In the wake of the appalling mass shootings last weekend, Neil DeGrasse Tyson (the pre-eminent scientist/communicator in the US) tweeted some facts that were, let’s just say, not well received (and for which he kind of apologised). At least one of the facts he tweeted about was incorrect (deaths by medical errors are far smaller). However, even if it had been correct, the overall response would have been the same, because the reaction was not driven by the specifics of what was said, but rather by the implied message of the context in which it was said. This is a key feature (or bug) of communications in a politicized environment, and one that continues to trip up people who are experienced enough to know better.
[Read more…] about Just the facts?Koonin’s case for yet another review of climate science
We watch long YouTube videos so you don’t have to.
In the seemingly endless deliberations on whether there should be a ‘red team’ exercise to review various climate science reports, Scott Waldman reported last week that the original architect of the idea, Steve Koonin, had given a talk on touching on the topic at Purdue University in Indiana last month. Since the talk is online, I thought it might be worth a viewing.
[Spoiler alert. It wasn’t].
[Read more…] about Koonin’s case for yet another review of climate scienceNenana Ice Classic 2019
Wow.
Perhaps unsurprisingly given the exceptional (relative) warmth in Alaska last month and in February, the record for the Nenana Ice Classic was shattered this year.
The previous official record was associated with the exceptional conditions in El Niño-affected winter of 1939-1940, when the ice went out on April 20th 1940. Though since 1940 was a leap year, that was actually a little later (relative to the vernal equinox) than the ice out date in 1998 (which wasn’t a leap year).
Other records are also tumbling in the region, for instance the ice out data at Bethel, Alaska:
The Kuskokwim River at Bethel has gone out. This is, by far, the earliest breakup in the 90+ years of breakup data. This follows the warmest February and warmest March on record. @kuskoiceclassic @Climatologist49 @AlaskaWx pic.twitter.com/auEfe0YQ7J
— International Arctic Research Center (@IARC_Alaska) April 13, 2019
While the trend at Nenana since 1908 has been towards earlier ice-out dates (by about 7 days a century on average), the interannual variability is high. This is consistent with the winter warming in this region over that period of about 2.5ºC. Recent winters have got close (2012/14/15/16) (3 to 4 days past the record), but this year’s April 14th date is an impressive jump (and with no leap year to help calendrically).
As usual, I plot both the raw date data and the version adjusted to relative to the vernal equinox (the official time of breakup was ~12:21am).
[As usual, I predict that there will be no interest from the our favorite contrarians in this]
The best case for worst case scenarios
The “end of the world” or “good for you” are the two least likely among the spectrum of potential outcomes.
Stephen Schneider
Scientists have been looking at best, middling and worst case scenarios for anthropogenic climate change for decades. For instance, Stephen Schneider himself took a turn back in 2009. And others have postulated both far more rosy and far more catastrophic possibilities as well (with somewhat variable evidentiary bases).
[Read more…] about The best case for worst case scenariosReferences
- S. Schneider, "The worst-case scenario", Nature, vol. 458, pp. 1104-1105, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/4581104a
Update day
So Wednesday was temperature series update day. The HadCRUT4, NOAA NCEI and GISTEMP time-series were all updated through to the end of 2018 (slightly delayed by the federal government shutdown). Berkeley Earth and the MSU satellite datasets were updated a couple of weeks ago. And that means that everyone gets to add a single additional annual data point to their model-observation comparison plots!
Decluttering
Given some unexpected down time this month (and maybe next month too!), I’ve been trying to go through key old posts on this site. The basic idea is to update links to other sites, references and figures that over the years have died (site domains that were abandoned, site redesigns, deliberate deletions etc.). Most notably, the IPCC website recently broke all the existing links to elements of the reports which we had referenced in hundreds of places. Thanks guys!
Some folk have been notifying us of issues they found (thanks Marcus!) and I’ve been fixing those as they come up, but obviously there are more. Links to old blog posts from Deltoid, Scienceblogs, Pielke Sr. or Prometheus generally don’t work anymore though they can sometimes be found on the wayback machine. It turns out a lot has changed since 2004 and many hotlinked images in particular have disappeared.
It’s obviously not worth finding replacements for every dead link, but digital uncluttering and fixing up is useful. So, please use this thread to notify us of any useful fixes we can make (and if you have an updated link,, that’d be perfect). Additionally, please let us know if any of the old content is still useful or interesting to you. We know there is still substantial traffic to the back catalog, so maybe it should be highlighted in some way?
To those of you who might ask whether blogging still brings me joy… of course it does!
NOAA-thing burger officially confirmed
Back in February 2017, I wrote about the tediously predictable arc of criticisms of the Karl et al (2015) paper, and in particular the comments of John Bates at Judith Curry’s blog.
an initial claim of imperfection spiced up with insinuations of misconduct, coordination with a breathless hyping of the initial claim with ridiculous supposed implications, some sensible responses refuting the initial specific claims and demolishing the wilder extrapolations. Unable to defend the nonsense clarifications are made that the initial claim wasn’t about misconduct but merely about ‘process’ (for who can argue against better processes?). Meanwhile the misconduct and data falsification claims escape into the wild, get more exaggerated and lose all connection to any actual substance.
The outcome was easy to predict:
the issues of ‘process’ will be lost in the noise, the fake overreaction will dominate the wider conversation and become an alternative fact to be regurgitated in twitter threads and blog comments for years, the originators of the issue may or may not walk back the many mis-statements they and others made but will lose credibility in any case, mainstream scientists will just see it as hyper-partisan noise and ignore it, no papers will be redacted, no science will change, and the actual point (one presumes) of the ‘process’ complaint (to encourage better archiving practices) gets set back because it’s associated with such obvious nonsense.
But I missed out the very final outcome which I should have been able to predict too: a report, commissioned from learned experts, who spent months poring over the details (including more than 600,000 emails!) and in the end, concluding there was nothing significantly wrong in anything Karl et al did.
That report has now been made public. [Update: apparently this happened in December]
In it the authors make some sensible recommendations to clean up the thicket of conflicting requirements at NOAA for publishing science papers, they spot one mistake made by Karl et al (submitting to Science the day before the NOAA internal review was officially completed), but overall find no substance to the allegations of “thumbs on the scale”, no improper interference by politicians, no rush to publish to influence political discussions, no data tampering, no missing archives. Nothing.
But there is one curious revelation. It turns out that the person in charge of the NOAA internal review about which John Bates was so concerned was…. John Bates!
And even more curiously:
“The MITRE Committee learned that the internal review, later criticized by Bates, was conducted and approved under his own authority. The MITRE Committee found no evidence that Bates ever mentioned this fact in his blog, email, or anywhere else in his discussion of the matter in public.”
Did he mention this to David Rose or Judith Curry in private perhaps? If so, you’d think that they would have publically said so. If not, it adds one more misrepresentation to the pile.
What a colossal and counter-productive waste of everyone’s time.
References
- T.R. Karl, A. Arguez, B. Huang, J.H. Lawrimore, J.R. McMahon, M.J. Menne, T.C. Peterson, R.S. Vose, and H. Zhang, "Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus", Science, vol. 348, pp. 1469-1472, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.aaa5632
Bending low with Bated breath
“Shall I bend low and in a bondman’s key,
Shylock (Merchant of Venice, Act 1, Scene 3)
With bated breath and whisp’ring humbleness…?”
As dark nights draw in, the venerable contrarians at the GWPF are still up late commissioning silly pseudo-rebuttals to mainstream science. The latest, [but see update below] which no-one was awaiting with any kind of breath, is by Dr. Ray Bates (rtd.) which purports to be a take-down of the recent #SR15 report. As Peter Thorne (an IPCC author) correctly noted, this report is a “cut-and-paste of long-debunked arguments”. I’ve grown a little weary of diving down to rebut every repetitive piece of nonsense, but this one has a few funny aspects that make it worthwhile to do so.
When they go low, we go “sigh…”.
[Read more…] about Bending low with Bated breathFall AGU Week 2018
Fall AGU is in Washington DC. Follow #AGU18 for twitter discussions and highlights, and live streaming of keynotes and selected sessions. Use this thread to discuss anything arising from the meeting – or it’s controversies.
4th National Climate Assessment report
In possibly the biggest “Friday night news dump” in climate report history, the long awaited 4th National Climate Assessment (#NCA4) was released today (roughly two weeks earlier than everyone had been expecting).
The summaries and FAQ (pdf) are good, and the ClimateNexus briefing is worth reading too. The basic picture is utterly unsurprising, but the real interest in the NCA is the detailed work on vulnerabilities and sectorial impacts in 10 specific regions of the US. The writing teams for those sections include a whole raft of scientists and local stakeholders and so if you think climate reports are the same old, same old, it’s where you should go to read things you might not have seen before.
- Regional Chapters
- Northeast
- Southeast
- U.S. Caribbean
- Midwest
- Northern Great Plains
- Southern Great Plains
- Northwest
- Southwest
- Alaska
- Hawai‘i & U.S.-Affiliated Pacific Islands
Obviously, since the report was only released at 2pm today without any serious embargo, most takes you will read today or tomorrow will be pretty superficial, but there should be more considered discussions over the next few days. Feel free to ask specific questions or bring up topics below.