A New Index to Willis’s Posts

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

Well, my old index to my posts was out of date, and I finally got tired of not being able to find things that I’ve written. This is me trying to figure it out.

So I wrote a program in the computer language “R”. It takes as input a list of URLs of my writings, and it goes and scrapes each post. As output it gives me the name of the post, the category if any, and the first few lines of text.

Then I took that output, saved it as a CSV file, imported it into Excel, and used that to automate the generation of the HTML code that creates the index as well as creating the individual entries. The spreadsheet also created the links from the index to the corresponding sections. Then I copied the HTML code to this page, and it was done.

I found out in the process that I’ve written 681 posts on the subjects listed below … clicking on one of the subjects will take you to that section in the list below. Or you can do a text search on this page.

Next, when I’m searching WUWT looking for something I’ve written, I do a search on

“guest post by willis eschenbach” site:wattsupwiththat.com KEYWORDS

That limits the search to the version of my posts that’s here on Watts Up With That.

Next, my posts on my thermostat hypothesis and thunderstorms are in the section called “Emergence”.

Finally, my more political and personal writings for the last year or so have been posted on my blog, “Skating Under The Ice“. And you can follow me on Twitter, @WEschenbach . C’mon over, everyone’s welcome.

Best regards to everyone,

Hurst/Autocorrelation

Philosophy of Science

Proxy Reconstructions

Temperature Datasets and Adjustments

Agriculture

Of Rice and Men 2010-08-11

Anthony has posted on a recent study (behind a paywall) of rice production in Rice yields, CO2 and temperature – you write the article. The article claims that rice yields are falling, and will fall further, due to temperature changes. I said I’d write the article if someone would send…

I Am So Tired of Malthus 2010-09-08

Daily we are deluged with gloom about how we are overwhelming the Earth’s ability to sustain and support our growing numbers. Increasing population is again being hailed as the catastrophe of the century. In addition, floods and droughts are said to be leading to widespread crop loss. The erosion of…

Which Group Is Smarter? 2011-03-14

Anthony has discussed a paywalled study in the new reality-based Nature Magazine production, Nature Climate Change magazine. Unlike Anthony, they approved my application for a free subscription … go figure. The study is called “Nonlinear heat effects on African maize (corn) as evidenced by historical yield trials”, Lobell et al.…

Farmers versus Famine 2011-03-26

Bill McKibben, the skeptics best friend, can always be depended on to provide interesting claims. Never one to let a good crisis go to waste, he opines on the tsunami and our “shrinking margins” over at the Guardian. A number of people have highlighted various of his ideas, not all…

Mental Sloth and Joshua Trees 2011-03-30

“Out of passions grow opinions; mental sloth lets these rigidify into convictions” Friedrich Nietzsche, 1844-1900 Anthony discussed the press release about the paper Past and ongoing shifts in Joshua tree distribution support future modeled range contraction. I didn’t have a copy so I wrote to the lead author, Kenneth Cole,…

The Long View of Feeding the Planet 2011-06-09

People have short memories. One of the things that I have learned in this game is to start any particular quest by finding the longest continuous records and look at them to understand the situation. This prevents the unjustified exaggerations that result from a short-term view of an issue. Take…

Do Increasing Temperatures Lower Crop Yields? 2013-01-31

I keep reading these claims that we’re all going to starve because of global warming. People say it’s going to be the death of agriculture, that increasing temperatures will cause significant drops in crop yields. Here’s a typical bit of alarmism (emphasis mine): A study by the International Food Policy…

Malthus Redux 2017-12-10

I see that there’s another neo-Malthusian trying to convince us that global starvation and food riots are just around the corner. This time it’s David Archibald right here on WUWT. Anthony had posted a graph showing gains in various human indicators, viz: But David disagrees, showing various looks at wheat …

Alarmism

Congenital Climate Abnormalities 2010-02-13

[see Updates at the end of this post] Science is what we use to explain anomalies, to elucidate mysteries, to shed light on unexplained occurrences. For example, once we understand how the earth rotates, there is no great need for a scientific explanation of the sun rising in the morning.…

Come Rain or Come Shine 2010-04-18

[Updated, see end of article] One of the claimed dangers of a few degrees warming of the Earth is increasing drought. Drought is a very difficult thing to fight, because it is hard to manufacture water. So this is a frightening possibility. I have long claimed that “a warmer world…

Kilwa Kisiwani Gereza 2011-04-21

I love African names. I mean, could there be a more euphonious name than “Dikembe Mutumbo”? That’s just poetry. In any case, this post is about a place charmingly yclept “Kilwa Kisiwani Gereza”. It seems it’s a new poster child for the dire effects of “climate change”. This alleged victim of…

Not Alarmist Enough 2011-10-23

Normally, I might not deal with a four year old paper by James Hansen, the NASA doyenne of serial doomcasters. However, I note that this paper has been cited ten times this year alone, so I thought I might comment. At some point when he was not giving a Press…

It was the best of droughts, it was the worst of droughts 2012-07-17

Of course, the media are advancing all kinds of claims about the current drought affecting much of the US, because it is the ‘worst in fifty years’. They claim that it is clear evidence of global warming, that it shows how much things have changed, that this is the face …

There might possibly could be a chance of danger! Thunderstorms! 2012-08-02

Thunderstorms are one of my main interests, so I read up on a study by some Harvard researchers that has been receiving all kinds of attention in the blogosphere. Unfortunately, it’s another “could, might, possibly, chance of” study. The YaleGlobal Online blog of the venerable Yale University quotes the Christian…

The Alliance, and how it Protects the Climate 2012-11-24

I got to reading about Al Gore today, and started wondering about his Climate Reality Project (CRP). So I looked up the background of the company on Guidestar. The official name of the CRP is the Alliance for Climate Protection. The purpose of the Alliance is as follows: The Alliance’s single purpose is to ignite…

When Alaska Was Cold 2013-03-09

Temperatures are generally referred to some kind of long-term, often 30-year average. This is called the “climatology”, meaning the long-term average values of various climate variables. For up-to-date analyses, the period of time is usually taken as being the thirty years from 1981-2010. For Alaska, the usual measure for the…

The Grand Prize in Obama’s War on Coal™ 2013-06-30

It’s a bad week for poor people around the planet. First, and with great fanfare, our President unleashed his patented climate plan, affectionately known as Obama’s War on Coal™. He hasn’t said yet how much Obama’s War on Coal™ will cost, but we can be sure that it will not…

The Sixth First Climate Refugees 2013-07-02

For years now, folks have searched desperately for the “fingerprints” of human climate change. These are things that are supposed to reveal how and where humans are affecting the climate. One of these fingerprints, which is alleged to be a sure and certain harbinger of the thermal end times, is…

The Handsomest Fox In The Henhouse 2013-07-20

Well, we had the Senate hearing on the climate. Dr. Roy Spencer and Dr. Roger Pielke gave excellent talks. There’s a discussion of it here on WUWT and Dr. Judith Curry has a post on it at her blog. I wanted to discuss the silver fox in the science house,…

Breaking News! Seventh First Climate Refugees Discovered! 2013-08-09

Well, my heart fell when I saw the recent BBC article which proudly proclaimed that the people of Kivalina were slated to become “America’s first climate change refugees” … Figure 1. The Alaskan native village of Kivalina. SOURCE: BBC My heart fell for three reasons. First, because once again we…

Counting Your Penguin Chicks Before They Hatch 2014-01-29

Well, the BBC, which as I understand it is an acronym for “Blindly Broadcasting Cra- ziness”, gives us its now-standard tabloid style headline, that Climate change is ‘killing penguin chicks’ say researchers Of course they’ve included the obligatory “awwwww-inspiring” picture, viz: Naturally, the researchers didn’t say what the Beeb claimed. What…

Lakes For Sale, Partially Thawed, N=20 2014-02-05

Anthony pointed out the selling of overhyped claims of the “dramatic thinning” of Arctic ice here. The title of the underlying scientific study is much more prosaic, Response of ice cover on shallow lakes of the North Slope of Alaska to contemporary climate conditions (1950–2011): radar remote-sensing and numerical modeling…

Automated Twits 2014-12-24

People wonder why anthropogenic global warming is a politicized issue. Here’s one reason among many. In a presentation aimed at the holidays that is impossible to parody, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) has put up a website called, no kidding, “the Democrat’s guide to talking politics with your republican uncle”.…

Urbane Legends 2016-09-02

So we were sitting around the fire at the fish camp on the Colombia a few days ago, and a man said ‘Did you hear about the scientific study into meat preservatives?’ We admitted our ignorance, and he started in. The story was like this: ‘A few years ago there …

Alarums And Excursions 2017-07-20

My friend Dr. Willie Soon is both a charming man and a most courageous scientist, who has taken a lot of heat for his principled stands on climate issues. He recently wrote a piece about climate alarmism along with Kesten Green and J. Scott Armstrong which deserves much wider …

Albedo

The Size of Icy Reflections 2016-04-02

In my continuing wanderings through the regions cryospherical, I find more side roads than main highways. In my last two posts here and here, I discussed the curious inverse relationship between temperature and ice accumulation rates in Greenland and Antarctica. Wanting to understand the changes in the polar oceans that occur when …

Argo

Krige the Argo Probe Data, Mr. Spock! 2011-12-31

A few weeks ago I wrote a piece highlighting a comment made in the Hansen et al. paper, “Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications“, by James Hansen et al. (hereinafter H2011). Some folks said I should take a real look at Hansen’s paper, so I have done so twice, first a quick look at “Losing Your…

Where in the World is Argo? 2012-02-06

The Argo floats are technical marvels. They float around below the surface of the ocean, about a kilometre down, for nine days. On the tenth day, they rise slowly to the surface, sampling the pressure, temperature, and salinity as they go. When they reach the surface, they radio home like…

Jason and the Argo Notes 2012-02-09

Like Jason, I proceed into the unknown with my look at the Argo data, and will post random notes as I voyage. Come, my friends, ‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world. Push off, and sitting well in order smite The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds To…

Argo Notes Part 2 2012-02-10

Following on my previous post, “Jason and the Argo Notes”, just a couple of graphs in passing: Figure 1. Argo surface temperatures, northern hemisphere. Colors show the latitude of the floats, from red at the Equator to blue in the north. Click on image for full size version. UPDATE: several…

Argo and the Ocean Temperature Maximum 2012-02-12

It has been known for some time that the “Pacific Warm Pool”, the area just northeast of Australia, has a maximum temperature. It never gets much warmer than around 30 – 31°C. This has been borne out by the Argo floats. I discussed this in passing in “Jason and the…

Argo Notes the Third 2012-02-29

I got into this investigation of Argo because I disbelieved their claimed error of 0.002°C for the annual average temperature of the top mile of the ocean. I discussed this in “Decimals of Precision“, where I showed that the error estimates were overly optimistic. I wanted to know more about what the structure of the…

Argo, Latitude, Day, and Reynolds Interpolation 2012-03-05

This is another of my occasional reports from my peripatetic travels through the Argo data (see the Appendix for my other dispatches from the front lines). In the comments to my previous post, I had put up a graphic showing how the January/February/March data for one gridcell varied by latitude…

By Land and By Sea 2013-05-05

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 the global ocean data, to provide it with some context. After following a variety of…

Argo, Temperature, and OHC 2014-03-02

I’ve been thinking about the Argo floats and the data they’ve collected. There are about 4,000 Argo floats in the ocean. Most of the time they are asleep, a thousand metres below the surface. Every 10 days they wake up and slowly rise to the surface, taking temperature measurements as…

Autobiography

It’s Not About Me 2011-02-28

One response to Christopher Booker graciously mentioning my work in the Telegraph is the predictable increase in the usual personal attacks on me, as opposed to attacking my ideas and claims. People are rehashing Tim Lambert calling me a liar because he disagreed with my methods, as though that meant…

Would You Give This Man a Ride? 2011-10-17

As I mentioned in my last post, I’d planned to hitchhike for a couple days. My plan was to hitch up to Grant’s Pass, Oregon to go to the bachelor party for a good friend. This is the guy who was instrumental in my getting a job a couple years…

Ranger Rick 2012-02-26

I’ve had the privilege of living in a wide variety ofries and societies. And having not always been entirely sane myself, one way that I judge societies is by how they handle their crazy folks. “Back in the day”, as they say, I lived in a town called Olema,…

Stalking the Wild Hiatus 2012-08-25

I’ll be out of contact for the next couple of weeks. I’m going to investigate the climatic conditions on the Black Rock dry lake bed in Nevada… … if anyone is going to be there, you can find me at the Skinny Kitty Teahouse. (shown below in 2011) C’mon by for a cup of tea.…

The Playa – Willis’ Excellent Adventure 2012-09-09

This isn’t the normal fare for WUWT, and I had some reservations initially about publishing a piece by Willis about “Burning Man”, fearing it would have tales of wicked debauchery, and irrational topics like crystal healing, bead therapy, and cannabis cures. As most pieces by Willis usually are, I found it entertaining in a “Mad…

Modern Piracy 2012-12-29

Well, folks have been asking me about my autobiography. It’s not done. Dunno what to say except that writing about my life is a long and slow task, partly because of the variety in my life, partly because there’s no surprises ’cause I’ve heard the whole thing so it gets…

Between The Warm And The Wild 2013-02-09

People have been encouraging me to write a book of my experiences, and so I’ve chosen to do so in bits and pieces. We’ve been discussing the vagaries of those astonishing emergent phenomena known as wild animals, so let me continue the theme. When I was a kid on the…

Bird Language 2013-02-10

One fine day, after exhausting my meager means and concluding that my hopes of being struck by financial lightning were as ungrounded as Ben Frankin’s kite, I found myself yielding to exigency. “Exigency”, as far as I can tell, is from a Latin word meaning “out of money again”. So…

Tropical Crime and Punishment 2013-02-11

People sometimes ask how I learned so much about coral atolls and islands. It’s because for three years in the late ’80s I lived in one of the most beautiful places on the planet, a coral island in the South Pacific. I was the Manager of the island, the company…

Even Scientists Need Love 2013-02-14

It being Valentines Day and all, I thought I’d write a Valentine message about the woman I generally describe as my “gorgeous ex-fiancee”, my wife of 35 years this November. I thought I’d say a few words about her and how we got married … because as is usual in…

Home Invasion 2013-02-15

Since our gracious host Anthony Watts has kindly turned a portion of the arts and entertainment section of WUWT over to me for the four-day weekend while he takes some well-earned time with his family, while I have the microphone I wanted to start by acknowledging him for what he has…

Freighted With Memories 2013-02-16

In my mind, freight trains have always held some kind of special mojo. As a kid, I’d read about them, and sung about them. I loved the story, “The Boxcar Children”. I’d seen freight trains, and I’d always wanted to ride them, but at the exalted age of twenty-two years,…

The Missing Cashbox and the Nguru Patrol 2013-02-16

The South Pacific is a marvelous place for characters, it attracts them and magnifies them the same way it magnifies all the tales and rumors. After while I developed Willis’s Rule of Rumors, which is that you need to divide all the numbers in a story about some other island…

Blackmailing the Japanese Ambassador 2013-02-17

I got to talking and laughing with my lovely lady today about old Billy Bennett. Billy was a rascal and a rogue and an erstwhile killer of men and a gentleman, another of those odd folk one finds in the Solomon Islands. Billy was born the same year as my…

The Captain’s Daughter 2013-02-18

I come by my storytelling habits honestly, mostly I credit my grandmother for my love of a well-turned tale. I grew up way out in the woods, on a cattle ranch surrounded by forest. With no TV and little radio, in my earliest memories there were always stories—tales of derring-do,…

Gold Fever 2013-02-20

I first met my friend Mel in the Army nuthouse. I wrote about him before, and the nuthouse, in a piece called “It’s Not About Me“. I hadn’t seen him for a couple months. One day he blew into Santa Cruz. He said he’d met an old man up in…

Fishing the Mighty Kenai 2013-02-22

When I was 62, I had the great pleasure of working once again in Alaska. I love Alaska, I’ve starved and frozen there, worked there many times. I’ve also made good money there, and it’s always been piles of fun. I was finishing up as the Construction Manager of about…

Behind Bars Again 2013-02-24

I’ve written about my time in the US Army, and about spending time behind bars getting out of the Army, in my story called It’s Not About Me. In that story, I discussed a bit of my view on the Vietnam war, the view echoed by many who have studied…

Old Bill Rises From The Dead 2013-03-01

I’ve written about a South Pacific reprobate I called “Old Bill” before in my tale called Modern Piracy. He was a con man of the highest order. As a friend remarked, most con men tell a story so good you believe it without question. Bill’s problem was that he told…

The Native Sun 2013-03-03

After I left Clayton’s place in 1971, following my motto of “Retire Early … And Often”, I retired for a while. It was good fun, but as usual, impending hunger eventually called me out of retirement, and I went looking for work. I walked the docks looking for a fishing job. I searched in Bodega…

I Have It Made In Alaska 2013-03-05

In the fall of 1964 I started college at the University of California at Berkeley, but I hated it. I lasted one year, and as soon as school let out in June of 1965 I went to Alaska to seek my fortune. My cousin and I had heard that fishermen…

In Which We Kidnap Reagan, And He Wins Anyway! 2013-03-10

After I got out of the Army, I became involved in the anti-war movement as well as the other main causes of the time, women’s rights and racial equality. We’d go out and do street theater, we’d march, we printed broadsides that I cringe to remember and thankfully have no…

Dancing Lessons 2013-08-31

Well, as Bokonon said, “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God”. So as a result of the usual mix of misconceptions and coincidences, we’ve got the house-sitter to stay in the house when we’re gone, and the ladies and I are going to England. The ladies, in this case, are my gorgeous ex-fiancée and…

Get Your Kicks In Stepney 2013-09-03

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach. WARNING: This post contains no scientific content of any kind, just a story of our travels. So we made it to London, a place that up ’til now I’ve only known through family stories, and books and song lyrics, viz: Your old man took her diamonds and tiaras by the…

Going Around In Great Circles 2013-09-05

I’m sure many people know this, but a “great circle” is a circle that goes clear around the entire globe, and whose center is at the center of the globe. A “meridian”, on the other hand, is a great circle that passes through the poles. Lines of longitude are meridians,…

Rolling With The Sarsen Stones 2013-09-06

I woke up this morning in London to a gentle rain, and was reminded of a comment by Mark Twain. When Twain was living in the UK, a couple of his friends from the US were out to his house to tea. A week later, he writes to someone else:…

How You Get There 2013-09-07

Today seemed to be about modes of transportation—cars and boats and trains. We rolled out early to go to Bath, and met up with a quintessential charming publican, Nick Luke, in a village near Bath with the lovely British name of Limpley Stoke. He suggested a slight detour to see…

The Call Of The Running Tide 2013-09-08

I spent the afternoon in the port city of Liverpool, walking the docks. Here’s the view from one point, a panorama running from sunshine on the right and grading into rain on the left, looking across the Mersey (click to enlarge). As a seaman, there’s not much I’d rather do…

In Which We Visit The Neo-Lithic 2013-09-10

People are all aflutter demanding that the governments around the world step in and do something, anything, about the eventual end of oil and fossil fuels. It reminds me of the old saying, The Stone Age didn’t end because we ran out of stones! However, now that I’m in the…

The Romans Be Stylin’ 2013-09-11

As we were driving north today from the Lake District, we passed through the town of Troutbeck, and I was reminded how much of my knowledge of the UK derives from songs and poetry. In this case the song was: D’ye ken John Peel, wi’ his coat so gray? He…

The Wheel Of Fortune 2013-09-14

Due to good fortune and the WUWT readership, we got the chance to not only see the Falkirk Wheel, but to take a ride on it … what a marvelous piece of Scottish engineering. No wonder the engineer on the Starship Enterprise was “Scotty” … here’s the wheel, on a…

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back 2013-09-15

David Rose has posted this , from the unreleased IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5): ‘ECS is likely in the range 1.5C to 4.5C… The lower limit of the assessed likely range is thus less than the 2C in the [2007 report], reflecting the evidence from new studies.’ SOURCE I cracked up…

Scots, Scottish, and Scotch 2013-09-17

Edinburgh is not only enough to confuse your average humanoid. It drives the GPS crazy. Why? Because the city exists on two levels, one of which is about fifty feet (fifteen metres) above the other. It’s bizarre. We’d be driving along the street, following the directions from Google Earth on…

It Isn’t A Good Britain, It’s A Great Britain 2013-09-20

After heavy rain during the night, we rolled south from Edinburgh in sporadic showers through the land of the giant bird shredders … I stopped to look at them. I’d not been up close to one in a decade or so, and like my daughter, oh, my how they’ve grown…

Catching My Breath 2013-09-23

I thought I’d write about something a bit different, still about science, but of another kind. When I was sixty-three, I had the curious experience of getting my heart and lungs and all tested to the max by the doctors. They shot my veins full of drugs and made way…

Who Is Your Favorite Cardiologist? 2013-11-10

Well, it’s been a most unusual week on my planet. On Tuesday, I went to my doctor about some recurring chest pain I’d been having. He gave me an EKG and a complete physical. He told me that there had been some changes since my last EKG (in 1985), and…

Fishing Bootstrap Style 2013-11-11

Well, my recent adventures with the stent have put me in a reflective mode, and for some reason, I got to thinking about night fishing. In the late eighties, the gorgeous ex-fiancee and I lived for three years right on the beach in Honiara, the capital of the Solomon Islands…

My Friend Billy 2014-04-18

(Note – I saved this for the weekend, when people who might read this would likely be more relaxed. This is not the usual fare for WUWT, but it is something that is revealing, enlightening, entertaining, and educational, while at the same time sad and sunny all at once. If you want science, skip this…

Esperanza Inutil 2014-07-12

Well, once again the house-sitter is in place, and Clan Eschenbach is on the highway. Just me and the gorgeous ex-fiancee this time, our daughter is working as a construction manager south of San Francisco. Our plan is to roll out through Nevada, then generally up through Yellowstone from south…

Fog May Be Icy 2014-07-13

That was what the sign on the highway outside of Reno said, at any rate. I kept waiting for the corresponding sign saying Ice May Be Foggy But I haven’t seen it yet. We escaped from the Nugget Hotel, which was a good thing. They have a “Gilleys” bar there,…

How Can You Tell? 2014-07-15

All day long we’ve been driving in Montana, which is cowboyry and miningry. To assist folks in distinguishing these from say the Midwest kind ofry which also may have horses and cows, here are some distinguishing marks and features of cowboyry. You know you’re in cowboy…

sWINDle 2014-07-15

On our way out of Idaho today I saw a great billboard about wind power. It gave me hope for the future. Here’s what the billboard said:

Mending Fences 2014-07-16

Recently there have been a number of accusations and bad blood involving myself, David Evans, Joanne Nova, Lord Christopher Monckton, and Leif Svalgaard. Now, I cannot speak for any of them, but on my part, my own blood ended up mightily angrified, and I fear I waxed wroth.

Onwards, Ever Onwards 2014-07-24

I’ve been remiss in my duties as travel correspondent. When last heard from, the gorgeous ex-fiancee and I were rolling out of Butte, Montana in a rented car. At the end of the day, we arrived in Missoula, Montana, one of the two goals of the trip. It’s the home…

Boat Delivery 2014-08-01

Last night I turned to the gorgeous ex-fiancee and said “Man, I can’t believe I’m shipping out to sea again! I thought I would have learned my lesson by now”. She just laughed. So, up at 4:15 AM and rolling at 5 through the foggy vineyards of Sonoma to the…

Anchors Aweigh At Last 2014-09-03

(Part 3 of the voyage, see also Part 1 and Part 2) … In the morning, the Captain drove the thirty miles back to Campbell River and bought a used outboard, a 6 horsepower Sailmaster he’d heard about yesterday. It’s perfect for the dinghy, it will give us freedom in the ports…

Fetching the Tow Boat 2014-09-03

A week or two ago I started the tale of my most recent voyage, as first mate on a fishing boat delivery from northern Vancouver Island to Oregon … difficulty factor: we needed to use the fishing boat to tow a 30′ (9 metre) trimaran. (A “trimaran” is a boat…

The Strait of Juan de Fuca 2014-09-04

(Part 4 of the voyage, see also Part 1, Part 2 , and Part 3) …Up early and we’re off for Galiano Island, where the Captain has a good friend he wants to visit. Well, actually, like me he wants to take advantage of the good weather to run south … but we’re going…

Gray 2014-09-06

(Part 5 of the voyage, see also Part 1, Part 2 , Part 3, and Part 4) … After going to sleep at sea just outside Cape Flattery, with a clear night, stars, and miles of visibility, I woke up to this … Overcast and fog. And calm. The Straits of Juan de Fuca had been a…

Da Train, Boss, Da Train 2014-09-07

(Final part of the voyage, see also Part 1, Part 2 , Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5) The early morning bus dropped me off in Salem, Oregon, where I find out that the Friday train is $60 cheaper than the Thursday train. Friday fits my schedule better, so I decide to spend the day…

The Art of Art 2014-11-26

With Thanksgiving coming up, I thought I’d write about something other than science. A few weekends ago, I went by kayak across Tomales Bay from Marshall to Lairds Landing, where I lived for nine months or so when I was about twenty-five with a wonderful friend and his lady and…

Slip Slidin Away 2015-09-06

So, my gorgeous ex-fiancee says to me “Did you forget anything”? I sez, “If I did I don’t remember it!”, and we’re on the road again. House-sitters are sitting, and we’re back on the highway for a couple of weeks. We’re heading for the Grand Canyon, by way of Lake Tahoe…

Get Your Kicks On Route Sixty Six 2015-09-10

(Part 4 of an ongoing series … Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) After it got to 110°F (43°C) yesterday afternoon”at Willow Beach, and after a very warm night’s lack of rest in the tent, when we got up early this morning the temperature had fallen all the way back down …

The Grand Canyon Of The Mind 2015-09-16

(Part 5″of an ongoing series ‚Ä¶”Part 1,”Part 2,”Part 3, Part 4) Ever since I was a kid I wanted to live to be 103 years old, because I’ve always wanted to see what will be going on in 2050. As a result, I had to figure out a way to …

Sea Trials 2016-05-03

Before you take a new boat to sea, you do a ‘sea trial’ to make sure everything is working. Today was the day for the sea trials. It was early afternoon when we went out, so the clear morning had been replaced by stupendous thunderstorm clouds. By about 1PM they …

Moving Out 2016-05-04

The last crew member arrived today, and we moved onto the boat. It’s great except for the mosquitoes … and unfortunately, Zika virus is alleged to be here in Fiji. As a result, I’ve been increasing the quarterly profits of the insect repellant company … Mostly, today was gathering bits …

Gang Aft Agley 2016-05-08

At least things started well on the voyage to New Caledonia. We got the ship all prepared, we cleared Customs and Immigration, and the good Fijian folks at the Vuda Point Marina came out to sing the lovely Fijian song of farewell, ‘Isa Lei’. The weather was stunning, the sea …

Fiji Waters 2016-05-09

As I’ve mentioned in my previous posts, I’ve been using a home-made thermometer setup to measure the air and water temperatures of the waters around Fiji. To start with, I’ve been thinking about just why I did it. The answer, as with many things in my life, is ‘I’m not …

Ta Moko 2016-05-11

Yesterday afternoon we took off at 3:45 from Fiji en route to Brisbane. I always enjoy that flight, it’s often a cross-section of the types of clouds seen at different temperatures. Interestingly, we flew right over the course that we had just sailed. So having just seen the weather from …

Motomania 2016-05-13

Today was all about motor sports. Mike and I started by taking the bikes for a spin. Unfortunately, in my haste to go riding I didn’t check the tires on the BMW, and the front tire was quite low. As a result, the sucker didn’t steer at all correctly. It …

Pushing the Adventure Button 2016-09-01

My good fortune this week was to drive with my gorgeous ex-fiancee up to go fishing on the Columbia River. My mad friend John Whitlatch and his lovely wife Allie have their Buoy 10 fish camp there at the mouth of the Columbia every year. So we jumped in the wheels, …

I Finally Beat My Blog Into Submission 2016-12-12

Well, I finally bit the bullet and successfully got my own blog up and running. It’s called ‘Skating on the underside of the ice’. The ‘About This Blog’ page says: My name is Willis Eschenbach. I am a generalist. My CV is here. This is a blog of my thoughts …

Northern Journeys 2017-08-27

I just got back from going up north to see my friends, to investigate core drills for gold ore sampling … oh, and to see the eclipse. We rolled out of home in our camper van, heading up the California coast. Me, I was still recuperating from running my thumb …

Bad Science

PDI: Elsner 2006-10-10

Well, looking at these studies is giving me a headache. My latest one is High frequency variability in hurricane power dissipation and its relationship to global temperature, James B. Elsner et al.

Willis on Hegerl 2006-10-25

Willis writes: A couple of things. First, I’ve digitized all of the Hegerl proxy data, and placed it here. I sampled it at ~three year intervals, and interpolated the actual years. Second, I took a look at their reconstruction method. They say: The first step of the reconstruction technique is to scale the individual proxy …

Data Smoothing and Spurious Correlation 2008-02-12

Allan Macrae has posted an interesting study at ICECAP. In the study he argues that the changes in temperature (tropospheric and surface) precede the changes in atmospheric CO2 by nine months. Thus, he says, CO2 cannot be the source of the changes in temperature, because it follows those changes. Being a curious and generally disbelieving …

Tropical Tropospheric Amplification – an invitation to review this new paper 2009-06-30

The Amplification Invitation Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach A while ago I started studying the question of the amplification of the tropical tropospheric temperature with respect to the surface. After months of research bore fruit, I started writing a paper. My intention was to have it published in a peer-reviewed journal. I finished the writing …

When Results Go Bad … 2009-11-29

One of the claims in this hacked CRU email saga goes something like ‘Well, the scientists acted like jerks, but that doesn’t affect the results, it’s still warming.’ I got intrigued by one of the hacked CRU emails, from the Phil Jones and Kevin Trenberth to Professor Wibjorn Karlen. In …

Climate, Caution, and Precaution 2009-12-31

One of the arguments frequently applied to the climate debate is that the “Precautionary Principle” requires that we take action to reduce CO2. However, this is a misunderstanding of the Precautionary Principle, which means something very different from the kind of caution that makes us carry an umbrella when rain…

Climate Actually Changes! Film at 11:00! 2010-05-08

Last month (April 2010), the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) put out a study called “Climate Change Indicators in the United States” (13 Mb PDF). I read through it … depressingly bad science. To start with, they parrot the findings of the IPCC as their “evidence” that everything we see…

Anthropogenic Decline in Natural Gas 2010-05-27

Well, Nature Geoscience is on a roll. Their latest “scientific study” makes an old claim in a new way. After ascribing the temperature changes in Lake Tanganyika to human actions, in a new paper they are now ascribing the changes in the climate 12,000 years ago to the actions of…

Where’s the ice for my drink? 2010-05-28

I don’t know what to make of this one. I was wandering the web when I came across a Reuters article about a scientific study called “Global Floating Ice In “Constant Retreat”: Study“. The Reuters article opens with this arresting text (emphasis mine): LONDON Wed Apr 28, 2010 1:38pm EDT…

You cursed brat! Look what you’ve done! I’m melting! Melting! 2010-05-30

Yesterday, I discussed the Shepherd et al. paper, “Recent loss of floating ice and the consequent sea level contribution” (which I will call S2010). I also posted up a spreadsheet of their Table 1, showing the arithmetic errors in their Table. Today, I’d like to discuss the problems with their…

Waxman Malarkey 2: Impact Zone Australia 2010-06-29

Having spent a reasonable amount of time there, I have the highest regard for Australia and Australians. In general they are good, level-headed folks. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the people who wrote the Waxman-Markey website page on Australia. I discussed the first of their “Impact Zones” here, please…

Waxman-Malarkey: Impact Zone US Northeast 2010-06-29

In the US House of Representatives, there is something curiously yclept the “Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming” despite the lack of connection between the energy independence and warming. They have a very professionally done website, filled with some of the most outrageous misrepresentations imaginable. It is designed…

Waxman Malarkey 3: Impact Zone Alaska 2010-06-30

Once again, I return to that endless font of misinformation, the Waxman Markey website. In this case, I look at their claims about Alaska. This one will be short and sweet. Their claim is that Alaska is roasting, as in the picture below: Figure 1. The dessert known as “flaming…

Waxman Malarkey 4: Impact Zone Ireland 2010-07-01

In part 4 of this series, I take a look at the Waxman Markey claims about the Emerald Isle, Impact Zone Ireland. My previous analyses of the same site were Waxman Malarkey: Impact Zone US Northeast, Australia, and Alaska. Having run short of other scares, the W/M folks want to…

Ponderous Pachyderms Prevent Permafrost 2010-07-02

Anthony Watts has pointed to a curious new paper in his article “Climate Craziness of the Week: The AGU peddles a mammoth climate change theory” I thought I’d use it as an example of how I take a first cut at whether a theory is reasonable or not. The new…

Border Transgressions 2010-07-28

There is a new paper out in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences called Linkages among climate change, crop yields and Mexico–US cross-border migration (hereinafter L2010). It has Supplementary Online Information (SOI) here. The editor of the paper is (the late) Dr. Stephen Schneider. The paper basically advances…

Dr. Curry Warms the Southern Ocean 2010-08-17

UPDATE: 8/18 10:30AM I spoke with Dr. Judith Curry by telephone today, and she graciously offered the link to the full paper here, and has added this graphic to help clarify the discussion. I have reformatted it to fit this presentation format (side by side rather than top-bottom) While this is a controversial issue, I…

Ecological Footprints – a good idea gone bad 2010-08-26

In “Another day, overshot to hell” Anthony Watts commented on the “Overshoot Day” promoted by Mathis Wackernagel and the Global Footprint Network (GFN). This is based on the idea of the “ecological footprint”. Your “ecological footprint” (EF) is how many acres (hectares) of land it takes to support you, to…

Animal, Vegetable, or E. O. Wilson 2010-09-11

Buoyed by the equal parts of derision and support I received for writing in “I am So Tired Of Malthus” about how humans are better fed than at any time in history, I am foolishly but bravely venturing once again into the question of how we feed ourselves. In a…

Vegans are not from Vegas 2010-10-20

In response to my recent post about whether we could feed more people if everyone were vegetarians (I say no), a poster named Marissa wrote a heartfelt paean to Veganism. Figure 1. Perhaps the world’s best-known adherent of a strict Vegan diet. Vegans are a kind of fundamentalist sect of born-again…

Eight tenths of a degree? Think of the Grandchildren! 2010-10-22

James Hansen and others say that we owe it to our Grandchildren to get this climate question right. Hansen says “Grandchildren” with a capital G when he speaks of them so I will continue the practice. I mean, for PR purposes, Grandchildren with a capital letter outrank even Puppies with…

Save the Sunburnt Whales 2010-11-12

We should be careful to get out of an experience only the wisdom that is in it — and stop there; lest we be like the cat that sits down on a hot stove-lid. She will never sit down on a hot stove-lid again — and that is well; but…

Knobs 2010-12-09

Andrew Lacis and the good folks at GISS have a new paper, Atmospheric CO2: Principal Control Knob Governing Earth’s Temperature, Andrew A. Lacis, Gavin A. Schmidt, David Rind, Reto A. Ruedy 15 OCTOBER 2010 VOL 330 SCIENCE [hereinafter “Lacis10”]. Although most commenters have dismissed their work as being derivative and…

Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics … and Graphs 2011-02-20

Recently, Nature Magazine published a paywalled paper called “Human contribution to more-intense precipitation extremes” by Seung-Ki Min, Xuebin Zhang, Francis W. Zwiers & Gabriele C. Hegerl (hereinafter MZZH11) was published in Nature Magazine. The Supplementary Information is available here. The study makes a very strong claim to have shown that CO2…

Nature Magazine’s Folie à Deux, Part Deux 2011-02-24

Well, in my last post I thought that I had seen nature at its worst … Nature Magazine, that is. But now I’ve had a chance to look at the other paywalled Nature paper in the same issue, entitled Anthropogenic greenhouse gas contribution to flood risk in England and Wales…

Not Evil, Just Romm 2011-03-17

UPDATE: Romm at CP makes some significant concessions to error with additions, but can’t bring himself to mention WUWT, credit Willis, or allow any commenters to do so either. He has been “disappearing” critical comments as evidenced by our own commenters reposting their disappeared comments here. It is comical to watch. – Anthony UPDATE: That’s…

Gotta Admire The Chutzpah 2011-06-11

The abstract of a new study from Science Magazine entitled “The Unusual Nature of Recent Snowpack Declines in the North American Cordillera”, Gregory Pederson et al., 9 June 2011 (paywalled, all data available here, figures here, overview here) opens by saying: In western North America snowpack has declined in recent…

Mistaking Numerology for Math 2011-06-28

I always love seeing what Science magazine thinks is important. In their June 10th edition, in their “BY THE NUMBERS” section, they quote Nature Climate Change magazine, viz: 1,211,287 Square kilometers of ice road-accessible Arctic lands that will be unreachable by 2050, a 14% decrease, according to a report online 29 May…

Lowering The Bar 2011-07-12

Anthony has pointed out a new paper by McKinley et al. regarding the carbon sinks of the oceans (preprint available here , supplementary online information here). The oceans absorb and sequester carbon from the atmosphere. As usual in this world of “science by press release”, the paper has already been…

Riding a Pseudocycle 2011-07-30

Loehle and Scafetta recently posted a piece on decomposing the HadCRUT3 temperature record into a couple of component cycles plus a trend. I disagreed with their analysis on a variety of grounds. In the process, I was reminded of work I had done a few years ago using what is…

Climate and Early Asian Immigrants 2011-08-08

The National Wildlife Federation (NWF) has issued a new report (PDF) asserting that the Early Asian Immigrants (incorrectly referred to as “Native” Americans) are hit the hardest by “climate-induced weather extremes”. I’ll leave aside the obvious problems with that fanciful claim, and the oddity of the idea of “climate-induced weather” whatever…

Allergies and Dr. Broecker 2011-09-26

In yet another futile attempt to explain away what I see as the reasonable and justified skeptical American reaction to the unending stream of nonsense being peddled as climate science these days, we have an article by a Special Correspondent to the Associated Press. I don’t know what makes the…

EPA Rules … and how they don’t follow their own 2011-09-28

Most folks would not be surprised if I were to make the claim that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) did not properly consider the science when it issued its “Endangerment Finding” saying that CO2 was a pollutant and a danger to humanity. It is that scientifically unsupported finding that…

Act Now! Make Money From Global Warming! 2011-10-09

Over at the National Institutes of Health, they have announced that there are funds available for research into the effects of climate on human health (NIH announces climate change and health funding). I guess it’s like they said in the movie “Field of Dreams”, their famous line that “If you…

The Incredible Shrinking Frog 2011-10-19

In the New York Times, there’s an article on some research that suggest a slight shrinkage of plants and animals with warming. In the “you can’t make this up” department, here’s the illustration: Figure 1. A big frog collected a while ago and a small frog collected more recently, which…

Only a Century? Ya Wimps! 2011-10-20

You’ve heard of “Post Normal Science”? I investigate “Para Normal Science”. That’s the kind of science that is based on the willing suspension of belief in the physical laws of nature. Continuing my investigation of para normal science, I find a group that takes the long view of sea level…

Increase of extreme foolishness in a warming world 2011-10-28

Stefan Rahmstorf and Dim Coumou have published a paper (paywalled, of course) in one of the best-known vanity presses of science, PNAS (Proceedings of the National Alarmists of Science). I think this is another PNAS study that appears to be peer-reviewed, but is actually only “edited”, whatever that means. It has…

Uncertain about Uncertainty 2011-11-06

I was reading a study just published in Science mag, pay-walled of course. It’s called “The Pace of Shifting Climate in Marine and Terrestrial Ecosystems”, by Burrows et al. (hereinafter B2011). However, I believe that the Supplementary Online Information (SOI) may not be paywalled, and it is here. The paper itself…

Finally Some Good News! 2011-11-11

As reported in the Guardian (so it must be true), we are treated to some great news: World headed for irreversible climate change in five years, IEA warns If fossil fuel infrastructure is not rapidly changed, the world will ‘lose for ever’ the chance to avoid dangerous climate change …

Short Splice, Long Splice 2011-11-11

When I was a kid I had the great fortune to be taught to splice rope by a grandson of Richard Henry Dana. He taught me how to do a long splice and a short splice … but I never learned how to do either the long or short data…

To Sahel And Back 2011-12-13

The Sahel, that stretch of harsh territory south of the Sahara desert, is a bleak region. I did some work there, in a couple threeries. I came away with the conviction that if every day, every person in the Sahel planted one fruit tree and killed one goat, in…

Hansen’s Arrested Development 2011-12-20

James Hansen has taken time off between being arrested to produce another in the list of his publications. It’s called “Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications“. This one is listed as “submitted” … Normally these days I prefer to only deal with scientific papers, which of course leaves activist pleadings like Hansen’s…

The USGS Investigates Elk 2012-01-12

Elk are one of the largest of the “Cervidae”, the deer family, and are one of North America’s largest mammals. Cows weight about 225 kg. (500 pounds) while bulls weigh about 320 kg (700 pounds). They are magnificent animals in the wild, and in addition they have another very important…

Perpetuum Mobile 2012-01-19

Since at least the days of Da Vinci, people have been fascinated by perpetual motion machines. One such “perpetuum mobile” designed around the time of the civil war is shown below. It wasn’t until the development of the science of thermodynamics that it could be proven that all such mechanisms…

The Birth of CGR Science 2012-01-20

I was reading a study published in November 2011 in Science mag, paywalled of course. It’s called “The Pace of Shifting Climate in Marine and Terrestrial Ecosystems”, by Burrows et al. (abstract here, hereinafter B2011). However, I believe that the Supplementary Online Information (SOI) may not be paywalled, and it…

The Mystery of Equation 8 2012-01-23

I’ve been looking at the Nikolov and Zeller paper again. Among other things, they claim to be able to calculate the surface temperature Ts of eight different planets and moons from knowing nothing more than the solar irradiation So and the surface pressure Ps for each heavenly body. Dr. Zeller refers to this as their MIRACLE…

Hansen’s Sea Shell Game 2012-01-29

There’s an old con game that has been played on the suckers for hundreds and hundreds of years. It is done in various forms, with various objects, under various names—three card monty, the shell game, Thimblerig, bottle caps, cups and ball, the game is the same in every one. The…

Cites and Signs of the times 2012-02-01

I’ve been involved in climate science for a while now, this is not my first rodeo. And I’ve read so many pseudo-scientific studies that I’m starting to develop a list of signs that indicate when all is not well with a particular piece of work. One sign is whether, how,…

Under the radar – the NAS Report 2012-03-07

Under the radar, and un-noticed by many climate scientists, there was a recent study by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), commissioned by the US Government, regarding climate change. Here is the remit under which they were supposed to operate: Specifically, our charge was 1. To identify the principal premises…

Seven Building Blocks To Fairness and Equity 2012-03-16

There’s an article in the latest issue of Science magazine, called “Strengthening the UN Agencies In Order To Protect The Authors’ Paychecks” … just kidding, that would be the title if they enforced the “Truth in Advertising” laws for pseudoscientific papers. In fact it is called “Navigating the Anthropocene: Improving Earth…

The National Wildlife Federation Jumps The Shark 2012-04-04

SOURCE It doesn’t happen often … some would say not often enough … but I’m speechless.

The Moon and Sick-plans 2012-04-21

News hot off the presses, the madness spreads … UN calls for doubling renewable energy by 2030 (AFP) – 1 day ago WASHINGTON — UN chief Ban Ki-moon made a call to double global consumption of renewable energy over the next two decades in order to ensure sustainable economic development.…

Racing To The Mountaintop at 0.4 Metres Per Year 2012-04-25

Anthony highlighted a study called “Recent Plant Diversity Changes on Europe’s Mountain Peaks” (paywalled here , hereinafter Pauli2012). The Supplementary Online Information (SOI) is here. The study concluded that the plants had moved vertically up the mountain by 2.7 metres, and Anthony was justifiably amused by the accuracy of the…

Does This Analysis Make My Tropics Look Big? 2012-05-22

There is a new paper in Nature magazine that claims that the tropics are expanding. This would be worrisome because it could push the dry zones further north and south, moving the Saharan aridity into Southern Europe. The paper is called “Recent Northern Hemisphere tropical expansion primarily driven by black…

Keep doing that and you’ll go blind 2012-12-19

Statistical failure of A Population-Based Case–Control Study of Extreme Summer Temperature and Birth The story of how global warming causes congenital cataracts in newborns babies has been getting wide media attention. So I thought I’d take a look at the study itself. It’s called A Population-Based Case–Control Study of Extreme…

Steven W. Running On Empty 2013-03-20

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 as a result of photosynthesis. In a book excerpt in the February 2002 UnScientific American…

James Hansen Says Coal Is Greening The Planet!?! 2013-03-29

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 carbon, only about half of that remains in the air. The other half of the…

The Effect of Climate Change On The Arizona Quadrat 2013-08-15

Anthony recently pointed out a new paper called “Dramatic Response of Montane Plants to Climate Change in the Southwest” by Brusca et al., available here. In that paper, the authors have done an interesting repeat of an earlier study. In the Brusca2013 study the authors report having done a new plant…

Forgive Us Our Transgressions 2015-01-15

A new paper in Science magazine entitled “Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet” (paywalled here) claims that we are all potential “transgressors” … a curious term more appropriate to a religion than to science. But given the total lack of science in the paper, perhaps it’s appropriate.…

The Secret Life of Half-Life 2015-04-19

[see update at the end of the head post] I first got introduced to the idea of “half-life” in the 1950s because the topic of the day was nuclear fallout. We practiced hiding under our school desks if the bomb went off, and talked about how long you’d have to…

An Albedic Curiosity 2015-07-10

I had one of my investigations take a curious turn recently. I was going to use as my springboard the most interesting 2015 paper entitled The Albedo Of Earth, by Graeme L. Stephens et al. However, a strange thing happened along the way. I got to thinking about their Fig…

Heathrow Hijinks 2015-07-18

Once again the Week In Review-Science Edition over at Dr. Judith Curry’s website brings up interesting news. It appears that the first of July was hot in the UK, and among others the airport at Heathrow set a record high temperature for the date.. This led to a bit of&he…

Scientific Urban Legends 2015-10-11

I have a category that I call “scientific urban legends”. These include things like the idea that rising seas will drown atolls, when Darwin showed 150 years ago that rising seas create atolls. Another scientific urban legend is the claim that we’re in the middle of the …

Plankton Redux 2015-11-08

Back in 2010 I wrote a post called “Walking the Plank-ton”. In that post I baldly stated”that claims of a 40% loss in plankton since 1950 were totally bogus. However, I also admitted that I didn’t know why or where they’d made a mistake, and I really …

The Height Of Temperature Folly 2015-11-10

In her always interesting blog, Dr. Judith Curry [and Anthony at WUWT]”points to a very well-researched article by Bjorn Lomborg, peer-reviewed, entitled “Impact of Current Climate Proposals” (full text). He has repeated the work that Tom Wigley did for the pre…

The Eighth First Climate Refugees 2015-12-26

I’ve written before about the crazy claims of “climate refugees”, there’s a list of posts in the notes below. When I set out to write about bogus climate claims, I find myself in what I call a “target-rich environment”. Crazy ideas on the subject…

The Penguin Strikes Back 2016-02-16

Well, once again we’ve proven that Mark Twain was right when he observed that “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” … but the response time of the truth is getting better. Three days ago guest author Eric Worral…

Of The Ears Of Whales 2016-03-06

Whales are awe-inspiring creatures. When I was a kid, they used to bring in the whale carcasses to the rendering plant not far from my dad’s house, and a couple times I got to watch”them winch the huge sperm whales from the catcher boats. A small kid next to an …

Wrecked In A Hurricane 2016-03-08

Bemused by claims about connections between solar radiation, shipwrecks, and hurricanes in the pre-publication press release of a paywalled study highlighted by Anthony here on WUWT, I thought I’d take a look. I got a copy of the study thanks to my undersea connection, m…

The Unsinkable ‘Sinking Atolls’ Meme 2016-07-25

I’ve written before about the study of Arthur Webb and Paul Kench regarding the fact that coral atolls are not being swallowed by rising seas. Their conclusion in that study was that the claims of sinking atolls were contradicted by the actual measurements of the islands in question. The measurements showed …

Estimating Cloud Feedback Using CERES Data 2017-05-25

As usual, Dr. Judith Curry’s Week In Review – Science Edition contains interesting studies. I took a look at one entitled ‘Cloud feedback mechanisms and their representation in global climate models’, by Ceppi et al., hereinafter Ceppi2017. The paper looks at the changes in the radiative effects of clouds. From …

Autopsy Of An Excuse 2017-07-22

[See Update At End] Well, Dr. James Hansen, the man who invented the global warming scam and our favorite failed serial doomcaster, recently addressed the cratering of a 30-year prediction he made in 1988. Back then, he said the globe would warm up by one full degree by 2018 under the …

Volcanic Northern Winters 2017-08-05

I see there’s a new study, unfortunately paywalled, which starts out by saying: Observations show that all recent large tropical volcanic eruptions (1850-present) were followed by surface winter warming in the first Northern Hemisphere (NH) winter after the eruption. Recent studies show that climate models produce a surface winter warming response in the first winter …

Stefan Rahmstorf, Climate Ex-Communicator 2017-08-27

[see update at the end of the post] Stefan Rahmstorf recently got the AGU Climate Communications Prize, despite acting like a vicious jerkwagon when his claims get questioned by mere mortals, viz: Journalist Markus Lehmkuhland works for the German Science Journalists Association. He wrote an article about Stefan Rahmstorf called Ideology …

Driving Forces 2017-09-03

There’s a new paper published in Nature Scientific Reports called ‘Identification of the driving forces of climate change using the longest instrumental temperature record’, by Geli Wang et al, hereinafter Wang2017. By ‘the longest instrumental temperature record’ they mean the Central England Temperature, commonly called the ‘CET’. Unfortunately, the CET is …

Tamino 2017-12-04

I was notified by a friend that Tamino is slagging Anthony and me over at his blog, where I was banned from commenting years ago because I pointed out some unwanted facts to him. Of course, Tamino is still free to comment here, we don’t censor the views we might disagree with”that’s science. To begin …

Berkeley Earth

Not Whether, but How to Do The Math 2011-03-23

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) team is making a new global climate temperature record. Hopefully this will give us a better handle on what’s going on with the temperature. BEST has put out a list of the four goals for their mathematical methods (algorithms). I like three of those goals…

Expect the BEST, plan for the worst 2011-03-31

RELATED ARTICLES, highly suggested: Clarification on BEST submitted to the House Pielke Sr. on the Muller testimony Independent company station siting analysis demonstrates the problem Quote of the Week – other scientists weigh in Well, I had hoped for the best from BEST, the new Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project looking at…

Second BEST 2011-04-13

Professor Muller of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project is always interesting, but he just keeps digging his personal hole deeper. He recently gave an interview titled “Scientists Often Pigeonholed By Political Debates” and answered questions on NPR. To his credit, he is standing up straight and tall for science, for…

Pre-Prints and Pre-Data 2011-11-01

Folks have said that I’m far too hard on Dr. Richard Muller of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST Project). So let me stick to the facts. I fear I lost all respect for the man when he broke a confidentiality agreement with Anthony Watts, not just in casual conversation,…

Cap-and-trade

The Recursive Cost Of Carbon 2017-01-11

I see that Andrew Revkin continues to try to keep the climate pot bubbling. In this case, he’s issued dire warnings about reducing the so-called ‘Social Cost of Carbon’ (SCC). He starts by defining the SCC This value is the government’s best estimate of how much society gains over the …

The Economic Cost Of The Social Cost Of Carbon 2017-01-20

I’ve crossposted this from my blog, ‘Skating Under The Ice’. The unscientific enterprise called the Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) is a thinly disguised political attempt to justify some kind of a ‘carbon tax’. Of course calling it a ‘carbon tax’ or the ‘social cost of carbon’ is doublespeak, or …

Carbon Cycle

No Increase of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Fraction in Past 160 Years 2010-01-01

I’ve been getting a lot of requests to cover this story, probably 20 or so now with wonderings about ‘why haven’t you covered this yet?’ How quickly you all forget. WUWT was the very first to cover this story back on November 10th, 2009. Everybody else in the media today is playing catch-up. So if …

Extremely Black Carbon 2012-02-07

Of late there has been a lot written about the effect of “black carbon”, a.k.a. “soot”, and also “brown carbon”, a.k.a. wood and dung smoke, on the climate. Me, I think it’s worthwhile controlling black and brown carbon solely because of the health effects. Inhaled soot and wood smoke kill…

Ramanathan and Almost-Black Carbon 2012-03-27

My thanks to Nick Stokes and Joel Shore. In the comments to my post on the effects of atmospheric black carbon, Extremely Black Carbon, they brought up and we discussed the results of Ramanathan et al. (PDF, hereinafter R2008). Black carbon, aka fine soot, is an atmospheric pollutant that has…

CO2 in the air, CO2 in the seawater 2013-11-27

[See updated graph] Inspired by some comments on another thread, I decided to see what I could find in the way of actual measurements of the amount of CO2 in the surface layer of the ocean. I found the following data on the Scripps Institute web site. What they did…

Diving into the Deeps of Decarbonization 2014-07-09

[UPDATE: Comment from Anthony: There has been a tremendous amount of discussion and dissent on this topic, far more than I ever would have imagined. On one hand some people have said in comments that Willis has completely botched this essay, and the Kaya identity holds true, others are in agreement saying that the way…

Double The Atmospheric CO2? Fuggeddaboutit! 2016-03-27

On another thread here at WUWT we were discussing the Bern carbon dioxide model used by the IPCC. The Bern Model calculates how fast a pulse of emitted CO2 decays back towards the pre-pulse state. See below for Bern model details. We were comparing the Bern model with a simple …

CERES

Three Clocks 2014-03-08

I got to wandering through the three main datasets that make up the overall CERES data, and I noticed an odd thing. The three main datasets are the all-sky downwelling solar, upwelling reflected solar, and upwelling longwave radiation, measured in watts per square metre (W/m2). Here are those three datasets:…

Citizen science

Questing Into The New Year 2015-01-01

It’s a cold clear night here along the north Pacific coast where I live, with a waxing moon surveying the scene. As befits New Years Day, I’ve been thinking about the past and the future … and I always do my best thinking down by the ocean. I live near…

Agreeing to Disagree 2015-04-05

Over at “Digging in the Clay” Verity Jones has an excellent graphic summarizing the different levels of disagreement. The graphic deserves wider circulation. The types of disagreement range in a spectrum from the strongest, refuting the author’s central point, all the way down to the weakest, name-calling. Here’s the graphic:…

Climate Datasets

The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero 2009-12-08

People keep saying ‘Yes, the Climategate scientists behaved badly. But that doesn’t mean the data is bad. That doesn’t mean the earth is not warming.’ Let me start with the second objection first. The earth has generally been warming since the Little Ice Age, around 1650. There is general agreement that the …

Darwin Zero Before and After 2009-12-20

Recapping the story begun at WUWT here and continued at WUWT here, data from the temperature station Darwin Zero in northern Australia was found to be radically adjusted and showing huge warming (red line, adjusted temperature) compared to the unadjusted data (blue line). The unadjusted data showed that Darwin Zero …

Fudged Fevers in the Frozen North 2010-02-21

[see Update at the end of this post] I got to thinking about the (non) adjustment of the GISS temperature data for the Urban Heat Island effect, and it reminded me that I had once looked briefly at Anchorage, Alaska in that regard. So I thought I’d take a fresh…

Himalayan Hijinks 2010-03-09

According to an article in the Hindustan Times by someone for whom English is a second language, I find: Senior scientists at the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology (WITG) has rejected the Global Warming Theory and told that the Himalayas are quite safer zone on earth, where Global Warming has…

More on the National Geographic Decline 2010-03-18

Anthony has covered the National Geographic Northern Hemisphere temperature graph here. This is the graph under discussion. Figure 1. Graph from November 1976 National Geographic article Since I’m a suspicious guy who never takes anything on faith, I went and got the original data that was used by National Geographic.…

GISScapades 2010-03-25

Inspired by this thread on the lack of data in the Arctic Ocean, I looked into how GISS creates data when there is no data. GISS is the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a part of NASA. The Director of GISS is Dr. James Hansen. Dr. Hansen is an impartial scientist…

A preliminary assessment of BEST’s decline 2011-10-22

With altogether far too much fanfare for my taste, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project has not released its preliminary results. Or at least I can’t find them. I just wanted the month-by-month data that their hotrod new computer program spits out at the end of its run. The…

What the BEST data actually says 2011-10-24

My theory is that the BEST folks must have eaten at a Hollywood Chinese restaurant. You can tell because when you eat there, an hour later you find you’re hungry for stardom. Now that the BEST folks have demanded and received their fifteen minutes of fame before their results have…

Problems With The Scalpel Method 2014-06-28

In an insightful post at WUWT by Bob Dedekind, he talked about a problem with temperature adjustments. He pointed out that the stations are maintained, by doing things like periodically cutting back the trees that are encroaching, or by painting the Stevenson Screen. He noted that that if we try…

A First Look At SURFRAD 2014-11-25

Since the late Nineties the US has had seven industrial-strength stations that measure a variety of climate variables every minute, 24/7. These are called “SURFRAD” stations. As a data junkie I’ve been wanting to look at their results for a while … but the data is in an ugly format. They have…

The CERES Calculated Surface Datasets 2015-02-21

The CERES dataset is satellite data that is based on radiation measurements made from low earth orbit. The CERES data has two parts. The first part is observational data, measurements of downwelling and upwelling solar radiation and of upwelling longwave radiation. It is usually referred as the CERES “top-of-atmosphere” data.…

The Temperature Field 2015-05-14

I’ve been mulling over a comment made by Steven Mosher. I don’t have the exact quote, so he’s welcome to correct any errors. As I understood it, he said that much of the variation in temperatures around the planet can be explained by a combination of elevation and latitude. He…

Whats Hot Whats Not 2016-01-19

I got to thinking about the idea of a temperature field. By that I mean nothing more than an estimation of theoretical temperatures given some variables like say latitude and elevation. We all know that as we go poleward it gets colder, and the same is true when we go …

Mauna Loa Daily Meteorology 2016-02-20

As a confirmed data junkie, I’m fond of hourly data. The interesting processes in the climate system unfold on the scale of minutes and hours, not years. So I picked up a project I’d started a while ago, but as is too often the case I’d gotten sidetractored by …

Climate Indices

Chylek Imitates Ouroboros 2014-03-16

Bob Tisdale has a detailed post on the new 2014 paper entitled “The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation as a dominant factor of oceanic influence on climate” by Chylek et al. Nic Lewis also did a good analysis of the paper, see the Notes below for the links. I have a different…

AMO, NAO, and Correlation 2014-04-02

There’s a new paper over at IOP called “Forcing of the wintertime atmospheric circulation by the multidecadal fluctuations of the North Atlantic ocean”, by Y Peings and G Magnusdottir, hereinafter Peings2014. I was particularly interested in a couple of things they discuss in their abstract, which says (emphasis mine): Abstract The…

NAO And Then 2015-09-18

Anthony recently highlighted a new study which purports to find that the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) is synchronized to the fluctuations in solar activity. The study …

Weather Two Months From Now 2015-12-17

A while back, folks noticed that a couple of months after the El Nino kicked in across the Pacific, the earth would warm up a bit. Since then, people have engaged in what they describe as “removing the El Nino signal” from the global temperature record. A while…

Climate Models

Hansen and Schmidt: Predicting the Past 2006-04-09

If you cast your minds back to last year, a modelling study[1] by James Hansen and Gavin Schmidt was touted as yet another “smoking gun” proving that the dire warnings of future warming were justified as they could now model the past – or at least a few years of it.

CMIP Control Runs 2006-08-26

Willis Eschenbach sent in the following information about the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) project. I’ve not checked the analysis myself, but it is an interesting topic and well worth a separate thread. There are some other pretty good posts like this. If people want to suggest some back posts for individual threads, it just …

Willis on Santer et al 2006 2006-09-30

The new Santer et al. paper, Forced and unforced ocean temperature changes in Atlantic and Pacific tropical cyclogenesis regions, purports to show that sea surface temperature (SST) changes in the Pacific Cyclogenesis Region (PCR) and the Atlantic Cyclogenesis Region are caused by anthopogenic global warming (AGW). They claim to do this by showing that models …

Testing … testing … is this model powered up? 2010-12-02

Over at Judith Curry’s excellent blog she has a post on how to test the climate models. In response I wrote a bit about some model testing I did four years ago, and I thought I should expand it into a full post for WUWT. We are being asked to bet…

Model Charged with Excessive Use of Forcing 2010-12-19

The GISS Model E is the workhorse of NASA’s climate models. I got interested in the GISSE hindcasts of the 20th century due to an interesting posting by Lucia over at the Blackboard. She built a simple model (which she calls “Lumpy”) which does a pretty good job of emulating…

Zero Point Three times the Forcing 2011-01-17

Now that my blood pressure has returned to normal after responding to Dr. Trenberth, I returned to thinking about my earlier somewhat unsatisfying attempt to make a very simple emulation of the GISS Model E (herinafter GISSE) climate model. I described that attempt here, please see that post for the…

News The Media Missed 2011-03-02

Based on a model, unfortunately. Behind a paywall, unfortunately. Posted without comment, emphasis and formatting mine. The abstract says: Recovery mechanisms of Arctic summer sea ice S. Tietsche, D. Notz, J. H. Jungclaus, J. Marotzke, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, Germany We examine the recovery of Arctic sea ice from prescribed ice-free…

Models All The Way Down 2011-03-08

A learned man was arguing with a rube named Nasruddin. The learned man asked “What holds up the Earth?” Nasruddin said “It sits on the back of a giant turtle.” The learned man knew he had Nasruddin then. The learned man asked “But what holds up the turtle”, expecting Nasruddin…

Reality Leaves A Lot To The Imagination 2011-04-30

On an average day you’ll find lots of people, including NASA folks like Gavin Schmidt and James Hansen, evaluating how well the climate models compare to reality. As I showed here, models often don’t do well when matched up with real-world observations. However, they are still held up as being accurate…

Top Secret NOFORN Restricted Access Climate Model Results 2011-05-06

Y’know, some of these climate games are getting kind of boring. I’m tired of people who are paid with my taxes hiding their data, results, and findings. Case in point, the “Community Earth System Model” of the University Center for Atmospheric Research (UCAR). They describe their model as: The Community…

First Light on the Ozone Hockeystick 2011-05-09

After many false starts, thanks to Steven Mosher and Derecho64 I was able to access the forcings used by the CCSM3 climate model. This is an important model because its successor, the CESM3 model, is going to be used in the laughably named “CIM-EARTH Project.” Anyhow, just as new telescopes…

Life is Like a Black Box of Chocolates 2011-05-14

In my earlier post about climate models, “Zero Point Three Times The Forcing“, a commenter provided the breakthrough that allowed the analysis of the GISSE climate model as a black box. In a “black box” type of analysis, we know nothing but what goes into the box and what comes…

Modeling the Oddities 2011-06-05

Today I came across an IPCC figure (AR4 Working Group 1 Chapter 2, PDF, p. 208) that I hadn’t noticed before. I’m interested in the forcings and responses of the climate models. This one showed the forcings, both at the surface and at the top-of-atmosphere (TOA), from the Japanese MIROC…

Why Reanalysis “Data” Isn’t 2011-11-07

There is a new paper out by Xu and Powell, “Uncertainty of the stratospheric/tropospheric temperature trends in 1979–2008: multiple satellite MSU, radiosonde, and reanalysis datasets” (PDF, hereinafter XP2011). It shows the large differences between the satellite, balloon (radiosonde), and reanalysis temperatures for the troposphere and the stratosphere. The paper is well…

The Bern Model Puzzle 2012-05-06

Although it sounds like the title of an adventure movie like the “Bourne Identity”, the Bern Model is actually a model of the sequestration (removal from the atmosphere) of carbon by natural processes. It allegedly measures how fast CO2 is removed from the atmosphere. The Bern Model is used by…

CMIP5 Model Temperature Results in Excel 2014-12-22

I’ve been looking at the surface temperature results from the 42 CMIP5 models used in the IPCC reports. It’s a bit of a game to download them from the outstanding KNMI site. To get around that, I’ve collated them into an Excel workbook so that everyone can investigate them. Here’s…

The Best Test of Downscaling 2015-01-05

In a recent issue of Science magazine there was a “Perspective” article entitled “Projecting regional change” (paywalled here) This is the opening: Techniques to downscale global climate model (GCM) output and produce high-resolution climate change projections have emerged over the past two decades. GCM projections of future climate change, with…

Out At The Boundaries 2015-05-25

I’ve heard many times that whereas weather prediction is an “initial-value” problem, climate prediction is a “boundary problem”. I’ve often wondered about this, questions like “what is the boundary?”. I woke up today thinking that I didn’t have an adequately clear understanding of the difference between the two types of problems.…

A Tale Of Two Convergences 2015-11-12

In the course of doing the research for my previous post on thunderstorm evaporation, I came across something I’d read about but never had seen. This was the claim that the models showed not one, but two inter-tropical convergence zones (ITCZ). Please allow me a small di…

When The Model Models Itself 2017-08-11

Eric Worrell posted an interesting article wherein a climate ‘scientist’ says that falsifiability is not an integral part of science … now that’s bizarre madness to me, but here’s what she says: It turns out that my work now as a climate scientist doesn’t quite gel with the way we …

Climate News

Quote of the Week 2014-02-14

In discussing President Obama’s latest boondoggle, the one billion (with a “b) dollar Climate Resilience Plan, The US Under-Assistant Minister of Scientific Silly Walks, John Holdren, wandered way off of the party line. The party line in question, of course, is … “Although we can’t ascribe any given weather event to climate…

Winning Slowly 2014-10-28

I wanted to highlight an interesting article by Dr. Daniel Botkin. It seems that it helps to be a Professor Emeritus in order to be able to speak your mind freely. Among other things, Dr. Botkin says: Whatever is happening to Earth’s climate does not seem to be our fault. What he said … =================================== Climate Is Changing,…

87 Is The New 97 2015-01-30

There’s a new survey out by the Pew Research Center folks that’s getting lots of press. Much of the coverage mentions the following claim that the claimed 97% consensus is real but it’s only 87%. The survey reports a: • 37-percentage point gap over whether climate change is mostly caused by human…

The Warmer The Icier Part II 2016-03-10

In the first part of this disquisition, I discussed the oddity that the warmer it gets around Antarctica, the more ice accumulates on the Antarctic ice cap. However, that’s only one part of a very large planet. So I thought I’d take a look at the situation in Greenland. To …

Palestine Redux 2016-04-20

Back in December of last year I put up a post which said in its entirety: Very short post. I read today that Palestine has been granted full member status in the UNFCCC, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. I also recall from a few years ago that when Palestine …

Sea of Dreams 2016-04-27

So I got an email from my mad South Pacific amigo Mike. I wrote about him in The Missing Cashbox and the Nguru Patrol, and he’s still going strong. His email, sent to a few of his saltier friends, said he was thinking about buying a sailboat that was up …

The Dogs of Winter 2016-04-30

After a very long night, with a ten-hour flight somewhere in the middle, I blew into Fiji at about five in the morning. I was reminded during my trip of the old story about the guy who decided to leave the ocean behind. He said he was going to put …

Gore Offers To Work With Trump On Climate 2016-11-11

Man, there is just no end to Gore’s hubris. From his website, which I’ll pass on linking to for obvious reasons … Last night President-elect Trump said he wanted to be a president for all Americans. In that spirit, I hope that he will work with the overwhelming majority of us …

What’s That Musky Smell? 2016-11-19

Well, the man who has made billions with a ‘b’ by sponging off of your taxpayer dollars, the man you can always find face-down at the government trough, is at it again. Elon Musk now says that his whiz-bang glass solar roofing shingles will be, get this, cheaper than a ‘normal’ …

The UN Poll Redux 2016-11-22

A while back I discussed the UN Global Poll regarding what people around the world think is important to them. At that point there were about six million respondents. The people taking the poll are asked to choose (just choose, but not rank) the six issues that matter most to them …

Unscientific Americans 2016-12-04

Our betters at the so-called ‘Scientific’ American magazine have decided to lecture us unscientific Americans on what is real science. The occasion was a retweet by Representative Lamar Smith of the Science, Space, and Technology Committee of a link to an article entitled ‘Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate …

The DOE vs. Ugly Reality 2016-12-10

Over at the Washington Post, Chris Mooney and the usual suspects are seriously alarmed by a memo sent out by the Transition Team at the Department of Energy. They describe it in breathless terms in an article entitled ‘Trump transition team for Energy Department seeks names of employees involved in …

Ouarzazate 2016-12-10

The BBC, that bastion of slanted reportage on all things green, has an article about a new solar power plant entitled ‘The Colossal African Solar Plant That Could Power Europe’. It’s full of all kinds of interesting information about the plant, located in Ouarzazate, Morocco. Man, how come Africa gets …

Barack Obama, Climate Scientist 2017-01-09

I fear that Science magazine has beclowned itself as badly as the Nobel Peace Prize Committee. They’ve published a ‘scientific’ policy paper by the noted climate scientist Barack Hussein Obama. Not a paper with Obama as one of the signatories. No, Science magazine claims that the President wrote the deathless …

Not Tired Of Winning Yet 2017-01-13

I’ve been discussing cost-benefit analyses lately. The AP has the story of a Federal judge who has just made a most excellent and far-reaching ruling regarding EPA cost-benefit analyses. He said that the EPA has to include the cost of lost jobs in the economic part of the cost-benefit analysis …

NOAA Jumps The Shark In Tampa Bay 2017-01-14

[see Update at the end] I thought I might write about how I research a subject. Over at Dr. Judith’s excellent website, she periodically puts out a list of interesting papers that she has come across. This time it was ‘Week In Review: Water Edition’. She gave a link to …

Gagged? Not Hardly. 2017-01-24

” Crossposted from my blog, Skating Under The Ice The media is all abuzz with claims that the Trump Administration has ‘gagged’ or ‘muzzled’ the EPA. Under the headline Trump administration seeks to muzzle U.S. agency employees the news agency Reuters reports: On Tuesday, a source at the EPA said …

Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds 2017-01-24

Estimates of future atmospheric CO2 values as a result of future emissions, called ‘scenarios’, fall into two camps”demand driven, and supply driven. A recent paper entitled ‘The implications of fossil fuel supply constraints on climate change projections: A supply-driven analysis’ by J.Wang, et al., paywalled here, has a good description …

Palestinian Climate Change Part II 2017-01-25

In my prior post on this subject, Palestinian Climate Change, I reported that I was overjoyed that the UNFCCC, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, had admitted Palestine as a full member. At the time I said: I also recall from a few years ago that when Palestine was …

Parrotfish Vindicated 2017-01-29

Four years ago I wrote a post called ‘The Parrotfish Should Be The National Bird’, about the critical place that the parrotfish plays in the life of both the reef and the coral atolls that depend on the reef. It was based mostly on my years of scuba and snorkel …

A Reverse Greenhouse Effect 2017-02-13

[See two Updates at the end] Here’s an oddity. Some very clever folks have invented a plastic film that cools surfaces by as much as 10°C. From Science magazine: Cheap plastic film cools whatever it touches up to 10°C By Robert F. Service Feb. 9, 2017 , 2:00 PM If heat …

Bill Nye Loses The Plot 2017-02-27

Bill Nye the not-really-Science Guy was on Tucker Carlson tonight. Tucker tried time after time to get Nye to say how much of the change was due to humans … and time after time, Nye refused to say what his opinion was. So Tucker got him to agree that the …

Killer Cold 2017-04-04

I found an interesting article on weather-related deaths. Deaths Attributed to Heat, Cold, and Other Weather Events in the United States, 2006“2010 Abstract Objectives”This report examines heat-related mortality, cold-related mortality, and other weather-related mortality during 2006“2010 among subgroups of U.S. residents. Methods”Weather-related death rates for demographic and area-based subgroups were computed using death …

The March Against Science 2017-04-06

Well, I wrote about this crazy March For Science idea two months ago, but the story just gets better. Far and away the most insightful comment I’ve read on this goofy idea of marching was from a climate scientist I respect, Dr. Roger Pielke Jr., who said: The smartest people …

The North Atlantic Seesaw 2017-06-24

In my peripatetic meandering through the CERES satellite data, I’ve been looking at the correlation between the temperatures in the NINO3.4 region and the temperatures of the rest of the planet. The NINO3.4 region is an area in the equatorial eastern Pacific Ocean. It covers five degrees north and south …

No Lye 2017-07-25

In Reading gaol by Reading town There is a pit of shame, And in it lies a wretched man Eaten by teeth of flame, In burning winding-sheet he lies, And his grave has got no name. ”Oscar Wilde, from The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898) So … why is …

Into The Vortex 2017-09-08

I came across a lovely photograph of a ‘fire devil’, also called a ‘fire whirl’. I liked it because the photo perfectly exemplified what is wrong with the current generation of climate models. What is wrong with the models is that they don’t include any of the vortex-based emergent atmospheric …

NOAA’s USCRN Revisited — no significant warming in the USA in 12 years 2017-11-08

Back in 2014, Anthony put up a post called ‘NOAA shows ˜the pause’ in the U.S. surface temperature record over nearly a decade’. In it, he discussed the record of the US Climate Reference Network (USCRN). I can’t better Anthony’s description of the USCRN, so I’m stealing it to use here: This data is from state-of-the-art …

Been There, Exceeded That 2018-01-08

Much angst has been expended on a very vague climate threshold, the so-called ‘2 degrees Celsius limit’, sometimes called the ‘2° global warming tipping point’. I find it all quite hilarious, for a reason that will become clear shortly. First a bit of prologue. Here’s the New Republic from 2014 …

Climate Phenomena

In Which I Finally Understand the Fair-Weather Gale 2011-03-02

In the Pacific off the coast of California, there’s an unusual weather phenomenon called a “fair-weather gale”. It happens periodically in the summer when California’s Central Valley and Mojave Desert heat up. To replace the rising warm air, the cool air starts to rush in from a broad expanse of…

In Which I Talk to the Thunderstorms 2011-03-02

Thunderstorms are great majestic beasts. If you had never seen one or heard of one in your life, imagine your surprise if a lovely peaceful day suddenly clouded up. Then it started to rain. Then it was pelting down hail. Then a blinding bolt of lightning blew your ears off…

Climate Politics

Trust and Mistrust 2010-03-31

Following up on the excellent initiative of Dr. Judith Curry (see Judith’s post and my response ), I would like to see what I can do to rebuild the justifiably lost trust in climate science. I want to bring some clarity to terms which are used all the time but…

Carbon Emissionaries 2010-03-31

In 2005, the European Union (EU) put into place a carbon trading scheme. Prices for carbon permits promptly plunged, and have remained depressed since then. The price for a permit to emit a tonne of CO2 went from 21.59 Euros in 2005, to 17.28 in 2006, to 0.68 in 2007, to 2.16 in 2008, to…

Dr. Ravetz Posts, Normally 2010-04-12

Dr. Ravetz, welcome back to the fray with your new post. My congratulations on your courage and willingness to go “once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more …” You are putting AGW supporting scientists to shame with your bravery, most of them (with some conspicuous exceptions like Dr.…

Editorializing about the Editorial 2010-05-22

I just got my printed copy of the May 7th issue of Science Magazine, and I read their Editorial. This is the issue that contained the now-infamous Letter to the Editor with the Photoshopped image of a polar bear on an ice floe. An alternate version of that Photoshopped image…

It Was The Worst of The Times 2011-03-11

I did jail time in the Sixties for a peaceful sit-in against the Vietnam War. So (as with many things) my understanding of the issues involved in what may be termed “civil disobedience” is eminently practical as well as theoretical. I was very disturbed by a recent column in the…

Canadian Contretemps 2011-10-01

Driving home today, I heard about a new report from one of those Canadian “we work for the Government but we’re actually really truly independent, honest we are” kind of organizations. It’s called “PAYING THE PRICE: THE ECONOMIC IMPACTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE FOR CANADA.” It is chock full of the usual…

A Modest Proposal—Forget About Tomorrow 2011-10-31

There’s a lovely 2005 paper I hadn’t seen, put out by the Los Alamos National Laboratory entitled “Our Calibrated Model has No Predictive Value” (PDF). Figure 1. The Tinkertoy Computer. It also has no predictive value. The paper’s abstract says it much better than I could: Abstract: It is often…

OCCUPY COP 17–CMP 7 ! 2011-11-01

Anyone concerned about the huge influence of Wall Street on our lives should definitely be protesting the influence of Wall Street on the upcoming climate conference in Durban, South Africa. Durban is the latest incarnation of the occasional IPCC celebration. I’m not sure what it celebrates, perhaps they are celebrating…

The Durban Game 2011-11-08

In the run-up to the next-to-last big meeting of the UNFCCC (United Nations Frequent Climate Change Carnival) held in Copenhagen in 2009, I showed the following graph under the title “Why Copenhagen Will Achieve Nothing“ Figure 1. Carbon Emissions 1970-2006 by Region, and Global (red). At that time it was…

What Hath Kyoto Wrought? 2011-11-09

The Kyoto Protocol is the quixotic attempt by someries around the world to reduce each participatingry’s CO2 emissions to their emission levels in 1990. Since CO2 emissions are a measure of the energy used, that seemed foolish to me, but hey, I was born yesterday. I figured nobody…

What Didn’t Kyoto Do? 2011-12-01

There has been some discussion over the years regarding Tom Wigley’s 1998 estimate that even if Kyoto were to be 100% successful in meeting its targets, it would only have reduced temperatures by an estimated 0.05 degrees Celsius by 2050. Since Wigley was and is a strong supporter of Kyoto,…

Chinese Deal Breakers 2011-12-05

The lead Chinese negotiator at the 17th UN COP (United Nations Conference of Partygoers) being celebrated in Durban is a man named Xie Zhenhua. He is the Vice Chairman of the Chinese National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC). Mr. Xie has come to Durban in part to lay out the…

Kumi Brings The Good News 2011-12-11

I haven’t yet found a copy of whatever agreement they signed at Durban. But thanks to Kumi Naidoo, the radical head of Greenpeace International, I know that there’s nothing to worry about. He’s done the analysis for me. Figure 1. Kumi Naidoo, Greenpeace International Executive Director PHOTO SOURCE NYT

Durban Dementia 2011-12-17

A range of proxy records, supported by contemporaneous descriptions of the weather, all agree that the earth went through what is called the “Little Ice Age”. The coldest part seems to have been somewhere around 1700, at which time it was perhaps two or three degrees colder than at present.…

Nothing is Sustainable 2011-12-22

People have this idea that sailing is cheap, because of the low fuel costs. But blue-water sailors have a saying that goes like this: The wind is free … but everything else costs money. Reading the various pronouncements from the partygoers at the Durban climate-related Conference of Parties, I was…

Defund the IPCC Now 2012-01-05

Well, I woke up to some bad news this morning. It turns out that the GAO, the US General Accounting Office, says US has been secretly hiding their funding of the IPCC for the last decade. They were already told not to do that by the GAO. In the 2005…

The Gore Effect kicks in, plus ça change … 2012-02-02

… plus ça same old stuff. Thank goodness somethings never change. For example, the “Gore Effect”, which says that wherever His Nobelity Albert Gore III might hold a Climastravaganza to remind the world of the critical and imminent climate overheating that we can only avert by sending him some more…

Rio+20 meets Agenda 21 2012-02-26

Well, the rent-seekers, money-hungry NGOs, grifters, post-normal “scientists”, con-men, Eurotrash, Ameritrash, and the usual camp followers are gearing up again for another monumental waste of money. This time, it’s for the upcoming extravagarbonza, the new Rio+20 Climate Carnival. Figure 1. The logo of the Rio+20 Climate Carnival, featuring someone being drowned…

UN Sheep At Work 2012-04-28

The United Nations, progenitor of a thousand agencies, has released a report called “MOVING TOWARDS A CLIMATE NEUTRAL UN” regarding its success in reducing its own “carbon footprint” (full version , summary). The Head Prophet of the UN, Ban Ki-moon, has revealed the mysteries to us unwashed masses as follows: We…

Energy and Economic Crises SOLVED! 2012-05-14

This story is from the “you can’t make this stuff up” file. Some of our British cousins have figured out a way to solve it all. They have set up the One Million Jobs Caravan, as part of a “Campaign Against Climate Change” … I’m not sure how they plan…

Don’t Say That! Just Don’t Say It! 2012-05-22

As the result of a Freedom of Information Act request, the US Government has released the list of words that will trigger the Department of Homeland Security to start monitoring your online contributions and conversations. The list is divided into sections by subject matter. Figure 1. You can call it a thunderstorm, but under no…

Summary: The International Conference on Climate Change 7 2012-05-25

After years of getting up at 4 AM to go commercial fishing, these days I generally have as little to do with dawn as possible. But last Sunday, I found myself in the Palm Springs airport at 5 AM, boarding a plane to Chicago to go speak at the ICCC7.…

Climate Alarmists Target the Arabunna People – With No Evidence 2012-06-29

The Arabunna people live in the area around Lake Eyre in Southern Australia. It is a hot, hostile desert region, which is no surprise, because … well … it’s in Australia. Here’s the general area where they live: Figure 1. Lake Eyre region in South Australia. Yellow line show the…

Harvesting Fog: The No-Regrets Option 2013-02-21

I’ve written before about the “no-regrets” option when one is faced with uncertainty. It relates to one of my favorite rules of thumb. I often live my life by my “rules of thumb”, general guidelines for when things aren’t clear. One that I’ve used for decades goes like this: “Do…

The Imperial President and the Imperious Idiot 2014-07-05

From an interview with Lester Brown, founder of the Earth Policy Institute, a man of whom Bill Clinton said “We should all heed his advice”: You’ve talked before about the civilizational challenge that climate change poses, how confident are you that the human race is up to meeting that challenge?…

The Revenge of the Climate Reparations 2014-07-05

Much of the current angst at the UN regarding climate has to do with the idea of “climate reparations”. These are an imaginary debt supposedly owed by the major CO2 emitting nations to theries of the developing world. As the story goes, we in the industrialized world have been…

Climate Change … Who Cares? 2014-12-05

Thanks to the blog of the irrepressible Hilary Ostrov, a long-time WUWT commenter, I found out about a poll gone either horribly wrong or totally predictably depending on your point of view. It’s a global poll done by the United Nations, with over six million responses from all over the…

A Taxonomy of Science Blogs 2015-01-16

Over at Lucia Liljegren’s most interesting site, “Rank Exploits”, she has another fascinating post, as is often the case. I busted out laughing at the post title, which is “HotWhopper Sou Doesn’t Read WUWT”. Given how often the lady in the Batcave over at Hotwhopper writes about Watts Up With…

Mental Midgets Try To Bite Dr. Willie Soon’s Ankles 2015-01-27

According to a biased article in the Boston Globe, a man named Kert Davies, the Executive Director of something called the “Climate Investigations Center” (CIC) has penned a scurrilous letter to the journal Science Bulletin, accusing Dr. Willie Soon of a conflict of interest. The article says he was accused because…

The Hood Robin Syndrome 2015-08-29

There’s a new study out, under the imprimatur of the Energy Institute of the Haas School of Business in Berkeley, California,”entitled The Distributional Effects of U.S. Clean Energy Tax Credits. “As the title implies, it looks at who actually profited from the various “…

Palestinian Climate Change 2015-12-24

Very short post. I read today that Palestine has been granted full member status in the UNFCCC, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. I also recall from a few years ago that when Palestine was admitted to UNESCO, the US had to cut off funds to UNESCO…

Climate Sensitivity

Sense and Sensitivity 2010-02-28

This is an extension of the ideas I laid out as the Thunderstorm Thermostat Hypothesis on WUWT. For those who have not read it, I’ll wait here while you go there and read it … (dum de dum de dum) … (makes himself a cup of coffee) … OK, welcome…

Another Look at Climate Sensitivity 2010-03-16

OK, a quick pop quiz. The average temperature of the planet is about 14°C (57°F). If the earth had no atmosphere, and if it were a blackbody at the same distance from the sun, how much cooler would it be than at present? a) 33°C (59°F) cooler b) 20°C (36°F)…

Some of the Missing Energy 2010-12-23

The canonical equation describing the energy balance of the earth looks like this: ∆Q (energy added) = ∆U (energy lost) + ∆Ocean (energy moving in/out of the ocean) …

An Unexpected Limit to Climate Sensitivity 2011-01-03

[Update: I have found the problems in my calculations. The main one was I was measuring a different system than Kiehl et al. My thanks to all who wrote in, much appreciated.] The IPCC puts the central value for the climate sensitivity at 3°C per doubling of CO2, with lower…

The Cold Equations 2011-01-28

I’ve tried writing this piece several times already. I’ll give it another shot, I haven’t been happy with my previous efforts. It is an important subject that I want to get right. The title comes from a 1954 science fiction story that I read when I was maybe ten or eleven…

Triangular Fuzzy Numbers and the IPCC 2012-02-07

I got to thinking about “triangular fuzzy numbers” regarding the IPCC and their claims about how the climate system works. The IPCC, along with the climate establishment in general, make what to me is a ridiculous claim. This is the idea that in a hugely complex system like the Earth’s…

An Observational Estimate of Climate Sensitivity 2012-05-29

“Climate sensitivity” is the name for the measure of how much the earth’s surface is supposed to warm for a given change in what is called “forcing”. A change in forcing means a change in the net downwelling radiation at the top of the atmosphere, which includes both shortwave (solar)…

An Interim Look At Intermediate Sensitivity 2012-12-10

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me,…

Climate Insensitivity 2015-05-23

I’ve been wanting to [take] another look at the relationship between net top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiation changes on the one hand and changes in temperature on the other. As a necessary prelude, I finally have gotten round to an oft-postponed task, that of looking at the thermal lag in different areas…

Lags And Leads 2015-08-24

I’ve been thinking about thermal lags in the climate system. Everyone is familiar with thermal lag in everyday life. When you put a cast-iron pan on the stove flame, it doesn’t heat up instantly. Instead, the warming process starts instantly, but it takes some amount of …

Pre- and Post-Feedback Sensitivity 2016-08-15

[UPDATE TWO: Rather than trying to cooper up the errors, I have simply removed the incorrect sections and left the calculation of the Planck feedback intact. I think that it is right … however, as events remind me too frequently … I could be wrong … ] [UPDATE: As Jan Kjetil Andersen …

Putting It On The Line 2016-08-20

Thanks to an alert commenter, half of my last post was shown to be in error. Like most folks, I really, really hate to be publicly wrong, and of course I do my utmost to avoid it. But sometimes I overlook something, or my logical staircase is missing some steps, …

Effective Radiation Level (ERL) Temperature 2016-09-06

Lord Monckton has initiated an interesting discussion of the effective radiation level. Such discussions are of value to me because they strike off ideas of things to investigate … so again I go wandering through the data. Let me define a couple terms I’ll use. ‘Radiation temperature’ is the temperature …

Evaporation Redux 2017-06-11

I got to thinking again about the question of evaporation and rainfall. I wrote about it here a few years ago. Short version”when the earth’s surface gets warmer, we get more evaporation and thus more rainfall. Since what comes down must go up, we can use the Tropical Rainfall Measuring …

Temperature and Forcing 2017-07-13

Over at Dr. Curry’s excellent website, she’s discussing the Red and Blue Team approach. If I ran the zoo and could re-examine the climate question, I’d want to look at what I see as the central misunderstanding in the current theory of climate. This is the mistaken idea that changes …

Where The Temperature Rules The Sun 2017-12-14

I’ve held for a long time that there is a regulatory mechanism in the tropics that keeps the earth’s temperature within very narrow bounds on average (e.g. ± 0.3°C over the 20th Century). This mechanism is the timing and amount of the daily emergence of the cumulus cloud field, and the timing and emergence of …

Delta T and Delta F 2017-12-18

The fundamental and to me incorrect assumption at the core of the modern view of climate is that changes in temperature are a linear function of changes in forcing. Forcing is defined as the net downwelling radiation at the top of the atmosphere (TOA). According to this theory, in order …

Climategate

Measuring Precipitation on Willis’ Boots 2007-04-20

Willis writes in with latest FOI refusal from CRU, saying that they are unable to provide a list of the sites used in HadCRU3. As y’all may recall, I wrote back regarding the FOI request I had made for Phil Jones’ list of stations used for HadCRUT3. Unlike Steve M., I was not looking for …

The people -vs- the CRU: Freedom of information, my okole… 2009-11-24

Foreword: Willis asked me to carry this post here. What follows is a long and detailed series of email exchanges that outline the difficult task of getting data so that scientific replication/reproduction can be done by people external to the tight knit group of scientists that make up climate science today. This is a must …

Mr. David Palmer Explains The Problem 2011-11-23

Whoever took the Climategate emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia (UEA) are certainly playing the long game. Two whole years they waited before publishing the second group of 5,292 CRU emails, now known as Climategate 2.0. Impressive. I’m mentioned in 17 of the…

Clouds

The Cloud Radiative Effect (CRE) 2013-10-03

[UPDATE: An alert commenter, Ken Gregory, has pointed out that in addition to the temperature affecting the CRE, it is also affected by the changing solar radiation. He is correct that I did not control for this. SO … I need to go off and re-think and then re-do the…

The Cloud Radiative Effect, Take Two 2013-10-05

Well, in my last post I took a first cut at figuring the cloud radiative “feedback” from the CERES dataset. However, an alert commenter pointed out that I hadn’t controlled for the changes in solar radiation. The problem is that even if the clouds stay exactly the same, if the…

Evidence that Clouds Actively Regulate the Temperature 2013-10-06

I have put forth the idea for some time now that one of the main climate thermoregulatory mechanisms is a temperature-controlled sharp increase in albedo in the tropical regions. I have explained that this occurs in a stepwise fashion when cumulus clouds first emerge, and that the albedo is further…

Cancelling the Tropical Cancellation 2013-12-30

There’s a much-cited paper (129 citations) from 1994 called “On the Observed Near Cancellation between Longwave and Shortwave Cloud Forcing in Tropical Regions” by J. T. Kiehl (hereinafter Kiehl1994), available here. The paper makes the following claim (emphasis mine): ABSTRACT Observations based on Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) satellite data indicate that…

Upwelling Solar, Upwelling Longwave 2014-01-07

The CERES dataset contains three main parts—downwelling solar radiation, upwelling solar radiation, and upwelling longwave radiation. With the exception of leap-year variations, the solar dataset does not change from year to year over a few decades at least. It is fixed by unchanging physical laws. The upwelling longwave radiation and…

Silver Ants 2015-06-22

I stumbled across a lovely article about the Saharan silver ant over at phys.org. These ants have special hairs that reflect strongly in the visual and radiate strongly in the infrared. They show a photo of the ant hairs under a couple different amounts of magnification: Figure 1. Photograph from the phys.org…

Cosmic Disconnections 2016-04-09

I read yesterday that someone had supposedly provided evidence in support of Svensmark’s hypothesis that cosmic rays affect the weather. So I went to look it up. The study is called Cloud cover anomalies at middle latitudes: links to troposphere dynamics and solar variability, by S. Veretenenkoa and M. Ogurtsova, paywalled here. Let’s look at this …

The Rainmakers 2017-08-08

For more than a decade now I’ve been saying something without getting much agreement, which was: ‘When you cut down the trees, you cut down the clouds’. I based my saying on my own experience, first growing up in a ponderosa pine and fir forest, and later living in a …

CO2

Under the Volcano, Over the Volcano 2010-06-04

In 2006, I lived for a year in Waimea, on the Big Island of Hawaii. From my house I could see the Mauna Loa Observatory (MLO). This observatory is the home of the longest continuous series of CO2 measurements we have. The recording station was set up by Dave Keeling…

Some people claim, that there’s a human to blame … 2010-06-07

There seem to be a host of people out there who want to discuss whether humanoids are responsible for the post ~1850 rise in the amount of CO2. People seem madly passionate about this question. So I figure I’ll deal with it by employing the method I used in the…

A reply to Shakun et al – Dr. Munchausen Explains Science By Proxy 2012-04-06

There’s a new study entitled “Global warming preceded by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations during the last deglaciation”, Shakun et al. (paywalled, hereinafter Shakun2012). The paper claims to show that in the warming since the last ice age, CO2 leads temperature. Anthony wrote about it in his post “A new paper…

Shakun Redux: Master tricksed us! I told you he was tricksy! 2012-04-07

The quote above is from Lord of the Rings, an exchange between Gollum and Smeagol, and it encapsulates my latest results from looking into the Shakun 2012 paper, “Global warming preceded by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations during the last deglaciation” (paywalled, at Nature hereinafter Shakun2012). I discussed the paper in my…

Shakun, Not Stirred, and Definitely Not Area-Weighted 2012-04-09

I’d like to highlight one oddity in the Shakun et al. paper, “Global warming preceded by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations during the last deglaciation” (Shakun2012), which I’ve discussed here and here. They say: The data were projected onto a 5°x5° grid, linearly interpolated to 100-yr resolution and combined as area-weighted averages. The oddity I want you…

Shakun The Last, I Hope 2012-04-11

In three previous posts here, here, and here, I discussed problems with the paper by Shakun et al., “Global warming preceded by increasing carbon dioxide concentrations during the last deglaciation” (PDF,hereinafter S2012) Commenters said, and reasonably so, that I had not fully addressed their claim that warming progressed from south…

Does The Effect From The Cause Affect The Cause? 2013-01-03

There’s been a recent paper claiming a long-term correlation between CO2 and sea level, discussed here at WUWT. The paper implies that CO2 controls temperature and thus indirectly sea level. I thought I might follow up the comments on that thread by looking at what the ice core records actually…

A Modtran Mystery 2014-04-12

I’ve been messing about with the “Modtran” online calculator for atmospheric absorption. It’s called “Modtran” because it is a MODerate resolution program to calculate atmospheric infrared absorption written in ForTRAN, which calculates the result for each 1 cm-1 wide band of the wavenumber across the spectrum. Not quite a “line-by-line” calculation, but…

Conferences

Livetooning the ICCC 2010-05-17

Well, I’m at the International Conference on Climate Change in Chicago, where I’m one of the speakers. Since I’m a cartoonist, rather than liveblogging the conferenceI figured I’d livetoon it instead … these are my summaries of the main points that each scientist made in their presentation:

Livetooning the ICCC, Day 2 2010-05-18

Fewer cartoons today, I presented my paper (which was well received) and there were fewer sessions. The Conference is over now, it was very successful. Lord Moncton gave the closing address in his inimitable style. I started to draw him but soon realized that nothing I could say would be…

The DDP Conference 2014-07-27

I had the great pleasure of being invited to give a presentation at the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (DDP) conference this weekend in Knoxville, Tennessee. It was a very interesting and professionally run conference, and I offer my thanks to Dr. Jane Orient for her invitation, and to her team…

Willis’s DDP Presentation Video 2014-08-17

My thanks again to Dr. Jane Orient, Jeremy Snavely, and the Doctors for Disaster Preparedness (DDP). I previously described how they invited me to Knoxville to speak at the DDP conference. However, they’ve now outdone themselves and posted my speech online, and have my further thanks for doing so. Here’s the…

Constructal Law

The Unbearable Complexity of Climate 2009-12-27

Figure 1. The Experimental Setup I keep reading statements in various places about how it is indisputable “simple physics” that if we increase amount of atmospheric CO2, it will inevitably warm the planet. Here’s a typical example: In the hyperbolic language that has infested the debate, researchers have been accused…

The Constructal Law of Flow Systems 2010-11-15

One of the most fundamental and far-reaching discoveries in modern thermodynamics is the Constructal Law (see the wiki entry as well). It was first formulated by Adrian Bejan in 1996. In one of his descriptions, the Constructal Law is: For a finite-size (flow) system to persist in time (to live),…

Constructal GDP 2010-11-16

Encouraged by the response to my post on Adrian Bejan and the Constructal Law, which achieved what might be termed unprecedented levels of tepidity, I persevere. Here’s a lovely look at the energy use of the United States: Figure 1. US 2002 Energy production and consumption by sector. There are…

Marginal Parasitic Loss Rates 2014-03-26

There is a more global restatement of Murphy’s Law which says “Nature always sides with the hidden flaw”. Parasitic losses are an example of that law at work. In any heat engine, either natural or manmade, there are what are called “parasitic losses”. These are losses that tend to reduce…

Cryosphere

Skating on the Other Side of the Ice 2010-03-28

Inspired by this thread over at Bishop Hill’s excellent blog, I thought I’d write about sea ice. Among the many catastrophic things claimed to be the result of “global warming”, declining sea ice is one of the most popular. We see scary graphics of this all the time, things that…

My Thanks and Comments for Dr. Walt Meier 2010-04-10

First, I would like to thank Dr. Meier of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) for answering the questions I had posed (and had given my own personal answers) in “Trust and Mistrust”. I found his replies to be both temperate and well-reasoned. Also, I appreciate the positive…

The Ice Who Came In From The Cold 2010-06-01

A few days ago, Steve Goddard put up a post called “Does PIOMAS Verify?” In it, he compared the PIOMAS computer model estimate of the Arctic ice volume with the SIDADS satellite measured Arctic ice area. He noted that from 2007 on, the two datasets diverge. Intrigued by this, I…

Antarctic Agreements and Disagreements 2010-06-19

Steven Mosher has pointed out a Science Magazine article (subscription only) about Antarctica. It is a discussion of the temperature changes in the West Antarctic Peninsula (WAP). And where might that be? Figure 1. Location of the West Antarctic Peninsula. Yellow push-pin markers show the location of temperature stations. Yellow…

Frozen Global Warming Research 2011-09-07

A number of nations conduct research in Antarctica. To do research in Antarctica, you need to have an icebreaker. As the old saying goes, you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few icebergs … or something like that. For the last few years, said icebreaker has been the Swedish…

Alaska On The Rocks 2012-01-27

From the “weather is not climate” department, the sea ice is in early and thick in Alaska. It makes me shiver just to look at the picture. They had to use an icebreaker to get fuel to Nome. Figure 1. The Bering Sea region in Alaska. Anchorage is at the…

I used to be Snow White 2012-03-06

There’s a paper out by, inter alios, our good friend Judith Curry. The paper is “Impact of Declining Arctic Sea Ice on Winter Snowfall”, by Jiping Liu, Judith A. Curry, Huijun Wang, Mirong Song, and Radley M. Horton (PDF, hereinafter L2012). Judith has a thread discussing the paper at her…

Snow White Takes a Walk In The Park 2012-03-12

I wrote a post called I Used To Be Snow White (… but then I drifted) a week or so ago about a study titled “Impact of Declining Arctic Sea Ice on Winter Snowfall” (PDF) that claimed to link low arctic ice levels with high snow levels. To recap, their specific…

Icy Arctic Variations in Variability 2012-05-03

A while back, I noticed an oddity about the Hadley Centre’s HadISST sea ice dataset for the Arctic. There’s a big change in variation from the pre- to the post-satellite era. Satellite measurements of ice areas began in 1979. Here is the full HadISST record, with the monthly variations removed.…

Into and Out of the Icebox 2015-01-23

Inspired by a random comment by Steve McIntyre over at his marvelous blog Climate Audit, I got to thinking about the ice ages. I’ve long heard that the ice ages are caused by the changes in summer insolation in the northern hemisphere. As the story goes, the Milankovitch cycles of…

The Icebox Heats Up 2015-01-24

Well, either it’s a genetic defect or I’m just a glutton for punishment, but I’m going to delve some more into the ice ages. This is a followup to my previous post, Into and Out Of The Icebox. Let me start by looking at the cycles in the insolation and…

The Ice Was All Between 2016-03-02

I do my best to maintain my sense of awe regarding the things I study. I’ve had the good fortune in my life to be a commercial fisherman on the Bering Sea, and to voyage and fish on the edges of the Arctic ice. To me, sea ice, whether fixed …

Through The Ice Darkly 2016-03-03

As always, I get distracted by the daily news. The weather news today is a lovely rainy morning here in drought-plagued California, we got just under an inch (2cm) in last night’s storm, and the outer world is green and happy. Regarding the climate news, Anthony highligh…

Cycles

The Slow Fourier Transform (SFT) 2014-05-03

While investigating the question of cycles in climate datasets (Part 1, Part 2), I invented a method I called “sinusoidal periodicity”. What I did was to fit a sine wave of various periods to the data, and record the amplitude of the best fit. I figured it had been invented…

Cycling in Central England 2014-05-08

Looking at a recent article over at Tallbloke’s Talkshop, I realized I’d never done a periodogram looking for possible cycles in the entire Central England Temperature (CET) series. I’d looked at part of it, but not all of it. The CET is one of the longest continuous temperature series, with…

Sailing on the Solar Wind 2014-05-17

The lack of cycles in the solar wind isn’t surprising when you analyze this paper. There is very little sign of any kind of annual cycle, which makes perfect sense because the sun doesn’t run by earthly clocks … the sun doesn’t know much about “one year for earthlings”.

Data Presentation

Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics … and Graphs 2010-04-13

I got to thinking about how the information about temperatures is presented. Usually, we are shown a graph something like Fig. 1, which shows the change in the US temperatures over the last century. Figure 1. Change in the US annual temperatures, 1895-2009. Data from the US Historical Climate Network…

arXiv bookworm 2012-04-01

I stumbled across something called “bookworm“, which looks through all of the articles in the pre-print service arXiv. Their default home page looks like this. Figure 1. Comparison of the usage of three terms, “graphene” (light blue), “qubit” (red) and “superluminal neutrinos” (green). You can see how there were no…

Datasets

Australia and ACORN-SAT 2013-06-28

As Anthony discussed here, some Australian climate scientists think that there was an “angry summer” in 2012. Inspired by the necromantic incantations in support of the Aussie claims coming from the irrepressible Racehorse Nick Stokes, I went to take a look at the Australian temperature data. I found out that…

Economics

Browner, Colbert, the EPA, and Broken Windows 2011-10-20

Last night I saw Carol Browner, ex-head of the EPA, make an astounding statement on the Colbert Report TV show. I was so amazed, I tracked down the video to make sure I’d heard her right. Before I tell you what Ms. Browner said that so bemused me, let me…

Potholes In Their Arguments 2015-05-29

For folks with sensitive stomachs, I’d advise that you do not read the “Working Paper” named How Large Are Global Energy Subsidies? It was produced by the IMF [the “I” stands for “International” and most folks know what a “MF” is] as part of the media blitz in preparation for the upcoming…

Exxonomics 2015-07-09

The British rag “The Guardian” gets astounding web traction. Here’s the headline and first part of a story that, despite only being posted yesterday, has already spawned ninety-five copies across the web: Exxon knew of climate change in 1981, email says ” but it fun…

The Cruelest Tax Of All 2017-01-21

A ‘progressive’ tax is one where the wealthier you are the higher percentage of tax you pay. On the other hand, I’ve said before that a tax on energy, the so-called ‘carbon tax’, is one of the most regressive taxes available. It is the reverse of progressive, it hits the …

El Nino

Why El Niño and not the AMO? 2013-01-17

On another thread, a poster got me thinking about the common practice of using the El Nino 3.4 Index to remove some of the variability from the historical global average surface temperature record. The theory, as I have heard it propounded, is that the temperature of the Earth is “signal”,…

CEEMD and Sunspots 2016-04-20

I’ve been investigating the use of the ‘complete ensemble empirical mode decomposition’ (CEEMD) analysis method, which I discussed in a previous post entitled Noise-Assisted Data Analysis. One of the big insights leading to modern signal analysis was the brilliant idea of Joseph Fourier. He realized that any given waveform can …

Rainfall and El Niño 2016-06-10

In a recent post here on WattsUpWithThat, the claim was made that the El Nino influences rainfall. They showed a correlation between various historical proxies and El Nino/La Nina. So I thought I’d take a look at the modern correlation between rainfall and the El Nino. As a measurement of …

Emergence

The Thermostat Hypothesis 2009-06-14

Abstract: The Thermostat Hypothesis is that tropical clouds and thunderstorms actively regulate the temperature of the earth. This keeps the earth at a equilibrium temperature.

Plankton Cause Hurricanes! Urgent Action Required! 2010-08-15

When people say that we understand the unbelievably complex climate system well enough to project scenarios out a hundred years, I point out that new things are being discovered every week. The latest scientific finding is that plankton cause hurricanes. I know it sounds like a headline in The Onion,…

Which way to the feedback? 2010-12-11

There is an interesting new study by Lauer et al. entitled “The Impact of Global Warming on Marine Boundary Layer Clouds over the Eastern Pacific—A Regional Model Study” [hereinafter Lauer10]. Anthony Watts has discussed some early issues with the paper here. The Lauer10 study has been controversial because it found that…

The Details Are In The Devil 2010-12-13

I love thought experiments. They allow us to understand complex systems that don’t fit into the laboratory. They have been an invaluable tool in the scientific inventory for centuries. Here’s my thought experiment for today. Imagine a room. In a room dirt collects, as you might imagine. In my household…

Further Evidence for my Thunderstorm Thermostat Hypothesis 2011-06-07

For some time now I’ve been wondering what kind of new evidence I could come up with to add support to my Thunderstorm Thermostat hypothesis (q.v.). This is the idea that cumulus clouds and thunderstorms combine to cap the rise of tropical temperatures. In particular, thunderstorms are able to drive…

It’s Not About Feedback 2011-08-14

The current climate paradigm believed by most scientists in the field can be likened to the movement of balls on a pool table. Figure 1. Pool balls on a level table. Response is directly proportional to applied force (double the force, double the distance). There are no “preferred” positions—every position…

Estimating Cloud Feedback From Observations 2011-10-08

I had an idea a couple days ago about how to estimate cloud feedback from observations, and it appears to have panned out well. You tell me. Figure 1. Month-to-month change in 5° gridcell actual temperature ∆T, versus gridcell change in net cloud forcing ∆F. Curved green lines are for…

Wrong Again … 2011-10-11

Like anyone else, I’m not fond of being wrong, particularly very publicly wrong. However, that’s the price of science, and sometimes you have to go through being wrong to get to being right. Case in point? My last post. In that post I looked at what is known as “net…

A Longer Look at Climate Sensitivity 2012-05-31

After I published my previous post, “An Observational Estimate of Climate Sensitivity“, a number of people objected that I was just looking at the average annual cycle. On a time scale of decades, they said, things are very different, and the climate sensitivity is much larger. So I decided to…

Sun and Clouds are Sufficient 2012-06-04

In my previous post, A Longer Look at Climate Sensitivity, I showed that the match between lagged net sunshine (the solar energy remaining after albedo reflections) and the observational temperature record is quite good. However, there was still a discrepancy between the trends, with the observational trends being slightly larger…

Forcing or Feedback? 2012-06-07

I read a Reviewer’s Comment on one of Richard Lindzen’s papers today, a paper about the tropics from 20°N to 20°S, and I came across this curiosity (emphasis mine): Lastly, the authors go through convoluted arguments between forcing and feed backs. For the authors’ analyses to be valid, clouds should…

Observations on TOA Forcing vs Temperature 2012-06-12

I recently wrote three posts (first, second, and third), regarding climate sensitivity. I wanted to compare my results to another dataset. Continued digging has led me to the CERES monthly global albedo dataset from the Terra satellite. It’s an outstanding set, in that it contains downwelling solar (shortwave) radiation (DSR), upwelling solar radiation (USR), and most…

A Demonstration of Negative Climate Sensitivity 2012-06-19

Well, after my brief digression to some other topics, I’ve finally been able to get back to the reason that I got the CERES albedo and radiation data in the first place. This was to look at the relationship between the top of atmosphere (TOA) radiation imbalance and the surface…

The Tao of El Nino 2013-01-28

I was wandering through the graphics section of the TAO buoy data this evening. I noted that they have an outstanding animation of the most recent sixty months of tropical sea temperatures and surface heights. Go to their graphics page, click on “Animation”. Then click on “Animate”. When the new…

Here there be Dragons 2013-02-04

I was reflecting tonight about emergent phenomena, and how one thing about emergent phenomena is their unpredictability. I’m in the process of writing up a post on emergent phenomena in climate, so they’ve been on my mind. I got to thinking about something I saw thirty-five years ago, a vision…

Emergent Climate Phenomena 2013-02-07

In a recent post, I described how the El Nino/La Nina alteration operates as a giant pump. Whenever the Pacific Ocean gets too warm across its surface, the Nino/Nina pump kicks in and removes the warm water from the Pacific, pumping it first west and thence poleward. I also wrote…

Slow Drift in Thermoregulated Emergent Systems 2013-02-08

In my last post, “Emergent Climate Phenomena“, I gave a different paradigm for the climate. The current paradigm is that climate is a system in which temperature slavishly follows the changes in inputs. Under my paradigm, on the other hand, natural thermoregulatory systems constrain the temperature to vary within a…

Air Conditioning Nairobi, Refrigerating The Planet 2013-03-11

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 regards my knowledge of refrigeration. The simplest explanation of my refrigeration credentials is that I…

Dehumidifying the Tropics 2013-04-21

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 the Solomon Islands, which are near the Equator, south to Brisbane. Brisbane is at 27°…

Decadal Oscillations Of The Pacific Kind 2013-06-08

The recent post here on WUWT about the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has a lot of folks claiming that the PDO is useful for predicting the future of the climate … I don’t think so myself, and this post is about why I don’t think the PDO predicts the climate…

Stalking the Rogue Hotspot 2013-08-21

[I’m making this excellent essay a top sticky post for a day or two, I urge sharing it far and wide. New stories will appear below this one. – Anthony] Dr. Kevin Trenberth is a mainstream climate scientist, best known for inadvertently telling the world the truth about the parlous…

The Magnificent Climate Heat Engine 2013-12-21

I’ve been reflecting over the last few days about how the climate system of the earth functions as a giant natural heat engine. A “heat engine”, whether natural or man-made, is a mechanism that converts heat into mechanical energy of some kind. In the case of the climate system, the…

The Thermostatic Throttle 2013-12-28

I have theorized that the reflective nature of the tropical clouds, in particular those of the inter-tropical convergence zone (ITCZ) just above the equator, functions as the “throttle” on the global climate engine. We’re all familiar with what a throttle does, because the gas pedal on your car controls the…

On The Stability and Symmetry Of The Climate System 2014-01-06

The CERES data has its problems, because the three datasets (incoming solar, outgoing longwave, and reflected shortwave) don’t add up to anything near zero. So the keepers of the keys adjusted them to an artificial imbalance of +0.85 W/m2 (warming). Despite that lack of accuracy, however, the CERES data is…

Dust In My Eyes 2014-02-13

I was thinking about “dust devils”, the little whirlwinds of dust that you see on a hot day, and they reminded me that we get dulled by familiarity with the wonders of our planet. Suppose, for example, you that “back in the olden days” your family lived for generations in…

The Power Stroke 2014-02-27

I got to thinking about the well-known correlation of El Ninos and global temperature. I knew that the Pacific temperatures lead the global temperatures, and the tropics lead the Pacific, but I’d never looked at the actual physical

Arctic Albedo Variations 2014-12-17

Anthony has just posted the results from a “Press Session” at the AGU conference. In it the authors make two claims of interest. The first is that there has been a five percent decrease in the summer Arctic albedo since the year 2000: A decline in the region’s albedo –…

Albedic Meanderings 2015-06-03

I’ve been considering the nature of the relationship between the albedo and temperature. I have hypothesized elsewhere that variations in tropical cloud albedo are one of the main mechanisms that maintain the global surface temperature within a fairly narrow range (e.g. within ± 0.3°C during the entire 20th Century). To…

An Inherently Stable System 2015-06-04

At the end of my last post , I said that the climate seems to be an inherently stable system. The graphic below shows ~2,000 climate simulations run by climateprediction.net. Unlike the other modelers, whose failures end up on the cutting room floor, they’ve shown all of the runs ……

The Daily Albedo Cycle 2015-06-08

I discussed the role of tropical albedo in regulating the temperature in two previous posts entitled Albedic Meanderings and An Inherently Stable System. This post builds on that foundation. I said in the latter post that I would discuss the diurnal changes in tropical cloud albedo. For this I use…

Problems With Analyzing Governed Systems 2015-08-02

I’ve been ruminating on the continuing misunderstanding of my position that a governor is fundamentally different from simple feedback. People say things like “A governor is just a kind of feedback”. Well, yes, that’s true, and it is also true that a human being is “just…

Cooling And Warming Clouds And Thunderstorms 2015-08-18

Following up on a suggestion made to me by one of my long-time scientific heroes, Dr. Fred Singer, I’ve been looking at the rainfall dataset from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite. Here’s s the TRMM average rainfall data for the entire mission to d…

Tropical Evaporative Cooling 2015-11-11

I’ve been looking again into the satellite rainfall measurements from the Tropical Rainfall Measurement Mission (TRMM). I discussed my first look at this rainfall data in a post called Cooling and Warming, Clouds and Thunderstorms. There I showed that the cooling from th…

How Thunderstorms Beat The Heat 2016-01-08

I got to thinking again about the thunderstorms, and how much heat they remove from the surface by means of evaporation. We have good data on this from the Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellites. Here is the distribution and strength of rainfall, and thus …

The Warmer The Icier 2016-02-25

A WUWT commenter emailed me with a curious claim. I have described various emergent phenomena that regulate the surface temperature. These operate on time scales ranging from minutes to hours (e.g. dust devils, thunderstorms) to multi-decadal (e.g. Atlantic Multidecadal …

Energy

The Empire Strikes Out 2011-03-04

I guess having electricity when you need it is sooooo last century … UK families will have to get used to “only using power when it was available”. That constant electricity at home was dangerous anyhow, the unending hum of the wires can drive a man so insane that the…

The Only Choice Is Where It Gets Burned 2011-10-06

The noted anti-development expert James Hansen and some other AGW supporters are out in force trying to block the proposed expansion of the existing Keystone Pipeline called the “Keystone XL”. They claim that it would be carrying “dirty oil” from the Canadian Oil Sands … and what makes oil “dirty”…

The R/P Ratio 2011-12-13

In oil, as in other extractive industries, you have what is called the “R/P ratio”. In the R/P ratio, “R” is reserves of whatever it is you are extracting, and “P” is the production rate, the rate at which you are extracting and using up your reserves. Figure 1. World…

Conventional Wisdom, Unconventional Oil 2013-02-02

There’s a discussion over at Judith Curry’s excellent blog, about peak oil. I find the whole madness surrounding peak oil to be one more example of our human love for warnings of future disaster. Few people want to hear that tomorrow will be OK, that things will work out. Instead,…

Getting Energy From The Energy Store 2013-06-29

Inspired by an interesting guest post entitled “An energy model for the future, from the 12th century” over at Judith Curry’s excellent blog, I want to talk a bit about energy storage. The author of the guest post is partially right. His thesis is that solving the problem of how…

Drilling For Hydrogen 2013-07-01

As a result of my post on energy storage entitled Getting Energy From The Energy Store, a few people brought up the idea of using hydrogen as an energy source. You see this on the web, that we could power our civilization on hydrogen, convert all the trucks and buses…

Pump Price, Miles Driven, and Energy Taxes 2013-07-09

Inspired (as I often am) by either the insights or the foolishness of a guest post at Judith Curry’s always-provocative blog, I decided to take a look at the relationship between fuel price and miles driven. My inspiration came from my amusement at the guest author’s use of the following…

M. King Meets the EIA 2014-01-11

Dramatis Personae: The “EIA” is the US Energy Information Agency, the US agency in charge of data about energy production, consumption, and use. It has just released its January 2014 Short Term Energy Report, with current and projected oil production figures. And “M. King” is Marion King Hubbert, the man who…

More Fun with Oil and Gas 2014-01-12

Well, having had such a good time with M. King Hubbert meeting the EIA, I thought I’d toss out another puzzle. This one is inspired by a statement from the King himself that someone quoted in that thread, viz: “A child born in the middle 30s,” Hubbert told reporters, “will…

The Levelized Cost of Electric Generation 2014-02-16

In early 2013, the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) released their new figures for the “levelized cost” of new power plants. I just came across them, so I thought I’d pass them on. These are two years more recent than the same EIA cost estimates I discussed in 2011 here. Levelized…

Four Stories, Two Worlds 2015-01-18

To start the four tales of the title, I noticed a couple of stories in the news lately about how critical inexpensive energy is for the poor. The first story said: Wall Street may be growing anxious about the negative impact of falling oil prices on energy producers, but the…

What Powers The Electricity 2016-02-09

There is a generator-by-generator analysis of the US power supply for 2012, called “eGrid”, available here”as an Excel file. I’ve aggregated the data by fuel type. Discuss. Best of a lovely February night”to all, Orion refulgent in ebon sky, Castor and Pol…

Energy and Poverty

Firing Up The Economy, Literally 2010-11-17

I’ve spent the last week in the Solomon Islands, which is northeast of Australia. It’s a wonderful place for me to come back to, even if only for a week, as I lived here for nine years. It’s a curious place, one of the UNs “LDCs”, the “Least Developedries.”…

Not Evil, Just Destructive 2011-03-17

Well, the Joe Romm saga continues. He’s been discussing the paper “Evidence for super-exponentially accelerating atmospheric carbon dioxide growth“. After I pointed out the problems with the paper’s ludicrous claims about population, Joe pulled his whole goofy section repeating the paper’s population errors. He also talked to one of the…

Why a “Revenue Neutral” Energy Tax Isn’t 2011-03-18

Over at her excellent blog, Judith Curry is hosting a discussion that in part is about “revenue-neutral” carbon (in reality energy) taxes. This is another example of where being a generalist is an advantage. I’ve started and run businesses, so I know why revenue neutral isn’t neutral at all when…

I Blame The Australian Carbon Tax for Price Increases 2011-11-17

You likely didn’t realize that the First Rule for the Carbon Tax Club is … nobody talks about the Carbon Tax Club. And not only that … it could cost the poor Aussies big bucks if they say what I just said about the Carbon Tax Club. Gotta love totalitarianism…

Don’t Tax Development, It Hurts The Poor 2011-12-19

I was reading an interesting article, paywalled sadly, called “Detecting Novel Associations in Large Data Sets“, by David N. Reshef et al. It describes a subtle method for detecting relationships in datasets. Their method is called “MIC” for maximal information coefficient. The MIC coefficient measures the strength of the association of…

Monetizing the Effects of Carbon 2013-01-11

I see that the New York Times (NYT) is going to close their environmental desk. Given that there still are actual environmental problems on the planet, I consider the closing as a sad commentary on the hijacking of the environmental movement by carbon alarmists. CO2 alarmism has done huge damage…

Lord Stern’s Mathematical Malapropisms 2013-01-27

I see the good Lord Stern is back in the news. Lord Stern famously produced an eponymous report a few years ago about how much it would cost to cut down carbon dioxide to try to cool down the planetary temperature. He said it would be dirt cheap, a percent…

Cooking Grandma 2013-07-04

I got to thinking about the way that California prices its electricity, which is never a good thing for a man’s blood pressure. When I was a kid, the goal of the Public Utilities Commission and Pacific Gas and Electric was to provide cheap electricity. The Bonneville Dam and the…

Double the Burn Rate, Scotty! 2013-08-21

Lots of folks claim that the worst possible thing we could do is to allow the third world to actually develop to the level of the industrialized nations. The conventional wisdom holds that there’s not enough fossil fuels in the world to do that, that fuel use would be ten…

Expensive Energy Kills Poor People 2013-09-27

Lesotho (pronounced “Leh – soo – too”), is a mountain fortress of ary, totally surrounded by South Africa. The people there, the Basotho (pronounced “Bah – soo – too), are tough as nails, and you’d have to be. It’s high desertry, cold in the winter, not much water.…

The PowerHouse School Concept 2013-09-28

In my last post, “Expensive Energy Kills Poor People” , I spoke of the women of Lesotho. In the comments someone asked what I would recommend that they do regarding electricity. For me, there are two separate questions about the provision of electricity. One is cities and the grid. The…

Long Green 2013-10-27

The US has some of the world’s most boring looking money—it’s all green. So we have terms like “greenbacks” for dollars, and “long green”, meaning lots of money. I offer this as context for what I found when I got to wondering what had happened to the United Nations “Green…

Energy Budget

Accuracy, Precision, and One Watt per Square Metre 2013-08-30

I’ve been investigating one of my favorite datasets in the last few days, the CERES satellite-based top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiation dataset. In particular, I’ve taken month-by-month global and hemispheric averages of the data. The dataset consists of observations of three variables—downwelling solar radiation, upwelling longwave (infrared) radiation, and upwelling shortwave radiation…

Environment

Conservamentalism 2010-04-07

I am surprised at the visceral nature of the rejection of the term “environmentalist”. I had not realized it had gotten that bad. I don’t think I’d want to be one of those if that’s how people feel. …

NGOs: It’s Worse Than We Thought 2011-12-07

The official numbers of partygoers to the 17th Conference of Parties in Durban, South Africa, shape up like this: Figure 1. Theoretical distribution of the 14,570 partygoers at the Durban 17th Conference of Partygoers. Numbers indicate total delegates from that group. Slightly more government delegates than NGO representatives. However, as in all things climate, it’s…

Lisa Shops Sustainably by the Seine 2012-03-30

A few months ago I wrote a post about the previous head of the EPA, Carol Browner, and her risible claim that she was creating jobs. Her successor, Lisa Jackson, is worse. Lisa has just ordered that in the future, American coal will be burned in the most polluting way…

The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Beche-de-mer 2013-01-04

The atoll of Ontong Java, in the Solomon Islands, is unusual for a few reasons. First, it’s huge, one of the largest atolls in the South Pacific. Second, unlike the main islands of the Solomon Islands with their Melanesian populations, the people of Ontong Java are Polynesian. The third reason…

How Environmental Organizations Are Destroying The Environment 2013-06-25

The Washington Post reports: During an April visit to the San Francisco home of billionaire and environmental activist Tom Steyer, who created a political action committee in March to target lawmakers supporting the Keystone pipeline, Obama noted that the issue of climate change “is near and dear” to Steyer and…

Expeditions

Here we go again: row, row, row, your boat – Arctic edition 2012-07-09

I must admit, being an oceanic adventurer myself, I do love to read about outrageous voyages. The feats of Shackleton in the Endurance stir my blood. I’ve stood on the deck of the Gjoa, the first ship to make the northwest Passage, and marveled at how tiny it was, and…

The Coldest Journey Gets Colder 2013-03-04

I was saddened to get the news that Sir Ranulf Fiennes, OBE, has gotten frostbitten. As a result, he has been forced to give up his dream of a winter crossing of Antarctica, an expedition entitled The Coldest Journey. His public support of CO2 alarmism has led to perhaps somewhat…

Cruising the Northwest Passage In Style 2014-08-16

While working on finishing the story of my sea voyage last week down from Canada to Oregon, I was surprised to see that there is a new market in the world of marine “eco-tourism”. This one involves burning thousands and thousands of gallons of eeevil fossil fuels so that rich folks can make a…

Extinctions

Where Are The Corpses? 2010-01-04

Abstract The record of continental (as opposed to island) bird and mammal extinctions in the last five centuries was analyzed to determine if the “species-area” relationship actually works to predict extinctions. Very few continental birds or mammals are recorded as having gone extinct, and none have gone extinct from habitat…

Common Sense Added to Endangered Species List 2011-06-01

As Anthony Watts highlighted, the recent paper in Nature (paywalled, reported here) on extinctions agreed with the main conclusion that I had established in my post “Where Are The Corpses“. The conclusion was that the “species/area relationship” as currently used doesn’t work to predict extinctions, and thus there is no…

New paper from Loehle & Eschenbach shows extinction data has been wrongly blamed on climate change due to island species sensitivity 2011-10-25

Guest post by Dr. Craig Loehle Last year, Willis Eschenbach had a WUWT post about extinction rates being exaggerated in the literature (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/04/where-are-the-corpses/). I offered to help him get this published, and it is now out. We conclude that the …

Always Trust Your Gut Extinct 2013-01-25

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach, title from a Paula Abdul quote The backstory for today’s adventure is that this is the first scientific question I seriously researched. It is also the reason I don’t trust the “experts” or the “consensus”. In 1988, E. O. Wilson, an ant expert with little knowledge of extinction, made a…

Alexander the Great Explains The Drop In Extinctions 2013-07-07

In a recent post here on WattsUpWithThat called The Thirteen Worst Graphs In The World, Geoff Chambers explores the graphs in a new book called “10 Billion”, by Stephen Emmott. The book appears to be Emmott’s first entry in the “Future Failed Serial Doomcaster” competition. I thought I’d take a…

Geoengineering

Every Silver Lining Has A Cloud 2010-05-12

I noted on the news that there is a new plan afoot to cool down the planet. This one supposedly has been given big money by none other than Bill Gates. The plan involves a fleet of ships that supposedly look like this: Figure 1. Artist’s conception of cloud-making ships.…

Greenhouse

Water Vapor Feedback 2014-03-24

Well, another productive ramble through the CERES dataset, which never ceases to surprise me. This time my eye was caught by a press release about a new (paywalled) study by Gordon et al. regarding the effect of water vapor on the climate: From 2002 to 2009, an infrared sounder aboard…

Greenhouse Theory

The Steel Greenhouse 2009-11-17

There is a lot of misinformation floating around the web about the greenhouse effect works. It is variously described as a “blanket” that keeps the Earth warm, or a “mirror” that reflects part of the heat back to Earth, or “a pane of glass” that somehow keeps energy from escaping. It is none of these things.

People Living in Glass Planets 2010-11-27

Dr. Judith Curry notes in a posting at her excellent blog Climate Etc. that there are folks out there that claim the poorly named planetary “greenhouse effect” doesn’t exist. And she is right, some folks do think that. I took a shot at explaining that the “greenhouse effect” is a…

Radiating the Ocean 2011-08-15

Once again, the crazy idea that downwelling longwave radiation (DLR, also called infra-red or IR, or “greenhouse radiation”) can’t heat the ocean has raised its ugly head on one of my threads. Figure 1. The question in question. There are lots of good arguments against the AGW consensus, but this…

ODTRAN Moddities 2011-08-18

There’s an online calculator called MODTRAN that calculates the absorption of longwave (“greenhouse”) radiation for various greenhouse gases (“GHGs”), and shows their resulting effect. It does this on a “line-by-line” basis, meaning it examines each interval of the longwave spectrum for each greenhouse gas at each altitude, and calculates the…

The 1% Solution 2011-10-04

When I’m analyzing a system, I divide the variables into three categories—first-, second-, and third-order variables. First-order variables are those variables that can change the system by more than 10%. Obviously, these must be included in any analysis of the system. Second-order are those that can change the system by…

The Moon is a Cold Mistress 2012-01-08

I’ve been considering the effect that temperature swings have on the average temperature of a planet. It comes up regarding the question of why the moon is so much colder than you’d expect. The albedo (reflectivity) of the moon is less than that of the Earth. You can see the…

A Matter of Some Gravity 2012-01-13

A couple of apparently related theories have been making the rounds lately. One is by Nikolov and Zeller (N&Z), expounded here and replied to here on WUWT. The other is by Hans Jelbring, discussed at Tallblokes Talkshop. As I understand their theories, they say that the combination of gravity plus…

Thanks and Apologies 2012-01-17

I have no use for people who censor and ban those who don’t agree with their scientific ideas. I’ve had my simple, on-topic, scientific comments censored over at RealClimate. And I’m banned at Tamino’s “Closed Mind” blog for asking one too many unwanted questions. I really, really didn’t like either experience at…

The R. W. Wood Experiment 2013-02-06

Pushed by a commenter on another thread, I thought I’d discuss the R. W. Wood experiment, done in 1909. Many people hold that this experiment shows that CO2 absorption and/or back-radiation doesn’t exist, or at least that the poorly named “greenhouse effect” is trivially small. I say it doesn’t show…

Arctic Layer Cake 2014-02-03

There’s a recent paper paywalled here, called Arctic winter warming amplified by the thermal inversion and consequent low infrared cooling to space. Fortunately, the Supplementary Online Information is available here, and it contains much valuable information. The paper claims that during the arctic winter, the atmospheric radiation doesn’t go out to…

Guy Stewart Callendar 2014-11-13

I greatly enjoy reading old science. Back fifty years or more ago, they actually did real science, not the “my model says it must be true” kind of thing that we are treated to today. In that regard, I’ve been fortunate to stumble on one of the earliest papers on…

Northern Winter Nights 2016-02-23

[See Addendum at the bottom.] [See Second Addendum at the bottom] I got to thinking about the distribution of the so-called “global” warming. I’d heard that a good chunk of it was due to increasing nighttime minimum temperatures. So I grabbed the Berkeley…

Hurst/Autocorrelation

Repeated Trials, Autocorrelation, and Albedo 2015-06-27

OK, quick gambler’s question. Suppose I flip seven coins in the air at once and they all seven come up heads. Are the coins loaded? Near as I can tell, statistics was invented by gamblers to answer this type of question. The seven coins are independent events. If they are…

A Way To Calculate Effective N 2015-07-01

One of the best parts of writing for the web is the outstanding advice and guidance I get from folks with lots of experience. I recently had the good fortune to have Robert Brown of Duke University recommend a study by Demitris Koutsoyiannis entitled The Hurst phenomenon and fractional Gaussian…

IPCC

Why Copenhagen Will Achieve Nothing 2009-11-06

The upcoming Copenhagen climate summit, officially and ponderously named ‘COP15 United Nations Climate Change Conference Copenhagen 2009’, is aimed at reducing the emissions of the developed world. The main players, of course, are the US and Western Europe. There is a widespread perception that if the US and Western Europe …

More Oddities with the IPCC Numbers 2010-10-23

A number of people have said Hey, in your previous post, the missing forcing is going into the ocean, so it’s still “in the pipeline”. I had considered that, but it didn’t make sense. I’ve taken a closer look, and it still doesn’t make sense. According to the IPCC calculations…

A Strange Problem with the IPCC Numbers 2010-10-23

ABSTRACT The IPCC says that the expected change in temperature arising from a change in forcing is equal to the change in forcing times the climate sensitivity. The IPCC provides values we can use to estimate the total human and natural forcing change since 1850. The IPCC also proves estimates…

Nature hates straight lines 2010-10-25

Yeah, I know Nature doesn’t have human emotions, give me a break. I’m aware it is unscientific and dare I call it atavistic and perhaps even socially unseemly to say Nature “hates” straight lines, but hey, it’s a headline, cut me some poetic slack. My point is, everyone is aware…

I Have A Stake In The Outcome 2011-02-13

Here on WUWT, Ron Cram has provided an interesting overview of a number of people’s ideas about desirable changes to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC). He proposes that the IPCC provide us with a majority and a minority view of climate science, rather than just…

CDM-ania 2011-09-30

I wrote previously about the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol. In that post, I pointed out an underlying irony of the CDM. At the behest of European AGW supporters who would never, ever think of allowing the building of a hydroelectric dam in their ownry, European…

Lack of Effect

Where’s the Climate Beef? 2010-04-16

A while back in the US there was an ad for a hamburger chain. It featured an old lady who bought a competitor’s hamburger with a great big hamburger bun. But when she opened it up she asked … I got to thinking about this in the context of whether…

The Nuclear Winter of our Discontent 2011-04-06

Anthony recently discussed a recent paper called “The Role of Atmospheric Nuclear Explosions on the Stagnation of Global Warming in the Mid 20th Century” (PDF, author’s version). It advances the claim that nuclear tests changed the temperature in the period 1945-1980, in a sort of mini-“nuclear winter”. Here’s their main graph:…

Malfeasance

Out in the Ama-zone 2010-06-27

There have been lots of articles lately discussing the retraction by the UK Sunday Times of their claims about Amazongate. Folks like George Monbiot are claiming that their point of view has been vindicated, that Amazongate is “rubbish” and that skeptics have been “skewered”. So I decided to follow the…

It Was The Worst of The Times 2011-03-11

I did jail time in the Sixties for a peaceful sit-in against the Vietnam War. So (as with many things) my understanding of the issues involved in what may be termed ‘civil disobedience’ is eminently practical as well as theoretical. I was very disturbed by a recent column in the …

Yes, Virginia, there is an FOIA 2011-07-02

A judge has ordered the University of Virginia to release Professor Michael Mann’s emails pursuant to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. Mann is the climatologist who developed of the “Hockeystick” graph, which became the icon of the IPCC climate alarmism … until it was shown to be what…

AGU, Gleick, Climate Science, and Baseball Steroid Use 2013-01-10

Please Turn Around, Dr. Gundersen, You’re Blowing Your One Chance! I was ruminating about Peter Gleick, and the AGU Task Force on Scientific Integrity, when I came across a very apropos quote. This is from another arena of life entirely, that of professional baseball. No one was elected to the…

Chris Mooney’s Chartsmanship in the Service of Alarmism 2013-02-07

I came across this beautiful example of chartsmanship today in a Chris Mooney post of raw, pure, visceral alarmism, it’s a gem. It’s from the Mother Jones website and comes with the lovely headline “Humans Have Already Set in Motion 69 Feet of Sea Level Rise”. I do love the…

Dr. Trenberth Redux 2014-11-15

A couple days ago, I was given a copy of a most interesting interchange from 2011 between Dr. Kevin Trenberth and a layman asking him a question. The sender of the question recently passed it on to me. I’ve redacted the email addresses and the name of the person asking the question,…

Mathematics

Can’t See the Signal For the Trees 2008-11-23

ABSTRACT: A new method is proposed for determining if a group of datasets contain a signal in common. The method, which I call Correlation Distribution Analysis (CDA), is shown to be able to detect common signals down to a signal:noise ratio of 1:10. In addition, the method reveals how much of the common signal is …

On Being the Wrong Size 2010-05-23

This topic is a particular peeve of mine, so I hope I will be forgiven if I wax wroth. There is a most marvelous piece of technology called the GRACE satellites, which stands for the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment. It is composed of two satellites flying in formation. Measuring…

Kill It With Fire 2011-05-30

The discussion of the 1998 Mann “Hockeystick” seems like it will never die. (The “Hockeystick” was Dr. Michael Mann’s famous graph showing flatline historical temperatures followed by a huge modern rise.) Claims of the Hockeystick’s veracity continue apace, with people doggedly wanting to believe that the results are “robust”. I…

Decimals of Precision – Trenberth’s missing heat 2012-01-26

Over at Judith Curry’s excellent blog there’s a discussion of Trenberth’s missing heat. A new paper about oceanic temperatures says the heat’s not really missing, we just don’t have accurate enough information to tell where it is. The paper’s called Observed changes in top-of-the-atmosphere radiation and upper-ocean heating consistent within…

Time Lags in the Climate System 2012-06-18

Did you ever sit on a hot sand beach and dig your hand down into the sand? You don’t have to dig very far before you get to cool sand … but even though it’s nice and cool a few handwidths down, the fact that it is cool doesn’t matter…

Hell and High Histogramming – Mastering an Interesting Heat Wave Puzzle 2012-07-10

Anthony Watts, Lucia Liljegren , and Michael Tobis have all done a good job blogging about Jeff Masters’ egregious math error. His error was that he claimed that a run of high US temperatures had only a chance of 1 in 1.6 million of being a natural occurrence. Here’s his claim:…

Dr. Michael Mann, Smooth Operator 2013-03-30

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 time series. It was called “On smoothing potentially non-stationary climate time series“, and it was…

The Pitfalls of Data Smoothing 2013-03-30

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 I got involved in climate science, the go-to blog was the late, great John Daly’s…

Berkeley Earth, Very Rural and Not 2013-04-04

Jet exhaust as climate forcing 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 Average using Rural Sites Identified from MODIS Classifications”, by Wickham et al, hereinafter W2013. They…

Monthly Averages, Anomalies, and Uncertainties 2013-08-17

I have long suspected a theoretical error in the way that some climate scientists estimate the uncertainty in anomaly data. I think that I’ve found clear evidence of the error in the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature data. I say “I think”, because as always, there certainly may be something I’ve…

Canute Ponders The Tides 2014-02-14

Short Post. You can skip this if you understand the tidal force. Some folks seem confused about the nature of tidal forces. Today I saw this gem: “The tide raising force acts in both directions (bulge on each side in the simplistic model)” … the author of that statement may…

Extreme Times 2014-04-24

I read a curious statement on the web yesterday, and I don’t remember where. If the author wishes to claim priority, here’s your chance. The author said (paraphrasing): If you’re looking at any given time window on an autocorrelated time series, the extreme values are more likely to be at…

Well, Color Me Gobsmacked! 2014-05-26

I’ve developed a curious kind of algorithm that I’ve humorously called “slow Fourier analysis”, but which might be better described as a method for direct spectral analysis. The basic concept is quite simple. I fit a sine wave with a certain cycle length, say 19 months, to the dataset of…

The Beer Identity 2014-07-12

It’s morning here in Reno, and I thought I’d write a bit more about the Kaya Identity and the Beer Identity. My last post about the Kaya Identity was controversial, and I wanted to see if I could clarify my point. On the last thread, a commenter did a good…

The Desert Finder 2015-03-28

Despite doing lots of research and investigations over the last few weeks, I’ve written little. Well, actually, I’ve published little, although I’ve written a lot. But I didn’t publish what I’d done, there was no wonder in it, no awe. So I tossed it all out and started “simply messing…

Nassim Taleb Strikes Again 2015-07-11

Following up on his brilliant earlier work “The Black Swan”, Taleb has written a paper called Error, Dimensionality, and Predictability”(draft version). I could not even begin to do justice to this tour-de-force, so let me just quote the abstract and encourage …

Is The Climate Chaotic 2015-10-22

After I’d published my previous post on the Hurst Exponent entitled A Way To Calculate Effective N, I got an email from Dan Hughes which contained a most interesting idea. He thought that it would be productive to compare the Hurst analysis of the records of weather phen…

Noise Assisted Data Analysis 2015-12-10

Once again, Dr. Curry’s “Week in Review-Science and Technology” doesn’t disappoint. I find the following: Evidence of a decadal solar signal in the Amazon River: 1903 to 2013 [link] “by Antico and Torres So I go to the link, and I find the abstract: Abstra…

Mercury

The EPA’s Mercurial Madness 2012-03-31

In the process of writing my piece about Lisa Jackson and the EPA, I got to reading about the EPA passing new mercury regulations. Their regulations are supposed to save the lives of some 11,000 people per year. So I figured I should learn something about mercury. It turned out…

Mercury, the Trickster God 2012-04-01

I’ve been puzzling for a while about why the areas with the most power plants aren’t the areas with the worst levels of mercury pollution. Why aren’t the areas downwind from the power plants heavily polluted? I keep running across curious statements like “There was no obvious relationship between large-mouth bass or yellow perch fish…

Something Fishy about Mercury 2015-02-05

There’s a new study out called Increase in mercury in Pacific yellowfin tuna by Paul E. Drevnick, Carl H. Lamborg, and Martin J. Horgan. It claims that: By compiling and re-analyzing published reports on yellowfin tuna (Thunnus albacares) caught near Hawaii (USA) over the past half century, the authors found…

Mitigation

How Much Would You Buy? 2011-03-13

In the US, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is imposing the first US rules on CO2. I thought I’d take a look at the EPA’s own estimates of cost and benefit of CO2 regulation, to see if the new rules make sense. Figure 1. Danger, high costs ahead. Photo Source…

Models

The Alligator Model 2011-10-20

I wrote my first computer program in 1963. It was an implementation of the Sieve of Erastosthenes, used to find prime numbers. I haven’t stopped programming since then. So I am intimately acquainted with the innards of computers, computer programs, and computer models, both iterative and otherwise. And those who…

Improbable Maximum Precipitation 2013-04-06

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 says: Probable Maximum Precipitation (PMP) is the greatest accumulation of precipitation for a given duration…

Why Reanalysis Data Isn’t … 2013-05-10

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. [UPDATE: my thanks to Nick Stokes for locating the paper here.] Among the “distinctive climate…

Model Climate Sensitivity Calculated Directly From Model Results 2013-05-21

[UPDATE: Steven Mosher pointed out that I have calculated the transient climate response (TCR) rather than the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS). For the last half century, the ECS has been about 1.3 times the TCR (see my comment below for the derivation of this value). I have changed the values…

Climate Sensitivity Deconstructed 2013-06-03

I haven’t commented much on my most recents posts, because of the usual reasons: a day job, and the unending lure of doing more research, my true passion. To be precise, recently I’ve been frying my synapses trying to twist my head around the implications of the finding that the…

The Thousand-Year Model 2013-06-25

Back in 2007, Jeffrey Kiehl first pointed out a curious puzzle about the climate models, viz: (emphasis mine) [3] A review of the published literature on climate simulations of the 20th century indicates that a large number of fully coupled three dimensional climate models are able to simulate the global…

Dr. Kiehl’s Paradox 2013-10-01

Back in 2007, in a paper published in GRL entitled “Twentieth century climate model response and climate sensitivity” Jeffrey Kiehl noted a curious paradox. All of the various different climate models operated by different groups were able to do a reasonable job of emulating the historical surface temperature record. In…

One Model, One Vote 2013-11-21

The IPCC, that charming bunch of United Nations intergovernmental bureaucrats masquerading as a scientific organization, views the world of climate models as a democracy. It seems that as long as your model is big enough, they will include your model in their confabulations. This has always seemed strange to me,…

Mechanical Models 2013-12-01

[NOTE the update at the end of the post.] I’ve continued my peregrinations following the spoor of the global climate model data cited in my last post. This was data from 19 global climate models. There are two parts to the data, the inputs and the outputs. The inputs to…

The Fatal Lure of Assumed Linearity 2013-12-18

[note new Update at the end, and new Figs. 4-6] In climate science, linearity is the order of the day. The global climate models are all based around the idea that in the long run, when we calculate the global temperature everything else averages out, and we’re left with the…

No Regrets

A Modest Proposal for Nuclear Waste Disposal 2011-05-06

For many people the sticking point for nuclear power is, what do we do with the waste? We can “vitrify” the waste, but what do we do with it after that? Figure 1. The process of “vitrification”. Liquid nuclear waste (solid fuel rods dissolved in acid) is converted into a…

The Magic Cookpot 2011-05-10

This one is for fun and also for real. The theme of this post is “There’s never enough time.” I worked in the villages of the developing world off and on for a number of years. A recurring issue is the inefficiency of most stoves. The simplest is the “three…

SODIS Roolz 2011-05-15

One of the joys of writing for this blog is that I can promote good ideas. Here’s one I just came across, thanks to a commenter on another post of mine. The idea is solar disinfection of water, or SODIS. Follow the link, lots of good info. Figure 1. The SODIS…

Ocean

An Analysis of the TOPEX Sea Level Record 2006-10-13

Willis writes: I wanted to see if there was acceleration in the TOPEX sea level record. I have looked all over the web to find either the data used to create the following image of the sea level rise as measured by the TOPEX satellite, available here, or some estimate of any acceleration that might …

Walking the Plank-ton 2010-07-31

Following on from Anthony’s article, here are my thoughts about the phytoplankton paper “Global phytoplankton decline over the past century”, by Daniel G. Boyce, Marlon R. Lewis & Boris Worm. I started to write about this earlier, but I decided to wait until I had the actual paper. The paper…

Where Did I Put That Energy? 2010-12-23

[UPDATE 2 AM Christmas morning, and of course Murphy is still alive and his Law is still in operation. I find a decimal point error in my calculations … grrr, I hates that, ocean energy flows shows at 1/10th size. Public exposure of error, the bane of any scientific endeavor.…

Putting the Brakes on Acceleration 2011-01-08

Various pundits and scientists keep talking about a threatened acceleration in the sea level rise. Here’s the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report: Anthropogenic forcing is also expected to produce an accelerating rate of sea level rise (Woodworth et al., 2004). The usual font of misinformation says: Church and White (2006) report…

The Ocean Wins Again 2011-04-25

I took a lot of flak last year for my post saying that the global 50% drop in phytoplankton claimed by Boyce et. al was an illusion. I had said: So where did the Nature paper go wrong? The short answer is that I don’t know … but I don’t…

Losing Your Imbalance 2011-12-30

People have upbraided me for not doing an in-depth analysis of the paper “Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications“, by James Hansen et al. (hereinafter H2011). In that paper they claim that the earth has a serious energy imbalance, based on the change in oceanic heat content (OHC). Here’s my quick…

A Japanese Puzzle 2012-01-31

A reader who posts under the name “tokyoboy” sent a link to a very interesting sea level record from the Japanese Meteorological Agency. It covers the period 1906–2010, and when I first saw it I thought they’d made some mistake. So I got their data, and plotted it up. I…

An Ocean of Overconfidence 2012-04-23

I previously discussed the question of error bars in oceanic heat content measurements in “Decimals of Precision“. There’s a new study of changes in oceanic heat content, by Levitus et al., called “World Ocean Heat Content And Thermosteric Sea Level Change (0-2000), 1955-2010″ (paywalled here). It’s highlighted over at Roger…

More Ocean-sized Errors in Levitus et al. 2012-04-24

Previously, we discussed the errors in Levitus et al here in An Ocean of Overconfidence Unfortunately, the supplemental information for the new Levitus et al. paper has not been published. Fortunately, WUWT regular P. Solar has located a version of the preprint containing their error estimate, located here. This is how…

The cure for anything is salt water—sweat, tears, or the sea. 2012-05-12

There’s an interesting study in Science magazine, entitled “Ocean Salinities Reveal Strong Global Water Cycle Intensification During 1950 to 2000″ by Durack et al. (paywalled here, hereinafter D2012). The abstract of D2012 says: Fundamental thermodynamics and climate models suggest that dry regions will become drier and wet regions will become…

Natural Variability in the Widths of the Tropics 2012-05-25

In my previous post, “Does This Analysis Make My Tropics Look Big?“I discussed a paper called “Recent Northern Hemisphere tropical expansion primarily driven by black carbon and tropospheric ozone”, by Robert Allen et al, hereinafter A2012. They use several metrics to measure the width of the tropics—the location of the…

Ocean Temperature And Heat Content 2013-02-25

Anthony has an interesting post up discussing the latest findings regarding the heat content of the upper ocean. Here’s one of the figures from that post. Figure 1. Upper ocean heat content anomaly (OHCA), 0-700 metres, in zeta-joules (10^21 joules). Errors are not specified but are presumably one sigma. SOURCE …

Science, Surfing, Stratification, Overturning, and Timing 2013-03-10

Surfing When I was a kid, swimming in the ocean was a rarity. We kids spent summers with my Dad, and once, maybe twice over the summer we’d go to Stinson Beach. I loved the waves, cold as it was. We bodysurfed them over and over, emerging at the end…

A Strong Surge in Overconfidence 2013-03-19

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 up the one discussed below. They make the fantabulous prediction of a Katrina every other…

TAO Rain, Sea, and Air Data 2013-03-28

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 I perambulate through that data I get surprised, and I learn things, and this was…

The Layers of Meaning in Levitus 2013-05-10

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 the upper ocean. Here’s a typical graphic showing the issue: Figure 1. Changes in the…

Why The Parrotfish Should Be The National Bird 2013-06-13

Ecological alarmist scares have a lot in common with zombies. They seem to eat up people’s brains, they are mindless themselves, and most important, they are really, really hard to kill. Take for example the long-discredited idea, first overthrown by Charles Darwin, that coral atolls are under threat from sea…

Forcing The Ocean To Confess 2013-06-19

According to the current climate paradigm, if the forcing (total downwelling energy) increases, a combination of two things happens. Some of the additional incoming energy (forcing) goes into heating the surface, and some goes into heating the ocean. Lately there’s been much furor about what the Levitus ocean data says…

Upwelling Longwave Over The Ocean 2013-10-08

To continue my investigations utilizing the CERES satellite dataset of top of atmosphere radiation, here is a set of curious graphs. The first one is the outgoing (upwelling) longwave radiation at the top of the atmosphere (TOA) versus the sea surface temperature, for the northern hemisphere, at the times of…

Ocean Heat Content Variations—Satellites vs Oceanographers 2014-01-01

I got to looking at the numbers for how much energy is exported from the tropics each month by this great heat engine we call the climate. As I discussed in The Magnificent Climate Heat Engine, at all times the tropics are receiving more energy than they are radiating to…

New CERES Data and Ocean Heat Content 2014-01-05

We have gotten three more years of data for the CERES dataset, which is good, more data is always welcome. However, one of the sad things about the CERES dataset is that we can’t use it for net top-of-atmosphere (TOA) radiation trends. Net TOA radiation is what comes in (downwelling…

Buoy Temperatures, First Cut 2014-11-28

As many folks know, I’m a fan of good clear detailed data. I’ve been eyeing the buoy data from the National Data Buoy Center (NDBC) for a while. This is the data collected by a large number of buoys moored offshore all around the coast of the US. I like…

Big Numbers, Small Numbers 2014-12-10

I read a paper today that said that there are no less than 270,000,000 kilograms of plastic in the ocean, which is about half a billion pounds plus of plastic. So … is this a big number or a small number? The story is at the Guardian, and they’ve illustrated…

Learning From The Argonauts 2015-01-22

The best thing about doing climate science the way I do it is that I can study anything I want, and there is always so much more to learn … in the present instance, there’s another year of Argo data, so I thought I’d take another stroll through the world…

TAO And TAO Again 2015-02-18

Impelled by my restless curiosity, I’ve returned to the TAO buoy dataset to investigate a claim by Dr. Ramanathan of a “super-greenhouse” effect. The TAO buoys are a number of moored buoys located across the Pacific. The TAO data is available here. Figure 1. Locations of all of the sites…

Rapture Of The Deeps 2015-11-10

One of the reasons I lived so much of my life in the tropical South Pacific is because of the diving. Coral reefs are one of the most astounding ecosystems on the planet, boiling over with energy, movement, and color. I’ve spent hundreds and hundreds of hours in the wate…

Ocean Neutralization

The Electric Oceanic Acid Test 2010-06-19

I’m a long-time ocean devotee. I’ve spent a good chunk of my life on and under the ocean as a commercial and sport fisherman, a surfer, a blue-water sailor, and a commercial and sport diver. So I’m concerned that the new poster-boy of alarmism these days is sea-water “acidification” from…

The Reef Abides 2011-10-25

I love the coral reefs of the planet. In my childhood on a dusty cattle ranch in the Western US, I decorated my mental imaginarium of the world with images of unbelievably colored reefs below white sand beaches, with impossibly shaped fish and strange, brilliant plants. But when I finally…

The Ocean Is Not Getting Acidified 2011-12-27

There’s an interesting study out on the natural pH changes in the ocean. I discussed some of these pH changes a year ago in my post “The Electric Oceanic Acid Test“. Before getting to the new study, let me say a couple of things about pH. The pH scale measures…

The Reef Abides … Or Not 2014-07-06

I’ve written a few times on the question of one of my favorite hangouts on the planet, underwater tropical coral reefs. Don’t know if you’ve ever been down to one, but they are a fairyland of delights, full of hosts of strange and mysterious creatures. I’ve seen them far from…

pH Sampling Density 2014-12-30

A recent post by Anthony Watts highlighted a curious fact. This is that records of some two and a half million oceanic pH samples existed, but weren’t used in testimony before Congress about ocean pH. The post was accompanied by a graph which purported to show a historical variation in ocean…

A Neutral View of Oceanic pH 2015-01-02

Following up on my previous investigations into the oceanic pH dataset, I’ve taken a deeper look at what the 2.5 million pH data points from the oceanographic data can tell us. Let me start with an overview of oceanic pH (the measure of alkalinity/acidity, with neutral being a pH of…

The Kavachi Sharcano 2015-07-11

The Solomon Islands, where I lived for eight years, is just north of Australia and just south of the Equator. It is part of the “Ring Of Fire”, the area of strong earthquake and volcanic activity that encircles the Pacific. You can see below that the islands are on …

Carbon And Carbonate 2016-01-30

I’ve spent a good chunk of my life around, on, and under the ocean. I worked seasonally for many years as a commercial fisherman off of the western coast of the US. I’ve frozen off my begonias setting nets in driving sleet up in the Bering Sea. I’m also a …

OHC

Argo And Ocean Heat Content 2014-12-04

Today I ran across an interesting presentation from 2013 regarding the Argo floats. These are a large number of independent floats spread all across the world oceans. They spend most of their time sleeping at a depth of 1,000 metres (3,300 feet) below the surface of the ocean. Then they drop…

Things In General 2015-05-15

My business card gives my job title as “Generalist”. Let me give you an example of why this is an advantage in climate science. I worked for a while in the field of low-tech renewable energy. One of the things I did was to work with inexpensive solar water heating. Using…

Can We Tell If The Oceans Are Warming? 2015-06-06

Well, I was going to write about hourly albedo changes, honest I was, but as is often the case I got sidetractored. My great thanks to Joanne Nova for highlighting a mostly unknown paper on the error estimate for the Argo dataset entitled On the accuracy of North Atlantic temperature and…

Open Letters

Willis: Reply to the Economist 2009-12-12

This replaced the previous sticky, and I have this comment about the Economist. Bad form and unprofessional to use the word ‘denialists’. For WUWTÂ readers who wish to complain: letters@economist.com or use their online form here. – Anthony AN OPEN LETTER TO THE ECONOMIST On Dec 11th, the Economist published an unsigned articleÂ attacking both me …

Judith, I love ya, but you’re way wrong … 2010-02-25

Judith Curry posted here on WUWT regarding rebuilding the lost trust we used to have in climate science and climate scientists. This is my response to her post, an expansion and revision of what I wrote in the comments on that thread. First, be clear that I admire Judith Curry…

An Open Letter to Dr. Michael Mann 2010-10-11

Dear Dr. Mann: I just read your piece in the Washington Post. First, let me say that I disagree entirely with Cuccinelli’s legalistic approach. It doesn’t seem like the right way to achieve the desired result, that of shining the merciless light of publicity on your actions. Figure 1. The…

An Open Letter to Dr. Subra Suresh 2010-12-12

Dear Dr. Suresh: My sincere and heartfelt congratulations on your being appointed Director of the US National Science Foundation (NSF). It is indeed an honor for anyone. In particular it is a great achievement for you, considering the long road you traveled to eventually attain the post. Photo Source: Science…

Unequivocal Equivocation – an open letter to Dr. Trenberth 2011-01-15

This essay from Willis appeared on WUWT overnight Saturday while I slept. After reading it this morning, I decided to make it a sticky at the top of WUWT (I also added the open letter reference) because it says everything that needs to be said about the current state of affairs in climate science and…

An Open Letter to Bruce Alberts of Science Magazine 2011-02-25

In the February 11, 2011 issue of Science Magazine, an editorial called Making Data Maximally Available has announced a new policy regarding requirements for authors, from the pen of Bruce Alberts, the Editor-in-Chief and two Deputy Editors. Figure 1. Why it is necessary to see all the data and code to understand a given result.…

An Open Letter to Google 2011-03-19

Dear Googlefolk; Recently, you have decided to take sides in a scientific debate. That in itself is very foolish. Why would Google want to take either side when there is a disagreement between scientists? I thought your motto was “Do No Evil.” For the 900-pound gorilla to take sides in…

An Open Letter to Dr. Phil Jones of the UEA CRU 2011-11-27

Dear Dr. Jones: You and I have been interacting, albeit at a distance, since I first asked you for your data some five years ago. I asked for your data in part because I was astounded by your answer to Warwick Hughes when he asked for the same data. You…

An Open Letter to Dr. Linda Gundersen 2012-02-21

Dear Dr. Gundersen; I see that due to the highly theatrical auto-defenestration of your predecessor, Dr. Peter Gleick, you are now the Chair of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Task Force on Scientific Integrity. I’m not sure whether to offer my congratulations or my condolences. Let me offer you both,…

The National Academy of Sciences Loses The Plot 2012-06-23

A man who has a daughter is a pretty pathetic specimen, ruled by the vicissitudes of hormones and hairspray. So when my daughter told me this morning “Hey, Dad, I put the newspaper on your desk, you’re gonna like it a lot!”, I knew my blood pressure was in deep…

The ScAm Gets Worse—An Open Letter To Bora Zivkovic 2013-03-05

Dear Bora; I know, I know, like many people I didn’t think it was possible for Scientific American magazine to sink any lower. I loved Scientific American as a kid, the “Amateur Scientist” column was a godsend on the ranch. But then, slowly your magazine morphed, first into less-science, then…

An Open Letter to Dr. Marcia McNutt, new Editor-In-Chief, Science Magazine 2013-08-04

Dear Dr. McNutt: As a somewhat unwilling subscriber to Science, let me start by welcoming you as the latest editor of Science magazine. You’ve stated “Thirty-five years ago, when I was a graduate student and my very first research paper was published in Science, I do not think I could…

Dr. Roy Spencer’s Ill Considered Comments on Citizen Science 2013-10-09

Over at Roy Spencer’s usually excellent blog, Roy has published what could be called a hatchet job on “citizen climate scientists” in general and me in particular. Now, Dr. Roy has long been a hero of mine, because of all his excellent scientific work … which is why his attack…

Journals Not Enforcing Their Policies 2013-10-22

From an interesting post entitled “Trust and Don’t Bother To Verify” on Judith Curry’s excellent blog , I’ve taken the following quote: Journals’ growing insistence that at least some raw data be made available seems to for little: a recent review by Dr Ioannidis which showed that only 143…

Andrew Revkin Loses The Plot, Episode XXXVIII 2014-02-22

I went over to Andy Revkin’s site to be entertained by his latest fulminations against “denialists”. Revkin, as you may remember from the Climategate emails, was the main go-to media lapdog for the various unindicted Climategate co-conspirators. His latest post is a bizarre mishmash of allegations, bogus claims, and name-calling.…

An Open Invitation To Ira Flatow 2015-10-03

I had to go to town yesterday, and so I was glad it was Friday, because it’s Science Friday on the local Public Broadcasting System station and I can listen on my truck radio. In general I enjoy Science Friday, because the host, Ira Flatow, has interesting people on the&…

Paleo

In Which I Go Spelunking … 2010-05-26

In my usual peripatetic wandering around the web, I came across an interesting paper called “Millennial- and orbital-scale changes in the East Asian monsoon over the past 224,000 years”, in Nature Magazine (subscription required), 28 Feb. 2008 , with Supplementary Online Information. The paper uses “speleothems” to estimate past climate…

My Oh Miocene 2011-09-30

It was hot here a couple of days ago. I walked past a huge aloe vera plant, taller than my head, that grows by our house. The heat radiating off of the plant was palpable. I could feel a wash of warm air over me as I stood downwind of…

Philosophy of Science

Peer Review, Pal Review, and Broccoli 2011-02-17

The recent problems with the publication of the O’Donnell et al. response to the Steig et al. paper on Antarctica have focused attention on continuing problems with the current system of peer review, problems initially highlighted by the CRU emails. In addition to significant questions revealed in this particular case, I’d…

Awe, shucks … 2012-12-27

Wintertime was magic when I was a kid. When the snow came, it transformed our world. It turned the forest that surrounded our ranch into an infinity of marvels, mysteries and delights. We could track the animals and follow their secret ways. We didn’t get a lot of snow, most…

What We Don’t Know 2013-05-13

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 experimental evidence, starting with the Curies, that the rate of radioactive decay is constant, unaffected…

Policy

A Pox on Both Their Houses 2011-04-08

I don’t usually wander too far off of the climate reservation, but this excellent cartoon by Michael Ramirez deserves wider publication, as it addresses a critical problem. It shows the US Budget for 2011, along with the cuts proposed by the Democrats (liberal) and the Republicans (GOP, conservative).

Between Wind and Water 2011-04-14

“Between wind and water: (Nautical) In that part of a ship’s side or bottom which is frequently brought above water by the rolling of the ship, or fluctuation of the water’s surface. Hence, colloquially, (as an injury to that part of a vessel, in an engagement, is particularly dangerous) the vulnerable…

Politics

An election analysis you won’t see in the MSM 2016-11-09

[See Update at end] First, I heard three of the best, most moving, heartfelt, and real speeches of the election yesterday and today, from Trump, Clinton, and Obama. My congratulations to all three of them for a statesman-like response to the outcome. Next, when I was a kid, the Democrats …

Poverty and Energy

The Cost in Human Energy 2013-01-02

For a while, I taught a course in human-powered machinery for the Peace Corps. You know, bicycle powered generators, treadle powered pumps, that kind of thing. One of the very rough rules of thumb regarding human energy is that an adult human can put out about a hundred watts on…

We have met the 1%, and he is us 2013-01-13

In explanation of my title, I fear I’ll have to go on a bit of a digression. Let me tell three stories, about people in three different parts of our amazing planet. STORY THE FIRST: In my early thirties, through a series of misunderstandings and coincidences I spent some time…

Overhyped: The Human Cost of Climate Alarmism 2013-02-16

I do love tracing down how numbers kind of ricochet around the web. This investigation started when I ran across a book review in the South China Morning Post of a book called “Overheated: The Human Cost of Climate Change“, by Andrew T Guzman. Figure 1. Andrew T. Guzman, law…

James Hansen’s Policies Are Shafting The Poor 2013-03-15

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 GapMinder, the world’s best online visualization software. Here’s a first cut at the relationship between…

Energy, Resources, Money, and Technology 2013-03-17

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 inextricably linked. • Making energy expensive hurts, impoverishes, and even kills the poor. • Technology…

Obama By-Passes Gas 2013-03-17

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, although both are more expensive than gasoline and diesel for road and rail transport. According…

Precipitation

Learning From The Monsoon 2014-10-08

Inspired by a claim made on WUWT that A new study led by Professor K.M. Hiremath of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics shows the strong, possibly causative correlation between variations in solar activity (red curve) and in monsoon rainfall (blue curve) in Figure 1. I decided to see what I…

Who’ll Stop The Rain? 2017-01-03

I haven’t posted here at WUWT in a bit. I’ve been preoccupied writing for my own blog, Skating Under The Ice. It’s a work in progress. However, my climate work continues. There’s a paper out about a year old, unfortunately paywalled, regarding precipitation with some interesting conclusions. [UPDATE: available here, …

Proxy Reconstructions

Underground Problems with Mann-Holes 2006-10-04

Willis writes in: While researching ocean drill cores at the WCDC, I stumbled across Mann’s borehole data. One of the proxies used for historical temperature reconstruction is ‘borehole temperature’, the temperature down in the ground. In 2002, Michael Mann et al. published a study called Optimal surface temperature reconstructions using terrestrial borehole data. It is …

When Good Proxies Go Bad 2008-09-28

Many of the good folks who write the papers and keep the databases seem not to use their naked eyeballs. By that I mean, they seriously think that you can invent some new procedure, and then apply it across the board to transform a group of a thousand datasets without looking at each and every …

Publication Reports

Willis publishes his thermostat hypothesis paper 2010-07-24

I’m sure WUWT readers will recall this excellent guest post at WUWT just over one year ago: The ThermostatÂ Hypothesis Now published in E&E Volume 21, Number 4 / August 2010 The thunderstorm thermostat hypothesis: How clouds and thunderstorms control the Earth’s temperature Authors Willis Eschenbach Abstract The Thunderstorm Thermostat Hypothesis is the hypothesis that tropical …

Radiation

The Forcing Conundrum 2012-12-12

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach. For all of its faults, the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) lays out their idea of the climate paradigm pretty clearly. A fundamental part of this paradigm is that the long-term change in global average surface temperature is a linear function of the long-term change in what is called…

A Tropical Oddity 2013-02-01

I wanted to bring you up to date on my current meanderings in the TAO buoy data that I investigated previously in a post called “Cloud Radiation Forcing in the TAO Dataset“. In my peripatetic inquiries into all things that are ooh, shiny, I ran across a curiosity. First, a…

How Much Sunlight Actually Enters The System? 2014-02-18

There’s a new study in PNAS, entitled “Observational determination of albedo decrease caused by vanishing Arctic sea ice” by Pistone et al. Let me start by registering a huge protest against the title. The sea ice is varying, it isn’t “vanishing”, that’s just alarmist rhetoric that has no place in…

Precipitable Water 2016-07-25

One of my great pleasures is to come across a new dataset. Turn me loose on new observations of this magical world, and there’s no telling where I’ll end up. Thanks to a recent article here on WUWT I got to thinking about water vapor. Some research found the RSS …

Precipitable Water Redux 2016-07-28

In my last post I investigated the mathematical relationship between the amount of total precipitable water vapor (TPW) in the atmosphere, and the clear-sky greenhouse effect. Here is the main figure from that post showing the relationship: Figure 1. Scatterplot, TPW (horizontal scale) versus Atmospheric Absorption (vertical scale). Dashed yellow …

Reconstructions

Marcott’s proxies – 10% fail their own criteria for inclusion 2013-03-13

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 I don’t know what it is about proxies that makes normal scientists lose their…

Spurious Varvology 2013-04-13

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, by Martin P. Tingley and Peter Huybers (paywalled), hereinafter TH2013. Here’s their claim from the…

Neukom’s Science By Proxy 2014-04-03

Over at Climate Audit, Steve McIntyre is engaged in the slow public defenestration of the latest multi-proxy extravapalooza, a gem of a paper yclept “Inter-hemispheric temperature variability over the past millennium” by Neukom et al, hereinafter Neukom2014. Not content with simply creating a thousand-year temperature reconstruction for the Southern Hemisphere,…

Duke Neukom’s Secret Sauce 2014-04-04

In my last post, I talked about the “secret sauce”, as I described it, in the Neukom et al. study “Inter-hemispheric temperature variability over the past millennium”. By the “secret sauce” I mean the method which is able to turn the raw proxy data, which has no particular shape or…

Renewables

Dammed if you do, dammed if you don’t 2010-10-14

I grew up on a remote cattle ranch in the middle of miles of forest in the northern Sierra Nevada mountains of California. We had our own hydroelectric power plant. It was built by my father and my brother-in-law. They put a two-foot high dam across the creek (blue line),…

Electric Cars in Alaska 2011-10-02

I recently had the great pleasure of going back for a week to Alaska, where I’ve spent many exhilarating summers. I was reminded of the winter cold by seeing all of the electrical outlets by the parking meters in Fairbanks. Every car that is parked there in the winter plugs…

Make 29% On Your Money, Guaranteed! 2011-11-18

Sounds like a scam, huh? But it’s real. Let me explain how people (no, not you or me, don’t be foolish) can make a guaranteed 29% return on their investment. However, to make it clear, I’ll need to take a short digression. I ran across a National Geographic article on…

Duking It Out With Foreign Investors 2011-11-20

The Duke of Edinburgh, the husband of Queen Elizabeth, has spoken out about windmills, and he’s not happy at all. Chris Huhne, the UK Energy Secretary, has said that people who oppose windmills are “curmudgeons and fault-finders”. He finds windmills “elegant” and “beautiful”. Figure 1. A photo of elegant windmills…

The Dark Future of Solar Electricity 2011-12-03

The “Annual Energy Outlook” for 2011 is just out from the US Energy Information Administration. The section called “Levelized Cost of New Generation Resources” looks at what are called the “levelized” costs of electric power from a variety of sources. Their study includes “renewable” sources like solar, although I’ve never…

Of Coconuts, the Sun, and Small Isolated Islands 2012-08-09

For a few years, I managed a combination of businesses on a very remote 100 hectare (250 acre) South Pacific island. The main businesses were a shipyard; a machine shop building aluminum boats and water tanks; a banking agency; a postal agency; a buying point for locals selling copra (dried…

We Had To Pave The Environment In Order To Save It 2013-01-05

Trading food for fuel, in a world where high food prices already affect the poor, has always seemed like a bad idea to me. If I have a choice between growing corn to fuel SUVs versus growing corn to make tortillas, to me that’s a no-brainer. I’ve known too many…

Moronomics 2013-01-14

Reading my Sunday paper today, I find the following: Customers Can Sell Back Solar Power. The Los Angeles District of Water and Power will allow customers to sell back excess solar energy created on their own equipment. Described as the largest urban rooftop solar program of its kind in the…

The High Cost of Free Energy 2013-07-04

I will take as my departure point the following rather depressing chart from the US Energy Information Agency (EIA). It shows the rise in US electricity prices since 2001: Figure 1. Increase in energy costs for the industrial, commercial, and residential sectors, along with the average, from the EIA. SOURCE…

Canadian Tragedy 2013-07-06

I was saddened to read this morning that a train with a load of crude oil derailed and caught fire in Lac-Mégantic, Canada, and I started writing this post. I heard during the afternoon there was one person killed, and more may still be found. In addition, the oil spilled…

British Columbia, British Utopia 2013-07-11

I was pointed by a commenter on another blog to the Canadian Province of British Columbia, where they put a carbon-based energy tax scheme into effect in 2008. Before looking at either the costs or the actual results of the scheme, let me start by looking at the possible benefits…

Fuel On The Highway In British Pre-Columbia 2013-07-12

Supporters of the British Columbia (Canada) carbon-based energy tax that I discussed in my last post have made claims that the data shows this tax was a success … so being a suspicious-type fellow, I thought I’d take a look at the data myself. I didn’t figure the tax was…

The Real Canadian Hockeystick 2013-07-13

Well, the leaders of the carbophobes in British Columbia are already declaring victory for their carbon-based energy tax as a way to reduce CO2 emissions. They highlight as a main indication of success the reduction in per-capita gasoline use, and my research shows that their numbers are right. Here’s a…

Why Revenue Neutral Isn’t, and Other Costs of the BC Tax 2013-07-15

I hope against hope that this is my last post on this lunacy. I started by foolishly saying I would write about the benefits, costs, and outcomes of the BC carbon-based energy tax, so I was stuck with doing it. I discussed the possible benefits of the tax in “British…

The Price Tag Of Renewables, Part 2 2014-07-03

Anthony has posted a story about a laughable analysis of the cost of propping up renewables through subsidies. And long-time WUWT contributor KD helpfully pointed me to the document itself. Now that I have the actual document, here’s what they say about subsidies (all emphasis mine).

Solar Fossil Fueled Fantasies 2015-06-15

Sometimes when I’m reading about renewable technologies, I just break out laughing at the madness that the war on carbon has wrought. Consider the Ivanpah solar tower electric power plant. It covers five square miles in Southern California with mirrors which are all focusing the sun on a central tower.…

Thirty Eight Years Of Subsidies 2015-11-05

On April 18, 1977, President Jimmy Carter announced his new energy policy. His speech included the following predictions of a dire future unless we repented of our evil ways: I know that some of you may doubt that we face real energy shortages. The 1973 gasoline lines ar…

Sea ice

The Awful Terrible Horrible Global Sea Ice Crisis 2016-04-06

My examination of objects cryospherical continues. In my last post, The Size of Icy Reflections, I showed that a change of 10% in the global sea ice area translates into a global average of a 0.1 watt per square metre (W/m2) change in reflected sunlight. In this post, I’ll look at what …

Sea Level

Floating Islands 2010-01-27

Much has been written of late regarding the impending projected demise of the world’s coral atoll islands due to CO2-caused sea level rise. Micronesia is suing the Czech Government over CO2 emissions that they claim are damaging their coral atolls via sea level rise. Tuvalu and the Maldives are also repeating…

The Irony, It Burns … 2010-06-03

Anthony commented yesterday on the question of atolls and sea level rise here, and I had previously written on the subject in my post “Floating Islands“. However, Anthony referenced a paper which was incorrectly linked by New Scientist. So I thought I’d provide some more information on the actual study, entitled “The dynamic response of reef…

Reduce your CO2 footprint by recycling past errors! 2011-06-23

Anthony has pointed out the further inanities of that well-known vanity press, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. This time it is Michael Mann (of Hockeystick fame) and company claiming an increase in the rate of sea level rise (complete paper here, by Kemp et al., hereinafter Kemp…

Further Problems with Kemp and Mann 2011-06-26

In my previous post I discussed some of the issues with the paper “Climate related sea-level variations over the past two millennia” by Kemp et al. including Michael Mann (Kemp 2011). However, some commenters rightly said that I was not specific enough about what Kemp et al. have done wrong,…

The Ups and Downs of Sea Level 2011-07-03

Much has been made in AGW circles of the sea level forecast of Vermeer and Rahmstorf, in “Global sea level linked to global temperature” (V&R2009). Their estimate of forecast sea level rise was much larger than that of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (FAR). Their results have been hyped at…

So Many People … So Little Rain 2012-03-10

Well, I started a post on Kiribati, but when it was half written I found Andi Cockroft had beaten me to it with his post. His analysis was fine, but I had a different take on the events. President Tong of Kiribati says the good folk of the atolls are…

The Most Important Sea Level Graph 2013-08-02

In a post here on WUWT, Nils-Axel Morner has discussed the sea level in Kwajalein, an atoll in the Marshall Islands. Sea levels in Kwajalein have been rising at an increased rate over the last 20 years. Nils-Axel pointed to a nearby Majuro tidal record extending to 2010, noting that…

Sea Water Level, Fresh Water Tilted 2014-03-28

Among the recent efforts to explain away the effects of the ongoing “pause” in temperature rise, there’s an interesting paper by Dr. Anny Cazenave et al entitled “The Rate of Sea Level Rise”, hereinafter Cazenave14. Unfortunately it is paywalled, but the Supplementary Information is quite complete and is available here.…

Virginia Sea Level 2014-09-13

Science Magazine is published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. I’m reading my AAAS Newsletter, and I find the following blurb (emphasis mine): Virginia Panel Releases Coastal Flooding Report. A subpanel of the Secure Commonwealth Panel of Virginia released a report containing several recommendations for dealing with risks…

The Ninth First Climate Refugees 2016-11-30

[see update] Well, the claims of the ‘first climate refugees’ are coming up again. I think we’re up to the ninth first climate refugees, it’s hard to keep track. In any case, I came across this: International leaders gathering in Paris to address global warming face increasing pressure to tackle …

Sea Level Rise Accelerating? Not. 2017-07-20

(NOTE UPDATE AT END) There’s a recent and good post here at WUWT by Larry Kummer about sea level rise. However, I disagree with a couple of his comments, viz: (b) There are some tentative signs that the rate of increase is already accelerating, rather than just fluctuating. But the …

Wandering Thru The Tides 2017-12-30

I got to thinking about the records of the sea level height taken at tidal stations all over the planet. The main problem with these tide stations is that they measure the height of the sea surface versus the height of some object attached to the land … but the …

Solar

Steinhilber 2009 2016-04-27

Someone recommended that I look at the Steinhilber 2009 paper. I did. The data is here. My first-cut graphs are below. Discuss. For the reasons I talked about in my previous post, I gotta run. Best wishes to all, I’m outta her …

Sunspots

Congenital Cyclomania Redux 2013-07-23

Well, I wasn’t going to mention this paper, but it seems to be getting some play in the blogosphere. Our friend Nicola Scafetta is back again, this time with a paper called “Solar and planetary oscillation control on climate change: hind-cast, forecast and a comparison with the CMIP5 GCMs”. He’s…

Cycles Without The Mania 2013-07-29

Are there cycles in the sun and its associated electromagnetic phenomena? Assuredly. What are the lengths of the cycles? Well, there’s the question. In the process of writing my recent post about cyclomania, I came across a very interesting paper entitled “Correlation Between the Sunspot Number, the Total Solar Irradiance,…

Sunspots and Sea Level 2014-01-21

I came across a curious graph and claim today in a peer-reviewed scientific paper. Here’s the graph relating sunspots and the change in sea level: And here is the claim about the graph: Sea level change and solar activity A stronger effect related to solar cycles is seen in Fig.…

Riding A Mathemagical Solarcycle 2014-01-22

Among the papers in the Copernicus Special Issue of Pattern Recognition in Physics we find a paper from R. J. Salvador in which he says he has developed A mathematical model of the sunspot cycle for the past 1000 yr. Setting aside the difficulties of verification of sunspot numbers for…

Sunny Spots Along the Parana River 2014-01-25

In a comment on a recent post, I was pointed to a study making the following surprising claim: Here, we analyze the stream flow of one of the largest rivers in the world, the Parana ́ in southeastern South America. For the last century, we find a strong correlation with…

Usoskin Et Al. Discover A New Class of Sunspots 2014-02-22

There’s a new post up by Usoskin et al. entitled “Evidence for distinct modes of solar activity”. To their credit, they’ve archived their data, it’s available here. Figure 1 shows their reconstructed decadal averages of sunspot numbers for the last three thousand years, from their paper: Figure 1. The results…

Solar Periodicity 2014-04-10

I was pointed to a 2010 post by Dr. Roy Spencer over at his always interesting blog. In it, he says that he can show a relationship between total solar irradiance (TSI) and the HadCRUT3 global surface temperature anomalies. TSI is the strength of the sun’s energy at a specified distance…

Cosmic Rays, Sunspots, and Beryllium 2014-04-13

In investigations of the past history of cosmic rays, the deposition rates (flux rates) of the beryllium isotope 10Be are often used as a proxy for the amount of cosmic rays. This is because 10Be is produced, inter alia, by cosmic rays in the atmosphere. Being a congenitally inquisitive type…

The Tip of the Gleissberg 2014-05-17

A look at Gleissberg’s famous solar cycle reveals that it is constructed from some dubious signal analysis methods. This purported 80-year “Gleissberg cycle” in the sunspot numbers has excited much interest since Gleissberg’s original work. However, the claimed length of the cycle has varied widely.

The Effect of Gleissberg’s “Secular Smoothing” 2014-05-19

ABSTRACT: Slow Fourier Transform (SFT) periodograms reveal the strength of the cycles in the full sunspot dataset (n=314), in the sunspot cycle maxima data alone (n=28), and the sunspot cycle maxima after they have been “secularly smoothed” using the method of Gleissberg (n = 24). In all three datasets, there…

It’s The Evidence, Stupid! 2014-05-24

I hear a lot of folks give the following explanation for the vagaries of the climate, viz: It’s the sun, stupid. And in fact, when I first started looking at the climate I thought the very same thing. How could it not be the sun, I reasoned, since obviously that’s…

Sunspots and Sea Surface Temperature 2014-06-06

I thought I was done with sunspots … but as the well-known climate scientist Michael Corleone once remarked, “Just when I thought I was out … they pull me back in”. In this case Marcel Crok, the well-known Dutch climate writer, asked me if I’d seen the paper from Nir…

Maunder and Dalton Sunspot Minima 2014-06-23

In a recent interchange over at Joanne Nova’s always interesting blog, I’d said that the slow changes in the sun have little effect on temperature. Someone asked me, well, what about the cold temperatures during the Maunder and Dalton sunspot minima? And I thought … hey, what about them? I…

Changes in Total Solar Irradiance 2014-10-25

Total solar irradiance, also called “TSI”, is the total amount of energy coming from the sun at all frequencies. It is measured in watts per square metre (W/m2). Lots of folks claim that the small ~ 11-year variations in TSI are amplified by some unspecified mechanism, and thus these small changes in TSI make an…

Splicing Clouds 2014-11-01

So once again, I have donned my Don Quijote armor and continued my quest for a ~11-year sunspot-related solar signal in some surface weather dataset. My plan for the quest has been simple. It is based on the fact that all of the phenomena commonly credited with affecting the temperature,…

Volcanoes and Sunspots 2015-02-09

I keep reading how sunspots are supposed to affect volcanoes. In the comments to my last post, Tides, Earthquakes, and Volcanoes, someone approvingly quoted a volcano researcher who had looked at eleven eruptions of a particular type and stated: …. Nine of the 11 events occurred during the solar inactive phase…

Early Sunspots and Volcanoes 2015-02-10

Well, as often happens I started out in one direction and then I got sidetractored … I wanted to respond to Michele Casati’s claim in the comments of my last post. His claim was that if we include the Maunder Minimum in the 1600’s, it’s clear that volcanoes with a…

Sunspots and Norwegian Child Mortality 2015-03-07

In January there was a study published by The Royal Society entitled “Solar activity at birth predicted infant survival and women’s fertility in historical Norway”, available here. It claimed that in Norway in the 1700s and 1800s the solar activity at birth affected a child’s survival chances. As you might imagine, this…

The New Sunspot Data And Satellite Sea Levels 2015-08-13

[UPDATE:”Upon reading Dr. Shaviv’s reply to this post, I have withdrawn any mention of “deceptive” from this post. This term was over the top, as it ascribed motive to the authors. I have replaced the term with “misleading”. This is more accurate…

My Thanks Apologies And Reply To Dr Nir Shaviv 2015-08-17

Dr. Nir Shaviv has kindly replied in the comments to my previous post. There, he says: Nir Shaviv” August 15, 2015 at 2:51 pm There is very little truth about any of the points raised by Eschenbach in this article. In particular, his analysis excludes the fact that the o…

Is The Signal Detectable 2015-08-19

[UPDATE] In the comments, Nick Stokes pointed out that although I thought that Dr. Shaviv’s harmonic solar component was a 12.6 year sine wave with a standard deviation of 1.7 centimetres, it is actually a 12.6 year sine wave with a standard deviation of 1.7 millime…

The Missing 11 Year Signal 2015-08-19

Dr. Nir Shaviv and others strongly believe that there is an ~ 11-year solar signal visible in the sea level height data. I don’t think such a signal is visible. So I decided to look for it another way, one I’d not seen used before. One of the more sensitive …

23 New Papers 2015-09-22

Over at Pierre Gosselin’s site, NoTricksZone, he’s trumpeting the fact that there are a bunch of new papers showing a solar effect on the climate. The headline is Already 23 Papers Supporting Sun As Major Climate Factor In 2015 “Burgeoning Evidence No Longer Dismissible!…

The Cosmic Problem With Rays 2016-10-17

Normal carbon has six neutrons and six protons, for an atomic weight of twelve. However, there is a slightly different form of carbon which has two extra neutrons. That form of carbon, called carbon-14 or ’14C’, has an atomic weight of fourteen. It is known to be formed by the …

TAO Buoys

The Tao That Can Be Spoken … 2011-08-14

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve started to look at the data from the TAO/TRITON buoy array in the Pacific Ocean. These are an array of moored buoys which collect hourly information on a variety of environmental variables. The results are quite interesting, because they relate directly to…

Pinatubo and the Albedo Thermostat 2011-08-21

I got to thinking that the eruption of Mount Pinatubo should provide a good test case for my theory that changes in albedo help regulate the temperature and keep it within a narrow range. When a big volcano erupts, it throws both black and reflective particles and aerosols high into…

TAO/TRITON TAKE TWO 2011-08-25

I wrote before of my investigations into the surface air temperature records of the TAO/TRITON buoys in the Pacific Ocean. To refresh your memory, here are the locations of the TAO/TRITON buoys. Figure 1. Locations of the TAO/TRITON buoys (pink squares). Each buoy is equipped with a sensor array measuring…

Cloud Radiation Forcing in the TAO Dataset 2011-09-15

This is the third in a series ( Part 1, Part 2 ) of occasional posts regarding my somewhat peripatetic analysis of the data from the TAO moored buoys in the Western Pacific. I’m doing construction work these days, and so in between pounding nails into the frame of a building I continue to…

TAO Buoys Go Hot And Cold 2015-06-16

I got to thinking about how I could gain more understanding of the daily air temperature cycles in the tropics. I decided to look at what happens when the early morning (midnight to 5:00 AM) of a given day is cooler than usual, versus what happens when the early morning…

Temperature

Temperature and TOA Forcing 2015-05-08

I’ve been thinking about temperature and top-of-atmosphere (TOA) forcing. TOA forcing is the imbalance between the TOA upwelling and downwelling radiation. The CERES satellite dataset contains observations of the TOA radiation imbalance on a gridcell-by-gridcell basis. It is calculated as the downwelling solar radiation for that month by gridcell, minus…

UAH, MSU, TLT, and other Acronyms 2015-06-21

The satellite-based atmospheric temperature dataset is one of the better datasets in climate science. Drs. Roy Spencer and John Christy have long been scientific heroes of mine because of the quality of their work in the creation, analysis, corrections, and curation of the dataset. It is kept at the University…

Temperature Datasets

Of Hawks and Handsaws 2010-04-20

“I am but mad north-north-west: when the wind is southerly I know a hawk from a handsaw” William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act II, Scene ii Following on from my look at the USHCN temperature dataset, I have gone north (if not north-north-west) and looked at the NORDKLIM dataset. This dataset covers…

Is NOAA Wrong? 2014-10-24

On another post here on Watts Up With That, a commenter pointed out that NOAA says that September 2014 was the warmest September ever on record. The commenter asked, “Is NOAA wrong?” Sadly, as near as I can tell the answer is “Quite possibly”. Here is the NOAA graphic in question, showing their…

Temperature Datasets and Adjustments

Before One Has Data 2010-06-24

Anthony Watts has posted up an interesting article on the temperature at Laverton Airport (Laverton Aero), Australia. Unfortunately, he was moving too fast, plus he’s on the other side of the world, with his head pointed downwards and his luggage lost in Limbo (which in Australia is probably called something…

More Gunsmoke, This Time In Nepal 2010-08-11

Note to Readers: This is an important post, as Willis demonstrates that NASA GISS has taken a cooling trend and converted it into a warming trend for the one GHCN station in Nepal which covers the Himalayas. I offer NASA GISS, either via Jim Hansen or Gavin Schmidt, rebuttal opportunity to this issue on WUWT…

Is Armagh Burning? 2010-08-29

Anthony has highlighted a study by Coughlin and Butler. Their study says that there is little or no urban warming (urban heat island, or UHI) in the temperature record from the Armagh Observatory in Ireland. They say: It is concluded that temperature observations made at Armagh Observatory have been unaffected by rapid…

Cooking In New York 2015-07-20

I’ve been thinking about the idea of the urban heat island (UHI) as a result of my post”on the bogus temperature “record” at Heathrow. The “urban heat island” refers to the fact that cities generally run warmer than the surroundingryside. This is fro…

Tides

How Scientists Study Cycles 2014-01-24

We have the ill-fated stillborn Copernicus Special Edition as an example of how those authors went about analyzing the possible effects of astronomical cycles. Let me put up a contrasting example, which is The 1,800-year oceanic tidal cycle: A possible cause of rapid climate change. Heck, it’s even got “cycle” in the…

Time and the Tides Wait for Godot 2014-02-09

I’ve been listening to lots of stuff lately about tidal cycles. These exist, to be sure. However, they are fairly complex, and they only repeat (and even then only approximately) every 54 years 34 days. They also repeat (even more approximately) every 1/3 of that 54+ year cycle, which is…

The Elusive ~ 60-year Sea Level Cycle 2014-04-25

I was referred to a paywalled paper called “Is there a 60-year oscillation in global mean sea level?” The authors’ answer to the eponymous question is “yes”, in fact, their answer boils down to “dangbetcha fer sure yes there is a 60-year oscillation”, viz: We examine long tide gauge records…

The Sea Level Cycles Get More Elusive 2014-05-01

In my last post on the purported existence of the elusive ~60-year cycle in sea levels as claimed in the recent paper “Is there a 60-year oscillation in global mean sea level?”, I used a tool called “periodicity analysis” (discussed here) to investigate cycles in the sea level. However, some people…

Tides, Earthquakes, and Volcanoes 2015-02-07

[Graphs updated to include error bars] Inspired by the paper by the charmingly-named Maya Tolstoy discussed here on WUWT, I decided to see if tidal forces affect the timing of earthquakes and volcanoes. Dr. Tolstoy’s hypothesis is that tidal forces affect the timing of the subterranean eruptions … but she has…

Trends

Dr. Roy Spencer’s Sea Surface Temperatures 2013-03-06

Over at Roy Spencer’s excellent web site, Dr. Roy has a post up showing a sea surface temperature (SST) anomaly calculated from AMSR-E, TMI, and WindSat. Here’s his post of the results: Figure 1. Global Microwave Sea Surface Temperature Update for Feb. 2013: -0.01 deg. C Regarding these results, Dr.…

Weekly Area of Snow Extent 2013-10-18

I got to thinking about snow the other day. It was occasioned by my look at the correlation (both positive and negative) of temperature and albedo. Albedo is a measure of how much sunlight is reflected from the clouds and the surface. The greater the albedo, the more sunlight is…

CO2 and CERES 2014-01-13

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the bureaucratic agency which appropriated the role of arbiter of things climatic, has advanced a theory for the lack of warming since the turn of the century, viz: The observed reduction in warming trend over the period 1998–2012 as compared to the period 1951–2012,…

Should We Be Worried? 2014-01-29

I chanced to plot up the lower tropospheric temperatures by broad latitude zones today. This is based on the data from the satellite microwave sounding unit (MSU), as analyzed by the good folks at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. Here are the results, divided into tropical, extratropical, and polar.…

Volcanoes

Overshoot and Undershoot 2010-11-29

Today I thought I’d discuss my research into what is put forward as one of the key pieces of evidence that GCMs (global climate models) are able to accurately reproduce the climate. This is the claim that the GCMs are able to reproduce the effects of volcanoes on the climate.…

Prediction is hard, especially of the future. 2010-12-29

[UPDATE]: I have added a discussion of the size of the model error at the end of this post. Over at Judith Curry’s climate blog, the NASA climate scientist Dr. Andrew Lacis has been providing some comments. He was asked: Please provide 5- 10 recent ‘proof points’ which you would…

Volcanic Disruptions 2012-03-16

The claim is often made that volcanoes support the theory that forcing rules temperature. The aerosols from the eruptions are injected into the stratosphere. This reflects additional sunlight, and cuts the amount of sunshine that strikes the surface. As a result of this reduction in forcing, the biggest volcanic eruptions…

Dronning Maud Meets the Little Ice Age 2012-04-13

I have to learn to keep my blood pressure down … this new paper, “Abrupt onset of the Little Ice Age triggered by volcanism and sustained by sea-ice/ocean feedbacks“, hereinafter M2012, has me shaking my head. It has gotten favorable reports in the scientific blogs … I don’t see it at…

Missing the Missing Summer 2012-04-15

Since I was a kid I’ve been reading stories about “The Year Without A Summer”. This was the summer of 1816, one year after the great eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia. The Tambora eruption, in April of 1815, was so huge it could be heard from 2,600 km…

New Data, Old Claims About Volcanoes 2012-07-30

Richard Muller and the good folks over at the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project have released their temperature analysis back to 1750, and are making their usual unsupportable claims. I don’t mean his risible statements that the temperature changes are due to CO2 because the curves look alike—that joke has…

BEST, Volcanoes and Climate Sensitivity 2012-08-13

I’ve argued in a variety of posts that the usual canonical estimate of climate sensitivity, which is 3°C of warming for a doubling of CO2, is an order of magnitude too large. Today, at the urging of Steven Mosher in a thread on Lucia Liljegren’s excellent blog “The Blackboard”, I’ve…

Volcanic Corroboration 2012-09-10

Back in 2010, I wrote a post called “Prediction is hard, especially of the future“. It turned out to be the first of a series of posts that I ended up writing on the inability of climate models to successfully replicate the effects of volcanoes. It was an investigation occasioned…

Volcanoes: Active, Inactive, and Retroactive 2013-05-22

Anthony put up a post titled “Why the new Otto et al climate sensitivity paper is important – it’s a sea change for some IPCC authors” The paper in question is “Energy budget constraints on climate response” (free registration required), supplementary online information (SOI) here, by Otto et alia, sixteen…

Stacked Volcanoes Falsify Models 2013-05-25

Well, this has been a circuitous journey. I started out to research volcanoes. First I got distracted by the question of model sensitivity, as I described in Model Climate Sensitivity Calculated Directly From Model Results. Then I was diverted by the question of smoothing of the Otto data, as I reported…

The Eruption Over the IPCC AR5 2013-09-22

In the leaked version of the upcoming United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) Chapter 1, we find the following claims regarding volcanoes. The forcing from stratospheric volcanic aerosols can have a large impact on the climate for some years after volcanic eruptions. Several…

Volcanoes Erupt Again 2014-02-24

I see that Susan Solomon and her climate police have rounded up the usual suspects, which in this case are volcanic eruptions, in their desperation to explain the so-called “pause” in global warming that’s stretching towards two decades now. Their problem is that for a long while the climate alarmists…

Eruptions and Ocean Heat Content 2014-04-06

I was out trolling for science the other day at the AGW Observer site. It’s a great place, they list lots and lots of science including the good, the bad, and the ugly, like for example all the references from the UN IPCC AR5. The beauty part is that the…

Volcanoes and Drought In Asia 2014-08-09

There’s a recent study in AGU Atmospheres entitled “Proxy evidence for China’s monsoon precipitation response to volcanic aerosols over the past seven centuries”, by Zhou et al, paywalled here. The study was highlighted by Anthony here. It makes the claim that volcanic eruptions cause droughts in China. Is this possible?…

Get Laki, Get Unlaki 2014-11-18

Well, we haven’t had a game of “Spot The Volcano” in a while, so I thought I’d take a look at what is likely the earliest volcanic eruption for which we have actual temperature records. This was the eruption of the Icelandic volcano Laki in June of 1783. It is claimed to…

Volcanoes Once Again, Again 2015-01-09

[also, see update at the end of the post] Anthony recently highlighted a couple of new papers claiming to explain the current plateau in global warming. This time, it’s volcanoes, but the claim this time is that it’s not the big volcanoes. It’s the small volcanoes. The studies both seem to…

Volcanic Legends Keep Erupting 2015-07-22

Once again, Anthony has highlighted a paper claiming that volcanoes have great power over the global temperature. Indeed, they go so far as to say: “From the reconstruction it can be seen that large eruptions, such as Mount Tambora in 1815, or clusters of eruptions, may …

Why Volcanoes Dont Matter Much 2015-07-29

The word “forcing” is what is called a “term of art” in climate science. A term of art means a word that is used in a special or unusual sense in a particular field of science or other activity. This unusual meaning for the word may or may not be …

Weather Events

Tanganyika Revisited 2010-05-20

The new Nature Magazine article on Lake Tanganyika, “Late-twentieth-century warming in Lake Tanganyika unprecedented since AD 500″, discussed a couple days ago by Anthony Watts here, was quite interesting to me. In 2003 I had contributed a “Communications Arising” to Nature Magazine regarding earlier claims that AGW was causing productivity loss…

Tropical Storm Irene 2011-09-01

When is a hurricane not a hurricane? Well, when it doesn’t blow 64 knots (33 m/sec, 74 mph), because then it’s only a tropical storm. Inspired by a post over at the Cliff Mass Weather Blog, I’ve been trying to find a single report of sustained hurricane force winds anywhere…

Tropical Storm Sandy 2012-10-29

As at 2 PM Pacific time, here’s the current position of Sandy and the projected path. SOURCE: National Data Buoy Center I had said a couple of days ago, when Sandy was a hurricane, that it would not be a hurricane when it hit the coast. How did that go?

The Icy Nenana River 2013-05-15

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 Nenana Rivers. The dates of the ice breakup at Nenana form one of the longest-term…

Weather Phenomena

Sailing On The Moon Wind 2012-12-24

I grew up on a remote cattle ranch surrounded by miles of forest, far from street lights. The nights were large and silent and very dark when there was no moon. But when the moon was full, the forest at night was full of life. It was clear that the…

Whitewashes

Where the !@#$% is Svalbard? 2010-05-12

Anthony has suggested that I post a paper of mine that was written in 2006 about unusual temperatures in Svalbard. It was published as a peer-reviewed submission in Energy and Environment, the journal that AGW supporters love to hate. First, where the heck is Svalbard? It’s up at the top of the world, at 78° North, where…

Michael Mann and Donald Kennedy 2010-10-16

With Dr. Michael Mann out on the hustings selling his innocence, as I discussed a few days ago, I was pleased when I came across this clear explanation of some major issues in the so-called inquiry by Penn State into the Mann’s actions. I urge everyone to read it, and…

Exonerated? Not. 2010-10-19

The official report of the Pennsylvania State University Inquiry Committee into the actions of Dr. Michael Mann is available here. It is the Report of the Inquiry that Mann says exonerated him completely of the three most important allegations. From Cartoons by Josh The Inquiry Report was written by professors. As…

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rms

January 20, 2018 1:25 am

Wow. What a contribution to the world. Thank you.

Reply to rms

January 20, 2018 6:27 am

“wow”

Me, too! Impressive. A lot of in-depth thinking went into all of that.

Reply to rms

January 20, 2018 5:17 pm

Willis do you ever sleep? Keep it up, you are truly one of a kind.

Richard Greene

Reply to rms

January 21, 2018 12:38 pm

Thank you for the many valuable contributions
to this website,
as one of the best writers here.

Do you have a team of writers and researchers ?

This seems like too much for one person.

I got exhausted just from reading the list !

Willis Eschenbach

Author

Reply to Richard Greene

January 21, 2018 5:00 pm

Richard, I wish I had a team of writers and researchers …

Regards,

Wim Röst

January 20, 2018 1:34 am

Great! Thank you Willis.

Two remarks.
First. No foreigner will search by typing “Emergence” as he is searching for ‘Thermostat Hypothesis”. So some of your most important posts will not be found easily. Perhaps you can change that.

Secondly: a lot of information is hidden in your graphics. But the graphics are ‘somewhere in a post’. Is there a possibility to put them together somewhere?

Science or Fiction

January 20, 2018 1:36 am

Brilliant. Thanks a lot.

Jimmy Haigh

January 20, 2018 1:51 am

Impressive work Willis.

wilmergam trey

January 20, 2018 1:59 am

thanks for the index to junk

Warren Blair

Reply to wilmergam trey

January 20, 2018 3:57 am

Can we have a list of your work?

eyesonu

Reply to wilmergam trey

January 20, 2018 10:04 am

I checked the index and didn’t see a category for junk but I’m sure your comment would be listed there if it were to exist.

wilmergam trey

Reply to eyesonu

January 21, 2018 1:17 am

There’s a category for junk, in the Behind Bars Again post, where Willis is doing his Trump thing:

“It was also the time of “free love”. I later learned that (for me at least) love is rarely free, but we were young and didn’t know that yet. At the time I was sexually involved with three women. Not at the same instant or in the same bed, you understand, but at the same time. They all three lived in a commune called the “River Street House”. They all knew each other, they were good friends, they all knew about me, there were no secrets between us. None of us thought much about it, it went on for a couple months, it was great … well, it was actually fantastic until I came down with the clap, and I had to tell all three of them.

Gonorrhea. Ugly word, I know, and an ugly reality, but I have to be honest about the bad as well as the good. I’ve said I am telling my tale warts and all, and having the clap definitely qualifies as more than a wart in my world.

I got the usual symptom, a leaky faucet, went to the doctor, got tested, and I got the bad news. So I called the three lovely ladies all together, and told them all at one time so there was no misunderstanding and we could get it clear. I said that I had the clap, and that I must have gotten it from one of them, because I hadn’t had sex with anyone else, and I was willing to swear to that.”

EEWWWW!

Willis Eschenbach

Author

Reply to wilmergam trey

January 21, 2018 12:35 pm

Hey, wilmergam, I could have lied about what happened, but I am addicted to the truth. Have you told the truth about your own life, warts and all? If so, where, ’cause I’d like to read it …

I have told the truth about my own life, the good, the bad, and the ugly. As I said, “we were young” … and I greatly doubt that I’m the only young man who made foolish mistakes.

PS—I did not harm, intimidate, or take advantage of any women in what I did; we were all consenting adults. Stupid adults, perhaps … but adults nonetheless.

PPS—How are you twisting my telling the truth about my youthful foolishness into what you call “doing [my] Trump thing”? Seems like another case of TDS to me …

Jim

Reply to eyesonu

January 23, 2018 1:48 am

Ha ha, he quoted WEe Willis words exactly

ALLAN MACRAE

January 20, 2018 6:00 am

Willis – I suggest you should delete reference to this paper. It was shown to be wrong in 2008 in the comments on Climate Audit.
https://climateaudit.org/2008/02/12/data-smoothing-and-spurious-correlation/

I only learned about your paper in 2008 from a friend – yet at the time you had my email, and I was surprised that you did not write me before you published this.

I hope you no longer believe this is “spurious correlation”.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:1979/mean:12/derivative/plot/uah5/from:1979/scale:0.22/offset:0.14

The mainstream climate debate is essentially an argument about the magnitude of Climate Sensitivity (TCS or ECS) to increasing atmospheric CO2:
Global warming alarmists say TCS is greater than or equal to about 3C/(2xCO2), which is extremist nonsense, for which there is no credible evidence;
Global warming skeptics say TCS is less than or equal to about 1C/(2xCO2), which is sufficiently low that there is no real global warming crisis.

The detailed signal derived from the data (above plot) show that dCO2/dt changes contemporaneously with atmospheric temperature, so its integral CO2 lags temperature by ~9 months. In fact, CO2 lags temperature at all measured time scales, from the ~9 month lag for ~ENSO cycles to the ~~800 year lag inferred in the ice core data, for much longer cycles.

IF CO2 were the primary driver of global temperature, as the warming alarmists allege, then CO2 would lead temperature at all time scales, and not lag it. Richard Feynman called this principle “Causality”. In layman’s terms, “the future cannot cause the past” (at least in this space/time continuum). 🙂

I conclude that temperature drives CO2 more than CO2 drives temperature. This also means that TCS must be very low, probably much less than 1C/(2xCO2) imo.

This does not preclude other drivers of CO2 such as fossil fuel combustion, deforestation, other land use changes, etc. – this last sentence is the one most people ignore when they argue about my conclusion – not all increasing CO2 is necessarily caused by increasing temperature, and yet the clear signal of dCO2/dt vs temperature survives loud and clear – not only in the satellite era, but all the way back to the origin of quality CO2 data in 1958, and I suggest long before then too.

Humlum et al reached similar conclusions in 2013 here:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921818112001658
“Highlights:
– Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging 11–12 months behind changes in global sea surface temperature.
– Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging 9.5–10 months behind changes in global air surface temperature.
– Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging about 9 months behind changes in global lower troposphere temperature.
– Changes in ocean temperatures explain a substantial part of the observed changes in atmospheric CO2 since January 1980.
– Changes in atmospheric CO2 are not tracking changes in human emissions.”
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1551019291642294&set=a.1012901982120697.1073741826.100002027142240&type=3&theater

I suggest that the global warming alarmists could not be more wrong. These are the true facts, which are opposite to their alarmist claims:
1. CO2 is plant food, and greater atmospheric CO2 is good for natural plants and also for agriculture.
2. Earth’s atmosphere is clearly CO2-deficient and the current increase in CO2 (whatever the causes) is beneficial.
3. Increased atmospheric CO2 does not cause significant global warming – regrettable because the world is too cold and about to get colder, imo.

Regards to all, Allan

Willis Eschenbach

Author

Reply to ALLAN MACRAE

January 20, 2018 8:40 am

ALLAN MACRAE January 20, 2018 at 6:00 am

Willis – I suggest you should delete reference to this paper. It was shown to be wrong in 2008 in the comments on Climate Audit.
https://climateaudit.org/2008/02/12/data-smoothing-and-spurious-correlation/

Allan, as you well know, I ask people to quote the words that they are discussing. This is the reason. I have no idea where in the comments you say it was “shown to be wrong”, and no interest in guessing what you are referring to.

I only learned about your paper in 2008 from a friend – yet at the time you had my email, and I was surprised that you did not write me before you published this.

Seriously? I don’t check with ANYONE before writing something, you included. If I’m wrong, you have ample opportunity to point it out in the comments.

I hope you no longer believe this is “spurious correlation”.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:1979/mean:12/derivative/plot/uah5/from:1979/scale:0.22/offset:0.14

And I, on the other hand, hope that you learn to QUOTE THE WORDS YOU ARE DISCUSSING!!! I have no recollection of ever claiming that that correlation was spurious, and if I did so I’d want to see the context.

Regards,

ALLAN MACRAE

Reply to Willis Eschenbach

January 20, 2018 10:02 am

For the record Willis, your words in your 2008 article were:
“And for the $64,000 question … is the correlation found in the MacRae study valid, or spurious? I truly don’t know, although I strongly suspect that it is spurious.”

Here again is the subject correlation – there is no need for you to respond further.
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/esrl-co2/from:1979/mean:12/derivative/plot/uah5/from:1979/scale:0.22/offset:0.14

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=1556510707759819&set=a.1012901982120697.1073741826.100002027142240&type=3&theater

Willis Eschenbach

Author

Reply to ALLAN MACRAE

January 20, 2018 3:48 pm

ALLAN MACRAE January 20, 2018 at 6:00 am

…
Humlum et al reached similar conclusions in 2013 here:
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921818112001658
“Highlights:
– Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging 11–12 months behind changes in global sea surface temperature.
– Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging 9.5–10 months behind changes in global air surface temperature.
– Changes in global atmospheric CO2 are lagging about 9 months behind changes in global lower troposphere temperature.

Allan, one last thing. I was unable to replicate Humlum’s results you cited above. My results all show about a two month lag from temperature changes to CO2 changes … have you replicated his results?

ALLAN MACRAE

Reply to Willis Eschenbach

January 20, 2018 6:03 pm

Yes Willis.

From memory:

My 2008 icecap paper showed a ~9 month lag of global atmospheric CO2 after Lower Tropospheric temperatures (UAH LT) and about the same lag for Surface temperatures (Hadcrut3).

The Spreadsheet is included at icecap.us.with the Paper.

Paper at
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/CO2vsTMacRae.pdf

Spreadsheet at
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/CO2vsTMacRaeFig5b.xls

I later ran a similar correlation between Mauna Loa CO2 back to 1958 and Surface Temperatures.

Regards, Allan

Matthew W

January 20, 2018 6:11 am

Willis, do you ever go way,way back and read your own posts and think “did I write that?”

Willis Eschenbach

Author

Reply to Matthew W

January 20, 2018 8:41 am

Matthew W January 20, 2018 at 6:11 am

Willis, do you ever go way,way back and read your own posts and think “did I write that?”

Oh, yes. I started a post the other day and thought “this seems familiar”, only to find that I’d written about that exact subject before and forgotten it completely.

The joys of being in my middle youth …

co2islife

January 20, 2018 8:07 am

Here is a concise index of global warming debunking talking points:

How to Discuss Global Warming with a “Climate Alarmist.” Scientific Talking Points to Win the Debate.
Smoking Gun #1: Al Gore’s Ice Core CO2 Temperature Chart Ironically, some of the most damning evidence again the AGW or Anthropogenic Global Warming Theory comes from Al Gore himself. This post has been updated and reformatted since being published. Talking Points: Climate change is the norm.
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2017/01/16/how-to-discuss-global-warming-with-a-climate-alarmist-scientific-talking-points-to-win-the-debate/

How Do You Know A Climate Alarmist Is Lying? Their Lips Are Moving
https://co2islife.wordpress.com/2018/01/13/how-do-you-know-a-climate-alarmist-is-lying-their-lips-are-moving/

photios

Reply to co2islife

January 20, 2018 10:25 am

‘How Do You Know A Climate Alarmist Is Lying? Their Lips Are Moving’
This is poor English and worse arithmetic.

Since much of sceptical opposition to CAGW rests on numbers (and the interpretation thereof),
failure to distinguish between ‘one’ and ‘more than ‘one’ does not enhance credibility.

Here are two perfectly simple grammatical alternatives:
1) ‘How Do You Know Climate Alarmists are Lying? Their Lips Are Moving.’
2) ‘How Do You Know A Climate Alarmist Is Lying? His (or her) Lips Are Moving.’

co2islife

Reply to photios

January 20, 2018 12:20 pm

Yea, never was much for spelling and grammar. Math brain, sorry.

photios

Reply to photios

January 21, 2018 8:36 am

There is, of course, a thoroughly modern non-binary alternative:
3) ‘How Do You Know A Climate Alarmist Is Lying? Its Lips Are Moving.’

Tom

January 20, 2018 8:27 am

Great job Willis; thanks ever so much.

Tom Bakewell

January 20, 2018 9:25 am

Sir, thank you so much for the care and effort you put into your writing.It is clearly a work of great love.

I have wondered if you were presented with a series of seascapes, calmish, some cloud cover if you could identify the sea and time of year.

Thank you again.

PiperPaul

January 20, 2018 9:30 am

Willis, you are a stable genius.

Mark - Helsinki

January 20, 2018 10:18 am

Nice “no waste” bit of practical problem solving there W. 🙂

Joel O'Bryan

January 20, 2018 10:20 am

Willis,
Appears you have a Duplicated post under Whitewashes: Exonerated? Not.
So maybe *only* 680 🙂

Joel O’Bryan

January 20, 2018 10:23 am

Since you have the data in an Excel file, a histogram of # articles by quarter or year would be 1 metric of productivity.

robert_g

January 20, 2018 10:39 am

Willis,

Your catalog inspired me to look for, find, and reread my all time favorite essay of yours:
Sailing On The Moon Wind 2012-12-24

It is still as emotionally touching and beautifully evocative of “nature-magic” as ever.

Thank you!

Best,

Robert

whiten

Reply to robert_g

January 20, 2018 11:52 am

A good point made,in all this…but if I may ask…

What actually is the learning curve in all this…Willis???
Would it be, that for the most known, still there is a lot more unknown…to be explored???
Would that be so difficult to consider…regardless of a claim in a 97% certainty of knowing things!!!

Forgive me for being a little too lose…:)

I should not have actually commented, at this point, considering the one too many drinks…:)

cheers

Stevek

January 20, 2018 12:56 pm

Willis R is the best language for doing your statistical analysis. I recommend removing the spreadsheet macros and creating similar functions in R. It will save you lots of time !!

I work for quant hedge fund and R is language of choice for the analysts. Python is also a popular these days.

Stevek

Reply to Stevek

January 20, 2018 12:57 pm

Work for not “word for”

Willis Eschenbach

Author

Reply to Stevek

January 20, 2018 4:19 pm

Oh, yeah, Stevek, I fixed your typo. I hate typos, particularly when they’re out of reach.

Willis Eschenbach

Author

Reply to Stevek

January 20, 2018 4:06 pm

Thanks, Stevek. I use R for almost everything these days … however, for certain simple things I use Excel. In this case, I had to wrap html around certain parts of the text and around the index titles to connect the two … and I’d wager I got it done faster in Excel than might happen in R. I’m wicked fast in Excel and having it all visible makes it easy.

However, with all that said, I love R. I wrote my first program in 1963 on a computer the size of a walk-in closet, I’ve learned a couple dozen computer languages, and R is far and away the best.

Plus it’s free, and with RStudio it has a killer user interface. I’m a huge fan of R.

1saveenergy

January 20, 2018 2:12 pm

Willis, love your good look’s… bet you wow all the ladies, shame you’re thinning on top. (:-))
good effort a useful resource thanks

aashfield

January 20, 2018 2:44 pm

Thank you Willis for a wonderful and impressive collection of papers

Max Hugoson

January 20, 2018 3:47 pm

Willis: Dutifully “Bookmarked” on my Browser. Looking forward to the downloadable PDF of “Opus Magnum de Willis”. Probably take an hour to download, but worth it.

Willis Eschenbach

Author

January 20, 2018 7:04 pm

Dang, I forgot to say one thing, so I’ve added it to the head post. My more political and personal writings for the last year or so have been posted on my blog, “Skating Under The Ice“. C’mon over, everyone’s welcome.

duke

January 20, 2018 8:11 pm

Willis, you may love R because you started in 1963. I like a Python a lot, but I had so much trouble with R that I signed up for a “special project” at a local college with a prof, just to get him to help me debug my efforts at R. Could you post a link to your R script so that I can see how you do it? Thanks!

Willis Eschenbach

Author

Reply to duke

January 20, 2018 10:07 pm

Glad to, duke, although it might not help a lot because this is an odd task. I’m using R to go to a web page from a list of URLs (provided from somewhere else) and grab the HTML text from it. Then I have to parse the text to chop out all the deadwood and only leave what I need. I then stow the results in a data frame, and when I’m done, I write the data frame to disk as a CSV file for further processing in Excel.

Anyhow, here it is. It might be turnkey, it might not. if not I’m glad to answer questions.

library(curl)
library(stringr)
library(dplyr)

# myurl="https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/01/18/ceres-edition-4-and-the-cloud-radiative-effect/"
# 
# myurl="https://wattsupwiththat.com/2018/01/19/nyts-botched-hidden-climate-change-report-story-makes-trumps-top-10-fake-news-events-of-2017/"
# 
# curlstrings=read.csv("my writings urls.csv",as.is=T)
curlstrings=read.csv("my writings no header.csv",as.is=T)


urlcount=NROW(curlstrings);urlcount
curlstr=dplyr::mutate(curlstrings,Name =NA,Text = NA)
# head(curlstr)
# 
# i=1

for (i in 1:urlcount){
  print(i)
  myurl=curlstrings[i,1];print(myurl)
  con <- curl(myurl)
  open(con)
  
  # Get 3 lines
  # out ([^<]*)"
  tagllen=nchar("rel=\"category tag\">");tagllen
  thetag=grep(tagpattern,thepage,value=TRUE)
  if (nchar(thetag)>5){
    shorttag=str_extract(thetag,tagpattern)
    shorttaglen=nchar(shorttag)
    finaltag=substr(shorttag,tagllen+1,shorttaglen-4)
  }
  
  # mypattern = '([^<]*)'
  titlepattern = '([^<]*)'
  thetitle = grep(titlepattern,thepage,value=TRUE);thetitle
  thetitle=sub("","",thetitle);thetitle
  nchar(" | Watts Up With That?")
  thetitle=substr(thetitle,1,nchar(thetitle)-30);thetitle
  curlstr[i,2]=thetitle
  # mypattern = "Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach"
  
  mypattern = "<meta name=\"description\" content="
  dataraw = grep(mypattern,thepage,value=TRUE)
  
  nchar(dataraw)
  longpattern="<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach "
  
  
  datalines=dataraw;datalines
  datalines=sub(longpattern,"",datalines);datalines
  datalines=paste(substr(datalines,1,nchar(datalines)-12),"...");datalines
  curlstr[i,3]=datalines
  
  close(con)
}
i
write.csv(curlstr,file="my writings.csv")

Retired Engineer John

January 21, 2018 5:35 pm

Willis,, I always enjoy reading your work. Thanks and keep up the good work.

James Bull

January 21, 2018 10:24 pm

What a lot of writing you’ve done!
What a lot of reading I’ve done!
Well worthwhile effort.

James Bull

wpDiscuz

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Climate Models

Climate News

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