A sensational science paper has blown holes in alarmist claims that global temperatures are surging. Just published results in Nature show “limited evidence” for a warming surge. “In most surface temperature time series, no change in the warming rate beyond the 1970s is detected despite the breaking record temperatures observed in 2023,” the paper says. Written by an international group of mathematicians and scientists, it is unlikely to be acknowledged in the mainstream media where general hysteria reigns over the anomalous 2023 experience. As we have seen, constant misinformation is published to scare the general public and this is exemplified by climate comedy-turn Jim ‘jail the deniers’ Dale forecasting almost daily Armageddon and exhorting people to “join up the dots”.
In science, one swallow does not make a summer and in climate science it is impossible to show a trend by picking on short periods or individual weather events. This paper is an excellent piece of climate science work since it takes the long statistical view and challenges the two-a penny clickbait alarmists looking for a headline on the BBC. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is a biased body but it understands the importance of long-term climate trends by stating, much to the chagrin of Net Zero-promoting activists, that it can find little or no human involvement in most extreme weather events either in the past or in the likely immediate future. But these findings, along with the paper on the warming trend, are inconvenient to those promoting the unproven claim that humans control the climate thermostat by utilising hydrocarbons.
The paper is highly technical and mathematically-inclined readers can study the full workings out in the open access publication. It notes that global temperature datasets fluctuate due to short-term variability and this often creates the appearance of surges and slowdowns in warming. It is important to consider random noise caused by natural variation when investigating the recent pauses in temperature and the more recent “alleged warming acceleration”, it adds. In fact there have been a number of plausible explanations given for the recent spike, with attention focused on the massive Hunga Tonga submarine volcano adding 13% extra water vapour to the stratosphere, a strong El Niño and even the reduction in atmospheric particulates caused by recent changes in shipping vessel fuel. Several “changepoints” were used by the mathematicians and it was found that “a warming surge could not be reliably detected any time after 1970”.
While the focus was on whether there had been a continued acceleration in the rate of global warming, it was recognised how unusual the surface temperature anomalies were in 2023. Indeed they were, and it was widely argued that this showed the climate was breaking down, or in the silly words of the UN chief Antonio Guterres that the planet was “boiling”. Last year’s hysterics were useful for short-term alarmism but they help destroy the ‘settled’ science around CO2. If human-caused CO2 is responsible for the rise, why did the temperature pause from 1998-2012 when atmospheric levels of the gas were on the up. Does alarmism on the BBC and most other mainstream media only apply when the temperatures spikes upwards for a few months?
One of the key conclusions in the paper arises from considering two time series – 1970-2023 and 2013-2023. This of course includes the early 1970s when global cooling fears were all the rage and average temperatures were falling. Estimated temperature trends were said to be 0.019°C per year for the first time segment and 0.029°C for the second that includes the spike from last year. This 0.029°C estimated slope “falls far short” of an increase needed to point to a change in the warming trend in the recent past. This is because of short-term variability in the U.K. Met Office HadCRUT global database since 1970 and “uncertainty” of the 2012 changepoint. This uncertainty arises over speculation as to whether 2012 and the ending of the pause was a year marking an important change in the longer time series. ”The HadCRUT record is simply not long enough for the surge to be statistically detectable at this time,” they note.
Cliff Mass is the Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Washington. He has a golden rule of weather extremes: “The more extreme a climate or weather record is, the greater the contribution of natural variability, and the smaller the contribution of human-caused global warming.”
The mathematicians used changepoint statistical techniques which were designed to identify structural changes over time. Four global mean surface temperature records over 1850-2023 were used including HadCRUT. This of course is problematic since there is substantial evidence that these datasets hype the warming trend by their careless treatment of urban heat corruptions – the fact that urban areas become warmer through ongoing development. In addition, substantial retrospective adjustments are made, often cooling the past and warming the near present to increase the ‘trend’. Despite writing copiously about the 1998-2012 ‘pause’, the Met Office has now removed it from its own record by adding 30% retrospective warming. Perhaps the Met Office need not have worried, with the mathematicians noting that the pause was “not unusual” given the level of short-term variability present in the data. But these datasets are the best we have and nobody doubts that the planet has warmed a small amount over the last 200 years since the lifting of the little ice age. For want of anything better, using these datasets for scientific analysis is fair, although it could be suggested that overall warming is probably less than suggested by this paper.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Good article. ‘Hide the expansion’. ‘Hide the Arctic is not doing much of anything when compared to historical data’.
So the recent cold spell is due to the melting Arctic which blah blah causes the changey thingy blah blah and makes it colder (please send money for further ‘research’).
Except the 1% global ice volume Arctic and Greenland Ice sheets (15%) are expanding or doing not much of anything if viewed historically. So how can a stable Arctic which is not melting cause cold snaps due to plant food as stated by the climate religion? And if the winter was mild like 2 winters ago then what is the answer?
The idiocy of the Klimat-tard cult boggles, along with their fascistic pursuit of money and power. No morality in the Gaia cults. $cience. Follow the Trillion$.
These tired old bones prefer warmth to cold. I do not consider it an improvement if the Arctic is getting colder. OK, sea level is still rising gently. If anyone complains that the sea will flood homes in 100 years, ask them how old their present dwelling is – invariably much less than that.
That’s also just nonsense. Large parts of the Netherlands and Belgium have been below sea-level ever since they came to be dry land at all due to human work (and pre-industrial technology) being put into making that happen. Where sea-levels are a problem, people build dikes. They’re common throughout all of the continental shore of the North Sea.
And yet………
Melting ice caps will enable China’s military forces to “reach into the Atlantic”, the Chief of the Defence Staff has warned.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2022/12/14/chinas-military-could-reach-atlantic-ice-caps-melt-warns-armed/
That’s good to know
. If we have time to worry about the Chinese navy once the polar ice caps have melted because of climate change, climate change in itself must be harmless.
Perhaps someone will tell some bloke called Radakin, chief of defence or the suchlike, with his alarmist statement the Chinese will be able to sail round the melting poles into the Atlantic. But then again just a bid for more defence spending to be blown on civil servants and undelivered projects
Probable a stupid question, but don’t the Chinese have nuclear powered submarines that can go under the ice?
Extrapolating 30 or 40 years of Arctic sea ice to try and explain 4 billion years of climate change on our planet is like looking at a bare patch of 1 square cm of my 5 acre farm, and calling it a desert, when it is actually an abundance of green.
The pushers of the climate con do not understand context, or else are truly corrupted by a financial motive (Al Gore et al).
Definitely the latter.
Motive is more about power and control, the financial element of course comes trotting after.
Another good trick is to adjust old temps down and new temps up, creating a scary slope. Then project to the moon.
https://realclimatescience.com/rewriting-the-climate-at-nasa/
I’m fairly certain this documentary from 2007 is the one I saw on channel 4 ( obv not BBC material! ) back in the day, and ever since then I’ve known that man-made global warming to be complete hogwash;
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTq8-hnDeyk&ab_channel=ClaudeStrobbe
It wasn’t that long ago The Coming Ice Age: With Leonard Nimoy was worrying over an imminent ice age and how we could potentially halt it with black soot on the ice sheets, and whatever their data back then concluded that ice age was still possible after the industrial revolution was well established (and that thing that causes all the [supposed] warming) so they know there are many [other] factors at play.
Now they’re warning of the complete opposite whilst ignoring all these other factors? Just goes to show the data can be presented to fit any hypothesis, from one extreme to another. Granted they were wrong back then, but that doesn’t mean the opposite is true now (unless of course an ice age is still on the cards). Their fraudulent data might support a warming planet, given that mini-mini ice age was used as a convenient baseline but that doesn’t make the warming (even if there genuinely was any) man made or anything outside the norms either. Why is that period considered normal and today’s not normal?
Thank god they didn’t cover the ice with black soot! Imagine the total catastrophe that would have been. Honestly, when are these people going to understand that we live on something infinitely more complex, interrelated, and balanced than we could ever imagine and that tinkering with its mechanisms is the one thing that will cause the problems we are trying to avert! Better by by far to live in this magnificent place, be a part of it as we already are, and learn to dance with its changes and adapt in a creative, harmonious way than trying to play god at every shadow that looms.
Thanks for all the data and reporting. We Greenland polar bears are especially thankful that the truth about the ice pack and the melting — hah! — of our glaciers is being told by someone in the media who is not engaged in climate propaganda. — Grandpa Polar Bear https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0BQ2B29GP
Spot on article. The fact that they hide the data is 100% correct and very sad. This website below used to be fantastic and had masses of historical surface area data about ice extent in both the Arctic and Antarctic, but now it only shows the daily satellite pictures (these seem to have stopped in Sept 2022) with no surface area data.
https://cryosphere.today
I know because I used to regularly monitor the site 20 years ago.
Confessions of a Computer Modeler
“Any model, including those predicting climate doom, can be tweaked to yield a desired result. I should know.”
After three iterations [of remodeling] I finally blurted out, “What number are you looking for?” He didn’t miss a beat: He told me that he needed to show $2 billion of benefits to get the program renewed.
I finally turned enough knobs to get the answer he wanted, and everyone was happy.
Was the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] official asking me to lie?
I have to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he believed in the value of continuing the program. (Congress ended the grants in 1990.)
Robert J. Caprara, “Confessions of a Computer Modeler,”
The Wall Street Journal, 9 July 2014
https://www.wsj.com/articles/confessions-of-a-computer-modeler-1404861351
.
“There is something fascinating about science. On gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact”——Mark Twain. ——-But in those days scientists were actually indulging in a genuine search for truth. It would be interesting to see a quote from Mr.Twain about today’s Government funded data adjusters and their genuine search for anything that seems to support public policy and ignores everything that doesn’t
Chris I think your headline is a bit unfair. If scientists were hiding the data we wouldn’t have it available to us. Its mainstream media where most of the problem lies because they refuse to accurately report on what is actually happening if it doesn’t support the crazy net zero agenda. There must be scientists who see what is really happening and who would love to report it on TV but are never given the opportunity. People like Attenborough have lost any credibility they had with anybody who does any research on climate and he has become no more than a purveyor of a lying pile of political propaganda. He is either too old or too stupid or working to a political agenda to report things accurately and he has unlimited use of our TV licence fees to do it on the BBC. While this is the case many people watch his extortionately funded programs full of inaccurate or distorted data and believe the rubbish he spouts. Surely there must be somewhere, a UK TV station to take this crap on and set the record straight.