Global Warming: Stopped 16 years ago

[_bcspace]

The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week.

The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.

This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years.

The new data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, was issued quietly on the internet, without any media fanfare, and, until today, it has not been reported.

This stands in sharp contrast to the release of the previous figures six months ago, which went only to the end of 2010 – a very warm year.

Ending the data then means it is possible to show a slight warming trend since 1997, but 2011 and the first eight months of 2012 were much cooler, and thus this trend is erased.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2217286/Global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago-reveals-Met-Office-report-quietly-released--chart-prove-it.html

[_Tarski]

Scientist Says Evolution Makes Bad Science
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UC Berkeley professor denies link between HIV and AIDS
http://www.dailycal.org/2012/02/22/uc-b ... -and-aids/


Recent Saudi Science: The earth is flat.
http://www.topix.com/forum/religion/isl ... N6S7JNPIOP

Scientists deploy genetics in search for bigfoot
http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/ ... QK20120522

[_Drifting]

16 years ago we 'knew' why black people hadn't been allowed the Priesthood...

[_MeDotOrg]

http://www.carbonbrief.org/profiles/has-global-warming-stopped

The argument that global warming has stopped is typified by this quote from Benny Peiser, Director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, in the Daily Telegraph last December:

"The data on 2010 confirms that since 1998 there has been no overall warming… Climate theory is at a loss to explain this."

The assertion that "global warming has stopped" over the last 10-15 years is frequently stated by climate skeptics.

It has been featured by the UK media - for example, in a Daily Mail article subtitled "The truth is global warming has halted", in the Daily Telegraph, the New Statesman and the Spectator. In Parliament Lord Lawson suggested that "there has been no warming so far this century at all," and it is even alluded to in the masthead graph of the Global Warming Policy Foundation's website:

Temperature rise

Those using argument that 'global warming has stopped' point to where the global average temperature measurements conducted by scientists show temperatures falling over time. Skeptics often point to the year 1998 as a turning point, after which global temperatures have fallen.

However, this argument relies on considering global temperature over very short periods of time - ten or fifteen years. There are good reasons to not draw conclusions from such short time periods.

The world's temperature varies in response to natural cycles, in particular the three-seven year El Nino/ La Nina cycle and the eleven year solar cycle, as well as occasional one-off events like volcanic eruptions. For example, 1998 was hot in part because of a particularly strong El Nino effect.

Over ten or fifteen year timescales natural variation can dominate temperature behaviour, masking the longer-term trend in rising temperatures.

This is evident from the header on the Global Warming Policy Foundation's website, which charts global temperature data over just 10 years:



Over ten years - a brief snapshot of climate history - there's no clear up or down trend. However, by increasing the amount of data they consider, scientists are able to see clear trends and exclude the "noise" of natural variablity.

The past hundred years have seen significant periods of time when temperatures have not risen. But by looking at the bigger picture we get a more informed view of what's going on.



Global surface temperature as measured by the four main datasets since 1880. Source:NASA earth observatory

The Met Office itself has specifically indicated that short-term observations of its data do not indicate that 'warming has stopped':

Over the last ten years, global temperatures have warmed more slowly than the long-term trend. But this does not mean that global warming has slowed down or even stopped. It is entirely consistent with our understanding of natural fluctuations of the climate within a trend of continued long-term warming.

As one scientist put it, considering only 10-15 years of temperature is like

"analysing the temperature observations from 10-17 April to check whether it really gets warmer during spring."

Statistically flawed

Because it relies on looking at temperature behaviour over only short periods of time, the argument that "global warming has stopped" has been labelled statistically flawed.

In 2008, the Associated Press (AP) gave four statistical experts global temperature data which had been 'anonymised' so the analysts wouldn't know what the data represented.

According to AP:

Statisticians who analyzed the data found a distinct decades-long upward trend in the numbers, but could not find a significant drop in the past 10 years in either data set. The ups and downs during the last decade repeat random variability in data as far back as 1880.

One of the experts, a professor of statistics at the University of South Carolina, concluded:

"If you look at the data and sort of cherry-pick a microtrend within a bigger trend, that technique is particularly suspect."

This argument has even been rejected by Dr Pat Michaels, one of the most prominent US climate skeptics. In this video, he urges the audience at a skeptic conference not to use the argument that global warming has stopped, because it is so easy to disprove it undermines their credibility.

Global temperatures

The data shows that temperatures have been rising since the 1880s. There has been roughly 0.75°C warming since the beginning of the 20th Century. The period 2000-2010 was the hottest decade on record.

There has been a slow-down in the rate of warming over the last decade. Whilst the average temperature rose at about 0.16-0.17 degrees per decade since the late 1970s, the temperature rise through the 2000s has been between 0.05-0.13 degrees per decade. This slow-down has been attributed to natural variability.

The lower end of this estimates comes from the Met Office. The other main datasets which use surface temperature measurements (held by NASA and the NCDC) show greater temperature rise over the last ten years.

The difference may be because the Met Office leaves areas of the Arctic ocean out of their calculations, whilst the other two datasets do not. The rate of Arctic sea ice loss indicates that the Arctic climate is changing rapidly, and would support suggestions that the Met Office method may underestimate temperature rise in the Arctic. Climate skeptics usually ignore the data from the other datasets.

Finally, it's worth pointing a wider point: arguing 'global warming has stopped' based on only the temperature record would be ignoring all of the other indicators of warming.

To support their claim that 'global warming has stopped' climate skeptics cherry-pick a small sample of years from a single dataset. This approach has been labelled 'particularly suspect' by independent statistical experts, and rejected by the scientific bodies which produce the temperature datasets.

[_just me]

I thought there was no such thing as global warming.

[_MeDotOrg]

I thought there was no such thing as global warming.

When it was happening, there was not such thing as global warming. That was global climate change. Now you can go ahead and call it global warming, because it has "stopped".

[Guest]

Surface temperatures have long been known to be thoroughly compromised by the UHI. No such empirical evidence exists in either satellite or high altitude radiosonde data, and never has.

Phil Jones himself admitted years ago that global warming essentially ceased in 1995. There was a brief spike in 1998, which was caused by a large El Nino in that year, and then warming went flat until about 2002, at which time a clear cooling trend set in, which is still in play.

There is no empirical scientific evidence of human-caused, anthropogenic global warming of a kind that could possibly ever post the slightest threat to humanity or the earth qua earth, and there never was. That is the bottom lone. The crux.

The "hotspot" does not exist. All of the modest, utterly normative, by historical standards, warming that has occurred in the 20th century is well within known variation over historical and geological time. The oceans are rising at roughly the same rate they've been rising at since the end of the last major glacial age, some glaciers are shrinking, and some are growing. C02 - a trace gas existing in vanishing tiny amounts in the atmosphere - does not have the power ascribed to it by climatists. The physics do not add up, nor do the fantasy scenarios dreamed up the the eco-fascists who stand to gain, as Gadianton Robbers always have, in power and wealth (CO2 has been, over geological time anywhere from 10 to 15 to 20 times greater than present levels, and the earth (the dinosaur and some of the pre-dinosaur era periods) was far greener, lusher, and roiling in organic life than it is now.

The entire edifice of AGW has been built, not on empirical science, but upon computer modeling, computer modeling that compares its output to the output of other computer models, and to anecdotal observation of the weather. It has also, we now know, been based in probably what is, since Lysenko, the most egregious scientific fraud in the name of ideology and lucre ever seen in 20th century history, as the Climategate mails (and other supporting documentary evidence) clearly show. This was, indeed, conspiratorial and furtive in nature, and deeply, deeply venal, made even more awful by the vast waste of resources and human damage it already cased and the catastrophic human damage it may yet well cause.

That all of this has arisen and been pursued by the Left, around the world, is hardly unexpected or shocking. The only thing that remains truly shocking is the Left itself, and its anti-human crusade to end freedom, liberty, prosperity, individual thought, agency, all forms of morality, ethics, and human relations in any way associated with the gospel and the broad truths of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the "pursuit of happiness" among all of God's children, were they able to do so.

There is no empirical evidence in the earth sciences - none - linking human produced CO2 to the warming that has occurred in the 20th century. The hopeful, indeed, desperate need and desire of the Left that dangerous, human-caused global warming is true, is the really fascinating study - and the real danger humanity faces.

[_Droopy]

I thought there was no such thing as global warming.

No one every claimed this. "Global warming" has been going on for hundreds of millions of years, as had global cooling. The only question has ever been what the cause of the present warming was, and, to the degree that humans have had some influence (and they probably have), what that degree actually is.

So far, we don't know, because, empirically speaking, the human contribution is so tiny - swamped and buried behind the background noise of the vastly greater natural emissions - that the human signal has not been discovered (don't be fooled by IPCC claims; no empirical evidence of this "footprint" yet exists. The claims that have been made are conclusions derived from guesstimation and conjecture, not empirical data).

[_Drifting]

Surface temperatures have long been known to be thoroughly compromised by the UHI. No such empirical evidence exists in either satellite or high altitude radiosonde data, and never has.

Phil Jones himself admitted years ago that global warming essentially ceased in 1995. There was a brief spike in 1998, which was caused by a large El Nino in that year, and then warming went flat until about 2002, at which time a clear cooling trend set in, which is still in play.

There is no empirical scientific evidence of human-caused, anthropogenic global warming of a kind that could possibly ever post the slightest threat to humanity or the earth qua earth, and there never was. That is the bottom lone. The crux.

The "hotspot" does not exist. All of the modest, utterly normative, by historical standards, warming that has occurred in the 20th century is well within known variation over historical and geological time. The oceans are rising at roughly the same rate they've been rising at since the end of the last major glacial age, some glaciers are shrinking, and some are growing. C02 - a trace gas existing in vanishing tiny amounts in the atmosphere - does not have the power ascribed to it by climatists. The physics do not add up, nor do the fantasy scenarios dreamed up the the eco-fascists who stand to gain, as Gadianton Robbers always have, in power and wealth (CO2 has been, over geological time anywhere from 10 to 15 to 20 times greater than present levels, and the earth (the dinosaur and some of the pre-dinosaur era periods) was far greener, lusher, and roiling in organic life than it is now.

The entire edifice of AGW has been built, not on empirical science, but upon computer modeling, computer modeling that compares its output to the output of other computer models, and to anecdotal observation of the weather. It has also, we now know, been based in probably what is, since Lysenko, the most egregious scientific fraud in the name of ideology and lucre ever seen in 20th century history, as the Climategate mails (and other supporting documentary evidence) clearly show. This was, indeed, conspiratorial and furtive in nature, and deeply, deeply venal, made even more awful by the vast waste of resources and human damage it already cased and the catastrophic human damage it may yet well cause.

That all of this has arisen and been pursued by the Left, around the world, is hardly unexpected or shocking. The only thing that remains truly shocking is the Left itself, and its anti-human crusade to end freedom, liberty, prosperity, individual thought, agency, all forms of morality, ethics, and human relations in any way associated with the gospel and the broad truths of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the "pursuit of happiness" among all of God's children, were they able to do so.

There is no empirical evidence in the earth sciences - none - linking human produced CO2 to the warming that has occurred in the 20th century. The hopeful, indeed, desperate need and desire of the Left that dangerous, human-caused global warming is true, is the really fascinating study - and the real danger humanity faces.

[_Brackite]

Global warming has STALLED since 1998:
Met Office admits Earth's temperature is rising slower than first thought

Read more at: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... z2HRAHMA7h