Bishop Hill Climate cuttings 4
Jul 8, 2007 Climate: Cuttings 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.
Reader Comments (2)
The article on models was very interesting, especially since it appeared in Science. Models should be used to help us understand what happens, not tell us whats going to happen.
Good work.