Climate Research News

In the climate controversy dubbed Kiwigate New Zealand skeptics inflict shock courtroom defeat on climatologists implicated in temperature data fraud.

New Zealand’s government via its National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) has announced it has nothing to do with the country’s “official” climate record in what commentators are calling a capitulation from the tainted climate reconstruction.

NIWA’s statement claims they were never responsible for the national temperature record (NZTR).The climb down is seen as a dramatic legal triumph for skeptics of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition (NZCSC) who had initiated their challenge last August when petitioning the high court of New Zealand to invalidate the weather service’s reconstruction of antipodean temperatures.

According to NZCSC, climate scientists cooked the books by using the same alleged ‘trick’ employed by British and American doomsaying scientists. This involves subtly imposing a warming bias during what is known as the ‘homogenisation’ process that occurs when climate data needs to be adjusted.

The specific charge brought against the Kiwi government was that it’s climate scientists had taken the raw temperature records of the country and then adjusted them artificially with the result that a steeper warming trend was created than would otherwise exist by examination of the raw data alone.

Indeed, the original Kiwi records shows no warming during the 20th century, but after government sponsored climatologists had manipulated the data a warming trend of 1C appeared.

New Zealand Government Abandons ‘Official’ Climate Record

The NZCSC story reports that the NZ authorities, “formally stated that, in their opinion, they are not required to use the best available information nor to apply the best scientific practices and techniques available at any given time. They don’t think that forms any part of their statutory obligation to pursue “excellence.”

NIWA now denies there was any such thing as an “official” NZ Temperature Record, although there was an official acronym for it (NZTR). However, the position now taken by the NZ government is that all such records are now to be deemed as unofficial and strictly for internal research purposes.

The article urges that if the government will not affirm that their temperature reconstruction is official then, “Nobody else should rely on it.”

Researcher from Climategate University Implicated in Data Fraud

As reported in a Suite101 article by the same writer of April 2010 ‘Kiwigate is a Carbon Copy of Climategate’ it was shown that the scientist who made the controversial “bold adjustments” is none other than Jim Salinger who is also a lead author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Salinger was dismissed by NIWA earlier this year for speaking without authorization to the media. The discredited researcher originally worked at Britain’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), the institution at the center of the Climategate scandal.

Salinger was also among the inner circle of climate scientists whose leaked emails precipitated the original climate controversy in November 2009. In an email (August 4, 2003) to fellow disgraced American climate professor, Michael Mann, Salinger stated he was “extremely concerned about academic standards” among climate skeptics.

Bogus Data Destroyed before it could be independently verified

In circumstances strangely similar to those witnessed in the Climategate controversy Kiwigate appears to match Climategate in three key three facets. First, climate scientists declined to submit their data for independent analysis. Second, when backed into a corner the scientists claimed their adjustments had been ‘lost’. Third, the raw data itself proves no warming trend.

References:

Treadgold, R., ‘Observations on NIWA’s Statement of Defence,’ (October 6, 2010), Climate Conversation Group (www.climateconversation.wordshine.co.nz: accessed online: October 6, 2010)

Costa, A.C. and A. Soares, ‘Homogenization of Climate Data: Review and New Perspectives Using Geostatistics,’ Mathematical Geoscience, Volume 41, Number 3 / April, 2009.

New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, ‘NIWA Challenged to Show Why and How Temperature Records Were Adjusted’ (February 7, 2010), accessed online April 26, 2010.

NZCSC & Climate Science Conversation Group; Press Statement of December 18, 2009; accessed online ( April 26, 2010).

Salinger, J. Climategate email Filename: 1060002347.txt. (August 4, 2003).

Suite 101, 6 October 2010

GWPF: Legal Defeat For Global Warming In Kiwigate Scandal

October 8th, 2010 | Tags: Climate Alarmism, Global Warming | Category: News | Comments (1)

Nature News reports on a new solar study:

Declining solar activity linked to recent warming

The Sun may have caused as much warming as carbon dioxide over three years.

An analysis of satellite data challenges the intuitive idea that decreasing solar activity cools Earth, and vice versa. In fact, solar forcing of Earth’s surface climate seems to work the opposite way around — at least during the current Sun cycle.

Joanna Haigh, an atmospheric physicist at Imperial College London, and her colleagues analysed daily measurements of the spectral composition of sunlight made between 2004 and 2007 by NASA’s Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) satellite. They found that the amount of visible light reaching Earth increased as the Sun’s activity declined — warming the Earth’s surface. Their unexpected findings are published today in Nature.

An influence of solar spectral variations on radiative forcing of climate

Haigh, J. D., Winning, A. R., Toumi, R. & Harder, J. W. Nature 467, 696-699 (2010).

The thermal structure and composition of the atmosphere is determined fundamentally by the incoming solar irradiance. Radiation at ultraviolet wavelengths dissociates atmospheric molecules, initiating chains of chemical reactions—specifically those producing stratospheric ozone—and providing the major source of heating for the middle atmosphere, while radiation at visible and near-infrared wavelengths mainly reaches and warms the lower atmosphere and the Earth’s surface1. Thus the spectral composition of solar radiation is crucial in determining atmospheric structure, as well as surface temperature, and it follows that the response of the atmosphere to variations in solar irradiance depends on the spectrum2. Daily measurements of the solar spectrum between 0.2 µm and 2.4 µm, made by the Spectral Irradiance Monitor (SIM) instrument on the Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) satellite3 since April 2004, have revealed4 that over this declining phase of the solar cycle there was a four to six times larger decline in ultraviolet than would have been predicted on the basis of our previous understanding. This reduction was partially compensated in the total solar output by an increase in radiation at visible wavelengths. Here we show that these spectral changes appear to have led to a significant decline from 2004 to 2007 in stratospheric ozone below an altitude of 45 km, with an increase above this altitude. Our results, simulated with a radiative-photochemical model, are consistent with contemporaneous measurements of ozone from the Aura-MLS satellite, although the short time period makes precise attribution to solar effects difficult. We also show, using the SIM data, that solar radiative forcing of surface climate is out of phase with solar activity. Currently there is insufficient observational evidence to validate the spectral variations observed by SIM, or to fully characterize other solar cycles, but our findings raise the possibility that the effects of solar variability on temperature throughout the atmosphere may be contrary to current expectations.

October 7th, 2010 | Tags: Climate Change, Solar Activity | Category: News | Leave a comment

Sony is pulling its support of the climate change campaign 10:10 after slamming the video that showed school children being blown up as “ill-conceived and tasteless”.

Marketing Week: Sony pulls out of 10:10 climate change campaign

CRN Comment: At the time of posting, still no sign of 10:10 supporters O2 doing the decent thing and following Sony’s lead.

EU Referendum: Splattergate – the new Climategate?

October 6th, 2010 | Tags: Climate Alarmism | Category: News | Comments (1)

Climate change continues to be a subject of intense public and political debate. Because of the level of interest in the topic the Royal Society has produced a new guide to the science of climate change. The guide summarises the current scientific evidence on climate change and its drivers, highlighting the areas where the science is well established, where there is still some debate, and where substantial uncertainties remain.

The document was prepared by a working group chaired by Professor John Pethica, Vice President of the Royal Society and was approved by the Royal Society Council.

Download the guide here (PDF):

http://royalsociety.org/climate-change-summary-of-science/

CRN Comment: Better, but still claims that there is a meaningful consensus when attributing natural and ‘man-made’ causes.

October 6th, 2010 | Tags: Climate Science | Category: Opinion | Leave a comment

Via the blogs, we learn that feed-in tariffs are a total rip-off. But how can that message possibly prevail when the BBC’s “take” is that buying in to the scam offers “a great return on investment!” And, needless to say, the Beeb is also talking up the news that the world’s biggest offshore wind farm off the Kent coast has been officially opened.

As always, the BBC sprays out figures, but no information. We get told that there are 100 turbines in the £780m wind farm, and that these “are expected to generate enough electricity to power 240,000 homes” – perhaps the most dishonest way going of describing the capacity of these machines.

In fact, getting proper statistics from the media is a losing battle, but Vattenfall, the project owner, has it on its website that there are 100 Vestas V90 wind turbines, with a total capacity of 300 MW. This is sufficient, it says, to supply more than 200,000 homes per year with clean energy.

By the time you take in the load factors (about 26 percent), however, and apply the rather understated government-inspired domestic consumption factor, you actually get 131,000 homes – but even then the figure is fiction. On cold, windless days, the number is zero. On a breezy summer night, when the power isn’t needed anyway and the National Grid is having to pay suppliers not to produce electricity, it could be a lot more. Such are the games they play.

But there are no games when it comes to the subsidies. On top of the £40 million in electricity sales, Vattenfall will collect at least £60 million a year in Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROCs) top-sliced from our electricity bills so that we do not notice the theft. And theft it is, an undisclosed tax paid to these rip-off merchants for producing unsustainable electricity.

Over term for the 20 years these turbines are suppose to last, we are looking at a public subsidy of £1.2 billion – enough to build a 1GW nuclear power station – a plant with a deliverable capacity more than 13 times this wind array. That is the extent of the rip-off to which we are being subjected.

And for that, it appears, we get 21 full-time green jobs. But if we gave them a million each and told them to get lost, that is not even a rounding error on the amount we are dealing with. We would get to “save” (i.e., not spend) £1.2 billion, less £0.021 billion. Instead, we pay – effectively – nearly £60m per job for the 20 years. These must be the most expensive jobs on the planet – we could even have 20 David Camerons for the price of each worker.

As with my previous thread, I ask why we tolerate this. That much, of course, is rhetoric. We tolerate it because, individually, we are powerless against the might of the state. But that will not always be the case. We need to make it so before the state ruins us.

EU Referendum: The Scam Spreads

Booker, thank goodness, will get slightly more coverage with his column than I did with my post covering the same territory.

Certainly, it cannot be said often enough – especially as it is being ignored by the BBC and almost all of the media – that “the world’s largest wind farm” opened off the Kent coast last week, is going to cost us £1.2 billion in subsidies over the 20-year working life of this installation. The corrected headline, by the way, reads “billions” and not “millions”.

At a time, supposedly, of economic stringency, it is offensive beyond measure that this government – like its predecessor – is encouraging such huge amounts of money to be top-sliced from our electricity bills, “by far the most important and shocking aspect of this vast project” writes Booker.

But what is equally offensive is the silence of the media on this aspect. Those outlets which have reported on the installation have been completely silent on the fact that, for the subsidy we are being forced to pay, we could have a 1GW nuclear power station, which could yield a staggering 13 times more electricity, with much greater reliability.

The obscenity does not stop there, though. The Swedish owners, Vattenfall, may have commissioned 100 turbines but they are only the first stage of a project eventually designed to comprise 341 of them. When complete, this will generate subsidies of £1 billion every five years.

And even then, that is not the end of it. A final claim for the Thanet wind farm (which Mr Huhne boasts is “only the beginning”) is that it will create “green jobs” – although the developers say that only 21 of these will be permanent.

Now, when you work it out, each of these are costing, in “green subsidies” alone, £3 million per job per year. That is £57 million for each job over the next 20 years. The Government gaily prattles about how it wants to create “400,000 green jobs”, which on this basis would eventually cost us £22.8 trillion, or 17 times the entire annual output of the UK economy.

If all this sounds dizzyingly surreal, Booker says, the fact remains that we must begin to grasp just what the green fantasies of Mr Huhne, the EU and the rest are costing us. And we should also remember that Huhne’s immediate predecessor was Ed Miliband, the man who is now the leader of the Labour Party, the man who approved this dreadful, deceitful scheme in the first place.

A crucial first step towards getting some grip on reality, Booker concludes, “must be for those who report on these wind farms to stop hiding away the colossal price we are all now having to pay for one of the greatest scams of our age.” He is right. Even in this day and age, £1.2 billion is a serious amount of money, especially as that is only a down payment.

EU Referendum: Shouting out loud

In all the publicity given to the opening of “the world’s largest wind farm” off the Kent coast last week, by far the most important and shocking aspect of this vast project was completely overlooked. Over the coming years we will be giving the wind farm’s Swedish owners a total of £1.2 billion in subsidies. That same sum, invested now in a single nuclear power station, could yield a staggering 13 times more electricity, with much greater reliability.

The first all-too-common mistake in the glowing coverage accorded to the inauguration of this Thanet wind farm by the Climate Change Secretary, Chris Huhne, was to accept unquestioningly the claims of the developer, Vattenfall, about its output. The array of 100 three-megawatt (MW) turbines, each the height of Blackpool Tower, will have, it was said, the “capacity” to produce 300MW of electricity, enough to “power” 200,000 (or even 240,000) homes.

This may be true at those rare moments when the wind is blowing at the right speeds. But the wind, of course, is intermittent, and the average output of these turbines will be barely a quarter of that figure………..

Christopher Booker: The Thanet wind farm will milk us of billions

September 27th, 2010 | Tags: Climate Policy, Energy, Wind Power | Category: Opinion | Comments (1)

The hiatus of global warming in the Northern Hemisphere during the mid-20th century may have been due to an abrupt cooling event centered over the North Atlantic around 1970, rather than the cooling effects of tropospheric pollution, according to a new paper appearing in Nature.

News release from Colorado State University: Sudden ocean cooling contributed to global warming hiatus in middle 20th century in the N. Hemisphere

September 23rd, 2010 | Tags: Global Temperature, Natural Variability | Category: News | Leave a comment

Roger Pielke Sr reports on an in press paper on his blog:

There is an excellent new paper by Bob Knox and David Douglas that provides further insight into the issue of the monitoring of global climate system heat changes. The paper is:

R. S. Knox, David H. Douglass 2010: Recent energy balance of Earth  International Journal of Geosciences, 2010, vol. 1, no. 3 (November) In press doi:10.4236/ijg2010.00000.

The abstract reads:

A recently published estimate of Earth’s global warming trend is 0.63 ± 0.28 W/m2, as calculated from ocean heat content anomaly data spanning 1993–2008. This value is not representative of the recent (2003–2008) warming/cooling rate because of a “flattening” that occurred around 2001–2002. Using only 2003–2008 data from Argo floats, we find by four different algorithms that the recent trend ranges from –0.010 to –0.160 W/m2 with a typical error bar of ±0.2 W/m2. These results fail to support the existence of a frequently-cited large positive computed radiative imbalance.

September 22nd, 2010 | Tags: Climate Models, Global Warming, Ocean Heat Content | Category: News | Leave a comment

Damning New Investigation Into Climategate Inquiries

The Global Warming Policy Foundation, 14 September 2010

The Global Warming Policy Foundation today publishes a detailed assessment of the Climategate inquiries set up by the University of East Anglia and others which finds that they avoided key questions and failed to probe some of the most serious allegations.

The report The Climategate Inquiries, written by Andrew Montford and with a foreword by Lord (Andrew) Turnbull, finds that the inquiries into the conduct and integrity of scientists at the Climatic Research Unit of the University of East Anglia were rushed and seriously inadequate.

In particular, the report finds that:

none of the Climategate panels mounted an inquiry that was comprehensive within their area of remit

insufficient consideration in the choice of panel members led to a failure to ensure balance and independence

none managed to be objective and comprehensive none made any serious attempt to consider the views and submissions of well-informed critics

terms of reference were either vague or non-existent

none of them performed their work in a way that is likely to restore confidence in the work of CRU.

Andrew Montford, the author of the GWPF report, said:

“The lack of impartiality manifested itself in the different ways the panels treated CRU scientists and their critics. While CRU justifications and explanations were willingly accepted without any serious probing, critics were denied adequate opportunity to respond and to counter demonstrably inaccurate claims.”

“All in all, the evidence of the failings of the three UK inquiries is overwhelming. Public confidence in the reliability of climate science will not be restored until a thorough, independent and impartial investigation takes place,” Andrew Montford warned.

Lord Turnbull, who wrote the foreword to the GWPF report, said:

“The report by Andrew Montford clearly demonstrates that all three inquiries have serious flaws. The result has been that the three investigations have failed to achieve their objective, ie early and conclusive closure and restoration of confidence.”

“The new House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology, which has rightly reopened the issue, would do well to study Andrew Montford’s report and take evidence from him. It needs to satisfy itself as to whether the criticisms made are valid and whether the exoneration claimed is justified.”

“Only if the integrity of the science is re-established and the strengths and weaknesses of the main propositions are acknowledged will there be the basis of trust with the public which policymakers need,” Lord Turnbull said.

Lord Turnbull also called on the Government to look at the serious criticisms of the IPCC made in the recent InterAcademy Council Report. He said: “The Government should demand that the fundamental reforms recommended by the IAC in the practice, governance and leadership of the IPCC are implemented immediately for its Fifth Assessment.”

The full report can be downloaded here

Hard copies can be ordered for £10.00 from the Global Warming Policy Foundation, 1 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5DB, UK

About the author

Andrew Montford is the author of The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science (2010), a history of some of the events leading up to the release of emails and data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. He writes a blog specialising in climate change issues at http://www.bishop-hill.net and has made many media appearances discussing global warming from a sceptic perspective.

Lord Turnbull

Andrew Turnbull was Permanent Secretary, Environment Department,1994-98; Permanent Secretary to the Treasury 1998-2002, Cabinet Secretary and Head of the Home Civil Service 2002-05. He is now a Crossbench member of the House of Lords and a trustee of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

GWPF Reports

Views expressed in the publications of the Global Warming Policy Foundation are those of the authors, not those of the GWPF, its Trustees, its Academic Advisory Council members or its Directors.

Press reaction to the report listed here

September 22nd, 2010 | Tags: Climategate | Category: Opinion | Leave a comment

THE world’s leading climate change body has been accused of losing credibility after a damning report into its research practices.

A high-level inquiry into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found there was “little evidence” for its claims about global warming.

It also said the panel had emphasised the negative impacts of climate change and made “substantive findings” based on little proof.

The review by the InterAcademy Council (IAC) was launched after the IPCC’s hugely embarrassing 2007 benchmark climate change report, which contained exaggerated and false claims that Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 – Sunday Express: Climate Change Lies Are Exposed

“IPCC reports are supposed to be the gold standard account of what is — and is not — known about global warming. The panel boasts that it uses only peer-reviewed scientific literature. But its claims about mountain ice turned out to be anecdotes from a climbing magazine, its claims on the Amazon’s vulnerability to drought from a Brazilian pressure group’s website and 42 per cent of the references in one chapter proved to be to reports by Greenpeace, WWF and other “grey” literature.” – Matt Ridley in The Times (£)

“UN climate change experts have been accused of making ‘imprecise and vague’ statements and over-egging the evidence. A scathing report into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change called for it to avoid politics and stick instead to predictions based on solid science.” – Daily Mail: UN climate experts ‘overstated dangers’: Keep your noses out of politics, scientists told

August 31st, 2010 | Tags: IPCC | Category: News, Opinion | Comments (1)