Predicting 2016 Temperatures - Part 1

Introduction

Most of the global temperature sets have been published up to April 2015 and they all continue to show the globe is very warm. GISS in particular has had 7 months of record breaking anomalies, with every month since October 2015 being more than a degree above the base line average (1951 - 1980).

Of course, this spike in temperatures is generated by the current El Niño conditions, and temperatures will fall back later in the year.

This leaves a question as to whether 2016 will be another record breaking year, in some or all data sets. Personally I don't care too much for emphasizing annual records, as it's a distraction from the long term trends - a single record warm year does not prove the trend is upwards, and a lack of records over a certain period does not mean warming has stopped. Nevertheless, records are fun and if 2016 is a record it will be remarkable given that it will be the 3rd record year in a row for land based observations. For the satellites the question is whether 2016 will finally break the long standing record set in 1998.

It's something of a risky move predicting a record, given how the doubters will use anything you say in evidence against you - If you predict a record that doesn't happen it will be prove that all your forecasts are wrong, in it does happen it will be evidence that the figures are fraudulent. So I was intrigued by a couple of tweets Gavin Schmidt made over the last couple of months, saying that it was more than 99% certain that 2016 would be a record at least as far as GISS goes.

Aside from the wisdom of making himself such a hostage to fortune, I was also suspicious of the idea that 3 or 4 months in you could be so confident. So I've been looking at the statistics myself. This proved to be so interesting, that I think I might try to do a month by month summary.

Simple Correlation

The first question is how much correlation has there been in the past between the first 4 months of the year and the final Annual temperature.

The correlation is remarkably good, and looks pretty linear. I was surprised at how strong the correlation was, but on reflection there are a couple of reasons why this shouldn't be so surprising. First, by April a third of the year has already been locked-in. More importantly as temperatures have warmed in general it's natural that this will increase both the annual average and the starting average.

Using this line to predict 2016, we get a forecast of 1.08 ° C, with a 95% prediction interval of 0.94 - 1.23. This compares with the current record set all the way back in 2015 of 0.87 ° C. From this I estimate the probability of 2016 setting a record in GISTEMP at 99.8%.

This graph puts the forecast in the context of previous annual temperatures. The vertical line represents the 95% prediction interval.

Is this a reasonable prediction? I'd be extremely cautious about reading to much into this simple analysis. For one thing, extrapolating from a trend is dangerous when you move outside the range from which the trend was calculated. In this case the average for Jan-Apr is far warmer than anything seen before, so it's impossible to know if the trend would continue linearly. The red dot in the next graph shows where our prediction sits on the line.

In addition any probability is only the probability of a record assuming the assumptions of the model are correct. There will always be a lot of factors that such a simple model does not take into account, and given the probability is so high, there's a reasonable chance that any additional factors will reduce that probability. One thing in particular is that this model does not take into account the fact that this is an El Niño year, and that it is almost certain that temperatures will drop during the rest of the year. Though looking at the last big El Niño year, 1998, that ended up very close to the predicted value. I want to look at more complicated forecast models in a later post.

All of the above has been with regard to the GISS temperature set, but we can use the same method to look at other sets.

For NOAA the probability of a record is slightly less, partly because 2015 was somewhat warmer, 0.9 ° C, and partly because the start to 2016 hasn't been quite as warm in NOAA as in GISS. The prediction for NOAA using this method is 1.01 ° C, with a probability of 97.9% of beating the 2015 record.

For HadCRUT4 the probability of a record year is only 91.7%.

For the satellite data the current record goes back to 1998, and the two versions of data sets used which show the smallest amount of warming, RSS 3.3 and UAH beta 6, show the most uncertainty. RSS 3.3 is projected to beat 1998 by 0.13 ° C, with a 95.5% of a record. UAH beta 6 is projected to beat 1998 by 0.08 ° C, with a 87.0% chance of a record.

By contrast UAH v5.6 has a 99.9% chance of being a record, and RSS TTT 4.0 has a 99.7% chance. It's curious that for UAH the newer, but still unpublished, version is the data set with the greatest chance of not being a record, but the older official version has the most chance of any set of beating the record.

Here's what the UAH beta 6 forecast looks like in context.

This table summarizes the probabilities and margins for all data sets. I'm showing the expected value as a margin over the previous record, rather than as an anomaly to avoid confusion between the different bases used for each set.

Set	Probability	Margin
GISTEMP	0.998	0.22
HadCRUT4	0.917	0.12
NOAA	0.979	0.15
RSS 3.3	0.955	0.13
RSS 4.0 (TTT)	0.997	0.25
UAH 5.6	0.999	0.26
UAH Beta 6	0.870	0.08

Changes over time

Here's a graph that shows how the probabilities have changed since the January figures.

and here's a graph showing projected difference between 2016 and the previous record in degrees C.

Conclusion

I think it's very likely that most and probably all data sets will show 2016 as being the warmest year on record. But I would be pretty skeptical about the very high probabilities obtained by this simple method. All of the above statistics should be considered just for fun and I take no responsibility for any losses occurred by anyone taking bets. My main interest in all this is to see how the forecasts, using this simple method, change over the year.

Update

This post was updated on June 1st to include HadCRUT4 figures for April.

Rise of the Zombie Termites

The Story So Far

In a previous post I was talking about Piers Corbyn and his strange obsession with termites. The claim was that termites emit ten times the CO₂ as humans, and I pointed out that the only source he quoted for that extraordinary claim was a list of fun facts on a website for a termite detector company, and he ignored contradictory facts from that very source.

But that left the question as to whether there was any truth in the claim, and if there isn't where did the claim originate.

Zombie Termites

Piers is not the first to have made the claim. In fact the claim has been around for at least 25 years, and has all the hallmarks of a zombie statistic - one that is repeated so often it can never be killed. It's a suspiciously round number - ten times anything has a certain shock value that 9 times or 11 times doesn't. Then there's the lack of clarity, ten times human output from what year, and do we mean all human activity, or just from fossil fuels. And I can find no instance of someone given precise figures and sources both for termite and human emissions - nobody says According to this research termites emit X amount of CO₂. According to this research humans emit Y amount of CO₂. Note that X is 10 times Y..

The question of the time frame for the claim is important as human emissions have increased over the last few decades, as this graph demonstrates.

Data from CDIAC

Emissions have doubled since 1975, so if termites had been emitting 10 times as much back then, they'd only be emitting 5 times as much now.

Looking for a Source

Alan Caruba

The earliest online example of the claim I could find was from 2001, in an article by Alan Caruba, with the equivocal title Global warming: Lies, lies, damnable lies!.

Carbon Dioxide is a natural, abundant chemical that is essential to the growth of all plants and trees. You and every other member of the planet's six billion human population emits CO2 every time they exhale. Termites produce ten times the amount of CO2 than all the fossil fuels burned in a year worldwide. The technology of energy production, transportation, etc., has been calculated to be only 0.04 per cent. The UN Kyoto Climate Control Treaty is intended to control that! Do you think 0.04 per cent has any effect? The notion of calling CO2 a "pollutant" is ludicrous. Worse, it is a criminal fraud.

Global warming: Lies, lies, damnable lies! - Alan Caruba

As is often the case it's thrown in amidst a number of irrelevant claims, and provides no source. He makes an even odder claim that energy production and transportation are 0.04%, without saying what they are 0.04% of.

Edmund Contoski

A slightly later, and much quoted, version comes from Edmund Contoski in 2008 -

Not only is carbon dioxide's total greenhouse effect puny, mankind's contribution to it is minuscule. The overwhelming majority (97%) of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere comes from nature, not from man. Volcanoes, swamps, rice paddies, fallen leaves, and even insects and bacteria produce carbon dioxide, as well as methane. According to the journal Science (Nov. 5, 1982) , termites alone emit ten times more carbon dioxide than all the factories and automobiles in the world. Natural wetlands emit more greenhouse gases than all human activities combined. (If greenhouse warming is such a problem, why are we trying to save all the wetlands?) Geothermal activity in Yellowstone National Park emits ten times the carbon dioxide of a midsized coal-burning power plant, and volcanoes emit hundreds of times more. In fact, our atmosphere's composition is primarily the result of volcanic activity. There are about 100 active volcanoes today, mostly in remote locations, and we're living in a period of relatively low volcanic activity. There have been times when volcanic activity was ten times greater than in modern times. But by far the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions is the equatorial Pacific Ocean. It produces 72% of the earth's emissions of carbon dioxide, and the rest of the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, and the other oceans also contribute.

Global Warming, Global Myth - Edmund Contoski

This is from a very long article which throws claim after claim at the reader. It starts by claiming all the warming of the 20th century was wiped out in 2007 - an utterly ludicrous claim. He also claims that 72% of all emissions come from the Pacific ocean, a claim both wrong and incompatible with termites producing 40% of all emissions. But his claim about termites is weaker than others, he only says termites emit ten times all the factories and automobiles in the world, not all emissions from fossil fuel.

The Science

Contoski does at least provide a source - Science (Nov. 5, 1982). The article in question is Termites: A Potentially Large Source of Atmospheric Methane, Carbon Dioxide, and Molecular Hydrogen by P. R. Zimmerman et al.

This article seems to be the only paper ever cited as evidence that termites produce 10 times as much CO₂ as humans. But there are a couple of problems using it as evidence:

1. It doesn't support the claim.
2. It's probably wrong.

The full article is behind a pay wall, but the abstract states:

Termites may emit large quantities of methane, carbon dioxide, and molecular hydrogen into the atmosphere. Global annual emissions calculated from laboratory measurements could reach 1.5 x 10¹⁴ grams of methane and 5 x 10¹⁶ grams of carbon dioxide. As much as 2 x 10¹⁴ grams of molecular hydrogen may also be produced. Field measurements of methane emissions from two termite nests in Guatemala corroborated the laboratory results. The largest emissions should occur in tropical areas disturbed by human activities.

Termites: A Potentially Large Source of Atmospheric Methane, Carbon Dioxide, and Molecular Hydrogen

The figure of 5 x 10¹⁶ grams of carbon dioxide is 50 Gt of CO₂. This is less than twice current human emissions from fossil fuel, and around 2.5 times as much as human emissions in 1982 when the article was published; nothing like 10 times human emissions.

It's accuracy was called into question as soon as it was published, even by the authors. The Sydney Morning Herald quoted the authors as saying, ... actual gas production may vary from their estimates by a factor of two. and quotes Dr Pearman of CSIRO saying that as far as methane output was concerned

... the first impression was that the production rate on a global scale was about 10 times less than that reported in Science.

Hungry termites have scientists in a sweat - Dec 6, 1982

A couple of years after it's initial publication, Science published this letter from N. M. Collins and T. G. Wood, saying

We do not question their laboratory experiments, but we are critical of their extrapolations of gas emissions (calculated from food consumption) to a global scale. Our appraisal of the available data indicates that gas emissions by termites was overestimated by at least one order of magnitude.

technical comment Science April 6, 1984

Since 1982 there have been other papers giving much lower estimates for termite emissions - agreeing with the claim that Zimmerman et al were out by a factor of 10.

In 1990 there was a paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research called The influence of termites on atmospheric trace gases: CH4, CO2, CHCl3, N2O, CO, H2, and light hydrocarbons (M. A. K. Khalil et al which put the global termite emissions of CO₂ at 4 Gt per year.

Then in December 1996, we have research from M. G. Sanderson which gave termites a global CO₂ emission rate of just 3.5 Gt per year (± 0.7 Gt per year).

A global database describing the geographical distribution of the biomass of termites and their emissions of methane and carbon dioxide has been constructed. Termite biomasses were assigned to various ecosystems using published measurements and a recent high-resolution (10' × 10') database of vegetation categories. The assigned biomasses were then combined with literature measurements of fluxes of methane and carbon dioxide from termites and extrapolated to give global emission estimates for each gas. The global emissions of methane and carbon dioxide are 19.7 ± 1.5 and 3500 ± 700 Mt yr^-1, respectively (1 Mt = 10¹² g) . These emissions contribute approximately 4% and 2%, respectively, to the total global fluxes of these gases.

Biomass of termites and their emissions of methane and carbon dioxide: A global database - M. G. Sanderson

That puts termite emissions at not much more than a tenth of all human emissions. Incidentally, the figure of 2% of global fluxes is misleading as they are comparing termite emissions against net land emissions. Compared with total global emissions their figure is more like 0.5% for termites, compared with around 4% for humans.

Here's a graph comparing the different estimates for annual termite emissions along with that claimed by Corbyn. The dotted line shows 29 Gt, which is the value given for all human emissions in the IPCC's 4th report.

Dixy Lee Ray

So where did this myth originate? I don't know for certain, but the earliest record I could find is in a book called Trashing the Planet by Dixy Lee Ray. Published in 1990 this book, subtitled How Science Can Help Us Deal With Acid Rain, Depletion of the Ozone, and Nuclear Waste (among Other Things) is something of a blueprint for arguments made against environmental concerns, including global warming. The quote in question says:

The largest source of greenhouse gas may well be termites, whose digestive activities are responsible for about 50 billion tons of CO₂ and methane annually. This is 10 times more than the present world production of CO₂ from burning fossil fuel.

Trashing the Planet - Dixy Ray Lee

It's a garbled claim as it mixes CO₂ and methane, but the figure of 50 billion tons (50 Gt) suggests it comes from the Zimmerman paper.

Given that this book was written only 8 years after the Science paper, and given that this passage was mentioned in several book reviews on publication, I think it's quite possible that Dixy Lee Ray is the originator of this zombie statistic.

Incidentally, Trashing the Planet, to give it its full title, was responsible, for more than the myth about termites. See The Volcano Gambit for another misunderstanding starting with an article in Science.

As to why Dixy Lee Ray made the mistake in the first place, I don't know. But I do have a very tentative theory - I wonder if it might have come from a confusion of different units used in measuring carbon. Carbon emissions can be described either as the mass of carbon-dioxide (CO₂), or as the mass of carbon (C). This can be a big source of confusion, as Joe Romm explains. For this and the previous article I've tried to be consistent and convert all measurements into gigatons of CO₂. But many sources measure emissions in mass of carbon - it's a simple process to convert the mass of carbon to the equivalent mass of carbon-dioxide, simply multiply by 3.67. Now, if you look at estimates for human emissions at the start of the 80s, this would have been around 5 Gt of Carbon. If you were not paying sufficient attention you could easily think the figure quoted in the Science paper (50 Gt of CO₂) was ten times that of human emissions (5 Gt of C).

The real issue with the termite myth is not how it started, but how it has been perpetuated by people endlessly repeating other's mistakes. They

• Do not check the original source
• Do not check the figures
• Do not consider if human emissions have changed
• Do not ask if there are any estimates that contradict their claims
• Do not ask how termite emissions could be changing

Whatever else the people repeating this claim are, they are not skeptics.

Piers Corbyn and the War on Termites

For those unfamiliar with Piers Corbyn, he is a weather forecaster from England. He runs a company called WeatherAction, which sells long-range forecasts for various regions of the world. To quote the Weatheraction web site:

The forecasts are based on predictable aspects of solar particle and magnetic activity and sun-earth connections and their modulation by lunar effects. The unique method developed by Piers Corbyn - WeatherAction founder, astrophysicist, theoretical physicist and weather & climate physicist & forecaster - is kown [sic] as The Solar-Lunar-Action-Technique (SLAT) of Long-Range forecasting.

I've been fascinated by Corbyn ever since reading Boris Johnson's 2010 article in the Daily Telegraph The man who repeatedly beats the Met Office at its own game. (Johnson's written at several more articles for the Telegraph about Corbyn since then.) The 2010 article is about Corbyn's success at predicting December 2010 would be very cold, and contains gushing remarks such as

Allow me to introduce readers to Piers Corbyn, meteorologist and brother of my old chum, bearded leftie MP Jeremy. Piers Corbyn works in an undistinguished office in Borough High Street. He has no telescope or supercomputer. Armed only with a laptop, huge quantities of publicly available data and a first-class degree in astrophysics, he gets it right again and again.

and

He seems to get it right about 85 per cent of the time and serious business people - notably in farming - are starting to invest in his forecasts. In the eyes of many punters, he puts the taxpayer-funded Met Office to shame. How on earth does he do it? He studies the Sun.

The bearded leftie brother is now leader of the Labour party, which has put rather more focus on Pier's own believes, for good or bad.

Johnson's claim regarding Corbyn's 85% success rate is presented with no evidence. It's a figure often quoted by his supporters, but I've seen no statistical evidence to back that claim. To me, and many others, it seems Weatheraction's claims of success are more to do with confirmation bias than objective evidence - 5 years on, December 2010 is still held as evidence for his uncanny ability to forecast the weather, but the failure to predict the rest of that winter are quickly forgotten.

Piers the Climate Scientist

I want to look at Weatheraction's results in later articles, but here I'm more interested in his claims about climate science. His Weatheraction site makes his views on global warming and the role of CO₂ plain - he spends more time talking about it on that site than he does about the weather. His views are summed up thus:

WeatherAction is involved in the Global Warming/Climate Change debate where we point out that the world is now cooling not warming and there is no observational evidence in the thousands and millions of years of data that changes in CO2 have any observable effect on weather or climate in the real world.

His work on the subject consists of badly written and intemperate rants, with a fair amount of conspiracy theories thrown in. He claims that CO₂ based climate change is a hoax perpetuated by Big Oil to drive up fuel prices - which is a change from the more usual claims that it is a hoax perpetuated by communists to destroy oil companies. To get some idea of his style here's some brief extracts from a recent post on the Weatheraction site:

Happy(?!) Lenin's Birthday & World Earth Day

The dates are the same because Green campaigners & Eco-socialists (whatever that means) wanted to drag former communist supporters into their scheme of increased taxation and bigger national and world government in name of 'saving the planet'.

In actual fact their de-industrialization and asset-stripping privatisation policies to be applied to the UK, USA and most western countries (but not Germany) and fraudulent manipulation of (weather) data conducted through the United Nations Climate Committee (IPCC) and the European Union diktats such as the EUETS (Emission Trading Scheme) are the OPPOSITE to Lenin's promotion of heavy industry and professed intended application of real objective science for the good of mankind.

...

In the UK it is likley that Whitehall and most Tory MPs know the CO2 story is a pack of lies but promote it as an important ideological component of their green-tax, high energy charges, pro-nuclear, living-standards-lowering, asset-stripping - de-industrialization agenda. The LibDems, Greens (especially) and Labour (with the exception of those that actually know something about science such as Graham Stringer MP) largely believe in the delusion, although they cannot put an argument for it and painfully find themsleves watching the destruction of the steel and other heavy industries and whole communities (of their, not Tory, voters) thanks largely to anti-CO2 and related EU policies of their own making - and go into denial, trying to blame China rather than themselves. They will only give-up the CO2 story when they decide to defend the interests of their UK voters.

Weatheraction - Comments from Piers

It's difficult to believe anyone takes him seriously, but he seems to attract a large range of admirers especially amongst fringe politicians across the political spectrum - Boris Johnson, George Galloway and Roger Helmer MEP for example.

Piers on Termites

Piers Corbyn is frequently introduced as a scientist - often as a real scientist. I suspect people use the word real to indicate that he says what they want to believe. It's difficult to see much science in any of his rants, and he rarely backs up any claim with a source.

One of Pier's obsessions is termites. He mentions them at every opportunity, claiming that they produce ten times as much CO₂ as all human activities, and joking about the need to declare war on them.

Recently he made the claim in a profile in the New Statesman - Piers Corbyn interview: Soviets in Shropshire, termite wars, and Jeremy Corbyn's real EU views

His fury at the scientific consensus that humans are destroying the planet is palpable. If it's true that carbon dioxide is a problem, then the powers-that-be ought to attack the main producers of carbon dioxide. Termites produce ten times more CO2 than mankind, so we should have a war on termites. But we haven't seen any of that, he concludes. There's no war on termites.

In his review of the IPCC we have this marvelous non sequitur.

THEIR CLAIM that alleged CO2 warming due to a small rise in the atmospheric concentration (0.04%) of the trace gas, CO2, is somehow hidden in the deep ocean is scientific nonsense beyond reason, fact or observation. The non-observed warming of the atmosphere cannot realistically get to the deep sea let alone make a sensible difference to the massive oceans (71% of Earth's surface). Termites alone produce 10 times the CO2 of all Man's activity. Will Obama start A WAR ON ANTS?

and in this,

Their dire warning of world warming while it gets colder and their call for more switching to gas from coal - which is a bright Green Light to Russian militarism and gas-blackmail of the Eu; rest on two premises:-

1. That in the present real world increases in the trace gas CO2 (0.04% of air) cause warming and climate change.

2. That even if this were true Man's only 4% contribution of total CO2/ greenhouse gases dominates and nature's 96% conspires that all other CO2 etc from termites (10x that of Man) , volcanoes, rotting plants, cow-fart etc stay constant as a whole, leaving Man's 4% in charge.

and in numerous other places.

The Trouble with Termites

The first problem is he doesn't explain how termites emitting a lot of CO₂ would negate human activity. Nature puts a huge amount of CO₂ into the atmosphere each year, but also takes a huge amount out of the atmosphere each year. As long as the amount in is the same as the amount out, the amount in the atmosphere remains constant. What's changed is that humans are now adding additional carbon into the atmosphere, and as a result less CO₂ is leaving the atmosphere than entering it, so the amount is increasing.

Termite CO₂ emissions are part of the natural CO₂ cycle. As long as termite numbers are not changing the amount of CO₂ they put into the atmosphere will have no effect on the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere. (And if termite numbers are increasing it would probably be due to human activity.)

So what source does Corbyn quote for this claim? In almost all cases he never quotes a source - he simply asserts it's a FACT. The one exception I could find was in this slide show, where on the first page he claims ANTS produce TEN times as much CO2 as ALL man's output!

Aside from him mixing up termites and ants, you can just about see on the bottom right of the page a link to a source. But if you were expecting Corbyn to link to an actual scientific report, you would be disappointed. The link is to a list of Termite and Carbon Dioxide (CO2) Facts on a web site for a company who make termite detectors. The site no longer has that list, but it is archived here, It's basically just a list of fun facts regarding termites.

Sure enough the fact Corbyn is using as a source for his quote is there:

Scientists have calculated that termites alone produce ten times as much carbon dioxide as all the fossil fuels burned in the whole world in a year.

Actually that's not quite what Corbyn claims, he says it's ten times all human output, not just that from fossil fuels. But more problematically, Piers appears to have missed, or chosen to ignore, other facts in the list that contradict the ten times figure (my emphasis):

• It is thought "There are 2,600 different species of termites, and it is estimated that there are at least a million billion individual termites on Earth, that they emit two and four percent of the global carbon dioxide and methane budget , respectively-both mediated directly or indirectly by their microbes.
• The Science magazine reports that termites annually generate more than twice as much carbon dioxide as mankind does burning fossil fuels . One termite species annually emits 600,000 metric tons of formic acid into the atmosphere, an amount equal to the combined contributions of automobiles, refuse combustion and vegetation.

So Piers, who claims to be a scientist makes repeated claims that he only backs up with a single dubious source, and that source contradicts his claims.

As to whether there is any truth behind the termite claim - the short answer is probably not, but I'll leave that for a future post.

Update

Follow up post here.