Roger Pielke Senior on Real Climate claims: “bubkes”

30 06 2009

Pielke_SLR

Real Climate’s Misinformation

From Climate Science — Roger Pielke Sr. @ 7:00 am

Real Climate posted a weblog on June 21 2009 titled “A warning from Copenhagen”.  They report on a Synthesis Report of the Copenhagen Congress which was handed over to the Danish Prime Minister Rasmussen in Brussels the previous week.

Real Climate writes

“So what does it say? Our regular readers will hardly be surprised by the key findings from physical climate science, most of which we have already discussed here. Some aspects of climate change are progressing faster than was expected a few years ago – such as rising sea levels, the increase of heat stored in the ocean and the shrinking Arctic sea ice. “The updated estimates of the future global mean sea level rise are about double the IPCC projections from 2007″, says the new report. And it points out that any warming caused will be virtually irreversible for at least a thousand years – because of the long residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere.”

First, what is “physical climate science”? How is this different from “climate science”. In the past, this terminology has been used when authors ignore the biological components of the climate system.

More importantly, however, the author of the weblog makes the  statement that the following climate metrics “are progressing faster than was expected a few years ago” ; Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 180 Comments »

Categories : Science, oceans, sea ice, sea level

McIntyre on USHCN2’s “warmer” trend treatment of Orland

30 06 2009

Orland CA and the New Adjustments

by Steve McIntyre on June 29th, 2009

In my last post, I observed that NOAA’s Talking Points applied their new “adjustments” to supposedly prove that NOAA’s negligent administration of the USHCN network did not “matter”.

In order to illustrate the effect of the new methods in this post, I’ll compare the new adjustments (post-TOBS) to the old adjustments (post-TOBS) on a “good” station – Orland CA, a prototype “good” station, discussed at the outset of surfacestations.org, discussed at WUWT here and CA here in early 2007.

The station history for Orland (at CDIAC) says that it has been in its present location for (at least) most of the 20th century and has had minimal changes during that time, other than perhaps time-of-observation (TOBS). The TOBS adjustment is carried forward into USHCN-v2. As I understand it, NOAA’s New Adjustment Method replaces station-history based adjustments for instrumentation changes and station location (the latter formerly done in FILNET).

As a benchmark, here is the difference between FILNET (adjusted) and TOBS for Orland in the “old” USHCN. Adjustments in the 20th century are negligible – in keeping with station history information that indicates no changes in location. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 36 Comments »

Categories : climate data, weather_stations

Tropical Tropospheric Amplification – an invitation to review this new paper

30 06 2009

The Amplification Invitation

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

The ITCZ from space. Source: NASA Earth Observatory. Click for larger image

Tropical: the ITCZ from space. Source: NASA Earth Observatory. Click for larger image

A while ago I started studying the question of the amplification of the tropical tropospheric temperature with respect to the surface. After months of research bore fruit, I started writing a paper. My intention was to have it published in a peer-reviewed journal. I finished the writing about a week ago.

During that time, I also wrote and published The Temperature Hypothesis here on WUWT. This got me to thinking about science, and about how we establish scientific facts. In climate science, the peer review process is badly broken. Among other problems, it is often an “old boy” system where very poor work is waved through. In common with other sciences, turnaround of ideas in journals takes weeks. Under pressure to publish, journals often do only the most cursory examination of the papers.

Upon reflection, I have decided to try a different way to examine the truth content of my paper. This is to invite all of the authors whose work I discuss, and other interested scientists of all stripes, to comment on the paper and on whether they can find any flaws in it. To facilitate the process I have provided all of the code and data that I used to do the analysis.

To make this process work will require cooperation. First, I ask for science and science only. No discussions of motives. No ad homs. No generalizations to larger spheres. No asides. No disrespect, we can be gentlemen and gentlewomen. No comments on politics, CO2, or AGW, no snowball earth. This thread has one purpose only, to establish whether my ideas stand: to either attack and destroy the ideas I put forth in the paper below, or to provide evidence and data to support the ideas I put forth below. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 114 Comments »

Categories : Science, climate data, climate_change

10.7 solar radio flux, then and now

29 06 2009

Leif Svalgaard writes in with a collection of points on the 10.7 cm solar radio flux. Being busy tonight, I’m happy to oblige posting them. – Anthony

Leif writes:

People often call out that F10.7 flux has now reached a new low, and that a Grand minimum is imminent.

Perhaps this graph would calm nerves a bit:

The blue curve is the current F10.7 flux [adjusted to 1 AU, of course] and the red curve is F10.7 back at the 1954 minimum. The D spike (in 1954) was due to an old cycle [18] region. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 206 Comments »

Categories : Science, solar

McIntyre on the NCDC Talking Points Memo

29 06 2009

Foreword: I give thanks to Steve McIntyre for this analysis. Steve came to a conclusion similar to what I alluded to in my initial rebuttal where I said:

“For all I know, they could be comparing homogenized data from CRN1 and 2 (best stations) to homogenized data from CRN 345 (the worst stations), which of course would show nearly no difference.“

Steve does a superb job of deconstructing the memo’s undocumented results. Perhaps someday Dr. Thomas Peterson of NCDC will tell us how he did his analysis and show supporting data and methods. – Anthony

The Talking Points Memo

by Steve McIntyre reposted from Climate Audit

The NOAA Talking Points memo falls well short of a “full, true and plain disclosure” standard – aside from the failure to appropriately credit Watts (2009).

They presented the following graphic that purported to show that NOAA’s negligent administration of the USHCN station network did not “matter”, describing the stations as follows:

Two national time series were made using the same gridding and area averaging technique. One analysis was for the full data set. The other used only the 70 stations that surfacestations.org classified as good or best… the two time series, shown below as both annual data and smooth data, are remarkably similar. Clearly there is no indication for this analysis that poor current siting is imparting a bias in the U.S. temperature trends.


Figure 1. From Talking Points Memo.

Beyond the above sentence, there was no further information on the provenance of the two data sets. NOAA did not archive either data set nor provide source code for reconciliation.

The red graphic for the “full data set” had, using the preferred terminology of climate science, a “remarkable similarity” to the NOAA 48 data set that I’d previously compared to the corresponding GISS data set here (which showed a strong trend of NOAA relative to GISS). Here’s a replot of that data – there are some key telltales evidencing that this has a common provenance to the red series in the Talking Points graphic.


Figure 2. Plot of US data from www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cirs/drd964x.tmpst.txt

An obvious question is whether the Talking Points starting point of 1950 is relevant. Here’s the corresponding graphic with the 1895 starting point used in USHCN v2. Has the truncation of the graphic start at 1950 “enhanced” the visual impression of an increasing trend? I think so. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 75 Comments »

Categories : politics, weather_stations

NASA GISS: adjustments galore, rewriting U.S. climate history

28 06 2009

Contiguous U.S. GISTEMP Linear Trends: Before and After

Guest post by Bob Tisdale

Many of us have seen gif animations and blink comparators of the older version of Contiguous U.S. GISTEMP data versus the newer version, and here’s yet another one. The presentation is clearer than most.

http://i44.tinypic.com/29dwsj7.gif

It is based on the John Daly archived data:
http://www.john-daly.com/usatemps.006

and the current Contiguous U.S. surface temperature anomaly data from GISS:
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txt

In their presentations, most people have been concerned with which decade had the highest U.S. surface temperature anomaly: the 1940s or the 1990s. But I couldn’t recall having ever seen a trend comparison, so I snipped off the last 9 years from current data and let EXCEL plot the trends:

Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 211 Comments »

Categories : Science, climate data, ridiculae

UK’s Met Office loses 25% of its funding

28 06 2009

It appears that all is not well with the idea of “climate forecasting” as the Ministry of Defence pulls the financial rug out from under the Met Office climate program. Now how will they pay for the electricity to run “deep black”, the 1.2 megawatt supercomputer they just purchased?

Phil Jones may have drain the moat and sell access to his climate data lists and code to pay the bills.

From the Register, UK

Weather soothsayers lose £4.3m

By Austin Modine

Story excerpts:

The Met Office, home of UK weather soothsaying, is getting its climate research budget chopped by a quarter after the Ministry of Defence ended financial support to focus on “current operations.” Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 95 Comments »

Categories : forecasting

An Australian look at USHCN: 20th century trend is largely if not entirely an artefact arising from the “corrections”

28 06 2009
click for larger image

click for larger image

From environmentalist Jennifer Marohasy’s blog in Australia, please pay her a visit here – Anthony

There has been criticism of the potential for official weather stations in the USA to record artificially high temperatures because of the changing environments in which they exist, for example, new asphalt, new building or new air conditioning outlets.   Meteorologist, Anthony Watts, has documented evidence of the problem and Canadian academic, Ross McKitrick, has attempted to calculate just how artificially elevated temperatures might be as a consequence.

A reader of this blog, Michael Hammer, recently studied the official data from the US official weather stations and in particular how it is adjusted after it has been collected.   Mr Hammer concludes that the temperature rise profile claimed by the US government is largely if not entirely an artefact of the adjustments applied after the raw data is collected from the weather stations.

Does the US Temperature Record Support Global Warming?
By Michael Hammer

IN the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) collects, analyses and publishes temperature data for the United States.   As part of the analysis process, NOAA applies several adjustments to the raw data.

If we consider, the above graph, which shows, their plot of the raw data  (dark pink) and the adjusted data (pale pink), it is obvious that the adjustments have little impact on data from early in the 20th century but adjust later temperature readings upwards by an increasing amount.  This means that the adjustments will create an apparent warming trend over the 20th century.  [Click on the above chart for a better larger view, this chart can also be viewed at http://cdiac.ornl.gov/epubs/ndp/ushcn/ndp019.html .]

NOAA state that they adjust the raw data for five factors.  The magnitude of the adjustments are shown in Figure 2.

Figure 2.  Form of individual corrections applied by NOAA. The black line is the adjustment for time of observation.  The red line is for a change in maximum/minimum thermometers used.  The yellow line is for changes in station siting. The pale blue line is for filling in missing data from individual station records. The purple line is for UHI effects (this correction is now removed).  [Click on the chart for a better larger view or visit the same website as for Figure 1.] Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 127 Comments »

Categories : climate data, climate_change, weather_stations

RELEASED The censored EPA CO2 endangerment document – final report

27 06 2009

EPA-Carlin-FinalOn June 25th the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) released a draft copy of the suppressed EPA report by EPA employee Alan Carlin critical of the EPA’s position on Carbon Dioxide saying:

The released report is a draft version, prepared under EPA’s unusually short internal review schedule, and thus may contain inaccuracies which were corrected in the final report.

While we hoped that EPA would release the final report, we’re tired of waiting for this agency to become transparent, even though its Administrator has been talking transparency since she took office. So we are releasing a draft version of the report ourselves, today,” said CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman.

CEI notes that: Internal EPA email messages, released by CEI earlier in the week, indicate that the report was kept under wraps and its author silenced because of pressure to support the Administration’s agenda of regulating carbon dioxide.

I’m pleased to say that we have the final report exclusively available here, courtesy of our verified contact at the EPA, who shall remain anonymous. For some background on this contact, developed with the help of Tom Fuller at the San Francisco Environmental Policy Examiner, please read the WUWT story below. The download link is also below. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 271 Comments »

Categories : Announcements, Carbon dioxide, politics

New paper – Global dimming and brightening: A review

27 06 2009

Stockholm_solar

Global dimming and brightening: A review

Martin Wild
Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

There is increasing evidence that the amount of solar radiation incident at the Earth’s surface is not stable over the years but undergoes significant decadal variations. Here I review the evidence for these changes, their magnitude, their possible causes, their representation in climate models, and their potential implications for climate change. The various studies analyzing long-term records of surface radiation measurements suggest a widespread decrease in surface solar radiation between the 1950s and 1980s (“global dimming”), with a partial recovery more recently at many locations (“brightening”). There are also some indications for an “early brightening” in the first part of the 20th century. These variations are in line with independent long-term observations of sunshine duration, diurnal temperature range, pan evaporation, and, more recently, satellite-derived estimates, which add credibility to the existence of these changes and their larger-scale significance. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 158 Comments »

Categories : Science, earth, measurement, solar

Warmists deny Copenhagen access to polar bear scientist

27 06 2009

From the UK Telegraph 26 June 2009

Christopher Booker

POLAR BEAR EXPERT BARRED BY WARMISTS

Over the coming days a curiously revealing event will be taking place in Copenhagen. Top of the agenda at a meeting of the Polar Bear Specialist Group, set up under the International Union for the Conservation of Nature/Species Survival Commission, will be the need to produce a suitably scary report on how polar bears are being threatened with extinction by man-made global warming.

This is one of a steady drizzle of events planned to stoke up alarm in the run-up to the UN’s major conference on climate change in Copenhagen next December. But one of the world’s leading experts on polar bears has been told to stay away from this week’s meeting, specifically because his views on global warming do not accord with the views of the rest of the group.

Dr Mitchell Taylor has been researching into the status and management of  polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by  insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.

polar_bears480

WUWT readers may recall seeing this photo flashed around the world of polar bears “stranded” on ice at sea. Photo by: Amanda Byrd

Dr Taylor agrees that the Arctic has been warming in the past 30 years. But he ascribes this not to rising levels of CO2 – as is dictated by the computer models of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and believed by his PBSG colleagues – but to currents bringing warm water into the Arctic from the Pacific and the effect of winds blowing in from the Bering Sea.

He has also observed, however, how the melting of Arctic ice, supposedly threatening the survival of the bears, has rocketed to the top of the warmists’ agenda as their most iconic single cause.

The famous photograph of two bears standing forlornly on a melting iceberg was produced thousands of times by Al Gore, the WWF and others as an emblem of how the bears faced extinction – until last year the photographer, Amanda Byrd, revealed that the bears, just off the Alaska coast, were in no danger. Her picture had nothing to do with global warming and was only taken because the ‘wind-sculpted ice’ they were standing on made such a striking image. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 222 Comments »

Categories : Arctic, Science, ridiculae

Quote of the Week – bonus extra

26 06 2009

Normally I do this on Sunday or Monday, but this has been an extraordinary week in many ways.

qotw_cropped

This QOTW comes from an unexpected and surprising source. When I read it, I realized that it describes what we witnessed today on the floor of the House of Representatives.

“When the strategic interest of the nation and the world is so clear, can a few gluttons with a few bucks really drive our policy? Does this great country not have better leadership than that?”

Guess who said it? Don’t be tempted to click through right away, think about it a bit.

Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 93 Comments »

Categories : Quote of the Week

300 pages added to ‘Climate Bill’ at 3:09AM – Rep John Boehner tells it like it is

26 06 2009

For those of you that missed it on CSPAN1 today, watch this and get an understanding of what just happened.

My own representative, Wally Herger had a few things to say also: Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 170 Comments »

Categories : politics

Climate Bill Passes in House

26 06 2009

waxman-markey-sausage

Final vote: 219 Yea, 212 Nay

Lets hope for defeat in the Senate. The list of votes is below.

Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 234 Comments »

Categories : Announcements, politics

The Waxman-Markey pre-vote count – where you can help

25 06 2009

OK folks, time to engage in our rights of citizenship. You know what to do. Phones and email contact info at the bottom. – Anthony

UPDATE2: test vote passes narrowly, 7 votes needed to defeat this bill – Anthony

UPDATE: C-SPAN1 is covering this live, there is a live media streaming page which you can access here:

http://www.c-span.org/Watch/C-SPAN_wm.aspx

CSPAN also has live phone in. Phone in your comments: (202)585-3885 , -3886, -3887

http://legalplanet.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/waxman-and-markey.jpg?w=400&h=283

Waxman and Markey

From GreenHell blog the Waxman-Markey pre-vote count…

Waxman-markey pre-liminary head-count as of Thursday afternoon (courtesy Myron Ebell):

218 needed to win…

Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 315 Comments »

Categories : Announcements, Carbon dioxide, politics

CARBONGATE – Global Warming Study Censored by EPA

25 06 2009

EPA_censorshipRelated story:

Source inside EPA confirms claims of science being ignored, suppressed, by top EPA management

by Richard Morrison, Competitive Enterprise Institute

Washington, D.C., June 26, 2009—The Competitive Enterprise Institute is today making public an internal study on climate science which was suppressed by the Environmental Protection Agency. Internal EPA email messages, released by CEI earlier in the week, indicate that the report was kept under wraps and its author silenced because of pressure to support the Administration’s agenda of regulating carbon dioxide.

The report finds that EPA, by adopting the United Nations’ 2007 “Fourth Assessment” report, is relying on outdated research and is ignoring major new developments. Those developments include a continued decline in global temperatures, a new consensus that future hurricanes will not be more frequent or intense, and new findings that water vapor will moderate, rather than exacerbate, temperature. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 224 Comments »

Categories : Announcements, Carbon dioxide, Science, politics

Source inside EPA confirms claims of science being ignored, suppressed, by top EPA management

25 06 2009

This story is a joint effort between the San Francisco Examiner Environmental Policy blogger Thomas Fuller  and WUWT.

Thomas_Fuller_Examiner

click for the Examiner story

Here is what started it all. An email as part of a package of emails posted as public comment in the EPA endangerment finding by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) who  caught EPA administration red-handed in concealment of internal dissent as well as apparently proceeding with plans in advance of public comment.

From this PDF circulated by CEI, here is the most pertinent email:

McGartland-Carlin-epa-memo

click for a larger image

Yesterday, Thomas Fuller, who writes for the Examiner in San Francisco, noted as many other WUWT readers did, a comment from “anonymous” posted on the WUWT thread “The EPA suppresses dissent and opinion, and apparently decides issues in advance of public comment”

“anonymous” wrote:

Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 95 Comments »

Categories : Announcements, Carbon dioxide, climate_change, politics

Absence makes the chart grow fonder

25 06 2009

For those who love (or hate) GISTEMP’s surface temperature product, we have this from Climate-Skeptic.com, by Warren Meyer. His interesting analysis is timely and appropriate. Surface station coverage in the areas of greatest contention right now are rather poor. – Anthony

Warren writes:

Apropos of my last post, Bob Tisdale is beginning a series analyzing the differences between the warmest surface-based temperature set (GISTEMP) and a leading satellite measurement series (UAH).  As I mentioned, these two sets have been diverging for years.  I estimated the divergence at around 0.1C per decade  (this is a big number, as it is about equal to the measured warming rate in the second half of the 20th century and about half the IPCC predicted warming for the next century).   Tisdale does the math a little more precisely, and gets the divergence at only 0.035C per decade.   This is lower than I would have expected and seems to be driven a lot by the GISS’s under-estimation of the 1998 spike vs. UAH.  I got the higher number with a different approach, by putting the two anamolies on the same basis using 1979-1985 averages and then comparing recent values.

Here are the differences in trendline by area of the world (he covers the whole world by grouping ocean areas with nearby continents).  GISS trend minus UAH trend, degrees C per decade:Arctic:  0.134

North America:  -0.026

South America: -0.013

Europe:  0.05

Africa:  0.104

Asia:  0.077

Australia:  -0.02

Antarctica:  0.139

So, the three highest differences, each about an order of magnitude higher than differences in other areas, are in 1.  Antarctica;  2. Arctic; and 3. Africa.  What do these three have in common?

Well, what the have most in common is the fact that these are also the three areas of the world with the poorest surface temperature coverage.  Here is the GISS coverage showing color only in areas where they have a thermometer record within a 250km box:

ghcn_giss_250km_anom1212_1991_2008_1961_1990

Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 31 Comments »

Categories : climate data, weather_stations

Arctic temperature is still not above 0°C – the latest date in fifty years of record keeping

25 06 2009

By Joseph D’Aleo, AMS Fellow, CCM

The average arctic temperature is still not above (take your pick) 32°F 0°C 273.15°K–this the latest date in fifty years of record keeping that this has happened. Usually it is beginning to level off now and if it does so, it will stay near freezing on average in the arctic leading to still less melting than last summer which saw a 9% increase in arctic ice than in 2007.  H/T to FredM and MarcM


image
Data from DMI (Danish Meteorological Institute)

See larger image here. Compare with DMI charts in other years here.

[NOTE: as a second source to Joe’s article I’ve added this weather station data from the “North Pole Cam” operated by NOAA. Link is here: http://www.arctic.noaa.gov/gallery_np.html

There is a webcam at the “North Pole” (at least it starts out very near there) that reports via satellite data uplink at regular intervals. They also have a weather station with a once weekly data plot.  Note it is still below zero centigrade there. Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 210 Comments »

Categories : Arctic, measurement, sea ice, weather_stations

A comphrehensive comparison of GISS and UAH global Temperature data

24 06 2009

Part 1 of Comparison of GISTEMP and UAH MSU TLT Anomalies

Guest Post by Bob Tisdale

I originally started this comparison by looking at the differences between OI.v2 SST and the UAH MSU Lower Troposphere Temperature (TLT) anomalies for the same ocean segments. Since OI.v2 SST data has been used by GISS for their GISTEMP product since December 1981, I decided to add another comparison: GISS Land Surface Temperature (LST) versus UAH MSU TLT for the same continental land segments. Then I added one last comparison, which is the subject of this post.

Note 1: The data illustrated in the following graphs are as I downloaded them from the KNMI Climate Explorer website. I made no effort to offset either dataset in the comparative graphs so that the two curves rested on one another. The graphs will show that GISTEMP anomalies are higher than UAH MSU TLT anomalies. This is a function of base years. Focus on the trends and the shapes of the curves, not the location of the curves.

Figure 1 is a comparison of Global GISS Surface Temperature (GISTEMP) and UAH MSU Lower Troposphere Temperature (TLT) anomalies. Both datasets have been smoothed with 12-month running-average filters.
http://i41.tinypic.com/34ryski.jpg
Figure 1 Read the rest of this entry »


Comments : 68 Comments »

Categories : Science, climate data

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