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.

Change-Point Fun

Lately I’ve been having fun with change-point analysis.

Here. Now.

Please watch it. Watch the whole thing.

100% consensus

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum recently appeared on Real Time with Bill Maher. He denied the consensus on man-made climate change. It’s what he does. He’s a denier.

Talking Climate

There’s a website, talkingclimate.org, which focuses on how to be persuasive when talking to people about climate change. Here’s a taste of their approach, which I think is well worth watching: