Monthly Archives: November 2011

Shifts, phase-locked state and chaos in climate data

Posted on November 30, 2011 | 180 Comments

by David Douglass

Recent studies of observational climate data have shown that Earth’s climate system:  has many abrupt climate shifts; is phase locked to an annual cycle of Solar origin; and is chaotic. These phenomena are related and are summarized below.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Discussion thread: Durban, emails

Posted on November 29, 2011 | 431 Comments

by Judith Curry

Its a busy week in the climate blogosphere, reacting to the emails and also the UNFCCC Conference in Durban.

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Posted in Uncategorized

WHT on Schmittner et al. on climate sensitivity

Posted on November 29, 2011 | 269 Comments
by WebHubTelescope
.
Schmittner et al have written a paper titled “Climate Sensitivity Estimated from Temperature Reconstructions of the Last Glacial Maximum” (Science Nov 24. 2011).

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Posted in Sensitivity & feedbacks

McKitrick on the IPCC

Posted on November 26, 2011 | 672 Comments

by Judith Curry

Ross McKitrick writes:

I am pleased to announce the publication of a report I have written that provides systematic detail on the procedures of the IPCC and makes the case for reforming them. My study, called What is Wrong With the IPCC? A Proposal for Radical Reform, was published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation in the U.K., and includes a foreword by the Hon. John Howard, former prime minister of Australia.

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Posted in IPCC

Emails

Posted on November 24, 2011 | 890 Comments

by Judith Curry

Two years ago on Thanksgiving, I was working on my Climategate essay An open letter to graduate students and young scientists in fields related to climate research.  It was a topic of family discussion, and my 4 nieces and nephews (high school and college age) were all discussing and commenting on my essay.  I was also involved in extensive e-discussions with Joe Rom and Andy Revkin, who were hosting my letter on their blogs.

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Posted in Ethics

Research ethics training

Posted on November 22, 2011 | 871 Comments

by Judith Curry

I have been pondering how to best teach research ethics to incoming graduate students and to meet the new NSF guidelines.   While googling around, I found an interesting document from the Department of Meteorology at Penn State.

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Posted in Ethics

Expertise: breadth vs depth

Posted on November 21, 2011 | 323 Comments

by Judith Curry

Richard Feynman has famously stated: “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.“

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Posted in Sociology of science

Santa Fe Conference: Part II

Posted on November 19, 2011 | 193 Comments

by Judith Curry

I now have some of the presentations from the Santa Fe Conference posted on a web site.

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Posted in Uncategorized

IPCC Special Report on Extreme Events

Posted on November 18, 2011 | 212 Comments

by Judith Curry

The IPCC has just published the Summary for Policymakers from the forthcoming Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX).

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Posted in Climate change impacts

New report on climate change and security

Posted on November 17, 2011 | 219 Comments

by Judith Curry

Mother Jones has an article entitled “CIA’s Weather Underground.”  Its closing sentence:

In this political climate, it’s no wonder the CIA declined to discuss its global-warming research for this article. For the time being, the climate spooks have gone underground.

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Posted in Climate change impacts, Policy

Smith and Stern on uncertainty in science and its role in climate policy

Posted on November 16, 2011 | 249 Comments

by Judith Curry

Risk assessment requires grappling with probability and ambiguity (uncertainty in the Knightian sense) and assessing the ethical, logical, philosophical and economic underpinnings of whether a target of ‘50 per cent chance of remaining under +2◦C’ is either ‘right’ or ‘safe’. How do we better stimulate advances in the difficult analytical and philosophical questions while maintaining foundational scientific work advancing our understanding of the phenomena? And provide immediate help with decisions that must be made now?

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Posted in Policy, Uncertainty

Capitalism vs. the Climate

Posted on November 16, 2011 | 683 Comments

by Judith Curry

There is a question from a gentleman in the fourth row.  He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for county commissioner in Maryland’s Carroll County because he had come to the conclusion that policies to combat global warming were actually “an attack on middle-class American capitalism.” His question for the panelists, gathered in a Washington, DC, Marriott Hotel in late June, is this: “To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?”

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Posted in Policy

Ludecke et al. respond: Part II

Posted on November 15, 2011 | 239 Comments

by Horst-Joachim Lüdecke, Rainer Link, Friedrich-Karl Ewert

It is nearly impossible to answer more than 1000 comments that the previous three threads [here, here and here] on the surface temperature data records have generated. Most technical comments and errors would settle themselves if the commentators better understood the methods applied.  This large number of comments demonstrates the interest in the BEST and the LU, LL publications.

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Posted in Data and observations

Proc. Roy. Soc. Special Issue on ‘Handling Uncertainty in Science’

Posted on November 14, 2011 | 161 Comments

by Judith Curry

The Royal Society Discussion Meeting on Handling Uncertainty in Science, held 22/23 March 2010, played a seminal role in motivating me to investigate uncertainty in the climate debate.

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Posted in Uncertainty

Public engagement on climate change

Posted on November 13, 2011 | 325 Comments

by Judith Curry

At the forthcoming  AGU Fall Meeting,  I have an invited talk in a session on Scientist Participation in Science Communication.

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Posted in Communication

Congressional Climate Briefing to Push “End of Climate Change Skepticism”

Posted on November 13, 2011 | 444 Comments

by Judith Curry

Press release from the Democrats of the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee:

Three prominent scientists will present the best case yet for the end of climate skepticism in Washington and the world over the fact that the world is warming at a congressional briefing held by Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.)

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Posted in Sociology of science

Peer review is f***ed up

Posted on November 12, 2011 | 304 Comments

by Judith Curry

But the truth is that peer review as practiced in the 21st century biomedical research poisons science. It is conservative, cumbersome, capricious and intrusive. It slows down the communication of new ideas and discoveries, while failing to accomplish most of what it purports to do. And, worst of all, the mythical veneer of peer review has created the perception that a handful of journals stand as gatekeepers of success in science, ceding undue power to them, and thereby stifling innovation in scientific communication.

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Posted in Sociology of science

Disinformation vs fraud in the climate debate

Posted on November 10, 2011 | 824 Comments

by Judith Curry

Lets conduct a thought experiment.  Consider the differing reactions to the two Ludecke papers if the exact same papers had been written by:

a)  Ludecke et al.
b)  Michael Mann
c)  Isaac Held
d)  A graduate student

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Posted in Greenhouse effect

Ludecke et al. respond

Posted on November 10, 2011 | 305 Comments

by Horst-Joachim Lüdecke, Rainer Link, and Friedrich-Karl Ewert

In his comments R. L. Tol argues that our paper LU and LL should be ignored. We will respond following the order of R. Tol’s objections. We refer to the same shortcuts and references as in our guest post – LU resp. LL, and [1]-[5].

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Posted in Skeptics

Tol’s critique of the Ludecke et al. papers

Posted on November 8, 2011 | 615 Comments

by Richard Tol

There has been some brouhaha over a guest post by Lüdecke, Link, and Ewert. I think the quality of work is so bad that Judith should never have spotlighted these papers. Publicly berating Judith, I of course drew more attention to their work, and her response added to that.

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Posted in Skeptics

Disinformation and pseudo critical thinking

Posted on November 7, 2011 | 756 Comments

by Judith Curry

Barry Woods highlights a twitter exchange about my hosting a guest post, where I am accused of purveying disinformation:

@ Richard Tol: Its wrong, but with @JudithCurry lending her authority it becomes disinformation

with Keith Kloor forwarding the following Tweet:

@KeithKloor:  @Richard Tol says to @JudithCurry: “I think you have done a disservice by lending your credibility to these two papers.”

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Posted in Communication, Ethics

Two new papers vs. BEST

Posted on November 7, 2011 | 536 Comments

Guest Post by Lüdecke, Link, and Ewert

Our two papers [1], hereafter LU, and [2], hereafter LL, were published almost simultaneous with the release of the BEST papers. The basic objective of all of these papers is the same – to document reliably the surface temperature of the Earth from the beginning of the 19th century until the present.

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Posted in Data and observations

The wrong(?) conversation

Posted on November 6, 2011 | 217 Comments

by Judith Curry

I’ve been meaning to  write a post on the recent “Open Science Conference” organized by the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP).  A post at RealClimate entitled “Conference Conversations” provides a starting point for my post, with this concluding sentence:

The contrast between the conversations in this meeting and what passes for serious issues in the media and blogosphere was very clear.

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Posted in Communication, Policy

Harmony of the climate: isolating the oscillations in many climate data sets

Posted on November 6, 2011 | 80 Comments

by Vaughan Pratt

Paul Clark, the developer of the immensely useful WoodForTrees website that plots climate data, has kindly joined the discussion at Climate Etc., to clarify the meanings of ‘From:’, ‘To:’, and ‘Isolate’ which had been giving some people trouble. In this post I’d like to focus on the third of these, ‘Isolate’, whose utility may not have been fully appreciated.

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Posted in Data and observations

Pause (?)

Posted on November 4, 2011 | 801 Comments

by Judith Curry

Question of the week:

Has the rate of warming continued unabated, or has there been a  pause in the warming?

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Posted in Data and observations, Scientific method