"How much do I fail thee. Let me count the ways" Ben Santer's latest model/observation comparison paper demonstrates that climate realists were right and climate models exaggerate warming: The multimodel average tropospheric temperature trends are outside the 5–95 percentile range of RSS results at most latitudes. Where do the models fail? 1. Significantly warmer than reality (95% CI) in the lower troposphere at all latitudes, except for the arctic. 2. Significantly warmer Read more [...] one

Bob Tisdale, author of the awesome book “Who Turned on the Heat?” presented an interesting problem that turns out to be a good application of robust statistical tests called empirical fluctuation processes. Bob notes that sea surface temperature (SST) in a large region of the globe in the Eastern Pacific does not appear to have warmed at all in the last 30 years, in contrast to model simulations (CMIP SST) for that region that show strong warming. The region in question is shown below. The Read more [...] 2 com

Cointegration has been mentioned previously and is one of the highest ranking search terms on landshape. We have also discussed the cointegration manuscript from 2009 by Beenstock and Reingewertz, and I see he has picked up another author and submitted it to an open access journal here. Here is the abstract. Polynomial cointegration tests of anthropogenic impact on global warming M. Beenstock, Y. Reingewertz, and N. Paldor Abstract. We use statistical methods for nonstationary time Read more [...] one

I read an interesting article article about Peter Martin, head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics. He has a refreshing, mature attitude to his job. 'I want people to challenge our data - that's a good thing, it helps us pick things up,' he says. Big contrast to the attitude of Climate Scientists. Examples that they believe they cannot be challenged are legion, from meetings to peer review. For example, emails expressing disagreement with the science are treated as threatening, as Read more [...] one

Using realtime trends in Twitter to track frontrunners Ron Paul, Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich.

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A couple of new entries in the links section: Sabermetric Research does it own sports research and reviews statistical studies of sports research. I added this after reading one of my Chrissy gifts - Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game - by Michael Lewis, now a movie starring Brad Pitt, a David vs Goliath story of stats over precedent. Status Iatrogenicus by Scott K. Aberegg, M.D., and ER physician in Salt Lake City who also has a Medical Evidence Blog I follow. This blog is about Read more [...] none

Sea levels, recently updated with 10 new data-points, reinforce the hiatus described as a 'pothole' by Josh Willis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., who says you can blame the pothole on the cycle of El Niño and La Niña in the Pacific: This temporary transfer of large volumes of water from the oceans to the land surfaces also helps explain the large drop in global mean sea level. But they also expect the global mean sea level to begin climbing again. Attributing the Read more [...] 7 com

The NIPCC - Interim Report 2011 updates their last 2009 Report, with an overview of the research on climate change that the IPCC did not see fit to print. Its published by the Heartland Institute with lead authors Craig D. Idso, Australian Robert Carter, and S. Fred Singer with a number of other significant contributions. I am grateful for inclusion of some of my work in Chapter 6 on the uncertainty of the range-shift method for modeling biodiversity under climate change. The controversy Read more [...] 5 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

What did they say about warming in Antarctica? In a review by Professor Will Steffen, Australian National University, commissioned by the Department of Climate Change and a major input to Labor government policy advanced also by Senator Wong in her discussions with Senator Fielding: “Climate Change 2009: Faster Change & More Serious Risks” A recent analysis shows warming of about 0.1°C per decade over the West Antarctica region over the last half century, attributed in part to changes Read more [...] 7 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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