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.

Irony alive and well at the BBC

On the BBC's climate change portal at the moment, the main stories include

• Calls to strengthen the EU emissions trading scheme for airlines
• Calls to encourage homes to go green
• A report that the British are addicted to cheap flights
• A report that the risk of flooding due to climate change has been underestimated
• A conference to discuss tackling climate change
• Increases in forest fires due to climate change
• A report that APEC has muddied the climate change waters
• A way to track your carbon emissions through your phone
• A report that winter sports threaten mountain ecosystems

and lastly, and surely with tongue firmly in cheek, an entry from the Editors blog in which Head of TV news, Peter Horrocks says that the BBC has no line on climate change.

You couldn't make it up. 

An insider's view on EU environment policy

Bacon Butty is a blog written by a British civil servant working in environmental policy which I read occasionally. There's a very interesting posting up at the moment about the folly of the EU's renewable energy policy. Bureaucrats usually only stir themselves to a little gentle concern after a disaster has struck - when their jobs, perks and administrative empires are under threat in the glare of public attention. That they are concerned about EU policy already would seem to suggest that things have gone very badly awry.

The delicate balance hypothesis

Anyone who claims that a "delicate balance" is under threat doesn't know what they are talking about.

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.