Arctic Heat

Lately Alaska has been feeling the heat, particularly in the part of it you’d least expect: the northern part. As many have noted, places like Deadhorse have had heat-wave conditions despite being within 50 mi. of the Arctic ocean, and old records haven’t just been broken they’ve been smashed. It’s not just last week, the whole year (so far) has been unusually warm in our northernmost state.

State of the Climate: Earth’s Temperature

“Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”

That now-famous saying is often attributed to Mark Twain, but in reality he only popularized it when, in a public lecture, he quoted its originator: his friend and sometime co-author Charles Dudley Warner.

Global Warning

A story in the Washington Post highlights the fact that scientists have been warning us about man-made climate change for a long time.

Deluge

Surely some of you noticed that the area around Houston Texas suffered extreme flooding recently. At least 8 people were killed and damages ran into the billions of dollars. It was a major disaster.

No Slowdown

A new paper by Fyfe et al. speaks with apparent certainty of a “slowdown” in the rise of global mean surface temperature (GMST). What it doesn’t give is any real evidence of it.

Catch 22. No.1.

From time to time the boys at WUWT and elsewhere, rather than dole nonsense in bite-size morsels, are so kind as to serve up a compendium, a cornucopia if you will. I know they truly want to persuade people that man-made global warming is no problemo, but I wonder whether they’re quite aware of what they’re doing; this kind of bounty doesn’t do their image much good.

In a recent post, Jean-Pierre Bardinet outlines what he refers to as “22 Very Inconvenient Climate Truths,” which he subtitles “Here are 22 good reasons not to believe the statements made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).”

It’s the Trend, Stupid

Both NASA and NOAA report 2014 as the hottest year on record. Despite the new #1, neither the news itself nor the response to it has surprised me.

Global Warming, Climate Change

It seems to me that Roger Pielke Jr. is now persona non grata at Nate Silver’s 538 blog. Silver, whose statistics-based predictions of the last presidential election were stunningly accurate, hoped to capitalize on his celebrity by starting a blog which would present interesting and sometimes important posts which were based on competent analysis of actual data. What a concept! Unfortunately for Silver (in my opinion), he failed miserably when choosing Pielke as his point-man for the global warming/climate change issue. Many of us noted the kerfuffle which followed Pielke’s first foray, with Silver himself admitting publicly that it wasn’t up to the standard he hoped to set.

Time and Tide

A new paper (Foster and Brown 2014, Time and Tide: Analysis of Sea Level Time Series, Climate Dynamics, doi:10.1007/s00382-014-2224-3) looks at how some authors have analyzed sea level data, and how they’ve gone wrong.

Fracklahoma

A new study led by a researcher at Cornell University confirms what we’ve known for some time now: that the massive wastewater injection associated with “fracking” (hydraulic fracturing) has greatly increased earthquake activity. In this case, the area of study is Oklahoma.