The UK Met orifice...a man called Wayne Mapp...and the Pacific sea level...

...ever vigilant reader Butch (right) spotted this reference to a UK enthusiast (John Graham-Cumming) whose amateur sleuthing led to this glorious headline in the London Times... How I made the Met Office admit its climate-change data was wrong...

...Since my training is in mathematics and computing I thought it best to write self-checking code: I’m unfamiliar with the science of climate change and so having my program perform internal checks for consistency was vital to making sure I didn’t make a mistake.
To my surprise the program complained about average temperatures in Australia and New Zealand. At first I assumed I’d made a mistake in the code and used a pocket calculator to double check the calculations. The result was unequivocal: something was wrong with the average temperature data in Oceania. And I also stumbled upon other small errors in calculations. About a week after I’d told the Met Office about these problems I received a response confirming that I was correct: a problem in the process of updating Met Office records had caused the wrong average temperatures to be reported...more here...

In the grand scheme of things - small potatoes, but for the UK Met. office another awful humiliation. After making absurdly confident and dramatically wrong predictions of BBQ summers and mild winters Met. office workers must be a shamefaced lot. "Well, what do you do for a crust then ? "I uhh, uhh work in the uhh Met. Office..."

...and with a deep H/T to PKH and WhaleOil...are you ready to read of obfuscation, disingenuity and Parliamentary chicanery here in NZ ? This exchange, written in Hansard is a series of straightforward and evaded Parliamentary questions re NIWA (our Met. office) to Mr Wayne Mapp, our Minister of Research, Sci­ence and Tech­nol­ogy. Read it and weep...

...and when the global warming alarmist hysteria was at its height, and the science was all settled, I posted about the ARGOS project; a worldwide network of buoys recording salinity, ocean temperature and sea levels. ARGOS and ongoing experiments, such as the CLOUD experiment at CERN, will answer many questions, provide comprehensive data and fill in some important gaps in climate science. With ARGOS data just in we learn that... (H/T The Hockey Schtick):

... The full 6 year dataset from January 31, 2004 to January 31, 2010 of the ARGO global network of 3198 free drifting ocean floats with GPS...is now available. Using the Pacific Marine Atlas program to plot data from the entire network shows a downtrend in Sea Height over the past six years (January 31, 2004 - January 31, 2010) using data from the entire network...The trendline shows the rate of global sea level decrease to be -.1mm/year or-10mm/century...more here...

This is already being labelled Oceangate, and could well be the last gate to shut the IPCC down. Read more here...This, I hope, is real science coming in, not just alarmist predictions from a poorly set up spreadsheet (ever been crazy enough - I have - to make an investment based on one ? ) and it is providing data that is killing alarmism. Such data hammers nail after nail into the climatastrophe coffin...Won't the worried people of greensleaze, and Prince Charles, Bono and the WWF and all the occupants of Tuvalu be so pleased !

...and with that I'm signing off. Posting will be intermittent and maybe even non-existent for 3 1/2 weeks, as I experience northern hemisphere (UK) global warming first hand. I'll be making full use of night clubs, bars, cosy rooms, internet cafes and getting to net access whenever and wherever I can, all the time keeping warm, dry and very well hydrated. Your comments (including details of crap investments made after consulting crappier spreadsheets) are as always, most welcome. Salut !

Clouds, the CLOUD experiment and cosmic rays...

...on July 2nd, I posted that "the smoking gun" that shatters the warmists' arguments is getting close to hand. The smoking gun will be wielded by scientists, and the bullets will come from the CLOUD experiment at CERN, and from the ongoing ARGOS sea temperature buoys, quietly bobbing around in their thousands worldwide gathering sea temperature data. Entering the arena on behalf of AGW sceptics is Danish scientist Henrik Svensmark, the author of The Chilling Stars... his theories contradict the IPCC’s theory of anthropogenic global warming, which basically blames last century's rise in average global temperature on human CO2 emissions. As many good scientists outside of the inbred climate change community have noticed, carbon dioxide just isn't up to the job of causing last century's observed global temperature rise. Instead, Svensmark and his colleagues hypothesize that clouds created by cosmic rays, which are in part controlled by the activity of the sun, regulate Earth's climate. Because this contradicts the IPCC's view of global warming, Svensmark's theory has been ignored by the climate alarmists and Svensmark himself vilified...according to Svensmark: “Instead of thinking of clouds as a result of the climate, it’s actually showing that the climate is a result of the clouds, because the clouds take their orders from the stars.” He has released a new paper detailing the most recent results from his continuing study of a possible link between cosmic rays, aerosols, cloud formation, and our climate, which concludes:

• Our results show global-scale evidence of conspicuous influences of solar variability on cloudiness and aerosols. Irrespective of the detailed mechanism, the loss of ions from the air during fine days reduces the cloud liquid water content over the oceans. So marked is the response to relatively small variations in the total ionization, we suspect that a large fraction of Earth’s clouds could be controlled by ionization. Future work should estimate how large a volume of the Earth’s atmosphere is involved in the ion process that leads to the changes...and its importance for the Earth’s radiation budget. From solar activity to cosmic ray ionization to aerosols and liquid-water clouds, a causal chain appears to operate on a global scale....more here....

Note the Eagle Nebula picture above, click to enlarge. More here...

The smoking gun is getting close to hand...

...Since this blog began, I have posted the address details of the ARGOS and CLOUD experiments many times. To reiterate, ARGOS is an extensive experiment monitoring ocean temperatures using thousands of submersible buoys, distributed around the world. The CLOUD experiment uses a cloud chamber to study the possible link between galactic cosmic rays and cloud formation. Based at the Proton Synchrotron at CERN, this is the first time a high-energy physics accelerator has been used to study atmospheric and climate science. I have stated many times that these two experiments and others will teach us a great deal more about our climate, and in so doing will correct the pseudo-scientific theory of AGW. To their great and everlasting shame, many so-called climate scientists have joined in Al Gore's crusade to cripple Western economies, and have agreed with Gore, Hansen and others that the "science is settled" and that the results of ARGOS and CLOUD will not effect their climatastrophe theories. Many of these sham scientists will be shaking in their boots as results become public from ARGOS and CLOUD, and WuWT offers this hint that the smoking gun is getting close to hand...The end is near for the warmists, I suspect. This month, Jasper Kirkby of CERN explained the Centre’s CLOUD experiment, which is moving forward...
• Climate has continually varied in the past, and the causes are not well understood – especially on the 100 year timescale relevant for today’s climate change
• Strong evidence for solar-climate variability, but no established mechanism. A cosmic ray influence on clouds is a leading candidate
• CLOUD at CERN aims to study and quantify the cosmic ray/cloud mechanism in a controlled laboratory experiment
• The question of whether – and to what extent – the climate is influenced by solar/cosmic ray variability remains central to our understanding of anthropogenic climate change ...more here...

...in other words there is still much to learn, and nothing like certainty over AGW...and P.S, an internal report suppressed by the E.P.A. is having significant repercussions...the truly shocking thing is the content of that report. The executive summary contains a list of items contradicting claim after claim put forth by the IPCC and global warming alarmists. The contents are nothing short of incendiary...more from The Resilient Earth here...