Changes

Change is the essential property of the universe.

— Spock

Global climate is changing, as is global temperature. But is the change itself changing? With 2015’s temperature so much higher than any previously recorded, talk of the “hiatus” or “pause” has, in some quarters, been replaced with talk of a “surge.” It was a mistake to talk about a slowdown of global warming when real evidence of it was lacking. But lately the question has changed to whether or not we’re seeing the beginning of an acceleration of global warming.

Deniers’ Worst Enemy?

Who is most effective at showing how empty, how misleading, how utterly nonsensical are the arguments from global warming deniers? Perhaps — of course this is just my opinion — the answer to the question “Who is the deniers’ worst enemy?” is one of their own: Christopher Monckton.

Why? Because he’s still writing stuff like this blog post at WUWT (where else?). A recent video demolished the claim that “there’s been no warming for 18 years” because “the satellite data are the best,” and did such an effective job of it that Monckton just had to respond.

It’s Not a Question of “If”

One quote from today’s NASA/NOAA press conference on global climate stands out in my mind. At one point a journalist asked a question starting with “If this trend continues…” Gavin Schmidt’s response begin, “It’s not a question of if…”

2015 Climate Announcement from NASA, NOAA

Climate experts from NOAA and NASA will announce new data on 2015 global temperatures during a media teleconference on Wednesday, Jan. 20, 11:00 a.m. ET. The scientists will also discuss the year’s most important weather and climate events in context of long-term warming trends.

You can read more about it here, and listen to a livestream of the briefing here (it starts at 11:00 A.M. Eastern time).

Monty Hall

Readers as old as I am may remember one of TV’s more popular game shows, Let’s Make a Deal, and its host Monty Hall. Those keen on probability and statistics may also know of a now-classic, once in dispute, problem known as the Monty Hall problem.

Martin Luther King

Joe Romm and Van Jones have an excellent essay on the urgent need for climate action, on this day which celebrates the life of a great American, Martin Luther King.

Cherry Cruz Cherry Monckton Cherry Christy Cherry Spencer Cherry Curry

Amid all the brouhaha about Ted Cruz’s insistence that the globe isn’t warming, based on his using satellite data for the lower troposphere (not Earth’s surface), insisting that it’s “the best we’ve got” (it isn’t), and ignoring absolutely all the other evidence (which isn’t just powerful, it’s overwhelming), we haven’t paid enough attention to the fact that Cruz, and Monckton, and Christy, and Spencer, and Curry are cherry picking. Not just a little — they are cherry cherry cherry picking.

Earth to John Christy

John Christy doesn’t like criticism of the satellite temperature record. He has multiple objections, but the one that struck me as bizarre is this one which was recently brought to my attention:

Drift

The Rabett made an interesting post recently, based on an idea that occurred to him on the subject of the “Cruz pause” (a drawback to slumming at Lucia’s).

If the changes in temperature over short periods (like days or months or even annually) track each other, even just in direction in the satellite and surface records (so) then that is pretty convincing evidence that the problem is a long term drift in one or the other and that on the short term they are measuring the same thing.

N-TREND: New Kid on the Hockey Rink

A new paper by Wilson et al. combines data from paleoclimate reconstructions over the last 1000+ years, by a number of different researchers, to create a sort of “consensus” reconstruction. Hence the name: Northern hemisphere TREe-Ring Network Development, or N-TREND. As pointed out by And Then There’s Physics, it’s not groundbreaking or earth-shattering, it pretty much tells the story we already knew.