gregladen | February 23, 2015The following statement was issued this afternoon by the Smithsonian:
Smithsonian Statement on Willie Soon, researcher at the Smithsonian Astrophysics Observatory.
The Smithsonian is greatly concerned about the allegations surrounding Dr. Willie Soon’s failure to disclose funding sources for his climate change research.
The Smithsonian is taking immediate action to address the issue: Acting Secretary Albert Horvath has asked the Smithsonian Inspector General to review the matter. Horvath will also lead a full review of Smithsonian ethics and disclosure policies governing the conduct of…
gregladen | February 23, 2015A newly published study has identified changes in precipitation patterns in the US Northeast, which are likely caused by human pollution of the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses, which has resulted in global warming. According to the study, there has been an increase in extreme precipitation events, and an increase in the clumping across time of precipitation, with longer or more intense rainy periods, and longer dry periods.
Generally, climate and weather watchers have noticed that arid regions are drier, wetter regions are wetter, and many feel this is a consequence of global warming.…
gregladen | February 23, 2015The Willie Soon Story broke on Saturday night, having cloned off the front page of the Sunday New York Times into a few secondary sources. But we all saw it coming. Since then there has been quite a bit more written and there will be quite a bit more.
The main thing I want to add to the discussion is this. It is clear that Willie Soon was taking piles of Big Fossil money for his climate research. It is clear that his research was widely discredited in the mainstream scientific community. It should have been easy to check to see if he was using the money properly (mainly, with respect to…
gregladen | February 21, 2015A few days ago I suggested that Willie Soon's career may be taking a nose dive soon. I was right. Tomorrow's New York Times has a story that has as many leaks as an old canoe, so we can see it now in various outlets. The story is out and linked to below.
Before going into detail I just want to note that Justin Gillis is doing a great job at the New York Times.
Anyway, you can read the following items, the most recent listed here:
Deeper Ties to Corporate Cash for a Doubtful Climate Scientist
Willie Soon Gate
Willie Soon, will he soon be fired?
It really looks like Willie Soon has been paid…
gregladen | February 20, 2015From here:
Since last November, Dr. John Holdren -- the President's science advisor -- has been encouraging the public to ask him anything about climate change on social media using the hashtag #AskDrH. In his first set of answers, he covered a lot of ground -- the connection between climate change and extreme weather, temperature trends, how we know that climate change is human-cased, and more.
Today, Dr. H is answering more of your questions -- this time from students and classrooms across the country.
As the community leaders, city planners, innovators, and entrepreneurs of tomorrow,…
gregladen | February 20, 2015Regular readers of this blog will know Tom Harris, as he is an occasional commenter here. Tom is a climate science denier who wears an Invisibility Cloak of Concern. However, this particular Invisibilty Cloak was never worn by Ignotus Peverell; you can see right though it.
"Demanding and unreasonable and absurd level of proof from scientists is not Harris’ only dishonest expectation ... Harris is trying to make science appear to be mere opinion, presumably no better or worse than any other opinion. [But] some opinions matter more than others, and opinions based on knowledge matter more…
gregladen | February 17, 2015Are there cultural differences between those who accept and generally understand the current consensus on climate change science and those who don't? One gets the sense that there is, but it is possible to explore this in more detail.
I took the public Twitter profile descriptions, written by individual Twitterers, from two different Twitter lists that I maintain, and made word clouds out of them. The first is a list of "Global warming deniers." People get on this list when they actively deny climate change science in Twitter exchanges with me (or that I observe). There are 309 members as…
gregladen | February 17, 2015A recent twitter conversation prompted me to dig up some old posts on cannibalism, and maybe a few memories of my time in Central Africa.
The twitter conversation concerned a story in which it is claimed that James Jameson, heir to the Jameson Irish whiskey empire, bought a slave girl (for the price of six handkerchiefs) in order to watch her be eviscerated and eaten by cannibals, and in particular, so that he could make some nice watercolor painting of the event. Apparently this is going around the internet.
If this is true, which as I will argue in a moment is not actually the case, then…
gregladen | February 17, 2015A year is 12 months long. It is also the period of time between January and December, inclusively. But you can use that first definition (we do it all the time) when appropriate. So, we can ask the question, how does the last 12 months, ending at the end of January 2015, compare to previous 12 month time periods in terms of global surface temperature?
We can do this using a moving average. A moving average for a series of values is the average of a certain number of values in sequence, calculated to correspond to each value. So a one year (12 month) moving average of temperature would be…
gregladen | February 16, 2015January was warm, globally. A fun fact of limited importance is that January's average global temperature, in the NASA GISS database, has a value of 75 (that's anomaly above a baseline expressed in the standard hundredths's of a degree C) of 75, which is higher than the average for any year in that dat base. (Lot's of months are higher than the average, but only recent ones!)
January 2015 was the second warmest January in this data set. The graph above also indicates which of the Januarys in the data base are in the top ten, and obviously, they are all recent.
So, we'll do this 11 more…
gregladen | February 9, 2015New England is now experiencing the fifth in a series of worse than average winter storms. So far, Winter has dumped over 60 inches of snow on Boston, and after the present storm, it will probably be possible to say that a total of 60 inches or more have fallen there in just over 2 weeks, according to Paul Douglas, meteorologist and founder of Media Logic Group. Douglas notes "I’ve never seen a SST anomaly of +11.5C, but that’s the case just east of Cape Cod. No wonder Boston is submerged.... Quite amazing, really." As such, Boston has already broken it's 30 day snowfall record going into…
gregladen | February 9, 2015The latest in a series of Climate Change elevator pitches, being posted regularly at Peter Sinclair's blog:
The first pitch is here.
gregladen | February 7, 2015From FiveThirtyEight:
You probably don’t know the name Grace Hopper, but you should.
As a rear admiral in the U.S. Navy, Hopper worked on the first computer, the Harvard Mark 1. And she headed the team that created the first compiler, which led to the creation of COBOL, a programming language that by the year 2000 accounted for 70 percent of all actively used code. Passing away in 1992, she left behind an inimitable legacy as a brilliant programmer and pioneering woman in male-dominated fields.
Hopper’s story is told in “The Queen of Code,” directed by Gillian Jacobs (of “Community” fame). It…
gregladen | February 7, 2015Andrew Weaver is a Canadian climate scientist with numerous publications. The National Post is a Canadian newspaper generally recognized as having a conservative and Libertarian leaning. Between 2009 and 2010, the Post published four articles that seemed defamatory of Dr. Weaver’s reputation as a scientist. Weaver sued the post over this, and yesterday, the B.C. Supreme Court agreed that the articles were in fact defamatory. The defendants in the case were Terence Corcoran, Financial Post editor, Peter Foster, National Post columnist, Kevin Libin, a contributor to the Financial Post, National…
gregladen | February 2, 2015Bjørn Lomborg wrote an opinion piece that is offensively wrong
Bjørn Lomborg is the director of the conservative Copenhagen Consensus Center. He is author of two books that seem to recommend inaction in the face of climate change, Cool It, which appears to be both a book and a movie, and “The Skeptical Environmentalist.”
This is apparently the Copenhagen Consensus Center, Copenhagen Consensus Center USA, 262 Middlesex St, Lowell MA .
He is well known as a climate contrarian, though I don’t subscribe to the subcategories that are often used to divide up the denialists. Let’s just say that…
gregladen | February 2, 2015Sea levels are rising with increasing global temperatures. It seems that whenever there is a new estimate of the rate of melting of one or more major parts of the polar ice caps, that estimate is higher than previously thought. By the end of the century, the most aggressive estimates suggest that we will have close to 2 meters (6 feet) of sea level rise along the coasts.
So,here are three sea level rise items for you.
First, the Obama Administration will begin to plan for sea level rise in all major federal projects to which this variable pertains. See this item in the Washington Post.…
gregladen | February 2, 2015If you are running for office, note that the majority of Americans think global warming is real, important, and can and should be addressed by government.
This has been happening since two elections back, when we started to see candidates threatened, if only to a limited degree, based on an untenable position on climate change. Last election cycle this became even more important as organizations like ClimateHawksVote had remarkable successes in supporting climate hawk candidates -- candidates that place climate change at the top of the list of important issues. Since then even more has…
gregladen | January 31, 2015The Willie Soon Controversy
There’s been a lot of talk about the Willie Soon Controversy. Bottom line: Soon was an author on a paper that failed to disclose his extensive funding by the petroleum industry and its friends (over a million dollars to date, I believe) as required. I don’t have time to craft a detailed expose or commentary, but I wanted to get a bunch of resources in one place. I should mention that this is not all about Willie Soon, but rather, about climate science denialists more generally, a few specific others besides Soon, about how crap gets published now and then much to…
gregladen | January 31, 2015The Great DeflateGate Controversy
This year's Super Bowl will be, as of this writing, tomorrow, late afternoon, between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks. Both teams have a 14-4 record for the season, so it should be a good game. Also, the game will be held in a stadium located in an arid and warm region of the country, in a stadium with a covered roof. So, there is no chance of a cloudy with a chance of deflated-balls scenario.
You have probably heard that an accusation has been made against the New England Patriots regarding their balls. It has been claimed that they…