Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
I see that my favorite serially failed climate doomcaster, Dr. James Hansen, is at it again. Accompanied by his usual Greek chorus of co-sycophants, he’s written a new paper entitled Global warming in the pipeline, by James E Hansen, Makiko Sato, Leon Simons, Larissa S Nazarenko, Isabelle Sangha, Pushker Kharecha, James C Zachos, Karina von Schuckmann, Norman G Loeb, Matthew B Osman, Qinjian Jin, George Tselioudis, Eunbi Jeong, Andrew Lacis, Reto Ruedy, Gary Russell, Junji Cao, and Jing Li.
The press release quotes Hansen as follows:
“We would be damned fools and bad scientists if we didn’t expect an acceleration of global warming,” Hansen said. “We are beginning to suffer the effect of our Faustian bargain. That is why the rate of global warming is accelerating.”
And of course, the press release contains the requisite global warming scare photo complete with a bleached skull in the lower right …
In the underlying paper, Hansen et al. ad infinitum warn us very seriously of a “predicted post-2010 accelerated warming rate”. And how do they know these things?
Models. Yeah, big surprise, I know.
Hmmm, sez I … so I figured I should take a look at the changes in the rate of temperature increase over the last 170 years. To do that, I started by looking at the Berkeley Earth temperature dataset. Then I thought “Well, somebody’s sure to claim I should have used the HadCRUT dataset”, so I threw that in for good measure. Here are the 50-year trailing accelerations for those two surface air temperature datasets. By “50-year trailing accelerations”, I mean the calculated acceleration (or deceleration) for the 50 years preceding a given date.
Figure 1. 50-year trailing acceleration, Berkeley Earth and HadCRUT global mean temperature datasets.
As you can see, at different times, there has been both acceleration and deceleration in the rate of temperature change over the last 170 years.
Of particular interest, and in total contradiction to James Hansen’s claim of a “predicted post-2010 accelerated warming rate”, since about 1990 or so the 50-year trailing acceleration has been decreasing. The rate of warming was actually decelerating starting, ironically, around 2010. And at present, acceleration over the final half-century of the record is approximately zero.
Go figure.
Mentions in their paper:
- OBSERVATIONS: 11
- MODELS: 148
In the midst of all of this, what’s actually going on with the temperature? Here are six different datasets.
Figure 2. CEEMD smooths, global mean temperature anomalies from six datasets. Anomalies are taken around the starting point in each smoothed dataset. Note that JMA only goes to Dec 2022, so it misses the final uptick.
There are some curiosities in Figure 2.
- All six show that temperatures have been decreasing since the peak of the 2018 El Nino event. While such decreases are not uncommon in the record (see post-1998 El Nino in Fig. 2 above), it sure ain’t acceleration.
- GISS, HadCRUT5, and Berkeley Earth are almost indistinguishable. HadCRUT5, plotted first, hardly peeks out from behind the other two.
- Over the first twenty years up to the low temperatures around the year 2000, all six datasets are in agreement. After that, RSS goes high and JMA and UAH go low. What changed?
- Finally, saying that there is some kind of “acceleration” post-2010 as Hansen et all of them claim is a scientific joke. The time period is far too short and the temperature variations are far too complex to say anything about possible acceleration.
Rain predicted tonight, wonderful rain in our dry part of the planet. My very best wishes to all, life is short, enjoy. It does no good to complain about the coming storm, so we might as well learn to dance in the rain …
w.
PS—When you comment, quote the exact words you are discussing. I can defend my words. I can’t defend your interpretation of my words. Thanks.
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