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Here's a few more climate stories that I've come across in recent days:

A forthcoming review paper claims to have found the fingerprint of mankind on the global climate. Lubos picks over the entrails.

Richard Tol continues to find grey literature cited in the IPCC's WG3 report. Andreas Bjorstrom says that in the Third Assessment Report only 36% of references in WG3 came from the scientific literature.

Climate scientists are planning to take out attack ads in the New York Times. I wonder if they'll call us "deniers". Judith Curry thinks that maybe doing some sound science would be a better approach.

The interest in whether the "great dying of the thermometers" caused a bias in the global temperature average continues. Lucia has invited Chiefio to go a guest post explaining his thoughts.

Roy Spencer has come up with a new way of estimating the Urban Heat Island effect.

Warmist affluence, sceptic squalor? Richard North looks at the sea of money in which climatologists are swimming.

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Let's round up some of the developments in the Sunday newspapers and around the blogs.

Steve McIntyre gives some of the back story on Geoffrey Boulton's CV. Was it tarted up by the mysterious Nini Yang? And why is Boulton trying to insinuate that sceptics tampered with it when it is clear that this cannot have been so. A commenter on this site notes another appearance of the IPCC in a Boulton biography.

Al Gore himself is in the New York Times, telling us to move along and that there's nothing to see here. Werner Krauss is looking for reasoned responses. The Sunday Times says Gore's hurricane science is wonky.

Booker looks at the steady draining away of credibility at the IPCC and manages to fit in citations of both The Hockey Stick Illusion and Mosher and Fuller's CRUTape Letters.

Much interesting backwards and forwards on the surface temperature records. Tamino says that the "great dying of the thermometers" has no effect on the trend. Lucia agrees. Roy Spencer says he has evidence of a spurious warming in Phil Jones' CRUTEM3 land temperature index.

Benny Peiser's submission to the Science & Technology select committee is very interesting, telling the story of the Keenan fraud allegation from the journal editor's perspective.

Richard North notes that some £11m of British taxpayers money has been delivered or pledged to Pachauri's TERI

It's snowing again.

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There's just so much material round at the moment, it's hard to keep up. Here then is another resurrection of the Climate Cuttings series, in which I round up some recent developments.

In a story running in parallel in the Sunday Times and EU Referendum, Raj Pachauri is linked directly to a new set of erroneous statements in the IPCC reports. This time it's African rainfall they've been misleading us about. Since Pachauri is the author of the relevant part of the report and has repeated the claims elsewhere, he will find it harder to absolve himself of responsibility this time. Commenters noted a recent study that found that there has been a massive recent greening of the Sahel, with temperature rises leading to higher rainfall.

CCNet's Benny Peiser and The Observer's Robin McKie go head to head on whether Climategate matters. There's an interesting difference in tone between the two men.

The Observer's editorial says that the worst allegations in the emails are of suppression of information. I would have thought gatekeeping at scientific journals was far more important in the big picture. Either way, the Observer thinks that alarmism should continue regardless (or words to that effect).

Phil Jones has apparently considered suicide and he says he is still receiving death threats.

The Telegraph looks at Pachauri's financial interests and also finds that, as well as being a soft-porn writer, the big man is "a professional medium pace bowler", "a good top-order batsman and a fielder with a sharp catching arm." The IPCC. Is there nothing they can't do?

I've noted before the silly attempts to try to link sceptics to oil money, and the Independent is trying hard to use this kind of argument to destroy its remaining credibility. Apparently attending a seminar funded by Exxon is enough to refute one's arguments entirely. (It's true in Independent land).

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Ian JolliffeBack in March, global warming's canine-in-chief, Tamino, wrote a series of posts explaining why the notorious decentred principal components analysis used by Michael Mann in his near-legendary hockey stick paper were, in fact, entirely valid. He rounded the series of postings up by citing in his support Ian Joliffe, an important authority on principal components. Tamino is now looking rather foolish, because Joliffe has posted a comment on his site saying that Tamino has misrepresented his views and that Mann should not have used decentred principal components. In fact he wonders about the validity of using principal components at all. Oh dear. 

Mann's latest magnum opus is still causing much hilarity, with the stick-meister deleting and replacing the data on his website faster than a climatologist can fill in a funding request. Unfortunately he has (to his credit) already placed the raw proxies in a public archive from where it is possible to see the quality of the inputs to his study. This is a particularly hilarious one..  

Iain StewartThe BBC's "history" of global warming (in reality it's a propaganda piece) showed a few frayed seams. Presenter Iain Stewart spent a lot of time pouting about how Reagan appointed the Nierenburg committee to look at the issue, and hand-picked its chairman so as to bias its findings. Unfortunately, somebody noticed that the committee was actually set up by the Carter administration. This (ahem) error has come straight from the mouth of Naomi Oreskes, so the producers of the programme have only themselves to blame for picking a "player" as the series adviser. The son of the committee's chairman has responded in the comments and notes that Oreskes knew that the committee was appointed by Carter, because she says so in a scholarly work on the subject. I guess the bit about it being wicked Reagan who appointed Neirenburg was a bit of a flourish for the benefit of the proles.

Atmoz (a climatologist from the US) has also been looking into Oreskes' work on the Nierenburg report, and has found some pretty outrageous selective quoting and misrepresentation of the findings. With all these revelations, she is starting to look throroughly dishonest. The perfect series adviser for a BBC documentary, in fact.

This year's Artic melt seems to have come to a end, with small increases in area appearing for the first time this year, slightly earlier than 2007. The minimum area seems to have been some 400,000 sq km higher than last year. Still no sign of the Antarctic warming either.

And lastly, it hailed in Kenya.

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Right, having restarting the blogging engine, here's a much-delayed edition of climate cuttings. Some of these are quite old now, having sat waiting for me to click the publish button for a month now. Still - there's some interesting stuff out there.

A paper published in The Holocene said that there was a surge in summer storms in Britain in the 1680s and 1690s - the depths of the Little Ice Age. This rather dents recent theories that summer storms are being caused by global warming.

The Hockey Stick reared its ugly head again! Michael Mann's dodgy reconstruction of past temperatures appears in the pages of an important US report on climate. Still more remarkably it's in the variant where the thermometer record is tacked on to the end of the reconstruction to make it look more scary, with not a word of explanation that this is what has been done. Junk science from the US government, it seems.

And a few weeks later Dr Mann tried it on again, publishing a new take on paleoclimate, which quickly reduced readers at Climate Audit to tears of laughter as problem after problem with the data came to light. The cock-ups didn't so much crawl out of the woodwork, as fart up into the firmament like so many damp squibs. The full story is ongoing over at Climate Audit. I'd try to point you to a relevant place but there are so many threads outlining all the things wrong with this study that it's a full time job keeping up with them all. 

The new paper was, of course, given the headline treatment by the BBC ("Any old bilge, so long as it's green bilge"). The hockey stick is alive and well apparently.

Meanwhile, concerns were raised about the mental stability of statistician Matt Briggs. Dr Briggs may have been driven close to madness by the repeated transgressions of basic statistical procedures by the hockey team. (This is a really good posting, by the way, especially for any members of the hockey team who might still have delusions of statistical competence - didn't Wegman say they should involve some statisticians in their work so they would stop getting it wrong?).Having got his hands on CSIRO's drought data (see Climate Cuttings 21), David Stockwell did a statistical re-analysis of the numbers behind the Australian scientific body's claim that their models showed that droughts were going to double in the next twenty to thirty years. When it came to the models' correlation with observed rainfall, Stockwell observes:

In almost all cases, the correlation coefficient between simulated and observed values was very low, and not significant. The models on average explained less than 1% of the observed variation in rainfall.

There have now been no sunspots on our local star for 400 days. This is getting solar enthusiasts rather excited because most previous solar cycle minima have had between two and three hundred sunspot free days.

A guest blogger at Anthony Watts reviewed the Met Office's summer forecast:

On April 11, 2007 they issued this press release stating “there is a high probability that summer temperature will exceed the 1971-2000 long-term average of 14.1 °C ….. there are no indications of an increased risk of a particularly dry or particularly wet summer.”  This was interpreted by The Guardian as “Britain set to enjoy another sizzling summer.“

Britain was hit by flooding.

One of the oddities of the surface temperature record is the claim by climatologists that the effect of urban heat islands (warming from urbanisation) is negligible. A new study from some awkward so-and-so in Japan says that the effect is actually rather larger than the alleged twentieth century warming. Don't expect to read about this in the next IPCC report. (He was probably funded by big oil anyway).

August 2008 temperatures were well below 2007's. The BBC forgot to mention this. Again.

And finally, our favourite enviro-hero Lewis Gordon Pugh (remember him?) went on another CO₂ splurge conciousness raising mission to the Arctic. This time he was going to kayak to the North Pole, which was going to be ice-free this summer, you may remember. He had to turn back because of heavy sea ice. And because his bottom was cold.

Photo credit: Summer storm by Steve Lacy, Tree rings by Shekay,

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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.

Photo credits: Storm Afar by WUJI9981

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Edition 20 of Climate Cuttings finds the blogosphere debating the outcome of the OfCom inquiry into The Great Global Warming Swindle.  Both sides claim vindication, but as someone pointed out, if Channel Four came out of it so badly, how come they're allowed to repeat the show with only minor edits? The best round up (or roundups) were at Climate Audit, with a close analysis of the complaints and the rulings. Meanwhile Hamish Mykura of Channel Four revealed that the station plans to broadcast An Inconvenient Truth. Given that a judge has already ruled that Al Gore's film is full of errors and exaggerations, expect OfCom to be kept very busy.

The University of Illinois, which runs the Cryosphere Today website, has adjusted its data again. Suddenly there hasn't been nearly as much sea ice in the Southern Hemisphere as previously thought. This is apparently the third time this has happened this year, and the change is always in the same direction. Funny that. Unfortunately for Cryosphere Today, the unannounced change was spotted by Mikel Mariñelarena.

Meanwhile the Hadley Centre and NASA also seem to have been adjusting their data after the event.

Lord MoncktonThe American Physical Society got cold feet over publishing Lord Monckton's critique of climate sensitivity calculations and slapped a notice at the top saying it wasn't peer-reviewed. The noble lord wasn't amused.

Russ Steele notices that one of the surface stations used for estimating the global temperature is still contributing readings more than two years after it was closed. This doesn't inspire much confidence in the output, does it?

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation, a pattern of temperature changes in the Pacific Ocean, has shifted to a cool phase. Some think this means that the globe will experience cooler temperatures for the next twenty to thirty years. 

Prashant SardeshmukhA new paper in Climate Dynamics by Compo and Sardeshmukh reported that recent warming over land is mainly caused by the oceans rather than directly by greenhouse gases. Roger Pielke Snr explains the importance.

Nature Climate Feedback mentioned Climate Audit, without explaining to their bewildered readers who or what it is. Previously they've refused to even acknowledge McIntyre's existence.

CSIRO seem to have noticed the criticism that they were getting for not archiving data backing up their recent paper on Australian droughts, which I reported in the last edition of Climate Cuttings. The numbers have now appeared on the Ozzy Meterorology Bureau website.

Update on Jul 27, 2008 by Bishop Hill

Just noticed that the Cryosphere Today story is a year old! Doh!

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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.

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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

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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

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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)

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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.

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There's been no shortage of action on the climate front in recent weeks. In fact, the only reason I haven't been posting more often is the sheer effort of trying to stay abreast of everything as well as doing the day-job. Here then, is the climate news you may have missed.

We know that when you are making a reconstruction of the historic temperature from tree rings, you shouldn't use bristlecone pines (BCPs). This was the advice of the US National Academy of Sciences who observed that these species are thought to be prone to CO2 fertilisation - which is to say that increased growth might be due to more CO2 in the air, rather than temperature. Of course the IPCC doesn't care about this and uses BCPs all the time, most notoriously in the "Hockey Stick" graph. Now, a new paper from Craig Loehle finds that if you don't use any tree rings in your reconstruction, you don't get a hockey stick at all - in fact the medieval warm period looks warmer than the present. This is upsetting to "warmongers" who claim that the MWP was a local phenomenon.

Because of this the Loehle paper was attacked or ignored. Julien Emile-Geay, a colleague of hockey stick manufacturer, Michael Mann, gave a bravura performance in a thread at Climate Audit, in which he called the Loehle paper "pseudoscience" because, amongst other things, it didn't calculate error bounds. He become rather bashful when it was pointed out to him that none of his colleagues did this either. Nobody seemed to be able to explain how error bounds for this kind of reconstruction should be calculated. Which is odd, when you think about the idea that the science is apparently "settled".

Loehle's approach to calculating a global temperature turns out to have been rather unique. The proxies he used were each calibrated against local temperature to give a reconstructed local temperature record. Then the reconstructed temperatures for each locale were averaged to give a global temperature. This is very different to the way this kind of thing has been done in the wacky world of hockey stick climate science. Here, proxies of different kinds, some calibrated, some not, are aggregated and then some kind of a global temperature signal is looked for by statistical means. The idea is that proxies will correlate in some way with temperatures elsewhere in the world by means of something called "teleconnections". This seems, shall we say, unconvincing.

One of the proxies used in a recent temperature reconstruction was rainfall records. If you're wondering, these are thought to teleconnect to temperature, so you can look for a temperature signal in there.  This sounds daft enough, but when you learn that the coordinates of the locations used were not correctly aligned with the temperature data, so that, for example, the rainfall in Philadelphia was compared to the temperature in Bombay, it sounds truly crazy. However the really amazing, fall-off-your-chair laughing bit, is that this error had also been observed in one of the author's previous papers, and that he had had his gaffe pointed out to him then! And the author? Hockey stick guy, Michael Mann! Who else?

Meanwhile a recent PhD thesis raises important questions about some of the bristlecone pine records. The hockey stick graph is driven by a surge in growth in bristlecone pine trees in the latter half of the twentieth century. One of the most important such records is the Graybill chronology from Sheep Mountain. The new thesis updates these records, but shows none of the growth surge that was previously reported. Unfortunately, no attempt was made to reconcile the two sets of records, but this would appear to kill the hockey stick stone dead. Not that this will bother the IPCC who will, no doubt, continue to use it.

If you've seen Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth", you will remember the long, long graph with the surge in temperatures at the end, which was incontrovertible evidence that the Earth is warming in an unprecedented fashion... apparently. Gore claimed that the graph was from ice core records and that it therefore supported the hockey stick and refuted its critics. Except it wasn't from ice cores at all, it was just a reprint of the hockey stick itself. Yes folks, he made it up.

In the last edition of Climate Cuttings, I reported Tim Worstall's observation that the global warming panic should recede, now that the global economy seems to be following the Stern report's "warmer but richer" scenario, rather than the more unpleasant poorer one. Now Tim has also reported that the whole crisis should be over in a couple of decades because of the rapidly falling price of solar cells. The end of the carbon economy is is sight. Don't do something - stand there!

Reports that sea level will rise when the Greenland ice sheet melts are less certain than previously advertised. The glaciers are sitting in a bowl of rock.  It has been demonstrated that James Hansen at NASA knew this, but made his scaremongering claims of sea level rise anyway.

According to satellite records, October was the second coolest month on record. 

There is no link between global warming and typhoon activity. 

Northern latitudes should be warming fastest, according to global warming theory. Why then is there no warming apparent in the Baltic?

Global warming might thin cirrus clouds and release all the extra heat, according to a new paper.

And that's it for this time. Thanks to those people who have suggested that I get off my backside and do some more blogging. I will try to oblige, time permitting.

Climate cuttings 13

Welcome to the latest edition of climate cuttings in which I round up recent developments in the wacky world of climate science.

The sun appears to have entered a period of low activity. This has created much interest among sceptics as it may lead to a period of falling global temperatures.  

There has been a certain amount of anecdotal evidence in support of this theory, with early snows in the Alps and unusual migratory patterns among birds, apparently all organised by big oil. An abundant acorn harvest in the US is also said to indicate a harsh winter ahead.

An iceberg was alleged to have been seen off the coast of South Africa. 

Last year, hurricane forecasters predicted a bumper season powered by the horrors of global warming. They were disappointed. In 2007 they tried again, and once more Gaia has failed to go off in a huff. The 2007 is set to be one of the least active seasons for years.

The stripbark pine story continues apace. To recap, the reconstructions of past climate involve using tree ring widths as a proxy for temperature. Most of the alleged increase in twentieth century temperatures in these reconstructions has been traced to stripbark pines - trees where a strip of bark has been removed. These are thought to be unreliable because of a possible CO₂ fertilisation effect - ie increased ring widths are due to carbon dioxide rather than temperature. Now, blogger Steve McIntyre has discovered huge discrepancies in the ring widths within the same tree. Essentially the tree compensates for bark stripping by putting on growth on the opposite side of the tree - a confounding effect which seems to have gone unnoticed. It appears though that climate researchers have gone out of their way to use these most unreliable of trees though. We wonder why.

Biofuels are in the news. The Adam Smith Institute Blog notes that it takes 1700 kgs of water to produce a gallon of biodiesel. The UN calls biofuels a crime against humanity. Politicians continue promoting them anyway.

Roe and Baker, writing in Nature, say that climate is inherently unpredictable. 

More evidence has appeared supporting a non-anthropogenic basis for recent climate change. The Earth has become more reflective ("higher albedo") in recent years suggesting that the recent falls in temperature measured by satellites may be due to cloud cover. The interesting thing about this effect is that it is much stronger than that of greenhouse gases, again suggesting that man's impact on climate is small. 

And lastly, Tim Worstall noted an important fact about recent economic history. The world's economy appears to be following the IPCC's A1 scenario in which everyone is much richer than now, rather than the A2 scenario which assumes lower growth. This latter was the scenario chosen for the Stern report, which can now be consigned to the dustbin of history.  

Which is probably where it belonged in the first place.

Climate cuttings 12

Welcome to the latest review of developments in the Alice in Wonderland world of climate science.

Hot off the press is the news that Steve McIntyre has been doing some fieldwork. Reconstructions of past temperatures are done using tree ring measurements, and sceptical voices have regularly pointed out that the databases of tree ring measurements haven't been brought up to date since the 1980s - something which would allow verification of the validity of the reconstructions. Arch-warmer Michael Mann has gone on record as saying that it's too expensive, something which seems just a little unlikely in view of the money poured into climate research in recent years. Now McIntyre has revealed that he has done the work to update one set of measurements from Colorado. The first set of rings show no increase in growth and while this is a very early result, it's not looking good for the warmers.

In the face of a freedom of information request, the secretive Hadley Centre have been forced to reveal the list of weather stations they use in their climate reconstruction. Among the interesting features noted are that they have eliminated every rural station in France from the record, that the number of stations in the list doesn't tally with the number reported in their published work, duplicate station numbers and so on. A shambles in other words.

Al Gore's scary movie, An Incontinent Truth, was found to be political and inaccurate by a UK judge. This didn't seem to be a problem for the Nobel Peace Prize committee who gave the award to the Goracle anyway.

One of Gore's most blatant exagerrations was his claim that sea levels are going to rise by 20ft. People are asking why, if that's so, he's currently buying real estate at the seaside. 

Also ignoring their own claims of coming sea level rises in the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, who are in the process of destroying sea defences near Southend. 

The BBC was strangely silent on a number of news items. The melting of the Arctic sea ice, which they were so excited about the other day, turns out to be due to wind conditions. And according to the satellites, this September was one of the coolest  on record.

Martin Juckes, whose paper attacking McIntyre I discussed in the last edition of Climate Cuttings, entered the fray in the comments of a follow up CA posting which was discussing the amusing way in which Juckes had managed to eliminate a set of records with a falling temperature trend from his analysis. He managed to avoid answering any questions at all. Someone noted that one of Juckes' co-authors had removed his name from the paper between the discussion and final drafts, presumably not wanting to be associated with this kind of work. 

And there it is. Climate science. Still crazy, after all these years.