Govindan et al. (some of the authors being famous people who promoted fractals) showed in Phys. Rev. Let. (and in a book edited by Murray "SantaFe" Gell-Mann) that there is apparently universal scaling
- C(s) = #.s^{-gamma}
where the exponent "gamma" seems to be universal, between 0.6 and 0.7, independently of the location (at least as long as it is a continental station). The universal exponent could very well be 0.65. (This counting is somewhat analogous to the CMB scale-invariant spectrum but the exponent differs.) The law seems to hold when "s" is a couple of days or ten years - in fact, no violation of the law is known from the data, not even at very long time scales. This critical exponent is what I call an interesting insight about temperature dynamics.
The authors demonstrate that most climate models give a very different exponent which is usually closer to an experimentally wrong value 0.5, and moreover lead to results that depend on the location: coasts are supposed to differ. Because the results of Govindan et al. imply that the climate models don't work - and moreover, more concretely, overestimate the trends, the consensual scientists such as William immediately know what to think about the paper:
- But... is [the paper] any good? Weeeeeelllll... probably not. This is yet more of the fitting power laws to things stuff. They use "detrended fluctuation analysis" (DFA) which I don't understand, but that doesn't matter, we'll just read the results.
Of course, the result that William sees at the end of the paper is that the models give wrong exponents and their prediction of global warming is thus unjustified. This could mean that the predicted global warming will be smaller than one predicted by IPCC 2001, and therefore William knows what to think about the paper even though he does not understand a word.
I added the boldface because William's innocently honest description of the "mainstream" climate edition of the "scientific method" is refreshing. William continues with some amount of nonsensical criticism - such as that it is strange that they included Prague as a representative city :-) - and then he promoted a paper by Fraedrich and Blender (FB), also in Phys. Rev. Let.
These Gentlemen offer a surprising conclusion that the scaling exponent should be around 0.5 for inner continents and 1 for the oceans which William, of course, immediately accepts. Why? Because it would help his global warming beliefs.
I have not analyzed the data in detail, but the FB statement seems to contradict something I would call a physics intuition. Oceans or continents can change the (dimensionful) timescales of exponentially decaying processes or the overall size of the temperature fluctuations, but they should not change the (dimensionless) critical exponents of the power laws.
It should not be surprising that the original team, Bunde et al., published a one-page comment also in Phys. Rev. Let. about FB which shows that the FB results contradict both their analysis as well as the initial data. Of course, William won't inform you about such a thing and he will erase every comment on his blog that would try to link to the new corrected paper by Bonde et al. - which is what he did to my comment. He's just damned scared that all these flawed scientific assertions will be revealed.
Instead, he is going to convince you that the critical exponents (and probably also the rest of physics) are uninteresting because they have already validated their friends' models and no amount of heresy such as the critical exponents - or publications in Phys. Rev. Let. that no true AGW believer would ever read - can change the holy word. ;-)
Meanwhile, the people who are still able to use their brains may compute the critical exponents in the statistical climate data and falsify most of the climate models that are being used today. Noise is not always the same thing as another noise, and there are scientific methods to determine whether two "noises" match. Cosmologists have been using these methods for more than a decade to analyze the CMB. The modern alchemists of course don't want to hear about the methods that have the power to show that some models are simply wrong and the "wrongness" can't be hidden behind the apparent "randomness" because when investigated scientifically, "randomness" is not universal. The very purpose of science is to uncover the layer of randomness and see the patterns that can be expressed by quantitatively measurable and predictable numbers.
Finally, there have been quite many different papers that show that the climate models fail to reproduce the observed temperatures, for example paper from Boston University here; or a paper by Douglass et al.
