NZCLIMATE & ENVIRO TRUTH NO 94

From March 2nd to March 15th I was a Visiting Scholar at the Beijing Climate Center. It is situated in the midst of a vast complex comprising the Chinese Meteorological Service in the North West of Beijing, just North of the zoo. The buildings are large, modern and impressive, and it is evident that the whole service commands considerable prestige both locally and internationally..

I and my wife were supplied with a comfortable two-bedroom flat with new furniture and furnishings, which included fridge, phone, TV, microwave and kitchen, An exceedingly inexpensive restaurant and local shops were close.

I was welcomed by the Director General of the Beijing Climate Center, Dr Wenjie Dong, who had evidently been reading my material. I was asked to give three lectures over the fortnight which were received by an appreciative audience of fifty (for the first) to twenty five (for the third). The final banquet was chaired by the Vice-Director of the Beijing Meteorological Administration, Mr Xu Xiaofeng, who subsequently appeared on TV on behalf of World Meteorological Day.

I was introduced to several staff members and two of them gave me their recent reprints, in English, from Acta Meteorologica Sinica.

ZHOU Zongci, DING Yihui, LUO Yong, and WANG Shaowu, "Recent Studies on Attributions of Climate Change in China" , Acta Meteorologica Sinica 2005, Vol 19, 389-400.

You may be aware that when annual mean surface temperatures for the continental USA are subjected to a comprehensive correction procedure called "Homogeneity Adjustment" the resulting sequence shows only very modest overall warming (less than 1°C) for the period 1900 to 2000. They point out that such a comprehensive adjustment is not possible anywhere else in the world because nobody else has the large number of stations and reliable records for comparison purposes.

We also know (apart from people like Kevin Trenberth) that the published global surface record is biased upwards, as shown by recent statistical studies by McKitrick and Michaels ( Climate Research 2004 26 159-173, for land-based data) and Christy, Parker et al (Geophysical Research Letters 2001 28, 183-186, for sea-surface temperatures)

Now, Zhou et al have carried out a "homogeneity adjustment" on weather station measurements for China from 1900 to 1998.for temperature and precipitation. The results are attached. The corrected temperature showed a fluctuating behaviour with a peak in 1943 and a similar figure in 1998. No evidence of significant "global warming". Please note that this adjusted record has been endorsed by Phil Jones of the UK Hadley Centre

On top of that, they have identified a large number of natural events which have influenced annual fluctuations. They conclude

"The signals produced by the human activities such as greenhouse gases and "brown clouds" likely play the role for the patterns. But the physical feedbacks and mechanisms still keep ambiguous and vague. More researches should be carried out in future to solve this issue"

It is evident that if comprehensive "homogeneity adjustment" could be carried out for the whole of the global surface record there would be little remaining "global warming" which could be attributed to the influence of greenhouse gas increases.

It might also be noted that the second author of this paper, DING Yihui, was one of the eight Chief Editors of "Climate Change 2001, and he is Co-Chair of Working Group I of the IPCC.

Vincent Gray
75 Silverstream Road
Crofton Downs
Wellington 6004
New Zealand
Phone/Fax 064 4 9735939
"It's not the things you don't know that fool you.
It's the things you do know that aint so"
Josh Billings