Global Warming Since 1958
Posted by Fred Singer, December 26th, 2008 - under Opinion.
Tags: Climate & Climate Change
I know it’s a tough job – but let’s just check the International Panel on Climate Changes (IPCC) iconic, widely-quoted conclusion* and parse its meaning:
“Most of the observed increase in globally-averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations.”
How should one interpret this ex cathedra declaration to the faithful?
IPCC helpfully defines ‘very likely’ as ‘90-99% certain’, but they don’t tell us how they reached such well-defined certainty.
What remarkable unanimity!
Just how many and whom did they poll?
IPCC doesn’t define the word ‘most.’ We may assume it means anything between 51 and 99%. Quite a spread.
But a footnote informs us that solar forcing is less than 10% of anthropogenic [0.12/ 1.6 W/m2]; so ‘most’ must be closer to 99% than to 51%.
OK; let’s check out the data since 1958. But we don’t want to rely on contaminated surface data – which IPCC likely used – although they omitted to say so.
Atmospheric data were readily available to the IPCC in the CCSP-SAP-1.1 report (Fig 3a, p.54; convening lead author John Lanzante, NOAA), with independent analyses by Hadley Centre and NOAA that agree well. And further, according to GH models, atmospheric trends should be larger than surface temperature trends.
1958 – 2005: Total warming of +0.5 C (But how much of that is anthropogenic?)
1958 – 1976: Cooling
1976 – 1977: Sudden jump of +0.5 C (Cannot be due to GHG.)
1977 – 1997: No detectable trend
1998 – 1999: El Nino spike
2000 – 2001: No detectable trend
2001 – 2003: Sudden jump of +0.3 C (Cannot be due to GHG.)
2003 – present: No trend, maybe even slight cooling
In conclusion: The IPCC’s ‘most’ is not sustained by observations; the human contribution is very likely only 10% or even less.
By Fred Singer, who lives in Arlington, Virginia, and holds a B.E.E. in Electrical engineering from Ohio State University and an A.M. and PhD in Physics from Princeton University
***************************
*IPCC Synthesis Report, Summary for Policy Makers, November 2007
Photograph of Fred Singer taken in New York by Jennifer Marohasy in March 2008.
This note is from SEPP Science Editorial #17 (December 27, 08), ‘Keeping the IPCC honest’ http://www.sepp.org/
Malcolm Hill,
I think you might have touched a raw nerve with your last post – I had not considered the possibility that our “esteemed” Luke might be paid by a Soros source of funding.
But his Lukiness has been less prolific in his posts here, suggesting that there remains hope that even the dimmest in his circle of followers might see a light.
Isn’t this what drives all religions? Hope?
this is pretty close to the Hansen scenario!
oh really – so why don’t we put the Hansen forecast scenario A (i.e increase in GHG @ 1.5% per year) up against the observed temps in scale.
This is what we get
http://users.tpg.com.au/johnsay1/Stuff/temp15.jpg
over a 6.0C range he is 4.5C out!! he’s not even half right.
Hansen is wrong!
Gosh you guys are clever =- yes I am paid per post by Al Gore to make war on you guys. $250 USD per post. Cohenite is my accomplice and double agent. A mole in fact and you fell for it. You guys … LOL
Sinkers – why is your gravatar that of a big dumb chook?
Anyway have a another puff on the ganga guys.
sod; wearisome; a temperature trend between 2 points is a temperature trend period; however, a trend doesn’t tell you the rate of change nor does it tell you whether that rate of change is correlated with a causal factor; what Singer is showing is that an overall trend between 2 designated points cannot be causally connected with CO2; the overall trends are a product of sudden and large steps; look at this;
http://i38.tinypic.com/16aa03o.jpg
The graph shows the large 1976 ’step-up’ which has been well described in many papers; the temperature rise of 0.5C in one year was maintained by a succession of El Nino events which has been described by Bob Tisdale and White and Cayon and Tsonis amongst others, most recently Compo and Sardeshmukh. Try asking yourself how a designated causal agent such as CO2 which is almost linear in increase can produce not only such large haphazard jumps in temperature but also produce declines such as between 1940-1976 and from 1998 onwards.
Your reliance on GISS and the Mad Hatter’s prognistications is trollish.
Sod,
Just wondering but did you study statistics?
well, sort of.
I wonder if you are confusing statistics with maths – the two are quite different.
no. statistics are a part of mathematics. wiki says:
Statistics is a mathematical science pertaining to the collection, analysis, interpretation or explanation, and presentation of data.
it makes sense to distinguish the pure from the applied math. but its still math.
Trendlines and the like are better understood as mathematical functions describing an objects spatial behaviour wrt time.
again, you got this wrong. a trendline (or linear regression..) is a mathematical (or statistical) tool to analyze the relationship between variables. while “time” might be part of the data, it surely is not part of the methodology.
a trend line over the scatter plot showing scientific understanding of people and their view of AGW should give a pretty interesting result…
That raises the nonsensical idea that the price of a chicken egg is dependent on its position around the sun.
again, you don t understand the basics. not of statistics, neither of math nor on climate science.
Sod,
First of all, mathematics is not science. It is a tool of understanding.
Your second point is correct – a linear regression is indeed a mathemtical derivation of how two variables are associated. However trying to calculate a trend line between “scientific understanding of people and their view of AGW” is not possible, unless human activity could be reduced to simplistic numbers.
As for the Chook Egg Price example, this is based on the observation that the price of eggs incsreases with time. They don’t but then perhaps I might be excused for having lived a tad longer than you.
Cohenite – really stupid posting now from yourself. Step functions? AGW is putting an extra forcing on a system that has annual, inter-annual and decadal phenomena – what would you actually expect. The SHEER dishonesty of the denialist position is breathtaking.
I enjoyed this – http://www.skepticalscience.com/empirical-evidence-for-global-warming.htm it’s called a balance of evidence doopies… Note movement of whole circulation systems.
Singer’s little analysis is so utterly pathetic – why even bother with it?
Sod – Sinkers doesn’t even understand what an anomaly is – what waste your time of a big dopey eccentric chook still locked in some 1950s cold war still dreaming of WMC. Actually there’s usually a kooky Dutchman or two in all those places like Kununurra. Probably good technicians but that’s about it. Normally they just get ignored.
oh really – so why don’t we put the Hansen forecast scenario A (i.e increase in GHG @ 1.5% per year) up against the observed temps in scale.
you used kindergarten analysis again, to get that result.
you can t just clue Hansen s work to the high point in a different dataset.
here s what you get, when you do it in a more scientific way:
http://www.realclimate.org/images/Hansen06_fig2.jpg
i am looking forward to any comparison between Hansens work and some denialist “scenarios”. please bring them on!
a temperature trend between 2 points is a temperature trend period;
yes. a kindergarten trend.
however, a trend doesn’t tell you the rate of change
sure it does. you are supposed to take a look at the graph. have some knowledge about the field. and use multiple statistical tools to analyze it.
Try asking yourself how a designated causal agent such as CO2 which is almost linear in increase can produce not only such large haphazard jumps in temperature but also produce declines such as between 1940-1976 and from 1998 onwards.
you might not know it, but CO2 is NOT the only factor influencing temperature. actually there is quite some WEATHER fluctuation in the data.
nobody would claim anything, but CO2 being the main factor influencing the long term TREND over the last decades.
looking at those “jumps2 shows some serious lack of understanding of climate FORCINGS.
Luke,
Spooked you have I?
“clue” was supposed to be “glue” in my post above…
First of all, mathematics is not science. It is a tool of understanding.
nice philosophical question. but completely irrelevant to the false claims you made above.
However trying to calculate a trend line between “scientific understanding of people and their view of AGW” is not possible, unless human activity could be reduced to simplistic numbers.
it can be done. we could use a simple method, like going by years of education. or by giving numbers to academic degrees. or we could have a board of scientists test the people over a month, giving marks.
and the funny thing is, the results would be the same, if we use a big enough group and avoid systematic bias!
As for the Chook Egg Price example, this is based on the observation that the price of eggs incsreases with time. They don’t but then perhaps I might be excused for having lived a tad longer than you.
you are mixing up “causation” and “correlation” in this example. most scientists don t do that.
“You posed no argument at all.Just a series of empty words.”
Honestly, it’s hard to know how to debate complete stupidity.
luke; for the New year can you at least read your links before you post; the SC link quotes Ghosh on isotopes and the climate sensitivity efforts of Annan and others; they’ve never looked like being right; and now you’re resorting to telling me that AGW is capable of sudden movements in temperature; so, AGW can accumulate and step but PDO can do neither; or was that NT who said that? No matter, with Will and this new purveyor of Hansenite genuflection, sod, I’m finding it hard to distinguish any of you. Sod wants to debate Hansen’s “work”; shades of Koutsoyiannis, is this the best your side can do?
http://www.climate-skeptic.com/2008/06/gret-moments-in.html
Cohers – all this indicates you haven’t got a clue. A linearist. Anyway we’ll just wait – when the temperature starts to trend up you guys will have NOWHERE to hide !! Nowhere. You guys think this is a daily game – it isn’t.
here s what you get, when you do it in a more scientific way:
you mean like this :)
http://users.tpg.com.au/johnsay1/Stuff/temp18.jpg
To Sod and others, yes there is cherrypicking on both sides. The warmers as well often cherrypick their starting points and restate older predictions/numbers to make the newest ones look better.
Here is a chart with no cherry-picking at all. It contains all of the monthly temperature observations on the same baseline since each record began versus CO2.
The actual observations to-date are about half of the trendline predicted by the global warming models (this one is a little less than Hansen’s Scenario B).
http://img254.imageshack.us/img254/2626/tempobsrvvsco2ct4.png
Bill; you haven’t got that graph with time on it by any chance?
To cohenite:
CO2 has increased every year since 1850 (other than a very slight decline and pause in WWII) (and CO2 doesn’t rise every month so there are a few months in the chart where there is a pause) but, generally, the dots start in January 1850 and progress out by month until November 2008.
The main charts I built were based on taking the ENSO and AMO natural variation out and then assuming the remainder was global warming. The ENSO and AMO variability (+/-) is removed but the overall trend of 0.7C of warming is maintained.
Here is the chart for Hadcrut3 (starting in 1871 when reliable ENSO figures became available) with the ENSO and AMO variation removed.
http://img510.imageshack.us/img510/811/finalwarminggw8.png
Thanks Bill; the whole isolation of the AGW effect interests me; you will be aware that Douglass and Christy isolated an AGW effect of 0.07C PD for the period 1979-2008; in an earlier paper published in Nature, vol 367, 27 January 1994, Christy and McNider found an AGW effect of 0.09CPD for the period 1979-1994; Trenberth has found an AGW effect for the period 1950-1998 of 0.0925PD; I try to make sense of this here;
http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2008/10/temperature-trends-and-carbon-dioxide-a-note-from-cohenite/#comments
Perhaps you could kindly comment.
My numbers for 1979 onward are 0.046C per decade for RSS ranging up to 0.058C per decade for GISS, (the UAH trendline is 0.03C per decade which is too low in my opinion.)
- RSS (with ENSO and AMO pulled out)
http://img368.imageshack.us/img368/6820/rsswarmingdi8.png
- GISS (with ENSO and AMO pulled out)
http://i463.photobucket.com/albums/qq360/Bill-illis/GISS1979Warming.png?t=1230507604
I would make two other significant comments:
- The AMO should be used rather than the PDO. The AMO has similar long-term cycles to the PDO but the AMO explains temperature variation much better than the PDO. The PDO doesn’t have a very good correlation. Secondly, the AMO is tied to the deep ocean circulation system and, consequently, is a significant node of energy exchange between the oceans and the atmosphere and, consequently, is more logical to include than the PDO. The northern Pacific ocean is shallow at deep ocean circulation depths and thus is not really part of the ocean circulation system.
The AMO matches the long-term cyclical changes in the climate very closely – the downswing from 1900 to 1919, the upswing from 1920 to 1945, the downswing from 1946 to 1976 and the upswing from 1977 to 2005. It also has big spikes in some super El Nino years like 1877-78 and 1997-98. In fact, half of the temperature increase in 1997-98 was due to the AMO and only half was due to the El Nino.
http://img111.imageshack.us/img111/3383/amoanomalynp6.png
- Southern Hemisphere temperatures (which may be of interest to you) have very unusual trends – lots of rapid ups and downs and strange cycles. In fact, they are hardly correlated with the ENSO at all (is Australia temps correlated with the ENSO, precipitation is but is temperature?). If you are going to correct global temperatures for natural variation of ocean cycles, you need to be able to explain the southern hemisphere temps as well (it is half the globe afterall.)
For example, here is the monthly Southern Hemisphere temps from Hacrut3 (what a mess).
http://img122.imageshack.us/img122/7797/shtempanomalybq1.png
Southern Hemisphere temps are not correlated with the ENSO but they correlated with the AMO and what I have been calling the southern version of the AMO, the Southern Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. It has similar characteristics to the AMO, in that it has long cycles and it is a major part of the deep ocean circulation patterns in the southern hemisphere.
I used the SST anomalies for this region to build the southern AMO and when you include this region, you have a pretty good match to the SH temps.
http://maps.google.ca/maps/ms?hl=en&ie=UTF8&msa=0&ll=33.137551,-49.921875&spn=164.593939,360&z=1&msid=110686680343951250375.00045cd66a477c08c6d08
There are other areas along Antarctica that could be used in this index but you have to be careful to not include too much of the ocean to explain global temps since the ocean SSts are part of global temps.
When you put all that together, you get a Hadcrut3 reconstruction like this.
http://img510.imageshack.us/img510/8456/finalhadcrut3modeljs7.png
This method works on all the major temperature series and most of the smaller zonal components as well. I’ve left out the Southern AMO for some reconstructions since it is not a recognized ocean indicator and the reconstructions are almost as good without it (but it is needed for the southern hemisphere.)
There is a very good match to the tropics zone for example.
http://img205.imageshack.us/img205/8008/rsstropicsnw0.png
In terms of the global warming signature left over after you pull out this natural variation (and it doesn’t change the 0.7C increase, just the +/- cycles out), it is, at most, only half of the predictions of the global warming models. The pro-AGW crowd have used aerosols to explain the difference (Hansen and GISS have -0.3C built in for aerosols now). The newest one is that deep oceans are absorbing some of the global warming temperature increase which will push out the date we get to 3.0C per doubling by as little as 35 years and as much as 1,000 years (my numbers say at least 500 years). The deep oceans are warming very slightly however.
Bill; some amazing stuff; are you a dedicated amateur or do you fulfill the Peer-review gauntlet laid down by the AGW bien pensants? One final question; you say the AGW 0.07CPD AGW signature is solid; isn’t this subject to a logarithmic decline so with more CO2 the actual rate delines; you also may have noticed Lucia’s isolation of the AGW effect for 2001 onwards was actually a -ve temp trend; any thoughts on that?
To cohenite, yes I am just an amateur. But when you start down this road of trying to actually adjust temperatures for the ENSO etc. on a monthly basis and you start putting all the data in, it starts taking you down so many roads …
Yes, the CO2 impact is logarithmic and my warming reconstructions are based on the LN of CO2 (with CO2 as a proxy for all the greenhouse gases).
But CO2 is growing at a slightly exponential rate right now (an increase in the rate of 0.002 ppm each month).
We are at a point in the logarithmic impact of rising GHGs where the warming is nearly linear (and it will stay nearly linear for as much as 90 years before it starts to flatten out in the future). It is just a characteristic of the formulae.
The exponential section of the growth started about 1955 and ended about 1990 after which it will be roughly linear for 100 years or so assuming GHGs continue growing at their current rates.
I’ve built these charts showing the current growth rates of CO2 and the log warming impact of CO2 from 1 ppm to 560 ppm (which you probably have not seen before but it is an accurate reflection of the situation) and then how it works in a more normal “temp versus time” chart.
http://img155.imageshack.us/img155/1071/co2forecastwz0.png
http://img216.imageshack.us/img216/9652/logwarmingillustratedkn7.png
http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/3930/hadcrut3scattervj2.png
http://img510.imageshack.us/img510/811/finalwarminggw8.png
This log warming chart is based on the Hadcrut3 dataset and it produces the largest warming rate of the temperature series at 1.62C per doubling. GISS produces 1.54C per doubling, and NCDC produces 1.32C per doubling. The theory now says the warming will continue for another 35 years or more after one reaches the 560 ppm doubling level before one reaches the 3.0C or 3.25C per doubling temperature level but the trends to date indicate that will not happen – it will take hundreds of years more or it will just not happen at all.
… and RSS from 1979 on produces just 0.7C per doubling …
… (since 1979, the warming rate of all the temperature series declines – maybe the satellites are keeping them honest now – the warming since 1979 from all the temperature series indicates that the historic data may have been artificially adjusted to increase the trend by about 0.3C.)
http://img210.imageshack.us/img210/6140/zoominrsslogwarmingar8.png
Sure that S. Fred didn’t pwn you Jen? This strangeness is not on his site, and FWIW, it is so weird that Eli is not sure he didn’t pull it down from shame.
On the other hand, it does establish how ignorant the cheerleaders here are. C’mon, averages from two consecutive years are not a trend.
Well, he finally posted it. . . .poor guy