Bishop Hill Deben admits the pause
Nov 13, 2014 Deben Readers may recall that when Matt Ridley mentioned the IPCC's recognition of the hiatus in surface temperature rises, Lord Deben responded by issuing a rebuttal on the website of the Committee on Climate Change in which he disputed that there was a pause. It was only a slowdown, he said:
IPCC has always showed and discussed charts of up-to-date global annual average temperature records. In 2007, at the time of the IPCC’s last assessment, discussion of a pause since 1998 would have been irrelevant as this is much too short a period to measure any meaningful climate trend. In the latest assessment, it notes that the trend since 1998 has been lower, but still cautions against interpreting this as being significant in terms of climate.
Now it seems, the noble Lord has finally had to back down, sneaking what I believe is his first public recognition of the pause into a column (£) he has written for the Times.
The hiatus in surface temperature rise is real, but misleading. Warming and acidification of the ocean continues; so does the rise in sea levels and the melting of mountain glaciers.
A slow learner, it seems.
Reader Comments (48)
What do you expect from someone who has no scientific qualifications whatsoever!
No scientific understanding of the science!
Financially connect to renewables!
A longtime believer in CAGW.
Also a man who uses Ad Hominem insults - associating skeptics with the tobacco industry and Jehovah Witnesses!
What a charming man!
A slow learner can never keep track of the lies he made in the past.
Perhaps the noble Lord might consider the possibility that the late 20th Century warming was also " real but misleading"
I think that's what is known in the trade as crapola.
So, temperatures have stopped rising but the warming continues. Sorry Lord Deben but it has to be one or the other, it can't be both.
Yes indeed, how can warming continue if warming has stopped?
Don't forget the deep oceans.
Glebekinvara
Now that would tax the noble Lord!
Tax the noble Lord?
Revolutionary thought.
I wonder does it ever occur to the noble Lord that the rise in surface temperatures was real, but misleading?
The Koolaid is now bitter and hard to swallow. Cough, cough.
Maybe sceptics should now change tack and agree that there is no pause at all, as there was not enough happening in the past to merit the use of the word pause.
Global Warming in a nutshell.
1. The earth is getting uncontrollably hotter. We're all going to die.
2. The earth is getting hotter. We're all going to die.
3. The earth is getting warmer. We're all going to die.
4. The earth might be getting warmer. We're all going to die.
5. The earth will get warmer in the future. We're all going to die.
6. The earth might get warmer in the future. We're all going to die.
7. The earth isn't getting any hotter. We're all going to die.
8. The earth isn't getting any hotter – and neither are the oceans. We're all going to die.
Oh, we give up.
9. The earth is cooling. We're all going to die.
Well sea level rise has not changed in any significant way. The implication that if slr is "happening" it must be due to CO2 is a red herring. Oceans are not "acidifying" and cannot do so, unless one creates new laws of chemistry. Perhaps in a few more years the good lord Debben will catch up with these tidbits as well.
Ah yes, the old 'oceans ate my heat excuse'.
How much have the oceans warmed?
well we like to talk in terms of increased heat content.
Why? Is that measured directly or is it inferred?
Well it is inferred but it allows us to write really big numbers with 23 zeros and show graphs going up!
OK. What sort of temperature change does that represent? Given that it is the temperature you have to measure...
Well, something of the order of 0.02C...
I see. And this is measured by ARGO buoys presumably?
Yes. We have 3500 of them in the ocean right now!
OK. So one ARGO buoy for every 300,000 cubic kilometers of ocean and they can measure the temperature of those 300,000km3 to an accuracy of 0.005C. Not bad!! (now please stop stealing oxygen)
There will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents...
@ CharmingQuark.
Many people who are following this debate with great interest have zero scientific qualifications - I'm one of them, but that doesn't prevent me from assessing known evidence from each side to draw my own conclusions. That Deben is scientifically qualified or not shouldn't excuse his wilful refusal to face uncomfortable facts, and certainly can't be used to justify his influential position when it's impacted by a clear conflict of financial interest.
Qualified or not, he has no excuse.
Cheshirered
In September 2012, Lord Deben was confirmed as Chairman of the UK's independent Committee on Climate Change
Lord Deben is a Government Adviser on climate change you are not, therefore his qualifications for the job are important
it is true that the oceans are a 1000 times larger energy reservoir than atmosphere so it always was a canard to draw conclusions from atmospheric data alone. who was pushing these lies for 25y hmmm?
if trapped heat in atmosphere is a driving cause for rising ocean energy content, has anyone ever proved this withsimple overall heat equations? it occurs to me unlikely that a 1.2 degree warmer atmosphere can heat the 1km deep oceans so fast. it can no doubt do so but likely will take 5000y for it. anyway this can be made clear with simple equations of the style hdh has done to prove Venus temp is entirely explained by its shorter distance to the sun and not by co2 angles* dancing on a pin
[*angels? TM}
@Cheshirered agreed, but hasn't Lord Deben profited through climate alarmism in his businessness interests ?
Chairman, Sancroft International Ltd, consultants in corporate responsibility and environmental, social and ethical issues
Chairman, Veolia , (various environmental projects, wind, recycling etc.)
Contract to supply a monthly column on property and sustainable development (with Reed Business Information previously Haymarket Publishing ),
member of Climate Change Bill Committee
The headline of this latest dim pronouncement from Deben in the Times is
" Thatcher was right to warn us about climate change"
"She would give short shrift to today’s merchants of negativity"
Is he really unaware that she completely changed her mind on this?
Re 'Ocean Acidification'
I see an awful lot of theoretical stuff telling me about all the pH changes people envisage. Modelling, simulations, scenarios and all the paraphernalia beloved of theoreticians. And of all the devastating consequences that will happen if it falls from 8.11 to 7.95..or whatever the scare story du jour might be....
But rarely have I seen any actual pH measurements that tell me this supposed effect is actually happening in practice. Way back when I trained as a chemist. And chemists are pretty practical 'Show Me' folks. Theory is great, but bench work and real data is much much better.
So couple of years ago I spent a few weeks looking for published measurements. And beyond a few hundred monthly measurements of dubious quality taken at Manua Loa and in Bermuda, the cupboard was bare.
This was a surprise and a concern.To 'prove' that the globe was warming in the 80s and early 90s took somewhere between 10 and 100 million temperature measurements from about 5,000 sites.
And yet the whole Ocean Acidification industry/scare seems to rest on fewer than a thousand data points in total taken at only two places.
I smell something fishy...and it is clearly not rotting fish made extinct by the change from slightly alkaline seawater to slightly less slightly alkaline seawater that exercises so many - with so little empirical evidence.
When pressed, the main handwringers and knickerwetters insist that there is indeed a mountain of such evidence. Somehow however, they are never able to direct me to it. It seems to be like the Holy Grail. Many believe it exists and has magical powers. But none can actually locate it.
Comments?
(If anyone wants to point me to further measurements I missed, I'd be very grateful. But please check they do actually exist before doing so. There are many review articles whose titles suggest that they are filled with great stuff. But in the end they all (IME) come back to the same two short lo-quality datasets)
I'd have said we were all about positivity. Surely the constant prediction of doom marks the real merchants of negativity. Did he even admit that BSE can actually transfer to humans, entirely against the consensus of scientific opinion at the time, or did that fall out of his unreliable memory banks too?
So - 'It may not be changing - but it must be getting worse anyway...'
Oh - perleeeease....
"The hiatus in surface temperature rise is real, but misleading."
So the global temperature record is misleading us on global warming? It must be in denial
I wonder if Lord Deben is aware that published paleoclimate research ( eg Grove, 1988) shows that mountain glaciers all over the world have melted completely away and re-grown several times in the last 10,000 years and that the majority of presently extant glaciers are less than 4000 years old. Glaciers melt and reform on very short geological timescales as of a result of changes in precipitation as of well as of temperature.
Moreover during the last 18 years or so the direct relationship between atmospheric CO2 concentration and temperatures has by observation deviated from that which was predicted by theory.
Feynman observed :- " If there is an exception to any rule and it can be proved by observation, that rule is wrong".
He also pointed out that:- " if there is something slightly wrong in the definition of theories then full mathematical rigour may convert these errors into ridiculous conclusions".
Both these observations would appear to be highly relevant to the hypothesis CO2 driven global warming as it is presented to us by " authorities " like Lord Deben who needs to be made aware of the limitations of his knowledge and expertise in the field of climatology
.One can only hope his knowledge in other areas is better than it is of climatology. It is a bit much to be receiving sermons on climate change from someone whose knowledge of it is effectively nil.
Latimer Alder:
This claims to be state of the art:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/10/claim-new-global-maps-detail-human-caused-ocean-acidification/
Of course the plateau should really have started in 1960 when the sunspot cycles stopped increasing but severe aerosol cooling from those nasty fossil fuels caused a downturn that was only reversed by the clean air act :)
//////////
http://cse.ssl.berkeley.edu/segwayed/lessons/sunspots/research4.html
"Do sunspots affect earth's climate?
From 1645 to 1715, there was a drastically reduced number of sunspots. This period of reduced solar activity, which was first noticed by G. Spörer, was later investigated by E.W. Maunder, is now called the Maunder Minimum.
That the same period of time was also unusually cold on Earth. Similar periods of low solar activity seem to have occurred during the Spörer Minimum (1420-1530), the Wolf Minimum (1280-1340), and the Oort minimum (1010-1050). This succession of low-temperature periods is now called the "Little Ice Age," and the corresponding pattern of extreme sunspot minima has led to speculation that sunspot activity may affect the earth's climate."
////////////////////
You will recognise the logic which sparked off the new ice age scare of the 70's and was later used by alarmists to explain away the temperature dip from 1945-1975. Making stuff up is easy but you don't get funded in academia until you pretend there is a problem, that it is going to get worse, and that it's all the fault of industry.
An interesting Twitter spat with Greenpeace:
https://twitter.com/lorddeben/status/532857481945686018
Is he really unaware that she completely changed her mind on this?
Nov 13, 2014 at 12:10 PM | Registered CommenterPaul Matthews
Can't put my hands on it at the moment but Margaret Thatcher commented in her autobiography how she concluded it was nonsense.
-----------------------------------
Remembered: It was in her book "Statecraft" and was a section titled "Hot air and global warming".
So CO2 continues to increase, but temperatures do not. That's OK though because the oceans are becoming slightly less alkaline?
And apparently it is sceptics that are "anti-science"!
WRT SLR. I posted WUWT the other day that I am attending a situation on a site where the sub-stratum rock has faulted causing a property to tilt towards the sea. I designed the foundations for the property several years ago now. After two inspections with a geotechnical engineer, I returned to my office & dug out my college geology book, "A Geology for Engineers", by Blyth & de'fraitas. Thumbing through the pages, largely on UK geology, I came across a little piece on iso-static rebound, & how Scotland was rebounding, & southern England was sinking. The rate of sinking? 2.3mm/year or 230mm per century! I was curious that this figure seemed to match coincidentally the very figure put forward by SLR expert Nils Axel Morner! Perhaps Lord Deben would like to read my book for himself? I think not, I do not offer swathes for taxpayer funding or grants for him to take an interest! ;-)
This morning I started writing a comment. The reply is now on Scottish Sceptic
My best estimate is the effect of the pause is to force estimates to drop from 1-3C of warming. I personally think these are still far far too high and so would confidently say that we are likely to see cooling over the next decade. If this happens, this will make the upper limit of possible predictions by reasonable people at around 0.6-2C with 3C being unlikely.
Only the UK would appoint to the post of Chairman of the Climate Change Committee someone quite as unfit for high office as the noble Lord Deben. If you think impartiality would be a pre-requisite, forget it. This is a man who describes himself as 'Climate Change Champion' in his Twitter bio, who has been known to call those that disagree with him 'deniers' and is on the record as saying climate change is a good excuse for world government.
We would be no worse off if the post was held by a mad cow.
It doesn't add up...
Thanks for the link. But like so much of the literature, it presents just a snapshot. To show that a process (the excruciatingly badly named 'acidification') is taking place, you have to present a series of measurements, not just one.
Example.The temperature in my back garden right now is 12C. This tells us nothing at all about any temperature trends.
Similarly, pH snapshots tells us nothing about pH trends.
Surely somebody somewhere must have measured it? If not then there's a lot of dodgy 'science' floating around under the OA banner.
Nov 13, 2014 at 11:03 AM | Stuck-Record
The second sentence in all 9 cases is correct, but we'll probably spread it out quite a lot. And most people provide replacements. It's the non sequiturs that annoy. :)
To show that a process (the excruciatingly badly named 'acidification') is taking place, you have to present a series of measurements, not just one. (Nov 13, 2014 at 4:43 PM | Latimer Alder)
It occurred to me once that Heisenberg's famous principle does not just apply to the quantum world. Wish it was generally appreciated.
H20: "Only the UK would appoint to the post of Chairman of the Climate Change Committee someone quite as unfit for high office as the noble Lord Deben. "
Especially as the biggest food safety scandal in the UK (BSE), occurred during his watch as Secretary (aka Idiot) of State at MAFF, and lead to the partial (but inept) 'restructuring' of said Ministry.
@Martin A Thanks for the heads up on Thatcher's change of opinion on Climate*
It is covered well by Climate Edinburgh in 2013 ..and By Booker in the Telegraph in 2010
..Bob Ward (The Climate Fraud) attempted a rebuttal in the Guardian in 2010 'Yeh, but yeh she got it off a lot of rightwing climate pamphets she'd been reading' I paraphrase
*(not that I really care, except to set the record straight)
It doesn't add up
Thanks for the Twitter link.
I particularly like the tweet (presumably referring to the departure of Glover): "we see this as a chance to strengthen the role of independent science in policy making".
Post-modernism at its best, I would guess.
"We don't need no stinkin' facts!"
People like Gummer know no shame. Give him time, in a few years when he is sitting on the board of a shale gas company he will deny ever being a warmist. When that happens, even rubbing his nose in internet preserved records will not draw an admission from him. I live in the lovely county of Suffolk and, like many of my fellow residents, wish Gummer would go and live elsewhere (To avoid a ticking off from his Holiness I changed the wording of that last sentence but I'm sure you all know what I meant).
Latimer, the essay Shell Games in Blowing Smoke contains some interesting ocean pH references of the sort younare seeking. Not just MLO over time, but concerning seasonal varability in various ocean biomes. Surprise, the variability is much greater than the about -0.15pH now predicted by AR5 under the worst scenarios. AR4 forgot the ocean's chemical buffering system.
@Rud too shy ? to put links to Rud Istvan's book and Rud Istvan's essay on Climate Etc
@Rud
Thanks for the reminder of your essay from last year. I see that I commented there as well.
But even your excellent piece about oysters presents no more actual data than the minor change at Manua Loa I mentioned before.
And you are right to say that AR4 forgot the ocean's chemical buffering system.
I spent some time over the summer crossing the Channel several times between Dieppe (France) and Newhaven (England). There are white (chalk) cliffs still present on both sides. F
From my memories of physical and inorganic chemistry, chalk is a superb buffer for 'acidification' The oceans ain't going to get acid until the chalk has gone. And there's a lot of chalk.
@Rud Istvan
Follow up
Rud - did you ever get to examine the Hawaii data in detail? They claim to have found a very small signal among what we know is likely a very noisy background. Or (by pure chance) Hawaii doesn't have the natural pH variations that we know to exist in many other marine environments.
I note also that the very precise (+/- 0.01) pH 'measurements' are presented without any indication of error bars or other uncertainties. And I can't find (maybe not looking hard enough) any description of their experimental method.
Can you - or anyone else - help? I'd like to understand these things better. Thanks.
Hi Latimer, like you, I'd seen very few actual measurements of ocean pH. But on the WUWT thread linked above, Ferdinand Engelbeen (November 11, 2014 at 2:48 am) posted this link:
http://www.tos.org/oceanography/archive/27-1_bates.pdf
It shows pH and other ocean chemistry measurements at seven stations dating back to the 1980s or 1990s. I've not looked at it in detail, but the seasonal variations in pH are clearly large (fig 2) compared to the average pH changes (fig 7). Some of the stations are only sampled a few times a year, so a lot of assumptions are made in correcting the data for seasonality. But it contains more actual data than I'd seen before.
It seems to me that ocean pH, like temperature and CO2 concentration, is something that is used to keep the mind from the man behind the curtain.
By taking measurements at a variety of places and a variety of times (and sampling possibly somewhere less than one-millionth of the world's oceans and atmosphere) we can produce an average figure which when analysed turns out to be a fraction of a degree or per cent or concentration and we are expected, on little or no evidence, to believe the change to be significant (in the layman's meaning of the word).
I can't help thinking that if our planetary system was so delicate a flower that it could not put up with a change from 14.4 to 15 degrees or 0.003% to 0.004% concentration of a gas or from 8.2 to 7.9 on a scale of 0-14 then the whole edifice would have collapsed long since.
But while we are navel-gazing (at the activists' behest) on these minutiae what are they up to that we are not paying attention to?
Just askin'.
Ruth, Latimer, on a cursory examination of the Bates paper, one interesting thing gets my attention. Much of the data is presented as anomalies where the available data has been squeezed into four annual seasons, and also as "observed" data (though some of these are just calculated from the other parameters). In many, if not most, cases the trends clearly differ. The observed data trend often appears very close to zero (they choose only to draw the trend lines for the anomalies!).
Interesting.
Some things have always puzzled me, one being why is a 20 to 25 year period "a trend" but an 18 to 19 year period not one? What makes 20 years "magic?" Another thing is why is it assumed that vertical mixing of the atmosphere causes temperature changes or shifts in ocean water can cause temperature changes, but difference in solar radiant energy, the source of those vertical changes or those water temperature changes, somehow is irrelevant? Why is it that as we slide towards a new ice age, we want to cut back on power generation and convert farm land from food production and turn it into "biofuel" production? Has someone introduced a new "aerosol" into the atmosphere that has somehow multiplied "stupid" and divided intelligence?