Hot Air ALERT..Climate Mongerers at Work

That the earth’s climate changes over time, whether measured in days, years ,decades or in geological time is demonstrable and unarguable.

That atmospheric temperature changes at different levels occurs and has have consequent atmospheric effects effects on air pressure, winds, precipitation, that then affect, snow and ice melt, riverflow, ocean salinity and currents is manifest.

The principle that these atmospheric heating effects are anthropogenic, caused by human activity, rests almost completely on the effect of increasing carbon dioxide concentration caused by the combustion of fossil fuels, coal, oil and gas… with some subsidiary effects from other components such as methane and carbo-fluerons.

Moving on from this belief ,the novel industry of climate mongerers has been developed who spread cries of woe, death and destruction caused by man’s apparent indifference and hubris.

Most of the scientific research is post war and increasingly relies upon highly detailed and sophisticated monitoring and telemetry from space which is fed into huge models which run in appropriately huge computers and claim to simulate the world climate.

The most recent instalment from the Popular Front for Climate Mongerers, AKA The UK Meterological Office.. is published today ,”SURFACE AND UPPER-AIR TEMPERATURE TRENDS: IS THERE REALLY A DISCREPANCY? “

The authors (Santer et. Al) have been studying research that has been undertaken to obtain a better understanding of the large difference between estimates of temperature trends above the Earth's surface from observations and models. In 2001 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC – the Trades Union of climate mongerers), suggested from observations that the Earth's surface had warmed rapidly since 1979, whilst the air in the lower 8 km of the atmosphere above the surface had not. This difference, most evident in tropical zones directly contradicted climate models which simulated larger warming aloft, rather than at the surface.

Research led by the Met Office's Hadley Centre makes the entirely unsurprising conclusion, that; choices made by each research group in constructing climate datasets can have a significant impact. Initially satellite and balloon-based systems used were designed to provide the best possible snapshot of the global weather at any time, rather than to long term monitoring. The new research shows clearly that the choices made in homogenising the data have a particularly strong effect on estimates of climate change – or in simpler terms, if you use different methods…you obtain different results.

These findings appear in Science Express (Science's advanced online publication) this week. Santer et al. compare simulations from 19 (!) of the world's climate models with four different upper-air datasets (two from satellites and two from weather balloons).

Within the tropics, simple theory predicts that any increase in surface temperature should be accompanied by an even larger increase aloft. All the climate models considered in the Santer et al. study behave in this way, whether looking at individual months or from one decade to another. Given the differences between the models, the degree of agreement amongst them they claim is quite remarkable. All observed datasets also exhibit this behaviour on short timescales (months to years). However, on long timescales, only one of the four upper-air datasets gives amplification aloft, with others implying damping of surface temperature changes.

Here is the interesting bit ….There are (the authors claim) two potential explanations for this result;

1. In the 'real world' tropics, different processes control the link between surface and upper-air temperatures on short and long timescales, and models cannot capture such subtle behaviour.

2. Some of the observational records retain large biases which preclude their use for long-term trend analysis in the tropics.

Or in simpler terms,

1. The models don’t work properly …

2. There is a problem with the data …

But the authors hopefully and unexpectedly add..

Alhough recent analyses have not entirely resolved these issues, they have gone a long way to highlighting where further research efforts are required.

The paper will appear in Science Express on 11 August 2005 and is embargoed until this date. Wayne Elliott Senior Press Officer
Met Office FitzRoy Road Exeter Devon EX1 3PB United Kingdom