Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

No Warming Until Maybe 2020

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OK.  It is not pleasant to call someone a ‘warmaholic’. 

I guess it does suggest a dependency.

I always thought of the blog RealClimate as dependent on their being global warming.  But in a recent article they are suggesting there may be no more warming until 2020.   I reckon if you can live without something for 11 years it suggests a lack of dependency.

But they are denying there is cooling.  

A reader, Robert Ellison, has suggested it is OK to leave the question of whether this is a longer term trend – for the moment.  But, he insists, “The real point is that 0.08 degrees per decade (and declining sensitivity to greenhouse gases) is not sufficient to warrant restricting the economic aspirations of billions of people.”

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Notes and Links

Warming, interrupted: Much ado about natural variability
By Kyle Swanson – University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
http://www.uwm.edu/~kswanson/publications/2008GL037022_all.pdf
discussed at http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/07/warminginterrupted-much-ado-about-natural-variability/

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Birdie says

    Last week the IUCN Polar bear specialist group finished their meeting in Copenhagen.

    Last time the the IUCN Polar bear specialist group met was in year 2005. Their conclusion that time was that :

    1) 2 subpopulations increased

    2) 6 subpopulations were stable

    3) 5 subpopulations declining

    Now only 1 subpopulation is increasing and 8 decreasing.

    Climate change is the major threat to polar bears , according to the IUCN PBSG. Together with contaminants.

  4. Luke says

    Don’t have yourself on Cohers – Stocksie just has an unpublished non-peer reviewed report. No paper. Send it to Chris Folland and stop wussing out.

    But hurry up as our true sceptic paper on lunar and greenhouse might beat ya to it.

    Anyway don’t bust a whatsy – the Tsonis and Swanson is just a bit of informed speculation. The sort that uninformed boringly tedious rhetorically bloated Wessy Woo ridiculed me for?

  5. hunter says

    The poor fellas at RC. Now it turns out the world ahs experienced its *hottest* *day* *ever*.
    They cannot even be wrong about being wrong.
    And the AGW true believers will need to be tripping over themselves to rationalize how a one day ‘spike’ is proof of climate, and years of moderation is simply weather.

  6. Graeme Bird says

    “Climate change is the major threat to polar bears , according to the IUCN PBSG. Together with contaminants.”

    What about overfishing? Maybe there aren’t as much fish as their used to be. Mucking about with CO2 to save the bears looks about as useful as that suicide squad near the end of Monty Pythons Life Of Brian.

  8. David Stockwell says

    “http://landshape.org/enm/swansons-pc-projection/#more-2704

    Which begs the question; which paper best describes the temperature record?”

    I see both papers as complimentary, arriving at much tehe same results through different methods, which is always satisfying and a sign there really is some reliability in the result.

    One of the main points of agreement is that something significant happened to climate around the turn of the century, which means that contrary to claims by Easterling in GRL about ‘cherry picking’ 10 year trends, there is justification in talking about flat or declining temperature trends since then. It marks the start of a new climate-regime, which are typically multi-decadal in duration. Note Easterling made the claim without actually looking for evidence of significance.

    Secondly the projections are similar too. Though Swanson has global temperature flat to 2020, and I have it flat to 2050, the difference arises from the choice of interval for establishing the ‘underlying warming trend’ based on a +ve and -ve cycle of the PDO. He went from 1950 to 1998, a -ve and a +ve (though in the text he said he went from 1976 to 1998 which would be just a +ve cphase, and would give high biased underlying warming trends. That threw me a bit.) I went from 1910 to 1976, covering apparent +ve and -ve segments.

    Of course, no-one can know the future, but you can know the assumptions you are basing projection on. It may be that Swansons is an upper end, and mine is a lower end projection, putting resumption of warming between 2020 to 2050 with some level of confidence.

    And the paper is in review at International Journal of Forecasting, so we’ll just have to wait and see how it goes. A preprint is available at arXiv.

  9. Graeme Bird says

    “Though Swanson has global temperature flat to 2020, and I have it flat to 2050…..”

    Flat? You’ve got to be kidding. When you say “underlying trend” what data are you working off? The instrumental record has to be considered wrong. Since it does not accord with the satelite data. So you may be adding in an underlying trend that isn’t there. And hence you are coming up with a flat projection rather then pretty severe cooling.

  10. Graeme Bird says

    I remember seeing a graph where Americas temperature had been corrected so that the 30’s were now shown to be warmer than the 90’s. Its very likely that this is a better representation of the world trend as well. A suggestion would be to use that American graph as a proxy for the world trend and see if you come up with cooling in that case. It would be a shame to base your forecast on the Hadley or the Goddard fake-ups and then to see your projections go off the beam because of an underlying trend thats not there but assumed to be from the CO2.

  12. Ian Mott says

    Further to David’s point about the curve of the best fit projection, the deceptive part of the graph is the green (what else) line of 1979/99 best fit. Why would anyone project from a 20 year data set when an additional, more recent, decade is available? Why would anyone seriously seeking to project into the future eliminate the most recent third of an available data set?

    Furthermore, if we were to add in the El Chichon and Mt Pinatubo volcanic adjustments in the 1980s and 90’s and then plot a 1979/2009 best fit we would have a curve indicating an unambiguously diminishing rate of warming.

    Indeed, we would have an 18 year plateau (60% of the data set) to 2009 and the red projection of that plateau would intersect with the increasingly flatter green best fit projection way out past 2080.

    But then again, no warming till 2080, and no sea level rise till 2080, and no change in polar ice, and no identifiable climate change till 2080, might just undermine the case for urgent and expensive action, don’t you think?

  13. Toby says

    Better not tell anybody Ian, dont you think the world would be so much better if we had global governance and stopped pesty individuals choosing how to use the resources! After all, we all know humans are evil and nasty creatures who care only about themselves and not nature. Nature is far more important than us, and really wouldnt it all be so much better if we just disappeared?

  14. Jan Pompe says

    “Stocksie just has an unpublished non-peer reviewed report”

    Does that make it wrong?

    How is Chris Folland anyway?