All posts by Warwick Hughes

Benchmarking CRUT3 and CRUT4 land only grid box temperature trends against AMSU lower troposphere data for East China, Russia, Africa and North America

After comparing land only CRUT3 vs the shiny new CRUT4 for some Australian grid boxes I examined again grid box areas in East China, Russia, Africa and also North America which I have checked in past years for trend differences between CRUT data and AMSU satellite data from UAH. For map of grid box areas. Data from KNMI Climate Explorer
For East China the differences are large and have increased in CRUT4.

Over Russia differences are less and have increased in CRUT4.
In the case of the grid box over Africa the trend per decade differences between CRUT3 and AMSU are huge and have eased slightly in CRUT4. These results imply large errors in surface data – unless some other reason can be found.
In 2006 I found close agreement between satellites and CRUT2 over the USA. Now we find that CRUT4 finds more warming trend in the USA than did CRUT3 – this chart shows evidence of huge adjustments in 1850’s data – and also CRUT4 has been tweaked warmer in recent years. The North American grid box area still shows the closest agreement with satellites – but CRUT4 finds increasing warmth by a variety of adjustments. An example is this 0.25 degree jump in the CRUT4 minus AMSU trace at 1997. I wonder if this tweak was “peer reviewed” ?
Perhaps the CRUT team thinks USA climate scientists are not watching – we are told the science is settled – not where I am looking.

Another 3 months of spectacular failed BoM temperature and rainfall Outlook predictions

The maximum temperature Outlook must be a comprehensive failure over eastern Australia extending to the 50% line inside WA. Maps of actual weather averages can be made here.
The cool success in WA has to be limited by the warmth of the western WA coastal strip which would lower the score there. Overall surely a serious fail mark.

The minimum temperature Outlook must be an even worse failure – with not one square centimetre of the continent predicted to be even as cool as average. If anyone can spot the BoM 50% line – let me know. I see the “National night-time HotSpot” shining through – you can not hold down BoM errors.
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Even the rainfall Outlook fails overall despite a win or two here and there. You have to look at the huge areal extent of the predicted dry inside the 50% line – note the majority of the NSW highest ever rain areas were predicted dryer than average.

And our gullible policymakers and politicians are convinced the BoM can predict the future – what a sick joke.

CRUT4 revison of the Murray-Darling Basin grid box temperature data – is this the worst warming tweak ever by the UKMO / Jones et al team ?

Many long term Australian temperature stations have data well back into the 1800’s. Often these 19C data show warmth on a scale with modern decades. See my two graphics from 1991.
Although the Jones et al 1986 data included very few of the long term Australian non-Capital city data – in 1994 many of these stations were included. The situation stayed like this up to the closing of CRUT2 in 2005 – included many Australian stations with relatively warm data a century or more ago – see my article in Coolwire Issue 5: Jan 2003 – “Global Warming” and the Australian Drought. Note the contrasting trends from the adjoining Murray-Darling Basin (MDB) and Sydney grid cells which IMHO are due to urban warming effects in the Sydney grid cell CRUT2 data.
In 2006 the UK Met Office (UKMO) took over the reins and rebuilt CRUT2 into CRUT3. In recent weeks Jones has announced his latest version CRUT4 and the point of this article is to highlight the huge extra warming in the trend for the MDB grid cell in CRUT4 compared to CRUT3. The MDB has been “corrected” to now agree with the urban affected UKMO version of their Sydney Airport station (947670) trend.
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All the grid box data has been downloaded from KNMI Climate Explorer.
Some background on the warm 19C data. The BoM does not publish it “high quality” data further back than 1910 because the have a view that most data before that might not have been collected in a Stevenson screen. I disagree with that and have a 1995 paper with pages scanned here. Here are two studies into the temperature changes produced when thermometer exposures have changed from older more exposed stands to the louvre sided box – the Stevenson screen.
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In his abstract Parker found – “…little overall bias in land surface air temperature has accumulated since the late nineteenth century:” He speaks of a maximum bias of 0.2 deg but says summer and winter changes may have cancelled out.
Then in 1996 Nicholls, N., R. Tapp, K. Burrows, and D. Richards. Historical thermometer exposures in Australia. Int. J. Climatology, 16, 705-710 (downloadable at above link – note Nicholls et al are BoM).
Nicholls et al compared a long running experiment at Adelaide comparing readings in Stevenson screens and a Glaisher stand found that – “Over the year, the mean temperatures were about 0.2 deg C warmer in the Glaisher stand, relative to the Stevenson screen.”
So looking back to the main issue of the massive increase in the CRUT4 trend over the MDB grid cell – I have this chart of CRUT4 minus CRUT3 which shows massive adjustments of 1 to 1.5 degrees – seems out of all proportion to the 0.2 degrees adjustment justified by Nicholls et al 1996.
If anybody knows of greater warming adjustments in CRUT4 grid cell data – please let me know.

New Queensland LNP Government acting fast to unwind carbon reduction schemes

Great news – and the sky will not fall in – unproductive people will be freed to get productive work.
On top of recent news from Victoria that they will dump their 20% greenhouse reduction target.
This could get to be catching – cleaning out GreenLabor rubbish. What other candidates are there for shutting down – abolishing – repealing – firing – generally giving taxpayers a break.

Incompetent and left-wing biased BBC

I often check the BBC news website for this or that region – thinking I will at least get a half competent digest of what is going on. Now I am not so sure – perhaps the BBC is just a great waste of time.
Note that you click on Asia to get Australian news – here is a screen shot. For days now the Australian stories have been – Huawei barred in Australia deal – Australia extinction ‘due to man’ – and Australia’s most wanted man held, which is so important to score 2 links. Refers to the capture of a prison escapee in NE NSW 5 days ago early last Thursday 22 March. I have been looking for the BBC take on the Queensland State election (24 Mar 12) which reduced the ruling Labor party to a single digit number of seats – I think the greatest defeat in an Australian election in my lifetime.
The BBC has nothing on this. Yet when you search for Queensland election – you come up with many articles on Queensland elections – including glowing reports of Labor’s 2009 win. If you search for Queensland election 2012 you still get no BBC ref – but you do get an offsite ref to a Murdoch Australian site. I can only conclude that the BBC news service is very odd, slack and biased to the left side of politics.

AGL Energy Ltd to build huge windfarm at Silverton near Broken Hill NSW

AGL Energy Ltd announced “23/03/2012 SILVERTON WIND FARM DEVELOPMENT RIGHTS – a one page summary pdf. The ABC reported on this – and there is a Silverton Wind Farm web site. The two stage project will end up at 1000MW capacity which is about half of all the wind farms listed on this site.
They say there are planned 282 turbines in stage 1 – capacity 300MW – then another 316 turbines in stage 2 = total 1000MW for 598 turbines. The maths do not add up if the turbines are all planned to be of equal size.
I expect all of the claimed performance figures are exaggerated – as proposed wind farms usually are.
I wonder what size gas turbine power generator will be required somewhere nearby to balance this huge load of erratic electricity – similar to the Dalton gas fired proposal. AGL says nothing about this in their material on Silverton. I predict a White Elephant at Silverton – another loss for taxpayers and electricity users.

The newly released CRUT4 shows many warmer tweaks over the Australian region

My attention was caught by the release of the new version of the UK Met Office / Prof Jones global land temperatures – CRUT4. Just quickly pulling up data plotted as 5 degree grid cells from the KNMI Climate Explorer – for the broad Australian region as per these maps. These are anomalies for 2007 relative to the 1961-1990 period.

Checking various Australian grid cells it is clear that on balance CRUT4 finds more warmth than CRUT3.

This chart shows the trends – and CRUT4 warms by 0.67 compared to 0.58 for CRUT3. The chart also shows that from 2006 onwards CRUT4 is jumped up – whereas in early years CRUT4 is always cooler than CRUT3.
There are several puzzling features of the data and here are a few – the Tuvalu grid cell (2 nth of Fiji) gets lost in CRUT4, probably swamped by rising sea levels – the grid cell with Giles Meteorological Office Number: 13017 is blank in both versions – Giles is I think our most remote & purpose built station. No data can be found for 2007 in all the huge island of New Guinea and a large sector of Indonesia. Looking at New Zealand – Dunedin is missing data as is that region east of Wellington.

The Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists in Australia was convened by the WWF in 2003

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Loss of the New Zealand fishing boat “Easy Rider” NW coast Stewart Island 14 March 2012 claimed eight lives

Reading some of the earlier press on this tragedy there was mention of worsening weather. Google will find many articles. If anybody can find forecasts for the morning of the 14th – please send them in. Likewise if anybody has weather observations from the NW of Stewart Island – I would be keen to see them. Is there a lighthouse there ?
I was curious as to what the BoM satellite images show – here are 24 frames at 30 minute intervals that day – the time is UTC (Greenwich)and NZ is 13 hours ahead.
So as the images roll through – look for the early morning frames – around Loop Number 7 – that would be when Easy Rider left Bluff that evening. Opinion seems to be that she was lost about midnight – so look for the 11.32 UTC frame – Loop Number 12. The semi-circular patch to the south of NZ is cold air and the cloud band signifying the cold front is blindingly obvious. You could expect elevated winds around a cold front – made worse by shoaling water around the NW capes. I am not saying cold fronts are “ship sinkers” – but negative factors can add up.
These satellite animations are available free on the BoM website. Not hard to check if an unfavourable system is coming your way. The satellite archives are here.

Does Australia really need a foreign minister this diplomatic ?

Amazed as I was at the statements by the new Australian Foreign Minister, Senator Bob Carr – that Australia would have to “…organise the world to condemn and isolate Papua New Guinea…”.
Bob Carr
Carr was referring to reports of some differences of opinion from PNG re the timing of their next election – which I thought was entirely their internal business to discuss.
I have also been surprised there has been no call for Carr’s sacking – I mean how much more harmful could a foreign minister be ? I would have thought – open & shut case – gone – record shortest term as foreign minister. But our MSM is just so ingrained – knee jerk – dyed in the wool – pro GreenLabor – that our Bob is safe.
Picture from Sydney Morning Herald – Photo: Penny Bradfield