Archive
A Sea-Surface Miracle!
Overlong “On the adjustments to the HadSST3 data set” blog post just out (after a few technical glitches) at Judith Curry’s comes to a conclusion that aounds like yet another climate-related miracle…
HadSST3 selectively removes the majority of the long term variations from the pre-1960 part of the record. ie. it removes the majority of the climate variation…
…that cannot be attributed to anthropogenic global warming!
How unexpected!
THIS IS The #Climate Question
Everything else, is a corollary….
From Bishop Hill’s “Nobel laureate on temperatures” (Feb 2012):
The question is not whether temperatures have risen or whether mankind has affected the climate. Temperatures have always risen and fallen and mankind has always affected the climate. The question is whether we have a problem on our hands. The poor performance of the climate models suggests that the problem is much less than we have been led to believe.
Perspective Amiss At @AmSciMag
Summary of the latest email edition of “Science In The News Weekly“, “a digest of science news stories appearing in the mainstream media. It is delivered every Monday afternoon (or Tuesday afternoon in the case of a Monday holiday) as part of Sigma Xi’s public understanding of science program area, in conjunction with American Scientist magazine”
Science-y news
Another science-y news
Yet another science-y news
World to end(*)
More science-y news
More more science-y news
In particular the (*) bit is of the form:
Scientists say that if carbon dioxide emissions don’t begin to decline soon, the complex fabric of marine ecosystems will begin fraying–and eventually unravel completely.
Evidently reason takes a momentary leave of absence at American Scientist like in many other places, whenever carbon dioxide is mentioned.
BTW the link is to the study that used naturally-occurring CO2 seeps to try to figure out what might happen in 2100, an impressive collection of “might’s” if you ask me.
Is Thickness of Mind Mandatory To Become A Distinguished Climate Scientist?
My answer is of course “not”. However, there are some worrying signs. A guy in East Anglia is unable to use Excel, a bunch of guys from the US and elsewhere don’t know how to use Acrobat.
No wonder they haven’t got a clue where their missing heat has gone to. And no wonder they are foreign to the scientific method.
Nothing New About Fudging – Mass Delusions Among Scientists
I’m sure nowadays the NYT would not even mention such a book as Alexander Kohn’s “FALSE PROPHETS“, if it said anything about climate science:
BOOKS OF THE TIMES
By John Gross
Published: December 30, 1986
[…] Deceptions as blatant as this are -as far as anyone can tell – rare in the annals of science, but they represent only one end of a broad spectrum of possible scientific cheating. At the other extreme are errors that are at least partly the product of wishful thinking or a failure to guard against bias; in between come numerous gradations of what the Victorian scientist Charles Babbage classified as ”trimming” and ”cooking” (manipulating the data, suppressing inconvenient facts), along with plagiarism, making bogus claims about the probable course of research and the more subtle varieties of Babbage’s third category of misconduct, outright ”forging.”
[…] here are errors, as Mr. Kohn says, that ”are nothing to be ashamed of,” and he begins by considering some examples – in particular, those cases of collective error where a scientist’s initial mistake has been taken up and repeated by other scientists until it assumes the proportions of a mass delusion.
During the 1920’s and 1930’s, for instance, some 500 publications in reputable quarters were devoted to the phenomenon of ”mitogenetic rays” – ultraviolet rays that were erroneously thought to be emitted by plant or animal cells while they were dividing. Mr. Kohn observes that ”mythogenetic rays” might have been a better name; but he also tries to account for what it was that predisposed so many scientists to believe in them, and in subsequent mirages such as ”polywater” (a supposedly anomalous form of water – one eminent authority, J. D. Bernal, referred to it as ”the most important physical chemical discovery of the century”) and ”scotophobin” (a substance said to induce fear of darkness in rats). […]
As I already said, this stuff should be mandatory reading in all science schools.
Open Letter To Heartland From The Don’t-Do-As-We-Do Climate Team
I’ll believe the sincerity of the Open Letter to the Heartland Institute when, say,
- Mann’s twitter account will display a little less bile and won’t say incredibly stupid stuff like “[Climategate] was a crime against humanity. It’s a crime against the planet“
- Schmidt will allow discussion on RealClimate, instead of focusing on “simply deleting all of the attempts to draw attention to [whatever he dislikes to talk about]“
- Overpeck will come clean on the trouble of normalizing proxy reconstruction in a misleading way for policy makers
- Dear Kev will explain why Wolfgang Wagner had to apologize to him of all people, when resigning about publishing a paper that wasn’t retracted;
- Santer will clarify how exactly to tell the “human fingerprint” in global warming
- Karoly will apologize about personally attacking a climate scientist himself
- Bradley will clarify why he kept his concerns very private on a very public HS matter
After all, these are climate scientists that keep writing the patently-untrue, such as passing as “fact” this total fantasy
Climate change is already disrupting many human and natural systems.
that is contrary to the latest IPCC assessment.
No surprise there.
Missing Heat 3 – Implications For Policymaking
Trenberth’s “missing heat” should be a problem of physics, only it’s handled by amateur homeo-climate-paths.
Actually, it’s much more than a problem of physics. It has vast policy implications.
If models are not useful in a decadal timescale, such as they can predict a strong warming for a period of minimal or even no warning, then what use is there for models? What government (apart from North Korea…) would make it difficult for people to heat up their homes in the next decade with the explanation that is going to be warm in 2070 anyway?
People do not average-out their lives across decades or centuries: each and every one of us have to go through each and every day first.
If I freeze to death today at -10C, I will not enjoy the warmth of July at +30C even if the average is +10C, perfectly compatible with human life. The same can be said of plants and animals. If I plant an olive tree in my London garden, it will die of cold in February even if the yearly average is in theory just enough to make olive trees survive in the open. If a nasty mosquito species migrates from warmer places during an August heatwave, still if that species cannot survive the following winter it will not be around until next migration opportunity during a future heatwave.
A purely statistical, multi-year approach to modelling the climate is in theory useless for policymaking (similar considerations could be made for non-regional projections, but that is too long a story here – read “How Space-Time Digested AGW” if interested). And if we end up with 15 years of incorrect projections without even a volcano for an excuse, then whatever physical explanation there is, policymakers would be much wiser in keeping climate scientists at arm’s length.
