The Meteorological Office is blocking public scrutiny of the central role played by its top climate scientist in a highly controversial report by the beleaguered United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Professor John Mitchell, the Met Office’s Director of Climate Science, shared responsibility for the most worrying headline in the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning IPCC report - that the Earth is now hotter than at any time in the past 1,300 years. And he approved the inclusion in the report of the famous ‘hockey stick’ graph, showing centuries of level or declining temperatures until a steep 20th Century rise.

By the time the 2007 report was being written, the graph had been heavily criticised by climate sceptics who had shown it minimised the ‘medieval warm period’ around 1000AD, when the Vikings established farming settlements in Greenland. In fact, according to some scientists, the planet was then as warm, or even warmer, than it is today.

Early drafts of the report were fiercely contested by official IPCC reviewers, who cited other scientific papers stating that the 1,300-year claim and the graph were inaccurate. But the final version, approved by Prof Mitchell, the relevant chapter’s review editor, swept aside these concerns.
Now, the Met Office is refusing to disclose Prof Mitchell’s working papers and correspondence with his IPCC colleagues in response to requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act.

The block has been endorsed in writing by Defence Secretary Bob Ainsworth - whose department has responsibility for the Met Office. Documents obtained by The Mail on Sunday reveal that the Met Office’s stonewalling was part of a co-ordinated, legally questionable strategy by climate change academics linked with the IPCC to block access to outsiders.

Last month, the Information Commissioner ruled that scientists from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia - the source of the leaked ‘Warmergate’ emails - acted unlawfully in refusing FOI requests to share their data. Some of the FOI requests made to them came from the same person who has made requests to the Met Office.

He is David Holland, an electrical engineer familiar with advanced statistics who has written several papers questioning orthodox thinking on global warming. The Met Office’s first response to Mr Holland was a claim that Prof Mitchell’s records had been ‘deleted’ from its computers.
Later, officials admitted they did exist after all, but could not be disclosed because they were ‘personal’, and had nothing to do with the professor’s Met Office job.

Finally, they conceded that this too was misleading because Prof Mitchell had been paid by the Met Office for his IPCC work and had received Government expenses to travel to IPCC meetings. The Met Office had even boasted of his role in a Press release when the report first came out.

But disclosure, they added, was still rejected on the grounds it would ‘inhibit the free and frank provision of advice or the free and frank provision of views’.

It would also ‘prejudice Britain’s relationship with an international organisation’ and thus be contrary to UK interests. In a written response justifying the refusal dated August 20, 2008, Mr Ainsworth - then MoD Minister of State - used exactly the same language. Mr Holland also filed a request for the papers kept by Sir Brian Hoskins of Reading University, who was the review editor of a different chapter of the IPCC report.

When this too was refused, Mr Holland used the Data Protection Act to obtain a copy of an email from Sir Brian to the university’s information officer. The email, dated July 17, 2008 - when Mr Holland was also trying to get material from the Met Office and the CRU - provides clear evidence of a co-ordinated effort to hide data. Sir Brian wrote: ‘I have made enquiries and found that both the Met Office/MOD and UEA are resisting the FOI requests made by Holland. The latter are very relevant to us, as UK universities should speak with the same voice on this. I gather that they are using academic freedom as their reason.’

At the CRU, as the Warmergate emails reveal, its director, Dr Phil Jones (who is currently suspended), wrote to an American colleague:

‘[We are] still getting FOI requests as well as Reading. All our FOI officers have been in discussions and are now using the same exceptions - not to respond.’ Last night Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said the affair further undermined the credibility of the IPCC and those associated with it. He said:

‘It’s of critical importance that data such as this should be open. More importantly, the questions being raised about the hockey stick mean that we may have to reassess the climate history of the past 2,000 years.

‘The attempt to make the medieval warm period disappear is being seriously weakened, and the claim that now is the warmest time for 1,300 years is no longer based on reliable evidence.’ Despite repeated requests, the MoD and Met Office failed to comment.

Read story here. Read more here and here. 

Bryan Walsh has a great career in public relations awaiting him. Unfortunately he is currently passing himself off as a journalist for Time Magazine.

PR, a profession I have enjoyed for several decades, is widely seen to “spin” facts to a client’s advantage and this is frequently the case. PR is advocacy. Journalism is supposed to be something else, i.e., the unbiased, objective reporting of the facts. Someone needs to explain this to Bryan.

In an article titled “Explaining a Global Climate Panel’s Key Missteps”, Bryan barely pretends to be a journalist as he engages in whitewashing some widely known facts about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations’ scam for the propagation of the huge global warming hoax.

Bryan correctly notes that the IPCC was “one of the most respected organizations in the world” and, in October 2007, had shared a Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, a famed global warming blowhard and fabulist best known for predicting the end of the world next Tuesday.

Bryan noted that the Norwegian Nobel committee had “lauded the IPCC’s fourth assessment report in 2007 as creating an ever broader consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming.” Note that these are stated as facts, but in truth there never was a “consensus” in the worldwide community of climatologists and meteorologists, and other scientists.

Indeed, there have been three international conferences to debunk global warming, all sponsored by the Heartland Institute, a Chicago-based non-profit, free market think tank that brought together some of the world’s leading scientists who participated in seminars and gave addresses that were illustrated by graphs and other data that debunked global warming. A fourth conference is scheduled in May and, who knows, some members of the U.S. media might actually attend and report the truth this time?

The assertion that there is a connection between human activities and the non-existent global warming doesn’t even meet the lowest standard of journalistic accuracy. There is no connection. None has ever been proven despite the claims. In general terms, the Earth’s climate is determined by the sun, the oceans, and other factors of such magnitude as to suggest that an ant hill poses a threat to a skyscraper.

Bryan finally got around to mentioning that “over the past week or two, the IPCC has seen its reputation for impartiality and accuracy take serious hits.” Hello! Those hits have been around for years, but the leak of emails in November 2009 between the key players in the global warming fraud unleashed a tsunami of revelations about the way the IPCC relied on deliberately distorted “facts” and strove to suppress the publication of the truth in leading science publications. It wasn’t over the past week or two unless Bryan has been in a deep comma for three months.

Calls for the resignation of IPCC chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, were noted. He has been under fire because he knew in advance of the Copenhagen conference that claims about melting Himalayan glaciers were bogus. Plaintively, Bryan asked,
“What’s wrong with the IPCC?” and then answered saying, “To some degree, it’s a victim of its own size.”

Wrong again. The IPCC may have claimed that it had some 2,500 scientists participating, but the real “work” of the IPCC was undertaken by a close knit group of global warming fraudsters, several of whom are under investigation. They include Prof. Phil Jones of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) that provided key data regarding the planet’s temperatures---which always seemed to be rising exponentially.

Others included Prof. Michael Mann of Penn State University, a paleoclimatologist famed for his “hockey stick” graph of temperatures over the past 1,000 years that managed to overlook the Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850. Joining the merry pranksters was Prof. Keith Briffa, another CRU researcher, who dished up a tree ring theory that confirmed global warming.

Dr. Kevin Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, linked increased hurricane activity to global warming, but was probably hard pressed to explain those years when it did not increase. There are others like Dr. James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute that got the whole ball rolling in 1986 when he told Congress that global warming would destroy the Earth if we didn’t put an end to all energy use that generated greenhouse gas emissions.

Instead of noting the misdeeds of these and others closely affiliated with the IPCC, Bryan quoted a scientist from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, a “lead author on the 2007 IPCC report.” And we know how eager Richard Somerville must have been to suggest it might have been a thousand pages of nonsense. Bryan also quoted Peter Frumhoff of the left-learning Union of Concerned Scientists who repeated the tired IPCC message that “there is no debate about the core urgency” of global warming.

No debate? The debate has been raging for decades. Bryan, however, just plowed on, offering one excuse after another to cover the IPCC’s serious breach of ethics and accuracy, concluding that its “self-assessment” after each report and
“the pressure to be flawless” is the problem, but not the lies it has been putting forth since 1988.

“But that’s exactly the sort of information policymakers will need to prepare for climate change going forward,” said Bryan.

No, policymakers need is real science, proven science. And the IPCC “science” about global warming, now rebranded as “climate change”, is an insult to all real scientists and, beyond them, to a worldwide public that was consistently led to believe a massive hoax.

Time, Newsweek, and countless others in the mainstream media have been co-conspirators in the global warming fraud. It is time to end this shameful blot on journalism and begin to report facts, not apocalyptic fantasy. Read Alan’s blog here.

Solar Cycle 24 was a late starter, about three and a half years later than the average of the strong cycles in the late 20th century and almost three year later than the weak cycles of the late 19th century.  It was almost as late as Solar Cycle 5, the first half of the Dalton Minimum.  The last few months have seen it ramp up relatively rapidly.

[Note: Solar Cycle 22 and 23 are overlaid on solar cycle 3 and 4 above to show similarity]

Plotting up the last three solar cycles relative to the Dalton Minimum, another solar minimum is not precluded by the data to date (below, enlarged here).

With Solar Cycle 23 ending up at twelve and a half years long, applying Friis-Christenson and Lassen theory to the temperature record of Hanover, New Hampshire (below, enlarged here) results in a two degree centigrade decline in the annual average temperature at this location over the expected twelve years of Solar Cycle 24, from December 2009 to late 2021.  Given some record low monthly averages in the northeast US in the recent summer, and the current cold winter, this cooling is well under way.

Read story and comments here.

Also shown in this analysis by the Armaugh Observatory in Ireland (below and enlarged here).

ICECAP NOTE: SNOWCOVER RUNNING WELL ABOVE NORMAL

The Weather Channel and Heidi Cullen of Climate Central, who used to haunt the halls at The Weathrer Channel while talking about the frigid cold and snow in most places in mid-latitudes from Europe and Russia to China and the United States, in their infinite ignorance mentioned that global warming did not go away because it was warmer than normal in the arctic regions. Of course, any practicing meteorologist knows this kind of 5 standard deviation nagative arctic oscillation (high latitude blocking) that we have had is what drive cold to mid-latitudes and that comes with warmer higher latitude temperatures (still cold but above normal). TWC is owned by GE which had expected to benefit hugely from global warming and carbon trading, solar and wind power and NBC is the green peacock network and Heidi Cullen now works for George Soros funded Climate Central. GE stock which once was over $40/share is hovering around $15. And as for Climate Central, George you are wasting your money.

Guess what? The man responsible for looking after the fat pensions of the boys and girls at the BBC is a climate change fanatic, and he is part of an international group of investment managers who bust a gut to invest in ‘climate change’ schemes. He’s called Peter Dunscombe, and he runs the 8.2bn corporation pension fund, advising trustees on a day-to-day basis about their investments. Mr Dunscombe, who addresses conferences about ‘ethical investments’, is also chairman of the Institutional Investment Group on Climate Change(IIGCC), which has 47 members and manages four trillion euros’ worth of investments; yes, four trillion. Their goal is to find as many ‘climate change’ investment opportunities as possible:

The IIGCC Investor Statement on Climate change was launched in October 2006. Asset owners and asset managers who signed the Statement committed to increasing their focus on climate change in their own processes and in their engagement with companies and governments.

So now we really know why BBC staffers are so fanatical about ‘climate change’. It’s naked self-interest. In 2008, there were 18,736 contributors to the BBC pension fund; every man jack of them benefits from climate alarmism.

Update: I’ve been going through the latest BBC Pensions Trust report, and it reveals that Helen Boaden, who is the overall boss of the BBC’s news and current affairs operation, was appointed to the trust in 2008. So the woman who tells environment reporters such as Roger Harrabin and Richard Black that the science is settled also works to maximise the returns of the pension fund with Peter Dunscombe. I thought that needed spelling out fully, just in case any subtleties might be missed. See post here.

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Global warming extremists silence doubters with charges of ‘terracide’
By Kirk Myers, Seminole County Environmental Examiner

The extremist disciples of modern climate-change theology are hard at work trying to silence unbelievers who express doubts or misgivings about the “proven science” of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming.

The True Believers - those who claim man is warming the planet - view non-worshipers as heretics who should be ostracized, silenced, fired, put on trial or jailed (no talk yet of firing squads or public hangings) for the crime of “terracide” - destroying earth.

The eco-ecclesiastics brook no dissent from official dogma, as two university professors discovered. Climatologist Pat Michaels was forced from his post as a research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia for postulating a belief in naturally induced climate swings - for example, changes caused by solar activity or ocean currents. And Oregon State University professor George Taylor, the state’s climatologist, was damned in the media for apostasy and forced to defend himself publicly for challenging the Book of Global Warming Revelation.

Many university professors who question the man-is-warming-the-earth dogma - and their numbers are growing - remain silent out of fear of reprisal. Those who are courageous enough to speak out are ridiculed and sometimes threatened. Dr. Timothy Ball, a former professor at the University of Winnipeg in Canada, received five death threats after publicly confronting the tenets of global warming. “I can tolerate being called a skeptic because all scientists should be skeptics, but then they started calling us deniers, with all the connotations of the Holocaust. That is an obscenity. It has got really nasty and personal.”

Put them on trial, says Dr. James Hansen

Among the chief keepers of the faith is Al Gore comrade Dr. James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies, who declared that global warming dissenters should be put on trial for “crimes against humanity.” This is the same James Hansen who has been called an activist and an embarrassment by his former supervisor at NASA, Dr. John Theon, and was roundly criticized for testifiying on behalf of six Greenpeace activists who had vandalized a coal-fired power plant in Britain. On the witness stand, Hansen testified that CO2 emissions from the plant would damage the environment through the effects of climate change.

It gets worse. Speaking at a business conference in Montreal, prominent scientist David Suzuki branded as “criminals” politicians who challenge the global warming orthodoxy, much to the delight of the standing-room-only crowd. “What I would challenge you to do is to put a lot of effort into trying to see whether there’s a legal way of throwing our so-called leaders into jail because what they’re doing is a criminal act,” said Dr. Suzuki, a former board member of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. “It’s an intergenerational crime in the face of all the knowledge and science from over 20 years.”

Robert Kennedy, Jr. calls skeptics ‘traitors’

Not to be outdone, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., during a fire-and-brimstone speech at the 2007 Live Earth concert, lambasted the “crooked scientists who are lying to the American people day after day after day . . . and these rotten politicians . . . who are nothing more than corporate toadies . . . .”

“This is treason, and we need to start treating them now as traitors,” he thundered. Heidi Cullen, former host of The Weather Channel’s “Forecast Earth,” called for the American Meteorological Society to revoke the Seal of Approval for any weatherman disputing the tenets of man-made warming.

“If a meteorologist can’t speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the AMS shouldn’t give them a Seal of Approval. Clearly, the AMS doesn’t agree that global warming can be blamed on cyclical weather patterns,” she wrote in her Weather Channel weblog.

Thought control on the Internet?

Stripping non-believers of their professional credentials is only the start. Several eco-cultists have called for the appointment of Internet gatekeepers to monitor the opinions of global warming doubters. In Britain, environmental journalist Alex Lockwood of the University of Sunderland writes that “there is clearly a need for research into the ways in which climate skepticism online is free to contest scientific fact.” Translation: How do we best muzzle dissenters?

He continues: “I would argue that climate disinformation online is a form of cultural and political Malware. . . [that] harms not only our democracy, but our planet.” Lockwood also views favorably those who have called for nationalizing the Internet as a public utility and requiring online publications to register with an “Internet watchdog.”

In the minds of some eco-alarmists, banning contrary thinking does not go nearly far enough. More draconian measures are needed to rein in and punish views that deviate from officially sanctioned dogma.

David Roberts, a staff writer for the environmental organization Grist, wants to see leading warming skeptics hauled before a “war crimes” tribunal. He writes: “When we’ve finally gotten serious about global warming, when the impacts are really hitting us, and we’re in a full worldwide scramble to minimize the damage, we should have war crimes trials for these bastards - some sort of climate Nuremberg.”

To his credit, Roberts says he is interested only in the truth and is “opposed to state-sanctioned execution in all cases . . . and would certainly never advocate it merely for the crime of being a lying scumbag.” No word yet on whether water-boarding or flogging would be acceptable.

The climate-change Torquemadas no doubt yearn for the good old medieval times of the rack, thumb screw, heretic’s fork, head vice, Inquisition chair, and Virgin of Nuremberg. Let the red out and the green spirit in. The first sinners in line for spiritual cleansing would undoubtedly be Lord Monckton of Brenchley, Steven McIntyre of Climate Audit and Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That? - three well-known apostates held in especially high disrepute by the high priests of global warming.

Have the environmental-global warming-climate change jihadists finally lost their moral bearings - and sense of fair play in the forum of intellectual debate? When thoughtful people can no longer express their doubts about man-made global warming - a still unproven theory - without fear of on-the-job reprisals, ostracism, jail or worse, something has gone terribly awry. Environmentalism then has crossed into the dark province of eco-extremism, interested not in the pursuit of truth, but in strict adherence to a neo-fascist religious code.

The following missive forwarded recently to Climategate.com, captures the gravitas and profound philosophical underpinnings of the global warming cult:

“it doesnt really matter what you people say - all your arguments and all the bullsh!t won’t make a lick of difference to what we are facing and what will happen to our climate. I don’t know how you can live with yourselves. please just put some arsenic in your coffee and let the rest of world get on with it.” Read more of this frightening look into the sick and angry minds of environmental alarmism here.

Never mind predictions of catastrophic bleaching from global warming, cold is the culprit of this story. With ocean heat content now shown to be dropping slightly since 2005, there is even greater concern.

Excerpts from Physorg.com: Coral in Florida Keys suffers lethal hit from cold

A dead coral in the Upper Keys shows signs of temperature stress. (Nature Conservancy / January 29, 2010)
January 30, 2010 By Curtis Morgan

Bitter cold this month may have wiped out many of the shallow water corals in the Keys. Scientists have only begun assessments, with dive teams looking for “bleaching” that is a telltale indicator of temperature stress in sensitive corals, but initial reports are bleak. The impact could extend from Key Largo through the Dry Tortugas west of Key West, a vast expanse that covers some of the prettiest and healthiest reefs in North America.

Given the depth and duration of frigid weather, Meaghan Johnson, marine science coordinator for The Nature Conservancy, expected to see losses. But she was stunned by what she saw when diving a patch reef 2.5 miles off Harry Harris Park in Key Largo.

Star and brain corals, large species that can take hundreds of years to grow, were as white and lifeless as bones, frozen to death. There were also dead sea turtles, eels and parrotfish littering the bottom. “Corals didn’t even have a chance to bleach. They just went straight to dead,” said Johnson, who joined teams of divers last week surveying reefs in the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. “It’s really ecosystem-wide mortality.”

The record chill that gripped South Florida for two weeks has taken a heavy toll on wildlife - particularly marine life. Many of the Florida Keys’ signature diving destinations such as Carysfort, Molasses and Sombrero reefs as well as deeper reefs off Miami-Dade and Broward are believed to have escaped heavy losses, thanks to warming effects of the Gulf Stream. But shallower reefs took a serious, perhaps unprecedented hit, said Billy Causey, Southeast regional director of national marine sanctuaries for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Cold-water bleaching is unusual, last occurring in 1977, the year it snowed in Miami. It killed hundreds of acres of staghorn and elkhorn corals across the Keys. Neither species has recovered, both becoming the first corals to be federally listed as threatened in 2006. This big chill, said Causey, shapes up worse.

“They were exposed to temperatures much colder, that went on longer, than what they were exposed to three decades ago,” he said. Typical winter lows in-shore hover in the mid- to high-60s in the Keys. At its coldest more than a week ago, a Key Largo reef monitor recorded 52. At Munson Reef, just about a half-mile off the Newfound Harbor Keys near Big Pine Key, it hit 56.

At Munson Reef, said Cory Walter, a biologist for Mote Marine Laboratory in Summerland Key, scientists saw losses similar to what was reported off Key Largo. Dead eels, dead hogfish, dead coral - including big coral head 5- to 6-feet wide, bleached white with only fringes of decaying tissue.

“They were as big, as tall, as me. They were pretty much dead,” said Walter, who coordinates Mote’s BleachWatch program, which monitors reefs. See PHYSORG story.

PRIME Minister Kevin Rudd, the man who said he would never “knowingly” tell a lie, should begin the new Parliamentary session Tuesday with a few admissions of deceit. His massively exaggerated claims of catastrophic climate change caused by human activity have been thoroughly rejected by the UK chief scientist, John Beddington. Even Australia’s chief scientist, Penny Sackett, has been unable to provide any evidence to support her wild December claim that there are about five years to avoid dangerous climate change damage.

Both scientific chiefs are now calling for absolute openness and rigour in the presentation of climate science evidence. Professor Beddington says scientists should be more open about the uncertainty of predicting the rate of climate change but has he told his Australian counterpart, Professor Sackett?

This is scientific backdown with a capital “B”.

Before the Copenhagen fiasco, Mr Rudd was certain that human-induced climate change was the greatest moral challenge of our times. Now he is mute on the topic. So much for the need for the emissions trading legislation he plans to re-introduce this week. So much for his often-proclaimed decisiveness. So much for the need for certainty.

The Himalayan glaciers may not be melting, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Mr Rudd falsely claimed, but the UN’s credibility, and that of Rudd and his Climate Change Minister Penny Wong, has evaporated. In Britain, the Information Commissioner’s Office has found the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit broke the Freedom of Information law throughout 2007 and 2008. The unit was one of the principal sources the IPCC, the Australian Government and CSIRO has relied upon for its human-induced global warming propaganda.

Little wonder that climate change scientists on both sides of the debate are going back to the original data to try and find material that has not been tampered with. Of course, Mr Rudd was such a proponent of man-made global warming that he gave $1 million late last year to the Tata Energy Research Institute. This is the Indian organisation run by the chairman of the IPCC, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, who was recently forced to admit that the IPCC claim in its 2007 report that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 had no scientific basis, and its inclusion in the report reflected a “poor application” of IPCC procedures.

In fact, they represented worse than a “poor application” of procedures; they represented zero application of anything but a desire to present propaganda on the behalf of governments pushing to impose a new global body on nations participating in the Copenhagen conference that would oversee wealth redistribution and enforce punitive carbon emission levels on the wealthier nations.

It’s all there in copies of the draft agreement Australia had a hand in preparing before the conference and can now be found with a couple of mouse clicks on the internet. Dr Pachauri has his fingers in many odious pies, due to the expanding worldwide business connections he’s made since becoming chairman of the IPCC. He is now a very wealthy man. Could Mr Rudd explain why it was necessary to present this individual with $1 million of Australian taxpayers’ funds without any justification or accountability?

As the Wall Street Journal sagely observed last week, while the harm from global warming is speculative, the harm from global warmists is real. In the two years Mr Rudd has been in office, he has shown no skill in any area (discounting his co-authorship of a children’s book about his dog and his cat) beyond giving away the wealth of the nation.

He rapidly went through the surplus that was painstakingly amassed by the previous Howard-Costello government. Then he started to spend funds he didn’t have to protect the nation from the fallout of the global fiscal collapse. The problem was that, despite his claims, the collapse was not global. Australia came through virtually unscathed because of the strength of financial regulation brought in by the Howard-Costello and the Hawke-Keating governments and the rapacious demand for commodities from the growth markets of Asia.

It is increasingly obvious that Mr Rudd is not a diplomat’s bootlace, as our foreign relations are at their lowest ebb in decades. Nor does he understand numbers. He doesn’t even know how many Australians there are, selling the population short by one million when he told The 7.30 Report on Thursday there were 21 million of us.

As for finances, he is now going to give $100 million to Afghanistan, with $25 million earmarked for the Taliban. Should our troops there be writing cheques or firing bullets? All of these are serious issues but in the lead-up to this week’s parliamentary session, the Labor Government, led by Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard, has chosen to focus on the sex lives of teenage girls.

The new Opposition leader Tony Abbott has a smorgasbord of issues with which to confront the Rudd Government, which is a master of spin and obfuscation. Like a good editor, Abbott and his team must cut through the verbiage. It is important he does not get distracted by the frippery with which elements of the media are obsessed, but concentrates on the matters that are important to Australians. Read more here.

There has been a lot of buzz about the Menne et al 2010 paper “On the reliability of the U.S. Surface Temperature Record” which is NCDC’s response to the surfacestations.org project. One paid blogger even erroneously trumpeted the “death of UHI” which is humorous, because the project was a study about station siting issues, not UHI. Anybody who owns a car with a dashboard thermometer who commutes from country to city can tell you about UHI.

Image: NOAA USHCN COOP station at Hanksville, UT, sited over a grave.  Photo by surfacestations volunteer Juan Slayton.
Larger image here.

There’s also claims of this paper being a “death blow” to the surfacestations project. I’m sure in some circles, they believe that to be true. However, it is very important to point out that the Menne et al 2010 paper was based on an early version of the surfacestations.org data, at 43% of the network surveyed. The dataset that Dr. Menne used was not quality controlled, and contained errors both in station identification and rating, and was never intended for analysis. I had posted it to direct volunteers to so they could keep track of what stations had been surveyed to eliminate repetitive efforts. When I discovered people were doing ad hoc analysis with it, I stopped updating it.

Our current dataset at 87% of the USHCN surveyed has been quality controlled.

There’s quite a backstory to all this.

In the summer, Dr. Menne had been inviting me to co-author with him, and our team reciprocated with an offer to join us also, and we had an agreement in principle for participation, but I asked for a formal letter of invitation, and they refused, which seems very odd to me. The only thing they would provide was a receipt for my new data (at 80%) and an offer to “look into” archiving my station photographs with their existing database.  They made it pretty clear that I’d have no significant role other than that of data provider. We also invited Dr. Menne to participate in our paper, but he declined.

The appearance of the Menne et al 2010 paper was a bit of a surprise, since I had been offered collaboration by NCDC’s director in the fall. In typed letter on 9/22/09 Tom Karl wrote to me:

“We at NOAA/NCDC seek a way forward to cooperate with you, and are interested in joint scientific inquiry. When more or better information is available, we will reanalyze and compare and contrast the results.”

“If working together cooperatively is of interest to you, please let us know.”

I discussed it with Dr. Pielke Sr. and the rest of the team, which took some time since not all were available due to travel and other obligations. It was decided to reply to NCDC on a collaboration offer.

On November 10th, 2009, I sent a reply letter via Federal Express to Mr. Karl, advising him that we would like to collaborate, and offered to include NCDC in our paper. In that letter I also reiterated my concerns about use of the preliminary surfacestation data (43% surveyed) that they had, and spelled out very specific reasons why I didn’t think the results would be representative nor useful.

We all waited, but there was no reply from NCDC to our reply to offer of collaboration by Mr. Karl from his last letter. Not even a “thank you, but no”.

Then we discovered that Dr. Menne’s group had submitted a paper to JGR Atmospheres using my preliminary data and it was in press. This was a shock to me since I was told it was normal procedure for the person who gathered the primary data the paper was based on to have some input in the review process by the journal.

NCDC uses data from one of the largest volunteer organization in the world, the NOAA Cooperative Observer Network. Yet NCDC director Karl, by not bothering to reply to our letter about an offer he initiated, and by the journal not giving me any review process opportunity, extends what Dr. Roger Pielke Senior calls “professional discourtesy” to my own volunteers and my team’s work. See his weblog on the subject:

Professional Discourtesy By The National Climate Data Center On The Menne Et Al 2010 paper

I will point out that Dr. Menne provided thanks to me and the surfacestations volunteers in the Menne et al 2010 paper, and I hear through word of mouth, also in a recent verbal presentation. For that I thank him. He has been gracious in his communications with me, but I think he’s also having to answer to the organization for which he works and that limited his ability to meet some of my requests, like a simple letter of invitation.

Political issues aside, the appearance of the Menne et al 2010 paper does not stop the surfacestations project nor the work I’m doing with the Pielke research group to produce a peer reviewed paper of our own. It does illustrate though that some people have been in a rush to get results. Texas state Climatologist John Neilsen-Gammon suggested way back at 33% of the network surveyed that we had a statistically large enough sample to produce an analysis. I begged to differ then, at 43%, and yes even at 70% when I wrote my booklet “Is the US Surface Temperature Record Reliable?”, which contained no temperature analysis, only a census of stations by rating.

The problem is known as the “low hanging fruit problem”. You see this project was done on an ad hoc basis, with no specific roadmap on which stations to acquire. This was necessitated by the social networking (blogging) Dr. Pielke and I employed early in the project to get volunteers. What we ended up getting was a lumpy and poorly spatially distributed dataset because early volunteers would get the stations closest to them, often near or within cities.

The urban stations were well represented in the early dataset, but the rural ones, where we believed the best siting existed, were poorly represented. So naturally, any sort of study early on even with a “significant sample size” would be biased towards urban stations. We also had a distribution problem within CONUS, with much of the great plains and upper midwest not being well represented.

This is why I’ve been continuing to collect what some might consider an unusually large sample size, now at 87%. We’ve learned that there are so few well sited stations, the ones that meet the CRN1/CRN2 criteria (or NOAA’s 100 foot rule for COOPS) are just 10% of the whole network. See our current census:

When you have such a small percentage of well sited stations, it is obviously important to get a large sample size, which is exactly what I’ve done. Preliminary temperature analysis done by the Pielke group of the the data at 87% surveyed looks quite a bit different now than when at 43%.

It has been said by NCDC in Menne et al “On the reliability of the U.S. surface temperature record” (in press) and in the June 2009 “Talking Points: related to “Is the U.S. Surface Temperature Record Reliable?” that station siting errors do not matter. However, I believe the way NCDC conducted the analysis gives a false impression because of the homogenization process used. As many readers know, the FILNET algorithm blends a lot of the data together to infill missing data. This means temperature data from both well sited and poorly sited stations gets combined to infill missing data. The theory is that it all averages out, but when you see that 90% of the USHCN network doesn’t meet even the old NOAA 100 foot rule for COOPS, you realize this may not be the case.

Here’s a way to visualize the homogenization/FILNET process. Think of it like measuring water pollution. Here’s a simple visual table of CRN station quality ratings and what they might look like as water pollution turbidity levels, rated as 1 to 5 from best to worst turbidity.

In homogenization the data is weighted against the nearby neighbors within a radius. And so a station might start out as a “1” data wise, might end up getting polluted with the data of nearby stations and end up as a new value, say weighted at “2.5”. Even single stations can affect many other stations in the GISS and NOAA data homogenization methods carried out on US surface temperature data here and here.

Larger image here.

See full post and comments here.

Our American friends remember The Alamo, we see Gallipoli and North Africa among defining moments in national pride and self-sacrifice against seemingly insurmountable odds.

Viv Forbes, rallying the troops

These initial bloody defeats led state and nations on to ultimate victory against powerful foes. It’s drawing a long bow to compare any of those to the political battle now being fought on global warming, but one prominent climate realist has done that, and it’s sure to grab some attention.

Federal Parliament resumes next week, an emissions trading scheme will be revisited for the third time, and a mass rally of farmers pushing for land rights in the wake of Peter Spencer’s solo “Tower of Hope” protest will converge on Canberra.

At the same time, head of the Carbon Sense Coalition, Viv Forbes, is rallying his troops with comparisons to El Alamein, the battle which proved a turning point in halting the Nazi’s World War II advance in North Africa and Europe. Forbes, a wiry, whip-tough grazier and pastoralist, is also a qualified geologist and soil scientist who runs a stud of Sherana sheep, cattle and goats on his property at Rosevale in southeast Queensland.

He holds a mantra in common with other leading climate realists such as Professors Ian Plimer, Bob Carter and hereditary British Peer Lord Christopher Monckton, now visiting Australia on a lecture tour: “Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but a natural trace gas essential to all plant and animal life on earth”. They point to times in Earth’s history when concentrations of CO2 were much higher, plants thrived, coral reefs grew prolifically and polar bears survived. They do not believe man’s “greenhouse gas emissions” are a major driver of global warming."Forbes relentlessly churns out newsletters packed with controversial prose, such as his latest effort:

“Like the British Eighth Army in North Africa in the 1940’s, climate realists have been in continual retreat since the Climate War started. Led by Al Gore’s trained regiments using Nobel Prize gunpowder, backed by academic and government snipers using manipulated temperature data, financed by endless conveys carrying tax payer funds, reinforced by a steady barrage of scare forecasts from the media, and legislative carpet bombing from pliant politicians, the Green Army looked invincible. But suddenly the tide turned.

“What started with the Climategate scandals was followed by the defeat of the Ration-N-Tax Scheme in the Australian Senate and the defeat of the IPCC in Copenhagen. Then we had the IPCC fraud regarding Himalayan glaciers and the serial failures of the weather forecasts from the alarm-promoting British Met Office. Now data manipulation scandals are unfolding in USA, New Zealand and Australia.

“And finally, with the sound defeat of a key Obama Senate candidate in the US, we are seeing the end of the climate equivalent of the long Battles of El Alamein.

“We hope Churchill’s comment is apt today:” Before Alamein we never saw a victory. After Alamein we never saw a defeat. We must not relax after these small victories. In Australia, the Rudd/Wong/Turnbull Axis will never surrender. Already there is talk that the Greens, supported by Turncoat Liberals may allow the Ration-N-Tax Scheme to pass in the Australian Senate.

“It is time to go on the offensive...”

Forbes tells his followers to alert people in politics, business, government, media and the unions they face a revolt of their supporters if they provide “uncritical support for the global warming agenda”.

“We must tell every politician who votes for any legislation based on the disgraced propaganda from the IPCC that he/she will be relentlessly punished in pre-selections, elections and fund raising. Let them know that we will actively work to replace them with more rational politicians and parties.

“There is a political sea change coming and those politicians and parties who do not switch in time will be swept out with the tide.” He also has in his sights businesses relying on subsidies, market mandates or carbon taxes to profit from “artificial industries” such as carbon trading, carbon credits, wind farms, solar power, carbon sequestration or bio-fuels. Union leaders must be warned they should expect a revolt from their members when hidden costs of the global warming agenda start hitting their jobs.

“Warn those academics and bureaucrats who produce scare forecasts on demand they will be called to account for damages they have caused. Protest property confiscation. Take the lead from people like Peter Spencer and use every weapon available against those who destroy or confiscate assets with changes in coastal zoning laws, bans on development, clearing weeds and regrowth, or sterilisation of farms and grasslands with declaration of political parks and non-development areas”.

Forbes says this battle will be international and Australia, Canada and United States are key battlegrounds. Read more hereIcecap enthusiastically supports the efforts of Viv Forbes and the many others fighting to save Australia and world from government control over all aspects of our life and the destruction of the world’s economies He writes about the huge enthusiastic turnout of ordinary men and women for the Monckton-Plimer meetings in working towns like Newcastle. Many were union members concerned for their jobs. May their voices be heard loud and clear in parliament.