global warming
illconsidered | August 7, 2009A recent comment here brought up the frequent contrarian argument that there is a signature patern to enhanced greenhouse gas warming that is missing in the observational data despite showing up in the models. This is notably absent from the How to talk to a climate sceptic guide, something I hope to rectify Real Soon Now(tm).
I left a comment response but thought I may as well put it here in a new thread as it is OT over there.
Here is the referenced graph:
Figure 9.1. Zonal mean atmospheric temperature change from 1890 to 1999 (°C per century) as simulated by the PCM model from (a) solar…
nisbetmc | August 7, 2009Last week I participated in a two-day workshop at NSF on climate change education. The meeting brought together researchers in science education, communication, and informal learning; representatives from government agencies such as NOAA, the EPA, and NASA; and organizations such as the American Geophysical Union and the American Meteorological Society. The presentations and discussions focused not only on school-based settings but also on public engagement campaigns, the news media, and the role of science centers and museums.
Among several participants, there was an emphasis on three…
tlambert | August 6, 2009It's only taken two weeks to go from the blog posts shredding McLean et al to a paper submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research. The authors are G. Foster, J. D. Annan, P. D. Jones, M. E. Mann, B. Mullan, J. Renwick, J. Salinger, G. A. Schmidt, and K. E. Trenberth and the abstract says:
McLean et al. [2009] (henceforth MFC09) claim that the El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO), as represented by the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI), accounts for as much as 72% of the global tropospheric temperature anomaly (GTTA) and an even higher 81% of this anomaly in the tropics. They conclude…
tlambert | August 5, 2009Australia's CIS (Centre for Independent Studies) has been promoting greenhouse denial and delay for a decade. Last year their "Big Ideas" forum featured some classic denialism from Arthur Herman. This year, on Monday 10 August in Sydney we have:
Enemies of Progress?
Cute title. Maybe I should have used "Enemies of Science?" as the title of this post.
Where humanity once solved the world's problems, we are now viewed as the source. We no longer take pride in dynamic progress to benefit mankind; we bemoan the so-called carbon footprint that this progress will leave.
What? "so-called carbon…
illconsidered | August 3, 2009 Sipping from the internet firehose...
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Sipping from the internet firehose... August 2, 2009 McKinsey Report, WPO Poll, Nile Basin Conf., G2 Conf., Bonner & Assoc., Cash4Clunkers, Dire Projections Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics, Xcel Perversity, Bangladesh conf., Jellyfish, Late Comments Food Crisis, Food Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, GHGs, Temperatures, Paleoclimate, ENSO, Glaciers, Sea Levels, Satellites Impacts, Forests…
nisbetmc | August 2, 2009At the WPost today, Dan Morgan contributes an excellent analysis of what he calls the "agracrats," Democratic members of Congress from traditional farm states such as Iowa or Minnesota. As Morgan notes, these representatives have been an influential force in first opposing and then fundamentally altering climate change legislation, fearing as Morgan describes that "the cap and trade measures would increase fuel and fertilizer costs for farmers, hurt coal-burning rural electric utilities and leave the Midwest's thriving biofuels industry vulnerable to regulatory restrictions by the…
bleimanb | August 1, 2009According to a new study reported on by National Geographic, all of the flipping, flapping, undulating, kicking, tail whipping, swishing and swoshing that sea creatures use to propel themselves in the ocean may account for a large portion of "ocean mixing" and this in turn may make climate change modeling even more complicated a task. Ocean mixing is the mixing up of sea water layers (including their temperatures, salinity, etc.). Previously, it was thought that wind, weather, seismic activity and tides were the main forces behind ocean mixing. But according to this study, published…
tlambert | July 31, 2009Mercurius has listed the things AGW denialists will accept as evidence:
1) Nothing that was recorded by instruments such as weather-stations, ocean buoys or satellite data. Since all instruments are subject to error, we cannot use them to measure climate.
2) Nothing that has been corrected to account for the error of recording instruments. Any corrected data is a fudge. You must use only the raw data, which is previously disqualified under rule #1. Got that? OK, moving along...
3) Nothing that was produced by a computer model. We all know that you can't trust computer models, and they have a…
tlambert | July 29, 2009When Peter Sinclair made Anthony Watts the subject of his "Climate Crock of the week" video, Watts response was to attempt to suppress the criticism by making a bogus copyright claim against the video. Naturally this hasn't worked, with Desmogblog reposting the video. Better see it in case Watts tries again. Also of interest is Roger Pielke Sr's harumphing about the video.
tlambert | July 28, 2009John McLean, the guy who kept guiding Andrew Bolt off cliffs, has this time taken Bob Carter and Chris de Freitas with him. As tamino explains, they say that recent warming trends can be attributed to natural variation, but their analysis removed the trend from the data. See also McLean's defence and Robert Grumbine's lucid post. James Annan exposes another error - they fit a step function to that data and conclude that there is step in the data merely because there is a step in the fitted step function. John Lott made the same mistake in his "more guns, less crime" argument, as I showed…
tlambert | July 23, 2009Carl Zimmer summarizes:
In earlier days, Will liked to claim the World Meteorological Organization as an authority when he wrote that there has been no global warming since 1998. Now that the World Meteorological Organization has set things straight, he's claiming a columnist at National Review as his authority. That's quite an upgrade.
Actually, it's worse than "a columnist". His authority is fact averse Creationist Mark Steyn.
tlambert | July 23, 2009People outside Australia are probably unfamiliar with Piers Akerman, who is an absurdly partisan columnist for Sydney's Daily Telegraph. Tobias Ziegler finds Akerman not only denying the existence of global warming but also the existence of any criticism of Plimer's book and even the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere.
illconsidered | July 20, 2009 Sipping from the internet firehose...
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Disruption News Sipping from the internet firehose... July 19, 2009 Chuckle, Post G8-MEF, UK Low Carbon Transition Plan, Exxon Algae, Desertec, PETM, THC Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Carbon Tariffs, Solar Cycle, State of the Future Food Crisis, Food Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, GHGs, Temperatures, Paleoclimate, ENSO, Glaciers, Sea Levels, Satellites Impacts, Forests,…
tlambert | July 7, 2009Chilingar has republished his paper that shows that if you assume CO2 is not a greenhouse gas then it doesn't warm the planetin Enviromental Geology. This paper is so bad that S Fred Singer has resigned as an editor from Environmental Geology. Yes, this S Fred Singer.
Hat tip: Eli Rabett.
awild | July 2, 2009
(a) current distribution of Sasquatch (b) Sasquatch distribution post-climate change
For those of you dallying around about how seriously to take the threat of climate change, here's something for you. If we don't cease our emissions of greenhouse gases pronto, Bigfoot will invade Arizona and Utah. I'm serious.
tlambert | July 2, 2009Chris Mooney refutes claims that a skeptical report was suppressed by the EPA. (See also Deep Climate's analysis of the origin of the report.
Another story about skeptics being suppressed has been concocted by Christopher Booker:
Dr Taylor had obtained funding to attend this week's meeting of the [Polar Bear Study Group], but this was voted down by its members because of his views on global warming. The chairman, Dr Andy Derocher, a former university pupil of Dr Taylor's, frankly explained in an email (which I was not sent by Dr Taylor) that his rejection had nothing to do with his undoubted…
tlambert | July 1, 2009You might have learnt in stats class how to use linear regression to estimate trends. Well I'm sorry but you going to have to forget it all and the boring statistics books are going to have to be rewritten because that stuff is obsolete due to revolutionary breakthrough by Roger Pielke Sr. If you use the boring-and-now-obsolete linear regression stuff on the University of Colorado at Boulder sea level data you discover that the trend is positive and highly statistically significant, even if you just consider the data since 2006.
But using his revolutionary new technique Roger Pielke Sr…
nisbetmc | June 30, 2009
In the latest issue of the journal Public Understanding of Science, Lorraine Whitmarsh from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the UK, publishes a study that finds that the terms "climate change" versus "global warming" matter to public perceptions. In a mail survey of a representative sample of 590 residents from the Portsmouth, UK region, Whitmarsh gave half the participants a questionnaire asking them to evaluate the risks and impacts of "climate change" and the other half of the sample a questionnaire asking them to evaluate the risks and impacts of "global warming."
From…
illconsidered | June 29, 2009(The following is offered as an amusing example of how reality sometimes seems to have a sense of homour:)
My wife is from the Czech Republic and was mentioning to me her family's worries about the recent flooding (they are not in immediate danger). I google-news'ed it and went to the first hit, an AP article, that mentioned among the rest of it that there have been several major floods in the last 10 or fifteen years.
She mentioned that Czech never had these kids of events when she was growing up. I mentioned that increased flooding is an expected consequence of climate change in many…