I know this is well after the event, but Dr Wegman’s extensive and detailed responses to Rep Stupak‘s written questions are interesting reading. I’m not aware that Steve linked to this document before.
Beware though: the file is 10MB in size, so I’d recommend a right click followed by “Save Target as” – otherwise your browser will lock up waiting on the University of Guelph’s strangely low bandwidth Internet connection.
As if to demonstrate the “state of fear” in climate science – here is how some of the referees to Wegman’s Report reacted (page 8):
In addition, we had two other reviewers who asked that their
names not be revealed because of potential negative consequences
for them.
I’ve been going through the literature and data on ocean sediments looking for proxies with high resolution in the Holocene – something that I discussed a few months ago.
Kim et al 2004 and Lorenz et al 2006, two articles by the same group, discuss Holocene SST changes based on alkenones. Most of their proxies are rather low resolution – sometimes only 6 or 7 measurements in the past 7000 years.
However, SSDP-102 has a resolution of about 40 years during the past 2000 years. It’s taken in shallow waters (40 m) offshore Korea (most alkenone cores seem to be from depths of over 1000 m). Its highest values occur in the MWP – where values are significantly higher than the most recent values. MWP values are also higher than values around 6000 BP.
Continue reading →
A couple of years ago, before I got involved in proxy studies, I was interested in the UHI question and wrote to Phil Jones to request the data used in Jones et al 1990, his study purporting to show the unimportance of urban warming. Jones said that it was on a diskette somewhere and too hard to find, Jones observing that the study had been superceded by other studies. (“Moved on” ?) Anyway, that was before I was wise to the ways of the Team and I didn’t pursue the matter.
However, Jones et al 1990 continues to be relied upon; it’s cited in recent literature and in AR4. So I thought that it would be interesting to re-visit the matter. I still don’t know what sites were used, but something turned up anyway. Continue reading →
I made a subset of HadCRU3 to cover the continental U.S. and compared it to the USHCN-2000 version. Continue reading →
Just a quick note to all viewers/commenters/lurkers⟴hat I will be working on the WordPress theme for this blog in order to try to fix several things that got broken when I upgraded the WordPress software to 2.1.
Because its a theme, no comments will be lost, nor posts deleted because I’m not affecting the database where everything is stored – so fear not if it looks a little peculiar for a few hours.
Although the USHCN version used in Hansen’s 1999 press release seems to be expunged from official U.S. government records, it was fortunately preserved by John Daly. Jerry Brennan sent me a link to a version preserved by John Daly yesterday, from which I was able to replicate the version in the 1999 press release, as shown below.
Figure 1. USHCN Version from 2000. Left – From Contemporary Press Release; Right – from data archived by John Daly. Both are 1951-1980 anomalies in deg C.
Now here’s the fun part. Here’s a recent NOAA version of the same data. If you look carefully, you can see that the late 1990s are higher and the 1920s and 1930s are lower. Compare 1999 to earlier years.
The graph below shows the difference between the version archived in 2000 and the version downloaded from the table-making NOAA webpage. These are obviously not small adjustments – as the adjustment is approximately the same amount as the temperature increase being observed.
Figure 2. Difference between 2000 and 2007 Versions
The effect of the adjustments since 2000 has been to bring the USHCN history more in line with the CRU version. One wonders exactly what adjustments have been performed by CRU and others and the recent admission by Brohan et al 2006 that original versions of many series have been lost (or never even collated by CRU in the first place) leaving only the adjusted versions at CRU (with the nature of some or all of the adjustments undocumented and unknown) is extremely disquieting.
Update: Jerry Brennan observed that the comparison above is between the 2000 GISS version and the 2007 NOAA version and that the more appropriate comparison was between GISS versions. I’ve done so below from the GISS data yielding the differences below: red – GISS2007 vs GISS 2000; blue – NOAA 2007-GISS 2000. So the effect exists with GISS adjustments as well. The proposed NOAA beta version looks like it’s going to increase the adjustments shown below even more (as noted above).
According to the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC),, covered here, a new Beta version of the U.S. Historical Climatology Network will be released next year. They say that the new data set uses
“recent scientific advances that better address uncertainties in the instrumental record. Because different algorithms were used in making adjustments to the station data which comprise both data sets, there are small differences in annual average temperatures between the two data sets. These small differences in average temperatures result in minor changes in annual rankings for some years”.
One of these “minor changes” reverses the order of 1934 and 1999, with the relative change amounting to 0.45 deg F. And, in fact, the new changes are on top of some other puzzling changes which had already moved 1999 well up the league table. Continue reading →
On a couple of occasions, I’ve noted that near infrared water vapor parameterizations in HITRAN-1996 were incorrect and wondered about what the impact of these changes would have been on a non-retuned GCM. It looks like Collins et al JGR 2006 have done something like that – implementing HITRAN changes up to 2003. Unfortunately, they did not attempt to implement the most up-to-date changes as of 2006 (or even implement 2004 changes). Collins et al 2006 excuse this on the following basis:
In general, the radiative parameterizations in GCMs are updated infrequently and are not consistent with the latest LBL calculations of H2O shortwave absorption.
While this may be standard practice in GCM circles, given the amount of weight being placed on GCM prognostications, this seems like a pretty casual way of doing business, especially given that Collins et al are aware of other changes:
There are independent indications that the near-infrared absorption calculated using the latest HITRAN may be underestimated.
However, that’s not the topic of today’s post. It turns out that the difference between old and new parameterizations is about 3.4 wm-2 and that this amount is absorbed in the atmosphere. Collins et al:
The updates to the parameterization of water vapor extinction increase the shortwave convergence in the atmosphere by approximately 3.4 W m-2.
The amount (3.4 wm-2) is obviously very similar to the forcing from doubled CO2 (3.7-4 wm-2). So in a sense, Collins et al, by testing the impact of the 3.4 wm-2 change in atmospheric “convergence”, may provide interesting information on sensitivity where there are no built-in expectations for the answer. I say this because it’s hard not to think that tests on the impact of doubled CO2 within climate models – from a statistical point of view – have become so stylized that they amount to little more than a type of Kabuki theatre. Here there are no built-in expectations. Before you read on, write down your guess as to the impact on average temperature obtained by Collins et al and compare it to their result which I’ll give below. Continue reading →
Continuation of Unthreaded #3
One of the remarkable claims in the AR4 Summary for Policy-Makers was that they provided the first “ assessed likely range to be given for climate sensitivity”, which they reported as follows:
the global average surface warming following a doubling of carbon dioxide concentrations … is likely to be in the range 2 to 4.5°C with a best estimate of about 3°C, and is very unlikely to be less than 1.5°C. Values substantially higher than 4.5°C cannot be excluded, but agreement of models with observations is not as good for those values. Water vapour changes represent the largest feedback affecting climate sensitivity and are now better understood than in the TAR. Cloud feedbacks remain the largest source of uncertainty.
It seemed to me that I’d seen similar figures in the past, so I thought that I’d look back at prior assessments back to the 1979 NAS Report (Charney) and found some interesting results. Continue reading →
Climate Audit 
Theme Update in Progress
Just a quick note to all viewers/commenters/lurkers⟴hat I will be working on the WordPress theme for this blog in order to try to fix several things that got broken when I upgraded the WordPress software to 2.1.
Because its a theme, no comments will be lost, nor posts deleted because I’m not affecting the database where everything is stored – so fear not if it looks a little peculiar for a few hours.