Monckton’s Latest Commentary on the Pause

Christopher Monckton of Brenchley yesterday posted an excellent commentary about the warming “pause” on Watts Up With That. In previous posts on this topic, Monckton has tracked the pause in the Remote Sensing Laboratory (RSS) satellite dataset. For example, in June, he reported that the global warming trend of the previous 17 years 9 months — September 1996 through May 2014 — was “zero.”

In yesterday’s post, Monckton plots the average of five datasets: the RSS and UAH (University of Alabama in Huntsville) satellite datasets and the GISS (NASA), HadCRUT4 (UK Climate Research Unit), and NCDC (NOAA) surface station datasets. The averaged datasets show a period of 13 years 4 months with no net warming.

This all flies in the face of the ‘worse than we thought’ school. Nearly a quarter of all fossil-fuel carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions since the dawn of the industrial revolution occurred during 2001-2010 (see chart below). Yet in the past 13-plus years, not only has there been no acceleration in warming, there has been no warming trend.

Source: Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center

Now to the heart of the matter. Monckton compares the observed warming in the five datasets with the projected warming in IPCC reports.

The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, published in 2013, acknowledges that its ensemble of climate models project 0.16°C of warming since 2005. As noted, in the mean of all five datasets, no warming has occurred.

The divergence is even greater between the three surface datasets and the warming projections of the IPCC’s first (1990) assessment report.

Monckton comments:

The rate of global warming since 1990, taken as the mean of the three terrestrial datasets, is half what the IPCC had then projected. The trend line of real-world temperature, in bright blue, falls well below the entire orange region representing the interval of near-term global warming predicted by the IPCC in 1990.

A warming rate of 1.40°C/century is not the stuff of which doomsday scenarios are made. Would climate change have become the political juggernaut and cultural icon it is today if the IPCC’s first assessment report had projected so little warming?