Author Archives: curryja

Pondering the Arctic Ocean. Part I: Climate Dynamics

by Judith Curry

I spent the 1990’s conducting research on the climate dynamics of the Arctic Ocean, and then moved onto other things circa 2002.  My interest in the Arctic has recently been reinvigorated by the increasing societal implications of reduced sea ice extent in terms of security issues, the prospect of a northern sea route, implications for resource exploration and extraction, and adaptation issues for coastal villages along the Arctic Ocean coast.

This multi-part series will begin with an overview of what we know about the climate dynamics of the Arctic Ocean sea ice.

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UK SciTech peer review inquiry

by Judith Curry

The UK House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology has launched an inquiry into peer review.

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Reasoning about floods and climate change

by Judith Curry

I just came across a paper that I view to be remarkably important, entitled “Influence diagrams for representing uncertainty in climate-related propositions,” by Hall, Twyman and Kay.  This paper integrates a number of themes that we have been discussing here: reasoning about uncertainty, consilience of evidence,  attribution of extreme events, floods, and even the Italian flag(!).  And it does the best job I’ve seen of assessing uncertainty and confidence in a climate-related proposition.

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Foxes, Hedgehogs and Prediction

by Judith Curry

Robert Ellison sent me a link to a review of a book entitled “Future Babble:  Why Expert Predictions Fail and Why We Believe Them“, by Dan Gardner, which describes the research of UC Berkeley Professor Philip Tetlock.

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Property Rights and Climate Change

by Judith Curry

Jonathan Adler has an interesting article at the Volokh Conspiracy (a libertarian legal blog) entitled “The GOP’s Anti-Climate Policy.”

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Talking past each other?

by Judith Curry

There is a recent article in the NYTimes entitled “Snubbing skeptics threatens to intensify climate war, study says.”  The NYTimes article refers to a study entitled: “Talking Past Each Other: Cultural Framing of Skeptical and Convinced Logics in the Climate Change Debate.”

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Climate Stabilization

by Judith Curry

Roger Pielke Jr. brought to my attention a provocative paper entitled “Discursive stability meets climate instability: A critical exploration of climate stabilization in contemporary climate policy.”

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Extreme Testimony. Part II: Floods

by Judith Curry

In Part I, the Congressional testimony of John Christy and Francis Zwiers on extreme events was discussed.  In this post, I focus in on issues related to floods.  This topic was also discussed in a previous post on Attribution of Extreme Events Part II.

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Extreme testimony

by Judith Curry

In today’s Hearing on “Climate Science and EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Regulations,”  John Christy and Francis Zwiers both presented testimony that focused on extreme events,  climate sensitivity and warming trends.

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Congressional Hearing on EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Regulations

by Judith Curry

From the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Power are holding a hearing today Tuesday, March 8, 2011, at 10:00 a.m. entitled, “Climate Science and EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Regulations.”

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Phase locked states

by Judith Curry
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Of relevance to our discussion on the Tsonis et al papers and spatio-temporal chaos, there is a new paper out by David Douglass in Physics Letters, entitled “Topology of Earth’s climate indices and phase-locked state.”
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Climate story telling angst

by Judith Curry

There has been much discussion in the climate blogosphere this past week on scientific story telling and communicating with the public.

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Chaos, ergodicity, and attractors

by Tomas Milanovic

This post has been triggered by the following comment from Eli Rabbett in the spatio-temporal chaos thread :

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Neverending Reflections on Climategate

by Judith Curry

Motivated by a post by David Roberts at Grist, there has been some interesting reflection on Climategate this past week.  Roberts’ post entitled “What we have and haven’t learned from Climategate” says:

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The Harry Potter Theory of Climate

by Judith Curry

I just spotted spotted an article on Reuters entitled “The Harry Potter Theory of Climate,” and I couldn’t resist doing a post on it.

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Long Death(?) of Environmentalism

by Judith Curry

Schellenberger and Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute posted an interesting essay last week entitled  “The Long Death of Environmentalism.”  The summary reads:

Last week Breakthrough co-founders Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus returned to Yale University for a retrospective on their seminal 2004 essay, “The Death of Environmentalism.” In their speech they argued that the critical work of rethinking green politics was cut short by fantasies about green jobs and “An Inconvenient Truth.” The latter backfired — more Americans started to believe news of global warming was being exaggerated after the movie came out — the former made false promises that could not be realized by cap and trade. What is an earnest green who cares about global warming to do now? In this speech, Nordhaus and Shellenberger reflect on what went so badly awry, and offer 12 Theses for a post-environmental approach to climate change.

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Agreeing(?): Part II

by Judith Curry

Part one has engendered considerable discussion.  In addition to the discussion at the Blackboard, Roger Pielke Sr. has written an essay entitled “Missing the point of sensitivity” which is discussed at WUWT.  Josh has prepared a cartoon:


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Agreeing(?)

by Judith Curry

On Lucia Liljegren’s Blackboard (commonly categorized as a “lukewarmer” site), Zeke has a post titled “Agreeing.”    Zeke’s motivation for this is:

My personal pet peeve in the climate debate is how much time is wasted on arguments that are largely spurious, while more substantive and interesting subjects receive short shrift. While I’m sure a number of folks will disagree with me on what is spurious vs. substantive, I think it would be useful to outline which parts of the debate I feel are relatively certain, are somewhat uncertain, and quite uncertain.

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Hiding the Decline. Part V: Discussion

by Judith Curry

The other threads are having problems with the reply threading, here is a new thread that will hopefully facilitate the discussion

Hiding the Decline. Part IV: Beautiful Evidence

by Judith Curry

Continuing the themes of conflict prevention and best practices developed in Part III, I would like to discuss some pages from Edward Tufte’s book Beautiful Evidence, which was introduced here by Steve Mosher (seconded by MrPete).  Of particular relevance is a chapter entitled “Corrupt Techniques in Evidence Presentations: Effects Without Cause, Cherry Picking, Punning, Chartjunk.”

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Hiding the Decline: Part III

by Judith Curry

On the Part II thread, John Nielsen-Gammon summarized the constructive suggestions as follows.  I’ve edited this to intersperse additional comments from John N-G and also Steve Mosher’s comments on these suggestions:

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Hiding the Decline: Part II

by Judith Curry

The significance of the debate over the hockey stick and “hide the decline” is the following:

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Hiding the Decline

by Judith Curry

To date, I’ve kept Climate Etc.  a “tree ring free zone,” since the issues surrounding the hockey stick are a black hole for conflict and pretty much a tar baby, IMO.  Further, paleoproxies are outside the arena of my personal research expertise, and I find my eyes glaze over when I start reading about bristlecones, etc.  However, two things this week have changed my mind, and I have decided to take on one aspect of this issue: the infamous “hide the decline.”

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Pseudo-science versus skepticism

by Judith Curry

John Beddington, Chief Science Advisor to the UK government, goes to war against bad science (h/t BishopHill, dated Feb 14):

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Lisbon Workshop on Reconciliation. Part XII: Ravetz’s lecture

by Judith Curry

Over at WUWT, Jerome Ravetz has a guest post, which includes the text of his lecture at the public event in Lisbon, which is entitled “Nonviolence in science?”.  I’ve excerpted what I regard as the more interesting points to serve as the focus for discusion.

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