GLOBAL WARMING CHART-2012

GLOBAL WARMING?  YES?  NO?

 

 

Dee Finney's blog

start date July 20, 2011

today's date November 16, 2012

page 375

TOPIC:  GLOBAL WARMING - YES?  NO?

Global warming stopped 16 years ago, reveals Met Office report quietly released... and here is the chart to prove it

By David Rose

PUBLISHED:16:42 EST, 13 October 2012| UPDATED:08:59 EST, 16 October 2012

The world stopped getting warmer almost 16 years ago, according to new data released last week.

The figures, which have triggered debate among climate scientists, reveal that from the beginning of 1997 until August 2012, there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temperatures.

This means that the ‘plateau’ or ‘pause’ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. Before that, temperatures had been stable or declining for about 40 years.

global temperature changes

global temperature changes

Research: The new figures mean that the ¿pause¿ in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. This picture shows an iceberg melting in Eastern Greenland

Research: The new figures mean that the 'pause' in global warming has now lasted for about the same time as the previous period when temperatures rose, 1980 to 1996. This picture shows an iceberg melting in Eastern Greenland

The new data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land and sea, was issued quietly on the internet, without any media fanfare, and, until today, it has not been reported.

This stands in sharp contrast to the release of the previous figures six months ago, which went only to the end of 2010 – a very warm year.

Ending the data then means it is possible to show a slight warming trend since 1997, but 2011 and the first eight months of 2012 were much cooler, and thus this trend is erased.

Wettest start to autumn for 12 years as South West continues to be battered by torrential rain

Some climate scientists, such as Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, last week dismissed the significance of the plateau, saying that 15 or 16 years is too short a period from which to draw conclusions.

Others disagreed. Professor Judith Curry, who is the head of the climate science department at America’s prestigious Georgia Tech university, told The Mail on Sunday that it was clear that the computer models used to predict future warming were ‘deeply flawed’.

Even Prof Jones admitted that he and his colleagues did not understand the impact of ‘natural variability’ – factors such as long-term ocean temperature cycles and changes in the output of the sun. However, he said he was still convinced that the current decade would end up significantly warmer than the previous two.

Professor Phil Jones

Dr Judith A Curry

Disagreement: Professor Phil Jones, left, from the University of East Anglia, dismissed the significance of the plateau. Professor Judith Curry, right, from Georgia Tech university in America, disagreed, saying the computer models used to predict future warming were ‘deeply flawed’

Warmer: Since 1880 the world has warmed by 0.75 degrees Celsius. This image shows floating icebergs in Greenland

Warmer: Since 1880 the world has warmed by 0.75 degrees Celsius. This image shows floating icebergs in Greenland

The regular data collected on global temperature is called Hadcrut 4, as it is jointly issued by the Met Office’s Hadley Centre and Prof Jones’s Climatic Research Unit.

Since 1880, when worldwide industrialisation began to gather pace and reliable statistics were first collected on a global scale, the world has warmed by 0.75 degrees Celsius.

Some scientists have claimed that this rate of warming is set to increase hugely without drastic cuts to carbon-dioxide emissions, predicting a catastrophic increase of up to a further five degrees Celsius by the end of the century.

The new figures were released as the Government made clear that it would ‘bend’ its own carbon-dioxide rules and build new power stations to try to combat the threat of blackouts.

At last week’s Conservative Party Conference, the new Energy Minister, John Hayes, promised that ‘the high-flown theories of bourgeois Left-wing academics will not override the interests of ordinary people who need fuel for heat, light and transport – energy policies, you might say, for the many, not the few’ – a pledge that has triggered fury from green activists, who fear reductions in the huge subsidies given to wind-turbine firms.

Flawed science costs us dearly


Here are three not-so trivial questions you probably won’t find in your next pub quiz. First, how much warmer has the world become since a) 1880 and b) the beginning of 1997? And what has this got to do with your ever-increasing energy bill?

You may find the answers to the first two surprising. Since 1880, when reliable temperature records began to be kept across most of the globe, the world has warmed by about 0.75 degrees Celsius.

From the start of 1997 until August 2012, however, figures released last week show the answer is zero: the trend, derived from the aggregate data collected from more than 3,000 worldwide measuring points, has been flat.

Surprising: News that the world has got no warmer for the past 16 years will come as something of a shock. This picture shows drifting ice in Canada

Surprising: News that the world has got no warmer for the past 16 years will come as something of a shock. This picture shows drifting ice in Canada

Not that there has been any coverage in the media, which usually reports climate issues assiduously, since the figures were quietly release online with no accompanying press release – unlike six months ago when they showed a slight warming trend.

The answer to the third question is perhaps the most familiar. Your bills are going up, at least in part, because of the array of ‘green’ subsidies being provided to the renewable energy industry, chiefly wind.

They will cost the average household about £100 this year. This is set to rise steadily higher – yet it is being imposed for only one reason: the widespread conviction, which is shared by politicians of all stripes and drilled into children at primary schools, that, without drastic action to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions, global warming is certain soon to accelerate, with truly catastrophic consequences by the end of the century – when temperatures could be up to five degrees higher.

Hence the significance of those first two answers. Global industrialisation over the past 130 years has made relatively little difference.

And with the country committed by Act of Parliament to reducing CO2 by 80 per cent by 2050, a project that will cost hundreds of billions, the news that the world has got no warmer for the past 16 years comes as something of a shock.

It poses a fundamental challenge to the assumptions underlying every aspect of energy and climate change policy.

This ‘plateau’ in rising temperatures does not mean that global warming won’t at some point resume.

But according to increasing numbers of serious climate scientists, it does suggest that the computer models that have for years been predicting imminent doom, such as those used by the Met Office and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are flawed, and that the climate is far more complex than the models assert.

‘The new data confirms the existence of a pause in global warming,’ Professor Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Science at America’s Georgia Tech university, told me yesterday.

‘Climate models are very complex, but they are imperfect and incomplete. Natural variability [the impact of factors such as long-term temperature cycles in the oceans and the output of the sun] has been shown over the past two decades to have a magnitude that dominates the greenhouse warming effect.

‘It is becoming increasingly apparent that our attribution of warming since 1980 and future projections of climate change needs to consider natural internal variability as a factor of fundamental importance.’

Professor Phil Jones, director of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, who found himself at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ scandal over leaked emails three years ago, would not normally be expected to agree with her. Yet on two important points, he did.

The data does suggest a plateau, he admitted, and without a major El Nino event – the sudden, dramatic warming of the southern Pacific which takes place unpredictably and always has a huge effect on global weather – ‘it could go on for a while’.

Like Prof Curry, Prof Jones also admitted that the climate models were imperfect: ‘We don’t fully understand how to input things like changes in the oceans, and because we don’t fully understand it you could say that natural variability is now working to suppress the warming. We don’t know what natural variability is doing.’

Headache: The evidence is beginning to suggest that global warming may be happening much slower than the catastrophists have claimed ¿ a conclusion with enormous policy implications for politicians at Westminster, pictured

Headache: The evidence is beginning to suggest that global warming may be happening much slower than the catastrophists have claimed - a conclusion with enormous policy implications for politicians at Westminster, pictured

Yet he insisted that 15 or 16 years is not a significant period: pauses of such length had always been expected, he said.

Yet in 2009, when the plateau was already becoming apparent and being discussed by scientists, he told a colleague in one of the Climategate emails: ‘Bottom line: the “no upward trend” has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’

But although that point has now been passed, he said that he hadn’t changed his mind about the models’ gloomy predictions: ‘I still think that the current decade which began in 2010 will be warmer by about 0.17 degrees than the previous one, which was warmer than the Nineties.’

Only if that did not happen would he seriously begin to wonder whether something more profound might be happening. In other words, though five years ago he seemed to be saying that 15 years without warming would make him ‘worried’, that period has now become 20 years.

Meanwhile, his Met Office colleagues were sticking to their guns. A spokesman said: ‘Choosing a starting or end point on short-term scales can be very misleading. Climate change can only be detected from multi-decadal timescales due to the inherent variability in the climate system.’

He said that for the plateau to last any more than 15 years was ‘unlikely’. Asked about a prediction that the Met Office made in 2009 – that three of the ensuing five years would set a new world temperature record – he made no comment. With no sign of a strong El Nino next year, the prospects of this happening are remote.

Why all this matters should be obvious. Every quarter, statistics on the economy’s output and models of future performance have a huge impact on our lives. They trigger a range of policy responses from the Bank of England and the Treasury, and myriad decisions by private businesses.

Yet it has steadily become apparent since the 2008 crash that both the statistics and the modelling are extremely unreliable. To plan the future around them makes about as much sense as choosing a wedding date three months’ hence on the basis of a long-term weather forecast.

Few people would be so foolish. But decisions of far deeper and more costly significance than those derived from output figures have been and are still being made on the basis of climate predictions, not of the next three months but of the coming century – and this despite the fact that Phil Jones and his colleagues now admit they do not understand the role of ‘natural variability’.

The most depressing feature of this debate is that anyone who questions the alarmist, doomsday scenario will automatically be labelled a climate change ‘denier’, and accused of jeopardising the future of humanity.

So let’s be clear. Yes: global warming is real, and some of it at least has been caused by the CO2 emitted by fossil fuels. But the evidence is beginning to suggest that it may be happening much slower than the catastrophists have claimed – a conclusion with enormous policy implications.

responses below:

TIta Gascoin How do you know the whole world was warmer during the Middle Ages? The whole world, not just the North Atlantic Basin which is about the worst place in the world to look for an indication of global climate. If the World was so much warmer back then, how come sea levels are around 1-2 metres higher now than they were then - just ask the Ancient Romans who constructed sea water fish tanks at sea level that are all underwater now.

- Glenn Tamblyn , Melbourne, Australia, 16/10/2012 04:17

TIta Gascoin How do you know the whole world was warmer during the Middle Ages? The whole world, not just the North Atlantic Basin which is about the worst place in the world to look for an indication of global climate. If the World was so much warmer back then, how come sea levels are around 1-2 metres higher now than they were then - just ask the Ancient Romans who constructed sea water fish tanks at sea level that are all underwater now.

- Glenn Tamblyn , Melbourne, Australia, 16/10/2012 04:11

Well if it is happening slower than they thought, that gives us time to make things right. If we were being rushed to make a decision we might not pick the right path. We still should reduce CO2 emmisions, because quite frankly, it has other detrimental effects outside of affecting global warming, even if it is less than previously thought. In the end, we should move away from fossile fuels, but atleast now we can do so in a more structured way, and not in a rush.

- Leon L. Kappler , Wixom, United States, 16/10/2012 03:52

The Met Office response is quite inadequate. It has not gotten any warmer for 16 years (and has cooled considerably over the last 10). And if you start in 1999, as they suggest, you'd be in the pit of a really nasty La Nina, and starting in 1997 is before the severe peak of 1998. There has not been statistically significant warming since around 1995, in any case. (So much for end point fallacy.) They fail to explain why warming was as (or more) rapid from 1910 to 1940 as it was from 1980 - 2010, in spite of the fact that CO2 did not begin really to take off until after 1950. (Both were positive PDO periods). They also fail to account for microsite (or even mesosite), but instead "homogenize" the few well sited stations away. (This is four times as bad as failing to account for TOBS -- but in the opposite direction.) So, yes, there is warming. But it appears to be highballed by a factor of two. You can't run away from the data.

- Evan Jones , New York, 16/10/2012 03:24

Your graph starts with September 1997, it does not include all of 1997's data. January 1997's temperate anomaly from the HADCRUT4 dataset was .206 degrees celsius. I guess a rise of 0.3 three degrees would not suit the authors agenda.

- Jeremy David Thomson , Whangamata, New Zealand, 16/10/2012 03:05

This article is a complete misrepresentation of the data collected by the Met Office¿s Hadley Centre. The Met office has refuted the claims this article has made and accuses its backers of cherry picking data to meet their politically motivated agenda. In effect a blatant lie. Anthropogenic Global Warming is real and the temperature will continue to rise as humans continue to release CO2 into the atmosphere unabated. Dr. Jones is in agreement. Dr.Curry's claims are flawed and incorrect.

- johnnyunsu , Montreal, Canada, 16/10/2012 02:27

This article is a complete misrepresentation of the data collected by the Met Office¿s Hadley Centre. The Met office has refuted the claims this article has made and accuses its backers of cherry picking data to meet their politically motivated agenda. In effect a blatant lie. Anthropogenic Global Warming is real and the temperature will continue to rise as humans continue to release CO2 into the atmosphere unabated. Dr. Jones is in agreement. Dr.Curry a trained climatologist now towing the line of the fossil-fuel industry has lost her way and disgraced the profession of scientists. Her claims are flawed and incorrect.

- johnnyunsu , Montreal, Canada, 16/10/2012 02:19

This article is a complete misrepresentation of the data collected by the Met Office¿s Hadley Centre. The Met office has refuted the claims this article has made and accuses its backers of cherry picking data to meet their politically motivated agenda. In effect a blatant lie. Anthropogenic Global Warming is real and the temperature will continue to rise as humans continue to release CO2 into the atmosphere unabated. Dr. Jones is in agreement. Dr.Curry a trained climatologist now towing the line of the fossil-fuel industry has lost her way and disgraced the profession of scientists. Her claims are flawed and incorrect.

- johnnyunsu , Montreal, Canada, 16/10/2012 02:10

Yes: global warming is real, and some of it at least has been caused by the CO2 emitted by fossil fuels. But the evidence is beginning to suggest that it may be happening much slower than the catastrophists have claimed ¿ a conclusion with enormous policy implications.I agree. I will go a bit further. Our research shows that the data itself is inaccurate. The adjusted Tmean trend for all USHCN stations is 90% higher than the raw trend of well sited rural, non-airport stations, using Leroy (2010) methodology, with all TOBS-biased stations removed from the sample (and with MMTS conversion accounted for). It is 50% higher for the sample of all stations, including airports, semi-urban, and urban stations (again, with TOBS bias removed and MMTS conversion factored in). Since the same boyz who do USHCN also do GHCN, the problem is not confined to US data, but is a worldwide error in methodology. The warming trend, since 1979, at least, is spuriously near-doubled.

- Evan Jones , New York, 16/10/2012 01:

Dang! The Thin Man (inter alia) beat me to it.

- Evan Jones , New York, 16/10/2012 01:19



Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2217286/Global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago-reveals-Met-Office-report-quietly-released--chart-prove-it.html#ixzz2COmjHhMC
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Wind-Whipped Rains Lift Venice Tide to 6th Highest

Published: Nov 12, 2012, 0:35 PM ESTAssociated Press

AP Photo/Luigi Costantini

People sit at the table of a bar in a flooded St. Mark's Square in Venice, Italy, Sunday, Nov. 11, 2012.

VENICE, Italy -- Heavy rains and seas whipped up by strong winds have flooded Venice and brought the lagoon city's high tide mark to its sixth-highest level since records began being kept 150 years ago.

Senior weather.com meterologist Jonathan Erdman says the ultimate culprit for this is a deep, slow-moving upper-level trough in the western Mediterranean Sea.

"As a result, southeast surface winds are blowing almost the entire length of the Adriatic Sea, pushing water into Venice." Erdman adds, "There is also, a stalled frontal boundary is serving as a focus for heavy rain over central and northern Italy, including parts of Tuscany."


WATCH VIDEO:  WHO COULD LIVE LIKE THIS? 
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/high-tide-causes-major-flooding-in-venice/2012/11/01/f4be7169-eb08-4af4-b8c4-7f02150463a9_video.html

3 more die in Italy floods; Venice waters receding

ReutersBy Silvia Ognibene of Reuters

Four people have now died in Italy's floods after two men and a woman, local electricity workers, were killed when their car fell off a Tuscan bridge.

FLORENCE, Italy — Three people died when their car fell off a collapsed bridge Tuesday, as flooding battered central Italy for a third straight day, forcing part of Italy's main north-south highway to close.

Water levels were receding, however, in Venice, the lagoon city and Unesco world heritage site that at the weekend saw its sixth-worst flooding since records began in 1872.

St. Mark's Square, one of the lowest lying areas of the city, where some tourists were able to swim in high water Sunday, was returning to normal, a city official said.

The flooding alert was now centered for the area north of Rome, where officials feared the Tiber and Aniene rivers could burst their banks in low-lying areas outside the centre of the capital.

The center, however, was not expected to see damage because of high embankment walls and because the capital itself had not been hit by heavy rain for the past two days.

The two men and one woman who died in Tuscany were local electricity workers. Their deaths brought the toll to four in flooding that has damaged many homes and stores as well as thousands of acres of farmland.

One of the hardest hit areas was the Maremma zone of southern Tuscany, where flooding washed out many secondary roads, forced hundreds of people to leave their homes, and isolated several towns.

 

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Global warming facts

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Despite overwhelming scientific evidence, popular myths and misinformation abound. Here are some of the facts of what we know about global warming.

  1. There is scientific consensus on the basic facts of global warming.

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  2. Scientists are certain that the Earth is warming.

    Scientists are certain the Earth has been warming for 100 years. Here's how they know »

  3. Human activity is causing the Earth to get warmer.

    Only CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions from human activities explain the observed warming now taking place on Earth How we know »

  4. The effects of warming can be seen today.

    We can already see the effects of global warming in our world through disappearing habitat, shrinking arctic sea ice and extreme weather. Impacts we can see today »

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