Two degrees/century still falsified

Those who are new to the nitty gritty of the climate debate may not be aware of the sterling work Lucia Liljegren does in monitoring monthly temperature anomalies against the IPCC's last published predictions of warming at 2°C/century.

Lucia is very careful to make her work bulletproof, in terms of avoiding accusations of cherrypicked start points and careful treatment of "weather noise". I think the warmists have stopped trying to poke holes in her results now.

The GISS figures are out for November and Lucia reports that they are highish, at 0.68°C, but not high enough to stop the IPCC's hypothesis from being remaining in falsified territory. I wonder why I don't read this in the newspapers?

The Pachauri Nexus

I did say so didn't I? Once Richard North has a hold on your ankles he will not let go. Rajendra Pachauri is just starting to realise this.

US readers, for instance, might be intrigued to learn that their tax dollars take a four-way hit. There US government agencies pay into Pachauri's pot, the US Agency for International Development, the US Department of Energy and US Environment Protection Agency and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, a US Department of Energy National Laboratory, also pays a contribution.

Lots more where that came from, and lots more to come too, I fancy.

Constructing a temperature record

Some background reading on creating temperature records. These are probably aimed at the geekier reader:

• Matt Briggs looks at the specific question of dealing with station moves in a four-part posting that starts here. He notes the failure of climatologists to account for their errors properly.
• Error budgets are also bothering AJStrata, who views the so-called homogenisation adjustments as science fiction.

Vested interests

It has been claimed that Steve McIntyre's employer having given a lecture at a thinktank that had once received funding from an oil company amounts to a vested interest.

That's not a vested interest.

This is what a vested interest looks like.

I think this could be the next big Climategate story. Richard North looks like he has the bit between his teeth, and we all know what happened the last time he did that...(Warning - that last link is non-climatic, for those who only want climate stuff).

Scientists say "trust us"

The Met Office's hastily assembled list of scientists speaking out in favour of the alleged consensus has been something of a damp squib. I mean, lots of people with a vested interest in the continuation of the global warming crisis think that the global warming crisis is real and important?

Big deal.

Here's an interesting thing though - people who didn't sign it:

• Phil Jones
• Keith Briffa
• Bob Watson
• Andrew Watson
• Mike Hulme
• Tim Osborn

Some people might say that it's remarkable that some of the most prominent climatologists in the country failed to sign a statement of confidence in climatology.

Or perhaps they know something that the rest of us merely suspect.

Then again, maybe they were busy on other things.

Yours truly in the Telegraph

I have a letter in the Telegraph today. Nothing new for regular readers here, but welcome nevertheless.

(H/T Jonathan in the comments)

Blast and counterblast

Giorgio Gilestro takes issue with Willis Eschenbach's attack on the credibility of the adjustments at Darwin. One should, he says, look at the big picture, and proceeds to an analysis of the adjustments showing that they are normally distributed and average to zero (i.e. there are as many upward adjustments as downwards ones).

Hooray! says RealClimate author Eric Steig in the comments:

This is a very nice analysis, and is really the last word on this entire fabricated scandal.

The last word? Not so, says Climate Audit regular, retired statistician Roman M, who produces this rather amazing graph of how the adjustments pan out over time.

Was Briffa the mole?

AJ Strata looks at the evidence that someone in the heart of the Hockey Team couldn't stand the pressure any longer and decided to spill the beans. Was it Keith Briffa?

Mail on the splice

Wow. A 3000-word article on the nitty gritty details of some paleoclimate shenanigans in a major newspaper.  Kudos to the Mail.

The madness of warming

Philosopher Martin Cohen finds an explanation for the global warming phenomenon in the madness of crowds.

Is belief in global-warming science another example of the "madness of crowds"? That strange but powerful social phenomenon, first described by Charles Mackay in 1841, turns a widely shared prejudice into an irresistible "authority". Could it indeed represent the final triumph of irrationality? After all, how rational is it to pass laws banning one kind of light bulb (and insisting on their replacement by ones filled with poisonous mercury vapour) in order to "save electricity", while ploughing money into schemes to run cars on ... electricity? How rational is it to pay the Russians once for fossil fuels, and a second time for permission (via carbon credits) to burn them...? And how rational is it to suppose that the effects of increased CO2 in the atmosphere take between 200 and 1,000 years to be felt, but that solutions can take effect almost instantaneously?

H/T Jonathan in the comments

Schneider doesn't want to acknowledge Climategate

Is calling security a reasonable response to someone asking a question about the Climategate emails? Global warming promoter Stephen Schneider seemed to think this was easier than trying to respond to the questions.

Hail to the Chiefio

Chiefio has some more interesting analysis of one of the emails, showing how CRU, NCDC and the IPCC are all in each other's pockets. He also finds more evidence that CRU has been "economic with the actualite" in their responses to FoI requests.

No conspiracy

Tom Fuller writes an interesting piece in which he considers whether there is evidence of an international conspiracy to create a "global warming scam" in the CRU emails. He concludes, correctly in my opinion, that there isn't. There is, however, enough bad stuff in there that we should still be worried:

I think that they had an informal conspiracy going to pump each others' careers up, peer review each others' papers, and slam any skeptics or lukewarmers who wandered within punching range - and later, after they realised how badly they had acted, they conspired to evade the Freedom of Information Act.

Anyone who has had an honest review of the emails will find this very hard to argue with.

Click to read more ...

And so it begins

McIntyre has posted his first analysis of some of the emails. It's not looking good for the Hockey Team, with their scheming to remove the divergence problem and "hide the decline" from the IPCC reports laid out in horrifying detail.

There are going to be months of revelations like this.

Faking it

From the emails

From: Tom Wigley <wigley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: Mike Hulme <m.hulme@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Subject: Re: New MAGICC/SCENGEN
Date: Mon, 9 Feb 1998 15:48:15 -0700 (MST)

It just happens that, in your version, I 'faked up' column 5 as the difference between column 6 and the sum of columns 2, 3 and 4. I did this simply to get the code working; but (as you now know) I never got around to fixing it up until now. In the latest version, column 6 is again equal to the sum of columns 2, 3, 4 and 5 because I scale columns 3, 4 and 5 to ensure that this is so. . . .
(3) Re HadCM2, again it is impossible to be consistent. What I said before is that the reason for adding these results is simply to make them readily available. I do *not* advocate using them in combination with any other model results.. . .

I wonder what the result of all this "faking" was?