IPCC Special Report on Extreme Events

Posted on November 18, 2011 by | 213 comments

by Judith Curry

The IPCC has just published the Summary for Policymakers from the forthcoming Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation (SREX).

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213 Comments

Posted in Climate change impacts

New report on climate change and security

Posted on November 17, 2011 by | 219 comments

by Judith Curry

Mother Jones has an article entitled “CIA’s Weather Underground.”  Its closing sentence:

In this political climate, it’s no wonder the CIA declined to discuss its global-warming research for this article. For the time being, the climate spooks have gone underground.

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219 Comments

Posted in Climate change impacts, Policy

Smith and Stern on uncertainty in science and its role in climate policy

Posted on November 16, 2011 by | 249 comments

by Judith Curry

Risk assessment requires grappling with probability and ambiguity (uncertainty in the Knightian sense) and assessing the ethical, logical, philosophical and economic underpinnings of whether a target of ‘50 per cent chance of remaining under +2◦C’ is either ‘right’ or ‘safe’. How do we better stimulate advances in the difficult analytical and philosophical questions while maintaining foundational scientific work advancing our understanding of the phenomena? And provide immediate help with decisions that must be made now?

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249 Comments

Posted in Policy, Uncertainty

Capitalism vs. the Climate

Posted on November 16, 2011 by | 683 comments

by Judith Curry

There is a question from a gentleman in the fourth row.  He introduces himself as Richard Rothschild. He tells the crowd that he ran for county commissioner in Maryland’s Carroll County because he had come to the conclusion that policies to combat global warming were actually “an attack on middle-class American capitalism.” His question for the panelists, gathered in a Washington, DC, Marriott Hotel in late June, is this: “To what extent is this entire movement simply a green Trojan horse, whose belly is full with red Marxist socioeconomic doctrine?”

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683 Comments

Posted in Policy

Ludecke et al. respond: Part II

Posted on November 15, 2011 by | 239 comments

by Horst-Joachim Lüdecke, Rainer Link, Friedrich-Karl Ewert

It is nearly impossible to answer more than 1000 comments that the previous three threads [here, here and here] on the surface temperature data records have generated. Most technical comments and errors would settle themselves if the commentators better understood the methods applied.  This large number of comments demonstrates the interest in the BEST and the LU, LL publications.

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239 Comments

Posted in Data and observations

Proc. Roy. Soc. Special Issue on ‘Handling Uncertainty in Science’

Posted on November 14, 2011 by | 161 comments

by Judith Curry

The Royal Society Discussion Meeting on Handling Uncertainty in Science, held 22/23 March 2010, played a seminal role in motivating me to investigate uncertainty in the climate debate.

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161 Comments

Posted in Uncertainty

Public engagement on climate change

Posted on November 13, 2011 by | 325 comments

by Judith Curry

At the forthcoming  AGU Fall Meeting,  I have an invited talk in a session on Scientist Participation in Science Communication.

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325 Comments

Posted in Communication

Congressional Climate Briefing to Push “End of Climate Change Skepticism”

Posted on November 13, 2011 by | 444 comments

by Judith Curry

Press release from the Democrats of the U.S. House Natural Resources Committee:

Three prominent scientists will present the best case yet for the end of climate skepticism in Washington and the world over the fact that the world is warming at a congressional briefing held by Rep. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) and Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.)

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444 Comments

Posted in Sociology of science

Peer review is f***ed up

Posted on November 12, 2011 by | 308 comments

by Judith Curry

But the truth is that peer review as practiced in the 21st century biomedical research poisons science. It is conservative, cumbersome, capricious and intrusive. It slows down the communication of new ideas and discoveries, while failing to accomplish most of what it purports to do. And, worst of all, the mythical veneer of peer review has created the perception that a handful of journals stand as gatekeepers of success in science, ceding undue power to them, and thereby stifling innovation in scientific communication.

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308 Comments

Posted in Sociology of science

Disinformation vs fraud in the climate debate

Posted on November 10, 2011 by | 825 comments

by Judith Curry

Lets conduct a thought experiment.  Consider the differing reactions to the two Ludecke papers if the exact same papers had been written by:

a)  Ludecke et al.
b)  Michael Mann
c)  Isaac Held
d)  A graduate student

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825 Comments

Posted in Greenhouse effect

Ludecke et al. respond

Posted on November 10, 2011 by | 305 comments

by Horst-Joachim Lüdecke, Rainer Link, and Friedrich-Karl Ewert

In his comments R. L. Tol argues that our paper LU and LL should be ignored. We will respond following the order of R. Tol’s objections. We refer to the same shortcuts and references as in our guest post – LU resp. LL, and [1]-[5].

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305 Comments

Posted in Skeptics

Tol’s critique of the Ludecke et al. papers

Posted on November 8, 2011 by | 615 comments

by Richard Tol

There has been some brouhaha over a guest post by Lüdecke, Link, and Ewert. I think the quality of work is so bad that Judith should never have spotlighted these papers. Publicly berating Judith, I of course drew more attention to their work, and her response added to that.

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615 Comments

Posted in Skeptics

Disinformation and pseudo critical thinking

Posted on November 7, 2011 by | 759 comments

by Judith Curry

Barry Woods highlights a twitter exchange about my hosting a guest post, where I am accused of purveying disinformation:

@ Richard Tol: Its wrong, but with @JudithCurry lending her authority it becomes disinformation

with Keith Kloor forwarding the following Tweet:

@KeithKloor:  @Richard Tol says to @JudithCurry: “I think you have done a disservice by lending your credibility to these two papers.”

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759 Comments

Posted in Communication, Ethics

Two new papers vs. BEST

Posted on November 7, 2011 by | 537 comments

Guest Post by Lüdecke, Link, and Ewert

Our two papers [1], hereafter LU, and [2], hereafter LL, were published almost simultaneous with the release of the BEST papers. The basic objective of all of these papers is the same – to document reliably the surface temperature of the Earth from the beginning of the 19th century until the present.

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537 Comments

Posted in Data and observations

The wrong(?) conversation

Posted on November 6, 2011 by | 217 comments

by Judith Curry

I’ve been meaning to  write a post on the recent “Open Science Conference” organized by the World Climate Research Programme (WCRP).  A post at RealClimate entitled “Conference Conversations” provides a starting point for my post, with this concluding sentence:

The contrast between the conversations in this meeting and what passes for serious issues in the media and blogosphere was very clear.

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217 Comments

Posted in Communication, Policy

Harmony of the climate: isolating the oscillations in many climate data sets

Posted on November 6, 2011 by | 80 comments

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.

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80 Comments

Posted in Data and observations

Pause (?)

Posted on November 4, 2011 by | 801 comments

by Judith Curry

Question of the week:

Has the rate of warming continued unabated, or has there been a  pause in the warming?

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801 Comments

Posted in Data and observations, Scientific method

Climate null(?) hypothesis

Posted on November 3, 2011 by | 439 comments

by Judith Curry

The dueling climate null hypothesis papers by myself and Kevin Trenberth are now online.

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439 Comments

Posted in Scientific method

Notes from the Santa Fe Conference

Posted on November 2, 2011 by | 318 comments

by Judith Curry

I am currently in Santa Fe, attending the Third Santa Fe Conference on Global and Regional Climate.

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318 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

BEST implications for peer review

Posted on October 31, 2011 by | 594 comments

by Judith Curry

The issuing of the BEST press release prior to peer review of the papers raises some interesting and provocative issues.

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594 Comments

Posted in Sociology of science

Discussion with Rich Muller

Posted on October 30, 2011 by | 561 comments

by Judith Curry

I had a 90 minute meeting with Richard Muller this evening.

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561 Comments

Posted in Sociology of science

Mail on BEST

Posted on October 30, 2011 by | 664 comments

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? 

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664 Comments

Posted in Sociology of science

Tropospheric and surface temperatures

Posted on October 29, 2011 by | 431 comments

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.

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431 Comments

Posted in Data and observations

Is there any good news for the environment among Evangelicals?

Posted on October 28, 2011 by | 506 comments

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.)

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506 Comments

Posted in Ethics

Candid comments from global warming scientists

Posted on October 27, 2011 by | 560 comments

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.”

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560 Comments

Posted in Attribution