climate science
stoat | September 30, 2013 The AR5 draft is now available from http://www.climatechange2013.org/report/review-drafts/. W00t! In the style we've come to love so much from the IPCC it sayeth:
The final draft Report, dated 7 June 2013, of the Working Group I contribution to the IPCC 5th Assessment Report "Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis" was accepted but not approved in detail by the 12th Session of Working Group I and the 36th Session of the IPCC on 26 September 2013 in Stockholm, Sweden. It consists of the full scientific and technical assessment undertaken by Working Group I. The Report has to be…
stoat | September 9, 2013 A report for the Department of Energy and Climate Change. MacKay is Sustainable Energy – without the hot air person, and a rather infrequently updated blog. He's a pretty sensible chap and the new report is a challenge to all the folk who go around unthinkingly saying that shale gas emissions mean that its worse than coal (and for the people who think at least a bit, but rely on Howarth, they provide some reasons why Howarth may be wrong). At least, if you don't agree, you'd better have a good reason.
More on global temperature spectra and trends
From Moyhu. Interesting stuff: removing ENSO…
stoat | September 4, 2013This is my take 2. See here for my incautious take 1. Take 2 is not as interesting as take 1 - I no longer have an overall theme, and I don't feel inclined to contradict the take-home message. That reduces me to quibbling and a slight feeling of unease, though that may quite possibly be because I now feel biased against this paper for giving me a hard time.
So, take their "We present a novel method of uncovering mechanisms for global temperature change by prescribing, in addition to radiative forcing, the observed history of sea surface temperature over the central to eastern tropical Pacific…
stoat | September 2, 2013[Ahem. Update: this was just wrong, because I misread the defn of POGA-C; see comment 2, thanks to TC. To avoid polluting the record, I'll delete the rest of this post, but there's an archived copy at http://www.webcitation.org/6JMTX0nGx if you like. The paper fairy has now delivered a copy of K+X to me, so I expect to post a "take 2" later this evening. Or maybe tomorrow; I might actually try reading it properly this time.]
I have a take 2 if you're interested, but its dull.
stoat | September 2, 2013From the dept of general-fun-but-with-a-serious-message: Retraction Watch on a somewhat unusual case: "Journal retracts two papers after being caught manipulating citations":
Mauricio Rocha-e-Silva ... and several other editors published articles containing hundreds of references to papers in each others’ journals — in order, he says, to elevate the journals’ impact factors. Because each article avoided citing papers published by its own journal, the agreement flew under the radar of analyses that spot extremes in self-citation — until 19 June, when the pattern was discovered. Thomson Reuters…
esiegel | August 30, 2013"Being told about the effects of climate change is an appeal to our reason and to our desire to bring about change. But to see that Africans are the hardest hit by climate change, even though they generate almost no greenhouse gas, is a glaring injustice, which also triggers anger and outrage over those who seek to ignore it." -Sigmar Gabriel
With all of the scientific issues subject to politicization in this world, there's arguably none that raises such strong emotions as the issue of global warming and climate change. This is the final installment of a three-part series on how one could…
esiegel | August 29, 2013"We make the world we live in and shape our own environment." -Orison Swett Marden
If you had never heard of global warming before, how would you figure out whether it's real or not? And if it is real, how would you figure out what humanity's role in it is? To answer this, I've decided to do a three-part series on how you'd go about figuring this out, putting aside all politics, economics, opinion and any other non-scientific factors. If you missed part 1, you can check it out here; today we're going to build on that and talk about what determines the temperature of a planet with an…
esiegel | August 28, 2013"There is no question that climate change is happening; the only arguable point is what part humans are playing in it." -David Attenborough
It's been a long time since I've written anything on this blog about global warming, climate change, or most Earth-based environmental topics in general. After all, I'm a physicist -- an astrophysicist in particular -- and although I'm well-versed in the physics of the Earth and in science in general, it's not my particular area of expertise.
Image credit: NASA, Johnson Space Center, Apollo 17 crew.
Recently, I've had a number of requests to take a…
stoat | July 29, 2013Some parts of the discussion of Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear: chaos, weather and climate confuses denialists have turned into discussions of (bit) reproducibility of GCM code. mt has a post on this at P3 which he linked to, and I commented there, but most of the comments continued here. So its worth splitting out into its own thread I think. The comments on this issue on that thread are mostly mt against the world; I'm part of the world, but nonetheless I think its worth discussing.
What is the issue?
The issue (for those not familiar with it, which I think is many. I briefly googled this and…
stoat | July 24, 2013 Says Aunty. And the Graun says "Arctic thawing could cost the world $60tn, scientists say". $60tn is a big number. But lets not trouble ourselves with the popular press: lets go straight to the source, which is Nature ("Vast costs of Arctic change", by Gail Whiteman, Chris Hope and Peter Wadhams). Is that an impeccable source? Weeell, not quite. Nature whores after big-impact studies in a rather regrettable way, and more importantly this is but a "Comment" not (as far as I can tell) a proper peer-reviewed article.
You'd certainly hope it wasn't peer reviewed, because some of it is dodgy,…
stoat | May 19, 2013 VV has a thoughtful post about the value of peer review, looked at mostly through the lens of a couple of recent poor papers. Peer review (or whatever system you choose for choosing which papers will see the light) has to balance weeding out dross with not suppressing the unusual but good. It is primarily intended to do this for scientists; its not so great at handling the recent (?) phenomenon of septics deliberately gaming journals in order to publish their drivel. But I think I care about that less than I used to. Probably the greatest problem it faces is the vast mass of publish-or-…
stoat | April 12, 2013As regular readers will be aware, I think the ETS is stupid, and we should be imposing a carbon price via carbon taxes instead (Time for carbon taxes? and refs therein, if you're interested in the history).
But David Hone isn't, he likes the ETS, and nice person that he undoubtedly is, it cannot be mere coincidence that he has a strong financial interest in the trading scheme. Which is one of my objections to it - the inevitable parasitic class that grows up around it (and part of my despair - because carbon taxes are cleaner, they lack a similar parasitic class, and therefore semi-…
stoat | March 13, 2013 All over the world (my path: Timmy -> Torygraph -> google -> Nude scientist -> JOGMEC press release -> JOGMEC) there is excitement about "Japan cracks seabed 'ice gas' in dramatic leap for global energy". Which is indeed interesting, but not quite as dramatic as suggested. Because as the pic of the flare makes clear, this is a very small flow. If you read the press release, is clear this is still experimental:
Methane hydrate (*1) receives attention as one of the unconventional gas resources in the future. During the period from FY2001 to FY2008, which is Phase 1 of the “Japan…
stoat | March 11, 2013 Well, no-one has said what I wanted to say about this, so I thought I should. Click on the image for P3's take. This is about Shaun A. Marcott, Jeremy D. Shakun, Peter U. Clark, Alan C. Mix's latest in Science. If you want to read some stupid things said about it, try Curry (surprise) or if you prefer your stupidity super-sized, then WUWT. And indeed, if you want to read drivel, why bother with watered down gruel?
The abstract has something for everyone:
Surface temperature reconstructions of the past 1500 years suggest that recent warming is unprecedented in that time. Here we provide a…
gregladen | March 9, 2013This is a must watch video from the US Senate:
I'm pretty sure I heard once that there is a rule in the Senate that you can't call another Senator a liar using that word (lier). So when you see Senator Whitehouse not using that word, that may be why.
stoat | February 16, 2013A fascinating paper, Why Do Voters Dismantle Checks and Balances? by Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson and Ragnar Torvik (h/t FE). There is a pile of maths in there, but you don't really need it and I only skimmed it. From the conclusions:
In many weakly-institutionalized democracies, particularly in Latin America, voters have recently dismantled constitutional checks and balances that are commonly thought to limit presidential rents and abuses of power. In this paper, we develop an equilibrium model of checks and balances in which voters may vote for the removal of such constraints on…
stoat | February 2, 2013 Whew, that's a relief. The Arbiter has finally spoken, and I can stop trying to think for myself. Not that I was trying very hard. No one really likes thinking for themselves anyway - if you can its hard work, and if you can't its not pretty.
Yeah, I should probably have had a tl;dr version, which is that sensitivity is still about 3C.
Well, that's the only bit people care about really. Mialambre continues:
The discerning reader will already have noted that my previous posts on the matter actually point to a value more likely on the low side of this rather than higher, and were I pressed for…
cwhyte | February 1, 2013Inspired by the internet comic “The Up-Goer Five”, which used only the 1,000 most commonly used words to describe the Saturn V Rocket, scientists across the internet are attempting to describe their work using the just this small set of words. And it’s tough! But one of Brookhaven’s atmospheric scientists was up to the challenge. Alistair Rogers, who works in our Environmental Sciences Department, gives it a go:
Understanding change at the top of the world so we’ll know what is going to happen later
When we drive cars and warm our homes we give out bad stuff that ends up in the air. The bad…
stoat | January 20, 2013 It looks like the first of the BEST papers is published (webcite): A New Estimate of the Average Earth Surface Land Temperature Spanning 1753 to 2011 (h/t WUWT) - Richard A. Muller, Robert Rohde, Robert Jacobsen, Elizabeth Muller, Saul Perlmutter, Arthur Rosenfeld, Jonathan Wurtele, Donald Groom and Charlotte Wickham. Note the absence of La Curry (she's noticed, though. Note absence of comment on journal quality).
AW has thrown Muller under the bus and is cwuel to the paper, which is almost enough to make me kind, but not quite. The audience duly parrots this back to him, with a few…
stoat | January 15, 2013 Conservapedia, as any fule kno, is The Trustworthy Encyclopedia. On matters of politics or "difficult" science like dinosaurs, perhaps one might expect a slight divergence from reality. But on well understood matters like relativity? All will be well, Shirley. But someone posted their E=mc2 article as a screenshot to facebook, so I checked up, and lo! It is true: they really are utterly nutso. We all knew that anyway really, so this is just for fun (if you want details, it looks like rationalwiki is useful). Quoting:
E=mc² is Einstein's famous formula which asserts that the energy (E) which…