Groucho Marx once quipped: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them… well I have others.” Welcome to the world of global temperature setting and climate modelling where changes, no doubt for sound scientific reasons, almost invariably promote the Net Zero agenda. On Monday, the Daily Sceptic disclosed that the fifth revision to the Met Office’s HadCRUT temperature database boosted recent global warming by 14%. In fact, this was just the latest uplift in the HadCRUT series
In 2013, the slight cooling from 1998 to 2012 was transformed to a 0.04°C warming, a figure that subsequently found its way into the fifth 2013 IPCC assessment report.
The graph above, published in the climate science website No Tricks Zone, shows the change from HadCRUT3 to HadCRUT4. Overnight, a temperature flatline became a gently rising trend. At the time, many climate alarmists were worried about the pause in global temperatures that set in from around 1998. The carbon dioxide scare was becoming a potent weapon in the drive to introduce a control and command economy characterised by an agenda now called Net Zero. Scientists have spent decades trying to prove a constant link between CO2 emissions and temperatures, but to no avail. In the absence of actual proof, climate models guess that doubling CO2 in the atmosphere will lead to a rise of up to 6°C. As a result, their forecasts have long lost any semblance of reality in an era when global warming has run out of steam.
HadCRUT is a joint venture between the U.K. Met Office and the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. The latter of course was at the centre of the 2009 Climategate scandal, when a large leak of internal documents cast interesting light on some of the methods used to produce the IPCC ‘hockey stick’ graph. This graph accentuated recent warming by abolishing the substantial rises seen in the mediaeval warming period and the cooling of the little ice age.
In a paper published last month, a group of academics led by Meng Wei from the First Institute of Oceanography in Qingdao, examined the results of numerous versions of land, sea and merged temperature databases. They were said to “consistently show that the global surface temperature somewhat plateaus in 1998-2012 after the strong warming surge in 1975-97”.
Let us now look at what happened to that pause in the latest HadCRUT revision. As can be seen in the graph below, the pause was still slightly evident in HadCRUT4, but it is now no longer with us. HadCRUT5 added about 0.1°C to the record of the last 20 years and the pause has been quietly airbrushed from the historical record. The graph also shows the cooling of around 0.1°C applied before 1974, which has the effect of accentuating the ‘hockey stick’ effect of recent warming.
Announcing the fifth revision in 2020, the Met Office said HadCRUT5 was now “in line” with other datasets, adding: “the four years 2015 to 2018 are the warmest in the series… which runs from 1850 to 2018.” News that perhaps doesn’t come as a great surprise given the helpful 14% boost to the figures. As we also noted on Monday, the U.S. database run for NASA by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has also undergone considerable recent revisions. As with HadCRUT, these have cooled the past until the 1970s and warmed the latest recordings. Changes in temperature at GISS have been substantial with a range of 0.3°C.
One place where the pause is still with us is the highly accurate satellite record.
Between 1998 and 2012 there is clearly no increase in the global temperature. And as we have noted in a number of recent articles, the Earth is currently in another pause, this time lasting around 90 months. There are spikes from the mid-1990s caused by the powerful weather fluctuations starting in the tropical Pacific and known as El Nino and La Nina. The large upward spike in 1995 was caused by one of the largest El Ninos on record. Similar El Nino spikes are seen in 2009, 2016 (also very powerful) and 2019. Downward pushes are often caused by the effect of La Ninas.
It might be concluded that the awkward temperature pauses are the elephants in the room, so far as Net Zero activists are concerned.
But as Groucho Marx said: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pyjamas. How he got in my pyjamas, I’ll never know.”
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
Par for the course from a load of professional arse-sitters, spouters and generalised planet savers, educated in subjects specialising in the latest fashionable drivel.
Incapable of doing a real job, a serious day’s work or understanding the principles of physics.
Keep up the good work, Mr Pile. In the long run, physics will prevail over fallacy and folly. Just a matter of when.
Reading your comment Art, it just occurred to me that Rayner is emblematic of the malaise afflicting our ‘governing’ party. Your three points in order: 1. She isn’t educated at all. 2.She’s never tried a ‘real job’ having been steeped in Trade Union lore prior to local government, then politics. 3.I doubt she could spell physics. ‘Room for improvement.’ as her end of term report might read would be a colossal understatement.
Ms Nobrayner is a bit of an outlier among the spouting classes. Having said that, anecdotally the two working people currently re-roofing our house have worked it all out for themselves. Work doesn’t get much more real, or educational, than being up on a roof at 8.15 in a cold, frosty February sunrise.
Been there, got the tee-shirt. Re-roofed our 8m x 5m barn in Yorkshire 40 years ago. Nothing like jumping in at the deep end. Never again!
I am not convinced it has much to do with understanding of physics. I know little about physics. There are useful idiots who find comfort in the religion of signalling their virtue, and there are others who just want to lord it over everybody and have cottoned on to “climate change” (or “pandemics”) as a good way to do that.
You know more about physics than you give yourself credit for. Less about O- and A-levels, more about grasping reality. Most career politicians don’t get that – witness Miliband (who has a physics A-level…).
Agreed on motivations – in my experience, one half of people revel in telling the other half what to do. The other half just wants both halves to work it out for themselves. Controllers vs responders, chalk and cheese mindsets.
Each to their own, live and let live. You see what you see, I see what I see, best we can do is each say what we’ve seen and discuss from there.
Some people seem to want to be told what to do.
As far as physics goes, I think it’s a case of doublethink or “there’s none so deaf as those that refuse to listen”.
Oh, I expect you’re right for too many of the people too much of the time. Bring up Feynman and Popper and watch eyes glaze over. Cue Dietrich Boenhoeffer on stupidity…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc
“…Against stupidity we are defenceless. The stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental.”
I don’t think using the word “stupidity” in that way is overly useful. I think most people understand “stupid” in the sense of being intellectually challenged, inarticulate, incapable of higher order reasoning. If “stupid” people “go on the attack” then they are malicious. I know malicious stupid people and highly moral ones.
Let’s not get too hung up on a single word. I’m assuming Boenhoeffer used it in good faith in the circumstance of the time he was up against.
I’m sure he was wiser and certainly more courageous than I am.
We’re now fully in the grip of a socialist, central planning regime.
It’s been advancing for 100 years but now all the major and essential elements of our economy are for all intents and purposes centrally planned.
The remaining pockets of free market are in small enterprises. Sandwich shops, bits of the tech industry, basically the scraps.
Indeed. If memory of O-level history serves right, all those canals, railways and Victorian sewers had little to do with the governments of the time, and everything to do with men with spades and civil engineers of genius.
Credit where credit’s due, government did rule the waves, abolish slavery and foster civil engineering on foreign soil (but gets little historic thanks for it from present day arse-sitting and spouting classes).
Basically all the bits that are being forced out of business by the blob/govt.
You could mage an argument that the last 50 years or so of history have all been ‘about oil’. As one philosopher proposed ‘things’ change into their opposites over time… so perhaps the current history being formed is about ‘fake oil’. Oil you don’t extract and use to fuel (pun) the economy and standard of living.
Can we borrow Elon Musk
What happens in America never stays in America.
A large number of exceptionally fat backsides in the climate change/green energy taxpayer rip off business will be emaciated shadows of their former selves by 2015….
Bring it on.
Government Hates Wealth Creation
This one does – but of course they do, because they are socialists.
Socialism leads to denial of reality, poverty, economic collapse, totalitarianism, famine and death. History abounds with examples.
Socialism. Always. Fails.
“Labour’s manifesto promise to “create new high-quality jobs, working with business and trade unions, as we manage the transition””
Do governments create jobs? Don’t “jobs” arise because people want their needs fulfilled? Didn’t people do work thousands of years before we had “governments”?
Government create non-jobs that the private sector won’t because they see no value in them. The secret of the success of Donald and Elon is that they are successful businessmen and understand value for money. Governments can destroy jobs and 100 days on from the worst budget in history from probably our worst Chancellor this one is doing just that. With inflation about to rise again after the brief blip in December, the Bank of England has been forced to gamble in reducing the interest rate to prop up the failing economy. I see far too much optimism in rate reductions for this year. And don’t expect to see your mortgage rate come down as they are driven by 10 year bond rates.
100%
Yesterday is a good illustration of the variability of renewable power. At the start of the day wind was producing 14GW, by the following midnight it had dropped to just 4GW. Try coping for that sort of variation without reliable, dispatchable energy
January is obviously a critcal month in UK. The percentage graph from Gridwatch shows nuclear as grey, gas as dull orange and wind as pale blue.
PS You can see how pathetic solar is by the little flashes of yellow where the sun broke through.
It’s worth mentioning that the chart is %age of power generated. The nuclear power generated does not peak each night – it continues at the same level of power but represents a larger percentage because less is generated/required overnight.
On the other hand, solar…
Right now CCGT (gas turbines) contributing 54.46% towards our 42.91 GW demand today in spite of a glorious clear sunny February day in East Yorkshire (solar 6.43%).
Only slightly on topic, I fell about laughing this morning watching the article about vegan pets on GBNews. The woman from PETA (not British by the way), said that vegan foods for dogs is readily available, nutritious and reduces your dog’s carbon footprint. She then held up a tin consisting mainly of jack fruit. This comes from tropical countries, so massive food miles and carbon footprint and costs about £3.00 per 400g tin. Pedigree chum costs £1.00 per tin. What planet do these idiots come from?
You’re so right. And did you see the item on dog meat ‘made in the lab’ (for the lab??) guaranteed to reduce your dog’s carbon footprint!