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

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

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 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

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

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

From Nature (see http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/ngeo761.html): "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." Climate science has a colorful history of hyperbole: hurricanes, droughts, floods, fires, famines. Old habits die hard and so do true believers. I want to turn attention to the Read more [...] none

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

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

Here is the second major claim contained in van Ommen and Morgan from the abstract: Here we report a significant inverse correlation between the records of precipitation at Law Dome, East Antarctica and southwest Western Australia over the instrumental period, including the most recent decades. The actual figures quoted for correlation are as follows. The results show significant negative correlation between seasonal June–August average values of the SWWA regional series and LawDome. Read more [...] none

An issue in question here is whether the recent snowfall at Law Dome is unusually high relative to the 750 year long record (and therefore, so the argument goes, probably due to AGW). Below is the snowfall at Law Dome from the ice core. Above is the actual snowfall, and below is the accumulation of the series minus the mean (using the R function cumsum) indicating where snowfall is above or below average. This simple approach is not used in the paper. While the accumulation of snow at present Read more [...] 18 com

A few impressions from Monckton's talk at the Brisbane Irish Club, providing some novel points not seen elsewhere. Some interesting impressions did come out of it. I found Monckton (and Plimer) a little disappointing in quality of presentation and slides. A fair bit of time was put into boosting the audience, but his essential points on low climate sensitivity were rushed over. Plimer gave a hand-waving review of geological history, making the point that CO2 has never been responsible for the Read more [...] 3 com

Monckton's main argument seems to be represented by the statement that climate sensitivity to CO2 has been overestimated by the IPCC by around 6-7 times, giving exaggerated projections of warming for a business as usual scenario of CO2 emissions. The IPCC range is around 2-6C degrees warming by 2100, and Monckton's is 0.5C. While he provides some calculations, this view is also supported by a measure of respectable scientific literature. The view that CO2 sensitivity is being grossly exaggerated Read more [...] 110 com

WUWT reports in The IPCC: More Sins of Omission – Telling the Truth but Not the Whole Truth the greatest failing of the IPCC, if not environmental sciences. The article describes how the effects of climate change on climate, hunger and water storage are misrepresented to exaggerate negative effects. Here I show that the same deception is in play with the statements on species extinctions in AR4. In Climate Change 2007: Working Group II: Impacts, Adaption and Vulnerability it is stated, Read more [...] 2 com