climate science
stoat | November 10, 2008Really, why are you reading this? Read something of substance instead.
Last time I said I ought to read Oresekes again carefully. I have.Summary: nothing has changed. She is still wrong. Note: in all the following, I abbreviate the authors of Chicken Itza as "Oreskes". Well, she is the lead author and the only famous one, so gets to take the rap.
Oreskes central thesis is: Nierenberg was the lead author of the first major report on climate science issued by the National Academy of Sciences that challenged the emerging consensus view on global warming. It did so not by focusing on the…
stoat | November 5, 2008So, Obama will be Prez. Congratulations to him. The last upsurge of enthusiasm like this I recall was Blur in 1997. I remember that well; we drove down to Cornwall overnight and listened to the reports and went to sleep in a gorgeous pink dawn. And look how Blur turned out. We'll have to wait and see if Obama can do more than give inspiring speeches (and occaisionally jarring ones: "disabled and... not disabled" he managed to say in his acceptance speech. Can he not say "able"? Has no-one told him about avoiding double negatives?) But is hard to see how he can't be better than Bush.
Meanwhile…
stoat | October 22, 2008MW points out the regrettable Global Conference on Global Warming 2008 (GCGW-08). The wot? you might well say. Its not one of those, is it? It doesn't quite appear to be one of those. In fact, it even appears to have some fairly sensible people associated with it. Although rumour has it that they didn't quite know what they were associated with. "Imagine Borat organising a conference" said one source, who rather strangely would rather remain anonymous.
So how come it ends up awarding a conference prize to "GLOBAL WARMING IS GLOBAL ENERGY STORAGE", B. Nordell, B. Gervet, Luleå University of…
stoat | October 18, 2008Fergus is interested in the effects of El Nino on sea ice. So I looked at http://climexp.knmi.nl/. At first I thought it didn't have sea ice, and it doesn't in the indices, but it does have in the monthly data, which you can average. And then end up with:
The shows Arctic sea ice correlated to SST over the sea. I used the Reynolds SST, so its 1982-2008. Oddly enough, more sea ice makes it colder in the Arctic. More interestingly, this applies to the Atlantic, but much less to the Pacific, though there is some effect (but outside Nino 3.4?). This is all months, as I failed to persuade it to…
stoat | October 10, 2008Via their blog, Nurture have some commentary on sea ice by Serreze & Stroeve.
Its all pretty vapid: With sharply rising atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the change to a seasonally ice-free Arctic Ocean seems inevitable. Very good, but The only question is how fast we get there. Well its certainly an important question, but the most important point is that they have no answer.
After the resulting record-low ice extent in September, unprecedented in satellite observations, over 70 per cent of the sea ice cover in spring 2008 consisted of young, fairly thin ice -- an even more…
stoat | October 7, 2008Since this years sea ice failed to be a record min (how careless of it) there is a sense of furtive scurrying around looking for something else; and DSB is looking at record thin instead: Sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has melted to its lowest volume in recorded history, according to new measurements they say on 7th october. Interesting.
Volume implies measuring thickness. But while measuring area from satellite isn't too hard (people have been doing it routinely for years, and there are problems, especially when its wet, ahem, but still no-one is too worried), measuring thickness is much harder…
stoat | September 29, 2008Do you ever have the experience of a book you've bought from abe or ebay turning up, and you can't remember why you bought it? I got "The long-term impacts of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide" by MacDonald today (The Long-term Impacts of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Levels, By Gordon James MacDonald, Published by Ballinger, 1982, ISBN 088410902X, 9780884109020, 252 pages) , and thought "hmm thats interesting, but why *this* book?". Now I'm at home, I can find the answer: its really the JASON report. Aha.
So how does it shape up? Well of course what I've done is a very quick…
stoat | September 25, 2008AL (and V1S, sorry!) pointed me to http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/, which lead me to http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/iadv/, from which I selected Barrow, as being in the Arctic, and CH4, as being methane, and 2000-2008, as being a small enough interval that you can see whats going on, and I got:
So there you have it: methane isn't shooting up precipitously. Its a bit higher this year than last. OK, I know, those are preliminary data. But I think thats enough to rule out any major changes.
Its worth pointing out (JA has said this, but I forget where) that methane is an awful long way…
stoat | September 24, 2008Various wild excitement about methane emissions from the Arctic shelf... Hot Topic, Inel and The Indescribably Overhyped, which latter reveals "exclusively" what Magnus translated several weeks ago.
Inel, very sensibly, asks for context: what are we to make of "millions of tons of a gas 20 times more damaging than carbon dioxide"? I think the best thing to look at would be the global methane concentration. If that isn't going up strongly, then this isn't a big thing at present. Whether or not its a sign for the future is another matter. Unfortunately I couldn't find the current methane concs…
stoat | September 18, 2008My paper with Tom Peterson and John Fleck (trailed here) is out in BAMS; you can get it now (for free! [Update: also direct from BAMS]).
Nice, isn't it:
And thats just the first page!
For those who weren't paying attention, you may wish to read:
The RC post that John Fleck wrote recently
My RC post from 2005
http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/ - my collection of papers and notes
[[Global_cooling]] on wikipedia
My post pointing out how Iain Stewart got it wrong
The undead and the dead
See-also: Exploding myth of 1970s global cooling "consensus"
And: Nurture
And http://www.sciencenews.…
stoat | September 15, 2008By S. P. Huang, H. N. Pollack, and P.-Y. Shen, also known as HPS. This is a very interesting paper. To understand why, you'll need to at least browse The borehole mystery and More boring.
To recap: the image shown was being shamelessly abused by the septics as purported proof that the MWP was much warmer than today and this vital evidence was being suppressed by the IPCC using black helicopters and the usual kind of stuff. I thought that the major point is that the HPS '97 graph (the one here) just isn't used anymore by anyone and wondered why not (not even H, P or S used it).
They say:
The…
stoat | September 15, 2008clearclimatecode.org is a project of Nick Barnes, who occasionally comments here. Its an attempt to re-write the byzantine GISS historical record processing software into something that won't disgrace the 21st century, namely Python (boo hiss, but mt will be happy).
So the bugfixes are nice and clearly described, and are things like "STEP 0 of the GISTEMP code is in FORTRAN. This makes it unclear to the public." :-)
The aim is to re-implement the GISS algorithms, but in clearer code and in a more portable way, ideally producing identical results except for bug-fixes.
They have found one…
stoat | September 6, 2008This starts from Pielke Jr commenteing at RC that the 1990 IPCC grossly overestimated sea level rise to date, and pointing to his post here as proof. Its nonsense, of course.
[Aside: Chinese Cut Back Coal-to-liquids from John Fleck is interesting.]
Pielke does the familiar rub-out-all-the-uncertainty estimates stuff, as well as using A.12 rather than fig 12 (p xxx), to try to show that IPCC '90 overestimated current sea level rise. First off, Pielkes graph is a straight line, and the IPCC's clearly isn't, so he hasn't been exact. Secondly, the IPCC graph is obviously not intended to predict…
stoat | September 5, 2008The story so far... IPCC sez sea-level rise (SLR) by 2100 (0.18 to 0.6 m), but this excluded dynamic effects on the grounds that present understanding of the relevant processes is too limited for reliable model estimates. It even said so fairly explicitly in the SPM table heading (Model-based range excluding future rapid dynamical changes in ice flow) but naturally enough this caveat gets ignored as not providing any useful numbers. RC noticed, of course. It does become obvious, however, that you can't really get any very exciting numbers out without some rapid ice sheet response.
But saying…
stoat | August 11, 2008Nothing much going on with sea ice at the moment, but people are getting excited about it, so why shouldn't I contribute to the smoke?
[A little concept I just created in the comments but am so pleased with I'm going to put it here: is 2007's Arctic sea ice like 1998's global temperature?]
First up in the stupidity stakes is Tim Flannery, for his Words of warming in the Grauniad, in particular for by June 2008 signs of a great melt were emerging and a senior adviser to the Norwegian government was warning that this may be the Arctic's first ice-free year. Even in June, that was blatantly…
stoat | July 5, 2008Its a paper in Science, by R. S. W. van de Wal et al. I've only read the abstract, by I was rather struck by how easy it is to misinterpret the title, given that the abstract continues ...Over a longer period of 17 years, annual ice velocities have decreased slightly, which suggests that the englacial hydraulic system adjusts constantly to the variable meltwater input, which results in a more or less constant ice flux over the years. So much for the rapidly sliding Greenland...
stoat | June 2, 2008...as the famous sage replied. He wasn't talking about the Thompson et al. stuff, but he could have been. RP Jr appears determined to prove me right and is in danger of saltating the carcharhiniforme (ho ho).
Meanwhile, in an abrupt U-turn, James "maverick" Annan is toeing the party line, describing RC's post as "pretty reasonable as ever" :-).
But enough snarking. I should say something.
It now seems fairly clear that "everyone" is accepting the correction as necessary, and in my brief perusal of the T et al. paper I thought it seemed fair enough. Whats up for grabs is how much, and where,…
stoat | May 29, 2008At last some news on the climate front, and JA has a nice posting on it. I'd say its a bit early to be expresssing an opinion. They have found something; quite how it affects the record needs chewing over.
Meanwhile, did you know that Singer has a Nobel Prize? No? Well it was news to me, and is yet another case of the septics puffing up their weak credentials with IPCC reviewer status. Found via skeptics in the pub whom S-said-Fred is due to address on June 24th. In fact he may have found his level: propped up on the bar, with a pint in his hand, grandly offering to explain away the worlds…
stoat | May 1, 2008All the blogosphere is abuzz with Advancing decadal-scale climate prediction in the North Atlantic sector. I don't have much to say that JA hasn't already said. But that isn't going to stop me saying it.
Firstly they've done something very odd with the reference model data in fig 4. The std IPCC projections would be right on their obs verification (which stops in 1998 for some bizarre reason) and their "forecast" would be even more obviously an outlier. I assume that the black line on fig 4 must be their own model. Looking again, I'm really rather baffled how this can possibly be anything…
stoat | April 12, 2008I've realised that I've been dismissing a load of nonsense merely on the grounds that its discussing short trem trends, without troubling to look at those trends. But everyone else is talking about them, so why shouldn't I?
So Anyway, Lucia says that trends since 2001 are negative, based on a fitting procedure no-one has ever heard of. John V says they are positive.
Looking at the yearly numbers from 2001, they look positive. Ditto from the graph.
So I'm rather confused as to where this whole "temperatures are falling this century" meme comes from. Has anyone bothered to try to sort this out…