Archives for December 2007

Dr David Whitehouse is an astronomer and author of ‘The Sun: A Biography’ (John Wiley, 2004). He has written an article for The Independent, normally the home of hype and alarmism about the small, diminishing logarithmic effect of increased atmospheric CO2 on our ever changing climate, entitled ‘Ray of hope: Can the sun save us from global warming?’

Something is happening to our Sun. It has to do with sunspots, or rather the activity cycle their coming and going signifies. After a period of exceptionally high activity in the 20th century, our Sun has suddenly gone exceptionally quiet. Months have passed with no spots visible on its disc. We are at the end of one cycle of activity and astronomers are waiting for the sunspots to return and mark the start of the next, the so-called cycle 24. They have been waiting for a while now with no sign it’s on its way any time soon.

Read the rest of the article from The Independent, 5th December, here.

Also, see SolarCycle24.com

and The Great Frost of 1683

Seasons of the Sun

Modern Solar Minimum
(2000-?)

Modern Climate Optimum
(1890–2000) – the world is getting warmer. Concentrations of greenhouse gas increase. Solar activity increases.

Dalton Solar Minimum
(1790–1820) – global temperatures are lower than average.

Maunder Solar Minimum
(1645–1715) – coincident with the ‘Little Ice Age’.

Spörer Solar Minimum
(1420-1530) – discovered by the analysis of radioactive carbon in tree rings that correlate with solar activity – colder weather. Greenland settlements abandoned.

Wolf Solar Minimum
(1280–1340) – climate deterioration begins. Life gets harder in Greenland.

Medieval Solar Maximum
(1075–1240) – coincides with Medieval Warm Period. Vikings from Norway and Iceland found settlements in Greenland and North America.

Oort Solar Minimum
(1010-1050) – temperature on Earth is colder than average.

There seem to have been 18 sunspot minima periods in the last 8,000 years; studies indicate that the Sun currently spends up to a quarter of its time in these minima.

The Bali climate conference has inevitably put Indonesia under the media spotlight. The conference itself is not the only story deemed to be newsworthy:

Indonesian scientists say many of Indonesia’s islands may be swallowed up by the sea if world leaders fail to find a way to halt rising sea levels.

Doomsayers take this dire warning by Indonesian scientists a step further and predict that by 2035, the Indonesian capital’s airport will be flooded by sea water and rendered useless. (That might put an end to Indonesia as a climate conference venue).

Read the rest of the Yahoo news article ‘Global warming may threaten Indonesia’

The following story made the ITN News in the UK and ABC News online in Australia (Thanks Luke):

Because of illegal logging, the climate conference host, Indonesia, is losing an area of forest the size of a soccer field every 10 seconds. Most threatened are the peatlands of Kalimantan and the orangutans which call them home.

This is what they’re making way for – palm oil plantations. Chasing a boom in demand for biofuels and along the way, killing up to 50 orangutans a week.

The unintended consequences of CO2 hysteria.

Watch the video report here or read the transcript here, from ABC’s usual perspective.

In a new article just published in the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres, Pat Michaels and I have concluded that the manipulations for the steep post-1980 period are inadequate, and the global temperature graph showing warming is an exaggeration, at least in the past few decades. Along the way I have also found that the UN agency promoting the global temperature graph has made false claims about the quality of their data. The graph comes from data collected in weather stations around the world. Other graphs come from weather satellites and from networks of weather balloons that monitor layers of the atmosphere. These other graphs didn’t show as much warming as the weather station data, even though they measure at heights where there is supposed to be even more greenhouse gas-induced warming than at the surface. The discrepancy is especially clear in the tropics.

The surface-measured data has many well-known problems. Over the post-war era, equipment has changed, station sites have been moved, and the time of day at which the data are collected has changed. Many long-term weather records come from in or near cities, which have gotten warmer as they grow. Many poor countries have sparse weather station records, and few resources to ensure data quality. Fewer than one-third of the weather stations operating in the 1970s remain in operation. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s, more than half the world’s weather stations were closed in a four year span, which means that we can’t really compare today’s average to that from the 1980s. Read a background summary here and a technical paper published in the JGR December 2007 here.

The Abstract states:

Local land surface modification and variations in data quality affect temperature trends in
surface-measured data. Such effects are considered extraneous for the purpose of
measuring climate change, and providers of climate data must develop adjustments to
filter them out. If done correctly, temperature trends in climate data should be
uncorrelated with socioeconomic variables that determine these extraneous factors. This
hypothesis can be tested, which is the main aim of this paper. Using a new data base for
all available land-based grid cells around the world we test the null hypothesis that the
spatial pattern of temperature trends in a widely-used gridded climate data set is
independent of socioeconomic determinants of surface processes and data
inhomogeneities. The hypothesis is strongly rejected (P= 14 7.1 10− × ), indicating that
extraneous (nonclimatic) signals contaminate gridded climate data. The patterns of
contamination are detectable in both rich and poor countries, and are relatively stronger in
countries where real income is growing. We apply a battery of model specification tests to
rule out spurious correlations and endogeneity bias. We conclude that the data
contamination likely leads to an overstatement of actual trends over land. Using the
regression model to filter the extraneous, nonclimatic effects reduces the estimated 1980-
2002 global average temperature trend over land by about half.

Final preparations are under way for a key UN climate summit that will attempt to reach a deal on what should replace the Kyoto Protocol, which ends in 2012.

Talks will centre on whether binding targets are needed to cut emissions.

BBC New website: ‘Nations gather for climate talks’

Eduardo Zorita sent Steve McIntyre an interesting paper from Kiehl, a prominent climate modeler, which analyzes the paradox of how GCMs with very different climate sensitivities nonetheless all more or less agree in their simulations of 20th century climate. Kiehl found that the high sensitivity models had low aerosol forcing history and vice versa. Kiehl observed:

These results explain to a large degree why models with such diverse climate sensitivities can all simulate the global anomaly in surface temperature. The magnitude of applied anthropogenic total forcing compensates for the model sensitivity.

Eduardo’s take was as follows:

surprisingly the attached paper, from a main stream climate scientist, seems to admit that the anthropogenic forcings in the 20th century used to drive the IPCC simulations were chosen to fit the observed temperature trend. It seems to me a quite important admission.

Kiehl (2007) on Tuning GCMs

BALI, Indonesia: Coal-burning power plants belch pollutants into the air in China, contributing to global warming that experts say has destroyed billions of dollars in crops. In India, melting Himalayan glaciers cause floods, while raising a more daunting long-term prospect: the drying up of life-sustaining rivers.

The two economic giants are becoming increasingly aware of the effects of rising temperatures. But though they are among the biggest contributors to the problem, both say they will not sign any climate change treaty that would slow the pace of their development.

International Herald Tribune: Spotlight on China and India as delegates gather for U.N. global warming summit in Bali

MORE TROUBLE FOR CLIMATE ALARMISTS

Green scientists have been accused of overstating the dangers of climate change by researchers who found that the number of people killed each year by weather-related disasters is falling. Their report suggests that a central plank in the global warming argument – that it will result in a big increase in deaths from weather-related disasters – is undermined by the facts. It shows deaths in such disasters peaked in the 1920s and have been declining ever since. Average annual deaths from weather-related events in the period 1990-2006 – considered by scientists to be when global warming has been most intense – were down by 87% on the 1900-89 average. The mortality rate from catastrophes, measured in deaths per million people, dropped by 93%.

The Sunday Times: ‘Fall in weather deaths dents climate warnings’

Airlines stand to make billions of pounds in “windfall profits” from an emissions trading scheme that was supposed to make them pay for the environmental damage they cause, according to a government-commissioned report.

They will take advantage of the scheme to raise fares substantially, even though their costs will hardly change. The windfall will be highly embarrassing for the Government because it has heavily promoted the trading of aviation emissions to justify its plans to allow air travel to double by 2030.

Ruth Kelly, the Transport Secretary, claimed last week that emissions trading would ensure that the proposed third runway at Heathrow would not add to overall climate-change gases. She said that the scheme would force the industry “to take its environmental responsibilities seriously”.

It will be the second time that an industry has made huge profits from emissions trading. There was widespread public outrage last year when it emerged that British power generators had made more than £1 billion from the scheme, under which industries have to obtain a permit for each tonne of carbon they emit. The theory is that they will become more efficient so that they need fewer permits.

The problem with the power generators arose because they were given billions of pounds of free permits at the start to cover their existing emissions. The same problem could occur with airlines, which are due to join the scheme in 2011, because the European Commission is proposing that they be given enough free permits to cover 96-97 per cent of their present emissions.

The Times: AIRLINES TO MAKE BILLIONS FROM CARBON TRADING