No Global Warming For 18 Years, 4 Months

When the “climategate” emails were revealed in 1998, a leading warmer scientist, Dr. Kevin Trenberth, said: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” He said in a 2014 UCAR publication, that he did not mean that quote the way everyone has taken it. Well, maybe. But he and 60 other warmer scientist have published theories trying to explain why there has been no statistically significant rise in the Global temperatures in 18 + years.

Here is what it looks like from a guest posting by Christopher Monckton, on WUWT website, titled “El Niño or ñot, the Pause lengthens again”.

Chart       RSS Satellite Monthly Global Mean Surface Temperature Anomaly

Monckton describes the chart as follows:

“The least-squares linear-regression trend on the RSS satellite monthly global mean surface temperature anomaly dataset shows no global warming for 18 years 4 months since December 1996. The hiatus period of 18 years 4 months, or 220 months, is the farthest back one can go in the RSS satellite temperature record and still show a sub-zero trend.”

Still a longer ranged temperature comparison shows that IPCC’s 1990 forecast of 2.8C per century forecast versus the actual measured temperature for that period of time is shown below.

Chart   1990 IPCC Forecast Versus Measured Temperature          1990 To Date

Monckton describes this chart as:

” Near-term projections of warming at a rate equivalent to 2.8 [1.9, 4.2] K/century, made with “substantial confidence” in IPCC (1990), for the 303 months January 1990 to March 2015 (orange region and red trend line), vs. observed anomalies (dark blue) and trend (bright blue) at less than 1.4 K/century equivalent, taken as the mean of the RSS and UAH satellite monthly mean lower-troposphere temperature anomalies.”

Monckton’s posting discusses atmospheric global warming further. You can read that by clicking here.

Because this posting opened with a notice of Dr. Trenberth, it is appropriate to discuss his theory that the oceans are taking up the heat that would otherwise warm up the atmosphere. Conceptually I find this difficult to comprehend.   At some point, it would seem, according to this theory, Gia (using the warmers sentient inanimate object) dictated that the heat would no longer raise the atmospheric temperature as it had been doing and decided to give the oceans a change to join in the fun. And further, the heat would go down into the deep ocean, some 2000 meters of ocean depth. Only Gia knows when it will be brought back to the surface and drive up the atmospheric temperature readings. Dr Roy Spencer, who I have great respect for, allowed this might be possible. However, Christopher Monckton contends that the data do not support Trenberth theory.

The Argothermographic buoys have been measuring ocean temperature for 11 years. Monckton says:

“Actually, it is not known whether the ocean is warming: each of the 3600 automated ARGO bathythermograph buoys somehow has to cover 200,000 cubic kilometres of ocean – a 100,000-square-mile box more than 316 km square and 2 km deep. Plainly, the results on the basis of a resolution that sparse (which, as Willis Eschenbach puts it, is approximately the equivalent of trying to take a single temperature and salinity profile taken at a single point in Lake Superior less than once a year) are not going to be a lot better than guesswork.”

Monckton charts the ocean temperature:

 Chart T5     Mean Ocean Temperatures

Monckton describes this chart:

“The ocean warming, if ARGO is right, is equivalent to just 0.02 Cº decade–1, or 0.2 Cº century–1 equivalent. The entire near-global ARGO 2 km ocean temperature dataset from January 2004 to December 2014 (black spline-curve), with the least-squares linear-regression trend calculated from the data by the author (green arrow).”

 How much heat would be stored based upon this temperature rise? Monckton says:

“The terrifying-sounding heat content change of 260 ZJ from 1970 to 2014 (Fig. T6) is equivalent to just 0.2 K/century of global warming. All those “Hiroshima bombs of heat” are a barely discernible pinprick. The ocean and its heat capacity are a lot bigger than some may realize.”

Chart T6 Global Ocean Heat Content

Monckton contests NOAA’a stated heat content of 260ZJ when he says:

” Converting the ocean heat content change back to temperature change reveals an interesting discrepancy between NOAA’s data and that of the ARGO system. Over the period of ARGO data, from 2004-2014, the NOAA data imply that the oceans are warming at 0.05 Cº decade–1, equivalent to 0.5 Cº century–1, or rather more than double the rate shown by ARGO.”

Christopher Monckton’s paper is 13 pages long. Too long for this blog, but you are encouraged to read it in its entirety.

cbdakota