Climate Etc. | Page 2

How epidemiologists try to fool us with flawed statistical practices

Posted on May 17, 2021 by curryja | 184 comments

by S. Stanley Young and Warren Kindzierski

Climate Etc. recently carried several insightful posts about How we fool ourselves. One of the posts – Part II: Scientific consensus building – was right on the money given our experience! The post pointed out that… ‘researcher degrees of freedom’… allows for researchers to extract statistical significance or other meaningful information out of almost any data set. Along similar lines, we offer some thoughts on how others try to fool us using statistics (aka how to lie with statistics); others being epidemiologists and government bureaucrats.

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Posted in Uncategorized

North Atlantic Nonsense

Posted on May 12, 2021 by curryja | 106 comments

by Alan Longhurst

“Never before in 1000 years the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), also known as the Gulf Stream System, has been as weak as in the last decades“.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Climate book shelf

Posted on May 10, 2021 by curryja | 298 comments

by Judith Curry

Reviews of new books by Steve Koonin, Matthew Kahn and Marc Morano.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Week in review – science edition

Posted on May 8, 2021 by curryja | 199 comments

by Judith Curry

A few things that caught my these past few weeks.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Eco-anxiety

Posted on May 6, 2021 by curryja | 268 comments

by Judith Curry

The damaging effects of generating eco-anxiety in children. Climate Etc. as an antidote.

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Posted in Communication, Uncategorized

Climate is everything

Posted on May 2, 2021 by curryja | 244 comments

by Judith Curry

. . . according to the cover story of April 26 issue of Time Magazine. How have we have fooled ourselves into thinking that manmade climate change is the dominant cause of societal problems?

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Posted in Policy, Uncategorized

Academic freedom and scholarship: perspective from Canada

Posted on April 29, 2021 by curryja | 70 comments

by Pamela Lindsay

Mentorships by professors of students are among the vital functions of a university. Here I expose the vulnerable underbelly of mentorship and one possible threat to academic freedom and scholarship.

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Posted in Sociology of science

How we fool ourselves. Part III: Social biases

Posted on April 25, 2021 by curryja | 375 comments

by Judith Curry

“Is the road to scientific hell paved with good intentions?” – political psychologist Philip Tetlock (1994)

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Posted in Uncategorized

Week in review – science edition

Posted on April 17, 2021 by curryja | 501 comments

by Judith Curry

A few things that caught my eye this past week

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Posted in Uncategorized

How we fool ourselves. Part II: Scientific consensus building

Posted on April 10, 2021 by curryja | 556 comments

by Judith Curry

“Like a magnetic field that pulls iron filings into alignment, a powerful cultural belief is aligning multiple sources of scientific bias in the same direction. – policy scientist Daniel Sarewitz

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Posted in Uncategorized

Environmental Justice campaign to replace New York City peaking power plants

Posted on April 2, 2021 by curryja | 112 comments

by Roger Caiazza

Environmental justice organizations are currently a major driver of environmental regulation in New York. A new report “The Fossil Fuel End Game, A frontline vision to retire New York City’s peaker plants by 2030” illustrates the campaign strategy they are using to shut down peaking power plants in New York City. Unfortunately their claims are based more on emotion than fact.

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Posted in Uncategorized

A pertinent climate question

Posted on March 28, 2021 by curryja | 120 comments

by Michel de Rougemont

Not so innocent as it looks, a pertinent question is asked by Judith Curry on Twitter:

How much of a change in cloudiness would it take to account for the 0.53 W/m² increase in TOA radiative forcing since 2003?
https://twitter.com/curryja/status/1375144537522204672

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Posted in Sensitivity & feedbacks

UK climate policy discussion thread

Posted on March 21, 2021 by curryja | 261 comments

by Judith Curry

I have been contacted by a UK politician about climate policy in the UK,

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Posted in Policy, Politics, Uncategorized

Climate adaptation sense. Part III: Dynamic Adaptation Policy Pathways

Posted on March 17, 2021 by curryja | 88 comments

by Judith Curry

Best practices in adapting to sea level rise use a framework suitable for decision making under deep uncertainty.

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Posted in Adaptation, Oceans, Uncertainty

Week in review – science edition

Posted on March 12, 2021 by curryja | 164 comments

by Judith Curry

A few things that caught my eye these past few weeks

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Posted in Week in review

Climate adaptation follies. Part II: scenarios of future sea level rise

Posted on March 8, 2021 by curryja | 61 comments

by Judith Curry

How did the state of New Jersey come to adopt sea level rise projections for their adaptation planning that are more than twice as high as the IPCC’s values?

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Posted in Adaptation, Uncertainty

Climate adaptation follies. Part I: The New Jersey challenge

Posted on March 7, 2021 by curryja | 93 comments

by Judith Curry

New Jersey has a sea level rise problem. How should this be managed?

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Posted in Adaptation, Oceans

Canceling the AMO

Posted on March 6, 2021 by curryja | 140 comments

by Judith Curry

Conclusion from Michael Mann’s new paper: “We conclude that there is no compelling evidence for internal multidecadal oscillations in the climate system.”

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Posted in Causation, Oceans

Compensation between cloud feedback + ECS and aerosol-cloud forcing in CMIP6 models

Posted on March 5, 2021 by niclewis | 45 comments

By Nic Lewis

An important paper, Wang et al.[1], on the relationships between cloud feedback, climate sensitivity (ECS) and aerosol-cloud interaction in the latest generation of global climate models (CMIP6) has just been published. The key conclusion of the paper is:

The seeming consistency of global-mean temperature evolution between more positive cloud feedback (high ECS) models and observations requires a strong aerosol indirect cooling effect that leads to an interhemispheric temperature evolution that is inconsistent with observations.

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Posted in climate models, Sensitivity & feedbacks

Uncomfortable knowledge

Posted on March 3, 2021 by curryja | 197 comments

by Judith Curry

On the misuse of science and scientific authority.

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Posted in Policy, Sociology of science, Uncertainty

Week in review – TX edition

Posted on February 28, 2021 by curryja | 147 comments

by Judith Curry

A round up of some insightful articles on the TX blackout

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Posted in Week in review

CO2 sensitivity: the polar solution

Posted on February 26, 2021 by curryja | 108 comments

by Alan Longhurst

Natural climate variability in the polar regions.

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Posted in Polar regions, Sensitivity & feedbacks

Assigning Blame for the Blackouts in Texas

Posted on February 18, 2021 by curryja | 553 comments

By Planning Engineer

The story from some media sources is that frozen wind turbines are responsible for the power shortfalls in Texas. Other media sources emphasize that fossil fuel resources should shoulder the blame because they have large cold induced outages as well and also some natural gas plants could not obtain fuel.

Extreme cold should be expected to cause significant outages of both renewable and fossil fuel based resources. Why would anyone expect that sufficient amounts of natural gas would be available and deliverable to supply much needed generation? Considering the extreme cold, nothing particularly surprising is happening within any resource class in Texas. The technologies and their performance were well within the expected bounds of what could have been foreseen for such weather conditions. While some degradation should be expected, what is happening in Texas is a departure from what they should be experiencing. Who or what then is responsible for the shocking consequences produced by Texas’s run in with this recent bout of extreme cold?

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Posted in Energy

The progress of the COVID-19 epidemic in Sweden: an update

Posted on February 18, 2021 by niclewis | 787 comments

By Nic Lewis

I thought it was time for an update of my original analysis of 28 June 2020. As I wrote then, the course of the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden is of great interest, as it is one of very few advanced nations where no lockdown order that heavily restricted people’s movements and other basic freedoms was imposed. Continue reading →

Posted in Uncategorized

Assessment of climate change risk to the insurance sector

Posted on February 15, 2021 by curryja | 86 comments

by Judith Curry

The insurance sector is abuzz with a new report from AIR Worldwide on the insurance risk from the impact of climate change on hurricanes. Insurance industry clients of my company, Climate Forecast Applications Network (CFAN), have requested a critique of this report.

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Posted in Hurricanes