gregladen | January 29, 2015I've recently written about the Serengeti Strategy, a coin termed by climate scientist Michael Mann to describe the anti-science strategy of personal attacks against individual scientists in an attempt to discredit valid scientific research one might find inconvenient. Science Careers (from Science Magazine) has a new item called "Science under the microscope" looking at bad faith criticism of science and scientist. Some of this comes from within science itself, where the term "torpedo" is sometimes used. Rival scientists do take shots at each other in the peer review or grant review…
gregladen | January 28, 2015What happened to the Blizzard of 2015? Well, it happened. Despite breathless complaining about how the forecasters got it all wrong, they didn't. As the storm was predicted, there should have been close to about two feet of snow in the New York City metropolitan area, but as it turns out, there was between 8 and 12 inches. That means that New York City experienced a typical winter month's worth of snow in one day. Also, most snow that falls on The City falls a few inches at a time and melts more or less instantly, as few cities can match New York in its heat island effect. So, 8-12 inches…
gregladen | January 28, 2015Suddenly and for the first time I saw Amanda as a little child wide eyed with both awe and fear, among other children some sitting on the floor, some in chairs, some standing behind desks, eyes trained on a TV monitor and their teacher as the sudden realization dawned on all of them that the Space Shuttle Challenger had been consumed in a fiery, deadly explosion.
The teacher on board seemed to have been incinerated before their very eyes. As the explosion developed, shooting out huge arms of smoke, and the voice-over began to acknowledge that something was wrong, NASA's space program was…
gregladen | January 27, 2015A new early human fossil has been reported, recovered from the seabed near Taiwan. We are calling it Penghu 1.
Simply put, it is the lower right jaw of a hominid (hominine) that most resembles either a form of Homo erectus or Archaic Homo sapiens (kin to, but not, Neanderthal). Teeth are fairly useful for categorizing hominids into groups that can be thought of as species. This hominid does not look like modern humans (teeth are way too big and the enamel is not right). It does not look like African Homo ergaster or Asian Homo erectus. It does not look like Neanderthal or so called…
gregladen | January 27, 2015The Blizzard continues. The center of the low pressure system moved to the northeast more than expected, so the maximum snowfall amounts have also moved deeper into New England, and it the storm may end up dropping the largest amounts Downeast, in Maine, rather than around New York and southern New England. Nonetheless maximum snow totals are heading for 20 inches in many areas west of Boston.
Here, I wanted to alert you to a recent study that talks about "Changes in US East Coast Cyclone Dynamics with Climate Change," which has this abstract:
Previous studies investigating the impacts of…
gregladen | January 26, 2015About 20 million people are currently under a blizzard warning, and double that under a winter weather advisory, for a storm moving into the Northeast today and tomorrow, with snow falling though Wednesday. Thousands of flights have been cancelled. Wind will be at tropical storm force, and occasionally, hurricane force, and coastal flooding is expected to be epic. The total amounts of snowfall will be over a foot for a very large area, and well over that here and there, though this is very difficult to predict.
This is a strong low pressure system that will gather significant energy from a…
gregladen | January 26, 2015A video by Kevin Cowtan about Christopher Booker's accusations of data tampering.
A quick response to an article by Christopher Booker in the Telegraph.
The video features a prototype tool for investigating the global temperature record. This tool will be made available with the upcoming MOOC, Making Sense of Climate Science Denial (http://gci.uq.edu.au/mooc), where we will interactively debunk myths regarding surface temperature records.
gregladen | January 23, 2015Since it is Caturday, and I don' think I've posted these before.
A King Cheetah (a rather large form of cat) in South Africa:
King Cheetah (cat)
Closer in on the King Cheetah, South Africa
Picture Of Cat On Top Photo Credit: Gatto Mimmo via Compfight cc
gregladen | January 22, 2015Arctic sea ice decline happened faster than expected. This has the effect of accelerating global warming because less of the Sun's energy is reflected back into space by ice.
Northern Hemisphere snow also sends some of that energy back into space. The amount of snow cover we have is also declining.
Difference from average annual snow extent since 1971, compared to the 1966-2010 average (dashed line). Snow extents have largely been below-average since the late1980s. Graph adapted from Figure 1.1 (h) in the 2012 BAMS State of the Climate report.
The warming of the Arctic region is also…
gregladen | January 22, 2015Andrew Revkin has this commentary at the New York Times: How ‘Warmest Ever’ Headlines and Debates Can Obscure What Matters About Climate Change.
I will argue below that Revkin has, inadvertently or not, linked a science denialist trope to the important scientific finding that 2014 is the warmest year on record, as part of his presumably well intentioned effort to focus on trends rather than individual points. (See his comment on this blog below.) Yes, the trend is more important than a given data point, but the headline does not really obscure, but rather, underscores.
I'm afraid the…
gregladen | January 21, 2015What is the Serengeti Strategy?
"The Serengeti Strategy" is a term coined by climate scientist Michael Mann in which "special interests faced with adverse scientific evidence ... target individual scientists rather than take on an entire scientific field at once." His invention of the analogy must have been an interesting moment, given the context. In his book, The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars: Dispatches from the Front Line, Mann talks about a trip to scientific meetings in Arusha as an IPCC co-author, during which he took the usual side trip to the Serengeti:
After the meeting, I…
gregladen | January 21, 2015Gas prices have fallen to nearly half (or more depending on your starting point) in recent months. Therefore, according to Jevons Paradox, which does indeed appear to exist sans apostrophe, use of gas should have gone up.
It did, but only by 1%.
So, we are not impressed with Jevons paradox.
gregladen | January 20, 2015I watched the State of the Union Address, and it was great. Not nearly enough on climate change, but otherwise it was great. I did not watch the response. I heard it was not great.
But then Clara Jeffery of Mother Jones asked on twitter if they, the responses, are ever great. So I went and looked through a few old ones and I found one that YOU MUST NOT MISS. Watch the whole thing including the credits and the bit with Brokaw at the end. Pay special attention to the hair.
So, without further delay, the Democratic Response to Reagan's 1985 State of the Union Address, a veritable Variety…
gregladen | January 20, 2015The title of this post is the beginning of a more extensive comment, as follows:
Few things threaten America’s future prosperity more than climate change.
But there is growing hope. Every 2.5 minutes of every single day, the U.S. solar industry is helping to fight this battle by flipping the switch on another completed solar project.
According to GTM Research and the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), the United States installed an estimated 7.4 gigawatts (GW) of solar last year — a 42 percent increase over 2013 — making it the best year ever for solar installations in America. What’…
gregladen | January 20, 2015NextGen Climate is putting an ad up, in at least some markets, during the State of the Union Address. Not sure how that works exactly. During halftime? Anyway, here it is:
gregladen | January 20, 2015You'll recall that a while back, Greenpeace activists entered a restricted zone in Peru, where the Nasca Lines are preserved, and messed with that important archaeological site. I wrote about it here.
At the time, the individuals who had carried out this unthinkable act managed to drift off into obscurity, and Greenpeace seemed unwilling to provide Peruvian authorities with their names.
Now, they have done so. Partially.
From Bloomberg Businessweek:
Greenpeace has provided Peruvian authorities with the identities of the four foreign activists principally responsible for vandalizing the…
gregladen | January 20, 2015Officially, 2014 closed without an official El Nino. Probably. If you went back in a time machine to the spring, and told El Nino watchers that, they would be a little surprised, but they would also say something like, "Yeah, well, you know, we keep saying this is hard to predict."
Despite the fact that for the most part there was not an official El Nino declared, a subset of El Nino conditions have been around, off and on, for many months. To officially declare an El Nino, a number of things have to add up, and while some of those things developed, the standard was not met. A few weeks ago…
gregladen | January 19, 2015Matt Ridley has written an opinion piece for The Times (not the New York Times, the other one) which is a response to his critics, specifically, to those who openly disagree with him about climate change. Ridley’s commentary is jaw dropping, and for most of you, those who are not of Royal Blood and highly privileged, it is more than a little squirm-inducing. But, putting that aside, Ridley makes a number of assertions, two of which (*) I’d like to address. Other problems with Ridley's approach have been addressed here, by Dana Nuccitelli.
Spoiler alert, he is wrong on both counts.
First, to…