Tag Archives: Global Warming

How warm will 2014 be?

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We just experienced the warmest two months (May and June) on record, meaning, essentially, in well over 100 years. This is because of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Does this mean that 2014 will be the warmest year on record? Probably not, in part because February was pretty cold and that lowers the score for the year. But it will be a warm year.

There is a strong correlation between the temperature in June and what turns out to be the global mean for the year. This can be shown empirically by calculating a simple correlation coefficient for each month of the year and the year’s average. For this I used the GISS anomaly data.

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Clearly, the ability of a month to predict the year follows a seasonal march, with June and its sibling months performing the best. I asked Michael Mann about this and he told me, “I think it is simply a consequence of signal-to-noise. Boreal summer has a large signal-to-noise ratio because the effects of radiative forcing are relatively large compared to those of internal atmospheric dynamics. Winter on the other hand tends to be dominated by synoptic and planetary-scale dynamics, meaning the signal of forcing is buried in more noise.”

Makes sense and the data shows this.

So let’s use June to predict 2014. Running all the data from GIS through a simple regression model, we get this:

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Yeah, I know, no axes lables. This is just a quick and dirty exercise in Science by Spreadsheet! This is June temperature anomaloy on the X axis and annual on the Y. The black regression line has the indicated R-squared and model formula. I added a second order polynomial regression line (in red) to check to see if the ability to predict goes haywire for the higher temperature values (which are also the more recent years). I’m going to say it doesn’t, though if we do a similar model regressing the second half of the year on the first, there is a skew with the higher (and thus later) values:

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So, I’m reasonably confident that June is a good predictor of the year, though I’m also sure that this method won’t predict the exact ranking for a given year. But we can try it anyway. Here is a list of all of recent years sorted by how hot it got (using the same data) with 2014 added in as a prediction (the rest of the GAT numbers are observations).

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Using this table we can see two things. First, it would take only a small difference from the prediction to move 2014 up or down. The average amount the predictions for these years are off is actually large enough to move 2014 up to the third slot, or down to the tenth slot or so, very easily. But given only this prediction, we might expect 2014 to tie as the fifth warmest year (if we round it off) or to be the sixth warmest year, more or less.

This assumes we don’t have warming effects of an El Niño this year. If we don’t I’m going to guess that 2014 will be about in the middle of the top ten years ever. If we do have an El Niño that affects temperatures during the last few months of the year, we could see a 2014 that is closer to the top of the pile.

That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. Until more data comes along and then I’ll revise as needed, of course.

Here’s a video from Paul Douglas discussing June’s temperature record:

The Expansion of Antarctic Sea Ice and Self Correcting Science

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One of the things climate change science deniers say, to throw you off, is that Antarctic sea ice is expanding. They even claim that the amount of expansion of Antarctic sea ice offsets the dramatic retreat of Arctic sea ice (see this for the latest on the Arctic). I’ve even seen it argued, in that famous peer-reviewed publication Twitter, that there is an inter-polar teleconnection that guarnatees that when the ice on one end of the earth expands the ice on the other end of the earth contracts, and visa versa, so everything is fine.

That Antarctic Sea ice is expanding has become standard knowledge. (See “Why is Antarctic Sea Ice Growing” for more.) It is a simple fact of nature that needs to be explained and addressed. The expansion of Antarctic Sea ice is one of the very few apparent reversals in climate change related trends across the world. And, there have been many explanations for it.

Or is it?

It turns out that we don’t know if Antarctic sea ice is expanding. A new study just released looked at Antarctic sea ice to examine the idea, which has been batted around for a while now, that there is something wrong with the data. The study, by Eisenman, Meier, and Norris, published in The Cryosphere, found this:

Recent estimates indicate that the Antarctic sea ice cover is expanding at a statistically significant rate with a magnitude one-third as large as the rapid rate of sea ice retreat in the Arctic. However, during the mid-2000s, with several fewer years in the observational record, the trend in Antarctic sea ice extent was reported to be considerably smaller and statistically indistinguishable from zero. Here, we show that much of the increase in the reported trend occurred due to the previously undocumented effect of a change in the way the satellite sea ice observations are processed for the widely used Bootstrap algorithm data set, rather than a physical increase in the rate of ice advance. Specifically, we find that a change in the intercalibration across a 1991 sensor transition when the data set was reprocessed in 2007 caused a substantial change in the long-term trend. Although our analysis does not definitively identify whether this change introduced an error or removed one, the resulting difference in the trends suggests that a substantial error exists in either the current data set or the version that was used prior to the mid-2000s, and numerous studies that have relied on these observations should be reexamined to determine the sensitivity of their results to this change in the data set. Furthermore, a number of recent studies have investigated physical mechanisms for the observed expansion of the Antarctic sea ice cover. The results of this analysis raise the possibility that much of this expansion may be a spurious artifact of an error in the processing of the satellite observations.

It looks like, for sure, you can’t say that Antarctic sea ice is expanding or contracting in its annual cycle. It also looks like the evidence suggests it is probably not expanding at all.

So, science, in its self correcting way, has thrown a wet blanket … a warm and wet blanket perhaps … on the idea that the Antarctic sea ice expansion disproves everything else we know about global warming. The Antarctic sea ice is not Galileo!

Current Status of Arctic Sea Ice Extent

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As it does every summer, the Arctic Sea ice is melting off. Over the last several years, the amount of sea ice that melts by the time it hits minimum in September has generally been increasing. So, how’s it doing now?

The graph above shows the 1981-2010 average plus or minus two standard deviations. Before going into more detail than that, you should look at the following graphic.
Arctic_Sea_Ice_First_v_Second_Ten_Years

The top chart shows the march of Arctic Sea ice melt for first ten years of the baseline data set only, and the bottom chart shows the last ten years of the same data set. This tells us that the two Standard Deviations for the period 1981-2010 hides an important fact. Since Arctic Sea ice is melting more and more every year, a proper baseline might be the first several years of this period, not the entire period.

Now refer to the graphic at the top of the post. This is the current year’s ice extent. Notice that it is tracking right along the lower edge of the 2 Standard Deviation zone. In other words, the present year is exhibiting what we have been seeing all along: An Arctic with much less ice.

Now look at the years that post date the baseline period, 2011 through the present, including the wildy extreme year of 2012 when a record melt was set.

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Here we see that collectively, the last three full years and the present partially documented year exist at the lower end of, or lower than, the 2 Standard Deviation zone. This suggests that the current trend is an extension of the previous couple of decades. More melting on average over time. One would hope this would level off, and maybe it will. But we certainly can not make that claim at this point.

Note that it is very hard to predict the ultimate minimum for a given year, even at this point. (Even so, I did it here way at the beginning of the season). We’ll have to wait and see.

Humans accepting climate change vs. Jell-O: The Coastal Effect

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There is an old theory in psychology that characterizes humans as a bowl of Jell-O (Jelly for some of you). Life pokes at the Jell-O, the Jell-O jiggles. Eventually the jiggles begin to change the Jell-O, so certain kinds of pokes result in certain kinds of responses. The Jell-O gurgles, babbles, notices things, learns, develops, and eventually becomes self aware.

That is a great oversimplification of a theory that was, in turn, a great oversimplification of human development, yet it does seem to apply in many ways to human behavior. When it comes to climate change, people seem more accepting of the reality of Anthropogenic Global Warming when it is hot out, less so when it is cool. Nature pokes, or fails to poke, and the Jell-O responds. Sadly, this seems to be how our Big Brains work.

Climate Change has had, and will have, a very wide range of effects across the entire planet, and most of them have had or will have significant impacts on humans. Imagine a world that is warmed by an average of 3.0 degrees C. This is likely given our current and expected release of fossil Carbon into the atmosphere. That is a warming significantly more than we have experienced so far. One could take the effects that have already occurred and simply extrapolate into the future, and that may work for some effects. But other effects may be fundamental qualitative changes in climate systems that will be more difficult to characterize or predict. For example, 30 years ago it may have been difficult to predict changes in the jet stream that would cause widespread changes in weather patterns, threatening agriculture, water supplies, and causing frequent floods or other disasters. But that seems to have happened. Maybe in a couple of more decades, that effect will go away and something else will happen.

So, imagine this world with 3.0 degrees greater average heat, and try to estimate what the worst effects will be. Clearly, this is a complicated question. One change in climate may strongly affect people in one part of the world and a different change may strongly affect people in another part of the world, and those different groups of people may have different levels of adaptability owing to economic or infrastructure differences. It is really hard to say what will happen. In a warmer world, high-humidity super-heat waves may happen in which large populations will find themselves experiencing temperatures well above body temperature for several days in a row. People in those areas, not all of them but a noticeable number, will simply die of the heat. Severe continental storms could become more common, so the chances of a community being wiped out by tornadoes or derechos may become extraordinarily high. Perhaps people will truly consider the costs and benefits of living in a “tornado ally” rather than simply knowing that tornado alley is a thing and otherwise more or less ignoring it. Arid regions may become hyper-arid for the long term, so water management simply becomes impossible. Even if California is inundated every few years with repeated pineapples express, if extreme drought becomes the norm a significant breadbasket may simply be a place we no longer grow food. And so on.

One change that is inevitable is the rise of sea level. The current level of CO2 in the atmosphere has been associated in the past with sea levels significantly higher than they are now. The sea hasn’t risen to that level yet simply because it takes time, though we really don’t know how much time it takes. If we stopped adding fossil Carbon to the atmosphere today, the sea will still rise, significantly, perhaps several meters. We have accomplished this and we can’t un-accomplish it. But we are very likely to not stop using fossil fuels tomorrow, or any time soon, so it is likely that the maximum amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will will eventually achieve will be associated with even higher sea levels. Coastal cities will be inundated. Small Pacific nations will cease to exist. All of that is going to happen, pretty much no matter what. When you imagine all of the different bad things that may happen in the future, sea level rise may or many not be on the top of your list, and it may in fact not be the worst thing that occurs. But at present, sea level rise is probably the biggest single effect that can be easily identified, won’t not happen no matter what, and can be understood the best; how heat waves, drought, flash floods, etc. work, and what their effects will be is hard to grasp. Losing land to the ocean is not hard to grasp. (Though I quickly add most people still don’t get the level of magnitude of sea level rise that we will experience, eventually.)

So, where does the bowl of Jell-O fit in to all of this? A recent study, in PLOS One, examines attitudes about climate change in relation to distance from the sea. The study takes place in New Zealand, but references other studies that look at similar things elsewhere. The bottom line is this: The farther a human lives from the sea, the less likely the human is to accept the reality of climate change science. Putting this another way, the father a bowl of Jell-O is from that which may poke it, the less poked it is, and thus, the less it develops, learns, evolves, gets smart.

Psychologists have examined the many psychological barriers to both climate change belief and concern. One barrier is the belief that climate change is too uncertain, and likely to happen in distant places and times, to people unlike oneself. Related to this perceived psychological distance of climate change, studies have shown that direct experience of the effects of climate change increases climate change concern. The present study examined the relationship between physical proximity to the coastline and climate change belief, as proximity may be related to experiencing or anticipating the effects of climate change such as sea-level rise. We show, in a national probability sample of 5,815 New Zealanders, that people living in closer proximity to the shoreline expressed greater belief that climate change is real and greater support for government regulation of carbon emissions. This proximity effect held when adjusting for height above sea level and regional poverty. The model also included individual differences in respondents’ sex, age, education, political orientation, and wealth. The results indicate that physical place plays a role in the psychological acceptance of climate change, perhaps because the effects of climate change become more concrete and local.

Another study done in 2011 indicated that Americans are more willing to alter their behavior related to climate change depending on an number of factors. In that study, distance to coast was a significant factor predicting willingness to change, but only one of several factors. Interestingly, knowledge of climate change science and distance to coast had similar levels of effect in that case. Another study done in 2013 “showed in [the] U.S. … that risk from climate change is perceived to be significantly lower for respondents located farther away from the coastline. Indeed, among the other geo-physical variables considered in this study (e.g., relative elevation, sea-level rise/inundation risk, temperature trend), distance to the coast had the strongest association with climate change risk perception.” cited here.

I live and work in the Upper Midwest. There are no coasts nearby. I imagine the people around me as bowls of Jell-O that are unlikely to be poked by concern over sea level rise, and thus unlikely to accept climate change as real.

Or are they?

I frequently give talks on climate change, in the Upper Midwest, and I always talk about sea level rise, partly because I think it is very important and partly because I think there is more certainty about sea level rise (aside from the timing, we are not very certain about that) compared to many other effects of climate change. People get this. Even though we live far from the coast, it is possible to show people how important sea level rise is.

Do you like rice? Do you have any idea how much of the global supply of rice is grown in regions that will be inundated by even a couple of meters of sea level rise? Do you ever go to Mexico during the winter? Did you ever notice how close to the sea, vertically, the Maya Riviera is? The region is built on coral, essentially, a vast “inland sea” risen temporarily out of the ocean for your pleasure. Temporarily. Are you, or is anyone important to you, in the agricultural business? (Many are around here.) Did you notice that New Orleans is the most important sea port for bringing fertilizer into the region, and bringing produce out? NOLA will not survive even a very modest, not too far in the future, rise in sea level. Were you thinking that a few meters of sea level rise will not happen for centuries, so who cares? Well, first, you don’t know how long it will take any more than anyone else does. Scientists who study these things have been shortening the time scale with almost every study. But forget about that. Are you a patriotic American? Did the founding fathers work out a Constitution that would only apply in their lifetimes, or during the lifetimes of their children? Did god tell Moses that the 10 commandments have an expiration date? Did Jesus die for the sins of people who he knew, AND NOT YOU???? I should mention that a lot of people around here are religious, though frankly, half the talks I give are to groups of godless heathens of which I am a member. But the point still stands. Timing is not everything. Timing is just an excuse.

I don’t think the goal of climate activists should necessarily be to convince everyone to get on board and stop being dumb about global warming. For one thing, that will never happen. Rather, the goal of climate activists should be to make addressing climate change – which primarily means keeping the fossil Carbon in the ground – normal, part of our social and governmental responsibility, and to do so soon. Most people these days are pretty ignorant about the Ozone Layer, yet somehow we are mostly taking care of the ozone layer, not because we got everyone on board, but because we made taking care of the ozone layer national and international law and set up systems to do that. Climate change is a much bigger challenge, or really, a large number of individual challenges many of which are very big. But we have to meet those challenges with methods and approaches that work and changing human psychology – making humans be something other than bowls of Jell-O – is not going to work in time to matter, if at all. But, getting some more people on board by addressing the psychology of belief, as it were, in the science, needs to happen to bring certain communities and factions to a tipping point.

Maybe everyone should move to the coast for a few years. Get their feet wet.

Global Warming Is Warm, Especially Lately

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June 2014 was the hottest June on record, and records go back to 1880, by which time Global Warming may have started already but wasn’t nearly as intense as the last half of the 20th century, according to data NOAA has released and highlighted. The previous month, May, was the hottest May on record.

Global Warming June Graphic
June Global Land and Ocean plot
NOAA notes that this was the 38th consecutive June and the 352nd consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20th century average, which was already elevated due to global warming. Also, the last time June was below average for the century was in 1976. The last below-average temperature for any month was in 1985, and it was a February.

It has been especially warm over southeastern Greenland, so that’s not so nice for the glaciers there. Central and East Africa have also bee extra warm, whcih they don’t need. Also, there are big huge warm blobs here and there across the world’s oceans.

For the ocean, the June global sea surface temperature was 0.64°C (1.15°F) above the 20th century average of 16.4°C (61.5°F), the highest for June on record and the highest departure from average for any month.

Large parts of North America were relatively cold, and dumb people live there, so they will think that the entire Earth is cool even though they are only observing a teeny tiny fraction of it.

NOAA also provided these additional bullet points of interest:

<li>New Zealand observed its warmest June since national records began in 1909. The warmth was notable for both its intensity and coverage, according to NIWA, with above-average temperatures from the northernmost of the North Island to the southernmost of the South Island.</li>

<li>The average monthly temperature for Australia during June 2014 was above average, with variations across the country. Most of the states were warmer than average, with Victoria and Tasmania observing their seventh and tenth warmest June, respectively. However, both Western Australia and the Northern Territory had below-average monthly temperatures, marking the first below-average statewide temperatures for any state since February.</li>

<li>The June temperature for the United Kingdom tied with 2010 as the ninth warmest June since records began in 1910, at 1.2°C (2.2°F) above the 1981–2010 average. In Scotland, the June minimum temperature was record high for the month.</li>

<li>June in Latvia was 0.9°C (1.6°F) cooler than average, marking the second coolest June of the 21st century, behind 2004.</li>

<li>Austria observed a June temperature that was 1.0°C (1.8°F) higher than the 1981–2010 average. The warmth was driven by a heat wave during June 7–13, when many regions broke daily maximum temperature records.</li>

<li>France observed its fifth warmest June in the country's 115-year period of record, at 1.3°C (2.3°F) above the 1981–2010 average. The week-long heat wave that impacted Austria also extended to France from the 7th to the 14th, contributing to the overall warmth for the month.</li>

<li>Spain had a June temperature that was 1.3°C (2.3°F) higher than the 1971–2000 average. However, this June ranks as the fifth coolest (11th warmest) in the past 15 years, according to AEMet, Spain's national meteorological agency.</li>

<li>Parts of Greenland were record warm during June. According to the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI), Kangerlussuaq in southwestern Greenland recorded its record highest maximum June temperature of 23.2°C (73.8°F) on June 15, surpassing the previous record of 23.1°C (73.6°F) set in 1988 and tied in 2002. Records at this station date back to 1958.</li>

<li>It was also warmer-than-average in Iceland. Stykkishòlmur in western Iceland recorded its warmest June since local records began in 1845, while the capital of Reykjavìk had its fourth warmest June since records began there in 1871. Every station, as reported by the Icelandic Met Office, had a June temperature among their seven highest for their respective periods of records (the periods of record vary by station).</li>

Having experienced a significant anomaly here at home, with respect to participation, it was interesting to see this graphic:

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Notice the dry over California and the wet over Minnesota.

In India, the monsoon was late and has been weak:

The onset of the Southwest Asian Monsoon officially occurs when the monsoon crosses Kerala in southern India, according to the India Meteorological Department (IMD). The monsoon typically reaches Kerala around June 1. This year the onset was nearly a week late, arriving on June 6. Through the month of June, the cumulative rainfall was just 57 percent of average for the country as a whole. Every region experienced rainfall deficits during this period, ranging from 39 percent of average in Central India to 74 percent of average in East and Northeast India. The monsoon season lasts from early June through late September.

That’s gonna leave a mark.

The top of the Earth burns, makes Global Warming Worse

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AGW -> AA -> QR -> WW -> WF -> DS -> A- -> AGW

The great cycle of climate change. Anthropogenic Global Warming has resulted in a relatively increased warming of the poles, which changes the dynamic of jet streams forming thus causing quasi-ressonant (stuck in place) Rossby Waves (curvy slow moving jet streams) which then fuels Weather Whiplash (or Weather Weirding if you prefer) which at the moment is causing unprecedented wild fires especially in Western Canada and Siberia, which causes a darkening of glacial surfaces in Greenland (Dark Snow) which decreases albedo which then contributes to both Arctic Amplification and Global Warming.

It’s happening now at your local planet.

Here’s some information about the fires, some older, some newer:

<li><a href="http://www.cnn.com/2014/07/18/us/washington-wildfires/index.html?hpt=hp_t2"><strong>Wildfires drive residents from homes in Washington state and Canada</strong></a></li>


<li><a href="http://robertscribbler.wordpress.com/2014/07/17/polar-jet-stream-wrecked-by-climate-change-fuels-unprecedented-wildfires-over-canada-and-siberia/"><strong>Polar Jet Stream Wrecked By Climate Change Fuels Unprecedented Wildfires Over Canada and Siberia</strong></a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/07/17/forest-fires-in-canada-confirm-predictions-of-unprecedented-wildfire-activity/"><strong>Forest fires in Canada confirm predictions of ‘unprecedented’ wildfire activity</strong></a></li>

<li><a href="http://www.rferl.org/content/siberian-forest-wildfires-triple-within-three-days/25398654.html"><strong>Siberian Forest Wildfires Triple Within Three Days</strong></a></li>

Photo from here.

Jeffrey Sachs: Low Carbon By 2050 Report on Morning Joe

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Jeffrey Sachs was interviewed today on MorningJoe about the just released report to the UN Secretary-General on climate change and energy. The report addresses the goal of reaching a low-Carbon economy by mid century in the countries that release the most fossil carbon today.

One interesting thing about this report is that Joe Scarborough, Morning Joe himself, seems to be pretty much on board with the reality of climate change science. Since Joe occupies a centrist to right position in Mainstream Media, this is important. Good for you Joe.

Here is the show:

Is the California Drought Caused By Climate Change, Or By Californians?

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Possibly both.

Climate change certainly has a huge effect. Increased evaporation, decreased snowpack, the stalling of air masses that cause more drying and less wetting, which in turn is caused by changes in the jet stream, which in turn is caused by “Arctic Amplification,” an effect of global warming, are major causes of a three year drought coming hard on the heels of a decade of near-drought dry.

But also, Californian approaches to water management have been an issue. I recently learned that there are communities in California that don’t even have water meters on people’s houses. What the heck? A while back the state asked people to use less water. They didn’t. Just now, the California Water Board implemented a fine for overuse of water, and local communities are asking people to turn in their neighbors who do so.

Here is an interview on All In with Chis Hays of Peter Gleick of The Pacific Institute, on the drought and the response to it.

Two Emmy Nominations for Major Climate Science Documentary

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Showtime’s Years of Living Dangerously is one of the most important and well done documentaries addressing climate change. The 2014 Emmy Nominations were just announced and this series has received two nominations: Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series and Outstanding Writing for Nonfiction Programming (Adam Bolt).

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While often portrayed as an unsettled debate, the reality is that 97% of scientists agree global warming is happening and humans are to blame.

Top scientific organizations like the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Medical Association and the World Health Organization, along with hundreds of others around the world, all endorse this position.

To put this overwhelming consensus into perspective, this means scientists are statistically as sure or even more sure we’re changing our climate than they are of the age of the universe, that cigarettes kill and that vitamins are healthy.

Congratulations especially to my friend Joe Romm of Climate Progress who made a big contribution to the project!

You can watch the first episode of the documentary on line here.

Minnesota's Amazing June Weather

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We are breaking all sorts of records here in Minnesota this June, and not the records for drought (or, for once, cold). It has been raining and storming a lot, and not just in one place as happens now and then. The rains have been widespread and intensive. The flood levels of most rivers are not breaking records because those are set in the earlier Spring snow-melt driven flooding, but this time of year all the creeks, kills, and rivers should be receding not rising.

The situation is so interesting and important that our local public TV political weekly put the weather on top of the show and interviewed meteorologist Paul Douglas about it. Starting just after 3 minutes. Note especially his very important comment at 7:13!!!:

But don’t worry, we’ll be fine.

The Amazing Decelerating Acceleration of Velocity Curve Of Global Cooling! #FauxPause

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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?

climategroupgraph

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?

Are we warm yet? (UPDATED)

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According to the NOAA GISS global instrumental record for temperatures (1880 to the present), since 2000 (inclusively) we have had

  • 2002 and 2003 ties for first and second warmest January. Januray 2014 was the fourth warmest, 2005 the fifth warmest.
  • February 2010 was the third warmest Feburary, and 2002 had the fourth warmest February.
  • March 2002 was the warmest, 2012 was the second warmest. March 2014 was the fourth warmest.
  • April 2010 was the warmest on record, April 2014 the second warmest.
  • We are still waiting for the data on May 2014, but during this time the warmest May on record occurred in 2010, and the second warmest in 2012.
  • The warmest and second warmest months during this period were recorded for June, July, August, September, October, November, and December.
  • With an impending El Niño, of as yet undetermined strength (and, actually, not 100% certain to occur) we might expect some of the remaining months for 2014 to be in the top two or three rankings for warmest over the entire instrumental record.
  • ADDED: May 2014 was the hottest May on record.

May temperatures should be available over the next week or so.

So far, for this period, 2010 has been the warmest year on record. 2005 has been the second warmest year on record. 2007 has been the third warmest year on record. 2002 has been the fourt warmest year on record. Last year, 2013, was the sixth warmest and 2003 the seventh. Of the 14 most recent full years, nine have been in the top ten.

Climate-Contrarian Research: Rebutted by Peer Review, Soaked Up by MSM

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Given recent attention to the issue of consensus in climate change research, this is a good time to mention a paper that came out recently by John Abraham, John Cook, John Fasullo, Peter Jacobs, Scott Mandia and Dana Nuccitelli called “Review of the consensus and asymmetric quality of research on human-induced climate change.”

I’ll paste the abstract below but first I’ll summarize it in a sentence. The few papers that explicitly deny the basic science of climate change are rightfully rejected by the peer review process because they are crap. Bit they do find more attention by main stream media, presumably because main stream media is inadequate to the task of addressing actual important issues.

Here’s the abstract for the paper published in Cosmopolis.

Climate science is a massively interdisciplinary field with different areas understood to varying degrees. One area that has been well understood for decades is the fundamental fact that humans are causing global warming. The greenhouse effect has been understood since the 1800s, and subsequent research has refined our understanding of the impact of increased concentrations of greenhouse gases on the planet. Also increasing has been the consensus among the world’s climate scientists that the basic principles of anthropogenic global warming (AGW) are correct. This has been demonstrated by multiple reinforcing studies that the consensus of scientists on the basic tenets of AGW is nearly unanimous. Nevertheless, the general public in many countries remains unconvinced not only of the existence of AGW, but also of the degree of scientific consensus. Additionally, there remain a few high-profile scientists who have continued to put forth alternative explanations for observed climatic changes across the globe. Here, we summarize research on the degree of agreement amongst scientists and we assess the quality of scholarship from the contrarian scientists. Many major contrarian arguments against mainstream thinking have been strongly challenged and criticized in the scientific literature; significant flaws have often been found. The same fate has not befallen the prominent consensus studies.

Dana Nuccitelli, one of the authors, wrote a summary of the paper here, in which he notes:

Despite the 97% expert consensus on human-caused global warming supported by peer-reviewed research, expert opinion, the IPCC reports, and National Academies of Science and other scientific organizations from around the world, a large segment of the population remains unconvinced on the issue. A new commentary by Edward Maibach, Teresa Myers and Anthony Leiserowitz in Earth’s Future notes that most people don’t know there is a scientific consensus about human-caused climate change, which undermines public engagement on the subject.

This ‘consensus gap’ is in large part due the media giving disproportionate coverage to climate contrarians. In our paper, we sought to evaluate whether that disproportionate media coverage was justified by examining how well contrarian hypotheses have withstood scientific scrutiny and the test of time. The short answer is, not well.

The consensus gap in public opinion is mirrored by, and relates to, an expertise gap among the researchers. Abraham et al note in their paper:

Insofar as these contrarian themes are representative of other contrarian viewpoints, our findings reinforce those of Anderegg et al., (2010) who found lower expertise and prominence among the contrarian scientists and those of Doran and Zimmermann (2009) who found that as scientific expertise increased, so did certainty in the main premises of AGW. Here we find case study evidence that the science representing major contrarian views is less robust than the counterparts that reflect the AGW consensus.

I remember Jerry Rubin once saying “The masses are asses.” Wikipedia does not, and claims it was Karl Rove. Other sources cite Alexander Hamilton, but apparently it is an old Yiddish proverb. In any event, it is true, of course, but it is not really their fault. The fact that the vast majority of the public arrive at scientific conclusions as a matter of enculturation and not actually replicating the science is exactly what we expect; people are busy and simply want to be informed from reliable sources. The problem is, the sources … are not so reliable. But within climate science it is interesting to see that the non-consensus positions are expressed in the form of low quality research which tends to not pass mustard in the peer review process because it just isn’t good enough. In other words, globally, the more you actually know the more likely you are to accept the realities of climate science; within the sciences, the smarter you are the more likely you are to understand the realities of global warming.

This explains a lot of what we see in Twitter and other social media. Just sayin.

I refer you again to Dana’s post for a more detailed discussion of the paper.