We haven’t had a new post since 2014, but while the blog hasn’t been very active, we have been very busy continuing our climate research. So, in case anyone is wondering how our work is going, here’s a short progress report of what we’ve been doing since 2014.
In this essay, we summarise the results of our three “Urbanization bias” papers, which we have submitted for peer review at the Open Peer Review Journal.
Urban areas are known to be warmer than rural areas. This is known as the “urban heat island” effect.
This is a problem for analysing global temperature trends, because the widespread urbanization since the 19th century has introduced an artificial warming “urbanization bias” into many of the weather station records around the world. As a result, much of the “unusual global warming since the Industrial Revolution” which has been reported is just an artefact of urbanization bias.
Several groups have claimed that urbanization bias has already been taken into account in the global temperature estimates, and that they’re sure the unusual global warming is due to man-made global warming. However, in our three papers, we show that those claims are invalid.
Urbanization bias has seriously biased the current global temperature trend estimates. When we properly account for this bias, it turns out that it was probably just as warm in the 1930s and 1940s!
In this essay, we summarise the results of our “Has poor station quality biased U.S. temperature trend estimates?” paper, which we have submitted for peer review at the Open Peer Review Journal. The recent Surface Stations project has revealed that about 70% of the U.S. stations used for studying temperature trends are currently located near artificial heating sources, e.g., concrete surfaces, air conditioning units, parking lots. We found that this poor station quality has increased the mean temperature trends of the raw records by about half.
It has previously been claimed that these biases have been removed by a series of data adjustments carried out by the National Climatic Data Center on these station records. However, we found that these adjustments to be inappropriate. The adjustments spread the biases uniformly amongst the stations, instead of removing them.
It appears that poor siting has led to an overestimation of U.S. temperature trends. It is likely that similar siting problems exist for the rest of the world. This means that the amount of “global warming” which is thought to have occurred since the 19th century has probably been overestimated.
In this essay, we summarise the results of our three “Physics of the Earth’s atmosphere” papers, which we have submitted for peer review at the Open Peer Review Journal.
For these papers we carried out new laboratory experiments to measure the mechanisms by which energy is transmitted throughout the atmosphere. We also analysed the distribution of energy throughout the atmosphere, using data from more than 13 million weather balloons.
Our experimental results show that the temperature distribution in the atmosphere is completely independent of greenhouse gas concentrations. This directly contradicts the greenhouse effect theory, which predicts that increasing carbon dioxide concentrations should cause the lower atmosphere to heat up (“global warming”).
Our results also provide important new insights into why the jet streams exist, why tropical cyclones form, and how to predict the weather. In addition, they suggest a new mechanism for the formation of ozone in the ozone layer, which implies that the expansion and contraction of the ozone layer is much quicker than had previously been thought.
In this essay, we summarise the results of our “Global temperature changes of the last millennium” paper, which we have submitted for peer review at the Open Peer Review Journal.
We reviewed the various studies which have attempted to estimate how global temperatures have changed over the last 1000 years, by using tree rings, lake sediments and ice cores, and other “temperature proxies”.
All of these studies have identified at least three climatic periods – a warm “Medieval Warm Period” (roughly 800-1200 A.D.), a cold “Little Ice Age” (roughly 1500-1850 A.D.) and a warm “Current Warm Period” (roughly 1900 A.D. on).
There has been a lot of controversy over how temperatures in the Medieval Warm Period compared to present temperatures. Some studies claim that temperatures in the Current Warm Period are much warmer than in the Medieval Warm Period because of man-made global warming, whereas other studies find that global temperatures in the Medieval Warm Period were just as warm as in the Current Warm Period.
This is an important issue for the global warming debate, because if the Medieval Warm Period was comparable to the Current Warm Period, this would suggest that much of the recent global warming has nothing to do with carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. After all, the Medieval Warm Period pre-dates the Industrial Revolution.
In our paper, we discuss different ways in which this issue could be resolved.