climate science
sa smith | November 11, 2011BlogBrother Ethan Siegel just caught (yet another) scientist manipulating data to generate the conclusion they want... not the conclusion the data actually supports.
Exposing a Climate Science Fraud
Yeah, thats how we roll on SciBlogs.
But in my example, the scientists actively hid relevant data from other scientists they were speaking to/the journals they were submitting to/the patients they were preaching to.
In Ethans case, all of the data was happily and knowingly laid out for anyone and everyone to mess around with themselves. So either this Judith Curry character is a fantastic idiot,…
stoat | September 6, 2011Not me guv, but Tom Fuller (just when I'd given up hope he would ever say something sensible). You might say, "well der". But this chimes in very neatly with a not-fully-discussed problem with the Spencer and Braswell error, which Gavin talks about at RC: With better peer review, Spencer could perhaps have discovered these things for himself, and a better and more useful paper might have resulted. By trying to do an end run around his critics, Spencer ended up running into a wall.
Spencer and his ilk are afraid of peer review. Not for the reasons that they give - that the vast conspiracy will…
stoat | September 4, 2011Those with long memories will note that this is a re-post of this from my old blog. I've hoicked it over here because I read Stratospheric Cooling, April 18, 2010, by scienceofdoom who says "Why Is the Stratosphere Expected to Cool from Increases in "Greenhouse" Gases? This is a difficult one to answer with a 30-second soundbite". But I think he is wrong. Now read on.
One of the strongest predictions of global warming is that the stratosphere will cool - unlike the troposphere, which will warm, of course. See the IPCC here for example. This turns out to be not as useful for detecting climate…
stoat | August 31, 2011Every now and again I remember to look at this year's sea ice, and it is as depressing as looking at the share prices :-(
2011 is already #3, and will almost inevitably make #2, though probably not #1.
Refs
* Betting on sea ice: $10,000
* This year's sea ice
* Around Bee Rescue, Honey and Rancor
* RMG
* Arctic.io
* Neven
stoat | August 22, 2011I've said before (and correctly sourced the original observation to JA) that atmospheric methane is way below its IPCC scenarios (which of course leads to a lower forcing). There is a recent thing in Nature that may explain this:
Atmospheric methane (CH4) increased through much of the twentieth century, but this trend gradually weakened until a stable state was temporarily reached around the turn of the millennium1, 2, after which levels increased once more3. The reasons for the slowdown are incompletely understood, with past work identifying changes in fossil fuel, wetland and agricultural…
stoat | August 17, 2011RP Jr is doing weird stuff - well, he's doing what he's done before: misunderstanding the science, in a very fundamental way, and then arguing tendentiously in a desperate attempt to throw enough confusion in the air to hide his original error. JA has the details.
Come on RP: just say sorry and admit your mistake. And stick to policy in future, which you're good at.
Meanwhile, speaking of "policy", there is mt on Dr. Charles Monnett, the fellow who had the misfortune to be footnoted by Al Gore on the polar bear question. That was the kind of thing you expected (and which happened) under Bush…
stoat | July 19, 2011Every now and again, people get a little bit confused when they realise that the thing we all call the "greenhouse effect" is not the mechanism that warms greenhouses. This is nothing new; R. W. Wood: Note on the Theory of the Greenhouse pointed it out in 1909. The wikipedia [[Greenhouse effect]] page states this explicitly (because I added it. I had a very long edit war with some bozo who didn't believe it). Sometimes septics - or simply the badly confused - get very excited, because they think it tells you something useful about the actual greenhouse effect - usually, they think it proves…
stoat | July 16, 2011Eduardo has quite a nice post at KZ. I say "quite nice" because it is definitely one for those deeply emeshed in the debate and familiar with it, yet not wanting to be part of the rancour.
Point 1 should be required reading for all the septic folk out there:
The main question here that any scientist would like to answer is what are the factors or combination of factors that have caused this warming. Note that even if temperatures had been much higher in , say 1800, even much higher than today -which I doubt - this question would remain. We see a change and we have to find an explanation for…
stoat | July 11, 2011This is a super-el-cheapo post, brought to you by simple reproduction of http://wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/nas-1975.html. Well, I did it with R. W. Wood: Note on the Theory of the Greenhouse and I happen to have a reason for bringing this out again.
The 1975 US National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council Report
UNDERSTANDING CLIMATE CHANGE: A program for action
Review by W M Connolley
This little-read report appears to serve as a useful summary of the state of opinion at the time (aside: I was prompted to read this by someone who thought the report supported the ice-age-was-…
stoat | June 29, 2011Don't bother read this post. Watch the video "Earth facing mini-ice age!!" say the media. Now for the science... instead. Or read the RC post.
I ignored this when it first came out, and am only posting now because the Economyth has picked it up. They lose points for not putting a question mark in their headline, but gain points from the byline "Several lines of evidence suggest that the sun is about to go quiet", i.e. not talking rubbish about a new ice age. And similarly, for spending much of the article on what it is actually about, viz solar activity. They lose somewhat for not putting in…
stoat | May 12, 2011From http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/mailings/2011/20110415_EnergyImbalancePaper.pdf. The email that pointed me at it said "Sincere apologies -- I am very sorry that I did not have time to write a shorter paper" and I think he is correct to apologise. It also says "Climate sensitivity section probably belongs in the paleo paper still under review" which also seems correct - to devote 15 pages (more than 1/4 of the paper!) to saying that Climate Sensitivity is ~ 3 oC is to confess that your prose is too prolix - and he doesn't even quote JA (which brings up another topic: he spends far too much…
stoat | April 29, 2011Still no new science (is there any? Jules and James didn't find much to post about at EGU), but Tamino posted on AF, which prompted me to look up some of my earlier posts. Tamino shows the CO2 growth rate from 1960, and they look upwards, which was rather less obvious when I drew them from 1990 on.
If you want to think happy thoughts, you can notice that the dCO2 rates are ~a bit less than 2 ppm on average, which is to say rather closer to 0.5% than 1% (1% gets you CO2 doubling in 70 years; but even 0.5% will get us above 600 ppm by the end of this century).
Update: this is an experiment (in…
stoat | April 5, 2011But he isn't a tosser. I'm sure he'll be glad to know that.
Which Mullah do I mean? I mean Richard Muller (who has one of the worst-looking websites in the known universe, beaten only in my personal experience by TimeCube and (of course) Lubos). Muller is running the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST, geeddit?) project. By now you'll have guessed I'm a bit cynical about all this, but don't give up on me yet, I'll not trouble you with any of the funding stuff, Eli is good for snark and mt has some good stuff too and Tamino pokes gentle fun.
Anyway, the back story (which I can't be…
stoat | January 7, 2011This has been on my website http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/wood_rw.1909.html for some time now; but websites are so tedious to update. So I think I'll copy it here; more may follow. And it will distract the squabbling children. Note that as of now, this is the maintained copy; the version on my website is now longer "live".
R. W. Wood: Note on the Theory of the Greenhouse
The following text is from the Philosophical magazine (more properly the London, Edinburgh and Dublin Philosophical Magazine (and Journal of Science?); its name has morphed since), 1909, vol 17, p319-320. Cambridge UL…
stoat | December 28, 2010A couple of people have recently complained about the rash of stories explaining how snow-in-December (or, your pet weather event at whatever time of year) is compatible with Global Warming. For example: Cold Spells From Climate Change? (DA) or Yes, they have now said it (TW; I'm sure those two will love being associated).
What I think is correct is to explain that Yes, X has occurred, which perhaps you might not expect given GW, but then showing that it is entirely compatible with GW. Not that it is a particularly exciting game to play, because pretty well any form of weather will be; the…
stoat | September 21, 2010Judith Curry is now blogging, which is probably a good thing, because now instead of nitpicking other people's blogs she is now attempting to say what she thinks. Unfortunately this results in some very strange things. In doubt she appears to believe that, over the next century, natural variablity is as likely to dominate as anthro forcing, and that uncertainty about this is as big as the two put together. Bart can't make sense of that eany more than I can. She doesn't seem to make any attempt to tie her opinion to published research, either.
But this post is about her take on the Pakistan…
stoat | August 30, 2010Accelerated warming of the Southern Ocean and its impacts on the hydrological cycle and sea ice? refers, as does Curry's comments in the comments. I suspect we're now at the going-round-in-circles stage, but it is probably worth one more spin.
Curry begins rather gracelessly:
William, all of these issues were discussed ad nauseum over at WUWT, on three threads. These are certainly valid questions, but not particularly interesting ones IMO, which is why I was not motivated to answer them until repeatedly queried (including email) about them.
The WUWT thread(s) are sprawling and generally far…
stoat | August 23, 2010Yes, the review you've all been waiting for. Before I start, let me point out that this has been discussed by WE at WUWT, who has pointed out the obvious problem. It has also been mentioned by KK, though that appears to be more of a meta-discussion about the paper's reception rather than the paper itself.
[Note: follow-up here.]
To quote KK:
But back to the show. One commenter at WUWT, noting the negative reaction to Judith, gives her a backhanded compliment when he writes: I have to applaud Judith Curry on having the guts to present her paper in the boxing ring of climate blogs where the…
stoat | July 29, 2010Header shamelessly stolen from Coby. But his post is so wonderful that I can't help re-saying it.
So: Roy Spencer says that the basic greenhouse effect mechanism is sound; or perhaps, more weakly, that the basic mechanism is phyically possible. You might think that is not very strange, after all it isn't really very dificult. But alas so many poor innocent young and not-so-young wannabe "skeptics" have been exposed to the denialist meme "cold things can't make warm things warmer; the upper atmophere is colder than the surface; therefore the atmosphere doesn't heat the surface; therefore the…
stoat | July 24, 2010There is an interesting new post up at KlimaZweibel about a paper by Smerdon et al.. This is going to be all over everywhere very soon, so I may as well jump in.
The title, of course, is a snark at RC; see the article A Mistake with Repercussions which points out some errors in a Zorita and Von Storch paper (they got their model setup wrong). [I've just snarked them in their comments; it will be intersting to see if it stays]
In this case the problem is rather more arcane, but worth explaining, so let me do that first.
[Update: no, let me first point out that there is a response by Rutherford…