Spot the difference

I'm still suffering. Even whisky isn't working. It must be serious.

In the meantime, Paul Homewood has found something interesting about the Met Office's forecasts.

Secret Santa searchable

Reader Simon Barnett has made the Secret Santa data searchable online. See here.

Rumbling on

The rumpus over the Met Office's downgrading of its climate predictions rumbles on (much like my lurgy!). The Mail covered the story yesterday evening (H/T Jonathan Jones), and included a couple of interesting quotes.

Graham Stringer:

Labour MP Graham Stringer said the Met Office’s short-term forecasts had improved, but their climate change analysis was ‘poor’.

He said: ‘By putting out the information on Christmas Eve they were just burying bad news – that they have got their climate change forecast wrong.

‘For a science-based organisation, they should be more up front, both about their successes and failures.’

and Myles Allen

Professor Myles Allen of the University of Oxford said: ‘A lot of people  were claiming, in the run-up to the Copenhagen 2009 conference, that warming was accelerating and it is all worse than we thought.

‘What has happened since then has demonstrated that it is foolish to extrapolate short-term climate trends.

‘While every new year brings in welcome new data to help us rule out the more extreme scenarios for the future, it would be equally silly to interpret what has happened since the early 2000s as evidence that the warming has stopped.’

Secret Santa releases IPCC Draft - Josh 193

Donna Laframboise received three USB sticks with draft versions of most chapters of the IPCC's AR5. You can access them at Donna's site here.

Cartoons by Josh

Go read Donna

I'm feeling rotten. Go read Donna over at WUWT. There's a whole lotta leakin' going on.

Donna's own longer version of the article is here.

Today on Met Office models

For anyone who missed it, here is the Today programme on the new revision to the Met Office temperature projections. I gather there was an earlier segment on the same subject, but I haven't been able to find it yet.

Today: Met Office models

Update on Jan 8, 2013 by Bishop Hill

David Shukman's article on the subject is here.

Update on Jan 8, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Paul Hudson's take is here:

The new projection, if correct, would mean there will have been little additional warming for two decades despite rising greenhouse gases.

It's bound to raise questions about the robustness and reliability of computer simulations that governments around the world are using in order to determine policies aimed at combating global warming.

Update on Jan 8, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Tom Clarke here.

The Archers on subsidies

The Archers, the BBC's ultra-long-running farming soap opera covered renewables subsidies in one of its story lines the other day (H/T Guy). The writers were somewhat off message (link below).

I wonder if this signifies anything.

Archers

A trip to the big smoke

It's been three or four months since my last tip drive. This time I have a specific purpose in mind. I'm off to the big smoke next week to do some AGW-related stuff. I'll fill readers in on the details nearer the time, but if anyone fancies helping to defray the expenses, that would be great.

Climate correspondents

Doug Keenan has followed up on his observations about the long-term rainfall records for England and Wales with an exchange of emails with Julia Slingo, the chief scientist at the Met Office. (Note that images can all be enlarged by clicking on them).

Dear Julia,

On November 12^th, I sent an e-mail, in which you were Cc’d, about the statistical analysis of (observational) climatic data that has been done by the Met Office. My e-mail stated that some of the analysis is so incompetent that it “is not science”. It then asked if scientists at the Met Office had training in the relevant branch of statistics—i.e. in time series.

You did not reply to that e-mail. In consequence, on November 29^th, Lord Donoughue put the following Question in the House of Lords.

Click to read more ...

The minds of warmist pundits

This is a guest post by John Bell.

There is something that troubles me in the Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) debate that I would like to bring to light and solicit remarks from others in helping me understand it. I used to believe in Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) when I first heard about it decades ago because it seemed plausible, but as I read articles skeptical of it I saw how I had been fooled. Being a skeptic I must dig in and get both sides of a controversial subject and then decide for myself. I’m a mechanical engineer and I understand physics and chemistry and energy a bit better than the average bear.

Click to read more ...

Principle of proportionality

Pat Swords is well known to reader as the man behind the legal challenge to the Irish Government's renewables policy. Here he writes about the current state of play.

Ultimately the wind and climate change scandal at EU, member state and municipality level is nothing more than a reflection of a weak democracy. If people solely express opinions, then the political process and the administration which fawns to it, will just exist to manipulate various opinions to maximise its agenda. If progress is to be made, we have to move away from public opinion to holding the administration to account on the detail, in particular did it follow the procedural requirements to reach the position it is now in. For instance it may not be quite so important that the Climate Research Unit derived a somewhat unique version of climate change records, but it is hugely important that they acted unlawfully in relation to the transparency of how they derived this. Who watches the watchman? Unfortunately it is left to the concerned citizen, mostly being those who do 'detail' to enforce these standards. Not the Lord Oxburghs of the world. Only in such a manner is the dreadful position we are now in going to be reversed, before more collateral damage occurs.

Click to read more ...

Double-entry bookkeeping?

The big story of this morning is going to be Anthony Watts' discovery that the National Climatic Data Center over there is keeping two sets of books for US temperature data:

The question for now is: why do we appear to have two different sets of data for the past two years between the official database and the SOTC reports and why have they let this claim they made stand if the data does not support it?

It's actually worse than that. They seem actually to have no idea what the temperatures of the past were.

The handy All Weather is Extreme Climate Barometer - Josh 192

Click image for larger version

Cartoons by Josh

Must-reads

A couple of posts that I simply must point out to readers. Firstly, Steve M is back in the saddle at Climate Audit, reviewing his recent visit to the AGU and making some disturbing revelations about the AGU's welcoming back of Peter Gleick into the fold.

Gleick’s welcome back to AGU prominence – without serving even the equivalent of a game’s suspension – was pretty startling, given his admitted identity fraud and distribution (and probable fabrication) of a forged document. Last year, then AGU President Mike McPhadren, a colleague of Eric Steig’s at the University of Washington, had stated on behalf of AGU that Gleick had “compromised AGU’s credibility as a scientific society” and that his “transgression cannot be condoned”. McPhadren stated that AGU‘s “guiding core value” was “excellence and integrity in everything we do” – values that would seem to be inconsistent with identity fraud and distribution and/or fabrication of forged documents, even by the relaxed standards of academic institutions.

Meanwhile, Tallbloke and his readers have uncovered a downwards revision in the Met Office's temperature projections. It's interesting to wonder why a statistically insignificant rainfall trend was worthy of a Met Office press release while a major reining back on the projections wasn't.

The 110 billion pound question

David Rose, in a blistering article at the Mail on Sunday, asks:

Why IS Britain about to pay £110billion to enter a new Dark Age?

There is considerable discussion of whether we should be focusing on developing nuclear fusion. That would certainly seem like a sensible way forward. Given that climate sensitivity looks to be only around 1.5, we have the best part of a century to bring such a project to fruition before GDP falls much below current levels.

In the meantime, Andrew Neil has been reading the tea-leaves of David Cameron's interview on the Marr Show this morning. On his Twitter feed Neil says he reckons the public is being softened up ahead of the UK losing its AAA credit rating. Adding higher interest rates to the burdens the public are having to endure is going to make it much harder for the political classes to continue along the path they are currently treading.