This is a repost from here. John is a friend and a great guy and I hope you can do as he asks. Thanks. Please help Tessa and Marlowe This is a plea to save my ex from a financial death spiral. The short, short, short version is that she needs about $3500 by the end of next week or she loses both her car and her apartment. Tessa lost her job soon after the crash in 2008 and hasn't had a permanent job since then. For a while, we tried to build a home business around soaps, lotions, and scents that she made, but that never did more than break even. She's an experienced technical writer and…

How do you explain a person seemingly legitimately trained in science drifting off and becoming more and more of a science denier? In the case of Judith Curry I was unwilling to think of her as a full on science denier for a long time because her transition into denierhood seemed to be going very slowly, methodologically. It was almost like she was trying to drift over into denier land and maybe bring a few back with her. Like some people seem to do sometimes. But no, she just kept providing more and more evidence that she does not accept climate science's concensus that global warming is…

The academic world and its detractors are all a-tizzy about this recent news reported here: Springer, a major science and medical publisher, recently announced the retraction of 64 articles from 10 of its journals. The articles were retracted after editors found the authors had faked the peer-review process using phony e-mail addresses. The article goes on to say that science has been truly sullied by this event, and anti-science voices are claiming that this is the end of the peer reviewed system, proving it is corrupt. The original Springer statement is here. See this post at Retraction…

When I studied the Efe Pygmies of the Congo, I discovered (and yes, it was me who discovered this amazing fact everyone now knows) that the Efe organize their space in elongated linear trails. They knew all about everything along those specific trails, and their knowledge of other trails was often very limited. If an Efe person spent time living with a group associated with a trail, he* would learn about that trail as well. Most interesting is that one’s knowledge of important things like where to find food (or danger) was based on experience not on general principles. So an Efe off his trail…

This is F@k1n' brilliant. Cherry-pickin’ a bit of temperature data And tryin’ to claim that climate change is in hiatus It’s not, the trends are still going straight up But they ain’t tryin’ to change their minds once they’re made up In 1992 my mama’s thesis Was about CO2 and Svante Arrhenius So if you try to tell me that climate change isn’t serious You’re dissin’ my mama, yup I’m kinda cliquish Also by Baba Brinkman: The Rap Guide to Religion The Rap Guide to Evolution The Rap Guide to Evolution: Revised [Explicit] The Rap Canterbury Tales The Rap Guide to Wilderness The Rap Guide to…

Climate Models Accurately Predict Warming Climate models employ piles of data and sophisticated computational techniques to predict what will happen in the future. Sometimes they predict what happened in the past as well. That is important to test the models (because we might know what happened in the past), or to fill in the blanks (we don’t always know exactly what happened in the past) or to understand complex climate systems better. If you glance at the science denier rhetoric (mainly on blogs, you won’t find much in the peer reviewed literature because it isn’t good science) you’ll see…

Bill Maher and Penn State meteorology professor Michael Mann discuss the “settled science” of climate change and the lack of public engagement on the issue. Dr. Mann is the co-author of "Dire Predictions: Understanding Climate Change.”

A couple of days ago I assimilated data from a bunch of on line polls where people could informally and unscientifically express their opinion about who won the GOP debate (the big boy debate only, with ten candidates). I suggested a series of hypotheses to isolate the idea that this sort of on line unscientific effort might reflect reality, with the idea of testing the results of those polls with upcoming formal polls. Now we have a couple of formal polls to test against. I took the raw percentages for the ten GOP big boy debate candidates, recalculated the percentages, and came up with…

I have a few thoughts I want to float on the recent #BLM activism that involved, as of this writing, two takeovers of public events. One takeover was at a Netroots Nation event that included Bernie Sanders, the other at a Sanders rally. First, I think it has to be understood that disruptive actions like this need to be carried out, and carried out more. Unless you can somehow convince me that there is a way to deal with violence in and against the African American community, widespread incarceration, habitual attacks by police on African Americans (and some others), etc. without civil…

Select one and only one. Or two if you like. --- see down below for update --- Megyn Kelly of FOX news went after Donald Trump, the apparent winner of the FOX-GOP Fauxbate. Donald Trump at first declared that he has no time to be politically correct. Later he proved that he does have time to be politically incorrect, when he seemed to imply that Kelly was out of sorts during the debate because she was having female problems. This led a conservative organization to dump Trump from a keynote speakers spot. We see a crack in the armor form as Erick Erickson, who had invited Trump to…

Trump went into the GOP debate last night with a roughly 20% poll standing. Everyone will tell you to ignore polls early in this race, they never predict the outcome of a primary or a general election. That, however, is a non sequitur. We do not look at early polls to predict the distant future. We look at them to help understand the present, and to get a handle on what might happen over the next few weeks. The meaning of the polls shifts quite a bit before the first primaries, then they meaning of the polls has to be re-evaluated after every primary. At some point the re-evaluations…

First the bad news. Taiwan is going to get slammed with Typhoon Soudelor over the next day (landfall at about 8:00 AM local time). Soudelor was one of the strongest typhoons earlier during its development but weakened to a Category 1. However, very warm seas, lack of wind shear, and other factors may make Doudelor return to category 3 or even 4 strength before making landfall. Also, it is large. The storm is likely to hit Taiwan in about the middle, which along the east coast is not heavily populated. But it will bring heavy rains, likely causing landslides and floods, to the mountainous…

A guest post by Robet Hollander, Winemaker 2redWinery, makers of the award-winning Ziniphany© Zinfandel and #2red is 38% towards goal on Indiegogo with all proceeds supporting prostate cancer research through the Robert and Susan Hollander Foundation, an IRS approved 501c3 organization. Campaign supporters, in exchange for their tax-deductible support, can secure wine from the 2015 vintage or from the award-winning wine library of 2redWinery. Robert Hollander, the winemaker and principle of 2redWinery, started small-volume winemaking in 2007 to indulge a long-standing passion. Passion…

There are two new scientific research papers looking at variation over the last century or so in global warming. One paper looks at the march of annual estimates of global surface temperature (air over the land plus sea surface, not ocean), and applies a well established statistical technique to ask the question: Was there a pause in global warming some time over the last couple of decades, as claimed by some? The answer is, no, there wasn’t. The paper is open access, is very clearly written so it speaks for itself, and is available here. One of the authors has a blog post here, in German…

Men and women are different, on average, in a number of ways. It all probably starts with who has the physiology to have babies and who doesn't, and the differences spread out from there, affecting both the body and the mind. Decades of research show us that many of the body differences (but not all) are determined by developmental processes while many of the mind differences (but maybe not all) are determined by culture, but culture still has men and women as being different, so those differences tend to be persistent and predictable, on average. One of the differences which seems to…

I did an interview with JD Goodwin at at Blue Streak Science. It is here. Great science podcast, check out their other items. Here is the interview on iTunes.

What is not new Ultimately sea levels will rise several feet, given the present levels of CO2 in the atmosphere. We already knew this by examining paleo data, and finding periods in the past with similar surface temperatures and/or similar atmospheric CO2 levels as today. I put a graphic from a paper by Gavin Foster and Eelco Rohling at the top of the post. It does a good job of summarizing the paleo data. If we keep pumping CO2 into the atmosphere at current, or even somewhat reduced, levels for a few more decades, the ultimate increase in sea levels will be significant. Find the 400–500…

The tl:dr... don't sleep late.

Every month NASA GISS comes out with the new data for the prior month's global surface temperature, and I generally grab that data set and make a graph or two. In a way this is a futile effort because the actual global surface temperature month by month is not as important as the long term trend. But at the same time it is a worthy exercise because it is news, and especially lately, we seem to be breaking records of one kind or another every month. This month I was out of town and actually traveling sans computer, when the NASA GISS data became available. So, for me to produce the graphs…