climate science
stoat | October 27, 2009Please don't force me to write another of these, I'll run out of "oh dear"s.
The issue is RP Jr venturing into areas of climate science he doesn't understand (see losing the plot for the last one I remember) and dragging Cruel Mistress along behind, though to be fair CM doesn't fully commit herself.
AndrewT has already expalined the truth to Roger, but it doesn't look like he wants to know it :-(.
And I still haven't written up Larklight or Saturn's Children.
[While I'm here, and since I can: HH on foxes -W]
[Update: you may want to know about my comment policy. Please put any tedious whines…
stoat | October 27, 2009There is a slightly weird AP news article by Seth Borenstein which purports to show that In a blind test, the AP gave temperature data to four independent statisticians and asked them to look for trends, without telling them what the numbers represented. The experts found no true temperature declines over time. All very well, taken literally, but I thought the world was supposed to be warming, not not statistically cooling.
But it gets worse:
The AP sent expert statisticians NOAA's year-to-year ground temperature changes over 130 years and the 30 years of satellite-measured temperatures…
stoat | October 20, 2009The Arctic Ocean could be largely ice-free and open to shipping during the summer in as little as ten years' time, a top polar specialist has said. Don't believe it, but who is saying it? Yes, its the Beeb again, determined to run their reputation into the ground and then hammer it six feet under.
This stems from the Caitlin Arctic Survey which isn't promising.
What Wadhams actually said was "The Catlin Arctic Survey data supports the new consensus view - based on seasonal variation of ice extent and thickness, changes in temperatures, winds and especially ice composition - that the Arctic…
sciencewoman | October 12, 2009It's Earth Science Week, and this year's theme is Understanding Climate. So it's the perfect time to share some cool videos of women earth scientists and how they are working to improve the diversity and representation of women in atmospheric science. Hat tip to Erika Marin-Spiotta for sharing these videos.
The first three-minute video is about the GRASP program, which gives undergraduate students a chance to do research at Storm Peak Lab in Colorado.
The second ten-minute video is on the ASCENT workshops, that aimed to develop vertical mentoring and lateral networking among women…
stoat | October 7, 2009Which is, wittily, Yamal backwards. The shape of this is now becoming clearer; I think it is safe to post.
I first ran across this in The Torygraph, which is worthless, but appears to be based on climateaudit.org/?p=7168. RC ripped into this but its a bit snarky (unlike me, obviously) and perhaps doesn't make the main points all that clearly. And then we have Briffa's statement.
So those main points are:
1. MBH '98 doesn't use the Yamal series in question. This isn't too surprising, since it was first used in Briffa (2000). RC points this out. The Torygraph, above, failed to notice that, as…
sciencewoman | October 3, 2009This job ad from Katherine Hayhoe, amazing climate scientist and one of my favorite Twitter people, is EXACTLY the sort of career opportunity that we need to see more of.
The realities of our world are that many of us need or wish we had
more flexible jobs - in terms of hours, location, and what we can do
with kids underfoot. With that in mind, about 10 years ago I started a
research consulting company that I hoped would create that ideal job
for me. Today, atmosresearch.com provides occasional to full-time work
to more than a dozen people, over half of us women.
Given our focus on providing…
stoat | September 29, 2009So says Krugman. He means, of course, that the scientists are predicting disaster but no-one is listening. Or rather, that people listen but then find doing anything too inconvenient. Since this happened over fishing I find it not at all odd. But Krugman's basic premise - the sense that we're hurtling toward catastrophe but nobody wants to hear about it or do anything to avert it. And here's the thing: I'm not engaging in hyperbole - is twaddle. This *is* obvious hyperbole. The prognosis for the planet has gotten much, much worse in just the last few years. - no, I don't think so. You could…
stoat | September 22, 2009Off on an email list we've been discussing wildfires and their connection to global warming. I've always been somewhat cynical about the connection, which appears in the popular press [1] to amount to "fires are hot, global warming is, err, warm, so they must be connected". However, I really do know well enough to ignore the popular press.
This kind of thing: There are many reasons for any particular fire, but basically the (wildfire) pattern is reflection of two things related to higher temperatures - earlier spring snow melt and also higher spring and summer temperatures," he added. [2] isn…
stoat | May 21, 2009I apologise for the brief intrusion of something vaguely related to climate science on this rowing-n-wiki blog; we'll return you to your usual programming shortly.
Maurizio Morabito attempts to establish that there was a consensus for global cooling in the 1960's (this is all part of a rather dull campaign to discredit the mighty number one climate paper "The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus"; generally he appears to have failed to understand what we said, so I won't bore you by attacking it further). Evidence is apparently found in a 1961 UNESCO / WMO conference…
stoat | May 3, 2009Did you notice that RC called it "Meinshausen et al"? Barbarians :-). Anyway, they liked the paper whilst I'm less sure. As far as I can tell its not really a question of science in dispute, just what you make of it. So what M et al. do is instead of the std.ipcc "force a GCM with CO2 and see how climate changes" they try to reverse this process, and see what level of CO2 produces a given temperature change. They can't do this with GCMs, of course, so are fitting the GCM stuff to a simpler model. And since there is uncertainty in the sensitivity, there is uncertainty in the result, but at…
stoat | April 23, 2009A while ago, crowing over the extent of Arctic sea ice this winter and the possibility this would mean loadsa ice this summer, I noted that "it is clear from that, that the winter anomaly doesn't correlate too closely with the summer minimum". That was based on the IJIS plot, and on little more than that the 2008 winter ice is clearly on the high side while the summer ice was on the low side. C challenged my assertion, and drew some plots, and decided in the end that maybe I was right. He was also kind enough to send me his spread sheet, but I didn't get along with it, so have faked up my own…
stoat | April 14, 2009But just for once not sea ice, at least not to start with.
RMG provides a nice link to some of the Wordie "collapse" stuff. Although I find that a touch confusing, as the Wordie had essentially gone by 1992 - see [[Wordie Ice Shelf]] for example. Reuters is also noting it as news. Odd. Perhaps they are confusing it with that other well-known ice shelf that begins with a W, the Wilkins. That hasn't collapsed (warning: link to BAS PR, and BAS has a terrible habit of re-writing its website and breaking all the old links. If it still works for you, be grateful). It has however lost a bit of…
stoat | March 12, 2009Time to break my lengthy science drought by trying to get back up to speed on what sea level is supposed to do. Sea levels rising faster than expected: scientists says Reuters, and they lead with Stefan Rahmstorf predicting more than a meter in 100 years. Reuters make the common mistake by saying The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 predicted global warming would cause sea levels to rise by between 18 cm and 59 cm (7 inches and 23 inches) this century. To be fair to them, IPCC practically begged people to get this wrong; that is the value excluding weird things…
stoat | March 4, 2009All the George Will nonsense has had one good result - "The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Vol. 89 Iss. 9 " is up at number one in the AMS charts. But there is more of interest in the list if you look further..
1. The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society Vol. 89 Iss. 9
- That's us. Hurrah!
2. Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow
Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences Vol. 20 Iss. 2
- Lorenz. Butterfly effect - from 1963.
3. Some Coolness Concerning Global Warming…
stoat | January 12, 2009Nurture notes some controversy over LOHAFEX. We're taken aback by this flagrant disregard of international law, says someone I've never heard of.
Well, my reading of COP 9 Decision IX/16, Section C (Ocean Fertilization), paragraph 4 is that it says it requests Parties and urges other Governments, in accordance with the precautionary approach, to ensure that ocean fertilization activities do not take place until there is an adequate scientific basis on which to justify such activities, including assessing associated risks, and a global, transparent and effective control and regulatory…
stoat | January 12, 2009So says The Grauniad. It seems eerily familiar to me, and the The shift has alarmed experts, who blame global warming almost seems like a parody. Torygraph tags along.
Oh yes, here we were and here.
The new study says The results showed the amount of CO2 absorbed during 1999 to 2007 was half the level recorded from 1992 to 1999. This is all very well, but it cant be global, or it would be obvious in the atmospheric CO2 levels. And it isn't.
stoat | January 11, 2009Ahem. So previously there was a lot of hype and confusion and not much paper. Now that has changed, with Reconstructing sea level from paleo and projected temperatures 200 to 2100AD by Aslak Grinsted, John C. Moore & Svetlana Jevrejeva.
Which says:
We use a physically plausible 4 parameter linear response equation to relate 2000 years of global temperatures and sea level. We estimate likelihood distributions of equation parameters using Monte Carlo inversion, which then allows visualization of past and future sea level scenarios. The model has good predictive power when calibrated on the…
stoat | January 5, 2009Its all rather manky here: cold, thin snow semi-melted by rain and refrozen. Urgh.
Which brings up the obvious question: if I could suddenly make the world, or at least this little bit of it, 2 degrees warmer all year round, would I be better or worse off? I'm just thinking of direct response, mind you, so leaving out any ecological problems and assuming no change in precipitation. +2 oC would mean that we never had snow and hardly ever had frosts. That latter would make breaking up the soil each winter a bit harder (and would have lots of ecological repercussions, but I'm ignoring them, only…
stoat | December 1, 2008One of the possibilities for GW-damage is reductions in crop yield - up to 25%, in extreme scenarios. My reaction to that was "we all eat too much anyway" (well I certainly do) but some people did point out the obvious, that not everyone lives in the overfed West. Eli was kind enough to point to the FAO who tell me that in 2000 global average calories per day per person was 2807 (up from 24xx in 1970). The NHS tells me that the average adult should eat about 2,000 per day (women) and 2,500 per day (men) which we'll average down to about 2,250 (m/f) and then down to 2000 (including children).…
stoat | November 27, 2008Is it a Pearl Harbor if it has to happen twice? says Nature, discussing a list of stuff that Joe Romm thinks might lead to the second-world-war scale of effort against climate change.
#1 is Arctic goes ice free before 2020. I have bets out on this. It would be a big, visible global shock. One of his bettee's is me, so it will come as no surprise to you all that I think this is unlikely. Would I get wildly excited if it did become ice free? The odds on the bet are 1-1, so neither side is sticking its neck out and saying this definitely will/won't happen.
#2 is Rapid warming over next decade,…