Busy, busy, busy, …

If things have seemed a bit slow lately, it’s because I’ve been very busy. Among other things, there’s a paper in preparation based on this post — but it should be submitted soon, and I’ll post a link to a preview as soon as possible.

In the meantime, just a few notes. Arctic sea ice hit an all-time low extent according to the University of Bremen, but not quite according to NSIDC and JAXA. It did break the all-time low record for ice area according to Cryosphere today, and for ice volume according to PIOMAS. Record-breaker or no, this much is clear: the trend continues. And the trend is: death spiral.

Also, the Rabett continues his excellent series on the idiotic witch-hunt against Charles Monnett, one which is turning into an extremely serious embarrassment for the witch-hunters. His series is extremely important, and I urge you all both to support his continued blogging on this issue, and to spread the word about the politically motivated harrassment of a scientist, for no other reason than his exposing evidence of the impact of global warming on the environment.

Fred Singer

It has been brought to my attention that Fred Singer has made outrageous claims during recent lectures in Europe, including about temperature trends. I guess I’ll have to blog about that. But it’ll take a bit of time, since I’m busy with several projects right now. More to come…

Odd Introduction to a New Paper

The Rabett has an interesting post about a paper that appeared recently in Climate of the Past on temperature trends in data measured at the Mauna Loa Observatory (MLO). Most of us are very familiar with the data on CO₂ concentration from Mauna Loa, but I didn’t know there’s also temperature data from the same location since 1977. Interestingly, the data are not just monthly, not just daily, they’re hourly, and because MLO is an atmospheric observatory, the data were recorded not just to the nearest whole degree, but to the nearest 0.1 deg.C.

Arctic Sea Ice: Death Spiral Continues

Now that August numbers for sea ice area and extent are available from NSIDC, let’s update the prediction of the upcoming September value.

Temperature Prediction: the next few months

Let’s have a little fun, and predict the global average temperature (land+ocean) for the next few months. We’ll base the prediction on GISS data, so this will be a prediction for the upcoming temperature according to GISS.

Learning from Bastardi’s Mistakes

For the sake of those with the guts to face hard science, who are willing to invest enough actual thought to learn something more complicated than soundbites and platitudes, we’ll address some of the mistakes in Joe Bastardi’s comment. There are too many to address them all in one blog post. So let’s start small, with just the first paragraph:

Can Bastardi Learn?

Joe Bastardi was so kind as to grace us with a comment on a recent post. I congratulate him on an impressive achievement that few others could surpass: it would be difficult to squeeze more fallacies into a single comment even if you tried. Bastardi’s lack of comprehension shows such breadth and depth that it’s reminiscent of an elementary-school book report — from someone who didn’t read the book.

Crock

Best Crock yet?

Settled Science

Fake skeptics retch at the phrase “settled science.” Well they should. They’re wretched.

Bag of Hammers II

When it comes to global warming, Murry Salby is the darling du jour of fake skeptics everywhere. His thesis was touted on WUWT, lauded by JoNova, and even earned a “wow” from Judith Curry. And what is his thesis? That it’s temperature increase which is causing CO₂ increase, not the other way around. An mp3 of his presentation is here.