Archive for the ‘Climate’ Category
June 11, 2012
Reuters reports that Chinese carbon dioxide emissions may be some 20% higher than previously thought. But then the Reuters reporters (David Fogarty and David Stanway) and their editor Jonathan Thatcher get their knickers properly in a twist and conclude that this suggests that “the pace of global climate change could be even faster than currently predicted”.
Perhaps some bright schoolboy could point out to our intrepid reporters that if the change in B is supposed to be dependent upon the change in A and if the change in A is actually higher than assumed, then the change in B is less dependent upon the change in A than assumed.
(more…)
Tags:carbon diocide, carbon dioxide emissions, China, climate change, climate models
Posted in Alarmism, Climate | Comments Off on Reuters gets it wrong again: If Chinese emissions have been higher than assumed then emissions have even less effect on climate than thought!
June 11, 2012
When science leads to activism great things can be accomplished but when activism leads to “biased science” to justify the activism, we plumb the depths.
The Gergis affaire has some way to run as her activism-led science is revealed. ACM has preserved some of her activist writings on her now-disappeared blog :
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Tags:Activism, Climate Audit, Confirmation bias, improper data screening, Joelle Gergis, screening fallacy
Posted in Academic misconduct, Alarmism, Climate, scientific misconduct | Comments Off on How to beat data into a hockey-stick…
June 9, 2012
One would think that after Climategate, climate scientists would be a little more careful with their “trickery”.
When a supposedly peer reviewed paper in the American Meteorological Society Journal is withdrawn / “put on hold” after publication when the on-line community (Jean S / Steve McIntyre) find the authors to have cherry picked and improperly “massaged their data, it says 2 things:
- that the peer review process at the AMS is either incompetent or corrupt (in that it is especially friendly to papers propounding the global warming orthodoxy), and
- that the “tricks” revealed by Climategate are still being actively used by so-called climate scientists to support their beliefs
That one of the authors – probably responsible for this cock-up – a Joelle Gergis from the University of Melbourne, is more an “activist” than a “scientist” does not help matters . Going through the abstracts of her list of publications suggests that she often decides on her conclusions first and then selects data and writes her papers to fit the conclusions. Cherry picking data is bad enough but when it is done because of confirmation bias it is perhaps the most insidious form of scientific misconduct there is.
Interestingly
joellegergis.wordpress.com is no longer available.
The authors have deleted this blog.
The AMS Journal “peers” who reviewed this paper don’t come out of this very well either. But of course they will receive no strictures for a job done badly.
Sources:
Gergis et al “Put on Hold”
American Meteorological Society disappears withdraws Gergis et al paper on proxy temperature reconstruction after post peer review finds fatal flaws
Gergis paper disappears
Another Hockey Stick broken
Tags:American Meteorological Society, Confirmation bias, data manipulation, global warming, hockey stick, hockey stick withdrawn, Joelle Gergis, peer review, Scientific misconduct, Steve McIntyre
Posted in Alarmism, Climate, scientific misconduct | Comments Off on Another warming hockey stick is withdrawn/”put-on-hold” for bad data
June 3, 2012
It’s weather not climate of course.
But is it Global warming? or is it Global cooling? or just normal changes of climate which no so-called “climate scientist” understands or is capable of predicting.
http://www.scancomark.se
Friday, 01 June 2012
On the calendar, today is the first of June which is supposed to be a real summer day. This means that we were supposed to have great sunshine and would be outside in our gardens basking – if not at work though.
But such is not the reality if you live in the Swedish town of Långsjöby a couple miles from Storuman in Västerbotten. Here it has been snowing enough that a few centimetres of snow is visibly gathering on the ground now. Visitors to the town from places such as Stockholm were surprised to find snow and some thought that they had been travelling in a time machine.
image SvT
And yesterday on 2nd June the participants in the Stockholm marathon were met by a rainy, windy and cold day – the coldest in 84 years.
A 84-year cold record has been beaten in Stockholm. The temperature on Saturday reached no higher than 6 degrees.
Stockholm marathon runners braving the coldest June day in 84 years image SvT
Tags:climate change, June, Snow, Stockholm, Sweden
Posted in Climate, Sweden, Weather | Comments Off on Snowfall in Sweden and the coldest June day in Stockholm for 84 years
May 31, 2012
I’ve been away for a couple of weeks and have been struck by the way in which the false deity of global warming (part of the unholy trinity made up by the “God of the Greater Good”, his son the “God of I know what’s good for you” and the underlying spirit of “Benevolent Fascism” which infuses this religious movement) is used by different people in a different ways to further their own aims. “Global warming” like “excess population” is merely a fashionable deity which will be worshipped for as long as it serves as a convenient label to suspend rational thought and justify the unjustifiable.
(more…)
Tags:Benevolent Fascism, climate change, global warming, God of the Greater Good
Posted in Behaviour, Climate | Comments Off on Global warming is just another false deity of the “God of the Greater Good”
May 17, 2012
The Hockey Shtick reports on a recent paper by Aldert J. van Beelen and Aarnout J. van Delden of the Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research Utrecht, Utrecht University, The Netherlands which shows that the hours of sunshine decreased somewhat from 1958-1983 and then increased sharply between 1985 and 2010 at a number of places. The authors postulate that the reduction of cloud cover since 1985 was possibly due to the cleaner air with reduced aerosols during this period.
It was not so long ago that the CERN CLOUD experiments showed that cosmic rays could indeed influence cloud formation providing support for Svensmark’s hypothesis that it is solar effects via cloud formation which dominates climate.
If we assume that the reduction in sunshine hours between 1958 and 1983 was due to man-made pollution and that this was reversed in the period after 1985, it still needs Svensmark’s solar effects or some other mechanism to explain the very sharp reduction in cloud cover and increase in sunshine hours after 1985. It seems patently obvious from every day observations that cloud cover is far more important to weather and climate than any far-fetched notions of man-made carbon dioxide having any significant influence.
The Hockey Shtick: A paper recently published in the journal Weather finds that global summer average sunshine [solar short-wave radiation that reaches Earth’s surface] dimmed during the period 1958-1983 [prompting an ice age scare], but markedly increased from 1985-2010. The increase in summer average sunshine between those two periods is 6 Watts per square meter, which dwarfs the alleged effects of CO2 by more than 5 times. [Alleged CO2 effect from 1958-2010 was calculated using the IPCC formula 5.35*ln(389.78/315) = 1.14 Watts per square meter]. At one measurement site [De Bilt], summer sunshine increased from 1985-2010 by 15 Watts per square meter, more than 23 times the IPCC alleged forcing from CO2 during the same timeframe [5.35*ln(389.78/346.04) = 0.64 Watts per square meter].
The paper states the increase in sunshine reaching the Earth’s surface is due to a decrease in aerosols including clouds, which are influenced by both anthropogenic and natural factors, and possibly changes in solar activity.
from van Beelen and van Delden “Weather” Vol.67 No. 1, January 2012
Tags:carbon dioxide, CERN, clean air, clouds, cosmic rays, hours of sunshine, IPCC, solar effects, Svensmark
Posted in Climate, Clouds, Environment, Solar science | Comments Off on More evidence that cloud cover – and not carbon dioxide – dominates climate
May 15, 2012
UPDATE! Not just Sarajevo but even the UK is enjoying snow on the ides of May!
It’s weather of course and not climate. Or perhaps it should be called an extreme event caused by global warming.
The snow is expected to become heavy rain later this week.
AFP reports:
SARAJEVO — The Bosnian capital and its surroundings were covered by snow on Monday, the first time in half a century snow has settled in Sarajevo at this time of year, as temperatures plunged to just above freezing.
“The snow was nine centimetres (over three inches) high at 0500 GMT. It is the first time in the past 50 years that we have snow that remained in Sarajevo in May,” Dzenan Zulum of the national meteorological institute told AFP.
Zulum said snow had previously covered the capital in May in 1962 and 1953, adding that it also fell in Sarajevo in May 2005, but immediately melted.
Temperatures have plummeted in the past two days from 28 degrees Celsius (82 degrees Fahrenheit) on Saturday to 0.3 degrees Celsius on Monday. ….
image: thewatchers.adorraeli.com
Tags:Sarajevo, Snow, snow in May
Posted in Climate, Weather | Comments Off on Snow in Sarajevo in May
May 14, 2012
Yet another paper indicating that climate and solar behaviour are related – at least over the Tibetan plateau and at least over the last 1000 years.
Tree ring based precipitation reconstruction in the south slope of the middle Qilian Mountains, northeastern Tibetan Plateau, over the last millennium
by Junyan Sun and Yu Liu, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Xi’an, China
JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 117, D08108, 11 PP., 2012
doi:10.1029/2011JD017290
Reconstruction of precipitation amounts for the edge of the Tibet Plateau. The bars on the chart depict prominent weak phases of solar activity, which correspond to Om = Oort Minimum; Wm = Wolf Minimum; Sm = Spörer Minimum; Mm = Maunder Minimum; Dm = Dalton Minimum). Figure from: Sun & Liu (2012).
Geologist Dr. Sebastian Lüning and chemist Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt have written a summary of this paper (in German), and this translation is from P Gosselin at NoTricksZone
New Study of the Tibet Plateau: Whenever Solar Activity is Weak, the Rains Disappear
By Sebastian Lüning and Fritz Vahrenholt
The Tibet Plateau is at 3000 to 5000 meters elevation and is the highest and (most) expansive high plateau on Earth. Therefore it reacts sensitively to climate changes. Junyan Sun and Yu Liu of the Chinese Academy of Sciences studied tree rings in the northwest plateau edge from two living 1000 year old trees. Tree growth in the area of study is particularly sensitive to the amount of precipitation. (more…)
Tags:Dalton minimum, grand solar minima, Maunder Minimum, solar effects on climate, Solar variation, Spörer Minimum, Tibetan Plateau
Posted in Climate, Solar science | Comments Off on Droughts on the Tibetan plateau coincide with grand solar minima
May 12, 2012
It has been just over two years since I started this blog – my first – and I now feel sufficiently comfortable to move away from the general and to try and focus just on the topics that interest me most. I have changed the sub-heading to reflect this.
My opinions on aspects of energy and power generation and climate and environment will now take centre stage on this blog. I shall have to try to address my interests in technology and materials and behaviour and management and anthropology and politics elsewhere. It has been the advent of accessible electric power which has been the single most liberating force for the human condition – ever. For the foreseeable future humanity will continue to use – and need to use – electric power. And virtually all our sources for electric power – except perhaps some nuclear fuels – derive from the Sun.
Sol Invictus.
The blog image is of sunrise on a very cold day in February last year.
Tags:climate, Electric Power, Energy, environment
Posted in Climate, Energy, Environment | Comments Off on A slight shift of focus
May 9, 2012
And another paper showing that the Little Ice Age was a global event.It is highly probable that the LIA was related to the solar effects which gave a dearth of sunspots during the Maunder Minimum.
GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 39, L09710, 7 PP., 2012, doi:10.1029/2012GL051260
Little Ice Age cold interval in West Antarctica: Evidence from borehole temperature at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) Divide
by
Anais J. Orsi , Bruce D. Cornuelle, Jeffrey P. Severinghaus – Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, California, USA
(more…)
Tags:Antarctica, Little Ice Age, Maunder Minimum, solar effects on climate, WAIS Divide, West Antarctic Ice Sheet
Posted in Climate, Solar science, Southern Hemisphere | Comments Off on Solar effects on climate – evidence mounts that the Little Ice Age was a global event
The k2p blog 