Excerpts from the three part series below.

A significant amount of evidence indicates that the global temperature did increase during the 20th century. For example, direct thermometer measurements indicate that the temperature increased by perhaps 0.8°C.
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In summary, there is no direct evidence showing that CO2 caused the 20th century warming, or as a matter of fact, any warming. The question to ask is therefore can we point to some other culprit? If humans are not the only ones responsible for climate change, what else is responsible?
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Moreover, when studying directly the total ocean heat content, it is possible to see that the amount of heat going into the oceans is at least 5 times larger than can be expected from just the changes in the total solar irradiance (e.g., see this blog entry and references therein). Thus, one can conclude that there must be at least one mechanism amplifying the link between solar activity and climate.
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The fact that the sun plays a decisive role in climate change has important implications to the understanding of the causes of 20th century global warming and the expected temperature change in the coming century. The increased solar activity over the 20th century can be translated into a radiative forcing contribution. Since the solar/climate link was already quantified, it is possible to estimate the solar contribution, which turns out to be about half of the measured warming.
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Thus, the warming component left to be explained by humans is much smaller than is often claimed by the proponents of the anthropogenic warming. However, if we are to predict the temperature change over the 21st century, we have to know what is the expected human contribution to the radiative budget, but equally important, also the climate sensitivity to these changes in the energy budget.
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As we have seen above, the answer to the second question is that the sensitivity is most likely small. In fact, this sensitivity is about 1 degree increase per doubling of CO2.
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The evidence shows therefore that even if we continue with “business as usual”, we will not cause a climate catastrophe. It is also possible to estimate the sea level increase, which will be of order 10 cm over the coming century, much less than the meters talked about in Gore’s movie.

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Ken Stewart has released his much awaited review of the Australian High Quality Sites. His conclusion:

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Validation of climate models is like finding someone to cement your drive.

You ask one contractor, and they say they can do it, sometime between now and Christmas. That’s a high level of uncertainty.

You ask another, and they say they can do it, but it’s their first time. That’s a low level of skill.

You ask another, and they say that they will do it, but the result is not going to be any better than what you have already, or may even be worst. That’s an honest vendor, and a product not ‘fit-for-use’.

Model validation is very obvious when you put it in a familiar context. There is a level of service you expect from the money you have to spend. Any public servant involved in the procurement of services faces a similar situation to concreting one’s drive. Due diligence requires a check that models are fit-for-purpose.

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As I write this, my wife of 46 years is in intensive care fighting to live. She is there partly because of bad medical science and partly because of what had become a widespread syndrome in many scientific disciplines, the demonization of a person or a concept by people who can be wrong.

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• The Age reports that Climategate was a game changer. Judith Curry said Dr Jones had shown himself to be ”genuinely repentant, and has been completely open and honest about what has been done and why … speaking with humility about the uncertainty in the data sets”.

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For those interested in the theory that upper atmosphere inflow of moisture from the Indian Ocean is a major determinant of rain in Australia, check out the satellite loop for the last 4 hours right now.

Here is the development of the inflow over the last few days.

Note this is in the presence of a high pressure system with an upper atmosphere ridge and trough, as can be seen by the slight deformation of the isobars over Queensland.

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Ken Stewart is engaged in the first ever independent study of the complete High Quality Australian Site Network. Ken has a series of posts, the first including a lot of background information and explanation. Subsequent posts are not be as long and part 6, the data from the Victorian sites has just been done.

Like many people, he thought that the analysis of climate change in Australia, and information given to the public and the government, was based on the raw temperature data. He was wrong. He averaged maxima and minima for all stations at each site, then compared the result with the High Quality means. By these calculations (averaging the trend at each site in Victoria) the raw trend is 0.35 degrees C per 100 years, and the High Quality state trend is 0.83C. That’s a warming bias of 133%!

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Corrected the page-proofs of my drought paper today.

CRITIQUE OF DROUGHT MODELS IN THE AUSTRALIAN DROUGHT EXCEPTIONAL CIRCUMSTANCES REPORT (DECR)

ABSTRACT
This paper evaluates the reliability of modeling in the Drought Exceptional Circumstances Report (DECR) where global circulation (or climate) simulations were used to forecast future extremes of temperatures, rainfall and soil moisture. The DECR provided the Australian government with an assessment of the likely future change in the extent and frequency of drought resulting from anthropogenic global warming. Three specific and different statistical techniques show that the simulation of the occurrence of extreme high temperatures last century was adequate, but the simulation of the occurrence of extreme low rainfall was unacceptably poor. In particular, the simulations indicate that the measure of hydrological drought increased significantly last century, while the observations indicate a significant decrease. The main conclusion and purpose of the paper is to provide a case study showing the need for more rigorous and explicit validation of climate models if they are to advise government policy.

Meanwhile, scientists are finding new ways to communicate worthless forecasts to decision makers.

These models have been the basis of climate information issued for national and seasonal forecasting and have been used extensively by Australian industries and governments. The results of global climate models are complex, and constantly being refined. Scientists are trialling different ways of presenting climate information to make it more useful for a range of people.

Conducting professional validation assessment of models would be a start, followed by admitting they are so uncertain they should be ignored.

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Anthony’s Tour continues at a breakneck pace this week — with only four venues to go.

The talks at Emerald that I organized went quite well, considering this is a small regional town. About 80-100 people attended an teaser session during the Property Rights Australia meeting during the day, and around 40 attended at night. We got a standing ovation during the day — the first time for me! The crowd was a mixture of ages and sexes and I think messages of bureaucratic sloth and opportunism resonated with them. Central Queensland turned on one of its trademark sunsets for Anthony:

It was good to spend a bit of time with Anthony and catch up on the goss — well not really gossip, but about bloggers and the people behind the curtain. You know how it is, you tend to get a certain view of the people involved, but when you learn more about them, it turns out they are just regular people who put their hand up for something they believe in.

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The ‘strongest male’ is itself a highly variable component.

How to formalise this as a niche? Preamble. All we have, really, are observations. To put niches into a statistical framework, we only have the expected distributions of those observations (both singly and jointly). Selection (either natural or through our study design) changes the distribution of features, and we observe those changes.

For example, if the sample of breeding males is generally taller than the population of breeding males, then we could presume there is selective pressure on this feature — an important item of information. This could be detected statistical significant (e.g. the distribution differ in a Chi–squared test).

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A couple of questions from the last nichey post prompted this post. Geoff said that:

I’m not even sure what is meant by an optimal environment for a species/genus/whatever.

while Andrew said that:

it wouldn’t surprise me if a lot of species tend to live at the margins of their “ideal” habitat.

We need a bit of abstraction to address these questions. In a laboratory, a plant would be expected to show a humped response to the main variables of temperature and water availability. The parameterisation of this function can be termed the ‘fundamental niche’ of the species, and may be equated with a physiochemical optimum unaffected by competition.

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Having just returned from my leg of the tour, I have been offline for awhile, but expect to catch up this week. Here is my powerpoint presentation “Tweeter and the Monkey M(e)an — Negating Climate Change Policy” (4.3MB).

The title comes from a song by the Traveling Wilburys. The message is that without proper validation, climate models are no more credible than Tweets, and from my (and others’) validation testing, the model forecasts are not fit-for-forecasting, showing no more accuracy than the “Monkey Mean” — the average temperature and rainfall. I critique CSIRO and BoM reports and conclude with an example of how to make rational business decisions under climate forecast uncertainty.

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CO2 Science reviews a study showing that the appearance of high levels of extinction due to shifts in climate is due to the coarse resolution of the grid cells used in the simulations. This is another vindication of the conclusion of our 18 author collaboration.

When grid cells are coarse, a one degree shift in temperature, say, affects a large area, and can appear to eliminate all habitat for a species in the grid cell. The virtual species must move a long way to find another suitable grid cell. In actuality each coarse grid cell contains a range of temperatures. When the grid cells are finer, there will most likely be areas within the grid cell with suitable habitat for the species, enabling it to persist through large climate variations.

Refugia are well known to have a crucial role in species’ persistence, and may be characterized as areas of high spatial heterogeneity. It is easy to see that choice of scale would have a large effect on determinations of species persistence, and great caution would be needed in interpreting results of simulations conducted on coarse grids.
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Below is a graph of the blow-out in Australian Government Debt.

I don’t know why everyone is blaming Rudd. Growing the State is what tax-and-spend-spend liberals do.

The idea that the budget should be in deficit for the next four or five years when the economy is at near-full employment, should be laughable. But Rudd and Abbott would prefer to test the electorate’s mendacity than complete our rise as a world-beating economy by paying our own way in recovery.

But the article makes an interesting observation related to Hauser’s Law.

In a speech last year, Treasury secretary Ken Henry identified a little known fact. Government spending exploded under Gough Whitlam, from 18.9 per cent of GDP in 1971-2 to 24.8 per cent in 1975-6. And it has stayed at about that level ever since, through Fraser-Howard, Hawke-Keating and Howard-Costello.

“In the 3 1/2 decades since, while there have been significant annual fluctuations, the average level of spending by the Australian government has changed little, to be around 25.25 per cent of GDP.”

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Virial Paper 6_12_2010 submitted by Adolf J. Giger.

Allow me to make some more comments on the Virial Theorem (VT) as used by Ferenc Miskolczi (FM) for the atmosphere.

As I said on this blog back in February, a very fundamental derivation of the VT was made by H. Goldstein in Section 3-4 of “Classical Mechanics”, 1980, Ref.[1] : PE= 2*KE (potential energy=2 x kinetic energy). Then, he also derives the Ideal Gas Law (IGL), P*V = N*k*T as a consequence of the VT, and shows that PE=3*P*V and KE=(3/2)*N*k*T. The two laws, IGL and VT, therefore are two ways to describe the same physical phenomenon. Despite its seemingly restrictive name, we know that the IGL is a good approximation for many gases, monatomic, biatomic, polyatomic and even water vapor, as long as they remain very dilute. Goldstein’s derivations are made for an enclosure of volume V with constant gas pressure P and temperature T in a central force field like the Earth’s gravitational field. They also hold for an open volume V anywhere in the atmosphere. As to FM, he points out that the VT reflects the fact that the atmosphere is gravitationally bounded.
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Ferenc Miskolczi in his papers [2,3] relates the total potential energy of the atmosphere, PEtot, to the total IR upward radiation Su at the surface. This relationship has to be considered a proportionality rather than an exact equality, or Su=const* PEtot. We see that this linkage makes sense since Su determines the surface temperature Ts through the Stefan-Boltzmann law, Su = (5.6703/10^8)*Ts^4 , and finally the IGL ties together Ts, P(z=0) and PEtot.
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FM then assigns the kinetic IR energy KE (temperature) in the atmosphere to the upward atmospheric IR emittance Eu, or Eu=const*KE. The flux Eu is made up of two terms F + K , where F is due to thermalized absorption of short wave solar radiation in atmospheric water vapor, and K due to heat transfers from the Earth’s surface to air masses and clouds through evaporation and convection. Neither F or K are directly radiated from the Earth’s surface. They represent radiation from the atmosphere itself. There is an obvious limitation for such an assignment mainly because for the VT , or the IGL in general, the temperature (the KE) has to be measured with a thermometer, whereas Eu represents the radiative temperature (flux) that has to be measured with a radiometer, and these two measurements can give vastly different results as we see for the two following extreme cases:
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In between these two extremes we have the Earth where FM’s version of the VT , Su = 2 * Eu applies reasonably well. We will see next in a discussion of FM’s exact solution how close, and for what types of atmospheres FM’s VT ( Eu/Su=0.5) holds, but we can say already that no physical principle is violated if it doesn’t. The VT that always holds for gases is not being violated, it is simply not fully recognized by FM’s fluxes that have to be measured by radiometers. This may be an indication that the VT is less important for FM’s theory than normally assumed.

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On the other hand, the IPCC assumes a positive water vapor feedback and arrives at very imprecise predictions for the Climate Sensitivity ranging from 1.5 to 5K (and even more). It is clear that this wide range of numbers is caused by the assumed positive feedback system, which apparently is close to instability (or singing, as the electrical engineer would call it in an unstable microphone-loudspeaker system). With such large uncertainties in their outputs true scientists should be reluctant to publish their results.

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My rebuttal of Thomas’ computer models of massive species extinctions has been mentioned in a statement by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch before the United States Senate, on June 10, 2010.

1. Stockwell (2000) observes that the Thomas models, due to lack of any observed extinction data, are not ‘tried and true,’ and their doctrine of ‘massive extinction’ is actually a case of ‘massive extinction bias.’

[Stockwell, D.R.B. 2004. Biased Toward Extinction, Guest Editorial, CO2 Science 7 (19): http://www.co2 science.org/articles/V7/N19/EDIT.php]

The one extinct species mentioned in the Thomas article is now thought to have fallen victim to the 1998 El Nino.

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Ferenc sent out reprints of his upcoming manuscript, and graciously acknowledges the contribution of a number of us for support, help and encouragement. I particularly like the perturbation and statistical power analysis, checking that a change in the greenhouse effect due to CO2 would likely have been detected if it had been present in the last 61 years.

ABSTRACT
By the line-by-line method, a computer program is used to analyze Earth atmospheric radiosonde data from hundreds of weather balloon observations. In terms of a quasi-all-sky protocol, fundamental infrared atmospheric radiative flux components are calculated: at the top boundary, the outgoing long wave radiation, the surface transmitted radiation, and the upward atmospheric emittance; at the bottom boundary, the downward atmospheric emittance. The partition of the outgoing long wave radiation into upward atmospheric emittance and surface transmitted radiation components is based on the accurate computation of the true greenhouse-gas optical thickness for the radiosonde data. New relationships
among the flux components have been found and are used to construct a quasi-all- sky model of the earth’s atmospheric energy transfer process. In the 1948-2008 time period the global average annual mean true greenhouse-gas optical thickness is found to be time-stationary. Simulated radiative no-feedback effects of measured actual CO2 change over the 61years were calculated and found to be of magnitude easily detectable by the empirical data and analytical methods used. The data negate increase in CO2 in the atmosphere as a hypothetical cause for the apparently observed global warming. A hypothesis of significant positive feedback by water vapor effect on atmospheric infrared absorption is also negated by the observed measurements. Apparently major revision of the physics underlying the greenhouse effect is needed.
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It’s gratifying to see the essay by Johnston getting the attention it deserves (at WUWT and JoNova) after Pielke brought it to our attention. Johnston reviews many areas of climate science in 82 pages of readable prose and concludes:

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Problem 4. Why has a community of thousands or tens of thousands of climate scientists not managed to improve certainty in core areas in any significant way in more than a decade (eg the climate sensitivity caused by CO2 doubling as evidenced by little change in the IPCC bounds)?

This problem has been the hardest, probably because it takes enormous hubris to claim solution to a problem that defeats thousands of usually intelligent people. One man who does that is — Dr Roy Spencer — claiming a huge ‘blunder’ pervades the whole of climate science regarding the direction and magnitude of ocean-cloud feedback, the subject of his upcoming book and paper.

What I want to demonstrate is one of the issues that is almost totally forgotten in the global warming debate: long-term climate changes can be caused by short-term random cloud variations.

The main reason this counter-intuitive mechanism is possible is that the large heat capacity of the ocean retains a memory of past temperature change, and so it experiences a “random-walk” like behavior. It is not a true random walk because the temperature excursions from the average climate state are somewhat constrained by the temperature-dependent emission of infrared radiation to space.

As showed previously, an AR coefficient of 0.99 is sufficient to change a random walk behavior (AR=1) to the kind of mean-reverting behavior his model shows. This difference is virtually undetectable using the usual tests on the available 150 years of global temperature data. Global temperature cannot be a random walk, but it can be ‘almost a random walk’. It can also respond to random shocks, such as volcanic eruptions, and sudden injections of GHGs, and oscillating solar forcings while still retaining the random walk character.

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Nicola Scafetta published another paper today, confirming the period dependency of climate sensitivity. (I would have loved to write this, but he attributes the original idea to a book chapter by Wigley in 1988, so its not original anyway.)

In his words, climate sensitivity is frequency dependent:

However, the multiple linear regression analysis is not optimal because the parameters ki and τi might be time-dependent and, in such a case, keeping them constant would yield serious systematic errors in the evaluation of the parameters ki . Moreover, climate models predict that the climate sensitivity to cyclical forcing increases at lower frequencies because of the strong frequency-dependent damping effect of ocean thermal inertia [Wigley, 1988; Foukal et al., 2004].

When the signal is properly decomposed, solar forcing is significantly stronger at longer periods of oscillation:

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Terry McCran’s accusation that CSRIO ‘breached trust’ in The Australian this weekend sounds like an overly possessive lover saying he will never trust them again:

… our two pre-eminent centres of knowledge and public policy analysis across the social and hard sciences spectrum are now literally unbelievable.

In case you hadn’t heard, this is about the unseemly Treasury/Mining Co. cat fight over the RSPT, and Tom Quirk’s fracas with Paul Fraser, the Chief Research Scientist at CSIRO at Quadrant over his article CSIRO Abandons Science identifying a convenient omission in their State of the Climate position statement.

But the State of the Climate report has a number of very odd and questionable statements other than the one Tom wrote about. I will go through them in order:

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Now reading…

Empirical evidence for a celestial origin of the climate oscillations and its implications by Nicola Scafetta

Abstract: We investigate whether or not the decadal and multi-decadal climate oscillations have an astronomical origin. Several global surface temperature records since 1850 and records deduced from the orbits of the planets present very similar power spectra. Eleven frequencies with period between 5 and 100 years closely correspond in the two records. Among them, large climate oscillations with peak-to-trough amplitude of about 0.1 $^oC$ and 0.25 $^oC$, and periods of about 20 and 60 years, respectively, are synchronized to the orbital periods of Jupiter and Saturn. Schwabe and Hale solar cycles are also visible in the temperature records. A 9.1-year cycle is synchronized to the Moon’s orbital cycles. A phenomenological model based on these astronomical cycles can be used to well reconstruct the temperature oscillations since 1850 and to make partial forecasts for the 21$^{st}$ century. It is found that at least 60\% of the global warming observed since 1970 has been induced by the combined effect of the above natural climate oscillations. The partial forecast indicates that climate may stabilize or cool until 2030-2040. Possible physical mechanisms are qualitatively discussed with an emphasis on the phenomenon of collective synchronization of coupled oscillators.

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Even the Age is circling the wounded beast. Time to go to ER.

PORTLAND hospital was rushed into signing a $4.9 million funding agreement for its new GP super clinic so the Rudd government could avoid political embarrassment, a leaked email has revealed.

Hospital management was told to sign the agreement by noon on Wednesday – just moments before shadow treasurer Joe Hockey delivered his post-budget reply to the National Press Club.

Portland District Health chief executive John O’Neill warned his board members of the urgency of the government’s request in an email that morning: “I have been asked to sign this agreement before 12 noon today – that is, before Joe Hockey makes his budget reply … If not signed, funding will be withdrawn.”

A representative Catallaxy comment by JC:

It’s not funny anymore. These people are liars and will stop at nothing to impose a dishonest policy based on a dishonest set of assumptions.

They have to go.

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Cheering developments today show the force of numbers in the debate over the Resource Super Profits Mining Tax:

As the Treasurer implored the mining industry to drop its “rhetoric and threats” and negotiate with the government, his weekend claim that miners pay effective tax rates of between 13 and 17 per cent was torpedoed by tax office figures produced by the opposition.

The ATO data said miners paid an effective rate of 27.8 per cent, which rose to 41.3 per cent with the inclusion of state royalties.

The opposition also sought to undermine the source of Mr Swan’s claims – a paper from the US National Bureau of Economic Research written partly by a graduate student at the North Carolina University whose international comparison lumped Australia and New Zealand together.

The Coalition attacked the research, by PhD student Kevin Markle and professor Douglas Shackelford, as “the shonkiest piece of work”.

Professor Shackelford said:

“[T]he paper is a draft form and likely will undergo additional revision before publication in a peer-reviewed journal. Moreover, the paper’s usefulness in formulating policy for one sector in one country should not be overstated.

In the updated version of the paper, the researchers removed references to mining companies paying an effective tax rate of just 13 to 17 per cent.

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Almost a mea culpa in today’s publication of The impact of global warming on the tropical Pacific Ocean and El Niño (CSIRO and PDF) by a who’s who of atmospheric circulation research including Vecchi, and CSIRO/BoM researchers Cai and Power.

Therefore, despite considerable progress in our understanding of the impact of climate change on many of the processes that contribute to El Niño variability, it is not yet possible to say whether ENSO activity will be enhanced or damped, or if the frequency of events will change.

This is illustrated by figure 3, where some CGCMs show an increase in the amplitude of ENSO variability in the future, some show a decrease, some show no statistically significant changes.

Their paper flatly contradicts Power and Smith [2007] that increased El Ninos are caused by weakening of the pressure differential, indicated by the SOI:

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Sceptic – from the Greek skeptikos one who reflects upon, from skeptesthai to consider.

Scepticism is variously described as a doubting or questioning attitude, a person who uses their mind creatively, or even someone who demands physical evidence in order to be convinced (especially when this demand is out of place).

To consider carefully with regard to evidence is the professional way to approach public affairs, or matters of considerable importance — the opposite of sloppy, credulous, reckless or even foolhardy behavior.

A sceptic is painfully aware that the casual believer is punished when reality is understated and underestimated.

-oil spill greater than first estimated
-Euro zone bailout underestimated
-USD rise underestimated
-oil’s fall underestimated
-tarp underestimated
-unemployment understated
-recession length underestimated
-volcano impact underestimated
-gold’s persistence understated
-housing slump underestimated

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Is the anthropogenic climate change controversy just an episode in an ongoing drama, and if so what is the main theme?

The Catallaxyfiles in RSPT in la la land review a number of biting newspaper editorials on the Resource Super Profits Tax (RSPT), providing a possible answer by replacing a few words.

Funny thing is, Garimpeiro does not think the government and its Treasury [IPCC] advisers actually know that they have been practising deceptions. It’s more a case of them not having an even basic understanding of the industry [climate system] they are tinkering with in a big way.

Which is scarier? They do know what they are doing but are being misleading and deceptive to achieve a given goal. Let’s call that the Nobel Lie Hypothesis. They don’t know what they are doing and are making it up as they go; the Incompetence Hypothesis.

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Hauser’s Law states that tax revenues remain at about 19.5% of GDP. When higher taxes reap more revenue, GDP contracts due to the flight of capital investment to bring the yield back to ~20%. Today I looked at the application of this principle (not really a law) to tax revenues in the State of Queensland (where I live). Eg:

Total GSR – Government sector revenue (2008-9): $37bn
Total GSP – Gross State Product (2008-9): $224bn

Which is 17% and fairly close to the Hauser Law value, and so gives little support for changing the tax rate. Though we would all like to pay less tax, and the Henry tax review lists those inefficient State taxes.

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Will a 40% tax on mining profits increase government revenue from the sector?

If you apply the theoretical perspective of Hauser’s Law, maybe not. Hauser’s Law is based on an empirical observations that no matter what the tax rates have been, in postwar America tax revenues have remained at about 19.5% of GDP.

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Some many interesting posts and discussions going on this week.

Pielke Jr and Sr are in the thick of it with a series of provocative directions. My favourite is the Gang Who Couldn’t Shoot Straight.

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