Analysis of Global Temperature Trends, November, 2016, what’s really going on with the Climate?

The analysis and plots shown here are based on the following two data series. First NASA-GISS estimates of a global temperature shown as an anomaly (converted to degrees Celsius) as shown in their table Land Ocean Temperature Index (LOTI) and shown in the following Chart as the red plot labeled NASA. This plot is shown as a twelve month moving average to minimize the large monthly swings and better show trends; the scale for the temperatures is on the left. Second NOAA-ESRL Carbon Dioxide (CO₂₎ values in Parts Per Million (PPM) which are shown in the following Chart as a black plot labeled NOAA. This plot is shown exactly as the data from NOAA is presented and there is no need for a moving average the scale for CO₂ is shown on the right. There were no meaningful changes in the plots shown this month from last month reports.

NASA published data as stated in the first paragraph is shown as an anomaly, but what is a temperature anomaly?  An anomaly is a deviation from some base value normally an average that is fixed. There were two problems with the system that NASA picked which were number one there is no “actual” global temperature and two since climate is a variable there cannot be a real base to measure from. NASA known for its science and engineering expertise back in the day thought it could get around these issues and created a system to do so. First they developed a computer model which took readings from all over the planet and made significant adjustments to them called homogenization and came up with the estimated global temperature. Second they picked the period 1950 to 1980 (30 years) and averaged the values and came up with 14.00 degrees Celsius and make that their base.  Then they took the calculated temperature and subtracted the base from it which gave them the anomaly. The problem is that both the base and the anomaly are arbitrary.

Now that we have a base to work with we are going to add to the previous Chart three things. The first is a trend line of the growth in CO₂ since that is the entire basis for climate change according to the government through NASA and NOAA. That plot is superimposed over the black plot of the actual NOAA CO₂ values as the cyan line labeled as the CO₂ Model and one can see there is a very good fit to the actual NOAA values so there should be no dispute about its validity.  This plot allows us to make projections as to future global temperatures according to the level of CO₂. The second added item is James E. Hansen’s Scenario B data, which is the very core of the IPCC Global Climate models (GCM’s) and which was based on a CO₂ sensitivity value of 3.0^O Celsius per doubling of CO_2. This plot is shown here in lavender and is part of a presentation that Hansen showed to congress in 1988 when the UN was about to set up the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and this plot is labeled as Hansen Scenario B which Hansen stated was the most likely to happen based on his theories’.  The third item is the current plot of the most likely temperature of the planet based on the growth of CO₂ published by the IPCC. This plot is shown in Red and is labeled as IPCC AR5 A2 as that is the table where the data was found. This plot is a GCM computer projection of the planets temperature based to the complex relationships developed on the levels of CO₂ by the IPCC through NASS and NOAA.

It can be seen in this Chart that the lavender plot and the Hansen plot are very close from 1965 to around 2000 after that, from 2000 to 2014, there is a very large and growing deviation reaching close to .5 degrees Celsius in 2014, which is not an insubstantial number.  Also of note is that there doesn’t seem to be a good correlation between the growth in CO₂ and the increase in the planets temperature. The CO₂ is going up in a log function and the Temperature was going down in a log function until recently where it reversed and is now going up in a log function. That major change in direction that occurred between 2013 and 2014 is the subject of this paper.

The next Chart is developed from the raw data from NASS and NOAA as shown in the first Chart.  This plot was made first by adding ten years blocks of temperature and CO₂ as indicated in the Chart and diving by 120 to give an average for each.  Then the average Temperature was divided by the average CO₂ to give degrees of temperature increase per PPM of CO₂. After that was plotted it appeared that there were two different curves the first was from block 1965-1974 through block 2004-2014 shown as Black Dots and the second was from block 1995-2004 through block 2005-2016 shown as Black Dashes. When trend lines were added they were both almost perfect fits to the raw data and so you cannot see the data points very well on the Chart.  These blocks were picked to represent the entire period of time where we had both NASA temperature data and NOAA Co₂ levels.

On the following Chart are two sets of color coded information. The first is Cyan plot and the Cyan box with the equation in it along with the R² value 0f 1.0 are for the first series from block 1965-1974 through block 2004-2014. The other is the Red plot and the Red box with the equation in it along with the R² value of 1.0 which are for the first series from block 1965-1974 through block 2004-2016. We can speculate on how this change has happened but it cannot be said that the plot change is not real; however additions data over the next few years will be required to actually prove that something has changed.

In summary the Cyan data set indicates a diminishing effect of CO₂ on global temperature for about 54 years and the Red data set represents an increasing effect of CO₂ on global temperature for the past 2 years. Since both data sets have an R² value of 1.00 the trend lines cannot be in question.

Before we get into a possible explanation to the drastic change from the Cyan data to the Red data that occurred in 20014 we need to consider other factors than CO₂ on Climate change.  The fault that occurred in the work that was done in the 1980’s was in assuming that there was an optimum or constant global temperature and therefore any change that was being observed was from the increasing amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere.  There may have been correlation but it was never proved that there was causation (high R² value) between CO₂ and global temperatures. With that assumption, which limited options, we moved from true science into the realm of political science.  True science has an open mind and finds relationships that work in matching observations with predictions.  Political science changes history and/or facts to match the desires of the politicians. Since the politicians control the money political science is what we get; which means that what we get may not be technically correct.

A decade ago when I started looking at “climate” change the first thing I did was look at geological temperature changes since it is well known that the climate is not a constant; I learned that 52 years ago in my undergrad geology and climatology courses in 1964. The next paragraph explains currently observed patterns in climate related to this subject.

Ignoring the last Ice Age which ended some 11,000 years ago when a good portion of the Northern hemisphere was under miles of ice the following observations give a starting point to any serious study on the subject. First, there is a clear up and down movement in global temperatures with a 1,000 some year cycle going back at least 3,000 to 4,000 years; probably because of the apsidal precession of the earth’s orbit of about 20,000 years for a complete cycle. However about every 10,000 years the seasons are reversed making the winter colder and the summer warmer in the northern hemisphere. 10,000 years from now the seasons will be reversed. Secondly, there are also 60 to 70 year cycles in the Pacific and the Atlantic oceans that are well documented. These are known as the Atlantic MultiDecadal Oscillations (AMO) in the Atlantic and as La Nina and El Nino in the Pacific. Thirdly, we also know that there are greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide that can affect global temperatures. Lastly the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) estimated that carbon dioxide had a doubling rate of 3.0^O Celsius plus or minus 1.5^O Celsius in 1979 when there were only two studies available and one for sure and maybe both were not per reviewed.

The result of looking objectively at the three possible sources of global temperature changes was a series of equations based on these observations that when added together produced a sinusoidal curve that seemed to follow NASA published temperatures very closely.  Since this curve was based on observed temperature patterns it was called a Pattern Climate Model (PCM) which has been described in previous papers and posts on my blog and since it is generated by “equations” many assume it is some form of least squares curve fitting, which it is not. It does seem to be related to ocean currents.

As can be seen in the following Chart the PCM there is a 69.1 year cycle that moves the trend line up and then down a total of 0.29^O Celsius and we are now in the downward portion of that trend (-.01491^O C per year) which will continue until around ~2035.  This short cycle is clearly observed in the raw NASA data in the LOTI table going back to 1880. Then there is a long trend, 1036.7 years with an up and down of 1.65^O Celsius (.00396^O C per year) also observed in the NASA data. Lastly, there is CO₂ adding about .0079^O Celsius per year so currently they all basically wash out at -.0039^O C per year, which matches the current holding pattern we are experiencing. After about 2035 the short cycle will have bottomed and turn up and all three will be on the upswing again.  Note: the values shown here are only representative as the actual model uses many more places than what are shown here.

When using the 12 month running average for global temperatures up until 2014 the PCM model was within +/- .01 degrees of what NASA was publishing in their LOTI table since the early 1960’s as shown in the next Chart. Further the back projection of the PCM plot matched historical records and global temperatures going back past the time of Christ. It should also be consider that geologically CO₂ levels have reached levels many times that of the current 400 ppm without destroying the planet so the current hysteria over the current small numbers can only be explained by political science not real science.

The nest step in this analysis is to put all of the known data and projections into one Chart which will contain: NASA’s table LOTI global temperature estimates, NOAA’s actual CO₂ values, the CO₂ model projections, the PCM model global temperature plot, Hansen’s Scenario B 1988 global temperature plot, and lastly the IPCC AR5 A2 global temperature plot. With that done we can look at the results and try to make some sense of what is going on with the various arms of the federal government that are promoting that carbon based fuels be eliminated since they are responsible for the global temperature level  going up.  As previously started when the government pours money into the sciences the sciences respond with technical papers the support the governments views, this is what I call political science verses real science as was done prior to the 1980’s; money talks and BS walks as everyone on the street knows.  This Chart views a good overview of the current situation showing all the facts and all the projections.

This Chart contains no manipulation of the data and the only change that was made was to convert the NASA anomalies back to degrees Celsius to make it more readable to lay people.  This is only a change in units and has no bearing on the look.  A subject not broached here is that of the NASA homogenization process itself and the base period from 1950 to 1980. The portion in the black circle contains the NASA base period of 14.0⁰ degrees Celsius and the reason it’s brought up here is that the Homogenization process causes the global temperatures to move around since the entire data base all the way back to 1880 is recalculated each month.  But since the base has to stay at 14.0⁰ degrees Celsius the program must be set to not allow changes in that period of time. I’m sure the programmers have fun with that. Prior work here has shown how this creates a teeter totter effect with the data plots, some of which have recently been significant.

The next Chart will be a look at the period from 2010 to 2020 so we can see the detail of the past few years where a change in CO₂ of only a few ppm has caused a major change in the global temperature way beyond anything previously shown in any published NASA data. There are two black ovals on the Chart one at the top of the Chart which is a black oval around the CO₂ levels for 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and part of 2016 and it’s very obvious that there has been very little change, maybe 7 ppm or about 1.9%. Then at the bottom of the Chart is another black oval around the NASA global temperature levels for 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and part of 2016 and its very obvious that there has been a very large change, almost .45 degrees Celsius or about 3.1%. There has never been such a large increase in temperature from such a small increase in CO₂.

By contrast the previous comparable period of the last part of 2010 through 2013 shows about the same increase for CO₂ at 1.1% but no increase for global temperature but actually small decrease. Worse it appears that this current strange upward trend will continue as the values shown here are based on a 12 month moving average and the current values being published by NASA have been very high for the past 7 months and therefore I would expect the NASA plot to be well over 15.0⁰ Celsius within a few months and certainly before the end of 2016.  Also in looking at the raw data for September 2015 and October 2015 there was a jump of almost .30⁰ Celsius that is a very large number for a couple of months and as we have shown here in previous charts not reasonable at all and therefore a perfect example of political science.

In summary, the IPCC models were designed before a true picture of the world’s climate was understood. During the 1980’s and 1990’s CO₂ levels were going up and the world temperature was also going up so there appeared to be correlation and causation. The mistake that was made was looking at only a ~20 year period when the real variations in climate all move in much longer cycles of decades and centuries.  Those other cycles can be observed in the NASA data but they were ignored for some reason.  By ignoring those trends and focusing only on CO₂ the models will be unable to correctly plot global temperatures until they are fixed.

Lastly, the next chart shows what a plot of the PCM model, in yellow, would look like from the year 1400 to the year 2900. This plot matches reasonably well with recorded history and fits the current NASA-GISS table LOTI data, in red, very closely, despite homogenization.  I understand that this model is not based on physics but it is also not true curve fitting. It’s based on observed reoccurring patterns in the climate. These patterns can be modeled and when they are, you get a plot that works better than any of the IPCC’s GCM’s. If the conditions that create these patterns do not change and CO₂ continues to increase to 800 ppm or even 1000 ppm than this model will work well into the foreseeable future.  150 years from now global temperatures will peak at around 15.75⁰ to 16.00⁰ C and then will be on the downside of the long cycle for the next ~500 years.

The overall effect of CO₂ reaching levels of 1000 ppm or even higher will be about 1.5⁰ C which is about the same as that of the long cycle.  The Green plot on the Chart shows the observed pattern with no change in CO₂ from the pre-industrial era of ~280 ppm. CO₂ cannot affect global temperatures more than 1.50⁰ C +/- no matter what the ppm level of CO₂is. The reason being that the CO₂ sensitivity value is not 3.0⁰ per doubling of CO₂ but under 1.0⁰ C per doubling of CO₂ as shown in more current scientific work.

The purpose of this post is to make people aware of the errors inherent in the IPCC models so that they can be corrected. 

The Obama administration’s “need” for a binding UN climate treaty with mandated CO₂ reductions in Europe and America was achieved as predicted at the COP12 conference in Paris in December 2015. To support this endeavor NASA was forced to show ever increasing global temperatures that will make less and less sense based on observations and satellite data which will all be dismissed or ignored.  Within a few years the manipulation will be obvious even to those without knowledge in the subject, but by then it will be to late the damage to the reputation of science will have been done.

Sir Karl Raimund Popper (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian and British philosopher and a professor at the London School of Economics. He is considered one of the most influential philosophers for science of the 20th century, and he also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy. The following quotes of his apply to this subject.

If we are uncritical we shall always find what we want: we shall look for, and find, confirmations, and we shall look away from, and not see, whatever might be dangerous to our pet theories.

Whenever a theory appears to you as the only possible one, take this as a sign that you have neither understood the theory nor the problem which it was intended to solve.

… (S)cience is one of the very few human activities — perhaps the only one — in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected.