Last week I prepared a comment defending McLean’s SOI paper. I shall send it in shortly. Basically, I extend their analysis a little and show that the majority of variation in a linear regression model predicting global temperature (not differences) can be accounted for using SOI-related terms.

The sorry-state of Dr. Hathaway’s prediction record is in the news.

For example, in 2006, Dr. Hathaway looked at disturbances in the Earth’s magnetic field that are caused by the Sun, and they were strong. During past cycles, strong disturbances at minimum indicated strong fields all over the Sun at maximum and a bounty of sunspots. Because the previous cycles had been shorter than average, Dr. Hathaway thought the next one would be shorter and thus solar minimum was imminent. He predicted the new solar cycle would be a ferocious one, consistent with a short cycle.

Instead, the new cycle did not arrive as quickly as Dr. Hathaway anticipated, and the disturbances weakened. His revised prediction is for a smaller-than-average maximum. “There was a long lull of several months of virtually no activity, which had me worried,” Dr. Hathaway said.

Predicting trends will continue, like the stock market always going up, or the housing market never dropping more than 20%, is a fool’s bet.

Fresh Bilge is a little kinder:

I have watched Hathaway’s NASA press releases for a couple of years, with the increasingly comical upcurves of an active solar cycle projected from the solar minimum that just kept going and going. It was clear that someone was resisting reality. I always surmised that Hathaway was a global warming ideologue who did not want the AGW paradigm disturbed by news of a quiet sun. But the man finally proved himself a scientist rather than an ideologue and went with the evidence. Good for him.

If the AGW ideologue is finally becoming a scientist, what was he before?

This week I am going to work on getting the disproof of sea-level acceleration paper done. Basically, the so-called acceleration of sea level is not significant on a century scale, so there is no basis for belief in anything other than a linear model of sea level rise, and correspondingly small rises in the centimeters (not meters) by 2100.

Apologies for not having an RSS prediction question up, but the providers have blocked my ssh access for some reason, and I have to get that reinstated.

Fifteen of ‘Australia’s top climate scientists’ published their creed.

Around the world, thousands of scientists have devoted their professional lives to studying the climate. Not centrally organised, they sometimes build temporary affiliations but they remain scientists throughout – that is, they are independent, constantly challenge each other and are committed to searching for truth through objective, independently verifiable evidence.

As we used to say in grad school, they are “pulling back the foreskin of science”. You would think by now enough instances of collusion, bias, sloppiness, lack of critical evaluation of the AGW hypothesis, and basic mistakes have been documented that there is little cause for such pretentiousness.

Like the Copenhagen conference report Figure 5, based on the now-discredited Rahmstorf et al 2007 paper, altered by Stefan Rahmstorf to enhance the impression of warming, and then misreported in the figure caption. I wonder if its been fixed yet? Or the growing list of discredited AGW papers, as well as

Harries who claimed to detect the greenhouse effect from CO2 spectral brightening but whose later (unreported) publications were much more equivocal;

Soden, who claims to have detected increase in specific water vapor from spectral brightening using false assumptions.

History shows the proclamations by ‘top’ scientists such as Harries, Santer, and Sodon, that proof of AGW had been found, only fade away later. What the article fails to mention is that the case of AGW remains circumstantial, as it always has been. CO2 is blamed for temperature increases since 1960 because ‘we can’t find any other explanation’. However, the literature is replete with other possible explanations — UHI, solar, CRF, and SOI — sources of ongoing controversy totally ignored in their article.

I believe there are a number of responses being written.