Just this morning I wondered how long it would be before some rent-a-quote scientist would come out and say that the record snow in the UK (plus record cold elsewhere in the Northern hemisphere) could not be used to question the religion of “global warming”. Well, it’s taken just a few hours:

Stephen Dorling, of the University of East Anglia’s school of environmental sciences, said it was not surprising the cold period raised questions over climate change - but the snowy weather should not be used as evidence against it.

He said: ‘’It’s no surprise that people look out of their window at the snow and find it hard to rationalise what’s going on with the longer term trend.’’

But he said it was wrong to focus on single events - whether they were cold snaps or heat waves - which were the product of natural variability.

Instead they should look at the underlying, longer term trends for the climate which were more ‘’robust’’ evidence of the changes which are happening.

Dr Dorling said: ‘’There is no doubt we will continue to have unusually warm and unusually cold Decembers and Januarys but it will be superimposed on what the background climate is doing.’’ (source)

It cuts both ways: if record cold and snow don’t negate global warming theory (which they obviously don’t), then heatwaves and droughts don’t support it either. So I wait with bated breath for The Sydney Morning Herald or The Age to run the following headlines in the next hot spell: “Don’t jump to conclusions: heatwave does not prove global warming theory”, or “Drought ‘entirely consistent’ with global cooling, says scientist.” I think I’ll be waiting a very, very long time…

See post here.

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Snow in summer - Sydney Morning Herald blames “climate change”

I hope to do the occasional post over the next few weeks, as time permits, and I couldn’t resist this one. From the Weather Isn’t Climate (Except When We Say It Is) Department…

Once again, we have to ask the simple question: to a climate alarmist, what weather phenomenon would not be a sign of “climate change”? Warmer temperatures? Obviously not - it’s global warming, stupid. Colder temperatures. No, because climate change creates more “extremes” (apparently, when it suits their cause - like today). More rain? No, because one of our models predicted more rain. Less rain? No, because a different model predicted less rain as well. We could go on (and on, and on). The answer is, that there is nothing that isn’t a sign of climate change. Everything and everything is “consistent with it”.

So when snow fell in the New South Wales mountains yesterday, at the height of the southern hemisphere summer, the Moonbat Herald blames climate change in the first sentence of its report this morning:

AS CLIMATE change tips the planet inextricably towards a more complicated future the weather already presents as downright confusing. (source)

So the question for the warmists is this: what weather conditions would not indicate “climate change”? This needs an answer, because at the moment, if everything is a sign of climate change, the flip side of that same argument is that nothing is.

Read more here.

Editor’s Note: This piece was co-authored by Selvaraj Kandaswamy.

The Cancun global warming and wealth redistribution summit concluded last week, with little to show for two weeks of talking in 5-star hotels and restaurants, other than vague promises that countries will try to do something meaningful about the “threat” of “dangerous” climate change.

Indian Environment and Forests Minister Jairam Ramesh nevertheless praised the summit. Rich countries will finance global warming adaptation measures in poor countries, he announced, invoking the good will of “goddesses” of Mexico to achieve some degree of public relations success. (At least they promised, again, to provide some financin....someday...from somewhere.)

Meanwhile, the Northern Hemisphere was being blasted by record cold and snow, as Old Man Winter arrived early. Britain, the United States, other countries and even Cancun were pummeled by record cold, and early snowstorms shut down highways, airports and cities.

In India, at least three people died in the northwestern states of Punjab and Haryana, when night-time temperatures dropped by three degrees Celsius below normal. Cities from Hisar to Amritsar experienced record low temperatures of 3-7 degrees Celsius (5.4-12.6 F). In central England, the BBC reported, 2010 has ushered in one of the coldest starts to winter since 1659.

Is this how rising atmospheric CO2 increases global warming? A closer look at India’s history of climate change provides still more evidence that the
“dangerous manmade climate disruption” thesis is backed by very little evidence.

The cold reality is that overall average Indian temperatures have increased by only 0.4 degrees C (0.7 F) over the past century, while northwestern India and parts of south India have witnessed cooling trends. Himalayan glaciers grew to their maximum ice accumulation about 260 years ago, according to the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, and their well-known retreats began as Earth warmed following the 500-year-long Little Ice Age - not because of human CO2 emissions.

Then why on Earth did Minister Ramesh work so hard to promote CO2-induced global warming, by issuing an official report, “Climate Change and India: A sectoral and regional analysis for 2030s,” just before Cancun? Why does he prefer to believe computer-generated scenarios of extreme warming 20-30 years from now, rather than rely on his country’s past climate variations? Is there a “goddess” in his computer who can foretell our future?

Apparently, there is much still to learn from Henry Blanford (1834-1893), the Geological Survey of India’s pioneering scientist, who wrote about Indian monsoons and climate change in Nature magazine in 1891:

“[T]his warning, alas! is no mere guesswork of credulous and speculative minds, such as in these latitudes certain of our would-be weather prophets love to put forth at hazard, to furnish the topic of a day’s gossip to the millions, or happy to win for themselves a summer day’s reputation with the uninstructed, in the event of a successful [prediction]. Certainly, indeed there is not and cannot be till science shall have extended its domain far beyond its present limits.”

Even today, we are far from having predictive capabilities, and even computer-generated threats of sea level rise do not match reality.

Tide gauge data collected over the past 20 years reveal that mean sea level rise averages only 1.3 mm per year along India’s coastline. By contrast, Environment and Forests Ministry computer models projected that India’s coastal sea level might rise by three times that amount: 4mm per year or 0.4 meters (1.3 feet) per century.

Two distinguished sea level experts from the University of Durham in Britain and University of Pennsylvania, USA analyzed past sea level studies based on dating coral, marine shells, beach ridges and coastal sedimentary sequences from the Northern Indian Ocean along India’s east coast and the coast of Sri Lanka. They found at least four periods, each one lasting 1000 to 1800 years, during the mid-Holocene period (7500 to 1500 years ago), when seas were one to three meters above current levels.

Another study by Peter Ramsay of Durban, South Africa produced a 9000-year record along the southern African coastline. It shows a 2500-year-long sea level rise of up to 3.5 meters (11.6 feet) during the early to mid Holocene, before sea level fell to current levels.

This evidence suggests that the Middle Holocene was warmer than today - and that “scary” CO2-induced sea level rises projected in the ministry’s 2030 Climate report are less than natural cycles of high and low seas that our ancestors faced in India and elsewhere.

Yet another study examined coastal erosion. Scientists from the Directorate of Water Management in Orissa found that 88% of stations along India’s tropical river basins had measured reduced sediment levels for the last three decades. But this had nothing to do with CO2 emissions. The actual cause was significant diversion and storage of runoff to meet increasing water demands for agriculture and industry - and the false cure of cutting emissions would not improve this situation.

The news media and environmental organizations repeatedly tell the “uninstructed” public that current global warming is unprecedented and threatens humankind and all life on Earth. However, past temperature and sea level changes were certainly more extreme than what scientists have observed in India during the past two centuries. More importantly, even the exaggerated computer model future for India in 2030 would not be extraordinary or unprecedented, and there is no evidence that human CO2 emissions caused recent or current (natural and cyclical) temperature and sea level fluctuations.

We survived those past global warming and cooling periods. With our scientific and technological advances, we will survive future changes, too - if we do not shackle our energy and economic development, thereby keeping billions of people poor and deprived of the ability to adapt. The ministry’s November 2010 climate change report says India’s average annual temperature could increase a minimum of 1 degree to a maximum of 4 degrees C (1.8 to 7.2 F) by the 2030s. We seriously doubt that these higher temperatures are based on reality, but wonder if they might save lives, like those lost during Punjab’s cold spells in December 2010.

The report also says warmer temperatures will prevail during the nighttime over the south peninsula and central and northern India, whereas daytime warming is will occur in central and northern India. However, such diurnal warming patterns might simply be related to the distance from the sea, rather than to any CO2 global warming effects.

Like Henry Blanford, we believe India, the USA and the rest of the world need more paleoclimatology and field monitoring work, before anyone makes speculative predictions based entirely on CO2-driven computer climate model “scenarios” of the future. For countries to implement restrictive, punitive energy policies - based on such speculation - would be crazy and suicidal.

Willie Soon is an astrophysicist and geoscientist at the Solar, Stellar and Planetary Sciences Division of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Selvaraj Kandaswamy is a paleoclimatologist working at the Research Center for Environmental Changes, Academia Sinica, in Taiwan.

On Sept. 24, Scott Storms, a lawyer for the Indiana utility commission, quit and went to work for Duke after receiving an ethics waiver. That decision outraged consumer advocates. On Oct. 5, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels fired the commission’s head and ordered a reopening of Mr. Storm’s recent decisions involving Duke. Duke later fired Mr. Storms and also its top local executive who had hired him.

End of story? Not by a long shot. Then came a release of emails pried loose by the Indianapolis Star, which led to the resignation last week of James Turner, Duke’s executive in charge of its regulated utility businesses. The emails exposed an allegedly excessive coziness between Indiana regulators and Duke executives, who joked about cars, wine and wives. In one email, Duke’s Mr. Turner wondered if the state’s “ethics police would have a cow” if a top regulator visited him at his weekend home.

Then again, you might wonder how the people involved could have helped being buddy-buddy with each other. Virtually all the players working for Duke had once worked for the Indiana government, while the main player on Indiana’s side, the head of its utility commission, had once been a lawyer for a local utility now owned by Duke.

The company in the future might be smart to hire out-of-staters to run its Indiana business. The state might be smart to subject its utility regulators to legislative confirmation or direct election by voters, as other states do to ward off cronyism. Hovering over all is Duke’s Edwardsport coal-gasification plant, whose high-tech white elephanthood is a direct product of Mr. Rogers’s attempt to position his company to prosper in the age of climate politics.

The plant, which is nearly $1 billion over budget, was always destined to mean higher prices for consumers compared to the low-tech coal plants it would replace. But it was sold to the locals as supplying not just electricity but a “clean coal” future for Indiana’s “dirty” coal-mining industry. More to the point, the plant’s economics were supposed to be rescued when Congress passed cap and trade, dramatically hiking costs for traditional coal power plants.

Mr. Rogers here was betting on Mr. Rogers, the closest thing to a celebrity CEO in the utility business, profiled in the New York Times magazine two years ago as a “green coal baron.” No executive has lobbied as noisily or consistently for a national price on carbon output. His wish seemed certain to come true after both major parties nominated climate worrywarts in the 2008 presidential contest.

But something about a 9.8% national unemployment rate has now made politicians less keen on imposing higher utility bills. Nor did Mr. Rogers count on what we’ll boldly call the public’s growing sophistication about climate science. Where the public was once prepared to believe in a pending climate meltdown because “scientists” said so, now it entertains the possibility that “scientists” are human, capable of mistaking theory for fact, of confusing belief with knowledge.

From the start, the Edwardsport plant was unpopular with certain consumer and green groups for whom clean coal is an oxymoron, but they were outvoiced by other groups that take a more realistic view of America’s dependence on coal. Now the opponents are limbering up again, joined by industrial customers such as Nucor Steel, who fret about getting socked with high-priced electricity.

Though it isn’t reflected in the emails, let’s just assume then a certain neuralgia on Duke’s part about whether Indiana regulators will continue to let the plant’s costs be passed along to consumers. Until the scandal, the state had been reasonably obliging. But ‘tis the season to be charitable. The critics should also acknowledge that Duke and the rest of the industry have been in a tough position, trying to invest billions to meet future demand despite nagging uncertainty about the future of climate policy. The Edwardsport plant may be proving a wrong bet in this regard, but that does not mean that Indiana’s regulatory process has been corrupted.

Just the opposite: The plant was hugely popular with the political firmament, and continues to benefit from a gusher of federal, state and local tax subsidies worth $460 million. One could even say the regulatory process made the Edwardsport blunder possible. Without regulators around to guarantee a return on such a risky and pioneering investment, Duke likely would have sat on it hands and let rising electricity prices take care of any gap between demand and supply while waiting for the country to make up its mind about global warming.

Read full story and many comments here.

Update: Millions in UK face fuel rationing over Christmas as cold and snow blitze the country again here.

Britain will be buried by the worst blizzards in almost a century in the coming days - as 12 inches of snow and 60mph-plus winds create 6ft snowdrifts and cause transport chaos.

Forecasters said up to a foot of snow will be dumped across Scotland, northern and western England from tomorrow morning, with several inches in the south.

Gale-force winds will create 6ft snowdrifts expected to shut dozens of main roads and threaten railway line closures - likely to lead to widespread school closures and millions struggling to and from work.

Forecasters said the blizzards will be more serious than an infamous blizzard in the cold 1962-63 winter and the worst to hit Britain since 1927. Then, a 12-hour blizzard on Christmas Day night left 20ft snowdrifts across the south and south-east, with villages cut off for a week and supplied with food by air-drop.

The Met Office has issued nationwide extreme weather warnings for snow and icy roads for the next two days, with Scotland, the north and west put on ‘amber alert’ - the second most-serious status, meaning ‘be prepared’.

Government’s forecasters predicted up to 20cm of snow as well as gales or near-gale force winds nationwide, with wind speeds peaking at 55mph in Cornwall, 46mph in Lancashire and 62mph in Aberdeenshire.

The Met Office said temperatures will remain sub-zero everywhere in the UK bar the west coast during Friday daytime, while -15C nights will feel as cold as a scarcely-bearable -20C due to the Arctic winds.

The south is also at risk of a freak 12inch-plus snowfall on Sunday or Monday if moist continental air collides with cold air over Britain. Forecasters said 4ft drifts would result if this happens.

Netweather forecaster Ian Michaelwhite said: ‘Through Thursday and into Friday, there will be up to a foot of snow in Scotland and northern and western England, with strong winds causing very severe drifting up to 6ft in height.

‘There is also the chance moist air from across the Channel will hit cold air and cause extreme snowfall in the south over the weekend and into next week.
‘There could be more than a foot of snow and 4ft drifts, caused by winds which are strong but not as serious as winds expected to cause 6ft drifts in the north.

‘The most recent weather event comparable to what we are about to see is the famous Christmas Day blizzard of 1927.’

Charles Powell, a forecaster for the Met Office, said: ‘We have got early warnings out for Thursday and Friday. Whereas a couple of weeks ago the main risk was in the eastern part of the country, this time the western side is most at risk.

‘We are fairly certain that the western side will see some snowfall.’ Mr Powell said the snow would be ‘quite significant’ and could cause disruption. Bookies have already slashed their odds of a white Christmas, and Mr Powell said it could be a while before we get a break from the chilly conditions. ‘There is no real sign next week or the Christmas period of it warming up. It could well stay cold into the start of the New Year,’ he added.

See also: Storm warning: Heaviest snow fall of the winter on the way - Manchester Evening News

Snow set to send Britain back into deep freeze - Channel4 News

UK fears worst winter weather since 1963 - The Guardian.

Transport secretary calls summit as Met Office predicts return of icy temperatures, further snow and transport disruption.

Icebound birds fell out of the sky, the sea froze and the third round of the FA Cup took 66 days to complete. These were the consequences of Britain’s last truly Arctic season, in 1963, and the country may be facing it again in the next few weeks.

Forecasters are cautious about predicting a repeat of that cold spring. But the chaos of two weeks ago led the transport secretary, Philip Hammond, to call a national summit of government leaders today which sanctioned the purchase of 250,000 more tonnes of road salt.

It also agreed immediate distribution to councils hit by the new band of snow, from a national stockpile that has taken shipments from as far away as Peru.

Light snow is expected to dust much of the United Kingdom tomorrow , with temperatures plunging from the last week’s “phoney thaw”. Heavier falls are forecast for Friday in Scotland, northern England, parts of Cornwall, the North Sea coast as far as Suffolk, and the east coast of England and Wales.

The Met Office predicts icy temperatures next week, with “further snow, widespread ice, and severe overnight frosts likely in most parts of the country”.

The longer-range forecast predicts that “unsettled and wintry weather will continue across the north of the country into the following week, while temperatures overall remain cold with further snowfall likely in places, especially eastern areas”.

Hammond organised a national ring-round of transport operators to check on progress with avoiding a repeat of the road and rail delays and closure of Gatwick airport. “We entered this winter better prepared than last year,” he claimed. “However, much of the country has been hit unusually early by severe weather.”

Businesses have also clamoured for “effective and resilient measures” to avoid further damage to the economic recovery, which took an estimated hit of 4.8bn pounds in the late November snow, according to insurers. The company RSA warned that similar disruption in the coming freeze could nearly triple that to 13bn, compounded if the last nine days of Christmas shopping were hit.

The Federation of Small Businesses echoed that warning. Its chair, John Walker, said: “We were disappointed that we still haven’t learnt the lessons from previous bad weather and that the country yet again ground to a halt.”

The Met Office said it was too early to warn of another 1963, despite December’s unusual cold, the worst for 30 years. The current 30-day Met Office forecast suggest continuing cold, but with signs of warmer weather pushing in from the south towards the middle of January.

The RSPB called for community action on behalf of owls, which are vulnerable to starvation in freezing weather. Members of the public are encouraged to report sick or injured owls to a wildlife rescue centre. Quick action could save the life of a starving bird, it said. 

About 15 to 20 years ago, folks began to notice problems in amphibian communities around the world. At first, physical deformities were being noticed and then large population declines were being documented.

The finger was initially pointed at the coal industry, with an idea that perhaps mercury was leading to the deformities. But this didn’t pan out. Next, farm practices came under fire, as excess fertilizer running off into farm ponds became the leading suspect. But that theory didn’t hold water either. Then, attention turned to the ozone hole, with the idea that increased ultraviolet radiation was killing the frogs. No luck there either.

Then came the Eureka moment - aha, it must be global warming!

This played to widespread audiences, received beaucoup media attention and, of course, found its way into Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth.

But, alas, this theory, too, wilted under the harsh glare of science, as new research has now pretty definitively linked an infection of the chytrid fungus to declines, and even local extinctions, of frog and toad species around the world.

Perhaps the biggest irony in all of this, is that while researchers fell all over themselves to link anthropogenic environmental impacts to the frog declines, turns out that as they traipsed through the woods and rainforests to study the frogs, the researchers themselves quite possibly helped spread the chytrid fungus to locations and populations where it had previously been absent.

Now a bit good - although hardly unexpected - news is coming out of the frog research studies. Some frog populations in various parts of the world are not only recovering, but also showing signs of increased resistance - gained through adaptation and/or evolution - to the chytrid fungus.

Thus opens a new chapter in the ongoing Disappearing Frog saga, and one that likely foretells of a hoppy ending.

The magazine New Scientist has an interesting article titled “Fungus out! The frog resistance is here” that ties together a growing number of research findings indicating that frog populations that once faced local extinction have been making a come back - even in the continued presence of the chytrid fungus.

New Scientist reports that Australian researchers are reporting that a variety of frog species from across the Land Down Under that were once devastated by chytrid infection are now re-establishing themselves in areas that they were wiped out and in some cases have even returned to numbers as large as they were prior to the chytrid outbreak.

Other researchers are finding, as reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Briggs et al., 2010), that frogs in the mountains of California that were once “driven virtually to extinction” are also making a recovery even though the chytrid fungus is still present. Some populations there have apparently developed the ability to survive in the presence of low-levels of the fungus.

Evidence of a developing resistance to the chytrid fungus has also been reported in a species of Australian frogs. A study published in the journal Diversity and Distributions (Woodhams et al., 2010) looked at populations of frogs which have recovered from a chytrid infection and found indications that natural selection may have led to more resistant populations and facilitated the recovery.

All this is not to say that amphibian populations across the world have made a full and complete recovery, but it is to say that there are encouraging signs that some populations are clawing their way back through adaptation and natural selection - precisely the way things are supposed to work.

And even though global warming is no longer considered to be the guilty party (of course, exonerated with much less fanfare than it was accused), the amphibian story does show the resiliency of nature - a resiliency that is grossly underplayed or even ignored in virtually all doom and gloom presentations of the impacts of environmental change.

Something that is worth keeping in mind.

References:
Briggs, C. J., et al., 2010. Enzootic and epizootic dynamics of chytrid fungal pathogen of amphibians. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107, 9695-9700.

Woodhams, D.C., et al., 2010. Adaptations of skin peptide defenses and possible response to the amphibian chytrid fungus in populations of Australian green-eyed treefrogs, Litoria genimaculata. Diversity and Distributions, 16, 703-712.

When it comes to UN climate conferences, I am constantly flabbergasted by the breathless naivety and forced optimism of certain politicians and environmental reporters, not to mention of green activists. It is as if Voltaire’s very own Dr. Pangloss had set sail to Cancun with Candide. Despite having become a syphilitic beggar, Dr. Pangloss remains firm in his belief that “all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds”, explaining that syphilis “was a thing unavoidable, a necessary ingredient in the best of worlds; for if Columbus had not caught in an island in America this disease, which contaminates the source of generation, and frequently impedes propagation itself, and is evidently opposed to the great end of nature, we should have had neither chocolate nor cochineal.”

‘Global warming’ was likewise reduced to a clapped-out beggar last year in frozen Copenhagen. Yet, in the best of all possible worlds, this Danish debacle is now seen as a good thing, because it brought a sense of reality to the delegates in Cancun, who still, of course, neatly proceeded to avoid any legally-binding commitments on emissions, and on pretty well anything else for that matter, putting off the whole charade until next December in sunny Durban, South Africa. My, how this ship of fools traverses the globe - Candide and Gulliver have nothing on them! And, it is worth remembering that Cancun was the 16th Conference of the Parties no less.

Even more difficult to comprehend, however, is the desperate desire for a post-Kyoto Protocol. After all, it is not even as if the Protocol reduced carbon emissions in any meaningful way. In truth, it appears that emissions actually rose after the Protocol was put in place on December 11, 1997. The average annual growth in atmospheric carbon dioxide over the last 50 years (as measured at Mauna Loa, Hawaii, in parts per million by volume - ppmv) was around 1.37 ppmv. In contrast, the average since 1997and Kyoto has risen to about 1.97 ppmv. So much then for the value of internationally-binding protocols.

This would perhaps be a cause for wry amusement were it not for the fact that political and economic policies predicated on UN Climate Conference agendas are raising costs and burdens for everyone around the world, and especially so at a time when the financial crisis is putting much in jeopardy. In the UK, our ludicrous political obsession with carbon footprints is warping energy policy, dangerously loading energy prices and costs, heaping retrogressive debt on 5 million people in energy poverty, and undermining UK competitiveness, and all at a time when vast new reserves of cheap energy in the form of gas and oil shales are becoming a reality.

As Benny Peiser, Director of The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), wisely argues:

“No other country has been as foolish as Britain to enact extremely aggressive and completely unrealistic climate targets. For the UK, to keep going it alone is not merely suicidal but pointless.

Nor does it make sense to make British industry - and manufacturing in particular - even more uncompetitive, or to drive it overseas, by gratuitously driving up energy costs.

The Government should now suspend its unilateral and extremely costly climate targets until such time as all other major nations have signed up to the same course.”

This is even more the case when we note the extraordinary decline of global-warming coverage and interest throughout the British media since Copenhagen. Until this last Friday, one would have hardly known that Cancún was a two-week conference, and, even now, after it has limply concluded, the coverage is so slim as to merit comment.

For example, as far as I can judge, in the main ‘Sunday Times’, the conference does not achieve a single mention, while the climate-change obsessed ‘Observer’ manages only half-an-inside page and a short, mealy-mouthed editorial partly worthy of Dr Pangloss himself.

The reality is surely dawning, if too slowly, that, to paraphrase Voltaire’s famous 1767 letter to Fredrick the Great, King of Prussia: “Global warming is the most ridiculous, the most absurd and cost-raising farce that ever infected the world.”

Emeritus Professor Philip Stott of the University of London is on the Academic Advisory Council of The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF)

How clouds respond to warming - the ‘cloud feedback- problem - will likely determine whether manmade global warming becomes either the defining environmental event of the 21st Century, or is merely lost in the noise of natural climate variability.

Unfortunately, diagnosing cloud feedback from our global satellite observations has been surprisingly difficult. The problem isn’t the quality of the data, though. The problem is figuring out what the cloud and temperature behaviors we observe in the data mean in terms of cause and effect.

So, Andy Dessler’s (a Texas A&M climate researcher) new paper appearing in Science this week is potentially significant, for it claims to have greatly closed the gap in our understanding of cloud feedback.

Dessler’s paper claims to show that cloud feedback is indeed positive, and generally supportive of the cloud feedbacks exhibited by the IPCC computerized climate models. This would in turn support the IPCC’s claim that anthropogenic global warming will become an increasingly serious problem in the future.

Unfortunately, the central evidence contained in the paper is weak at best, and seriously misleading at worst. It uses flawed logic to ignore recent advancements we have made in identifying cloud feedback.

In fact, the new paper is like going back to using only X-rays for medical imaging when we already have MRI technology available to us.

What the New Study Shows

So what is this new evidence of positive cloud feedback that Dessler has published? Well, actually it is not new. It’s basically the same evidence we published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

Yet we came to a very different conclusion, which was that the only clear evidence of feedback we found in the data was of strongly negative cloud feedback.

But how can this be? How can two climate researchers, using the same dataset, come to opposite conclusions?

The answer lies in an issue that challenges researchers in most scientific disciplines - separating cause from effect.

Dessler’s claim (and the IPCC party line) is that cloud changes are caused by temperature changes, and not the other way around. Causation only occurs in one direction, not the other.

In their interpretation, if one observes a warmer year being accompanied by fewer clouds, then that is evidence of positive cloud feedback. Why? Because if warming causes fewer clouds, it lets in more sunlight, which then amplifies the warming. That is positive cloud feedback in a nutshell.

But what if the warming was caused by fewer clouds, rather than the fewer clouds being caused by warming? In other words, what if previous researchers have simply mixed up cause and effect when estimating cloud feedback?

A Step Backwards for Climate Science

What we demonstrated in our JGR paper earlier this year is that when cloud changes cause temperature changes, it gives the illusion of positive cloud feedback - even if strongly negative cloud feedback is really operating!

I can not overemphasize the importance of that last statement.

We used essentially the same satellite dataset Dessler uses, but we analyzed those data with something called ‘phase space analysis’. Phase space analysis allows us to “see” behaviors in the climate system that would not be apparent with traditional methods of data analysis. It is like using an MRI to see a type of tumor that X-rays cannot reveal.

What we showed was basically a new diagnostic capability that can, to some extent, separate cause from effect. This is a fundamental advancement - and one that the news media largely refused to report on.

The Dessler paper is like someone publishing a medical research paper that claims those tumors do not exist, because they still do not show up on our latest X-ray equipment...even though the new MRI technology shows they DO exist!

Sound strange? Welcome to my world.

We even replicated that behavior see in the satellite data analyzed with phase space analysis - our ‘MRI for the climate system’ - by using a simple forcing-feedback climate model containing negative cloud feedback. It showed that, indeed, when clouds cause temperature changes, the illusion of positive cloud feedback is created...even when strongly negative cloud feedback really exists.

Why Dessler Assumed We Are Wrong

To Dessler’s credit, he actually references our paper. But he then immediately discounts our interpretation of the satellite data.

Why?

Because, as he claims, (1) most of the climate variability during the satellite period of record (2000 to 2010) was due to El Nino and La Nina (which is largely true), and (2) no researcher has ever claimed that El Nino or La Nina are caused by clouds.

This simple, blanket claim was then intended to negate all of the evidence we published.

But this is not what we were claiming, nor is it a necessary condition for our interpretation to be correct. El Nino and La Nina represent a temporary change in the way the coupled atmospheric-ocean circulation system operates. And any change in the atmospheric circulation can cause a change in cloud cover, which can in turn cause a change in ocean temperatures. We even showed this behavior for the major La Nina cooling event of 2007-08 in our paper!

It doesn’t mean that “clouds cause El Nino”, as Dessler suggests we are claiming, which would be too simplistic and misleading of a statement. Clouds are complicated beasts, and climate researchers ignore that complexity at their peril.

Very Curious Timing

Dessler’s paper is being announced on probably THE best day for it to support the IPCC’s COP-16 meeting here in Cancun, and whatever agreement is announced tomorrow in the way of international climate policy.

I suspect - but have no proof of it - that Dessler was under pressure to get this paper published to blunt the negative impact our work has had on the IPCC’s efforts.

But if this is the best they can do, the scientists aligning themselves with the IPCC really are running out of ideas to help shore up their climate models, and their claims that our climate system is very sensitive to greenhouse gas emissions.

The weak reasoning the paper employs [ and the evidence we published which it purposely ignores! - combined with the great deal of media attention it will garner at a time when the IPCC needs to regain scientific respectability (especially after Climategate), makes this new Science paper just one more reason why the public is increasingly distrustful of the scientific community when it comes to research having enormous policy implications. See Roy’s post and comments here.

UPDATE: An addition from Joe Bastardi’s blog

HOW COLD IS IT?

Gavin Partridge has supplied the details:

The central England Temperature (CET) from the 1st-7th of December is -1.9, making this the coldest opening week of December since 1879; 1879 is the coldest opening week on CET record, so this week has been the second coldest opening week to December since CET records began in 1659.

The two-week period, last week of November and first week of December is the coldest since CET records began in 1659.

My (JB) addition:

I guess when a lot of us started speculating about going back to the time of the Victorian era… we underestimated it.

Ciao for now

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Over the centuries, mankind has experienced tremendous rainfalls and massive floods, monster hurricanes and typhoons, destructive tornadoes, parched-earth droughts, strong gales, flash floods, great snowfalls and killer blizzards, lightning storms sent down from the heavens, blind dense fogs, freezing rain, sleet, great hail, and bone-chilling cold and even an occasional mudstorm or two and in-between, periods of warm sunshine and tranquility. 

And WE ARE STILL HERE.  We are perhaps a little battered and bruised from the wear.  But there is nothing new in the weather to fear because we have been there before.  We have learned to cope.  We have developed knowledge, skills and tools to reduce the effects of weather extremes.

Today, every time a heat wave or a great flood occurs (such as those in Russia and Pakistan this year), voices arise claiming this is more proof of man-made global warming.  I wonder to myself if these voices are intentionally ignorant of historical weather extremes or just dishonest.

Early meteorologist and historians have documented weather for many centuries.  Recently, I have compiled several of these accounts into “A Chronological Listing of Early Weather Events” and published this document on the Impact website here. 

This chronology covers the years 0 to 1900 A.D.  (When downloading the file, please be a little patient.  This is a master resource and the 6.5 MB file may take a few minutes to access.)

Why is a chronological listing of weather events of value?  If one wishes to peer into the future, then a firm grasp of the past events is a key to that gateway.  This is intrinsically true for the scientific underpinnings of weather and climate.

Icecap Note: a wonderfully comprehensive chronology of past weather before the age of the SVU.