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 Read more [...] one

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 Read more [...] 2 com

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 Read more [...] 18 com

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. It easy to see that constant revenue, whatever the tax rate, could give rise to the niche-like Laffer curve, a humped distribution where rates of taxation above or below an optimal rate Read more [...] none

Watts' Tour of Australia is to be announced shortly. He will be visiting a number of major and many minor regional centres, accompanied by David Archibald. I will be speaking at Newcastle, Noosa and Emerald (Q). I have decided to present as much local context as much as possible, structured around a review of the CSIRO State of the Climate Report. This report implies that climate changes in Australia are a result of human emissions of greenhouse gases. I think I will critique this with reviews Read more [...] 12 com

Problem 2. Cointegration was developed in economics to deal with a problem of spurious correlation between series with stochastic trends. Why should spurious correlation be a concern if the trends in temperature and GHGs are deterministic? Sometimes I've been accused of over-simplifying, but I do try to make models as simple as possible, because it avoids a lot of speculation. With that view, this simple model represents paradoxical features of unit roots. Even if there was a deterministic relation Read more [...] 9 com

The acronym ARIMA stands for "Auto-Regressive Integrated Moving Average." Random-walk and random-trend models, autoregressive models, and exponential smoothing models (i.e., exponential weighted moving averages) are all special cases of ARIMA models. An ARIMA model is classified as an "ARIMA(p,d,q)" model, where the current value y is determined by: * p -- the number of lagged terms (AR), * d -- the number of integrations, and * q -- the number of moving average terms (MA). Here is Read more [...] 52 com

Problem 5. Why do most of the forecasts of climate science fail? If climate science had a history of accurate forecasts, it would have a foundation for greater credibility. That is what is expected in other fields. Instead, it is "denialist" to say that climate science has a lousy record of predictions. When I started analysing ecological models in my doctoral studies, it wasn't ideologically unsound to say that the models did a lousy job, and I spent 3 years trying to work out why. Wouldn't Read more [...] 35 com

Problem 3. Why is the concept of ‘climate’ distinguished from the concept of ‘weather’ by an arbitrary free parameter, usually involved in averaging or smoothing or ’scale’ transformations of 10 to 30 years? The recent article on Question #9 by Meiers and response by Stephen Goddard used a coin toss analogy to answer this question. Meiers states that while the uncertainty of the probability of heads in the short term is high, over the long term we expect Read more [...] 17 com

Prompted by the interest VS has rekindled in fundamental analysis of the temperature series at Bart's and Lucia's blogs, below are a small set of core 'problems' facing statistical climate science (CS) -- kind of a challenge. Remember a deterministic trend is one brought about by a changing value of the mean, due to a change in an equilibrium value for example (ie non-stationary). A stochastic trend is due the accumulation of random variations; all parameters are stationary. Problem 1. If temperature Read more [...] 2 com

False forecasts are not without consequences. How to think about this? Opposition to "Crying Wolf" is growing. A report by a British MP claims the World Health Organisation and other public health bodies have "gambled away" public confidence by overstating the dangers of the flu pandemic. "This decline in confidence could be risky in the future," says the report, seen by the Guardian. "When the next pandemic arises many persons may not give full credibility to recommendations put forward by WHO Read more [...] 11 com

The "State of the Climate" report from two of Australia's lead agencies, the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM) and CSIRO, states that total rainfall has been "relatively stable" last century, but omitted their own data that clearly shows total rainfall increasing. The fine print at the bottom of BoM graph says rainfall has increased at the "relatively stable" rate of 6.3mm per decade. On downloading the data and fitting a linear regression, the upwards slope is significantly greater than zero as follows. Slope=0.63 Read more [...] 85 com

A couple of recent posts challenging global warming science have not been picked up by other observers. While real scientists find Climategate distasteful, it does not necessarily challenge the pillars of AGW logic. These latest developments do, and perhaps give the insightful a heads-up of the direction of challenges to come. The first is Loehle, Craig. 2010. The estimation of historical CO2 trajectories is indeterminate: Comment on "A new look at atmospheric carbon dioxide." Atmospheric Environment, Read more [...] 4 com

I(0), I(1) or I(2)? What does it all mean? Below is a visual presentation of CO2 concentration from Mauna Loa and global temperature from GISS, demonstrating the difference in their order of integration. The blue series is the increasing level of CO2 in annual steps. Differencing means to successively subtract the previous value at each step, giving the change at each step (the delta or dCO2 shown in magenta). Differencing again gives ddCO2 shown in yellow. After these two differences the Read more [...] 117 com

A short post, but it doesn't take much to show that CSIRO and BoM are telling porkies again in their just released State of Climate report. Just click here to get a graph showing the INCREASING trend in rainfall. The report states: 2. Rainfall While total rainfall on the Australian continent has been relatively stable ... The fine print at the bottom left says: "Linear trend of 6.33mm decade." Related Links: Some quick thoughts on CSIRO drought info. Debate on lack of skill of drought models. Little Read more [...] 78 com

Beenstock's radical theory needs to be tested. As discussed here, he proposed that CHANGE in greenhouse gases (delta GHGs or dGHGs) not absolute values produces global warming. A simple test is to develop linear regression models predicting temperature, with and without GHG and dGHG. If Beenstock's theory is correct, then models containing dGHG should be more accurate. The protocol was to develop and test linear regression models on all the temperature data from 1900 to 2004 (internal test), Read more [...] 57 com

It’s incredible that a global warming theory could agree with both the IPCC (discernable anthropogenic influence) and the sceptics (low long term risk from emissions) but there you are. The analysis of Greenstock suggests it is not the amount of greenhouse gasses, particularly CO2, in the atmosphere that contributes to global warming, but the change in the amount. That is, when the rate of CO2 produced is increasing -- as it was last century -- this increases the global temperature. Conversely, Read more [...] 98 com

Sea level data from Church appear be integrated as I(1). d Root ADF Padf [1,] 0 0.9713052 -0.8354583 0.9561317 [2,] 1 -0.2771277 -5.8808801 0.0100000 [3,] 2 -1.1410606 -8.1287823 0.0100000 As does Jevrejeva's data set from 1700. d Root ADF Padf [1,] 0 0.7552908 -2.106932 0.5312376 [2,] 1 -0.4415736 -9.329505 0.0100000 [3,] 2 -1.3634252 -12.083777 0.0100000 And while the correlation is high when sea level is added into the linear model, the sea Read more [...] 3 com

So now the fun starts. We have established the integration order of the variables in the RadF file, we impose the rule that only variables of the same order can be combined, and in particular that they cannot be cointegrated with temperature which is I(1). In this case all the anthropogenic variables in RadF are I(2) -- W-M_GHGs, O3, StratH2O, LandUse, SnowAlb, BC, ReflAer, AIE -- while Solar and StratAer are I(1) or I(0). Adding these AGW variables together would be one way, as they are Read more [...] 38 com

The test of integration order from the previous post is applied to the major atmospheric forcings used in the GISS global climate models in recent years. These are available for 1880 to 2003 in a file called RadF.txt The codes for the forcings are self explanatory: W-M_GHGs, O3, StratH2O, Solar, LandUse, SnowAlb, StratAer, BC, ReflAer, AIE. Below is the sum of the forcings. We want to know the integration order of the global surface temperature series as well. The result: Temp=1, Read more [...] 27 com

Here we generate and test a number of series with different integration order I(n) and polynomial order O(n). The test is the Augmented Dickey Fuller test, one of the most well known of the unit root tests. Beenstock used three tests, because the tests for unit roots are known to have low power. The six series shown above are as follows (black, red, green): In the first group is a random series I(0), the integrated random series I(1), and the twice integrated random series I(2). The second Read more [...] 22 com

A draft of a paper by Beenstock and Reingewertz has surfaced in the blogosphere, but there seems to be confusion about what unit roots and cointegration are, and I can’t find anywhere on the web that explains them simply for the average Joe. Given one can’t understand the paper without a good grasp of these concepts; I am going to do a few posts in an attempt to make their argument clearer. The ‘differential diagnosis’ of Beenstock that GHG’s are not giving plant Read more [...] 19 com

A recent Nature paper we have been reviewing, claims recent snowfall at Law Dome, Antarctica and the drought in Western Australia "lies outside the range of variability for the record as a whole". Being about precipitation (often more important to us than temperature), and claims of evidence of AGW causing drought, its interesting. I finally succeeded in replicating the results but only after resorting to viewing the code, due to omissions in the description of methods. Below I argue (at the end) Read more [...] 11 com

I try not to pen editorials. OK here goes. I respect the attention given to this blog, as there are plenty of other great blogs on climate change, politics, finance, etc to read. I try to stay an 'on message' advocate for numeracy. Everyone has something to offer from their experiences though. Right at this moment, there is something to say that is important about numeracy, but takes a bit to explain. I would encourage y'all to read the discussion on New paper on mathematical analysis of GHG Read more [...] 60 com

While the US has had record snowfalls, Australia has had its own excesses of precipitation. Below is a 30 day loop of precipitation. The sequence starts with cyclone Olga crossing the coast in the far north east, moving into the Gulf, and tracking south with widespread rain down through the central east and south east. The rain quickly moves to the east, with heavy rain and storms on the east coast, especially Sydney, but then appears to 'bounce west' and collide with a very large trough to bring Read more [...] 9 com

Just posted on arXiv: The virial theorem and planetary atmospheres by Viktor T. Toth. Abstract We derive a version of the virial theorem that is applicable to diatomic planetary atmospheres that are in approximate thermal equilibrium at moderate temperatures and pressures and are sufficiently thin such that the gravitational acceleration can be considered constant. We contrast a pedagogically inclined theoretical presentation with the actual measured properties of air. Read more [...] 120 com

Please discuss the new paper by Michael Beenstock and Yaniv Reingewertz here. Way back in early 2006 I posted on an exchange with R. Kaufmann, whose cointegration modelling is referenced in the paper, entitled Peer censorship and fraud. He was complaining at RealClimate about the supression of these lines of inquiry by the general circulation modellers. The post gives a number of examples that were topical at the time. ClimateGate bears it out. Steve McIntyre wrote a long post on the affair here. [R]ealclimate’s Read more [...] 73 com

The claim that "the precipitation anomaly of the past few decades in Law Dome is the largest in 750 years, and lies outside the range of variability for the record as a whole", is a 'Hockeystick-like' claim. Such claims have a considerable literature, and the analysis I have been doing is reminiscent of Rybski et.al. on the temperature record. Koutsoyiannis has a career of work grappling with non-normal statistics in hydrological data, using models with long-term-persistence, and the difficulty Read more [...] 40 com

Here is the distribution of annual snowfall in Law Dome Antarctica over the last 750 years (blue), compared to a normal (dashed red) and a lognormal (solid red) distribution. Remember that in the finest Popperian tradition we are trying to disprove that the snowfall in the last few decades at Law Dome has been unusual. To do this, I have used a robust approach of aggregation (splitting the series into equal sized section), estimating the parameters of the lognormal distribution, then plotting Read more [...] 11 com

Yes I watch "House". I wanted to return to the issue of whether the snowfall in Antarctica is normally distributed, as it has bearing on the claim in van Ommen and Morgan from the abstract: The precipitation anomaly of the past few decades in Law Dome is the largest in 750 years, and lies outside the range of variability for the record as a whole, suggesting that the drought in Western Australia may be similarly unusual. The relevant passage in the supplementary information where normality is Read more [...] 3 com