Bishop Hill Climate cuttings 20
Jul 26, 2008 Climate: Cuttings Edition 20 of Climate Cuttings finds the blogosphere debating the outcome of the OfCom inquiry into The Great Global Warming Swindle. 
Both sides claim vindication, but as someone pointed out, if Channel Four came out of it so badly, how come they're allowed to repeat the show with only minor edits? The best round up (or roundups) were at Climate Audit, with a close analysis of the complaints and the rulings. Meanwhile Hamish Mykura of Channel Four revealed that the station plans to broadcast An Inconvenient Truth. Given that a judge has already ruled that Al Gore's film is full of errors and exaggerations, expect OfCom to be kept very busy.
The University of Illinois, which runs the Cryosphere Today website, has adjusted its data again. Suddenly there hasn't been nearly as much sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere as previously thought. This is apparently the third time this has happened this year, and the change is always in the same direction. Funny that. Unfortunately for Cryosphere Today, the unannounced change was spotted by Mikel Mariñelarena.
Meanwhile the Hadley Centre and NASA also seem to have been adjusting their data after the event.
Lord MoncktonThe American Physical Society got cold feet over publishing Lord Monckton's critique of climate sensitivity calculations and slapped a notice at the top saying it wasn't peer-reviewed. The noble lord wasn't amused.
Russ Steele notices that one of the surface stations used for estimating the global temperature is still contributing readings more than two years after it was closed. This doesn't inspire much confidence in the output, does it?
The Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a pattern of temperature changes in the Pacific Ocean, has shifted to a cool phase. Some think this means that the globe will experience cooler temperatures for the next twenty to thirty years.
Prashant SardeshmukhA new paper in Climate Dynamics by Compo and Sardeshmukh reported that recent warming over land is mainly caused by the oceans rather than directly by greenhouse gases. Roger Pielke Snr explains the importance.
Nature Climate Feedback mentioned Climate Audit, without explaining to their bewildered readers who or what it is. Previously they've refused to even acknowledge McIntyre's existence.
CSIRO seem to have noticed the criticism that they were getting for not archiving data backing up their recent paper on Australian droughts, which I reported in the last edition of Climate Cuttings. The numbers have now appeared on the Ozzy Meterorology Bureau website.
Bishop Hill
Just noticed that the Cryosphere Today story is a year old! Doh!
Reader Comments (2)
http://ams.confex.com/ams/Annual2006/techprogram/paper_104011.htm
The final sentence of that abstract reads as follows: "Our analysis thus leads us to conclude that the observed 50-year trends of SST at most tropical locations, and especially in the Indian and west Pacific oceans, are not consistent with naturally occurring 50-year trends expected from the observed statistics of interannual SST variability over the last half century."
Thank-you for commenting. As far as I can tell, there is a quite a lot of ground to be fought over still. The real debate over AGW is between lukewarmers and alarmists. There is almost certainly an element of anthropogenic warming of the earth - simple physics tells us this much. The question is, how large is it? As the C&S paper recognises, much of the recent warming of the oceans may be natural. This doesn't rule out an anthropogenic element to the late twentieth century temperature rise, but it does make it smaller.