Watts reasons with Goddard

Over at Reason magazine, Anthony Watts is very critical of "Stephen Goddard" over claims he made that US temperature records have been fiddled.

Some segments of the Internet are abuzz with the claim by climate change skeptic Steven Goddard (Tony Heller) over at his Real Science blog that NASA/NOAA have been jiggering the numbers so that they can claim that warmest years in the continental United States occurred recently, not back in the 1930s. Folks, please watch out for confirmation bias.

Via email, I asked Anthony Watts, proprietor of WattsUpWithThat, what he thinks of Goddard's claims. He responded...

Read the whole thing.

Statistical sierra

Sierra Rayne, writing at the American Thinker blog over the weekend, took a gentle pop at AP's Seth Borenstein for making alarmist claims regional temperature trends in the USA while barely paying lipservice to standard statistical techniques.

The AP used "the least squares regression method" to calculate the annual temperature trend for all these regions, but then proceeded to ignore entirely whether the regression method indicated if the trend was statistically significant (the typical criteria would be a p-value<0.05).

This is first-year statistics level stuff.  Quite simply, if your statistical test ("least squares regression method") tells you the trend isn't significant, you cannot claim there is a trend, since the null hypothesis (i.e., no trend) cannot be rejected with any reasonable degree of confidence.

In an area like climate, you would have thought an experienced journalist like Borenstein would take some statistical advice before writing.

A la Southern Annual Mode

As I understand it, GCMs say that ice extent at both poles should be reducing as global warming hits the poles in advance of the rest of the planet. The increase in Antarctic sea ice is therefore another question mark over the veracity and trustworthiness of climate model output.

That's the way I understand it, anyway. According to this article at The Conversation, I'm completely wrong. The increase in extent is due to changes in the Southern Annual Mode, a sort of El Nino of the Antarctic.

Here’s the kicker: the strengthening of SAM over recent decades has been directly linked to human activity. Since the 1940s, ozone depletion and increasing greenhouse gases have caused the westerly winds to intensify and migrate south towards Antarctica. The net effect of this drives sea ice further north and increases its total extent.

There is still plenty of great work ahead to improve our understanding and modelling of Antarctica’s climate, but a basic message is emerging. Far from discounting climate change in the Southern Hemisphere, the apparent paradox of Antarctic sea ice is telling us that it is real and that we are contributing to it.

So this means that the models don't recreate the Southern Annular Mode then?

Knock me down

Well this is a turn up for the books. A new paper by Rignot et al has looked at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and found that it is going to collapse!

With disastrous consequences!

And it will be awful!

Terrible!

(But it could take a thousand years).

Update on May 13, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Revkin's take on the paper is a bit calmer than most.

Lawson's standpoint

Nigel Lawson has a long article in Standpoint magazine, covering the whole gamut of the climate debate, from accusations of denial to climate sensitivity to the language used by the Met Office. Older readers may remember that Lawson was once the editor of the Spectator and his journalistic flair is on prominent display:

The unusual persistence of heavy rainfall over the UK during February, which led to considerable flooding, is believed by the scientists to have been caused by the wayward behaviour of the jetstream; and there is no credible scientific theory that links this behaviour to the fact that the earth's surface is some 0.8ºC warmer than it was 150 years ago.

Click to read more ...

Deliberate distortions

The New Yorker is taking sceptics to task for citing old newspaper articles (H/T Leo Hickman). The case seems to be that this is being done in a cursory fashion.

There’s nothing wrong with examining old newspaper articles for clues about climate conditions in the past. Legitimate climate researchers look at historical documents of all kinds. However, a good-faith effort to arrive at the truth would not rely on cherry-picking catchy headlines. It would require considering the context and looking at all the evidence. At the very least, it wouldn’t allow for deliberate distortions.

This made me laugh because I had raised an eyebrow at an earlier sentence in which the author said this:

A central tenet for [sceptics] is that today’s sea-ice retreat, warming surface temperatures, and similar observations are short-lived anomalies of a kind that often happened in the past—and that overzealous scientists and gullible media are quick to drum up crises where none exist.

Is claiming that sea ice is in retreat when sea ice levels are well above their long-term average the kind of "deliberate distortion" that he is referring to? Or perhaps "today's" means something different at the New Yorker.

That was quick

Anthony Watts records the release of a new paper by Shaun Lovejoy of McGill University, which claims to have shown that the chances of recent temperature change being natural are close to zero.

With 99% certainty claimed for the results, all sorts of alarm bells are sounded, and sure enough holes are being picked in the results already: Monckton here and Matt Briggs here.

I think it's fair to say that this particular paper is going to sink without trace.

http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=8061

Some comments on the Royal Society report

Reader Alex Henney sends some comments on The Royal Society/National Academy of Sciences Report on Climate Change that he sent to the President of the Royal Society and the British authors of the report.¹

It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are, if it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.

Richard Feynman

1. The document continues to espouse models which are flawed, see p. 5, even though the final draft of the 2013 SPM commented “Models do not generally reproduce the observed reduction in surface warming trend over the last 10-15 years”.  John Christy² compared the performance of 39 climate model that were used in AR5 over the period 1975 to 2012 with measured temperature data.  The models over back-cast temperature significantly in a range 0-0.7^oC. 

Click to read more ...

Geographical magazine does climate

Geographical, the members magazine of the Royal Geographical Society has a climate change supplement ("Climate Change. Here...Now...") out with its current issue.

You know things are bad when you can find things to object to on the contents page, but this is the measure of just how awful it is. There above the contents we see the image that appeared on the cover of Nature when it published Eric Steig's paper that purported to have found warming in West Antartica - a result that a subsequent paper  showed to be a function of erroneous methodology rather than the underlying data. It's as if the "compelling image" was simply too good to miss.

Click to read more ...

Walport's presentation

Mark Walport's staff have kindly made available the slides he used in Glasgow. They can be seen here.

As I have suggested previously, the talk was a recitation of the standard case for alarm, but there were many aspects of it that piqued my interest. For example, I noted that while warming up to the first slide he spoke about energy security first, before moving on to climate. Later on in the talk he spoke of the three lenses through which the climate problem had to be viewed and the first of these was again energy security. Is this a new tack? Are backsides starting to be covered? Perhaps.

Click to read more ...

Something a bit neffy

The New Economics Foundation are well known for their outlandish policy prescriptions and for their extreme reluctance to use economics to support them. This is all entertaining stuff but they have now decided to dip their feet into the climate change waters, with a new paper that purports to show that climate scientists are much better at predicting the future than economists.

They may well be right, but I was struck by some of the evidence they have used to support this view. They have taken some of the IPCC's predictions, apparently from the Second Assessment Report, and have tracked them against subsequent observations. Take the temperature one for example:

It's instructive to take a look at this post at Watts Up With That?, which looks at the predictions of each of the IPCC assessments and notes that SAR makes the coolest prediction of temperature increase and still came out too warm by quite a long way.

I'm not sure that nef picking the IPCC's best performing prediction and holding it up as representative is what you might call a credible assessment of climatologists' abilities.

Your environment

Ross McKitrick has unveiled an excellent new initiative:

I am very pleased to announce the launch of yourenvironment.ca, a new project of mine. The idea is very simple: to present the complete environmental record of every community across Canada. The site currently shows air emissions by source (back to 1985), air contaminant levels (back to 1974) and monthly average high temperatures (back to 1900) for hundreds of places across the country. Water pollution data are coming this summer.

The layout is self-explanatory and it's very easy to use. The data are all from government agencies, but most of it has not hitherto been disseminated in a usable form to the public. All my sources are, or will soon be, linked and the data I use will all be easily-downloadable.

So the next time you find yourself in a conversation with someone who (i) is convinced that Canada does nothing to protect the environment, or (ii) thinks winters around here used to be a lot colder/longer/snowier; or it never used to be this warm/cold in April/October/ etc, or (iii) worries/guffaws about the alleged/obvious ecological disaster all around us, and you wonder what, if any, of this is true, look at yourenvironment.ca and find out.

I especially hope households with high school students will learn about it, though from the experience at our home it might put some kids at risk of being expelled.

What an excellent idea. I don't think we have anything like this in the UK.

Any volunteers?

An MSM outing for Paul Homewood

The East Anglian Daily Times has published a supplement on climate change and has invited Paul Homewood to write about that region's climate history. Suffice it to say, it's hard to detect any change in recent years.

Read it here.

Research is optional

Guardian columnist Henry Porter has written a very funny column in which he takes a bash at global warming sceptics:

Hearing Lord Lawson argue with the impeccably reasonable climate scientist Sir Brian Hoskins on the BBC Today programme last week, I finally boiled over. It is surely now time for the deniers to make their case and hold an international conference, where they set out their scientific stall, which, while stating that the climate is fundamentally chaotic, provides positive, underlying evidence that man's activity has had no impact on sea and atmosphere temperatures, diminishing icecaps and glaciers, rising sea levels and so on.

Until such a conference is held and people such as Lawson, Lord Monckton, Christopher Booker, Samuel Brittan and Viscount Ridley – names that begin to give you some idea of the demographic – are required to provide the proof of their case, rather than feeding off that of their opponents, they should be treated with mild disdain.

Click to read more ...

Lawson vs Hoskins

Nigel Lawson was on the Today programme this morning, up against Brian Hoskins of the Grantham Institute.

Hoskins was reasonably circumspect about the link between global warming and the recent floods. However, some of his peripheral insinuations were seriously dodgy - sea level rise (trend began before global warming), Arctic sea ice (claimed that last year's minimum hadn't been seen for a very, very, long time; and what about the Antarctic?), insinuations that we can detect a changing climate here in the UK.

Good that Lawson got in a pop at renewables.

Here's the audio.

listen to ‘Is climate change a factor in the recent extreme weather?’ on Audioboo

Update on Feb 13, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Re the Arctic sea ice, Doug McNeall points out that when he said "in the summer" he may not have meant last summer, but something more like "in summers". This is a reasonable interpretation.