By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Global temperature update: the Pause is now 18 years 2 months
Since October 1996 there has been no global warming at all (Fig. 1). This month’s
RSS temperature plot pushes up the period without any global warming from 18
years 1 month to 18 years 2 months (indeed, very nearly 18 years 3 months). Will this devastating chart be displayed anywhere at the Lima conference? Don’t bet on it.
![]() |
Figure 1. The least-squares linear-regression trend on the RSS satellite
monthly global mean surface temperature anomaly dataset shows no
global warming for 18 years 2 months since October 1996.
|
The hiatus period of 18 years 2 months, or 218 months, is the farthest back one can
go in the RSS satellite temperature record and still show a sub-zero trend.
What will the chart look like this time next year, at the beginning of the Paris World
government conference, at which the Treaty of Copenhagen will be dusted off and
nodded through by the scientifically illiterate national negotiating delegates of
almost 200 nations, ending the freedom and democracy of the West and putting
absolute economic and political power in the hands of the grim secretariat of the UN
climate convention?
When the November 2015 RSS data are available, how many years and months of
zero global warming will have occurred? Enter our friendly competition by putting
your best estimate in comments. For guidance, at the December 2012 Doha
conference I was banned from UN climate yadayadathons for life for the grave sin of
telling the truth that there had been no global warming for 16 years. And an El Niño of unknown magnitude is expected during the boreal winter, followed by a compensating La Niña.
A quarter-century after 1990, the global-warming outturn to date – expressed as the
least-squares linear-regression trend on the mean of the RSS and UAH monthly
global mean surface temperature anomalies – is 0.34 Cº, equivalent to just 1.4
Cº/century, or a little below half of the central estimate in IPCC (1990) and well
below even the least estimate (Fig. 2).
The Great Pause is a growing embarrassment to those who had told us with
“substantial confidence” that the science was settled and the debate over. Nature had
other ideas. Though approaching 70 mutually incompatible and more or less
implausible excuses for the Pause are appearing in nervous reviewed journals and
among proselytizing scientists, the possibility that the Pause is occurring because the
computer models are simply wrong about the sensitivity of temperature to manmade
greenhouse gases can no longer be dismissed, and will be demonstrated in a major
paper to be published shortly in the Orient’s leading science journal.
Remarkably, even the IPCC’s latest and much reduced near-term global-warming
projections are also excessive (Fig. 3).
In 1990, the IPCC’s central estimate of near-term warming was higher by two-thirds
than it is today. Then it was 2.8ºC/century equivalent. Now it is just 1.7 Cº equivalent
– and, as Fig. 3 shows, even that is proving to be a substantial exaggeration.
On the RSS satellite data, there has been no global warming statistically
distinguishable from zero for more than 26 years. None of the models predicted that,
in effect, there would be no global warming for a quarter of a century.
Key facts about global temperature
The RSS satellite dataset shows no global warming at all for 218 months from October 1996 to November 2014 – more than half the 430-month satellite record.
The global warming trend since 1900 is equivalent to 0.8 Cº per century. This is well within natural variability and may not have much to do with us.
Since 1950, when a human influence on global temperature first became theoretically possible, the global warming trend has been equivalent to below 1.2 Cº per century.
The fastest warming rate lasting ten years or more since 1950 occurred over the 33 years from 1974 to 2006. It was equivalent to 2.0 Cº per century.
In 1990, the IPCC’s mid-range prediction of near-term warming was equivalent to 2.8 Cº per century, higher by two-thirds than its current prediction of 1.7 Cº/century
The global warming trend since 1990, when the IPCC wrote its first report, is equivalent to below 1.4 Cº per century – half of what the IPCC had then predicted.
Though the IPCC has cut its near-term warming prediction, it has not cut its high-end business as usual centennial warming prediction of 4.8 Cº warming to 2100.
The IPCC’s predicted 4.8 Cº warming by 2100 is well over twice the greatest rate of warming lasting more than ten years that has been measured since 1950.
The IPCC’s 4.8 Cº-by-2100 prediction is almost four times the observed real-world warming trend since we might in theory have begun influencing it in 1950.
From September 2001 to September 2014, the warming trend on the mean of the 5 global-temperature datasets is nil. No warming for 13 years 1 month.
Recent extreme weather cannot be blamed on global warming, because there has not been any global warming. It is as simple as that.