Climate Change

BOM Caught Out Hyping Results Again

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Cyclone Marcie was a terrible storm. It has been reported as “Cat-5” which is the top of the cyclone/ hurricane scale.

The devastation, though widespread has not been as severe as you might have been expected.

The BOM was forecasting that the cyclone would become Cat-5 and of course the media ran with that, but in the event, as far as we can measure these things it made landfall as a Cat-3.

So it the BOM doing to cyclones what it has been doing to temperature records? Are they being re-categorised to march the global warming mantra of “more extreme weather”?

Of course if we believe that Rockhampton and Yeppoon survived a Cat-5 and it was only really a Cat-3 will that lead to relaxed building standards and complacency that could be fatal when a real Cat-5 storm comes.

Sigh! I used to be a real fan of science untll it became just another propaganda vehicle.

From Jo Nova:

Category Five storms aren’t what they used to be

The facts on Cyclone Maria: the top sustained wind speed was 156 km and the strongest gust 208 km/hr. These were recorded on Middle Percy Island in the direct path before it hit land and apparently rapidly slowed.  The minimum pressure recorded after landfall was 975Hpa. BOM and the media reported a “Cat-5″ cyclone with winds of 295 km/hr. To qualify as a Cat 5, windspeeds need be over 280km/hr. The UN GDACS alerts page estimated the cyclone as a Cat 3.

The damage toll so far is no deaths (the most important thing), but 1,500 houses were damaged and 100 families left homeless. It was a compact storm, meaning windspeeds drop away quickly with every kilometer from the eye, so the maps and locations of the storm and the instruments matter. See the maps below — the eye did pass over some met-sites, but made landfall on an unpopulated beach with no wind instruments. It slowed quickly thereafter. The 295 km/hr wind speed was repeated on media all over the world, but how was it measured? Not with any anemometer apparently — it was modeled. If the BOM is describing a Cat 2 or 3 as a “Cat 5″, that’s a pretty serious allegation. Is the weather bureau “homogenising” wind speeds between stations?

What will happen when Australians living in cyclone areas have to prepare for real Cat 5s? How much respect will Australians have for the BOM (and the ABC) if they find out that supposedly dispassionate and impartial scientists have been hyping weather events to score political points? Will the BOM issue any clarifications and corrections?

What does a Cat 5 mean anymore?

The headlines are still calling Marcia a “Cat 5″ cyclone three days later. But today there are many questions about that, and very different debates have broken out on the old media and the new. On the mainstream media, Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk is already defending the BOM after the Marcia “surprise”. But she is talking about the sudden escalation of a Cat 1 or 2 up to a 5, and whether the BOM gave residents enough warning. On the Internet people are asking why it was called a Cat 5. As Jennifer Marohasy points out, the top speeds recorded showed the cyclone was a Category 3. “Middle Percy” was under the path, and out to sea.

There is a weather station on Middle Percy, and it recorded a top wind speed of 156 km/h, the strongest gust was 208 km/h, and the lowest central pressure was 972 hPa. This raw observational data is available at the Bureau’s website and indicates a category 3 cyclone.

As commenters unmentionable and Ken recorded here, none of the observed wind-speeds came remotely close to being Cat 5. By strange coincidence, two guest authors here, Ken Stewart and TonyfromOz, live north of Rockhampton and both “walked in the eye” last Friday. I’ve spoken to both this morning, and fortunately their houses and families are OK, though still without electricity.

The US Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Centre was tracking the cyclone and, like me, noted the surface observations from Middle Percy Island. The US Navy had been estimating wind speeds based on the Dvorak modelling method. This method is considered much less reliable than aircraft reconnaissance, with surface observations (from anemometers and barometers) historically the ultimate measure of a tropical cyclone’s wind speed and central pressure. For example, in the case of Cyclone Yasi, a barograph at Tully sugar mill recorded a minimum central pressure of just 929 hPa, and this is the value in the final report from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology confirming that Yasi was a category 5 system.

In the case of Marcia, the US Navy acknowledged that their Dvorak estimates were higher than the surface observations from Middle Percy Island. In particular their real time “warning”, no longer available on the internet, noted an “intensity of 110 knots” based on the anemometer on Middle Percy. This corresponds with the highest wind gust recorded on Middle Percy Island as Marcia passed over. The maximum sustained wind speed, however, never exceeded 156 km/h, and the central pressure was never less than 972 hPa. This makes Marcia a category 3 based on the Australian system, and only a category 2 based on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale.

Yet the bureau continued to report the cyclone, not as it was, based on the surface observations, but as they had forecast it in a media release the previous day: “Tropical Cyclone Marcia to reach Category 5 system at landfall”.

Full story here

Maybe the BOM isn’t that interested in climate

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From Jo Nova

The mysterious BOM disinterest in hot historic Australian Stevenson screen temperatures

When it comes to our rare high-quality historic records, and the real long term trends of Australian weather, the silence is striking. There are some excellent historical records of long term temperature data from the late 1800s in Australia, which lie underused and largely ignored by the BOM.

For the BOM, history almost appears to start in 1910, yet the modern type of Stevenson screen thermometer was installed across Australia starting as early as 1884 in Adelaide. Most stations in Queensland were converted as long ago as 1889 and in South Australia by 1892. Though states like NSW and Victoria were delayed until 1908.

Here’s a photo of the ones in Brisbane in 1890.

Brisbane was recording temperatures with modern Stevenson screens in 1890, as were some other stations, but the BOM often ignores these long records.

The BOM don’t often mention all their older temperature data. They argue that all the recordings then were not taken with standardized equipment. The BOM prefers to start long term graphs and trends from 1910 (except when they start in 1950 or 1970, or 1993).

The BOM was set up in 1908.  Before that there were Stevenson screens going in all over Australia, but somehow these records appear uninteresting to climate researchers. Could it be that the late 1800s would have been more captivating if they were colder? In the late 1800′s there was the widespread heatwave of 1896 killing hundreds of people and recording 50C plus temperatures across the continent as well as the infamous Federation Drought?

Figure that if the BOM were curious about long term natural trends, it would not be impossible for a PhD student to compare the distant past and estimate those long trends. (If two stands of trees in 1200AD are accurate to 0.1C, why not actual, but non-standard thermometers in 1890?)

Not only were some stations using Stevenson screens in Australia, but other types of non-standard but common screens were documented, along with sites, and there were studies of overlapping data. (Though there were also some highly irregular sites that would defy analysis). More to the point, with millions in government grants available for research, the BOM could even recreate some historic sites and do modern side-by-side comparisons. Surely in the space age we can figure out the temperature differences of wooden boxes?

Suppose for a moment that the old records showed cool summers, or demonstrated that Australia had warmed by two degrees instead of one? Wouldn’t there rather be a flood of papers adjusting and homogenising Glaishers and Stevensons, and perhaps even sheds and octagons? Whole new museums could spring forth, recreating sacred meteorology stations from 1862. School children would file by and gasp!

The British CRU (University of East Anglia) reports Australian trends from 1850

Jennifer Marohasy wonders where the CRU got the data that the BOM don’t want to use. She has beenwriting about the Stevenson screens and  asking the Australian BOM questions like this and more. Warwick Hughes has been analyzing these old records even longer.  His paper in 1995 provoked the Neville Nicholls reply of 1996 (which is used to create the map below).

Above, the year that Nicholls 1996 describes “most” stations as being shifted to Stevenson screens.

There were a few late exceptions to these dates.

Although there were many sites, especially in NSW and Victoria that didn’t get Stevenson screens until sometime in 1907,  vast areas of Australia in WA,  Queensland and South Australia have accurate older data. When   “hottest” ever records for these states are announced, why are the older high quality measurements almost invisible?

Full article here

Jo Nova- Enough Money Wasted on Renewables to Give Everyone Clean Water

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Jo Nova reports that Europe alone has wasted more than 100 Billion Euro on mismanagement of renewable energy- that is just in terms of where wind farms and solar plants are located, ignoring the huge subsidies and innate inefficiencies, or the excess price over traditional power sources. The estimated cost to give everyone in the world safe drinking water is only 30 billion Euros.

A bonfire of waste: $100 billion burnt by big-government renewables mismanagement

 

Renewables, are not just inefficient, unnecessary, and deadly to wildlife, but they were also a disaster of planning and management. The list of dollars and euros destroyed in the Glorious Renewables Quest has gone “nuclear”. The World Economic Forum estimates $100 billion Euro has been wasted, but its even worse than it looks. I had to read their opening sentence twice. I thought it read “European countries could have saved approximately $100 billion if each country had invested in the most efficient energy source.” I was thinking they could have saved that sort of money by using coal instead of windmills… but no, those huge savings would be over and above those ones. The WEF is talking about money saved if “badly managed renewables, had been “well managed ones”.

The inefficiency here is the scale only big-government could achieve.

The Energy Collective

Europe Loses Billions in Badly Sited Renewable Power Plants

European countries could have saved approximately $100 billion if each country had invested in the most efficient capacity given their renewable energy resources, that is, by installing wind turbines in windier countries and solar power plants in sunnier places.

But why would we be surprised?

The people who pushed renewables onto Europe were never doing it for pragmatic or practical reasons. The numbers never made sense on any level — not for electricity-made, not for global “cooling”, nor species saved, nor jobs created.  The numbers didn’t work for “energy independence” and they certainly didn’t add up to a profit.

Since the point wasn’t about electricity, or the environment, it didn’t really matter if the solar panels were not in sunny spots, and the wind towers were not in windy places. If those things mattered, the Greens would have been apoplectic at this waste. How many children could have got access to clean water instead?All of them. WHO estimates the cost of clean water globally at $30b.

The sticker shock of the odd 100b has worn off, but we’re talking of one hundred thousand million dollars.

The WEF are a pro-renewables lot too. They want renewables to work.

The $100b figure was not surprisingly, not in the executive summary, but on page 14.

 For example, it is obvious to most European citizens that southern Europe has the lion’s share of the solar irradiation while northern Europe has the wind.

But the EU’s investment in renewables does not reflect this: where Spain has about 65% more solar irradiation than Germany (1750 vs 1050 kWh/m2), Germany installed about 600% more solar PV capacity (33 GW vs 5 GW). In contrast, whereas Spain has less wind than countries in the north, it has still installed 23 GW of wind capacity.

Such suboptimal deployment of resources is estimated to have cost the EU approximately $100 billion more than if each country in the EU had invested in the most efficient capacity given its renewable resources. And by looking across borders for the optimum deployment of renewable
resources (with associated physical interconnections), the EU could have saved a further $40 billion.

And if the EU had coordinated across boundaries (isn’t that what the EU is for) they could have saved another $40b on top of that.

 

Everywhere Hit Hardest by Climate Change

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You know climate change must be real when everywhere is supposedly the hardest hit by those hundredths of a degree temperature changes. It’s a bit like cancer being caused by everything.

From Jo Nova:

Climate change will hit “Everywhere” harder than “rest of world”

The Prophets of Doom are still at  The Guardian (and the CSIRO)

Climate change will hit Australia harder than rest of world, study shows

The first paragraph contains the word “could”. It’s all a guess based on models they already know are broken:

Australia could be on track for a temperature rise of more than 5C by the end of the century, outstripping the rate of warming experienced by the rest of the world, unless drastic action is taken to slash greenhouse gas emissions, according to the most comprehensive analysis ever produced of the country’s future climate.

But wait, will Australia — a rich, low population country with a temperate climate and surrounded by ocean — really be hit harder than the polar regions, the poor, those closest to rising seas and those living in cyclone zones?

A new website called ClimateChangePredictions is keeping track of the “hardest hit” predictions and can’t find a consensus on this one:

“Rural Australians will be the hardest hitby climate change according to Professor Steve Vanderheiden from the Charles Sturt University (CSU)”

“Sydney’s urban areas to be hit hardest by global warming” — ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Sytem Science

“Climate change is faster and more severe in the Arctic than in most of the rest of the world”

There seems to be consensus in the developed world that Africa will be the hardest hit or most affected region, due to anthropogenic climate change.

Bangladesh is one of the hardest hit nations by the impacts of climate change.

“Maldives is the most at-risk country in South Asia from climate change impacts”

“…climate change is likely to have the strongest impact on Scandinavian countries such as Denmark, Norway and Sweden”

“Bulgaria, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece are the countries that would be worst affected by global warming, according to a European Union report.”

China’s Poor Farmers Hit Hardest by Climate Change.

Middle East, African Countries to Be Hardest Hit by Climate Change

The environment organization Germanwatch compiled a climate risk index. At the top of the 2011 ranking is Thailand.

Vietnam is likely to be among the countries hardest hit by climate change…

So the real question is, where won’t be “hit hardest” by climate change (apart from Tasmania). Can anyone find a headline saying “Climate Change will benefit ______ region?”

Hottest Year Ever! Probably Not.

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You won’t hear this on the ABC, but NASA now admits that 2014 probably was not the hottest year ever and we are only talking about hundredths of a degree, well inside the margins of error (how accurately can you read a thermometer? And if you add thousands of thermometers around the world to get an average, how accurate is that going to be?)

 

Jo Nova writes: 

Gavin Schmidt now admits NASA are only 38% sure 2014 was the hottest year

I said the vaguest scientists in the world lie by omission, and it’s what they don’t say that gives them away. The “hottest ever” press release didn’t tell us how much hotter the hottest year supposedly was, nor how big the error bars were. David Rose of the Daily Mail pinned down Gavin Schmidt of NASA GISS to ask a few questions that bloggers and voters want answered but almost no other journalist seems to want to ask.

Finally…

Nasa climate scientists: We said 2014 was the warmest year on record… but we’re only 38% sure we were right

Nasa admits this means it is far from certain that 2014 set a record at all 

Does that mean 97% of climate experts are 62% sure they are wrong?*

The thing with half-truths is that they generate a glorious fog, but it has no substance. Ask the spin-cloud of a couple of sensible questions and the narrative collapses. This is the kind of analysis that would have stopped the rot 25 years ago if most news outlets had investigative reporters instead of science communicators trained to “raise awareness”. (The media IS the problem). If there was a David-Rose-type in most major dailies, man-made global warming would never have got off the ground.

The claim made headlines around the world, but yesterday it emerged that GISS’s analysis – based on readings from more than 3,000 measuring stations worldwide – is subject to a margin of error. Nasa admits this means it is far from certain that 2014 set a record at all.

Yet the Nasa press release failed to mention this, as well as the fact that the alleged ‘record’ amounted to an increase over 2010, the previous ‘warmest year’, of just two-hundredths of a degree – or 0.02C.

The margin of error is about a tenth of a degree, so those error bars are 500% larger than the amount pushed in headlines all over the world. Gavin Schmidt of course, is horrified that millions of people may have been mislead:

GISS’s director Gavin Schmidt has now admitted Nasa thinks the likelihood that 2014 was the warmest year since 1880 is just 38 per cent. However, when asked by this newspaper whether he regretted that the news release did not mention this, he did not respond.

I’m sure he’s too busy contacting newspapers and MSNBC to make sure stories from NASA GISS are accurate and scientifically correct.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk

In the mood for sport? Turn the torch back on the journalists who were too gullible to ask a sensible question. Let’s start asking the ABC and BBC journalists why they didn’t ask “how much hotter was it” and “how big are those error bars”.

H/t to Colin, Gardy.

Carbon Tax Accounting: $24= $5310

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burning-australian-dollar-c-400

The carbon tax was the maddest deed of the Gillard Government, although the Mining Tax comes close. It takes a special kind of stupidity to produce two taxes that cost more to administer than they raised.

The scary bit is that these people still do not get it and could soon be running the country into an even deeper hole- see the comments by Mark Butler at the end of the story.

Jo Nova writes:

Carbon tax cost $5310 a ton. $15 billion to abate almost nothing and cool the world by even less.

If the Greens cared about the environment, they’d call this scheme “a ghastly waste”.

It takes skill to figure out a scheme where you set the price at $24 for something and end up paying $5,000. It could only happen when people are playing with other people’s money. That’s the soft left idea of good maths and good business.

That the Labor-Greens boast that this spectacular failure was a success shows the carbon tax was never about the climate, nor about CO2 or the environment. Follow the money. The purpose of the tax was to reward friends and punish competitors. Anyone dependent on Big-Government is a “friend”, and anyone who can stand on their own two feet is a “polluter” or a “denier”.

If the Greens cared about the environment, they’d call this scheme “a ghastly waste”.

The $15 billion price tag is $670 per Australian, or $2,700 per household of four. The real total is much more (when will the government add up the real bill?), because that tally doesn’t include the money wasted on solar panels, windpower, or the whole  “Department of Weather Change”. It doesn’t include millions in scientific research money poured down the sinkhole of climate models that don’t model our climate, nor the advertising, promotion and propaganda of all of the above.

A smart conservative government would add up the whole bill, then spend 0.1% (something like $20 million) paying skeptical scientists to audit, and check the evidence trail. They would trumpet their green credentials. This source of the river of gravy starts with the science. People who care about the poor and the planet would want to get that right.

Sid Maher, The Australian

THE carbon tax cost $5,310 for every tonne of emissions abated during its two years of operation, new government analysis shows.

The release of the National Greenhouse Gas Inventory last week shows emissions for the economy, excluding the land sector, fell 1.4 per cent in 2013-14 and 0.8 per cent in 2012-13. When the land sector is included, as is the case under Kyoto accounting, Australia’s emissions fell from 567.1mt in 2012-13 to 563.5mt, a drop of 3.6mt. Between 2011-12 and 2013-14, emissions fell 0.5 per cent or 2.9mt (there was a small rise the previous year).

No one can call this a success. Australian emissions were falling before the carbon tax came in. The big 1.4% fall only came after the figures of the year before were adjusted up. The 0.8% reduction they talk about for the previous 12 months does not exist after the figures were changed, yet they are still citing it. The current count of emissions will most likely be adjusted up itself, and the 1.4% figure is mere noise in the data — in past years the post hoc adjustments have been larger.

Opposition climate change spokesman Mark Butler told the ABC the report proved Labor’s policies were working. “The Nat­ional Greenhouse Gas Inventory — dropped by the government in the lead-up to Christmas in an effort to bury the report — showed that the emissions count for the overall year of Labor’s climate policies reduced by 1.4 per cent,” he said.

“That compares to a decline in emissions of 0.8 per cent for the previous 12 months, which shows that Labor policies to reduce emissions were working — to say otherwise is laughable.

Shame the Greens hate the environment.

Full article

Renewable Energy A Pipe Dream

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Engineers who worked on Google’s now abandoned renewable energy project discover that there is no way that current technology can replace fossil fuels in any practical way. They made the interesting discovery that the output of all renewable systems barely exceeds the energy input of constructing them in the first place.

 

If you add that to the research last month that found that it an area the size of the U.K. would have to be given over to wind or solar power every year just to provide renewable energy for the increased energy demand that year, it is obvious that current technology will not provide the clean green world that greenies dream of.

From WUWT:

A research effort by Google corporation to make renewable energy viable has been a complete failure, according to the scientists who led the programme. After 4 years of effort, their conclusion is that renewable energy “simply won’t work”.

According to an interview with the engineers, published in IEEE;

“At the start of RE<C, we had shared the attitude of many stalwart environmentalists: We felt that with steady improvements to today’s renewable energy technologies, our society could stave off catastrophic climate change. We now know that to be a false hope …
Renewable energy technologies simply won’t work; we need a fundamentally different approach.”
http://spectrum.ieee.org/energy/renewables/what-it-would-really-take-to-reverse-climate-change

There is simply no getout clause for renewables supporters. The people who ran the study are very much committed to the belief that CO2 is dangerous – they are supporters of James Hansen. Their sincere goal was not to simply install a few solar cells, but to find a way to fundamentally transform the economics of energy production – to make renewable energy cheaper than coal. To this end, the study considered exotic innovations barely on the drawing board, such as self erecting wind turbines, using robotic technology to create new wind farms without human intervention. The result however was total failure – even these exotic possibilities couldn’t deliver the necessary economic model.

The key problem appears to be that the cost of manufacturing the components of the renewable power facilities is far too close to the total recoverable energy – the facilities never, or just barely, produce enough energy to balance the budget of what was consumed in their construction. This leads to a runaway cycle of constructing more and more renewable plants simply to produce the energy required to manufacture and maintain renewable energy plants – an obvious practical absurdity.

According to the IEEE article;

“Even if one were to electrify all of transport, industry, heating and so on, so much renewable generation and balancing/storage equipment would be needed to power it that astronomical new requirements for steel, concrete, copper, glass, carbon fibre, neodymium, shipping and haulage etc etc would appear. All these things are made using mammoth amounts of energy: far from achieving massive energy savings, which most plans for a renewables future rely on implicitly, we would wind up needing far more energy, which would mean even more vast renewables farms – and even more materials and energy to make and maintain them and so on. The scale of the building would be like nothing ever attempted by the human race.”

I must say I’m personally surprised at the conclusion of this study. I genuinely thought that we were maybe a few solar innovations and battery technology breakthroughs away from truly viable solar power. But if this study is to be believed, solar and other renewables will never in the foreseeable future deliver meaningful amounts of energy.

 

Fusion Power Within A Decade?

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I have to admit I am somewhat sceptical about the timeline of an operational fusion plant within ten years but, if true, this has the capacity to transform the world with cheap, non-polluting energy within decades.

From businessinsider.com:

LOCKHEED: We Made A Huge Breakthrough In Nuclear Fusion

sunNASA/Solar Dynamics ObservatoryNuclear fusion is the energy that powers stars.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Lockheed Martin Corp said on Wednesday it had made a technological breakthrough in developing a power source based on nuclear fusion, and the first reactors, small enough to fit on the back of a truck, could be ready for use in a decade.

Tom McGuire, who heads the project, said he and a small team had been working on fusion energy at Lockheed‘s secretive Skunk Works for about four years, but were now going public to find potential partners in industry and government for their work.

Initial work demonstrated the feasibility of building a 100-megawatt reactor measuring seven feet by 10 feet, which could fit on the back of a large truck, and is about 10 times smaller than current reactors, McGuire told reporters.

In a statement, the company, the Pentagon’s largest supplier, said it would build and test a compact fusion reactor in less than a year, and build a prototype in five years.

In recent years, Lockheed has gotten increasingly involved in a variety of alternate energy projects, including several ocean energy projects, as it looks to offset a decline in U.S. and European military spending.

Lockheed‘s work on fusion energy could help in developing new power sources amid increasing global conflicts over energy, and as projections show there will be a 40 percent to 50 percent increase in energy use over the next generation, McGuire said.

If it proves feasible, Lockheed‘s work would mark a key breakthrough in a field that scientists have long eyed as promising, but which has not yet yielded viable power systems. The effort seeks to harness the energy released during nuclear fusion, when atoms combine into more stable forms.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/andrea-shalal-lockheed-nuclear-fusion-breakthrough-2014-10#ixzz3IzNACGN6

New Temperature Records- It’s Hotter Than We Thought!

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How bizarre- the Bureau of Meteorology has adjusted Australia’s temperature records to exaggerate the warming trend of the last century. The next time the media tell us it’s a record high temperature or an angry summer you might need to ask, “What does that even mean?”

From Jo Nova:

Australian summer maximums “warmed” by 200%

Which causes more summer heatwaves: carbon dioxide or Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) adjustments?

Ken Stewart has analyzed the adjustments used to create the all-new ACORN wonder dataset and compared them with another BOM dataset called AWAP, and finds, extraordinarily, that the trend in average summer maximums has been tripled by adjustments that the BOM imply are neutral.

Since summer maxima are the ones used to generate the most headlines in Australia, I ask again if the Bureau of Meteorology is a scientific agency or a PR group?  Increasing the trend in summer maxima would produce more headlines of hottest ever month, season, heatwave, and weekend.

In this graph Stewart splits the data into months, and compares the trends in maxima in the AWAP and ACORN datasets, across the entire nation. We see that most of the adjustments happen to data from the hottest months of the year, October to March. Even though the measured maxima in February and March are possibly cooler now than they were in the early 1900s, they have been adjusted to show warming trends.

When was the last time you heard the BOM tell you that their “hottest ever” February record depended on adjusting down the past hotter records?

Full story: Australian summer maximums “warmed” by 200% « JoNova.

The Pause Grows Up

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It’s official- the pause in global warming is now 18 years old- which means that people graduating from High School about now have never experienced global warming. So what happened to that catastrophic warming we keep hearing aobut?

From Watts Up With That?

It’s official: no global warming for 18 years 1 month

 / 2 hours ago October 2, 2014

Global Temperature Update By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

The RSS monthly satellite global temperature anomaly for September 2014 is in, and the Great Pause is now two months longer than it was last month. Would this year’s el Niño bite soon enough to stop the psychologically-significant 18-year threshold from being crossed? The official answer is No.

Globally, September was scarcely warmer than August, which was itself some distance below the 18-year trend-line. Therefore, taking the least-squares linear-regression trend on the RSS satellite monthly global mean surface temperature anomalies, there has now been no global warming for 18 years 1 month.

Dr Benny Peiser, our good friend at the Global Warming Policy Foundation in the UK, had anticipated the official crossing of the 18-year threshold by a day or two with an interesting note circulated to supporters on the ever-lengthening period without any global warming, and featuring our 17-years-11-months graph from last month.

The Great Pause is the longest continuous period without any warming in the global instrumental temperature record since the satellites first watched in 1979. It has endured for a little over half the satellite temperature record. Yet the Pause coincides with a continuing, rapid increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration.

clip_image002

Figure 1. RSS monthly global mean lower-troposphere temperature anomalies (dark blue) and trend (thick bright blue line), September 1996 to September 2014, showing no trend for 18 years 1 month.

The hiatus period of 18 years 1 month, or 217 months, is the farthest back one can go in the RSS satellite temperature record and still show a sub-zero trend.

 

Full story