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.
Posted in Data and observations
by Judith Curry
Question of the week:
Has the rate of warming continued unabated, or has there been a pause in the warming?
Posted in Data and observations, Scientific method
by Judith Curry
The dueling climate null hypothesis papers by myself and Kevin Trenberth are now online.
Posted in Scientific method
by Judith Curry
I am currently in Santa Fe, attending the Third Santa Fe Conference on Global and Regional Climate.
Posted in Uncategorized
by Judith Curry
The issuing of the BEST press release prior to peer review of the papers raises some interesting and provocative issues.
Posted in Sociology of science
by Judith Curry
I just received this email via Peter Webster from a friend in the UK:
Hi Peter
Woke up this morning to hear on the News that Judy is dismayed about something. What is Judy upset about?
Posted in Sociology of science
by Donald Rapp
Santer et al. (2005) emphasized that “a robust feature” of climate models is that increasing greenhouse gas concentrations will amplify warming in the middle and upper tropical troposphere (compared to the surface). It was then with some consternation that they noted that the data do not support this prediction; indeed, surface warming typically exceeds tropospheric warming.
Posted in Data and observations
by Ken Wilson
It’s not been a good year for the environment or for evangelicalism. I received an especially pained email from Carl Safina, our church’s “adopted scientist.” Carl and I, secular scientist and evangelical pastor, have worked together to bridge the historic divide between our respective communities. But my team isn’t making that easy lately. Case in point: Carl bemoaned the fact that prominent evangelical presidential candidates are anti-science; Governor Perry of Texas, for example, denies climate change while calling constituents to pray for rain in a time of drought (a predicted effect of climate change.)
Posted in Ethics
by Judith Curry
Roger Pielke Sr has a fascinating, even mind-boggling, post that draws from an article by Paul Voosen in Greenwire entitled “Provoked scientists try to explain lag in global warming.”
Posted in Attribution
by Judith Curry
I’ve completed a revised draft of my response the to Reply to our Uncertainty Monster paper.
Posted in Uncertainty
by Judith Curry
The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project is giving us much to discuss. A number people have criticized the BEST PR in terms of posting the papers before the peer review process has completed, issuing a press release, etc.
Posted in Sociology of science
by Judith Curry
The new Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature product and the accompanying papers have generated considerable discussion. Lets focus on the technical criticisms.
Posted in Data and observations
by Judith Curry
I just got the reviews on my reply to the rebuttal submitted regarding my uncertainty monster paper. They take exception with my criticism of transparency of the IPCC’s attribution argument.
Posted in Uncertainty
by Judith Curry
Max Anacker writes:
Several posters have stated that it would be good to have a separate thread on “How should a post-IPCC world look?”
Posted in Uncategorized
by Judith Curry
Fred Moolten poses the following challenge:
I would be interested in a post asking participants how their own views have evolved as a result of participation here (and their experiences elsewhere as well). I expect few epiphanies or conversions, but I would be disappointed if no-one acknowledges learning anything. I’m sure you would be too.
Posted in Sociology of science
by Judith Curry
The new surface temperature dataset developed by the Berkeley group is now available, along with four manuscripts that have been submitted for publication.
Posted in Data and observations
by Judith Curry
I’ve finished reading Donna Laframboise’s book “The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert: An Expose of the IPCC.”
by Richard Saumarez
Many continuous signals are sampled so that they can be manipulated digitally. We assume that the train of samples in the time domain gives a true picture of what the underlying signal is doing, but can we be sure that this is true and the signal isn’t doing something wildly different between samples? Can we reconstruct the signal between samples and, more important, can we tell if the signal has been incorrectly sampled and is not a true representation of the signal?
Posted in Data and observations, Uncertainty
by Frank Lemke
A recent post in our Global Warming Prediction Project discusses the question “What Drives Global Warming?” based on a self-organized interdependent nonlinear dynamic system of equations of 6 variables (ozone, aerosols, clouds, sun activity, CO2, global temperature). It also predicts using this system global warming 6 years ahead (monthly resolved) and it compares the known IPCC AR4 projections with this system prediction and the observed anomalies of the past 23 years.
Posted in Attribution, climate models
by Chris Colose
There has been a lot of blog interest recently on feedback theory and climate sensitivity (e.g., Isaac Held, ClimateAudit, Science of Doom, Nick Stokes, one on control theory here at Climate Etc.).
Posted in Sensitivity & feedbacks
by Don Aitkin
Our hostess ran a recent thread ‘On being a Radical scholar’, and she built it on article by Dr Kate Clancy, who wrote on the difficult situation of women who are doing their best to climb the academic ladder while also looking after children. I completely sympathised with her, and could identify with the stories that she heard at the Purdue conference that had prompted her essay.
Posted in Sociology of science
by Judith Curry
A letter from Grant Petty provides a fitting finale to our engagement with the skydragons.
Posted in Greenhouse effect
by Judith Curry
There are two problems with the current criteria for tenure: they don’t reflect modern, interdisciplinary scholarship, and they don’t include metrics to evaluate influence and perspective beyond peer-reviewed publications.
Posted in Open knowledge
by Judith Curry
Partisan groups lobbying for preferred outcomes have a long history of the selective use of information to support predetermined conclusions. This is acceptable in politics, but not in science. The motivations for such advocacy science may be a sincere desire to improve the protection of . . ecosystems and frustration with decision-making processes that seem to give too little weight to longer term environmental considerations, or a cynical strategy to exploit the challenges that uncertainty poses to decision-making. Whatever the cause, making science advice itself partisan means it no longer deserves to be treated in any special way in the decision-making process. There is a serious risk that the long-term costs of merging advocacy with science advice would outweigh any short-term benefits of greater impact on a particular decision. If scientists do wish to increase the impact of science advice on decision-making, there are alternatives to advocacy in doing so. These approaches make the advice more amenable to decision-makers, while avoiding turning science advisors into partisan lobbyists.
