In 2009 someone wrote a blog post about climate change that made all the usual science denialist claims. Hurricanes have reduced therefore global warming is not real. In this case, hurricanes are one of the main threats of climate change (a straw man) and since they are not as common these days in the Atlantic as alarmists claimed the would be (cherry picking) global warming is not a concern. There were stronger storms in the past. Katrina wasn’t really all that bad. Etc. etc.
The Ice Caps (he called sea ice “Ice Caps”) are not really melting that bad and besides we don’t really know what they were doing before 1970 so we can use anecdotal evidence that sea ice was less extensive and ignore anecdotal evidence that sea ice was more extensive in the past.
El Nino was supposed to do somehting rather specific and unusual (that El Nino researchers were never very sure of) and instead did something else rather unusual therefore there is no global warming. Climate models don’t really work, Carbondioxide is a plant food, global temperatures are experiencing a hiatus in increase, it’s really the sun, etc. He called concern over climate change hysteria and called discussion of changes to climate alarmism.
This was Matt Rogers, who at the time, and who is still now, with the Capitol Weather Group. Perhaps Matt was confused five years ago. Perhaps he was a climate change skeptic in the days when it was reasonable to question the mainstream science, before the consensus formed and climate scientists started working more on details. But no, that doesn’t really explain what he was saying then because consensus was already established. He was, in truth, spouting denialist creed. But still, perhaps these days Matt, who is actually a trained meteorologist, has shaken off the denialism.
Maybe. But just the other day he came out with a post that is very much worhy of admonishment, in part because of a graphic it uses. Have a look at the graphic, which is about Global Temperature Change in recent years. Tell me what you think this graph shows?
Decrease, decline, flatness, hiatus. Cooling. Climate getting cooler. Global warming must be wrong.
Nope.
This is a change in the rate of acceleration of the velocity of global temperatures. We’ll get back to that in a moment.
Matt starts his post with:
The recently-released National Climate Assessment (NCA) from the U.S. government offers considerable cause for concern for climate calamity, but downplays the decelerating trend in global surface temperature in the 2000s, which I document here.
No it doesn’t. The NCA addresses the topic in the FAQ and in the body of the report rather prominently.
Matt then notes:
Many climate scientists are currently working to figure out what is causing the slowdown, because if it continues, it would call into question the legitimacy of many climate model projections (and inversely offer some good news for our planet).
This is a misstatement. This verbiage implies that many climate scientists accept the idea of a “slowdown” and are trying to figure it out. This is simply not true. There is secular variation in the commonly used surface temperature measures, which are an incomplete estimate of global temperature and warming/cooling over time, ignoring the largest heat reservoir on the planet (the ocean) and highly dynamic changing effects such as the Arctic. It is like an index, useful but nothing like perfect. Imagine using only one of several indexes of the economy to stand in for all of them? You wouldn’t Actually, these temperatures series are much better measures of global warming than any of those economic indexes are of the economy, but you get the point; it is a good estimate. Emphasis on both “good” and “estimate.” Anyway, most of this variation has been explained in the past. A few studies recently explained more of the variation. But overall the march of global surface temperatures have tracked with expectations and gone up over time. Scientists are not scrambling to explain a thing that is not happening. Matt should know this.
Now about his graph. Matt first tells the people reading his post that they could create their own graph of global temperatures and make one, but no, Mat will do it for you:
You can see the pause (or deceleration in warming) yourself by simply grabbing the freely available data from NASA and NOAA. For the chart below, I took the annual global temperature difference from average (or anomaly) and calculated the change from the prior year.
He’s referring to the chart I show above, but implying in the text that this is a chart of global temperature anomalies (differences above or below a baseline) just like any other temperature change over time chart. He doesn’t exactly lie, but he made a very obscure graph of a very obscure measure with questionable statistical validity or usefulness and seems to do everything he can to pass it off to the unwary as a graph showing global temperature decreases over the last several years.
More subtly, why did he smooth the line? It makes it look like a mathematical function (giving it undue credence?) when it is really multi-cause variation from year to year in a derivative.
Also, by setting the start of the graph at a recent arbitrary point, the graph can not show the long term trend. That would probably be a more or less flat line with short term up and down trends. It would be a very uninteresting graph. Only by focusing on this close up does it look like it is showing something. At the moment I’m writing this blog post from the middle of the Great North Woods so I don’t have access to the data but maybe I’ll make that graph for you and show you at a later time.
The “sign of data validation” he refers to in his post, that both data sets have the same trend, is bogus. They are not two separate data sets. They are two overlapping sets of data measuring the same thing. So, here, “Data Validation” means that no one accidentally inserted their checkbook balancing data into the wrong spreadsheet cells.
Matt notes “…the warm changes have generally been decreasing while cool changes have grown.” This is not a graph of warm or cool changes. It is a graph of the rate at which changes have happened. So by stating it this way, the essence of the graph is lost. This is a graph of change in rate of change.
Then, “To be sure, both sets of data points show an mean annual change of +0.01C during the 2000s. But, if current trends continue for just a few more years, then the mean change for the 2000s will shift to negative.”
Wut?
Nice to admit that the trend is an increasing temperature, but suggesting that this could shift to negative (for more than a brief moment) is insane. This is like looking at the increase in maximum rate of human travel over a century, from horse to car to aircraft to space ship and predicting that at some point we will be going faster than the speed of light. You can’t go faster than the speed of light. You can’t add greenhouse gasses to the atmosphere and cool off the planet short of a very serious negative feedback mechanism which apparently does not exist. Warp drives in the news lately notwithstanding, we will not cool the planet by, effectively, turning up the effects of the sun’s energy.
Then, “The current +.01C mean increase in temperatures is insufficient to verify the climate change projections for major warming (even the low end +1-2C) by mid-to-late century.”
There is not a “current +.01C increase.” There is a poorly made graph combined with an apparently poor understanding of the science possibly made with the intent of minimizing concern over global warming covering only a short period of time being misinterpreted as a valid measurement. This is like cold fusion or faster than light neutrinos invalidating the Standard Model in physics. But less interesting.
The rest of Matt’s post is him tossing softballs at himself in the form of the usual objections people make when someone advocates for the #FausPause. Like that Matt or his friends might be cherry picking. Like they do. Or noting that it is warmer now than ever. Like it is.
In the end, literally, Matt notes that the slow down is not real, is only temporary, and will go away. But this is only after a majorly misleading graphic and a lot of verbiage with an entirely different message. Is this a new kind of denialism and what do we call it?
Have you read the breakthrough novel of the year? When you are done with that, try:
or Paperback
*Please note:
Links to books and other items on this page and elsewhere on Greg Ladens' blog may send you to Amazon, where I am a registered affiliate. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, which helps to fund this site.
Since the beginning of the unfortunate tenure of Fred Hiatt, the Washington Post has built an abominable record of promoting climate science denialism. For one take among many on this, see:
http://thinkprogress.org/yglesias/2011/04/19/184683/climate-denialism-promoter-fred-hiatt-hits-american-conservatives-for-embrace-of-climate-denialism/
Up until now, it seemed like the reputable Capital Weather Gang blog had maintained some integrity and independence where science could thrive. With Rogers’ deliberately misleading column it seems Hiatt has given the order to turn CWG as well into a Fox Noise Redux shill for the threatened industries.
What a sad, disreputable man Fred Hiatt is. I cannot stand the way Chief Sendum Into Iraq has ruined a once fine paper.
I’d like to see that complementary blog post from 2006 — “Global warming of the Earth’s surface has run amok” — in which Matt Rogers fretted that given the (then) statistically significant 14-year warming trend of 3+ degrees per century, climate scientists had better revise their conservative climate sensitivity estimates upward.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2007207/Screen%20Shot%202014-06-23%20at%204.04.14%20PM.png
I’d like to see it, but I don’t think it exists.
Seriously, this has been a somewhat longer than usual “pause”/”deceleration” in the surface temperature warming trend than any we’ve seen since the epic pause circa ~1944-1978. It’s the resultant longer-than-usual loss of statistical significance at the 2?/95% probability level (around 18-20 years, depending on the dataset, compared to the 10-15 years required for statistical significance most of the time since 1980) that’s created a climate confusion opportunity for those so inclined and a teaching moment for those who know better about the constantly shifting balance sheet of natural and anthropogenic forcings, the complexities of short-term internal climate variability and how we need to look everywhere – air, oceans, cryopshere – to figure out if the planet is warming consistently with AGW theory and current estimate of climate sensitivity.
Remember, the giss and similar data sets do not account for the arctic warming which has accelerated recently, skips much of Africa, and surface heat – air near the surface and SST — is only a few percent of the total AGW related heat. It is a little like estimating the total business activity in a major shopping district by tracking the use of one parking lot in which 3% of the cars park. Might be a useful indicator, but you can’t sweat the year by year or even decade by decade variations, and you certainly can’t can’t let the wiggles in the line stand in for an alternate theory of pyysics.
Yes, I totally agree, Greg. Guess it wasn’t obvious from my comment. I actually just wrote a detailed piece for general consumption on this very subject, including mention of the attenuating effect the Cowtan and Way study has on the pause/”pause” (http://www.aquarianonline.com/a-cold-winter-in-a-still-warming-world/).
No, I got it, I was just adding on. Thanks for the link.
Since 1974 the average duration of years in GISS that achieve statistically significant warming was 14-15 years. Two 19 year periods (1977-95 inclusive and 1979-97 inclusive) each had just significant warming and two 18 years periods (1978-95 inclusive and 1980-97 inclusive) each had just significant warming. The commonest duration was 14 years.
So 19 years is not an unprecedented duration needed for significance. I’d say we’d have to wait until it becomes 20 years before we could say, yes, that is pretty unusual.
Why does it start in 1910-1920?
Why does what start in 1910 – 1920?