Posts tagged…Climate
Plimer review: more from G Schmidt
Sat, May 23 2009Dr Gavin Schmidt has further criticisms of my review of Plimer (and of Plimer's book). I'm happy to reproduce them as emailed (presuming again that he has no objection). He has three main points concerning the Wegman 'cluster' analysis of the Mann authorial relationships; whether the Hockey Stick article was a 'fraud', and; whether Plimer's account of paleo-climate variability matters to current…
Read more…U.S. and Global Temperatures: a correction
Fri, May 22 2009
Dr Gavin Schmidt, a climate modeler at NASA and a principal author of the Real Climate weblog, has emailed me to point out an error (mine) in my review of Ian Plimer's Heaven + Earth.
I said that I had learned from Ian Plimer that NASA had reversed it's claim that the ten years following 1995 were the hottest ten years of the century when Steven McIntyre showed that the record belonged to 1934.…
Plimer’s Heaven + Earth
Mon, May 18 2009
I have finally finished reading and skimming Ian Plimer's thick book Heaven + Earth. I found it admirable for being a comprehensive and intelligent account of relevant evidence on climate change. I did not like it so much for the writing, or for the organization of ideas in some places, but that's a quibble in light of the book's strengths.
Prof. Plimer's book looks like a text book (and weighs…
India says ‘no’
Wed, Apr 15 2009Even IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri considers India is 'very unlikely' to change its opposition to emissions targets (for India).
"'If the question is whether India will take on binding emission reduction commitments, the answer is no. It is morally wrong for us to agree to reduce when 40 percent of Indians do not have access to electricity,' said a member of the Indian delegation to the…
How bad is polar ice loss?
Sat, Apr 11 2009
News reports everywhere are picking up the theme of 'alarm' over the extent of ice cover at the poles.
"‘What we’re seeing is very dramatic,’ said Andrew Fleming, remote sensing manager at the British Antarctic Survey. ‘It’s very worrying.’ Scientists believed the effects were linked to the ‘very strong warming’ at the poles, he said. The Antarctic peninsula has warmed by more than 3ºC in the…
A WTO ‘code’ on carbon tariffs
Thu, Apr 02 2009Gary Hufbauer, Steve Charnovitz and Jisun Kim from the Peterson Institute have produced a small book that recommends a way to deal with the vexing—but probably inevitable— conflict between future UNEP obligations to control GHG emissions and WTO provisions on keeping markets free from regulatory distortions at, and behind, the border for goods and services.
The book helpfully and accurately…
A climate rebuttal
Wed, Apr 01 2009
A strong message with good science behind it.
Volcanic explosion in Alaska
Fri, Mar 27 2009The thousands of tonnes of ash, dust and gasses that volcanos spew into the atmosphere are often a cause of short-run global cooling. The explosive eruption of Mt Redoubt, a large volcano in Alaska, in the past 24 hours seems bound to affect the northern hemisphere climate. The image (click) shows the ash plume shooting into the upper atmosphere.
Cap-and-trade to fund Obama’s tax cuts
Thu, Mar 26 2009This seems to be a plan to make the workers pay for the proposed tax cuts for the middle-class.
"The White House planned to finance the tax cuts with revenues from its proposed cap-and-trade scheme to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, but neither the House nor Senate budget committees are planning to include those measures in their legislation.
In his press conference on Tuesday evening, Mr Obama…
58 years of Victorian temperatures
Mon, Mar 23 2009
A small experiment with the Bureau of Met's record of mean temperature anomalies for Victoria using Hadley Wickham's 'ggplot' library for R. There are 696 observations of monthly means between 1950 and 2008. The Bureau provides 'anomalies' from the monthly 1961-1990 means. How are these anomalies distributed? Are they skewed toward the upper 'tail' of the distribution, pointing to an alarming…
Australia not at ‘most risk’ of warming
Wed, Mar 18 2009
The Financial Times carries a story on the politics of the Australian emissions trading scheme legislation that makes the usual genuflections to alarmism but manages also to be dead wrong in the second paragraph. It quotes John Connor, head of the Climate Institute, which describes itself as "an independent research group in Sydney" (merely fashionable thinkers however):
"‘We are the developed…
Deceptive climate headline
Sat, Mar 14 2009You may have seen the headlines in stories like this from the Sydney Morning Herald, that cites "Alarm at Weak Greeenhouse Targets" coming out of this week's conference on climate in Copenhagen. Most of the stories are based on the same media briefing that underlies the exaggerated account in the Nature Magazine weblog
"Climate experts who met this week in Denmark have warned that the overall…