Wegman Report

The Wegman report was made in 2006. It is an independent analysis of the statistics used to create the Hockey Stick, which starred in the IPCC 3rd report. It is here.

The executive summary reports the primary problem with Mann's Hockey Stick paper:

“The controversy of Mann’s methods lies in that the proxies are centered on the mean of the period 1902-1995, rather than on the whole time period. This mean is, thus, actually decentered low, which will cause it to exhibit a larger variance, giving it preference for being selected as the first principal component. The net effect of this decentering using the proxy data in MBH98 and MBH99 is to produce a “hockey stick” shape. Centering the mean is a critical factor in using the principal component methodology properly. It is not clear that Mann and associates realized the error in their methodology at the time of publication.” Finding number 7 discredits claims that the 1990s were the hottest decade in a millennium: “Our committee believes that the assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade in a millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year in a millennium cannot be supported by the MBH98/99 analysis. As mentioned earlier in our background section, tree ring proxies are typically calibrated to remove low frequency variations. The cycle of Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age that was widely recognized in 1990 has disappeared from the MBH98/99 analyses, thus making possible the hottest decade/hottest year claim. However, the methodology of MBH98/99 suppresses this low frequency information. The paucity of data in the more remote past makes the hottest-in-a-millennium claims essentially unverifiable.” McIntyre and McKitrick exposed the problems and showed that stationary trendless red noise would exhibit the same hockey stick shape after being processed using the MBH methodology! This was confirmed by Wegman.

Urban heat island effect

The urban heat island effect refers to the tendency of urban temperatures to be much higher than rural temperatures. The extra warmth is due to:

• more heat created by people
• landscape changes. For example roads and concrete surfaces absorb more solar heat
• less evaporative cooling. There's less vegetation and water evaporation in built-up areas. Water evaporation is one of the major causes of earth surface cooling.

Is the global warming scare due to misread thermometers?

• Actual measurements of the best rural ground stations, in USA, show no warming trend over the past 13 years, since the North American 'climate reference network' was built.

  When we look at average surface temperature but exclude urban data we get something like this:

  

  The chart above shows data from the U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN). This is a network of best practice surface stations from 114 sites, carefully sited to suffer no bias from an urban heat island effect. USCRN use the latest, highest quality measuring instruments. These are the most scientific, accurate, precise, direct, ground-level measurements made of temperature anywhere. USCRN shows no warming. The network is only 13 years old, and is only in the USA. Climate alarmists mostly pretend this network does not exist. They don't quote it.

• The chart below shows: Annual-mean temperature in California, averaged over population centers exceeding 1,000,000 (upper) & of less than 100,000 (lower). Superimposed is the record of Global Mean Temperature (GMT) from the network of surface stations (dotted). The warming trend is clearly far higher in densely populated areas. Source: Goodridge, J, 1996: Bull Am Meteorol Soc, 77, 1588–1589.
• The 3rd chart is a Histogram of observed temperature trend over California, as a function of population. This chart implies near zero warming in lightly populated areas. Source: Robinson, A, Balliunas, S, Soon, W, and Z Robinson, 1998: Med Sent, 3, 171–178.
• The UHI effect got worse over time. Paradoxically, since we began worrying about 'global warming' scientists took lower quality surface readings. They included a higher proportion of stations corrupted by UHI effect. In 1990s thousands of rural surface weather stations were closed. Leaving a strong bias with urban weather stations.
• For 20 years, climate scientists have been making massive adjustments to surface temperatures. They justify these adjustments by claiming to be fixing the corruption introduced by UHI! Adjustments are massive in both the number of adjustments and the size of those adjustments. Here is an example from Iceland. This seems strange to me that climate scientists should be so reliant on temperatures measured at surface stations. Because:
  • most are so unreliable. Temperature measurements are usually just the maximum and minimum temperature recorded per day. So no 'average' daily temperature is never measured. Error bounds are usually around +/- 2C
  • the excuse for closing so many surface stations in the 1990s was that, in future, scientists would rely on (more accurate and precise) satellite measurements. Satellites give:
    1. far both more accurate,
    2. more precise, measurements
    3. made at far more locations (at least ten times more),
    4. a much better picture of isolated areas (which we would otherwise hardly know about).
    5. Satellites eliminate the bias introduced by relying on stations corrupted by the urban heat island effect.
    To summarise: Satellites allow scientists to:
    1. avoid an urban heat island effect biasing temperatures
    2. not interpolate (invent data) for isolated areas where they don't take surface station readings
    3. take more accurate and precise readings
    4. avoid the issue of broken and malfunctioning surface stations
    5. obtain far more readings
    Why did climate scientists continue to use the obsolete ground surface measurements?, and make such a big deal of them in the media. Satellite readings are available for the past 40 years? It seems to me, unscientific to claim that adjusted surface readings, containing massive amounts of interpolated data are more reliable than Satellite readings. But that's what they say. Scientists complain that the Satellite record is corrupted by cloud and atmospheric effects. That is true. Yet what of the massive adjustments they make to the surface record. Today scientists interpolate (make up) nearly half the data they use, and adjust some of the rest.

The last 11,000 years show no remarkable recent climate warming.

One might think that scientists are able to compare the effect of errors introduced by relying on either 1) satellites, or 2) existing ground stations. I never see them quote these errors to give any measure of reliability, or any measure to compare the quality of satellite against ground station measurements. They seem to have no agreed method to calculate the degree of error. So their choice of one over the other (their preference for massively adjusted ground station data) is a subjective judgement.

Today's climate scientists are not behaving as real scientists.

Is average global temperature warming or cooling?

Temperature Evidence

1. Dr. Friedrich Karl Ewert, retired geologist & data computation expert, examined all NASA GISS’s temperature data series, from 1153 stations, going back to 1881. On comparing raw data to NASA’s revisions he found earth has been cooling since 1940, not warming.
2. The GHCN climate stations show there is no statistically significant warming – or cooling. GHCN = Global Historical Climatology Network.
3. The UAH statellite record shows 0.3C warming in the last 40 years. But the climate also showed considerable cooling from 1940s to mid-1970s and the satellite readings only date from 1978.

Uncorrected NASA GISS data should show warming because beginning with the climate scare (1988) vast numbers of climate surface stations were shut. Many of them rural. The stations left open are mostly urban which should be subject to the Urban Heat Island UHI effect, which has increased over time. So uncorrected data should show warming purely on the basis of this massive station shutdown with the warmest stations surviving. If no warming was found (as is the case since the early 1940s) I conclude the climate must be cooling.

Science, as it was once imagined

It’s a kind of scientific integrity, a principle of scientific thought that corresponds to a kind of utter honesty–a kind of leaning over backwards. For example, if you’re doing an experiment, you should report everything that you think might make it invalid–not only what you think is right about it: other causes that could possibly explain your results; and things you thought of that you’ve eliminated by some other experiment, and how they worked–to make sure the other fellow can tell they have been eliminated.

Details that could throw doubt on your interpretation must be given, if you know them. You must do the best you can–if you know anything at all wrong, or possibly wrong–to explain it. If you make a theory, for example, and advertise it, or put it out, then you must also put down all the facts that disagree with it, as well as those that agree with it. There is also a more subtle problem. When you have put a lot of ideas together to make an elaborate theory, you want to make sure, when explaining what it fits, that those things it fits are not just the things that gave you the idea for the theory; but that the finished theory makes something else come out right, in addition.

In summary, the idea is to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgement in one particular direction or another.

-- Richard Feynman.

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Richard Feynman: Cargo-Cult Science speech, 14 June 1974, Caltech, California, USA

Arctic Warming

This is due to warmer temperatures in Winter. Whereas it used to be very cold there, it is now just cold.

Arctic ice isn't about to collapse because 'global warming' makes nights, winters, and very cold regions (such as the Arctic) slightly warmer. All of that is good for people.

Much of the work that supports the AGW conjecture is based on these inherently useless simulations.

Reblog from: WUWT

Wiliam Haas

The reality is that based on the paleoclimate record and the work done with models, the climate change we have been experiencing is caused by the sun and the oceans over which mankind has no control. There is no real evidence that CO2 has any effect on climate and plenty of scientific rational to support the idea that the climate sensitivity of CO2 is zero. The AGW conjecture is based on only partial science and is full of holes. For example, the AGW conjecture depends upon the existence of a radiant greenhouse effect in the Earth’s atmosphere caused by trace gases with LWIR absorption bands. Such a greenhouse effect has not been observed in a real greenhouse, in the Earth’s atmosphere or anywhere else in the solar system for that mater. The radiant greenhouse effect is science fiction hence the AGW conjecture is science fiction as well. Computer simulation of the weather is only reasonable good for about 10 days. The climate simulations are not as good as the weather simulations because of an increase in spatial and temporal sample sizes and inherent instabilities with the simulation process. The idea that adding CO2 to the atmosphere is hard coded into the simulations, begs the question and makes the climate simulations useless. Much of the work that supports the AGW conjecture is based on these inherently useless simulations.

Telling the public that the AGW conjecture is not based on only partial science is pure propaganda and should not be supported with the tax dollars. The federal government should not be funding explanations of global warming and the greenhouse effect that are just plane wrong.

There is ‘No Role of CO2 in Any Significant Change of the Earth’s Climate’

An updated review about carbon dioxide and climate change Vol.:(0123456789)1 3Environmental Earth Sciences (2018) 77:262 https://doi.org/10.1007/s12665-018-7438-y , by Dr. Rex J. Fleming

“One can summarize these calculations as follows: whatever the “climate-change regime,” whatever surface heat from the Sun on any given day within that regime, that heat is fully absorbed and fully vertically redistributed throughout the troposphere—there is no propensity for CO₂ to store heat in a systematic way over time to produce a climate change effect (as defined in the introduction).”

“Why does the integrated effect of CO₂ have so little effect on the total temperature profile? The reason is that the Planck function change with height (temperature) is very strong in reducing the intensity of those relatively few lines with large absorption coefficients. Another reason is that the longwave radiation is diffuse which depletes the intensity rapidly over distance. The diffuse nature of the radiation also leads to the fact that the net radiation for a given level (that sent upward at the bottom of a layer, minus that sent downward at the top of a layer) further reduces the adsorbed CO₂ radiation intensity.”

“Other so-called “greenhouse gases” (some with larger absorption coefficients, but all with significantly less concentration) have their intensity quickly transferred upward and depleted by the same strong Planck function intensity change that applies to CO₂ and H₂O. From the historical record and from these calculations one sees that the CO₂ concentration had no impact on temperature. It contributes low-level heating and allows upper level cooling for a zero net effect.”

Discussion at NTZ.