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.

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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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. The two laws, IGL and VT, therefore are two ways to describe the same physical phenomenon. Despite its seemingly restrictive name, we know that the IGL is a good approximation for many gases, monatomic, biatomic, polyatomic and even water vapor, as long as they remain very dilute. Goldstein’s derivations are made for an enclosure of volume V with constant gas pressure P and temperature T in a central force field like the Earth’s gravitational field. They also hold for an open volume V anywhere in the atmosphere. As to FM, he points out that the VT reflects the fact that the atmosphere is gravitationally bounded.
…
Ferenc Miskolczi in his papers [2,3] relates the total potential energy of the atmosphere, PEtot, to the total IR upward radiation Su at the surface. This relationship has to be considered a proportionality rather than an exact equality, or Su=const* PEtot. We see that this linkage makes sense since Su determines the surface temperature Ts through the Stefan-Boltzmann law, Su = (5.6703/10^8)*Ts^4 , and finally the IGL ties together Ts, P(z=0) and PEtot.
…
FM then assigns the kinetic IR energy KE (temperature) in the atmosphere to the upward atmospheric IR emittance Eu, or Eu=const*KE. The flux Eu is made up of two terms F + K , where F is due to thermalized absorption of short wave solar radiation in atmospheric water vapor, and K due to heat transfers from the Earth’s surface to air masses and clouds through evaporation and convection. Neither F or K are directly radiated from the Earth’s surface. They represent radiation from the atmosphere itself. There is an obvious limitation for such an assignment mainly because for the VT , or the IGL in general, the temperature (the KE) has to be measured with a thermometer, whereas Eu represents the radiative temperature (flux) that has to be measured with a radiometer, and these two measurements can give vastly different results as we see for the two following extreme cases:
…

In between these two extremes we have the Earth where FM’s version of the VT , Su = 2 * Eu applies reasonably well. We will see next in a discussion of FM’s exact solution how close, and for what types of atmospheres FM’s VT ( Eu/Su=0.5) holds, but we can say already that no physical principle is violated if it doesn’t. The VT that always holds for gases is not being violated, it is simply not fully recognized by FM’s fluxes that have to be measured by radiometers. This may be an indication that the VT is less important for FM’s theory than normally assumed.

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On the other hand, the IPCC assumes a positive water vapor feedback and arrives at very imprecise predictions for the Climate Sensitivity ranging from 1.5 to 5K (and even more). It is clear that this wide range of numbers is caused by the assumed positive feedback system, which apparently is close to instability (or singing, as the electrical engineer would call it in an unstable microphone-loudspeaker system). With such large uncertainties in their outputs true scientists should be reluctant to publish their results.

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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, Guest Editorial, CO2 Science 7 (19): http://www.co2 science.org/articles/V7/N19/EDIT.php]

The one extinct species mentioned in the Thomas article is now thought to have fallen victim to the 1998 El Nino.

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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 & Environment, 21:4 2010.

ABSTRACT
By the line-by-line method, a computer program is used to analyze Earth atmospheric radiosonde data from hundreds of weather balloon observations. In terms of a quasi-all-sky protocol, fundamental infrared atmospheric radiative flux components are calculated: at the top boundary, the outgoing long wave radiation, the surface transmitted radiation, and the upward atmospheric emittance; at the bottom boundary, the downward atmospheric emittance. The partition of the outgoing long wave radiation into upward atmospheric emittance and surface transmitted radiation components is based on the accurate computation of the true greenhouse-gas optical thickness for the radiosonde data. New relationships
among the flux components have been found and are used to construct a quasi-all- sky model of the earth’s atmospheric energy transfer process. In the 1948-2008 time period the global average annual mean true greenhouse-gas optical thickness is found to be time-stationary. Simulated radiative no-feedback effects of measured actual CO2 change over the 61years were calculated and found to be of magnitude easily detectable by the empirical data and analytical methods used. The data negate increase in CO2 in the atmosphere as a hypothetical cause for the apparently observed global warming. A hypothesis of significant positive feedback by water vapor effect on atmospheric infrared absorption is also negated by the observed measurements. Apparently major revision of the physics underlying the greenhouse effect is needed.
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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 huge ‘blunder’ pervades the whole of climate science regarding the direction and magnitude of ocean-cloud feedback, the subject of his upcoming book and paper.

What I want to demonstrate is one of the issues that is almost totally forgotten in the global warming debate: long-term climate changes can be caused by short-term random cloud variations.

The main reason this counter-intuitive mechanism is possible is that the large heat capacity of the ocean retains a memory of past temperature change, and so it experiences a “random-walk” like behavior. It is not a true random walk because the temperature excursions from the average climate state are somewhat constrained by the temperature-dependent emission of infrared radiation to space.

As showed previously, an AR coefficient of 0.99 is sufficient to change a random walk behavior (AR=1) to the kind of mean-reverting behavior his model shows. This difference is virtually undetectable using the usual tests on the available 150 years of global temperature data. Global temperature cannot be a random walk, but it can be ‘almost a random walk’. It can also respond to random shocks, such as volcanic eruptions, and sudden injections of GHGs, and oscillating solar forcings while still retaining the random walk character.

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Sceptic – from the Greek skeptikos one who reflects upon, from skeptesthai to consider.

Scepticism is variously described as a doubting or questioning attitude, a person who uses their mind creatively, or even someone who demands physical evidence in order to be convinced (especially when this demand is out of place).

To consider carefully with regard to evidence is the professional way to approach public affairs, or matters of considerable importance — the opposite of sloppy, credulous, reckless or even foolhardy behavior.

A sceptic is painfully aware that the casual believer is punished when reality is understated and underestimated.

-oil spill greater than first estimated
-Euro zone bailout underestimated
-USD rise underestimated
-oil’s fall underestimated
-tarp underestimated
-unemployment understated
-recession length underestimated
-volcano impact underestimated
-gold’s persistence understated
-housing slump underestimated

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