Errors in IPCC climate science

The Andrew Bolt Show on Australian Channel 10 Sundays. Well worth a few minutes of your time.

Canadian scientist Dean Brooks has written a provocative paper pointing out that GCM’s have not handled atmospheric density changes correctly. You can download his 1MB pdf paper “The ‘Pot Lid’ Hypothesis: Where Does the Air Go?”.

He has also written and published on “The Decline Effect – The law behind diminishing returns and wildly varying outcomes in markets, politics, culture, religion, disease, and war” – his 30 odd page Chapter 1 is downloadable, only 400Kb – Looks like a must read.

Videos putting the case against the Carbon Tax.
Note other links on right hand side to a series of videos against the Carbon Tax. Thanks to the Galileo Movement.

Well worth half an hour viewing – such a crisp and to the point delivery by Professor Vincent Courtillot – no time wasting.

A recent paper in Nature claiming an increase in extreme rain events 1951-1999 correlates with “AGW-climate change” has been given the usual uncritical acclaim in our GreenLeft media. I enjoy the originality in ABC headlines. Dr Roger Pielke Sr. has reviewed the paper.

I was surprised to see the Min et al paper only quote data for their “5 day consecutive rainfall” to 1999 – over a decade ago. Rainfall data must be in a worse state than I imagined.

I was curious to see what total rainfall data showed for the 20 to 60 degrees north band in the Northern Hemisphere –

Using data I can access at the KNMI Climate Explorer up to 2010, look under “Monthly observations.”

Running the linest function in Excel over the 60 years of GHCN rain 1951-2010 – the daily rainfall anomaly has increased by 0.00026mm PA which equates to 0.0156mm over the 60 year period – which in turn equates to an extra 5.69mm PA.

I seriously doubt anybody would notice a ~1% increase in their average rainfall over 60 years – but imagine the panic stories from the warmists if the climate were drying !!

Last night after 10pm I saw some of the ABC 24hr TV News show and the segment was The Drum – a presenter with a few people (mostly with greenleft views) to discuss current affairs. The subject turned to the Greens Senator Brown’s call for coal companies to pay bigtime for the Queensland flood cleanup, “because the coal they mine causes global warming and of course the floods”. Somebody mentioned the statement by Senator Barnaby Joyce in above article “…it was absurd for Senator Brown to blame the coal industry for floods, which had been a reality in Queensland throughout its history. “In 1893, the flood gauge on the Brisbane River reached 8.35m, so was the coal industry responsible for that as well?” he (Joyce) asked.
John Barron of ABC NewsRadio replied that “There was a lot of coal burnt in 1893.” And that misinformation went unchallenged. This CDIAC page shows carbon emissions in 1893 at 370 million metric tons of carbon as opposed to 8365 million metric tons of carbon emissions in 2007. The figure for 1893 is 4.4% of current levels so it was clearly misleading for John Barron to cut the debate as he did.

Readers have sent in data about this issue trying to get a feel for how global temperatures might cool as 2010 unfolds.
The salient points for me are;
[1] 1997-98 was an altogether greater El Nino event than 2009-10.
[2] The SOI went negative early in 1997 and stayed negative until April 98.
[3] This contrasts with 2009 where the SOI muddled around near zero until September and was positive again by April this year. (note I have plotted SOI over 10 to fit the chart better)
[4] [1] is reflected in the Nino3.4 monthly SST anomalies.
[5] The global satellite lower troposphere T anomalies are coming off a higher base in 2009 compared to 1997.

So I would not expect temperatures to cool as much this year as they did in 1998. But hey – the global system is vastly more complex than this.

Fluctuations in global economic activity are clearly imprinted on the carbon emissions timeseries.

It is interesting to see the delay between major events and the consequent troughs in the annual rate of change. The second oil shock and the 1987 stock market crash both took five years to produce the maximum dip in the rate of slowing in annual emissions. It seems likely that the 2007-2008 market crashes and GFC will cause another minimum in the % rate of annual change – a few years in the future – and it could well be off the bottom of this chart.

This article in the UK Telegraph says; “Carbon dioxide emissions ‘cut by recession’”
Global greenhouse gas emissions will be 9 per cent below what they were expected to be in 2012 as a result of the recession, researchers said today.
Data from CDIAC, and for recent years, this Netherlands site

Accurate estimation of CO2 background level from near ground measurements at non-mixed environments
Authors: Dr. Francis Massen , Dipl. Biol. Ernst-Georg Beck
Read the rest of this entry »

The brave prediction, “Sydney’s climate to ‘become like Brisbane’s'” for 2100 by staff at James Cook University means that Sydney Airport will warm by ~2.75 degrees C relative to Brisbane Airport (based on 1961-1990 averages) for this prediction to come true. It is obvious that the Sydney Urban Heat Island (UHI) has already notionally moved Sydney north but we will all be departed when it falls due to adjudicate on this claim by JCU staff in 90 odd years time.

However the review paper that this prediction was extracted from is titled, “Expansion of the tropics”. The authors do not seem to present evidence directly themselves, preferring to cherry pick quotes from a wide range of IPCC compliant literature.

I just want to point out that whatever merits this concept of the “expanding tropics” might have, the tropics are only warming slightly. According to 30 years of temperature trends in the lower troposphere generated by NASA satellites and calculated by the University of Alabama at Huntsville, the tropics are warming at about 0.05 C per decade. That trend is partly driven by cooling due to volcanoes early in the 30 year period then warming from the huge El Nino in 1998 – cooling early in the 30 years and warming late in the 30 years forms a couple which to some extent inserts a warming trend into the data.

However one hopes that none of the papers reviewed and relied upon by our JCU academics are quoting the authoritative (much IPCC quoted) HadCRUT3 land sea gridded temperature data compiled by the University of Norwich, Climate Research Unit, Dr. P. D. Jones and the UK Met. Office Hadley Centre.

This graphic shows that for a huge region of tropical Africa the HadCRUT3 data has errors of about 0.8 degrees C over the 30 odd years.
And world leaders are discussing huge changes to our economies assuming all the science is settled.
I should have said I got my data from the The Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute useful website Climate Explorer. Follow the Monthly observations link on the right.