As one of the first people to start talking about the pause, if not the first, I knew it would be important in this debate. However, I’m not sure I’ve ever tried to explain why it is so important in simple terms. The reason is that it limits the possible value of man-made warming and means that man-made warming is likely to be less than natural variation (and you have to be mental to suggest a 90% confidence that man-made warming is higher).
To simplify the argument I’m using a single metric for natural variation which is a trend. The basic argument would be the same if I used a more complex measure, but so long as we are comparing periods of not too dissimilar length, 1/f noise can be modelled as either a trend or an absolute variation – the easiest way to understand this is to imagine a system that is very slow to respond. As such a stimulus doesn’t cause an immediate change but instead a long climb. And the rate of climb is proportional to the size of the stimulus.
Global Warming
Everyone knows the “global warming” curve as shown below (also showing how it is manipulated so hardly accurate).
Just to ensure everyone understands, by “global warming” I don’t mean a measurement, but instead the whole doomsday end-of-world-non-science temperature predictions. And the pause is what those like me who discovered it =define it to be: the discrepancy between the predicted and actual surface temperature.
Global Cooling, Global warming, pause
As the graphic to the right shows, the period of the graph for which we have measurements of rising CO2 (post 1958) can be neatly split into three distinct phases:
- 1970s global cooling scare and predictions of an impending ice-age age
- 1980, 90s and 2000s obsession with global warming of around 0.2C/decade (as inflated on the graph) with predictions of fireball earth, plagues of frogs etc.
- 2010s, realisation that global temperature warming has “paused” (with 18 years of zero actual warming as shown by satellites – but obviously the human adjusted datasets are still being adjusted to show warming).
Simple estimate of natural variation
If, as the alarmists demand, we accept that the post global cooling warming was caused by mankind, then their hypothesis is that man-made warming causes 0.2C/decade warming.
Therefore, if we find a deviation from this 0.2C/decade such as the pause, then this will be caused by natural variation and so this is our best estimate of the scale of natural variation.
Natural variation ~= 0.2C/decade
One proviso, is that we must use this estimate over similar periods, but as the post cooling scare is less than 30 years and the pause is now longer than 18 years, we are using similar length periods.
Can we prove man-made global warming?
It therefore follows, that if the alarmists predict 0.2C warming per decade then, when we get a pause, it proves that there is sufficient natural variation to have caused all the post global cooling scare warming. Therefore:
100% of the apparent warming can be fully explained by natural variation.
But it gets worse!
Because the alarmists couldn’t help but predict “accelerated warming” they then predicted around 0.3C/decade warming. As such the best estimate of natural variation now increases to 0.3C/decade. Which now means that natural variation is very likely to be the cause of all the post global cooling scare warming of 0.2C/decade.
So, it beggars belief that any intelligent person who predicts more than 0.2C warming also then asserts high confidence that the post global cooling scare was mostly “man-made”. Indeed, because the predictions were so high, these predictions, in light of the pause, show that natural variation was very likely responsible for most of the 20th century warming.
So, paradoxically, the higher the warming prediction, the less anyone can honestly claim the 20th century warming was caused by humans.
What is the worst case scenario?
Therefore, the lower the estimate, the more of the previous warming that could be attributed to humans.
From this we can work out the highest ratio of man-made warming to natural variation.
The lowest estimate of the contribution of natural variation one can make is to assume that natural variation added to the temperature from the global cooling scare and that it reduced the temperature during the pause.
Any acceleration at all forces us to increase our estimate of natural variation – so the worse case is to assume constant warming (or even deceleration).
Therefore, the lowest value of natural variation is the post cooling trend divided by two or 0.1C. This means that the highest ratio of man-made warming to natural is when we estimate man-made warming of 0.1C/decade has an addition from natural variation of 0.1C/decade from the cooling scare onwards and that the pause was man-made warming of 0.1C with a -0.1C contribution from natural variation.
As this is the lowest estimate of natural variation, it is likely the actual variation is higher. So the worst case scenario with the highest ratio of man-made warming to natural variation is 0.1C/decade human causation and 0.1C natural variation So
Man-made warming < natural variation
But it gets even worse for the alarmists
Because the scale of natural variation will be the same throughout the 20th century, but man-made causation will be greatest at the end, it therefore follows that:
man-made temperature rise over the 20th century
is much lower than natural variation.
“If global temperatures were to resume warming despite a reduction in solar activity and/or a negative PDO then the alarmist position might be vindicated. The alarmist camp is predicting such a resumption of warming. The Hadley Centre suggested 2010 but others have more recently suggested 2015. If there is no resumption of warming by 2015 then AGW is dead as a theory. It would not count in favour of AGW if any resumed warming were accompanied by increased solar activity or a positive PDO because that would put the solar driver back in control.”
from here:
http://www.newclimatemodel.com/the-death-blow-to-anthropogenic-global-warming/
Published by Stephen Wilde June 4, 2008
So I have been discussing the current pause since at least 2008.
“the difference between the predicted and actual surface temperature”
bingo
an arrow to the heart of the matter
in others words, a monster that exist only in the minds of people dumb enough not understand this well stated fact
a short, hap hazard, technically inconsistent data base compared to primitive computer models lacking the complete math of the system
an imagined problem constructed from half arsed information
this is the ultimate poverty of fears
Thanks. I can remember where I was in the house when I looked at the graph and said something like “stop thinking about it as a global temperature and just treat it like any normal graph that I worked on professionally”. And back came my answer “but I really can’t draw any conclusion from that graph”.
I was quite shocked that not only was the analysis something I had done a lot of, but that if it had been anything else I’d have known there was no meaningful information in it. I knew it was one of those graphs that mislead you into believing there are trends or other features which inevitably turn out to be just an illusion.
I was certainly not the first to notice the pause as a concept (although I can remember my first post on something called “Random banter” where I did a simple linear regression on five years of data).
But I certainly chose the name “pause” when I attempted to get a section into the wikipedia article on the lack of warming. I realised that “lack of ” or “halt “or “stop” would be taken as suggesting the end, so I picked a word “pause” which tends to infer that it is a temporary stop after which it continues.
A couple of years ago I tried to find exactly when it was, but it seemed they deleted the whole discussion as I couldn’t find any trace of it.
I spent long enough arguing for the section that I started using the name and talked about it on forums.
from 7 July:
Please identify any of your illusionary parcel. such a parcel must be a contradiction to all continuum theory that actually describes this compressible non gas fluid that surrounds this Earth!
WIll, I didn’t think we were making much progress and I didn’t see enough to make me change my mind but I’m not in a position to add much more without doing a lot more work on the subject. I’ll have to leave it there as other things are taking priority just at the moment.
Sorry Mike,
That was for Stephen. From the lapse rate thing!
He leaves when asked hard questions!
I see.
You could well have been the first to use the term ‘pause’. I didn’t initiate the use of that particular term 🙂
Not applicable to this thread.
Since you ignore the deride the entire discipline of meteorology there is no point in trying to explain about parcels orf rising and falling air.
Meteorology has no discipline, only religious faith. That is the problem and the cause of the whole CAGW mess! There are no air parcels only a continuum, and fluid flows in every direction! 🙂
I think a lot of people quite independently noticed the pause.
Who discovered it is much less important than that it is recognised it was first discussed by sceptics long before the alarmists even admitted it existed.
So, we are the “original discoverer” which then gives us the right to define it in terms of what we discovered.
That will prevent alarmists … OK it will greatly hinder is perhaps more accurate … alarmists trying to find a definition for the pause which they think means it does not exist.
Good point Mr. Smith. It truly is “an arrow to the heart of the matter” as you say.
For those of us who don’t believe it is even possible for CO2 to “warm the surface by 33C” due to back-radiation, this comes as no surprise at all. The real surprise to me is that the delusion of CO2 warming the planet rather than the damn sun just won’t die.
Will, while what you say may be technically true, the fact is that climate models are almost exclusively variants of finite-element modeling, which means the area under examination is divided up into a grid, with cells of a certain size.
Using such a structure, energy transfer and the like is indeed modeled by chunks or parcels relevant to the size of the grid cell. We don’t really have the technology to do any better.
Indeed: current computing limitations mean the grid cells in Global Circulation Models are so large that even precipitation is impossible to model to any significant degree. Precipitation generally takes place on a much smaller scale that the minimum grid size it is practical to compute on a global scale today.
I think we can all agree that the models are inadequate, but that doesn’t meant that they are completely information-free. If you can make your discrete model accurate enough, and the cells small enough, then you approach approximating an actual climate with gases “flowing in every direction”. But that’s still a long way off.
That doesn’t negate the utility of models! The sad fact is that we just don’t have the computing power to do the models well enough today.
lonnyeachus says: 13th July 2015 at 4:13 am
“Will, while what you say may be technically true, the fact is that climate models are almost exclusively variants of finite-element modelling.”
Lonny, Indeed, and that is the problem, the models themselves from the first concept cannot possibly work. All are tack ons to try to fix the latest aw-shit!
Discard the whole mess and start with computational fluid dynamics to model what we do know about this atmosphere, like the great variations with latitude necessary for a rotating sphere in a gravitationally controlled compressible fluid atmosphere! Even with no insolation or radiative exitance, much can be done to get results similar to what we have measured about this atmosphere.
“That doesn’t negate the utility of models! The sad fact is that we just don’t have the computing power to do the models well enough today.”
It does exactly negate! The current models and all the creators should be flushed!! Go hire folk that know what they are doing! 🙂
{In case you haven’t seen this:”…A team of European researchers unveiled last week a scientific model showing that the Earth is likely to experience a “mini ice age” from 2030 to 2040 as a result of decreased solar activity.”}
Read more: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/jul/12/mini-ice-age-likely-from-2030-to-2040-european-sci/#ixzz3gK3SXXFH