Climate cuttings 7

There's been plenty of excitement in climate circles this week, so without further ado, here's what you may have missed.

The Lockwood & Frohlich paper and its claim to refute the solar theory of climate change continues to attract comment.

• Lubos Motl has comment from solar physicist Nir Shaviv, who reckons the paper is meaningless. Apparently Lockwood is using proxy measurements of solar activity (like sunspots) rather than measurements of the cosmic ray flux, and also doesn't consider the possibility of a damping which would introduce a delay between changes in cosmic ray flux and changes in temperature.
• Joe D'Aleo has a substantial paper pointing out flaws in Lockwood's thesis. In particular, he's been picking the brains of solar scientists Richard Willson and Nicola Scafetta.

Willson runs the NASA's ACRIM programme which collects the data on solar output. He thinks Lockwood should have used his ACRIM results rather than Frohlich's own PMOD series which represents ACRIM plus some heavily disputed "corrections".

Scafetta points out that the results of the Lockwood paper would be quite different if they had used ACRIM instead of PMOD and takes Lockwood & Frohlich to task for not considering this. He also takes issue with their averaging technique which implies that temperature at any point in time is partly driven by the future output of the sun!

• There is some discussion of the ACRIM vs PMOD issue at Open Mind. Richard Willson gets involved. There's a follow-up post here.

There's also more comment on the Armstong paper claims of the inadequacy of climate forecasts.

• Real Climate had a piece attacking the paper. While mostly knockabout stuff, they did make a substantial claim, namely that there is out of sample testing of climate models, although how you can test your model against the shambles of the paleoclimate reconstructions is beyond me.
• Jos de Laat of the Dutch Met Office reckons Armstrong's criticisms have hit the nail on the head

Surfacestations.org has now passed the 200 mark and should hit 20% of the network next week. 

• The station at Tucson AZ was nominated as the worst in the network. It has also shown the fastest rising temperatures.
• A commenter at Climate Audit pointed out that not all AC units expel hot air.
• Surfacestations suffered a denial of service attack. Observers wondered if environmentalists were behind it.
• Police destroyed a suspicious weather station. Observers wondered whether this was a case of destroying the evidence.
• An US Weather Service insider has written to Anthony Watts complaining of NWS's resistance to modernisation of the network.
• The American Association of State Climatologists has written to Congress, complaining that the surface station network is close to collapse.

The Great Global Warming Swindle was shown on Australian TV to a great deal of hoo-ha. Martin Durkin said that the film survived the mauling it received.

Roger Pielke Snr continues to post on the failure of the IPCC to address the issue of land use and its effect on climate. This post has a huge list of papers that were ignored.

Next week should see a lot of interest in a new paper from two German scientists, Gerlich & Tscheuschner. They claim to have refuted the greenhouse theory of climate change once and for all.

And lastly, this letter to the FT:

From Mr Ake Nilson.

Sir, In your editorial "It's time to plan for the next deluge" (July 25) you say that "it is now scientifically incontrovertible that global warming is making heavy rain fall more frequently across the world's temperate latitudes". But less than a year ago, on August 10 2006, you reported: "This year's hot, dry summer will be repeated many times in the future and will become normal in the next 40 to 50 years if climate scientists are correct."

Please could you make up your mind as to the effect of global warming?

Ake Nilson

Comments

[John Nicklin]

The Gerlich & Tscheuschner paper is very dense, not a flighty bit of twaddle as the AGW proponents will try to prove over the coming weeks. I imagine that realclimate is in high gear revising climate records and proxy measurements.

The quote from Ake Nilson is priceless, I'm grabbing it, with credit to Bishop Hill Blog of course. Its just too good.

[Bishop Hill]

I've not waded my way through much of G&T yet. It may prove too much for my rusty maths skills. I'm interested to see what the experts make of it though.

[John Nicklin]

Something to keep an eye on.

[Bishop Hill]

John Brignell at Numberwatch has posted a review of it. Good in parts, but overall, less than the title suggests.

[Steve Giess]

An interesting and worthwhile read. A bit variable in parts, both in technical depth and also the English!