OK, climate sceptics: here's the raw data you wanted

[cjolley]

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20739-ok-climate-sceptics-heres-the-raw-data-you-wanted.html

Anyone can now view for themselves the raw data that was at the centre of last year's "climategate" scandal.
Temperature records going back 150 years from 5113 weather stations around the world were yesterday released to the public by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. The only records missing are from 19 stations in Poland, which refused to allow them to be made public.
"We released [the dataset] to dispel the myths that the data have been inappropriately manipulated, and that we are being secretive," says Trevor Davies, the university's pro-vice-chancellor for research. "Some sceptics argue we must have something to hide, and we've released the data to pull the rug out from those who say there isn't evidence that the global temperature is increasing."
...

[Dr Mordrid]

Too late - no ones listening, and the perceptions going to get worse now that Charles Monnett, one of Al Gore's scientific sources on Inconvenient Truth and on the US Govt. payroll, has been suspended and is under investigation for scientific misconduct.

Link....

APNewsBreak: Arctic scientist under investigation

By BECKY BOHRER - Associated Press

JUNEAU, ALASKA A federal wildlife biologist whose observation that polar bears likely drowned in the Arctic helped galvanize the global warming movement during the last decade was placed on administrative leave while officials investigate scientific misconduct allegations.

While it wasn't clear what the exact allegations are, a government watchdog group representing Anchorage-based scientist Charles Monnett said investigators have focused on his 2006 journal article about the bears that garnered worldwide attention.

The group, Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, filed a complaint on Monnett's behalf Thursday with the agency, the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement.

BOEMRE told Monnett on July 18 that he was being put on leave, pending an investigation into "integrity issues." The investigator has not yet told him of the specific charges or questions related to the scientific integrity of his work, said Jeff Ruch, the watchdog group's executive director.

A BOEMRE spokeswoman, Melissa Schwartz, acknowledged there was an "ongoing internal investigation" but declined to get into specifics about it.

Whatever the outcome or the nature of the allegations, the investigation could fuel the ongoing fight between climate change activists and those who are skeptical of scientists' findings about global warming. The probe also focuses attention on an Obama administration policy intended to protect scientists from political interference.
>

[Dr Mordrid]

Also, seems some new NASA data shows something interesting -

Remote Sensing paper....

Forbes...

NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

Study co-author Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and U.S. Science Team Leader for the Advanced Microwave Scanning Radiometer flying on NASA's Aqua satellite, reports that real-world data from NASA's Terra satellite contradict multiple assumptions fed into alarmist computer models.

"The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show," Spencer said in a July 26 University of Alabama press release. "There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans."

In addition to finding that far less heat is being trapped than alarmist computer models have predicted, the NASA satellite data show the atmosphere begins shedding heat into space long before United Nations computer models predicted.

The new findings are extremely important and should dramatically alter the global warming debate.
>

[cjolley]

Too late - no ones listening, and the perceptions going to get worse...

See? And there I was thinking that the denialists were just after the scientific truth.

[Brian Ellis]

NASA satellite data from the years 2000 through 2011 show the Earth's atmosphere is allowing far more heat to be released into space than alarmist computer models have predicted, reports a new study in the peer-reviewed science journal Remote Sensing. The study indicates far less future global warming will occur than United Nations computer models have predicted, and supports prior studies indicating increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide trap far less heat than alarmists have claimed.

1. Cherry-picking data is bad science, as is also using language with an agenda. Just because more heat is "released" does not mean that more heat is not retained. This would be expected as global temperatures rise.

2. The loaded and unscientific word 'alarmist' is used twice in the one paragraph. This removes all scientific credibility from it. These guys are tarring the IPCC with the brush. This is ridiculous as IPCC are continually improving their science as new data become available and, in so doing, may modify what the uninitiated public conceive as 'alarmist' in either direction. If they cherry-pick only the arguments that suit them, then this indicates exactly how unscientific they are. Unfortunately newspaper hacks are unable to be impartial because most of them are pig-ignorant on the subject and jump on buzz-words.

3. The "trapping" of radiation from the earth's surface by greenhouse gases (note that they mention only one out of several tens, carbon dioxide, ignoring all the others) and its effects has been known since about 1820 and quantified mathematically by Svente Arrhenius in a paper published in 1896. Since then, his formula has been very slightly refined by himself and others but it is still valid. He calculated what would happen by doubling and halving CO2 levels in 1906 and his results tie in within the median tolerances of modern modelling.

4. I sum this up with one word: RUBBISH on the basis that media reporting is usually so. Remember the MMR/Autism scare that was generated, without the slightest scientific grounds, by the media using exactly the same techniques of cherry-picking and inappropriate unscientific language?

[Dr Mordrid]

The University of Alabama in Huntsville works with NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center (also in Huntsville) on its studies and posted this -

http://www.uah.edu/news/newspages/campusnews.php?id=564

Climate models get energy balance wrong, make too hot forecasts of global warming

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. (July 26, 2011) -- Data from NASA's Terra satellite shows that when the climate warms, Earth's atmosphere is apparently more efficient at releasing energy to space than models used to forecast climate change have been programmed to "believe."

The result is climate forecasts that are warming substantially faster than the atmosphere, says Dr. Roy Spencer, a principal research scientist in the Earth System Science Center at The University of Alabama in Huntsville.

The previously unexplained differences between model-based forecasts of rapid global warming and meteorological data showing a slower rate of warming have been the source of often contentious debate and controversy for more than two decades.

In research published this week in the journal “Remote Sensing,” Spencer and UA-Huntsville's Dr. Danny Braswell compared what a half dozen climate models say the atmosphere should do to satellite data showing what the atmosphere actually did during the 18 months before and after warming events between 2000 and 2011.

"The satellite observations suggest there is much more energy lost to space during and after warming than the climate models show," Spencer said. "There is a huge discrepancy between the data and the forecasts that is especially big over the oceans."

Not only does the atmosphere release more energy than previously thought, it starts releasing it earlier in a warming cycle. The models forecast that the climate should continue to absorb solar energy until a warming event peaks.

Instead, the satellite data shows the climate system starting to shed energy more than three months before the typical warming event reaches its peak.

"At the peak, satellites show energy being lost while climate models show energy still being gained," Spencer said.

This is the first time scientists have looked at radiative balances during the months before and after these transient temperature peaks.

Applied to long-term climate change, the research might indicate that the climate is less sensitive to warming due to increased carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere than climate modelers have theorized. A major underpinning of global warming theory is that the slight warming caused by enhanced greenhouse gases should change cloud cover in ways that cause additional warming, which would be a positive feedback cycle.

Instead, the natural ebb and flow of clouds, solar radiation, heat rising from the oceans and a myriad of other factors added to the different time lags in which they impact the atmosphere might make it impossible to isolate or accurately identify which piece of Earth's changing climate is feedback from manmade greenhouse gases.

"There are simply too many variables to reliably gauge the right number for that," Spencer said. "The main finding from this research is that there is no solution to the problem of measuring atmospheric feedback, due mostly to our inability to distinguish between radiative forcing and radiative feedback in our observations."

For this experiment, the UA-Huntsville team used surface temperature data gathered by the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Great Britain. The radiant energy data was collected by the Clouds and Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) instruments aboard NASA's Terra satellite.

The six climate models were chosen from those used by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The UA-Huntsville team used the three models programmed using the greatest sensitivity to radiative forcing and the three that programmed in the least sensitivity.

[Brian Ellis]

If you skim through the Spencer and Braswell article (not a scientific paper) at http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-conte...diagnos_11.pdf you may come to a much more mitigated conclusion. It clearly shows time lags in radiative weather changes as measured by satellites. Some of these changes increase forcing and some decrease it.

Just the abstract will tell you that this research is very much at a hypothetical stage.

Abstract: The sensitivity of the climate system to an imposed radiative imbalance remains the largest
source of uncertainty in projections of future anthropogenic climate change. Here we present further
evidence that this uncertainty from an observational perspective is largely due to the masking of the
radiative feedback signal by internal radiative forcing, probably due to natural cloud variations. That
these internal radiative forcings exist and likely corrupt feedback diagnosis is demonstrated with lag
regression analysis of satellite and coupled climate model data, interpreted with a simple forcing
feedback model. While the satellitebased metrics for the period 20002010 depart substantially in the
direction of lower climate sensitivity from those similarly computed from coupled climate models, we
find it is not possible with current methods to quantify this discrepancy in terms of the feedbacks
which determine climate sensitivity. It is concluded that atmospheric feedback diagnosis of the
climate system remains an unsolved problem, due primarily to the inability to distinguish between
radiative forcing and radiative feedback in satellite radiative budget observations.

Fig. 2b does not give any real conclusive visual clues, one way or the other. The last sentence of the article states, remembering that the authors' measurements were made during El Niño and La Niña phases:

What this might (or might not) imply regarding the ultimate causes of the El Niño and La Niña
phenomena is not relevant to our central point, i.e. that the presence of radiative forcing in satellite
radiative flux measurements corrupts the diagnosis of radiative feedback.

Do you really like to quote such hypotheses as if they were fact to bolster your argument?

PS I'm quite happy that. if further research by the authors and subsequent publication of a peer-reviewed scientific paper show that we need to improve the climate change forcing models, this will be taken into account by the IPCC who do recalculations every few months in the light of new data.

[cjolley]

...I'm quite happy that. if further research by the authors and subsequent publication of a peer-reviewed scientific paper show that we need to improve the climate change forcing models, this will be taken into account by the IPCC who do recalculations every few months in the light of new data.

"Too late - no ones listening...blah, blah blah"

Just pre-answering for Doc.

[Marshmallowman]

yet the arctic is melting faster than predicted...

[Evildead666]

yet the arctic is melting faster than predicted...

No, No, its just a mass hallucination.
Move along now.