Climate cuttings 11

After the hectic pace of the last few weeks, things have quieted down a bit on the climate front, but there's still plenty to cause a bit of shock and awe for those whose scientific training was in fields where "post-modern science" is less the vogue.

IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth took pot shots at Syun-Ichi Akasofu of the International Arctic Research Centre. He tells us that the Hockey Stick has been confirmed (choosing not to discuss the findings of Professor Wegman which confirmed that it was broken).

Global warming sceptics are soon to be non-persons. The Wikipedia list of those opposing the hysterical outlook on the planet's climate has been flagged for deletion. Perhaps it was getting too long?

Robert Corell, a director of Mrs John Kerry's Heinz Centre in Washington, said that melting glaciers were causing earthquakes. Jose Rial, a professor of geophysics at the University of North Carolina said that this was scaremongering.

A group of Italian scientists compared 19 climate models used in the IPCC's 4th report. The outputs are apparently entirely inconsistent with each other, thus confirming the view that climate models are currently, and possibly inherently, unreliable. 

People are still chucking rocks in the direction of NASA's bungling AGW cheerleader, James Hansen. Lubos Motl says he was involved in the 1970s global cooling scare too. Meanwhile there was a brouhaha about the fact that he appears to have been receiving money from George Soros. This follows his being showered in cash by the aforementioned Mrs John Kerry - Teresa Heinz. Why are these left-wing luminaries so generous to a public servant? The Soros story has been brought up to date by Paul Biggs writing at Jennifer Marohasy's blog.

There was lots of interest in the climate history of Wellington, New Zealand. Hansen has managed to adjust his way from a gently cooling trend to a sharply warming one. Oh, and the city seems to have disappeared altogether after 1988. Only climate scientists can make major conurbations disappear before your very eyes, it seems. Climate Skeptic's take on the affair here. Climate Audit here. 

Those who follow the AGW debate know that in the ice core records, increases in temperature lead increases in CO2 by about 800 years, implying what we might call an inconvenient causality. The hysterics try to shrug it off by saying it's all to do with feedbacks. They were very excited by a new paper which claimed that the lag was less than the 800 years previously thought. Unfortunately another paper a few days later suggested a lag of 1300 years.

An online journal called Credibility Climate of the Past published a paper by prominent climate scientist (and Green party councillor) Martin Juckes, attacking McIntyre & McItrick's refutation of the hockey stick. They managed to do this despite this involving their breaching their own policies on review comments and having an editor who had a clear conflict of interest, again in breach of their stated policies. They also didn't seem to mind that the content of the paper was wrong. Cue much blustering from the bigwigs at the journal and claims that "it's very hard to find an unconflicted editor". Cue also McIntyre pointing out that almost any other member of their editorial board would not have been conflicted in the same way. Full story here. Do read the comments thread too.

One of the key reconstructions of the historical climate is that of Osborn and Briffa who say that the 20th Century was abnormally warm. Their work has been the subject of much attention from Climate Audit in recent years. Now another researcher, Gerd Berger of Berlin’s Institut für Meteorologie, has reported that Osborn & Briffa have not done their statistical tests correctly. This will not be a surprise to regular readers. Berger has gone on to recreate their work using the correct tests and says that doing this makes the 20th century temperatures look pretty normal.

Some interesting work has been published by a statistician/blogger called Jonathan Lowe. While the AGW community looks at daily max/min temperatures, JL has looked instead at temperatures throughout the day and finds that night time temperatures in Australia show no trend. It's only daytime temperatures that are rising - when the sun is out.

And that's it folks. As always, thanks to everyone who sent links, even if I didn't use them. Keep them coming.

Climate cuttings 10

Welcome to the tenth edition of Climate Cuttings in which I round up the goings-on in the crazy world of climate science (and believe me, "crazy" is the word). There has been no let up in the pace since last week, so without further ado.....

First up is the ongoing trail of devastation and disaster wrought by NASA's climate guru James Hansen. Having been humiliated by the revelations about his "Y2K" error, having had his bizarre method of combining station records revealed, and having been forced to release his code after years of refusals (see Climate Cuttings 9), he has now actually managed to make things worse. This time he has chosen to make unannounced adjustments to the basis of the NASA temperature record - presumably in a bid to raise the temperatures of recent years relative to earlier ones. Professor John Brignell says that "whatever it actually is, [it] smells remarkably like Fraud".

There has been a great deal of excitement over the extent of sea ice. All the usual suspects trumpeted the record minimum extent of Arctic Sea ice and the apparent opening of a North Western Passage. The BBC, for example. Freeborn John noted that the Beeb had also reported the North-West Passage has being open in 2000. Power and Control blog gave an embarrassingly long list of all the previous traversings of the North-West Passage. Lubos Motl noted the economic benefits that would flow from this shorter route to the Pacific, and wondered why it was considered to be a bad thing. Stoat said probably the wisest thing which was "Don't get too carried away".

Fewer people were inclined to mention the record maximum recorded for Antarctic ice. In some ways this is probably just as well, because shortly after this started to be widely pointed out, Cryosphere Today, who maintain the sea ice record discovered "a glitch" in their software and adjusted the figure downwards - result: no more record. Surprise, surprise. Attentive readers may remember another extraordinary adjustment made by Cryosphere some months ago. What a lot of errors there seem to be in their output.

Also writing about Antarctica was David Bromwich of the Byrd Polar Research Center who said "It's hard to see a global-warming signal from the mainland of Antarctica right now."

Meanwhile the results of Anthony Watts survey of surface stations are being analysed. Steve McIntyre posted about his first cut here. A commenter at Climate Audit called John V did another version which suggested that the trend in the best stations was in line with the overall figures published by NASA. Cue lots of jumping to conclusions at, for example, Deltoid,
Big City Liberal, etc. The survey has covered one third of the network so far, so as Stoat would say - don't get too carried away.

John V has set up a new site to create an open source global temperature record. This may be significant because, being open source, it will be authoritative. That is to say, if NASA's figures don't agree, Hansen would be left in the position of having to explain why they differ.

Everyone who follows climate knows that temperature leads CO2 in the paleoclimate records. Al Gore associate Laurie David has mislabelled a graph intended for US schoolchildren to show the opposite. Another researcher who has evidence that CO2 can't be a major driver of climate change is Jan Veizer. In his latest paper, he has apparently amended the wording of his conclusions slightly to suggest that they were in accordance with AGW orthodoxy.

Argument over the Schwartz paper on climate sensitivity (it's less than previously thought) continues. There's a good summary here.

The hurricane season is upon us and appears quiet. The Adam Smith Institute notes that hurricane insurance premiums have dropped sharply. 

And lastly, Freakonomic authors Dubner and Levitt reveal the real cause of global warming - Jane Fonda. 

Climate cuttings 9

It's been ten days or so since the last edition of Climate Cuttings, but what a ten days it's been!

The action has all been taking place over at Climate Audit, where Steve McIntyre has relented not a jot on the pummelling he has been dishing out to NASA's warmer-in-chief, James Hansen. Having had his faulty work exposed (as outlined in Climate Cuttings 8), Hansen responded with a snarky email to his colleagues saying that it was a storm in a teacup and that perhaps the "lights were not on upstairs" with his critics. He followed up with another, dismissing his critics as "court jesters".

While the (allegedly) real scientists were engaging in ad-hominems, the amateurs at Climate Audit followed up with further revelations of faulty work from Hansen. The latest batch of errors were found when the site started to raise questions about the way that Hansen combines different versions of the temperature record for a particular station. This appeared peculiar because Hansen was combining records and ending up with an average lower than any of the individual temperatures in the series. Because Hansen has not adhered to the basic scientific standards and released his code, it was necessary to derive what he had done by trial and error - guessing the procedure from the limited explanation in his publications. Eventually it was suggested by a commenter that the solution lay in understanding what Hansen did where the temperature for a particular date was missing from one of the versions. If you and I had this problem we would take the temperature from the other version. It was thought, however, that Hansen was "estimating" it somehow. This obviously represents a corruption of the temperature record, but this is climate science where pretty much anything goes.

All this speculation clearly made NASA rather nervous, coming so soon after Hansen's earlier error was made public. Out of the blue, Hansen released the code associated with the temperature record, along with the now-customary snark at his critics. The code was quickly found to be something of a shambles (amongst other things it's written in now-obsolete Fortran). A full scale wiki project is planned to get it working and fully understood.

With the code in place a full summary of the way Hansen's methodology works (at least as far as it is currently understood) was posted by John Goetz, the CA commenter who discovered the importance of the missing records. This makes it clear that, while the effect on the trend for the station could be up or down, it appears that more often than not the effect is to lower earlier temperatures - ie to make the warming trend look artificially high.

The latest headline about the integrity (or lack of it) of Hansen's work is the revelation today that, unannounced, he has made large changes to the temperature records for the US. This has happened in the last few weeks - since the Y2K errors were revealed last month. From the outside this might be mistaken for an attempt to get the temperature of recent decades up again.

Either way, it's pretty clear that Hansen's credibility is shot. Can NASA really tolerate this sort of junk science from one of its leading officials any longer? 

And the rest?

Well, Anthony Watts has now surveyed 33% of the US surface stations and has released preliminary results. Only 13% (yes, you read that correctly) of the network is of a standard suitable for climate monitoring according to the standards set out by CRN - the new high standard network currently being developed. 

A new paper in the Journal of Remote Sensing claims that there is an order of magnitude uncertainty in forecasts of temperature due to our lack of knowledge of clouds. 

The BBC cancelled a proposed global warming day, claiming, apparently in all seriousness, that it didn't have a "line" on the issue. Nature Climate Feedback reported that the BBC had commented that the alleged consensus on global warming is "increasingly strong (but not overwhelming)" - a massive downgrading of their previous position of "We're all going to fry!!".

Also on the consensus front, there was a complete lack of consensus over whether there is, in fact a consensus or not. That is to say that the bickering over Oreskes and Shulte's papers continues apace. This is probably all rather futile.

There was much talk of record lows in the extent of Arctic sea ice. Nature Climate Feedback, never knowingly understated on the subject of global warming, reported that polar bears are all going to die. AGW enthusiast William Connelly said the report was a load of bunk. Nature Climate Feedback admitted that actually, it probably was.

Meanwhile all those reporting the disappearance of the Arctic ice and the opening of the North East passage managed somehow to overlook that Antarctic sea ice has reached record latitudes, a fact which was reported here, here and here.

A British sailor, perhaps putting too much faith in these stories of disappearing sea ice got trapped by, erm, sea ice.

According to AGW enthusiasts pretty much everything bad, and pretty much nothing good, can be ascribed to a warming globe. Nice then to see Nature Newsblog reporting that Neanderthals were not in fact killed off by climate change. 

Bjorn Lomborg (of Skeptical Environmentalist fame) has a new book about global warming out. Many commenters say that he should be ignored because he's a bad man (or words to that effect).

And that's it folks. Suggestions for inclusion in the next edition are always welcome. Hope you've found it useful.

Climate cuttings 8

This is the first Climate Cuttings since the end of July. During August, I've not spent much time on the web, what with moving house and getting settled in to the new home. The long-awaited improvement in the weather has been a factor too. So all in all, this is not as thorough a review of what's been going on as previous editions but here's what I've picked up on.

The big news was NASA's having to correct their US temperature figures when Steve McIntyre pointed out that they were using inconsistent data sets. The news hit the global media in a big way. Real Climate said that the effect on the global temperature record was small, the US accounting for only 2% of the earth's surface. Of course the error might have been spotted years ago if the climate community had adhered to basic scientific standards and made their data and code available. Mcintyre pointed out that the real importance of this cock-up is that it makes a nonsense of NASA GISS's claims that their error correcting procedures can fix bad data in the surface stations record. In fact they have been introducing errors themselves.

Surfacestations.org has now surveyed 25% of the US. Critics are still accusing him of cherry picking. Anthony Watts presented preliminary findings at a UCAR conference. Nobody threw rotten fruit at him. Eli Rabett started posting a "cool station of the day" showing sites where there were A/C units but a cooling trend. After posting two such stations he appears to have run out of examples.

A new study claimed that statistical analysis of temperature and greenhouse gas emissions confirmed the AGW hypothesis. Lies, damned lies, and statistical analysis I hear you cry? Freeman Dyson certainly thinks so - he reckons the whole thing is exaggerated.

A new paper by Stephen Schwartz of the Brookhaven National Laboratory says that the Earth is not as sensitive to carbon dioxide as had previously been thought.

Researchers at the University of Alabama-Huntsville have published evidence supporting Richard Lindzen's iris theory, which says that when the Earth's surface warms, cirrus clouds open up to let the heat out. They have analysed data on rainfall and cloud cover and the heat escaping to space. They find a strong negative feedbank, confirming Lindzen's theory and directly contradicting the alarmist case.

Commenters at a weather bulletin board noticed that the record of historic Arctic sea ice had mysteriously changed. There is, of course, no surprise about the direction of the change. Orwellian airbrushing of the past seems to be quite popular among AGW enthusiasts.

The Met Office issued the results of its new forecast model. It appears that temperatures will stabilise for a few years before rising again from 2009. The University of Colorado's Roger Pielke Snr calls it a misuse of science, as nobody has a model with any forecasting skill at these timescales. Cynics might wonder whether carbon dioxide emissions are expected to slow down for a couple of years. It might also occur to them that solar activity should increase from 2009.

And finally, the aforementioned Roger Pielke Snr has decided to call it a day at Climate Science. His insights will be much missed.

Climate cuttings 7

There's been plenty of excitement in climate circles this week, so without further ado, here's what you may have missed.

The Lockwood & Frohlich paper and its claim to refute the solar theory of climate change continues to attract comment.

• Lubos Motl has comment from solar physicist Nir Shaviv, who reckons the paper is meaningless. Apparently Lockwood is using proxy measurements of solar activity (like sunspots) rather than measurements of the cosmic ray flux, and also doesn't consider the possibility of a damping which would introduce a delay between changes in cosmic ray flux and changes in temperature.
• Joe D'Aleo has a substantial paper pointing out flaws in Lockwood's thesis. In particular, he's been picking the brains of solar scientists Richard Willson and Nicola Scafetta.

Willson runs the NASA's ACRIM programme which collects the data on solar output. He thinks Lockwood should have used his ACRIM results rather than Frohlich's own PMOD series which represents ACRIM plus some heavily disputed "corrections".

Scafetta points out that the results of the Lockwood paper would be quite different if they had used ACRIM instead of PMOD and takes Lockwood & Frohlich to task for not considering this. He also takes issue with their averaging technique which implies that temperature at any point in time is partly driven by the future output of the sun!

• There is some discussion of the ACRIM vs PMOD issue at Open Mind. Richard Willson gets involved. There's a follow-up post here.

There's also more comment on the Armstong paper claims of the inadequacy of climate forecasts.

• Real Climate had a piece attacking the paper. While mostly knockabout stuff, they did make a substantial claim, namely that there is out of sample testing of climate models, although how you can test your model against the shambles of the paleoclimate reconstructions is beyond me.
• Jos de Laat of the Dutch Met Office reckons Armstrong's criticisms have hit the nail on the head

Surfacestations.org has now passed the 200 mark and should hit 20% of the network next week. 

• The station at Tucson AZ was nominated as the worst in the network. It has also shown the fastest rising temperatures.
• A commenter at Climate Audit pointed out that not all AC units expel hot air.
• Surfacestations suffered a denial of service attack. Observers wondered if environmentalists were behind it.
• Police destroyed a suspicious weather station. Observers wondered whether this was a case of destroying the evidence.
• An US Weather Service insider has written to Anthony Watts complaining of NWS's resistance to modernisation of the network.
• The American Association of State Climatologists has written to Congress, complaining that the surface station network is close to collapse.

The Great Global Warming Swindle was shown on Australian TV to a great deal of hoo-ha. Martin Durkin said that the film survived the mauling it received.

Roger Pielke Snr continues to post on the failure of the IPCC to address the issue of land use and its effect on climate. This post has a huge list of papers that were ignored.

Next week should see a lot of interest in a new paper from two German scientists, Gerlich & Tscheuschner. They claim to have refuted the greenhouse theory of climate change once and for all.

And lastly, this letter to the FT:

From Mr Ake Nilson.

Sir, In your editorial "It's time to plan for the next deluge" (July 25) you say that "it is now scientifically incontrovertible that global warming is making heavy rain fall more frequently across the world's temperate latitudes". But less than a year ago, on August 10 2006, you reported: "This year's hot, dry summer will be repeated many times in the future and will become normal in the next 40 to 50 years if climate scientists are correct."

Please could you make up your mind as to the effect of global warming?

Ake Nilson

Climate cuttings 6

Welcome to the sixth edition of climate cuttings, in which I round up interesting postings in the world of global warming.

Reaction to the Lockwood paper, which claims that the sun can't be causing recent warming, rumbles on.

Climate scientist Eduardo Zorita describes a Nature post lauding the results as "an example of what science journalism should not be". He goes on to explain why the Lockwood paper might be considered superficial.

Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist and co-author of a book on the solar theory of climate change with Henrik Svensmark, is interviewed in the London Book Review. He points out that the earth has stopped warming despite continued rises in CO₂, a fact that supports the solar theory better than the CO₂ one.

John Brignell of Numberwatch, in common with other commentators, takes issue with the odd smoothing algorithm used by Lockwood.

Astronomer David Whitehouse weighs in too. 

Anthony Watts of surfacestations.org (15% of the network now surveyed!) has been investigating the impact of the paint used on climate stations. This was originally specified as whitewash, but because this is no longer available, latex paint is now used instead. He thinks that this may have introduced a warming bias into the data and has designed an experiment to find out if he's right. Why has nobody done this before? 

Glacier melt has been something of a theme for the week. Roger Pielke notes a paper describing the advance of the Siachen glacier in the Himalayas, and points out that this evidence needs to be taken into account when considering the oft-repeated claims that glaciers are retreating everywhere. William Connelly says that nobody is saying this. Lonnie Thompson (a man who is perhaps best known for not archiving his data) then somewhat takes the ground from under Connelly's feet when he is quoted in the New York Times as saying that glacial ice loss is “a repeating theme whether you are in tropical Andes, the Himalayas or Kilimanjaro in Africa.”

Roger Pielke has also been highlighting the issue of land use and its effect on climate. This is an area which is not well captured by climate models.

Not climate, but weather - a distinction lost on most of the MSM - but it's been remarkably cold in many parts of the world, particularly in the southern hemisphere.

First snow in Buenos Aires for nearly a century
Cold snap in Peru prompts emergency
Savage cold snap has brought record low temperatures to Australia

It's also been wet and not very warm in the UK. The Met Office had predicted a hot dry summer, so they've now decided to hedge their bets about the outlook for the winter. It will be wetter, but dryer. Perhaps. This is the Gypsy Rose Lee school of weather forecasting, I guess.

An environmentalist went for a swim near the north pole, claiming that this was only possible because of recent climate change. It was widely pointed out that this wasn't true.  

Climate cuttings 5

Welcome to the latest Climate Cuttings, in which I round up interesting stories on the Global Warming front. 

First up was the Lockwood paper which purported to end Svensmark's arguments that the main driver of climate change is cosmic rays.  Certainly the press were keen to echo Lockwood's statement that this ended the argument. Commenters at Climate Audit wondered about why Prof Lockwood used a long filter when dealing with a short-term effect, why he used the notoriously unreliable surface temperature record, and whether he was looking in the wrong place. I think we'll have to wait for a response from Svensmark himself for enlightenment here.

The Armstrong paper which claims that the IPCC couldn't forecast the arrival of next Christmas, let alone the climate next century, continues to get a lot of attention. IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth attempts a rebuttal at Nature Climate Feedback. His argument seems to be that the IPCC deals in scenarios, not forecasts and so Armstrong's points don't apply. We might characterise this as the "I did not have sex with that woman" argument. 

Eske Willerslev, described in Science how he and his team had used recovered DNA to show that the Greenland ice sheet was forested in the past, but that the ice sheet made it through the last interglacial when temperatures were up to 5^oC higher than today, the implication being that we may not be doomed after all. Real Climate responded with a piece analysing the press releases which followed the paper's publication.

The latest evidence that global warming causes both madness and unemployment was found in a story from worsethanfailure.com. Man switches off office air conditioning to save the planet. Writes pompous letter to colleagues to tell them what he has done. Discovers on Monday morning that he has destroyed the office IT infrastructure. Takes early retirement.

Inspired by the example of Al Gore, Oxford University decides to go into the global warming movie business.

Retiring boss of the British Antarctic Survey, Chris Rapley is interviewed in the THES. He raises once again Monbiot's idea of Nuremburg-style trials for skeptics. Nice.

And lastly, inspired no doubt by the success of these Climate Cuttings posts (readers in the hundreds, you know) Real Climate has started its own weekly round up of climate stories. 

Climate cuttings 4

Welcome to the latest episode of Climate Cuttings, in which I try to do a roundup of interesting postings on the subject of climate change.

The good news this week was that NOAA have reinstated contact details for their climate station network. Readers may remember that they had tried to block the surfacestations.org survey by hiding this information. The surveys are now rolling in thick and fast with over 10% of the US network covered, including all of the state of Indiana. Plenty more problem sites in there too.

Steve McIntyre returned from a break fully refreshed and posted a jaw-dropping article on the weather station in New York's Central Park. Thomas Karl has managed to adjust for urban warming by, believe it or not, raising the temperature record for the station. McIntyre then adds insult to injury by reverse engineering the UHI adjustment to show that this implies that Karl seems to believe that the population of New York has declined by 15 million in the last couple of decades. Hilarious, and a must-read.

Freeborn John notices an article from the Centre for Alternative Energy in Wales. Apparently the race to become a zero-carbon economy is going to involve the issuing of carbon allowances to all (should we call this Carbon Communism?). Their idea is heartily endorsed by well-known detatched scientist, Sir John "We're all going to die" Houghton, former head of the IPCC.

Schwartz et al, writing on the Nature Climate Reports site, say that the IPCC is exagerrating the predictive power of its computer models. As I observed some weeks ago, Kevin Trenberth - an IPCC lead author - says they're not forecasts but scenarios.  The semantics involved turn out to be quite interesting, as some of the comments in this Climate Audit thread show. The confusion over just what the model outputs represent does seem to allow the AGW industry to demand drastic action (and no doubt funding too) while having a convenient excuse ("they were only scenarios") if they ever get found out.

Oh yes, and some people, whose egos are shaded only by the size of their carbon footprints, flew off to exotic locations in their private jets, from where they lectured us all on the sacrifices we are going to have to make in the face of global warming. Even AGW enthusiasts weren't impressed. 

Climate cuttings 3

In the last edition of Climate Cuttings, I noted that NOAA was trying to stop the Surfacestations project by hiding the names of the volunteer station managers in the reference database. They now appear foolish as well as disingenuous as it's been revealed that they already publish photos and names of many volunteers, thus ruling out any claim that the data was hidden on privacy grounds.

Over at Real Climate, Gavin Schmidt is all in favour of Surfacestations and documenting how well the stations are sited. He just thinks that people are jumping to conclusions (who? where?). We also learn that the models don't need to square with the temperature record because they've got physics in, and that even if the stations are sited next to AC exhaust outlets, it won't materially affect the temperature record. Roger Pielke Sr shoots back.

Al Gore was in town to deliver a gentle reminder, just in case we'd forgotten that we're all about to burn. Nobody believes him though. 

Henrik Svensmark, a bad man who reckons that climate change is all caused by cosmic rays, is interviewed in Discover.   

Climate cuttings 2

Anthony Watts and his volunteers continue to find startling bad practice in the siting of weather stations in the (allegedly) high quality USHCN network. The latest survey, of Waterville, Washington reveals a station with broken slats and peeling paint, and which is located on cinder chippings next to a car park.

This is obviously very embarrassing to the bureaucrats involved. They've retaliated by placing a major barrier in the way of the surveyors. Many weather stations are located at private homes, and surveyors had been telephoning ahead to ask for permission to visit. Our friends in the bureaucracy have now removed the contact details for the site operators from the public database. It's shameless, but was probably to have been expected.

Data integrity (or the appalling lack of it) seems to be a developing theme in the world of climate science. Cloud researcher Robert Maddox points out to problems with RRS (weather balloon) data. Our friends in the bureaucracy have moved the Tucson weather station (to a completely unsuitable location) and at the same time have replaced the instrumentation. This effectively prevents researchers from isolating the two effects. They also haven't been letting on that there are problems with all the new kit.

In the face of Freedom of Information requests, the IPCC has finally put the reviewers comments on the Fourth Assessment Report online. As part of the conditions for looking at the comments they demand that you agree not to reproduce them in part or in full!  It's flabbergasting to see the IPCC say that it would be "inappropriate" to show the missing Briffa data (you know, where the tree rings suggested falling temperatures in recent decades). The truth is apparently inappropriate for the IPCC.

Climate cuttings

Steve McIntyre notices some surprising features of the temperature record. Examining the figures for a couple of locations (gridcells) in California, the temperatures as calculated by NASA-GISS and UEA Hadley are in good agreement for most of the last century, but..

• they diverge by up to 0.5^oC after 2000 - a time when the measurements should be improving
• the high temperatures recorded in the 19th century have been excised from recent versions of the Hadley figures, increasing the apparent warming trend

How, he asks, can these scientists claim to know the temperature a millenium ago to an accuracy of a couple of tenths of a degree when they have errors of half a degree in 2005?

Anthony Watts has got another truly hilarious example of poor weather station siting - this one's at a sewage treatment plant with the temperature sensor surrounded by brick walls and windows, and in close proximity to the sewage treatment tanks (which give off heat) and also to an air-conditioning unit exhaust.

Some climate snippets

Following on from its exposure as... erm... erroneous, Steve McIntyre has invited Phil Jones of the Hadley Centre to withdraw his 1990 paper in Nature. The Bishop wonders if he will respond, let alone comply.

Tim Blair notes a prominent Australian environmentalist doing a bit of a flip-flop on the subject of drought. (via Gust of Hot Air)

IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth notes a number of surprising features of future climate:

• There are no predictions in the IPCC report and there never have been. There are only scenarios.
• None of the models used by IPCC use the current climate as their starting point and "none of the climate states in the models correspond even remotely to the current observed climate."
• "[W]e do not have reliable or regional predictions of climate"