Phase locked states

Posted on March 7, 2011 by | 80 comments
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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80 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Climate story telling angst

Posted on March 6, 2011 by | 824 comments

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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824 Comments

Posted in Communication

Chaos, ergodicity, and attractors

Posted on March 5, 2011 by | 197 comments

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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197 Comments

Posted in Prediction

Neverending Reflections on Climategate

Posted on March 3, 2011 by | 624 comments

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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624 Comments

Posted in Communication, Ethics, Uncertainty

The Harry Potter Theory of Climate

Posted on March 2, 2011 by | 489 comments

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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489 Comments

Posted in Attribution

Long Death(?) of Environmentalism

Posted on March 1, 2011 by | 456 comments

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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456 Comments

Posted in Policy

Agreeing(?): Part II

Posted on February 28, 2011 by | 546 comments

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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546 Comments

Posted in Sociology of science

Agreeing(?)

Posted on February 26, 2011 by | 1,120 comments

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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1,120 Comments

Posted in Sociology of science

Hiding the Decline. Part V: Discussion

Posted on February 25, 2011 by | 202 comments

by Judith Curry

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

202 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Hiding the Decline. Part IV: Beautiful Evidence

Posted on February 25, 2011 by | 502 comments

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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502 Comments

Posted in Communication, Ethics, Scientific method

Hiding the Decline: Part III

Posted on February 24, 2011 by | 529 comments

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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529 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Hiding the Decline: Part II

Posted on February 23, 2011 by | 801 comments

by Judith Curry

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

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801 Comments

Posted in Data and observations, Ethics, Scientific method

Hiding the Decline

Posted on February 22, 2011 by | 1,472 comments

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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1,472 Comments

Posted in Data and observations, Ethics

Pseudo-science versus skepticism

Posted on February 21, 2011 by | 233 comments

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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233 Comments

Posted in Scientific method

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

Posted on February 21, 2011 by | 65 comments

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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65 Comments

Posted in Sociology of science

Believing Science

Posted on February 20, 2011 by | 336 comments
by Thomas G. Brown
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At six, my son began his dinosaur phase.  Like many precocious youngsters, he had the multisyllabic names mastered, could cite the diet of the dinosaurs and in some cases knew the height and weight.   At a time when Jurassic Park was still on the drawing board,  my son lived and breathed dinosaurs.  Somewhere in our attic collection sits a set of prehistoric creatures fashioned in molded plastic — figures that my son never doubted were true representations of the original.
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Long before computer aided reconstruction of skeletal remains became possible, artistic representation of scientific conjecture has been used to ignite the imagination of a public eager for scientific stories while unable (or unwilling) to grasp the methods used in the analysis.  And textbook editors have often found the artists’ depictions more compelling than the scientific results–the most enduring images of dinosaurs are not the fossils, bones and dating methods but the flesh and blood fiction of a Jurassic Park. And the enduring images of evolution are not the robustness of genetics and the amazing adaptation of species in response to environmental changes.   Instead,  the general public is treated to artistic representations of evolutionary ancestry that may, or may not, fit the latest genome research.
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336 Comments

Posted in Communication, Scientific method

U.S. to kill funding for the IPCC?

Posted on February 19, 2011 by | 383 comments

by Judith Curry

Rick Piltz at Climate Science Watch reports that the U.S. House of Representatives votes 244-179 to kill funding for the UN IPCC.

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383 Comments

Posted in IPCC, Politics

Epistemology of Disagreement

Posted on February 18, 2011 by | 284 comments

by Judith Curry

For the paper that I am writing on uncertainty and the IPCC, I am including a section on “Consensus, Disagreement, and Argument Justification.”  While googling around on this this topic, I encountered a fascinating body of work by Princeton philosopher Thomas Kelly, which I find mind-blowingly relevant to the climate conflict.  Here are some excerpts from a few of his papers that I found to be particularly provocative.

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284 Comments

Posted in Scientific method

On the consilience of evidence argument

Posted on February 17, 2011 by | 223 comments

On the Uncertainty and the AR5 thread, Fred Moolten and Paul Dunmore provide starkly different arguments for reasoning about multiple lines of evidence.  This issue gets to the heart of the source of much disagreement in the scientific debate about climate change.

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223 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Attribution of Extreme Events: Part II

Posted on February 16, 2011 by | 234 comments

by Judith Curry

In Part I, I was very unconvinced by strategies for attributing extreme events to global warming.  Today, two new papers have been published in Nature that attribute the recent heavy rains to global warming.  For a summary, see this article linked to at Huffington Post.  The article said:

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234 Comments

Posted in Attribution

Mid 20th Century Global(?) Warming: Part II

Posted on February 16, 2011 by | 227 comments

by Judith Curry

Part I addressed the mid-20th century surface temperature “bump” (peaking circa 1940).  The IPCC AR4 states in  the figure caption for FAQ3.1, Figure 1:

From about 1940 to 1970 the increasing industrialisation following World War II increased pollution in the Northern Hemisphere, contributing to cooling, and increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases dominate the observed warming after the mid-1970s.

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227 Comments

Posted in Data and observations

Lisbon Workshop on Reconciliation. Part XI: Convinced or Unconvinced?

Posted on February 16, 2011 by | 102 comments

by Judith Curry

Josh’s Valentine cartoon has the caption “Share the Love, Man” with a valentine aimed at Lisbon. Almost three weeks after the Lisbon Workshop on Reconciliation, is anything new evident from the participants that is of relevance to reconciliation?

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102 Comments

Posted in Sociology of science

The Principles of Reasoning. Part III: Logic and climatology

Posted on February 15, 2011 by | 182 comments

by Terry Oldberg
copyright by Terry Oldberg 2011

As originally planned, this essay was to end after Part II. However, Dr. Curry has asked me to address the topic of logic and climatology in a Part III. By the following remarks I respond to her request.

I focus upon the methodologies of the pair of inquiries that were conducted by IPCC Working Group 1 (WG1) in reaching the conclusions, in its year 2007 report, that:

  • “There is considerable confidence that Atmosphere-Ocean General Circulation Models (AOGCMs) provide credible quantitative estimates of future climate change…” [1] and
  • the equilibrium climate sensitivity (TECS) is “likely” to lie in the range 2oC to 4.5oC [2].

I address the question of whether these methodologies were logical.

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182 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Blame on Heartland, Cato, Marshall, etc.

Posted on February 14, 2011 by | 675 comments

by Judith Curry

On the Chris Colose thread,  Andy Lacis wrote:

So, like the tobacco companies before them, they have elected to muddy the waters by deliberately sowing misinformation to confuse and bamboozle the public understanding of what is happening with global climate.

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675 Comments

Posted in Politics

Uncertainty and the IPCC AR5: Part II

Posted on February 13, 2011 by | 190 comments

by Judith Curry

I am currently digging into the treatment of uncertainty in the IPCC AR5, pursuant to Part I and the paper that I am writing for Climate Change.

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190 Comments

Posted in Uncertainty