Climate cuttings 19

The Paleoclimate Reconstruction Challenge is firing lots of interest. If reconstructions of past climate are going to be based on sound science in future, it will be a big step forward. A kick-off conference was held (behind closed doors) in Trieste but some of the papers presented have fortunately found their way onto the internet. One, by the CRU's Keith Briffa, was very candid about the problems of verification of tree ring regressions, describing them as "of limited rigour", and that they tell us "virtually nothing about the validity of long-timescale climate estimates". Strangely, while writing the paleoclimate chapter of the IPCC report, he rejected any such criticism out of hand. The IPCC's final report talked of "the general strength of many such calibrated relationships, and their significant verification using independent instrumental data."

Dr Briffa is also on the receiving end of an audit from Steve McIntyre. His 2008 paper in Phil Trans Roy Soc looks at a selection of Eurasian tree ring chronologies. The headlines in the abstract talk of unprecedented warming in recent years. The actual text of the paper says something rather different. As usual, there is no justification of the novel statistical procedures they've adopted, no data is archived and no explanation is given of why they've picked the particular chronologies they have.

The meme of refusing access to climatic data on the spurious grounds that it's subject to intellectual property restrictions is gaining favour among climate alarmists. Australia's national scientific body CSIRO is refusing access to data underlying a report forecasting disaster due to drought.

Roger Pielke Snr lists three important research findings that are ignored by the IPCC. 

• The effect of atmospheric particulates ("aerosols") is much, much greater than anything CO₂ might contribute
• About 30% of any rise in temperatures is due merely to the fact that temperatures are measured near the ground
• Rising temperatures near the poles have less of an effect on emission of radiation from the Earth than a similar rise near the equator. 

And the silly season must be upon us because vlimate change has been linked to an increased prevalence of kidney stones, a finding described by Time magazine as "compelling". It certainly makes me giggle, anyway.

This one may be equally kooky, but it's actually not the first time I've heard it - oil is not a fossil fuel, but is produced by the high temperature reaction of calcium carbonate and iron oxide in the Earth's core. Panic over then.

Lord Monckton, a journalist and politician, is given space by the American Physical Society to put forward the view that the sensititivity of the climate to input of CO2 has been vastly overstated. Observers note that the APS, which once proclaimed that global warming was irrefutable, is now saying that there is a considerable body of dissenting opinion.

Lucia took another look at the IPCC's 2^oC/century forecast, this time doing monte carlo methods. The forecast still falsifies against the actual trend. 

One of Anthony Watt's correspondents tells how technicians recording temperatures in the Canadian Arctic in the 1950s would regularly fabricate the readings rather than venture out into the cold. These are the same data which form part of the global temperature record today.

Climate cuttings 18

Interesting developments this week with the two sides of the debate finally engaging in some constructive dialogue. So without further ado....

Gavin Schmidt at Real Climate published the temperature record corrected for the ENSO index (A measure of El Niño/La Niña), in an attempt to rebut Lucia's falsification of the IPCC forecasts (although amusingly, he refuses to mention her by name or link to her work). Lucia reran her verification procedures and said that the IPCC forecasts of 2001 were still falsified to a high degree of confidence. She also wonders why Gavin chooses to use 1998 as his start point when she's using 2001, where his error bars are, and whether he thinks his corrected figures match the IPCC forecasts or not. Finally a little light is shed when Gavin starts posting comments at Lucia's. The upshot appears to be this:

• Gavin is saying that the models define a range of temperatures for the future. The actual observed temperatures fall within this range, giving us confidence in the ensemble of models.
• Lucia is saying that if you had models which gave both very high and very low projections, almost any observed temperatures would fall within the range of models. The question she is asking is "Does the actual observed temperature match the central trend of the range of models?", and the answer she gets is "No".
  
• Because of this we can probably reject many of the higher estimates of future temperature. 
  

"Earth begins to kill people for changing its climate" proclaimed Pravda. "Nonsense" was the general thrust of the response from economist Indur Goklany, who presented WHO figures showing a precipitous decline in deaths from extreme weather events. This didn't stop publication of another mathematical model saying that warming was going to cause more extreme weather events.

Click to enlargeArctic Sea ice continued to hold the attention of climate bloggers, with McIntyre reporting daily on the seasonal melt (at time of writing 2008 is more than half a million quare kilometers behind 2007). The Alfred Wegener Institute reckons the 2007 record minimum is unlikely to be beaten, which is odd because we were told that there was lots of first year ice (which should melt more easily) this year.

Of course, it's traditional for the MSM not to mention the very high levels of Antarctic Sea Ice. They prefer only to talk about the West Antarctic Peninsula where, unlike the rest of the continent, there has been a little warming. Another ice sheet there is in danger of breaking up. From this we are supposed to conclude that the Southern Hemisphere is warming, when in fact it's getting colder.

Gerbrand Komen, retired director of the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, pointed out that the stated uncertainties in model predictions of future climate are subjective guesses rather than objective calculations. He wondered if everyone realises this.

After the hockey stick fiasco, nobody believes the results of paleoclimatologists any more. Because of this, a bunch of its chief practitioners are launching a "Paleoclimate reconstruction challenge" where teams will be given proxy data and calibrated instrumental data and they have to try to reconstuct the climate from them.  The idea is to justify the whole science of paleoclimatology rather than to find the best technique.

The world is still cold - rare snowstorms have hit New Zealand's North Island.

Photo credits under CC licence: Tornado - OAR/ERL/National Severe Storms

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

Climate cuttings 16

Well, the enthusiasm has lasted through another week, so here it is: the latest installment of Climate Cuttings, in which I round up recent developments on the climate science front.

First up is The Englishman, who wonders why UEA's Climate Research Unit hasn't published any of its indicators of climate change since 2000. Perhaps because the temperature's not going up?

Lucia Liljegren has been comparing the temperature records to the last IPCC forecast of temperatures rising at 2^oC per century. She has been able to reject the 2^oC/century hypothesis with a high degree of confidence, but points out that this doesn't mean temperatures aren't going to start rising again.

Sir Nicholas Stern, of Stern Report fame, turns out to be coining it on the back of his climate scaremongering, launching a carbon credits rating agency. Of course, if it were Exxon doing this they'd be accused on being unreliable. Stern will just laugh all the way to the bank.

Climate Audit's work on discovering whether NASA's shambolic computer code does what it is supposed to continues. Steve McIntyre has discovered that NASA are monitoring the work, despite the fact that they refuse to mention or even discuss Climate Audit. Perhaps they want to learn how code is written these days.

Like the first swallow of summer, the annual "ice-free North Pole" story arrived. This time it's the Independent doing the honours, with Science Editor, Steve Connor blissfully unaware that the New York Times was forced to retract an identical story in 2000 when it was pointed out to them that it isn't even unusual for there to be no ice at the Pole. Real Climate weighed in too and said that this time there were going to be "large expanses" of open water. Still no mention of the growing sea ice in the Antarctic.

Volcanoes were discovered under the Arctic ice (shouldn't they be able to see them now all the ice is gone?). Sceptics wondered if this might explain some of the ice melt.

 The Surface Stations project, to survey all 1221 stations used as input to the global temperature figure, has now reached over 40% of the network. One preliminary analysis of the data suggests that the best sited stations show a much lower rise in temperature than the worst.

Anthony Watts, the man behind SurfaceStations, has also been keeping an eye on the sun. There has been a complete absence of sunspots since April 13th. In the past, this sort of sunspot pause has presaged a 1-2^oC drop in global temperatures.

Professor Aynsley Kellow writes about the great failures of environmental science - how green scientists treat mathematical models as scientific truth and manipulate real world data to fit the models. Anyone who has followed the climate debate will recognise this pattern. There's also an amusing potshot at Nature for editorialising in support of some "scientists" who faked evidence. 

(Updated to fix the Kellow link)

Climate cuttings 15

A reader on one of the Basher for Liberty posts said that he missed the Climate Cuttings roundups I used to do. By strange coincidence, there have been a couple of interesting developments recently, so here I am going to revive it, at least for one night. Who knows, maybe I'll get all enthusiastic again.

Here goes:

Today is the twentieth anniversary of James Hansen's famous speech to congress in which, foaming ever so slightly at the mouth, he told the assembled eminences that we were all going to burn. To mark the occasion, (and now slavering wildly), Hansen has called for oil company executives to be tried. Rumours that he screamed "Burn them! Burn them!" are, as yet, unsubstantiated. In an article at the Graun, he said (again) that we have to act now. Commenters were rude to him.

Readers at Climate Audit have been paying lots of attention to Dr Hansen's work. Having finally forced him to release his code, experienced programmers have been astonished at the sheer amateurishness of the way he has written the programs to create a global temperature record. "Like descending into the hell described in a Steven King novel" was one opinion on the experience of trying to make head or tail of Dr Hansen's work.

David Holland has been trying to get hold of IPCC review editors' working papers. The review editors are the guys who are supposed to go through the IPCC draft report to make sure that it reflects different opinions fairly. Having got hold of the comments of the review editors, he found that they pretty much all just sent in a form sign-off saying that everything was fine and dandy. Given the importance of their job, Holland took the view that there must be more, and asked to see the working papers of the Met Office's John Mitchell who was a review editor on a key chapter.  This opened up a can of worms. The Met Office has given Holland a disgraceful runaround, first of all claiming that all the working papers were destroyed, and when it was pointed out to them that this would contravene both IPCC and Met Office data retention policies, they changed their tune and said that Mitchell was performing this work on his own time.

Meanwhile Holland has been pursuing a completely separate Freedom of Information request to get similar information from Keith Briffa of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. This time the excuse has been that the information is confidential. This is pretty extraordinary, because the IPCC reviews are all meant to be entirely transparent. It's hard to see how a reviewer can have expected his comments to be confidential. In a classic piece of bureaucrat-speak the CRU opined that

The public interest in withholding this information outweighs that of releasing it due to the need to protect the openness and confidentiality of academic intercourse prior to publication which, in turn, assures that such cooperation & openness can continue and inform scientific research and debate.

Academic openness requires confidentiality it seems.

Pollsters discovered that the British public doesn't believe the global warming hype. It's not surprising really - they've kept the story too black and white. It doesn't "feel" like the truth.

Mark Lynas on economics

So is it time to follow in the steps of the UK environment minister Phil Woolas and reassess the potential of GM? As Woolas says: "There is a growing question of whether GM crops can help the developing world out of the current food price crisis. It is a question that we as a nation need to ask ourselves." So is he right?

I doubt it. For starters, the current food price crisis is only partly about supply. Yes, falling harvests have affected the amount of food available, and the recent severe flooding in the US midwest certainly won't help the situation. But, as with oil, rising demand is the biggest factor driving prices towards the stratosphere. As countries such as India and China get richer and adopt more western diets, they consume more meat, sucking grain off the market to feed growing numbers of livestock. The misconceived rush to biofuels has further intensified the problem, gobbling up vast quantities of corn and soya in order to produce the fuel Americans and Europeans need to feed their addiction to the car. Underlying all this, the human population continues to grow, adding another 80 million mouths every single year.

Lynas's article is another candidate for the hotly contested "Dumb Guardian Article of the Year" award. It's just ignorant verbiage to say "it's about demand rather than supply". If demand goes up, then either supply goes up to match it or the price goes up and pushes demand back down again. You can't separate the two. The price is changing because supply and demand are out of kilter. End of.

Another day, another propaganda piece

I do sometimes wonder if Messrs Harrabin and Black, the BBC's prime global warming propagandists, ever get bored of telling one side of the story.

Today's contribution from Mr Black is a story about declining sea ice coverage in the Arctic. 

Arctic sea ice is melting even faster than last year, despite a cold winter.

Data from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) shows that the year began with ice covering a larger area than at the beginning of 2007.

But now it is down to levels seen last June, at the beginning of a summer that broke records for sea ice loss.

Why does he keep doing this? Everybody knows he's cherry picking in order to maintain the BBC's  chosen narrative of "We're all going to die!". Simply checking the sea ice chart at Cryosphere Today shows that global sea ice coverage is pretty much normal - the reduction in the Arctic is offset by extra in the Antarctic.

However, the word "Antarctic" appears nowhere in Richard Black's article. This is good, plain, old-fashioned out-and-out dishonesty. Par for the course for the BBC's environment team.

Jack Frost

According to the weather forecast, there's a slight possibility of frost tonight in my neck of the woods. The summer solstice is a week away.

Global warming eh? 

Getting colder....

The satellite data show that May temperatures were chilly - the anomaly was even cooler than the first few months of 2008, which were pretty damn cold to start with.

Lubos has the details. 

Physics be damned

This is really getting quite amusing.

A new paper published in Nature claims to have uncovered an almighty cock-up in the sea surface temperature record just after the Second World War. Previously the temperature records showed a sharp fall, but it turns out that this was wrong. According to the authors:

It turns out that the mysterious drop is due to differences in the way that British and US ships’ crews measured the sea surface temperature (SST) in the 1940s.

Only a few SST measurements were made during wartime, and almost exclusively by US ships. Then, in the summer of 1945, British ships resumed measurements. But whereas US crews had measured the temperature of the intake water used for cooling the ships’ engines, British crews collected water in buckets from the sea for their measurements. When these uninsulated buckets were hauled from the ocean, the temperature probe would get a little colder as a result of the cooling effect of evaporation. US measurements, on the other hand, yielded slightly higher temperatures due to the warm engine-room environment.

The standard logbook entries made at the time contain no information about how the measurements were taken, so the cause was overlooked, says David Thompson, first author on the paper and an atmospheric scientist at the State University of Colorado in Boulder. As a result, the bias — which, although small, was large enough to produce the sharp drop in global mean temperature — was never adjusted for.

Bravo. And the paper gets the full headline treatment in Nature, with editorials on two of the Nature Group's websites.

The only thing is that this cock-up was pointed out nearly two years ago at Climate Audit. As expected, neither the authors or Nature's leader writers acknowledge their debt to Steve McIntyre, a fact which rather gives the lie to their executive editor's claims that Nature is "of the highest quality and independent". I've noted before that they refuse to link to Climate Audit, while being happy to point their readers to environmentalist writers, so this kind of claim is becoming increasingly ridiculous.

Meanwhile, the implications of these findings are starting to sink in. We should remember in passing that the sea surface record is much more important than the land records, because the sea is such a large proportion of the world's surface. Now, all those climate models, which we are told are based on fundamental physics, have included calculations based on the effects of aerosols - pollution in layman's terms - which allow the models to reproduce the post-war temperature drop. The argument goes that all there was a lot of pollution around in the post-war period which depressed temperatures. Now, of course, the temperature drop turns out to be a mistake, the modellers are going to have to start to explain away why their post-war reconstructions are so much lower than the recorded temperatures. Their alternative is to suddenly discover that the effect of aerosols is not as great as previously thought or that aerosol concentrations were lower, but this will just make it look as if they just throw anything into the models which seems to give the "right" answer, and physics be damned.