I know I haven't been keeping up with my monthly temperature summaries.
I may go back to selected updates as we get further into the year, but the June statistics are in for the satellite data, and are worth bearing in mind whilst reading this article.
Both UAH and RSS show June was hot globally.
UAH has 2019 as the second hottest June in its 40 year record, only beaten by the super El Niño year of 1998.
Whilst RSS has June as the hottest in its 40 year record, beating the previous record June by over 0.2°C.
The RSS anomaly map shows most of the globe was above average with the warmest anomalies in Western Europe and Northern Russia, but with the occasional colder spot, noticeably a cold blob just west of the UK and Ireland, and the USA is a mixture of above and below average spots.
The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs. Since nothing is ever quite proved or disproved, the most unmistakable fact can be impudently denied. Moreover, although endlessly brooding on power, victory, defeat, revenge, the nationalist is often somewhat uninterested in what happens in the real world. What he wants is to feel that his own unit is getting the better of some other unit, and he can more easily do this by scoring off an adversary than by examining the facts to see whether they support him.
George Orwell - Notes on Nationalism
My Thoughts On Lying
Although the main purpose of this blog was to draw attention to things that are untrue,
I find it oddly difficult to come straight to the point and call these untruths lies.
This is partly because I'm meek and mild and don't want to be sued,
but there are a couple more objections.
One is that it's difficult to determining when someone is actually lying and when they are just wrong.
It can be a fruitless task trying to separate the genuinely deceitful from the credulous or ignorant.
The other is that whilst the act of lying can be a tool of propagandists, accusing others of lying can be an even more effective propaganda trick.
Claiming your opponents of doing what you continuously do is a great way of confusing the issue,
and at its most successful allows your faithful side to disbelieve any evidence used against you, with the added benefit of allowing your followers to feel superior.
Your enemies are such gullible fools believing their own sides propaganda.
You should be prepared to call out obvious lies, but it's more important to explain why the lie is false rather than just shout LIAR, LIAR.
Look for evidence, ask for sources, don't assume that everything that agrees with your world view is true.
This is another post, possibly the last, in my series looking at the pause that this been claimed happened in the early part of the 21st century.
Last time I looked at a post from Watt's Up With That, by Dr David Whitehouse,
NEW STUDY CONFIRMS: THE WARMING 'PAUSE' IS REAL AND REVEALING
.
(Archived version here, as the original is currently missing graphics.)
I looked at the specific claim of global warming stopping in 1998, made by Bob Carter,
and pointed out that apart from being a very short period,
it required a huge increase in the overall rate of warming.
In this post I'll look at yet another claim of a pause made by Dr Whitehouse in the article.
This pause starts in in 2001 and lasting 13 years.
Meet the New Pause
Dr Whitehouse's pause is introduced when he talks about the Nature report
saying there are multiple definitions of the pause:
What the authors miss, with their three definitions of the pause, is a simple fact we have often pointed out.
Look at HadCRUT4 from 2001 (after the 1999-2000 El Nino/La Nina event) until 2014 (before the start of the recent El Nino event)
and you will see the temperature is flat.
Apart from the recent El Nino there has been no global increase since 2001,
even though there have been El Ninos and La Ninas in that period.
Now that's what I call a pause.
So why does Whitehouse start his pause in 2001, when Carter was convinced warming had stopped in 1998?
The answer is that Whitehouse wants to insist that all the warming over the last couple of years was the result of a strong El Niño,
and should not be included in any warming trend as it is not caused by humans.
As he says,
The pause ended not because of gradual global warming but because of a natural weather event whose temporary
increased rate of global warming was far too large to be anthropogenic.
There's some truth in that; it would be completely wrong to look at the past 7 years and claim it shows accelerated warming when you are ending on a couple of unusually hot years.
If you did, you could claim that the world has been warming at a rate of over 5 °C / century since 2011, 3 times the rate since 1970.
Of course, no-one would claim a 7 year trend as having any meaning.
Trend for HadCRUT 4, since 2010.
Whitehouse doesn't want to allow a Strong El Niño to be counted as part of a trend, but it would then be a touch hypocritical to point to Carter's Pause - which started on a strong El Niño - as evidence of no warming.
By shifting the start of the pause to 2001, Whitehouse is trying to show that the pause doesn't depend on the 1998 El Niño.
His pause doesn't start with an El Niño, and is just an arbitrary period of 13 years that contains both El Niños and La Niñas.
The problem is he's still being very selective in his starting point.
Why not look at the trend from 1999 if all you wanted to do was discount the 1998 El Niño?
Because then he would have a modest amount of warming (0.87° / century).
Or why not calculate the trend including both El Niños?
Then the trend would be 1.33 °C / century.
The period 2001 to 2013 is selected precisely
because it gives a 13 year period of near zero warming.
It is a cherry-pick.
Before and After the Pause
What Whitehouse's pause does illustrate is that whilst 1998 has a big impact on the rate of warming, it isn't the only factor.
To illustrate the problem let's play my usual game of asking what impact these 13 years of no-warming had on the overall rate of warming.
I'll follow Bob Carter's definition of the warming period and look at the trend starting in 1970.
The trend before the 1998 El Niño, from 1970-1997 was 1.56°C / century.
By the start of the Whitehouse Pause the 1970-2000 trend had risen to 1.66.
Whitehouse could argue that this rise was only due to the natural 1998 El Niño and the trend up to 1997 was the true rate of global warming,
but the difference is minor and I'll assume that the figure of 1.66 is the underlying rate of warming before the pause.
So what would you expect to happen to the trend by the end of the 13 year Whitehouse Pause?
Amazingly, the trend up to the end of the Whitehouse Pause is identical to the trend to the start of the pause.
This is purely a coincidence - choosing different start years would have produced different results.
But it does illustrate the point that all these pauses have had no significant effect on the overall trend.
This is not what you would expect if global warming had really stopped, or slowed down.
Annotating the Pause
To explain how it's possible that Whitehouse can show 13 years of zero warming, yet it not have any effect on the underlying trend I'll take a painfully long
look at the HadCRUT temperatures, year-by-year.
The following graph shows annual anomalies since 1970 to 2000, just before the start of the Whitehouse Pause.
The trend line is the trend from 1970-2000, projected up to the current day.
If, at the end of 2000, you felt that this trend was a reasonable model of how warming would continue - that is you were not expecting a pause,
you would expect future years to be close to the trend line, rising slowly, but with roughly as many years below the line as above it.
In all the following graphs this trend line is unchanged, that is it represents the trend as it would have been predicted from 2000.
Years belonging to the Whitehouse Pause are marked in red.
Let's just look at the first year of the pause, 2001.
2001 was hot, remarkably so considering it was not an El Niño year.
It was the second warmest year on record, marginally warmer than 1997 and much warmer than any year before 1997.
It's also warmer than the trend, which starts to explain why it is the first year of the Whitehouse Pause.
Now jump forward to 2007, half way through the Whitehouse Pause.
This is where it gets interesting.
2001 was warm, but 2002 was warmer, 2003 even warmer, and 2005 warmer still.
If it hadn't been for 1998, HadCRUT would be showing 4 record breaking years in a 5 year period.
In fact 2005 is a new record, narrowly beating 1998.
More importantly, each of the first 7 years, is above the trend line.
That's an unusually long run of warm years, and it's no coincidence that this is the first half of the Whitehouse Pause.
Now at this point, if you were an observer at the end of 2007, you might be wondering if something had happened to the climate -
had the rate of warming accelerated, had we moved into a new phase of warming where temperatures were going to be warmer even than the post '98 El Niño suggested?
Or was it just a chance that there had been 7 hot years in a row?
If it was chance and the trend was a good estimate of future warming there would be a good possibility of cooler years appearing later.
And that's exactly what we see over the next 6 years.
During the next 6 years, 4 were below the trend, only 2 above it.
The two coldest years, both La Niña years, were well below the trend, though there was also one record breaking El Niño year in 2010.
I find it difficult see any evidence that HadCRUT temperatures between 2001 and 2013 were not in keeping with the trend up to 2001.
Compared with the projected trend, there were more warmer than cooler years, but not significantly more.
The only reason Whitehouse can claim any sort of pause is that more of the warmer years happened at the start of the period, and more of the colder years happened in the later half.
The last two years have been very warm, and yes this is in part because of the recent El Niño.
But, they are not so far above the trend line as 1998.
If you accept warming has continued unabated since 2000, there is nothing too surprising here -
the absolute warmth of the last two years are a result of the strong El Niño, on top of the underlying trend.
But, if you believe that global warming stopped in 2000, then the El Niño was exceptionally warm,
which raises the question of why it was so extreme.
The above is what the 20th century looked like compared with an unchanged rate of warming.
The following shows what it looked like compared with a trend that stops in 2000, as Whitehouse is implying.
Annual HadCRUT4 anomalies, 1970 - 2016. Trend from 1970 - 2000, with phony pause trend from 2001 in red.
Every year of his pause was warmer than what would be expected if the pause was real.
Of course, this isn't the pause Dr Whitehouse shows.
He shows the actual trend through the 13 years without the context of the previous years, giving the impression that warming simply stopped in 2000.
Here's what the actual pause trend line looks like.
Annual HadCRUT4 anomalies, 1970 - 2016. Trend from 1970 - 2000 in blue, and trend from 2001 - 2013 in red.
As with other pauses, the flat line requires a big rise in temperatures at its start.
Another episode in my ongoing series looking at aspects of the claimed global warming pause,
and what it looks like in 2017.
In this post I start to look at a May 2017 post in Watts Up With That -
NEW STUDY CONFIRMS: THE WARMING 'PAUSE' IS REAL AND REVEALING
.
(WUWT capitalization and quote marks).
The post is by Dr David Whitehouse, Science Editor for the GWPF, and refers to an article in Nature,
Reconciling controversies about the 'global warming hiatus'
.
Dr Whitehouse says this paper confirms the pause was real,
but it doesn't exactly say that.
Rather, it says it depends on how the term is defined.
For example, it starts
Between about 1998 and 2012, a time that coincided with political negotiations for preventing climate change, the surface
of Earth seemed hardly to warm. This phenomenon, often termed the 'global warming hiatus', caused doubt in the public
mind about how well anthropogenic climate change and natural variability are understood. Here we show that apparently
contradictory conclusions stem from different definitions of 'hiatus' and from different datasets.
A combination of changes in forcing, uptake of heat by the oceans,
natural variability and incomplete observational coverage reconciles models and data.
Combined with stronger recent warming trends in newer datasets, we are now more confident than ever that
human influence is dominant in long-term warming.
The Pause Begins
There are a couple of points made by Dr Whitehouse I want to look at.
Here I'll look at what he says about the origin of the pause claim.
In the next article I'll look at Whitehouse's claim about a longer pause.
The Nature report says that the pause was first claimed by outsiders about 2006.
Some years after the record warm global-mean surface air temperatures (GMSTs) in 1998,
claims were put forward by voices outside the scientific community that [global warming] stopped in 1998,
arguing on the basis of the HadCRUT3 dataset that was available then
that GMST had not increased over the period 1998–2005.
Dr Whitehouse objects, saying
The authors say the pause started with claims from outside the scientific community.
Well, yes and no.
It was tentatively suggested in 2006 and 2007 by climate sceptics
many of whom were experienced scientists and quite capable of reading a graph and calculating statistics.
A decade after it was raised,
every time the 'pause' is debated it is a tribute to those who first noticed it and faced harsh criticism.
It was the sceptics who noticed the 'pause,' and in doing so made a valuable contribution to science.
For years it was only analysed and discussed on the blogosphere before journals took notice.
Whitehouse tries to paint those who first pointed to the pause as pioneers, putting forward a tentative
hypothesis that global warming had stopped, who were ignored by climate scientists who couldn't accept challenges to their authority.
This claim is nonsense.
These skeptics were doing what those trying to avoid measures to stop global warming have always done, looking for any vague argument to muddy the waters.
They were not being tentative in their arguments, and were not saying anything new
Scientists were right to ignore any argument that global warming had stopped when such arguments were based on a very brief period following a very strong El Niño.
One of the first claims that global warming had stopped (that is stopped, not paused), was Bob Carter.
This was in a Daily Telegraph article from early 2006 -
There IS a problem with global warming... it stopped in 1998
.
There's nothing tentative in the headline, and the rest of the article is just as assertive.
Consider the simple fact,
drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia,
that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).
Dr Bob Carter
Whitehouse objects to the harsh criticism directed at such claims, but the criticism was completely justified at this point -
it's a meaningless claim.
We are talking about just 8 years, starting with a very warm year caused by a strong El Niño.
You can find many examples of 8 year declining trends, and quickly accelerating trends.
It means little or nothing to the long term rise in temperatures.
Carter is using HadCRUT data, which at the time was at version 3. This shows less warming than the revised version 4.
Here's what Carter's period of no warming, or slight cooling, looks like.
The Eight Years Bob Carter claims there was no global warming.
He starts the claimed pause on a very warm year, yet is still wrong to claim there has been no warming.
The linear trend for the 8 years 1998-2005 was rising at the rate of 0.99 °C / century.
This is almost identical to the trend of the preceding eight years, 1990-1997, of 1.09 °C / century.
And yet, as so often happens, splitting trends into smaller sections gives a very misleading picture.
The 8 years leading up to 1998 and the 8 years following 1998 were both warming at a slow rate,
but joining the two together gives a 16 year trend of 2.39 °C / century.
More than double the rate of warming of either 8 year period looked at in isolation.
Here are the two trends in context, which shows where the problem is.
Bob Carter's 8 year pause, compared with the previous 8 years.
Pause Comparisons
By the third paragraph Carter makes a curious argument:
In response to these facts,
a global warming devotee will chuckle and say "how silly to judge climate change over such a short period".
Yet in the next breath, the same person will assure you that the
28-year-long period of warming which occurred between 1970 and 1998 constitutes a dangerous (and man-made) warming. Tosh.
Dr Bob Carter
It's a false equivalence to compare a 28 year period with an 8 year one.
The warming since 1970 is statistically significant - it's very unlikely to have occurred by chance
The trend over the much shorter pause period has very little significance at all.
But in comparing the two periods he seems to be accepting that his claim that global warming has stopped for the past 8 years is
tosh.
He's implying his 8 years is as meaningful as the alarmist's 28 years, and so both are meaningless -
the pause that so many skeptics have been clinging onto was originally just a parody.
But lets look at the warming since 1970 in more detail.
It's interesting he starts in 1970 as the first 8 years (1970-1977)
really did show a slight negative trend.
By Carter's argument global warming had stopped before it started.
But by 1998
the trend over Carter's 28-year-long warming period was upwards, at a rate of 1.42°C / century.
So if global warming stopped in 1988, how much does adding the 8 years of no warming reduce the warming since 1998?
In fact the warming rate over the 36 years from 1970-2005 increased to 1.74°C / century.
The effect of Carter's eight problem years was to add almost a third of a degree warming per century.
In this case there are two problems with the skeptics claim - the trend over the 8 year period did not stop as claimed, but was rising at a slightly slower rate,
but, more importantly, it ignores the big increase in temperatures required for their cherry-picked period.
This graph illustrates the problems.
Bob Carter's pause in relation to the previous 28 years of warming.
As a final aside, if you think it is fine to take an eight year period as evidence of temperature trends,
and if you think it's OK for such a period to begin or end on an unusually warm year,
you would presumably be interested in what's been happening recently.
Take, for example, the nine years 2008-2016.
According to HadCRUT4, temperatures have been rising at the rate of 4.02°C / century.
Needless to say this is much faster than the long term trend - and is as meaningless as the pause.
In the 11 years since Bob Carter announced global warming had stopped,
temperatures have been rising at 2.63 °C / century - more than a degree per century faster than they were before the pause.
If Carter was still around, he could now be writing articles saying
There IS a problem with the global warming pause... it ended in 2007.
Conclusion
Contrary to Whitehouse's suggestion, there was absolutely no reason in 2006 for scientists to take seriously, claims that global warming had stopped.
These claims were for meaninglessly short periods, they were not based on any statistical foundation, and they required starting at the record breaking El Ni&ntile;o year of 1998.
It should have been obvious to anyone with a degree of skepticism that claims of a pause were unsustainable,
and were probably being raised to distract from the evidence that warming had if anything accelerated in the early part of the 21st century.
Moreover, there wasn't anything especially original in the pause argument.
Skeptics had long argued that global warming had stopped, or never existed.
For example, in 2001 Alan Caruba was stating that there had been no warming since the 50s:
Listen closely.
The earth warmed about one degree Fahrenheit between 1850 and 1950.
Since then, not one single piece of scientific data,
largely collected from meteorological satellites, as well as radiosonde balloons,
has supported the lies that the earth is warning.
A half-century has passed since the last, brief warming and the only thing the current data points to is a slight cooling.
Indeed, back in the 1970's, the Greens were writing books predicting a new Ice Age.
In 2000 Dr Fred Singer was saying the
balance of the evidence showed no warming since about 1940, and there was
overwhelming evidence that there was no warming trend since 1980.
(He made the claim again in Watts Up With That recently.)
The only reason the idea that there had been some sort of hiatus in global warming started to be given any credence were some cooler the years after 2006,
which allowed the appearance of a pause to be extended for longer, possibly more significant periods.
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.
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.
Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we've got our brave Captain to thank:
(So the crew would protest) that he's bought us the best-
A perfect and absolute blank!
This was charming, no doubt; but they shortly found out
That the Captain they trusted so well
Had only one notion for crossing the ocean,
And that was to tingle his bell.
This has been dissected at Hot Whopper, and I don't have anything to add,
but I was intrigued by a typically Mittyesque anecdote he throws in for little reason.
Grockling All Over The World
I once saved the owners of the swank rent-a-suite megaship The World from losing a fortune when
her otherwise perfectly sane skipper had conceived the notion of sailing her through the North-West Passage,
and had sold them on the idea.
The World was lying in Fremantle at the time.
My lovely wife and I were spending a few days aboard.
We were grockling all over the ship when, by mistake, we stumbled into the skipper's day cabin,
where he and his brother officers were merrily laying plans to penetrate the North-West Passage.
By VirtualSteve - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8927159
To quote their own website:
The largest private residential ship on the planet,
The World is home to only 165 Residences.
Residents & Guests spend extensive time exploring the most exotic and well-traveled destinations,
and return onboard to a lifestyle that exists nowhere else on earth.
...
With only 165 individual Homes,
The World's Residents enjoy one of the most exclusive lifestyles imaginable.
Not only do Residents own their individual Residences, but collectively, they own the ship, ensuring that the experiences –
both onboard and off – are far beyond current luxury travel standards.
Monckton doesn't give a date for this story, nor does he explain how he came to be aboard this swank rent-a-suite megaship.
The most likely date is February 2012, when The World was in Fremantle and had planned to sail the Northwest Passage,
as this archive from the start of 2012 shows.
Given the exclusivity of the ship it seems reasonable to assume that Monckton was on board as a guest of one of the owners;
possibly Gina Rinehart, who had financed Monckton's controversial lecture tour of Australia the previous year.
Sic Transit Gloria Mundi
Monckton concludes:
The skipper took us up to the bridge and, with that faraway gleam in his eye that bespeaks the adventurer,
told us all about his idea.
I called up the University of Illinois' global and Arctic sea-ice data on the ship's computer
and gave the skipper a short lecture on the very few occasions over the previous century or two when the
North-West Passage had been open.
The Arctic, I said, was unpredictable,
wherefore he should not be too ready to join the True-Believers in subscribing to every barmy but
transiently fashionable dogma of the New Religion.
He saw at once that the thing was impossible and cabled the owners to tell them to think again.
Like most of Monckton's stories this seems highly implausible.
The idea that the captain of the ship would abandon a cruise that had been advertised over a year in advance
on the say-so of a single eccentric English man,
the idea that going through the Northwest Passage was the dream of a temporarily insane captain,
the idea that cancelling a planned excursion would save the owners any money, let alone a fortune.
(Bearing in mind the residents are the owners.)
But the most obvious problem with this story is that far from cancelling the planned journey, The World
successfully sailed through the Northwest passage, as planned 6 months after Monckton's interference.
Setting sail from Nome, Alaska, U.S. on 18 Aug 2012 and reaching Nuuk, Greenland on 12 Sept 2012,
the ship became the largest passenger vessel to transit the Northwest Passage.
The ship, carrying 481 passengers and crew, for 26 days and 4,800 nautical miles at sea,
followed in the path of Captain Roald Amundsen, the first sailor to complete the journey in 1906.
Here's a video of the attempt:
So how could Monckton have saved the owners a fortune persuading the captain to abandon the journey,
when it made the journey in any case?
It's possible everything Monckton said was true, but after the Captain cabled the owners to tell them to think again,
they told him to stick to the plan.
Or more plausibly the Captain was just humoring Monckton when he said the thing was impossible -
having realized this was the only way to get the Monckton to stop bothering him.
What's telling about Monckton is that four years later he's still telling this story, blissfully unaware that his meddling
made no difference to the fate of the World.
Several months after Christopher Monckton of Brenchley last had a post on WUWT
concerning the 18 years of pause, he's returned with a new post - Introducing the global warming speedometer.
This is much shorter then his previous reports, and fails to mention the Great Pause at all, instead concentrating on a new graph, which he describes as
A single devastating graph shows official climate predictions were wild
Actually, it isn't really new - just a straightened up version of the dial graphs he featured in his previous posts.
Those graphs showed the warming rates of various data sets, but now he's dropped all data except the two satellite sets that show the least warming.
I'm not keen on the style of graph; it's rather distracting and presenting the data on a circular dial makes no sense,
except to make it look like a speedometer.
But, in any event, a speedometer is a lousy metaphor for changing temperatures.
A car's speedometer shows the instantaneous speed of a car,
but that isn't a useful concept for temperature records, that change greatly from month to month.
So the speedometer in Monckton's graph is showing a rate of change averaged over a longer period.
But then you have to decide what length of time you are taking for the average.
For Monckton's graph he's chosen to start in 2001.
Odd, as last time he was insisting the Great Pause starting date was calculated, and not plucked arbitrarily from the ether, which he implied was the defining point of the end-point fallacy.
Now he seems to plucking the start date out of the ether.
Monckton's Omissions
Here's my own version of the details of Monckton's speedometer, flattened out to make it easier to read.
It's trying to show the disparity between IPCC projections compared with real observations.
That is the two satellite sets showing temperatures in the lower troposphere - RSS 3.3, ignoring the newer RSS 4.0 and older UAH 5.6,
both of which shows considerably more warming.
He shows the warming rate over a 15 year and 4 month period, and claims
Fifteen years is long enough to verify the predictions from IPCC’s first three Assessment Reports against
real-world temperature change measured by the most sophisticated method available – satellites.
But he's wrong as can easily be seen by looking at the confidence intervals for these 15 years
using this handy tool.
RSS 3.3 shows only 0.36 °C / Century warming, but with a 2σ confidence interval of ± 2.26 °C / Century.
We cannot say with any degree of confidence that the real rate of warming isn't in the IPCC's 2001 predictions, or even their 1990 predictions.
Here's the previous graph showing the rates of warming since 2001 for more data sets with their 2σ confidence intervals marked.
The Missing Heat
The IPCC figures Monckton uses are projections for the period 1990 to 2025,
but Monckton compares this with the 15 years from 2001 to present.
He's implying that this slower rate will continue until 2025, which is dubious given the uncertainty in the trend,
but he's also effectively tracing that lower rate back to 1990, and in so doing effectively hides much of the warming that has already occurred during the first decade of the IPCC's projection.
This graph illustrates the problem.
It shows Monckton's preferred satellite data from 1990, the start of the forecast period.
The green line shows Monckton's trend starting in 2001, the blue line shows the trend from 1990.
The trend of speed since 1990 is 0.98 °C / Century, twice the speed Monckton uses, and very close to the lowest IPCC projection. (If you include May's figures the rate is now 1.19 °C / Century, within the lower bound.)
But the IPCC were not making a claim about the rate of change but the total change over a 35 year period.
Monckton uses projections from the first three IPCC reports (1990, 1995 and 2001).
The 1990 report was based on simpler models and later reports have shown less warming,
so I'll stick with the 2001 projections.
The values Monckton uses come from page 8 of the IPCC 2001 Synthesis Report:
For the periods 1990 to
2025 and 1990 to 2050, the projected increases are 0.4 to 1.1°C and 0.8 to 2.6°C, respectively.
Monckton translates this as:
IPCC (2001), on page 8, predicted that in the 36 years 1990-2025 the world would warm by 0.75 [0.4, 1.1] C°,
equivalent to 2.1 [1.1, 3.1] C°/century.
This predicted interval is 4.5 [2.3, 6.6] times observed warming since January 2001.
Aside from thinking that 1990 - 2025 is a 36 year period, when it's 35, he makes a couple of dubious changes.
He says that the IPCC predicted the world would warm by 0.75 °C by 2025, when they only give a range of values.
He's taken the mid point of the range as the expected amount of warming.
But this assumes the projected range is symmetrical, which is unlikely if you look at the 1990 reports estimates.
Then he converts the projected warming into a rate of warming.
The IPCC only say that 2025 is expected to be 0.4 to 1.1 °C warmer than 1990.
This should be measured using an average of annual temperatures centered on those two dates - I'll use 20 year averages as this is the method specified in later reports.
So the true measure will be to take the average temperature between 2016 - 2035 inclusive,
and see if they are between 0.4 and 1.1 °C above the average temperatures for 1981 - 2000.
We won't know for certain if this projection is correct until 2035, but how far off are they at the moment?
Here is a graph showing the running 20 year averages for Monckton's preferred temperature set,
relative to the 1990 average.
This goes up to 2005, the year centered on the 20 years from 1996 to 2015.
The average in 2005 is 0.207 °C warmer than it was in 1990. That's more than halfway to the lower bound of the IPCC's projection, even though we are less than halfway through the projection period.
Translating this into Monckton's speed, we have a rate of warming since 1990 of 1.38 °C / Century, well within the IPCC's projections.
Using the Hadley Centre's surface data, which is what the IPCC are referring to,
the rate of warming since 1990 is 1.80 °C / Century - exactly in line with the IPCC's 1995 projection, and well within the 2001 projections.
The following graph shows the rolling 20 year averages, both for Monckton's satellite averages, and for HadCRUT4,
along with a representation of the range of projections from the IPCC 2001 report.
None of this guarantees that the IPCC projections will be met.
If temperatures continue to rise in line with Monckton's speedometer, the 2025 figure would be 0.31 °C above the 1990 value.
A bit short of the IPCC's lower bound of 0.4 °C, but much higher than Monckton is implying
And as theories go this was all very fine and pleasant until Veet Voojagig
suddenly claimed to have found this planet,
and to have worked there for a while driving a limousine for a family of cheap green
retractables, whereupon he was taken away,
locked up, wrote a book, and was finally sent into tax exile, which is the usual fate reserved
for those who are determined to make a fool of themselves in public.
Introduction
Among the inspirations for Conventional Signs are some of Martin Gardner's essays
on skepticism, in
particular those found in his book Science: Good. Bad, and Bogus.
The earliest essay in that collection, written in 1951, called The Hermit Scientist
describes a number of individuals who have come up with theories that challenged established
ideas, and for good reason were not accepted by scientists.
The second person to be mentioned in that essay is Dr Immanuel Velikovsky (the first is L Ron
Hubbard).
Gardner sums up Velikovsky's book Worlds in Collision thus:
A few months before Hubbard's revelation, the Macmillan Company published Dr. Immanuel
Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision.
The book throws together a jumbled mass of data to support the preposterous theory that a giant
comet once erupted from the planet Jupiter,
passed close to the earth on two occasions, then settled down as Venus.
The first visit to the earth of this erratic comet was precisely at the moment Moses stretched
out his hand and caused the Red Sea to divide.
The manna which fell from the skies shortly thereafter was a precipitate, fortunately edible, of
suspended elements in the celestial visitor's tail.
Later the comet's return coincided with Joshua's successful attempt to make the sun and moon
stand still.
The miracles of both Moses and Joshua were the result, Velikovksy informs us, of a temporary
cessation of the earth's spin.
Gardner's description is only really the tip of the iceberg
- Worlds in Collision also suggests that flies might have traveled on Venus to
reach Earth, Mars was also knocked out of it's orbit and came into close contact with Earth,
causing yet more biblical catastrophes,
and he hints that if any of this is inconsistent with Newtonian mechanics, then Newton is wrong
and the planets are governed by some mysterious form of electro-magnatism that allows of the
events he describes to just happen.
WiC also makes it clear that this is only the start and there are more revelations
to be published in future books.
These would included ideas such as Saturn exploding and drenching the earth, and ancient
astronauts visiting the early earth.
Although Velikovsky's work is a tissue of absurdities, and has been recognized as such by every
geologist and astronomer in the country, it is astonishing how many who reviewed the book were
caught off guard by the author's persuasive rhetoric.
John J. O'Neill, science editor of the "New York Herald Tribune," described the book as "a
magnificent piece of scholarly historical research."
Horace Kallen, editor of the "Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences," wrote, "The vigor of the
scientific imagination, the boldness of construction and the range of inquiry and information
fill me with admiration."
Ted Thackrey, editor of the "New York Compass," suggested that Velikovsky's discoveries "may
well rank him in contemporary and future history with Galileo, Newton, Kepler, Darwin, Einstein.
. . ."
And the book received enthusiastic endorsement by those two eminent scientists, Clifton Fadiman
and Fulton Oursler.
Gardener was wrong in one important respect - his 1951 essay concludes:
Thus it is that probably no scientist of importance will present the bewildered public with
detailed proofs that the earth did not twice stop whirling in Old Testament times ...
The current flurry of discussion about Velikovsky and Hubbard will soon subside, and their books
will begin to gather dust on library shelves.
Neither Velikovsky nor Hubbard disappeared.
Velikovsky became increasing popular especially in the early 70s, when it was claimed that many
of his predictions were being confirmed by space exploration.
Also, there were detailed debunkings of his work by popular scientists, most noticeably
Carl Sagan.
His chapter in Brocca's Brain is a very detailed debunking of the astronomical
problems in WiC,
though it seems like quite a large sledgehammer to crack a very nutty nut.
But Velikiovsky ideas did die out after the 70s,
and tempting as it might be to draw comparisons between current nonsense, such as Global Warming
Doubters, and Velikovsky, I don't think it would be remotely fair.
But it turns out, thanks to Watts Up With That, I don't need to draw the comparison,
they've done it themselves.
WUWT in Chaos
Chaos - G.F.Watts
There have so far been three articles posted on Watts Up With That within a 10 day
period, mentioning Velikovsky.
Sensational Scientific Speculation
The first was called The Complicity of Journals and Magazines in Pushing Flawed IPCC Climate
Science, archived here.
In this essay, Ball says that science journals are too commercial and publish pseudo-science and
sensational articles in order to boost flagging sales.
But then complains that Macmillan dropped publication of the entirely scientific and
unsensational Worlds in Collision
... they [Macmillan] were the publishers involved with
the Velikovsky travesty, one of the most egregious examples of the conflicts that occur
between publishers and a search for the truth.
He then goes on to say that Carl Sagan an early promoter of human CO2 caused global
warming, felt so threatened by Velikovsky
that he published a book on the subject.
Ball concludes that He (presumably Sagan) is not to be believed on anything.
This post produced a lot of reaction. Those hostile to the views of WUWT couldn't believe their
luck.
Gavin Schmidt tweeted:
Today is obviously something
special: Tim Ball & Anthony Watts come out in support of Velikovsky https://t.co/r62KGYTGEZ
In the comments section of WUWT there was both delight from supporters of Velikovsky and dismay
from the more level headed doubters.
This lead to Ball posting this comment:
Wrong! I am not pushing Velikovsky.
Why don't you read carefully without automatically and almost immediately putting on your
blinders?
I was using Velikovsky to illustrate how mainstream academia reacts when somebody dares to
suggest anything other than what they push.
Step outside their prevailing wisdom and they disclose their tunnel vision and prejudices
quickly and nastily.
Harlow Shapley's despicable behavior in the matter was exposed by the letter he wrote to
Macmillan threatening wto get all academics to withdraw their textbooks.
The letter was obtained and revealed by the Harvard Hasty Pudding Club.
It's curious that he only mentions Harlow Shapely at this point, but Carl Sagan in the article.
Shapely in the 50s organized the boycott of Macmillan that resulted in them dropping the book.
Sagan in the 70s was highly critical of this action.
In this Ball again complains that he was falsely accused of pushing
Velikovsky, but spends most of the post seeming to do just that.
The part where he says he isn't pushing Velikovsky starts:
The reaction to my recent reference to Immanuel Velikovsky was knee-jerk, ill-informed, and a
classic example of scientific elitism.
I suspect that like so many such reactions they are by people who read or know little about the
events and issues involved.
I also suspect because it occurs all the time, that definitive opinions are based on a minor
matter unrelated to the whole story.
As G. K. Chesterton explained,
The thing which the world suffers just now more than from any other evil is not the
assertion of falsehood,
but the endless repetition of half-truths.
I was falsely accused, along with Anthony Watts, of pushing Velikovsky.
Ironically the unsourced quote from Chesterton is itself a half-truth.
Chesterton said it was England that was suffering, not the world.
It was a world in which painters were trying to be novelists, and novelists trying to be
historians, and musicians doing the work of schoolmasters, and sculptors doing the work of
curates.
That is a view which has some truth in it, both as a description of the actual state of
things and as involving an interesting and suggestive philosophy of the arts.
But a good deal of harm may be done by ceaselessly repeating to ourselves even a true and
fascinating fashionable theory,
and a great deal of good by endeavouring to realize the real truth about an older one.
The thing from which England suffers just now more than from any other evil is not the
assertion of falsehoods, but the endless and irrepressible repetition of half-truths.
There is another side to every historic situation, and that often a startling one;
and the other side of the Victorian view of art, now so out of mode, is too little
considered.
The salient and essential characteristic of Watts and men of his school was that they
regarded life as a whole.
They had in their heads, as it were, a synthetic philosophy which put everything into a
certain relation with God and the wheel of things.
Ostensibly the point of this post is to claim that a scientific elite tries to suppress
theories that threaten the
orthodox believe.
I don't agree with this, and his article is confused and contradictory, but the main issue is he
continues to use Velikovsky as an example of the
heretic being suppressed by the elite, and in so doing gives the impression that Velikovsky was
right, or at least plausible.
Anthony Watts added a disclaimer to this article insisting he's never ... never supported
Velikovsky's ideas ... in Worlds in Collision,
but he does ... support discussing them in the context of learning ....
Rightly Labeled Ridiculous
Three days later there was a joint post from Watts and Ball, called A response to being
Mann-handled, archived here, and is described
as a Full Disclosure – by Tim Ball and Anthony Watts.
This tries to set the record straight, insisting that neither Watts nor Ball
agree with Velikovsky.
But it distracts from this by going for a full out attack on Michael E
Mann, permanent bogyman for the WUWT.
Mann's crime in all this was to post a tweet saying that Ball and Watts subscribed to
Velikovsky.
Mann's accusation is completely false and indicates he either failed to read the article or if
he did, failed to understand its purpose.
The objective of the original article and follow up was to show how self-appointed elitists
hinder the advance of science.
A majority who made written comments about the article understood and agreed with the premise.
Even this full disclosure finds it difficult to say straight out that Velikovsky was wrong
Again, for the record, neither of us support Velikovsky's views on
planetary motion
.
Some
of them are rightly labeled as ridiculous.
However, to claim that we do, simply because the articles used him as an example of how some
in
science turn spiteful when confronted with ideas they see as threatening,
is wrong, and the elitist premise is well illustrated by the ugly behavior of Dr. Mann and
others.
But in the same article they say:
We pointed out that he worked with Einstein, who knew his claims and encouraged him.
We also pointed out that some who initially attacked his work, like Professor Hess, later
conceded that
many of his predictions were confirmed
.
Which could be read as being a little supportive.
To be fair, it seems obvious that Watts is genuinely
embarrassed that he allowed Ball to use such an example.
He says in the comments section that he was wasn't very familiar with Velikovsky's work when
Ball submitted the article,
and if he had been he would have asked Ball to find a better example.
I'm more curious about what Ball really feels about Velikovsky.
Ball's Opinion of Velikovsky
Ball claims that Velikovsky was merely the example to illustrate the behavior of the scientific
elite, and in no way did this show support for Velikovsky's views.
Leaving aside the premise of the scientific elite, the claim that Ball only regards
Velikovsky as an example of elitist persecution seems dubious to me.
Here are some of my reasons for this doubt:
If you do want to attack the suppression of ideas from a scientific elite,
why use a case like Velikovsky if you think his ideas are ridiculous?
It undermines your case if the work that was not accepted by the scientific elite
is
wrong, and worse if it is as ridiculously wrong as Velikovsky's.
If you are deliberately using Velikovsky to make a point that no matter how wrong
someone
is they should still be given a fair hearing,
why not make that clear from the start?
A simple statement such as I completely disagree with Velikovsky's theories, but I
will defend to my death his right to a serious publisher,
would have avoided any confusion.
Nowhere in either of the first two posts does Ball indicate any thing specifically wrong
with Velikovsky.
The closest he even gets to accepting Velikovsky might have made any mistakes is when he
says Sagan was more wrong on fundamental issues
than Velikovsky.
What he thinks Sagan got more wrong than Velikovsky was CO2 causing global warming.
Throughout the posts, Ball uses phrases that might give the impression he supports
Velikovsky, despite his claims he doesn't. For example,
As a result of Velikovsky's research, done with thoroughness and
precision,
he discovered anomalies that didn't fit the prevailing sequence of events.
Velikovsky's story is fascinating because of his innovative thinking and
accuracy of his predictions.
He quotes Michael Goodspeed:
More than 5 decades after the Velikovsky firestorm, questions first posed by Velikovsky
can no longer be ignored.
At stake here is not just the billions of dollars NASA has wasted chasing chimeras, but
the very integrity of scientific exploration.
Also at stake is the ability of the sciences to attract and inspire new generations.
And nothing is more inspirational than a sense of being on the edge of discovery.
No matter the outcome of this long-standing battle, the time of reckoning is at
hand.
The voice of Velikovsky's ghost WILL be heard.
He objects to Sagan and Gould criticizing Velikovsky's works, yet they are only
confirming what Ball claims to agree with,
that Velikovsky's ideas are ridiculous.
In the comments section Ball never complains about any post supporting Velikovsky, but does
write a long comment in response to others:
Some of the comments show the ignorance of their author.
For example, the claim that V was not a scientist by any measure, contradicts his formal
education and life work.
He worked and communicated extensively with Einstein on matters of science, in
particular electromagnetism.
Einstein had no problems with his credentials or abilities,
and if he is good enough for
Einstein he is good enough for me.
Then there are those who ask what predictions he made that were correct. This only
confirms they never read his work or subsequent discoveries and discussions.
If they did they would find his predictions that flew in the face of the then
scientifically held wisdom.
He compare the history of Velikovsky with those who oppose the theory of CO2 causing global
warming.
For example
The complexity of the corruption by the few scientists who hijacked climate science is
revealed by comparison.
They quickly established their views as the prevailing truth through the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) by deliberately misusing climate science,
but also misusing basic science.
They isolated anyone who challenged either part of their false 'offical' science in the same
way Velikovsky was marginalized.
But Ball is accepting the official science was correct in the case of Velikovsky.
Watt about Scientific Elitism
Ignoring Velikovsky, the argument of the second article was that scientific
elitism is damaging to science.
This is an old claim that I find unconvincing.
It's an argument that is used by people who are wrong, are rejected or ignored by people who are
in the best position to know they are wrong.
It's always so much easier to believe that the reason your arguments were rejected is not
because you were wrong,
but because there's a cabal of scientists, who cannot allow your views to be accepted for fear
it would undermine their authority.
It's the appeal to the romance of the heretic over that of a reactionary orthodoxy, which
in science is rarely correct.
As G.K. Chesterton explained -
The word heresy not only means no longer being wrong; it practically means being
clear-headed and courageous.
The word orthodoxy not only no longer means being right; it practically means being
wrong.
All this can mean one thing, and one thing only.
It means that people care less for whether they are philosophically right.
For obviously a man ought to confess himself crazy before he confesses himself heretical.
And yes, I am taking Chesterton out of context to emulate Ball, and the use of this quote should
in no way be taken to mean I agree with any of Chesterton's views.
As far as the idea of the scientific heretic, Martin Gardner summed up the problem
When Renaissance science first began to free itself from metaphysical biases, it was the rule
rather than the exception for courageous pioneers to find their work greeted with derision by
their colleagues.
Galileo had to battle not only church authorities but fellow scientists who were more
preoccupied with Aristotle than with an experimental determination of how the world did, in
fact, behave.
As Aristotle's scientific authority declined, however, opposition to new ideas in science became
more confined to areas where science clashed with Christian doctrine.
Since the turn of the century, even this area of conflict has become remarkably small, and
widespread opposition by scientists to a legitimate theory,
based on verifiable evidence and cogent reasoning, is an increasing rarity.
For a contemporary scientist, often the quickest way to fame is to overturn a widely held
theory.
Einstein's work on relativity is an excellent illustration of how easily a revolutionary
hypothesis can meet with almost immediate serious response,
careful testing, and ultimate acceptance.
Of course there are exceptions ... But, if anything, science today leans backward in the
friendly consideration of bizarre hypotheses.
Moreover, Tim Ball's articles, especially the second, seem contradictory and careless.
It would take far too long to go over every problem, in many ways he's a lot like Velikovsky in
that respect.
But a few issues are:
Ball objects to pejorative and subjective adjectives, such as radical and notorious,
but then uses phrases like indoctrinated by formal education and describes scientific
specialization as the bastions of dogmatism and intellectual tunnel vision.
He objects to Velikovsky being described as a catastrophist, but Velikovsky constantly uses
the word catastrophy throughout his work,
and describes his ideas as theory of cosmic catastrophism.
He says Velikovsky was born in the Soviet Union. In fact he was born in 1895, 20 years
before there was a Soviet Union.
He claims the church promoted and protected the Ptolemaic system for 2000 years,
which is at best a wild exaggeration.
The Ptolemaic system hasn't even existed for 2000 years.
He says that Carl Sagan and Stephen J Gould are both part of the scientific elite.
Yet both were popularizers of science, wrote popular books and Gould was frequently attacked
for his unorthodox ideas.
Moreover, both explicitly disagreed with the actions of Harlow Shapely in trying to get
Macmillan to drop WiC.
Sagan was particularly harsh on this action, calling it a disgraceful attempt by some who
called themselves scientists to suppress his writings.
That didn't take long. I wondered how the skeptics would react to the changes in RSS 4.0,
when they had been so un-skeptical over the changes to UAH 6.0 beta. That same day Anthony Watts publishes a post
called
The 'Karlization' of global temperature continues - this time RSS makes a massive upwards adjustment, in which he basically accuses Carl Mears, chief scientist of RSS,
of fraud in changing adjusting the RSS trend upwards. Some extracts give the flavor:
Forget homogenization, that is so 2010.
If the pause is bothering you and your belief is that there must be more warming, we only need to find it in the data, then what you need is “Karlization”, named after director of the National Climatic Data Center,
(now NCEI) Tom Karl who pulled a fast one this summer trying to adjust the past down, so the present would be warmer.
Now we have a new player in the Karlization process – Carl Mears, who is the chief scientist for RSS (Remote Sensing Systems) in Santa Rosa, CA.
This is a private business that just happens to make a satellite based climate data set that is similar to the
UAH satellite data set produced by Roy Spencer and John Christy.
Readers may recall a video produced by the execrable “Climate Crock of the Week” activist Peter Sinclair that we covered here where the basic premise was
that the satellites are lying.
Clearly, he's miffed.
So what to do? Taking a cue from the other Karl, he publishes a paper and claims that new and improved adjustments have found that missing warming.
I like the irony in this.
Peter Sinclair is vilified for claiming the satellites are lying, yet Anthony Watts is doing exactly that, claiming you cannot believe RSS 4.0.
The only supporting evidence for this claim is a letter from Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr. John Christy (of UAH), who say they spotted a problem with the adjustments.
From what little we have looked at so far, it appears that they did not correct for spurious warming in NOAA-14 MSU relative to NOAA-15 AMSU
...see their Fig. 7c.
They just leave it in.
Fair enough, I cannot really comment on whether this is a reasonable issue.
But note that although it's been used for almost a year without criticism, UAH 6 could have just as many problems. We don't know as the methods have yet to be published.
What Watts' objection to the new RSS data really shows, is just how wrong the claims of impeccability for the satellite data are.
Anthony Watts himself has objected to anyone criticizing satellite data, calling them satellite deniers, presumably with a sense of irony.
The claim made by those who insist that satellite data be used in preference to ground based data is that satellites are unbiased, state-of-the-art and highly expensive.
See here for example.
All of which may be correct, but actually trying to calculate a global temperature from them requires complicated and fallible calculations, and these are built on many assumptions.
The fact that both UAH and RSS have made adjustments, which have resulted in major changes, proves that they cannot always be that accurate.
If you take the Watts' line then UAH 5.6 was completely flawed, but we can trust 6.0 to be accurate - RSS 3.3 was the best data of all, but the person responsible is a fraud.
And as a passing thought, note that the objection above to RSS 4.0 is that it includes a satellite showing spurious warming. In other words, the satellites are lying.
Updates
Carl Mears has now posted more details of the RSS V4.0 adjustments here. This also seeks to address the flaw Roy Spencer claimed to have found:
First, we note that our treatment of NOAA-14, except for the diurnal adjustment, is unchanged from V3.3, so we do not understand how it can be the cause of two thirds the change. ... Clearly, the change in the diurnal cycle is the main cause of any differences between V3.3 and V4.0.
We agree that there is a problem with either NOAA-14 or NOAA-15, or both. We explicitly discuss the problem with the NOAA-14/NOAA-15 overlap in the paper. We do not know if the problem is due to NOAA-14 or NOAA-15. If we assume that all the drift is due to NOAA-14, as Dr. Spencer would like us to do, we can eliminate the use of NOAA-14 after 1999 so that its (potentially erroneous) trend during the overlap period does not affect the overall results. If we do this, the overall trend is decreased by 0.019K/decade.
...
These results are reported in the paper, and the differences between them should be viewed as part of the uncertainty in the final results. For the final dataset, we used case 3 where the errors are shared between NOAA-14 and NOAA-15, which is reasonable because we do not know the source of the problem.
Roy Spencer seems to agree with this in an update to his original blog post:
Chip Knappenberger has pointed out that, while the warming in RSS v4 versus UAH v6 might be as described above, when RSS v4 is compared to RSS v3.3, the increase in warming might be mostly due to their new diurnal cycle adjustment. In other words, the NOAA-14 calibration issue was also in their v3.3, but maybe it was obscured more by diurnal drift adjustment issues.
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