Explaining different results for climate sensitivity and the low bias

This was a month late at WUWT but better late than never I suppose.  WUWT's current leading blog writer, Eric Worrall, has written about a paper published last month in Nature Climate Change (archived here). The authors, Mark Richardson, Kevin Cowtan, Ed Hawkins and Martin B. Stolpe, had a look at how temperature records are sampled. They found that slower warming regions are preferentially sampled, which means that observations are biased low.

The authors reported that after adjusting for biases, and using observations, the transient climate response (TCR) is 1.66 °C with a 5% to 95% range of 1.0 to 3.3 °C. This is consistent with that derived from climate models considered in the AR5 IPCC report.

Global surface warming continues without pause contrary to denier claims

There's another new paper out in Nature Climate Change today that discusses the recent trends on global surface temperature. It's by a rash of notable authors: John C. Fyfe, Gerald A. Meehl, Matthew H. England, Michael E. Mann, Benjamin D. Santer, Gregory M. Flato, Ed Hawkins, Nathan P. Gillett, Shang-Ping Xie, Yu Kosaka, Neil C. Swart. Anthony Watts heralded the paper (archived here), which is unusual because he normally scoffs at the findings of most of these authors. He referred to an article in the Examiner newspaper, which claims that this paper contradicted "another study last June" that stated that the "the hiatus was just an artifact that “vanishes when biases in temperature data are corrected.”

Well it doesn't contradict it. Needless to say Anthony and the Examiner was comparing apples and oranges.

The new paper, Fyfe16, discussed the reality of the slowdown. There was no "hiatus" or stopping of global warming, contrary to Anthony Watts' headline. The rise in global surface temperatures slowed down earlier this century compared to the rate of rise from the mid-1970s to the late 1990s. As Jeff Tollefson of Nature wrote about the lead author: "Fyfe uses the term “slowdown” rather than “hiatus” and stresses that it does not in any way undermine global-warming theory."

Jim Steele brings the Arctic to Antarctica

There's a very odd article at WUWT by Jim Steele about Antarctic sea ice (archived here, latest here). He started off the article saying he'd just read a new paper about Arctic sea ice. The paper, by Neil Swart and colleagues was published in Nature at the end of January.

The introduction to the paper sets the scene:

Internal climate variability can mask or enhance human-induced sea-ice loss on timescales ranging from years to decades. It must be properly accounted for when considering observations, understanding projections and evaluating models.

The scientists were looking at trends in Arctic sea ice in recent years. What they were looking at in particular was the extent to which internal climate variability can affect the trend. That is, how much of the ups and downs in Arctic sea ice could come from internal variability compared to the underlying decline from enhanced greenhouse warming.

The main message from the paper, I think, is that Arctic sea ice decline is not necessarily underestimated by climate models. The recent big dips of 2007 and 2012 could be natural variability. It's difficult to tell.

Why did the water in the kettle boil? Because it got hot!

WUWT has been really, really quiet since the fiasco with Tim Ball's latest conspiracy blurb and the response. Usually there are anything from three to eight articles a day. There have only been three articles in the past three days, including the fiasco article.

There's one by Willis Eschenbach about a buoy and temperatures. It's too trivial to archive. There's another by "Bob Tisdale", about an article on Ed Hawkins' blog by Geert Jan van Oldenborgh. "Bob's" article isn't worth reading, either, though if you want to do so it's archived here. The article on Ed Hawkin's blog is worth reading.

Dr. van Oldenborgh's article is explaining how there is more energy being stored on earth than is coming in from the sun. He writes how most of it is being accumulated in the ocean.

"Bob" on the other hand doesn't want his readers to hear about that. He's gone off on some tropospheric tangent. He's also gone down the route that deniers go down, foolishly writing:

As we can see, yes, the oceans to depths of 2000 meters (about 1.25 miles) have warmed according to the NODC data, but note the warming rate. It is only +0.03 deg C/decade. That’s read 3 one-hundredths of a deg C per decade, which is a very tiny warming rate. It would be even tinier if we had data for the oceans from the surface to the ocean floor.

"Bob" doesn't mention the enormous heat capacity of the ocean. Just tosses around words like "miniscule" to describe ocean warming, which demonstrates his ignorance or his deceit. Or a mix of the two. Globally, the oceans are now probably as hot as they've been at least since the beginning of civilisation - and it won't stop as long as we insist on turning up the heat. The oceans absorb more than 90% of the extra energy that's being built up in the system. It won't take much for the surface to get quite a bit warmer. Here's a chart I did a while back on the ocean heat content:

Data Source: NOAA

You might recall that scientists have figured out that the oceans in the southern hemisphere have been warming faster - which doesn't show in the above.

There are some interesting charts in Dr. van Oldenborgh's article. He's plotted anomalies of surface temperatures against CO2, putting in the years. Go over and have a look. And while you're there you might think of something worthwhile to add to the comments, to let them know it's not just deniers reading the article :)

"Bob's" circular thinking

"Bob" is getting his excuses lined up for the next bout of global warming, writing:

Global surface temperatures in 2014 are very likely to be at record high levels in 2014. We are going to see that framed in many ways in months to come. However, we understand the reason for those record high levels to be the unusual warming of the eastern North Pacific. 

That's a bit like claiming that the water in the kettle boiled because it got hotter. It didn't boil because you put it on the stove and lit the gas.

From the WUWT comments

There aren't a lot of comments. I'll just pick out two as typical:

Neillusion is very sure what is not causing this very rapid rise in temperatures;

November 29, 2014 at 5:32 am
It is a change, a change from warming to ‘no change’ in temp that has three possible future trends, to start warming again, to stay even, or to start cooling. Until it is known why it warmed in the first place (and was cooling before that), no-one knows which of the three futures it’s gonna be. The only thing I’m personally sure of is that the ‘why’ has nothing to do with CO2

david smith, for some inexplicable reason, thinks that we here will be annoyed about what he thinks is virtually undetectable warming, that has been detected:

November 29, 2014 at 5:02 am
Thank you Bob. Informative as always.
The essential message from this post is (quite correctly) that we have absolutely nothing to worry about, the ocean ‘warming’ is virtually undetectable, and the models have been useless.
They’ll be annoyed over at Hot Whopper. 

Around the traps: GWPF and global warming, BEST daily temperatures and an El Niño watch

Some blog articles worth reading.

Ed Hawkins (and others) on a GWPF article on climate sensitivity

First Ed Hawkins has written about some article Nic Lewis and Marcel Crok wrote for the GWPF.  Actually it was two articles reports, a short version with 44 pages cover to cover and a long version with 72 pages cover to cover.  Ed makes the point that not before time is the GWPF acknowledging that we are heading to dangerous warming of more than two degrees by the end of the century if we keep burning fossil fuels at the rate we are.  The other points he makes are about why Nic Lewis is probably erring on the low side in his estimate of climate sensitivity.

Greg Laden has also written a good article on the topic of the Lewis and Crok article, which you can read here.  Bob Ward took down Nic Lewis' recent testimony to a UK parliamentary committee (along with that of other deniers).

I can't really add anything to what these people have written, except to say that Judith Curry wrote a foreword to Nic and Marcel's articles, with effusive praise for Nic and Marcel and slightly more muted "appreciation" for the GWPF.  Plus maybe a hint that they asked her to find a publisher, which she couldn't manage to do.

While writing this Foreword, I considered the very few options available for publishing a report such as this paper by Lewis and Crok. I am appreciative of the GWPF for publishing and publicizing this report. Public accountability of governmental and intergovernmental climate science and policy analysis is enhanced by independent assessments of their conclusions and arguments.

Victor Venema on the daily temperature dataset from BEST

The other article I'll point you to is by Victor Venema.  He's saying "Be careful with the new daily temperature dataset from Berkeley".  And continues:

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project now also provides daily temperature data. On the one hand this is an important improvement, that we now have a global dataset with homogenized daily data. On the other hand, there was a reason that climatologists did not publish a global daily dataset yet. Homogenization of daily data is difficult and the data provided by Berkeley is likely better than analyzing raw data, but still insufficient for robust conclusions about changes in extreme weather and weather variability.

It's worth a read - Victor is a specialist in climate temperature data.

RealClimate has an article by Zeke Hausfather and Robert Rohde, two of the BEST team members behind the new data set.

Jeff Masters on El Niño watch

You read it here at HotWhopper first of course :)  Then NOAA announced it.  Jeff Masters has now written about it too. There may be an El Niño on its way later this year.

Jeff points to this earlier article by Michael Ventrice at wunderground.com that is worth reading. (I wrote something about ENSO here some weeks ago, which has more links to the subject,)

Update: Webb Roberts ‏(@webbr) pointed me to another article about this from Kim Cobb's Lab at Georgia Tech, suggesting it could provide a rare opportunity for scientific study and learning more about ENSO, if resources can be put together in time.

Monckton emits a silent scream - and gets the IPCC report wrong (as usual)

Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, otherwise known as the potty peer (among other things) is suffering memory loss.  Well, he probably always was batty so this will not come as a surprise to anyone.

Today Anthony Watts, who doesn't care what nonsense he publishes as long as it is anti-science, put up an article by Christopher Monckton that doesn't make a lot of sense. (Archived here.)

The headline reads:

IPCC silently slashes its global warming predictions in the AR5 final draft

Aside from being very late to the party, that's very odd for a couple of reasons.  First it implies that Christopher Monckton was hoping for a "talking" book from the IPCC.  Maybe so he could listen when he's on the train or maybe because his eyesight is failing.  Could someone tell Christopher that there are software programs around that will read text aloud.  All he needs is a computer with speakers or headphones and he can hear the sounds.

Secondly, Christopher can't have read the report properly if he thinks that global warming predictions have been "slashed".  Here is how Ed Hawkins responded:

@latimeralder @wattsupwiththat (1) This is the first 'prediction' the IPCC has made. (2) Observations within range of previous projections.
— Ed Hawkins (@ed_hawkins) January 2, 2014

As Ed Hawkins explained rather clearly and well - oh, more than three months ago now (Christopher is also behind the times):

The AR5 includes, for the first time, a specific chapter and assessment on ‘near-term’ climate change, which covers the period up to 2050, but with a specific focus on the 2016-2035 period.

The near-term period is interesting because the projections can be verified rather soon and because understanding the changes over this period may be relevant for adaptation decision making. This period is also relatively insensitive to the particular emissions scenario, although aerosol emissions decline quite rapidly in all RCPs which may be slightly unrealistic. However, the near-term is made complicated because of the role of climate variability.

The IPCC has made a probabilistic assessment of how global temperatures are projected to evolve over the next 20 or so years, which is valid for all RCPs, but with a few caveats such as no future large volcanic eruptions.

To find out more about the short term estimates for global temperatures, I recommend Ed Hawkin's blog article.

Now Christopher rabbits on about "climbdowns" and "overestimates" which is nothing but wishful thinking on his part.  He persists in using monthly charts of global temperature so he can hide the signal in among the noise of weather.

It's going to get hotter

Regular readers will have seen the following charts more than once, but for those of you who are new to the subject, or those of you who've barely subsisted on a diet of denial up to now, here they are again:

It's going to get hotter if we don't do something about it.  For some unknown reason, Christopher Monckton believes that future temperatures have either stopped or will proceed at exactly the same rate as they have over some period in the past or something else.  It's never easy to work out just what the potty peer is trying to say.  At one stage he was pushing for David "funny sunny" Archibald's "ice age by 2020" prediction.

Australia has just broken multiple heat records, including 2013 being the hottest year on record.  Large parts of the country have been suffering another near record-breaking heat wave, with known hot regions recording near highs (almost 50 degrees at Moomba).  And it's not even been an El Nino year.  It's a long, long time since there has been a "coldest year on record" - probably for almost any region on Earth that has several decades of temperature records, and certainly for the world as a whole.

Many scientists have found through their research that if we don't cut emissions enough, Earth will rise by four degrees above the temperatures of the early twentieth century.  That will spell disaster for a lot of people.  Roger Bodman and David Karoly, for example, in a paper published in Nature Climate Change back in May last year found

...an increased probability of exceeding a 2 °C global–mean temperature increase by 2100 while reducing the probability of surpassing a 6 °C threshold for non-mitigation scenarios.

More recently, Steven Sherwood et al have just had a paper published in Nature about the behaviour of clouds in a warming world, and Steven discusses the implications:

"When the processes are correct in the climate models the level of climate sensitivity is far higher. Previously, estimates of the sensitivity of global temperature to a doubling of carbon dioxide ranged from 1.5°C to 5°C. This new research takes away the lower end of climate sensitivity estimates, meaning that global average temperatures will increase by 3°C to 5°C with a doubling of carbon dioxide."

The bottom line is that if we don't cut emissions of CO2 enough, the world will continue to heat up and that will pose a lot of big challenges to many people and in many fields of endeavour.  Not least of which will be fishing, agriculture, food production, infrastructure maintenance, liveability in many regions and general quality of life and its affordability.

People like poor old Christopher Monckton, who complains that the IPCC didn't provide a read-aloud version of its reports, and has forgotten that he first read the IPCC report months ago.  He was even an "expert reviewer" at one stage but I guess he's forgotten that little fact - or forgotten that he's already written ad nauseum about it.

Christopher can't read a chart

Christopher Monckton has quite a reputation for telling bald-faced lies.  For example, in only the second paragraph of his article at WUWT, Christopher writes:

Official projections of global warming have plummeted since Dr. James Hansen of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies told the U.S. Congress in June 1988 the world would warm by 1 Cº every 20 years till 2050 (Fig. 1), implying 6 Cº to 2100.

I found nowhere in Dr Hansen's testimony any prediction or projection to 2050.  Nor could I find any example of his saying or even suggesting that the world will warm by one degree every twenty years.  Christopher put up this chart saying it was from Dr Hansen's testimony:

Source: WUWT

Which is similar to the actual chart from Dr Hansen's testimony, except Monckton's chart has the temperature in degree Kelvin for some strange reason and he's shifted around the labels.

Source: Hansen's 1988 testimony

If you look at the charts above, neither of them go to 2050. Nor do either of them, under any scenario, show a rise of one degree in twenty years.  Since 1960, Scenario A, which is the most extreme, shows a rise of almost 1.6 degrees to 2019. From 2000 to 2019, scenario A and B show a rise of around 0.7-0.8 degrees and nearly 0.6 degrees respectively.

Of course that's not to say that over the coming century the global temperatures won't rise more quickly in some decades, or more slowly in other decades.  The latest estimates suggest a rise of four degrees above temperatures in the early 1900s is quite on the cards by 2100 if we don't cut emissions enough.  And it will continue to rise after that as long as we're adding CO2 to the air in greater quantities than it's removed.

Here are the longer term projections for different choices we make about how much CO2 we will throw into the air.

Source: IPCC AR5 WG1 Summary for Policy Makers

Christopher's getting on in years like me, so he may not suffer too much.  So he can go gallivanting about complaining that he isn't allowed in the House of Lords and doesn't believe that Obama is President of the USA and that he's found a cure for AIDS and other crank ideas, like global warming isn't happening.  And Anthony Watts can promote as many crazies as he wants to on his anti-science blog.  It won't change a thing.

From the WUWT comments

GlynnMhor is a dinky di fake sceptic, not bothering to check any of Christopher's "claims".  He is one of the gullible dismissives, assuming he's witnessing the biggest hoax in human history - that all the thousands of scientists in the world who study various parts of Earth systems are "lying" and says:

January 1, 2014 at 6:01 pm
I generally tend to trust those recognized to be experts in their field, when they’re talking about their field, at least.

But once these ‘experts’ have been caught out in lie after lie after lie, their credibility in my mind declines markedly.

Janice Moore says (excerpt - okay, I'm having fun with the shouty god-botherer Janice):

January 1, 2014 at 6:55 pmHear, hear, Christopher Monckton. Well done! Thank you for the truth-in-science tour de force.

Damned out of their own mouths:...

...They must think we’re a bunch of morons.

Yep, Janice. For once you hit the nail on the head!

mib8 says innocently (excerpt):

January 1, 2014 at 10:42 pm
OK, folks, here’s something I don’t get in these graphs or some of the earlier ones. If there is a non-negative “anomaly” I’ve always understood it to mean that global warming is happening. Whether it is 0.001 degree or 0.1 degree or 0.9 degree or 2 degrees, it’s still “warming”....

...So, why do all of the graphs seem to show some global warming over the last 17-18 years, when several postings have said that the data show no global warming over that period? I’m not trying to be annoying; I just don’t understand.

M Courtney is another deluded denier that has no sense of time or just how fast is this change we are causing, and impatiently asks "are we there yet?":

January 2, 2014 at 12:49 am
It is worth noting that the rise in temperatures has never been considered catastrophic or even problematic.

It is the rate of rise in temperatures that was potentially disastrous.

So when does the expected change become so slow that we can adapt easily?
Probably when the effects of warming are slower than the natural wear-and-tear on infrastructure; we will adapt at no extra cost then.

Have we hit that point?

Richard Betts decides enough is enough and says:

January 2, 2014 at 3:28 am
How can something be “quietly cut” when it was only a draft in the first place?
Monckton makes it sound like the IPCC noisily made some predictions, and then secretly changed them afterwards, but this is the exact opposite of what really happened. The Second Order Draft was, as the name suggests, a draft. The IPCC specifically says that the earlier drafts are just preliminary, not the final conclusions, and indeed it asked authors and reviewers not to circulate the drafts specifically because it didn’t want people thinking that the draft conclusions were the final ones.

The drafts will be officially published later as a matter of public record, along with the review comments and author responses, so the evolution of the report will be clear.

This is a totally manufactured criticism.

Boris Gimbarzevsky does a grand imitation of a deluded denier (will someone call Poe?) and says:

January 2, 2014 at 5:21 am
I wouldn’t put it past the IPCC to suddenly announce that it had been wrong all along and that increasing atmospheric CO2 concentrations causes global cooling. All it would take would be just changing the signs of a few variables in their models and quickly readjusting historical global temperature data to show it was warmer in the past.

Given the propensity for the majority of individuals to not remember what happened decades ago and believe what authority figures tell them, likely such a preposterous scheme would be noticed only by those who are suspicious by nature and question authority. With a mere flip of the presumed effects of CO2 on world temperature, suddenly the models would fit far better and would predict a new ice age in a century. The only question is whether people would accept the huge reductions in fossil fuel consumption which would be imperative to prevent the next ice age according to “experts”? While such a reversal of the IPCC’s position might seem far fetched, it is more plausible than Trenbeth’s “missing heat” and it appears that no theory is too implausible for this group of kleptocrats if it furthers the watermelon agenda of a deindustrialized world.