2014 will be the warmest year on record

Randy Oldman wrote:

Sally Vixxxxens wrote:

You Global Warming Alarmists (Dupes) are nutjobs but please have a Happy New Year! And make sure to bundle up because this winter will be perhaps the coldest on record!

Extremes of weather are predicted in the Climate Change model.

If extremes of weather are predicted, why is everyone (Global Warming Alarmists) so giddy about the recent "warmest years on record?" Just another extreme. Nothing to note here.

I think you'll find the conclusions based on these report is very different to yours but you're the expert.

You Are What You Is wrote:

Science is stupid. Facts are for morans. What America needs is more Jesus.

I've worship on the throne of my new god, Gaia ever since the first IPCC report came out. The dogma is settled science and we must shame and shun the non believers!

(you see what I did there?)

The globe has been warming for 20,000 years. What kind of an idiot waits til now to get upset over it. Wait a while and it'll cool again. Oh no!

I'd been waiting on the release of the HADCRUT data to update my charts. NOAA / NASA already spilled the beans from their data, but the folks who maintain the HADCRUT database wait a month before releasing the most recent month's data. Anyway, the HADCRUT data, like the previous announcements, also confirm that 2014 was "the warmest year on record." I put it in quotations because "on record" sounds like more than it is, and because using the calendar year as the framework for the statistics is a bit arbitrary and potentially misleading. But nonetheless, 2014 was the warmest calendar year in the instrumented record.

What one chooses to make of that statistic is, I think, a personal choice. To provide context to the statistic, I will again share some graphs, this time updated to include December 2014.

In the spirit of fair play I need to come on and admit the error in my naive predictions from last year around this time:

the shill is gone... wrote:My naive predictions from all this are the following, in descending order of confidence:

- this time next year, the 12-month trailing average anomaly (from HACRUT4 (NH+SH)/2) will be 0.1-0.15C lower than it is this month

- over the next 10-20 years, the 12-month trailing average anomaly will stay within a band between 0.4-0.7 above the 1960-1990 baseline average

- by 2100, the 12-month trailing average global anomaly will be abour 1.5-2.0C above 19660-1990 baseline values

That will be $0.02, thanks!

Friom this:

We can see that my first (and most confident) prediction was well off. Actual monthly T anomalies in Sept 2014 and 2015 were 0.593C and 0.786C, and INCREASE of about 0.2C, well outside my expectation of a DECREASE of 0.1-0.15C. My second prediction is also wrong, as June, July and September 2015 all exceeded 0.7C.

As Neils Bohr might have written were he alive today, predictions about climate are difficult, especially those about future climate. :-)

It's past the end of 2015 so I thought this deserved an update. The original point of this thread was to discuss that 2014 was (then) on track to be the warmest year on record, which in fact it turned out to be (if only barely). Now with 2015 in the books, last year was much warmer again, making it again the warmest on record. Of course "on record" only means the last ~ 150 years give or take.

Anyway, I'm revisiting this thread to make further light of my naive predictions from last year, but also to claim that I'm not an idiot yet, we need another year (or more) to see if time (and climate) proves me for the idiot some people think I am...

So last year, I made some predictions, which I quoted in the last post. They were basedon my own naive analysis of the trends in global anomaly data, without making any effort (and in fact deliberately resisting any inclination) to consider causative relationships, but rather just let the data speak for themselves and see what they might tell us.

I started by plotting annual and decadally-smoothed anomaly data, and finding a fairly simple (second order) best fit:

Then I flattened the data by transfroming the second order best fit to a horizontal straight line:

Next I drew a crude sine curve to capture the broad behaviour of the decadally smoothed data:

Then I drew some parallel error bounds, upper and lower, that capture the 95th and 5th percentile of annual data:

Then I took the best fit sine curve and upper and lower bounds, and transformed them back to the original second order best fit to generate a "naive prediction," shown here with the best fit in reen, and upper and lower bounds in red/orange, and the annual data as orange dots. You can see this inferred trend captures nearly all the annual data:

... to be continued

... continued

So we can zoom in and look at the inferred trends and actual data from 1950 onward, this time also showing the monthly data (which you can see frequently stray outside our annual upper and lower bounds, no matter...):

Now my predictions, poor though they were, were based on the "expected" flattening that continues (in my naive projections) through to about 2030, and also due to the shorter period variability in annual anomaly, where we see peaks and troughs every 2-4 years. I was expecting this past year to reflect a dip, from eyeballing this plot:

Now the record already shows that 2015 was hotter again than 2014, so (all) my predictions were wrong. BUT, the annual data have not yet gone outside my projections:

And here's another view, showing the most recent year (admittedly only based on the first 11 months of the year, December HADCRUT data will be another couple of weeks getting posted):

So what does all this tell you?

First (and foremost!), I'm not an idiot (yet). Maybe next year...

Second, predictions are very difficult, especially about the future... (to paraphrase Neils Bohr)

Third, I still expect temperatures to hover (but fluctuate) around +0.6C (relative to 1960-90) for another 15-20 years, based solely on a naive interpretation of past data. If the AGW hypothesis is valid, this will be proven wildly wrong (and I will be proven completely idiotic).

There is one more point I want to make about all this. Irrespective of the validity of the AGW hypothesis, it is clear that there is significant natural climate variability not explained by (or not correlated with, anyway) atmospheric pollutants, which increase more or less linearly, and would suggest a more or less linear increase in temperature anomaly. We have not had a linear increase, the recent (last ~ 18 years) "pause" has gone against expectations. I'll not use that as an argument against AGW, but rather simply suggest that, assuming AGW is correct, it is still clear that the effect of atmospheric carbon is not the only significant factor (something else, or somethings else must explain the "pause"), and all our efforts to throttle CO2 production may show little (or no?) obvious effect, at least not measurable within a short timeframe following any such changes. Which could serve to undermine efforts. If people don't see a real cause and effect, they will lose appetite to spend money (or curb their lifestyles) for the sake of something outwardly ineffective.

Interesting charts. Thanks for posting.

A couple of your charts show a clear 60-year sine wave pattern that cannot be explained by AGW theory. AGW theory claims that CO2 is like your home's thermostat... as CO2 goes up, global temperature goes up. Clearly, this is not the case. Something else is in play here.

Also, I would point out that satellite and balloon temperature measurements show that global temps are still significantly below the 1998 high. It's only the "homogenized" (aka adjusted) surface temps that are showing marginally greater highs.

The best fit to the sine wave pattern is solar magnetism (not solar irradiance, which is often used to discount the impact of the sun on climate change). There are some charts showing this 60 year pattern in solar magnetism, I think. I'd have to track them down...

One half-hearted bump to see if any of the regular Global Warming crowd have anything to add...

OK really, for sure, LAST time... :-)