Killing the "Cooling Since 2002" Meme

The driver of the climate clown car is trying to cook up a new meme, based on this unfortunate Judith Curry post -- global cooling since 2002.

Of course, it isn't true when you look at the entire Earth, but it isn't even true if you only look at the surface -- neither cooling nor warming is statistially signficant in such a short time period.

Here's the trend since 2002 for the GISS global surface temperature:

The uncertainty is huge. There is simply too much inertia and too much noise in the climate system to say anything climatologically meaningful over such a short time period, which in this case is heavily influenced by two La Ninas near the end of its interval.

I don't, of course, expect anything like a commitment to the truth from Morano, but certain other people ought to know better.

"The tragic consequences of 'the American way of life'"

"So we have reached the point in history where we must face up to the tragic consequences of 'the American way of life,' a way of life also lived in other affluent countries, albeit typically with less intensity and ideological conviction. The same qualities that made the United States a great nation -- relentless optimism, commitment to know-how, determination to expand -- have become the enemies of its preservation and, collaterally, the preservation of the rest of humanity. A nation that has expansion running in its blood can barely conceive of contraction, and so the question we well soon be forced to ask is how much of the rest of the world will be sacrificed to prolong the dream of affluence?"

-- Clive Hamilton, Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering

"...if the meek are ever going to inherit the Earth then they had better be quick."

-- Clive Hamilton, Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering

Army Corps Opts-Out of Its Mission Statement

The Army Corps of Enginners opted to ignore its Mission Statement today, telling Congress it won't comprehensively review proposed Pacific Northwestern coal export terminals.

The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will not conduct an all-encompassing review of the three coal export projects proposed in the Northwest, rejecting requests from  Oregon and Washington's governors and project opponents.

Jennifer Moyer, acting chief of the Corps' regulatory program, told a House subcommittee today that the agency would review the three proposed export terminals separately, and would not directly address some of the opposition's top concerns. All three projects seek to export Montana and Wyoming coal to Asia through the Northwest.

"Many of the activities of concern to the public, such as rail traffic, coal mining, shipping coal outside of U.S. territory, and the ultimate burning of coal overseas, are outside the Corps' control and responsibility," Moyer said in prepared testimony.

ACE's Mission Statement reads:

Mission Statement: Provide vital public engineering services in peace and war to strengthen our Nation's security, energize the economy, and reduce risks from disasters.

And its Vision Statement is:

Vision Statement: A GREAT engineering force of highly disciplined people working with our partners through disciplined thought and action to deliver innovative and sustainable solutions to the Nation's engineering challenges.

There's simply no way you can argue that the proposed exports, which would total 110 million tons annually, might not possibly increase "risks from disasters" (and hence require a review) or not constitute a "sustainable solution." That amount of coal would, when burned, emit about 250 million tonnes of CO2 a year (about 5% of US emissions), costing, according the EPA's social cost of carbon, over $9 billon annually.

+1 for politics, -1 for the environment. Science is left to softly weep over in the corner, its hankie thoroughly soaked by now.

Steak For Me, But Not For Thee

From an article about Google's Balloon Internet project that could provide Internet access everywhere on Earth:

Temple University communications professor Patrick Murphy warned of mixed consequences, pointing to China and Brazil as places where Internet service promoted democratic principles but also contributed to a surge in consumerism that has resulted in environmental and health problems.

"The nutritional and medical information, farming techniques, democratic principles those are the wonderful parts of it," he said. "But you also have everyone wanting to drive a car, eat a steak, drink a Coke."

BEST Paper: AMO is Best Correlation with Global Temperatures

And to think I just gave Judith Curry grief for ignoring ocean warming.

OK, it's not exactly the same thing, but the BEST team has a paper out in JGR: Atmospheres:

Muller, R. A., J. Curry, D. Groom, R. Jacobsen, S. Perlmutter, R. Rohde, A. Rosenfeld, C. Wickham, and J. Wurtele (2013), Decadal variations in the global atmospheric land temperatures, J. Geophys. Res. Atmos., 118, doi:10.1002/jgrd.50458.

Its abstract reads:

Their most relevant figure is

showing that the AMO has a better correlation with surface temperatures than does the PDO. (But not by a huge amount. But I need to read the paper in full to better understand.)

The AMO is currently in its warm phase, since the mid-1990s, and the PDO its cool phase. So, I think, this finding would imply a new cooling influence on surface temperatures (countering the enhanced greenhouse effect) until about the mid-2020s....

Is a Geoengineering Experiment Now Taking Place?

There is an intriguing statement by UK climate scientist Piers Forster in an RTCC article; near its end he says,

"There is one experiment we’re currently undertaking – we’re trying to look at rescuing Arctic Ice by stimulating aeroplanes flying from Spitzbergen in Norway – and dump out a lot of Sulphur Dioxide, and we’re trying to look at that as a very short term protection against the loss of Arctic Ice."

It's unclear what "simulation" means -- I've written to ask him for more details. If it's actually planes dumping sulphur dioxide into the stratosphere, even on a small scale, that would be a huge deal, since no one has yet to do more than study such proposals, and there are all kinds of reasons why such "solar radiation management" (SRM) may be a bad idea. (I wrote about some of the ethical questions here.) Even as an experiment, it would be a huge step in a direction no one has yet dared to go.

A Record for the Pause?

In what may be a record for the claimed length of The Pause in global surface temperatures, a columnist in South Africa named David Gleason writes,

Between 1995 and last year carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere rose 10%, but global temperatures not at all.

This is complete nonsense. HadCRUT4 shows the globe warming 0.17°C (0.31°F) since January 1995, a number that is very statistically significant(*).

How that equals zero, I have no idea.

By the way, the David Rose Hole still exists, barely. There is still a 9-month period from 5/1997 to 1/1998 where there is warming-til-today, but whose statistical significance falls below 95% -- all the way to 89%. (*Again, no autocorrelation.)

(*) This conclusion doesn't includes autocorrelation. Slope uncertainties that take autocorrelation into account are nearly impossible to calculate using Excel, if you want to calculate them for a range of dates, because you need to create an array of the residuals for each interval. And I just haven't gotten around to writing a Python or R script to do it. Using the SkS trend calculator, I find that the HadCRUT4 trend since Jan-1995 is 0.095 ± 0.109 °C/decade (2σ), which is not quite statistically signficant warming at the 95% confidence level, though it is at the 92% level -- the large uncertainty simply showing that it's usually difficult to make statistically signficant conclusions about climatologically short time intervals (as I wrote about in the Sidebar here).

Stunned by a Judith Curry Post

I'm sorry, but I simply cannot understand this kind of thing from a scientist.

Judith Curry writes:

This period since 2002 is scientifically interesting, since it coincides with the ‘climate shift’ circa 2001/2002 posited by Tsonis and others. This shift and the subsequent slight cooling trend provides a rationale for inferring a slight cooling trend over the next decade or so, rather than a flat trend from the 15 yr ‘pause’.

I simply cannot fathom why any scientist would make such claims about short time periods - they are not representative of climate, but of natural variability.

I try, I really try when I write my articles, to include alternative voices. But anymore the (so-called) skeptics are getting increasingly ridiculous: this quote by Curry, Roger Pielke Jr's claim that Marcott et al bordered on misconduct, or John Christy's flogging an Anthony Watts blog post in front of Congress a mere couple of days after it appeared on a blog and before it was submitted for peer-reviewed. (And where, can I ask, has this finding yet appeared in the peer-reviewed literature? Nowhere, that's where.)

I have the utmost respect for the values of science and want to believe that all scientists are coming from an intellectually honest place.

But when I read things like this, I am simply stunned.

Is "The Big Burp" Underway?

The "Big Burp" would be the thawing of permafrost -- frozen soil -- that underlies much of the Arctic.

It contains an estimated 1,400-1,850 gigatons of carbon -- man's carbon emissions to date are about 385 GtC, from burning fossil fuels and land use changes.

That's 3.5 to 5 times as much as has been emitted so far.

Of course, this thawing will occur over centuries.

And it's why it's ridiculous to look only at the global average change in surface temperatures.

This is something you'd completely miss if you buy that global warming paused 17 years 4 months ago, as Lord Googly-Eyes Monckton recently claimed. It's not true anyway, but even if it was, such a broad brush stroke misses important regional changes, such as the fact that the North Pole region has warmed by 0.80°C in that time period, according to UAH data for the lower troposphere.

The NASA scientists say:

"Permafrost soils are warming even faster than Arctic air temperatures - as much as 2.7 to 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 to 2.5 degrees Celsius) in just the past 30 years.... As heat from Earth's surface penetrates into permafrost, it threatens to mobilize these organic carbon reservoirs and release them into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and methane, upsetting the Arctic's carbon balance and greatly exacerbating global warming."

They don't give any numbers -- I guess they will have to wait for their papers. But there is a surprisingly small amount of methane in our current atmosphere: only about 5.5 Mt.

Are atmospheric methane levels increasing? Yes, but only a little. Here is the graph of monthly CH4 measurements from a station in Yonagunijima, Japan. It just happens to be a station I found that updates only a month or to after the present, and is relatively far north:

So after whatever caused last decades pause in CH4 levels -- the consensus seems to be related to the implosion of the Soviet Union, though no one I've read seems especially sure -- methane levels are on the rise again.

Zvuki mu

Via: The World

Roy Spencer Writes....

Roy Spencer writes:

Forgive me if I sound frustrated, but we scientists who still believe that climate change can also be naturally forced have been virtually cut out of funding and publication by the ‘humans-cause-everything-bad-that-happens’ juggernaut.

Of course, few scientists would agree to sign on to the Cornwall Alliance's Evangelical Declaration on Global Warming, which says

"Recent global warming is one of many natural cycles of warming and cooling in geologic history."

The Declaration says a lot more, but that's enough.

I can understand how a "scientist" would be upset about being cut out of funding. But by signing the Cornwall Alliance declaration, Spencer has explicitely removed himself from the realm of science and has instead taken up a religious view of the world, and hence of climate.

I simply cannot understand how such a person expects to receive funding to do science, when he has made it very clear that his views are based on religion.

Religion should be funding him, not science.

About the Plateau

Justin Gillis writes, in a very good article in the New York Times:

As you might imagine, those dismissive of climate-change concerns have made much of this warming plateau. They typically argue that “global warming stopped 15 years ago” or some similar statement, and then assert that this disproves the whole notion that greenhouse gases are causing warming.

Rarely do they mention that most of the warmest years in the historical record have occurred recently. Moreover, their claim depends on careful selection of the starting and ending points. The starting point is almost always 1998, a particularly warm year because of a strong El Niño weather pattern.

Somebody who wanted to sell you gold coins as an investment could make the same kind of argument about the futility of putting your retirement funds into the stock market. If he picked the start date and the end date carefully enough, the gold salesman could make it look like the stock market did not go up for a decade or longer.

But that does not really tell you what your retirement money is going to do in the market over 30 or 40 years. It does not even tell you how you would have done over the cherry-picked decade, which would have depended on exactly when you got in and out of the market.

Scientists and statisticians reject this sort of selective use of numbers, and when they calculate the long-term temperature trends for the earth, they conclude that it continues to warm through time. Despite the recent lull, it is an open question whether the pace of that warming has undergone any lasting shift.

Unfortunately, I don't think Justin's article will change anything.

But personally, I'm getting a little tired of the "plateau." Arguments about it it simply aren't scientific.

Of course, I've done my own reporting on the subject.

Does UAH Have a Cool Bias?

By the way, there is a claim literature that UAH's mid-tropospheric temperatures are biased cool:

Po-Chedley, Stephen, Qiang Fu, 2012: A Bias in the Midtropospheric Channel Warm Target Factor on the NOAA-9 Microwave Sounding Unit, J. Atmos. Oceanic Technol., 29, 646–652.

whose abstract says:

"The analysis reveals that the UAH TMT product has a positive bias of 0.051 ± 0.031 in the warm target factor that artificially reduces the global TMT trend by 0.042 K decade⁻¹ for 1979–2009. Accounting for this bias increases the global UAH TMT trend from 0.038 to 0.080 K decade⁻¹, effectively eliminating the trend difference between UAH and RSS and decreasing the trend difference between UAH and NOAA by 47%."

That would essentially eliminate the RSS-UAH discrepency I pointed out. (Actually I noted this paper last year, but forgot about it until I read this HotWhopper post.)

(Why is it UAH's biases always seem to be on the cool side??)

This claim prompted a response by Christy and Spencer, which brought its own response from the original authors last month, saying

The main finding by Po-Chedley and Fu was that the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) microwave sounding unit (MSU) product has a bias in its NOAA-9 midtropospheric channel (TMT) warm target factor, which leads to a cold bias in the TMT trend. This reply demonstrates that the central arguments by Christy and Spencer to challenge Po-Chedley and Fu do not stand.

Obviously this correction, if indeed true, would bring UAH into agreement with RSS but not with the model results as claimed by Spencer. I am still puzzled how it is that the average model trend doubled from 2007 to 2013.

Kind of on the Authoritarian Side

"You can have a democratic surveillance state which collects as little data as possible and tells you as much as possible about what it's doing, or you can have an authoritarian surveillance state which collects as much as possible and tells the public as little as possible. And we are kind of on the authoritarian side."

-- Paul Krugman