"The number of excuses for the global warming pause or hiatus had grown to more than 66 when the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) added yet another one to the list in a just-published study in Science."
Excuses? Or just explanations.
There has been no "pause" in the warming - even before this new study came out that I cited, you still couldn't say global warming has stopped or "paused." At most you could say it had slowed down a bit.
In their argument that came out yesterday, NOAA said that long-existing instrument bases have masked rising sea surface temperatures. Once they "readjusted" the data, the warming hiatus disappeared. By cooling the past, they were able to make the most recent years even warmer.
Okay so they’re implying that scientists basically just made up data by putting "readjusted" in quotes.
What they did was make the data more reliable and accurate than it was before. A lot of the data for sea surface temperatures apparently comes from measurements taken by ships that are out at sea. They used to measure the water temperature by dropping a bucket over the side of the ship and taking the temperature of the water in the bucket. But starting in the 1930’s a lot of ships started measuring the temperature of water around the engine intakes of the ship and so water temperatures were recorded as warmer than they actually were, thus creating an artificial shift in the data. When NOAA improved their data set, they corrected for this problem by adding more data taken from buoys and newly digitized paper records from the 19th and 20th centuries, among other things. The authors of your article describe this as "readjusting" the data to make the warming hiatus disappear as if there were some sinister intentions involved when in actuality all we have here is a bunch of scientists trying to improve the accuracy of the temperature records. Very sinister indeed.
I get into this more below.
This assessment has drawn heavy criticism from both sides of the bitter climate debate, but one thing no one disputes: NOAA may have overstepped its authority in rewriting climate history and relying on faulty data sets.
No one disputes this? How have they rewritten climate history, by including more data (and more reliable data at that) in their analyses? They were relying on faulty data sets
before they overhauled the system.
By making the early 1900s colder, and using only land-based temperature stations and less-reliable ocean temperatures, NOAA can now readjust the past to chart a new future.
This is like what the third or fourth claim they’ve made that climatologists have basically just pulled data out of their asses and I’m not even past the second paragraph.
This new study also comes at a time when President Obama has
shifted his
focus to climate change, not to mention the EPA's proposed
plans to completely revamp the
country's power plant system through new regulations.
And now we have a conspiracy claim, and so late in the article.
One thing is clear: NOAA didn't rely on satellite temperatures, which clearly shows a global warming pause for the past 19 years. or the much more reliable ARGO buoys for ocean temperatures.
Actually what the NOAA actually did recently was to change the data set in such a way as to ADD MORE DATA TO IT. They digitized old paper records from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries so they could be incorporated into the computer system, which gives us more information to work with, which makes it
more reliable, not less. They also incorporated some way to monitor potential errors at existing temperature stations around the US which again, makes the data
more reliable, not less.
"These three developments result in a climate division dataset that uses many more stations than ever before, more advanced computational techniques, and, most importantly, a more accurate climate division dataset."
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/2014/2/supplemental/page-5/
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/news/transitioning-gridded-climate-divisional-dataset
They were able to fix a discrepancy in the way sea surface temperatures had been taken by ships starting in the 1930s that had resulted in faulty data. Again, this works towards making data
more reliable, not less.
http://www.iflscience.com/environment/improved-data-set-shows-no-global-warming-hiatus
According to The Daily Caller, "new satellite-derived temperature measurements show there’s been no global warming for 18 years and six months."
Their source is the Daily Caller? This is an article you want me to seriously consider and they’re quoting the Daily Caller.
Satellite data is preferable because it measures the first two miles of the lower atmosphere, and is accurate to within .001 degrees Celsius.
All the available data combined together would be most preferable, would it not? Why just focus on satellite measurements? Oh right, because you think it suppports your assertion that global warming has stopped or "paused."
Physicist Carl Mears, who works with satellite data at Remote Sensing Systems has this to say about satellite data,
"My particular dataset (RSS tropospheric temperatures from MSU/AMSU satellites) show less warming than would be expected when compared to the surface temperatures. All datasets contain errors. In this case, I would trust the surface data a little more because the difference between the long term trends in the various surface datasets (NOAA, NASA GISS, HADCRUT, Berkeley etc) are closer to each other than the long term trends from the different satellite datasets. This suggests that the satellite datasets contain more "structural uncertainty" than the surface dataset."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/03/24/ted-cruz-says-satellite-data-show-the-globe-isnt-warming-this-satellite-scientist-feels-otherwise/
Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) acknowledged two years ago that the rise in Earth's mean surface temperatures had begun to slow since 1998, and since then everything from volcanic activity to solar output to the oceans absorbing the extra heat have been put forward to explain the pause. Others believe the missing heat is hiding in the Deep Oceans, far from any sort of sensors or temperature gauges. NOAA is one of four independent organizations that gather and analyze global temperatures, and the three other groups have all detected a slowdown in the rate of global warming, which is why the IPCC mentioned the "hiatus" in the first place.
This is addressed here, in an article written by one of the scientists involved in the study:
http://www.iflscience.com/environment/improved-data-set-shows-no-global-warming-hiatus
One of the proposed reasons for the this slowdown was that the heat is accumulating in the oceans. But when they try to gather the most reliable temperature data available from the oceans, you get your underwear all in a twist and cry that scientists are making stuff up.
And what's with all the focus on the year 1998? Cherrypicking dates out of thin air isn't how you do proper science. Why ignore the much longer term trends that still show warming?
The study, led by Thomas Karl, of NOAA's Climatic Data Center, said once the data was 'adjusted' and the biases accounted for, "this hiatus or slowdown simply vanishes." Karl et al insists that global average surface temperature has climbed 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit each decade since 1950, without interruption, due to the heat-trapping effects of carbon dioxide emissions.
Jay Lawrimore, chief of the Data Set Branch for Weather and Climate at NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information said this,
"This work highlights the importance of data stewardship and continuously striving to improve the accuracy and consistency of temperature data sets.
While these improvements in the land and ocean temperature record reveal a rate of warming greater than previously documented, we also found that our computed trends likely continue to underestimate the true rate of warming. This is due at least in part to a lack of surface temperature observations in large parts of the Arctic where warming is occurring most rapidly.
Preliminary calculations of global temperature trends using estimates of temperatures in the Arctic indicate greater rates of warming than the 1998-2014 trend of 0.19F per decade reported in this study. Future data set development efforts will include a focus on further improvements to the temperature record in this area of the world."
https://theconversation.com/improved-data-set-shows-no-global-warming-hiatus-42807
Not everyone agrees. Judith Curry, a climate scientist at Georgia Tech who doesn't find this analysis at all convincing, writes, "While I'm sure this latest analysis from NOAA will be regarded as politically useful for the Obama administration, I don't regard it as a particularly useful contribution to our scientific understanding of what is going on." She went on to say that it "seems rather ironic, since this is the period where there is the greatest coverage of data with the highest quality of measurements — ARGO buoys and satellites don’t show a warming trend."
Here's a discussion about the accuracy of measurements obtained from ARGO buoys. Apparently some studies indicate cooling in the ocean depths while others indicate warming, while studies that incorporate more types of data show warming. It talks about long term trends versus short term trends and how focusing on short term trends ignores the bigger picture:
http://www.skepticalscience.com/print.php?a=67
Three climatologists at the CATO Institute released a joint statement about the NOAA adjustment report: "While this will be heralded as an important finding, the main claim that it uncovers a significant recent warming trend is certainly dubious. The significance level (.10) is hardly normative and the use of it certainly will prompt many readers to question the reasoning behind the use of such a lax standard."
They should get together and write a paper on it. I anxiously await its publication.This is how good science is done.
"I would argue the study is misleading on the implications of its results,"
said Piers Forster, an atmospheric physicist at the University of Leeds, in England. "This study has not 'magicked' the hiatus away or somehow corrected the IPCC." Indeed, scientists who have investigated the warming hiatus said the study's "key shortcoming is that it does what mainstream climate scientists accuse climate skeptics of doing: cherry-picking start and end dates to arrive at a particular conclusion."
The study in question goes back to 1880, while the people complainign that the data is cherrypicked to arrive at a particular conclusion are using 1998 as their starting date. Quite the difference, isn't it?
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/news/recent-global-surface-warming-hiatus
Gerald Meehl, a climate researcher at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, told Mashable in an email that "My conclusion is that even with the new data adjustments, there still was a nominal hiatus period that lasted until 2013 with a lower rate of global warming than the warming rate of the last 50 years of the 20th century, and a factor of two slower warming than the previous 20 years from the 1970s to 1990s."
How about the overall long term trend?
Lisa Goddard, director of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) at Columbia University, also told Mashable that "the study does not support the conclusion that global warming didn't slow down for a relatively short time period. 'It is clear that Karl et al. have put a lot of careful work into updating these global products,' Goddard said in an email. 'However, they go too far when they conclude that there was no decadal-scale slowdown in the rate of warming globally. This argument seems to rely on choosing the right period — such as including the recent record-breaking 2014.'"
Why
wouldn't they include data from 2014 when updating the system to include the newest available data?
Another climate researcher, Peter Thorne, a climate researcher at Naynooth University in Ireland, said in an interview that "more investments should go toward establishing redundant, carefully calibrated temperature-observing networks where data is currently sparse, such as the Arctic, much of Africa and especially the oceans."
Even more surprising is that climate scientists who believe that man is solely responsible for the planet warming less than a degree Celsius in the past 100 years also rejected NOAA's assessment that the slowdown is not occurring. "It is a bit misleading to say there is no hiatus," said climate scientist Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research.
"This new study suggests that the slowdown in the rate of warming may be much less pronounced than in the global temperature records that were available for the IPCC to assess," said Professor Tim Osborn of the University of East Anglia, which handles the UK dataset with the Met Office Hadley Centre. "The IPCC's assessment wasn't wrong, but perhaps the emphasis would be slightly different if the assessments were carried out afresh with the new studies since 2013 that could now be considered."
"I would caution against dismissing the slowdown in surface warming on the basis of this study … There are other data sets that still support a slowdown over some recent period of time, and there are intriguing geographical patterns such as cooling in large parts of the Pacific Ocean that were used to support explanations for the warming slowdown," Osborn added.
As Judith Curry writes, "In my opinion, the gold standard data set for global ocean surface temperatures is the UK data set, HadSST3. A review of the uncertainties is given in this paper by John Kennedy. Note, the UK group has dealt with the same issues raised by the NOAA team. I personally see no reason to the use the NOAA ERSST data set, I do not see any evidence that the NOAA group has done anywhere near as careful a job as the UK group in processing the ocean temperatures."
As Marc Morano of the site Climate Depot noted in an interview with National Geographic, "NOAA's new study will have "virtually no impact in the climate debate. … This latest study merely adds to the dueling data sets and of course time lines in the climate debate."
I'm not surprised that other scientists have issues with the study because , this is how science works. Now these people will go out and do studies of their own, they'll work to improve existing data sets and measurements and so on and we will glean more and more information about climate change.
