Balanced analysis?

Some grudging kudos is due to the BBC for a detailed airing of the sceptical viewpoint on the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning. They even interviewed ‘Sceptical Blogger’ Andrew Montford (Bishop Hill) – who made a great contribution. Pity it was an exercise in reassuring the public that sceptical views are probably wrong.

The usual suspects in authority such as Sir John Houghton (“first chair of the IPCC”) were trotted out, and apparently we will be treated to James Hansen’s views too:

The dog that did not bark

Guest post by Peter Morcombe

Remember the case of “Silver Blaze”?  Here Sherlock Holmes discusses it with a Scotland Yard detective:

Gregory: “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes:  ”To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Holmes:  “That was the curious incident.”

Why did the dogs fail to bark?

Just a few weeks ago I finally got around to looking at some papers relating to the EPICA “Dome C” ice cores.   My interest stems from the idea that temperature changes are presumed to be magnified at high latitudes so it ought to be easier to measure “Global Warming near the poles.  

A Modern Climatologist

Guest Post – the wit and rhyme of Mostly Harmless (with apologies to Gilbert and Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore The Pirates of Penzance – Major-General’s song – if you’re not sure of the meter click here to listen).

I am the very model of a modern climatologist,
I’m smart and brash and canny, and not a whit apologist.
I know my greenhouse science from Keeling and Arrhenius,
My hero is Pachauri, a prognosticating genius.
My arguments are fashioned from proxies picked and polished,
So hockey-sticks of various hues see history demolished.

Silence of the lambs

I apologise up front for the title of this post, but it aptly describes the impact of this snowy spring on Britain’s hill farms. The point of this post is to show the severity of this weather event.  As the South East of Britain escaped the worst of the snow, it is really the lack of Spring-like temperatures that have made the news, but for many areas in the northwest this has been comparable to the notorious Winters of 1947 and 1962/63, and the effect on livestock, particularly sheep in-lamb, has been devastating.

Source: Daily Mail

It all started late on Thursday 21st March when a band of rain moved diagonally across Ireland from the Southwest, turning to sleet and snow as it hit the cold air over Britain. 

Weather swings and see-saws

The contrast of the current March weather to Spring last year could hardly be a greater swing (Daily Mail: What a difference a year makes: Mother’s Day daffodils delayed by the cold weather…) to the coldest March in 50 years in the UK. This year has certainly bucked the supposed climate change-induced trend towards warmer and earlier Springs.

In the final week of his tenure as the government’s chief scientific adviser Sir John Beddington perpetuated the extreme weather meme:

“The [current] variation we are seeing in temperature or rainfall is double the rate of the average.”

Well, he might like to consider a graph posted last week by The Telegraph showing March temperatures (HADCET) over the last 100 years. Does anything strike you about it?

Masters of understatement

You might have heard we’ve had a bit of snow in the UK in the last few days.

Snow plough/gritter and digger stuck in drifts in Cumbria, March 23rd 2013.  Source: BBC via Daily Mail.

From the Daily Mail, (accompanied by impressive photos)

The blockades have closed many roads in the area, while the M6 between Hackthorpe and Shap is only passable with care.

The M6 at Shap is below the village as the land slopes down from the upland areas of the Cumbrian Fells.

The Altruist

“Pure altruism consists of sacrificing something for someone other than the self (e.g. sacrificing time, energy or possessions) with no expectation of any compensation or benefits, either direct, or indirect (e.g., receiving recognition for the act of giving).” (Source Wikipedia)

Climategate 3.0 opened today with a glimpse of Mr FOIA’s moral imperative.

If someone is still wondering why anyone would take these risks, or sees only a breach of privacy here, a few words…

The first glimpses I got behind the scenes did little to  garner my trust in the state of climate science — on the contrary.  I found myself in front of a choice that just might have a global impact.

Arrhenius Revisited

Guest Post by Peter Morcombe

Verity Jones kindly provided a soap box for me to compare the theories of Nikolov & Zeller to those of “Climate Scientists” exemplified by Scott Denning.  If N&Z are right the huge sums of money governments around the world are committing to “Mitigating” CO2 emissions can have no effect on global temperature.

In the discussion that followed supporters of Scott Denning were asked to provide an equation expressing the relationship between atmospheric CO2 and global temperature.  David Appell was bold enough to take the challenge

Snow record due to ‘colder temperatures’

Last week’s extreme snow accumulation in Japan featured on the Asia pages of the BBC news website.

Record snow in Northern Japan. (Source BBC – 1st March: click for link including video)

The video report ends by alluding to the ‘Extreme Weather’ mantra

“People here are well equipped for dealing with snow, but even they are wondering what on Earth is going on with their weather.”

However, here’s a simple truth at the tail end of the article:

Unified Theory of Climate Revisited

Peter Morcombe copied me into an email last week asking for feedback on a reworking of his calculations on Nikolov & Zeller’s theory.  He’s had some feedback, notably from Robert G. Brown.  Peter emails:

“Robert’s objections are based on dimensional analysis whereas I am just trying to check two theories against observations.  I did the Radiance plot backwards with the X-axis as frequency rather than wavelength or wave number.  In my opinion that makes it a little easier to appreciate the effect of the main CO2 absorption bands.

I wanted to show where the numbers come from for the benefit of people who will want to explain where I went wrong.”

I’m not in a position to comment, but I have no objection to providing an opportunity for it to be discussed here.

Guest post by Peter Morcombe

The Nikolov & Zeller poster titled a “Unified Theory of Climate” claims that planetary surface temperatures can be calculated if pressure and TSI (Total Solar Irradiance) are known.   The theory implies that other variables such as atmospheric composition, seas, ice caps and the presence of vapors are of minor importance.  Instead of dismissing this as implausible I decided to check the predictive skill of N&K’s equations on gas giants, something the authors had not envisaged.