The Pause in 2017 - Part 2: Monckton's Pause

The Great Pause of Monckton

This is the second part of a continuing series, looking at claims about the pause in 2017 (and already far behind schedule). In this episode I'm revisiting Christopher Monckton of Brenchleys Great Pause articles on Watts Up With That. These were a series of monthly articles, lasting almost two years, in which he would inform the public exactly, to the month, when the Great Pause started, how many months it had lasted, and how if only it would continue, the climate scare will become unsustainable.

The first Monckton pause article appeared on the 4th March 2014 in WUWT - No global warming for 17 years, 6 months>. This put the start date for the pause at September 1996. This was a very short piece, just two paragraphs, and says nothing about why he chose that month for the start of the trend, although it's obvious he cherry-picked it to get the result he wanted. In later, much much longer posts, he confirmed he was cherry-picking the start of each pause by calculating the earliest starting month that would still give a non-positive trend. By his final post on the subject in February 2016, the start date had moved forward 9 months to June 1997.

This is how Monckton starts his 2014 post

Seventeen and a half years. Not a flicker of global warming. The RSS satellite record, the first of the five global-temperature datasets to report its February value, shows a zero trend for an impressive 210 months. Miss Brevis, send a postcard to Mr Gore:

Saying there's not been a flicker of global warming, shows how misleading looking at a trend line in isolation can be. The graph fails to show the huge amount of global warming needed to reach the start of Monckton's pause.

The pause starts almost 0.25°C above the previous trend. Curiously, in Monckton's next pause article, No global warming for 17 years 8 months, he calculates how much warming there should have been during the pause, saying there should have been 0.22°C warming since September 1996. Yet if his pause trend is to be believed more than enough warming happened in a single month than his dubious calculations require.

This is what his original pause looks like now.

The trend since September 1996 is now stronger than the trend leading up to it. But both trends are a lot less than the trend over the entire satellite era - this is entirely due to the broken trend line resulting from cherry picking a meaningless split in the overall trend. By contrast, if you split the trends at the start of 1999 you can get a continuous pair of trends.

The later trend is 1.1°C / century, slower than the previous trend of 1.53°C / century, but the difference is not statistically significant, and there's still no firm evidence that a simple trend throughout the entire run is the best fit.

Cherry-picking the Data

All of Monckton's Pause claims are based on choosing RSS 3.3 satellite data. In a Pause update shortly before UAH 6.0 was released in beta format - El Niño or ñot, the Pause lengthens again, Monckton was insisting that RSS 3.3 was the least unreliable data set, and insisted that there was little statistical difference between the RSS and other datasets over the 18-year period of the Great Pause. This is true, but only because the confidence intervals for any trend over the last 18 years are very large, especially for satellite data. But this fact just highlights why it makes no sense to choose the set with the smallest trend and claim it as reality.

Waiting for the Return

Monckton's main goal has always to find the longest possible pause and attaches an odd significance to it one day reaching 20 years. At the end of his final article he puts it in the form of a Freedom Clock, saying

Finally, how long will it be before the Freedom Clock reaches 20 years without any global warming? If it does, the climate scare will become unsustainable.

Presumably as the pause stopped before reaching 19 years the climate scare is still sustainable, which is why there seems to be a lot of hope among true believers of the pause that it will shortly return. In Moncktons final article he says:

The current el Niño, as Bob Tisdale's distinguished series of reports here demonstrates, is at least as big as the Great el Niño of 1998. The RSS temperature record is now beginning to reflect its magnitude. If past events of this kind are a guide, there will be several months' further warming before the downturn in the spike begins.

However, if there is a following la Niña, as there often is, the Pause may return at some time from the end of this year onward. Perhaps Bob could address the likelihood of a la Niña in the next of his series of posts on the ENSO phenomenon.

I doubt there was ever any likelihood of the pause returning by the end of 2016. As things currently stand, even if temperatures were to drop to the levels seen during the La Niña years following the '98 spike, Monckton still won't see his pause return until 2019. But so far there's no sign of satellite data dropping to 1999/2000 levels.

In the mean time, it's possible to cherry-pick in the opposite direction - deliberately look for long stretches of fast warming trends. For example, using RSS 3.3, the earliest starting point where the trend was greater than 1.5°C / century is currently January 1982 - so for the past 35 years and 4 months temperatures have been rising at an accelerated rate (faster than the overall rate of warming) despite 18 years of that being the Great Pause.