Not Spaghetti

Umm, where are you guys coming from? I did indeed post an update back in April last year with a more precise form of "prediction" for 2011 and 2012 - these earlier items mentioned in this post were basically just guesses to tweak the many climateaudit folks who claimed things were "cooling" - obviously they weren't. And as I said specifically in this post I didn't expect 2011 and 2012 to be nearly so close. My 2011 updated guess was 0.57 - so a little high, the difference largely due to the unexpected return of La Nina late in the year. We'll see how 2012 goes.

Interestingly I just finished reading Michael Mann's new book (Kindle edition is already out) and one of the things he apparently looked at over the years was whether warming generally would trigger more extreme La Nina conditions. The last few years have perhaps shown there might be something to Mann's link there - it'll be interesting if that pans out.

Closing comments on this post.

Are you going to write a post about how badly you missed on your prediction for 2011? GISS is reporting 0.51°C so your prediction was off by almost a 1/4 of a degree C. Your prediction for 2012 is looking bad too.

So much for your predictive powers. Seems that you can't simply draw a straight line and expect to be correct after all. Amazing huh?

The 10^3 scale on the Richter yields some interesting results.
Have a look at what a hurricane is energetically.
http://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/tcfaq/D7.html

Arthur, just noted on Channel 5 that 2011 appears potentially ready to pierce through 2010, and is well above 2005. At midpoint in the year, do you see any hope for your 2011 prediction?

I have no blog to put this stuff up. I have been posting these graphs around a few bulletin boards. One that contained a long explanation on a particular board seems to have been lost, so I have created a blog as a replacement and so I can update the graph monthly:
http://zzzbbb.blogspot.com/

I got fed up having to guess names that weren't already taken so zzzbbb it is.

OK, here's a thought...

All these analyses assume that the ENSO indices will behave the same way in future as they have in the past, and in particular that there is no trend in the index.

But could we imaging a situation in which there is a trend? For example, an impact of recent warming leading to a shift in the behaviour leading to a running mean of the index which is consistently negative? In which case, there would be a corresponding offset on subsequent temperatures.

My initial reaction was no, because the underlying effect here is the Earth's energy balance, and El Nino can't affect that (assuming the critiques of Lindzen are correct). I can see one other possibility: if energy is being channelled preferentially into the oceans rather than the air, then that would lead to a temporary supression of the temperature trend owing to the greater heat capacity of water.

I'm not convinced, but I can't absolutely rule it out.

I have a similar one here for HadCRUT3, you can figure out what is what because it's mostly the same components (although I didn't think of checking for annual cycle - my eyeball method probably can't detect it anyway...)

I used a curved trend just to demonstrate it kind of works. The whole point of making these graphs at the time was to try and visually convince some people that "warming has stopped" is not a good conclusion to draw from the recent flatness of the HadCRUT3 record. The curve is to show that what's happened could even be compatible with ongoing acceleration.

The solar data is different from yours (I think) http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/greenwch/spot_num.txt and stratospheric aerosols are from http://data.giss.nasa.gov/modelforce/RadF.txt

I used MEI index for ENSO. I shift it foward about 3 months. The different components are eyeball scaled, so not great but I don't yet have the statistics ability to do it properly.

I also made a graph during the 2010 El Nino that predicted future ENSO. Funnily enough this prediction isn't too bad for what actually happened with ENSO, as far as the depth of the La Nina goes. This one was made as a visual aid to convince the same people that even a strong La Nina would only delay the inevitable.

I also plotted the relationship going forward out to 2100 (I had to generate some ENSO and solar data for this but on that scale such variation doesn't matter anyway). I showed this to them so they could see that 3C warming by 2100 isn't incompatible with what's happened in recent years.

I have been updating this as data comes in. The latest one I uploaded goes up to Jan 2011:

I have also done this with UAH and it's the same kind of deal.

I haven't done it with GISTEMP and after seeing your post I guess I don't need to anymore.

What is the linear trend of both the "fit" and just the quadratic function since 2001? Some claim that we aren't seeing enough warming, when, in fact, we are seeing the warming that we would expect to see given ENSO and the solar cycle.

The quadratic's definitely not good for long-term extrapolation, but it makes only a very small difference for the next few years - less than 0.01 degree. The annual linear trend is only about 0.02 degrees/year, so adjustments to that number at even the 30% level would need a few years to make a difference. Short term change is dominated by El Nino (or a stratospheric volcano), and then solar cycle, not the trend. The trend forces temperatures back to a certain range - even the strongest El Nino can't pull temperatures too far up or down from that - so it's important, but the exact slope makes little difference for periods of less than a decade or so.

I'm not sure how you would do a forecast as you suggest. The "fit" is itself a forecast of exactly that sort, based on the ENSO etc. as they happened. If you mean replacing the actual ENSO with a cyclical estimate, and the actual solar cycle with some other form of estimate, I guess one could do that - but you can pretty much tell what it would look like from my figure 1, just move the blue (ENSO) or brown (solar) curves up or down, and the red curve would follow.

I used cycle 14, using August 1903 numbers for March 2011, and copying month by month from there. It seems to have been similar to the present cycle in a number of ways, though I'm sure these are hard to predict. It was definitely one of the weakest of the 20th century, and I believe associated with the dip in temperatures in the first decade of the 20th century.

Hi Barry - I don't visit your blog all that often, it sounds like I should more, I had missed those posts! Anyway, definitely thinking along the same lines. My work here was almost completely based on Tamino's original posts on this, just adding on a predictive piece, so not terribly original, but still, I hope useful.

What would be nice would be to get some of those folks out there claiming "it's cooling", "no warming", etc. to put down where they think temperatures will be this year and in the next few years. That did happen way back in early 2008 (if you follow the thread of my previous predictions I linked to in the main post) when every "skeptic" seemed to be calling for a very low temperature that year, what with the coming ice age and all. But there seems to have been no revisiting, no public reckoning for those claims. I'd love for them to be some more visible way to show skeptics simply have no predictive skill. Any ideas?

Nice work: I'd been meaning to try something like this, but not had time.

Which sunspot cycle did you pick for your prediction? On the basis of the depth and length of the minimum, magnetic fields and such like, current predictions are for a very weak solar cycle this time round - the weakest in 200 years:
http://solarscience.msfc.nasa.gov/predict.shtml