Climate Etc.

by Judith Curry

A few things that caught my eye these past weeks

by Ross McKitrick

• Optimal fingerprinting is a statistical method that estimates the effect of greenhouse gases (GHGs) on the climate in the form of a regression slope coefficient.
• The larger the coefficient associated with GHGs, the bigger the implied effect on the climate system.
• In 2003 Myles Allen and Simon Tett published an influential paper in Climate Dynamics recommending the use of a method called Total Least Squares in optimal fingerprinting regression to correct a potential downward bias associated with Ordinary Least Squares
• The problem is that in most cases TLS replaces the downward bias in OLS with an upward bias that can be as large or larger
• Under special conditions TLS will yield unbiased estimates, but you can’t test if they hold
• Econometricians never use TLS because another method (Instrumental Variables) is a better solution to the problem

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by Dan Hughes

A brief continuation of previous discussions about calculation of viscous heat dissipation in the flow of liquids having linear stress/rate-of-strain constitutive description.

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by Judith Curry

A few things that caught my eye these past few weeks

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By Nic Lewis

This article concerns the paper “Globally resolved surface temperatures since the Last Glacial Maximum” by Matthew Osman et al.[2]  (hereafter Osman 2021) published by Nature in November 2021.

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by Judith Curry

A few things that caught my eye these past weeks

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by Dan Hughes

I recently ran across the paper by Isenko et al. [2005] listed below. The second paragraph of the introduction states:

“According to the conservation of energy, the loss of potential energy for a volume of water is sufficient to warm it by 0.2 C for each 100 m of lowering.”

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by Judith Curry

I have a new article published in the latest issue of International Affairs Forum.

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by Judith Curry

A few things that caught my eye these past few weeks

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by Dan Hughes

The contribution of viscous dissipation conversion of kinetic energy into thermal energy has been significantly over-estimated in three recent publications. The kinetic energy content of the macro-scale mean flow is assigned to be the heat dissipation into thermal energy. The estimate leads to temperature increases that make significant contributions to melting ice on Greenland.

A recent news release announced the findings of the research, and a video of a melt-lake draining into the glacier ice is in the news release and also at YouTube here.

A different estimate, in which the viscous dissipation is determined at the micro-scale of the flow, is calculated in these notes. This estimate, and the associated temperature increases in the flow, are significantly less than that based on the macro-scale. A PDF file with my analysis is here [BSLdissip02]

Comments, especially corrections for incorrectos, will be appreciated.

by Robert Ellison

I don’t raise the alarm at all, but there are tipping points in the Earth system.   Megafloods and megadroughts. Abrupt warming or cooling of many degrees C in years or decades.  Glacials and interglacials.  Solar energy driving patterns of planetary turbulence and an ice, cloud and biology response.   These have always been with us.  Our limited geophysical instrumental series reveal a variability that can’t be distinguished from anthropogenic warming effects (Koutsoyiannis 2020 ).    So it’s happening but perhaps not quite the end of the world yet.

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by Judith Curry

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is inextricably linked to the global energy crisis, which is inextricably linked to the so-called climate ‘crisis’.

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by Judith Curry

“The current thinking and approaches guiding this conceptualization and description have been shown to lack scientific rigour, the consequence being that climate change risk and uncertainties are poorly presented. The climate change field needs to strengthen its risk science basis, to improve the current situation.” – Norwegian risk scientist Terje Aven

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by Judith Curry

A few things that caught my eye these past few weeks

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by Javier

My perspectives on managing personal Covid risk, based upon my knowledge of microbiology, genetics, immunology, cancer, and neurobiology.

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by Judith Curry

“The first rule of climate chess is this.  The board is bigger than we think, and includes more than fossil fuels.”  – Jon Foley

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by Judith Curry

A few things that caught my eye these past few weeks

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by Judith Curry

Some reflections on the movie Don’t Look Up.

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by Judith Curry

A year ago, who would have thought that 2021 would be crazier than 2020?

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by Judith Curry

Politics versus the data versus communicating science.

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by Judith Curry

My follow up interview on the Strong And Free podcast [link].

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by Andy West

Although a game played on a relatively tiny stage, ClimateBall™ points to fundamental processes, which across the vastly larger global public stage and involving billions of meme transactions annually, have caused the emergence of a cultural belief-system based upon the narrative of ‘certain catastrophic climate-change’.

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by Judith Curry

“The field of Sun-climate relations . . . in recent years has been corrupted by unwelcome political and financial influence as climate change sceptics have seized upon putative solar effects as an excuse for inaction on anthropogenic warming” – Lockwood (2012)

“We argue that the Sun/climate debate is one of these issues where the IPCC’s “consensus” statements were prematurely achieved through the suppression of dissenting scientific opinions.” –  Connolly et al. (2021)

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by Judith Curry

Are our current solutions only a short term fix?

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by Judith Curry

A few things that have caught my eye these past few weeks

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