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There was no pause

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I think that the idea of a pause in the global warming has been a red herring ever since it was suggested, and we have commented on this several times here on RC: On how data gaps in some regions (eg. the Arctic) may explain an underestimation of the recent warming. We have also explained how natural oscillations may give the impression of a faux pause. Now, when we know the the global mean temperature for 2016, it’s even more obvious.

Easterling and Wehner (2009) explained that it is not surprising to see some brief periods with an apparent decrease in a temperature record that increases in jumps and spurts, and Foster and Rahmstorf (2012) showed in a later paper how temperature data from the most important observations show consistent global warming trends when known short-term influences such as El Niño Southern oscillation (ENSO), volcanic aerosols and solar variability are accounted for.

A recent paper by Hausfather et al. (2017) adds little new to our understanding, although it confirms that there has not been a recent “hiatus” in the global warming. However, if there are doubts about a physical condition, then further scientific research is our best option for establishing the facts. This is exactly what this recent study did.

The latest findings confirm the results of Karl et al. 2015 from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which Gavin described in a previous post here on RC. The NOAA analysis received unusual attention because of the harassment it drew from the chair of the US House Science Committee and the subpoena demand for emails.

Science is convincing because it builds on independent assessments, which either confirm or disagree with previous findings. A scientific consensus is established when many independent lines of evidence underpin the same conclusions.

It is important to realize that science is about universal truths, which means that you should get a consistent picture in a comprehensive analysis. The idea of a hiatus was indeed inconsistent with other indicators, such as the global sea level which continued to rise unabated (Watson et al, 2015). And there was no reason to think that changes in the cryosphere and precipitation had ceased either.

More than 70% of earth’s area is oceans, and sea surface temperatures (SSTs) carry a large weight in the global mean surface temperature estimates. Karl et al. (2015) reported a cold bias in recent SSTs due to changing observing network. This bias gave the false appearance of a slow-down in the warming of the oceans, and by taking into account artifacts from a change in the observing network, Karl et al found a more pronounced warming in the recent decade. Hausfather et al. (2017) studied these more closely, and their findings confirmed the NOAA analysis.

Rising levels of CO2 may not only result in a global mean surface warming, but it is also possible that it accelerates the turnaround of the hydrological cycle (Benestad, 2016). So even a hypothetical period could take place with a reduced warming rate, but it would be accompanied with an accelerated atmospheric vertical overturning.

References

  1. D.R. Easterling, and M.F. Wehner, "Is the climate warming or cooling?", Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 36, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2009GL037810
  2. G. Foster, and S. Rahmstorf, "Global temperature evolution 1979–2010", Environmental Research Letters, vol. 6, pp. 044022, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/6/4/044022
  3. Z. Hausfather, K. Cowtan, D.C. Clarke, P. Jacobs, M. Richardson, and R. Rohde, "Assessing recent warming using instrumentally homogeneous sea surface temperature records", Science Advances, vol. 3, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1601207
  4. T.R. Karl, A. Arguez, B. Huang, J.H. Lawrimore, J.R. McMahon, M.J. Menne, T.C. Peterson, R.S. Vose, and H. Zhang, "Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus", Science, vol. 348, pp. 1469-1472, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aaa5632
  5. C.S. Watson, N.J. White, J.A. Church, M.A. King, R.J. Burgette, and B. Legresy, "Unabated global mean sea-level rise over the satellite altimeter era", Nature Climate Change, vol. 5, pp. 565-568, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2635
  6. R.E. Benestad, "A mental picture of the greenhouse effect", Theoretical and Applied Climatology, vol. 128, pp. 679-688, 2016. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00704-016-1732-y

Reader Interactions

156 Responses to "There was no pause"

  1. 99 – ThomasTheUnbalanced :-) says:

    Thomas, your immature and off topic drivel needs to stop. Talk science or put a sock in it.

  2. Th 99: BPL, do keep up with learning how to be a good sci-fi writer. One day you might be as profuse and compelling as Hubbard was and start your very own religion! Very little chance you’ll amount to anything else. A small town mid-west preacher perhaps? aka a grandiose haughty fish in a very little pond. :-)

    BPL: Tommy, does your mother know you’re using her computer?

  3. V 100: the reliability of much of that data has been called into question

    BPL: No, it has not. You mistake minor adjustments for questioning “the reliability of… [the] data.” Not the same thing. We have different figures for the orbits of the planets than they had in 1900, but that doesn’t mean Saturn might be inside the orbit of Mercury.

  4. Victor says: 1 Feb 2017 at 9:43 AM , ~#100

    Your doctor tells you that you are overweight. For a great many years the doctor used calipers on your body, put you in a tank of water, weighed you on his trusty old double beam balance, calculated your BMI and made some extremely strong claims regarding the meaning of his findings to the point that any dissent was regarded as a denial of reality. Then, suddenly, presto chango, based on the doctor’s acquisition of a new digital scale, your weight data was changed by one pound. Now what does this development tell us about the reliability of all the doctor’s old predictions based on the unreliable scale?

    If there was something wrong with the old weight dataset, then how do we account for the fact that all the earlier studies managed to support the same conclusion as that supported by the “corrected” dataset? And, if these old measurements can no longer be regarded as reliable, what does that tell us about the reliability of “the medical science” behind the earlier claims?

    Victor, you are a very funny man. Steve

  5. #103 BPL: “V 100: the reliability of much of that data has been called into question

    BPL: No, it has not. You mistake minor adjustments for questioning “the reliability of… [the] data.””

    If the adjustments were minor then they wouldn’t have made much of a difference, would they? But that’s not what we’re being told. Ever since the NOAA corrections were announced, they’ve been hailed as THE “pause buster.”

    If they’re significant, which is clearly implied in the above blog post, then there is clearly a significant difference between the corrected data and the old data. And if they are only “minor,” then they can easily be ignored. Which is it?

  6. #104 Steve, here’s a better analogy, closer to home: According to a noted dietician, eating corn on the cob causes out of control weight gain. I regularly eat corn on the cob, yet there is no sign I’ve been gaining weight for the last 16 years (the “hiatus”). The dietician is embarrassed, since my results would appear to refute his theory. So he carefully goes over my dietary history, does some assiduous double checking, and discovers that, lo and behold, I’ve also been drinking lots of ice tea. He then formulates yet another theory, based on “irrefutable” evidence that persistent ice tea intake (here you can substitute any of the many “explanations” offered for the “hiatus”) causes weight loss.

    So he writes a paper concluding that eating corn on the cob does indeed produce an underlying tendency toward weight gain, but that tendency is masked by the regular sipping of ice tea. He is so sure of his results that anyone doubting him is labeled as a “denier.” And everyone with a weight problem is urged to stop eating corn on the cob and drink lots of ice tea.

    Then, presto chango, one of his grad students “discovers” that, lo and behold, a crucial widget in his scale has been gradually eroding over time. And after the data has been corrected for that defect, it turns out that I’d been gaining weight after all. His professor gleefully accepts this correction as a vindication, conveniently forgetting one important thing: if the correction does indeed support his theory about corn on the cob, it clearly falsifies his theory about ice tea, because it reveals that my intake of ice tea had no effect one way or another on my weight.

    Which causes (or should cause) his colleagues to doubt his scientific integrity, since in retrospect it looks like the theory regarding ice tea was tacked on to the corn cob theory simply in order to make his results come out right. At this point he’d like very much to forget about the ice tea and concentrate on corn cobs, but it’s too late. The cat is out of the bag and he is revealed as having either manipulated his data or succumbed to the temptations of confirmation bias.

  7. Steve Fish @104,
    Of course, you could also have referred the troll to this graph (previously linked @51)(usually 2 clicks to ‘download your attachment’) which showed a 6½ year period when essentially global surface temperature showed no increase as they reacted to an earlier period of above-average warming – this using the latest GISTEMP data. And having done so, you could have asked the troll whether the situation would look any different using GISTEMP data prior to the inclusion of the Karl et al (2015) ammendments to SST.
    Having carried out that comparison, I can share with you the result (as per the new lower panel of the graphic now down the link). It made very little difference. The 6½ year period was the same length while the prior above-average warming was much more evident, in this circumstace off the graph (7 years ahead of the 1970-97 mean instead of 4 years ahead).

  8. 90 Barton Paul Levenson there are many ways to say the very same thing.

    Here’s another way to point out the logical flaws of Emissions Trading Schemes
    https://youtu.be/I7ewn29w-9I?t=41m27s

    Read that overhead slide Barton Paul, it was prepared by an American a PhD in Economics no less especially the last line: …. but doing little to induce technological shift away from old energy technologies.”

    No surprise to me, I have known this since ETS Cap’n’Trade was first proposed.

    However, I’m more blunt than the Economist is Barton Paul, rather than mere flaws in economic theory I call it the Big Con for the gullible and the stupid or too busy who are unable to handle complexity or contradiction in fields outside their field of expertise.

    Please don’t shoot me I am merely your humble messenger, and you’ll miss anyway. Either ‘talk to the hand’ or garner the courage to go argue with Philip Mirowski face to face.

    You cannot blame me for your own ignorance about economics and what’s really been going on for decades now. Well actually you can blame me, but you’re totally wasting your time going there. :-)

  9. 85 Victor, my apologies as I missed your reply comment. https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2017/01/there-was-no-pause/comment-page-2/#comment-669998

    If I didn’t know better, Thomas, I’d assume you were being facetious. Nice double-speak. Do you know what you said vs actually meant to say, or just can’t come out and say it straight? :-)

    Don’t assume Victor, I wasn’t being facetious at all. That’s your own misguided misinterpretation. You don’t know better.

    You’ve seen various film shots of car assembly plants right. And seen the preformed door panels that have been stamped out of a sheet of steel by an automated machine, yeah?

    Well imo you are the intellectual equivalent of a door panel. To me you’re an open book and really easy to read. I know you believe you’re really smart but you’re not. Though sometimes you are quite witty and you make me laugh often. Sorry Victor but my dance card is full. Try someone else who is less perceptive and aware, because they could do with the practice.

    Have fun mate. :-)

  10. #100:

    Then, suddenly, presto chango, based on new studies, the reliability of much of that data has been called into question

    or much more accurately (ha!):

    Then, suddenly, presto chango, based on new studies, the accuracy of much of that data has been called into question

    The improved accuracy does, of course, make little difference to how long it takes global warming to achieve statistical significance ( a few months maybe).

    This is the thing about the self-deluded like Victor. They delude themselves into thinking that the slightly lower accuracy of the previous version of the data (which makes no significant difference to the fact of global warming) means the data was previously “unreliable”. Oh gee “unreliable”, isn’t that horrible?

    Fools like to delude themselves by using beatup words like “unreliable”.

  11. Re Victor: 2 Feb 2017 at 12:29 AM , ~#106

    Oh Victor, you are priceless. I am a biomedical researcher and I can tell you with knowledge and conviction that your counter analogy is very, very funny. Here is the deal peanut, you actually have to know something about a scientific topic before you can make an intelligent critique. But, don’t let me discourage you because your humorous eructions greatly outweigh your non sequiturs. Steve

  12. 106 Victor says of others “or succumbed to the temptations of confirmation bias.”

    Something which is impossible for Victor to do, ever, given he’s been inoculated from such devious left wing viruses which has infected all climate scientists with default confirmation bias.

    All 30,000 of them and few hundred thousand other scientists and academics all over the world. But not our Victor, oh no, never Victor. He’s an unrecognized living and breathing totally self-aware genius LMFAO

    At least he’s ‘cute’ though. ;-)

  13. @93 Chris O’Neill says: “Don’t tell us you thought Ezequiel was using actual global temperature anomalies in his statistics lesson”

    Uhh. No, did you?

    Trying reading #1 post and my posts again. How did you think that? He used 1998 as ’10’. I was just added that adding an upward progression after that was misleading as temps went up and down.

    Try doing a maths 101 to get the drift……….

  14. Victor @106, ok your eating corn and iced tea analogy is quite clever, but you are quite deluded about a couple of things as follows.

    Climate scientists have actually always predicted occasional slow periods or pauses (about 10 years) in the temperature record, due to natural variation, specifically ocean and sunspot cycles.This is documented in the various IPCC reports etc.

    Climate scientists still acknowledge these slow periods and there will be more.

    The thing that has changed is we now know the slow period after 1998 was quite short, about 6 – 10 years depending on what data set you look at, NASA, HadCrut, etc. This pause was “not statistically significant” (basically it was weak and within expectations). A few scientists have said “there was no pause” and in my opinion this is a bad choice of words, but what they really mean is it’s not statistically significant.

    It also is known that oceans warmed more than realised, meaning the pause was even smaller than seemed at the time. Now scientists have always known its hard to exactly measure ocean temperatures, so none of this comes as a surprise or undermines science, or the credibility of data, or alters the essential nature of the warming trend over the last 100 years.

    Instead of trying to kneecap scientists all the time, appreciate they are rather intelligent, and do think about all the things you think they don’t think about, before reaching conclusions. Try to slow down, and consider the big picture, also the fine detail, and all the factors.

  16. V 106: According to a noted dietician, eating corn on the cob causes out of control weight gain. I regularly eat corn on the cob, yet there is no sign I’ve been gaining weight for the last 16 years (the “hiatus”). The dietician is embarrassed, since my results would appear to refute his theory.

    BPL: Neither you nor the dietician seem to have any grasp of a concept called “sample size.” Victor, will you for God’s sake crack an introductory statistics book? Statistics is NOT THAT HARD! The math is mostly nothing harder than algebra. You passed an algebra course once, didn’t you?

  17. Th 108: I call it the Big Con for the gullible and the stupid

    BPL: Of course you do. That’s your style of argument: calm, reasoned, only dealing with the facts.

    Th: You cannot blame me for your own ignorance about economics

    BPL: As an econ minor at Pitt, and an amateur macro researcher, my ignorance of economics is so much less than yours that you’re not really competent to evaluate it.

  18. #113:

    “Don’t tell us you thought Ezequiel was using actual global temperature anomalies in his statistics lesson”

    Uhh. No

    #24:

    You forgot the (-) negatives values around the years 2000, 2008, 2011.

    So tell us Titus, what was going through your brain when you wrote “2000, 2008, 2011” and what is it that was negative (-) in those years?

  19. #113:

    as temps went up and down

    Poor old Titus doesn’t understand what the word “anomalies” means in general. You can use any baseline you like and it is still “actual global temperature anomalies”. So I’ll ask Titus again in the hope that he now understands what “actual global temperature anomalies” means or can mean.

    Oh dear Titus, don’t tell us you thought Ezequiel was using actual global temperature anomalies in his statistics lesson. You are deluded if you did.

  21. Barton Paul Levinson, you seem to me to have a generally mainstream view of things on climate and economics, and I have no great argument with you in general terms.

    But regarding emissions trading schemes to reduce climate change. You promoted these somewhere above, and noted that the ets scheme to reduce sulphate emissions was quite successful, and you are quite right it was.

    However I’m not so sure emissions trading schemes for carbon have worked quite so well or are likely to work. Wikipedia has numerous articles on emissions trading schemes and plenty of reputable research listed, that is critical of how existing schemes have performed. Eg as below:

    “Research by Preston Teeter and Jorgen Sandberg has shown that the flexibility, and thus complexity, inherent in cap and trade schemes has resulted in a great deal of policy uncertainty surrounding these schemes. Such uncertainty has beset such schemes in Australia, Canada, China, the EU, India, Japan, New Zealand, and the US. As a result of this uncertainty, organizations have little incentive to innovate and comply, resulting in an ongoing battle of stakeholder contestation for the past two decades.[2]”

    It’s rather hard to find much independent research extolling the virtues of existing carbon based emissions trading schemes.

    I think emissions trading schemes are one of those ideas that works well in theory, or when described in a text book, but can run into intractable problems in “the real world”. For example the quote above clearly highlights some of the challenges.

    We also have this global carbon market where carbon agreements and credits can be traded. Again this is brilliant in theory and combines the virtues of a market and base line government limits, but we are trading things that in many cases originate in countries with less than optimal government or private sector institutions, so in other words we could be trading complete rubbish. By the time we work out if an ets has worked, it will take ages to evaluate this and untangle it. We don’t have the luxury of this time.

    The other problem with emissions trading schemes in carbon is they are set up by governments for the corporate sector, and are very complex agreements. Firstly this makes the public understandably suspicious, and I have seen this in my own country. Secondly the complexity of the process makes it easy for governments to follow agendas of accounting for these emissions units that might be very suspect, and we have seen specific evidence of this in my country. In other words ets schemes make it easy for governments to “cheat”.

    Thirdly the nature of these schemes makes it very easy for corporates to also bend the rules. Fourthly given the inherent nature of these schemes, it’s very hard to evaluate whether such schemes actually work.

    Now in theory these problems could be overcome, but we have to ask ourselves is this realistically going to happen? I would say no.

    Therefore carbon taxes may be a more workable alternative. They are certainly simpler. and despite the fact they are a tax, appear to gain some public support. A number of countries have them as you would probably know.

    Personally I think we should make fossil fuel companies leave fossil fuels in the ground, but I admit that would be ambitious policy and would give some politicians a heart attack.

  22. @118 Chris O’Neill says: “So tell us Titus, what was going through your brain when you wrote “2000, 2008, 2011”

    Okay Chris, please help me to answer this?

    The ‘Ezequiel’ method clearly states that the ‘1998 outlier’ is represented by the 10. “2000, 2008, 2011” are other ‘outliers’.

    Question for you: How are they, or how should they be represented?

  23. would give some politicians a heart attack.

    I don’t see a problem with that. Would kill two birds with one stone. Very economical and wouldn’t raise emissions one iota. :-)

  24. n 121: However I’m not so sure emissions trading schemes for carbon have worked quite so well or are likely to work.

    BPL: Maybe not, although they would surely work better than nothing at all. I prefer carbon taxes, myself.

  27. Wanted to alert you all to this. I don’t normally link to tabloids, but former NOAA/NCEI scientist John Bates just gave Daily Mail a bizarre interview.

    “A high-level whistleblower has told this newspaper that America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) breached its own rules on scientific integrity when it published the sensational but flawed report, aimed at making the maximum possible impact on world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015…

    In an exclusive interview, Dr Bates accused the lead author of the paper, Thomas Karl, who was until last year director of the NOAA section that produces climate data – the National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) – of ‘insisting on decisions and scientific choices that maximised warming and minimised documentation… in an effort to discredit the notion of a global warming pause, rushed so that he could time publication to influence national and international deliberations on climate policy’…

    Dr Bates said: ‘How ironic it is that there is now this idea that Trump is going to trash climate data, when key decisions were earlier taken by someone whose responsibility it was to maintain its integrity – and failed.’

    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-4192182/World-leaders-duped-manipulated-global-warming-data.html

    The House Science Committee is going nuts in a tweetstorm, starting here:
    https://twitter.com/HouseScience/status/828067589163249664

    Why is Dr. Bates publishing his concerns in a tabloid? That hardly seems credible.

  28. A new article today that suggests the IPO perhaps caused the ‘hiatus’ in global warming, and they specifically use the phrase “leading to a slowdown in global warming over about the last 15 years”.

    https://theconversation.com/meet-el-ninos-cranky-uncle-that-could-send-global-warming-into-hyperdrive-72360?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20February%206%202017%20-%2066904879&utm_content=Latest%20from%20The%20Conversation%20for%20February%206%202017%20-%2066904879+CID_10e1559b132f2a7be568eeed942acc24&utm_source=campaign_monitor&utm_term=Meet%20El%20Nios%20cranky%20uncle%20that%20could%20send%20global%20warming%20into%20hyperdrive

  30. Regarding the discussion of carbon policies, the Fee and Dividend (F&D) (aka Clean Energy Credit) policy is the way to go. There is a steadily rising price on the CO2 content of fossil fuels paid at the well, mine, or port of entry. 100% of the money collected is equally distributed to every legal resident. A border duty is put on products coming from countries without their own price on carbon.
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0k2-SzlDGko

    Most people make money on the deal because (1) wealthy people generate more CO2 than the average person and (2) governments generate about 30% of CO2 but don’t get a dividend.

    A similar program (for different reasons) was implemented in Alaska (the Alaska Permanent Fund) and the folks there love it.

    Besides the fact that it could get public support, F&D is the way to go because it is possible to get to a high carbon fee because the public makes more money with a higher fee. To dramatically reduce emissions, a high fee is necessary. Normal taxes and cap and trade won’t get us where we need to be.

  31. And Mr. KIA destroys any credibility he ever had as a skeptic. He is at best selectively gullible, willing to believe anything he reads in a rightwing rag.

  32. PC 126: Bad news, there is now a pause buster – BUSTER.

    BPL: Yeah, anti-science dupes are citing this all over the web. Do yourself a favor, Phil–crack a book on atmosphere physics and learn a little about the theory you’re criticizing.

  35. So…a link to somebody calling global warming a lie because of capitalism is a lie?

    The NOAA thing would have to be evaluated. That they went to a conservative tabloid in Britain is a bit strange. And even then, if we accept what they are saying it does not disprove the several studies that confirmed their results independently.

    Just having somebody scream a hoax is not enough to do anything other than cause political turmoil. They would need to show proof of manipulation other than statistical correction.

  36. #122:

    The ‘Ezequiel’ method clearly states that the ‘1998 outlier’ is represented by the 10. “2000, 2008, 2011” are other ‘outliers’.

    OK. So you did think Ezequiel was using or trying to use actual global temperature anomalies in his statistics lesson.

    And yet you answer:

    Uhh. No

    You have a great deal of difficulty making up your mind Titus. No wonder climate science is completely beyond your cognition.

  37. #121:

    Such uncertainty has beset such schemes in Australia

    Australia has never had an emissions trading scheme (for GHGs at least).

  38. @137 Chris O’Neill says: ‘You have a great deal of difficulty making up your mind Titus’

    Try reading again Chris.

    @113 Titus says: Chris….”Try reading #1 post and my posts again. How did you think that? He used 1998 as ’10’. I was just saying that adding an upward progression after that was misleading as temps went up and down”

    So my question for you again: How are they, or how should they be represented?
    If they are not represented then the method is misleading.
    You can agree or not. No need for ad-hominems

  41. #139

    OK so now you disown your #113:

    Uhh. No

    in response to my question: “Don’t tell us you thought Ezequiel was using actual global temperature anomalies in his statistics lesson” which to anyone with any intelligence at all realises I meant “Don’t tell us you thought Ezequiel was intending using actual global temperature anomalies in his statistics lesson”.

    I’ll spell it out for you Titus. Ezequiel was NOT, repeat NOT intending to use global temperature anomalies in his statistics lesson. Therefore he was NOT, repeat NOT being misleading.

    I’m not making Ad homs by the way. Your implication that I am is just another one of your bad arguments. You can refer to this to learn what an ad hom is.

  43. I have a simple, stupid question: why can’t we simply say that the oceans have so much heat capacity that any perturbation under 30 years in duration is meaningless with respect to climate change, and therefore talking about a hiatus in warming of duration 14 years is meaningless?

    Isn’t it rather like talking about a “hiatus in GDP growth” extending over a period of 3 days? Or a “hiatus in population growth lasting 3 hours”? Or a “hiatus in the measured rotation of the earth” lasting 2 nanoseconds?

  44. Chris Crawford, currently #144:
    For the general public, you’re quite right. For the general public, I would just use the averages for calendar decades, 1970-79, 1980-89, etc. The alleged hiatus becomes invisible, which proves that it either never happened or wasn’t big enough to matter. Case closed.
    The objective of the trolls and deniers is to muddy the waters with arcane and/or misleading statistics, so the general public is confused and misled. They are aided in this effort by the natural tendency of people to love haggling over details. Folks who don’t understand the details should just disregard them, but that’s a tough message to get across.

  46. Chris @144, the IPCC said in the past you need 30 years of data to be really certain we are altering the climate, to get beyond natural variability, (and we have this).

    So you would think we would need 30 years of a big slowdown to determine if it really is a “pause” as in something unpredicted and unusual. For some reason they say we can expect approximately 10 year slowdowns as a predictable occurrence. It seems a conservative or inconsistent view to me.

  48. @142

    1/. Chris O’Neil says: “Therefore he was NOT, repeat NOT being misleading”

    Titus says: Thanks for answering my question Chris, appreciate it. I guess the NOT, NOT’s mean ‘not’?:) Phew, that was hard.

    2/. Chris O’Neil says: “I’ll spell it out for you Titus. Ezequiel was NOT, repeat NOT intending to use global temperature anomalies”

    Titus says: We have already agreed on that!! It was symbolic/allegorical in talking about the ‘outlier 1998’ and showing an ‘increase’ as applied to the subject of the ‘pause’. I call that misleading. So we can agree to differ.

    That’s what a “poor, deluded, deprived, beyond cognition” Titus thinks.
    And on behalf of Chris to finish: “we can all thank Titus yet again for providing us with his never-ending supply of alternative “facts”

    Cheers Chris…………..

  49. #144:

    why can’t we simply say that the oceans have so much heat capacity that any perturbation under 30 years in duration is meaningless with respect to climate change

    IIRC, the most difficult part in which to get accuracy in a “climate” model is the oceans.

    So even if your modelling of the atmosphere itself with its radiation physics and feedbacks and everything else was perfect, you’re still not going to be able to accurately predict short term (15 years or so) trends because of what goes on in the oceans.

  50. #149 Titus:

    It was symbolic/allegorical in talking about the ‘outlier 1998’ and showing an ‘increase’ as applied to the subject of the ‘pause’.

    It was applied to the subject of a non-existent pause, not a ‘pause’.

    I call that misleading.

    OK just to make you happy Titus I will replace Ezequiel’s numbers in his statement to satisfy your obsession:

    A series like 1, 10, -2, -2, 5, 9, 9, 5, 13, 9 is increasing. 1998 being such an outlier is an artifact of …

    You can call that series misleading now. Just like some people think Mann’s 1999 hockey stick “misleads” them into believing the truth. When you’re self-delusional like global warming denialists Titus, you just can’t help yourself being “misled”.