Sunday, February 28, 2010

Open Mind: Interesting Comment

February 25th, 2010
There’s a most interesting comment on Anthony Watts’ blog:
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Open Mind: Shame

February 25th, 2010
Two of the most prominent claims of global warming denialists have been proven wrong.
This raises two very serious issues. First, it’s certainly possible to “run the numbers” in order to check the truth or falsehood of their claims, but they didn’t bother to do so. I have. For them to make the claims they’ve made, without even doing the work require to find out, is fundamentally dishonest.
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Open Mind: False Claims Proven False

February 25th, 2010
Two of the most prominent claims of global warming denialists have proven to be utterly false.
I’ve completed processing the GHCN data for the northern hemisphere. This project was undertaken to investigate two denialist claims: 1st, that the dramatic reduction in the number of reporting stations around 1990 introduced a false warming trend; 2nd, that the adjustments applied to station data also introduce a false warming trend.
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Open Mind: Snow

February 22nd, 2010
Steven Goddard doesn’t know when to quit. Sad.
But far more interesting than showing him the error of his ways, is to take a look at northern hemisphere snow cover. Here’s the weekly snow cover since satellite observations began:

and here’s the weekly snow cover anomaly:
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Open Mind: Cherry Snow

February 18th, 2010
Anthony Watts has a new post by Steven Goddard about northern hemisphere snow cover. There’s plenty of snow in the northern hemisphere right now — an exceptional amount. This last week saw the 2nd-highest weekly average ever recorded in the data available from the Rutgers University Global Snow Lab. As we’re well aware, an exceptional event doesn’t mean there’s a trend. But Steven Goddard thinks there is. He even shows this graph:

and tells us that wintertime snow cover is increasing at 100,000 km^2 per year.
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RealClimate: Close Encounters of the Absurd Kind

February 24th, 2010
A recent story by Fred Pearce in the February 9th online edition of the Guardian (“Victory for openness as IPCC climate scientist opens up lab doors”) covers some of the more publicized aspects of the last 14 years of my scientific career. I am glad that Mr. Pearce’s account illuminates some of the non-scientific difficulties I have faced. However, his account also repeats unfounded allegations that I engaged in dubious professional conduct. In a number of instances, Mr Pearce provides links to these allegations, but does not provide a balanced account of the rebuttals to them. Nor does he give links to locations where these rebuttals can be found. I am taking this opportunity to correct Mr. Pearce’s omissions, to reply to the key allegations, and to supply links to more detailed responses.
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RealClimate: The Guardian disappoints

February 23rd, 2010
Over the last few weeks or so the UK Guardian (who occasionally reprint our posts) has published a 12-part series about the stolen CRU emails by Fred Pearce that are well below the normal Guardian standards of reporting. We delineate some of the errors and misrepresentations below. While this has to be seen on a backdrop of an almost complete collapse in reporting standards across the UK media on the issue of climate change, it can’t be excused on the basis that the Mail or the Times is just as bad. As a long-time Guardian reader and avid Guardian crossword puzzle solver, I’m extremely unhappy writing this post, but the pathologies of media reporting on this issue have become too big to ignore.
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RealClimate: Throw your iPhone into the climate debate

February 19th, 2010
Who says that the climate debate is not evolving? According to the daily newspaper the Guardian, a new application (‘app‘) has been written for iPhones that provides a list of climate dissidents’ arguments, and counter arguments based on more legitimate scientific substance. The app is developed by John Cook from ‘Skeptical Science‘. It’s apparently enough to have the climate dissidents up in arms – meaning that it’s likely to have some effect? Some dissidents are now thinking of writing their own app.
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Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Open Mind: Growthgate

February 16th, 2010
Suppose you have a child, a son — he’s 10. You want to know whether or not he’s growing normally, so every day you measure his height with a tape measure. You’ve done so since he was 5. You even plot the data on a graph, and notice two things about it. First: the measurements show a fair amount of jitter, sometimes they’re a wee bit higher, sometimes a wee bit lower, there’s noise in the data. Second: there’s also a trend. Your kid is a lot taller at 10 than he was at 5, in fact the trend over the observed time span is upward and reasonably steady. You even do a statistical analysis, estimate the growth rate, and determine that it’s definitely statistically significant — so it’s not a false trend due to noise in the data, it’s real. Your son is growing normally.
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RealClimate: Whatevergate

February 16th, 2010
It won’t have escaped many of our readers’ notice that there has been what can only be described as a media frenzy (mostly in the UK) with regards to climate change in recent weeks. The coverage has contained more bad reporting, misrepresentation and confusion on the subject than we have seen in such a short time anywhere. While the UK newspaper scene is uniquely competitive (especially compared to the US with over half a dozen national dailies selling in the same market), and historically there have been equally frenzied bouts of mis-reporting in the past on topics as diverse as pit bulls, vaccines and child abductions, there is something new in this mess that is worth discussing. And that has been a huge shift in the Overton window for climate change.
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Monday, February 15, 2010

Open Mind: Summer and Smoke

February 15th, 2010
One of the section titles in D’Aleo and Watts’s denialist document is “NO WARMING TREND IN THE 351-YEAR CENTRAL ENGLAND TEMPERATURE RECORD.” It comes from a site calling itself “carbon sense.” Only when you read the section do you discover that it only compares 100-year averages of the 20th century to the 18th century, and only for the summer season. In fact their entire case is just smoke and mirrors.

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Open Mind: Dropouts

February 15th, 2010
We’ve already critiqued the analytical skills of Joe D’Aleo and of course the incomparable Anthony Watts….. Incomparable.
They’ve joined forces to create a document which pretends to ask the question, “SURFACE TEMPERATURE RECORDS: POLICY DRIVEN DECEPTION?” but is really just a bunch of false claims intended to state outright that the surface temperature record is not just mistaken, it’s fraudulent.
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RealClimate: Daily Mangle

February 15th, 2010
Yesterday, the Daily Mail of the UK published a predictably inaccurate article entitled “Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995″.

The title itself is a distortion of what Jones actually said in an interview with the BBC. What Jones actually said is that, while the globe has nominally warmed since 1995, it is difficult to establish the statistical significance of that warming given the short nature of the time interval (1995-present) involved. The warming trend consequently doesn’t quite achieve statistical significance. But it is extremely difficult to establish a statistically significant trend over a time interval as short as 15 years–a point we have made countless times at RealClimate. It is also worth noting that the CRU record indicates slightly less warming than other global temperature estimates such as the GISS record.
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Sunday, February 14, 2010

RealClimate: IPCC errors: facts and spin

February 14th, 2010
Currently, a few errors –and supposed errors– in the last IPCC report (“AR4″) are making the media rounds – together with a lot of distortion and professional spin by parties interested in discrediting climate science.  Time for us to sort the wheat from the chaff: which of these putative errors are real, and which not? And what does it all mean, for the IPCC in particular, and for climate science more broadly?
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Open Mind: Prime Meridian

February 13th, 2010
I’ve decided to average the GHCN station data in gridboxes which are 10 deg. latitude tall, and approximately the same width. That makes them 600 nautical miles tall, which is a bit over 1100 km. Within that range, we can expect that all stations which inhabit the same grid box will show correlation with each other. The exception to the “10 deg. tall” rule will be stations north of 70N latitude — instead of defining separate grid boxes for stations north of 80N latitude, I’ll lump them together with the stations north of 70N latitude.
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Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Open Mind: Combining Stations

February 8th, 2010
On a non-climate note, I congratulate the New Orleans Saints for their victory in Super Bowl XLIV. It was a well-deserved victory for the underdogs, and is a source of pride for a city which still shows massive scars from the ravages of Hurricane Katrina.

We’ve already looked at a way to combine data from different locations to obtain a grid-wide average of station anomalies. In that post, I computed anomalies for each location then combined the anomalies. It’s also possible to combine raw temperature data, then compute anomalies for the grid averages. I also combined station records in a simple way, by starting with a “reference station” then adding one new location at a time, computing an offset to align it with existing data and then incorporating it into the average. But I’ve noted that this is not the “optimal” way, that optimally (in a least-squares sense) one would compute the offsets which give the minimum sum of squared differences between all stations.
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Sunday, February 7, 2010

Open Mind: Gridiron Games

February 6th, 2010
Tomorrow is super bowl Sunday, the day of the championship game for American football. It’s the biggest sports day of the year in the U.S., and possibly the world (I really don’t know). For those outside the U.S., the contestants are the Indiannapolis Colts and the New Orleans Saints. I guess I’m rooting for Indiannapolis, but I won’t mind if the upstart Saints take the prize.

But the “grid” for this post is a geographical grid, the 5×5-degree grid box containing Skikda. We looked at the data from Skikda (in northeast Algeria), and we discussed how different data records from the same station can be combined into a single location record. Since that city is at Lat. 36.93N, Lon. 6.95E, let’s see what else is in the GHCN from 35 to 40 deg. N.Lat, from 5 to 10 deg. E.Lon.
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Saturday, February 6, 2010

RealClimate: Good news for the earth's climate system?

February 6th, 2010
How much additional carbon dioxide will be released to, or removed from, the atmosphere, by the oceans and the biosphere in response to global warming over the next century? That is an important question, and David Frank and his Swiss coworkers at WSL have just published an interesting new approach to answering it. They empirically estimate the distribution of gamma, the temperature-induced carbon dioxide feedback to the climate system, given the current state of the knowledge of reconstructed temperature, and carbon dioxide concentration, over the last millennium. It is a macro-scale approach to constraining this parameter; it does not attempt to refine our knowledge about carbon dioxide flux pathways, rates or mechanisms. Regardless of general approach or specific results, I like studies like this. They bring together results from actually or potentially disparate data inputs and methods, which can be hard to keep track of, into a systematic framework. By organizing, they help to clarify, and for that there is much to be said.
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Thursday, February 4, 2010

Open Mind: Skikda

February 4th, 2010
First of all, thanks to Scott Mandia for the link to the story of the duck. That sums up what denialists are doing. Plain and simple.
The very first data record in the GHCN (using the raw data, not the adjusted) is for Skikda in northeast Algeria near the Mediterranean Sea.
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