Ross McKitrick and Steve McIntryre have taken Roger Pielke Jr. up on his offer that they spell out their arguments about “why those of us not involved in the hockey stick fight should care about the continuing battles.” Neither offers any argument whatsoever regarding how this might influence my thinking about what policy choices I …
Given my personal feeling that variability is the climate change bugaboo that matters the most, I spent a lot of time thinking and asking about last year’s Science paper by Hans von Storch about variability in the paleo record. Now there’s a new paper in Journal of Climate by Mann, Rutherford, Wahl and Amman that …
Global warming has its winners as well as losers: That’s a hollyhock in the front garden, still blooming away two weeks after the average first fall freeze date in Albuquerque. Overnight lows for November in Albuquerque this month have averaged 42 F, 7 1/2 degrees above average. Daytime highs are 8 degrees above average. Obviously …
Don’t panic just yet, but it’s worth paying attention to a couple of signs out of the monitoring and forecast community that La Niña (the cool equatorial Pacific that tends toward dry winters here in New Mexico) may be about to sneak in the back door. The latest CPC forecast, out Thursday, said as much: …
I don’t mind saying that Al Zelicoff is a bit of a nut. But I mean that with the greatest respect, because you frankly can’t argue with the results (1.2 meg pdf, and more here). At Al’s ordinary (OK, slightly larger than ordinary) upper middle class Albuquerque home down the street from me, he has …
Jim Hansen and buds offer an explanation of the 2005 global temperature numbers, in part in response to last month’s Washington Post story on their data. Money quote: The existing record in the period of instrumental temperature measurements occurred when the 1997-98 “El Nino of the century” occurred on the back of a strong two-decade …
I’ve been struggling to understand “environmental determinism,” and why some people think it’s so icky. Thanks to Wikipedia, I finally get it. I was stuck on the plain English meaning of the words, and thought I had stumbled down the rabbit hole of some sort of academic argument over the relative importance of environmental boundary …
I’ve been guilty in my journalism of playing the “thermohaline card” – using the example of a thermohaline circulation shutdown as an example of the sort of abrupt climate change that could happen unexpectedly as a result of anthropogenic climate change. I never pushed it hard, but I thought it relevant. But a good story …
Dennis Kucinich’s wacky “resolution of inquiry” into What the President Knew About Global Warming and When He Knew It (see Prometheus for background) has been defeated. Comments from House Science Committee chair Sherwood Boehlert (he’s an R), as reported in the committee press release: I want to make clear at the outset that any debate …
David Appell’s not around to do this, so I guess it’s my job to point out that October 2005 was the second-warmest globally in history. The three warmest Octobers in history have come in the last three years. It’s not that I think that a single global number is useless. I agree with Roger Pielke …