Ned Nikolov: In Science, New Messages Mean More than the Messengers’ Names

An Interview Given by Dr. Ned Nikolov (a.k.a. Den Volokin) to Ben Guarino,
a Staff Writer at The Washington Post
Sep. 17, 2016

Research Paper Withdrawal by the Journal Advances in Space Research  

Q1: As succinctly as possible, could you tell me why you chose to publish this work under a pseudonym?

A1: We adopted pseudonyms as a measure of last resort as we could not get an unbiased and fair review from scientific journals under our real names. This is explained in more details in the attached letter we sent to the chief editor of the Journal Advances in Space Research (JASR) on Sep. 17, 2015. In brief, our real names became known to the climate-science blogosphere in 2012 when a poster, which we presented at an International Climate Conference in Denver in 2011, became available online and caused broad and intense discussions. When we later tried to publish elements of this poster as separate articles in scientific journals, we discovered that journal editors and reviewers would reject our manuscripts outright after Googling our names and reading the online discussion. The rejections were oftentimes justified by the journals using criticisms outside the scope of the manuscript at hand.  On two occasions, journal editors have even refused to send our manuscripts for review after reading the blogs and realizing the broader theoretical implications of our results, although the manuscript itself did not explicitly discuss any new theory. For example, our first paper was rejected 4 times by different journals while submitted under our real names before it was finally accepted by SpringerPlus after submitting it under pseudonyms.

UK needs to invest £215bn in energy by 2030, say analysts

Credit: telegraph.co.uk

Note: for ‘energy’ read ‘electricity supply’ in this report from Utility Week on the UK’s crumbling National Grid.

The UK will need to invest an “eye-watering” £215 billion in its energy system by 2030 in order to replace ageing assets and decarbonise, analysis by Barclays Research has found.

As the country undergoes an “energy revolution” nearly half – £95 billion – will need to be spent on disruptive technologies such as renewables, battery storage and distributed generation.

New Dawn Of Truth: London Climate Change Conference 2016

It’s finally happening. Thanks to Herculean efforts by Niklas Morner, we are presenting a two-day conference in central London on the 8-9th September. Speakers are coming from all over the world to present their work, and it is not to be missed!

Take the 8-9th September off work and join us for this historic event. The first UK climate conference in decades which will counter the scaremongering of the IPCC with a cool, rational approach to the study of climate change, presenting alternative explanations, new data, theory and commentary. Topics include solar-planetary theory, causes of ENSO, sea ice extent, sea level, ozone depletion, volcanos, regional forecasting, journal gatekeeping and many more.

The list of contributors is long, we are packing a huge number of presentations into this two day event. Speakers include Niklas Morner, myself, Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller,  Nicola Scafetta, Per Strandberg, Jan-Erik Solheim, and thats before lunch on day one! Piers Corbyn will be there! So will  Christopher Monckton! See the full programme and the extended abstracts in this 35 Megabyte document for full details. There are also some travel and booking details on the geoethic.com website. An updated version is available on reseachgate

Temperature Variation Due to ENSO

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Useful comparison of ENSO and (supposed) CO2 influences on climate by kenskingdom. ENSO correlations look significant, whereas CO2 – nothing to report really.
H/T Climate Depot

kenskingdom

In this post I use the Multivariate ENSO Index (MEI) supplied by NOAA at http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/enso/mei/index.html and lower tropospheric temperature data supplied by UAH to show how much of temperature variation over the past 20 years is due to ENSO and how little is due to CO2.  I will keep words brief and let graphics do the talking.

Firstly, here is the MEI data from 1950:

Fig. 1:  Monthly MEI from 1950

As an aside, this is how it compares with SOI data.  The SOI is inverted and both are scaled for comparison.

Fig. 2:  MEI compared with SOI inverted

Now compare scaled MEI with Global UAH:

Fig. 3: MEI (scaled) and UAH

Notice tropospheric temperatures appear to lag the MEI by some 5 months:

Fig. 4: MEI advanced 5 months and UAH

Notice both datasets are noisy, and there is a clear discrepancy in the early 1990s.  12 month running…

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Hourly data store

Tim writes,

Figure 1, hourly data collected from Met Office Datapoint over two years for Heathrow, one of many stations with data.

I’ve succeeded in collecting a massive data store from Met Office Datapoint, hourly data for many UK stations, known errors in the supplied data excepted. Some data is missing, such as the week when I went into hospital and in error had powered off the automatic data collection computer. The poor air, blue tinged when I realised.

I could upload the whole lot as CSV files inside an archive but the sheer size of this is a disincentive unless there is genuine demand. 40 or so MB, 230 MB uncompressed.

https://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2016/07/series-2016-07-27.zip 43MB (Megabytes)

There are also daily plots as PDF, a mountain of data. What do people want if anything?

Elite merchants of #Brexit doom expose their own pre #EUref lies

Post referendum analysis from Rodney Atkinson at Freenations.net

One of the most obnoxious features of the post Brexit climate is that the biggest liars and doom mongers in political history – the Remain campaigners – now accuse Leave Campaigners of lying! This has been picked up in continental attacks on Boris Johnson who, if anything, was rather kind and accommodating given the damage done to people, banks and businesses by the Euro corporatist elites. Now those liars are exposing their own lies:

THE IMF

Before the Brexit vote the IMF head, Christine Lagarde (whose appointment was avidly supported by George Osborne) said that the impact on the UK economy of a Brexit vote went from “pretty bad to very, very bad” and that there could be a recession.

Today the IMF says it has a “benign” view of the Brexit effect on the UK economy, there would be no recession and their revised forecast for UK growth is the same as their revised forecast for USA growth (-0.2% for 2016). Their forecast for UK growth in 2017 is 1.3%

Environmental Effects of Increased Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide

Important new paper from Robinsons and Soon available here

Weather stats, monthlies, updates

Tim writes: –

Another interlude gives me space to update the novel statistics computed from published data. This is not comparable with the official methods, it’s better. Takes into account normal variation during a year; bends the data to near gaussian.

May was not particularly interesting, June was the 2nd dimmest for S and SE England since these records commenced 1929.

RJ Salvador: Predicting El Niño predicts the climate

We’re pleased to say: Rick Salvador has been busy again.
[This graphic has been added by the Talkshop mainly for entertainment value]

Credit: Wikipedia

RJS writes:
The following demonstrates that Metoffice Hadcrut4 is a restatement of the NOAA El Nino index. It’s based on the conjecture that not only do El Nino events have an immediate effect on world temperature but also the clustering of El Nino or La Nina events have a cumulative effect on the worlds temperature. Ian Wilson and Paul Vaughan have provide the frame work to show that El Nino events are governed by the interaction of the Sun and Moon coupled with the hemispherical asymmetry of the Earth’s surface properties. The climate variation is driven by the ratio in strength and frequency of El Nino to La Nina events.

Hemispheric Temperature Anomalies: 1851-1980

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Are we anywhere close to really understanding the strength of natural climate variation and how it works?

We can easily overlook that most temperature measurements are taken on land, but over 70% of the Earth’s surface is deep water.

Frederick Colbourne investigates.

Geoscience - Environment

Climate Research Unit, University of East Anglia

The Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was established in the School of Environmental Sciences (ENV) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) in Norwich in 1972.

The CRU has collected, collated and archived global climate data for over 40 years.

CRU temperature data

In 1987, the American Meteorological Society published a paper by Stanley Grotch of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, University of California, that assessed the robustness of the CRU dataset for land and other datasets.

Monthly Weather Review, Volume 115 No. 7, July 1987, ISSN: 0027-0644; eISSN: 1520-0493

Abstract

Three data bases of gridded surface temperature anomalies were used to assess the sensitivity of the average estimated Northern Hemisphere (NH) temperature anomaly to: 1) extreme gridpoint values and 2) zonal band contributions. Over the last 100 year, removal of either the top or bottom 10% of the gridpoint anomalies in any year changes…

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Evidence for the Medieval Warm Period on the SE Greenland Shelf

Kangerlussuaq Fjord, Greenland [image credit: notsogreen.com]

CO2Science summarises another study pointing to more ‘inconvenient’ data concerning the Medieval Warm Period.

In the introduction to their enlightening study, Miettinen et al. (2015) write that they “reconstructed August sea surface temperature (aSST) and April sea ice concentration (aSIC) at sub-decadal temporal resolution based on diatom assemblages found in sediment core MC99-2322 from the Kangerlussuaq Trough, SE Greenland shelf in order to investigate the variability of summer sea surface conditions along with possible forcing factors on the climatologically sensitive SE Greenland shelf during the last 1130 years.

#Brexit The Movie: The six minute version

Dying from heat and cold: which extreme is the more deadly?

Hot or cold[Image credit: BBC]

Climate catastrophists should be careful what they wish for, according to this review featured by CO2 Science.

In a review of the human health effects of temperature, Seltenrich (2015) writes that “while isolated heat waves pose a major health risk and grab headlines when they occur, recent research has uncovered a more complex and perhaps unexpected relationship between temperature and public health,” which is, as he continues, that “on the whole, far more deaths occur in cold weather than in hot.”

NASA-led study looks at sea ice differences at Earth’s poles

Antarctic sea ice reached a record maximum extent while the Arctic reached a minimum extent in the ten lowest since satellite records began. Why are these trends going in opposite directions?
Credits: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/Joy Ng

It’s hard not to suspect a politicized element to the results of such a study due to the NASA/NOAA factor. They say Antarctic sea ice has increased ‘just slightly’ since the 1970s but some might put it stronger than that.

Why has the sea ice cover surrounding Antarctica been increasing slightly, in sharp contrast to the drastic loss of sea ice occurring in the Arctic Ocean? A new NASA-led study finds the geology of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean are responsible.

Ken Gregory: The Economic Impact of Greenhouse Gas Emissions

Energy Balance Climate Sensitivity

The most important parameter in determining the economic impact of climate change is the sensitivity of the climate to greenhouse gas emissions. Climatologist Nicholas Lewis used an energy balance method to estimate the Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS) best estimate at 1.45 °C from a doubling of CO₂ in the atmosphere with a likely range [17 – 83% confidence] of 1.2 to 1.8 °C. ECS is the global temperature change resulting from a doubling of CO₂ after allowing the oceans to reach temperature equilibrium, which takes about 3000 years.

A more policy-relevant parameter is the Transient Climate Response (TCR) which is the global temperature change at the time of the CO₂ doubling. A doubling of CO₂ at the current growth rate of 0.55%/year would take 126 years. The analysis gives the TCR best estimate at 1.21 °C with a likely range [17 – 83%] of 1.05 to 1.45 °C.

The two periods used for the analysis were 1859-1882 and 1995-2011. They were chosen to give the longest early and late periods free of significant volcanic activity, which provide the largest change in forcing and hence the narrowest uncertainty ranges. The long time between these periods has the effect of averaging out the effect of short-term ocean oscillations such as the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO) and the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), but it does not account for millennium scale ocean oscillations or indirect solar influences.

Andrea Leadsom MP: #Brexit is best for Britain’s energy security

Andrea Leadsom MP

From the Daily mail:

In March Energy Minister Amber Fudd claimed energy bills would soar by £500 million a year if we left the EU, adding: ‘The thing about the gas market is you don’t know what shocks and what changes there can be to it.’

But in a remarkable rebuttal to her boss’s claims, Ms Leadsom said today that Brexit would threaten ‘absolutely none’ of the three ‘critical considerations’ at the forefront of Britain’s energy policy.

‘Leaving the EU will give us freedom to keep bills down, to meet our climate change targets in the cheapest way possible, and of course, keep the lights on,’ she said in a speech in central London.

Under the European Commission’s ‘Winter Package’ proposals all 28 EU member states would ‘take on legal responsibility for each other’s gas security’.

This would ensure that EU member states that face having their gas supplies cut – due to political disputes with countries such as Russia or contracts expiring, for example, – would see its gas supplies guaranteed by fellow member states.

Setting out the ‘real threat out continued membership of the EU will have on our energy security,’ Ms Leadsom said: ‘The European Commission’s ‘Winter Package’, contains a number of proposals which make painfully clear the direction of travel in EU energy policy.

‘Two of those suggestions pose a potential threat to our continued energy security.

Matt Ridley: In the name of science, Britain must leave the EU

CapX has a cogently argued piece from Matt Ridley on the reasons why Britains science endeavours would be benefited by #Brexit.

Britain – for its size – is probably the world’s leading scientific country. We have less than 1% of the world’s population, but 15% of the most highly cited scientific papers, and more Nobel prize winners than any other European country. We are world leaders in biotechnology and digital technology and our greatest potential collaborators and potential rivals in both fields are in Asia and America, not Europe.

So it is vital that we remain open to the world, not stuck in little Europe. A regional customs union protected by tariff walls and run from a central bureaucracy is a 1950s idea – an analogue project in a digital era, as Michael Gove puts it. In an age when container shipping has collapsed the cost of intercontinental trade; when the internet and budget airlines and Skype have made it as easy to collaborate with Asia and America and Africa as in Europe, regionalism makes less sense.

Met Office Scarborough, site 99142

Tim writes

Under can’t make it up comes the Met Office adding Scarborough to Datapoint and Swanage vanishing.

Figure 1, photograph ©2013 Copyright Christopher Hall under CC, annotation, the author, same licence.

Hall’s image legend: –

Springhill Lane
Just above the hedge can be seen the top of a World War II pill box. This was sited to give protective cover to the Royal Navy radio station in Sandybed Lane at the foot of the hill. The fenced flat area in the background is Springhill Reservoir opened in 1928 to augment the town’s water supply at a time when new developments were taking place. Water is pumped to here from Irton Waterworks.

Winter rainfall 2015/16, Hadley series

Tim writes,

Figure 1, Met Office Hadley monthly rainfall series for England and Wales start date 1766. Winter 2015/16 was wet but ordinary. (data processing by the author, see previous articles)
Plots for all data series as PDF (2MB).

Some other parts / regions of the country do show an extreme but this adds weight to the flicker noise (or 1/f) hypothosis for weather noise.

RSS satellite temperature update consolidates with UAH

There’s been a lot of loud rhetoric flying around about the update to the RSS satellite temperature series. What it actually amounts to is a consolidation of the satellite temperature measurement effort.

The two time series are now in good agreement and exhibit a warming rate of 0.13K/decade during the 1980-2015 period.