From Alan at Appinsys, who emails that he was inspired by this story on WUWT: A spot check on NOAA’s “hottest so far” presser

“NOAA: June, April to June, and Year-to-Date Global Temperatures are Warmest on Record”

The following figure from NOAA shows the temperature anomaly of January - June 2010 compared to the 1971-2000 base period for 5x5 degree grids.

The problem with the above map: data quality and data manipulation.

The following sections provide some spot checks on the areas of the world exhibiting the most warming according to NOAA. The gridded historical data graphs shown in these sections are from the Hadley CRUTEM3 database for January - June. (CRUTEM3 uses a 1961-1990 base period whereas the NOAA data above is for a 1971-2000 base period. This simply shifts the anomalies on the vertical scale, but does not affect the relative trends.)

It is clear from the following sections that NOAA performs manipulations to create false impressions from the data, including assigning temperature increases were there is zero data.

Spot Check - Northern Africa

It is apparently much hotter than usual in the Sahara. But where is the data? Several of the 5x5 degree grids have zero stations (indicated by the black arrows). Many of the others have one station with very limited historical data. There seems to be an inverse correlation between the number of stations and warming - more stations in a 5x5 degree grid and less warming is observed.

The map figure above shows the location of stations in the NOAA GHCN database (blue G or green B icons) and the red 5x5 icon indicates whether data exists in the Hadley CRUTEM3 database - a 5x5 degree gridded database used by IPCC (plotted here).  The grid lines are 5×5 degree grids.

In many of the 5x5 degree grids showing 4 degrees warming according to the NOAA map, there are only one or two stations. The figure below shows some of the “hot-spots” in the NOAA map displaying January - June average temperature anomaly from the Hadley CRUTEM3 database for 1900 - 2009. In no cases is the warming close to what NOAA indicates.

There is a severe problem with lack of historical data in Africa as well as lack of coverage and gaps in the data. NOAA’s algorithms spread the low quality data across areas that have no data as well as showing warming that isn’t really there.

One must really question the NOAA data when even the areas with many stations seem misrepresented. The following figure shows the area of eastern Turkey which has many stations and shows no warming in Jan-Jun through 2009, but suddenly according to NOAA has 4 degrees in 2010.

Spot Check - Greenland

It is apparently much hotter than usual in Greenland. But where is the data? Most of the 5x5 degree grids have zero stations (only some of which are indicated by the black arrows). Most of the grids with data have one station. The two hottest spots on the NOAA Greenland area show 5 degrees warming and have no data.

Some of the Greenland stations have long-term data. The figure below shows some of the “hot-spots” (that actually have data) in the NOAA map displaying January - June average temperature anomaly from the Hadley CRUTEM3 database for 1900 - 2009.

Spot Check - Canada

It is apparently much hotter than usual in Greenland. But where is the data? Most of the 5x5 degree grids have zero stations (only some of which are indicated by the black arrows). Most of the grids with data

Read more and see full size images here.

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See Watts Up with that’s new sea ice tracking page here. See where the first part of July has seen the lowest ice melt of the last 8 years in the JAXA record here.

The scientific accuracy of the United Nations’ climate change reports are coming under fire again. In a scandal that dates back to January and was dubbed Amazongate at the time, it has been confirmed that claims of the Amazon burning up due to climate change were sexed-up and pulled from activist literature.

The 2007 UN report on climate change, the one that has helped guide government efforts to spend billions of dollars to combat global warming, claimed that “Up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation.” The real report, drawn from a website and paid for by pressure group the World Wildlife Fund, says something quite different.

While the UN reports are often described as scientific and peer-reviewed, this claim of the Amazon being at high risk originated on a website of a Brazilian advocacy group. The original claim read that “Probably 30 to 40% of the forests of the Brazilian Amazon are sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall.”

The World Wildlife Fund says it cannot be held responsible for how the UN climate change group used its data.

So far no one seems to be able to say how a report that claimed parts of the Brazilian rainforest “probably” are “sensitive” was hyped to make things sound more dire.

Professor Ross McKintrick says no one should be surprised that such mistakes end up in these massive reports.

“The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) doesn’t have the internal rigour that one would expect of it,” said McKintrick from his office at the University of Guelph. “Nothing is in the process to prevent activist rhetoric from appearing.” McKintrick, who teaches environmental economics and has had his own battles with the accuracy of climate change reports, says the calculations used in the UN reports are often not checked for accuracy and even the much-vaunted peer-review process does not guarantee that the information used is correct.

Amazongate is not the only claim that relies on information from activist groups.

Toronto author Donna Lafamboise recently led a team of citizen auditors through the 2007 climate change report and found heavy use of reports from Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund. That report is published at noconsensus.org.

Laframboise says Greenpeace was cited at least eight times and the WWF at least nine times, despite both groups having clearly stated activist goals when it comes to climate change.

“This is shocking in a report that the public has been told relies solely on peer-reviewed research published in scientific journals,” said Laframboise.

The UN has appointed a team of academic experts to give advice on how to avoid these mistakes in the future, but McKintrick says the UN isn’t really serious about changing anything.

He points out that the authors for the next massive climate change report have already been chosen and many were part of the last error-riddled effort.

Work has also already begun on the follow-up to Copenhagen; climate experts will try to hash out a new climate deal in Cancun, Mexico, in November. Read more here.

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Carbon Cycle Data Casts Doubt On Climate Models
By Dr. David Whitehouse

Many factors and feedback mechanisms are involved in the climatic response to increasing carbon dioxide levels. The uncertainties in these effects, and our general ignorance, make it almost impossible to predict what will happen to the Earth’s ecosystems as temperature increases. This has not stopped some predicting on the basis of climate models that the world will get drier as the temperature increases and for example, as a consequence, the Amazon rain forest will die and be replaced by savannah or bare earth.

For years, there has been debate about the effect of air temperature on global respiration - or the accumulated metabolic processes of organisms that return carbon dioxide to the atmosphere from Earth’s surface. It’s vital to understand this process if we are to have any ability to predict what may happen if the global temperature rises in the future. But how does the global carbon cycle react to global warming?

Most studies suggest that ecosystem respiration around the world is highly sensitive to increasing temperatures, while the majority of computer climate models suggest otherwise. Studies just published may throw some light on this problem as they suggest that the temperature sensitivity of the natural exhalation of carbon dioxide from ecosystems has been overestimated and needs to be reevaluated.

Scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry pooled large amounts of data from FLUXNET - an international initiative established more than 10 years ago to monitor exchanges of carbon dioxide between Earth’s ecosystems and the atmosphere - with remote sensing and climate data from around the world to investigate the spatial distribution of mean annual Earth’s Gross Primary Production (GPP) - which is the total amount of carbon dioxide that terrestrial plants produce each year via photosynthesis - between 1998 and 2006.

FLUXNET involves data from 250 sites around the world. Scientists have strung sensors on high towers above grasslands and forests to record water and carbon dioxide concentrations in the air as well as meteorological data. This enables them to calculate how much carbon dioxide is taken up and released by a certain ecosystem. Satellites provide data about how much light vegetated surfaces absorb. Until such data was available scientists had to use estimates.

The researchers found that the rate at which plants and microorganisms release carbon dioxide changes little with temperature variations. This is in contrast to earlier investigations that suggested a three or fourfold increase in carbon dioxide production at quite modest temperature changes. According to one of the researchers, Markus Reichstein, “Particularly alarmist scenarios for the feedback between global warming and ecosystem respiration thus prove to be unrealistic.”

The measurements also contradict another assumption used in climate models: that the respiration of the ecosystems in the tropics and temperate latitudes is not as temperature sensitive as higher latitudes. This does not seem to be borne out by these FLUXNET observations. “We were very surprised that different ecosystems react relatively uniformly to temperature variations.”

These findings will have implications for predicting the relationship between carbon dioxide balance and global warming. It is currently not possible to predict whether the response between these two factors. According to Reichstein, “The study shows very clearly that we do not yet have a good understanding of the global biogeochemical cycles and their importance for long-term developments.”

A parallel study by Christian Beer from the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany, and colleagues looked at the GPP. They estimate that the world’s plant life inhales 123 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide every year.

The study showed that uptake of carbon dioxide is most pronounced in tropical forests, which are responsible for 34 percent of the inhalation of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Savannas account for 26 percent of the global uptake, although they occupy about twice as much surface area as tropical forests.

The study suggests that water is the most important factor that influences photosynthesis. Over 40 per cent of the Earth’s vegetated surface plants photosynthesise more when the supply of water increases. This is a potentially important finding as some climate models appear to overestimate the influence of rainfall on global carbon dioxide uptake.

A curious finding is that it is the temperate grasslands and shrublands that are most affected by water variation and not tropical rain forests. According to Reichstein, “Here too, we need to therefore critically scrutinize the forecasts of some climate models which predict the Amazon will die as the world gets drier.” See more here.
H/T Benny Peiser here.

Last week, the third of three allegedly independent inquiries into last fall’s Climategate scandal at Britain’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) was concluded. Like the other two, it found troubling behaviour by the scientists at the CRU or by the University of East Anglia, of which the CRU is a part - most notably attempts to hide data from critics and from government investigators. Yet in the end, all three conclude no real wrongdoing occurred and that the basic premise of mainstream climate science - that our climate is changing for the worse and human activity is at least partly to blame - remains undamaged by the scandal.

Whew! Thank goodness for that.

The trouble is, while green groups have trumpeted this trio of reports as vindication of their climate alarmism, it would be hard to conclude any of the reports was truly independent. Indeed, in a recent posting on the website of the the Atlantic magazine (hardly a hotbed for climate-change skepticism), the magazine’s senior editor Clive Crook says that at best the three are “mealy-mouthed apologies; at worst they are patently incompetent and even wilfully wrong.”

Geoffrey Boulton, for instance, one of the five panellists on the most recent inquiry into the leaking last November of damaging emails among many of the world’s leading climate scientists, was for 18 years a member of the University of East Anglia’s School of Environmental Sciences, the department in which the CRU is housed. In other words, far from being an independent investigator, he was a former colleague of the scientists involved.

Early last December, just days after the Climategate emails were exposed, Mr. Boulton even signed a petition vouching that the scientists involved “adhere to the highest levels of professional integrity.” Talk about going into an investigation with one’s mind already made up.

And consider Ronald Oxburgh, chairman of the second investigation released on behalf of East Anglia in April. He is honorary president of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association; chairman of Falck Renewables, a wind-energy company seeking to set up wind farms all across Europe; and an advisor to Climate Change Capital, an investment firm specializing in start-up funding for low-carbon energy and manufacturing companies. Lord Oxburgh is also a former chairman of a biodiesel firm, a director of the Global Legislators Organisation for a Balanced Environment and a past U.K. chairman of Shell Oil.

During his tenure at British Shell in the mid-2000s, Lord Oxburgh told the BBC he saw “little hope for the world” unless carbon dioxide emissions could be “dealt with.” Climate change, he admitted, made him “very worried for the planet.”

Not for a second do I doubt that Lord Oxburgh is one of the world’s leading geologists, as claimed. Still his past stance on climate change (and the very real, current possibility of him personally profiting from it) make him an odd choice as chairman of a supposedly objective review into a scandal that threatens to shatter the scientific basis for concern about global warming.

The Atlantic’s Mr. Crook says of the first of the Climategate investigations - one concluded last March by Pennsylvania State University into the involvement of one of its professors, Michael Mann - that it “would be difficult to parody.” Penn State found no evidence of wrongdoing by Mr. Mann because, it argued, he was a very successful fundraiser for research projects, he got published in lots of academic journals and he won lots of awards.

As Mr. Crook points out, the university said there was no chance anything was untoward about Mr. Mann’s activities because “Dr. Mann’s reporting of his research has been successful and judged to be outstanding by his peers. This would have been impossible had his activities in reporting his work been outside of accepted practices in his field.”

I am not saying Mr. Mann is a fraudster, or even trying to imply it. But the above statement is about as meaningful as the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission concluding there was no need to investigate Bernie Madoff simply because he had convinced so many smart, successful people to give him their money.

Does any of this prove the Climategate investigations were wrong? Not directly. But it should call into question investigators’ motivations and cause the public to question their findings. See post here.

IPCC: The Flight from Truth: The Reign of deceit in the Age of Information

There are so many variables ignored, underreported or simply not understood in climate science and especially in the computer models that purport to simulate global climate, that they destroy any pretence we know or understand weather and climate. But don’t take my word for it. Consider the comments from proponents of anthropogenic global warming including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In the 2001 report they said, “In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that long-term prediction of future climate state is not possible.” James Lovelock, Gaia hypothesis speculator said, “It’s almost naive, scientifically speaking, to think that we can give relatively accurate predictions for future climate. There are so many unknowns that it’s wrong to do it.” Kevin Trenberth, IPCC author and CRU associate said, “It’s very clear we do not have a climate observing system...This may be a shock to many people who assume that we do know adequately what’s going on with the climate, but we don’t.”

Many reports exist on the inadequacy of temperature data. Ross McKitrick asks whether a global temperature exists at all. Anthony Watts shows the serious problems with the weather stations in the US and these are supposedly the best in the world. We also know how the record is ‘adjusted’ to support the warming theory.

However, measurement of other variables is worse simply because of the complexity of measurements. Instruments to accurately measure precipitation, especially snowfall, have always been a great challenge. Perhaps the most forgotten variable, yet critical to weather and climate, is wind speed. Ancient Greeks knew the importance of wind direction and how it determined the pattern of weather in a region. They even built a Tower of the Winds in Athens honoring the eight wind deities (Figure 1). Direction was critical for sailing as well, so mariners developed the ability to read the wind to 32 points of the compass. Speed was a different matter. Early attempts had a flat board on a spring with a pointer attached that was set against a scale. Wind pushed the board and the pointer indicated the force. The big change came with the wind cup or anemometer in 1846. While this provides an accurate measure, recording the information is important because the work the wind does requires detailed almost continuous data.

Figure 1: Tower of the winds, Athens Source: wikipedia.org (Tower of the Winds)

The atmosphere is heated by air in contact with the ground (conduction) but also by evaporation of moisture that is then released into the atmosphere. In both cases the rate varies with wind speed. Even a small variation in wind speed results in a variation in heat exchange and distribution in the atmosphere.

Wind is created by difference in pressure that is created by difference in temperature. High temperature creates low pressure and wind then blows from the high pressure to redress the imbalance. There are general global wind patterns created by differential heating. If the Earth wasn’t rotating a simple circulation of air rising at the Equator and descending at the Poles would occur, however rotation results in generally easterly winds at the Equator and the Poles with prevailing westerly winds in the middle latitudes. Each region has different land/ water ratios so a shift in these zonal winds will affect the role of the wind in heating the atmosphere.

Figure 2 shows plots of the percentage frequency of south winds at York Factory located on the southwest shore of Hudson Bay for two decades over 100 years apart. In the early decade from 1721 to 1731, which is well within the Little Ice Age (LIA), south winds blow less than 7 percent of the time. In the decade from 1841 to 1851, which is outside of the LIA, south winds are occur over 12 percent of the time with a peak in 1842 of 27 percent.

Figure 2: Percentage of south winds at York Factory Source; Ball (1986), Climate Change, Vol. 8 pp. 121-134.

The 2007 IPCC report acknowledges the shifts in some wind patterns and associated weather systems. Based on a variety of measurements at the surface and in the upper troposphere, it is likely that there has been an increase and a poleward shift in NH (Northern Hemisphere) winter storm-track activity over the second half of the 20th century, but there are still significant uncertainties in the magnitude of the increase due to time-dependent biases in the reanalyses. The word “likely” is defined as greater than 66% chance. The shift is not surprising because the prevailing westerly wind and accompanying storm track would move north as the Earth warms. They acknowledge the “significant uncertainties” in the validity of increased frequency. They don’t even attempt to discuss the significance for heat transfer or any other impact on global weather. We know wind causes shifts of Arctic ice to create open water or increase pack ice, but how does this affect heat exchange or evaporation? It is even worse in the Southern Hemisphere (SH).  Analysed decreases in cyclone numbers over the southern extratropics and increases in mean cyclone radius and depth over much of the SH over the last two decades are subject to even larger uncertainties.

The degree to which the IPCC and their supporters have fooled the world is amazing. As Jean-Francois Revel said: “How is it possible for a theory, which is false in its component parts, to be true as a whole.” In the case of ‘official’ climate science he could add that many parts of the whole are simply omitted. He explained the mentality that has pervaded the AGW supporters when he wrote, “A human group transforms itself into a crowd when it suddenly responds to a suggestion rather than to reasoning, to an image rather than to an idea, to an affirmation rather than to proof, to the repetition of a phrase rather than to arguments, to prestige rather than to competence” His book titled, “The Flight from Truth: The Reign of deceit in the Age of Information” tells it all.  Read post here.

After Alex and a TD that both tracked to northern Mexico and southern Texas, the tropical Atlantic has become quiet. The ITCZ has been suppressed south of 10N where development is impaired by the lack of the coriolis effect (that causes the spin when disturbances develop).

Enlarged here.

One of the key reasons for the quiet period is a large slug of Saharan dust which has blown across the subtropical Atlantic shown in yellows and reds on the Wisconsin CIMSS imagery below. This dry dusty air produces stability and inhibits any convection. It is typical of July and usually explains the mid summer lull. 


Enlarged here.

A disturbance can be seen coming off of Africa north of 10N seen above and in the infrared image below. Another will follow. Models do not suggest development.

Enlarged here.

Ocean temperatures have cooled some from early spring levels with some upwelling of cold water off Africa and in the southwestern Gulf after the mixing from Alex and the TD.

Enlarged here.

Activity usually picks up in mid August as the subtropical high shifts north seasonally and the dust diminishes.

My guess is an above normal season but not the extreme number of storms as in 2005. The AMO remains well above normal with the warmth in the tropics and North Atlantic, usually correlating with active seasons. Warm water off the east coast makes the threat of a major storm more likely. Warm Atlantic summers with a negative PDO usually mean enhanced east coast threats. This post here. More here.