Archives for July 17, 2008

It is summer in the northern hemisphere and given the Americans and Europeans are pretty obsessed with temperatures records at the moment, and some with a fear that the Arctic might go ice free this northern summer, it was with some anticipation that the June 2008 temperature records were released.

According to the US National Climatic Data Centre (NCDC) the Northern Hemisphere Arctic sea ice extent for June 2008 ranked third lowest for June since records began in 1979 while Southern Hemisphere Antarctic sea ice extent for June 2008 was above the 1979-2000 mean, ranking as the second largest June extent.

So there is still ice in the Arctic and more ice than usual in the Antarctic.

As regards the US, according to the NCDC, June 2008 was the 27th warmest June based on records dating back to 1895. Globally though June 2008 ranked eighth warmest for June since worldwide records began in 1880.

But according to Joe D’Aleo a meteorologist with a blog: Don’t believe a word of it.

Joe prefers the NASA satellite data compiled by Roy Spencer at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and it shows June 2008 was the 22nd warmest in its 30 years of records, Figure 1. According to Joe, this satellite data indicated the globe was a full 1.1F degrees colder than the NCDC guesstimate.

Figure 1. The NASA MSU June Temperatures since 1979 via Joe D’Aleo.

Joe explains that he prefers the satellite data because: the thermometer global data bases suffer from major station dropout after 1990 (number dropped from 6000 to less than 2000) and a ten fold increase in the number of missing months in the stations that report. Furthermore, there are serious problems with algorithms for assessing whether a station is urban or rural and adjusting for local land use changes. And there are major siting issues. You can find more information here: http://icecap.us/images/uploads/DATA_ISSUES.pdf

Interestingly though, even James Hansen’s monthly data for the last ten years to June 2008, shows some recent cooling and it looks like global temperaturs have plateaued, Figure 2.

Figure 2. The NASA GISS Monthly Mean Surface Temperature Analysis since 1998, (see http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.C.lrg.gif ).

The IPCC is a single-interest organisation, whose charter presumes a widespread human influence on climate, rather than consideration of whether such influence may be negligible or missing altogether. Though the IPCC’s principles also state that a wide range of views is to be sought when selecting lead authors and contributing authors, this rule has been honored more in the breach than in the observance.

More than two-thirds of all authors of chapter 9 of the IPCC’s 2007 climate-science assessment are part of a clique whose members have co-authored papers with each other and, we can surmise, very possibly at times acted as peer-reviewers for each other’s work. Of the 44 contributing authors, more than half have co-authored papers with the lead authors or coordinating lead authors of chapter 9.

It is no surprise, therefore, that the majority of scientists who are skeptical of a human influence on climate significant enough to be damaging to the planet were unrepresented in the authorship of chapter 9. Many of the IPCC authors were climate modelers – or associated with laboratories committed to modeling – unwilling to admit that their models are neither accurate nor complete. Still less do they recognize or admit that modeling a chaotic object whose initial state and evolutionary processes are not known to a sufficient precision has a validation skill not significantly different from zero. In short, it cannot be done and has long been proven impossible. The modelers say that the “consensus” among their models is significant: but it is an artifact of ex-post-facto tuning to replicate historical temperatures, of repeated intercomparison studies, and of the authors’ shared belief in the unrealistically high estimate of climate sensitivity upon which all of the models assume.

The hypothesis of damaging, man-made warming is a long way from being proven – and, given the recent trend in the peer-reviewed literature, is well on the way to being disproven. Recent cooling of the planet further suggests that man-made warming is at best too weak to be detected in the “noise” of natural internal variability.

Governments have naively and unwisely accepted the claims of a human influence on global temperatures made by a close-knit clique of a few dozen scientists, many of them climate modellers, as if such claims were representative of the opinion of the wider scientific community. On the evidence presented here, the IPCC’s selection of its chapter authors appears so prejudiced towards a predetermined outcome that it renders its scientific assessment of the climate suspect and its conclusions inappropriate for policy making.

Continue reading: Prejudiced authors, Prejudiced findings – Did the UN bias its attribution of “global warming” to
humankind? by John McLean