We spoke too soon! Having thought that Ozzy scientific body CSIRO had released their drought data, it turned out that they had actually only released summaries of the numbers. Are they hiding something?
Roy Spencer went to Washington and gave a presentation in which he said that previous estimates of the sensitivity of the climate to CO2 were too high. For his troubles he received much support and a certain amount of abuse.
Climate models were the flavour of the week. Professor Demetris Koutsoyiannis of the National Technical University of Athens published a paper in which he demonstrated that climate models have no predictive skill at regional levels, and there is no evidence that they work at larger scales either. This is a pity, as we are currently destroying our economies on the basis of the output of climate models. Meanwhile Lucia looked at weather noise as produced by climate models and started an assessment of how this compared to real weather. First results were for a model called EchoG, which produced weather with twice as much variability as what we observe around us. Not very realistic then.
Anthony Watts discovered a NASA server had been left accessible to outside users. The AIRS satellite takes infrared soundings of the Earth. Watts took a tour of the server and found some interesting stuff, including a chart showing cooling of the tropical oceans since 2002. The tropics are meant to warm the most in a global warming scenario. They also seem to have some results in the offing which are at variance with one of the key inputs to climate models - namely that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is well-mixed.
The rumpus over Lord Monckton's article for the American Physical Society grumbled on. Real Climate tried to take it apart. The noble lord fired back. Notable in his response is a list of the areas which Real Climate didn't even try to critique - the failure of computer models to predict the climate is one; that the IPCC's method of evaluating climate sensitivity is weak and relies on only four scientific papers, another. That's F-O-U-R articles. Sheesh!
This is not snow
In yet more evidence of dangerous heating of the planet....there was snow in Sydney, Australia. In a remarkable piece of spin, this was reclassified by the Bureau of Meterology as "soft hail".
Without batting an eyelid, the BBC changed its tune on Arctic ice melt. Just six weeks ago scientists were reporting that there was going to be a record melt this year. Now, they are saying that there won't.
And finally, Steve McIntyre wonders if Keith Briffa has just been caught out. As we noted last time round, Briffa has consistently stonewalled requests to see his data. But the Royal Society has recently told McIntyre that it takes the data issue very seriously, strongly suggesting that they, unlike the journals Nature and Science, are going to insist that Briffa toes the line regarding the numbers behind his recent paper.