2016 is the hottest year on record - three in a row now

A short while ago the data showed that 2016 temperatures for the troposphere (upper air) were the highest on record. Today, we've got results for the surface, from NASA and NOAA.

You will not be surprised to know that 2016 was yet another hottest year ever recorded in the instrumental record, beating 2015 by 0.12 °C.

That's more than I expected. (2015 beat 2014 by 0.13 °C and that seemed a big jump.)

Dr Gavin Schmidt, Director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), NASA and Deke Arndt, Chief, Climate Monitoring Branch, NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information in Asheville, North Carolina are currently giving a press conference to announce the annual average global surface temperature results and discuss the most important weather and climate events of the year.

2015 is the hottest year on record by a massive 0.13°C

Dr Gavin Schmidt, Director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies (GISS), NASA and Dr Thomas Karl, Director of the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), NOAA have just given a press conference to to announce the annual average global temperature results and discuss the most important weather and climate events of the year.

You will not be surprised to know that 2015 was yet another hottest year ever recorded in the instrumental record, beating 2014 by a huge 0.13 °C. It was 1.25 °C hotter than pre-industrial. It is now 106 years since there was a "coldest year on record". (Gavin Schmidt said that 2015 would have broken the record even without the El Niño, though presumably by not as much.)

Anyone who tries to tell you it hasn't warmed since 1996, or 1997, or 1998, is dead wrong. See for yourself:

Figure 1 | Annual global mean surface temperature. Anomaly from the 1881-1910 mean. Data source: GISS NASA.

The average global temperature in 2015 was:

• 0.13 °C hotter than in 2014
• 1.33 °C hotter than the coldest year in the record (1909)
• 0,24 °C hotter than the average for 1998
• 1.25 °C hotter than pre-industrial (ballpark)

Note about the ballpark: I took the pre-industrial benchmark to be 0.3 °C cooler than 1900, from this recent article by Professor Michael Mann in Huffington Post.

Denier weirdness: No pennies have dropped for Bob Tisdale at WUWT

Some deniers at WUWT seem to think that Bob Tisdale has a wonderful intellect. If he does he hides it very well. I've already written about his conspiracy theorising fantasies from his new "book". Well, he's at it again at WUWT.

He wrote a very silly article (archived here), full of meaningless charts. He was, I think, making the point that it can get warm in the day and cool at night in Central England. And in that part of the world, it's warmer in summer than it is in winter, surprise, surprise. Does he think that nobody knew that? Where I live it doesn't usually get quite as cold but it can get a lot hotter, so I'd say we experience seasonal and diurnal differences in temperature that might not be that different, just shifted up a bit on the chart.

The point Bob was trying to make is so puerile that I'm wondering if I've got it wrong. Maybe he was trying to write about some other great breakthrough. If he was he didn't explain it well.

David Burton @wattsupwiththat denies what's really warming the world

If you've been around climate stuff these last few days you may well have come across a neat climate graphic at Bloomberg. Eric Roston and Blacki Migliozzi, with help from Kate Marvel and Gavin Schmidt, have charts of global surface temperatures and more. What their charts show are the various contributions to global surface temperature changes since 1880, modeled and observed. There are a number of different charts illustrating the observed annual mean global surface temperature against modeled, as affected by:

1. Natural factors:

• orbital changes only
• solar variation
• volcanic eruptions
• all three natural factors together.

2. Human activity:

• land use changes
• ozone changes
• aerosols
• greenhouse gas accumulation
• all human activity together.

3. Natural factors and human activity combined.

The graphic is worth bookmarking for showing to (normal) people to illustrate how human activity has led to the large rise in global surface temperatures since 1880. There's not much point showing it to deniers, the sort of people who relish articles like the one by David Burton at WUWT the other day (archived here).

You might remember David. He's the chap who spent 547.5 days and nights fretting about Doran & Zimmerman (2009) before coming up with a number-fudging brainwave (It was not a brainwave, it was nothing but Dave's bad arithmetic.)

Judith Curry is unclear: is Jeb Bush too dumb?

The best estimate of the human induced contribution to warming is similar to the observed warming over this period.


The period in question being from 1951 to 2010. You all probably recognise the above statement from the IPCC WG1 report: The human induced contribution to warming is similar to the observed warming over the period. In other words, 100% of the warming from 1951 to 2010 is caused by humans.

Judith Curry is clear that she is unclear about clear science

That was written in 2013. Judith Curry today quoted Jeb Bush and wrote that he "gets it exactly right" (my emphasis):

As he has before, Bush acknowledged “the climate is changing” but stressed that it’s unknown why. “I don’t think the science is clear of what percentage is man-made and what percentage is natural. It’s convoluted,” he said at a house party in Bedford, New Hampshire.

...Jeb gets it exactly right. There are two broad hypotheses for recent climate change: human causes and natural causes (with numerous sub-hypotheses contained within).  The climate debate is dominated by the premature carving in stone of a theory that humans are the dominant cause of recent climate change. 

What? You don't believe a Professor who is a climate scientist would get it so wrong? Look for yourself.

Warmer oceans matter

Some people might argue that oceans aren't warming much and so we've lots of time to mitigate global warming. (See recent article.)

Thing is oceans are warming quickly, and it does matter. It matters to the creatures that live in the oceans for a start. Anyone who has had an aquarium knows that some fish are very sensitive to temperature. Sure, they can swim to where it's cooler if it gets too hot for comfort but there's no guarantee they'll find a source of food there that they like. Many fish have been moving to cooler waters as fishers have known for a while. The fish in the coolest waters don't have any such luck. They've run out of options. Add warming oceans to increasing acidification and marine life is getting a double whammy. (Which reminds me, I must finish that promised article soon.)

It also matters to species like us who live on the surface. That's not just because it affects a major source of food (fish) but because of the ocean-atmosphere connections. Warmer oceans means a warmer ocean surface, which has an impact on surface temperatures on the land as well. Plus there are impacts on ocean currents (with consequences for the atmosphere) and melting ice, which are not insignificant.

Gavin Schmidt, the new Director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies

Congratulations to Gavin Schmidt. He's the newly appointed Director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Dr. Gavin A. Schmidt, new head of NASA GISS.
(Photo credit: B. Gilbert)

From NASA's website:

NASA has named Gavin A. Schmidt to head the agency’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, a leading Earth climate research laboratory.

Currently deputy director of the institute, Schmidt steps into the position left vacant after the retirement of long-time director James E. Hansen and becomes only the third person to hold the post.

"Gavin is a highly respected climate scientist who already also has proven himself as a terrific leader of the GISS team," said NASA’s Chief Scientist Ellen Stofan. "He is the perfect candidate to continue leading this vital research institute at a critical time for the U.S. and the world."

Schmidt, an expert in climate modeling, began his career at GISS in 1996. His primary area of research is the simulation of past, present and future climates. He has worked on developing and improving computer models that integrate ocean, atmosphere, and land processes to simulate Earth’s climate, and is particularly interested in how their results can be compared to paleoclimatic data.

"It’s an honor to lead the team of talented scientists at GISS," he said. "The work being done here has implications for societies across the planet, and I will strive to make that research as valuable as possible."

Schmidt received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Oxford University in 1988 and a doctorate in applied mathematics from University College London in 1994. He came to New York as a 1996 National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Postdoctoral Fellow in Climate and Global Change Research.

In addition to more than 100 published, peer-reviewed articles, he is the co-author of "Climate Change: Picturing the Science" (W.W. Norton, 2009), a collaboration between climate scientists and photographers. In 2011, he was awarded the American Geophysical Union Climate Communications Prize.

GISS was founded in 1961 as NASA's theoretical division for work on planetary atmospheres, under the direction of Robert Jastrow, and is today a leading Earth climate research laboratory. Major areas of GISS research include measurements, remote sensing and simulation of Earth's climate, the forces driving climate change and its impacts on human society, agriculture and ecosystems and continuing work on planetary climates in the solar system and beyond. GISS works closely with partners at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and with the Earth Institute and School of Engineering at Columbia University.

NASA's Earth science program monitors the planet's vital signs from land, air and space with a fleet of satellites and ambitious airborne and ground-based observation campaigns. NASA develops new ways to observe and study Earth's interconnected natural systems with long-term data records and computer analysis tools to better see how our planet is changing. The agency shares this unique knowledge with the global community and works with institutions in the United States and around the world that contribute to understanding and protecting our home planet.

For more information about Schmidt’s research and publications, visit: www.giss.nasa.gov/staff/gschmidt/

And here's a video :)

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Climate models are skilful - Gavin Schmidt and TED give us 10 lessons in denialism at WUWT

To show how even-handed he is, Anthony Watts posted a TED video of Gavin Schmidt talking about climate models (archived here).  Anthony wrote:

Love him or hate him, it is worthwhile to understand where he is coming from, so I present this video: The emergent patterns of climate change.

The "love him or hate him" is the language of deniers. They aren't interested so much in what Dr Schmidt has to say, they prefer to get personal.  It's a "must have" for the Serengeti Strategy.

Anthony adds quite unnecessarily: "comments welcome".

It's worth watching the video full screen (click in the bottom right) and reading the transcript:

It's short. In just over 12 minutes Gavin Schmidt shows how scientists write code to emulate what happens with clouds, solar radiation, ice, natural and human-made aerosols, soil and vegetation, and other things that together shape our climate.

For a more detailed discussion of climate models, you can't do much better than this article by Scott K. Johnson at Ars Technica.

I went through the WUWT comments till I got up to ten lessons. There is more to learn, but ten is enough to get you going as an accredited science denier.  Here they are, with examples in the WUWT comments below.

• Lesson 1: accept one part of science and follow it up with a silly statement. Deniers are good at "silly". The silly statement proves to the crowd that you really are a science denier.
• Lesson 2: Make a grossly inaccurate statement and don't even pretend to back it up with any data, not even false data.
• Lesson 3: Make out that physics, chemistry and biology can only explain the past and aren't any use as a predictive tool. (Such people would, I expect, never step into an aeroplane and would quite happily and optimistically step out of a window on the 50th storey.)
• Lesson 4: If you haven't anything intelligent to add to the discussion, go for vulgarity.
• Lesson 5: If you don't like the data, claim a conspiracy.
• Lesson 6: If you can't refute the science, make out that the scientists stole their ideas from deniers.
• Lesson 7: If you can't refute the science and can't stomach facts, don't look. Avoid it altogether where possible. When that fails, try to ignore it.
• Lesson 8: Pretend that science is based on "faith" rather than evidence and reasoning. 
• Lesson 9: Trade on your reputation as a fake sceptic and dazzle with meaningless gobbledegook.
• Lesson 10: Harass any organisation that promotes sound science by sending spam. 

From the WUWT comments

The first out of the gate is a denier and the rest follow.  The WUWT deniers give a very good lesson in "how to be a science denier".

Latitude says:

May 3, 2014 at 12:08 pm
” We know what happened over the 20th century. Right? We know that it’s gotten warmer. We know where it’s gotten warmer. And if you ask the models why did that happen, and you say, okay, well, yes, basically it’s because of the carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere. We have a very good match up until the present day. ”

and if you tell the models ahead of time that’s what happened….
Those computer games can not tell you something you don’t know.

That's an odd thing for Latitude to write. Latitude is a regular science denying commenter at WUWT. What he or she is saying now is that it's well-accepted that adding CO2 to the atmosphere will cause global warming.

The last sentence is very wrong. If you watch the video you'll get a glimpse of all the extra knowledge that comes from the models. It's not just that CO2 warms earth, it's how dust gets spread around the globe and how that affects weather; and how quickly the CO2 warming happens; and what changes does a hole in the ozone layer cause; and lots more as well. Such changes would be almost impossible to work out without a complex climate model.

Lesson 1: accept one part of science and follow it up with a silly statement. Deniers are good at "silly". The silly statement proves to the crowd that you really are a science denier.


Gerry Parker says:

May 3, 2014 at 12:12 pm
And despite these claims of model skill, they consistently over predict warming.

The lesson that Gerry and quite a few others at WUWT provide is to make a completely wrong statement. Best not to provide any evidence or examples or it becomes too obvious that what you're saying is wrong. For example, if Gerry had put up a chart of CMIP5 and CMIP3 against observations he would see that firstly, observations have been within the model envelop right the way through since 1860, and secondly that the mean of the models has only been above the observations very few occasions. Similarly it's only been below the observations on very few occasions:

Figure TS.9 (a) Source: IPCC AR5 WG1

Lesson 2: Make a grossly inaccurate statement and don't even pretend to back it up with any data, not even false data.

Louis says:

May 3, 2014 at 12:23 pm
“The models are skillful.”
That phrase was repeated several times, so it must be the take-away message. But it is one thing to tune the models to forecast the past and quite another to accurately forecast the future.

Louis gives us another lesson in denial. This one is commonly used by "ice age cometh-ers". The trick is to argue that just because science explains past events doesn't mean that science can explain future events.  This is the equivalent of arguing that if you jump off a 30 storey building with no aids, you might fly. Roy Spencer is good at this sort of thing, when he talks about rear-view mirrors.

Lesson 3: Make out that physics, chemistry and biology can only explain the past and aren't any use as a predictive tool. (Such people would, I expect, never step into an aeroplanenever step into an aeroplane and would quite happily and optimistically step out of a window on the 50th storey.)


JEM says, apparently in response to Gavin saying that "a model result is skillful if it gives better predictions than a simpler alternative":

May 3, 2014 at 12:27 pm
Dear Gavin, unless you are carrying the error range of every number you feed into your model all the way through every calculation and out into the result, what’s coming out is not skillful, it’s fecal.

Lesson 4: If you haven't anything intelligent to add to the discussion, go for vulgarity.


Layne says:

May 3, 2014 at 12:31 pm
Let’s not forget that inconvenient warming of the 30s-40s has been disappeared so that the models can align with temps.

Layne learnt from Lesson 2 (making a grossly inaccurate statement), but she or he adds a twist and tosses in a conspiracy theory. That hundreds of people all around the world have conspired over decades to alter the temperature data recorded by volunteers and official weather offices.  Layne is arguing there has been a massive world-wide "fiddling" of data maintained independently by multiple organisations, which would have required not just a massive cover up but incredibly sophisticated coordination worldwide.  Shame that no-one has so far been able to uncover this conspiracy.

Lesson 5: If you don't like the data, claim a conspiracy.


Gary Pearse says (excerpt):

May 3, 2014 at 1:01 pm
“Emergent” hmm where have I heard this before. Oh yeah, Willis’s ‘emergent phenomena’ that serve as a governor on climate overheating. I and others have stated before that something as good as Willis’s emergent phenomena and other climate findings won’t be out there long before they begin to be stolen. They are just too good. Okay, Gav has only used the word emergent, half of the idea but that’s a start.

Gary is referring to Willis' convoluted thunderstorm hypothesis. It's a cocktail of the Gaia hypothesis and Richard Lindzen's failed Iris hypothesis, mixed up in a folksy manner with some some big dollops of fake data (eg Willis maintains that surface temperature varied by +/- 0.3 degrees over the last 100 years) and the tiniest smidgen of real science for good measure. Willis argues variously that we might be heading for an ice age and all the science is wrong and Wondering Willis is right.

Lesson 6: If you can't refute the science, make out that the scientists stole their ideas from deniers.

stephen richards says:

May 3, 2014 at 1:20 pm
Watching that piece of merde makes me sick. I cannot bring myself to do it.

Lesson 7: If you can't refute the science and can't stomach facts, don't look. Try to ignore it.


JFA in Montreal says:

May 3, 2014 at 1:55 pm
Priest of all persuasion of religion held the same discourse: you can’t comprehend anything up until you get the big picture. The underlying message is “you’re just to imbecile to see the light”. Of course, they know the only light is the one shining on them, for power, fame and profit.

This person doesn't understand science so belittles it. In addition to Lesson 5 (claiming a conspiracy with nefarious intent - "power, fame and profit"), pretend that just because you don't understand it, no-one else could possibly understand it. It's used by people who claim that climate science is religion not science.

Lesson 8: Pretend that science is based on "faith" rather than evidence and reasoning.


Steve McIntyre says:

May 3, 2014 at 2:33 pm
Mosh, I do not share the kneejerk antagonism to “models” of many commenters, but the CA post to which you refer doesn’t exactly support your assertion: it indicates that GCMs with positive feedbacks have no “skill” in forecasting global temperature relative to a “naive” no-feedback log relationship of Callendar 1938. I think that it’s entirely reasonable to criticize models on that point. As you and I have discussed, it’s unfortunate that the modeling community have failed to fully map the parameter space and left low-to-no feedback largely as a terra incognita, a mapping failure that seems to originate from a kind of academic stubbornness in the modeling community – it’s hard to contemplate similar behavior from commercial organizations.

As well as being his usual waffle, if you manage to decipher it, Steve is indulging in wishful thinking. From what I gather, he's hoping that someone some day will discover an unknown "parameter" that will offset all the global warming that we see. It will mop up all the warming and climate change will go away all by itself.

Most WUWT readers won't try to figure out what he's saying. They'll just be quite delighted that a notable fake sceptic has lowered himself, as he does from time to time, and joined in the hoi polloi denialati at the low brow denier blog, WUWT.

Lesson 9: Trade on your reputation as a fake sceptic and dazzle with meaningless gobbledegook.

Now I haven't even got a third of the way down the comments. There are doubtless many more lessons in how to be a good little denier.


John Coleman says:

May 3, 2014 at 5:30 pm
I sent the following email:
tedx@ted.com
Hello,
I note you have presented talks by several proponents of Global Warming/Climate Change. However, you have not given an opportunity to present the other side of the issue to climate skeptics. There are several notable, peer reviewed climate experts who present the skeptical view. Among them are Richard Lindzen at MIT, Willie Soon at the Harvard Smithsonian Observatory, Judith Curry at Georgia Tech, Roy Spencer and John Christy at the University of Alabama and a long list of other Ph.D. experts. Please invite one or more of these experts to take the stage at a future conference. Balance of scientific opinion is important.
Regards,
John Coleman

I think if would be excellent if they heard from many of the rest of you.

If you are a fake sceptic, particularly one who is known as a journalist turned television weather announcer, send a dumb email and urge everyone else to do the same. Thankfully junk email isn't quite as damaging to the environment as snail mail.

Lesson 10: Harass any organisation that promotes sound science by sending spam.

Going against the tide of denialism

There were very few people who tried to buck the trend, some of them just a little bit. I mean when you're battling a tide of denialism of more than 120 comments, you're asking for trouble.  Some people buck the trend because they want to appear as "reasonable" fake sceptics. Others might be more genuine.


Jeff Alberts quoted HenryP and indicated that times, denialism goes a bit too far for his liking, and says:

May 3, 2014 at 7:07 pm
The climate is changing only because of natural reasons.
It is God who made it so.

Actually THERE’S the #1 stupid skeptic argument.

Stephen Philbrick says:

May 3, 2014 at 5:57 pm
I thought it was fairly good.

Some false notes, but overall, an effective presentation.

I liked the orders of magnitude paradigm, a very useful way to illustrate the difficulty of the problem

Surprisingly, he used only 14, with the size of the earth as the upper bounds – somewhat surprising as he clearly (despite some comments upthread) acknowledged the influence of the sun. The 4 down 14 to go was simply the artifact of a live presentation.

I see some chuckles about Fortran, and can only assume people are doing serious modeling.
In a recent role with my company, I worked with a moderately sophisticated financial model. It was written in Fortran, because we had to model interest rates, inflation, and the interactions as they affect bond prices and yields, not to mention stochastic insurance loss projections. Fortran was used because it is a suitable language to do very heavy duty number-crunching. It makes a nice sound-bite to treat it as antiquated, but only to those who don’t really do heavy duty modeling. (Which is not to say it is always the best option – I’ve modeled some processes in APL, some others in Excel,, the choice depends on how much number crunching is needed. One can have a highly sophisticated model that doesn’t require a lot of number crunching, but models of the financial world and models of the climate need to do a lot of brute force calculations)

JohnB says:

May 3, 2014 at 7:12 pm
I thought it extremely interesting and would happily sit through a longer lecture by Dr Schmidt.
I may not agree with his conclusions but the talk certainly allows you to see where he is coming from. Note that he admits the models are “wrong” and should, can and hopefully will be improved. However he thinks that they are good enough for a “reasonable” projection of the future and that future improvements in the models will refine the projection but not fundamentally change it.

If you had a model that you thought gave a reasonable projection and the results of that projection gave you cause for concern, wouldn’t you speak loudly too? Dr Schmidt models climate and the results have convinced him that there are grounds for concern.

He spoke fairly from his point of view and that is the best that anyone can do.

Gavin Schmidt & Co have been reconciling climate models and surface temperature observations

Gavin A. Schmidt, Drew T. Shindell & Kostas Tsigaridis have a new article in Nature Geoscience (open access).  What they've done is estimate the impact of actual measures of solar, volcanoes and ENSO on a CMIP5 ensemble.  They found that this reduced the recent difference between models and observations a whole lot.

What they found in particular was the the models most likely overestimated the cooling from the Pinatubo eruption in the 1990s, making the models too cool and, when observed solar radiation, volcanic eruptions and ENSO were factored, in the models are pretty close to observations.

Here is the figure from the paper. Click to enlarge it.

Figure 1: Updated external influences on climate and their impact on the CMIP5 model runs.
a, The latest reconstructions of optical depth for volcanic aerosols9, 10 from the Mount Pinatubo eruption in 1991 suggest that the cooling effect of the eruption (1991–1993) was overestimated in the CMIP5 runs, making the simulated temperatures too cool. From about 1998 onwards, however, the cooling effects of solar activity (red), human-made tropospheric aerosols (green) and volcanic eruptions (pink) were all underestimated. WMGHG, well-mixed greenhouse gases.
b, Global mean surface temperature anomalies, with respect to 1980–1999, in the CMIP5 ensemble (mean: solid blue line; pale blue shading: 5–95% spread of simulations) on average exceeded two independent reconstructions from observations (GISTEMP Land–Ocean Temperature Index (LOTI)6, solid red; HadCRUT4 with spatial infilling7, dashed red) from about 1998. Adjusting for the phase of ENSO by regressing the observed temperature against the ENSO index11 adds interannual variability to the CMIP5 ensemble mean (dashed blue), and adjusting for updated external influences as in a further reduces the discrepancy between model and data from 1998 (black). The adjusted ensemble spread (dashed grey) clearly shows the decadal impact of the updated drivers. As an aside, we note that although it is convenient to use the CMIP5 ensemble to assess expected spreads in possible trends, the ensemble is not a true probabilistic sample.

It's going to get hotter

The authors conclude the following, which won't come as news (or welcome news) to HotWhopper readers (my bold):

We conclude that use of the latest information on external influences on the climate system and adjusting for internal variability associated with ENSO can almost completely reconcile the trends in global mean surface temperature in CMIP5 models and observations. Nevertheless, attributing climate trends over relatively short periods, such as 10 to 15 years, will always be problematic, and it is inherently unsatisfying to find model–data agreement only with the benefit of hindsight. We see no indication, however, that transient climate response is systematically overestimated in the CMIP5 climate models as has been speculated, or that decadal variability across the ensemble of models is systematically underestimated, although at least some individual models probably fall short in this respect.

Most importantly, our analysis implies that significant warming trends are likely to resume, because the dominant long-term warming effect of well-mixed greenhouse gases continues to rise. Asian pollution levels are likely to stabilize and perhaps decrease, although lower solar activity may persist and volcanic eruptions are unpredictable. ENSO will eventually move back into a positive phase and the simultaneous coincidence of multiple cooling effects will cease. Further warming is very likely to be the result. 

Anthony Watts hasn't picked up on this paper yet, but I expect he will sooner or later.

For the record, this is a link to the March 2014 special issue of Nature Geoscience "Recent slowdown in global warming".

Gavin A. Schmidt, Drew T. Shindell & Kostas Tsigaridis, Reconciling warming trends, Nature Geoscience 7, 158–160 (2014) doi:10.1038/ngeo2105 Published online 27 February 2014