New E-Cat website here. Nice. Patronizing essay at the Conversation. My guess is that as the "Climate Crisis" continues to fizzle, the less gullible skeptical scientists will take a more prominent place. The credibility of CSIRO, BoM and Astronomers will likely suffer for the certainty they have voiced, their deference to the IPCC, and defense of poor practices. Newt Gingrich now leading in the GOP polls. A man for the time? UPDATE: Good article on why Newt will lead - its his command of Read more [...] none
Paraphrasing Steve Jobs -- reasons not to pursue renewables: 1. Anti-environment. Increasing the concentration of generation allows larger areas of land to be retained in their natural state. In contrast, harvesting of land for biomass, wind or solar or energy damages more land. Advocates of renewable energy damn the natural environment with ugly, dangerous solar and wind structures. 2. Backwards. The progress of civilization is characterized by the utilization of denser, more intense energy Read more [...] 11 com
Seth Godin, a blogger I admire greatly, suggests we publish a list of accomplishments for the year (What did you ship in 2010?). Peer-reviewed publication demonstrating that policy-makers are being misled by inadequate climate models. Hosted a venue for the "Watts Up With the Climate" Tour of Australia. Gave four public lectures on climate skepticism, arguing that the forecasts of prominent climate modelers are not reliable. Contributed to two articles on the ABC community blog site Read more [...] 3 com
Another day, another half-baked green scheme busted as $150 million is blown on a clean coal scheme. Common sense tells us that burning a bulk substance, only to recapture it and return it back to where it came from will be very expensive. And, OMG, that's what they found. Its a good example of moral hazard, as the scientists, policy makers and advisers bear none of the costs that all fall on the long-suffering taxpayer. The list of green debacles in the state of Queensland (with a GDP about Read more [...] 2 com
Roger Pielke Sr. reviews another very important new paper showing the abuse of models. In the opinion of the editor Kundzewicz (who has served prominently on the IPCC), climate models were only designed to provide a broad assessment of the response of the global climate system to greenhouse gas (GHG) forcings, and to serve as the basis for devising a set of GHG emissions policies. They were not designed for regional adaptation studies. To expect more from these models is simply unrealistic, Read more [...] 23 com
The APS reminds me of the Australian Prime Minister's Standing Committee on Climate Change. Some of the more choice parts of Hal's resignation letter are extracted below. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of Read more [...] 13 com
Attributed to NEIL BROWN, December 26, 2009 UNLIKE most people, who think Copenhagen was a failure, I think it was a great success. It has preserved the golden rule of international diplomacy. Years ago, when I was a young fellow and started to go to international conferences, an old hand who was about to retire took me aside. ''I'll be shoving off into retirement soon,'' he said, ''so I thought I might pass on the golden rule of international conferences." I was fascinated. I was sure he would Read more [...] 3 com
This site since 2006 has dealt with current scientific issues, through feedback or drawing attention to articles -- perhaps even your own! We prefer articles that show a fascination with evidence from numbers -- that share the passion -- and welcome critical feedback as a path to knowledge. The range of topics considered is wide, whether it be stock predictors, maths, statistics, ecology, climate, betting systems or money, algorithms for predicting things or automated trading systems for FOREX. Read more [...] 18 com
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, Read more [...] 34 com
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. My wife does not provide the best example of demonization, but it is current, motivational and recent and on my mind. Please excuse me if I become too personal. The important part is not the personal part. It is Read more [...] 30 com
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''. So far its a case of the academic defense: "Oops, I lied." Sir Muir Russell, the chairman of the Judicial Appointments Board for Scotland, notes that senior climate scientists say their world has been dramatically changed by Read more [...] 8 com
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
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
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 Read more [...] 30 com
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 Read more [...] 53 com
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 Read more [...] 9 com
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 Read more [...] 14 com
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 Read more [...] 32 com

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