Fooled by Noise

I keep hearing the strangest things from strange quarters.

I know global warming didn’t take a “hiatus,” it didn’t “pause,” but some folks keep saying it did. I know Arctic sea ice hasn’t merely declined (dramatically in fact), it’s declining still, but some folks just can’t stop saying that the decline is over and/or that it’s actually in “recovery.”

I know wildfires in the western U.S. are getting worse and a big part (of course not all) of the reason is climate change, but some say that had nothing to do with it, it’s all due to something else. I know heat waves are getting worse and more frequent, but the usual suspects can’t help but deny it. I know sea level rise is accelerating but they insist it isn’t and that we shouldn’t even plan for the possibility.

Heat Wave 2040

Some things deserve repeating.

One of those things, which happened to come up in conversation recently, is that climate change has its most profound effect on extreme events. Climate change is a change in the probability function (the odds for each possible outcome) of weather, and when you look at probability functions you find that if they change in the way we expect them to, it can increase (or decrease) the chance of extremes by a surprising amount.

Global Temperature: Adjusting Data (Cowtan & Way)

I noticed there’s a post at Curry’s in which Frank Bosse uses my method (and my program) to adjust global temperature data for things we know cause it to fluctuate. By removing fluctuations of known origin (or at least, our best estimate of them), we hope to sharpen our view of the changes that are happening for other reasons.

As a starting point, Bosse takes the global temperature estimate of Cowtan & Way. The known factors allowed for are ENSO (the El Niño Southern Oscillation), atmospheric aerosols from volcanic eruptions, and variation in the output of the sun.

Sea Level Rise: U.S. East Coast (IV)

The 2nd region in my set of U.S. east coast areas (as part of the ongoing series) is the Mid-Atlantic North (MAN), from New York City down almost to Cape Hatteras:

What Is Climate? Really?

A post at RealClimate introduces a new app, which enables the user to take a detailed look at climate data. It also raises the age-old and oft confusing issue, just what is “climate” anyway? I’ll begin the new year with my own definition, in the hope that I can impart to all the knowledge of what climate really is.

Sea Level Rise: U.S. East Coast (III)

I’ll alter course in my cursory look at four regions of the U.S. east coast (we already looked at New England) to comment on a few things mentioned in comments.

Sea Level Rise: U.S. East Coast (II)

In the last post I defined the four regions of the U.S. east coast for which I’ve created a regional sea level estimate (since 1950). Northernmost is my New England (NE) region, which includes the coasts of Rhode Island and Connecticut, even the tip of Long Island:

Sea Level Rise: U.S. East Coast (I)

A new paper by Piecuch et al. looks at how sea level rise has differed from place to place along the east coast of the U.S. There’s a nice write-up about it in Science Magazine.

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.