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

The Scottish Climate & Energy Forum is pleased to announce a seminar by
world famous Australian climate expert

Atmospheric & Oceanic studies Faculty of Science,
Macquarie University, 2008-2013

as part of his
UK TOUR

Thursday 7th November
The Links Hotel, Edinburgh
7 – 9pm
Entry is free, but please book early as places will be limited
Contact: Mike Haseler 0845 10 88 500
Email: chairman@scef.org.uk
–oo000oo–

The hypocrisy of the labour party on green-tax induced fuel poverty is staggering. 23,000 deaths each winter – and they think that warming is a problem!

And interesting discussion has been triggered about the use of proxies to measure global temperature. It developed but the key point seems to be this comment from catweazle666
in response to William Connolley.

October 12, 2013 at 7:27 pm

When I saw the headline ” IPCC takes legal action against Met“, I couldn’t imagine what could have happened for Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to start taking legal action against the UK Meteorological  Office. Had the IPCC finally found out that the Met Office knew that statistically the 20th century warming could not be distinguished from natural variation?
It turns out the IPCC is the UK  Independent Police Complaints Commission and the Met is the the Metropolitan Police. Two points. First it continues to show the IPCC story flopped because the other IPCC is more newsworthy. Second if I am starting to believe this whole thing could blow up and have to read headlines like this to check, what must it be like for all those people who cut a few corners because they thought the end justified the means?

They must be getting seriously worried.