Climate cuttings 17

Welcome to the seventeenth edition of Climate Cuttings, in which I round up recent developments on the climate science front, this week with the added bonus of pictures.

Roy Spencer of the University of Alabama published a simplified version of a paper he has submitted for publication. He says that he has looked at clouds from both sides now and that people have been making faulty assumptions about them. He says that previous estimates of the sensitivity of climate to CO₂ are therefore wrong. If correct, then the effect of releasing CO₂ into the atmosphere is much less than had been thought.

Lucia examined James Hansen's 1988 forecasts (which kicked off the whole global warming fiasco) and found that reality has been a lot cooler than the NASA man's doom-laden prognostications. Read the comments too for an interesting discussion of why climate scientists use anomalies (variation from some mean) rather than actual temperatures - if they didn't, people would see that the scatter between the different forecasts is enormous.

Anthony Watts has a fascinating post about an odd rise in temperature at the climate station in Tucumari, New Mexico. An apparently good station had a sudden rise in temperatures around the year 2000. More dodgy adjustments by the scientists? No - it appears to be down to land use, and more specifically, irrigation, something that Roger Pielke Snr has been saying for years. How much of the alleged global warming is actually due to the increasing use of irrigation?

A panel of Nobel prize winners was split on whether man is causing dangerous climate change. Three out of seven revealed themselves as sceptics. Luboš Motl has the roundup.

Roger Pielke Snr wrote about the different definitions of climate and weather and concludes that climate prediction is necessarily more difficult than weather prediction because the weather system is a subset of the climate system. And as they can't forecast weather more than a couple of days ahead.....

Eleven of fourteen expert teams predicted that this summer's Arctic melt would be more severe than last year's. Climate Audit says there's no sign of it happening yet, and if it's going to happen, it should happen in the first half of July. The Register published an excellent roundup of recent shenanigans in the science and media reporting of Arctic warming.

Meanwhile, Andrew Revkin had the exclusive on a forthcoming paper in Science which seems to backpedal on the idea that the Greenland icesheet is in imminent danger of collapse.

Bjorn Lomborg made the call for technological solutions rather than economic suicide.

June temperature records were published. It's still chilly, with last month being the third coldest this century.

And that's it. Please feel free to drop me any interesting links.

Photo credits under creative commons: Cloud - Jeff Kubina, Irrigation rainbow - Frank Peters, Ice - Spigoo

Comments

[Frederick Davies]

CNN exclusive: June third coldest month in XIX century!

Yeah, dream on...

Anyway, thanks for the roundup.

[David]

I've looked at clouds from both sides now
From up and down, and still somehow
It's cloud illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all

[Bishop Hill]

They don't write them like that any more, do they?

[Chris, Baildon]

Here is a good article - I like Figure 3. Global Mean Temperature from 1850 - 2007. Says it all really

http://www.jennifermarohasy.com/blog/archives/003237.html