Likely: latest Atlantic hurricane-free date at least since 1941

Originally posted on September 4th. Now, 5 days later, it seems that no currently active systems will grow to a hurricane so the records will be broken – a new record at least since 1941, indeed.

Remotely related: Henrik Svensmark et al. have a new paper (press release) on cosmoclimatology in PLA, experimentally arguing that the UV rays increase the aerosol production from ozone, sulfur dioxide, vapor by the same factor even for nuclei above 50 nm of diameter – which may already be called cloud condensation nuclei. This strengthens his claims that the cosmic rays influence the climate and falsifies some theories about the chemistry of the atmosphere. Via WUWT. See previous TRF text on cosmoclimatology.

I have manually checked the dates of formation of the first hurricanes on Wikipedia pages about the 1851 Atlantic hurricane season (older, sparser data, are available at most on the "one page per decade" basis) through the 2013 Atlantic hurricane season. You should be able to manually edit the year in the URL to get to all the other pages.

This is what I found.

The first 2013 Atlantic hurricane hasn't started to form yet; only two 20-30 percent "glimpses" of a possible depression can be seen and they're likely to be destroyed by their collision with the land (and if they won't be, they will still be too weak for a hurricane). It's September 4th. The probability is therefore high that this situation will continue past September 9th, i.e. next Monday. If that's so, 2013 will beat 2002 (Sep 9th) and the "most recent" hurricane season that could beat our present are 1941 (Sep 17th), 1922 (Sep 13th), 1914 and 1907 (the only two recorded hurricane-free seasons with 1 and 5 named storms, respectively), 1905 (Oct 1st), 1877 (Sep 14th), and 1876 (Sep 12th).




For the sake of convenience, let me mention the first "hurricane birth date" for less spectacular years which were nevertheless late in the season: 1937 (Sep 9th), 1931 (Sep 6th), 1920 (Sep 7th), 1912 (Sep 10th), 1865, 1857 (both Sep 6th). Some seasons were very weak – 1952, 1939, 1930 – but some hurricanes materialized by the end of August, anyway.

Most of the years see the first hurricane forming sometime in July. August births of the first hurricanes are rarer, much like the beginning in September or, on the contrary, June (or even May). Several out-of-the-official-season hurricanes in January etc. mess up with the calendar and I was overlooking them (treating them as if they didn't occur).




See also an Accuweather and WUWT articles about the possibly looming new record.

After the unusually vigorous 2005 Atlantic hurricane season, we were drowning in predictions of ever stronger and ever more frequent hurricanes. A statistical evaluation of the 2006-2013 seasons shows that all the hurricane-related data randomly fluctuate in the usual intervals we have been used to for quite some time. These numbers are very volatile but there's no indication that something is increasing and everything suggests that 2005 was an exceptional year that is unlikely to be repeated often.

So far, we don't know for sure whether the late earliest 2002 hurricane date will be beaten – I would bet that it probably will – and whether 2013 will join the shortlist of hurricaneless seasons (1914 and 1907: how many TRF readers remember those years?) – chances for Yes and No seem comparable to me. And yes, I think it's more likely than not that at least one hurricane was overlooked either in 1907 or 1914, due to the absence of satellites and similar devices, so it's perfectly plausible that the ongoing season will actually be the weakest one since 1851 (unless a hurricane will materialize).

But what is clear is that the absence of any unusually strong hurricane activity after 2005 is just another example of the spectacular failures of the climate alarmists. Like with other failures, they never learn any lesson. They only cherry-pick the data that agree with their scientifically pathological opinion that a dangerous climate change should be underway and simply switch to something else whenever the clash of their idea with the data becomes too self-evident.

Whenever it becomes indisputable that the data have falsified a particular prediction of their "dangerous climate change" framework – and be almost sure that the data ultimately rule out every single one of them – they just switch to something else in which the data aren't sufficiently detailed which is why sufficiently spun, cherry-picked anecdotes may be temporarily used to replace the data. This approach is unscientific and despicable.

It's not too important scientifically or socially whether the first 2013 Atlantic hurricane starts to form before September 9th but I will be personally checking what's going on above the Atlantic Ocean, just for the fun of it. Will you?

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Pacific waters as an excuse for the warming hiatus

Most of the mainstream media offered us a bizarre "story" in the recent two or three days. The absence of global warming in recent years – well, it's really 17 years now – has been "explained" by the Pacific waters. Problem solved, the belief in the global warming ideology may continue unchallenged, we're de facto told.



PDO: warm and cool phase

The claims are based on the paper by Kosaka and Xie in Nature,

Recent global-warming hiatus tied to equatorial Pacific surface cooling,

which is bad enough but I will mostly focus on the journalists' added spin which is even worse. The Guardian's Fiona Harvey will be used as my sample but the comments below are applicable almost universally.




The first paragraph says that it's the Pacific Ocean that "slowed" the global warming and the second paragraph tells us why this research is supposed to be important:

Their work is a big step forward in helping to solve the greatest puzzle of current climate change research – why global average surface temperatures, while still on an upward trend, have risen more slowly in the past 10 to fifteen years than previously.

I had to laugh. The most important insight of the "modern" climate science research is that the world is warming and the greatest puzzle is why it's not true according to observations. Incidentally, it is not true that one may still find a "warming trend" in the last 10-15 years. One only finds noise and in various subintervals, the cooling and warming trends are about equally represented, as shown many times on this blog and elsewhere.

If you expect that half a degree or a degree Celsius of warming per decade is now inevitable, e.g. because you were brainwashed by the AGW charlatans or because your brain has been damaged in a similar sad accident, then the absence of the warming may look like a "great puzzle". But what about the approach not to be brainwashed by unscientific superstitions? Isn't it a bit more rational approach? In that case, there's no puzzle. The temperatures are doing what they have always been doing: fluctuate by one or two tenths of a degree each decade in pretty random directions; after all, we know it from the historical data from decades when the man-made CO2 concentration was vastly lower than today that the temperatures were doing nothing less than that. CO2 may add a contribution but it's just small enough so that the CO2-induced change remains more or less negligible relatively to the natural variability for 20 years if not much longer than that.

Isn't it a more convincing explanation than the program to identify a huge puzzle and then to "solve" it by naming a culprit?




But I had to laugh throughout Harvey's article, it's just so utterly stupid and irrational. You would say that some analysis of the role of the Pacific Ocean will be presented as the research of a factor that influences the climate as a whole. Instead, we're repeatedly told that what the paper studies is the ocean's influence on the pause in global warming. This completely silly formulation – sometimes with the word "hiatus" replacing "pause" – is repeated many times in the article. It's a classic example of a tail wagging the dog. Climatology – and this paper – studies or should study the climate (which is pretty much equally likely to change in both directions, as empirically shown all the time), not "global warming" or even "hiatuses in this non-existent global warming". But a lie repeated 100 times becomes the truth according to the key beliefs of Fiona Harvey.

However, what I found most comical is the suggestion – permeating Harvey's text and pretty much all similar articles – that the "bad guy" has been found so everything is fine now. It's the evil Pacific Ocean. I can't believe my eyes because a reader must have IQ below 70 to buy this cheap trick. Is it likely that such humans or, more generally, primates have learned to read the Guardian? It is sort of hard to believe.

In reality, these AGW scammers have claimed that the global mean temperature is

1. important,
2. predictable.

It's neither important nor predictable but they have simply made a prediction 20 years ago (and similarly in more recent years) and the prediction has totally failed. The warming in the 20 years wasn't 0.6 °C as predicted but pretty much zero. The error is 100 percent. It is a complete failure. The theory claiming that the global mean temperature is predictable in the 20-year horizon that makes these particular predictions must be thrown to the trash bin immediately if you're doing science. If those who have made the predictions haven't contributed anything substantially better, they must be thrown to the trash bin, too. If they don't fit the trash bin, they must be at least humanely shot into their skulls. It's that simple. It's called science, stupid.

Instead, we're sold stories about the Pacific Ocean as a "justification" of the failure. It's no justification. If you totally screw your understanding of the Pacific Ocean, it pretty much means that you screwed your understanding of the climate on most of the globe. The Pacific Ocean covers one third of the Earth's ocean. In fact, this largest ocean's area exceeds the area of all lands on Earth. It's in no way negligible.

So even if you just consider the Pacific Ocean's contribution to the global average of the temperatures, it is a huge contribution that can't be overlooked. The Pacific Ocean was this large and this important even 20 years ago – even millions of years ago. It is no "news" that the Pacific Ocean was important. The global mean temperatures were always meant to include the contribution of the Pacific temperatures with the appropriate weights. It was the global mean temperature that did include the Pacific contribution that the global warming ideology advocates claimed to predict. They just failed. One may try to isolate which parts of the Earth had larger errors than others but it's mostly silly because every sensible person agrees that regional temperature trends can't be predicted for 20 years in advance with currently available tools. That's why you can't really say that "just the Pacific" predictions failed. Moreover, the predictions of every region are based on the same ideas so if one region empirically shows you that you misunderstand how it works, you probably misunderstand how every region works.

Now, despite the huge size, the actual temperature of the Pacific Ocean temperature isn't that important for almost any humans. But almost every elementary school alumnus knew about this fact 20 years ago, too. Nevertheless, the Pacific temperatures have been included in the "important" quantity called the global warming temperature – mainly because the contemporary climatologists are obliged to be obsessed with the greenhouse effect that operates more or less equally on every square mile of the globe. The obsessive focus on the (for the actual climate change not too important) global mean temperature that uniformly depends on each square mile of the globe has always been a key meme of the global warming ideology. You can't just throw it away and claim that nothing about the ideology has to be changed. If you change this thing, you are really proving that it has been rubbish from the beginning.

One may always cherry-pick 1/3 or even 2/3 of the globe where the disagreement with the models is smaller than it is in the rest. But if you claim that a quantity is the most important and you completely fail in predicting it, you have just failed. In scientific disciplines that may be counted as hard science and that have corresponding standards, a hypothesis is really eliminated once any clear disagreement of its predictions with the reality is found. One wrong prediction is enough to falsify an idea. If you want to be satisfied with the agreement between the rough observations of 1/2 of the numbers (that you may cherry-pick a posteriori) and your predictions, then any hypothesis will end up as "viable".

Moreover, the Pacific Ocean influences the globe by more than just this large area that "directly" influences the global temperature averages. The Pacific Ocean is the cradle of the El Niño/La Niña ENSO oscillations which have been known for quite some time to be the dominant contribution to the interannual temperature variability. If the global mean temperature changes significantly from one year to the next, chances are very high that it has something to do with the El Niños or La Niñas.

The Pacific Ocean is important at the decadal scale, too. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation describes one of the most important regional degrees of freedom – if not the most important one (AMO is a possible competitor) – that changes at the timescale comparable to tens of years. In fact, both El Niños and PDOs are mentioned by many of the articles. But they're not able or willing to deduce the most obvious consequence of all these insights, and it is the following:

The more you use natural variations such as El Niño, PDO etc. to explain what's actually going on and what's being observed, the more important the natural drivers become, the more irrelevant the CO2 gets, the more the skeptics who claim that the climate change is mostly natural are shown to be right (many skeptics have talked about the important influence of the ocean cycles and patterns for many decades and most skeptics today are well aware about the tight PDO-global-temperature correlation in the last 100 years), and the more discredited the AGW doctrine becomes along with its defenders.

Is that really so difficult for Fiona Harvey to understand this trivial point? Do we have to read all the garbage about CO2 that manifestly has nothing to do with any of the important observations or insights and not even with these not-so-important observations of the recent events in the Pacific Ocean?

Even average U.S. and EU politicians are beginning to understand what the hiatus means (why not journalists in the Guardian?) and they want a credible explanation in the IPCC AR5 summary that will be out in one month from now.

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RSS: a negative temperature trend in 16.67 years

Before you open this blog entry, you should make sure that all the nuclear power plants in your country are operational. You may need them because the text below contains a really long table (with 415 lines or so) which will be processed as \(\rm\LaTeX\) using MathJax. ;-)

About two years ago, Kevin Trenberth and others promoted a paper (Ben Santer and 16 co-authors, 2011) that claimed that one needs 17 years – what a precision – to determine the existence of a global warming trend. The purpose of the paper was to inject some patience to the minds of the alarmists and the undecided – 15 years of "no warming" isn't enough to notice the absence of any warming because you need 17 and not 15 years. Your humble correspondent wrote a tirade explaining that people like Santer and Trenberth were numerologists because there can obviously be nothing special about the 17-year-long interval. The whole continuum of the frequencies contributes to the temperature change and all the confidence levels etc. are depending on the duration continuously. There's no sharp "magic deadline" after which a hypothetical trend "must" show up.



At any rate, my preferred temperature record – the satellite-based RSS AMSU dataset – has approached a point in which the global warming trend in the recent 17 years is statistically insignificant and negligible. In fact, if you include the latest 200 months i.e. 16 years and 8 months (from December 1996 through July 2013 included) into your calculation of linear regression, you get a negative warming trend!




Yes, a particular episode that helps the trend to be negative is the (globally warmer) El Niño of the century in 1997-1998 that occurred 15+ years ago.

In shorter recent intervals, the negative warming trends are about as widespread as the positive ones. In other words, the data from the 17 recent years show no noticeable temperature trend, in one way or another. Chances are high that by the end of 2013, the recent interval in which the temperature trend will be tiny and negative (i.e. a negligible global cooling) will actually extend to the full 17 years. With some sensible conventions for statistical significance, one would conclude that the record in the last 20 years or so shows no statistically significant trend in the global temperature. Compare this absence of a trend in the real world with the hysterical hype about "global warming" in the very same 20-year-long interval.




The table below contains the temperature trends in Celsius degrees per century (rounded to one hundredth) calculated by linear regression applied to the RSS AMSU dataset for all intervals whose length is between 415 and 2 months. The minus signs in the middle column indicate that we're returning a certain number of months into the past. For your convenience, I emphasize the multiples of twelve as whole years – see the number in the first column.

Because the laymen and occasional thinkers about these linear regression results are often horrified by the following observation, let me clarify it again. If you look at the table, it becomes clear that the absolute value of the temperature trend is severely increasing as you go towards shorter, more recent intervals (near the bottom of the table).

This fact does not mean that something is getting crazy about the climate. The larger absolute values of the trend are a consequence of evaluating shorter periods of time, not a consequence of evaluating more recent intervals. When the period of time is shorter, then the calculated trend is clearly dominated by high-frequency, fast, nearly random changes of the weather – i.e. by noise of a sort – while the role of a hypothetical underlying trend – if one exists at all – gets suppressed.

For example, the last line says that the temperature trend between June 2013 and July 2013 is –83 Celsius degrees per century. This doesn't mean that all of us will freeze soon and the Earth will drop below the absolute zero in several centuries from now. ;-) Such an extrapolation is of course completely illegitimate because the temperature doesn't change uniformly and linearly by any stretch of imagination. It's chaotically oscillating up and down and the shorter intervals of time you consider, the more inappropriate it becomes to extrapolate the trend from the short interval to a very long one! However, I would kindly point out that it's wrong to extrapolate the temperature trend even from 30-year or 100-year – or any other – intervals in the future, too.

A way to think about the behavior is to approximate the temperature by a random walk (or, using equivalent words, Brownian motion or red noise) which is a qualitatively realistic model to describe the behavior of the temperatures at certain timescales. Such a random walk has no underlying trend whatsoever but after \(t\) months, the temperature changes by something comparable to \(\pm C\sqrt{t}\) in average. The longer time you allow the climate to change, the more its temperature will change although the change will be far smaller than the change expected from proportionality.

If you divide this change by the length of the interval, \(t\), you obtain a temperature trend of order \(\pm C / \sqrt{t}\) which goes to infinity for really short intervals of time. And that's what you will see in the table below, too.

Finally, here is the long table of temperature trends. It's plausible that you may have to wait for half a minute for your browser and the Javascript in it to convert the table to a nice \(\rm\LaTeX\) output. I found this "export as \(\rm\LaTeX\)" to be the simplest way to reprint the result from Mathematica to the blog's HTML source.\[
\begin{array}{|c|c|c|}
\hline \text{#years}&\text{#months}&{}^\circ {\rm C}/\text{century}\\
\hline
\text{} & -415 & 1.29 \\
\text{} & -414 & 1.28 \\
\text{} & -413 & 1.28 \\
\text{} & -412 & 1.28 \\
\text{} & -411 & 1.27 \\
\text{} & -410 & 1.27 \\
\text{} & -409 & 1.27 \\
34 & -408 & 1.27 \\
\text{} & -407 & 1.27 \\
\text{} & -406 & 1.27 \\
\text{} & -405 & 1.28 \\
\text{} & -404 & 1.29 \\
\text{} & -403 & 1.3 \\
\text{} & -402 & 1.3 \\
\text{} & -401 & 1.31 \\
\text{} & -400 & 1.32 \\
\text{} & -399 & 1.32 \\
\text{} & -398 & 1.33 \\
\text{} & -397 & 1.34 \\
33 & -396 & 1.35 \\
\text{} & -395 & 1.36 \\
\text{} & -394 & 1.36 \\
\text{} & -393 & 1.37 \\
\text{} & -392 & 1.37 \\
\text{} & -391 & 1.37 \\
\text{} & -390 & 1.39 \\
\text{} & -389 & 1.4 \\
\text{} & -388 & 1.41 \\
\text{} & -387 & 1.42 \\
\text{} & -386 & 1.42 \\
\text{} & -385 & 1.43 \\
32 & -384 & 1.43 \\
\text{} & -383 & 1.44 \\
\text{} & -382 & 1.44 \\
\text{} & -381 & 1.44 \\
\text{} & -380 & 1.44 \\
\text{} & -379 & 1.46 \\
\text{} & -378 & 1.45 \\
\text{} & -377 & 1.46 \\
\text{} & -376 & 1.45 \\
\text{} & -375 & 1.45 \\
\text{} & -374 & 1.45 \\
\text{} & -373 & 1.44 \\
31 & -372 & 1.43 \\
\text{} & -371 & 1.43 \\
\text{} & -370 & 1.43 \\
\text{} & -369 & 1.42 \\
\text{} & -368 & 1.42 \\
\text{} & -367 & 1.42 \\
\text{} & -366 & 1.43 \\
\text{} & -365 & 1.44 \\
\text{} & -364 & 1.46 \\
\text{} & -363 & 1.48 \\
\text{} & -362 & 1.49 \\
\text{} & -361 & 1.49 \\
30 & -360 & 1.5 \\
\text{} & -359 & 1.51 \\
\text{} & -358 & 1.52 \\
\text{} & -357 & 1.53 \\
\text{} & -356 & 1.54 \\
\text{} & -355 & 1.53 \\
\text{} & -354 & 1.52 \\
\text{} & -353 & 1.52 \\
\text{} & -352 & 1.52 \\
\text{} & -351 & 1.51 \\
\text{} & -350 & 1.51 \\
\text{} & -349 & 1.5 \\
29 & -348 & 1.5 \\
\text{} & -347 & 1.49 \\
\text{} & -346 & 1.47 \\
\text{} & -345 & 1.47 \\
\text{} & -344 & 1.46 \\
\text{} & -343 & 1.44 \\
\text{} & -342 & 1.43 \\
\text{} & -341 & 1.42 \\
\text{} & -340 & 1.4 \\
\text{} & -339 & 1.39 \\
\text{} & -338 & 1.37 \\
\text{} & -337 & 1.35 \\
28 & -336 & 1.33 \\
\text{} & -335 & 1.32 \\
\text{} & -334 & 1.31 \\
\text{} & -333 & 1.3 \\
\text{} & -332 & 1.29 \\
\text{} & -331 & 1.28 \\
\text{} & -330 & 1.28 \\
\text{} & -329 & 1.27 \\
\text{} & -328 & 1.26 \\
\text{} & -327 & 1.26 \\
\text{} & -326 & 1.25 \\
\text{} & -325 & 1.24 \\
27 & -324 & 1.23 \\
\text{} & -323 & 1.22 \\
\text{} & -322 & 1.21 \\
\text{} & -321 & 1.19 \\
\text{} & -320 & 1.18 \\
\text{} & -319 & 1.18 \\
\text{} & -318 & 1.19 \\
\text{} & -317 & 1.2 \\
\text{} & -316 & 1.19 \\
\text{} & -315 & 1.2 \\
\text{} & -314 & 1.2 \\
\text{} & -313 & 1.21 \\
26 & -312 & 1.22 \\
\text{} & -311 & 1.22 \\
\text{} & -310 & 1.22 \\
\text{} & -309 & 1.23 \\
\text{} & -308 & 1.25 \\
\text{} & -307 & 1.27 \\
\text{} & -306 & 1.29 \\
\text{} & -305 & 1.29 \\
\text{} & -304 & 1.3 \\
\text{} & -303 & 1.31 \\
\text{} & -302 & 1.32 \\
\text{} & -301 & 1.33 \\
25 & -300 & 1.34 \\
\text{} & -299 & 1.35 \\
\text{} & -298 & 1.37 \\
\text{} & -297 & 1.36 \\
\text{} & -296 & 1.36 \\
\text{} & -295 & 1.34 \\
\text{} & -294 & 1.32 \\
\text{} & -293 & 1.3 \\
\text{} & -292 & 1.28 \\
\text{} & -291 & 1.27 \\
\text{} & -290 & 1.25 \\
\text{} & -289 & 1.24 \\
24 & -288 & 1.23 \\
\text{} & -287 & 1.22 \\
\text{} & -286 & 1.22 \\
\text{} & -285 & 1.21 \\
\text{} & -284 & 1.21 \\
\text{} & -283 & 1.2 \\
\text{} & -282 & 1.19 \\
\text{} & -281 & 1.18 \\
\text{} & -280 & 1.19 \\
\text{} & -279 & 1.2 \\
\text{} & -278 & 1.2 \\
\text{} & -277 & 1.21 \\
23 & -276 & 1.2 \\
\text{} & -275 & 1.2 \\
\text{} & -274 & 1.2 \\
\text{} & -273 & 1.2 \\
\text{} & -272 & 1.23 \\
\text{} & -271 & 1.25 \\
\text{} & -270 & 1.26 \\
\text{} & -269 & 1.26 \\
\text{} & -268 & 1.28 \\
\text{} & -267 & 1.29 \\
\text{} & -266 & 1.3 \\
\text{} & -265 & 1.33 \\
22 & -264 & 1.34 \\
\text{} & -263 & 1.35 \\
\text{} & -262 & 1.35 \\
\text{} & -261 & 1.34 \\
\text{} & -260 & 1.33 \\
\text{} & -259 & 1.3 \\
\text{} & -258 & 1.3 \\
\text{} & -257 & 1.28 \\
\text{} & -256 & 1.27 \\
\text{} & -255 & 1.25 \\
\text{} & -254 & 1.23 \\
\text{} & -253 & 1.2 \\
21 & -252 & 1.16 \\
\text{} & -251 & 1.11 \\
\text{} & -250 & 1.06 \\
\text{} & -249 & 1.03 \\
\text{} & -248 & 1.01 \\
\text{} & -247 & 0.97 \\
\text{} & -246 & 0.93 \\
\text{} & -245 & 0.9 \\
\text{} & -244 & 0.85 \\
\text{} & -243 & 0.81 \\
\text{} & -242 & 0.79 \\
\text{} & -241 & 0.77 \\
20 & -240 & 0.75 \\
\text{} & -239 & 0.71 \\
\text{} & -238 & 0.66 \\
\text{} & -237 & 0.64 \\
\text{} & -236 & 0.61 \\
\text{} & -235 & 0.6 \\
\text{} & -234 & 0.58 \\
\text{} & -233 & 0.55 \\
\text{} & -232 & 0.53 \\
\text{} & -231 & 0.49 \\
\text{} & -230 & 0.47 \\
\text{} & -229 & 0.46 \\
19 & -228 & 0.44 \\
\text{} & -227 & 0.43 \\
\text{} & -226 & 0.42 \\
\text{} & -225 & 0.38 \\
\text{} & -224 & 0.37 \\
\text{} & -223 & 0.36 \\
\text{} & -222 & 0.36 \\
\text{} & -221 & 0.35 \\
\text{} & -220 & 0.33 \\
\text{} & -219 & 0.34 \\
\text{} & -218 & 0.33 \\
\text{} & -217 & 0.32 \\
18 & -216 & 0.3 \\
\text{} & -215 & 0.31 \\
\text{} & -214 & 0.33 \\
\text{} & -213 & 0.33 \\
\text{} & -212 & 0.33 \\
\text{} & -211 & 0.29 \\
\text{} & -210 & 0.25 \\
\text{} & -209 & 0.24 \\
\text{} & -208 & 0.22 \\
\text{} & -207 & 0.17 \\
\text{} & -206 & 0.13 \\
\text{} & -205 & 0.09 \\
17 & -204 & 0.07 \\
\text{} & -203 & 0.04 \\
\text{} & -202 & 0.03 \\
\text{} & -201 & 0.01 \\
\text{} & -200 & -0.02 \\
\text{} & -199 & -0.07 \\
\text{} & -198 & -0.13 \\
\text{} & -197 & -0.16 \\
\text{} & -196 & -0.21 \\
\text{} & -195 & -0.27 \\
\text{} & -194 & -0.32 \\
\text{} & -193 & -0.37 \\
16 & -192 & -0.39 \\
\text{} & -191 & -0.41 \\
\text{} & -190 & -0.43 \\
\text{} & -189 & -0.44 \\
\text{} & -188 & -0.46 \\
\text{} & -187 & -0.46 \\
\text{} & -186 & -0.41 \\
\text{} & -185 & -0.31 \\
\text{} & -184 & -0.24 \\
\text{} & -183 & -0.11 \\
\text{} & -182 & -0.02 \\
\text{} & -181 & 0.05 \\
15 & -180 & 0.14 \\
\text{} & -179 & 0.22 \\
\text{} & -178 & 0.28 \\
\text{} & -177 & 0.34 \\
\text{} & -176 & 0.34 \\
\text{} & -175 & 0.36 \\
\text{} & -174 & 0.36 \\
\text{} & -173 & 0.38 \\
\text{} & -172 & 0.33 \\
\text{} & -171 & 0.33 \\
\text{} & -170 & 0.3 \\
\text{} & -169 & 0.23 \\
14 & -168 & 0.2 \\
\text{} & -167 & 0.15 \\
\text{} & -166 & 0.13 \\
\text{} & -165 & 0.1 \\
\text{} & -164 & 0.05 \\
\text{} & -163 & 0.02 \\
\text{} & -162 & -0.06 \\
\text{} & -161 & -0.09 \\
\text{} & -160 & -0.12 \\
\text{} & -159 & -0.12 \\
\text{} & -158 & -0.14 \\
\text{} & -157 & -0.18 \\
13 & -156 & -0.23 \\
\text{} & -155 & -0.31 \\
\text{} & -154 & -0.35 \\
\text{} & -153 & -0.4 \\
\text{} & -152 & -0.48 \\
\text{} & -151 & -0.56 \\
\text{} & -150 & -0.62 \\
\text{} & -149 & -0.67 \\
\text{} & -148 & -0.71 \\
\text{} & -147 & -0.69 \\
\text{} & -146 & -0.68 \\
\text{} & -145 & -0.74 \\
12 & -144 & -0.78 \\
\text{} & -143 & -0.73 \\
\text{} & -142 & -0.76 \\
\text{} & -141 & -0.75 \\
\text{} & -140 & -0.74 \\
\text{} & -139 & -0.74 \\
\text{} & -138 & -0.71 \\
\text{} & -137 & -0.65 \\
\text{} & -136 & -0.63 \\
\text{} & -135 & -0.59 \\
\text{} & -134 & -0.57 \\
\text{} & -133 & -0.52 \\
11 & -132 & -0.48 \\
\text{} & -131 & -0.47 \\
\text{} & -130 & -0.46 \\
\text{} & -129 & -0.53 \\
\text{} & -128 & -0.53 \\
\text{} & -127 & -0.56 \\
\text{} & -126 & -0.48 \\
\text{} & -125 & -0.46 \\
\text{} & -124 & -0.47 \\
\text{} & -123 & -0.46 \\
\text{} & -122 & -0.42 \\
\text{} & -121 & -0.48 \\
10 & -120 & -0.47 \\
\text{} & -119 & -0.47 \\
\text{} & -118 & -0.44 \\
\text{} & -117 & -0.35 \\
\text{} & -116 & -0.3 \\
\text{} & -115 & -0.19 \\
\text{} & -114 & -0.15 \\
\text{} & -113 & -0.11 \\
\text{} & -112 & 0. \\
\text{} & -111 & 0.02 \\
\text{} & -110 & -0.02 \\
\text{} & -109 & -0.11 \\
9 & -108 & -0.26 \\
\text{} & -107 & -0.37 \\
\text{} & -106 & -0.4 \\
\text{} & -105 & -0.39 \\
\text{} & -104 & -0.42 \\
\text{} & -103 & -0.52 \\
\text{} & -102 & -0.4 \\
\text{} & -101 & -0.34 \\
\text{} & -100 & -0.29 \\
\text{} & -99 & -0.12 \\
\text{} & -98 & -0.09 \\
\text{} & -97 & -0.07 \\
8 & -96 & 0.03 \\
\text{} & -95 & 0.05 \\
\text{} & -94 & 0.19 \\
\text{} & -93 & 0.33 \\
\text{} & -92 & 0.42 \\
\text{} & -91 & 0.37 \\
\text{} & -90 & 0.39 \\
\text{} & -89 & 0.42 \\
\text{} & -88 & 0.47 \\
\text{} & -87 & 0.49 \\
\text{} & -86 & 0.36 \\
\text{} & -85 & 0.31 \\
7 & -84 & 0.32 \\
\text{} & -83 & 0.34 \\
\text{} & -82 & 0.44 \\
\text{} & -81 & 0.56 \\
\text{} & -80 & 0.54 \\
\text{} & -79 & 0.63 \\
\text{} & -78 & 1.04 \\
\text{} & -77 & 1.22 \\
\text{} & -76 & 1.43 \\
\text{} & -75 & 1.58 \\
\text{} & -74 & 1.6 \\
\text{} & -73 & 1.63 \\
6 & -72 & 1.75 \\
\text{} & -71 & 1.97 \\
\text{} & -70 & 2.09 \\
\text{} & -69 & 2.17 \\
\text{} & -68 & 2.12 \\
\text{} & -67 & 1.96 \\
\text{} & -66 & 1.5 \\
\text{} & -65 & 1.08 \\
\text{} & -64 & 0.79 \\
\text{} & -63 & 0.44 \\
\text{} & -62 & -0.23 \\
\text{} & -61 & -0.78 \\
5 & -60 & -1.16 \\
\text{} & -59 & -1.61 \\
\text{} & -58 & -1.85 \\
\text{} & -57 & -2.13 \\
\text{} & -56 & -2.34 \\
\text{} & -55 & -2.73 \\
\text{} & -54 & -2.9 \\
\text{} & -53 & -3.24 \\
\text{} & -52 & -3.72 \\
\text{} & -51 & -4.2 \\
\text{} & -50 & -5.07 \\
\text{} & -49 & -6.15 \\
4 & -48 & -6.36 \\
\text{} & -47 & -6.87 \\
\text{} & -46 & -6.65 \\
\text{} & -45 & -6.99 \\
\text{} & -44 & -7.25 \\
\text{} & -43 & -8.02 \\
\text{} & -42 & -7.22 \\
\text{} & -41 & -6.6 \\
\text{} & -40 & -5.52 \\
\text{} & -39 & -4.69 \\
\text{} & -38 & -3.57 \\
\text{} & -37 & -2.44 \\
3 & -36 & -0.7 \\
\text{} & -35 & 1.3 \\
\text{} & -34 & 3.37 \\
\text{} & -33 & 4.41 \\
\text{} & -32 & 5.73 \\
\text{} & -31 & 6.55 \\
\text{} & -30 & 6.39 \\
\text{} & -29 & 5.86 \\
\text{} & -28 & 4.39 \\
\text{} & -27 & 3.9 \\
\text{} & -26 & 3.46 \\
\text{} & -25 & 4.92 \\
2 & -24 & 7.15 \\
\text{} & -23 & 9.34 \\
\text{} & -22 & 12.06 \\
\text{} & -21 & 12.06 \\
\text{} & -20 & 10.79 \\
\text{} & -19 & 10.65 \\
\text{} & -18 & 6.15 \\
\text{} & -17 & -1.91 \\
\text{} & -16 & -7.49 \\
\text{} & -15 & -6.54 \\
\text{} & -14 & -8.89 \\
\text{} & -13 & -7.27 \\
1 & -12 & -8.63 \\
\text{} & -11 & -10.59 \\
\text{} & -10 & -3.05 \\
\text{} & -9 & 2.12 \\
\text{} & -8 & -0.67 \\
\text{} & -7 & -22.67 \\
\text{} & -6 & 10.9 \\
\text{} & -5 & 12.72 \\
\text{} & -4 & 19.32 \\
\text{} & -3 & 49.8 \\
\text{} & -2 & -82.8 \\ \hline
\end{array}

\]

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Aspects of Al Gore's lies on category 6 hurricanes

Two days ago, Al Gore gave an interview to the Washington Post

Al Gore explains why he’s optimistic about stopping global warming

in which he pretended to be optimistic that unhinged alarmists like himself may still morph from the hopeless dirty losers such as himself to winners. With his characteristic diplomacy, the former future U.S. president compared climate realists to champions of apartheid, to homophobes, and to an alcoholic father who explodes whenever the elephant in the room (more precisely, ethanol in the bottle) is being mentioned which is why his relatives prefer to be silent.



But it was his scientific contributions that led to the most widespread reactions:

Al Gore: ...Would there be hurricanes and floods and droughts without man-made global warming? Of course. But they’re stronger now. The extreme events are more extreme. The hurricane scale used to be 1-5 and now they’re adding a 6. The fingerprint of man-made global warming is all over these storms and extreme weather events.

Remarkably enough, pretty much all the climate writers on all sides of the conflict agreed – while using various words for the same proposition – that Gore is a shameful lying mongrel who should splash himself into a toilet.

Aside from expected critics such as Anthony Watts, Marc Morano, the Wall Street Journal, the Hill, Newsmax, Politico, The National Review, and many others, even the Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang, The Union of Concerned Scientists and Climate Skeptics' Dogs, and their likes pointed out that Gore's claim was a science fiction that isn't backed by any credible enough experts.




One must still understand that the separation of hurricanes into categories, the Saffir-Simpson hurricane wind scale, is a matter of human conventions. But the experts doing these things are simply not adding any new category. Ultimately, the most important reason is that the hurricanes (and all other local weather phenomena!) are doing what they have always been doing and there's no reason for any change of the classification because we don't observe any fingerprint of any qualitative change, in a striking contrast with the claims by alarmist liars such as Al Gore.

Wikipedia's two paragraphs on Category 6 hurricanes actually tell you pretty much all the facts you need to know to understand the situation.




After some strong enough hurricanes, e.g. in 2005, various people proposed to create a new category 6 for the hurricanes. None of these people has ever been influential or successful. In the current terminology, Category 5 hurricanes include all the hurricanes with winds above 70 meters per second. If you allow me to simplify a table, the speeds in meters per second are:

Category 1: 33-42 m/s
Category 2: 43-49 m/s
Category 3: 50-58 m/s
Category 4: 58-70 m/s
Category 5: 70-∞ m/s

I hope you are able to translate the speeds to kph (km/h) or kn (knots). For each of the speeds, one may almost reliably predict the normal central pressure (lower than one atmosphere and decreasing with the category!) although it's an independent quantity and doesn't enter the primary definition of the scale.

Sorry that for some categories, the borderline speed is the same and for others, 1 m/s was added. They know how to round it and classify it in the marginal cases although the outcome may often be affected by the error margin, anyway.

At any rate, there is some minimal speed for which a tropical storm may be called a hurricane and the borderline speeds increase by roughly 10 m/s per category. Don't ask me why it's not uniform. But if you do ask me, it's because they wanted to associate the categories with the impact on man-made structures. But the final category (5) includes all the storms above a critical value.

Robert Simpson, a co-author of the Saffir-Simpson scale and a scientist who is now over 100 years old, gives a simple reason why it's a bad idea to introduce a higher category – even though you may find it natural to introduce an arbitrarily high category: he claims that the final category is rupturing buildings independently of the engineering methods that were used to construct it so there's no good reason to finely discriminate. I am a bit skeptical about the claim that the men can't design better materials and structures that simply withstand greater winds than the minimal Category 5 hurricane winds (in other words, I am probably more optimistic about the abilities of the new technologies) but I hope that he has some reasons to make this general claim.

However, there's another reason why the new category isn't even being considered. The number of such "Category 5 hurricanes on steroids" in the record is too small. Among the 35 Atlantic Category 5 hurricanes on the current record, 17 exceeded 78 m/s and 8 exceeded 80 m/s. You see that near 80 m/s, the number of storms seems to be dropping quickly. Similar decrease is seen in the Eastern Pacific hurricanes. Recall that the Northwestern Pacific tropical storms are usually classified with a different terminology than this scale and one talks about typhoons and supertyphoons etc. that have independent definitions.

If you introduced a new boundary near 80 m/s for the Atlantic hurricanes, the classification of Category 5 vs Category 6 would finely depend on the speed (on accidents, roughly speaking), and this extra splitting wouldn't be too useful, anyway. If the borderline speed were much higher than 80 m/s, you would probably be left with no or almost no hurricanes in the new group. If you're looking forward to some very strong hurricanes in their new class and you need some terminology to talk about them, why don't you directly talk about their speed? Try to make people excited while they are waiting for the first 85+ m/s Atlantic hurricane (that would mildly beat Camille 1969 and Allen 1980: you will probably never see one). Such an ad hoc threshold speed surely sounds less sexy than a new category but meritocratically speaking, this topic of the top hurricanes isn't sexy so you shouldn't try to pretend that it is. After all, the strongest hurricanes are remembered not according to their modest differences in the speed but according to their location and impact (a slower hurricane may be much more influential than a faster one) and these things are so dependent on the culture that no objective assignment to the categories could be done according to such criteria (but the classification should be objective so that we know that the distribution isn't changing with the human mood).

An essential fact to notice is that nothing seems to be visibly changing about the distribution of the tropical storms and hurricanes into the categories. Saffir and Simpson did some work in evaluating the data and dividing the hurricanes into useful categories and because the statistical data is pretty much the same (but more extensive) today, they would probably end up with the same results today, too.

None of the hurricane data shows a clear, statistically significant trend. Statistically insignificant trends may be positive and negative depending on what you precisely quantify and how. Theoretically, there exists a good fundamental reason – often emphasized by Richard Lindzen – why one should expect fewer hurricanes and weaker hurricanes in a warmer world (which we're very slowly entering, according to some claims and according to linear regression in the last 30 or 100 years): a warming occurs primarily in the polar regions that were and still are much colder than the equatorial zone (due to various polar e.g. ice-albedo feedbacks) and that's why the globally widespread warming trend also means that the polar-equatorial temperature difference decreases. But this difference – locally speaking, the gradient – is one of the main causes that power the storms (not only tropical storms) so if it goes down, so should the frequency and strength of the tropical cyclones.

It's plausible that someone has built a climate model that produces the opposite result but it's almost certainly an artifact of some numerical (or conceptual!) defects of the models (if I avoid justifiable accusations of fudging). Because there doesn't exist any theoretical, computerized-oracle-independent argument why the hurricanes should be getting stronger or more frequent, we should use Occam's razor and ignore such a complicated extra hypothetical trend until we have a reason to think otherwise.

At any rate, no one in the world of experts is proposing anything such as a sixth category for the hurricanes. It's too bad that Al Gore began to think that any lie that goes in the alarmist direction is excusable. I sincerely hope that his lying dirty mouth will start to be broken into many small bloody pieces whenever he says something comparably outrageous so that by the time he possesses one last tooth, he learns to speak the truth, at least sometimes. Unfortunately, most Americans are cowards who are afraid of beating scumbags such as Al Gore on the street while a minority of Americans even sympathizes with similar scumbags. Yes, I sort of preferred the America from the Westerns where Category 6 assholes such as Al Gore are finally shot by the heroes.

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Richard Lindzen vs Aljazeera gladiators

Some time ago, mostly Arabic-language-based politically correct TV station Aljazeera bought Current TV, a failed U.S. TV station, from former vice-president Al Gore and his partner for hundreds of millions of dollars.

They apparently got more interested in the climate and decided to debate Prof Richard Lindzen of MIT, a famous climate skeptic, in "Head to Head" which is described as "Al Jazeera's new forum of ideas - a gladiatorial contest tackling big issues such as faith, the economic crisis, democracy and intervention in front of an opinionated audience at the Oxford Union."



The video is 48 minutes long. Will you watch it?

The web page with some words and the video above is here:

Climate change: Fact or fiction?

My understanding is that Dick was hired as a bull while the brainwashed journalists indefinitely repeating the clichés about man-made climate change are supposed to be the gladiators.




At the beginning, Dick registers himself both as a skeptic and a denier, depending on what you mean. He says - and I also agree – that it's plausible that the CO2 emissions caused more than 50 percent of the warming in the last 50 or 90 years or whatever but what is the main mistake in the reasoning is that such an innocent assumption implies that there's a need to act, that there's an existential threat.




A hysterical white man asks about the catastrophe caused by the fact that we won't stop at doubling but we will continue indefinitely. Richard didn't really answer – or didn't get the opportunity to answer. It was a bit confusing. That's nice to be hysterical but even if we do, the temperatures will increase (counting the increase due to CO2) only linearly even if we expand the consumption of fossil fuels exponentially. That's due to the approximately logarithmic dependence. We obviously run out of the exponential trend at some point.

I had to turn the video off for five minutes because the dark-skinned jerk, the gladiator called Mehdi Hasan, just drove me up the wall with the constant insults against Richard who is "fringe" etc. I just hate this lynching, Nazi approach to finding the truth and I hate the people who are doing that. Yes, I want them to die. They're scum.

Just after 12 minutes when I started to think that Dick is amazingly brave to come to this den of aggressive morons, it became pretty clear that the audience in Oxford overwhelmingly supports Dick. A viewer started to talk about the perfect consensus that used to be imposed by the Inquisition and was rewarded by a loud applause. ;-)

After Mark Lynas' monologue, I had to suspend the video for extra five minutes to avoid vomiting. For him, the consensus is not just 97% as we sometimes hear but 99% and we have to stop "the experiment with the Earth". Dear green imbecile, the big experiment on the Earth has been running for 4.7 billion years and it will be running for extra 7.5 billion years when the Sun goes red giant. If you don't like it, please kindly f*ck off this blue, not green planet where you have absolutely no moral right to pollute the intellectual atmosphere.

Lots of debates about the funding by the Big Oil. Dick says that BP, Shell, and others mostly support the climate alarm. It's OK what he says and he's a preeminent scientist whom I like and admire but I would still admit that there are (a bit younger) folks, like Morano, who would be able to use the same time to overwhelm the audience with hundreds of relevant (and accurate) numbers and facts. Surprisingly, they (including Lynas) sort of agree and admit that fossil fuels are needed, the alarmists get more money, and the dirty-funding accusations are ludicrous.

The host behaves as if he were surprised that Dick doesn't like the environmental movement much. ;-) If he's really surprised, then it shows that he must have been living outside the real world so far. Lynas also talks about some of his disputes with the movement – he is pro-nuclear. Richard says that no one is going to change anything that matters. "Save the Planet" is an extreme slogan.

The host is offended that Richard is relaxed instead of hysterical – every good person should be hysterical which is also why the host's near countrymates demolished some skyscrapers in New York 12 years ago. He shoots idiotic proclamations about the costs-and-benefits by William Nordhaus, some hostility from opportunist Kerry Emanuel's mouth, and so on. I had to suspend the video to write this paragraph and drank 0.01 liters of domestic rum ;-) which allowed me to save 5 minutes from the otherwise required good-mood pause.

Relaxed Richard says that if there's no doable solution that matters, it makes no sense to make symbolic acts. People should be free to get stronger, smarter, and reach whatever conclusions they're led to. Applause. David Rose of Mail on Sunday, pretending to be mostly skeptic, says that he surely wants emissions to go down – they need to – and it's being claimed that everyone in the debate agrees. Well, I surely think that Richard doesn't and I don't. So Richard repeats some things about the futile symbols that clearly imply that he disagrees. Myles Allen says some of the same junk as David Rose – that we ultimately need to decarbonize the economy. He only differs from other brainwashed alarmists in the technicalities. Richard is smiling.

Richard answers a woman's question – oil industry has (financial and survival) interests like everyone else. What a surprise. Someone asks whether the alarmist case relies on computer models. Richard effectively says that the estimates of the sensitivity do. Discussions on whether the non-specialists in the IPCC voted on the key IPCC statements. A dark-skinned woman asks what causes the hotter summers etc. if not her SUV and whether she should really buy a bigger SUV and pretend she can do it, LOL. ;-) Dick says that the assumptions are wrong, the summers aren't hotter. Richard explains that in a quasi-continuous function, it's pretty much guaranteed that most of the recent years have to be among the top ten etc. if there were a warming trend. Not shocking.

He didn't have the time to tell the woman that she has the freedom to buy a bigger car. Too bad that she will remain oppressed. Richard explains that the year-to-year variability of the local temperature vastly exceeds the annual increase of the global mean temperature that no one can feel. Allen screamed at Dick that he had to agree about the warmer summers but Dick didn't and I wouldn't, either.

A confused male visitor hysterically asks about the "sum" of the climate sensitivity, biological sensitivity, penal sensitivity, pylon alergy and several other sensitivities. LOL. Not even your humble correspondent knows how to add these apples, oranges, and comets up. I didn't find Dick's answer optimal but he's right when he said that the humans have shown a bigger capacity to create social instabilities etc. than the environmental ones.

Someone asked whether the IPCC's message to policymaker is pure junk or it contains something usable. Dick was sad that he couldn't give a specific answer. ;-) Richard says that scientists say innocent things, environmental activists translate them to scary stories, politicians get alarmed and pay the scientists, and so on, with some exponential growth. A younger woman who registered as an alarmist asked about the link between CO2 and the death of her relative. ;-) For Richard, it's specious to attribute deaths caused by weather phenomena – which have occurred for millions of years – to the man-made activities. A hysterically alarmed Asian man asks about a hypothetical catastrophe for the poor nations again. XY people will die. What is Dick's conscience and threshold for action? It depends on the action. If it is symbolic, we will never reach Richard's threshold.

It's surely funny when these intellectual dwarfs are trying to beat Richard in something he knows so well – they say that Richard is "being challenged" – but they should still be praised relatively to Al Gore from whom they bought a TV station because he wouldn't dare to debate Richard at all.

Hat tip: Mr Jan V.



BTW Alena Vitásková, the chief of the Czech State Energy Regulation Bureau, had to be given a special police protection yesterday. It's a result of an April 2013 assassination attempt when another car was trying to push her out of the superhighway. The State Security Council met to discuss the incident immediately in April but 3 months passed before an answer was given. The primary suspects are people doing business with photovoltaic energy and those with biofuel. She was investigating their efforts to get extra subsidies earlier and other things. These renewable gangsters should be treated like Taliban.

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Bob Carter, John Spooner: Taxing Air

Previous related article: Bob Carter's job not renewed

I just received my copy of the paperback edition of cartoonist John Spooner's and geologist Bob Carter's new book, Taxing Air. The Kindle edition may be bought from amazon.com here (icon on the left side); go to TaxingAir.COM for the book's web page and options to buy it for $30.

The book immediately impressed me by the colorful illustrations on pretty much every page. They're playful, witty, full of colors and life, and they also quickly convey some key ideas.

Perhaps because it seems easier to read a 280-page book whose significant portion is filled with similar pictures, I couldn't resist and immediately started to read the book. Let me say in advance that about one-half of the pictures are jokes, often with alarmists' and (mostly Australian) politicians' faces; the other half are graphs and diagrams that explain serious scientific concepts and the cold hard data.




Now some facts. The book wasn't written "just" by Carter and Spooner. There are four other co-authors, economist Martin Feil and three others, who are co-responsible for the full content of the book. The authorship of individual sections isn't specifically mentioned but the preface explains what the other co-authors may have contributed.




At the very beginning, there is a page "Did you know that?" with some trivia that everyone should know – not only in Australia – except that it's normal for many people who are loud in the climate change debate to be ignorant about these basics of the interdisciplinary discipline.

Some pages with a praise follow, and so does the table of contents. The preface by the authors occupies two pages.

The first substantial chapter-like passage is the Introduction – answering the question how a cartoonist got his idea. We're told that Spooner would also believe various things we used to be told. But a turning point was Martin Durkin's The Great Global Warming Swindle documentary six years ago. Spooner understood that the hysterical reaction by the alarmists – that played a key role in the introduction of words such as "deniers" to the debate – had to have a reason. Spooner understood that the scientific consensus was being referred to by the activists exactly because the actual scientific evidence didn't work and doesn't work for them. He spends some time by analyzing how bad it is to use labels and libels such as "deniers", analyzes ClimateGate, and other important events, with some special emphasis on what it meant for the material inspiring a cartoonist such as Spooner.

After this point, you may be looking forward to 12 nicely written chapters about (the wording below is mine):

• Basics of the weather and the climate (changes at all possible time scales, what drives them, who studies and understands them etc.)
• Inner structure of the alarmist movement (sky-is-falling quotes since the 19th century, history of the IPCC, movies, tricks and abuse of language and science by the advocates etc., is consensus science and does it exist, what scientists agree about)
• Historical weather and climate data (methods to reconstruct the past, proxies, and drivers of variation – Milankovitch cycles, ocean cycles, and others; temperature trends, cyclone energy non-trends, and so on)
• The greenhouse effect (the energy budget, lots of flows, greenhouse gases also cool, decelerating log dependence on concentration, misinterpretations in the media, temperature changes before CO2 on seasonal through geological timescales, estimates of sensitivity, six falsifications of the dominant-CO2 hypothesis, recent relative CO2 starvation, methane ozone as small players)
• Computer models (brief history, what they're based upon, deterministic vs empirical-statistical, haven't been validated against independent datasets so projections aren't real predictions, systematically overestimated warming rates, some graphs of GCMs and better and milder Scafetta's model, predicted human fingerprints aren't unique and are often absent in the measured data)
• Ocean's role in the climate (details on sea level rise measurements, global just for 20 years, no worrying trends, local vs global level, local is important for coastal planning, level affected by geoid, tectonics, sediments, ancient Roman port is 2 miles inland today, big capacity of oceans, exchange with the atmosphere matters, currents that survive, El Niño starts by less mixing in surface ocean, acidification won't occur – oceans won't ever be acidic)
• Other climate drivers (geothermal fluxes negligible, 10,000 times below Sun, except for near volcanoes, volcano ashes' temporary effect, a nice summary of Svensmark cosmic rays, Soon and others solar influences, why the small irradiance variations don't exclude the concept; ocean cycles from ENSO, Indian Ocean Dipole, and Pacific Decadal Oscillation, with maps, diagrams, and discussion of impact on weather, global and Australian)
• Specific climate questions in Australia (the continent's extreme temperature, changing climate with continental drift, why Australia is drier than others, cyclones in Northern Australia went down, no disturbing trend in water storage and flows in the Murray-Darling basin, in number or strength of floods, in temperatures; good water management requires a good understanding of the natural conditions before people got in charge, Great Barrier Reef is doing fine, something got better, something worse, everything consistent with multidecadal oscillations, global warming would probably bring a decrease of the dangerous weather events via Lindzen's argument)
• Economics of carbon dioxide taxation (a definition of economics, interactions between politics, economics, science; carbon tax is useless and inefficient, convoluted, hard-to-define, unsustainable, creating inconsistencies and special interests; carbon trading adds gaming, corruption, and big price swings; no benefits; Australians will pay up to $100 billion before 2020 and already now $1,000 per person and year; Australia is not following but leading the world in this insanity)
• Influence of such policies on the climate (percentage of CO2 emissions from Australia ambiguous and hard to quantify due to errors and different schemes what to count, cooling for those hundreds of billions between microkelvins and 0.015 deg C, the latter if Australia stops carbon in its economy completely, it will be hard to repeal the tax because it has grown through the economy as a tumor, but it's still cheaper and more ethical to do so)
• What alternative energy doesn't do ("dirty energy" is an emotional label because electrons are clean; coal and nuclear energy are cheap and OK for environment; wind, solar, biofuel, tidal etc. energy are expensive, killing birds, need backup power plants to beat interruption, backup plants burn less efficiently than full-fledged plant, detailed numbers on costs, prices, output, what form of energy they use etc.; fortunately, Australia and NZ won't need nuclear so their irrational anti-nuclear sentiment won't hurt)
• Risk management in general (instead of feel-good campaigns, precautionary principle, and other emotional manipulative things, nations need evidence-based, scientific cost-benefit analysis; it's right to be prepared for real natural hazards that have mostly nothing to do with CO2; in Australia, it's almost only climatic ones such as drought, bushfires, floods – no earthquakes and volcanoes in the middle of a plate; coming cooling is also possible, due to the silent Sun etc., and would be worse than warming; how you can help: get educated about the real facts, inform folks around you)

At the end, you find a glossary, acronyms, index, and – for you not to be distracted in the bulk of the text – the list of figures and their sources, recommended literature, and the information about the authors.

I haven't read the whole book yet but what I have already read is enough to recommend you the book wholeheartedly. See a review in the Australian [free copy] to see another man's reasons to love the book. This blog entry may be updated later.

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Death Valley: highest temperature on Earth will survive 100th anniversary

Tons of journalists were recently hyping the warm weather that came to California and other places. Fox News and many others talk about "tied records" and "baked West".



But the real story which is almost totally overlooked is the comparison of the absolute temperature record on Earth and the modest temperatures in recent years that had no chance to match it. This real story is clearly inconvenient to the climate alarmists, one of the most unhinged and dishonest cliques of demagogues who have ever walked on the face of Earth, and journalists many of whom have always been trying to claim that what is happening right now is amazing even if it is not.




The Wikipedia page on weather records tells us, among other things, the highest ever recorded temperature in each country, on each continent, and on the whole Earth. For example, the absolute Czech record is just 40.4 °C – near 105 °F - recorded last August in the West suburbs of Prague. Czechia is one of a half-dozen of countries only that display a record from 2012 or 2013.

However, the global record happens to be recorded in the Death Valley, California – a place in the Mojave desert that is close to the borders of Nevada. On July 10th, 1913 – which will be exactly 100 years ago next Wednesday – the thermometers showed 56.7 °C – that is 134 °F. One may check a weather forecast for that place to see that during the following week, the temperature over there will drop by 5 °C or so.

Because the Death Valley only saw 129 °F during the recent 2013 heat wave, that means that the 1913 world record will have survived for more than 100 years.




Note that the current "extreme" temperatures were still 5 °F cooler than the record temperature set in 1913. This difference is four times greater than the oft quoted temperature increase during the 20th century. If we exaggerate by another factor of four, we may say that relatively to 1913, the year 2013 represents an ice age in the Death Valley.

We're often manipulated into thinking about the warmest ever recorded year according to the global mean temperature. The years such as 1998 and 2005 – relatively recent years most of us remember – win this contest. However, the globe wasn't covered by reliable weather stations just a century ago. On the other hand, individual thermometers have been doing a good job for several centuries. Despite their small number in the past, we may find some really hot readings.

I think that the absolute highest temperature ever recorded on Earth by a thermometer is at least as interesting an extremum as the year with the highest global mean temperature. It's the ultimate Olympic discipline. In spite of this fact, we almost never hear – and talk – about such a thing. Why? Because the 1913 record is just another inconvenient truth, just another fact that challenges the bold assertion that the recent years and decades are unusually warm.

Because most of the people who are spreading and interpreting the weather records these days are biased corrupt jerks who are humiliating proper science, despising the scientitic integrity, and spitting into your face, we are bombarded by selected pieces of information that are meant to convey the misguided picture that there is something unusual going on with the climate these days.

I wonder: How many of you have known that 1998 or 2005 boasts the "warmest year on the Earth" title? And on the contrary, how many of you knew that the absolute temperature record was recorded in the Death Valley in 1913? Concerning the latter quiz question, I will even tolerate the (obsolete) opinion (TRF) that the warmest temperature ever, 58 °C or 136.4 °C, was recorded in Al Aziziyah, Libya on September 13, 1922 – because this alternative changes nothing about the big picture.

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Murry Salby: CO2 is the integral of temperature

...in the past, on short timescales, it has therefore fluctuated rapidly...

Honza [=Jan] U. sent me the following one-hour April 2013 talk by Prof Murry Salby of Australia's Macquarie University:



This astrophysicist and atmospheric scientist has a rather impressive publication record. At the beginning, I was a bit discouraged by Pierre Gosselin's summary that suggested that Salby was making some widespread elementary errors about the direct attribution of CO₂ emissions according to their isotopic composition (the extra CO₂ we see in the atmosphere generally has a very different composition than the CO₂ when we emitted it, because the carbon is being quickly recycled all the time while chemistry doesn't care about the differences between isotopes but it's still true that our additions of CO₂ have increased the CO₂ concentration).

But I was wrong, Salby isn't doing these particular trivial mistakes and when I ultimately listened to the talk, it looked rather impressive.




He employs various types of statistical models, Fourier transformations, and other things to decode the relationships between CO₂ and the temperature. Of course, the temperature is mainly the driver of CO₂ and CO₂ follows – to say the least, that's the dominant relationship during the glaciation cycles (the time scales from tens to hundreds of thousands of years).

Those things wouldn't be new and I wouldn't listen to another 1-hour talk that just discusses whether CO₂ was the cause or the consequence during glaciation cycles. Of course it was the consequence. Whoever still acts as if he were misunderstanding these basic issues is either a hopelessly brainwashed moron or an amazingly dishonest demagogue or both.

But Salby said much more than that.




He argued that the anomalous CO₂ concentration may be approximated as the integral of the anomalous temperature, \[

\Delta\,{\rm conc}(CO_2) = \alpha \int \dd t\,\Delta T

\] which sort of explains why it seems to be rising so smoothly (if we ignore the nearly periodic seasonal variations). But Salby has also presented some evidence that the ice record heavily underestimates the fluctuations of the CO₂ concentration, especially the high-frequency (short-period) oscillations that occurred a long time ago. If that's true, it's pretty likely that concentrations above 400 ppm may have been rather mundane even before the industrial activity.

Using the Fourier methods, he argues that there is a phase shift of 90 degrees between the temperature and CO₂ pretty much at all frequencies. I am not quite seeing how this may be true because at least in the glaciation cycles, i.e. at the 10,000-year time scale, these two quantities are pretty much in sync. How does the phase shift move to 90 degrees for shorter time scales?

And his discussion of the different isotopic composition (C12 vs C13) of the fossil fuels and the present plant life is sophisticated, not the kind of silly caricature I was led to expect. At any rate, Salby concludes that the excess CO₂ is caused by the integrated or accumulated positive temperature anomaly in 1920-1940 and 1980-2000 or so and these positive anomalies may be interpreted as noise, not results of any trends.

That sounds nice except that I think it's obvious that the CO₂ we have added to the atmosphere has led to some increased CO₂ concentrations and the latter increase is comparable to 50% of the former (airborne fraction etc.) – it's not negligible. It doesn't matter that there are 50 times more important contributions to the CO₂ atmospheric budget as well. Despite these dominant contributions, a small surplus simply can't become completely invisible.

If you were thinking whether you should listen to that talk, my recommendation is probably Yes. Despite the fact that he is trying to deny some obvious facts – if I understand the discussion about the attribution of an elevated CO₂ well and if I am right about its imperfections – he is also saying lots of new things and offering many sophisticated methods that you may want to know about.

At the end, Salby offers some criticisms of the climate models that I only partly agree with. Concerning the agreeable conclusions, he says that the prevailing climate models show CO₂ and the temperature essentially as the same thing; in the real world, they're not the same thing at all. These two claims – and their paramount contrast – are self-evidently true.

To mention the propositions I don't quite share, he says that theories can't ever be tested against the past data; tests of predictions of the future are always needed. I disagree with that. It's a historical coincidence whether some data were collected before a theory was written down or after that. A theory is always constructed or chosen according to the data in the past and then it gives predictions for other phenomena as well. Those phenomena may be data to be collected in the future but also additional data that may be collected about the past. Regardless of the timing, such data may be used to strengthen or weaken our confidence in the theory (or rule it out).

See also replies by MeteoLCD (more detailed review than mine!), Anthony Watts' 100+ commenters, The Hockey Schtick, Climate Depot, Tall Bloke, and – from the crazy side of the aisle – John Cook (I agree with some of the criticism) and Deltoid who calls Salby "unhelpful" (for "the cause") LOL. ;-)

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Sea temperature trend: 1.35 ± 0.15 °C per century

I made the following easy-to-understand calculation of the warming trend, including an error margin, of the global sea surface temperatures since the late 1970s, as seen by the UAH AMSU satellite dataset.



First, I loaded the file of the monthly data, isolated the third temperature-like column, the global ocean temperature anomaly, and calculated the linear regressions.




It's straightforward to use one simple Mathematica command to compute the slope of the linear regression but the non-trivial addition I made was an estimate of the error margin of the resulting slope. My logic is that for different initial months and final months of the interval, you get different slopes. Then you draw the histogram and the width of this histogram approximately informs you about the error margin of the slope.




So I picked the interval from the \(i\)-th month of the dataset through the \(j\)-th month from the end of the dataset and allowed \(i,j\) to be integers between one and fifty. One gets 2,500 different slopes from the linear regression. When the month-on-month average slope is multiplied by 1,200 to get the warming per century, those 2,500 slopes are distributed along the following histogram:



One may easily compute the mean value 1.33 °C per century while the root-mean-square width of the curve is 0.12 °C.\[

\ddfrac{T}{t}\sim (1.33\pm 0.12)^\circ {\rm C} / {\rm century}

\] It's also possible to replace the number 50 by another number of months, like 60, and the qualitative conclusions are unchanged.

This really means that the data from the last 33 years – when the observed warming trend was faster than in longer intervals or previous intervals, so we're likely to get an overestimate – the warming trend was just 1.35 °C per century with a relatively small error margin. In particular, we can't exclude that the "right" warming trend is below 1 °C per century. However, we can rather reliably exclude the hypothesis that the centennial trend exceeds 2 °C per century.

If you need some very simple Mathematica code I used:

a = Import["http://vortex.nsstc.uah.edu/data/msu/t2lt/uahncdc.lt",
"Table"];
aaa = a[[2 ;; -12]][[All, 3]];
more = a[[2 ;; -12]][[All, 5]];
laaa = Length[aaa]

ListLinePlot[more]

trends = {};
For[i = 1, i <= 50, i++,
For[j = 1, j <= 50, j++,
morekus = more[[i ;; -j]];
trend = D[Normal[LinearModelFit[morekus, x, x]], x]*1200;
trends = trends~Join~{trend};
]
]

Histogram[trends]
avtrend = Total[trends]/2500
Sqrt[Total[trends^2 - avtrend^2]/2500]

I chose the sea temperatures because they seem to be less variable in the short run; the nearly white noise apparently contributing to the temperatures has a smaller prefactor. The latest, May 2013 temperature anomaly which sits at –0.01 °C, wasn't incorporated to the calculation yet. It would reduce the trends but just by a very tiny amount.

Needless to say, nothing guarantees that the underlying trend implicitly assumed above to be linear will remain constant in the future. Climatologists are often naively describing the temperatures as a combination of a superfast, nearly white noise (very high frequencies of the randomness) and a superslow, nearly linear and permanent, increase of the temperature (very low frequencies). In reality, there are contributions from many characteristic intermediate timescales, including one or two years or so from El Niño cycles, decades from PDO and AMO and all these things, and probably many other sub-centennial and near-centennial and multi-centennial cycles, some of which are more regular or periodic or predictable than others while others are chaotic.

Even the assumption that the cherry-picked high trend is going to continue doesn't look worrisome in any sense and the underlying trends are safely lower than the lower end point of the IPCC interval.

Note that the IPCC should publish the fifth report, AR5, later in 2013. I am not too curious what will happen but I am still approximately infinitesimally curious how the usual talking points by these mostly dishonest hired guns will change or not change relatively to AR4. ;-)

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AGW: due to cosmic rays and freons?

Lots of skeptics and the überalarmist Alexander Ač sent me the information about a widely discussed paper

Cosmic-Ray-Driven Reaction and Greenhouse Effect of Halogenated Molecules: Culprits for Atmospheric Ozone Depletion and Global Climate Change (arXiv, PDF)

---

WUWT, Google News

written by Qing-Bin Lu, a physicist (mostly biophysicist) at the University in Waterloo, in October 2012. The first detail that seems bizarre to me is the amount of hype surrounding a preprint that's been out for more than half a year. If there were real, active experts who follow what's going on in climatology and if the paper were right and important, they would have known it for half a year and not just now when the paper happened to appear in a journal.

It doesn't seem to be the case so at least one of the assumptions has to be invalid.




At any rate, the author claims that carbon dioxide has been irrelevant for the global mean temperature between 1850 and 1970; in fact, in a statistical analysis, he finds a slightly negative correlation between CO2 and temperature, \(R=-0.05\).

On the contrary, there's a positive claim – a nearly perfect correlation was observed with \(R\geq 0.96\) in 1970-2012 between the global surface temperature and the total amount of freons (more precisely CFCs – "freon" is a brand name owned by DuPont – and even more precisely halogenated gases) in the stratosphere.




So these ozone-hole-related compounds and factors decide about the climate as well, he believes. The Montreal Protocol is being praised; it recovered about 20%-25% of the Antarctic ozone hole while no significant progress has been seen in the mid latitudes. Note that the amount of ozone is reduced by freons but also by the effects of cosmic rays; the latter are modulated by the solar activity, we're reminded.

The author argues that freons could have generated 0.6 °C of warming between 1970 and 2012 and if they're really this important, their expected disappearance in the next 50-70 years could lead to global cooling that would bring the global mean temperature back to the levels people experienced in the 1950s.

There are many graphs in the paper; I won't repost them here. Some of them look pretty convincing. Still, the correlations could be coincidental and this possibility is more likely because many of these correlations have only been verified in the latest 3 decades or so. It's easy to fool oneself. I've seen many rather impressive visual correlations – three or four bumps reproduced rather nicely by a "theory" – and I know that most of them turn out to be fake.

Moreover, this scholar has much more experience with DNA molecules than analyses of the climate. The latter is a rather complicated thing and beginners tend to be naive in many respects. For these reasons and others, I doubt that the global climate is so easily linked to the freons. But I am not quite certain. It's plausible. They're powerful greenhouse gases (thousands of times greater global warming potential than CO2).



Around 0:19, this comedian seemed confused about the difference between "global warming" and "ozone depletion". Maybe he wasn't that confused, after all? ;-)

The apparent observation that no one can really safely show that the paper is wrong and why the paper is wrong highlights the immense degree of uncertainty about the truly dominant climate drivers on the decadal and centennial timescales.

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An extremely cloudy Prague in 2013

A Czech Canadian e-pal has complained to me that "the month of May was worth [an excrement]: cold, windy, rainy etc". But that's nothing compared to the first five months as we have experienced them in Czechia.



The Czech media such as The Week (EN) have told us about some cold hard figures describing the weather in Prague between January 1st and May 17th, 2013.




In this 137-day-long period, the number of hours when it was "clear skies" in Prague was just 80. To compare, it was 417 hours in the same period of the year 2011. I kid you not: the total length of the "clear skies" i.e. sunny weather in Prague dropped by a factor greater than five! (The figures refer to the Ruzyně station near the Havel airport.)

The cloudy, rainy weather may be blamed on the frequently low pressure but why the pressure is so low in 2013 isn't being explained by anything more fundamental that the meteorologists would be able to tell us. This lousy weather shouldn't continue indefinitely but the predictions suggest that the cloudy, rainy mess will actually continue for a few more weeks, well beyond the May 17th deadline I have mentioned.




The differences are extreme when we demand the "clear skies" but there are significant gaps even if we compare more inclusive quantities such as "the average percentage of the skies covered by clouds". In 2011, it was 61%; in 2012, it was 65%. In 2013, it was a whopping 82%. And let me remind you: this is not just some day-to-day variation of the weather but a comparison of periods that are almost half a year long!



The meteorologists warn that there could be floods but I don't think that there is such a direct relationship between a persistently lousy weather and floods. Impressive enough floods probably require some accumulation of water in the atmosphere while the persistently bad weather is delivering the precipitation in the form of rather uniform showers. These neverending showers and clouds is what the climate alarmists present as the "nice homogenized weather free of any extremes" but I have called it the "socialist weather" for 30 years (because this is how I remember the early 1980s) and even though farmers may like it, I am confident that most people agree that such a weather simply sucks.

Needless to say, the articles also mention promises of a global warming trend that our weather should eventually return to. Nice.



I want to emphasize how much more important these annoying yet mundane changes of the weather (which self-evidently have natural causes) are relatively to the "marvelous" effects that the promised global warming trends could ever bring us. If your good mood strongly depends on a sunny weather – or even clear skies – your reasons for a good mood were 5 times weaker than 2 years ago. That's a huge difference that may encourage suicides, the folks suggest. And I am not even going to explain what the cloudy weather does to the photovoltaic industry in which Czechia is still a major "power".

On the other hand, even if you adopt the hugely overestimated median predictions by the IPCC, the overall change of the global temperature during the two years that they want to attribute to CO2 is something like 0.03 °C. Imagine that you are a sane person and I ask you: What is the more important change among the following two: the increase of cloud cover from 61% to 82% or an increase of the global mean temperature (that is only very weakly correlated with the local temperature anywhere) by 0.03 °C?



Clearly, no human in the world could possibly detect the latter without special gadgets – and even common thermometers aren't really enough. On the other hand, everyone notices the lousy weather we've had in the Czech Republic since the early 2013 or so. After all, the clouds decide about more than 10 °C changes of the temperature during the daytime, 300 times greater temperature difference than the hypothetically CO2-induced temperature change. It's important to see various events and changes in the proper context and ignore events and changes that are manifestly 100+ times less important than certain other things that we pretty much ignore, too.

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