Betting

Met Office Prediction for 2010 & Betting on HadCrut.

35 Comments

This week is all about CRU so I’m going to start adding betting on HadCrut to the gambling line up. Before you bet, you should be aware that The Independent” reported the Met Office forecast for 2010:

The new forecast for 2009-2019 shows a range of possible outcomes for each year but the “central estimate” for 2010 shows a figure of about 0.55C above the average – clearly in excess of 1998. The temperatures then steadily climb to a high of about 0.7C above the average by 2015.


To show you how this related to current and previous temperatures, I plotted a “what if” graph with HadCrut data, setting the as yes unknown HadCrut temperatures anomalies for Nov 2009 – Oct 2010 to 0.55C.

Figure 1: Predicted trends based on real and predicted data.
Figure 1: Predicted trends based on real and predicted data.

(You can see that if the temperature does reach 0.55C, during the el nino year, it will be approaching the multimodel mean value for the projections in the IPCC AR4. Also, the least squares trends whether computed since 2000 or 2001 will be noticeably less than “about 0.2 C/decade”, the nominal value projected in the AR4.

That said, predicting the November value is about weather. Ordinarily, one might think that I should close betting before November is over. However, we all know these values are sufficiently unpredictable that most people can only guess within ±0.2C even on the day any agency publishes their value. So, I have decided that betting will be open until sometime in the evening on Dec. 4, 2009.

[sockulator(../musings/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/UAHBets2.php?Metric=HadCrutNHSH?Units=C?cutOffMonth=12?cutOffDay=5?cutOffYear=2009?DateMetric=November, 2009? )sockulator]

  1. Betting is based on The hadcrut3 nh+sh data posted for November 2009. We go with whatever Hadley posts in their December update.
  2. Europeans: Please enter x.x not x,x.
  3. If you make a mistake, just reenter. The script will log your new bet, and we always count your last bet as the real one.
  4. Your email will not be revealed to anyone. It is used for disambiguation because people do not have unique names but do have unique emails.
  5. Have fun spending your Quatloos on TriSkelion

35 thoughts on “Met Office Prediction for 2010 & Betting on HadCrut.”

  1. C’mon you lazy British bastards, sign the petition!

    http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/HADLEY-LEAK/

    Do you want to pay trillions of pounds for a fraudulent cause so that the rich fascist elite can be the only ones to eat meat, drive cars, and have kids? Next, the AGW zealots will tell us “NO MORE SEX FOR YOU PEONS. CREATES TOO MUCH HEAT & CO2. BAD FOR GLOBAL WARMING.”

  4. I’m a little confused. If they are predicting .55C for next year then they’re about .1C above the models prediction of about .45C and that is below the .2C per decade of the AR4 projection? Showing those points on the chart would make it more visual.

  5. Nathan,

    We’re not desperate at all. We’re doing what we always do- observing that AGW is a fraud and acting accordingly.

    Andrew

  7. I’m not a “lazy British bastards”, not even British for that matters. Had I happen to be, for sure I’d not follow whatever invitation by people insulting me like Paul Z.

    Don’t know why, but his post makes me think about catastrophism …

  8. This is maybe off topic, but…
    A lot of the media commentary about the HADCru emails ends with the comment that despite the content of the emails, and the shadow they cast over the individual researchers, there is a huge amount of independent data showing that global warming is real.
    Okay, but… really? The Mann Hockey Stick was a powerful image, showing that the recent warming trend was unprecedented. Other hockey sticks buttressed that observation. But if the Hockey Sticks are all connnected and perhaps not as… robust as initially presented, what does that do for all the other observations? It seems to me that they may show warming, but the context has changed; no longer is it neccessarily unprecedented.
    My question is, if we eliminate the work of the researchers implicated in the emails, what else is there to show the recent climate is unique?
    I’m sure this is a foolish question and I’m forgetting some basic bit of data, or that maybe this point has been made a hundred times before. But I’m curious.

  9. Douggerell,

    I’ll offer this quotation as a start. It’s from Jerry North’s testimony on the NAS report into the HS affair to U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Energy and Commerce –

    “We question some of the statistical choices made in the original papers by Dr. Mann and his colleagues. However, our reservations with some aspects of the original papers by Mann et al. should not be construed as evidence that our committee does not believe that the climate is warming, and will continue to warm, as a result of human activities. Large-scale surface temperature reconstructions are only one of multiple lines of evidence supporting the conclusion that climatic warming is occurring in response to human activities, and they are not the primary evidence. The scientific consensus regarding human-induced global warming would not be substantively altered if, for example, the global mean surface temperature 1,000 years ago was found to be as warm as it is today. This is because reconstructions of surface temperature do not tell us why the climate is changing. To answer that question, one would need to examine the factors, or forcings, that influence the climate system. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the primary climate forcings were changes in volcanic activity and in the output of the Sun, but the strength of these forcings is not very well known. In contrast, the increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over the past century are consistent with both the magnitude and the geographic pattern of warming seen by thermometers. “

    What is unprecedented over this period, regardless of comparisons with whatever the global temperature may have been during the MWP, is the level of GHGs (oh, unless one believes the findings of Ernst Georg Beck – anyone?). The concern, IMV, is not with how close we are to MWP temperatures but rather how far above them we may be in the future.

  10. Douggerell,
    fire all the CRU people, close the CRU itself, burn all the scientific papers they wrote, destroy the digital record too and force people to forget their very existence. And then what? Nothing. There will still be tons of data that come to the very same conclusions.
    Forget this story, don’t forgive them if you like; this issue will bring us nowhere.

  13. Simon:

    The quoted statement makes little sense–(1) an admission that we don’t understand major forcings whose effect is equal to or greater greater than whatever may be driving current climate but (2) we are still sure that whatever is happening now is mostly the result of CO2 and (3) we know it will predominate over these same larger but unknown forcings in the future. Huh?

    Also, we need to start making a distinction between “warming” (a balmy 1.5 degrees per century mostly resulting in warmer nights in Siberia, longer growing seasons everywhere and a healthier, wealthier planet that can get about the business of new energy sources in a measured fashion) and “WARMING!” (a Goresque 4-6 degree rise any day now at which time we will all simply die).

    Many of the people who comment at this site believe that “warming” is a pretty reasonable scientific guesstimate. Are you one of the zealous fringe that still believes in “WARMING!” ?

  14. I will forever change my stripes from a skeptic to a warmer if Phil Jones can publicly (via live broadcast with an audience of skeptics), run his own code and replicate his own temperature record without manually “fudging” the results.

    Here are a few new Mug slogans for consideration.

    “Expose the code”
    “Bust the Anti-Trust Climate Team”
    “Busted not Robust!”
    Shiny
    Edward

  15. George,

    North was not saying that we don’t understand natural forcings but that we don’t have very good knowledge of their strengths over the past 1,000 years, so your parsing is quite wrong.

    I don’t agree with you that +1.5C over the century would be a great thing anyway, so I would be concerned even about what you term simply ‘warming’. You seem to miss out the range between 1.5C and 4-6C – maybe that’s ‘warming’. I’d say the risks seem greatest somewhere in that range. As for ‘WARMING!’, I think there are risks of that just as there are ‘risks’ of it being less than 1.5C over the century. I think it’s a bad idea to keep on pumping GHGs into the atmosphere regardless, and the longer we do so the greater the risks are of higher temperatures.

  16. Nathan (Comment#24679) ,

    The best part IMO is one of the AGW faithful comparing Gavin’s “private” blog to a pet cat or dog.

    The CEI is asking NASA to disclose ‘government information’ about Gavin Schmidt’s private blog. It’s like, I don’t know, asking a police department to disclose details about the origin of one of their police officer’s cats and dogs.

    The correct response to this sort of nonsensical request is a big, fat “LOLWUT?!?!?!?!?”

    But I thought Gavin was important in all this! haha

  17. I’d guess CEI’s FOI requests information about hours Gavin charged to NASA and they are going to compare the hours changed to hours when he moderates comments. I suspect they will find very little useful information.

  20. Simon:
    Thanks for your response. I feel foolish saying this, but I’m not really sure I understand how the quotation you referenced answers my question. North says:
    “Large-scale surface temperature reconstructions are only one of multiple lines of evidence supporting the conclusion that climatic warming is occurring in response to human activities, and they are not the primary evidence.”
    He goes on to say “In contrast, the increasing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere over the past century are consistent with both the magnitude and the geographic pattern of warming seen by thermometers.”
    My question is, what is the prinary evidence that demonstrates that the observed temperature rise is due to human activity? Simply noting that the level of greenhouse gases and temperature are rising concurrently doesn’t prove causality. It almost seems like he’s saying that it must be greenhouse gases because it can’t be anything else. Again, I realize this is a pretty stupid question; I’m not being disingenuous, I’m just looking for an answer.

    Ahab: Whatever the upshot of “Climategate”, I doubt the CRU will be affected to any great degree. When I question the robustness of the Hockey Stick, I’m not referring to that; rather the work done by Stev Mc. and Ross. And i note that even the testimony quoted by Simon seems to question some of teh results.

  21. Douggerell,

    It probably wasn’t a very good answer – it was just for a starter, as I said. I deliberately chose a quotation which questioned the “statistical choices” in a study from a decade ago, since I wanted to pursue the point that one can be critical of scientific work without having to take an opposite position to its implications.

    Of course correlation is not causation (sorry for the cliche). An increase in GHGs implies, on a theoretical level, a warming of the atmosphere. I am not aware of any climate scientist (not Spencer, not Lindzen) who disputes that basic principle – the disagreement is over climate sensitivity/feedbacks upon GHG induced temperature rise (and thus the major difference of view is over what will happen rather than what has happened).

    There must be a physical explanation of any change in global temperature. We cannot ignore the calculation of GHG impact even if we were to think that there might be some ‘Factor X’ which is not understood.

    So, let us imagine that there is a Factor X, a form of natural variability which we do not understand. It remains the case that we have a theoretical understanding of the radiative impact of GHG forcing, and that understanding describes pretty well what has happened so far in this ‘experiment’. Regardless of any (very possibly entirely imaginary) Factor X , we are contributing to warming of the planet.

  22. Simon: Thanks again for responding. It does appear to be a case of “What else could it be?” Fair enough; a week ago I was discussing a biological effect I couldn’t account for with a supervisor. I told him it was probably a protein, and he agreed.
    The difference between this and AGW is I didn’t tell my boss he had to drastically alter the finances of the entire company because I couldn’t figure out any other possibilites.
    If climate scientists want to hypothesize possible reasons for recent temperature increases, that’s fine. But if you want to make sweeping changes to the world economy, you’d better have a much better reason than “What else could it be?”
    I’ve seen other possible effects mentioned, such as the sun, or cosmic rays. All of these theories were not debated, but belittled, savagely, on RC. Now we find out the authors of RC are actively trying to squelch all other theories, in some cases by subverting the peer-review process. They do not want to disclose the data. They do not want a balanced debate. They do not want other possibilities even discussed. I’m sorry, but their credibility is very low right now.
    I’d like a bit more data than “What else could it be?” before I bet the farm.

  23. douggerel,
    it was a paradox of course, just to say that destroying a single or a set of papers does not change the picture.
    I’d like to add that the human emissions of GHG causes a forcing that is strong enough to account for the observed warming. It’s not like “if not this then what?”; it’s a real forcing that has to be taken into account in any case. Even if someone find an as yet unknown comparable forcing (and they tryed indeed), he’d still need to explain where our emissions and the related forcing have gone.

  24. douggerel,

    I’ve seen other possible effects mentioned, such as the sun, or cosmic rays. All of these theories were not debated, but belittled, savagely, on RC.

    Let’s imagine that RC never existed at all, ok? What evidence is there to correlate changes in solar with temperature evolution? Even Richard Lindzen effectively ‘belittled savagely’ such suggestions at the last Heartland get-together.

    Sure, show a positive correlation with solar (or, by inversion, with GCRs) and that would be relevant to considering attribution of what has happened. But where is it? And even if it were so, how do you discount, regardless, the impact of GHGs, which is theorised from fundamental physics?

  25. Simon Evans,

    “And even if it were so, how do you discount, regardless, the impact of GHGs, which is theorised from fundamental physics?”
    .
    You are not paying attention. douggerel is not discounting radiative physics and has stated he is not.
    .
    Rather, you should explain why there has been no warming in the last 10 years with the continuing rise of GHG’s in the atmosphere. Apparently Phil Jones and associates can not.
    .
    Empirical evidence trumps theory every time.

  26. kuhnkat (Comment#24826)

    Rather, you should explain why there has been no warming in the last 10 years with the continuing rise of GHG’s in the atmosphere. </I.

    The last decade has been warmer than any previous decade in the instrumental record, despite the fall in solar output. Every year this cebtury has been amongst the top ten on record. What did you want me to explain?

  27. Lucia: KOT (kinda on topic)
    .
    This is an email from the alleged CRU documents.
    .
    From: Tom Wigley
    To: Phil Jones
    Subject: 1940s
    Date: Sun, 27 Sep 2009 23:25:38 -0600
    Cc: Ben Santer
    x-flowed
    Phil,
    Here are some speculations on correcting SSTs to partly
    explain the 1940s warming blip.
    If you look at the attached plot you will see that the
    land also shows the 1940s blip (as I’m sure you know).
    So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 degC,
    then this would be significant for the global mean — but
    we’d still have to explain the land blip.
    I’ve chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an
    ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of
    ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common
    forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of
    these). When you look at other blips, the land blips are
    1.5 to 2 times (roughly) the ocean blips — higher sensitivity
    plus thermal inertia effects. My 0.15 adjustment leaves things
    consistent with this, so you can see where I am coming from.
    .
    Note the repeated reference to reducing ocean temps by 0.15 deg.
    .
    Now, this code is from the purported CRU file, osborn-tree6/briffa_sep98_d.pro (NH temp reconstruction)
    .
    ;
    ; Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!
    ;
    yrloc=[1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
    valadj=[0.,0.,0.,0.,0.,-0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,- 0.1,0.3,0.8,1.2,1.7,2.5,2.6,2.6,$
    2.6,2.6,2.6]*0.75 ; fudge factor
    if n_elements(yrloc) ne n_elements(valadj) then message,’Oooops!’
    ;
    yearlyadj=interpol(valadj,yrloc,timey)
    .
    .
    If I am reading this right, the values for 1929 to 1949 are:
    .
    -0.1,-0.25,-0.3,0.,- 0.1
    .
    Which when averaged, gives:
    .
    -0.15 !!!!
    .
    The value 0f 0.75 times the “valadj” may be compensating for the land SST higher, as suggested by Jones.
    .
    It also gives a nice hockey stick shape, as shown here.
    .
    http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=1447

  28. Lucia: I used the “back”button, to get here, when I posted this last message. If you want, you can move it to one of the CRU threads.

  29. @Simon Evans

    You wrote: So, let us imagine that there is a Factor X, a form of natural variability which we do not understand. It remains the case that we have a theoretical understanding of the radiative impact of GHG forcing, and that understanding describes pretty well what has happened so far in this ‘experiment’. Regardless of any (very possibly entirely imaginary) Factor X , we are contributing to warming of the planet.

    I can’t seem to find any calculation of the temperature effects of adding 100 ppm CO2 to earth’s atmosphere purely and only on a theoretical basis. Is there any such calculation, which would say something like: 100 ppm extra CO2 would increase global temperature between a K and b K?

  30. peeke,
    if you’re looking for easy to use formulas, you can use an aproximation for the CO2 forcing:

    F=5.35*ln(C1/C0) with C1 and C0 two CO2 concentrations

    and then multiply it for the climate sensitivity (in °C/(W/m2) not the often quote for doubling CO2) of your choice to get the temperature increase.

    Alternatively, you can take a look to the GISS Model-E data pages at http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelE/ or even run it yourself.

  31. “and then multiply it for the climate sensitivity (in °C/(W/m2) not the often quote for doubling CO2) of your choice to get the temperature increase.”

    But doesn’t that mean the climate sensivity still is derived from empirical evidence, from measured data? I would like to see how that climate sensitivity is derived purely on theoretical grounds. So that we would agree that no matter what our differences of opinion physics proves that 100 ppm CO2 increase would at least lead to a K increase and at most to b K increase.

  32. peeke,
    climate sensitivity is quite complicated. As far as i know, It’s possible to derive a rough “theoretical” estimation only if you do not consider feedbacks.
    Radiative balance requires:

    0.25*(1-a)*S=eps*sig*Te^4

    where a is albedo, S the solar constant, eps the emissivity, sig the Stefan-Boltzman constant and Te the equilibrium temperature. If you have a forcing F, you have to increase temperature by DT to restore equilibrium. So, the forcing will be:

    F=0.25*(1-a)*S-eps*sig*(Te+DT)^4

    if you work out the forth power and keep only the two higer terms (Te^4 and Te^3) you end up with:

    F=(1-a)*S*DT/Te

    and hence

    DT=Te*F/(1-a)*S

    the climate sensitivy is then L=Te/(1-a)*S and if you use Te=285 K, a=0.3 and S=1360 W/m^2 you’ll find L=0.3 °C/(W/m^2). This value is about 2.5 times lower than what is commonly accepted.
    Then you should add feedbacks (water vapour, ice albedo, aerosol, etc.) and you’re in trouble. The full response of the climate system need to be taken into account and you need a GCM like the one i linked before.

  33. Thanks a lot, Ahab. You don’t see that much about the heat capacity of the ocean. It can theoretically hold roughly thousand times as much energy per degree K as the troposphere. You’d say that the troposphere keeps leaking a substantial amount of it’s stored energy in the ocean.

  34. Peeke,
    heat capacity does not play any role here because i’m assuming equilibrium; heat capacity affects just the transient response.

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