Bishop Hill Two new papers on surface temperatures
Nov 3, 2011 Climate: Surface Horst-Joachim Lüdecke (who is involved with EIKE, the German sceptic group) emails about two new papers he has on surface temperatures. He tells me that these contradict BEST.
The first is in the International Journal of Modern Physics and is entitled "How Natural is the Recent Centennial Warming? An Analysis of 2249 Surface Temperature Records".
Abstract. We evaluate to what extent the temperature rise in the past 100 years was a trend or a natural fluctuation and analyze 2249 worldwide monthly temperature records from GISS (NASA) with the 100-year period covering 1906-2005 and the two 50-year periods from 1906 to 1955 and 1956 to 2005. No global records are applied. The data document a strong urban heat island eff ect (UHI) and a warming with increasing station elevation. For the period 1906-2005, we evaluate a global warming of 0.58°C as the mean for all records. This decreases to 0.41°C if restricted to stations with a population of less than 1000 and below 800 meter above sea level. About a quarter of all the records for the 100-year period show a fall in temperatures. Our hypothesis for the analysis is - as generally in the papers concerned with long-term persistence of temperature records - that the observed temperature records are a combination of long-term correlated records with an additional trend, which is caused for instance by anthropogenic CO2, the UHI or other forcings. We apply the detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) and evaluate Hurst exponents between 0.6 and 0.65 for the majority of stations, which is in excellent agreement with the literature and use a method only recently published, which is based on DFA, synthetic records and Monte Carlo simulation. As a result, the probabilities that the observed temperature series are natural have values roughly between 40% and 90%, depending on the stations characteristics and the periods considered. 'Natural' means that we do not have within a defi ned con fidence interval a defi nitely positive anthropogenic contribution and, therefore, only a marginal anthropogenic contribution can not be excluded.
There is also an Arxiv paper called "Long-Term Instrumental and Reconstructed Temperature Records Contradict Anthropogenic Global Warming".
Abstract. Monthly instrumental temperature records from 5 stations in the northern hemisphere are analyzed, each of which is local and well over 200 years in length, as well as two reconstructed long-range yearly records - from a stalagmite and from tree rings that are about 2000 years long. In the instrumental records, the steepest 100-year temperature fall happened in the 19th century and the steepest rise in the 20th century, both events being of about the same magnitude. Evaluation by the detrended fluctuation analysis (DFA) yields Hurst exponents that are in good agreement with the literature. DFA, Monte Carlo simulations, and synthetic records reveal that both 100-year events have too small probabilities to be natural fluctuations and, therefore, were caused by external trends. In contrast to this, the reconstructed records show stronger 100-year rises and falls as quite common during the last 2000 years. Consequently, their DFA evaluation reveals far greater Hurst exponents. These results contradict the hypothesis of an unusual (anthropogenic) global warming during the 20th century. The cause of the diff erent Hurst exponents for the instrumental and the reconstructed temperature records is not known. As a hypothesis, the sun's magnetic fi eld, which is correlated with sunspot numbers, is put forward as an explanation. The long-term low-frequency fluctuations in sunspot numbers are not detectable by the DFA in the monthly instrumental records, resulting in the common low Hurst exponents. The same does not hold true for the 2000-year-long reconstructed records, which explains both their higher Hurst exponents and the higher probabilities of strong 100-year temperature fluctuations. A long-term synthetic record that embodies the reconstructed sunspot number fluctuations includes the di erent Hurst exponents of both the instrumental and the reconstructed records and, therefore, corroborates the conjecture.
Reader Comments (48)
Let the smearing begin.
What's a "dened condence interval" (end of first abstract) - anybody?
missing FI twice - deFIned conFIdence?
"...de ned con dence interval a de nitely positive..."
Appear to be a few "f"s missing in the last sentence of the first abstract.
Must learn to type "aster".
The ff, fi mystery explained (I worked my way through university in the reading room of a newspaper):
Proper typesetting uses special fonts for these characters, otherwise the spacing is all wrong. Most word-processing software can't handle the quirks of that were design for hot metal linotype machines, so you get various errors in cutting and pasting from formally set type into word-processing.
(I'm getting all nostalgic for the grime of hot type, galley proofs, compositors and lots of black ink! When newspapers were truly dark satanic mills).
oops: 'of that were design'. Send back for reset!:
'those which were designed for'
I think the "fi" is represented with a ligature in the original text (that is, a typesetting character that represents, in this case, the "f" and the "i" joined together; there will be no dot over the "i", this beinf amalgamated with the stroke avross the "f"); and since this character is not present in the computer font used at some point in the transition from typeset text to webpage, it has simply dropped out...
Cut n paste drops the FI's;
...'Natural' means that we do not have within a dEFi ned conFI dence interval a deFIinitely positive anthropogenic contribution and, therefore, only a marginal anthropogenic contribution can not be excluded.
inger trouble?
Do they conclude that any anthropogenic contribution is marginal or is not marginal? Clear as mud to my reading.
What both papers are arguing is that within the instrumental record stretching back some 100-200 years there is no definitive AGW signature.
We know there is no definitive AGW signature in the troposphere and there is no definitive AGW signature in the oceans.
AGW remains illusive in the empirical data.
nger trouble you mean - there xed!
Note that Lüdecke et al. are finding strong evidence of “long-range dependency”—i.e. the effects of the climate this year (or this decade, or this century) tend to persist far longer into the future that has usually been assumed in climatology. The authors are thus providing good support for the mechanisms deduced, from general thermodynamical principles, by Demetris Koutsoyiannis, as discussed here:
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2011/6/6/koutsoyiannis-2011.html
A new mandatory reading item, this time from the New York Times in the latest example of (massive) scientific fraud:
(If this doesn't kill Mann's attempts to avoid FOI, I don't know what will)
The ormat was ucked.
Lost ligatures now fixed - cutting and pasting from PDFs often does this - I thought I'd picked them all up but clearly missed a few.
Real science at work , the 'Team' must to spitting blood over this .
As a proof reader, sometime typesetter, and fully paid up pedant, may I say that what I hanker for is a little bit of proof-reading by some of my fellow-posters. I know we all get it wrong sometimes especially (I find) on a laptop — it's an ailment I've heard referred to as 'dyslexic fingers', with apologies to any dyslexics who may take exception to the term — but "Preview Post" and a quick scan through what you've written will usually sort it.
Or copy and paste from Word after you've run a spell check.
Note how our friend Gobfrey Shrdlu (whom Aynsley will have met if he had dealings with hot metal) is still busy screwing up where it will do the most damage and cause the most embarrassment — in this case to Aynsley himself and then to agn!!
@Mac
Illusive (false) or elusive (difficult to find)?
On the actual topic of this thread, I'll be interested to see what the reaction of the Climate Establishment is to these papers. Also to the IBUKU satellite findings if they're found to be correct.
It seems to me there has been a constant trickle over recent months of research which casts doubt on the extent to which CO2 is responsible for recent warming. This ought not to undermine the science very much since there has always been at least some debate around the question of positive vs negative feedback but it is in danger of shooting a very big hole in the alarmists' arguments since their whole rationale is based on the need to cut CO2 emissions for all the reasons which we all know about.
If evil humanity is not in reality to blame for this fairly minuscule warming and the threat of global catastrophe is only a myth, will we then be allowed to get on with the important things in life like making some honest attempt to make the world a better place not, as the enviro-nuts would like, a considerably worse one.
SA
Illusive (false - illusory, an illusion)
That is why the authors have proposed a link with sun activity.
They seek it here
they seek it there
that damned elusive (AGW) signature
That missing 'hot spot'
would' ve stopped the rot
but but then we got
the ' wind shear ' lot
Then again we see
Travesty Trenberth
and the missing OHC
Oh what more mirth
will there be?
More data needed
funding to be seeded
alarms not well heeded
IPCC has not succeeded
Uncertainty reigns
Oh how it pains
to see such reason
out of season
Bless the Bishop Hill
for giving us our fill
of Matt Ridley's like
instead of Mike
and all his Team
so we can dream
of a future clime
with CO2 no crime
Aw shucks
this sucks
I hear you say
give it up and go away!
Mike J
I would agree, but I’m as guilty as the rest. The problem is that the great talent of Gobfrey Shrdlu (or his IT equivalent) is the concealment of the mistake until the Send/Post/Submit button is pressed.
I’m composing this off-line with Rough Draft, a neat little editor that usually saves the bigger embarrassments, but I won’t be surprised if the letters appear in the wrong order later.
An Edit button would be good, though...
@Maurizio
Here's another take on the 'academic' referred to in your link:
http://velvetgloveironfist.blogspot.com/2011/11/good-news-story.html
Worrying that this single case already represents more than the number of cases of academic fraud within the entirety of UK academia.
Colour me sceptic, but I find it very hard to believe that out of the tens (more likely hundreds) of thousands of academics in the UK, not one of them has done anything fraudulent, a situation which would mark them as being very different to every other profession.
@ SSAT
They're pussyfooting around saying it might not be humans, for the same reason Soviet officials pussyfooted around saying Comrade Stalin might be wrong about something.
Orwell withers this style of writing brilliantly in Politics and the English Language.
@ Mike Jackson
I'll be interested to see what the reaction of the Climate Establishment is to these papers
Denial.
Can I just say I hugely admired your work with Quincy Jones.
Oi, SteveW, stop dropping them hints.
While CO2 is a ghg, it is not, despite what Lacis and Trenberth and Mann and etc. wish, THE control knob.
Good reviews of the data demonstrate that well: Nothing much is happening in the temperature record, just like nothing much is happening in the weather, slr, oceans pH, etc., etc. etc. etc.
Nothing makes a true believer cling harder and shout their faith more loudly than ambiguity.
The real monster in the great climate war is not, with all respect to Dr. Curry, the Uncertainty Monster.
It is, as was pointed by TomFP on a recent thread at Dr. Curry's, the Certainty Monster we need to beware of.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/11/02/notes-from-the-santa-fe-conference/#comment-132259
@ Mike
Further thought.
If evil humanity is not in reality to blame for this fairly minuscule warming and the threat of global catastrophe is only a myth, will we then be allowed to get on with the important things in life
In a word, no.
The advantage of CO2 to governments is that it facilitates the creation of a new instance of that type of tax that will never go away, cannot be avoided by changing your behaviours, and can be blamed on the unpaid collectors of it.
The model is tax on petrol. About £0.80 of the price of a £1.35 litre of diesel is tax, and of the £0.55 that's not tax, about £0.50 is raw material cost - the cost of buying and moving to a refinery the crude oil that made the diesel.
The other £0.05 of the pump price is what Shell / BP / Esso charges you to pipe the diesel to a terminal, load it on a truck, and deliver it to a filling station near you. The terminal, truck and filling station are all paid for out of the £0.05 too, as are the wages of everyone involved. In fact they all cost more than £0.05, and filling stations make up the deficit by flogging newspapers, sweets and coffee.
Despite the fact that the oil company's gross revenue is 3.6% of the pump price, it remains commonplace for people to shriek about greedy oil companies every time the tax on petrol goes up. In fact the biggest profiteer on retail fuel is the government, which makes about twice as much money in tax off fuel as Saudi Arabia or Russia makes selling us their oil in the first place. This is without considering corporation and the many other taxes levied against the oil companies' profits.
This did not, of course, stop Gordon Broon going to "Soddy" Arabia in 2008 to demand that they reduce their slice of the action so he could carry on collecting twice as much money off oil as they do.
With no significant changes, the above is the exact model by which government plans to screw us on CO2. Companies that make things will be told to emit ever-less CO2 doing so. They will not be able to do so for the most part, so instead they will have to buy a carbon indulgence and add the cost to the price of whatever it is they sell. These carbon indulgences are wished into being by national governments, who auction them off and simply keep all the money. They cost nothing to generate and you get nothing in return for the tax you have paid except handwavey promises about a better climate in a hundred years' time. Fantastic!
Meanwhile, the price of everything inflates, energy egregiously so but everything else as well. Chris Huhne has already started the ball rolling by blaming power companies for the price increases caused by green subsidies, and by suggesting that consumers shop around to find a power supply that's less greedy. None exists of course, because it is Huhne's fault the price is going up, because the governments of the world have finally lit on a reason and a "scientific consensus" to tax air.
So the model is already being enacted - tax widgets, keep the money, then blame widget manufacturers for the higher price of widgets, and consumers for paying those prices and not "shopping around".
The science, such as it is, is utterly irrelevant. Seriously, it's utterly, utterly, beside the point. Once the taxes are in places, it will be argued that they can't be repealed because we'd have to close schoolzanospitals. The long-forgotten and nugatory justification for the tax could not matter less, and in fact I think we are now more or less there.
Income tax was invented in the Napoleonic Wars to pay for the Napoleonic Wars, yet oddly enough we still have it, essentially for just this reason.
J4R
I take it more that English is not the first language of the authors and is therefore suffering from translation and modern science-speak. However I read it I now get that if there is any anthropogenic contribution at all, it is marginal. Being neither a catastrophist nor lukewarmer, I find this result important, not because it counter-claims mainstream CAGW/AGW theory but relegates it to the quiet backwater from whence it came. With missing heat no longer to be found in land, sea or air, I look forward to reducing fuel bills while various come-uppances unfold.
"Income tax was invented in the Napoleonic Wars to pay for the Napoleonic Wars"
And I believe was set at 10%. As Ken Dodd ventured, he thought it still was...
J4R
I would not dispute a single word of what you say though with one caveat. If the entire premise on which the taxing of "carbon emissions" (please let us use the words 'carbon dioxide' at every stage; we must not let government weasel their way out by hiding behind the wrong description) is based turns out to be a fallacy then governments will be very hard-pressed to justify continuing either with the tax or the principle of reducing said "carbon emissions".
We will all need to be vigilant, however, because we already know that if the CO2 monster is slain, the enviro-mentalists will have other — equally fallacious but equally plausible — cards tucked up their sleeves with which to ease our passage back to the 17th century where they would wish us all to be.
We may even be reduced in the short term to standing outside the DECC offices and making sure we turn away all the little lobbying gnomes from FoE and Greenpeace and WWF and the rent-seekers from E-ON and EDF and all the other energy firms that have bought their way into UK energy supply because we are a bunch of mugs.
PS Here in France the Michael Jackson joke is wearing a bit thin. Even the French customs officers can't resist and you know how much sense of humour customs officers have. Watch out or I shall get out my wax models and pins!
Mike J @ 11:57,
Surely you are referring to that oft quoted and referenced prolific author, second only to Anon, the much missed Etaoin Shrdlu?
After Linotypes became rare, I believe he underwent retraining and enjoyed a brief resurgence in popularity as a test customer in ecommerce stores, during the dot-com boom of the nineties.
Mike J
>governments will be very hard-pressed to justify continuing either with the tax or the principle of reducing said "carbon emissions"
Unfortunately, I think that their notion of justification is rather different from ours. The ratchet principle still works far too well... :-(
Proving that Co2 (anthropogenic or otherwise) is not causing current warming (IF indeed there is any) is very important. It might not change petrol tax but it would make possible shale gas power stations and coal fired powers stations. We could then start a new scrap metal boom by taking down all the wind farms plus ignore nuclear power. All this as well as assuring that we will not need to imprt energy.
Dang it! The Bish has stolen my o.
Maybe it should have been "ensuring" sorry again Mike :(
Chuckles
Gobfrey is the father, Etaoin is the son by his Welsh wife Cmfwyp.
Ask any Linotype operator.
James P
Under normal circumstances I would agree but I wonder if politicians have invested so much of their credibility in this that if it does turn out to be a scam the backlash will be such that they have to find another way to raise taxes.
The climatologists are in the same boat which is why it puzzles me that they have committed themselves to the extent they have.
Scenario: CO2 is found to have only a marginal influence on temperature: governments are forced to backtrack on renewable energy which is known to be inefficient and expensive compared with gas/coal: further research suggests that some combination of emissions has the potential to cause some other threat to mankind's well-being: who's going to believe them?
Ah, yes of course Mike J, thanks for the run down.
:)
Patrick, I was just thinking about that seconds before I saw your parody! The disconnect between the insistence that evidence for AGW keeps getting stronger while high profile scientists like Trenberth and Hansen are scrabbling around trying to explain why AGW isn't occuring as predicted is quite profound.
The following is just published in the online Letters section of The Economist.
Good, better, BEST
the data will not rest,
such torture they' ve endured
by now we are inured
to trends suspicious
and stats judicious
with variance diverging
from reality emerging
past is present haunting
uncertainties are daunting
hypotheses not tested
truth cannot be wrested
from the likes of IPCC
ARGO data from the sea
are troublesome it seems
as to what it means?
satellites not tree rings
will give us soundings
of clouds and aerosols
Well bless our souls!
the feedback's critical
to hacks political
with pretexts ever flimsy
to tax us at their whimsy
those hypotheses astounding
are always so resounding
in all our ears
for years and years
Oh why, oh why
they all cry
cannot he resist
he truly must desist
from silly verse
so terse and worse
the sentiments ill considered
time and efforts frittered
yet more appended
until he' s suspended
mercifully this is ended.
These two papers seek to add to the increasing corpus that diminishes the significance of sensitivity concerns.
Look forward to a vigorous critical discourse on them.
I appreciated D. J. Keenan's perspective.
John
100 years of data is not nearly enough to recognize "natural variation". During this same interglacial period it's been colder and it's been warmer. Try using 1000 years. I suspect everything but UHI would be identified as natural variation. If good data isn't available, then go to grosser figures, such as Vostock data and go for several hundred thousand years.
@ GoFigure
I had a brief e-mail exchange with Horst Lüdecke, including sending him the following.
Horst replied that this “confirms our caveats”.
Your idea about using long-dated ice-core data is interesting, but then we would have to consider Milankovitch effects, which could be quite tricky.
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I hope the full article fully justifies this restriction of the records. It could be interpreted as cherrypicking.
Similarly, it would be interesting to know how they chose their 2249 sites. With different sites worldwide showing a range of changes from +4C to -0.5C over the century, it would be possible for an author with an agenda to produce a wide range of outcomes by selective use of data.