Ken Haapala: Climate experts uncertainty vs EPA bureaucrats climate certainty

The Models – Uncertainty? In her presentation at the Workshop on Handling Uncertainty in Weather and Climate Prediction sponsored by the Royal Society, Judith Curry presented a few slides that must be unsettling to climate modelers as well as the IPCC – she dared question the purpose of expanding the climate models as matters stand now. Among her major points are:

· Increasing the complexity of the models does not necessarily yield greater scientific certainty.

· There are too many degrees of freedom in the models resulting in great uncertainty and large areas of ignorance. [Degrees of freedom can be roughly defined as independent pieces of information that are allowed to vary within the model.]

· Highly unlikely scenarios should not dominate political decision making.

· Improving the models for societal needs is based on three dubious assumptions: The models are fit, useful, and the best choice for this purpose.

In her summary, Curry raises a fundamental issue: that with the high costs of model production runs, “climate models are becoming less fit for the purpose of increasing our understanding of the climate system.”

TWTW would add that the resources would be better used towards understanding the natural drivers of climate change than on chasing carbon-dioxide-caused climate change. According to a summary of government estimates, the US has spent over $35 Billion on climate science and over $150 Billion on global warming / climate change. Although the US has some great instruments onboard satellites, the bulk of the monies have been mal-appropriated.

Please see links under Seeking a Common Ground and on the new US super-computer for climate change under Defending the Orthodoxy.

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The Data v. A Statistic: TWTW is not enamored with the reporting of global air surface temperatures with a single statistic, such as a global average. Causes of concern include issues with air-surface instruments, the likelihood that minimum temperatures have been increasing with slight changes in the surrounding area, and the frequent manipulation of the data by reporting agencies without clear justification for the manipulation. In addition, the single statistic buries the global composition of the warming / cooling. As the satellite data show, the warming is concentrated in the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere. Please see: http://nsstc.uah.edu/climate/2011/November/trend_Dec78_Nov11_alt.png

Even with satellite data there is a tendency to develop a trend using regression analysis or similar tools. An examination of the historic satellite data itself shows two long periods of no warming trend separated by period of discontinuity. The exact dates of the discontinuity depend upon the views of the researcher, but they are around the time of the great El Niño of 1998 or shortly thereafter. This discontinuity is a jump in the average temperature anomaly from -0.1 deg C to +0.1 deg C. The cause of this discontinuity should be a subject of great interest, but it is lost to the Climate Establishment. Please see:http://nsstc.uah.edu/climate/.

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The Quote of the Week: In the oral arguments on the litigation on the EPA finding that greenhouse gases endanger human health and welfare cited in last week’s TWTW and the TWTW on March 3, 2012, Angeline Purdy was introduced as the technical expert on the scientific evidence that there is 90 to 99% certainty in the findings of the IPCC and its models. Clearly, there is some difference of opinion between Ms. Purdy and researchers such as Phil Jones of CRU as well as Judith Curry. Four-time IPCC expert reviewer Vincent Gray of New Zealand would take great exception to Ms. Purdy’s comments.

Validation is a rigorous process during which unknowns are greatly reduced or eliminated. Even basic assumptions in the IPCC climate models, such as a warming caused by carbon dioxide will be amplified by an increase in water vapor over the tropics, have not been validated.

The IPCC grossly overstated the certainty of its science and its models and understated the natural variability. The gross overstatement is now part of the US legal system. The EPA used the overstatement of certainty in its endangerment finding which the US Federal Court of Appeals accepted.

The entire episode reveals that the public has no protection from the Federal courts against overzealous government agencies, which claim scientific support of their regulations. These miscarriages of justice must be remedied either by permitting challenges to government pronouncements of science or by establishing special scientific courts in which the jurists are well versed in the principles of science, the scientific method, scientific knowledge, and uncertainty.

Ray Tomes: Human Activity is not the Cause of Climate Change, it is the Result

Ray Tomes is one of the wisest people I know. His depth of knowledge and insight about the universe from the sub-atomic to the extra-galactic, and how things at all scale relate to each other is unsurpassed. His mathematical work on understanding cycles and their inter-relationships is groundbreaking. In this simply argued article, he uses common sense and logic to set cause and effect out in easy to understand terms for anyone to read.

Human Activity is not the Cause of Climate Change, it is the Result
by Ray Tomes

Many people today are totally convinced that changes in human activity are the cause of climate change. I want to show that actually, the exact opposite is true. I suggest further that most climate change originates beyond the Earth, mainly in the Sun. Firstly a list of accepted facts (even though many are not usually applied to climate change):

1. Chemical reaction rates vary with temperature. A modest temperature rise can lead to chemical reactions happening much faster. This is true of a wide variety of chemical reactions. It is taught to students of chemistry.

2. Life is governed by a bunch of chemical reactions. As such its activity is affected by temperature. In general life is more active in day time than at night, and more active in summer than winter, in other words when it is warmer. Studies of animals, birds and insects invariably show that activity varies with temperature. Life is teaming at the equator and more sparse at the poles. Humans are animals too and subject to the same causes.

De Vries cycle links warming rate peaks to solar system frequencies

Back in 2009, Anthony Watts and Basil Copeland did a study of the HADcruT3 temperature series and found some periodicities in the rate of warming of Earth’s surface. They created a model which achieved a reasonably good match:

Shown in Figure 6, the sinusoidal fit results in periods of 20.68, 9.22, 15.07 and 54.56 years, in that order of significance.  These periodicities fall within the ranges of the spectra obtained using MTM spectrum analysis, and yield a sinusoidal model with an R² of 0.60.

Model from Watts-Copeland study of HADcruT using HP filtering

I didn’t realise the significance of the periods they found at the time, but now we are a bit further down the road of understanding solar system dynamics, it is starting to make more sense.

Roger Andrews: How NASA GISS Manufactures Warming in the Antarctic

My thanks to Roger Andrews for his continuing efforts to uncover some of the bigger egregious errors and mannipulations in the historical temperature record. Here he examines the long term Antarctic record as published by Jim Hansen’s NASA-GISS.

HOW GISS MANUFACTURES WARMING (LOTS OF IT) IN THE ANTARCTIC
by Roger Andrews

Those pagod things of sabre-sway
With fronts of brass and feet of clay

These lines from Byron’s “Ode to Bonaparte” provide a fitting introduction to this short post, which I’m submitting as a filler while I delve ever more deeply into the regional, hemispheric and global atrocities committed by GISS’s homogeneity adjustments.

One of the more significant unknowns in climate science is what temperatures did in the Antarctic during the first half of the 20^th century, and the reason it’s an unknown, of course, is that there are no temperature records in the Antarctic in the first half of the 20^th century. There are records in the Antarctic Peninsula that date back to the 1940s, but the Antarctic Peninsula covers only a tiny fraction of the continent and temperature trends there aren’t representative of trends on the Antarctic mainland, and there are no records on the Antarctic mainland before the mid-1950s. So the mid-1950s is as far back as we can make meaningful estimates of Antarctic mean surface air temperatures, and here are mine, estimated as always using unadjusted GHCN v2 data:

This is an excellent introductory article on solar variation.

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Inform The Pundits!

Something strange, very strange, is happening on the sun. On October 8th, NOAA’s Solar Cycle Progression monthly update report came out.

Sunspot activity has dropped off to its lowest point in over 100 years, perhaps to its lowest since the Dalton Minimum of the early 1800s.

The sun is headed into a quiet phase. The evidence is mounting. Sunspot activity is down. Solar flux is down. The sun’s magnetic field is decreasing linearly toward zero by 2026. The long term trend points towards a less active sun.

Solar physicists believe a prolonged period of low solar activity lasting more than one cycle is coming.

This change in the sun’s behavior could have profound long-term implications for climate change over the next several decades.

What’s Happening on the Sun?

The trend for 2012 is set. According to NOAA, September’s sunspot number was 61.5.  After a giant hiccup in solar activity late…

View original post 776 more words

J Martin: Is the Arctic displaying the Mpemba effect?

From the Suggestions page, contributor J. Martin writes: 

I wonder if other people have any views on the idea that the Mpemba effect might also come into play in Arctic Antarctic behaviour ? I would welcome a discussion on this subject.

Mpemba effect ?

The increased ice melt which is largely driven by warmer Arctic currents, then re-freezes at a faster rate. Are we seeing the Mpemba effect in action here ?

Whilst we have figures for Arctic air temperature and graphs for sea ice extent and area, we seem to lack data for Arctic water temperatures to allow a fuller discussion of future Arctic behaviour.

With warmer Arctic currents set against a background of solar cooling we may see wider oscillation between record low ice extent in summer and increasing (perhaps record) ice extent in winter.

Seminars and Interview: A busy week behind the scenes

It has been an interesting week. On Tuesday I met with Jerry Ravetz, who came up to the History and Philosophy of Science dept. at Leeds on Tuesday to deliver two seminars. The first was on Thomas Kuhn’s seminal book ‘The Structure of Scientific Revolutions’. At the start of the seminar, he passed around a copies of page 5 of the introduction.

Richard Courtney: Empirical assessment of the warming effect of CO2

Richard Courtney has made a couple of comments on a WUWT discussion of a new paper studying temperature trend components which are worthy of a separate discussion. 

richardscourtney says:

October 18, 2012 at 8:04 am

Barton Paul Levenson:

I am ignoring the invitation to debate the climate of Venus although that would be interesting. WUWT has a severe troll infestation today and discussion of Venus would be a disruption to this thread which is about the Earth’s climate.

I am replying to the statement in your post at October 18, 2012 at 7:15 am which says

Richard:

at present levels of atmospheric CO2 concentration additional CO2 in the atmosphere has no discernible effect on the Earth’s climate.

BPL: No. It’s up 40% since the industrial revolution began. It’s the absolute amount that matters, not the concentration. The nitrogen, oxygen and argon that make up more than 99% of Earth’s atmosphere is not radiatively active.

It seems you are unaware that the IR absorbtion of CO2 in the atmosphere is constrained to only two narrow bands with almost all being in the 15 micron band. These bands are so near to saturation that they only increase their absorbtion by band broadening.

Phil Jones: “We don’t know what natural variability is doing”

The Daily Mail article by David Rose which has caused a bit of a flurry at the Met Office and elsewhere has been the subject of several blog posts recently. I think it’s worth highlighting this quote from Prof. Phil Jones, head of the CRU at the UEA:

We don’t fully understand how to input things like changes in the oceans, and because we don’t fully understand it you could say that natural variability is now working to suppress the warming. We don’t know what natural variability is doing.

Prof Jones admitted that he and his colleagues did not understand the impact of ‘natural variability’ – factors such as long-term ocean temperature cycles and changes in the output of the sun. However, he said he was still convinced that the current decade would end up significantly warmer than the previous two.

The data does suggest a plateau, he admitted, and without a major El Nino event – the sudden, dramatic warming of the southern Pacific which takes place unpredictably and always has a huge effect on global weather – ‘it could go on for a while’.

Benny Peiser: Man-Made Energy Crisis

My thanks to Dr Benny Peiser, who has given permission to repost this piece published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

Man-Made Energy Crisis
by Benny Peiser

800.000 German Households Can No Longer Pay Their Energy Bills

The Germans are facing the biggest electricity price increase in a decade. And that is just the beginning. By 2030, they will have spent more than 300 billion Euros on green electricity. –Welt am Sonntag, 14 October 2012 (http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/energie/article109820871/Preisexplosion-beim-Strom-beginnt-gerade-erst.html)

Germany’s consumers are facing record price rises for green energy. Especially for small household budgets – with real incomes more or less stagnant for many years – energy costs are becoming increasingly intolerable. In 2009, Germans spent about 100 billion Euros for energy – an average of 2,500 Euros per household. Social campaigners and consumer groups complain that up to 800 000 households in Germany can no longer pay their electric bills. If the rise in energy prices continues, this “second rent” could soon exceed the main rent in some parts of Germany. –Focus Magazin, 15 October 2012 (http://www.focus.de/immobilien/energiesparen/tid-27705/strom-und-heizkosten-ueberfordern-verbraucher-wenn-das-geld-nicht-mehr-zum-heizen-reicht_aid_838837.html)

Roger Andrews: Station Quality at Alice Springs

STATION QUALITY AND TEMPERATURE RECORD QUALITY AT ALICE SPRINGS

by Roger Andrews

While working my way through the records discussed in the recent “Chunder Down Under” post I became inspired by the work Tim Channon et al were doing on station quality in the UK, and in a fit of enthusiasm I decided to take a look at station quality at the seven stations I was using to see whether it might have affected the temperature readings. To keep the post down to a manageable length I’m discussing only the Alice Springs results here. The results from the other six stations will appear later. Alice Springs has an essentially unbroken temperature record going back to 1878, but the data come from four separate stations: Telegraph Office:        1878 to 1932 Post Office:                 1932 to 1989 Old Airport:                1942 to 1974 Current Airport:          1974 to present I’ll review station quality at these sites in sequence, starting with the Telegraph Office. Here’s a photograph of what it looked like in the early days of operation. From the standpoint of station quality the site looks pretty good – lots of open desert, not many trees, a few low buildings and minimum urban warming potential. Unfortunately, however, there’s no way of knowing where the thermometer was. http://oi48.tinypic.com/alkb4w.jpg Or is there?

Photography corner: cloud conditions in the Lake District

I was away in the Lake district over the weekend. We had a great walk on Saturday with 50 post graduate students. I did my mountain leadership bit on an intrepid ascent of Cat Bells. 🙂

Here are a few photos from the walk.

Looking South East from Cat Bells towards Glaramara and High Raise – click for larger image

One minute later, this was the view North East:

Llysdinam, Wales

Llysdinam, Wales

52.21567296196379,-3.451600644497286

New AWS set record low 2010
November –18.0 °C Llysdinam (Powys) 28 November 2010
Same as inside your freezer.

Estimated Class 5, image not clear enough to measure and might be marginal Class 4. Poor exposure. Microclimate.

UHI, local site, distance none.

Peatlands, Armagh, Northern Ireland

Yes this is a record breaking met station but here is spot of fun too.

I get to see the wierd and the beautiful, this is the nuts.

Taken from a dual carriageway, if you don’t like telephone poles dress them up, colour co-ordinated with a fancy hedge.

Not finished yet.

Greycrook, Scotland

Greycrook, Scotland

Defunct station setting Scottish highest August temperature August 32.9 °C Greycrook (Scottish Borders) 9 August 2003
Station ceased 2004
This was a very hot day with abnormal weather conditions but no records were broken at formal sites.

55.56597623086528,-2.636376909121077
Microsoft Bing link

No image from 2003 but an enclosure and screen is still present.

Looks likely it was at best Class 3.

East Malling, Kent, the Met Office’s finest

What a lovely large enclosure and without paving.

Let’s see what Microsoft and their providers have to show…

I invite go and look, rotate the scene, perhaps change altitude to see different photo dates. Bing maps

51.287504, 0.448382

Cambridge [University] Botanic Garden

2000	2003	2006	2007	2008

“We have been recording weather data at the Botanic Garden since 1904 and supply daily figures to the Meteorological Office at Bracknell.” — ref

Someone tell Cambridge University the Met Office moved but that is trivial relative to their issues over siting a Stevenson screen. A consequence is the claimed time series since 1904 is thrown into question, how much if any is reasonable?

Estimated Class 5, unstable environment. 2003, near polytunnel, bare ground. Microclimate.

UHI, local unstable site, polytunnels or glass, bare ground, building works, in Cambridge town, distance, largely semi-rural.

“The highest known temperature recorded in the area was 37.3 °C at Cavendish on 10 August 2003 and 36.9 °C was recorded that day at Cambridge Botanic Garden [Google tells of polytunnels and bare earth] and 36.5 °C there on 3 August 1990. The highest UK temperature stands at 38.5 °C at [Brogdale Fruit Farm,] Faversham in Kent on 10 August 2003.”

Cavendish, Suffolk

Cavendish, Suffolk

52.09068040327671,0.6278739518004595
Altitude 55 metres

Someone’s back garden (*), not a problem, neither is being a very hot day unless the results are conflated out of context, which they are.
(* unless I have made a mistake)

“The highest known temperature recorded in the area was 37.3 °C at Cavendish on 10 August 2003 and…” — exact source will me mentioned in the next article, is the Met Office.

Katesbridge, Northern Ireland

54.296694,-6.111149

[update 16th Oct, I’ve just noticed this site holds a record low
March –14.8 °C Katesbridge (Co. Down) 2 March 2001 ]

This is a “special” without definite details. Commenter Sparks asked a question. I can’t definitely link this site with the public persona so be cautious.

It seems to be on the raised edge of some kind of flat floor to a shallow valley, presumably webtland (sic), as can be seen from Google ground level views. At the same time there are “field” boundaries.

Roger Andrews: Chunder down under – How GHCN V3.2 manufactures warming in the outback

CHUNDER DOWN UNDER

HOW GHCN v3.2 MANUFACTURES WARMING IN THE OUTBACK
by Roger Andrews

I originally entitled this post “Blunder Down Under”, but then it occurred to me that all of what I’m about to describe wasn’t a blunder at all, but intentional. So I changed “Blunder” to “Chunder”, which as those of you familiar with the Strine language will know, means “throw up”.

NCDC recently released the latest version of the Global Historic Climate Network data set – GHCN version 3.2, which applies adjustments to remove the artificial man-made discontinuities and spurious gradients that allegedly plague the “raw” GHCN Version 2 data.

I started to go through the GHCN v3.2 data, and the first record I looked at was Alice Springs in the middle of Australia. I plotted the “raw” GHCN v2 data against the adjusted GHCN v3.2 data for the station, and here’s what I got:

http://oi49.tinypic.com/2e34y6d.jpg

GHCN v3.2 adds not one, not two, but three whole degrees of warming to the Alice record since 1880.