Skeptics: make your best case. Part II

by Judith Curry

By popular request, here is  new thread on one of the original ‘hot topics’ at Climate Etc.

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Reflections on the Arctic sea ice minimum: Part II

Judith Curry

Pursuant to Part I, i ask the following questions:

  • Whence an ‘ice free’ Arctic?
  • Does an ‘ice free’ Arctic matter?

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Reflections on the Arctic sea ice minimum: Part I

by Judith Curry

How should we interpret the record low minimum sea ice extent?

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BS detectors

by Judith Curry

Most likely, their bullshit detectors just went on high alert. – Greg Breining

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National Strategy for Advancing Climate Models

by Judith Curry

Overall, climate modeling has made enormous progress in the past several decades, but meeting the information needs of users will require further advances in the coming decades. – NRC

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The costs of tackling or not tackling anthropogenic global warming

by Michael Cunningham (“Faustino”)

There are many issues of debate about global warming.  Has there been warming this century?  Will there be further warming?  If so, will the cause be anthropogenic or other?  What will be the impacts, both positive and negative?  Should we take action to reduce emissions?  How might we proceed, and what are the costs and benefits of various approaches?

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Refocusing the debate about advocacy

by Judith Curry

The notion that a scientist is either an advocate or does nothing at all to shape policy is a false dichotomy that has muddied the debate about science and advocacy. – Scott and Rachlow

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Too much advocacy?

by Judith Curry

By advocating social policy positions, scientists may be forfeiting their credibility, instead becoming just ordinary folks with opinions. – Greg Breining

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The weatherman is not a moron

by Judith Curry

Why are weather forecasters succeeding when other predictors fail? It’s because long ago they came to accept the imperfections in their knowledge. – Nate Silver

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Climate change and U.S. presidential politics

by Judith Curry

So . . .  what do the U.S. presidential candidates have to say about climate change?

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Decision making under uncertainty: the dog and the frisbee

by Judith Curry

As you do not fight fire with fire, you do not fight complexity with complexity. Because complexity generates uncertainty, not risk, it requires a regulatory response grounded in simplicity, not complexity.

To ask today’s regulators to save us from tomorrow’s crisis using yesterday’s toolbox is to ask a border collie to catch a frisbee by first applying Newton’s Law of Gravity. – Haldane and Madouros

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The ‘hard won’ consensus

by Judith Curry

The extent to which a consensus is “hard won” can be understood to depend on the personal qualities of the participating experts.” Brent Ranalli

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Climate Etc. at 2

by Judith Curry

September 2  marks the 2nd anniversary of Climate Etc.  Time for some reflection, on where we’ve been and where we might be going.

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Rhetoric and rafts

by Judith Curry

The warning signals from the planet are clear. Now is the moment for our commu- nity to adopt the rallying cry of sea kayakers confronted with conditions too challenging to handle alone: “Time to raft up!”. – Chris Rapley

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Activate (?) your science

by Judith Curry

We need bold science and bold action.   There is a vital role for governments to play, but equally importantly is the role of academia, civil society, and industry.  Harnessing that collective commitment is underway – but it remains to be seen if changes will be rapid and substantial enough. Her Excellency noted in her powerful opening remarks that there is a significant gap between the accelerating pace of degradation and the rate of effective response.   
Each of you here can influence the rate of response by activating your science.  – Jane Lubchenco, NOAA Administrator

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Hurricane (?) Isaac

by Judith Curry

Tropical Storm Isaac is now spinning up in the Gulf of Mexico.   The models have finally converged on New Orleans as the landfall location.  Are better forecasts of hurricanes possible?  New research is pointing the way for improvements, and more useful hurricane forecasts are becoming available from the private sector, particularly at longer time horizons and also with regards to landfall impacts.

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AMS Statement on Climate Change

by Judith Curry

The American Meteorological Society (AMS) has just published its new statement on Climate Change.

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Apocalypse not (?)

by Judith Curry

Predictions of global famine and the end of oil in the 1970s proved just as wrong as end-of-the-world forecasts from millennialist priests. Yet there is no sign that experts are becoming more cautious about apocalyptic promises. If anything, the rhetoric has ramped up in recent years. Echoing the Mayan calendar folk, theBulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock one minute closer to midnight at the start of 2012, commenting: “The global community may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent catastrophe from changes in Earth’s atmosphere.” – Matt Ridley

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A modest proposal for sequestration of CO2 in the Antarctic

*** SEE UPDATE AT END OF POST

This is the most interesting idea I’ve encountered in awhile.

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Apportioning natural and forced components in the Arctic amplification

by Judith Curry

These results support the notion that the enhanced wintertime warming over high northern latitudes from 1965 to 2000 was mainly a reflection of unforced variability of the coupled climate system. Some of the simulations exhibit an enhancement of the warming along the Arctic coast, suggestive of exaggerated feedbacks. – Wallace et al.

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On the rapid disintegration of projections

by Judith Curry

How and why did the scientific consensus about sea level rise due to the disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), expressed in the third Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment, disintegrate on the road to the fourth? 

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Learning from the octopus

by Judith Curry

Indeed, if there is a single message that sums up all of Sagarin’s work, it’s that organisms realized long ago that the world is a much less predictable place than humans would like to believe.  “We spend a lot of time in planning exercises, making predictive models, and in optimization routines,” says Sagarin. “All of which have essentially been selected against in nature, because they’re incredibly wasteful when you live in an unpredictable world.”

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Making Scotland the Green Energy Capital of Europe

by James Stafford

Reposted with permission from oilprice.com.

We were fortunate enough to have some time with Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond where we discussed a broad range of topics from Scotland’s ambitious renewable energy targets and North Sea oil & gas to Scottish independence and Donald Trump.

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Philosophical reflections on climate model projections

by Judith Curry

Should probabilistic qualities be assigned to climate model projections?

Are the approaches used by the IPCC for assessing climate model projection quality – confidence building, subjective Bayesian, and likelihood –  appropriate for climate models?

What are some other approaches that could be used?

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Fuzzy dice

by Judith Curry

Much is being made of Hansen’s ‘loaded dice’ as a metaphor for the changing climate.  I think we should be talking about ‘fuzzy dice.’

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