This is not the most up to date issue, but I found it amusing.
Whilst looking through some of Christopher Monckton's Great Pause posts on WUWT, I noticed this, in one of his last articles on the subject - The Pause hangs on by its fingernails.
Early on in the extremely long ramblings we get this quote:
The not necessarily reliable Tom Karl of NOAA and the relentlessly campaigning Gavin Schmidt of NASA held a joint press conference to celebrate the grants their rent-seeking organizations can milk out of their assertion that 2015 was the warmest year since 1880.
But they carefully omitted the trend-line from their graph, so I have added it back.
It shows the world warming since 1880 at an unexciting two-thirds of a degree per century
Accompanied by this graph showing the Monckton trend-line
Now apart from the question of why you would want to fit a linear trend over data that clearly isn't linear,
and the fact that Monckton seems to have a problem understanding what the word trend means,
and his curious habit of drawing all trend lines with thick lines and meaningless arrowheads,
there's one major problem with his trend line.
It's completely false!
Here's what the trend line should look like.
It's much steeper than Monckton's line.
The odd thing is that Monckton gets the figures correct.
The trend is 0.67°C / century, which means a complete rise of 0.91°C over the 135 years of the data.
The problem seems to have arisen because NOAA are using the antique Fahrenheit scale, as indicated by the description in the top right of their original graph, saying that 2015 was 1.62°F warmer than the 20th century average.
The scale of the graph is in Fahrenheit, but Monckton has added a caption in the top left of his graph saying that the scale is in °C.
He's then drawing his trend line, scaled to Centigrade.
So his trend shows a line with a rise of 0.91°F, not the actual trend of 0.91°C.
Here's the original NOAA graph showing the correctly labelled temperature scale.
Here's Monckton's graph with the correct trend line in blue.
Corrected version of graph by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, showing correct trend line in blue.
This may well be an honest mistake by Monckton - the use of obsolete temperature scales by American institutions can cause confusion like this,
but it's convenient that it results in a graph that appears to show less warming.
And it doesn't explain why Monckton removes the label from the original NOAA / NASA graph and replaces it with his own incorrect label.
I've been meaning to write a piece looking at the old pause and where it is now -
based on a few posts on WUWT in the past month.
But it was in danger of becoming an epic, so I've decided to turn it into an ongoing series.
This will inevitably mean much of it will be out of date by the time I actually complete some of the posts -
but what else is new?
In this first post I'm just going to state my views on the pause.
Being Skeptical
In case it's not clear from any of my posts last year on the subject, I'm a pause skeptic.
By that I genuinely mean I'm skeptical;
I don't deny the possibility of a pause, I would just like to see some clear evidence for its existence.
The problem so far is that all the claims I've seen for the pause are based on short term trends,
carefully selected (aka cherry-picked) to show the longest possible static period, or the slowest possible warming period.
The problem here is that, as temperature records fluctuate from year to year, you will see short term fluctuations in the
trend, purely by chance.
The usual approach to claims such as this, is to look for statistically significant evidence;
that is, you want evidence that is unlikely to have arisen purely by chance.
All the claims of a pause I've seen either ignore the question of whether their evidence is significant,
or abuse the notion of significance by turning it on its head and claiming the lack of statistically significant warming over a period
is confirmation of a pause.
That is they claim absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Even if statistically evidence can be found for a particular pause period, the evidence is corrupted by the cherry-picking.
The probability that a given period will produce a small of negative trend might be low - and hence statistically significant,
but if you know that the given period was selected because it showed little or not warming, then the probability of such a period existing goes up considerably.
An example of this problem is to consider tossing a coin.
The probability that you if you toss a coin 7 times and it comes up heads each time is 1 / 128 (around 0.8%).
That is statistically significant.
But if you toss a coin 100 times, the likelihood of finding a sequence of 7 heads increases considerably, as there are now 94 possible sequences of seven coin tosses,
so the probability of a sequence of at least 7 heads is now over 50%.
The other major problem with talk of any pause is that the term the pause has become an umbrella phrase for many different concepts.
Sometimes it means a period of no warming, or negative warming,
sometimes for a period of slower warming,
sometimes for a period of warming that is less than some forecasts,
and sometimes for a period where the warming wasn't statistically significant.
There are a number of problems with using conflicting definitions for the same phenomenon.
Firstly, it's simply confusing the language.
If you say there has been a pause in warming, anyone would assume this meant warming has stopped - there has been no warming.
But with these multiple definitions it could mean warming was continuing, possibly faster than before the pause.
Secondly, it makes any statistical evidence even more suspect.
All the points made above about the dangers of selection a specific period count double when you can change your definition to reflect the data you have.
Thirdly, it allows a bait and switch argument by those using the pause as an
argument against global warming.
A scientist might right a study accepting a weak definition of a pause,
but that agreement is used as if it was evidence for a much stronger claim.
Through the Looking Glass
The thing that amuses me most about the so-called skeptics talking about the pause is how their own arguments against global warming get inverted.
People who react in affected outrage if they are called deniers will happily talk about pause deniers.
People who insist arguments based on a consensus of scientists ("as science isn't a democracy"), will point to a flurry of scientific papers apparently acknowledging the hiatus,
as proof that the pause is real.
An update that might become a semi-regular series looking at how Greenland's Ice is doing and how Tony Heller's deplorable climate science blog is reporting it.
See previous post for more details.
On the 5th of May Heller had another post on Greenland, Greenland Meltdown Update, which, apart from calling a large number of scientists fake, uses the same graph from the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) he'd previously claimed had been fraudulently changed to fit the theory.
Now he seems to be happy with it and claims it shows record levels of ice gain since September last year.
The actual surface of Greenland has gained a record 700 billion tons of ice this winter, with two days gaining more than 10 billion tons in 24 hours.
These figures would appear to be almost correct from the graph, though as I said before you cannot tell if there is an actual record just by looking at the graph.
The current ice balance is just over the grey area, but that does not show if it is a record.
The problem for Heller is that this does not tell you how much ice is actually melting, the big gains are going to be due to heavy snow falls, especially in October.
What will be interesting to see is if Heller mentions another graph on the DMI page showing the percentage of melting.
Melting has only started in the last couple of days, but is currently very high, around 10% of Greenland shows some melting - or as Heller might put it, blowing away all records
I've no idea if this high level of melt signifies anything - I expect not as it's only a couple of days, but it's probably more relevant than Heller's own personal observations.
He concludes his post:
I fly over Greenland regularly. The ice sheet looks almost exactly the same as it did 20 years ago. The claims of Greenland melting are 97% nonsense, just like everything else the press and government climate scientists say.
Another example of Tony Heller alleging criminal fraud at scientists in his post If The Data Doesn’t Match Theory, Change The Data
from the 25th April.
The headline makes it clear he's them of changing their data to fit a theory. But the whole post makes it obvious he doesn't have the slightest piece of evidence to back up the very serious charges,
so instead he just gets more hysterical - finishing up by comparing scientists to Nazi brown shirts.
The Data
The target of his bile in this post are the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI).
This is an organization he usually regards as accurate and frequently prefers their data to that of American institutes.
Given that he's not completely clear in this article if he thinks the DMI are part of the climate conspiracy, or if they have been forced to collaborate with them.
Here you can follow the daily surface mass balance on the Greenland Ice Sheet. The snow and ice model from one of DMI’s climate models is driven every six hours with snowfall, sunlight and other parameters from a research weather model for Greenland, Hirlam-Newsnow. We can thereby calculate the melting energy, refreezing of melt water and sublimation (snow that evaporates without melting first).
The part that Heller uses a lot is this graph showing the cumulative annual ice balance.
Heller uses this a lot to distract from record or near record low sea ice in the Arctic,
and gives the impression he doesn't fully understand what it's showing.
One possible confusion is that the graph always shows the final balance as being positive -
that is it appears Greenland has gained more ice than it's lost.
This could give the impression that Greenland has been gaining ice, but this balance does not take everything into account.
As DMI website says:
Over the year, it snows more than it melts, but calving of icebergs also adds to the total mass budget of the ice sheet.
Satellite observations over the last decade show that the ice sheet is not in balance.
The calving loss is greater than the gain from surface mass balance, and Greenland is losing mass at about 200 Gt/yr.
However, the main point he's been making is that this year has shown a well above average ice gain.
He was claiming in February that it was blowing away all records.
There's a problem with that claim - it's not possible to tell from the graph if any level is a record.
More importantly, the big ice gains don't say very much about temperature in Greenland as at this time of year the ice gain is almost entirely due to heavy snow falls.
There's never any melting during the winter.
The reason you cannot tell if the current level is a record just by looking at the graph
is because it only shows a few years - the current year and 2012, which had a very low cumulative balance.
The graph also shows the average balance for the 24 year reference period of 1990 - 2013,
and a gray band showing the distribution about the average, but it isn't entirely clear what the grey band exactly represents.
The web page says it shows 2 standard deviations from the average,
but the text under the graph says it shows the difference from year to year,
but with the lowest and highest values of the 24 years left out.
In either case it isn't showing the full range of values.
It's missing of the highest value(s), and it doesn't include any data from before 1990.
The fact that the current value is above the gray area does not prove it's a new record.
The Changes
So, as Heller noticed they changed the graph slightly on the 25th.
DMI explain this on their site:
The model has been updated in 2014 to better account for meltwater refreezing in the snow,
and again in 2015 to account for the lower reflectivity of sunlight in bare ice than in snow.
Finally, it has been updated again in 2017 with a more advanced representation of percolation and refreezing of meltwater.
The subsurface scheme of the regional climate model HIRHAM5 has been extended to include firn densification, grain size growth, snow state-dependent hydraulic conductivity and irreducible water saturation as well as retention of water in excess of the irreducible saturation and superimposed ice formation. Sensitivity experiments have been performed to gauge both small- and large-scale effects of these additions as well as the impact of different parameterization choices.
But none of this matters to Heller - changes never have an explanation, they can only be fraud,
and those making the changes criminals.
But in making these allegations Heller is completely wrong on just about every count.
He claims they have altered the data, when it's the model that has changed.
He's implying they've made the changes to reduce the ice gain - in fact the changes have resulted in more gain.
Despite Heller's framing of this being about altering data, the only thing he actually seems to be complaining about is that they've changed the reference period used for the average figures.
Before they were showing the average of 1990-2013, now they are using the period 1981-2010.
As a result the current year is (as of 25 April) slightly inside the gray area, whereas in the old graph it was slightly outside.
This has nothing whatsoever to do with changing data and actually just demonstrates that Heller was wrong to claim that it was beating all records.
If the gray area has moved over the current year it can only be because their were one or two years prior to 1990 that were higher than the current value and were not being included in the older reference period.
From these minor changes Heller reaches the darkest conclusions -
DMI, he says, changed their graph out of a fear of being shot by climate alarmists, and he finishes
Climate alarmists are Brownshirt thugs.
They don't represent science.
They represent the darkest side of human evil.
Postscript
And then five days later Heller changes his mind again.
On the 30th April he writes an article
Arctic Fraud By Government Scientists Reaches A Tipping Point,
using the same chart he was objecting to on the 26th, now claiming it shows Greenland blowing away all records.
How me manages to reach this conclusion is bewildering.
It might well have been the case in February when the balance was well above average,
but now his graph of the 30th April shows the current balance inside the gray area, so there has to be at least one year with a greater balance, and even if it was a record it could hardly be claimed to be blowing away all other records.
