Download: Structural break models of climatic regime-shifts: claims and forecasts Anthony asked if it would be difficult to statistically justify the breaks in temperature between 1976 and 1979 proposed by Quirk (2009) for Australian temperature. He has an interest in oceanographic regime-shifts and climate change. Sure, I said, a simple Chow test. We ended up rebutting the Easterling & Wehner (2009) claim that describing temperatures since 1998 as declining is 'cherry picking', finding a Read more [...] 49 com

The code for plotting the non-linear temperature trend, using SSA (singular spectrum analysis) in the figure below is here - ssa-demo. I have made it as turnkey as I can. The steps are: 1. Get and Install package ssa (http://r-forge.r-project.org/projects/ssa/). I had to hand-compile and move the C shared library around so it would find it, not sure why. 2. Run the script below with source("filename"). Uncomment line indicated after the first time to speed it up. You should get the following Read more [...] one

Still on my way home, after the lecture at Newcastle University by Miklós Zágoni and myself, this will be short. The lecture was well attended, with around 50 people -- surprising considering the campus is on a break and parking at a premium. The lectures were well received with a very engaged and relevant question time. There were some suggestions of disruption by anti-skeptics, but they did not eventuate. Transcript: errors-of-agw-science Powerpoint: newcastle-presentation Press Release: Read more [...] 57 com

Miklós Zágoni and I will be speaking in a public lecture at 1pm on Wednesday the 15th of April at the Engineering faculty, Newcastle University, in lecture theater ES203. Miklós will speak on the theory of Ferenc Miskolczi and I will give a short introduction of the work from the blog in the last 3 years in the global warming arena. A much longer version of my talk is incorporated into a new "Highlights" page. 37 com

Some time ago I had a brief discussion with Leif Svalgaard on ClimateAudit blog inspired by an exchange between Leif and David Archibald when the latter complained that Leif's TSI reconstruction was "too flat". The sunspots exhibited cyclic variability in terms of the frequency of the cycles and that most thermostats work by pulse width modulation and some digital music with pulse frequency modulation. Both these work in a similar manner the thermal inertia of whatever the thermostat is controlling Read more [...] 23 com

Edward Vul, Christine Harris, Piotr Winkielman, & Harold Pashler have published research that provides useful insights into the practice of 'cherry picking' or prior selection of desirable results leading to exaggerated significance. They also demonstrates the effect in a comprehensive survey of studies in the field of social neuroscience. To further 'pin the thumbs of researchers to the table', and ensure they are noticed and not ignored, they name all the studies explicitly, listing those Read more [...] 16 com

Global warming real’ say new studies according to the Financial Times, February 18, 2005. Tim Barnett of Scripps Institute of Oceanography crowed: “The debate over whether there is a global warming signal is over now at least for rational people.” The article records the team's triumph: A leading US team of climate researchers on Friday released “the most compelling evidence yet” that human activities are responsible for global warming. They said their analysis Read more [...] 10 com

Should we believe the cosmic ray flux theory (CRF)? Here I attempt to answer this question quantitatively, by calculating the strength of evidence so-far presented for CRF as a major forcing factor in climate change. Specifically we need to ask, what is the probability of being wrong about CRF? This can be calculated by combining the significance values of independent lines of evidence. Below I have started calculating and tabulating the P values. The first 8 rows were worked out from the difference Read more [...] 15 com

Every month we conduct a competition to guess the change in global temperatures for the previous month. The results from RSS normally are released on the 5th of the month. Voting is now open for February. You can place your vote below. 20 com

RSS global temperature in the lower atmosphere increased 0.148C from the previous month. The two early leaders in the 'Guess the monthly global temperatures' competition are still CoRev and Jan Pompe: The guesses were very biased, with an extraordinary 95.7% guessing incorrectly. That's a lot worst than random choices would do. What is the point of this competition? Well, I think there is a big difference between talking about prediction, and actually doing it. Real tests of skill provide Read more [...] none

Nir's 2005 paper "On climate response to changes in the cosmic ray flux and radiative budget", available as pdf here, provides a solid case linking cosmic ray flux (CRF) variations to global climate change. The effect is consistent over hugely different timescales, using completely different indicators -- from cosmic sources of CRF at the Phanerozoic, to the shortest time scale of the 11-yr solar cycle. The fit is extraordinary. The statistics competent. The bottom line? Thus, anthropogenic Read more [...] 28 com

The following is an approximate propagation of uncertainty through Dessler et als. equation for estimating the strength of water vapor feedback λ. We have been looking at the error-bars in his recent paper Water-vapor climate feedback inferred from climate fluctuations, 2003-2008, not calculated in the published paper. Assumptions made are noted. Refer to wiki for propagation of error equations. Here R is the top of atmosphere IR, q is the specific humidity and T is the temperature. 1. Read more [...] 19 com

A concerned reader sent me this recent paper Water-vapor climate feedback inferred from climate fluctuations, 2003-2008, writing: The following (ala Hansen) IMO should never have been accepted in a "peer reviewed" journal. "The existence of a strong and positive water-vapor feedback means that projected business-as-usual greenhouse gas emissions over the next century are virtually guaranteed to produce warming of several degrees Celsius. The only way that will not happen is if a strong, Read more [...] 53 com

Ian Castles organized a review of the Drought Exceptional Circumstances Report by two Accredited Statisticians, who also review my first report on the skill of the climate models. The statisticians find inadequate validation of the models of drought, as well as suboptimal regionalization in the DECR. They also find my analysis lacked force, and so I have done additional analysis in line with their suggestions. The last few posts in the series have consisted of reviews of an unsuccessful submission Read more [...] none

K.R.W. Brewer1 and A.N. Other1 28 January, 2009 1. K.R.W. Brewer is an Accredited Statistician of the Statistical Society of Australia Inc. (SSAI) and a long term Visiting Fellow at the School of Finance and Applied Statistics within the College of Business and Economics at the Australian National University. 2. A.N. Other is a pseudonym for another Accredited Statistician of the SSAI who prefers to remain anonymous. Full responsibility for the content is taken by K.R.W. Brewer. Abstract The Read more [...] 7 com

The Financial Times recently reported on the Australian bushfires, linking them to increases in greenhouse gases. We take another look at the data in the DECR and find Australia is getting wetter not drier: Scientists say Australia, with its harsh environment, is set to be one of the nations most affected by climate change. “Continued increases in greenhouse gases will lead to further warming and drier conditions in southern Australia, so the [fire] risks are likely to slightly worsen,” Read more [...] 16 com

Peter Gallagher reports that even while the coals are still warm, some are already blaming the Victorian fires on increases in greenhouse gases. The following summarizes indications of decline in droughts in Australia from 1900 to the present, compiled from data provided with the Drought Exceptional Circumstances Report. Some of this information was provided in the submission the the Australian Meteorological Magazine (more about this tomorrow). Drought is defined as the percentage of area with Read more [...] 6 com

A number of familiar tests, often used to evaluate the performance of models: R2 correlation, Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency and similarity of trends and return period, were reported here, noting not much evidence of skill in the DECR models compared with observations at any of these. I also said what a better treatment might entail but left that for another time: The percentage of droughted area appears to be a ’bounded extreme value, peaks over threshold’ or bounded POT statistic. The Read more [...] one

Sinfest has captured the essence of the bailout in comic form. What brave new theory permits contradictory gems like: The US Government is to spend up to $250 billion buying direct stakes in banks and other financial institutions under a controversial emergency plan which President Bush insisted today was "not intended to take over the free market but to preserve it". One does not take over free markets to save them. It was and still is government intervention in the first place that is destroying Read more [...] 4 com

The end of an era is an accurate description of a process that theories go through in dismantling the structure of the world we know in order to replace it with another way of understanding the world around them. Worthless Guarantees and Printing Presses Yesterday in Fannie, Freddie Commit to Waste $40 Billion a Month Taxpayer Money I talked about the chain reaction of guarantees. Ireland guaranteed bank deposits putting Germany and the UK at a disadvantage. After criticizing Ireland, Germany Read more [...] 2 com

I have avoided posting on the financial crisis until now, not wanting to add more negativity to the bail-out proposals, however now it is clear it's not preventing asset declines, I feel OK to use it as a jumping off point for a theoretical discussion on the role of theory. Theory has an uneasy relationship to data, and this is no more evident than in economics and climate science. In particular, what you see in data is largely determined by your preconcieved theory, and even more so determine Read more [...] 14 com

Here is a summary of the chapters in my upcoming book Niche Modeling to be published by CRC Press. Many of the topics have been introduced as posts on the blog. My deepest thanks to everyone who has commented and so helped in the refinement of ideas, and particularly in providing motivation and focus. Writing a book is a huge task, much of it a slog, and its not over yet. But I hope to get it to the publishers so it will be available at the end of this year. Here is the dustjacket blurb: Through Read more [...] 4 com