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

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

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

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

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

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

Carbon Central reports that NSW Land and Environment Court has thrown out most of Australia's first climate change case, agreeing with Macquarie Generation its licence allows it to emit CO2. NSW Environment Defender’s Office (EDO) argued that the Bayswater coal-fired power station breached its operating licence under the NSW Protection of the Environment Operations Act (POEO) by negligently emitting CO2. Justice Pain ruled the POEO Act gave it “implied authority” to emit CO2. Read more [...] 4 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

Problem 1. If temperature is adequately represented by a deterministic trend due to increasing GHGs, why be concerned with the presence of a unit root? Rather than bloviate over the implications of a unit root (integrative behavior) in the global temperature series, a more productive approach is to formulate an hypothesis, and test it. A deterministic model of global temperature (y) and anthropogenic forcing (g) with random errors e is: yt=a+b.gt+ε An autoregressive model of changes in Read more [...] 119 com