Chris Knight

I agree with the first objection, Dev, but the second one by Singer is strictly correct. Of course, as the earth cooled, it also warmed due to solar irradiation, as has happened for a very long time. The relative global change in temperature is still contentious.

The BBC is not the only fruit! I just checked Google. Fewer than 90,000 entries for "Chilcot enquiry". Over 11,000,000 for "Climategate". My hypothesis gains credence. :blush: Suggestions for titles please: Harry Plotter and the Dendrochronologist of Doom Harry Plotter and the Hidden Decline :lol:

Homage to "Harry"

That's funny, I entered "Chilcot" into the Netweather TV forum seach box and only came up with a single hit - with your above post. I need to get out more...

I think the leak was done by the government to focus attention away from the Iraq war enquiry. They probably thought we needed some harmless diversion whilst they salted away another enquiry under the governmental cloak of inadmissible evidence and evasive Blairite posturing. If you want to tell a big lie, hide it among a load of little lies.

Here in waterlogged Worthing, we have so far received about one quarter of our annual rainfall for 2009 in November alone, so far, with only a single dry day - the 19th. So, with it chucking down again, and expected to continue for half the night, about 150mm have fallen this month, and now over 600mm for the year to date. Over twice as wet as November last year and wetter than June 2007, and that's saying something. What's the forecast for the rest of the month - cool and wet. Wonder if we will top 180mm?

Hmm, not a mention of UEA CRU there - perhaps I detect a certain distancing by Julia Slingo there. Damage limitation? :unsure:

This is unashamedly ad-hom, but why could they not have chosen a thin person?

I try not to technobabble, Osmposm, honest I do, but there are times when you have to use the jargon for precision and brevity. I will try to provide a glossary in future, but there is always Google. "Legacy systems" means old software running on old computers and accessories - software that is likely not to run properly on current systems - many modern computers have replaced serial and parallel ports with USB (Universal Serial Bus) ports, so old accessories like backup tapes may not be readily attached to new computers. The drivers and backup installation software may be on floppy disks - when can you find floppy disk drives on new computers nowadays? Unix-type operating systems (like Linux distributions) may be more immune to these situations than Windows Operating Systems(OSs), which seem to exclude some legacy software and hardware with each version change. VP, last night, admitted to running on OS H*, which by name implies that it is a legacy system and is only fully understood by others running on the same OS! I could make out a few phrases he wrote, that is all. *Old Speckled Hen edited for missed parenthesis

There is nothing wrong with properly maintained legacy systems that have been designed and properly managed, as you say Shoreham (just down the road from me?), but they do need to be upgraded to run seamlessly on current hardware and modern OSs, etc. It is possible to get to the state where one Monday morning, all you have is a set of backup tapes, and nothing to read them with. It seems that the UEA CRU CRUTEM so-called "database" has grown organically with less than ideal input from a variety of idiosyncratic academic coding sources over time, and it is now a nigh impossible task to salvage a definitive clean dataset.

I don't believe all that you read, Dev. If Prof Jones can get £14,492.00 for "CRU involvement in the development of an improved global historic surface temperature dataset" for a 9-month project in 2004, I am sure he had the clout to get say £120,000.00 for "Essential upgrade to core surface station temperature database" for 12 months - covering the salaries of 3 data analysts. Especially after reading his programmer's reports. Has the Prof no heart at all? So I think they should spend more on cleaning up the existing core data, speaking as one who has spent most of my working life supporting academic research, either doing the practical lab work or as an analyst of research data (but not at UEA). It's nice to see you there too! I don't post much there - it is somehow like when once walking into a backstreet pub in Mortlake - the conversation stops and all eyes follow you, and you get the feeling that they all suspect you of being a policeman in plain clothes. :unsure:

The "leak" or "hack" has nothing to do with AGW, the mechanism of greenhouse gas forcing, or of the role of forcing feedbacks. Thus the disclosure does not affect AGW theory per se. Both the emails and the documents focus on the temperature record, particularly the instrumental station records and tree-ring proxies. Exactly the material that ClimateAudit has been after. The station temperature record was what the FOI requests were about, and someone has gone through a lot of trouble to copy both the relevant documents and the emails, and to filter out much irrelevant stuff*. It is almost as though someone was covering their back in case they were ordered to fall on their sword if the FOI request was granted (The request was rejected on the day after the last email in the file was sent). Someone had been putting this datafile together for some time, someone who does not fear the consequences of illegal disclosure as much as the consequences of withholding or destroying information requested from the FOI. In fact they were probably rather disappointed that the information was not going to see the light of day, and released it anyway. I wonder how they feel now? Exhilarated, or sick? The emails are nothing unusual for an academic department, backbiting, snark and jealousy is daily fare in all the academic workplaces I have been employed in - but it is still normal to consider that emails are like letters or faxes, but they can come back to bite you, since they are inevitably archived somewhere. If they had just archived their emails in their CRUTEM database, they probably would have been safe forever. The state of the databases is possibly why there has been a certain amount of reticence to publish raw station data - it is just not available in anything like a publishable form, since the code that has accrued over the years is not up to reconstructing the data, and the appalling state of documentation means that do do so will require major forensic reconstruction. Gavin Schmidt states on RealClimate that he mostly does his own coding (in FORTRAN). It is the way within academia that without formal training, computers have become tools that academics use to produce their own data. Sometimes that goes beyond Excel, or Filemaker Pro on a Mac (or god forbid, Hypercard) and the old mainframe languages like FORTRAN or COBOL (in science or economics, in medicine, M (MUMPS)code is an old favourite, found throughout the NHS) are the only way to access earlier databases, the data often hard coded so that the data is not portable. That is the problem facing "Harry" the programmer who has been trying to port the legacy CRUtem 2.1 data over to version 3.0, so it will run on Linux and Sun Alpha systems, with some code segments in FORTRAN77, other code in FORTRAN90. Here's an example of his frustration from HARRY_READ_ME.txt That is one unhappy tale, and the 700Kb textfile describes three years of grief for "Harry". It also indicates what a mess the data is really in, and however much the CRU have spent on computer systems and model making, they need to spend more on teams of data analysts who can clean up the mess they have allowed to build up, instead of leaving it up to one individual. They also need to honestly reassess the confidence they have in the long term record, including the instrumental station record, before making proclamations on how much we may expect to warm in the future. If the data that feeds the climate models is only slightly flawed, the output is absolutely worthless. *For example, on the TWO forum Prof. Tom Choularton seemed almost to be disappointed that he had no emails represented, since he has been an external examiner for UEA CRU for many years, and certainly had exchanged many emails over the years with people there.

This forum seems weary - As LG says WUWT is doing a roaring trade in this "Aunt Sally", as now is RC (Gavin has got his head together with his mates at CRU by whatever means they now use to communicate, and are doing a splendid, and "decent" (in the English sense) job of defending the fort), yet we struggle past 3 pages here! Where's the food-fight!! mentality? :lol: I would not second the "Shame on the..." comment though, like climate change, it is a reality of the world we live in - nothing is sacred any more, not even "private" conversations. As a scientist, why can't I tell to a mate that a competitor is a "plonker" in a private email, and plot to reveal his flaws in a future rebuttal? I was up late last night and linked into this story early, even had time to explore the FTP site where the FOI2009.zip first appeared. I don't know why that Russian guy's FTP site ended up hosting the file - it was pretty unremarkable - had a certain amount of stuff for gamers, a bit of mainstream porn, some downloaded music, images and videos, some Linux and other OS stuff, as well as some personal images from the host's latest vacation, I guess - certainly nothing to show that this was some committed hacker intent on destroying the AGW political momentum - I guess that his webspace was just a convenient vehicle for the file. The actual file content (which will be published elsewhere in fragments ad nauseam...) was also unremarkable, except, possibly, for the content that was not contained within it, if anything. I doubt that any of the published content was faked or embellished, but that there were possibly chunks removed, missing and possibly embarrassing to several individuals, who may be currently considering their futures... I'd look to a slighted lover if I were (close to the focus of this attack) at CRU, and short of committing suicide (if I were that vulnerable), I would make sure the police nailed the mole before any real damage was done.

Interesting figures, GW. I have often wondered if there is much mileage in the albedo theory of amplification. The ocean really only opens up in the few weeks before the September equinox, when the sun is below the horizon for much of the time, and very low in the sky in polar regions otherwise. The biggest albedo effect would be around the solstice, when the ice cover is only slightly diminished.

Sorry, that spreadsheet has an error in the Sea of Okhotsk column, for some reason. Here is a replacement. Arctic seaice1978-2007.xls

The NASA source I quoted breaks down the 1978-2007 data into specific sea areas: Sea of Okhotsk, Bering Sea, Hudson Bay, Baffin Bay, Greenland Sea, Kara-Barents Seas, Arctic Ocean, Canadian Archipelago, Gulf of St Lawrence, as well as the Total Arctic. It would therefore be possible to do the analysis you suggest. Some will be easy to do - Bering and Gulf of St Lawrence for instance - the date of the last consecutive day of zero ice should do, and also the number of consecutive days without ice for these areas. There may be other odd days without ice due to break-up of the pack, but I'd suggest these are ignored. For the other sea areas, a simple minimum will suffice. The way I'd do this is to dump the data into a spreadsheet, and mark a character (I used "X" for the total Arctic Ice) into a separate column against each row which contains the minimum for that year. I'd then sort on the column with the "X" in descending order and then by date in ascending order. Then just create a scatter chart from the selected dates and extents. Bar charts would be good to show consecutive ice-free periods in Baring and Gulf of St Lawrence data. I've started, but have no time to finish: any takers? Arctic seaice1978-2007.xls

Jethro, the Arctic datasets from 1972-2007 can be found here: http://polynya.gsfc.nasa.gov/seaice_datasets.html Jackone's spreadsheet data supply the data for the last two minima. date Day of year Total Arctic ice extent 08/09/1972 252 7292045 14/09/1973 257 7172536 17/09/1974 260 6904485 03/09/1975 246 7121414 13/09/1976 257 7039986 11/09/1977 254 6867947 17/09/1978 260 6798272 21/09/1979 264 6904193 24/08/1980 237 7517696 12/09/1981 255 6905228 07/09/1982 250 7161541 08/09/1983 251 7198425 16/09/1984 260 6370661 09/09/1985 252 6478039 06/09/1986 249 7147201 02/09/1987 245 6894980 11/09/1988 255 7014784 22/09/1989 265 6846555 21/09/1990 264 6012693 16/09/1991 259 6267875 07/09/1992 251 7140304 06/09/1993 249 6148266 05/09/1994 248 6908397 07/09/1995 250 5993640 10/09/1996 254 7119571 20/09/1997 263 6592881 18/09/1998 261 6296278 12/09/1999 255 5696905 11/09/2000 255 5934431 19/09/2001 262 6522513 17/09/2002 260 5592786 17/09/2003 260 5946320 19/09/2004 263 5728849 19/09/2005 262 5295806 15/09/2006 258 5737976 14/09/2007 257 4150112 09/09/2008 253 4707813 13/09/2009 256 5249844 Day of minimum has little correlation with minimum ice extent. Date - year of minimum does correlate.

Land use changes have affected local climates. Forested valley slopes cleared for vineyard cultivation create frost hollows where once protected sun traps harboured orange groves. Which do you prefer, wine or marmalade?

I have recently been involved in a discussion elsewhere, about the asymmetrical way the earth behaves over time because of the differences between what happens at the poles. Here is an example, Global Sea Ice (source: http://polynya.gsfc.nasa.gov/seaice_datasets.html, Arctic and Antarctic combined): Note the shape of the curve - it is not a sine wave - there is typically a sharp trough in early March, a small peak in late July, a small trough in late September and another small peak in early November, although the dates vary from year to year. A little investigation shows that the deep trough corresponds to the minimum for Antarctic ice extent, the little trough for the Northern ocean minimum. The curve is the product of both polar quasi-sinusoidal ice-extent curves running at 180degrees out of phase. This curve, or variations of it, crops up all over the place when you become aware of it - even superimposed over decadal trends, when looking at global datasets. It is the major part of the data that is filtered out of anomaly datasets. It occurs in Global SST measurements (From Bob Tisdale), the cool southern summer Antarctic meltwater providing the deep trough in SSTs, before the southern ocean starts to warm up. Global Ozone measurements (from ESA), can anyone suggest why? The pattern shows up in some even more surprising places. Here is the variation in the Length of Day (i.e. the speed of rotation of Earth) since 1962. (source IERS) . A major component in the cause for LOD changes is the AAM, which again has a similar annual pattern. Note the similar pattern over the year, but also notice that it is not in phase with the sea ice. However, is there a connection between the redistribution of sea ice and the Atmospheric angular momentum? Not only the earth shows an asymmetric north-south pattern, so does the sun! (From Leif Svalgaard). The Cosmic ray counts are a proxy for the strength of the solar Magnetic field, the measurements on earth rectify (like a diode) the changing north-south polarity of the sun's magnetic field over the course of the Hale cycle. If you visualise the sharp peaks as troughs (southwards), and the flat peaks as peaks (northwards), I think you will see what I mean. Finally, the curve is the similar to the light curve that is supposed to arise from eclipsing binary stars, with a big trough, a small peak, small trough and another small peak. Differential polar radiation (i.e. a dark south pole, bright north pole) for a star with a precessing axis could create this waveform. If anyone can suggest other datasets which show this pattern, I will do some further analysis and see if there are any links between the seasonal variations. If this is out of place, I would be happy for it to go somewhere else.

To move this forward, can anyone see a way to derive the observed global carbon dioxide curve from the available data?

By way of light relief, here is a video of ice overwhelming barriers around a small offshore island oil drilling platform in Alaska video

Richard A Muller has an alternative theory also here In a nutshell, the inclination of the earth's orbit to the "invariable plane of the solar system" reaches an extreme tilt every 100,000 years. Whereas the invariable plane is swept free of dust by the planets as they orbit, the remaining dust from the accretion disk that formed the solar system, is still mixed up on either side. If you think of a fried egg sandwich with the sun as the yolk, and the planetary orbits as the white, and the bread as the remaining dust, you get the picture, I hope. When the earth's orbital inclination is at an extreme, then twice a year, the earth will pass through the dust, and in fact drag dust around the orbit in its wake. There should be spectacular meteor showers, and the amount of solar radiation reaching the surface of the earth would diminish, because the finest dust would enter the upper atmosphere, dimming the sun. Dust acts as nuclei for condensation of the water in the cooling atmosphere and the earth enters a glaciation. Eventually the earth's orbital tilt clears the dust fields, and the dust clears from the atmosphere, but the earth is now in a glacial state and the high albedo, low water vapour levels due to low temperature, and low CO2 levels mean there is little greenhouse effect and the earth is in a glacial low temperature equilibrium state. The assumption is then that Vulcanism, perhaps exacerbated by continents sinking due to additional weight of ice, increase the greenhouse gases by melting ice and release of carbon dioxide, until the ice caps retreat once more.

Symposium website here. A series of video lectured accompanied by Powerpoint and PDF presentations. Link to Robert Carter's website also has further links to YouTube lectures.

A career in Marketing/Advertising - no, I see myself more as a WALL-E, picking up the plastic waste, and squeezing it into little cubic bricks. I even have a border collie to play M-O.

A little more research on the GLOSEA product from which the (UK and anywhere else they want to sell their products) seasonal forecasts are taken, has come up with the following from the Met Office: I found it HERE. I had to log on to the Science section for seasonal forecasts, so this link may not work. PM me if you have difficulty. It clearly states that volcanic, Solar and Greenhouse Gas forcings are being incorporated in the model: However, in variance to what the WMO report I quoted in an earlier post said, these forcings were used as long ago as 2000 in the GLOSEA model, as this 2000 report states: I guess the estimate of "skill" refers to hindcasts made by the model on various runs with and without the predictors, with various adjustments made to each to achieve the best result.