If you can’t take the heat…

Hot Topic, evidently feeling the heat from continued claims that warming has been on hold for the past decade, is snapping at anyone who dares to suggest it:

Gareth October 17, 2009 at 12:11 pm

'There hasn't been any warming for ten years now'

AGWD: You needn't have bothered with the rest of your comment, because this is one of the oldest, most debunked of the sceptic arguments around. I debunked it in the book, and it's been debunked many times since. It isn't true. Geddit?

Skeptical Science explains.

The rest of your comment is just wibble

Let's put Gareth to the test, yet again, shall we?

Virtually all the major datasets are now acknowledging atmospheric warming has slowed to a crawl or stopped over the past ten years, and even some leading climate alarmists scientists are publicly suggesting we've entered a climate shift and may not see warming return for a further decade or more. The data clearly shows temperature anomalies trending down despite CO2 emissions rising:

In the face of such admissions, Renowden insists this isn't true (see above). But on what logic does he base this? When you follow his link to Skeptical Science, the site he misunderstood last time he tried to ping me, he appears to be relying on a redefinition of "global warming":

To say we're currently experiencing global cooling overlooks one simple physical reality - the land and atmosphere are only one small fraction of the Earth's climate (albeit the part we inhabit). Global warming is by definition global. The entire planet is accumulating heat due to an energy imbalance.

Cute. Not really the common concept of global warming as per greenhouse theory, which deals with atmospheric CO2 emissions from car exhausts causing a hot gas blanket around the planet, but let's buy into this skittish enlargement of the idea just for the fun of it.

It is entirely true, as I have specified in Air Con, that the oceans store more heat than the atmosphere. However that's one of the big points of the book, that oceans lock up heat and release it as part of Earth's natural balancing out of climate. There is nothing mystical about this process. More to the point, studies this year suggest by far the majority of ocean warming (70%) is related to atmospheric dust and volcanoes blocking out direct solar radiation, with only a tiny fraction put down to 'global warming' theory.

The new analysis comes from scientists in the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Wisconsin. They say that the Atlantic temperature trend has been warmer by approximately a quarter of a degree each decade since 1980: but that most of this is actually because more sunlight is reaching the sea due to reducing levels of dirt in the air above it.

"A lot of this upward trend in the long-term pattern can be explained just by dust storms and volcanoes," says Amato Evan of Wisconsin uni. "About 70 percent of it is just being forced by the combination of dust and volcanoes, and about a quarter of it is just from the dust storms themselves."

"This makes sense, because we don't really expect global warming to make the ocean [temperature] increase that fast," he adds.

Indeed. Only the bunnies at Hot Topic appear to be claiming that. The news release makes some more good points:

The researchers say that predicting what will happen to atmospheric dust levels in future is difficult, with volcanoes notoriously random and African dust storms poorly understood. Nonetheless, according to Amato, future ocean-warming models will need to make allowance for them somehow or their predictions will be well out of whack.

Quite apart from matters such as the melting of the ice caps, species survival and so on, this will apparently mean very poor prediction of hurricanes - the killer storms being driven very largely by sea temperature. The Atlantic was on average a degree warmer for the record-breaking storm season of 2005 than it was during the quiet year seen in 1994.

"Volcanoes and dust storms are really important if you want to understand changes over long periods of time," Evan says. "If they have a huge effect on ocean temperature, they're likely going to have a huge effect on hurricane variability as well."

It is worth pointing out that the sun has been more active in the past 70 or so years than it has over the previous 1000, so one would expect some heat punch on planet Earth as a result of that higher solar activity. The studies suggesting solar dominance in ocean warming are entirely consistent with that. (I would add however that aspects of solar influence on climate remain unknown, and the simplistic measurement of watts per square metre may not account for total solar influence).

Now we know more facts about ocean warming (mainly solar driven depending on atmospheric clarity), let's return to the SkepticalScience bible. SS draws on Murphy et al 2009 to claim the oceans have been absorbing heat. Well, yes, we know that, but Murphy's study carefully notes that it is looking at the total heat budget from solar radiative forcing and greenhouse gases combined. We already know the solar forcing on the oceans is much stronger than the CO2 effect (see above), so I'm not sure that Murphy is a slam-dunk study to support the idea that rising CO2 is forcing heat into the oceans.

Neither, it would appear, is the man behind the Argo sea temperature project, Josh Willis, who points out in this email exchange that the Atlantic has cooled, regardless of what Murphy claims:

I also see a sort of transition in the North Atlantic from a period of rapid warming from the mid-1990s through about 2004, followed by a slight cooling during 2005 and 2006 and it has pretty much been level since then. This seems to agree well with the average over the altimeter data for the North Atlantic.  So, perhaps the recent cooling of the North Atlantic is real.

Cheers,

Josh

There are other problems with the Murphy paper, and I note that Douglass et al 2009 reach a very different conclusion about ocean heat trends.

The main point here? Debunked by Gareth or SkepticalScience – not even close. A significant scientific debate on global energy imbalance and the whereabouts of missing heat continues to rage at peer-reviewed level, let alone on lay blogs, and the issue is far from finalized, 'settled' or 'debunked'.

Get real, Truffle. The atmospheric temperature anomaly is trending down, the oceans are not displaying significant signs of heating, and some of your cheerleaders are admitting it's not so hot right now. I'm sure warming will return, but this is good evidence of strong natural cycles at play.

UPDATE 21 October:

Gareth is now trying to weasel his way out of this little mess by saying that when he said it was continuing to warm he was basing his claim on the accepted climate window of a 30 year trend.

Which would be all well and good, except that if you look at the top of this post you'll see he definitively claimed to have thoroughly "debunked" a commenter who suggested "there hasn't been any warming for ten years now".

The commenter was specific, and defined the basis of his opinion. Gareth appears to be now claiming that an appeal to the 30 year record somehow debunks an explicit factual comment about the ten year record.

This is the sort of slipperiness we've all come to expect from Hot Topic. We all know what the 30 year record shows, and the more informed of us know that the 80s and 90s marked a warming period on the back of an earlier cooler period. However, we also know, those of us with experience in statistics, that trends are built on raw data, and that the longer the current deceleration of warming lasts, the higher the warming will have to be in the latter years of the 30 year cycle in order to maintain the trend average.

The truth is, warming has slowed dramatically over the past decade, despite rising CO2. The models did not predict this, and appealing to the 30 year trend does not disprove or "debunk" the reality of what is currently happening.

UPDATE 2. Classic. Renowden's selective quoting strikes again. Anyone else spot the missing context from his extract of my comments above? If you didn't, here's what he DIDN'T include:

Which would be all well and good, except that if you look at the top of this post you'll see he definitively claimed to have thoroughly "debunked" a commenter who suggested "there hasn't been any warming for ten years now".

The commenter was specific, and defined the basis of his opinion. Gareth appears to be now claiming that an appeal to the 30 year record somehow debunks an explicit factual comment about the ten year record.

Hot Topic reminds me of these guys:

Comments

[fletch]

THIS is one of the most informative PDF's I've read recently that shows that all four of the reports that are used to show global temperature show cooling over the last decade; however, the IPCC only relies on one of them and it only takes it up to a certain year.

Quite eye-opening. One of the few places where you can actually see the graphs and the massaging of data the UN employs to smooth out the curve.

[fletch]

Bought the Heaven + Earth book at my local bookstore today. Going to start reading it tonight. The woman in the bookstore said it looked like it was going to be a huge seller.

[jonno]

Ian, you dick, cherry picking? 8 out the 10 hottest years on record have happened in this decade.

[fletch]

Jonno, that is patently untrue. Read the PDF in my link above. "On record"? You must be joking. The world has been wayy hotter than it is now - they used to grow crops in Greenland when it was actually green.

I hate when uneducated people make comments like those.

[iwishart]

You don't even have to go back a thousand years...one peer reviewed study this year confirmed Greenland was 30 percent warmer than now back in the 1930s.

[CM]

Great response back at Hot Topic, with a gadget that clearly shows that cherry-picking makes no difference no matter what time period you want to use.

SPPI churn out the same old garbage every month and call it something different. According to his own resume, Evans has not published a single peer-reviewed research paper on the subject of climate change. Evans published only a single paper in 1987 in his career and it is unrelated to climate change.

[CM]

"...and even some leading climate alarmists scientists are publicly suggesting we've entered a climate shift and may not see warming return for a further decade or more..."

Who are these people? I hope you're not referring to Mojib Latif...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=khikoh3sJg8

[jonno]

No Fletch, I think it is you that is uneducated. You have no idea what you are talking about. I love how climate change sceptic fools lie.

Yes, on record. Worldwide, the top ten hottest years have all occurred since 1997.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071213101419.htm

"they used to grow crops in Greenland"

Maybe you can't grasp the difference between local events and global events.

[Ian Wishart]

There’s nothing wrong with Latif, I’ve read the transcripts and whilst he sees a return to warming (as I do), he’s admitting it ain’t happening now.

I was however referring to the peer reviewed study of Swanson and Tsonis…among others…

[Ian Wishart]

And as for the Hot Topic ‘gadget’: garbage in, garbage out. He is using NOAA, after all.

[Ian Wishart]

Jonno, you should break out of the thought-bubble over at Gareth's and read a little more widely.

Fact One: until the UN and its WMO minions culled some of the 'cooler' temperature stations in 1990, there was no major warming trend being reported at all. The graph in Air Con tracking a massive jump in average temps from 1990 coincident with the staton cull tells a dramatic story.

Secondly, let's not overuse this "on record" meme: in that sense we are really only talking since 1979, which is hardly a large statistical baseline to measure against against Earth's 4.5 billion year history.

Thirdly, peer reviewed studies this year have found metro temp stations (which after all form the overwhelming majority) can be subject to UHI effect of 0.1C per decade, which is actually higher than the 0.7C per century that the UN attributes to AGW.

Fourthly, as I've just pointed out in reply to CM, you are relying on NOAA data which is possibly the least reliable of the datasets.

Talk about cherry picking and extrapolating "record" claims from short term data!

[CM]

Your quote I picked out is nonsense though - if warming 'returns' in a decade or two, then there has been no 'climate shift'.

Latif was only referring to natural variability, and nothing more. If you read the transcript (or have seen the video) then you'll see that he even joked about being misrepresented. I can't see where he "admitted it happening now".....even though it has been reported that way by New Scientist, Morano etc.

A 'climate shift' doesn't occur within a period of a few decades. It's fairly well agreed upon that 'climate' is a 30+ year timeframe.

Swanson and Tsonis's study has been widely misrepresented, as Swanson explains here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/07/warminginterrupted-much-ado-about-natural-variability/.

Romm also sets out some issues with that research here
http://climateprogress.org/2009/07/13/realclimate-debunks-global-cooling-myth-swanson-tsonis-warming-is-non-linear/
Perhaps the most important part being that warming is not going to be linear, so why try to pretend it will be?

So Latif wasn't talking 'climate shift' and neither were Swanson and Tsonis. So who else?

[CM]

The 'gadget' clearly a choice of either NASA's GISTEMP or the Hadley Centre’s HadCRUTv3 series to be used.

Ian, can you please direct me to these 2009 peer reviewed studies about metro temp stations, as I haven't seen them. Thanks.

[CM]

Apologies for the multiple posting, but I just noticed that you are critical of "relying on NOAA data which is possibly the least reliable of the datasets" even though the single graph in your post appears to be partly NOAA data?

Where is your graph from? The only place I can find it (also unreferenced) is from a Deroy Murdock opinion piece (Murdock being an American conservative syndicated columnist for the Scripps Howard News Service and a contributing editor with National Review Online) and the guy who said waterboarding was "something of which every American should be proud"......

[CTG]

As the author of the "gadget" at Hot Topic, I think I need to respond to Ian Wishart. He is suggesting that two of the main temperature records - and the only two records which extend past the satellite era are "garbage". Is Wishart therefore suggesting that we have no reliable evidence one way or the other to support human-caused warming?

Because if so, he is very much in a minority of one.

[AcidComments]

Of interest:

Study: model in good agreement with satellite temperature data – suggest cooling

Abstract

Global satellite data is analyzed for temperature trends for the period January 1979 through June 2009. Beginning and ending segments show a cooling trend, while the middle segment evinces a warming trend. The past 12 to 13 years show cooling using both satellite data sets, with lower confidence limits that do not exclude a negative trend until 16 to 22 years. It is shown that several published studies have predicted cooling in this time frame. One of these models is extrapolated from its 2000 calibration end date and shows a good match to the satellite data, with a projection of continued cooling for several more decades.

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/20/study-model-in-good-agreement-with-satellite-temperature-data-suggest-cooling/

[Ian Wishart]

Colin,

The UAH and RSS satellite data is widely regarded as more reliable than NASA-GIS or Hadley, for a number of reasons but not least of which that UAH and RSS have made their raw, unmanipulated data available to all researchers for peer-review.

Hadley East Anglia have just admitted they have "lost" all the pre-satellite raw data and that only the manipulated data remains, so I wouldn't be shouting them from the rooftops as a credible source.

Outside of Mann and Schmidt's clique of tame 'peers', neither the Hadley nor that GIS data has been independently peer-reviewed in any proper sense of the word.

Then you have the problem of UHI contamination of the GIS and Hadley data. Both datasets claim to have "adjusted" for UHI, but Hadley states its adjustment equates to 0.1C per century.

Unfortunately, the latest peer-reviewed studies this year suggest UHI contamination can be as high as 0.1C PER DECADE, which actually exceeds the UN IPCC estimate of AGW influence of 0.7C this past century.

Thirdly, the cull of weather stations in 1990 skewed the land temp data hugely and resulted in a massive warming spike being recorded for the 1990s. Highly suspect.

As for the assertion that the GCM's predict cooling periods, here's Craig Loehle:

"It is claimed that “the models” predict cooling in the sense that if you run a bunch of models a bunch of times, a small % of them will show a 10 year cooling or flat trend. However, it is only a small probability of getting such cooling/flat out of thousands of simulated years of climate"

None of the GCMs, that I'm aware, predicted the current 10 year flatline.

So in answer to your query as to whether there is no reliable evidence for human-caused warming, I'll say this:

In theory, humans will have caused some warming. Given the dodginess of the land temp datasets, unfortunately no, they cannot be taken as reliable.

Warming began in the 1800s well prior to AGW CO2 emissions becoming an issue (UN IPCC factors human influence beginning around 1950), so one cannot reliably say that because warming is happening that it is necessarily human caused. The solar driver out of the LIA may well be continuing, and may in fact have set off feedbacks.

I note on your own gadget that if you switch to Hadley and set the slider to 8 years, it shows the cooling trend of the past eight years, the one that Gareth suggested wasn't there.

[CTG]

Both UAH and RSS show warming of the same magnitude as GISTEMP and HadCRUT.

What was your point again?

[Ian Wishart]

Cobblers, Colin. Go and have a play on the WFT toy and do some comparisons. The trend might be similar, but the magnitude isn't, which is the point really.

In fact your link under same magnitude proves the point beautifully. If HadCRUT and GIS are contaminated, we would expect them to show higher warming than the others. Which they do.

[CTG]

The magnitude of the warming is derived from the slope of the trend lines, which is very similar for all four lines.

The reason HadCRUT and GISTEMP appear higher up on that graph is because those are temperature anomalies, not absolute temperatures. The satellite data use a different baseline period than the other two.

If something as basic as this needs to be explained to you, it's no wonder you don't understand the science.