There is quite a lot happening in AGW, but once again, a busy week moving house and time of the year issues, so my apologies. Here are some of events that seem to be emerging as important:

Plimer

Plimer responds to his critics in The Australian with Vitriolic climate in academic hothouse.

The cash cow climate institutes now seem to be drowning in their own self-importance.

Funny, I called his book a bit vitriolic here Backpackers Guide to Global Warming, though I must admit Peter Gallagher’s choice of the word invective is perhaps more apt. Nice to see Gavin Schmidt giving constructive feedback on his blog.

Double Dissolution

I wanted to head this up with the quote, but I see Roy Spencer beat me to it.

“There is something fascinating about science [anthropogenic global warming]. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture from such a trifling investment of fact.” -Mark Twain, Life on the Mississippi (1883)

The rejections of the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) legislation in the Senate is moving Australia towards a double dissolution trigger. For my international readers, a double dissolution resolves deadlocks between the House of Representatives and the Senate, where under Section 57 of the Australian Constitution, every seat is contested in a fresh election.

arXiv

There have been a number of interesting modeling publications in arXiv I wish to draw attention too, particularly An updated comparison of model ensemble and observed temperature trends in the tropical troposphere by Stephen McIntyre, Ross McKitrick indicates Santer et al (2008) gratuitously truncated his data, again.

John Daly reported back in 1996 that a paper published in the journal “Nature” (Vol.382, 4 July 1996, p.39-46) by Ben Santer and others called “A Search For Human Influences On The Thermal Structure Of The Atmosphere” was trumpeted by as the final `proof’ that AGW was already here, proved not just by models, but also by actual observed data (thanks to Michael Sirks). He reports this inspired the much quoted claim that there was “… a discernible human influence on global climate”.

Alas it was not to be. Five months later `Nature’ published two rebuttals from other climate scientists Prof Patrick Michaels and Dr Paul Knappenberger, both of the University of Virginia, who said:

“When we examine the period of record used by Santer et al. (1st graph) in the context of the longer period available from ref.5 (2nd graph), we find that in the region with the most significant warming (30-600 S. 850-300 hPa), the increase is largely an artefact of the time period chosen”

Santer had truncated almost 10 years of the most recent data to get his result!

Apparently he finds the lure of truncation irresistible. In association with 16 other authors, he again truncated the most recent results. M&M claim that bringing the results up to date reverses the results.

Publications

I also have a publication coming out soon. Stay tuned for more.