Urban Wet Island?

The June 2010 issue of BAMS (Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society) contains the State of the Climate in 2009 report (Arndt, D. S., M. O. Baringer, and M. R. Johnson, Eds., 2010: State of the Climate in 2009. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 91 (6), S1-S224). One feature of the report is the display of key climate indicators, each being a time series which is unambiguously expected to be going in some particular direction due to global warming. You can view graphs and download the data here.

Sea Ice Curiosity

The sea ice data available from NSIDC includes estimates of both sea ice extent and sea ice area. Extent is the area over which sea ice concentration is at least 15%, while area is … well, the area covered by ice. Necessarily, sea ice extent will be greater than sea ice area.

Summer Ice

RealClimate has an interesting post on arctic sea ice from Dirk Notz at the Max Planck Institute, which discusses (among other things) the obsession with the summer minimum extent. He adroitly points out several interesting points. One is that weather conditions strongly affect the summer minimum, so it’s really too early to know whether this summer’s minimum will be a record-breaker or just ho-hum. Another is that the decline in arctic sea ice thickness is where the real story lies, but for the moment thickness is not nearly so well-observed as extent so it’s extent that captures the most attention.

What’s Up?

When it comes to humankind’s influence on global climate, we should pay more attention to what’s really up.

On Thin Ice

When it comes to sea ice, especially in the arctic, the stooges have been very busy.

It wasn’t very long ago Shemp and Moe told us that Arctic sea ice was “about to hit normal.” Curly got in on the act too. Meanwhile Shemp desperately clings to the belief that the disappearance of arctic sea ice is “more of a marketing event than a climatological event,” and seems to think he can estimate sea ice volume better than the pros. I’m skeptical.

It’s the Trend, Stupid

Sometimes, one can’t help but be entertained by blog posts on WUWT. Like this one.

Silence

On a recent post titled “Your right to say it,” there were some comments from someone who posts under the name “Greg Goodknight.” He and I don’t seem to like each other.

Friday I found that I was unable to post, delete posts, or edit posts on my blog, and found this message on the dashboard when logging into my wordpress blog:

Warning: We have a concern about some of the content on your blog. Please click here to contact us as soon as possible to resolve the issue and re-enable posting.

After contacting wordpress personnel, I received this message:

Hi,

Please remove all posts and all comments that either name or allude to a Mr Goodknight

The only exception to this is where you absolutely make it clear it is your opinion or you can prove legally that what you say it true.

Thank you.

The post in question was one in which I defended the right of my most heated “internet adversary” to express his opinion without harassment. How ironic.

How Low Can You Go?

Anthony Watts has decided to question my patriotism. Eli Rabett’s too.

Watts ends a post about flying his flag on memorial day with

I wonder if “Tamino” or Eli Rabbet bothers to fly a flag on memorial day? Here’s to hoping that they do.

There’s no reason imaginable to say such a thing except to imply we’re not sufficiently patriotic.

This just might be the most loathsome thing Watts has yet done with his blog.

One of his readers notices — and gets the blatantly obvious implication:

Brad Johnson says:
May 31, 2010 at 10:39 am

Ha ha! Bloggers critical of you must hate America!

Sea Level Rise: What the Data Actually Shows

Someone recently pointed to a post by Norman G. Purves at “Climategate Country Club” about sea level rise.

Regression

It sometimes happens that we have only limited access to direct measurements of some variable of interest, but we have abundant data on some other, related variable. In such cases we can use the “other” variable as a proxy for our target variable. We attempt to determine the relationship between them, then use the measurement of one as input to that relationship in order to estimate the other. Voila! Of course such indirect estimates will be imperfect, but at least they’re an approximation, we hope a useful one. Why, such practice has even been applied to climate science.