Well, I’m tired but it would seem that it’s not late in California so I’m a “wide awake tired” 8-}

The conference has TV coverage here:

http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=144

though it asks for a login to watch. The Heartland Institute coverage is here:

http://www.heartland.org/environmentandclimate-news.org/index.html

So between them you ought to be able to join the fun, at least vicariously ;-)

If anyone knows of a better video link, feel free to post it.

Day Two, Science Track 1 & 2

There are 2 science tracks, one public policy track, and one economics track. Being both a science geek and an economist means I want to attend 3 tracks at most times and the other about 1/2 the time… Sigh. Completely overloaded and only getting 1/4 of the “show”. Guess I’ll be joining folks watching the videos later…

So, a couple of ‘crib notes’ on the events that I did attend:

Willie Soon

Had a droll and quite funny presentation on where the warmers have it wrong and our place in the Galaxy. He lampooned the idea of CO2 as being able to move the climate system and portrayed the sun as “King Kong” and the climate system as “Refrigerator Perry”, with CO2 as “Willie Soon” and asked who could move whom? Then pointed out that the warmers think Willie could move Perry if he was eating a lot of hamburgers… A real metaphor for the notion that CO2 is weak, but it’s rate of change is fast so the warmers assert it will dominate. If you can, see his presentations, well worth it.

Habibullo Abdussamatov

His presentation was titled simply “The Sun Dictates the Climate”. And that does more or less sum it up.

A wonderful man with a quick broad smile. Yet he can scowl at the assertion that CO2 matters in a most effective way. I took an instant liking to him. There is much that American and British “climate scientists” can learn from this man. He impressed me as a very “old school” classical scientist. A “Mr. McGuire” type (for those who’ve read my stuff for a while).

IMHO, he has the science exactly right.

The downside? He is stating flat out that we are headed for a Little Ice Age. The solar changes dictate cooling. The ocean mass delays it for about 40 years. And we’re headed for a lot of cold. There is a 200 year periodic decent of Total Solar Irradiance, that causes a Little Ice Age, and we’re due. The mechanism he asserts is a 250 km decrease in solar radius and that changes solar interior dynamics and processes. A plot of phase and amplitude for both sun spot number and solar radius showed a near perfect match, with the onset of the solar quieting in 1999.

Not the type to be bashful about making clear predictions (no wussy “projections” for this man!) he stated flat out the “New Little Ice Age begins in 2014.” Though with various lags from things such as ocean heat content and climate cooling rates, the depth of the NLIA is not reached until 2042 +/- 11 years for the solar minimum and then 2065 +/- 11 years for the temperature minimum.

So I’d suggest now might be a good time to go shopping for that place in Florida or Texas… Phoenix is looking better and better too – though wear shades 8-)

He asserts that water vapor is the key feedback mechanism, and that as water vapor drops in the cold, we start the positive feedback decent. This has some rather significant implications for food supply too. ( Oil and food would be good investments long term… though farms might well be poor investments as their yields will be dropping, IMHO).

His final conclusion ought to be written in Neon Lights in every city of the world:

We need to concentrate on economic development to adapt to the coming New Little Ice Age.

I could not agree more.

Craig Loehle

A very good presentation that looked at climate variation and found that natural climate cycles are all that is needed to explain the changes we see. (Though he hedges it with “most” of the 20th century changes…)

He recommended a paper by Klyashtorin and Lyubushin 2003 that is described here:

http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog/cyclical_climate_changes/

I think…

He opened with a statement that he was using Hadley data even though it appeared to have major issues ( I’d call it “cooked”) and pointed out in particular that two datasets are both identified as “HadCRUT 3” yet the 2008 version is different from the 2010 version with significant added warming. Yet no notice to users of the data that it had changed. With that caveat…

He finds that 55% of the “warming” in that data from 1970 to 200 can be explained by the natural PDO cycle and that there is a natural climate cycle of 59 years (which is all the more pointed when you think about warmers using a 30 year ‘baseline’ smack dab in the bottom of the cold half cycle, then screaming for 30 years that it’s getting warmer… “Well Duh!” comes to mind).

He then mentioned that it was difficult to get published. IMHO, we need a new journal. Perhaps “Proceedings of the ICCC”. There are clearly plenty of folks with Ph.Ds to do the peer review. (The vast bulk of folks presenting have at least Ph.D. after their name, I’m leaving them off just since I don’t feel like typing it 100 times ;-) So I see nothing that stands in the way of simply bypassing the “Pal Review” and “Editor in Your Pocket” system that has been built by the “ClimateGate Crew”. Frankly, I think the ClimateGate Crew have peed on enough folks papers that the bulk of scientists would be happy to flock to a new Journal of Record.

Joseph D’Aleo

I had to dash between Track 1 and Track 2 to see both Joe and Anthony. They really do need to put those guys together or at least not in competing sessions. I noticed Verity Jones of Digging In The Clay was also dashing between the two.

Joe gave a rousing presentation slow roasting the warmers as only he can do. Slides of cooked data, past made colder, recent warmer, bent folded, spindled and mutilated by the warmers. But Joe had both old and new and showed what they were up to.

Then, just as some brain candy dessert, he presented some quotes where the warmers were saying explicitly that their motives were biased. All in all, a rousing presentation.

I then dashed over to see Anthony. That entailed missing the presentation by S. Fred Singer ( something that bothers me… I really wanted to hear him speak as I love his books, but I wanted to see Anthony on stage just a bit more).

Howard Maccabee M.D. and Ph.D

I came in part way through this presentation. It was a well done analysis of the impacts of warmer vs colder on public health. No real surprise, cold kills far more than warm. There was the usual data manipulation scandal in that ‘warm deaths’ has all deaths counted, but ‘cold deaths’ excludes some of the major cold related causes as they get counted under “pneumonia” or “respiratory distress” or similar rather than “cold death”.

Further, there was pointed out that the proposed taxes and fuel cost increases will exacerbate deaths as folks have less fuel to keep warm. Paradoxically, it will also increase deaths from heat, as folks have less money to keep the A/C running…

The good doctor also cited the UK data that show deaths dropped as the world warmed and pointed out that the US Agencies said that didn’t count as the UK was different….

A big point to me was when he pointed out that the projected warming ought to mean 100+ Million ( I think he said 140 Million) AVOIDED deaths as people would not die of the cold. Now tie that in with what Habibullo Abdussamatov said about the NLIA. We’re talking a couple of hundred million deaths from cold… Not Good…

Anthony Watts

A rousing slide show touring some truly horrid station placement. Folks can see all of them over at http://www.surfacestations.org/ so I won’t do a ‘blow by blow’ of the slides (he had about 60? of them?)

One big takeaway I got was that many stations were sited over cement pads and other mineral surfaces that are major heat sinks which then emit heat at night. raising the ‘min’ temps. This would go a very long way toward explaining why when I do a ‘temperature rainbow graph” the summers are not warming but the colder months do and why I see differential trends by month in the dT/dt graphs (as different heating of the ‘pad’ via sun would give differential ‘warming of the mins’ by month).

One other bit of ‘eye candy’ was the FLIR slides at sewage treatment plants. For those who are not “well educated in poo” let me point out that treatment plants treat it via oxidation. Releasing one heck of a lot of heat. They are made of lots of concrete and have a load of water and “stuff” releasing a lot of heat. They also raise the humidity, so will cause a lag of temperature drops when you hit the dew point and all that humidity releases energy while forming dew. So, nothing like seeing an egg yolk yellow “facility” on a FLIR (indicating lots of IR radiation and lots of heat) and your thermometer sitting in the middle of it…

Ross McKitrick

Back to track 1, (and missing a presentation I also wanted to see on short term trends in observations vs climate models in track 2…)

Another carefully crafted analysis of models vs reality. There was so much care and such a well done nature to the presentation that I can’t possibly do justice to it. Lets just say that Ross showed in no uncertain terms that the data from several sources agree, but the models fail to match. So it’s the models that are wrong and are the outliers. The models tend to demand a very strongly heating Tropical Troposphere and we just are not getting it. So core assumptions and behaviours of the models are simply and utterly wrong.

Models can not be used to prove other models.

Gary Sharp?

We then got a bonus of a video clip that I think was presented by Gary Sharp. It showed the heat / cold cycling of water in the pacific over decades as El Niño comes and goes. How to put a movie into words? Not well… But you see the warm and cold moving and swirling and you start to see patterns, one is that it drifts north over time.

The Punch Lines being that that heat reaches the Arctic going past Alaska about 18 years after generation in the Pacific. So the warming in 2008 melting ice comes from a 1990 hot Pacific. None of the models allow for that time lag and “If you don’t have that in your model, your model is broken”. (as a pretty good paraphrase).

In Conclusion

I think you can see from these short descriptions just how much is going on here. The number of new insights per day is in some ways stunning. Nagging questions like “Why are only some winter months ‘warming’?” and “Why is Arctic ice reducing when the Arctic air has been cooling for a couple of years?” answered in every session. Even “Should I buy that Florida Condo?” 8-)

Well, enough for now. Time to try to sleep… Again…