Miami flooding

People are noticing:

Sleaziest Politician: Global Warming Edition

Glenn Beck recently interviewed Carly Fiorina. Here’s part of their conversation:

Beck: You believe in global warming, that it’s man-made.

Fiorina: No, I didn’t say that. What I said was, scientists tell us that global warming is real and man-made.

My opinion: Carly Fiorina makes Donald Trump look good.

Epidemic of Denial

Wouldn’t you know it, I just posted about how dumb it is to talk about “trends” without enough data to talk about trends intelligently, when it’s brought to my attention that there’s yet another example of doing just that.

Same Old Same Old

Here’s temperature anomaly in the USA (yearly averages for the “lower 48”) since 1880, according to NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration):

The Pope’s message is working

He laid it on the line, no ifs, ands, or buts, and his message is having a HUGE effect. Catholics are now having conventions about how to be better stewards of the earth. Republican politicians, who have worn their denial proudly until now, are being shamed by the leader of Christianity talking about a fundamental moral issue. You bet it’s having a profound effect.

At this point, perhaps Pope Francis is our most effective advocate. He makes even Republicans tremble.

Exogenous Redux

A reader recently requested that I revisit the issue of adjusting temperature data to allow for known factors, the ones that don’t affect the trend but do cause fluctuations, in order better to isolate the trend changes, which are mainly due to greenhouse gases. We can call those known influences exogenous factors. I’ve dealt with this many times, and published research about it, so I’m not going to say very much about the methodology.

Political Polls and the “Mode Effect”

I’ve been retrieving polling data (not the detailed stuff, but the overall results) from HuffPost Pollster. While checking the latest, I found an interesting article about a possible “mode effect” in poll results.

Right and Wrong

There’s yet another paper debunking the so-called “hiatus” in global temperature, making five so far (of which I’m aware), including one of my own. But this one, in my opinion, isn’t helping. In fact I believe it has some very serious problems, some of which make the idea of “hiatus” too easy to reject, while others make it too hard to reject. Although I agree with their overall conclusion — and published that conclusion before they did — I find their evidence completely unconvincing.

Big Risk

Mike Mann has written a piece for the Huffington Post about the “fat tail” of likely climate sensitivity, what it means for risk, and how discussion about it is being misused. Worth a read.

More Mathturbation

After the last post I expected a firestorm of commentary about Donald Trump. Personally, I’m not very fond of Donald Trump.

Instead, most comments since then have focused on a post by “GreenHeretic” referred to in a comment.