Multi-scale analysis of global temperature changes and trend of a drop in temperature in the next 20 years!?!

Tim Lambert provides the abstract of Zhen-Shan and Xian; MW was kind enough to send the text. I've seen it before... probably via Monckton or one of the std.septic channels. Lambert describes it as "just a rubbish paper that should not have been published". It comes up as one of the Schultz 7.

But why is it rubbish? (of course it must be, since it rejects the consensus :-), but is more detail of any value?).

Well, lets start off with the nearly-ad-homs: the English is in places terrible, although better than my Chinese. In most cases, this isn't a fair accusation to level at authors, since it has no real bearing on their ability as scientists, but its an indication that the journal standards may be rather low (the full ref is: Meteorol Atmos Phys 95, 115-121 (2007), DOI 10.1007/s00703-006-0199-2; I'm not familiar with the journal; its a minor one). But sometimes its so bad that the sense disappears: what does It appears to agree with the above conclusion: temperature in China has been falling on century scale in the next 20 years. mean? Should "has" mean "will"? Or should "next" be "last"? Or their conclusion: We consider that CO2 greenhouse effect impact on the trend of global temperature, simultaneity we expect to find the effect on climate change on different timescales by analysis the solar activity, earth movement (nutation, rift and volcano activity) and the others greenhouse gases using EMD method. I think that may be a suggestion for work they might do in the future, but its hard to tell.

But on to the paper. Its essentially a sexed-up Fourier analysis of the temperature record, and discovers, ta-da!, that the temperature doesn't linearly follow CO2 (fans of radiative physics will know that they ought to be looking for linearity in log(CO2). Although that wouldn't make a big difference, the fact that the authors don't even seem to realise this gives you some idea of where they aren't coming from). This allows them a major conclusion: The global climate warming is not solely affected by the CO2 greenhouse effect. Wow. Really? I think we knew that already (see? the paper *does* support the consensus...). Essentially, this is yet another "there was a period of cooling from 40-70 but CO2 was going up then so it can't be CO2", which has been done to death recently (aerosols). Or as the authors say: The best example is temperature obviously cooling however atmospheric CO2 concentration is ascending from 1940s to 1970s. The authors don't mention aerosol anywhere.

Other things are bad too: From Fig. 3, we see clearly that global and NH temperature will drop on century scale in the next 20 years is the sort of quote that makes them beloved of the septics. But fig 3 only goes up to 2000. You cannot see clearly from fig 3 what their "prediction" is.

So do they provide any predictions? Only very vague ones: on century-scale or 60-year scales, the global temperature tends to descend in the coming 20 years. They provide no graphs of any future "predicted" trends to back this up - all their graphs stop at 2000. Because the English is so poor, its really nto clear whether these trends are supposed to include extra CO2 forcing in the future or not: Therefore, if CO2 concentration remains constant at present, the CO2 greenhouse effect will be deficient in counterchecking the natural cooling of global climate in the following 20 years. suggests not.

Conclusion: Lambert is right: this is indeed "just a rubbish paper that should not have been published".