
So explain to me, metamars, can you make these calculations yourself, and produce the picture you claim, given the same hadrcut4 data set?
I was looking at the ice cores. You always get a warm interglacial period starting within 2 – 3 decades after CO2 grows to 375 ppm.
And another thing metamars:
Are you suggesting that periodic measurements play no role, unless it’s the period of measurement under discussion?
Because look at this 70 year trend.
Again, for the folks playing at home, a straight measure of the MEAN is meaningless somehow, right? /s
Would you please re-write this and try and be clearer? You seem to be claiming that excluding data prior to Feb. 1995 wrecks “the” claims in the article I linked.
Which claims, and which article? I linked to to 2 articles ( one is called ” Global Warming Stalled?”; the other is called “No global warming for 16 years”), both containing a large number of claims.
Please provide a link. I’m not sure, but I think you’re referring to the graphs that Al Gore used, which generally show about an 800 year lag for CO2. (Al somehow forgot to mention this fact…) The ‘official’ explanation, I believe, if that Milankovitch cycles force an initial thawing, which releases CO2, which in turn produces additional heating.
However, I have little confidence in the models. They are increasingly diverging from reality, in the here and now, and taking what some modelers, themselves, have said, can consider them falsified.
This doesn’t generally mean that they can’t be patched up; however I believe they are fundamentally flawed, and thus cannot be fixed, except on a continual, somewhat ad hoc basis. In which case, they are not falsifiable, and thus I don’t consider them good science.
Do you do climate modeling?
Just because a “model” deviates from reality does not mean it is falsified. A model is just that – a model. It is something put together from a set of variables. That set of variables consists of a bunch of guesses about how a system works. Each additional variable that is input into the system creates more options for output variances. Over time, as scientists discover more about how systems work – they also discover new variables. This process means they also find out that their models were not necessarily indicative of how the ACTUAL system performs in reality. That does not mean that the model is falsified, just that the scientists had not yet learned all the variables that needed to be put into the model.
Science is a learning process – something you apparently do not understand since you ascribe some underlying conspiracy or evil methodology to explain why any incorrect result from a given calculation happens. Natural systems are very complex and often poorly understood when we begin working on them. Over time, as we learn more about them, the models become more accurate – but we still have more to learn. The earth is large, its climate is a large system, it is very complex, has lots of variables that we are still learning about, and the models are just that – models.
You, on the other hand, need to learn how to understand how science works – and more importantly, does not work. And stop ascribing all these evil motives to people who are just trying to figure stuff out.
Pathological science, junk science, bad science, etc. are far more complicated than saying scientists who are wrong are evil. You have made unwarranted assumptions about me. I will say, though, that the spectrum of behavior one might call “evil” is broader if you consider scientific ethics as relevant to the discussion – which I certainly do. I recommend “Not Even Wrong”, by Lee Smolin, in part because of the discussion of scientific ethics.
Meanwhile, there are people – many of whom know very little about science – who are quick to accuse scientists who don’t cling to a CAGW viewpoint as being on the take from Exxon-Mobil. Or just outliers with no significance.
Why, e.g., Chinese scientists studying the Medieval Warm Period (and other warmer periods, when temperatures were higher and CO2 lower) could be so incompetent or so corrupt – that part they can’t explain.
Here we find one of the favorite ploys of climate change deniers in action – cherry picking.
The articles cited by this poster use carefully chosen dates to make the statistically insignificant implication that warming has stopped. Choosing any other time period would not give the same results. Warming has not stopped. This is merely a statistical parlor trick.
This is exactly the kind of cherry picking of data that was done during the “debate” about the link between cigarette smoke and cancer. Often done by the same PR firms and individuals.
The goal here is to introduce doubt and confusion to delay action as long as possible and keep the industry gravy train going.
Nothing about this claim says anything about the basic science of warming caused by greenhouse gasses. Greenhouse gasses trap heat, the amount of greenhouse gasses has been rising, human have caused that rise. And over any statistically significant time period, temperatures have risen – dramatically.
Don’t be fooled by industry attempts to spread confusion.
You accuse scientists of being corrupt and evil. These are the scientists who tell the truth against the LIES of your patrons such as Exxon. You again slander scientists instead of the several hundred billionaires who are destroying the Earth’s environment as they plunder its resources.
And then you blame Fat Al Gore. You forgot to mention that the 2000 Presidential election was stolen from Fat Al Gore, probably at the instigation of Big Oil, Coal and Uranium monopolies.
Did you bother reading Global Warming Stalled? The second paragraph is:
The source of this (inner) quote is not a so-called “climate change denier”. Why don’t you tell us
1) the source of this quote
2) whether or not the 18 year trend:
“For Hadcrut4: 0.095 +/- 0.111 C/decade at the two sigma level from 1995″
satisfies the premises of the quote
Here, I’ll give you a hint. “Two sigma level” is the 95% chance level, and 18 > 16.
I don’t believe you. Why don’t you provide us an example? I mean a specific, relevant example – one that defines a statistical falsifiability condition by an anti-smoking scientist, that condition being met, and then some other anti-smoking scientist turning around and saying “Awww! You cherry-picked the data. You should have used a slice of the data that didn’t satisfy the falsifiability condition, even though you found one that does satisfy the falsifiability condition.”
I realize that the climate catastrophist corps like to level the charge of “cherry picking”, at times producing the ridiculous “traveling down the up staircase graph”. However, details matter. Notice the quote doesn’t say, “Pick any 15 + years time interval you please (for which we have data of sufficient precision). Then the simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for any such interval.” (I.e., falsifiability does not require having flat temperature changes for all 15+ year periods.)
If that’s what the NOAA scientists had said, we wouldn’t be having this discussion….
Yes, it appears to be commonly accepted that human GHG has caused the rise. The fact is, though, the CO2 is a weak GHG. The belief that something like a 3deg C rise for a CO2 doubling is even possible depends on positive feedbacks. Even the NY Times is admitting that climate sensitivity (to CO2) is not as high as previously feared.
If you really believe this, then you must reject the 15+ year criteria stipulated by the NOAA scientists – correct? If so, on what basis (other than emotional) do you do so?
Oh, yeah. You use the phrase “climate change deniers”, which is an Orwellian term, the double speak of which is obvious to anybody who has a clue what dissident climate scientists believe. Have I missed something? Would you be so kind as to provide us with a non-double speak definition of what a “climate change denier” actually is?
Frank33 is the author of the following, confused, vile, verbal vomit:
x2
Why do you bother with these people?
Honestly, I think the main reason is a sort of compulsion – one that I’m trying to tame, not all that successfully. Thankfully, I am down to posting regularly on only 1 blog (this one). BTW, I have, I believe, some insights into specific karmic factors that relate to this compulsion, but will not discuss same in a public forum.
On a more positive note, I do have a tendency to defend the smeared. Nevertheless, it’s extremely doubtful that whatever good I’ve accomplished (probably next to nothing) defending the smeared somehow compensates for the opportunity cost to me, personally. I frankly would have been on my way to the better part of a nest egg of a million dollars, plus have at least a masters degree in physics, if I had stayed away from political subjects completely, including those that intersect physics (which were/are not even on a professional level).
Misner, Thorne and Wheeler’s 1300+ page Gravitation text remains on my shelf, mostly unread, and I have only myself to blame.
Here we see another favorite ploy of climate change deniers – taking questions concerning the minutia of emerging, advanced science and implying that this is the same as questions about the basic science.
All in the effort to create doubt and confusion – the only real goal of the denial industry.
What are the best time intervals to statistically evaluate the warming we’re seeing. This is a valid question. But it most certainly doesn’t cast the kind of doubt that this poster is hoping for on the basic science of climate change.
Once again:
Greenhouse gasses trap heat, the amount of greenhouse gasses has been rising, humans have caused that rise. And over any statistically significant time period, temperatures have risen – dramatically.
Note how the poster is desperate to take us into the weeds concerning statistical significance. But only a very carefully chosen patch of weeds, ignoring all others.
Meanwhile the greenhouse effect has not suddenly and magically disappeared.
It would be easy to show that NOAA is not saying what this poster claims.
http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2011/06/global-warming-since-1995-statistically-significant
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100519_ocean.html
But getting into arguments over minutia is exactly what the deniers are trying to achieve. Because this creates the doubt and confusion which is all they are after, since it allows the energy industry to continue with their destructive course of business as usual.
Do not be fooled.
Also, in regards to the poster’s shrill demand for a very narrowly defined example of the behavior of the smoking/cancer denial industry, this presents an excellent teaching moment.
Notice how the poster is attempting to frame the discussion to his/her own definition of cherry-picking. This is cherry picking about cherry picking. Very meta. And also a further example of striving for doubt and confusion at the expense of any clarity.
However, for anyone else reading this, there is a long documented history of the same groups working for the tobacco industry doing the same things they are now trying to do for the energy industry when it come to attacking climate science.
Read/watch and learn. And remember, don’t be fooled.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YhDacrl1aSA#!
http://climatecrocks.com/2011/12/19/addiction-incorporated/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2006/sep/19/ethicalliving.g2
http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/2000Q3/junkman.html
Nice duck!