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. Read more [...] 10 com

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. Read more [...] 20 com

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 Read more [...] 5 com

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 Read more [...] one

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 Read more [...] none

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 Read more [...] 21 com

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 Read more [...] 12 com

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. Read more [...] 22 com

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 Read more [...] 50 com

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. Read more [...] 21 com

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, Read more [...] none

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. The Stable Stationary Value of the Earth's Global Average Atmospheric Planc-weighted Greenhouse-Gas Optical Thickness by Ferenc Miskolczi, Energy Read more [...] 14 com

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: Insofar as establishment climate science has glossed over and minimized such fundamental questions and uncertainties in climate science, it has created widespread misimpressions that have serious consequences for optimal policy design. Apparently somebody asked "What Read more [...] 12 com

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 Read more [...] 9 com

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 Ï„i might be time-dependent and, in such a case, keeping them constant would yield serious systematic Read more [...] 7 com