Freezy Hot Climate Change

Temperature varies, through day and night, from day to day, from month to month, and year to year. The most common way to note its changes is to record each day’s high temperature and low temperature, which has been done at Kremsmuenster, Austria since 1876. Here’s a snapshot of five years of that data, from 2010 through 2014:

Global Warming’s Pretend Pause

A new paper by Risbey et al. examines the so-called “pause” in global temperature, and demonstrates convincingly that it wasn’t a real phenomenon, it was just random fluctuation that can look like a pause all along. I’ve been saying this for some time now. I’m also a co-author on the paper.

Arctic Hockey

I’ve been studying how temperature has changed over the years in the Arctic. The longest record I’ve got is for land areas only, from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature project, which starts way back in 1750:

‘Tis the Season for Sea Ice

The news lately is replete with mentions of sea ice, because NOAA’s Arctic Report Card features it prominently, mentioning that “In 2018 Arctic sea ice remained younger, thinner, and covered less area than in the past. The 12 lowest extents in the satellite record have occurred in the last 12 years.” It also emphasizes how the loss of Arctic sea ice is but the start of a chain of events leading to dramatic change both in the Arctic and elsewhere.

Cooling Down the What?

I confess, I’m confused by Willis Eschenbach’s latest post at WUWT, titled “Cooling Down the Land.” It begins with this graph (of a mere 18 years’ data):

In the News

Some things I’ve noticed in the news:

Global Warming: Denial is Depraved

Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman has an opinion in the New York Times about denialists, aka deniers, those who deny global warming’s reality, its cause (us), or its danger. What he calls them is: depraved.

Global Warming: Good Video

Temperature, Rainfall, and California Wildfire

We regularly hear opinions from pundits who are very good at making nonsense sound plausible, even clever. It’s still nonsense of course, but with the right window dressing it looks very sharp indeed. Such are those claiming that the increase of wildfire in California has nothing to do with climate change, and maybe even nothing to do with how much rainfall the state gets.

Trump Insults while California Burns

The LA Times reports that people in California, and especially firefighters, are angry at Donald Trump’s stunning display of both stupidity and insensitivity in response to the deadly fires raging through their state.