Global temperatures have plummeted!

Back in 2008, this meme was going round the internet. Google it and you'll find in in many places. I can't work out where it was first posted.

The coveted .7 degree rise in temperatures over the last 100 years has been wiped out with last years below “normal” temperatures

This is the period referred to. (The original reference was to HadCrut3- I've used HadCrut4 because HadCrut3 is now defunct.)

Temperatures had indeed fallen. Whether or not global warming had been wiped out, time would tell.

This year, it's deja vu all over again in denial land, with this claim from David Rose:

Global average temperatures over land have plummeted by more than 1C since the middle of this year – their biggest and steepest fall on record. 

He was referring to Satellite temperatures over land, but lets look at global HadCrut4 temperatures to compare to the previous graph.

Temperatures have indeed fallen again.

But almost a decade has passed since the last "falling temperatures have wiped out AGW" meme. What has happened since then?

Temperatures recovered a bit, dropped a bit (but not as much as 2008) Then rose rapidly, then dropped again (but not as low as 2008).

Temperatures this year fell from a much higher starting point, and fell to a much higher low (so far).

The reason that temperatures fell of course is that an El Nino warmed the planet's surface for a while, and when it finished, temperatures cooled.

The climate clown's act looks even less convincing the second time around.

No, the world ISN'T getting warmer

Sometimes you have to go back an re-examine claims made by global warming bozos to prove just how stupid they were.

The bozos this time are David Rose and the Daily Mail. Exactly three years ago the Mail published a story with the headline

The Great Green Con no. 1: The hard proof that finally shows global warming forecasts that are costing you billions were WRONG all along

With the claims that

No, the world ISN'T getting warmer

and

The graph on this page blows apart the ‘scientific basis’ for Britain reshaping its entire economy and spending billions in taxes and subsidies in order to cut emissions of greenhouse gases

and

But when the latest official global temperature figures from the Met Office are placed over the predictions, they show how wrong the estimates have been, to the point of falling out of the ‘95 per cent’ band completely. The graph shows in incontrovertible detail how the speed of global warming has been massively overestimated. 

Based on a graph they had "borrowed" (uncredited) from Ed Hawkins.

Three years later, this is what global temperatures look like:

The graph shows projected global temperature with 75% and 95% certainty.

And the legend reads

...and this heavy black line is the official world average temperature- which is about to crash out of them both.

Or not.

Actual temperatures for 2014 and 2015 from the Met Office.

Observed and likely temperatures for 2016 from Berkeley Earth.

Of course the fact that temperatures are now at the top of the range does not mean that global warming has speeded up, any more than the fact that they were at the bottom of the range three years ago did not mean global warming had stopped.

It's just natural variability.

Which is in the models.

But time has proved David Rose and the Mail's claims to be clownish.

Rise in CO2 has 'greened Planet Earth'

The clown this time is... Roger Harrabin.

If you want a good report of the title story, read Carbon Brief.

If you want a bad one, read Roger Harrabin.

You'll notice that the authors of the report concerned anticipate that their findings will be seized upon by the climate change sceptics, and go to pains to show that their arguments are invalid.

So what does Roger Harrabin do? He goes to the climate change sceptics and relays their arguments in the third sentence.

The despite the warning from the scientist the BBC asked to assess its science coverage:

"Science turns on evidence. Balance in science is not the same as balance in politics where politicians can have a voice however barmy their ideas are. They're not taking this on board. Why, I don't know."

 theguardian.com

So what barmy things do the "sceptics" say?

(Well first let's point out the irony of climate sceptics touting a study based on the output of computer models that demonstrates that human activity has an observable effect on the climate.)

"The magnitude of the increase in vegetation appears to be considerably larger than suggested by previous studies. This suggests that projected atmospheric CO2 levels in IPCC scenarios are significantly too high, which implies that global temperature rises projected by IPCC models are also too high, even if the climate is as sensitive to CO2 increases as the models imply."

Says one.

Well empirically, CO2 concentration isn't observed to be diverging (significantly) from IPCC projections, but this sceptic is obviously more interested in the hypothetical (i.e. what is projected from climate models), and what may happen in the future.

 Source: IPCC

Another says:

"It is inappropriate to dismiss the arguments of the so-called contrarians, since their disagreement with the consensus reflects conflicts of values [?!] and a preference for the empirical (i.e. what has been observed) versus the hypothetical (i.e. what is projected from climate models).

Well the greening of the earth due to an increase in CO2 the atmosphere was predicted by science. (See quote above.) The fact that prediction is now an empirical observation ("although the magnitude appears to be considerably larger than suggested by previous studies") should make us doubt "the hypothetical predictions of climate models"?

Maybe they are an underestimate too?

One prefers the hypothetical over the empirical and the other the empirical over the hypothetical.

Barmy.

This is not balance Roger, it's letting the clowns rung around the ring tripping over their comically large shoes.