Climate scientists have developed new models which plot natural oceanic temperature cycles, solar activity, and cathode-ray-tube (CRT) television household penetration against average global temperatures over time.  They show a surprising an unexpected result.  The recent unprecedented change in climate appears to be closely related to the number of cathode ray television sets in use.

At the beginning of the second world war, there were only about 8000 sets in use.  By 1949, there were over 3,602,872 in the US alone, and by 1959 accumulated sales in the US totalled more than 67 million.  Sales continued through the 70s and 80s at over 10 million sets per year.  As the global economy flourished, the trend was replicated all over the developing world.  The studies showed that the globe warmed more and more rapidly, matching the rising numbers of TV sets, until around the turn of the millennium, when it paused for ten years, and now appears to be in decline.

Interestingly, the models hind-cast the temperature variations since 1950 with astonishing accuracy. And critically, when the CRT penetration is removed from the models, we cannot explain those temperature variations.  There is no other acceptable conclusion, no other factor that can achieve the match with temperature variations.

Ah, I hear you object, China and India, the new Asian super-economies, are booming.  The number of TV sets sold is sky-rocketing again.  If Global Warming has ceased, how could it possibly be related to TV sets?  Right now, the number of sets in use in the world is 1416338245.

Pay attention!  TV technology has undergone a sea change.  The cathode-ray tube is out.  In the twenty-first century, flat-screen TFT and LED screens have taken over.  These do not emit the same radiation as the older, earth-warming monsters that sat in the corner of the room and heated our planet.  And as the old CRT screens sputter, distort and die, they are being replaced by the new, green, tree-hugging, polar-bear-loving flatties.  We are saved!

Earlier climate models achieved a reasonable match using global CO2 atmospheric variations, enough to give cause to speculate that the reason for the rise might be CO2.  But only to speculate.  CO2 concentrations are still rising at an increasing rate, but the global temperature since 2000, initially flat, is now declining.

And that, dear readers, should be the end of the argument.  I defy you to show me that this little analysis is any less robust or scientific than all of the scientific reports used by the IPCC, Al Gore, the EU or Skeptical Science.  The data behind my reasoning shows a closer match to world temperature fluctuations than any of the computer models used by NASA, GISS or UEA.

Trust the science on this.  Using our model, we can predict with 98.73% certainty that the temperature will decline for the next thirty years to at least the same level as it was in 1970.  More likely it will be even lower, as by 2040 there will be very few CRTs still in use.

What’s that?  You want to examine my data?  You have a confounded cheek.  It’s commercially sensitive and the TV companies have placed it under an embargo.

And I didn’t archive it, and seem to have lost it.

Joe Bastardi is a weatherman.  He works for Weatherbell, a US-based forecaster, that provides global weather reports and forecasts through its website, http://www.weatherbell.com/.  Joe also has a number of corporate clients, for whom he prepares specific detailed forecasts tailored to their weather information needs.

If one judges a weatherman by the success rate of his seasonal forecasts, then Joe is a super-weatherman.

When my wife and I came from New Zealand to live in the Haarlem in the Netherlands in 2008, we needed local weather information.  My Dutch language skills were non-existent, so I went looking in the internet for English-language reports on current conditions and forecasts.  The most accurate forecasts for Haarlem at the time were on the website of Accuweather, another global weather forecasting company, at http://www.accuweather.com/en-gb/nl/north-holland/haarlem/quick-look.aspx.

I had long been interested in the Anthropogenic Global Warming debate, which had wide publicity in New Zealand.  My interest (and suspicions) had been aroused by the way in which every weather event was described as evidence of human-influenced global warming.  However, the concept behind the idea seemed worthy of investigation, so I was interested in finding out more.

A Dutch television channel showed a film called “An Inconvenient Truth” featuring Al Gore showing a PowerPoint presentation which presented Michael Mann’s hockey-stick graph and argued in apocalyptic terms that the earth was in danger of a runaway greenhouse effect, caused by human beings, and specifically, the CO2 that we produce.

That film was a tipping-point for me.  ”An Inconvenient Truth” was far from being a reasoned, scientifically-based presentation.  It was full of half-truths and special pleading, presented by a salesman.  For the first time, I began to suspect that the AGW scare was a textbook real-life example of the behaviour illustrated by the classic fable of Chicken Little.

One of the blog links on the Accuweather site that caught my attention was also hosted by Accuweather.  Joe Bastardi’s European Weather blog.  Bastardi is no Shakespeare, but his postings were always entertaining and well-argued.

Now Joe Bastardi has left Accuweather, and resurfaced at the Weatherbell site.  Inexplicably, his blog posts are behind a paywall – they are in the premium section of Weatherbell.  That is tragic.  One expects to pay for premium services – after all, they are a big part of the income of a web-based service.  But to pay for blog-posts?

Bloggers blog to be read.  They blog to communicate, to give their ideas the widest possible coverage.  Including pensioners who cannot afford the premium subscriptions. I am over sixty-five years old, and at the end of this month, I too shall be a pensioner.

So long, Joe.  I shall miss your posts.

Anthony Watts reports that Obama’s visit to the UK produced a joint statement, released in a White house memo.  The whole thing makes interesting reading, and can be seen here:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/27/interesting-memo-from-the-white-house-on-science-and-climate-collaboration-with-the-uk/

The memo states that “Recognizing the great potential for productive cooperation in these domains, the Prime Minister and President reaffirmed during the State visit their mutual commitment to strong collaboration in science and higher education”.

It notes specific examples of existing cooperation in those fields.  At the end, there is this statement:  ”They emphasized the importance of data sharing and open science data policies that support climate research and modelling”.

The trouble is, their own warmist poster boys on both sides of the Atlantic strongly disagree.  The British Royal Society honcho, Paul Nurse, must be very angry with them.  He claims that requests for data amount to intimidation, and even claims that people request information from scientists prior to publication of their findings.  He doesn’t say how people know what to ask for before the scientist publishes – I guess the malicious data requesters must be psychic:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/05/26/nursing-their-wounds-with-salt/

It is possible that data sharing and open science data policies are the last thing he wants to see, and his outburst is simply an attack on those who want data transparency, i.e. those who want scientists to follow the principles of science.

On the US side of the Atlantic, a court battle over the FOI request for the release of Michael Mann’s work-related emails has raged for some time.  The University of Virginia first claimed they had deleted the emails.  After investigation proved that the emails had not been deleted, they then argued that they should be kept confidential in the name of Academic Freedom.  Finally, a court has ordered that the emails must be released:

http://washingtonexaminer.com/blogs/beltway-confidential/2011/05/freedom-information-trumps-academic-freedom

The leaders of the UK and the US both create policies reflecting the views of the AGW-promoting scientists.  The same scientists who refuse to share their working data and working correspondence.  The same “scientists” who do not want their findings scientifically tested.  If the leaders really believe their call for data sharing and open science, they should be taking steps to ensure that scientists comply with the call.

Those arguing for action against the perceived threat they call variously Catastrophic Anthropgenic Global Warming, Climate Change, Climate Disruption or whatever new name they can come up with to try to keep it alive have long relied on the argument that there is overwhelming scientific consensus about it and the “the science is settled”.

In another blog I have argued that consensus has no bearing on scientific accuracy, and that no science is ever settled.  AGW believers say that is nonsense.

Well, it now seems there is scientific consensus that AGW is incorrect, unscientific, fraudulent, and on the data available so far, most probably plain wrong:

http://www.climatedepot.com/a/9035/SPECIAL-REPORT-More-Than-1000-International-Scientists-Dissent-Over-ManMade-Global-Warming-Claims–Challenge-UN-IPCC–Gore (Hat tip to Joe Bastardi through one of his tweets).

In the face of this, look out for AGW supporters declaiming that consensus has no bearing on accuracy…

“Any scientist who can’t explain to an eight-year old what he is doing is a charlatan.” – Dr Felix Hoenikker, nuclear scientist.

“Write it down, then ask yourself ‘Would it make sense to my Grandmother’?” – Ken Dixon expounding his “Grandmother Test”.

A Stanford University study has concluded that domes of increased carbon dioxide concentrations – discovered to form above cities more than a decade ago – cause local temperature increases that in turn increase the amounts of local air pollutants, raising concentrations of health-damaging ground-level ozone, as well as particles in urban air.  The overall conclusion is that CO2 domes in US cities are responsible for an increase in premature mortality of 50 to 100 deaths per year in California , and even more,  300 to 1,000 more premature deaths in the contiguous 48 states.

How is this established?  By data-evaluated numerical computer modeling of CO2 feedbacks and health impacts for the contiguous 48 states, for California and for the Los Angeles area, to determine the increase in the death rate from air pollution for all three regions compared to what the rate would be if no local carbon dioxide were being emitted (See Appendix below).

That’s it – no hard data.  Nothing testable.  They built a complex model predicting heating impacts, made assumptions about the health consequences of that heating, and then made recommendations about carbon taxes based on the model’s estimates.  So CO2 causes the urban heat islands (UHI)!  Not concentrations of people and services and central heating and power and motor vehicles and concrete and stone, but CO2!  Come on – cities are hotter than the countryside simply because they are cities.

But no -we gotta blame CO2.  Carbon taxes are depending on it.

Pity the scientists didn’t try explaining it to their grandmothers.  Or failing that, to an eight-year-old.  They might have realised just how ludicrous their “study” really is.

References:

pdf of the Stanford study:  http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/CO2loc0709EST.pdf

WUWT Post on the story:  http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/16/stanford-urban-co2-domes-mean-more-death/

Appendix:

This is what they claim to have real-world modelled to a standard of certainty sufficient to predict the urban death-rate due to CO2:

Example CO2 feedbacks treated include those to heating  rates, thus temperatures, which affected

• (a) local temperature and pressure gradients, stability, wind speeds, and gas/particle transport
• (b) water evaporation rates
• (c) the relative humidity and particle swelling
• (d) temperature-dependent natural emissions, air chemistry, and particle microphysics.
• (e) photosynthesis and respiration rates
• (f) dissolution and evaporation rates of CO2 into the ocean
• (g) weathering rates
• (h) ocean pH and chemical composition
• (i) sea spray pH and composition
• (j) and rainwater pH and composition. Changes in sea spray composition, in turn, affected sea spray radiative properties, thus heating rates.

The Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, a group composed of natural and social science researchers, announced a study that “shows” that a solar minimum will not slow global warming.  The study is an attempt at a pre-emptive strike.  The sun goes into a cooler period and bingo – they rush to add to the endless repetitions of predictions of doom.  It’s what they do, and why they exist – to advocate for global warming.

The entire study depends on the assumption that the IPCC climate models are comprehensive and correct in their predictions of twenty-first century climate change.  These models include only the possible causes they know about and are capable of modelling, with all of their weightings of climate forcing tuned to enable reasonable hind-casting, applied to a warming world.  When the models approximately predict the global temperature (they are very approximate, and then only while the earth is warming) the climate change scientists conclude that they have proved their estimate of the climate forcing due to man-made CO2, and that their forecasts of temperature rises to come in the twenty-first century must therefore be correct.  They call this modelling technique “optimal detection”.  That is the technique that Ptolemy used in his geocentric model of the universe, which made very accurate predictions of the motions of the moon, planets and stars.  It took more than a thousand years for later scientists to discover the truth,  That is understandable – the relative predictive accuracy of Ptolemy’s model left little reason to suppose that it might be wrong.  So until Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler, astronomers fully accepted the geocentric model.

Similarly, the Potsdam people take AGW and the IPCC-sponsored models as fact.  The very notion that the earth cools and warms in cycles, and that in inter-glacial periods like the present, there are mini-cycles of warm periods between little ice-ages, is dismissed as unscientific wishful thinking.  It is nothing of the kind.  It’s simple observation.  And within the last two thousand years, we have written history to draw upon.  Written history that documents the Roman Warming and the Medieval Warm Period.  The IPCC claim that the recent warming is unprecedented is false.  So are the models.

There has been a fifteen-year hiatus in the warming, against the model predictions.  Even Phil Jones of the CRU agrees that there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995.  And in spite of the present warmth, all indications are that the PDO is now turning negative, and that in five-to-ten years the AMO will also turn negative.  The earth is in for 20 – 30 years of cooling, while CO2 continues to rise, fed by the economic growth in China and India.  The IPCC models did not predict the flat temperature since 1995, and they do not predict the forthcoming cooling.

Greenhouse gases did not cause the twentieth-century warming, or the earlier MWP and still earlier Roman warming.  When cooling sets in, it will not be because greenhouse gases are reduced, or because we are saved by a quiescent sun.  It will be a result of the natural cycles.

Reference:

Discovery News Article    http://news.discovery.com/space/the-sun-cant-save-us-from-global-warming.html

Potsdam Press Release:   http://www.pik-potsdam.de/news/press-releases/weakening-sun-would-hardly-slow-global-warming

On March 14 2010, Sciam (Scientific American) tweeted a report called “Climate Change – State of the Birds 2010 Report”.  A link is in the Reference section at the end of this post.

My wife and I are a lifelong conservationists with a special place in our hearts for birds.  In our home country, New Zealand, we gardened organically, without pesticides or artificial fertilisers, and planted native trees in the garden of every house we have owned, to attract, feed and encourage the NZ and exotic birds back into our lives.  People change landscapes, and we feel strongly that we should provide the means for the native wildlife to survive those changes.  So we do just that, and are rewarded by the tuis, wood pigeons, fantails, wax-eyes, goldfinches, starlings, sparrows and other birds that swarm in our garden.  They are so comfortable with us that they pick for food at our feet when we sit on the garden deck.  They will do so again when we return.

Here during our sojourn in the Netherlands, our greatest delight is the splendid variety of birds that grace the trees in our tiny lane in Haarlem, and fill the polders, reserves and wetlands.  We put out seeds, nuts, fat balls and insect blocks this winter, because it has been the harshest for forty years.  No doubt we have assisted the great tits, blue tits, jays, tree-creepers and robins that are outside the window, ten feet from me, right now.  And now that spring quickens the trees and the temperature is finally back above zero, we shall once more roam the cycle lanes in the reserves, among the swans, ducks, herons and magpies.

So how does a Grumpy Old Conservationist react to the report?  By grumping – it is shameless advocacy.  A load of self-serving twaddle riding the coat-tails of the highly exaggerated predictions of anthropogenic catastrophic global warming.  Prediction after prediction in the IPCC report is being exposed as nonsense.  Himalayan glaciers, African crop yields, Amazon rain-forest health are three examples.  These are not small errors – they are critical for the IPCC’s advocacy.  It will not be long before their predicted six-degree Celsius global temperature rise for the twenty-first century is similarly nailed, and nailed conclusively.  Already, scientific analyses of the various bases on which that prediction was based are showing them to be doubtful at best, and suggest that some of them have been shamelessly manipulated.  The leaked emails of the Climategate incident add weight to that suggestion.

Audubon and the other conservation agencies have done a great conservation job of maintaining, recovering and protecting wildlife populations, and will continue to do so.  It is important work, mitigating the environmental consequences of the actions of humankind.  It enriches all of life.  They should keep it up.

It saddens me to see that work, and the agencies who perform it, hooked up in the advocacy of the AGW group.  The predictions of the AGW camp will be shown to be about as accurate as the Jehovah’s Witnesses predictions of the end of the world in 1914, 1915, 1918, 1920, 1925, 1941, 1975 and 1994.  IPCC and all of those who have promoted AGW will be utterly discredited.  An angry world may well discredit all conservationist groups along with them.

That would be a very great shame.

References:

2010 State of the Birds:  http://www.stateofthebirds.org/habitats

Postscript: Scientific American is diminished.  It used to be great magazine that reported science.  Now it is an avenue for advocacy.

In a post in the SFGate blog, Dr Peter Gleick sets out to counter AGW skepticism by painting skeptics as deniers and bar-room brawlers.

He starts by stating that there is no argument against global warming, ignoring the fact that skeptics do not argue that global warming is not happening.  That’s the first mistake.  There are red-necked fools who deny that the earth warmed from the mid-nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth, certainly.  But they are not the skeptics.

Then he says: “in this world, no alternative explanation for climate change has ever come close to doing a better job than the science produced by the climate community and represented by the IPCC“.  There are two big things wrong with that statement.

Firstly, the IPCC and all the scientists who are funded by the AGW group have never provided any evidence that the recent warming is unprecedented.  It is clear that the Medieval Roman warm periods were at least as warm as the present, and some studies indicate they may have been much warmer.

Secondly, the “scientific” explanations of the IPCC themselves do not come close to explaining the warming.  All they have is models that include only the possible causes they know about and are capable of modelling, with all of their weightings tuned to enable reasonable hind-casting, applied to a warming world.  When the models approximately predict the global temperature (and they are very approximate) the climate change scientists conclude that they have proved their estimate of the climate forcing due to man-made CO2, and that their forecasts of temperature rises to come in the twenty-first century must therefore be correct.  They give this technique a fancy name – they call it “optimal detection”.  The very notion that the earth cools and warms in cycles, and that in inter-glacial periods like the present, there are mini-cycles of warm periods between little ice-ages is dismissed as unscientific wishful thinking.  It is nothing of the kind.  It’s simple observation.  And within the last two thousand years, we have written history to draw upon.

He then groups opponents as “marginal, discredited climate deniers”, put up by the media.  Hmmm.  He wants us to infer that Spencer, Lindzen, Watts, D’Aleo, McIntyre, Christy, Pielke Sr (and Jr.), Idso, Soon, Loehle, Micheals, Moberg, Singer, Landsea, Plimer, Ball etc are not serious scientists, just deniers.  That is quite some diversion he is attempting in his posting.

The next step he takes is to associate skeptics by implication with the right-wing red-necked ravers, who place hate-filled comments in climate blogs: “… there’s no such thing as global warming, you f!@%$#%@ing idiot and your f!@%$#%@ing colleagues.”  I understand his annoyance with that sort of offensive rubbish.  But such obscene tripe is in no way comparable with skeptical argument, and Peter Gleick knows it.

He finishes with a Simpsons cartoon showing an AGW opponent as a bully.  All-in-all, his posting is not a reasoned essay opposing the skeptical position.  It is a swinging, no-holds-barred, boots-and-all attempt to discredit all skeptics as bar-room brawlers.  He is not arguing logically, not speaking as a scientist.  He is displaying the very bullying behaviour that he accuses skeptics of.

But then, as he himself says, oblivious to the irony: “The world of policy often doesn’t give a hoot for the world of science.”

References:

Peter Gleik’s complaint: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/gleick/detail??blogid=104&entry_id=58962