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By Jean Chemnick, E&E reporter
Published: Thursday, December 6, 2012
[Reprint from E&E Greenwire – December 6, 2012 – subscription required]
Excerpt: UK’s Lord Christopher Monckton, a climate skeptic, gets evicted
After the news conference, and as diplomats gathered for the climate conference president’s assessment of how close countries are to agreement, Monckton quietly slipped into the seat reserved for the delegation of Myanmar and clicked the button to speak.
“In the 16 years we have been coming to these conferences, there has been no global warming,” Monckton said as confused murmurs filled the hall and then turned into a chorus of boos.
The stunt infuriated negotiators and activists here who gather every year to address what they believe is one of the world’s top threats, the steady rise of man-made global warming.
As Monckton was escorted from the hall and security officers stripped him of his U.N. credentials, several people noted that just a few hours earlier a group of young activists had been thrown out of the convention center and deported. Their crime: unfurling an unauthorized banner calling for the Qatari hosts to lead the negotiations to a strong conclusion.
By late today, several activists attending the conference had posted calls to “deport Monckton” on their Twitter feeds.
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End Greenwire excerpt.
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Climate Depot Note: Monckton was referring to the latest temperature data showing a 16 year stall in global warming.
Related links on 16 year global warming pause:
UK Daily Mail: ‘Global warming stopped 16 years ago’ according to UK Met Office ‘quietly released’ report — ‘Pause’ in warming lasted about same time as when temps rose, 1980 to 1996′ — ‘The new data, compiled from more than 3,000 measuring points on land & sea, was issued quietly on internet, without any media fanfare, & , until today, it has not been reported. This stands in sharp contrast to release of previous figures 6 months ago, which went only to end of 2010 – a very warm year…From beginning of 1997 until August 2012 there was no discernible rise in aggregate global temps.’
UK Daily Mail: ‘Claim that there has been any statistically significant warming for past 16 years is therefore unsustainable’ — Reaffirms ‘a 16-year ‘pause’ in rising temps’ — ‘Two new separate peer-reviewed studies, published in prestigious academic journals last week [challenged ‘Hockey Stick’] — ‘The level of warmth during the peak of the MWP in the second half of the 10th Century, equaled or slightly exceeded the mid-20th Century warming.’ There was also a pronounced warming period in Roman times’
Prof. Judith Curry on 16 year global temps: ‘ Nothing in Met Office’s statement…effectively refutes [UK Daily Mail] Rose’s argument that there has been no increase in global avg. surface temps for past 16 years’ — Curry defends UK Daily Mail article: ‘How does this refute Rose’s argument? No statistically significant positive trend, and it makes it look like [warmist Skeptical Science] hasn’t done their homework with the latest data’
Prof. Curry: ‘I think Rose’s 2nd article is well done. He lays out arguments the other ‘side’ is making, & provides his response. It is a reasonable portrayal of debate surrounding this issue’ — Judith Curry: ‘The trend since 1997 is very small, much smaller than the decadal trend of 0.2C that we have been led to expect by the IPCC for the early part of the 21st century…’
Analysis on 16 year ‘pause’ in global warming: ‘Regarding the significance of the period from 1997, recall that Dr. Ben Santer claimed 17 years was the period needed’ — ‘They find that tropospheric temperature records must be at least 17 years long to discriminate between internal climate noise and the signal of human-caused changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere.’ — MIT Professor Richard Lindzen said something similar in a WUWT guest post: ‘There has been no warming since 1997 and no statistically significant warming since 1995.’
Lüning/Vahrenholt On HadCRUT’s 16 Years Of No Warming: ‘Tough Times Ahead For Climate Science’ — ‘It turns out that everything that had been suspected was confirmed’ — ‘This is a completely unexpected development when one considers how all the boldly confident forecasts from the IPCC predicted more warming. The release of new HadCRUT figures occurred almost in absolute silence, without any media buzz whatsoever…One really has got to wonder that Jones has suddenly extended his personal threshold of pain to 20 years, and now claims that phases of no warming 15-16 years long had always been expected.’
Prof. Judith Curry: ‘The data confirms existence of a ‘pause’ in warming’: ‘The natural variability has been shown over past 2 decades to have a magnitude that dominates greenhouse warming signal’ — Curry: ‘It is becoming increasingly apparent that our attribution of warming since 1980 and future projections of climate change needs to consider natural internal variability as a factor of fundamental importance. I sincerely hope that the AR5 provides an assessment of what we know and what we don’t know and areas of disagreement, rather than trying to manufacture a consensus.’
New Phil Jones quote: ‘We don’t know what natural variability is doing’ — ‘We don’t fully understand how to input things like changes in the oceans’ — ‘…and because we don’t fully understand it you could say that natural variability is now working to suppress the warming. We don’t know what natural variability is doing..’
Climategate’s Phil Jones ‘insisted that 15 or 16 years is not a significant period: pauses of such length had always been expected, he said’ in 2012 — ‘Yet in 2009, when the [temperature] plateau was already becoming apparent and being discussed by scientists, Jones told a colleague in one of the Climategate emails: ‘Bottom line: the ‘no upward trend’ has to continue for a total of 15 years before we get worried.’ — ‘In other words, though 5 years ago he seemed to be saying that 15 years without warming would make him ‘worried’, that period has now become 20 years’
‘The UK Met Office says world has warmed by 0.03 deg C per decade since 1997…But what the Met Office doesn’t say is that this is statistically insignificant’ — ‘There is no case to be made for a statistically significant increase in global temperatures as given in the Hadcrut4 dataset between 1997 and August 2012. The Met Office says the 15-year standstill is not unusual. This is true but again the Met Office is being economical with the truth’
NOAA’s ’15 year statement’ from 2008 puts a kibosh on the current Met Office ‘insignificance’ claims that global warming flatlined for 16 years — ‘Yet, today, we see evidence of the goalposts being moved again as the Met Office tries to paint this lack of warming ‘plateau’ as being insignificant…So we are at 16 years, soon to be 17 years. What happens when we hit 20 years? Either the models are worth something or they aren’t. In this case it seems they aren’t’
UK Met Office: CO2 causes warming; other factors cause cooling — ‘We have known for some time that [multi-decadal oceanic cycles] may act to slow down or accelerate observed warming trend’ — ‘We also know that changes in the surface temperature occur not just due to internal variability, but are also influenced by ‘external forcings’, such as changes in solar activity, volcanic eruptions or aerosol emissions. Combined, several of these factors could account for some or all of the reduced warming trend seen over the last decade – but this is an area of ongoing research’
Analysis: Global Warming Standstill Confirmed: ‘There is now no consistent increase in temperature seen in this data. The data, displayed this way, reveals that far from showing a steady underlying rate of warming the global temperature has had two standstills, with curiously, the 1998 super El Nino delineating them.’