Postma’s ideas concerning the inadequacy of a diurnal average of insolation have merit if (as I suspect) the effect of SW on the ocean is non-linear. However the way Postmas ideas have been presented along with Claes Johnson’s have not been well recieved (on eiher side) and I doubt you’ll get anywhere with govt bodies quoting their work.

The KISS principle is the best way to deal with officials in my experience.

All the best

TB.

No I haven’t send the piece you wrote to either offices (yet, see below) mainly because the Prime Ministers Science Advisory Committee does not respond except to say they have received it so it’s like feeding information into a black hole. It is also difficult to engage our public institutions at a level of discussion (or any discussion) where scientific issues are addressed on their merits (i.e. if the IPCC don’t say it it ain’t so). I ‘m also finding it difficult finding the time to put the arguments together at the moment due to work and keeping up with climate science developments.

I have however gained a little traction by changing tack and approaching our Ministry for the Environment, Climate Change Office in the first instance with Cc to the PMSAC that has produced an exchange of letters. Robin Pittman, a NZ Elec. Engineer who checks in here from time to time has done similarly by presenting the latest Lindzen and Choi, Knox and Douglass and Spencer – Braswell papers to MftE CC but the difficulty is to elicit an informed and non-consensus response. Robin received a response that ignored K&D and S-B and addressed L&C’s PREVIOUS paper citing a RealClimate blog article by Trenberth, Fasullo and O’Dell: “Lindzen and Choi Unravelled”. So you see what we’re up against (an uninformed propaganda office).

I don’t want to overdo my approaches to MftE CC in case my avenue of engagement is cut off but given the CERN CLOUD results and solar grand minimum predictions (the latter sent to the PMSAC), your 6 point case is a useful approach that can be updated and used in the near future possibly.

In the meantime I’m in the process of replying to the latest MftE CC response to a challenge I made that they publish 7 key climate metrics on an on-going basis for this century overlaid with IPCC/AGW predictions so that the public can monitor the validity of the predictions. Understandably there has been some reluctance by them to do so saying “they are widely available” (apparently).

I have extracted a concession from them however in that they cite Easterling and Wehner 2009 who say we should expect natural variability to dominate climate now and then for periods of up one or two DECADES (!). I see this as a fall-back or face-saving position in view of recent climate not following predictions (also a tactic being employed by the UK Met Office BTW). On the other hand they characterize my cases for each of the 7 metrics not going to plan as blog science because I lifted some text from blog articles (they CITE blog articles but that’s OK if it’s RealClimate it seems). My reply will be to list all 20 peer-reviewed papers that I cited. I’ve been meaning to get the reply away but other things have got in the way.

What I have been spending time on is investigating (and you might be interested in this Roger) the heating effect of GHG DLR vs solar SW on geologic materials (water, rock etc) in conjunction with Trenberth, Fasullo and Kiehl’s (TF&Ks) “Earth Energy Balance” where they ascribe 333 W.m2 to GHG DLR and 161 W.m2 to solar SW. I contend that the GHG DLR is an ineffective heating agent compared to solar SW due to the difference in spectral range and energy transmission ability and that the energy balance is erroneous (you touch on this re water in point 2 of your case). You can follow my investigation down the thread starting here:-

http://www.climateconversation.wordshine.co.nz/2011/08/just-one-fact/#comment-64413

There’s some errors in it (yes water absorbs DLR but only minimally) but I don’t think I’m that far wrong on most of it. I note too that a group is studying heat flow from the earth’s core i.e. the heat gradient from core to surface and they say “Even in the absence of the sun the lowest few metres of the atmosphere would warm by about 282 degrees on average (that is, to 9 deg.C) due to the heat coming from the crust”. I don’t know how accurate that is but TF&K do not account for for anything like that from memory, see:-

Climate Forcing from the Earth’s Core

http://climate-change-theory.com/

What Physics says about CLIMATE CHANGE

http://earth-climate.com/

It would be best to discuss this topic in the “Just One Fact” thread linked above dealing with TF&K (I think it was discussed in a thread at WUWT but I can’t remember where, not being much of a visitor there).

Cheers, Rich.

“This is because the specific heat capacity of water is much, MUCH higher than air [4000:1]“

Keep up the good work down there, and well done on getting NIWA back on the straight and narrow with the NZ temperature record!

Regards to all

TB.

Salinger might have been fired but NIWA are using him in a consulting role so that dismissal was mainly window dressing.

The raw data set is the “Monthy Mean”. It is in fact not a mean at all, it is the average of weekly figures which in turn are the averages of daily measures.

This raw data set is manipulated in various ways one of which is the “annual mean rate of growth”. It is (roughly) the change in the seasonally adjusted average of the 4 months bunched around the end of each calendar year with the four months bunched around the start of the calendar year and is calculated once a year. Not a particularly useful number.

There inevitably has to be a break out from the medium term straight line trend in atmospheric CO2. Because the data exhibits a nice regular 12 month pattern a straightforward 12 month moving average of the raw data is the best way to monitor that.

I have down loaded the Maui sequence to excel. Please email me if you would like a version

The monthly figure is the average of the five weekly May figures being 394.00, 392.94, 394.78, 394.97, 394.07 average 394.15. The site is still showing the April monthly figure of 393.18 but all the numbers are there to calculate May.

The 2010 May monthly peak was 392.96 so the increase was 1.19. The annual growth data gives historic.