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 II(b).

Pressure (hPa)–>Surface 1000 925 850 700 600 500 400 300 250 200 150 100 Model Sims.∗ Trends (milli °C/decade)

1 9 128 303 121 177 161 172 190 216 247 263 268 243 40
2 5 125 1507 113 112 123 126 138 148 140 105 2 −114 −161
3 5 311 318 336 346 376 422 484 596 672 673 642 594 253
4 5 95 92 99 99 131 179 158 184 212 224 182 169 −3
5 5 210 302 224 215 249 264 293 343 391 408 400 319
6 4 119 118 148 175 189 214 238 283 365 406 425 393 −33
7 4 112 460 107 123 122 130 155 183 213 228 225 211 0
8 3 86 62 57 58 82 95 108 134 160 163 155 137 100
9 3 142 143 148 150 149 162 200 234 273 284 282 258 163
10 3 189 114 200 210 225 238 269 316 345 348 347 308 53
11 3 244 403 270 278 309 331 377 449 503 481 461 405 75
12 3 80 173 114 115 102 98 124 150 161 164 166 142 4
13 2 162 155 170∗∗ 182 225 218 221 282 352 360 340 277 −39
14 2 171 293 190 197 252 245 268 328 376 367 326 278 69
15 2 163 213 174 181 199 204 226 271 307 299 255 166 53
16 2 119 128 124 140 151 176 197 228 271 289 306 260 120
17 2 219 −1268 199 223 259 283 321 373 427 454 479 465 280
18 1 117 117 126 148 163 159 180 207 227 225 203 200 16
19 1 230 220 267 283 313 346 410 506 561 554 526 521 244
20 1 191 151 176 194 212 237 254 304 387 410 400 367 314
21 1 191 328 241 222 193 187 215 255 300 316 327 304 90
22 1 28 24 46 73 27 −26 −26 −1 20 24 32 −1 −136

Total simulations: 67

Average 156 198 166 177 191 203 227 272 314 320 307 268 78
Std. Dev. (σ) 64 443 72 70 82 96 109 131 148 149 154 160 124
∗ ‘Sims.’ refers to the number of simulations over which averages
CSIRO are number 15, with results compared to average of 67 runs on the line below

CSIRO 163 213 174 181 199 204 226 271 307 299 255 166 53
AVERAGE 156 198 166 177 191 203 227 272 314 320 307 268 78
Std. Dev. 64 443 72 70 82 96 109 131 148 149 154 160 124

h/t Geoff Sherrington

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 say I should always pursue noble objectives, lift up the downtrodden masses of Africa and Asia, stamp out disease and poverty and generally bring peace to the world. Alas, no.

”The most important item on the agenda at any international conference,” he resumed, ”is to fix the date of the next meeting – and of course the location.”

However – and it was a big however – if a conference succeeded in wiping out poverty or pestilence, there would be no prospect of trying to go to another conference the following year on the same subject. Concentrating on the date of the next conference would guarantee poverty and pestilence would still be there the next year and would provide the excuse for another year’s travel, entertainment, spending other people’s money, passing pious resolutions and generally being self-important, all of which are the only reasons for being in politics or diplomacy.

I soon learnt that seasoned players on the international scene knew very well the vital importance of the golden rule. For example, Sir Owen Dixon told me that when he was appointed the first UN troubleshooter on Kashmir, he went to New York to recruit an assistant. Someone recommended a young man in the UN building who, believe it or not, actually had the job description ”to bring peace to the world”.

”Do you like your job?” Sir Owen asked. ”Well, at least it’s permanent,” he replied. This young man, who had a stellar career at the UN thereafter, was right, because the intractable problem of Kashmir has, by definition, still not been solved and in the intervening years has provided immense fodder for studies, working groups, theses, working breakfasts, dinners, lunches and, of course, international conferences.

Statesmen and politicians did not achieve all of this by solving the problem of Kashmir; they did it by failing and by making sure that next year the crisis would be the gift that keeps on giving.

There was also a secret protocol to the golden rule, shielded from the prying eyes of the public as far as possible – to make sure that the location of the conference was somewhere nice, for example, fleshpots such as Casablanca, holiday spots such as Bali or ski resorts such as Davos.

The proof of the pudding is, of course, in the eating. Thus, despite the fact that almost everyone says that Copenhagen was a success because it narrowly avoided being a failure, the cognoscenti know it was a great success because it was such an appalling failure.

First, climate change is as bad as it ever was. None of the weasel words of progress and achievement about keeping temperatures down can conceal the good news that the whole thing was a disaster.

If the alarmists are right, climate change can only get worse. If they are wrong, the issue still is likely to have such life in it that it could last as long as Kashmir before the truth dawns.

Second, since Kyoto and again since Bali, we were told incessantly that Copenhagen was the last chance to prevent the world being plunged into a watery grave. Everyone was going to Copenhagen in the belief that it was a last chance to save the planet.

When I heard this, I mourned for the international political and diplomatic brotherhood of which I was once a part; they clearly were not going to be able to stretch climate change beyond Copenhagen as the excuse for more conferences, new taxes, tougher and more complicated laws and the perpetual extortion of money from poor workers in rich countries to rich kleptomaniacs in poor countries that foreign aid has become. Some other issue would have to be found.

Fortunately, this has turned out not to be the case. Mercifully, climate change will be there for at least another year to take its vengeance on a profligate and decadent world. It will provide the excuse for conferences next year and for years beyond. So also is the secret protocol intact: conferences on climate change will never be held anywhere near Darfur or Bangladesh.

Neil Brown is a barrister and former member of Federal Parliament, h/t to Geoff Sherrington.

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 is due to this contamination (Ross’s website here).

The methodology uses the regression coefficients from the socioeconomic variables to estimate the trend distribution after removing the estimated non-climatic biases in the temperature data. On observational data this reduces the mean warming trend by between one-third and one-half, but it does not affect the mean surface trend in the model-generated data. Again this is
consistent with the view that the observations contain a spatial contamination pattern not present in, or predicted by, the climate models.

Note that this rather gross bias is not present in or predicted by the climate models, meaning the climate models do not have the physical mechanisms to model it. One consequence is that if the models are to fit the recent increase in temperature, some other (incorrect) mechanism must be used (such as H2O feedback perhaps – I don’t know).

Ross has written up the backstory of the all too common obstacles to publication of articles questioning the IPCC here:

In the aftermath of Climategate a lot of scientists working on global warming-related topics are upset that their field has apparently lost credibility with the public. The public seems to believe that climatology is beset with cliquish gatekeeping, wagon-circling, biased peer-review, faulty data and statistical incompetence. In response to these perceptions, some scientists are casting around, in op-eds and weblogs, for ideas on how to hit back at their critics. I would like to suggest that the climate science community consider instead whether the public might actually have a point.

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 McIntyre and Chad Herman (2010). Nobody is talking about it, and I don’t know why, as it has a history almost as long as the hockey stick on McIntyre’s blog (summary here), and is a powerful condemnation of climate models in the PRL.

I feel a series coming on, as these results deliver a stunning blow to the last leg that alarmists have been standing on, i.e. model credulity. Also because I have a paper coming out in a similar vein, dealing with drought models in regional Australia.

Using a rigorous methodology on 57 runs from 23 model simulations of the lower troposphere (LT) and mid-troposphere (MT) with forcing inputs from the realistic A1B emission scenario, and four observational temperature series: two satellite-borne microwave sounding unit (MSU)-derived series and two balloon-borne radiosonde series, over two time periods from 1979-99 and 1999-2009, they tested a mismatch between models and observed trends in the tropical troposphere. This represents a basic validation test of climate models over a 30 year period, a validation test which SHOULD be fundamental to any belief in the models, and their usefulness for projections of global warming in the future.

The results are shown in their figure:

… the differences between models and observations now exceed the 99% critical value. As shown in Table 1 and Section 3.3, the model trends are about twice as large as observations in the LT layer, and about four times as large in the MT layer.

Read the rest of this entry…

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 Global Warming is so certain, why the need to exaggerate?

It is most urgent and important that we have a full scientific investigation, completely independent of BOM, CSIRO, or the Department of Climate Change, into the official climate record of Australia.

I will ask Dr Jones for his response.

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. He averaged maxima and minima for all stations at each site, then compared the result with the High Quality means. By these calculations (averaging the trend at each site in Victoria) the raw trend is 0.35 degrees C per 100 years, and the High Quality state trend is 0.83C. That’s a warming bias of 133%!

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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 frequency of drought resulting from anthropogenic global warming. Three specific and different statistical techniques show that the simulation of the occurrence of extreme high temperatures last century was adequate, but the simulation of the occurrence of extreme low rainfall was unacceptably poor. In particular, the simulations indicate that the measure of hydrological drought increased significantly last century, while the observations indicate a significant decrease. The main conclusion and purpose of the paper is to provide a case study showing the need for more rigorous and explicit validation of climate models if they are to advise government policy.

Meanwhile, scientists are finding new ways to communicate worthless forecasts to decision makers.

These models have been the basis of climate information issued for national and seasonal forecasting and have been used extensively by Australian industries and governments. The results of global climate models are complex, and constantly being refined. Scientists are trialling different ways of presenting climate information to make it more useful for a range of people.

Conducting professional validation assessment of models would be a start, followed by admitting they are so uncertain they should be ignored.

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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 with them. Central Queensland turned on one of its trademark sunsets for Anthony:

It was good to spend a bit of time with Anthony and catch up on the goss — well not really gossip, but about bloggers and the people behind the curtain. You know how it is, you tend to get a certain view of the people involved, but when you learn more about them, it turns out they are just regular people who put their hand up for something they believe in.

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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 males, then we could presume there is selective pressure on this feature — an important item of information. This could be detected statistical significant (e.g. the distribution differ in a Chi–squared test).

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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 of this function can be termed the ‘fundamental niche’ of the species, and may be equated with a physiochemical optimum unaffected by competition.

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