Bishop Hill Climate cuttings 31
Aug 16, 2009 Climate Another round of prunings from the hilarious world of climatology.
The Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia produce one of the main temperature indices for the planet. Their attempts to withhold their raw data have become positively farcical in recent days, with excuses ranging from "we lost it" to "it's confidential" to "you're not qualified to get it". Lots of comical posts at Climate Audit.
Continuing with the theme of temperature indices, the GISS data and code have been public for a while, but nobody has ever been able to get it to work because of the desperate state of the code. Until now: a lone blogger (new to me) going by the name of Chiefio seems to have got it running. Cheefio's early analysis seems to suggest that there is no warming signal in weather stations that have been around for a long time; the warming is coming from short-lived stations. Highly preliminary stuff, of course, but interesting nevertheless.
Still on temperature indices, Roger Pielke Snr was mightily annoyed by Thomas Karl suppressing his views on a possible warm bias in the land temperature records during the writing of an official report on the subject. Pielke has a new paper out demonstrating his point.
Everyone's favourite climatologist Michael Mann had a new paper out informing us that there are now more Atlantic hurricanes around than ever before. Which was a pity as a recent paper from Chris Landsea reported that there has been no twentieth century trend in Atlantic hurricanes. Observers also point out that there haven't been any Atlantic hurricanes at all this year.
Returning to the theme of data withholding, another hairraising Yes Minister style story of bureaucrats behaving like a bunch of bureaucrats was unfolded by Doug Keenan.
Roger Pielke Jnr wondered why the press reported Mann's paper and not Landsea's.
The annual melt in the Arctic slowed suddenly, with one group of observers even reporting that ice extent was growing (probably an error).
Reader Comments (2)
As to Mann's estimate of hurricane activity, who are you going to believe: Mann's computer model or your own lying eyes?
My own humble theory is that the missing CRU data still exists somewhere and hasn't yet been either deleted, wiped, chucked, dissolved, disintegrated or devoured by gerbils. Maybe it has simply been misplaced. Possibly it's hiding in one of the many nooks and crannies of the labyrinthine campus at UEA, on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard', as Douglas Adams might have put it. The CRU's responses certainly come across as bumbling and panicky rather than sinister - Hanlon's Razor surely applies here, or even better, Grey's Law: "Any sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice."