Spring in Switzerland

This Rutishauser and colleagues have been tracking the blooming of flowers in Switzerland (can you think of a more delightful job as a scientist?). In a paper just published in GRL, they concluded that 2007 was a remarkable spring: Anomalously high temperatures led to a very early onset of plant phenological spring phases, including 98 …

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Don’t Blame the Sun

A lovely bit of amateur climate science from Tim Haab: Follow the bouncing ball of logic.  C02 concentrations and temperatures are correlated.  Sunspot activity and temperatures are not and neither are CO2 concentrations and sunspot activity.  Therefore, sunspots activities are not a causal factor in determining long-term temperature trends. Don’t worry. His work is easily …

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Water in the Desert: Tempe Edition

We’ve got a standard joke around the office when it starts raining: “Drought’s over.” You’ve gotta love the picture on Arizona Republic water guy Shaun McKinnon’s blog today of water spilling over the dam in the middle of Tempe. To non-southwestern desert types: that’s a place where you don’t usually see water. But Shaun bids …

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Global Cooling: The Underlying Problem

Let us assume, for purpose of argument, that you are deeply concerned about the potential for humans’ impact on climate, but that you have some uncertainties about the reliability of the science that lies at the foundation of that concern. Today, you note, scientists tell us the planet is warming. But did they not argue …

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“Study Debunks ‘Global Cooling'”

Via Stoat, I see a nice story in USA Today about an interesting new analysis by some clever folk* on the history of the old “global cooling” canard: The supposed “global cooling” consensus among scientists in the 1970s — frequently offered by global-warming skeptics as proof that climatologists can’t make up their minds — is …

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