I like 90% of planet thought Clinton would win and was fine with that. She’s a moderate when she isn’t raking in baskets of cash from somewhere. We were going to be fine just like under President Obama and the show was going to be over. It is the fact that the Leftists just keeping doing whacked out things that I don’t see myself doing if Clinton had won, so I find myself not in his camp but thinking the leftists are really hurting the situation. And not drifting left but running there. They are becoming extremists. Vengeful. I am not used to being the reasonable one. Trump is dangerous. But so is the left. That’s how they often get their way. So often, people fold in front of a leftist assault. I think the odds are 80% that Trump will not. So I am hoping for middle support for those that stand up.

Mathew,

I can understand, in this instance, why my claims of merely wishing to supplement an article may appear as a disingenuous attempt to deny detraction. The truth is, the two are not mutually exclusive; the very fact that I feel the article required a supplement is a claim that it required improvement. I can even understand Andy’s defensiveness since, after all, nobody likes to think their work is being undervalued. The problem I have here, is trying to applaud the fact that someone is doing a good job of drawing attention to the certitude meme, whilst simultaneously saying you can do too good a job of it. The fact is, if all of the merchants of certitude were to disappear overnight, the powers that be would still have all the legal mandate they require to pursue a course of action that might as well assume certitude. This mandate is written into the current climate change legislation.

Rather than quibbling over the relative memetic traction of the two competing strategies for persuasion (certitude or precaution) I think the more interesting question is why so many authority figures, and figures of influence, felt the need to turn up the wick on the certitude lamp. If I were to write anything, it would be on that subject. ‘Manipulated’ might not be the best word to use here, but sceptics who respond to such rhetoric are like moths to a flame. By all means, we should draw attention to the growing rhetoric of certitude, but we must not forget the lurking presence of the precautionary principle. Certainly, Andy was not writing an article about the principle but, there again, I have every right to remind readers of its presence, and I certainly feel it was perfectly reasonable for me to suggest that Andy could have done so, lest readers be left with the impression that certitude is the only significant game in town. I do not feel any obligation to write a dissertation demonstrating a prevalence of precautionary thinking just because I choose to draw attention to it.

As for Anton’s comment, I think it is a perfect example of the precautionary meme in action. Setting a threshold for the acceptance of risk is always hugely problematic and laden with value judgement. However, many of these difficulties are sidestepped if one focuses purely upon the impact, claiming that it justifies action irrespective of its likelihood (as good a definition of ‘catastrophe’ as any). Sceptics are not prepared to take such a simplistic view, but this then leaves them holding the threshold-setting baby. And by that, I mean thresholds for the acceptance of uncertainty, acceptance of risk, and acceptance of the costs for risk mitigation or avoidance. It’s so much easier just to say “we need to act on climate change”, without applying preconditions. As I’ve been trying to say all along, it is not the certainty of outcome that matters, it is the certainty that the threat justifies action. Here is the best way of achieving this: Posit a calamity in a data-poor subject area. Challenge others to prove the negative that calamity won’t happen. Then justify action upon the failure to prove the negative.

Whilst I’m on here, can I also say that I take a rather literal view on the meaning of the CAGW acronym. As an acronym, it cannot have any inherent pejorative meaning; just an expansion. But if it is used to snarl at anyone, I wonder when it takes on such potency. There is Warming (W), Global Warming (GW), predominantly Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW), and predominantly Anthropogenic Global Warming that is presupposed to represent an existential threat (CAGW). There are sceptics for all of the above. I have seen sceptics snarl at W, let alone CAGW. Besides which, isn’t ‘snarl’ the real snarl word here?

My apologies to Atomsk’s Sanakan for using an incorrect reference in the above posting.

The credibility of your sea level rise claims (especially with respect to the future) depend, in part, on the credibility of your claims regarding temperature trends. After all, warming causes sea level rise by melting land ice and by causing thermal expansion of water. That has been addressed elsewhere:

https://judithcurry.com/2018/01/16/sea-level-rise-acceleration-or-not-part-i-introduction/#comment-864643
“Global sea level linked to global temperature”
“Temperature-driven global sea-level variability in the Common Era”

So what have you said about temperature trends?
Well:

“I’ve made my projection – global surface temperatures will remain mostly flat for at least another decade.”
https://judithcurry.com/2018/01/16/sea-level-rise-acceleration-or-not-part-i-introduction/#comment-864643

“I understand that 15 years is too short, but the climate model apostles told us not to expect a pause longer than 10 years, then 15 years, then 17 years. Looks like this one might go another two decades.”
https://judithcurry.com/2013/07/27/the-97-consensus-part-ii/#comment-353549

“A year earlier, Jan 2011, I made it pretty clear that I supported Tsonis’ argument regarding climate shifts and a flat temperature trend for the next few decades“
https://judithcurry.com/2013/07/27/the-97-consensus-part-ii/#comment-353668 (http://archive.is/9NdQN

Thus you thought global warming had stalled, with a prediction of flat temperature for the next few decades, including the next decade. You cited Tsonis in support of this. So what has Tsonis said?
Well:

“Professor Anastasios Tsonis, of the University of Wisconsin, said: “We are already in a cooling trend, which I think will continue for the next 15 years at least. There is no doubt the warming of the 1980s and 1990s has stopped.””
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/climatechange/10294082/Global-warming-No-actually-were-cooling-claim-scientists.html

With respect to post-1998 trends, Tsonis on page 4 of:
“The little boy: El Niño and natural climate change”
https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2017/09/Tsonis-17.pdf

Let’s see then if you and Tsonic were right about recent temperature trends. We can check that by seeing if the warming of the 1980s and 1990s ended, as Tsonis claimed. I’ll used 3 sources for that:

For Cowtan+Way’s update of HadCRUT4:
https://climexp.knmi.nl/selectindex.cgi?id=someone@somewhere
http://www.ysbl.york.ac.uk/~cowtan/applets/trend/trend.html

For the other temperature analyses:
https://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/cgi-bin/data/testdap/timeseries.pl
“Web-Based Reanalysis Intercomparison Tools (WRIT) for analysis and comparison of reanalyses and other datasets”

Looking at the analyses overall, the warming trend continued post-2000 up to the present, at roughly the same (or greater) rate than during the 1980s – 1990s. Therefore Tsonis was wrong when he claimed the warming of the 1980s and 1990s stopped. And you, by extension, were wrong in your endorsement of Tsonis’ position, along with your claim of a flat temperature for a decade or more longer. Since you under-estimate warming trends, it wouldn’t be surprising if you later under-estimate the warming-induced sea level rise.

For the curious:
Here are the warming trends for various surface/near-surface analyses in K per century, with the 1979 – 1999 warming trend given first, and the 2000 – 2018 trend placed second in brackets:

GISTEMP : 1.4 [2.0]
NOAA : 1.4 [1.9]
Berkeley Earth : 1.6 [2.2]
Cowtan+Way : 1.6 [1.8]
HadCRUT4 : 1.9 [1.9]
JMA : 1.1 [1.7]

JRA-55 : 1.5 [1.7]
ERA-I : 0.9 [1.9]
MERRA-2 (starts at 1980, not 1979) : 0.9 [0.8]
NCEP-2 : 0.8 [2.1]
20CR (stops at 2013) : 1.4 [0.7]
CFSR : 0.8 [-0.5]

Satellite-based and radiosonde-based analyses of the lower troposphere are not surface/near-surface analyses. But I’ll cite them here, in case people are curious about them and since some people bring them up as an objection to the surface/near-surface temperature anomaly record:

[Page S17 of: “State of the climate in 2017”]

Note that the RSS team admits that the satellite-based analyses likely under-estimate lower tropospheric warming over the past two decades:

Page 7715: “A satellite-derived lower tropospheric atmospheric temperature dataset using an optimized adjustment for diurnal effects”

“Understanding and reconciling differences in surface and satellite-based lower troposphere temperatures”
http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017AGUFMGC54C..05H

John,

“I can even understand Andy’s defensiveness since, after all, nobody likes to think their work is being undervalued…”

This is not the issue at all; let me recap here. So after a long thread it seems that your claims of serious issues are not based on some kind of mutual misunderstanding. It turns out instead that you have a domain-based cause, which you self-report thusly: “I am keeping alive the recognition that the precautionary meme is still out there…”, to which you add your concern that it’s losing out to its main ‘memetic competitor’, i.e. you regard this as a bad outcome should it go further / go to conclusion (and reiterate this concern in your last text). So your serious issues amount only to your belief that I should be supporting your cause, which also you think I should have ‘fully explored’. Both before and after knowing your cause, I point out that supplements regarding other relevant factors within the domain are most welcome, as indeed is yours, yet that the act of describing something does not prejudice for or against such other factors as are not actually addressed by the post. However, this is not explicit support for your cause, without which apparently bad things will happen due to my post and according to your concerns, albeit you are nevertheless not inclined to contribute more positive material of your own on the issue. You go on to say per these concerns: “Andy appears to deny that his post distracts attention away from the precautionary meme”, i.e. distracts from your cause. Well relative to the exampled A-listers and the many other authorities and influencers, I’m willing to bet that my own influence is the square root of diddly squat. Yet even if this were not the case, it is fundamental that examining how parts of the domain work should in no way be subject to conscious pressure or bias regarding favoured outcomes or candidates, be those candidates persons or parties or memes. It is hard enough to try and minimize subconscious bias. And it is perfectly fine to have another post exploring other relevant issues and their status, whatever these may be and whether you have a self-declared cause (which must be made clear) or instead are only identifying the relative criticality / role of the issue for the domain as a contribution to the knowledge of its whole workings. It is also fine to supplement any of same issues here, indeed you “have every right to remind readers” of an issue. It is not fine to declare serious issues just because a post doesn’t support your cause, and it is not defensiveness to point this out; you have provided no other justification or associated logic chain with post quotes / support. When folks with a cause say stuff is denied regarding nebulous bad things that may occur, a regular occurrence in this domain, it tends first to make me more curious about the adherence to and framing of the cause, rather than to start worrying about the apparent concerns. Whatever future history may say about the concerns, such expressions are not the path of objectivity.

“I certainly feel it was perfectly reasonable for me to suggest that Andy could have done so, lest readers be left with the impression that certitude is the only significant game in town”

But you didn’t *just* do this. You said there were serious issues, which is an entirely different thing.

“…you can do too good a job of it. The fact is, if all of the merchants of certitude were to disappear overnight…”

And this is why. It doesn’t matter that your cause is noble. It is a cause, and you defined lack of support for your cause as a serious issue.

1) LIA “recovery” is a misnomer in my opinion. It implies a return to a normal state when actually the LIA was the normal state of the Milankovitch cycle. Warming was not expected, just continuous cooling as had been going on for thousands of years. The so-called recovery is the anomaly to explain. The Milankovitch trend was 0.1-0.2 C per 1000 years. It is very hard to discern a difference from that until after the 1850’s and the upward trend was not noticeable until after 1900 by which time GHGs were having an impact exceeding that of aerosols and landuse.
As for Milankovitch, in the last 12k years since the Ice Age, the precession has changed phase by 180 degrees from completely not favoring northern ice (hence ending the Ice Age) to completely favoring it being furthest from the sun in the northern summer. In the Milankovitch cycle, the amount of summer insolation at northern latitudes is a key parameter in how much ice can persist through the year. We are in the middle of the phase that favors Arctic ice growth, and clearly that’s not happening due to other factors.
3) If the MWP was a global event, it could have been a solar anomaly, why not? The size of the purported MWP is within what the sun can do. Alternatively ocean circulations could have reduced ice cover and affected the albedo. These are tenths of a degree globally we are talking about, a typical scale of natural variability. Sources of variability like the sun. volcanoes, ocean circulations, can do that, but we don’t have the data to figure out which. Lovejoy puts the natural standard deviation of the pre-industrial centuries near 0.2 C (ocean cycles alone provide 0.1 C). We are currently 5 standard deviations above the mean and still climbing.
I am not familiar with the IPCC projection you chose to focus on, but the net forcing is always the key. The sun is weaker than expected, perhaps aerosols and volcanoes are more. The IPCC has always had TCRs in the 2 C range, so there is no reason that this value would produce a warm bias when you look at the regression match of forcing to temperature where that value fits well for at least the last 60 years, and perhaps 250 (according to Lovejoy). I always say that someone in 1950 when CO2 was about 310 ppm, using a TCR of 2 C per doubling could have nailed how much warming we got as we rose to 400 ppm (~0.75 C). An easy prediction with just pen, paper and log tables. The most uncertain part would be when exactly we would reach 400 ppm. Just as it is today. We can predict the temperature at 700 ppm quite well, but if and when we reach that is uncertain.
4) I have issues with both Nic Lewis and the IPCC when they add so much uncertainty to the TCR. If you have 60 years of decadal-averaged temperatures linearly correlated to log CO2 at 0.99, why not just use that formula? It is so clear that not only is CO2 the dominant forcing, but other factors (other GHGs, aerosols) have been proportionate enough to keep this correlation high.

John Ridgway: As I’ve been trying to say all along, it is not the certainty of outcome that matters, it is the certainty that the threat justifies action.

It would be helpful if you could list a bunch of exemplars. i.e. quotes from people at all levels of authority, where that distinction is clearly justified. I don’t think there are any.

No idea how to do that. And it is not an affect I set out to quantify. But it will presumably add heat to the oceans. It certainly cannot reduce the direct heat of cooling and crystalising magma that my calculations address simply, and are clearly limited to.

If you can add it, please feel free to publish your own contribution on this. The more variable heat entering the deep oceans, the happier I am that geothermal volcanism is one effect wrongly discounted as insignificantly variable by CO2ist atmospheric climate models.

BTW, my work considers the likely contribution of all sub aerial volcanoes. I discounted the warming effects at the 70,000Km of divergent mid oceanic sea floors as relatively small, however real.

JimD – the First Assessment Report, 1990 FAR, was based on science that likely would have included gases that were included in the Montreal Protocol, so their modeling would have been based on GHG forcing prior to 1990:

Compared to last month, the updated (October-November) MEI moved up by more than 0.2 standard deviations to reach +0.70, finally surpassing the lowest El Niño ranking. Looking at the nearest 12 rankings (+6/-6) in this season, and removing cases with one- or three-months drops rather than rises leading up to October-November, we are left with six ‘analogue’ years: 1963, ’68, ’69, ’79, ’03, and ’04, four of which were also mentioned last month. All but two of them (1969, 2003) either remained or attained El Niño status through the following boreal winter months, with ’69-70 and ’03-04 hovering in high neutral conditions. This is the time of year when persistence is hard to beat – the fact that the MEI attained this status this late in the season is quite unusual, perhaps most similar to 2004.

The odds for continued El Niño conditions at least for some of the following six months has risen to about 67% (four out of six), better than last month’s 50/50 odds.

Thanks, JCH, those CFCs could have been a big part of why FAR produced such warm projections.

A big Triassic dicynodont – who knew?

dpy6629,

you’re overly generous. “We both got out of the rat a little rat-a tat-tat.” Lovely! It reminds me why I must work on my metre and [internal] rhyme. I’ve always admired people whose words not only look good but sound good.

Apologies, by the way, for repeating all 11 of the USPs of climate science I’ve identified thus far. I intended only to paste #1, #3 and #5. This fascinating thread is already too long!

Ceresco Kid, sorry, that last comment was for you, not doy6629.

BOM is talking down El Niño:
(11 Dec):
The tropical Pacific Ocean remains ENSO-neutral, despite some indicators reaching El Niño levels. As a result, the Bureau’s ENSO Outlook remains at El Niño ALERT. The positive Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD) event in the tropical Indian Ocean weakened in the past fortnight.

Sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific Ocean have now exceeded El Niño thresholds for more than a month. However atmospheric indicators—such as trade winds, cloud patterns, and the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI)—have not reached El Niño levels. This indicates that the tropical ocean and atmosphere are not reinforcing each other and remain ‘uncoupled’. This coupling is required to establish and sustain any ENSO …

So nothing much has changed? As stated – persistence is ‘hard to beat’ this time of year. And normally you would for change closer to the Austral autumn. But holding for so long in roughly neutral conditions is very unusual. Neutral is not a stable ENSO state.

But it is looking more like an El Nino Modoki – as Judith suggested last week – high geopotential energy in the central equatorial Pacific.

Jim, you claim the ‘LIA “recovery” is a misnomer.’ You repeated your claim that effectively Standard Oil saved civilization from the return of the Ice Age due to Milankovitch cycle. My question to you was that if you were shown hard quantitative analysis that the CO2 forcing in the eighteenth and nineteenth century was insufficient for your claim would you concede? BTW, can you point to anyone affirming your claim?

You claim that before AGW the gradual 10,000 decline at “0.1-0.2 C per 1000 years” was the only variable forcing. Your position is that there were no warming periods (or cooling ones). Do you accept the validity of ice core proxies for showing Holocene variability? Do you believe the Holocene Optimum is a now dead myth, along with the MWP and RWP and others?

You wrote: “It is very hard to discern a difference from that until after the 1850’s and the upward trend was not noticeable until after 1900 by which time GHGs were having an impact exceeding that of aerosols and landuse.” This is because the recovery started around 1650, around the Maunder Minimum. This is about the only thing that is not in dispute in the proxy record, likely because there is ample documentation of the climate after printing presses started.

As for Milankovitch, your claim of gradual forcing is correct but GMST is far from a gradual plot over the last 100,000 years or million. Why do you think it is for the last 10,000? The climate case would be nearly closed if that were true. The fact is that climate is still a puzzle. And, just because Lewis, Curry and other scientists not on board with big climate don’t have all the answers doesn’t mean the Mann’s and Marotzke’s do. And, everyone’s work is fair game for audit. That’s science.

A few more things:

5) If you agree that the NH and SH climates work fairly independently, save for the global conveyor ocean current, why would one hemisphere’s warm period be necessarily cancelled by the other’s simultaneous cooling? What is the physics that leads to this? If there’s no physics coupling the hemispheres then a NH cooling period is just a likely to be reinforced by the SH than be cancelled.

Jim: “I am not familiar with the IPCC projection you chose to focus on…” Of course, because it was wrong. If it had been correct you would have been all over it. The truth is about 97% of predictions turn out to be wrong. The charlatan’s trick is to remember the 3% that turned out to be right. The point with the IPCC 1992 FAR is that if CO2 is the gorilla controlling climate they should have been able to easily succeed.

“We can predict the temperature at 700 ppm quite well, but if and when we reach that is uncertain.” You mean if we get there and if there is not a major eruption, solar minimum, unexpected cloudiness, slowing of the AMOC or unforeseen event. But we definitely will not be recalling this conversation. That is the only certainty.

JCH, fixing of the ozone hole (CFCs) is a great explanation. I forgot that one.

The Montreal Protocol was remarkably successful, and, look at the graph, significantly reduced the annual growth in GHG forcing after 1990.