The August average temperature across global land and ocean surfaces was 1.58°F (0.88°C) above the 20th century average—the warmest August on record, surpassing the previous record by +0.16°F (+0.09°C). This was the sixth month in 2015 that has broken its monthly temperature record (February, March, May, June, July, and August).
The August globally-averaged land surface temperature was 2.05°F (1.14°C) above the 20thcentury average. This was the highest for August in the 1880–2015 record, besting the previous record set in 1998 by +0.23°F (+0.13°C). Record warmth was observed across much of South America and parts of Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and Asia.
An apparent lull in the recent rate of global warming that has been widely accepted as fact is actually an artifact arising from faulty statistical methods, an interdisciplinary team of Stanford scientists says.
The study, titled “Debunking the climate hiatus” and published online this week in the journal Climatic Change, is a comprehensive assessment of the purported slowdown, or hiatus, of global warming.
“We translated the various scientific claims and assertions that have been made about the hiatus and tested to see whether they stand up to rigorous statistical scrutiny,” said study lead author Bala Rajaratnam, an assistant professor of statistics and of Earth system science.
The finding calls into question the idea that global warming “stalled” or “paused” during the period between 1998 and 2013. Reconciling the hiatus was a major focus of the 2013 climate change assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
But we knew this, right?
The notion of a global warming pause, or “climate hiatus,” suggests that the rising of global surface temperatures has significantly slowed or even stopped during the past 15 years. The idea, which experts believe cropped up sometime in 2013, has been seized upon by many climate skeptics, but also has managed to cause unexpected controversy within the scientific community. Since then, a flurry of scientific studies have emerged attempting to explain why such a pause might be occurring, pointing to natural climatic factors such as volcanic eruptions or changes in oceanic patterns.
But in the past few months, a handful of scientists have taken a different approach by asking not why the hiatus is occurring, but whether it’s occurring at all. And two new studies, released within days of each other, are adding to the evidence that the pause may not exist.
By all means read the Post article – but one of the papers mentioned caught my eye in particular.
A “blind” expert test. This paper also includes a statistical analysis of global temperature data and concludes that “there have been 6 occasions since 1970 when a 15-year trend would have failed to reach significance.” The authors argue that each of these cases, including the most recent 15-year stretch, constitutes a mere fluctuation in a much larger overall warming trend, and that none of these fluctuations statistically alters the trend.
The paper also describes a separate experiment that lead author Stephan Lewandowsky, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Bristol, says is “the most exciting part.” The researchers subjected the idea of a warming pause to something called a blind expert test.
They presented the climate data to a group of 25 professional economists, but told them that the data represented world agricultural output, not temperature. They did this to prevent any personal biases the economists might have, essentially “dressing up the data as something different that doesn’t have any political or emotional connotations,” Lewandowsky says.
They then asked the economists whether a pause in output had occurred in the period after 1998. The experts rejected this idea, and some even agreed that such a statement was “fraudulent.”
just looking at the last graph, I’m seeing we’re already +1.4C above the pre-industrial mid 1800’s average. So in future discussions we need to be careful about what the baseline is. If we are going to move the goalposts up to “the 20th century average”, then the +2C meme will have to be adjusted substantially downward; and we’re not far away from it. People looking at +0.88C and having in their comparison +2C may give false sense of things.
I have to say that the Lewandowsky blind expert test was a stroke of genius.
Economist seem to have a bias on the whole toward climate science, since their own complicated field has so much noise in the system that it is also ripe for bias and cherry picking. They should try this in their own field.
It is generous of you to consider economics a “field”. I sometimes wonder if it is related to astrology, voodoo, or perhaps phrenology (the “science” that allows us to understand that the bumps on Russell Cook’s head that he hides with his baseball cap are proof of his mental and moral deficiencies).
I have just finished slogging through “What Are We Waiting For”, a very illuminating book by Nicholas Stern, a prominent and well-respected economist in the UK, and one who truly “gets it” with regard to AGW and the looming climate disaster. The book is very dense in places, and has some rather goofy and seemingly made-up formulas that do NOT equate to the formulas physicists use, but it is filled with excellent info and insights about the global economy, fossil fuel use, and climate change (albeit obscured by a lot of economic “voodoo-speak”).
Unfortunately, while Stern strongly warns us that we cannot continue on the present path, he has walked a very convoluted path through his formulas and insights, and seems to think that we CAN avoid disaster and STILL have growth and equity in the world IF 2,742 puzzle pieces (approximately) fall into place just so in the near future. The brightsiders will love it and cherry pick it to death
It’s rather interesting that the book was written after the events described here:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jan/27/nicholas-stern-climate-change-davos
I remember reading that the U.S. has averaged one financial crisis-panic-collapse-recession-depression about every five years since its founding. IMO, the “field” of economics has a long way to go.
PS I am still struggling to get through Piketty’s “CAPITAL In the Twenty-First Century”, a 580 page book with 80 pages of notes. Another economist who looks to have some great insights, but reading the book is both headache-inducing and soporific. Compares to The Origin of Species in that regard.
Origin is a lot more readable, I’d say. But most economists live in a world of models– truth is beyond the field’s limits, since economically rational agents are a fiction if ever there was one.
And if I fabricated global temperature data showing that the earth was cooling would it have any more credibility than those people fabricating data showing it is warming.
No! The only credible figure is the only one that is not subject to human adjustment and that is the satellites – which continue to show the pause is what you get when you don’t have the human adjustments.
Satellite temperatures are based on a very complex physical model and a set of assumptions about the radiative properties of certain molecules at various temperatures.
The team of John Christie and Roy Spencer who developed the University of Alabama at Huntsville data set, based on satellite measurements, are most famous for insisting over most of a decade that their dataset showed global cooling – a notion that they defended stubbornly over a number of years, until the overwhelming weight of evidence forced them to admit that they had been wrong, that they had made a number of errors, (including transposing a plus and a minus sign) – errors, that all “coincidentally” distorted the data in the direction of their preferred answer.
Nevertheless, they remain climate denier’s preferred “experts” on the subject.
If you “fabricated” global temperature data and published it in peer reviewed literature – the workings of the scientific method are such that researchers who were able to point out your errors or fabrications would be rewarded with increased status and reputation, and most likely higher position and salary. That’s how the system gradually wrings out errors and promotes human progress. Scientists who deliberately distort information do come along, but they are eventually found out. That’s how we have developed our technological society over the last 200 years.
Your assertion that satellite data is not “subject to human adjustment” indicates that you are not familiar with the scientific method, much less the satellite data sets, and you need to look into the topic a little more deeply.
If satellite data is “not subject to human adjustment”, as you claim, why then does the same raw data, from the same satellites, give two different temperature results when analyzed by two different teams of human beings?
Not to belabor the obvious on a site devoted to dealing with “climate denial crocks”, but it’s because the one set of human beings are rational and honest scientists who seek truth for the greater good of mankind, while the other set of Wetiko-possessed “human beings” are deceitful and dishonest lying POS’s who twist reality to fit their ideological agenda. Which agenda is of course driven by the fact that they are paid whores for the fossil fuel interests and the plutocracy. I speak of people like Scottish Denier, aka SSSS, who once again returns here to make all people of Scottish descent look bad (like my half-Scottish wife, who I may need to start beating if SSSS doesn’t go away).
No true Scotsman is a climate skeptic. 😉
Scottish Sceptic criticizing the credibility of climate scientists! Even The Borg can’t build an irony meter that can withstand such abuse.
The existence of the so-called “pause” has also been thoroughly debunked in Grant Foster’s excellent blog, Open Mind. Foster, a statistician who blogs under the nom-de-net “Tamino”, has taken on this topic several times over the last few years, with completely convincing results. If only the IPCC had read it before AR5, they might have saved themselves some embarrassment.
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2015/04/30/slowdown-skeptic/
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2014/12/04/a-pause-or-not-a-pause-that-is-the-question/
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/by-request/
This is something I’ve been pointing out for years, that the “hiatus” is an illusion or an error. During the supposed “pause”, so many records have been set for heat, humidity, ocean temps and ice melt on a global scale.
Just a cursory glance at the diff in the heat capacity of water vs air should have been enough for any true skeptic Scotsman to think “hmm, wait a min”
Yep, with the key word being “true”. Since SSSS is a FAKE “skeptic” (i.e., a flat out denier), he could stare at the data until his eyeballs dried up and fell out and would never see the truths that you point out. Most of us can “see” and accept them within the span of one or two “eye blinks”.