Sunday morning catchup - A climate change special

Some wind power stories that I neglected to blog about recently.

1) Prince Philip showed why he is one of my favourite royals when he opined that wind farms were ‘absolutely useless’, completely reliant on subsidies and that those who claimed they were one of the most cost-effective forms of renewable energy believed in ‘fairytales’.


2) Melanie Phillips in The Mail explains why 'Once again, Prince Philip has performed an invaluable national service by tilting at windmills — or to be more precise in this case, wind turbines.'

3) James Delingpole sings the praises (or not) of peer-review on Amazon.


4) Watts Up With That sings the praises of Donna Laframboise’s new exposé book on the IPCC.


5) The Resilient Earth explains 'Why Climate Models Lie'. Here's the start of the article, do go and read the whole piece:

'It has come to light that a number of climate scientists have been less than truthful with regard to climate data. As shocking and embarrassing as this has been to the scientific community, it serves only to emphasize the huge blind spot that scientists have for their computer models. It is a career ending offense to knowingly falsify data, yet the entire climate science community engages in even worse deception without a second thought. This is because lies are generated for them wholesale by their faithful yet duplicitous servants: computer climate models.

In a guest post on Roger Pielke Sr.'s web site, Hiroshi L. Tanaka of the University of the University of Tsukuba in Japan, reported on the results of a new paper he published with his student, Masahiro Ohashi (see “Data Analysis of Recent Warming Pattern in the Arctic”). In it they state “it is shown that both of decadal variabilities before and after 1989 in the Arctic can be mostly explained by the natural variability of the AO not by the external response due to the human activity.” While this is an important finding in and of itself, that is not what caught my attention.

The implications of Ohashi and Tanaka's finding for climate modeling are even more dramatic, and even more damaging, for the climate alarmist cause. Why this new finding is so damaging goes to the heart of how modeling is done and how models are calibrated to reflect previously “known” conditions. Here is how Dr. Tanaka stated the implications of their research:

According to our result, the rapid warming during 1970-1990 contains a large fraction of unpredictable natural variability due to the AO. The subsequent period of 1990-2010 indicates a clear trend of the AO to be negative. The global warming has been stopped by natural variability superimposed on the gentle anthropogenic global warming. The important point is that the IPCC models have been tuned perfectly to fit the rapid warming during 1970-1990 by means of the ice-albedo feedback (anthropogenic forcing) which is not actually observed. IPCC models are justified with this wrong scientific basis and are applied to project the future global warming for 100 years in the future. Hence, we warn that the IPCC models overestimate the warming trend due to the mislead Arctic Oscillation.

This mildly worded warning belies the theory shattering implications it contains for all climate modelers who have depended on a strong ice-albedo feedback to calibrate their models. As the old computer programming saying goes, “garbage in, garbage out.” Tanaka has just informed the world's climate modelers that that have been basing their models on garbage. More specifically, what the modelers and climate scientists took for a strong anthropogenically influenced feedback, albedo change due to changes in ice cover, has been shown to be mostly attributable to natural variability.'