Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a misunderstanding of ranges. Imagine you flip a coin 100 times and you only get 41 heads. Is this coin fair? 41 heads falls just within the 95% confidence interval for a fair coin over 100 flips, so you can answer yes in that regard. But things are not binary. It's all probabilistic. In other words, it's not like 40 heads = rigged coin, 41 = legit. Your assumed interval is going to be a normal distribution.…
Having spent several years doing a PhD that was primarily statistical analysis, I can assure you I understand ranges very well. I certainly did not assume it is a normal distribution. There are going to be multiple sources of uncertainty including statistical and systematic errors which have different distributions. Taking all that into account they came up with an overall bound, and the actual number is within that…
The second is that the IPCC paper was published in 1990. I was using the heat data starting from 1989, as that's when the article I referenced was published. Here are the correct temperature deviations for testing the IPCC hypothesis which starts with 1990 as the baseline:
---
1990 = 0.44
2000 = 0.40
2010 = 0.7
current = 0.8
---
Your argument, which I believe is flawed, does not speak positively of the IPCC data even if we accept it to be true. From 1990 to 2000 the temperature dropped 0.04 degrees, which is of course well outside their 0.2 to 0.5 bound. From 2000 to 2010 it increased by 0.3 degrees, which does hit square on their expected value. From 2010 to present we've seen an increase of 0.1 degree. Unless we see a substantial increase over the next couple of years, we're likely to once again completely fall completely outside the IPCC predictions.
If you'd like to aggregate the data we see a 0.36 increase over 28 years = a decadal increase of less than 0.13, once again completely outside the IPCC range. And of course as we increase the time frames involved, we should be able to tighten that range as variance is reduced, which means we're even further outside their expected results. However, I'd also emphasize that this isn't really radically different than if we hit a decadal increase of 0.2. We're looking at seeing a tail distribution over and over, or something a bit below the tail distribution over and over.
----------------
Okay, but that is all an aside. The reason I am focusing on the director's comments is because politicians and other individuals are not debating the minutia of distribution mathematics, variance, and other such things. They are listening to these well established individuals and their predictions. And so why wasn't the individual who claimed a 1 to 7 degree increase immediately remanded and demoted by the UN? At the minimum why was the AP not immediately contacted by the UN to issue a correction?
In my opinion the answer is because people are being intentionally hyperbolic, mostly with good intentions. The idea is that people won't do anything if you tell them that what we expect is somewhat hotter days and maybe an increase in extreme weather events. And that is probably a correct assumption. So instead they resort to hyperbole preaching apocalyptic scenarios to come, as our UN Director did. But this is an even worse idea since when these 'prophecies' fail to come true it breeds skepticism towards further predictions. Climate progress plays out the tale of the boy who cried wolf!
Though I do have to say even when we just look at the models, something seems to be going wrong. This [1] is an image from the 2000 IPCC report indicating expected temperature changes from 1990 to 2030. We're currently about 75% of the way through that time frame and sitting on 0.36. It's possible that next decade will see an unprecedented ultra-rapid rise in heating, but if it doesn't then we're again looking at yet another complete failure of prediction. I think there is a clear hypothesis to explain what is going wrong, but this is already an excessively verbose post!
[1] - https://archive.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg1/fig9-15.htm