TC and DW

Our old friend Tim Curtin has published a paper in what is supposed to be a peer-reviewed scientific journal. I’m skeptical.

He regresses temperature time series against a variety of predictor variables, concluding that there is no real influence of “non-condensing greenhouse gases” (i.e., GHG except water vapor) like CO₂. He achieves this by rejecting regression of temperature in favor of regression of the first-differenced temperature data. You get that by taking the difference between each data value and its predecessor.

BS and DK

[Note: see the UPDATE at the end of the post]

Brandon Shollenberger has written a blog post about my last post. I consider it an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect, that unskilled individuals overrate their ability.

In the Classroom

The Committee for the Advancment of Scientific Skepticism (CASS) has issued a report on a course supposed to be about climate change, taught by Tom Harris at Carleton University in Canada. Harris is associated with the International Climate Science Coalition, and is a confirmed speaker for the upcoming climate conference to be hosted by the so-called “Heartland Institute“.

CASS reviewed video of Harris’s lectures, and found a bounty of errors as well as a consistently false portrayal of climate science. Let’s take a look at an example in which Harris indulges in one of the many ways that fake skeptics make fake arguments about global warming.

Let’s do the math!

Roger Pielke’s post which we criticized now has seven updates. Seven! He has protested, I would even say whined, that I and my readers have treated him unfairly. He has accused me of a lack of “professional courtesy” for such horrible deeds as blogging under a pseudonym. He even went to the trouble to dig up my real name and post my hometown location on his blog. How professionally courteous of you, Roger. That certainly advances our understanding of sea ice trends.

What he still hasn’t done is: the math.

Do the Math

Roger Pielke Sr. claims that northern hemisphere sea ice has not declined as fast as computer models predicted. Yet we’ve often heard the opposite, that northern hemisphere sea ice is declining faster than predicted by computer models. How does Pielke arrive at the opposite conclusion?

Defense Against the Dark Arts

Last summer we examined some first-class misinformation about global warming from the “Heartland Institute,” namely their NIPCC report. We showed that their fake take on Arctic sea ice revealed that they’re not real skeptics, they’re fake skeptics.

More Methane

It wasn’t that long ago that The Independent reported the detection of unprecedented methane (CH₄) emissions from the sea bed of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf by Russian scientists. This has spawned considerable speculation, and concern, about sudden increase of methane concentration in the Arctic due to extreme Arctic warming, which could potentially cause a nasty global-warming feedback since methane is a potent greenhouse gas. That some are very concerned is no surprise.

Nothin’ but Noise

Pat Michaels claims (also here) that the journal Nature has lost its credibility. That’s an extraordinary claim, considering that Nature is one of the most prestigious peer-reviewed science journals in the world. There are those who believe Pat Michaels is the one lacking any credibility.

Roy Spencer, man of mystery

Apparently, Roy Spencer believes that warming indicated by data from the USHCN (U.S. Historical Climate Network) is almost entirely false. He likewise distrusts the trend for the U.S. estimated from the CRUTem3 data. More to the point, he seems to think that warming over the U.S. for the last several decades has been negligible. All but a pittance (a mere 0.013 deg.C/decade), he says, isn’t real, it’s just due to “adjustments.”

March Madness

The National Climate Data Center has updated their temperature data for individual states and for USA48 (a.k.a. the conterminous United States, a.k.a. the “lower 48”). The headlines are that this March was the hottest March on record nationally, and this year’s 1st quarter (January through March) was likewise the hottest on record. Much of the central U.S. was as much as 15 deg.F hotter than average this March: