It’s been a rotten week for Pause denial
David Rose and the Daily Mail let rip, telling the world that retired NOAA insider, John Bates, was blowing the whistle on how global warming was being exaggerated by scientists to score political points. The hallowed pause-buster paper (Karl et al) broke practically every rule: it was based on misleading “unverified” data processed with a highly experimental, unstable program. There were bugs in the software, the results changed with every run, the data wasn’t archived, and no one could repeat it. They tripled the previous rate of warming by using old-bad-data to adjust better but still-not-very-good-data. They ignored the much better data from ARGO buoys and the satellites (see below) which showed they were wrong. (Rose didn’t even mention that the error bars on the magical adjustment were 17 times larger than the adjustment itself. Too many errors….)
It’s hard oo believe it could be worse, but then the one sole computer holding the program broke, and apparently (what bad luck) none of the eight authors had their own copy either. Nor did the reviewers. The Planet is going to hell, but no one thought to back up the data.
It all got a bit much for Dr Bates when he heard melodramatic news reports that a few triggered scientists feared Trump might trash their climate data.
The NOAA scientists have nothing to hide (especially not data since it’s gone) but when the subpoenas came for their emails, they refused to hand them over.
Then on Sunday Rose fired out part II: How can we trust global warming scientists if they keep twisting the truth.
The man deserves a medal. (Both men Rose and Bates).
NOAA told Obama and Congress that there was no pause in warming. If only Congress had access to Google… they could have downloaded the satellite data:
Graph thanks to Dr David Evans
The black line of best fit is for the same period, and shows a warming trend that is essentially zero (0.01 C per decade). That is, satellites say it didn’t warm from 2000 to 2014 — the exact same period that the NOAA team refer too.
Yet here is the graph that NOAA presented to Obama and Congress, saying “the rate of global warming during the last 15 years has been as fast as or faster than that seen during the latter half of the 20th Century.” Sure.
For the record, there are two independent satellite sets, but the UAH data matches weather balloons better than RSS, and the RSS adjustments includes a likely calibration drift error that probably causes spurious warming. (And if Roy Spencer’s site doesn’t behave, there’s a copy of all his reasoning here).
I’m guessing NOAA knows what the satellite data shows.
Here’s the ARGO data, Hadley, GISS and UAH:
….
The Pause shows the models don’t understand what drives the climate
If you can’t explain the pause, you can’t explain the cause.
— Hockeyschtick
Even if the rate of warming was the same in the 1950s as the 2000s, it wasn’t supposed to be. CO2 emissions have risen more than expected, and all the predictions missed the side of the barn totally. Let’s not forget how abject their failure was in the first assessment report in 1990, the IPCC predicted an average rate of global warming of 0.30 C per decade over the ensuing decades. Their lowest possible estimate was 0.2C and yet we didn’t even get to that. (See also here.)
For the record — the full satellite temperature series shows the world warmed. It doesn’t show that this had anything to do with CO2. The timing is all wrong, the correlation pathetic. The more CO2 we emit, the slower the warming.
REFERENCE
T.R. Karl; A. Arguez; B. Huang; J.H. Lawrimore; M.J. Menne; T.C. Peterson; R.S. Vose; H.-M. Zhang (2015) “Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus,” by at National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in Asheville, NC; J.R. McMahon at LMI in McLean, VA.