climate science
stoat | March 20, 2014 There's a fair section of the - errm - normally-sane-side-of-the-climate-wars blogosphere that regards RP Jr as the spawn of the devil. Eli weighs in complaining about Nate Silver of 538 getting RP to write for him (Eli has form, dontchaknow). Now I'd be the first to agree that RP has said some silly things , and some disastrously silly things on trends. But that's him playing away.
On his home turf, RP is very strong. Because he has a simple message based on good data. As I said in 2011 over SREX, "As usual, Pielke wipes the floor with Romm"; see-also another relevant article from 2009.
So…
stoat | March 18, 2014 I'm trying an experiment, which may be simpler for me, and perhaps more amusing too.
Rather than pushing things off into the burrow, I'm going to try putting such comments in a new specially-created blog
stoat-spam.blogspot.com
It will contain... well, we'll see. Some real spam, some stuff where people just won't stop trying to have the last word, whatever. We'll see. As you'd expect, the worthy first recipient of this honour is Doug Cotton.
stoat | March 9, 2014 Today was the anniversary of my glorious 1:36 in the Cambridge Half Marathon. Today, alas, I only managed 1:41 so at that rate Jules will be steaming past me before many more years have passed. I remain fairly confident of out-erging her over the distance though. Here I am with other folk from our rowing club that were running. You'll notice that most of them are female. Maggie in the background, if you were wondering. Onwards, to Brighton.
But other things are happening. You'll have to wait just a little longer for my deeply valuable thoughts on the Ukraine crisis; this post is Misc.
Last…
stoat | March 5, 2014 The Royal Soc and NAS have produced Climate Change: Evidence & Causes. From the official doc we have: The atmosphere and oceans have warmed, accompanied by sea-level rise, a strong decline in Arctic sea ice, and other climate-related changes. EWW says this in his quick intro (go on, its only 1:20, watch it) but he adds "...but so far, they are relatively modest, but if we continue emitting carbon dioxide without any abatement, the effects will get really large by the end of the century... we present this report as the state of the science as it is, the basis on which people - governments…
stoat | February 22, 2014 Um, so. Exciting times in the Ukraine seems to have got even more exciting. Is it possible to hope for a Happy Ending? If people will Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation then yes [*].
The Prez is fled, and the Beeb says Ukraine crisis: Crowds descend on Yanukovych house where they find the usual opulence; somewhat reminiscent of Gaddafi; I was cautiously hopeful then but I'll hope the Ukrainians manage better. Lenin statues toppled in protest Aunty continues, which has ominous echoes of the disaster area that we made of Iraq; not that the statue-toppling was the problem…
stoat | February 19, 2014 Um, so, it just happened that I was checking my moderation filter (can you guess why?) and the comments-held-in-moderation, which I very rarely do, and was embarrassed to find quite a few there that didn't belong. Sifting through the piles of trash trying to sell handbags, or herbal acne remedies, or even worse in a way the ones that appeared totally pointless, I found perhaps twenty that really should have been published ages ago. They are all now basking in the glorious light of day, though of course you've lost your chance to influence the conversations.
To prove that I hadn't held up…
stoat | February 19, 2014In Tim Ball: turned out NN again I gloated over Tim Ball's nth deletion, but now I have to eat humble pie because he's been undeleted. Or rather, he's been created from scratch. Before his partisans get too excited its worth pointing out that the keep rationales begin with
Keep: Michael E. Mann called him "perhaps the most prominent climate change denier in Canada".
This is clearly silly: you don't become notable just because some genuinely notable person thinks you're an idiot.
As compensation, there's still time to rub out Ferenc Miskolczi. He's looking pretty marginal: his puffers are…
stoat | February 16, 2014 This post comes about as an attempt to write down, slowly and carefully, a simple version of the "idealised GHE model". This apparently simple concept causes lots of confusion, though mostly amongst people who want to believe there are fatal flaws at the heart of climate science.
Before I go on: this is an idealised model. No-one actually does any real calculations from it. Some of the concepts involved are used in GCMs, but anyone who says, for example, "aha! You've averaged the diurnal cycle in your model, therefore the GCMs are wrong" isn't thinking.
Lets consider a very heavily idealised…
stoat | February 3, 2014There's a paper in Nurture GeoSci entitled Arctic amplification dominated by temperature feedbacks in contemporary climate models by Felix Pithan & Thorsten Mauritsen (Nature Geoscience (2014) doi:10.1038/ngeo2071). As far as I know the paper is entirely sensible, though I've only read the abstract. From which I quote:
Feedback effects associated with temperature, water vapour and clouds have been suggested to contribute to amplified warming in the Arctic, but the surface albedo feedback—the increase in surface absorption of solar radiation when snow and ice retreat—is often cited as the…
stoat | January 30, 2014 Following the brilliant success of my attempt to explain peer review I thought I'd have a go at explaining Science next. Why restrict myself to a small canvas? Lacking confidence in such a large project, I started this post then abandoned it, but have now picked it up again, encouraged in part by ATTP's light-hearted look and also VV on peer review. And by my own unconquerable belief in the value of my opinions.
Explaining Science is difficult, to people that don't do it, because its, like, totally multi-faceted, maaan. And I suspect that explaining it to people that do it would be difficult…
stoat | January 8, 2014Global cooling again; via a comment on this rather dodgy page I find Stockton, C. W. and W. R. Boggess, Geohydrological implications of climate change on water resource development, Contract Report DACW 72-78-C-0031, for U. S. Army Coastal Engineering Res. Center. That isn't P-R, but contains on p 159 a "Projected Climatic Trends" which in turn references A statistical study of a composite isotopic paleotemperature series from the last 700,000 years, Erik Lundtang Petersen, Søren E. Larsen. Tellus Volume 30, Issue 3, pages 193–200, June 1978; which is of course P-R. And which sayeth:
An…
stoat | January 1, 2014 Isaac Held again. Though nobody cared last time. A reminder that you can do basic interesting things with GCMs; that abstract thinking on problems can be illuminating; and that atmospheric dynamics is more complicated than you thought.
The video is from his blog; it shows "tropical cyclones" via their wind speed over a month of simulation on an [[f plane]] representation. Its a very heavily idealised model: SST is constant, there is no land, and the Coriolis parameter is a constant. And they find that in those circumstances, the model fills up with long-lived "tropical cyclones". The real…
stoat | December 19, 2013 Having mocked the Watties I thought I'd read on, and see what they had to say lower down. And what I've realised is that there is some interesting climatology there, which they've totally missed.
Here's the most easily understood picture:
Its CERES Top-Of-Atmosphere (TOA) radiation balance plotted against surface temperature, for ocean-only grid points. I'm not desperately familiar with CERES, but lets take it literally, as radiation inbalance, averaged over a year. Fine. What do we expect to see?
[At this point, I recommend you to stop reading for a while, and see if you can work out what…
stoat | November 27, 2013 Andy Skuce has an SKS article (with which I largely agree) disagreeing with a previous article that Myles Allen wrote for the Mail in May 2013. And now MA has an article in the Graun saying similar things. At Wotts, Rachel has an article approving of MA's piece; Wotts himself seems rather more dubious, and I'm with him.
MA does say some things with which I agree (e.g. if you suppose that the annual UN climate talks will save us, forget it. I met a delegate at the last talks in Doha in December who told me he had just watched a two-hour debate that culminated in placing square brackets…
stoat | November 25, 2013By John Fleck. While we're all on the Grand Themes, he's doing the bits and pieces.
Refs
* Film review: Catching Fire (Hunger Games book 2)
stoat | November 22, 2013Michael Mann has an article in the HuffPo, Something Is Rotten at the New York Times. He's complaining about the ill-informed views of Koch Brothers-funded climate change contrarian Richard Muller which is language that would normally put me off. But in this case I looked, and Muller's A Pause, Not an End, to Warming does seem rather objectionable.
Some of it is just a mixed bag:
My analysis is different. Berkeley Earth, a team of scientists I helped establish, found that the average land temperature had risen 1.5 degrees Celsius over the past 250 years. Solar variability didn’t match the…
stoat | November 18, 2013 Ha ha, fooled you. I don't really have much to say about Cowtan and Way. Various people have said just about everything there is to say already; VV has a nice post dissecting JC's failure; to which I commented
> The main serious critical voice seems to be Judith Curry at Climate Etc
I think you're being overly generous here, if by "critical" you mean "careful reasoned analysis". I get the strong impression that she hadn't really read the paper. I think she skimmed it well enough to put up a few quibbles, and you've discussed those. But as the comments by C+W show, her comments are shallow…
stoat | October 25, 2013 Isaac Held has a wonderful post about recent work on "Aqua-planet hurricanes and the ITCZ". Go read it and watch the videos - its utterly refreshing and might change your view of hurricanes.
Hey, you kow what? I've used that title before. More than once.
stoat | October 17, 2013Begin by reading Role for Eurasian Arctic shelf sea ice in a secularly varying hemispheric climate signal during the 20th century? That post offers some snarks on the paper, and some indications why you might distrust it, but no really substantive criticism. I'll try to do that here but I won't fully succeed because (just like Wyatt and Curry) I don't really understand MSSA. I'm hoping that someone how does know it will do a proper analysis.
Where's the meat?
If you look through the paper to find the core substance, you won't. There are layers of mush and piles of words but precious little…
stoat | October 16, 2013This is Wyatt / Curry's Stadium Wave (Marcia Glaze Wyatt, Judith A. Curry, Clim. Dyn., Sept. 2013; henceforth W+C), but you don't get a title like that past a staid journal like Climate Dynamics.
Note: the copy of W+C I started writing this from which I found at Curry's site offers graphics of truely outstanding industrial-strength awfulness. Really: if you don't believe me, go look. Most of them are completely unreadable (you need to go about half way down the comments at Curry's before you find anyone who notices this, strongly suggesting what the comments there also suggest: that few have…