Average global temperatures rose rapidly after the 1970s, but there has been little further warming over the most recent 10 to 15 years to 2013. So said the Met Office in a report about the ‘pause’ in global warming in 2013. But these days it’s ‘What pause?’ following two timely revisions of the Met Office HadCRUT temperature database, including the recent 14% boost revealed by the Daily Sceptic on Monday.
As the above graph shows, the December 2020 14% boost in recent temperatures in HadCRUT5 finally erased the inconvenient pause. An earlier revision to HadCRUT4 had started the work by removing a flatline trend and replacing it with some gentle warming.
Attempting to explain the pause when it was still around in 2013, the Met Office claimed that the additional heat from the continued rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide, “has been absorbed in the oceans”. There are of course constant heat exchanges between land, sea and air. Constructing a believable hypothesis that humans burning fossil fuel cause heat in the atmosphere, which suddenly decides to play temporary hide and seek in the oceans, was always a tall order. It was memorably given short shrift by the writer Clive James, who just before his death wrote: “When you tell people once too often that the missing extra heat is hiding in the ocean, they will switch over to watch Game of Thrones, where the dialogue is less ridiculous and all the threats come true.” He went on to add that the proponents of man-made climate catastrophe asked us for so many leaps of faith “they are bound to run out of credibility in the end”.
Much of the Met Office report refers to the outputs of climate models. Analysis of “simulated” natural variability suggests that “at least two periods with apparently zero trend for a decade would be expected on average every century”. As it turned out, this was a lousy forecast, even for a climate model. The pause ended under the influence of a powerful El Nino weather fluctuation soon after. Despite another large El Nino in 2019, it failed to interrupt another pause which to date has lasted over seven years.
Announcing its latest boost to global warming, the Met Office noted that HadCRUT5 was now “in line” with other datasets. This is true. NASA has also been updating its GISS database in similar fashion, removing the pause by warming up recent recordings. Changes over the record have been substantial with a range of 0.3C.
There is no doubt that extreme green zealotry runs through many scientific institutions. Commanding and controlling the economy through the Net Zero project is seen by these zealots as the last hope to save the world. These days, no scepticism or debate about the role of atmospheric CO2 can be tolerated. The science is “settled” – seemingly any tactics are justified for the greater good.
Peter Kalmus is a data scientist at NASA and was recently arrested outside the JP Morgan Chase building in Los Angeles during an Extinction Rebellion tantrum. Wearing a large XR badge, he raged: “I have been trying to warn you guys for so many decades that we are heading towards a fucking climate disaster… it’s got to stop, we are losing everything… we are seeing heat domes, people are drowning, wildfires are getting worse… it is going to take us to the brink of civilisational collapse.” He later described his experience in the Guardian, adding: “If everyone could see what I see coming, society would switch into climate emergency mode and end fossil fuels in just a few years.” In his view, it was no exaggeration to say that Chase and other banks “are contributing to murder and neocide through their fossil fuel finance”.
It is interesting how zealots such as Kalmus are focusing on bad weather events rather than the increasingly unreliable global warming motif, for their ‘end is nigh’ political messaging. Heat domes became fashionable last year in North America when it was discovered that some parts of the country are warmer than others during the summer. Wildfires provide plenty of scary headlines, not least when the National Interagency Fire Center (NIFC) – the keeper of all US wildfire figures for decades – removed all its data from before 1983.
As the graph above clearly shows, wildfires were far worse in the past. 1983 just happens to be the lowest point in the entire record from which a small recent rise can be seen. The data going back to 1926 is simple to compile – the number of fires and acreage affected. In the past, the NIFC noted that figures prior to 1983 may be revised as it “verifies historical data”. Last year it suddenly removed all the collations prior to 1983, stating that “there is no official data prior to 1983 posted on this site”. Is that what “verifying” means in climate emergency-word? Deleting?
Commenting on the move, the climate writer Anthony Watts noted: “This wholesale erasure of important public data stinks, but in today’s narrative control culture that wants to rid us of anything that might be inconvenient or doesn’t fit the ‘woke’ narrative, it isn’t surprising.”
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor
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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!