Tuesday
Oct272015
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Meehl bashes Karl
Oct 27, 2015 Climate: Surface The US CLIVAR project publishes a newsletter/cum journal, a recent issue of which was dedicated to the hiatus in global warming. Featuring papers from a variety of well-known climatologists, I was interested to see the headline article, from Gerald Meehl, which seems to take a fairly hefty pot-shot at the data tweaking approach adopted by many climatologists.
There have been recent claims that the early-2000s hiatus...was an artifact of problematic sea surface temperature (SST) data (Karl et al. 2015), lack of Arctic data (Cowtan and Way 2014), or both. Such claims indicate that when corrections are made to SST data, by taking into account various measurement methods that introduce biases in the data, then “there was no ‘hiatus’ in temperature rise...[and] a presumed pause in the rise of Earth’s average global surface temperature might never have happened” (Wendel 2015). Often there are issues with observed data that need adjusting - in this case such claims of “no hiatus” are artifacts of questionable interpretation of decadal timescale variability and externally forced response - not problems with the data. Thus, the hiatus is symptomatic of the much broader and very compelling problem of decadal timescale variability of the climate system.
Whether Meehl is any more correct than Karl is anyone's guess though.
Reader Comments (59)
The future of the global warming scam, now depends on adjusting historic records.
They really have given up on finding any evidence, to prove the theory. I don't think that adjusting the past will actually improve their ability to predict the future either.
The only certainty that currently exists in climate science, is job security. Remove that, and the science will change.
Michael Hart, noted and marked.
Plus, to Paleoclimate Buff - thank you for a very decent synopsis and I agree with every word....but we call it [the Eemian] the Ipswichian - same difference ;-) .............And not forgetting edmh - whose posts made some insightful and indeed thoughtful observations.
Paleoclimate buff,
The information you present was exactly what started my personal trip along the road to Damascus.
RusselI has more than demonstrated that his is neither capable of comprehending nor open minded enough to accept anything other than the vision that his addiction to the ironically labeled "Climate Change Kool Aid" presents to his blinkered views.
"Well, if Meehl concedes ignorance on what is responsible for multi decadal changes, then he has conceded ignorance on why global temperature today is warmer than it was half a century ago."
Well logically you might assume so but since he also writes this....
"It has long been known that long term trends (50 years or longer) in observed globally averaged surface air temperature reflect mainly increases in human-produced GHGs (e.g., Bindoff et al. 2013)."
Then clearly a bald assertion presented as fact is sufficient for him. Since the IPCC wrote that manmade warming was only detectable since 1950 (based on model assumptions of small & declining natural variation that hence could not cause any 'hiatus' or slowdown) and since solar reconstructions tell us that any departure from 'normal' can only be detected in 1980 (Solanki) or 1985 (Lockwood, Frohlich) then we know his assertion has no scientific base. Consensus science now seems to rely just on gut instinct (as von Storch and Andrew Dessler already admitted) or funding streams that depend on the problem existing in the first place.
I totally agree with Athelstan and with Mike Singleton and the best posts in this thread have been by edmh and paleoclimate buff ^.^
JamesG, I nearly commented on the exact same sentence. Meehl asserts "it has long been known", and then gives a (IPCC) reference dated in 2013 (!).
Did they first begin to assert this in 2013 and is that a "long" time ago? This is preposterous by either clause.
So is he referencing others who had already "long known" it in 2013? If they knew it around 1988 when the IPCC was formed that would still not strike me as a long time ago, and would also mean that the 50 year climate window would have to have started in the 1930's or earlier, which makes a mockery of any claim that human influences became evident in the second half of the 20th century.
I find his assertion to logically unsupportable, with a slovenly use of the English language to be the best excuse. We all do it, but this bunch would claim that their little newsletter cum journal represents the peer reviewed literature where standards should be higher.
A search of the whole PDF shows no mention of the satellite record, be it UAH or RSS.
That's a dead giveaway, a wonderful soundbite for public debate, about how the pause buster claims simply ignore space age data, don't even mention it, don't even try to explain it away or discount it. And that exposes them as scammers, straight up, where it matters, to a typical layperson voter, or to a skeptical politician looking for an attack vector that can't be ridiculed, something that can only be dishonestly denied.
I'll note that candidate Trump is the only one outright calling out climatology as the "hoax" that it currently is. Normal scientists don't ignore their best data. Physicists have even invented dark matter to cope with their best data seemingly falsifying their theories, and that's good science since they accept the mismatch instead of ignore it altogether! These climate "scientists" have willfully ignored, outright, satellite data, and that's just crazy, and that is thus quite sinister. These are evil men, to the core.
Remember, Grant Foster turned the Central England series into a hockey stick relying on a pure data smoothing artifact, another example of willful dishonesty by an author included in the PDF:
http://s1.postimg.org/9luuxrqm7/TAMINO_FINAL_FINAL_FINAL_FINAL.gif
Nik
Welcome :)
I think you will find that Ted Cruz (Texas) is pretty hot on dishing it out to the alarmists hehe.
What Meehl as well as the others all ignore is the fact that there was another hiatus in the eighties and nineties that completely stopped all warming from 1979 to 1997. I discovered it in 2008 while doing research for my book "What Warming?" In satellite records of the time there was a clear indication of a stoppage of warming from 1979 ti 1997, an 18 year stretch. But when I went to cross check with official records it turned out that they had disappeared this hiatus and were showing a fake warming called "late twentieth century warming" in its place. Thanks to a reader I have proof that NASA knew about this lack of warming in 1997 but went ahead with their false warming scheme anyway. It is important to know that the boss of NASA climate studies then was James Hansen himself. As the over-all supervisor he should bear at least some responsibility for temperature data coming out of his lab. I quickly discovered that the source of that fake warming came from HadCRUT3 and even put a warning about it into the preface of my book. But nothing happened. 18 years later they are still boldly showing that same fake warming as part of the official temperature curve. It is clearly designed to increase the urgency by showing that more warming took place than actually happened. Later I realized that GISS (from NASA) and NCDC (from NOAA) were co-conspirators with HadCRUT3 in the falsification scheme. All three had their temperature data processed by the same computer which left its footprints on all three of their publicly available temperature curves. Any articles published about the hiatus that do not take account of the existence of this former hiatus in the eighties and nineties are simply invalid because they are using a falsified temperature curve. These must all be withdrawn, whether the authors knew about the fakery or not . This applies specifically to Karl et al. To talk about any possible causes of the current hiatus while ignoring an earlier hiatus in its close proximity simply invalidates a whole cluster of anti-hiatus papers, Karl's included. If you are going to write about the current hiatus now you must come out with an explanation that applies to both of these hiatuses, not just to one in isolation. The existence of the former hiatus was never a secret - it was published as figure 15 in my book that has been out since 2010. Ignoring it is a sign of poor scholarship - not being aquainted with technical literature in your field - simply because you failed to do your homework. Or worse, an attitude that you know it all and are entitled to ignore any upstarts. That is simply stupidity and irresponsibility in high places. I have brought this situation up in numerous comments from time to time, but nothing again has happened. It is impossible for me to believe that they have not run across thyese comments because they all look through Anthony's blog as well as yours to see what is said about them. And by now it is pretty obvious that they have decided to stubbornly stick to their falsified temperature history, thinking, no doubt, that having gotten away this long guarantees their future immunity. I suggest that all of this should be put out ande discussed openly before the big conference in Paris gets going. Right now that falsified temperature curve is a perfect tool to milk the conferees out of more billions of dollars to stop a non-existent warming.