Monthly Archives: July 2012

Senate hearing on the Latest Climate Change Science and Local Adaptation Measures

Posted on July 31, 2012 by curryja | 38 comments

by Judith Curry

From the website of the Committee on Environment and Public Works:

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38 Comments

Posted in Climate change impacts, Policy

Observation-based (?) attribution

Posted on July 30, 2012 by curryja | 680 comments

by Judith Curry

Moreover, it appears likely that essentially all of this increase results from the human emission of greenhouse gases. These findings are stronger than those of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations group that defines the scientific and diplomatic consensus on global warming. In its 2007 report, the I.P.C.C. concluded only that most of the warming of the prior 50 years could be attributed to humans. – Richard Muller, NYT op-ed

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680 Comments

Posted in Attribution

A new release from Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature

Posted on July 29, 2012 by curryja | 456 comments

by Steven Mosher and Zeke Hausfather

Today the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project released a major update to their temperature data. The update includes:

Global and regional land temperature estimates back to the 1750s, with estimated uncertainties.
Temperature figures and data for every country, state, city, and individual station.
New estimates of the effect of early volcanoes as well as CO2 on the temperature record.
Globally gridded min, max, and mean anomalies for 1×1 lat lon cells for each month for land areas.

The link to the new paper from the Berkeley Earth group is [here].

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456 Comments

Posted in Data and observations

Loaded (?) dice

Posted on July 27, 2012 by curryja | 447 comments

by Judith Curry

“Climate dice”, describing the chance of unusually warm or cool seasons relative to climatology, have become progressively “loaded” in the past 30 years, coincident with rapid global warming. We conclude that extreme heat waves, such as that in Texas and Oklahoma in 2011 and Moscow in 2010, were “caused” by global warming, because their likelihood was negligible prior to the recent rapid global warming. – Hansen, Sato, Ruedy

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447 Comments

Posted in Attribution

Special issue on postnormal climate science

Posted on July 24, 2012 by curryja | 753 comments

by Judith Curry

Nature and Culture has a special issue on postnormal climate science.

[T]he concept of post-normal science helps to open up scientific discourse, to identify complex cultural and political situations, and to improve and extend the range of practices of an applied science. – Kraus, Schafer, and von Storch.

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753 Comments

Posted in Policy, Scientific method, Sociology of science

Cato’s Impact Assessment

Posted on July 23, 2012 by curryja | 621 comments

by Judith Curry

The Cato Institute has a new report entitled ADDENDUM: Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, which is an addendum to the 2009 USGCRP Report with the same title.

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621 Comments

Posted in Climate change impacts, Skeptics

What climate sensitivity says about the IPCC assessment process

Posted on July 22, 2012 by curryja | 204 comments

by Rud Istvan

If climate sensitivity is high, then modest GHG increases cause significant warming. If it is low, then significant GHG increases will not. Analysis of the IPCC assessment of sensitivity provides another window into the ‘government-climate research’ complex and its propensity to overstate future warming, misrepresent findings, and dismiss challenging evidence.

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204 Comments

Posted in Attribution, Consensus

Sensitivity of the nocturnal boundary layer to added longwave radiative forcing

Posted on July 20, 2012 by curryja | 162 comments

by Judith Curry

So, if you increase the longwave radiative forcing from CO2, which of the following happens?

heating of the near surface ground temperature
heating of the atmosphere
heating of the deep ground temperature
the heat is lost to radiative emission from the skin surface.

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162 Comments

Posted in Sensitivity & feedbacks

Climate models at their limit?

Posted on July 18, 2012 by curryja | 587 comments

by Judith Curry

Estimates of climate-change impacts will get less, rather than more, certain. But this should not excuse inaction, say Mark Maslin and Patrick Austin.

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587 Comments

Posted in climate models

No consensus on consensus: Part II

Posted on July 13, 2012 by curryja | 1,045 comments

by Judith Curry

I’ve been invited to write a paper on the topic of consensus in climate change.

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1,045 Comments

Posted in Consensus, Policy, Scientific method, Sociology of science, Uncertainty

Just the facts, please

Posted on July 12, 2012 by curryja | 632 comments

by Judith Curry

“Get your facts first; then you can distort them as you please” – Mark Twain

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632 Comments

Posted in Communication

Explaining (?) extreme events of 2011 from a climate perspective

Posted on July 12, 2012 by curryja | 170 comments

by Judith Curry

The latest issue of the Bulletin of American Meteorological Society has published a collection of papers that illustrate different methodologies for attributing causes of recent extreme weather events.

Attribution of extreme events shortly after their occurrence stretches the current state-of-theart of climate change assessment. To help foster the growth of this science, this article illustrates some approaches to answering questions about the role of human factors, and the relative role of different natural factors, for six specific extreme weather or climate events of 2011. – TC Petersen, PA Stott, S. Herring

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170 Comments

Posted in Attribution

Between tribalism and trust

Posted on July 10, 2012 by curryja | 557 comments

by Judith Curry

By addressing the symptoms (lack of information and communication) rather than the underlying causes (lack of public accountability and transparency), the IPCC leadership is failing to adequately address the problem of restoring expert credibility. By using its communication strategy as a means of “gatekeeping,” the IPCC is exacerbating rather than solving the problem of public trust caused by the authoritarian and exclusive performance of the “establishment.” – Silke Beck

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557 Comments

Posted in Consensus

5 logical fallacies that make you more wrong than you think

Posted on July 9, 2012 by curryja | 496 comments

by Judith Curry

The Internet has introduced a golden age of ill-informed arguments. But with all those different perspectives on important issues flying around, you’d think we’d be getting smarter and more informed. Unfortunately, the very wiring of our brains ensures that all these lively debates only make us dumber and more narrow-minded. – Kathy Benjamin, CRACKED

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496 Comments

Posted in Scientific method, Sociology of science

The Government-Climate Complex

Posted on July 8, 2012 by curryja | 255 comments

by Rud Istvan

Groundbreaking science is sometimes a global collaborative effort (CERN, Higgs boson, July 4). It is more often a contact sport—especially when individuals challenge a prevailing paradigm. In 1926 the president of the American Philosophical Society called Wegener’s theory of continental drift “utter damn rot”. Climate science has become just such a contact sport. There is a consensus paradigm represented by 4^th IPCC. There are apparent flaws and uncertainties in that consensus. The government-climate complex stifles healthy scientific discourse about them.

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255 Comments

Posted in Policy

Machiavelli and Fortuna’s whim

Posted on July 5, 2012 by curryja | 437 comments

by Judith Curry

So, how do you think Machiavelli would advise the Prince on dealing with climate change?

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437 Comments

Posted in Policy

What global warming looks like (?)

Posted on July 3, 2012 by curryja | 527 comments

by Judith Curry

But since at least 1988, climate scientists have warned that climate change would bring, in general, increased heat waves, more droughts, more sudden downpours, more widespread wildfires and worsening storms. In the United States, those extremes are happening here and now. – Seth Borenstein (AP)

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527 Comments

Posted in Climate change impacts