Each week, I’ll pull together a range of items that have attracted my attention. I hope you will find the variety of topics covered both interesting and enlightening. Please remember to read the comments, as the information (and the links) contained in them often put the main article into context.. If you follow a site that is, maybe, a bit off the beaten track and think it would be of interest, please contact me and I’ll take a look.
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More TSI variation and big UV variance
Posted on 26 April 2013 by Musings from the Chiefio
This is an interesting paper, and it is not paywalled! It looks at historical (Holocene and 1600s to date) variation in TSI Total Solar Irradiance and UV. (UV ranges from about 10 nm to about 400 nm. Then things turn to violet near 380 nm and wander on to about 700 nm for deep red, after that is IR from 700 nm down to about 1 mm when we start calling it radio, microwave, or millimeter wave depending on what we do with it and exactly how long the waves might be.)
The authors do a reconstruction. I really don’t like reconstructions all that well. Lots of opportunities to “manicure” things for effect. Yet for some things, like ancient solar data, you don’t have much choice but to ‘reconstruct’ based on something else.
The paper looks to me like it does a reasonable job of picking proxy data and doing the creation of the proxy by proxy… only doing one “splice” of Be10 data onto recent neutron count data (and that looks like it uses a plausible method). Since the Be10 data comes from ice cores, you can’t have recent layers that are the same as older compressed layers, so are still pretty much stuck with a splice. (I suppose one could come up with some ‘processing’ of recent snow layers to create an ‘old’ equal, but that is also a proxy for old ice…)
What they find is interesting.
Click here to read the full article
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Antarctic Sea Ice Still Way Above Normal
Posted on April 26, 2013 by Paul Homewood
Antarctic sea ice extent continues to run well above normal levels, and has even been above last year’s high level for the last two months. The average anomaly for March was the second highest since 1979, with only 2008 being greater, as shown below. Since 1979, extent has been increasing at a rate of 4% per decade.
Click here to read the full article
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No Warming Since 1997–A Better Way To Show It
Posted on April 25, 2013 by Paul Homewood
While there has been an increasing realisation that global temperatures have flatlined for the last 10 to 15 years, there have been attempts to muddy the waters by claims of cherry picking start and end dates.
The UK Met Office did precisely this last year in response to David Rose’s article in the Mail on Sunday, saying:-
The linear trend from August 1997 (in the middle of an exceptionally strong El Niño) to August 2012 (coming at the tail end of a double-dip La Nina) is about 0.03°C/decade, amounting to a temperature increase of 0.05°C over that period, but equally we could calculate the linear trend from 1999, during the subsequent La Nina, and show a more substantial warming.
As we’ve stressed before, choosing a starting or end point on short-term scales can be very misleading.
At the time I dealt with the inaccuracy of their statement, (August 1997 was not “in the middle”, but “at the start” of the El Niño, and August 2012 was in the middle of another El Niño). Nevertheless, in principle, they were spot on. To take a linear trend from an El Niño year, such as 1998, will give a totally different result to a trend from a La Niña year such as 1999. The two Woodfortrees graphs below show this well, using 1998 and 1999 as start points.
Click here to read the full article
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Criegee intermediates further unsettle climate science
Posted on April 26, 2013 by The k2p blog
Far from being a “settled” science, global warming in particular and “climate science” in general are looking decidedly shaky these days!
What is not in doubt is that clouds and their formation are of critical importance for our climate. But clouds can both “warm” and “cool”. They can attenuate the sun’s radiation that reaches the earth during the day and they can prevent the radiation of heat from the earth into space during the night. They can absorb some of the sun’s radiation and transfer that heat into the atmosphere and radiate some of it back into space as well. The net effect of clouds is uncertain. Solar effects themselves can affect the formation of clouds (Svensmark’s theory) as has been confirmed recently by experiments at CERN.
Click here to read the full article
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How Climate Scientists Think
Posted on April 26, 2013 by Donna Laframboise
Nobel-winning work about self-delusion and flawed judgment applies to all of us – even climatologists.
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman has spent his life studying human judgment and decision-making. At 79, he is the author of the 2011 award-winning, best-selling book Thinking, Fast and Slow.
Since we hear so much about the 2007 Peace Prize that recognized the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), it’s worth mentioning that Kahneman received the Nobel Prize in economics in 2002.
When his book first appeared, Kahneman wrote a long essay (3,400 words) for the New York Times magazine. Subtitled The Hazards of Confidence, it’s a fascinating read that doesn’t mention climate change, global warming, or scientists even once. But its insights are highly relevant to the climate debate.
Click here to read the full article
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Australian sea level data highly exaggerated, only 5 inches by 2100
Posted on April 26, 2013 by Anthony Watts
In a new analysis published in Volume 8 Issue 2 of Environmental Science Dr. Nils-Axel Morner suggests global sea levels will rise only about 5 inches by the year 2100.
Axel Morner concludes that Australian government claims of a 1 meter sea level rise by 2100 are greatly exaggerated, finding instead that sea levels are rising around Australia and globally at a rate of only 1.5 mm/year. This would imply a sea level change of only 0.13 meters or 5 inches by 2100. Dr. Morner also finds no evidence of any acceleration in sea level rise around Australia or globally.
Morner’s findings are inline with the longest running sea-level measurements recorded at Amsterdam, in the Netherlands (think of it like the England CET record) beginning in 1700. Since 1850, the rise in Amsterdam has averaged 1.5 mm/year.
Figure and link to full paper follows.
Click here to read the full article
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BREAKING: No comment will be heard from “jewel in the crown” … alarmist headline intact
Posted on April 26, 2013 by The View From Here
In my previous post, I had noted (inter alia) that this “jewel in the crown, of British science and global science” was participating in the passive perpetuation of alarmist propaganda.
One notorious example was found in a March 12, 2013 post on the My Climate and Me blog, which (if you read the very fine print on the logo) is produced “in association with” the Met Office.
As of yesterday, the site still showed:
Click here to read the full article
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grumpydenier 
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