Author Archives: Willis Eschenbach

The Icy Nenana River

Posted on May 15, 2013

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach The last time I was in Alaska, I had the good fortune to stop by the town of Nenana, home of the Nenana River Ice Classic. Nenana sits at the junction of the Tanana and … Continue reading →

About these ads
Posted in Arctic, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 171 Comments

What We Don’t Know

Posted on May 13, 2013

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Back in August 2010, WUWT ran an article wherein it was claimed that variations in the sun changed the rate of radioactive decay. This, of course, flew in the face of years and years of … Continue reading →

Posted in Radiation, Science | Tagged , , , | 198 Comments

Why Reanalysis Data Isn’t …

Posted on May 10, 2013

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I was reading through the recent Trenberth paper on ocean heat content that’s been discussed at various locations around the web. It’s called “Distinctive climate signals in reanalysis of global ocean heat content”,  paywalled, of course. … Continue reading →

Posted in Ocean Heat Content | Tagged , , , , | 113 Comments

The Layers of Meaning in Levitus

Posted on May 10, 2013

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach There have been a lot of electrons sacrificed on the altar of the discussion of the Levitus ocean heat content data. The oddity seems to be that the deep ocean is gaining heat faster than … Continue reading →

Posted in Ocean Heat Content | Tagged , | 81 Comments

By Land and By Sea

Posted on May 5, 2013

Guest post by Willis Eschenbach Bob Tisdale has discussed a variety of issues with the hemispheric and basis-by-basin Levitus summary of the ARGO data in his excellent post here on WUWT. I wanted to take a larger look at at … Continue reading →

Posted in Ocean Heat Content | Tagged , , , , , , | 112 Comments

Dehumidifying the Tropics

Posted on April 21, 2013

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I once had the good fortune to fly over an amazing spectacle, where I saw all of the various stages of emergent phenomena involving thunderstorms. It happened on a flight over the Coral Sea from … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate sensitivity | Tagged , , , , | 73 Comments

Spurious Varvology

Posted on April 13, 2013

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach As Anthony discussed here at WUWT, we have yet another effort to re-animate the long-dead “hockeystick” of Michael Mann. This time, it’s Recent temperature extremes at high northern latitudes unprecedented in the past 600 years, … Continue reading →

Posted in Alarmism | Tagged , , , , , | 91 Comments

Improbable Maximum Precipitation

Posted on April 6, 2013

Guest post by Willis Eschenbach There’s a new study out from NOAA called “Probable maximum precipitation (PMP) and climate change”, paywalled of course, which claims that global warming will lead to a 20%-30% increase in “probable maximum precipitation”. The abstract … Continue reading →

Posted in Modeling, Rainfall | Tagged , , , , | 211 Comments

Berkeley Earth, Very Rural and Not

Posted on April 4, 2013

Jet exhaust as climate forcing Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach The good folks over at the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project have published their paper about urban heat islands. It’s called “Influence of Urban Heating on the Global Temperature Land … Continue reading →

Posted in Land use land cover change, Surfacestations paper, UHI | Tagged , , , , , , , | 257 Comments

The Pitfalls of Data Smoothing

Posted on March 30, 2013

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Since we’ve been discussing smoothing in datasets, I thought I’d repost something that Steve McIntyre had graciously allowed me to post on his amazing blog ClimateAudit back in 2008. Let me start by saying that when … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate data | Tagged , , , , , | 125 Comments

Dr. Michael Mann, Smooth Operator

Posted on March 30, 2013

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach People sometimes ask why I don’t publish in the so-called scientific journals. Here’s a little story about that. Back in 2004, Michael Mann wrote a mathematically naive piece about how to smooth the ends of … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate ugliness | Tagged , , , | 207 Comments

James Hansen Says Coal Is Greening The Planet!?!

Posted on March 29, 2013

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach There’s an interesting measure of atmospheric CO2, called the “airborne fraction”. The airborne fraction is the fraction of the CO2 emitted each year which remains in the atmosphere. When humans emit say 9 gigatonnes of … Continue reading →

Posted in Alarmism, Carbon sequestration | Tagged , , , , , | 165 Comments

TAO Rain, Sea, and Air Data

Posted on March 28, 2013

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I got to thinking about the effect of thunderstorms on the surface air temperature. So I figured I’d wander once more through the TAO buoy dataset. The data is available here. I swear, every time … Continue reading →

Posted in TAO/TRITON Buoys | Tagged , , , | 85 Comments

Steven W. Running On Empty

Posted on March 20, 2013

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach Let me start by getting the jargon out of the way. The “NPP” is the “net primary productivity”. It is how many total tonnes of new plant matter are produced around the globe each year … Continue reading →

Posted in Agriculture, Alarmism | Tagged , , , , , , | 137 Comments

A Strong Surge in Overconfidence

Posted on March 19, 2013

Update: Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. says via email “the fake photo is perfectly appropriate” and adds this update to his report on Grinstead from last year: Today Grinsted et al. have another paper out in PNAS in which they follow … Continue reading →

Posted in Alarmism | Tagged , , , | 66 Comments

Energy, Resources, Money, and Technology

Posted on March 17, 2013

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I’ve made some statements lately that I’d like to reprise. • There is never a shortage of resources. It’s a shortage of cheap enough energy to get the resources economically. • Energy and money are … Continue reading →

Posted in Energy | Tagged , , , , | 151 Comments

Obama By-Passes Gas

Posted on March 17, 2013

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach President Obama continues his Global War on Cheap Energy™, this time under the guise of avoiding “spikes” in gasoline (petrol) prices.  He wants to pass gas without regrets and move post-haste to electricity and biofuels, … Continue reading →

Posted in Alarmism, Cap-and-trade, Carbon credits, carbon tax | Tagged , , , | 134 Comments

James Hansen’s Policies Are Shafting The Poor

Posted on March 15, 2013

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I was reading an interview with Adrian Bejan (worth taking a look at), and I got to musing about his comments regarding the relationship between energy use and per capita income. So I pulled up … Continue reading →

Posted in Cap-and-trade, carbon tax, James Hansen | Tagged , , , , | 128 Comments

Marcott’s proxies – 10% fail their own criteria for inclusion

Posted on March 13, 2013

Note: Steve McIntyre is also quite baffled by the Marcott et al paper, finding it currently unreproducible given the current information available. I’ve added some comments from him at the bottom of this post – Anthony Guest Post by Willis … Continue reading →

Posted in Proxies | Tagged , , , , , , | 128 Comments

Air Conditioning Nairobi, Refrigerating The Planet

Posted on March 11, 2013

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I’ve mentioned before that a thunderstorm functions as a natural refrigeration system. I’d like to explain in a bit more detail what I mean by that. However, let me start by explaining my credentials as … Continue reading →

Posted in Emergence | Tagged , , , | 129 Comments