Judith Curry's temperature predictions - charted

It's been brought to my attention that there's another set of projections guesses about global surface temperature floating about, this time from Judith Curry.

I don't have time to go into her "arguments" in detail. Suffice to say she seems to be hanging on to the failed "stadium wave" theory and has maybe tossed in a few other ideas as well such as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation flavoured with a smidgen of "it's the sun".

Judith has put up three options for the temperature change over the next 30 years: warmest +0.7C, moderate +0.11C and coldest -0.5C.

What I will do is what she hasn't (for reasons that seem obvious to me). I'll put up some charts showing her guesses. I can't tell from her post what she's used as a baseline, so I've taken it as the average global surface temperature for 2019. I've also made the assumption her predicted change relates to the last year of the prediction. That is, her prediction of 0.5 cooling is that in 2050 the average global surface temperature will be 0.5C colder than it was last year.

Don't make promises you can't keep...

Occasionally I've made promises that I haven't kept, including some here on this blog. On rare occasions I've promised to write about something at some point in the future and haven't. In the past few months Judith Curry hinted that she would be paying more attention to her blog. Or that's how I've interpreted Judith. She doesn't write much herself, apart from long lists of links to what she finds interesting on the internet. Her blog is mainly a notice board for denier tripe. Even the articles Judith posts under her own name are usually large slabs copied from somewhere else, with a short note from Judith at the bottom saying as little as possible.

Anthony Watts is the same. It does look as if he's at least reading his blog from time to time now, but there's little sign that he's going to write much himself in the future, any more than he has in the past. Which is probably a good thing.

Out in time. Anthony Watts thinks it's 2050!

I don't know what's got into Anthony Watts. Yesterday he thought it was June instead of July, and wrote about an upcoming release of May data from NOAA, when that report had already been released a month ago.

Today Anthony seems to think that 2050 is behind us (archived here). That it's been and gone. That we're already past the middle of this century. He wrote about a "failed prediction" from Joe Romm of Climate Progress, quoting him as writing (my emphasis):

In 2007, Science (subs. req’d) published research that “predicted a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest” — levels of aridity comparable to the 1930s Dust Bowl would stretch from Kansas to California.  Last year, a comprehensive literature review, “Drought under global warming: a review,” by NCAR found that we risk multiple, devastating global droughts worse than the Dust Bowl even on moderate emissions path.  Another study found the U.S. southwest could see a 60-year drought this century.

Currying favour with deniers - Judith predicts no more warming "for the next few decades"

I noticed a few visitors here from Judith Curry's blog and discovered HotWhopper got an honorable mention in the comments.  So I'll return the favour.  It also gives me a chance to show David Appell up in a good light to make up for my being hard on him a few weeks ago.

I'll provide part of an exchange for all those who are like me and, in order to stay sane, don't usually waste time at Curry's place.

It all started with Judith Curry posting a diatribe against the Cook et al study, which is the latest in several studies that have demonstrated the scientific consensus that humans are causing global warming.  Judith doesn't like the fact that there is a scientific consensus and seeks to undermine it every chance she gets.

JC comment: Too many defenders of the consensus have become either ‘pause’ deniers or ‘pause’ dismissers. A while back, I recommended that they ‘own’ the pause, and work on explaining it. Belatedly, we see a little bit of this happening, but of course it does not lead them to challenge the main IPCC conclusion on 20th century attribution.

Judy "recommended"! (Snort!) As if any self-respecting scientist would take any notice of what Dr Curry orders them to do.

JC summary: It is really good to see this discussion about the role of consensus in the public debate on climate change and the problems this has caused for the science, the policy, and increasingly for the proponents of consensus. It is however dismaying to see that continued influence that the existence of a ‘consensus’ has on the politics (especially President Obama’s citing of the Cook et al. study).

Green-Eyed
Uncertainty Monster

"Especially President Obama's citing..." Judy's jealous of John Cook and his team, just like Anthony Watts was.  (Did the then President cite her "epiphany moment" hurricane paper?)

Now let's wait and see how she argues that the scientific consensus on the dangers of tobacco led to everyone taking up smoking.  Or that no President (or Surgeon General) in the USA should have indicated that there is such a scientific consensus.

David Appell challenges Judith:

July 27, 2013 at 8:10 pm JC wrote: A while back, I recommended that they ‘own’ the pause, and work on explaining it.

It has been explained ad nauseum. It in now way undermines AGW, which many many scientists have now said. The Earth still has a clear energy imbalance, and the AGW problem is still here.

The “pause” is absolutely no reason to take AGW any less seriously. Surface warming will resume — physics says it has to.

What will be the excuse then?

Judith replied that anyone who spoke of a pause was called a denier.  But it's her next comment that really shows her up as a disinformation propagandist.  And she's one for building strawmen, too:

curryja | July 27, 2013 at 8:44 pm  I understand that 15 years is too short, but the climate model apostles told us not to expect a pause longer than 10 years, then 15 years, then 17 years. Looks like this one might go another two decades.

The 1945 – 1975 pause was not caused by aerosols. People who have argued that the 1945-1975 pause was caused by multidecadal ocean oscillations are called deniers, this is one of the main ‘denier’ arguments.

"Climate model apostles"?  Who is she talking about?  It can't be Dr Ben Santer and colleagues.  Their paper has in the conclusion (my bold):

... In summary, because of the effects of natural internal climate variability,we do not expect each year to be inexorably warmer than the preceding year, or each decade to be warmer than the last decade, even in the presence of strong anthropogenic forcing of the climate system. The clear message from our signal-to-noise analysis is that multi-decadal records are required for identifying human effects on tropospheric temperature. Minimal warming over a single decade does not disprove the existence of a slowly-evolving anthropogenic warming signal.

Judith is an apologist for science deniers.  It's what she does and who she is and what she wants.  She's pretty well given up on getting any professional respect so she curries favour with the denialati. 

Curry predicts no more warming for "the next few decades"

Enough of her prevarication.  Here is Judith Curry's prediction. A flat temperature trend for the next few decades. Now that will be one to watch if there is anyone left in the world who gives tuppence for what Judith Curry thinks.

curryja | July 27, 2013 at 11:22 pm | ...A year earlier, Jan 2011, I made it pretty clear that I supported Tsonis’ argument regarding climate shifts and a flat temperature trend for the next few decades...

How many is a "few"?  I would take it that she predicts no warming till at least 2050.  I wonder if she'll take a bet on that.

Of course, that's not what Swanson and Tsonis are saying.  (Not that Curry would care.)  In their 2007 paper and their 2009 paper, Swanson and Tsonis were putting up a hypothesis that the climate goes through "shifts".  In the 2009 paper, Swanson and Tsonis suggest that surface temperature may not rise much before 2020, which is a lot sooner than a "few decades" away.  And they are well aware that what they put forward is somewhat contentious and speculative.  The last para in their 2009 paper might upset Curry's denier fans if any of them took the time to read a scientific paper:

Finally, it is vital to note that there is no comfort to be gained by having a climate with a significant degree of internal variability, even if it results in a near-term cessation of global warming. It is straightforward to argue that a climate with significant internal variability is a climate that is very sensitive to applied anthropogenic radiative anomalies (c.f. Roe [2009]). If the role of internal variability in the climate system is as large as this analysis would seem to suggest, warming over the 21st century may well be larger than that predicted by the current generation of models, given the propensity of those models to underestimate climate internal variability [Kravtsov and Spannagle 2008].

Here is an article about their 2009 paper at Desmogblog, and another at realclimate.org by Swanson, who is the lead author.

Compare this with how Judith dismisses their conclusion that anthropogenic warming may be more sensitive rather than less - when she wrote in her 2011 blog piece about a "mandatory genuflexion to orthodox AGW":

Of course as the fact of being chaotic doesn’t imply that the GHG play no role (just that they play some role), he proceeds with the mandatory genuflexion to orthodox AGW by saying that “… the climate shifted after the 1970 event in another warmer state which may be superimposed on an anthropogenic warming trend.” This certainly allows him to avoid inflammatory articles by the usual suspects in the newspapers.

Could Judy possibly be trying to argue that the world shifts to a warmer state by magic?  Just like Bob Tisdale and other deniers at WUWT?

Judith Curry is happy to misrepresent the work of other scientists.  She isn't much interested in science itself, she's too caught up in denying it.