Friday 16 November 2012

A list of known climate errors and anomalies

The media and politicians treat the climate figures with certainty, and the rare times they report incidences of major error they sweep it away and say it makes no difference to the big picture. But when you see them all in one place do they actually become the big picture itself?

Alaskan glaciers defy the trend

Never before in the history of a research project dating back to 1946 had the Juneau Icefield witnessed the kind of snow buildup that came this year. It was similar on a lot of other glaciers too.
"It's been a long time on most glaciers where they've actually had positive mass balance," Molnia said.
That's the way a scientist says the glaciers got thicker in the middle.

NASA satellite finds new CO2 replaces stronger water vapour

Temperature satellite found to be 10X higher than reality

The ocean acidification claims exposed

Climate refugees predicted in the millions by UN

Climate refugees are the effects of dangerous climate change, 50 million predicted by 2010 by the UN. Don't make predictions, some people save them and bring them out if they're still alive to do so. There weren't any. Pretty well covers the rest then as all based on the same figures.

Sea level rise is falling

Increased clouds do not increase warming

Tree rings can grow from CO2 alone

Tree ring proxy data used to create a good part of the rise in Michael Mann's hockey stick diagram turns out to use trees which also grow (as many do) larger simply from more CO2 as it acts as a fertiliser. So much so greenhouses use around 1200ppm as it makes the plants grow far bigger. So instead of the rings demonstrating a higher temperature they are showing at least half the increase was simply caused by the gas claimed to raise the temperature. And they've got PhD's?

BEST temperature analysis finds changes may be natural
After checking the recent temperature records for authenticity, Berkeley University's team found them generally correct, but added this at the end which papers such as The Guardian, who made it one of the biggest headlines of the year, forgot to include themselves, making the whole thing appear to be man made rather than:
“Such changes may be independent responses to a common forcing (e.g.greenhouse gases); however, it is also possible that some of the land warming is a direct response to changes in the AMO region. If the long-term AMO changes have been driven by greenhouse gases then the AMO region may serve as a positive feedback that amplifies the effect of greenhouse gas forcing over land. On the other hand, some of the long-term change in the AMO could be driven by natural variability, e.g. fluctuations in thermohaline flow. In that case the human component of global warming may be somewhat overestimated.” 

Japanese satellite finds CO2 emitted by unpopulated areas only. Media miss it. 

Yes, the only satellite designed to measure where CO2 is emitted from released its findings in 2011, amazing the seven readers who could find it that it turned out not to come from industry after all. Phew, that was a relief, if anyone actually was told that is.

Natural causes dominate extreme weather This one's direct from the UN so had better bloody listen.


"Projected changes in climate extremes under different emissions scenarios
generally do not strongly diverge in the coming two to three
decades, but these signals are relatively small compared to natural climate variability over this time frame. Even the sign of projected changes in some climate extremes over this time frame is uncertain."

Tell the politicians!

Some leaked emails:

Phil Jones reveals the Department of Energy supports hiding temperature data: 'Any work we have done in the past is done on the back of the research grants we get – and has to be well hidden. I've discussed this with the main funder (US Dept of Energy) in the past and they are happy about not releasing the original station data'

"I thought I’d play around with some randomly generated time-series and see if I could ‘reconstruct’ northern hemisphere temperatures. The reconstructions clearly show a ‘hockey-stick’ trend. I guess this is precisely the phenomenon that Macintyre has been going on about."

Busted!


#4133 Johnathan Overpeck – IPCC review.
what Mike Mann continually fails to understand, and no amount of references will solve, is that there is practically no reliable tropical data for most of the time period, and without knowing the tropical sensitivity, we have no way of knowing how cold (or warm)the globe actually got.

[and later]
Unsatisfying, perhaps, since people will want to know whether 1200 AD was warmer than today, but if the data doesn’t exist, the question can’t yet be answered. A good topic for needed future work.


The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.*** (Kevin Trenberth)
--------------------------

Climate follows natural 60 year cycles 

Northern Europe probably warmer in the past 

More major uncertainty raised. 2000 year tree ring study shows Europe was indeed warmer twice in the past. And if one continent appears to have been overestimated, what about the others?

US govt agencies fixed the data 

James Hansen's errors corrected, temperatures fall 

"1998 was not even the hottest year of the last century.  This is because many temperatures from recent decades that appeared to show substantial warming have been revised downwards." 

This was written in 2007 and they are still using the old figures despite correcting them for themselves. That is not science is it? 

Real temperature in 2010 way below IPCC's lowest estimate
If the models can't estimate the future temperatures with any degree of accuracy, how can they predict anything more complicated?

20th century warming is normal   The first similar paper of many to follow

Himalayan glacier data made up for decades

"The world's greatest snow-capped peaks, which run in a chain from the Himalayas to Tian Shan on the border of China and Kyrgyzstan, have lost no ice over the last decade, new research shows.

The discovery has stunned scientists, who had believed that around 50bn tonnes of meltwater were being shed each year and not being replaced by new snowfall."


Oh yes? And the cheque's in the post. Yes, they 'assumed' the ice had melted but had never actually measured it.

James Hansen predicts the future in 1985

Yes, as anyone with a brain could work out, he was wrong, by about a factor of 100. But the UN still use them as the basis of their entire policies.
"To summarize, Hanson et al. believe that it is quite possible Earth could end up ice free with CO2 levels of 350 ppm which is well below where we currently are. Because the melting of Antarctic ice takes centuries there is time to lower the "tipping point" level of CO2 before it is too late. When Antarctica was last ice-free, sea levels were 70m (~230 feet) higher than today."
They are now 396ppm in 2012, the temperature is the same as it was in 1996.

James Hansen predicted temperature and sea level rises of a few degrees and feet by 2020 at the latest in the 80s. In 2012 the temperature rose less than half a degree and the sea by a couple of inches. He continues to make similar predictions to this day although clearly nowhere close to reality from the beginning.
------------------------

CO2 vs temperature. No correlation.  Solar activity vs temperature, very clear correlation

Emperor penguins, whose long treks across Antarctic ice to mate have been immortalised by Hollywood, are heading towards extinction, scientists say. Based on predictions of sea ice extent from climate change models, the penguins are likely to see their numbers plummet by 95% by 2100. That level of decline could wreak havoc on the delicate Antarctic food chain. The research is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. --BBC News, 26 January 2009


Nearly twice as many emperor penguins inhabit Antarctica as was thought. UK, US and Australian scientists used satellite technology to trace and count the iconic birds, finding them to number almost 600,000. The extent of sea ice in the Antarctic has been relatively stable in recent years (unlike in the Arctic), although this picture hides some fairly large regional variations. --Jonathan Amos, BBC News, 13 April 2012

any chance of a 'sorry' as well? Thought not.

CO2 effects on sea level 'undetectable' Sea level changes driven by natural causes

CO2 power halves when doubled, to eventual zero

Yes, when CO2 doubles from 260 to 520 ppm (minus any feedback) 1C would be added, double that and 0.5C is added etc, meaning it becomes so little effective after 500ppm or so any further rises are entirely irrelevant. I am not aware of this diagram being in any dispute, just ignored by those who make policies.

Dissenting scientists- no possible consensus here

.we argue that rapid warming in recent decades has been driven mainly by non-CO2 greenhouse gases (GHGs), such as chlorofluorocarbons, CH4, and N2O, not by the products of fossil fuel burning, CO2 and aerosols..

More gross errors 

 "It turns out that past studies, which were based on computer models without any direct data for comparison or guidance, overestimate the water temperatures and extent of melting beneath the Fimbul Ice Shelf. This has led to the misconception, Hattermann said, that the ice shelf is losing mass at a faster rate than it is gaining mass, leading to an overall loss of mass.

The team’s results show that water temperatures are far lower than computer models predicted ..."


Compare with Himalayan glacier errors to see a pattern not an isolated example.

 Nobel laureate denies global warming
He's not alone

In contrast to Crutzen and Molina, Giaever found the measurement of the global average temperature rise of 0.8 degrees over 150 years remarkably unlikely to be accurate, because of the difficulties with precision for such measurements—and small enough not to matter in any case:

“What does it mean that the temperature has gone up 0.8 degrees? Probably nothing.”

He disagreed that carbon dioxide was involved and showed several charts that asserted, among other things, that climate had even cooled.


A large team of scientists making a comprehensive study of data from tree rings say that in fact global temperatures have been on a falling trend for the past 2,000 years and they have often been noticeably higher than they are today - despite the absence of any significant amounts of human-released carbon dioxide in the atmosphere back then.

"We found that previous estimates of historical temperatures during the Roman era and the Middle Ages were too low," says Professor-Doktor Jan Esper of the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, one of the scientists leading the study. "Such findings are also significant with regard to climate policy."


NASA reduce doubling of CO2 to 1.64C rise

Temperature errors exposed

Solar effects discovered

"Paper finds climate is 'highly sensitive to extremely weak' changes in solar activity
A paper published in Science by the esteemed geologist Dr. Gerard Bond and colleagues finds that "Earth’s climate system is highly sensitive to extremely weak perturbations in the Sun’s energy output, not just on the decadal scales that have been investigated previously, but also on the centennial to millennial time scales."

Norwegian universities can find no warming

IPCC estimates three times higher than reality

Not the hockey stick

Hottest year ever? Nope Temperatures were higher from 4-800 years ago regardless of a medieval warm period or not. Although that was also in the IPCC records until 1995 when they replaced it.

Remember those tree rings? He's had to correct them. Yes, finding CO2 makes tree rings grow on its own they've had to dump the old diagram after all before someone gets into trouble.


We describe the analysis of existing and new maximum-latewood-density (MXD) and tree-ring width (TRW) data from the Torneträsk region of northern Sweden and the construction of 1500 year chronologies. Some previous work found that MXD and TRW chronologies from Torneträsk were inconsistent over the most recent 200 years, even though they both reflect predominantly summer temperature influences on tree growth. We show that this was partly a result of systematic bias in MXD data measurements and partly a result of inhomogeneous sample selection from living trees (modern sample bias). We use refinements of the simple Regional Curve Standardisation (RCS) method of chronology construction to identify and mitigate these biases. The new MXD and TRW chronologies now present a largely consistent picture of long-timescale changes in past summer temperature in this region over their full length, indicating similar levels of summer warmth in the medieval period (MWP, c. CE 900–1100) and the latter half of the 20th century. Future work involving the updating of MXD chronologies using differently sourced measurements may require similar analysis and appropriate adjustment to that described here to make the data suitable for the production of un-biased RCS chronologies. The use of ‘growth-rate’ based multiple RCS curves is recommended to identify and mitigate the problem of ‘modern sample bias’.

ie 'we got it wrong, sorry everyone'

Sea level measurements turn out to be wrong

The satellites weren't aimed at the surface, apparently, so reading around double the actual level, but the data still contributed to the graphs for many years.

More and more, Arctic ice loss many times less than thought as the data has since been filtered:


After a summer of absolute media overload, the Grace satellite has just refined its findings and found the loss of Arctic ice to be many times less than previously thought, as the spurious data was so great it took them this long to filter it out. The loss is now within the error margin, ie negligible. Which is logical going by the lack of warming for over 15 years now.


Here it is

" While overall ice loss on Greenland consistently increased between 2003 and 2010, Harig and Simons found that it was in fact very patchy from region to region.

In addition, the enhanced detail of where and how much ice melted allowed the researchers to estimate that the annual acceleration in ice loss is much lower than previous research has suggested, roughly increasing by 8 billion tons every year. Previous estimates were as high as 30 billion tons more per year.

The rate of loss of ice from Greenland is estimated at 199.72 plus-or-minus 6.28 gigatonnes per year. So the possible acceleration of losses is only barely larger than the margin of error in the readings: it's very difficult to tell the supposed loss curve from a straight line."

I'm sure both the IPCC and media will take this on board and change their approaches accordingly </sarc>

Read more here: http://www.adn.com/2008/10/13/555283/bad-weather-was-good-for-alaska.html#storylink=cpy

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