Jose L. Duarte
  • Home
  • Blog
  • Media Tips
  • Research
  • Data
  • An example
  • Haiku
  • About

Hottest year on record

3/5/2015

23 Comments

 
2014 was the hottest year on record by some hundredths of a degree. It was not significantly hotter than 2005 or 2010. See the Berkeley BEST lab for details. Global surface warming paused or slowed down after 1998 – there is some dispute about whether to call it a pause or a slowdown. We'll treat it as a pause or a plateau because that is the least favorable assumption for the point I make below (treating it as slow warming makes the points below even stronger.)

The "hottest year on record" got lots of hype, and people made false inferences about it with respect to global warming, the pause, etc. I saw deeply misleading stories in the New York Times and the Washington Post, which worries me. They're supposed to be the best.

When you have a rise in a variable, followed by a plateau, any given data point during the plateau has a decent chance of being the highest on on record. You're on top of a rise. Think of your weight in your 20s – any given year has a decent chance of being your heaviest on record, up to that point, since you've spent most of your life growing and gaining weight and you're now sitting on top of that rise.

The probability of any given year being the hottest on record is 1/n, where n is the number of years in the plateau.

(That calculation assumes that variance during the plateau is within the margin of the elbow of the rise, an assumption that is satisfied if you look at global temp data.)

Justin Gillis wrote an incredibly misleading article at the New York Times. He does that a lot, and I think he's ethically obligated to disclose his political ideology to his readers when he writes about politically-charged topics. In general, it's irresponsible for science writers who are also environmentalists to conceal this from readers when they write about climate science. This is especially true if they relate to environmentalism as a religion, as the recently resigned IPCC chair did – he should have told us it was his religion before he ever took the job.

Gillis  seems unaware of what it means to be on top of a rise, and that any given year has a decent chance of being the hottest on record. We can also blame climate scientists he quoted.

 Stefan Rahmstorf said: “However, the fact that the warmest years on record are 2014, 2010 and 2005 clearly indicates that global warming has not ‘stopped in 1998,’ as some like to falsely claim.”

The fact that 2014, 2010, and 2005 are the hottest years on record is another way of describing a pause or plateau in a universe where variables have variability. It is definitely not evidence of continued warming, and is fully consistent with warming having stopped. That's what "stopped" looks like. If we peaked at 1998 or whenever, and see random variance from that year, several of the subsequent years will be the hottest on record. (That these years were the hottest on record is also consistent with warming, but we'd need more info to know if significant warming has occurred.)

Michael Mann said: “It is exceptionally unlikely that we would be witnessing a record year of warmth, during a record-warm decade, during a several decades-long period of warmth..."

What is going on here? Why would a scientist ever say something like this? It is exceptionally likely that we'd be witnessing a record year of warmth during a record-warm decade. This is precisely when we'd expect to see it. This is also another way of describing a pause or plateau.

Gavin Schmidt said: "Why do we keep getting so many record-warm years?”

Because the earth warmed. If the earth warms and it does not subsequently cool, we will get a number of record-warm years. This is another way of describing a plateau, pause, or a question on a high school statistics test.

This worries me. What the hell are these people talking about? Why don't they know basic probability? Why is no one pointing out that when you're on top of a rise, any given year has a decent chance of being the hottest on record? This is basic stuff.

There was also a lot of nonsense in the media about a 1 in 27 million chance that 2014 was natural. Peter Gleick, a propagandist employed by the same bizarre journal that published the 97% fraud, even tweeted something to this effect. Years are not randomly drawn from a hat, and yearly temperature averages are not independent data points. It's not meaningful to compare 2014 to hundreds or thousands of other years and calculate odds or probabilities. 2014 followed 2013, and 2012, and so forth. Its temperatures are deeply influenced and constrained by the state of the earth's climate in prior years. It's not as though the earth hits a reset button as the clock strikes midnight in Times Square.

None of this says anything about future warming or model projections – my point is that as a basic mathematical and statistical fact, there's a decent chance any given year will be the hottest on record even if we assume no actual long-term warming. Gillis seemed to think the proposition "Global warming has paused" is contested by the observation that 2014 is the hottest year on record by hundredths of degrees. That is simply incorrect. There's no logical intersection between the two claims.

This stuff worries me, and I get grumpy about it, because this is simple math and probability. Our civilization seems extremely vulnerable to misinformation and innumeracy. It makes me uneasy that we can't get basic stats right in 2015. I feel like we're going to do something stupid, something harmful. Not necessarily on climate change, but something – if we can't get basic logic or probability, basic stats awareness, from the New York Times or the Washington Post, then I don't know where the public is going to get it. They're supposed to be the best. The science writers there are supposed to be the best. They have an ethical responsibility to not mislead the public, and when they stumble, they have an ethical obligation to correct their misinformation.

I sent those newspapers a fuller version of this a month ago, when it was fresh, and they wouldn't publish it. I'm sure I was one of a sea of submissions – what's important is that they need to publish someone who knows basic math and statistics, who won't make such big errors. They need to be truthful and valid in how they report science.

Alternative ways of understanding or expressing the above:

-- Having a hottest year on record around now is consistent with both a pause and actual long-term warming. A pause after decades of warming will include some number of hottest years on record.

-- Variability around a flat line means that some of the data points will be above that line. If the flat line appears after a long rise, those above-line data points will be the highest on record.
23 Comments
Richard_Arrett
3/5/2015 12:53:07 am

Very nice post!

I have wondered the same thing.

Of course, when advocate scientists are trying to persuade people to take "action", they will advocate and shade the truth with their own bias.

This is human nature.

I am pretty sure the average american is tuning out most of the advocacy - which is why global warming (excuse me I mean "climate change") polls so low as a problem.

So I am not to worried about these horribly bad articles which are advocacy disguised as science.

The only damage they appear to be doing is to the reputation of the entire field of climate science.

Reply
Barry Woods
3/5/2015 05:15:07 am

why do people think this, because scientist say 'hottest year', 'its the warmest decade', and produce graphs like this

http://jo.nova.s3.amazonaws.com/graph/temp/global/tricks/met-office-ranking-year.gif

from the MetOffice, ranking Hottest years by rank, not chronologically.. and then everyone says what 'plateau'

I rearranged the graph t by Time - to 'unhide the pause'

http://jo.nova.s3.amazonaws.com/graph/temp/global/tricks/hadcrut-rearranged-by-year.gif

http://joannenova.com.au/2015/02/uk-met-office-uses-graphical-tricks-to-hide-the-pause/

prefer to refer to the full dataset though...

http://www.klimatupplysningen.se/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/HadCRUT4.jpg

where previous short periods of warming, and 'pausing' can be seen,

Reply
BarryWoods
3/5/2015 05:22:36 am

Joe - I hate to break this to you.... Ill be gentle..

- this article makes you 'officially' a 'climate sceptic' - LOL
expect to be having emails about your funding, anytime soon, if you keep this up..

you may not think you are a 'climate sceptic - ie just good science,

but you don't get to choose, but this is how Cook and friends will likely be labelling you from now on...

Reply
Joe Duarte
3/5/2015 06:56:18 am

I'm not a skeptic. This whole thing is depressing. Gavin is way too smart to say things like that to a reporter. Mann seemed to be playing a dare, essentially saying we'd never expect to find water in a lake. I'm very confused. The politics of warming grosses me out. People are e-mailing me trying to scam me, we've got corruption at universities, reporters can't do math. I feel like I was born in the wrong place, the wrong time. I don't want to have to keep fighting like this, for such simple things like math and integrity. I'll flesh it out some other time, but this stuff just too depressing for me, makes my life worse. I didn't get into this thinking I'd need to point out 1/n or that false papers need to be retracted. More people need to do their jobs. We're trying to have a civilization here.

Reply
Jonathan Abbott link
3/6/2015 07:23:47 am

Joe, I'm afraid Barry's right. It doesn't matter what you think about the likelihood of future warming - the moment you comment on the fact that Mann and Schmidt spout such rubbish, you're a sceptic. At least as far as they're concerned. Welcome to the Climate Wars.

You need to remember that they are activists first and scientists second, or barely at all.

Joe Duarte
3/6/2015 11:47:43 am

They can call me whatever they want, but they probably shouldn't be flying the banner of science.

That's what I'm starting to worry about. The political camp that has loudly professed its love of science is engaging in too much unscientific activity. There are too many failures of basic math, logic, statistics, valid reasoning, grasp of probability. What is being tagged as "science" is often incredibly dumb. We've got the Cook stuff, the Lewandowsky stuff, the bizarre things these outspoken climate scientists are saying.

I think a person could evaluate all those cases and pull out different dimensions that tie them together. Some people might argue the left-wing politics is a common denominator. Some might focus on environmentalism in particular. Some might focus on integrity or truthfulness.

But I think a person might single out intelligence as a factor. I could see future historians and philosophers of science casting it as some kind of IQ crater, or applied IQ. If people don't understand what variability around a flat line looks like, or that counting papers from an arbitrary search is pointless, or that sloppy web surveys aren't valid, that could be cast as stupidity. Bias makes us dumber, probably in many ways, so it can be enfolded in the other issues, but it scares me to live in a civilization where no one points out such basic math issues as we saw with the HYOR, where scientists would be so sloppy and politically driven that they forgot basic probability.

I'm not prepared to wage a war against dumb. It would be horrible if science continued to be associated with instances of extremely low apparent IQ. The friction cost for civilization would be immense. I don't want to deal with that.

Sheri
3/7/2015 02:59:53 am

I think what others are trying to say is that while you do not consider yourself a skeptic, true believers will.
I have tried and tried to get people to understand what the graphs mean, but most just make fun of any interpretation not approved by activists. In reality, if you take the NOAA climate graph 1880 to 2014 that says 2014 was the warmest year, there are far more cold years (below the average) on the graph than hot ones. Yet the cold years are ignored and the hot ones means doom. The cold years dropped, then warmed up. Yet there is an insistent the warming cannot stop because the trend line says so. It is most frustrating. People believe that once the trend line is going in a certain direction, it cannot change, even though it clearly did just before 1910.

Joe Duarte
3/8/2015 04:40:29 pm

Hi Sheri -- I don't know what you mean. The number of cold years, or the ratio of cold to hot years, doesn't bear on the issue.

I don't think any scientists are claiming the warming can't stop because the trendline says so, or that the trendline can't change. That's reminiscent of Lewandowsky's bizarre sole-authored paper where he seemed to imply that if the general public thinks a trendline will continue, this tells us something about climate.

Climate scientists are saying that there are various things that impact the climate, that CO2 is one of those things, and that given our current understanding, taking into account all other known factors, increasing levels of CO2 will cause warming. There's some debate about how much warming it will cause, how soon, what the uncertainties are, etc. They're not just looking at trendlines and inferring something from them. That's not what climate scientists do.

Sheri
3/9/2015 03:30:10 am

Maybe not scientists, but bloggers do:
https://tamino.wordpress.com/2015/01/20/its-the-trend-stupid-3/
Also, wasn't this whole mess pushed over the top by the hockey stick, which clearly convinced people there was no stopping the trend. People do buy into it. I see it on blogs frequently. Skeptical Science clearly insists the trend line has to be linear and not stepped (http://www.skepticalscience.com/graphics.php?g=47) even though the stepped graph may be equally correct. I have found virtually no climate scientists who believe there is anything other than a linear trend upward. (One paper did look at other statistics that could be used.) Maybe I need to read more, I don't know.
I know they are not just looking at trend lines per se, but again, that's how they sell the product to public.
Why are the cold years, the linear trends thereof and why the cooling increased then decreased not investigated? The theory addresses added CO2 and there was a significant warming with a similar slope around 1910. The warming at that point was at the same rate as now, yet that is ignored. The level of CO2 at that point was not significant to explain the increase. If nature did, then nature can do it again. That's the problem--originally, this was CO2 as the driver, but now that CO2 is going up and the temperature does not rise as fast, a new theory has to be added--natural variability. I am still researching early papers on global warming, but I cannot recall any climate scientist saying nature could overcome CO2.

Barry Woods
3/26/2015 10:08:10 pm

Hi Joe

If I recall correctly another commentator agreed with me, and explained why..

ie you do not get to choose the labels that will be placed on you (after all you have criticised Mann, Schmitt, Cook, Lewandowsky - thus they will call you a sceptic/denier' like it or not - this is how their game works..

what happened to that comment? and Why?

Derrick Byford
3/5/2015 06:47:22 am

Spot on article. The likelihood though is that the world may indeed be expected to warm gradually since the end of the little ice age and from doubling CO2 levels. The real questions are how quickly, by how much and should we really be worried. The scenario I like to present to my alarmist friends is that global temperatures could increase by 0.01C every year for a century and after 100 years of 100 panic inducing "record hot" years we would be just 1C warmer. So what? I also prefer to use less alarmist language. 2010, 2014 and 2005 were probably slightly less cool than other years in the recent past. 58F is considered pretty cold in Hawaii and many other parts of the world.

Reply
Richard Tol link
3/5/2015 05:43:07 pm

"Why don't they know basic probability?"
Probability and statistics is a small part of the mandatory curriculum in the geosciences.

Reply
Sheri
3/7/2015 09:17:11 am

I know Arizona does not have daylight savings time, but the rest of the country changes tonight. I have heard all week that "we get an extra hour of daylight" from the change. I see no evidence that the reporters actually realize how foolish that comment is. We have exactly the same amount of daylight with or without DST. This fact seems to have escaped the reporter.

Reply
Joe Duarte
3/8/2015 04:26:58 pm

Hi Sheri – They mean usable daylight or de facto daylight, not actual sunrise to sunset. We're starting our day an hour earlier, relative to sunrise. In getting up at 7:00 am like always, we're getting up at what we used to mark as 6:00 am, exploiting daylight hours that we formerly slept or showered through. Depends a bit on your latitude.

Reply
Vieras
3/9/2015 04:00:37 am

"Climate scientists are saying that there are various things that impact the climate, that CO2 is one of those things, and that given our current understanding, taking into account all other known factors, increasing levels of CO2 will cause warming. There's some debate about how much warming it will cause, how soon, what the uncertainties are, etc."

True, and that's what sceptics have been saying for ages. Welcome to the dark side! ;-)

Seriously speaking, it must have been an interesting journey to read through all the Lewandowsky & Cook "science", writing all those complaints to the magazines and to find out how badly science has been corrupted. You did the same journey as countless others have done. It sucks to find out that clear, boneheaded crap is defended against all logic.

Even though I welcomed you to the sceptic "camp", there's no pressure. Feel free to think whatever you want. There is no need to agree with a certain set of opinions. The sceptics are like cats, free spirits who are hard to control. Unfortunately you'll be labeled but you seem to be a strong person and can take all the abuse. And why shouldn't you be able to? You're just being honest.

All the best!

Vieras

Reply
Jonathan Abbott link
3/9/2015 06:59:24 am

Good comment Vieras.

Joe, I'm curious about something: before you started getting involved in climatology, what did you assume sceptics thought? Did you buy the line that we are a bunch of anti-science cranks akin to creationists, as we are often portrayed? I realise there are some people like that, unfortunately - who think the greenhouse effect is false or that God would never allow dangerous climate change. But I'm talking about the people who find themselves on the 'wrong' side of a infinitely shaded scientific discussion (i.e. how much anthropogenic warming will there be and what will be the effect?) and smeared by their opponents. Or did you think only the cranks existed?

I'm not trying to push you in any particular direction, or put words in your mouth, I'm just genuinely curious. Thanks.

Reply
Joe Duarte
3/24/2015 02:14:20 pm

Hi Jonathan -- I'm not exactly sure what I thought. I don't think I thought a lot about it. Some climate skeptics I had encountered made awful arguments. The worst was someone who said that because increasing CO2 had come with lots of progress for humanity in the 20th century, CO2 could not hurt us in the 21st century. That argument is very difficult to comprehend, but it is literally what they argued, repeatedly.

The argument that CO2 was higher at points millions of years ago, and the earth cooler, is also a terrible argument against AGW. There's a basic lack of understanding of the nature of science, the claims that are being made, the plurality of variables, etc.

I don't think I've ever thought climate change merited any political or government action, though I've come close at times. Humans adapt very readily to all sorts of changes and conditions. What people are talking about on climate change is one of the milder things humans have had to adapt to, and were we born in a world with 10% more hurricanes, we wouldn't think anything of it. I'm deeply puzzled by adults who say they're "terrified" of climate change, like that political activist who serves as editor of the Guardian. Adults should have much higher thresholds for terror.

Alan Kennedy
3/25/2015 09:24:11 pm

"The worst was someone who said that because increasing CO2 had come with lots of progress for humanity in the 20th century, CO2 could not hurt us in the 21st century."

It's not THAT bad an argument. Try: "because the sun rises in the East in the 20th century it's going to rise in the East in the 21st." Now you're going to tell me all about having accurate models and understanding underlying processes etc. To which I reply "quite so."

Reply
Canman link
3/26/2015 03:12:57 am

"In general, it's irresponsible for science writers who are also environmentalists to conceal this from readers when they write about climate science."

I think you're expecting too much. As John Stossel says of liberals, "they don't think they're liberals". Nobody thinks of themself as an extremist. It's the guy on the other side that's the extremist.

I think the answer for major press outlets such as the Washington Post, is some counterpoint opinions. Chris Mooney is especially irritating. He laments that the press could have acted as "gate keepers" (actually used the term) @35:50 in his "Point of Inquiry" interview with Naomi Oreskes:

http://www.pointofinquiry.org/naomi_oreskes_merchants_of_doubt/

Reply
Canman link
3/26/2015 03:24:49 am

Your comment section's handling of html tags is mildly irritating.

Reply
Canman link
3/26/2015 03:47:20 am

I just read your section on Chris Mooney in the media tips page. Bravo!

Reply
MikeR
6/9/2015 01:12:14 am

I'm a little late, but just saw this: https://sites.google.com/site/mytranscriptbox/home/20140331_ip
IPCC's AR5 Working Group II Report Press Conference in Yokohama, Japan in 2014.
"Michel Jarraud: Yeah, I would like to come back to this "pause", because I think it's very misleading. There is. No. Pause. Thirteen out of the fourteen warmest years ever recorded occurred since the beginning of this century. What we call now a cold year - the coldest year since year 2001, which is actually 2011 - the coldest year in this period is actually warmer than any year before 1998. So I have real difficulties to accept that we can talk about a pause."

Reply
Sheri
6/9/2015 02:51:15 am

If thirteen out of the 14 years are on average say 15, 15.1, 15.3, 15.4, etc. and the actual measurements give you an error range of plus or minus .5 degrees, those years are all virtually identical. It is a pause. A difference of less than the error range may not be a real difference. If you look at official NOAA graphs, the last years are a plateau. As I have noted before, the coldest years on record were in the 1800's. It would appear, therefore, that in the 1800's we should have feared global cooling and another ice age. It's not the number of record highs or record lows that counts. It's the overall trend. Since we are dealing with statistics here and not actual temperatures (we use anomalies), there is always a margin of error. Add to that the constant adjusting of the values, and it's really not clear what is going on.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    José L. Duarte

    Social Psychology, Scientific Validity, and Research Methods.

    Archives

    February 2019
    August 2018
    July 2017
    December 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    November 2014
    October 2014
    September 2014
    August 2014
    July 2014
    June 2014

    Categories

    All

    RSS Feed

  • Home
  • Blog
  • Media Tips
  • Research
  • Data
  • An example
  • Haiku
  • About