170 Years of Earth Surface Temperature Data, where’s the warming?

Question

This paper was submitted to Nature Climate Change magazine, whose editors refused to review it, saying anything they publish must be “grounded in the current literature.” It is reprinted here by permission of the author. It is not long, and the chart with the green line is important. Please understand what the green line represents.]

https://medium.com/@pullnews/170-years-of-earth-surface-temperature-data-show-no-evidence-of-significant-warming-2a08ab3e9be9

Thomas K. Bjorklund
University of Houston
Dept. of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences

October 16, 2019

Answer 1

I see you have skeptics as to your data. Your chart tracks well with the1990 UN-IPCC report. (At least until 1990 because it was written in that year.) If you want to look it up it is in the1990 UN-IPCC report on page 202. 



As you say, "Where is all this Global Warming?"

Answer 2

Its like going to malta a society that loves life but are tricked into inducting the wrong into there society .Be it the wrong play writes or actors this allowing the malta to be inducted in other societies with malta lose there own society.my uncle caught rabbies

Answer 3

This graph is terrible, and I'll explain why for those who are actually interested in analysis of data ...



1. What the data (black line) actually shows is pretty much exactly what climatologists have been saying - the planet has warmed by about 1 degree since the 1850s (an anomaly in the graph of about -0.4 to about +0.7 degrees).



2. The red line is a polynomial fit they have applied to 'smooth' the data and remove the jaggedness or high frequency noise. This is entirely the *wrong* method to use given the analysis they do in the next step to generate the green line.



The reason is that a polynomial fit is basically a series of connected curves that the fitting process tries to bend, squash, magnify and offset to approximate the data taken. This means the time base is distorted - the curve doesn't represent a yearly average or decade average or any meaningful summary of the data.



To illustrate the point, the R^2 residual is 0.75. The closer to 1 the better the fit (generally speaking). Would a higher or lower order polynomial fit give a value closer to 1? What justification was there for the order of polynomial they chose?



The way they should have smoothed this data was to take a moving average or simply replot it as a yearly average or decade average. A polynomial is a guess that fits some parts better than others meaning any analysis based on that polynomial will be suspect.



3. Having obtained some polynomial, they now differentiate it to work out the 'acceleration'. This is where it breaks down entirely. They take data ... fit it using a polynomial with no real relationship to the data other than it sort of matching the shape of the data generally ... then take the derivitive of this curve that sort of matched the shape, and try to use that to infer something about the rate of change. This is such a rookie mistake I'd have to conclude the graph was analysed by freshman year undergraduates.



What they should have done was to take the black data and just averaged it over a year or decade ... then looked at the derivative of that graph. 



I think I'll try to find the raw data if anyone has a link and do the analysis properly to see what the result is.

Answer 4

Pull your head out of the graph. They are burning Australia, Sumatra, and the Amazon Rainforest to turn it over to cattle farming. 

Answer 5

LMFAO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

typical horse **** from a typical mindless idiot..........

republicans are bad for humanity.........

Answer 6

I thought it was an interesting article.  Obviously changes in acceleration and deceleration are understood by Christy.  If the warming is slowing, it is decelerating and "turning around".  I believe that is the point Christy et al was making. 



 It seems that Oik and Dirac are having a hard time figuring out the point.  If they just think of a car moving down the road and substitute speed for temperature, they might gain a better understanding of the point IMO.  

Answer 7

I'll second what oikos said, the paper deserved to be rejected by the journal editor without even being sent out to reviewers. The author of the paper doesn't seem to understand the difference between rate and acceleration.  He also doesn't really understand the difficulties in trying to calculate the acceleration of an inherently jittery quantity.  It is a numerically unstable process that he tried to clean up by smoothing the first order quantity (the rate of increase). but by doing that he also completely ignores the error in the acceleration, which is certainly comparable to (or larger than) the acceleration itself. He then bases all his conclusions around this highly dubious quantity, rather than the more accurate rate of change or just using the temperature itself--which is clearly going UP.



As a scientist I'm surprised that he could make such a fundamental error, which makes me suspicious of his background--he is an (old) oil exploration geologist.



EDIT: It's pretty easy to see by JimZ's answer that he doesn't really understand acceleration either, and neither did the person who wrote the "note" explaining the graph, so let's think about it. First, if we have temperature data over time, and we want to see whether it's warming, that's very easy to do--we just look at later times, and see if the values are greater than at earlier times.  It is quite easy to see from the plot that that is true, so that answers the question "..where's the warming?"--it's right there, in front of your face.



Another way to see whether it's warming or not (although less direct) is to look at the first derivative of the quantity, that is, the SLOPE of the temperature curve. If the slope is positive, then it's warming. Now, like many physical quantities, there is a lot of noise in the signal, and the noise makes the calculation of the slope a numerically unstable process. So the author smooths the temperature curve before differentiating.  This makes sense, and what do we find when we do that? We find that the green line (the rate of increase) is positive from 1882 until present.  That means that it's been warming that whole time. Of course, this is after the low pass filter has been applied to smooth the curve. So once again, that answers the question "...where's the warming?"--again, it's right there, in front of your face.  



Note that the editor's note is WRONG, the editor claims that when the green line curves down, that it is COOLING, but that is not right, as long as the green line is positive it is WARMING, not cooling. The author of the paper wants to infer something about whether the rate of warming is going up or down based on the value of the green line (the acceleration), but as I mentioned before, the error in the acceleration is probably comparable to the acceleration itself, so making interpretations from subtle slope changes of the green line is not a valid procedure.  However, we can do something along those lines by simply comparing the value of the green curve over a long time period. For example, the value of the green curve now is substantially greater than it was in the mid-20th century, if that difference is significant (the author would need to show that), then we can say that not only is the temperature going up, but the rate of temperature increase is accelerating.

Answer 8

I would have suggested rejecting the paper too, if I had been a reviewer. At least, until the author learned what "accelerating" and "decelerating" mean. Also, he should learn to read a graph; the data clearly show an increase, which, I assume is what is smoothed out to form the red line.

Answer 9

Way to go Solar, I see you have been doing your homework!!



The mainstream propaganda is going to take some time to collapse, but it will. Global Cooling is here and will be here for some time.

Answer 10

It doesn't exist. In fact, the data that does exist says the exact opposite of what climate criers have been telling us for years!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VNy7tTY0Vek

Answer 11

Get back to me when it gets published in Nature climate change magazine, it just makes it worthless sh*t otherwise