Right now I am in Emerald, Qld., Australia with choppers droning constantly overhead in the middle of a flood event, having spent the last few days bagging sand for friends' houses. I have been through this a few times now, having grown up in country areas. I want to document how poorly BoM modeling has served the community during this event. No flood risk was projected initially. Dec 25th: The main rain fell on Christmas day in the catchment, a widespread 4-6 inches. Dec 27th: The Read more [...] 25 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

A very interesting couple of graphs were posted by Bill Illis here. The sensitivity of the climate system to CO2 (or its doubling) has often been estimated from the left-over warming after removing natural variations. Bill uses a very simple and straightforward approach of fitting a regression of the atmospheric temperature from RSS to selected ocean basins. He arrives at the following graph and regression: Bill also makes a prediction of temperatures over the next few months, which is Read more [...] 2 com

Global warming probably didn't cause the drought in Australia's South-East Queensland according to a new paper from CSIRO. Apparently the drought was caused when a discombobulation of the ENSO Modoki teleconnection transmogrified the rainfall into a distillation of the Johnny Walker spirulation at the convention center on Hayman Island during the post-positive phase of Pacific decadal osculation. Being a post-postitive sceptic myself about droughts being caused by global warming, along with Read more [...] 15 com

From Chapter 2 of the inquiry, h/t Warwick Hughes. 2.69 The Committee was astounded to learn that private enterprises are apparently able to forecast particular seasonal conditions and events, which may not necessarily have been forecast by our leading national agencies. The question that came to the mind of Committee members when this issue came to light was “how did you forecast these events and why didn’t anyone else?” When considering the skills, knowledge and expertise in our national Read more [...] 16 com

As they used to say about the assassination of President Kennedy, "I remember where I was when I heard about it." My first post a few days later was entitled Climategate. More was done in Climategate than in all the rebuttals of climate science alarmism that have been published. So many things have changed since then, some good and some bad, qualifying Climategate as a truly defining event. Some of the things I have noticed: Scientific society popinjays waving the IPCC consensus in our Read more [...] 6 com

JN reports another study confirming the finding that alterations to Australian raw weather data have increased the official trend by over 30%. A recent submission to the arXiv archive suggests that altering the data to "inflate and dramatize weather conditions" may have a long tradition. The Weather and its Role in Captain Robert F. Scott and his Companions' Deaths by Krzysztof Sienicki Abstract: A long debate has ensued about the relationship of weather conditions and Antarctic Read more [...] 3 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

In The National Science Foundation Funds Multi-Decadal Climate Predictions Without An Ability To Verify Their Skill Roger Pielke Sr. links GCM skill at predicting drought with natural variation: 2. “Future efforts to predict drought will depend on models’ ability to predict tropical SSTs.” In other words, there is NO way to assess the skill of these models are predicting drought as they have not yet shown any skill in SST predictions on time scales longer than a season, nor natural climate Read more [...] 2 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

My critique of models used in a major Australian drought study appeared in Energy and Environment last month (read Critique-of-DECR-EE here). It deals with validation of models (the subject of a recent post by Judith Curry), and regional model disagreement with rainfall observations (see post by Willis here). The main purpose is summed up in the last sentence of the abstract: The main conclusion and purpose of the paper is to provide a case study showing the need for more rigorous and explicit Read more [...] 5 com

I'm seeing a few articles on Government-sponsored science lately that seem particularly applicable to the climate change research: A short review of Economic Laws of Scientific Research links to an overview of the area, particularly the Cato Institute Scientists may love government money, and politicians may love the power its expenditure confers upon them, but society is impoverished by the transaction. Another in a similar vein on medical research reminds me of Craig Venter's decoding Read more [...] 20 com

Kenskingdom demonstrates again the wisdom of 'trust, but verify': I compared the adjusted [Australian Temperature] data with the raw data of these 34 stations. Here are the results, and they are perplexing. * I was expecting to find a stronger warming trend in the urban data than the 100 non-urban sites. WRONG. * I was expecting to find BOM correcting for UHI, that is, reducing the trend. PARTLY RIGHT. But less often than with the non-urban sites. * I was expecting the urban Read more [...] one

From Roger Pielke Sr: Writing in 2005, Hansen, Willis, Schmidt et al. suggested that GISS model projections had been verified by a solid decade of increasing ocean heat (1993 to 2003). This was regarded as further confirmation the IPCC’s AGW hypothesis. Their expectation was that the earth’s climate system would continue accumulating heat more or less monotonically. Now that heat accumulation has stopped (and perhaps even reversed), the tables have turned. The same criteria used to Read more [...] one

Published drought paper here and preprint here. Citation: Stockwell, David R.B., 2010. Critique of Drought Models in the Australian Drought Exceptional Circumstances Report (DECR), Energy & Environment, 21:5, 425-436, DOI:10.1260/0958-305X.21.5.425, Link:http://multi-science.metapress.com/content/L4870G0N8Q064377 Read more [...] 7 com

In 2009, the Queensland Climate Change Centre of Excellence prepared a series of reports detailing projected climate changes for 13 regions throughout Queensland. The reports provide a high-level summary of projected changes and an accessible overview of the potential impacts to a wide audience, including: # a tendency for less rainfall, particularly in central and southern regions throughout winter and spring; # more severe droughts, occurring with increasing frequency; CO2 Science reviews Read more [...] 16 com

More evidence of worthless model predictions from CO2 Science: All of the future flow-rates calculated by Steynor et al. exhibited double-digit negative percentage changes that averaged -25% for one global climate model and -50% for another global climate model; and in like manner the mean past trend of four of Lloyd's five stations was also negative (-13%). But the other station had a positive trend (+14.6%). In addition, by "examination of river flows over the past 43 years in the Breede River Read more [...] one

Matt Ridley's article sensibly concludes that the likely outcome is very mild AGW. So I have concluded that global warming will most probably be a fairly minor problem - at least compared with others such as poverty and habitat loss - for nature as well as people. After watching the ecologically and economically destructive policies enacted in its name (biofuels, wind power), I think we run the risk of putting a tourniquet around our collective necks to stop a nosebleed. He suggests the Read more [...] none

A recipe for more reliable climate correlations with solar factors - use long temperature records such as Portugal for 140 years (from 1865 to 2005). Another study showing around half of decadal to centennial variations in temperature can be attributed to Cosmic Ray Flux. Monthly averaged temperature series have been analyzed together with monthly North-Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) index data, sunspot numbers (W) and cosmic ray (CR) flux intensity. The absolute values of the correlation coefficients Read more [...] none

Another example today of an upper atmosphere trough (note the kink in the isobars and the embedded high in the centre) dragging in tropical moisture at altitude. This is a major source of widespread rains. none

The latest paper by Roy Spencer claiming negative feedback from AGW really has the alarmists choking on their baguettes, so I thought I would try to explain it with an analogy. Feedbacks represent a secondary effect, but its not that much harder to understand with the following analogy. Imagine the atmosphere as a bucket. Short-wave solar radiation pours in the top (yellow arrow), some splashes out (orange arrow), and long wave radiation out a hole in the bottom (red arrow). The level Read more [...] one

On the comparisons of Climate Models from Douglass et al here is a table showing how well(?) the CSIRO Mark 3 model performed. In layers near 5 km, the modelled trend is 100 to 300% higher than observed, and, above 8 km, modelled and observed trends have opposite signs. The raw data are from http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~douglass/papers/Published%20JOC1651.pdf (2007). Table II. (a). Temperature trends for 22 CGCM Models with 20CEN forcing. The numbered models are fully identified in Table Read more [...] one

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

In the IAC Report released today, Working Group II comes in for particular criticism. Working Group II assesses the vulnerability of socioeconomic and natural systems to climate change, negative and positive consequences of climate change, and options for adapting to it. The vindicates what I have been saying, that the worst of climate alarmism comes from the climate effects people. For fabricating evidence: The Working Group II Summary for Policy Makers has been criticized for various errors Read more [...] none

Urban areas differ from rural areas in a number of well known ways, but the IPCC summaries maintain that these effects have been effectively removed when they talk about the recent (post 1960) increases in global surface temperature. Continuing the series on how bad climate models really are, another paper is in the pipeline on the long-standing influence of urban heat effects (UHI) in the surface temperature data. Ross McKitrick reports that between 1/2 and 1/3 of the recent increase in temperature Read more [...] none

Due to building the website for The Climate Sceptics I haven't been able to post despite some important events. My site and other files were deleted in some kind of attack, so I have had to rebuild it as well. I now have the WordPress 3.0 multiuser system which enable easy creation and management of multiple blogs, so its an ill wind eh? The important event I refer to is the release of "Panel and Multivariate Methods for Tests of Trend Equivalence in Climate Data Series" by Ross McKitrick, Stephen Read more [...] 9 com

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. ... 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 Read more [...] 6 com

Ken Stewart has released his much awaited review of the Australian High Quality Sites. His conclusion: The High Quality data does NOT give an accurate record of Australian temperatures over the last 100 years. BOM has produced a climate record that can only be described as a guess. The best we can say about Australian temperature trends over the last 100 years is “Temperatures have gone down and up where we have good enough records, but we don’t know enough.” If Anthropogenic Read more [...] 4 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