Families burned by solar subsidies... Quakers Hill father Steve Gross is one of 120,000 families across the state who thought he was onto a winner when he signed up to the then Labor government's solar bonus scheme last September. The maintenance fitter and his wife, Angelina, decided that with the government's subsidy and the promise to buy the energy back at 60c per kilowatt hour, they could not only one day have their power bills paid for by the sun but do their bit for the planet. So Read more [...] one

Failure to stress Hansen's fear-mongering theory is misrepresentation of climate science and poor scholarship, according to ANU scholar. The Cox-Stockwell commentary misrepresents Hansen’s role and his intention in posting the draft paper. I recommend some of the comments. Not only does this appear NOT to be "well understood", it appears to be highly questionable if you read the comments in the link you provided. EG: RALPH ALEXANDER - "The 'big problem' I referred to comes at the end Read more [...] none

Anthony Cox and I have an article in the Newcastle Herald today.

In a recent draft paper Dr James Hansen, the world's leading expert on computer modelling of the climate, has acknowledged that the climate computers (GCMs) have been wrong about a fundamental aspect of climate.

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A new site has been launched here, to cater to the needs of citizen scientists for sharing of information. From the site: You can connect by creating new groups (public or private) for hosting forums on topics of your choice. You can upload and share group documents. Advertise events, with Google maps and even manage events by taking bookings. Add and share links and images of interest, send private messages and other social networking facilities to be added. First, check out Read more [...] 2 com

I’m beginning to wonder if I picked the right career, or perhaps I’m coming down with a touch of the climate change denial syndrome. When I enrolled in an Integrated Climate Change Studies degree I was convinced that knowledge-based solutions to reducing emissions of greenhouse gases were the most important thing I could be doing with my life, with cool field work in Antarctica and on ships and all, and besides a good job in the Department of Climate Change was virtually guaranteed Read more [...] 19 com

A very interesting couple of graphs were posted by Bill Illis here. The sensitivity of the climate system to CO2 (or its doubling) has often been estimated from the left-over warming after removing natural variations. Bill uses a very simple and straightforward approach of fitting a regression of the atmospheric temperature from RSS to selected ocean basins. He arrives at the following graph and regression: Bill also makes a prediction of temperatures over the next few months, which is Read more [...] 2 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

Global warming probably didn't cause the drought in Australia's South-East Queensland according to a new paper from CSIRO. Apparently the drought was caused when a discombobulation of the ENSO Modoki teleconnection transmogrified the rainfall into a distillation of the Johnny Walker spirulation at the convention center on Hayman Island during the post-positive phase of Pacific decadal osculation. Being a post-postitive sceptic myself about droughts being caused by global warming, along with Read more [...] 15 com

A couple of days ago, Luke, a frequent commenter, sent in a number of links to a new Australian Government drought initiative. The Minister Tony Burke has appointed an Expert Panel to examine the social impacts of drought as part of its national review of exceptional circumstances (EC) funding, which argues for a major change, based on incentives rather than emergency aid. In a recent speech, Peter Kenny, chair of an expert panel looking at the social impact of drought said of the Drought Exceptional Read more [...] 4 com

I have converted the draft of the introductory document The new climate theory of Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi by Dr. Noor van Andel into a Wiki. The permissions are set for registered users of the Wiki to freely edit it. There are a great deal of areas where it could be improved and added too, and an opportunity to learn more about Wikis. Register here to edit. Wiki Syntax is here. The synopsis of the document points to the importance of right theory, and does a good job of comparing the new theory Read more [...] 87 com

Comment by Ken Gregory moved from Greenhouse Heat Engine. Last month I asked Ferenc Miskolczi to calculate a 60 year trend of optical depths using radiosonde data I compiled from the NOAA Earth Systems Research Laboratory to confirm his prediction of constant optical depth. We finally got the results: *There has been no increase in the effective amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere during the last 60 years.* Miskolczi's theory shows that the atmosphere maintains a “saturated” Read more [...] 108 com

Thread for “Consistency of Modelled and Observed Temperature Trends in the Tropical Troposphere”, by B.D. Santer et al. 10 com

One of the tests of climate models predicting drought in my review of the Drought Exceptional Circumstances Report was the correlation of predicted area under drought with actual observed area under drought. Lazar criticized my inclusion of the R-Squared (r2) coefficient, an issue I didn't follow up at the time. … correlating model predictions for individual years of exceptional rainfall with observed years of exceptional rainfall! This ignores noise (internal variability in the climate Read more [...] 4 com

Geoff Sherrington has been drawing attention to some changes in the legal language attached to various emails and reports associated with the CSIRO and the Climate Adaptation Flagship (CAF). Since I have been posting up emails in an attempt to hold people accountable, I have been looking into the legality. In the case of reports, to what degree are the authors accountable for the accuracy of the contents? (Disclaimer: This post makes no representations or warranties regarding merchantability, Read more [...] 3 com

Below is the email received a month ago from Dr Andrew Ash, Director of the Climate Adaptation Flagship, promising a formal response to issues raised about the Drought Exceptional Circumstances Report (DECR) concerning no apparent attempt at validation of the climate models for drought in the report, or evidence of skill at modeling drought. No reply has been forthcoming to date. from xxx@csiro.au to xxx@gmail.com date Tue, Sep 16, 2008 at 2:35 PM subject RE: Drought Exceptional Circumstances Report mailed-by csiro.au signed-by csiro.au Dear Read more [...] 14 com

Support was expressed for our efforts with the DECR from a reader of the Sydney Morning Herald below. Letters to the Editor, Sydney Morning Herald - 4 Oct 2008 Meanwhile, the Department of Climate Change is hiring in a big way! Need I say you could get a lot of economically productive research done in almost any hard science area with a unit this size. Employment Section, The Australian - 11 Oct 2008. Alan Sullivan diagnoses the financial turmoil in a memorable alliteration -- Laughable Left. Read more [...] 16 com

The sharp-eyed UC who keeps a good technical blog on signal theory alerted me to this intelligent reference in the Finnish media to Rahmstorf et al. 2007. This is a paper I have reviewed previously and had words with Stefan at RealClimate demonstrating they had grossly underestimated the uncertainty at the end points. This flawed paper is widely quoted to justify claims that the climate system is "responding more strongly than we thought". Who said statistics lie? Translation: "VO: The updated Read more [...] 2 com

Steve McIntyre, always gracious in his acknowledgments, mentioned my note in the Australian Institute of Geologists newsletter (AIG News No 83 Mar 2006 pp14) in a post yesterday "The Full Network". We've discussed on many occasions that you can "get" a HS merely from picking upward-trending series from networks of red noise (David Stockwell had a good note on this phenomenon on his blog a couple of years ago. My first experiments of this type were on the cherry picks in the original Jacoby network.) Read more [...] 65 com