Both the United States and Australia have pending carbon cap-and-trade legislation. While not a political blog, this mechanism is intrinsically numeric in its relationship to regulating carbon, so within scope. Personally, I don't know if the legislation will do any good, directly or indirectly. From a perusal of the 300-page amendment introduced into the US bill in the last moment, and if past indications are a guide, it is a bureaucrats dream (aka complex policy challenge). For example, figures Read more [...] one
Appearing in Energy and Environment (ee-20-4_7-stockwell2) is a note by myself on a paper by IPCC lead authors Rahmstorf, S., Cazenave A., Church J.A., Hansen J.E., Keeling R.F., Parker D.E., and R.C.J. Somerville, Recent climate observations compared to projections published in Science in 2007. As shown by 102 citations in Google Scholar already, Rahmstorf et al 2007 has been one of the main references for alarmist calls to action because the "climate system is responding more quickly than the Read more [...] 36 com
Given the way the components of the surface temperature record extracted from the SSA (singular spectrum analysis) line up with various potential causes of climate change in the previous post here, the temptation is to latch onto series 2, and say, aha, there is the forcing due to increase in CO2. It's the right shape, exponential. Its the right size, about 0.6C. But looking into fractal data is like seeing pictures in clouds. Be suspicious of magic methods that pull explanations out of the air. Read more [...] 26 com
Applying the singular spectrum analysis (SSA) R package to the global temperature record is potentially insightful. SSA is a type of principal components analysis for time series data, recovering orthogonal components, EOF's, of different period. Just the ticket for decomposing climate data into potential sources. Although, it must be remembered that temperature series have high enough autocorrelation to produce spurious results in any such method -- its not 'reliable' in a strict sense. Above Read more [...] 13 com
The code for plotting the non-linear temperature trend, using SSA (singular spectrum analysis) in the figure below is here - ssa-demo. I have made it as turnkey as I can. The steps are: 1. Get and Install package ssa (http://r-forge.r-project.org/projects/ssa/). I had to hand-compile and move the C shared library around so it would find it, not sure why. 2. Run the script below with source("filename"). Uncomment line indicated after the first time to speed it up. You should get the following Read more [...] one
Figure 3 of the Synthesis Report of the Copenhagen Congress presents the long-term trend of increasing temperature and the range of IPCC projections. The sharp-eyed JeanS over at Lucia's smelt a fish, noticed the trend appeared to be too high, and did a number of replications indicating the window used was 14 years, and not 11 years as claimed in the caption, and also in the list of Figures. Figure 3: Changes in global average surface air temperature (smoothed over 11 years) relative to 1990. The Read more [...] 34 com
ABC interview Just in - You would think the Government would have been more prepared, given Senator Steve Fielding's simple question: "Where is the direct evidence of CO2 driving up global temperatures?". Senator Fielding was accompanied by the Australian "Gang of Four": David Evans, Stewart Franks, Robert Carter, and William Kininmonth. Where does the research on greater reliability of ocean temperatures from Steffen come from? Or did he just wing that? Senator Fielding has questioned whether Read more [...] 15 com
Here is another very useful review paper from arXiv by Indian scientists: Siingh, Gopalakrishnana, Singh, Kamraa, Singh, Panta, Singh, and Singh. Abstract: Research work in the area of the Global Electric Circuit (GEC) has rapidly expanded in recent years mainly through observations of lightning from satellites and ground-based networks and observations of optical emissions between cloud and ionosphere. After reviewing this progress, we critically examine the role of various generators of the currents Read more [...] 3 com
This paper to appear is a very nice review of solar-earth interactions, including atmospheric electricity, by T. Dudok de Wit, J. Watermann. The Sun provides the main energy input to the terrestrial atmosphere, and yet the impact of solar variability on long-term changes remains a controversial issue. Direct radiative forcing is the most studied mechanism. Other much weaker mechanisms, however, can have a significant leverage, but the underlying physics is often poorly known. We review the main Read more [...] none

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