Last night I noticed JoNova’s site was either not responding at all or was very very slow. Then I read that Anthony Watt’s server had been under attack (A note on my cyber attack and communications). Now I’ve read that Andrew Montford’s site had  problems. Any more?
The weeks before the Salby lecture I thought I was going mad.
I put the notice on the SCEF website for the Salby lecture, went off to Amsterdam thinking I would come back to a lot of emails only to find the server had gone down. No emails, no website. When I did get it back up working, it was somehow delisted from google.

IT THEN HAPPENED AGAIN.

Can it be any coincidence that all this is happening as the parties to the (defunct) Kyoto treaty are meeting in the most sceptic country in Europe to yet again agree to another pointless statement agreeing to to hide the fact that Kyoto died last December and none of them want any replacement?

First they ignore us, then when we win the argument they have to attack us
… and then we win.

Climate: What we know and what we don’t

downloadable version

Professor Salby giving his presentation on 7^th November 2013
to the Scottish Climate & Energy Forum.
produced by Mike Haseler BSc. MBA

Summary

In order to understand the importance of the evidence presented by Salby it is necessary to understand the case for attributing the recent rise in CO2 to human emissions. This starts with the assertion that man-made, rather than natural, emissions of CO2 can be shown to be the cause of the recent rise in atmospheric CO2 because:

1. The recorded rise in CO2 from 1958 of about 100ppm is larger than anything apparent in the proxy record. This “unprecedented” rise is seen as a fingerprint of recent human activity
2. The ratio of carbon 13 to carbon 12 in the atmosphere has decreased since 1830. This was thought to be due to the burning of fossil fuels which have a lower ratio of carbon 13. As such the reduction in the ratio was thought to be the “fingerprint” of man-made emissions.

And then it is argued that this rise in CO2 is causing global warming because:

3. CO2 and temperature move together in an apparent relationship in the proxy records

In his lecture Salby showed:

1. Whilst there is a good fit in the ancient record from proxy ice-cores, the measurements of recent global temperature is poorly correlated with the measured level of CO2.
2. Instead, net emissions of CO2 (not the level) is more closely related to temperature.
3. If we model surface conditions with temperature & humidity in the atmosphere:

• net emissions of CO2 can be predicted from surface conditions
• net emissions of Methane can be predicted from surface conditions
• net emissions of Carbon 13 can be predicted from surface conditions

4. Evidence shows that the sources of atmospheric CO2 (as shown by areas with highest concentration) are not related to man-made emissions from burning fossil fuels.

5. The evidence shows Carbon 13 is not a fingerprint of human emissions.

6. The IPCC are wrong to say: “all … increases [in CO2] are caused by human activity.” or “the increased atmospheric CO2 concentration is known to be caused by human activities”.

7. In significant part, changes in the level of CO2 are controlled by global temperature.

8. Furthermore he proposed a mechanism to explain the anomaly between the behaviour of CO2 in the actual atmosphere and that seen in the proxy record from the ice core. This was that there was a non-conservative damping mechanism such as diffusion or loss in removal of the ice core.

9. Non-conservative influences would cause past atmospheric CO2 to be significantly underestimated, so it is likely that the recent rise in CO2 is not unprecedented.

10. All the recent history of CO2 can be explained from surface conditions alone. Continue reading →

Hermann Harde

“Simulations of the up- and down-welling radiation and its interaction with the most prominent greenhouse gases water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane, and ozone in the atmosphere are presented. The radiative forcing at doubled CO2 concentration is found to be 30% smaller than the IPCC-value.” (Radiation and Heat Transfer in the Atmosphere: A Comprehensive Approach on a Molecular Basis)

Continue reading →

I didn’t like Prof Murry Salby’s talk – not because it wasn’t thoroughly convincing that the rise in CO2 was unlikely to be man-made, but because it was so convincing.
I will admit to starting the day as a CO2 agnostic. Continue reading →

After my article: “Game set and match for Scottish Independence”
Here are a few more pieces to the Jigsaw

• BBC: A whole Daily Politics on the 5th Nov questioning the cost of green taxes on fuel and wind energy.
• BBC: Paul Hudson’s Blog Real risk of a Maunder minimum ‘Little Ice Age’ says leading scientist (I missed this when on holiday)
• BBC: Cold winter weather warning could help wind campaigners
• BBC: Wind farm ‘gravy train’ criticised by Conservatives
• Telegraph: SNP ministers ignore court ruling on large wind farms
• Parliament: Lord Stern who fabricated the economic case using unusual discount rates gets questioned by House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee on Climate Change. As Bishop hill puts it: “The bit about discount rates is fun too, with Stern denying using different rates for costs and benefits and then flannelling furiously.”
• Mirror: Fuel bills will kill: Cost of rocketing energy prices will be measured in lives needlessly lost
  Minister’s fury as 10m hit by shock SSE announcement of 8% rise and hard-up families in fear of other firms following with crippling gas and electricity

The quote I found most interesting is this one from Paul Hudson’s blog:

‘But should North Western Europe be heading for a new “little ice age”, there could be far reaching political implications…’

What implications do you think those could be?
In the 1690s during the sunspot Maunder Minimum a series of colder wetter winters in Northern Europe causes a famine that killed up to 1/4 of Scots and destroyed the Scottish Economy led to the loss of independence. I wonder when this will start being mentioned?

Unfortunately, this is a “42” kind of article as in the answer to everything. Yes, I have the answer – but as yet it won’t mean much to anyone until I’ve found the right way to introduce it. But it is definitely the answer. A real Eureka moment – so I feel it is worth the post even if I’m going to be the only one celebrating.
For a while I have been trying to find the noise model used in climate simulations. I knew there was a problem , but all attempts to find such a model had failed until tonight. Then I read The ESSENCE project – signal to noise ratio in climate projections

Different ensemble members are generated by disturbing the initial state of the atmosphere. Gaussian noise with an amplitude of 0.1K is added to the initial temperature field. … The basic ensemble consists of 17 runs drive by a time varying forcing.

Eureka!!!
I now know exactly why all these climate academics think they understand the climate and don’t. From a purely physics perspective this is the end of the global warming scare. Obviously, there’s more to the scare than just physics, but physics is the foundation and I can now show where that foundation is wrong.
What it means is I know why natural variation has been mistaken for a man-made signal and I can prove it. It explains why e.g. in the 2011 paper “Separating signal and noise in atmospheric temperature changes: The importance of timescale” Santer et al. found that:

the decrease in noise amplitude with increasing trend length, so that any errors in model  signal trends are less obscured by noise on longer time-scales.

This is not true. In fact the variance increases approximately proportional to the log of the time-scale. Unfortunately, just stating this won’t cut ice. Instead I had to show how their methods produced the wrong variance. I can now do that.
Till tonight, I’ve only mean able to say they were wrong without really knowing why. Now I am able to understand how they could come to such a counter intuitive conclusion as to suggest natural variation reduces over longer periods. Now I understand why the variance in their models reduces as time-scales increase. This allows me to explain some very peculiar things:

• the belief that longer time-scale projections are more accurate – which is akin to saying it is easier to predict the weather next week than this.
• the belief that even though they cannot predict the climate over 1 year, they can over longer periods. And indeed, the idea that even though they couldn’t predict the climate over the last 15+ years they can predict is over the next century.
• the reason why the patently massive noise to signal ratio (which makes it impossible to see any signal) is mistaken for a massive signal to noise ratio.

Now there is only the small issue of explaining this. That will take time.

But in the flicker of noise there is the answer.

Whilst the predicted storm was not anywhere near as bad as some thought, the Met Office have done a fantastic job warning people. The problem is that a probabilistic forecast can tell us that damage will occur but because the effects of storms can be very localised it cannot say exactly who will suffer damage and who will not. And if we don’t personally suffer a falling tree, we tend to think the warnings of falling trees were over-blown.
The problem is that both at the regional level the exact centre of the storm is difficult to predict in advance, and even when it is known where it will hit, the effects at the local level will be affected by local land topology which can funnel the wind in one area and not in another depending on the wind direction. And to cap it, turbulence from a 300m hill can extend 3km away causing local devastation from falling trees in one street with minor damage in another.
But whilst we praise their work for the short term forecast let’s not forget the same organisation still will not admit it cannot predict the global temperature just one year in advance having said they were only 0.06C per year out … when the predicted warming was 0.05C!
BBC up to their old tricks. Continue reading →

The SCEF.org.uk domain came up for renewal when my other PC was on the blink. It should have auto renewed, but for some reason it did not. This occurred whilst on holiday. On returning I assume there was something wrong with the new PC (Windows 8 is a real pain).

It has now all been sorted … apologies for those trying to contact me.

Mike