Open Thread

Another open thread, and a totally off-topic video:

If you do good things, good things will happen to you.

How Not to Analyze Tide Gauge Data

There’s another paper about sea level rise in the Journal of Coastal Research by P. J. Watson (2011, Is There Evidence Yet of Acceleration in Mean Sea Level Rise around Mainland Australia?, Journal of Coastal Research, 27, 368–377). According to this powerpoint, Watson is genuinely concerned about sea level rise due to global warming and argues forcefully for addressing the issue. His primary interest seems to be: to help those responsible for protecting Australia’s coastline be as well prepared as possible for the impending sea level rise. That’s a noble motive, and I wish him success. But in spite of the best of intentions, I can’t put much stock in Watson’s published results because it’s clear that he is no data analyst.

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Ice Forecast Update

As many of you know, nine months ago I predicted the minimum Arctic sea ice extent for 2011 would be 4.63 +/- 0.9 million km^2. I’ll update that prediction using more recent data from NSIDC.

Trend and Noise

A commenter recently linked to a post by Steve Goddard claiming that “GISS Shows No Warming Over The Last Decade.”

Bob Carter Does his Business

A certain blogger decided to inform us all that Bob Carter does the Business, referring to the this presentation to the Sydney Mining Club. Others have praised Carter’s presentation at the Heartland conference. There’s a lot of similarity between two presentations. And what, you wonder, does Bob Carter have to say about global warming?

Aligning Station Records

As some of you know, I devised a method for aligning temperature data records which I believe is better than the “reference station method” used by NASA GISS. However, the difference is small and it doesn’t change the overall global result when small regions are averaged, then those regional results are area-weight-averaged to produce a global estimate. It’s an interesting, and possibly useful, refinement which doesn’t change the overall final answer.