Author Archives: curryja

I (and others) have characterized climate change as a ‘wicked problem’ – systemic, self-fuelling tangles, which are multidimensional, hard to define and generate new problems when one tries to solve the old ones.

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387 Comments

Posted in Policy

The albedo of Earth

Posted on March 10, 2015 | 569 comments

by Judith Curry

An important new paper finds that the albedo of Earth is highly regulated, mostly by clouds, with some surprising consequences.

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569 Comments

Posted in Sensitivity & feedbacks

‘Big players’ and the climate science boom

Posted on March 8, 2015 | 386 comments

by Judith Curry

Big Players of any sort distort the normal systemic activity and render the emergent outcomes unstable and unreliable and create an ideal breeding ground for incentives that motivate ideologically biased people to circumvent normal constraints in the name of pursuing a “greater good”.

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386 Comments

Posted in Sociology of science

2 new papers on the ‘pause’

Posted on March 5, 2015 | 649 comments

by Judith Curry

Two new papers were published last week of relevance to the hiatus.

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649 Comments

Posted in Attribution

Differential temperature trends at the surface and in the lower atmosphere

Posted on March 4, 2015 | 262 comments

by Roger Pielke Sr., Phil Klotzbach, John Christy and Dick McNider

An update is presented of the analysis of Klotzbach et al. 2009.

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262 Comments

Posted in Data and observations

IPCC in transition

Posted on March 3, 2015 | 521 comments

by Judith Curry

Will Pachauri’s karma run over IPCC’s dogma? – Peter Foster

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521 Comments

Posted in IPCC

Lessons from the ‘Irreducibly Simple’ kerfuffle

Posted on March 1, 2015 | 435 comments

by Rud Istvan

UPDATE: Response from Christopher Monckton

The Monckton, Soon, Legates, and Briggs paper “Why models run hot, results from an irreducibly simple climate model” appeared in the January 2015 Science Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). Hereinafter MSLB.

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435 Comments

Posted in Sensitivity & feedbacks

Conflicts of interest in climate science

Posted on February 25, 2015 | 745 comments

by Judith Curry

Once you tug on the thread of undisclosed financial interests in climate science, you’ll find it more a norm than exception. – Roger Pielke Jr (tweet)

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745 Comments

Posted in Ethics

NARUC Panel Discussion on Climate Change

Posted on February 24, 2015 | 198 comments

by Judith Curry

At its recent Winter Meeting, The National Associated of Regulatory Utility Commissioners (NARUC) asked the following question: You’re Still Not Sure Global Warming is Real?

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198 Comments

Posted in Communication

Mitigating CO2 emissions: a busted flush?

Posted on February 23, 2015 | 263 comments

by Michael Kelly

One graph I caught up with this week has convinced me that climate change mitigation by supressing carbon dioxide emissions is a busted flush that history will look back on with great ridicule, even if the worst of the climate alarmist predictions come to pass.

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263 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Understanding Time of Observation Bias

Posted on February 22, 2015 | 575 comments

by Zeke Hausfather

Global temperatures are adjusted to account for the effects of station moves, instrument changes, time of observation (TOBs) changes, and other factors (referred to as inhomogenities) that cause localized non-climatic biases in the instrumental record.

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575 Comments

Posted in Data and observations

The Intermittent Little Ice Age

Posted on February 19, 2015 | 376 comments

by Tony Brown

Is our popular understanding of the ‘Little Ice Age’ (LIA) correct, as being a predominantly cold era lasting 500 years, leavened by a few brief warm spells?

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376 Comments

Posted in History

Public intellectuals in the climate space

Posted on February 17, 2015 | 444 comments

by Judith Curry

Wanted: disruptive ideas on climate change.

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444 Comments

Posted in Sociology of science

Denizens II

Posted on February 15, 2015 | 261 comments

by Judith Curry

The recent article by Paul Matthews has motivated me to start a new ‘Denizens’ thread.

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261 Comments

Posted in Welcome

Berkeley Earth: raw versus adjusted temperature data

Posted on February 9, 2015 | 1,178 comments

by Robert Rohde, Zeke Hausfather, Steve Mosher

Christopher Booker’s recent piece along with a few others have once again raised the issue of adjustments to various temperature series, including those made by Berkeley Earth. And now Booker has double-downed accusing people of fraud and Anthony Watts previously insinuated that adjustments are somehow criminal .

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1,178 Comments

Posted in Data and observations

Clean Air – Who Pays?

Posted on February 9, 2015 | 223 comments

by Planning Engineer

A recent posting presented taxonomy of potential policy perspectives around climate/energy policy. The ensuing comments brought home the unfortunate recognition that energy providers have not advocated specific actions and preferred directions for climate/energy policy. I think they have a good story. Why aren’t they telling it?

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223 Comments

Posted in Policy

On determination of tropical feedbacks

Posted on February 6, 2015 | 184 comments

by Greg Goodman

Satellite data for the period surrounding the Mt Pinatubo eruption in 1991 provide a means of estimating the scale of the volcanic forcing in the tropics. A simple relaxation model is used to examine how temporal evolution of the climate response will differ from the that of the radiative forcing.

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184 Comments

Posted in Sensitivity & feedbacks

Taxonomy of climate/energy policy perspectives

Posted on February 3, 2015 | 312 comments

by Planning Engineer

Debates on policy issues around climate and energy often feature opposing sides talking past each other.

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312 Comments

Posted in Energy, Policy

Questioning the robustness of the climate modeling paradigm

Posted on February 2, 2015 | 652 comments

by Judith Curry

Are climate models the best tools? A recent Ph.D. thesis from The Netherlands provides strong arguments for ‘no’.

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652 Comments

Posted in climate models

Climate psychology’s consensus bias

Posted on January 30, 2015 | 505 comments

by Andy West

Climate psychologists have for years now puzzled over public inaction on climate change and also what makes skeptics tick (or sick), apparently making little progress on these issues.

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505 Comments

Posted in Consensus

Towards mass marketed electric vehicles

Posted on January 29, 2015 | 268 comments

by Robert Ellison

A look at the Drift EV concept for electric vehicles.

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268 Comments

Posted in Energy

Climate change as a political process

Posted on January 26, 2015 | 425 comments

All this talk about climate change has misled us collectively. It has made us search for a mega solution to a mega problem: it has created the impression that if we solve the problem of climate change, all other problems would also be solved. This is not the case. – Eija-Riitta Korhola

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425 Comments

Posted in Policy