Climate Etc. - Page 72 of 75 -

Pierrehumbert on infrared radiation and planetary temperatures

Posted on January 19, 2011 by curryja | 693 comments

Raymond Pierrehumbert has written an excellent overview on infrared radiation and planetary temperature. The article was published in Physics Today, and unfortunately behind paywall. Fortunately, Climate Clash has posted the article in full. I suspect that this article is digest of the corresponding chapter in his new book, Principles of Planetary Climate, which is hot off the press (published December 2010). On a previous thread, Chris Colose highly recommended Pierrehumbert’s treatment of infrared radiation and planetary temperature.

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Posted in Greenhouse effect

Climate Change and Security

Posted on January 16, 2011 by curryja | 267 comments

by Judith Curry

The impacts of climate change and natural disasters can interact with the political, social, and economic circumstances of a region to alter its security environment. Through its primary security planning and strategy documents, the U.S. government has formally recognized the central importance that climate change and natural hazard impacts can have in degrading regional security. Among the key documents providing guidance regarding climate change are:

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Posted in Policy

Learning to love uncertainty

Posted on January 15, 2011 by curryja | 92 comments

by Judith Curry

I am returning to the topic of uncertainty (my article for Climate Change on this topic is overdue). I just spotted this article (h/t Bishop Hill):

We must learn to love uncertainty and failure, say leading thinkers Planet’s biggest brains answer this year’s Edge question: ‘What scientific concept would improve everybody’s cognitive toolkit?’

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Posted in Uncertainty

Attribution of extreme events

Posted on January 15, 2011 by curryja | 456 comments

by Judith Curry

Climate scientists have made public statements attributing extreme events to global warming. The first such attribution that I recall was made by Kevin Trenberth, to the effect that 7% of Hurricane Katrina’s intensity and rainfalls could be attributed to global warming. Trenberth has subsequently made public statements about the attribution to global warming of the Russian heatwave, Pakistan floods, and Queensland floods. Others have made similar public statements, most recently Richard Somerville.

NOAA is serious about including attribution of extreme events as part of its proposed National Climate Service. Their rationale is described in this Workshop summary:

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Posted in Attribution

Politics of Climate Expertise: Part III

Posted on January 14, 2011 by curryja | 793 comments

by Judith Curry

The recent controversies surrounding Kevin Trenberth deserve its own thread.

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Posted in Politics

(AGW) Skeptical Environmentalists

Posted on January 12, 2011 by curryja | 389 comments

by Judith Curry

The archetypal “skeptical environmentalist” is Bjorn Lomborg, although this post is not about him (for a recent interview with Lomborg, see dotearth).

This post is about the increasing muddiness between environmentalism and AGW. A recent youtube animation highlights this confusion: which character in this discussion seems more protective of the environment?

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Posted in Politics

Politics of climate expertise. Part II

Posted on January 11, 2011 by curryja | 397 comments

by Judith Curry

Over at Roger Pielke Jr’s blog, there is a guest essay by Sharon Friedman, who blogs at A New Century of Forest Planning. Her essay is on the topic of scientific integrity. She makes the following four recommendations:

Here are my four principles for improving the use of information in policy, (1) joint framing and design of research with policymakers (2) explicit consideration of the relevance of practitioner and other forms of knowledge (3) quality measures for scientific information (including QA/QC, data integrity and peer and practitioner review), and (3) transparency and openness of review of any information considered and its application to policy.

The bolded statement is of particular relevance to this topic. In the politics of climate expertise, which experts should be paid attention to?

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Posted in Politics

Winter Weather

Posted on January 10, 2011 by curryja | 99 comments

by Judith Curry

In Atlanta right now, we have about 2″ of snow, overlain by freezing rain, a classical “winter mix.” The whole city is pretty much closed down (including Georgia Tech). This is a fairly wimpy storm relative to what I used to encounter in Boulder or Chicago, but dealing with weather is relative to what you have adapted to. Madhav Khandekar from India posts at Pielke Sr.:

For last two weeks or about most of north and central India are witnessing cold wintry weather; some places in Kashmir and the Himalayan foothills have low temperatures at -5C to -20C! This is cold for India, since most houses are not insulated, not heated (except some small room heaters in north India) . . .

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Posted in Prediction

Politics of climate expertise

Posted on January 8, 2011 by curryja | 561 comments

by Judith Curry

Over at Die Klimazwiebel, Hans von Storch has a provocative post where he provides his answers to recent interview questions on the subject of climate scientists’ attitudes. The first question is:

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Posted in Sociology of science

Where’s the “missing” heat?

Posted on January 7, 2011 by curryja | 443 comments

by Judith Curry

I’m bowing to pressure to prepare a post on a current science topic that people seem to want to talk about. This topic refers to Kevin Trenberth’s infamous statement in the CRU emails:

The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.

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Posted in Attribution

Libertarianism and the environment

Posted on January 6, 2011 by curryja | 733 comments

by Judith Curry

On several previous threads, there has been considerable discussion of libertarian perspectives, some of which were rather heated. This comment by Gary M convinced me that we need a thread on this topic:

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Posted in Politics

Pakistan flood follow-up

Posted on January 5, 2011 by curryja | 128 comments

by Judith Curry & Peter Webster

The flooding of the Indus River system in Pakistan during the summer and autumn of 2010 was a cataclysmic humanitarian disaster. The destruction wrought by the 2010 floods could set Pakistan back years or even decades, weaken its struggling civilian administration and add to the burdens on its military, distracting from their efforts to keep the Taliban in check.

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Posted in South Asia

Scenarios: 2010-2040. Part III: Climate Shifts

Posted on January 4, 2011 by curryja | 247 comments

by Judith Curry

Interpretation of statistical or dynamical predictions of future climate change needs to appropriately interpret the modes of natural internal climate variability, such as the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and the North Pacific Gyre Oscillation (NPGO). This interpretation is needed in the context of forced climate change (e.g. solar, greenhouse gases).

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Posted in Prediction

Evangelicals and environmentalism

Posted on January 1, 2011 by curryja | 660 comments

by Judith Curry

The previous thread on “Understanding conservative religious resistance to climate change” generated over 800 comments that is still active, so I thought I should start a new thread on this general topic. Some of you complained that only one perspective was presented, that of Dr. Gushee. This post addresses the other side.

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Posted in Policy

Blogospheric New Year’s resolution

Posted on January 1, 2011 by curryja | 414 comments

by Judith Curry

Motivated by discussion initiated by Brandon Shollenberger, I put together a post that discusses conduct for effective rational discussion and blog netiqette.

A code of conduct for effective rational discussion

I just came across an excellent post at Evolving Thoughts, entitled “A code of conduct for effective rational discussion” (h/t Bob Grumbine), based upon Attacking Faulty Reasoning: A Practical Guide to Fallacy-Free Arguments by Edward T. Damer.

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Posted in Communication

Climate Etc.’s greatest “hits” for 2010

Posted on December 31, 2010 by curryja | 35 comments

by Judith Curry

Climate Etc.’s first post was on Sept 2, 2010. Since then, there have been 82 posts and over 26,000 comments. The WordPress stats counter provides all sorts of interesting information. Which posts do you think got the largest number of hits?

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Posted in Welcome

Sociology of scientists discussion thread

Posted on December 30, 2010 by curryja | 178 comments

by Judith Curry

This thread is “linky not thinky” on my part. Over the past week, there have been some very interesting posts in the blogosphere that can be loosely grouped under a topic of “sociology of scientists,” many of which are relevant to previous Climate Etc. threads.

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Posted in Sociology of science

Climate Feedbacks: Part I

Posted on December 29, 2010 by curryja | 233 comments

by Judith Curry

Everybody talks about climate feedbacks, but what are they, really? And where did the expression ΔT_s = λRF actually come from?

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Posted in Greenhouse effect, Sensitivity & feedbacks

Scenarios: 2010-2030: Part II

Posted on December 27, 2010 by curryja | 380 comments

Part I introduced the challenges of climate prediction on decadal scales, specifically in the context of global climate model simulations. On the Part I thread, Paul_K writes:

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Posted in Uncertainty

Climate Etc. holiday wishes

Posted on December 24, 2010 by curryja | 71 comments

by Judith Curry

My very best wishes to you and your families for the winter holidays, whichever one you might celebrate. Some climate funnies for the season:

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Posted in Communication

Scenarios: 2010-2030. Part I

Posted on December 23, 2010 by curryja | 437 comments

by Judith Curry

On the time scale of a few decades ahead, regional variations in weather patterns and climate will be strongly influenced by natural internal variability. The potential applications of high resolution decadal climate change predictions are described in this CLIVAR doc. Based upon my own interaction with decision makers, I see a need on these time scales that is primarily associated with infrastructure decisions. Sectors that seem particularly interested in predictions on this time timescale are city and regional planners, the military, and the financial sector.

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Posted in Attribution, climate models, Uncertainty

Washington update: science integrity

Posted on December 22, 2010 by curryja | 300 comments

by Judith Curry

Over the past week, there have been several notable events on the “Hill” of relevance to U.S. science policy, addressing issues of concern related to the integrity of science. In a word, Bravo!

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Posted in Ethics, Policy

Radiative transfer discussion thread

Posted on December 21, 2010 by curryja | 473 comments

The continuing large traffic on previous threads on the topic of radiative transfer (and increasingly on threads with unrelated topics) has demonstrated the need for a new thread. Here are some posts to start the new discussion over here:

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Posted in Greenhouse effect

Understanding conservative religious resistance to climate science

Posted on December 20, 2010 by curryja | 851 comments

This post is a Q&A with Dr. David Gushee, who is Distinguished Professor of Christian Ethics at Mercer University, his personal web site is here and Wikipedia bio is here.

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Posted in Ethics

Climate model verification and validation: Part II

Posted on December 18, 2010 by curryja | 217 comments

I’m starting a new thread for this topic, since interest in the previous thread has re-generated owing to this AGU abstract by Steve Easterbrook, entitled Do Over or Make Do? Climate Models as a Software Development Challenge.

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Posted in climate models