Is there evidence for a statistically significant trend change in the global surface temperature data?

Update: When one starts the trend analysis in 1999, using the the same tools as below, it takes the year 1998 with the strong El Nino out of the picture. Both the year 1999 and 2000 were years with La Nina present. One still gets some weak/medium statistical significance for the difference between the trends from 1975 to present and from 1999 to present.

Just to clarify. This has nothing to do with the denier talking point about a "global warming stop" or similar. Global warming has not stopped as one can see from the continuing increase in the ocean heat content also in recent years (the acceleration in the melting of the Arctic sea ice is another indicator):

Source: http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/

It has more to do with how the additional energy available from the radiative perturbation from increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is redistributed in the Earth system. There may be years, when the fraction of this energy that heats the deeper layers of the oceans increases at the expense of the fraction that heats the atmosphere. This may have been the case in the recent decade, and it could last a few more years. Some recent research supports this possibility (see Meehl et al., Journal of Climate (2013), doi: 10.1175/JCLI-D-12-00548.1).

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Update: I have asked the question below also at Tamino's blog "Open Mind". He gave an interesting answer, pointing me to another post by him, according to which cherry-picking of a start year, which I exactly did by choosing 1998, actually changes the results from the statistical significance test and requires much higher t-values to be exceeded to make the result statistically significant. Keep this in mind, when doing such a thing. I learn something new every day.

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Has anyone else noticed that the trend estimates in the data sets for the globally averaged surface temperature anomaly since 1998 have become statistically significantly different from the multi-decadal trend estimates since the mid 1970s? Not yet at the 95% level, but almost, except for the BEST land only data. This is different to the beginning of year 2012. Both the trend estimates and the 2 sigmas since 1998 have come down since then.

I use the Skeptical Science tool (http://www.skepticalscience.com/trend.php), which is based on the methodology according to the Foster and Rahmstorf, IOPS (2011) paper (http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/6/4/044022). For autocorrelation I use 1975 to present (What is the correct choice of the autocorrelation period?)

These are the trends and 2 sigmas in K/decade for the two time periods. The statistical Null-hypothesis is that there has been no change of the trends since 1975.

                    1975-present            1998-present         Significance level
GISTEMP:    0.169+/-0.039           0.057+/-0.14          >85%
NOAA:          0.159+/-0.036           0.033+/-0.131        >90%
HadCRUT4:  0.169+/-0.041          0.038+/-0.149        >90%

For land only data:
BEST:           0.264+/-0.063          0.144+/-0.26            < 1 sigma
NOAA:          0.275+/-0.052          0.101+/-0.205         >90%


This may be all just a statistical artifact due to the cherry picked start year of 1998 and the very strong El Nino in that year, the prevalence of La Ninas in recent years, and the deeper and prolonged solar minimum of cycle 23. The statistical significance may go away again with the adding of the data from coming years. Even a 95% significance level still allows for one false rejection of the Null-hypothesis out of 20. However, with these numbers I do not feel comfortable to reject that some empirical, statistical evidence for a significant trend change toward a lower warming trend in recent years has emerged. Those numbers actually indicate a quite high probability for such a change.

It is not inconsistent with the somewhat smaller increase in the ocean heat content (OHC) in the upper 700 m over the last decade compared to the decades before. http://www.nodc.noaa.gov/OC5/3M_HEAT_CONTENT/

It may be worth to check whether the smaller slope of the 700 m OHC in recent years is statistically significantly different from the slope in the decades before.

Any opinions on those numbers and what conclusions can be drawn from it?

Declared persona non grata at wattsupwiththat.com

Update, 07/07/2013: See Anthony Watts' comment below and my reply.

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I just have tested the new approach, announced in April by Anthony Watts who is host of the blog, to the treatment of comments at wattsupwiththat.com, to see whether anything has changed for me. I commented on an article with the title "No significant warming for 17 years 4 months" by the notorious Christopher Monckton. Well, I tried. This is the result:

Thus, the only change for me is that me being banned is official now. They want to be more among themselves, without being too much interrupted by someone informed rebutting their pseudo-science. It is like with a cult. This is Anthony Watts' big change. I am certainly not the first one who actually works in the field of climate science and who got declared persona non grata over there. I feel honored.

Here is what I had submitted in reply to Monckton's article:

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Anthony Watts seems to think this article posted under the title "No significant warming for 17 years 4 months", written by Christopher Monckton has an important message to deliver to have it put as sticky first post on his blog for a number of days. But with closer examination, it is only the x-th repetition and variation of the "skeptic" talking point about the "global warming stop/pause" or "no warming", observed allegedly for x-number of years (the x varies according to convenience).

Mr. Monckton asserts in his article right away in the first paragraph, that "there has been no global warming statistically distinguishable from zero for getting on for two decades."

Now we are already up from 17 years and 4 months to alleged "two decades", which would make it 20 years, for which there hadn't been any warming that was statistically distinguishable from Zero, according to Mr. Monckton. Why not boldly claim "two decades", if he is at it, right?

On what does Mr. Monckton base his assertion about the alleged lack of warming for > 17 years? He bases this assertion on the fact that the temperature trend in the HadCRUT4 data set does not exceed the 95% statistical significance threshold. As correct this fact is, technically, it's also the point where Mr. Monckton misleads the audience. He equalizes a temperature trend, which does not pass the 95% significance threshold when a statistical test is done with "no warming" at all. And this is just jumping to conclusions.

Let's examine the trend since the start of 1996. There is a tool at the Skeptical Science blog, with which this can be done for the major temperature data sets: http://www.skepticalscience.com/trend.php

HadCRUT4 shows a trend with a 2*sigma (=2*standard deviation, which is equal to about 95% statistical significance threshold) of 0.089+/-0.118 Kelvin/decade. Does this mean this warming is not distinguishable from Zero, generally, because the trend was smaller than 2 sigma? No, it does not necessarily mean that, because it is still possible that the trend exceeds a lower significance threshold.

So, let's check that. The trend of 0.089 in the HadCRUT4 data since the start of 1996 equals to about 1.51*sigma. The 80% threshold of statistical significance is about 1.28*sigma. Thus, even though the 95% threshold has not been exceeded (yet) since the start of 1996, one can distinguish the temperature trend in HadCRUT4 from Zero with more than 80% statistical significance. The probability to err is less than 20%. The other data sets, except for RSS that deviates to the cold side, show similar or higher warming trends since 1996, compared to HadCRUT4 (e.g., Spencer and Christy's UAH data: 0.12+/-0.2 Kelvin/decade). The satellite retrieved data have larger 2 sigma intervals, though. There is a larger interannual variability in the troposphere temperature data compared to the surface temperature data.

BTW: Even if the temperature trend was not statistically significant even at 1 sigma, this would not allow the conclusion that there was "a global warming stop/pause", since non-detectability of a trend in a time series, which is composed of trend and fluctuations is not sufficient to conclude absence of the trend in the time series. This is particularly true in this case, since there is a multi-decadal warming trend going back to the mid 70s, which is statistically significant with more than eight sigma in the surface temperature records.

Another point would be that the atmosphere is one thing, and not the major component regarding global warming. The oceans have continued to warm in the time period during which global warming allegedly has "stopped/paused". About 90% of the additional energy from the radiative perturbation due to increasing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere goes in the ocean. The ocean releases a part of this accumulated energy into the atmosphere over time. This energy release is not a linear process. A large part of this energy is released during El Ninos. And the ice caps at both poles of the planet (that includes the glaciers) have continued to melt. No one should have missed the melting trend of the Arctic sea ice, which has even accelerated over the last decade. These are strong indicators that global warming has continued also in recent years, contrary to what "skeptics" want to make believe.

In summary, Mr. Monckton's assertion of "no warming" for > 17 or even 20 years is false. It does not have any scientific validity, because it is not based on empirical, statistical evidence. And it ignores other indicators for global warming than the tropospheric/surface temperature trends.

Another assertion by Mr. Monckton is about something he calls "Dr. Santer's 17-year test", according to which "models may have failed", because the temperature trend hadn't exceeded the 95% threshold. Now, one could expect that Mr. Monckton provides some proof of source for this assertion about such a test, allegedly stated by Ben Santer. However, the link he provides leads only to another article in this opinion blog here, which was obviously not written by Ben Santer. So, is it the link to the one press release in the other article?
https://www.llnl.gov/news/newsreleases/2011/Nov/NR-11-11-03.html

The press release states something that refers to 17 years. It states:

"In fingerprinting, we analyze longer, multi-decadal temperature records, and we beat down the large year-to-year temperature variability caused by purely natural phenomena (like El NiÃ'±os and La NiÃ'±as). This makes it easier to identify a slowly-emerging signal arising from gradual, human-caused changes in atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases," Santer said.

The LLNL-led research shows that climate models can and do simulate short, 10- to 12-year "hiatus periods" with minimal warming, even when the models are run with historical increases in greenhouse gases and sulfate aerosol particles. 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.

The talk in the press release is about the fingerprinting method applied by Santer. Regarding this method, it is said that one needs at least 17 years of observed tropospheric temperature data to detect the human-caused warming signal. However, there is no statement whatsoever in the press release according to which a lack of 95% statistical significance for more than 17 years meant that the model had "failed".

I actually have read Santer et al.'s paper (doi:10.1029/2011JD016263), I suspect, unlike Mr. Monckton. There is nothing in the original paper either that says anything about such a test for model predictions of the kind as asserted by Mr. Monckton. Apparently, Mr. Monckton has just made something up here, regarding the alleged "Dr. Santer's 17-year test" for model predictions using the 95% threshold of significance in the observed data.

Also, I seem to have a different understanding of the English language compared to many "skeptics", because, in my world, "at least" marks a lower boundary, whereas many "skeptics" seem to think that "at least" has equal meaning to "at most".

As for Mr. Monckton's assertion about the alleged IPCC predictions regarding the temperature increase since 2005. Mr. Monckton writes:

It is better to focus on the ever-widening discrepancy between predicted and observed warming rates. The IPCC’s forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report backcasts the interval of 34 models’ global warming projections to 2005, since when the world should have been warming at a rate equivalent to 2.33 Cº/century. Instead, it has been cooling at a rate equivalent to a statistically-insignificant 0.87 Cº/century:

Mr. Monckton asserts here that the IPCC had predicted the temperature would nearly linearly increase by 0.0233 Kelvin/year since 2005, and because the temperature in the real world had behaved differently, the model predictions were wrong. I can't call this claim by Mr. Monckton anything else than absurd nonsense. Mr. Monckton just takes the model ensemble average calculated from many individual model simulations and interprets this as a prediction of how the temperature will behave in the real world. Of course, the ensemble mean does not show the same variability as the temperature in Nature, because it's a mean! Nature only provides one single realization of all possible realizations for the same boundary conditions in a chaotic system. Each individual model simulation is like a single possible realization. It is nowhere predicted by anyone that the one single realization from Nature would follow the model ensemble mean from year to year, or even from decade to decade. A proper comparison, for instance, would be to take the full range of all model simulations, among which, BTW, there are some that actually show a "cooling" over the same time period as well, obtain the 95% range spanned by the model simulations, and then see whether the observed temperature record lies within this range, or marches outside of the range. Mr. Monckton has not done that. According to the real Figure 11.33a in the leaked draft of the AR5 report, the observed global mean surface temperature still lies within the range of the model simulations, although near the lower end.
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Censored at Donner + Doria (partly in German)

Following reply to user Lollobrigida's comment got censored at the German "climate skeptic" blog "Donner + Doria", hosted by Die Welt journalist Ulrich Kulke, in the thread "Einheits-Klimaforschung - Teil 2: Das UBA Papier". It is not the only one of my comments that got censored over there. Even the ones that got finally posted needed more than one try. Here, we have another example for how informed comments that debunk fake skeptic claims are not liked at blogs of fake skeptics. The censorship happened after Mr. Kulke had written a long lamentation about how only a "unified" opinion was allegedly allowed in climate science, how critical opinions were allegedly suppressed, and he requested an "open discussion" instead. How ironic.

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In der Tat hatte ich die Namen von Herrn Kulke und Herrn Vahrenholt falsch geschrieben. Aber zumindest hatte ich das konsistent in dem ganzen Kommentar gemacht. Zu meiner Entschuldigung moechte ich vorbringen, dass ich mich mehr auf den Inhalt konzentriert hatte, so dass mir das nicht aufgefallen war. Es war keine Boeswilligkeit. Ich werde versuchen, die Namen in der Zukunft korrekt zu schreiben.

Sie behaupten:

"Es bleibt dabei: Das Ausmaß, inwieweit der Mensch an der Klimaerwärmung beteiligt ist, ist eben nicht unumstritten, da klaffen die einzelnen Studien weit auseinander."

Ihre Behauptung ist nun auch nicht sehr konkret. Wie weit ist denn "weit auseinander"? Wieviele Studien gibt es denn, die infragestellen, dass die globale Erwaermung real sei und die hauptsaechliche Ursache der statistisch signifikanten globalen Erwaermung der letzten Jahrzehnte menschliche Aktivitaeten, insbesondere Treibhausgasemissionen waeren? Gibt es mehr als den sehr kleinen Anteil an Studien, der auch von Cook et al., (2013) festgestellt wurde? Wenn Sie das behaupten, auf welche Belege stuetzt sich Ihre Behauptung?

"Selbst der Entwurf für den nächsten Assessment Report des IPCC, der im September herauskommt, geht inzwischen von nicht mehr als 50 Prozent als gesichert heraus, und das will schon viel heißen."

Abgesehen von der Ethik-Verletzung, die der/diejenige begangen hat, der/die den Entwurf oeffentlich verbreitet hat, wuerde ich doch gerne mal die Quelle wissen, wo Sie diese Behauptung herhaben. Ich vermute, von irgendeinem "Skeptiker"-Blog. Denn da sind Sie einer Luege aufgesessen, und Sie haben es anscheinend nicht fuer noetig gehalten, die Aussage zu ueberpruefen. Der draft report sagt naemlich etwas anderes. Der sagt aus, dass es extrem wahrscheinlich sei, dass mindestens 50% der globalen Erwaermung seit Mitte des letzten Jahrhunderts durch menschliche Aktivitaeten verursacht worden sei, und dass der Beitrag der Treibhausgase zum Trend von ca. 0.6 K von 1951 bis 2010 sehr wahrscheinlich zwischen 0.6 K und 1.4 K betraegt (Seite 10-3).

"Dabei sind darin noch nicht einmal die letzten Studien berücksichtlgt, die feststellten, dass die CO2-Sensitivität offenbar deutlich zu hoch bewertet wurden".

Relevant waeren fuer die Frage des Konsenses unter den Wissenschaftlern, ob AGW real ist, wenn es neue relevanten Studien zur Klimasensitivitaet gabe, die genau aus diesem Konsens herausfallen. Ansonsten gab es schon immer einige Studien mit niedrigeren Schaetzungen zur Klimasensitiviaet und andere mit hoeheren Schaetzungen. Es ist ja nicht so, dass da bisher nur ein einzelner fixer Wert als gueltig angesehen worden waere. Auch die neueren Schaetzungen werfen vorherige Aussagen, z.b im IPCC Report 2007 nicht ueber den Haufen, selbst wenn der Wert, dem die hoechste Wahrscheinlichkeit zugeschrieben wird, etwas niedriger ausfaellt.

"mal abgesehen von den Studien, die zwar eine menschliche Beteiligung konstatieren, aber den Ruß/Albedoeffekt deutlich in den Vordergrund rücken."

Worueber reden Sie? Es gibt keine Studien, die zu dem Ergebnis kommen, dass der Soot-Albedo Effekt auf das Klima groesser sei, als der Effekt der anthropogenen Treibhausgasemissionen, nicht mal gleich so gross. Es sei denn, ich habe da was uebersehen. Dann muessten Sie mir die Studie nennen, die zu so einem Ergebnis gekommen sein soll. Die Angabe des doi-keys genuegt.

"Hier eine Einheitlichkeit vorzugaukeln, wirkt reichlich hilflos."

Wer behauptet denn diese "Einheitlichkeit" bzgl. jeden Aspektes zur globalen Klimaaenderung? Oder ist diese Behauptung ueber die angebliche Behauptung einer "Einheitlichkeit" vielleicht nur ein Strohmannargument? Diejenigen, die das Wort "Einheitlichkeit" gebrauchen, sind doch auch nur Herr Kulke und Sie und vielleicht Ihnen gleichgesinnte Personen.

Dass bestimmte zentrale Aussagen in einem wissenschaftlichen Fachgebiet mit der Zeit den Status eines Paradigmas bekommen, ist nicht das gleiche wie "Einheitlichkeit" zu allen Fragen.

"Wo fangen eigentlich die "Skeptiker" an, und wo ist man noch im erlaubten Bereich? Und ab wann ist man "falscher Skeptiker", kein richtiger mehr?"

Das ist gar nicht so schwer auseinanderzuhalten, wer ein wahrer und wer ein falscher Skeptiker ist. Das haengt nicht davon ab, welcher wissenschaftlichen Hypothese oder Theorie man skeptisch gegenuebersteht, sondern davon, welche Form von Argumenten bzw. Pseudoargumente man gegen die Hypothese oder Theorie vorbringt. Man erkennt die falschen Skeptiker an der Methode. Wahre Skeptiker verwenden wissenschaftliche Argumente, und wenn sie eine Hypothese oder Theorie ablehnen, dann stellen sie eine alternative Hypothese auf, und testen diese mit der gleichen wissenschafltichen Rigorositaet, die sie von anderen Wissenschaftlern erwarten. Skeptizismus gehoert zum beruflichen Profil eines Wissenschaftlers.

Falsche Skeptiker greifen die wissenschaftlichen Hypothesen und Theorien, die von ihnen abgelehnt werden, mit unwissenschaftlichen Argumenten an, z.b, indem sie stattdessen persoenliche Angriffe auf die Wissenschaftler fahren, die diese Hypothesen oder Theorien in ihren Publikationen veroeffentlichen, oder sie bedienen sich logisch trugschluessiger Argumente, cherry picking, oder sie verbreiten schlichtweg tatsachenwidrige Behauptungen. Oft kommt das auch mit Verschwoerungsfantasien auf Seiten der falschen Skeptiker daher. Und aufgrund der stark politischen und ideologischen Motivierung, die viele der falschen "Skeptiker" antreibt, sieht man auch haeufig, dass politische und ideologische Argumente gegen die wissenschaftlichen Hypothesen und Theorien vorgebracht werden.

Sie, z.B., bedienen sich einer fuer falsche Skeptiker typischen Argumentationsfuehrung, in Ihrer Entgegnung auf meine Aussagen zu der angeblichen "Pause in der Klimaerwaermung". Waehrend ich inhaltliche Argumente dazu gebracht habe, wie mein Verweis auf die logisch und methodisch falsche Schlussfolgerung, die aus fehlender statistischer Signifikanz der Temperaturaenderung in der Troposphere ueber die letzten 15 Jahre gezogen wird, und mein Verweis auf andere Indikatoren dafuer, dass sich die globale Erwaermung fortsetzt, bedienen Sie sich des logisch trugschluessigen Arguments des Appells an die (angebliche) Mehrheitsmeinung, um meine Argumente vom Tisch zu wischen. Und mit extremer Wahrscheinlichkeit koennen Sie Ihre Behauptung, dass meine Argumente eine Aussenseiteransicht unter den Klimawissenschaftlern waere, auch gar nicht mal belegen.
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What got me snipped from wattsupwiththat.com - 11

Werner Brozek wrote a new article at wattsupwiththat.com about his research on noise in the global temperature record. The reply below to the article, which I submitted to the thread as a comment has not been published there. This is the second one of the couple of comments censored at Anthony Watts' blog, which I announced before to document here. Since I apparently have been blacklisted at Watt's blog by default, currently, I am not going to put any more efforts into trying to comment over there, unless I am not treated differently any more compared to how the ones are treated who agree with Anthony Watts and his friends.

----- snip -----

Werner Brozek wrote:

For example, do we mean that the slope of the temperature-time graph must be 0 or do we mean that there has to be a lack of “significant” warming over a given period? With regards to what a suitable time period is, NOAA says the following:

    ”The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”

To verify this for yourself, see page 23 here.

And once again the quote from the NOAA report is misrepresented by you. The quote still refers to the ENSO-adjusted temperature record as it has done in the past. However, you omit this information and use it here as if the quote had established some criterion for the unadjusted temperature record. You do so, although you have been pointed out already in the past that the quote applies to ENSO-adjusted data.

Your article does not hold what the headline promises. There is no analysis in there whatsoever that allows any conclusion with respect to whether climate models are "realistic". In order to do such an analysis one would have to do an actual comparison between model capabilities to simulate specific features of the climate system and real world data. Which you haven't done.

You only show some "flat lines" in the temperature record going back different numbers of years, depending on which specific record is chosen, which by itself does not allow any conclusion with respect to the presence or absence of a trend or regarding climate models, since one always will find periods with "flat lines" in any arbitrary time series that is composed of trend and fluctuations, if one chooses the time interval only short enough. One finds similar behaviour in individual simulations with climate models. You confine your examination on those time intervals, where the noise is still masking the long-term trend. This looks to me like a pointless undertaking, unless you want to study the features of the noise.

Models aside, your exercise doesn't even provide evidence for claims like "global warming stopped", or similar. Not being able to detect a trend, because the data set is too small does not allow the conclusion that the trend was not there. None of the seemingly "flat" temperature records, which you show here, can be statistically significantly distinguished from the multi-decadal surface or lower tropospheric warming trend, which itself is statistically significant with 3 sigma or more.

You state:

For this analysis, data was retrieved from SkepticalScience.com. This analysis indicates for how long there has not been significant warming according to their criteria. ... (To the best of my knowledge, SkS uses the same criteria that Phil Jones uses to determine significance.)

This looks to me like another misrepresentation of what others said. Or show me where Phil Jones or anyone at Skeptical Science supposedly claimed that "warming" was significant at 95% or 2 sigma, or there was no significant warming at all. Please provide a source where anyone said something like that, allegedly.

If warming is significant with, for instant higher than 90% probability, but lower than 95% probability, it is still statistically significant. Only the probability to have wrongly rejected the Null-hypothesis (which would be no significance warming in this case) is higher. To claim that there was no "significant warming" in such a case is just wishful thinking.

As for your conclusion:

After looking at the above facts, do you feel that we should spend billions to prevent catastrophic warming? Or do you feel we should take a “wait and see” attitude for a few years to be sure that future warming will be as catastrophic as some claim it will be?

You could have started with that in your posting. Then it would have been clear from the beginning, that your starting point is political and ideological preconception that you apply as a filter for your perception and examinations. That plausibly explains the motivation for your efforts here and for your misrepresentations.


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What got me snipped from wattsupwiththat.com - 10

The purpose of the post is merely to document the censored reply I gave to one of the participants in the thread. It was the repeated, and yet futile try to explain what institution employs me and which one does not. One could be astonished about the notorious refusal of many of the fake skeptics to let in anything that is in contradiction to their preconceived views, if it was not just another example of the usual modus operandi of this crowd, which can be observed at many occasions. I frankly admit that I may not be fully informed about all the nuances employment contracts can have, but I am pretty sure that if there is no contract that states an employment relationship between two parties, then there is no employment relationship in legal terms. The following is not particularly exiting. It is just for the record, since I was prevented to reply at the location where the claims were made.

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J. T. Jones wrote on April 8, 2013 at 7:16 pm in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/04/08/hansen-finally-muzzled-by-obama/#comment-1269733

If they were a contractor doing the work the government contracted them to do, it would be entirely legal and relevant to refer to them as being employed by the government as they (or the company that hired them) would indeed have a government employment contract. on the other hand, It wouldn’t be legal or relevant to refer to them as a federal employee, as they are not directly employed by the government.

You haven't answered my question whether you have an employment contract with the federal agency, and whether you could make legal claims against this federal agency regarding your employment. If you work for a company that has a contract with the federal agency to provide specific services to the federal agency, your employment contract is not with the federal agency. It's with the contracting company instead. You are employed with the contracting company. Or please explain to me based on what legal document you are claiming you were employed with the federal agency.

The simple facts of the matter is NASA is footing the bill for work that you do on their behalf. That is what is called employment.

No, employment is a legal contract between two parties. But it doesn't even work in the way you think regarding the relationship between Columbia University and NASA. It's not like the relationship between contractors who provide services for NASA (e.g., IT services) and NASA, and the contractors then employ people who do this work. Instead, it's a collaboration between Columbia and NASA to the benefit of both parties in the collaboration. The Columbia scientists working at GISS aren't even necessarily paid with money coming from NASA. They are paid from federal grant money like most researchers at Columbia, coming from various federal agencies, based on proposals that are submitted by the researchers and Columbia to the federal agencies, like NSF, DOE, NOAA, and also NASA, but not necessarily NASA. There is nothing in my contract that says I was employed to provide services to NASA. My legal status and my contract as a Columbia employee is not different to any contract of any other Columbia researcher who works in any other lab on the Columbia campus.

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Update Regarding My Posting Status at wattsupwiththat.com

As reported before, I had been banned from posting comments at the AGW-"skeptic" blog wattsupwiththat.com. Yesterday, I was able to publish some comments again. However, this was only until last night. Since then, none of my comments I submitted there have appeared. I take from this that I am stilled banned from posting at the blog by default. Publishing some comments submitted by me yesterday seems to have been at a whim of Anthony Watts, which apparently did not last long. This prevents me from sending rebuttals to claims made over there by some of the fake skeptics, including the ones about my person, which have reached a new level of absurdity. I am not going to try again and again to find out when I am allowed to post something and when I am not. If Anthony Watts does not want me to write at his blog so be it.

I am going to publish a couple of the censored comments at this place here later.

What got me snipped from wattsupwiththat.com - 9

Today, I got (temporarily, I was told. I will see) banished from posting comments on the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) denier blog wattsupwiththat.com. Anthony Watts, weather man and blog host, seems to have got upset (while seemingly projecting his own emotional reaction on me, which made him want to punish me). I apparently have been too critical toward him and his blog. I diagnosed hypocrisy after Watts had made accusations (in a reply at the end of the linked comment) against the hosts of the Skeptical Science blog. They allegedly were "fast and loose with spinning the truth to suit their agenda". The irony is that Watts writes such things below a post on his own blog written by the newspaper journalist and spin-doctor (well, he is not really a doctor of any profession) Christopher Monckton who is known for his notorious AGW denying propaganda and spread of disinformation with respect to empirical climate data and results from research in climate science. And this is only one post in Watts's blog. Disinformation, spin, and propaganda can be found in almost every single article that is posted on the blog.

I challenged Monckton's elaboration here and here with respect to their accuracy and scientific validity. The first comment by me got a reply by Monckton, in which he only repeated previous assertions without anything to back them up, plus some ad hominem arguments against my person. So far, I have not seen anything by Monckton after my second rebuttal to him.

In his announcement to punish me with banning, Watts declared I should not write there anymore, as someone who was funded with money coming from taxpayers. True it is, my whole life is publicly funded, all the expenses that are needed to sustain my lifelihood, everything I do is basically taxpayer funded, since I do not have any significant private income sources, only my salary funded with government grants. Of course, Watts is free to make whatever rules he likes for who is allowed to write on his blog, and no one's rights are violated by this. However, I wonder whether he thinks this should be the case in society generally that people whose incomes come from public funds should not have the same constitutional rights as the ones with income from private sources. And what other rights and entitlements should be limited for publicly funded people compared to privately funded ones, according to Watts.

I am going to see whether my banishment is going to be temporarily. I do not plan to back off from criticizing Watts's and friends's crooked approach toward science and truth on his own blog, from the perspective of someone who works in the field of climate science. If he does not want to have it there he will have to banish me permanently.

Here are the comments that got censored by Watts from the mentioned thread. The first one disputes the meaning of a quote from the NOAA State of the Climate Report 2008 (Attention, this file is 14.9 MB), how it had been presented in a previous comment by another user. The second one just states some facts about the trend of the near surface and lower tropospheric temperature trend over the time period of the last 17 years.

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Werner Brozek, on February 26, 2013 at 8:42 am, in http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/22/ipcc-railroad-engineer-pachauri-acknowledges-no-warming-for-17-years/#comment-1233141

wrote:

"My purposes are at least two fold. I think it is fairer to say a slope is 0 than to say a slope could be 0 at a certain level of significance, but that it could also be much higher at the higher end."

I don't really understand what "fair" or "fairer" is supposed to mean in the context of assessing data as empirical evidence to support or contradict a scientific statement. What is required in science is to be precise. A statement about a slope of a trend, when it is supposed to be empirical evidence for something, is quite meaningless without any information about the error band of the slope. You can do a trend analysis, and when the result shows a Zero-trend, it is always only a statistical estimate. It does not mean that you really have the information that the trend was exactly Zero. You only have the information that it was Zero within a range of uncertainty for a specified probability. There is no other way here than to make a probability statement. If the statistical significant trend of the temperature increase since the 1970ies lies within the error band of the temperature record of the recent years, then the conclusion that both trends probably did not belong to the same statistical population cannot be validly drawn from such a statistical trend estimate.

If uncertainty ranges did not matter, I could equally claim that the warming trend was something between 1.2 and 4.7 K per decade now, because that's what the trend analysis currently gives as result for all the major data sets from the beginning of the year 2012.

"PDF document @NOAA.gov. For anyone else who wants it, the exact quote from pg 23 is:
”The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”

http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/climate-assessment-2008-lo-rez.pdf

So I admit that Hadcrut4 does NOT meet this criteria yet, but three other data sets do. See the bolded ones below."

You say everyone who wants can check the quote under the link. However, I wonder whether you yourself have bothered to check whether the quote really says what you assert here it says, because what you bring here is a misrepresentation of its meaning. I already have discussed this quote previously, like here:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/02/01/encouraging-admission-of-lower-climate-sensitivity-by-a-hockey-team-scientist/#comment-1220510

This is the longer version of the quote:

"We can place this apparent lack of warming in the context of natural climate fluctuations other than ENSO using twenty-first century simulations with the HadCM3 climate model (Gordon et al. 2000), which is typical of those used in the recent IPCC report (AR4; Solomon et al. 2007). Ensembles with different modifications to the physical parameters of the model (within known uncertainties) (Collins et al. 2006) are performed for several of the IPCC SRES emissions scenarios (Solomon et al. 2007). Ten of these simulations have a steady long-term rate of warming between 0.15° and 0.25ºC decade–1, close to the expected rate of 0.2ºC decade–1. ENSO-adjusted warming in the three surface temperature datasets over the last 2–25 yr continually lies within the 90% range of all similar-length ENSO-adjusted temperature changes in these simulations (Fig. 2.8b). Near-zero and even negative trends are common for intervals of a decade or less in the simulations, due to the model’s internal climate variability. The simulations rule out (at the 95% level) zero trends for intervals of 15 yr or more, suggesting that an observed absence of warming of this duration is needed to create a discrepancy with the expected present-day warming rate.”
(http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cmb/bams-sotc/climate-assessment-2008-lo-rez.pdf, p. 23, Figure 2.8b on page 22 illustrates this graphically).

From the longer version you have only quoted the last sentence. The whole two pages where the quote is from are about the question whether there is a discrepancy between model simulations and observations. The report refers to a study (Collins et al., CD, 2006, doi: 10.1007/s00382-006-0121-0), where many simulations were carried out with one climate model, HadCM3, with varied configurations. The important information you have left out is that the comparison presented in the report is done for the temperature data after adjusting them for the contributions to the temperature series that come from ENSO variability. Therefore, your presentation that the bolded temperature series fulfill this criterion that you quoted is false, since you don't have calculated out those contributions of the temperature variability that come from ENSO.

If you wanted to see whether those temperature data sets fulfill this criterion, you would have to do the ENSO-adjustment exercise first.

Actually, if one really is precise this criterion of "15 years" would only apply to the simulations with the one model, HadCM3, that was used for the mentioned study. The internal variability of different climate models is not all the same. Thus, other models might have given a somewhat different answer, if the study had been performed with those models. Perhaps, the answer for some models, the ones with smaller internal variability, would have been 12 or 14 years, or for other ones, ones with higher internal variability, 17 or maybe 20 years. We don't know the answer for those other models.

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The second censored comment:

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The claim that there had been no temperature rise for 17 year isn't even factually correct, since all the trend estimates for the major data sets show a positive trend, with GISTEMP more than 90% probability of significance, and NOAA and HadCRUT4 with more than 80% probability of significance. The trend estimate for UAH is higher than for these surface data sets, but it is not statistically significant because of the higher variability of the tropospheric temperatures, compared to near surface temperatures. RSS only shows a small positive trend.
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