Jennifer Marohasy

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Climate & Climate Change

Global Temperature Update to February 2013

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“On average, global air temperatures were somewhat below the 1998-2006 average, although
with large regional differences…

“The global oceanic heat content has been rather stable since 2003/2004…

The above quotes and charts are from a monthly newsletter with global meteorological information updated to February 2013:

http://www.climate4you.com/Text/Climate4you_February_2013.pdf

Compiled by

Ole Humlum, Professor of Physical Geography, Physical Geography, Institute of Geosciences, University of Oslo, Norway

FOIA, Government-funded Climate science and Hole-digging

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FOIA is a recognised shorthand for Freedom of Information Act. Legislation by this name has existed in the USA since 1966, Australia since 1982 and the UK legislation was introduced in 2000. It was climate scientists at the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, conspiring to evade the UK FOIA that probably inspired Climategate, with Mr FOIA, as the “hacker” calls himself, releasing over 220,000 documents and emails beginning in November 2009. In a recent email he explained: “The circus was about to arrive in Copenhagen. Later on it could be too late.”

By providing public access to emails and documents from leading climate scientists, Mr FOIA exposed how tricks, adjustments, and corrections, were routinely applied to climate data to support the propaganda of the largely government-funded global warming industry.

I recently scrutinized documents from a successful FOI request by John Abbot to the Australian Department of Climate Change and Energy Efficiency, DCCEE. As far as I can make out from the documents the entire Australian Climate Change Science Program can be likened to what Mr FOIA describes as “a massive hole-digging-and-filling-up endeavor” for which the climate scientists are generously remunerated by the Australian taxpayer. Let me explain in more detail:

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Climategate 3: Thank you Mr FOIA

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SOMEONE hacked into the Climatic Research Unit, CRU, at the University of East Anglia and published thousands of confidential emails between leading climate scientists online in November 2009 [1]. Many of the emails showed that leading proponents of anthropogenic global warming were having great difficulty justifying their own propaganda. One of my favourite emails is from Kevin Trenberth, Head of Climate Analysis at the US National Center for Atmospheric Research, to the infamous Michael Mann complaining that there has been no global warming:

“Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low. This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather)…

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.”

While the hack was widely condemned by mainstream climate scientists and the hacker would likely go to jail for a long time – if only he could be found. For me, the stolen emails represented a first opportunity to see the extraordinary deceit and corruption within the mainstream climate science community; the very people running the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, at the United Nations.

Indeed I have always held the hacker in high esteem. He is one of my heroes.   Along with Thomas Huxley (1825-1895) and Thomas Kuhn (1922-1996), he is a great champion of science.

Anyway, yesterday the hacker provided several high profile bloggers, including Anthony Watts, with password access to some 220,000 additional emails!

WUWT will be publishing some of the new material over the next few days and probably also weeks and months [2].

In a covering email [3] the hacker explained he had done this because he was keen to off-load the remaining material and was not in a position to sort through the material and cull the sensitive and potentially socially damaging material:

“I prepared CG1 & 2 alone. Even skimming through all 220.000 emails would have taken several more months of work in an increasingly unfavorable environment.
Dumping them all into the public domain would be the last resort. Majority of the emails are irrelevant, some of them probably sensitive and socially damaging.”

I have often wondered who the hacker was, and what motivated him. In this latest email he provides significant insights. In particular, like many readers of this blog, he is clearly concerned about the increasing misallocation of resources by government in the name of anthropogenic global warming.

He is acutely aware that the opportunity for any one individual in a community to be fed, clothed and educated depends to a large extent on the collective wealth and wellbeing of that society. Towards this end, the covering email is also a plea for the better allocation of the “assets” at our collective disposal.

Mr FOIA, as he calls himself, wrote:

“Wealth of the surrounding society tends to draw the major brushstrokes of a newborn’s future life. It makes a huge difference whether humanity uses its assets to achieve progress, or whether it strives to stop and reverse it, essentially sacrificing the less fortunate to the climate gods.”

I couldn’t agree more.

Clearly Mr FOIA also places a premium on the truth, writing:

“Even if I have it all wrong and these scientists had some good reason to mislead us (instead of making a strong case with real data) I think disseminating the truth is still the safest bet by far.”

Thank you Mr FOIA.

 

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[1] All the emails, documents and computer code, from the original release in November 2009, can be downloaded from Wikileaks at 

http://wikileaks.org/wiki/Climatic_Research_Unit_emails,_data,_models,_1996-2009

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[2] I’m guessing that What’s Up With That will be a best place to find new emails as they are released. This morning the following was posted…

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Cooking Books for Hot Summers

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The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has “confirmed” that it is been the hottest summer on record in Australia. But I’m sceptical.

The “record breaking hot summer” is apparently a statistical fact derived from simply averaging across 104 or 112 localities – depending on whom at the Bureau is providing the information.  No mention is made of how the temperatures for all of these localities have been “corrected” over recent years through the ACORN program [2]. In general the “corrections” are such that temperature records for specific localities pre-1970 are adjusted down, while records for specific localities post-1970 are adjusted up.

In their media release [1] attention is drawn to the town of Moomba in South Australia which apparently had the highest temperature recorded at 49.6 degrees C. Interestingly the station of Moomba only opened in 1972 – this of course is not reported in the same media release.

I’ve been trying to get a good long temperature series for some rainfall hindcasting that I’ve been doing for southeast Queensland, and have found that none of the Brisbane temperature recording stations have had any permanence. While once the main temperature recording station for Brisbane was in a bay-side suburb, in recent years the temperature recording station has been moved to the middle of East Brisbane just south of the city’s CBD – where coincidently it tends to be hotter.

The Bureau’s media release goes on to claim this summer follows a pattern of extremely hot summers in various parts of the world over the last few years.

The phenomena whereby government climate scientists correct the historical temperature record to support their theory of anthropogenic global warming is not unique to Australia. In fact the Australian Bureau of Meteorology may be simply following instructions from The Team. The Team are, of course, that notorious in-group who run policy at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. In the leaked Climategate emails there is discussion involving The Team focused on the need to reduce global sea surface temperatures, SST, during the early part of the 20th Century by about 0.15 degree C.. By reducing, the blip in SST temperatures for example between 1940 and 1945, it is suggested that the rate and magnitude of global warming for the period 1910 to 1945 can be made to not exceed the rate and magnitude of warming for the 35 year to 2009.

Interestingly recent “corrections down” to historical global temperatures by the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, GISS, have been concentrated in this period, Figure 1. The net effect of the adjustments has been to generate a more smoothly increasing global temperature since 1880, and reduce a warming blip that occurred in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

The US National Climatic Data Center has also been making “corrections” to the historical global temperature record, Figure 2.  Indeed through administrative means January 1915 can be made to appear significantly cooler than January 2013, Figure 2.

This used to be known as cooking the books, however, of course, our esteemed climate scientists have detailed justifications for all the changes they have been busily making to all the global historical temperature databases.

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1. Issued March 1, 2013: Bureau of Meteorology confirms it’s been the hottest summer on record… http://www.bom.gov.au/announcements/media_releases/ho/20130301.shtml
2. A team of independent auditors, bloggers and scientists went through the BOM “High Quality” dataset and found significant errors, omissions and inexplicable adjustments, read more here… http://joannenova.com.au/2012/06/threat-of-anao-audit-means-australias-bom-throws-out-temperature-set-starts-again-gets-same-results/
3. Figures 1 and 2 are courtesy of Ole Humlum, Professor of Geosiences at the University of Oslo, Norway.  Click on the above charts for a slightly improved view. Visit http://www.climate4you.com for the best view and background information.

King Tide Not So High

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Jen, Here is a photograph of the King Tide yesterday, 12th January 2013, at Cleveland Point, Moreton Bay.

The King Tides here, where I used to live from 1946 until the early 1950s, used to cover the lawn on this land by about an inch (25mm) or so. Today’s King Tide was 2.68 m at the Brisbane Bar (about as high as they get) and the barometer reading at high tide was 1012.5 hPa (normal).

There were no enhancing or diminishing factors influencing sea levels that I am aware of. The remaining decking on the ruined jetty (click on photograph to see more of jetty) is at the height of the top of the sea wall (lawn height) so it can be seen that the King Tide height is about 300 mm below the lawn height.

So, according to my observations, sea levels in Moreton Bay have gone down about 300 mm over the last 67 years.

Cheers, Spangled Drongo

Your Temperatures Diddled

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ALMOST exactly three years ago Michael Hammer showed that the official temperature rise profile for the 20th century in the United States is largely, if not entirely, an artifact of adjustments applied after the raw data is collected from the weather stations [1]. It was a very neat little analysis, first published at this blog. It was a neat little analysis that was, for the most part, ignored.

Back then, meteorologist Anthony Watts was busy documenting evidence of problems with the official temperature record in the US because of poor placement of weather stations and Ross McKitrick was attempting to calculate just how artificially elevated temperatures might be as a consequence.

Then interestingly, just last month, John Hinderaker cited the original study by Mr Hammer at Powerline [2] and other studies, concluding:

‘These disclosures highlight a key fact with respect to global temperature data: the data sets are utterly lacking in integrity. Global warming alarmists confidently announce that worldwide temperatures have risen by, say .1 degree over a decade. It would be extraordinarily difficult to take measurements at many locations around the globe that would actually demonstrate that proposition. But the real situation is much worse: no one tells you what temperatures were actually measured at the world’s weather stations. Rather, they report claims of global warming based on “adjusted” temperature data–adjusted by alarmists, with the systematic purpose of manufacturing a rising temperature trend. If you subtract the “adjustments,” it may well be that there has been no net warming over the last 100 years at all.’

Ho Hum. But no one was publishing the proof in the technical literature.

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