Paul

David Stockwell has analysed the CSIRO/BoM Drought Report using data reluctantly released by CSIRO in response to public pressure. His report is entitled: ‘Tests of Regional Climate Model Validity in the Drought Exceptional Circumstances Report’

The Abstract states:

In a statistical re-analysis of the data from the Drought Exceptional Circumstances Report, all climate models failed standard internal validation tests for regional droughted area in Australia over the last century. The most worrying failure was that simulations showed increases in droughted area over the last century in all regions, while the observed trends in drought decreased in five of the seven regions identified in the CSIRO/Bureau of Meteorology report. Therefore there is no credible basis for the claims of increasing frequency of Exceptional Circumstances declarations made in the report. These results are consistent with other studies finding lack of adequate validation in global warming effects modeling, and lack of skill of climate models at the regional scale.

Read David’s own blog here.

Climate Audit:

Stockwell on CSIRO Drought Report

Some Quick Thoughts on CSIRO Drought Info

CSIRO: A Limited Hang out??

CSIRO and Stock Promotions

CSIRO adopts Phil Jones’ Stonewall Tactic

Malcolm Hill alerted me to Cohenite’s comments that are worthy of a new thread:

I’m just a middle man connecting the points first raised by John McLean and Thomas Quirk in their paper, ‘ Australian Temperature Variations – An Alternative View:’

http://mclean.ch/climate/Aust_temps_alt_view.pdf

And Bob Tisdales work with Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)

I agree with Malcolm that this is a crucial issue because if there has been no temperature increase then AGW is shot to bits.

A starting point would be a graph of PDO phase shifts over the 20th Century;

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2008/04/pdo_monthly.png

There were 3 PDO’s during the 20thC; a warm and dry +ve PDO from 1905-46; a cool and wet -ve PDO from 1946-76; and another +ve PDO from 1976-2006.

A typical temperature chart of the 20th Century is as follows;

http://i32.tinypic.com/2s01m5y.jpg

The 2 upward trends at the beginning and end of the 20th Century are typical because they are similar +ve PDO’s with similar temperature regimes; if one looks at the slope and amplitude for the temperature increase at the beginning, it is identical to the one from 1977 onwards; the only difference is that the one at the beginning of the 20th Century starts from a lower base. The reason for this is not because the temperatures were lower, but because of base period bias. HadCrut uses a base period of 1961-90. This period covers the end of the middle -ve PDO and the beginning of the 2nd +PDO; an average of the 30 years of this base will cause temperatures in the 2nd +PDO period to be anomalously higher because these temperatures will not have the impact of the cooler temperatures of the base period dragging them down as occurred in the averaging process; conversely, the temperatures in the -ve PDO from 1946 onwards will be anomalously cooler because they do not have the averaging benefit of the +ve PDO temperatures; there will be, therefore a step-up in temperature after 1977 and a step-down before 1946. The base period weighting for Hadcrut is 0.15C, which would drag the temperatures of the 2nd +ve PDO back down slightly; but the weighting doesn’t prevent the step-up at 1977 or the step-down at 1946.

What Bob Tisdale has done is to remove the base period bias; he does this by the simple method of annual variance; Tn+1-Tn over the full range of the HadCrut data; the result is this;

http://i25.tinypic.com/e6zj0l.jpg

This shows only variance within the PDO climate; if there was a seperate anthropogenic signal based on increasing CO2 increases it would show as an increasing trend; there is no seperate upward temperature trend, so there is no CO2 caused temperature increase; a comparison between the 2 temperature histories is here;

http://i26.tinypic.com/2hmpw6r.jpg

It is interesting that Lucia has undertaken something similar, but from an opposite direction, when she removed the ENSO signal from all temperature indices in the post 2000 period;

http://rankexploits.com/musings/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/ipcc-falsifies-gavin.gif

That Lucia shows a cooling trend would tend to suggest that if there is an anthropogenic signal, it is a cooling one.

The new US Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) report has been criticised by the likes of Roger Pielke Senior and Junior because science comes a poor third to sloppiness and political advocacy. The report represents the biased and narrow opinions of the lead authors, rather like the UN IPCC reports.

Amongst the report’s many and deliberate flaws are the use of the discredited ‘Hockey Stick’ figure from the Arctic Climate Assessment report (that splices paleoclimate temperature proxies and the modern instrument record, despite expert views that such splicing should not be done), and a image of a flooded house doctored using photoshop.

Maybe one day we will see an objective, scientific climate report that is actually of genuine use to policymakers. I fear global cooling will come to Hell first!

Roger Pielke Sr: Comments On The Draft CCSP Report “Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States”

Prometheus: Sloppy Work by the CCSP

Watts Up With That: NCDC: Photoshopping the climate change report for better impact

Climate Audit: Chucky and the U.S. CCSP

http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=3384#comment-284918

Britain’s great seafaring tradition is to provide a unique insight into modern climate change, thanks to thousands of Royal Navy logbooks that have survived from the 17th century onwards.

A preliminary study of 6,000 logbooks has produced results that raise questions about climate change theories. There was a surge in the frequency of summer storms over Britain in the 1680s and 1690s. Many scientists believe storms are a consequence of global warming, but these were the coldest decades of the so-called Little Ice Age that hit Europe from about 1600 to 1850.

During the 1730s, Europe underwent a period of rapid warming similar to that recorded recently – and which must have had natural origins.

“Global warming is a reality, but what our data shows is that climate science is complex and that it is wrong to take particular events and link them to CO2 emissions. These records will give us a much clearer picture of what is really happening.”

Papers will be published in the journals The Holocene and Climatic Change.

Read the entire Times article entitled: Captains’ logs yield climate clues – Records kept by Nelson and Cook are shedding light on climate change

DAILY, new evidence emerges to demonstrate that Climate Minister Penny Wong is wrong.

The latest blow to the Government’s apocalyptic prophet is news from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute that there is more ice than normal in the Arctic waters north of the Svalbard archipelago.

According to the Barents Observer there are open areas in this area in most years during July – but this year the area is covered by ice.

A fortnight ago a Norwegian research ship, Lance, and a Swedish ship, MV Stockholm, got stuck in the ice in the area and needed to be freed by the Norwegian Coast Guard.

While one ice floe does not amount to a mini-ice age, the dramatic evidence runs counter to the mantra of the climate warming cult which has claimed the Arctic is becoming progressively free of ice.

The Daily Telegraph, Piers Akerman: Icy reality cools the climate cultists

The New York Times Magazine published a story “Ice Free” by Stephan Faris, hawking his new book “Forecast: The Consequences of Climate Change, From the Amazon to the Arctic, From Darfur to Napa Valley”, to be published in January.

In the article, Faris notes “Greenland’s ice sheet represents one of global warming’s most disturbing threats. The vast expanses of glaciers- massed, on average, 1.6 miles deep – contain enough water to raise sea levels worldwide by 23 feet. Should they melt or otherwise slip into the ocean, they would flood coastal capitals, submerge tropical islands and generally redraw the world’s atlases. The infusion of fresh water could slow or shut down the ocean’s currents, plunging Europe into bitter winter.”

There is little recognition in the media and by the author of history. Greenland actually was warmer in the 1930s and 1940s than it has been in recent decades. For the period from the 1960s to the 1990s, temperatures actually declined significantly as the Atlantic went through its multidecadal cold mode. The temperature changes up and down the last few centuries were closely related to these multidecadal ocean cycles.

Shown below is the temperature plot for Godthab Nuuk in southwest Greenland. Note how closely the temperatures track with the AMO (which is a measure of the Atlantic temperatures 0 to 70N). It shows that cooling from the 1940s to the late 1990s even as greenhouse gases rose steadily, a negative correlation over almost 5 decades. The rise after the middle 1990s was due to the flip of the AMO into its warm phase. They have not reached the level of the 1930s and 1940s.

Temperatures cooled back to the levels of the 1880s by the 1980s and 1990s. In a GRL paper in 2003, Hanna and Cappelen showed a significant cooling trend for eight stations in coastal southern Greenland from 1958 to 2001 (-1.29ºC for the 44 years). The temperature trend represented a strong negative correlation with increasing CO2 levels.

Many recent studies have addressed Greenland ice mass balance. They yield a broad picture of slight inland thickening and strong near-coastal thinning, primarily in the south along fast-moving outlet glaciers. However, interannual variability is very large, driven mainly by variability in summer melting and sudden glacier accelerations. Consequently, the short time interval covered by instrumental data is of concern in separating fluctuations from trends. But in a paper published in Science in February 2007, Dr. Ian Howat of the University of Washington reports that two of the largest glaciers have suddenly slowed, bringing the rate of melting last year down to near the previous rate. At one glacier, Kangerdlugssuaq, “average thinning over the glacier during the summer of 2006 declined to near zero, with some apparent thickening in areas on the main trunk.”

Dr. Howat in a follow-up interview with the New York Times went on to add: “Greenland was about as warm or warmer in the 1930’s and 40’s, and many of the glaciers were smaller than they are now. This was a period of rapid glacier shrinkage world-wide, followed by at least partial re-expansion during a colder period from the 1950’s to the 1980’s. Of course, we don’t know very much about how the glacier dynamics changed then because we didn’t have satellites to observe it. However, it does suggest that large variations in ice sheet dynamics can occur from natural climate variability.” For more on this issue see this full post here. SPPI has also posted a response here. EPW compiled a series of papers here.

Icecap: Greenland Again

During our last check in, we had a look at northern Canada from the Arctic Circle to the North pole, and found we had quite a ways to go before we see an “ice free arctic” this year as some have speculated.

Today I did a check of the NASA rapidfire site for TERRA/MODIS satellite images and grabbed a view showing northern Greenland all the way to the North Pole.

There’s some bergy bits on the northeastern shore of Greenland, but in the cloud free area extending all the way to the pole, it appears to still be solid ice.

With more than half of the summer melt season gone, it looks like an uphill battle for an ice-free arctic this year.

This dovetails with a press release and news story about more ice than normal in the Barents Sea:

The Barents Observer:
http://www.barentsobserver.com/?cat=16149&id=4498513

The Meteorological Institute writes in a press release:

The ice findings from the area spurred surprise among the researchers, many of whom expect the very North Pole to be ice-free by September this year.

Watts Up With That: Polar Ice Check – Still a lot of ice up there

Bernie draws our attention to an article in the Globe and Mail on another break-off of the Ellesmere Island ice shelf:

The Globe and Mail has an excellent map of the “collapse” of this ice sheet. Apparently its collapse has been proceeding for about 100 years.

Update- The break is said to be unprecedented since as long ago as 2005:

Scientists say the break, the largest on record since 2005 but still small when compared with others

This topic is in the news from time to time – there was another similar story in a couple of years ago. At the time, I looked into the matter and wrote several posts on the topic of Ellesmere Island ice shelves, which people interested in this topic may wish to re-visit.

Climate Audit: Ward Hunt Island: Unprecedented since 2005

Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit continues his quest for unarchived and therefore unverifiable data that has been used in numerous millenial temperature reconstructions that produce a ‘Hockey Stick’ shape:

In 2000, Keith Briffa, lead author of the millennial section of AR4, published his own versions of Yamal, Taymir and Tornetrask, all three of which have been staples of all subsequent supposedly “independent” reconstructions. The Briffa version of Yamal has a very pronounced HS and is critical in the modern-medieval differences in several studies. However, the Briffa version for Yamal differs substantially from the version in the publication by the originating authors (Hantemirov, Holocene 2002), but is the one that is used in the multiproxy studies (though it’s hard to tell since Hantemirov is usually cited.) Studies listed in AR4 that use the Briffa versions include not just Briffa 2000, but Mann and Jones 2003, Moberg et al 2005, D’Arrigo et al 2006, Hegerl et al 2007, as well as Osborn and Briffa 2006.

Of the 8 proxies shown in the proxy spaghetti graph (as opposed to the reconstruction spaghetti graph), 3 are from the Briffa 2000 study (called NW Russia, N Russia and N Sweden) but demonstrably the Briffa versions of these sites.

An important characteristic of tree ring chronologies is that they are sensitive to the method used. Chronologies can be quickly and easily calculated from measurement data. Rob Wilson, for example, will nearly always run his own chronologies from measurement data so that he knows for sure how they were done and so that they are done consistently across sites.

Osborn and Briffa 2006 was published in Science, which has a policy requiring the availability of data. It used Briffa’s versions of Yamal, Taymir and Tornetrask. At the time, I requested the measurement data, which had still not been archived 6 years after the original publication of Briffa 2000, despite the availability of excellent international archive facilities at WDCP-A (www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo). Briffa refused. I asked Science to require Briffa to provide the data. After some deliberation, they stated that Osborn and Briffa 2006 had not used the measurement data directly but had only used the chronologies from an earlier study and that I should take up the matter with the author of the earlier study, pointedly not identifying the author, who was, of course, Briffa himself. I wrote Briffa again, this time in his capacity as author of the 2000 article in Quaternary Science Reviews and was blown off.

So years later, the measurement data for key studies used in both canonical multiproxy studies and illustrated in AR4 Box 6.4 Figure 1 (along, remarkably, with Mann’s PC1), remains unarchived, with Briffa resolutely stonewalling efforts to have him archive the data.

But has Briffa, after all these years, finally made a misstep?

Maybe.

Recently Briffa published Briffa et al 2008 in Phil Trans Roy Soc, a journal with a long history, and with a life outside IPCC. A reader drew my attention to the fact that Phil Trans Roy Soc has a clear and forthright policy. As I reported a little while ago, I wrote to them observing that Briffa had not observed their requirements on data availability and that their editors and reviewers had failed to require observance of a data archiving policy that would require provision of a url as a condition of publication. My letter was as follows:

Dear Sirs,

Your policy on data availability as stated at: publishing.royalsociety.org/index.cfm?page=1684#question10 states:

“As a condition of acceptance authors agree to honour any reasonable request by other researchers for materials, methods, or data necessary to verify the conclusion of the article.

Supplementary data up to 10Mb is placed on the Society’s website free of charge and is publicly accessible. Large datasets must be deposited in a recognised public domain database by the author prior to submission. The accession number should be provided for inclusion in the published article.”

Briffa et al failed to comply with your requirement that “large datasets must be deposited in a recognised public domain database by the author prior to submission” and your editorial staff and reviewers failed to ensure that the article included an accession number for such deposit.

In particular, Briffa et al. 2008 discussed the following tree ring measurement data sets which have not been archived at the International Tree Ring Data Bank or other public domain data base (other than a small subset of the Tornetrask data set.) Would you therefore please provide me with either a URL or the complete tree ring measurement data sets in digital form for all data sets discussed in Briffa et al 2008, including Yamal, Tornetrask, Taymyr, Bolshoi Avam and Finnish Lapland, together with digital versions of the individual reconstuctions referred to in Briffa et al 2008, including, without limitation, the reconstructions for each of the above sites and the composite regional reconstructions referred to in the article. This informaiton is necessary to “verify the conclusion of the article”.

Yours truly,

Stephen McIntyre

Last week, I received a cordial replying undertaking to look into the matter and stating:

“We take matters like this very seriously and I am sorry that this was not picked up in the publishing process.”

Imagine that. A journal that seems to have both a data policy and that takes it seriously. Unlike, say, Science or Nature, which have refused to make similar requirements of IPCC authors. On the face of it, a real science journal. That’s right: Real. Science.

However, Briffa is a wily data stonewalling veteran and may yet outwit the editors of Phil Trans Roy Soc. We shall see.

I suspect that Briffa won’t be able to pull off the same stunt that he pulled at Science, where he was able to use the prior publication of the data elsewhere as a pretext for not archiving the data in accordance with Science’s policies. Look at what Phil Trans Roy Soc says about publishing data in more than one place:

“It is important to ensure that research work is only published once. If it is published more than once, the scientific literature can be unjustifiably weighted by the appearance that one study has been replicated. It might also mean that the study is inadvertently entered twice into a meta-analysis, for example, or cause problems in systems which use the number of publications to assess an individual’s or an institute’s research output.”

There may be situations (e.g. review articles) where previously published work can be included in summary form, but it must be made clear to the Editor on submission that this is the case.

Imagine if that policy were applied in paleoclimate. How many times have we seen the same proxies re-cycled as a supposedly “independent” result. Look at the above sentence:

“If it is published more than once, the scientific literature can be unjustifiably weighted by the appearance that one study has been replicated.”

Precisely. If that were applied to the Team (Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick Team), they’d be out of business.

Climate Audit: Is Briffa Finally Cornered?