Errors in IPCC climate science

Thanks to Romanoz for alerting us to this fascinating research – see his comment #5. I now have the 20MB download – Antarctic Climate Change and the Environment – dated November 2009.
Under 2.1.2.7 Atmospheric data derived from ice cores
The last para on page 43 starts – Ice core sea-salt as a potential proxy for mid-latitude winter rainfall variability. The full text on p 43 & 44 is saved here if you click on “Read the rest of this entry” at the end of the post.
Fig 2.8 shows salt content of ice varying from 1300AD and the text says – [ The work in progress indicates that southwest Western Australia experienced periods of higher mean winter rainfall, with high interdecadal variability during 1300 to 1600 AD, followed by lower mean but less variable winter rainfall from 1600 to 1900 AD, which is similar to the past 50 years (Goodwin, in prep.).]

The text ends by saying – [This long record would be of enormous economic benefit to all water users in Western Australia.]

Fig 2.7 shows that in the phase illustrated in panel b, the SW of WA is affected by higher readings of MSLP (mean sea-level pressure) – more finer weather.

So WA water authorities and politicians should take note – there is evidence that pre-1975 SW WA rainfall was not some constant high-rain regime. The post-1975 lower rain regime may be a perfectly normal phase of long term cycles and nothing to do with Greenhouse as they have claimed ad nauseum – Chapter and verse for a decade or more. Read the rest of this entry »

Remembering all the propaganda and media hype about endless temperature records and heatwaves during our hottest ever summer courtesy of the BoM.
Plus our Angry summer courtesy of the Climate Commission. It is pertinent to recall how the BoM maximum (daytime) temperature Outlook visualized summer.
Can you believe with a huge cool trough running east-west through the centre of the continent – almost the exact opposite of the real world weather. What fantasy land does the BoM inhabit ?
All 4 map panels have Outlook forecast on left and real world weather temperature anomalies on the right.

The minimum (night-time) Outlook has many failings.

The maximum Outlook for Jan-Feb-Mar failed to forecast the prominent cool anomaly in far Eastern Australia.

The minimum Outlook for Jan-Feb-Mar failed on more points than the maximum Outlook

You can check the BoM Outlooks archives for temperature and rainfall.
BoM temperature and rainfall anomaly maps for various parameters and timescales can be made at their Maps – Recent & Past Conditions page.

This puzzles me.
In early March I questioned the BoM about a possible discontinuity in Perth Metro readings in July 2011 which had the effect of seeming to increase Perth Metro temperatures relative to Perth Airport.
The BoM reply dated 21 March (see below) said that their readings at both sites were correct and that the 2011/12 summer heat in Perth Metro and Swanbourne relative to “sites further inland”, which I assume includes Perth Airport, were “…potentially attributable to very warm conditions recorded in local sea surface temperatures and observed weaker sea breezes.” My 22 March post re the first BoM reply – see my comment 2 with their second reply see below.

I am amazed the BoM never mentioned these SST and weaker sea breeze factors in their “Perth seasonal climate summaries” for 2011/2012 Perth in summer 2011/12: A wet and warm summer and 2012/2013 Perth in summer 2012/2013: One of hottest summer
If the warm SST ‘s and associated weaker sea breezes are a factor in hiking Perth Metro summer max temperatures up to near the warmth of Perth Airport – then this is surely vital and very interesting information about the Perth climate to share with Australians.

This article from the Perth newspaper “The Sunday Times” 24th Feb 2013 says it with crystal clarity in the first paragraph.

But what did reality look like ? Well Perth Metro daytimes were 1.7° under normal and nights were 0.5° under. I think the blue shading here conveys that we are not dealing with sweltering heat.

The actual Perth district daily max and min temperatures for March 2013 can be seen here – and I have saved a large copy.
I wonder if The Sunday Times would listen to being told about this BoM failure.

A reader wrote in commenting that Sydney based family had reported that – “This summer has been too hot!”. I thought I would quickly run this basic check.

I will leave it there for now – the graph raises a few issues and I do not have time just now to dig deeper. This paper by Pierre Gosselin downloadable in Word doc from GWPF is worth a read. Third down in list – Die Welt: “Scientists Warn Of Little Ice Age”, by Pierre L. Gosselin at No Tricks Zone.

Severe weather continues to cause disruption across parts of the UK, as forecasters warn the cold temperatures will last until mid-April.
And – Snow misery spreads across Europe – experts blaming the Jet Stream being further south than usual.
Kiev after recent snow

I see it has been operating for 18 months and “…SA Water admitted the plant is likely to be mothballed in 2015 after its warranty period expires.”
Opposition Leader, Steven Marshall, says the Government should not have doubled the plant’s capacity from 50 to 100 gigalitres. “The original cost estimate for the 50 gigalitre site or infrastructure was going to be $500 million. We now find out the Government’s spent $2.2 billion,” he said.
“That of course is not money that the Government has paid. That’s money that every single water consumer in South Australia is going to be paying from now on.”
Sounds like another episode in the string of Australian desalination disasters and White Elephants.
I was looking for information summarizing the Adelaide water supply. This metro area map shows a lot of reservoirs and pipelines from the Murray River. However I can not find figures showing how much scheme water is sourced from rainfall around Adelaide and how much is from the river.

In early March I posted – Perth Metro BoM station 09225 looks to be reading too warm from mid-2011 – could much publicised summer hot days be exaggerated ? – and sent the following fax to the BoM Perth Office asking if they would check this out and let me know what they found. I also faxed BoM head office. Read the rest of this entry »

This story broke here in fanatasy-land a day or so ago but the roots go back two and a half years to October 2010 and earlier.
I have just faxed the ACT Chief Minister an open letter with ideas on reforming ACTEW. Here is the essential text.

Dear Chief Minister,
Re this ~$234K understating of one of the top ACTEW salaries.
Let us be clear here – this issue has been running for at least two and a half years.
I understood that the original +$600K figure (which was excessive enough) – came from a Canberra Times FOI request in 2010; if not under FOI then at least a persistent request for information that took months to be answered. Now we know the 2010 answer from ACTEW was wildly wrong and has stood until now.
Here is the 2010 story saved on RiotACT from two and a half years ago.
Mark Sullivan worth half a mil per year? – 8 Oct 2010

Clearly ACTEW needs major surgery and the following points might be just a start.
[1] Obviously they could source a replacement for less than half of what they are paying the current CEO. Review all salary scales and re-align with utilities from similar sized cities.
[2] ACTEW needs to be divorced from AGL in all areas.
[3] ACTEW should be pruned back to being an agency tasked to deliver the cheapest electricity and water to Canberra – prune back the top heavy ACTEW board and top management structure – sever non-core functions.
[4] Shut down their Civic offices and relocate to cheaper premises at depots in Fyshwick.
[5] ACTEW needs telling by Govt to cease all their “community sponsoring”. To the extent that worthy “community organisations” need financial help – a Minister should handle that task and make decisions to pay out taxpayers money through a Dept in an open and transparent process.
[6] ACTEW has wasted hundreds of $millions on gold plating our water supply while in the thrall of doomster climate change dogmas. A big contributor to blowing out the ACT debt.
[7] By “gold plating” I mean the unnecessary Murrumbidgee to Googong Water Transfer which should be put on “care & maintenance” at least cost to taxpayers.
[8] Your predecessor Chief Minister and Labor Governments contributed to ACTEW cost and debt blow-out by delaying construction of the no-brainer enlarged Cotter Dam.

And I have not started on wasteful Green power schemes – electric car scheme.

The BBC is reporting – New Zealand North Island hit by worst drought in 30 years. Curious to see some rainfall graphs I turned to KNMI Climate Explorer but it was not easy getting updated data. The GHCN V2 data assembled by NCDC in the USA has many data gaps post 2004 and ends anyway in March 2011 – see picture below. The CRU data ends at 2009. I wonder why – it still rains here and there – did somebody stop paying their salaries ?
So I turned to a shorter term partly satellite based data set from GPCP to bring the graph up to date at Dec 2012. The GPCP might reflect rain over both land and ocean – but that is what we have.

Note the grid area chosen misses out Southland and much of Otago west of 170°East. New Zealand should have rain data from say the 1860′s – if anybody has up to date station data please let me know – or please pass on URL’s to any published New Zealand rain history graphs.
This is a common feature when researching climate data – to find that recent data are worse than old data.

Perfect from 1900 to 2004 – then gaps abound.