http://www.realclimate.org Climate science commentary by actual climate scientists... Fri, 06 Mar 2009 15:05:51 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en We've avoided piling on to the George Will kerfuffle, partly because this was not a new story for us (we'd commented on very similar distortions in previous columns in 2004 and 2007), but mostly because everyone else seems to be doing a great job in pointing out the problems in ... http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/02/what-george-will-should-have-written/ A number of satellite related issues have come up this weekend: The NSIDC reminded us that satellite sensors are (like all kinds of data) not perfectly reliable and do not last forever. Two satellites collided by accident last week, littering the orbit with dangerous amounts of debris. In San ... http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/02/its-wrong-to-wish-on-space-hardware/ Guest commentary by Jim Bouldin, Department of Plant Sciences, UC Davis Linking the regional climate-ecology attribution chain in the western United States Many are obviously curious about whether certain current regional environmental changes are traceable to global climate change. There are a number of large-scale changes that clearly qualify—rapid warming of ... http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/02/linking-the-climate-ecology-attribution-chain/ Guest commentary by David Karoly, Professor of Meteorology at the University of Melbourne in Australia On Saturday 7 February 2009, Australia experienced its worst natural disaster in more than 100 years, when catastrophic bushfires killed more than 200 people and destroyed more than 1800 homes in Victoria, Australia. These fires ... http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/02/bushfires-and-climate/ This week has been dominated by questions of replication and of what standards are required to serve the interests of transparency and/or science (not necessarily the same thing). Possibly a recent example of replication would be helpful in showing up some of the real (as opposed to manufactured) issues that ... http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/02/on-replication/ The difference between a single calculation and a solid paper in the technical literature is vast. A good paper examines a question from multiple angles and find ways to assess the robustness of its conclusions to all sorts of possible sources of error -- in input data, in assumptions, and ... http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/02/antarctic-warming-is-robust/ Susan Solomon, ozone hole luminary and Nobel Prize winning chair of IPCC, and her colleagues, have just published a paper entitled “Irreversible climate change because of carbon dioxide emissions” in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. We at realclimate have been getting a lot of calls from ... http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/02/irreversible-does-not-mean-unstoppable/ Guest commentary by Mauri Pelto For global temperature time series we have GISTEMP, NCDC and HadCRUT. Each has worked hard to assimilate global temperature data into reliable and accurate indices of global temperature. The equivalent for alpine glaciers is the World Glacier Monitoring Service’s (WGMS) record of mass balance and terminus ... http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/01/a-global-glacier-index-update/ What determines how much coverage a climate study gets? It probably goes without saying that it isn't strongly related to the quality of the actual science, nor to the clarity of the writing. Appearing in one of the top journals does help (Nature, Science, PNAS and occasionally GRL), though that ... http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/01/warm-reception-to-antarctic-warming-story/ The British tabloid Daily Mirror recently headlined that “Sea will rise 'to levels of last Ice Age'”. No doubt many of our readers will appreciate just how scary this prospect is: sea level during the last Ice Age was up to 120 meters lower than today. Our favourite swimming beaches ... http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/01/sea-will-rise-to-levels-of-last-ice-age/