Climate cuttings 16

Well, the enthusiasm has lasted through another week, so here it is: the latest installment of Climate Cuttings, in which I round up recent developments on the climate science front.

First up is The Englishman, who wonders why UEA's Climate Research Unit hasn't published any of its indicators of climate change since 2000. Perhaps because the temperature's not going up?

Lucia Liljegren has been comparing the temperature records to the last IPCC forecast of temperatures rising at 2^oC per century. She has been able to reject the 2^oC/century hypothesis with a high degree of confidence, but points out that this doesn't mean temperatures aren't going to start rising again.

Sir Nicholas Stern, of Stern Report fame, turns out to be coining it on the back of his climate scaremongering, launching a carbon credits rating agency. Of course, if it were Exxon doing this they'd be accused on being unreliable. Stern will just laugh all the way to the bank.

Climate Audit's work on discovering whether NASA's shambolic computer code does what it is supposed to continues. Steve McIntyre has discovered that NASA are monitoring the work, despite the fact that they refuse to mention or even discuss Climate Audit. Perhaps they want to learn how code is written these days.

Like the first swallow of summer, the annual "ice-free North Pole" story arrived. This time it's the Independent doing the honours, with Science Editor, Steve Connor blissfully unaware that the New York Times was forced to retract an identical story in 2000 when it was pointed out to them that it isn't even unusual for there to be no ice at the Pole. Real Climate weighed in too and said that this time there were going to be "large expanses" of open water. Still no mention of the growing sea ice in the Antarctic.

Volcanoes were discovered under the Arctic ice (shouldn't they be able to see them now all the ice is gone?). Sceptics wondered if this might explain some of the ice melt.

 The Surface Stations project, to survey all 1221 stations used as input to the global temperature figure, has now reached over 40% of the network. One preliminary analysis of the data suggests that the best sited stations show a much lower rise in temperature than the worst.

Anthony Watts, the man behind SurfaceStations, has also been keeping an eye on the sun. There has been a complete absence of sunspots since April 13th. In the past, this sort of sunspot pause has presaged a 1-2^oC drop in global temperatures.

Professor Aynsley Kellow writes about the great failures of environmental science - how green scientists treat mathematical models as scientific truth and manipulate real world data to fit the models. Anyone who has followed the climate debate will recognise this pattern. There's also an amusing potshot at Nature for editorialising in support of some "scientists" who faked evidence. 

(Updated to fix the Kellow link)

Comments

[Alan B]

The last link takes me to the guy's CV but not to anything written by him.

Help!

Alan

(fell free to delete)

[Bishop Hill]

Fixed now.

Thanks

[JG]

Brilliant work-please keep it up