Comments for Strange Weather

Comment on Repower America by El Niño

El Niño — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 16:06:16 +0000

I have the misfortune of knowing a little something about the physics of climate (though not enough to be satisfied). This puts me in the regrettable position of having to judge rather sternly Steve McIntyre’s scratchpad reflections on the relationship between radiative budget and surface temperature, for instance. Al Gore does not pretend to have rewritten the textbooks when he reports other people’s work (if somewhat incorrectly at times).
Being optimist by nature, I will assume that I share a good half with your Polytechniciens. In honor of your kindness, I will make a donation to the Alliance for Climate Protection.
May I ask what your background is, dear DW ?

Comment on Repower America by dw

dw — Wed, 11 Feb 2009 02:05:41 +0000

Steve McIntyre lacks Al Gore’s capacity to learn basic physics?

Wow, we have had different experiences with both of them.

I’ve had the good fortune to work with some of the top students from Ecole Polytecnique. They have always been brilliant and rather arrogant. You sir, share half of their traits.

I’ll put a donation in the Climate Audit tip jar in your honour.

Comment on Repower America by El Niño

El Niño — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 21:18:04 +0000

DW,
most serious scientists (including cohorts of the world’s leading scientific societies) endorse the idea of anthropogenic global warming : http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/11/11/23656/027.
In addition, most climate scientists I know support the broad outlines of Al Gore’s representation of their work – though none of them is naïve enough to believe you can convey such complex issues to the public without making some some gross oversimplification. As I have written elsewhere on this blog, Gore was basically right, though I wished he had more closely consulted with scientists before making his famed keynote presentation.

Now, Mr McIntyre does a lot of good work exposing statistical problems in climate research, cleaning up databases, and writing angry emails to government agencies, but has yet to demonstrate the same capacity as Mr Gore for getting serious about learning the basic physics behind the global warming problem.
Thus, you might not have the same notion of seriousness as I do.
That being said, climate scientists have a lot more work to do to seriously address the statistical issues behind climate reconstruction, and personally I’m getting right back to it.
Cordially,
JEG

Comment on Repower America by dw

dw — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 18:19:01 +0000

In the same article you disparage Steve M and praise Al Gore. How do you reconcile that as a serious scientist?

Comment on The improbable environmentalists by El Niño

El Niño — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 15:35:06 +0000

Well, I guess I was expecting him to be ONLY about gas and oil. He’s obviously smarter than that, and holds enough sway in the business that he’ll hopefully shake things up in the right direction.

Comment on The improbable environmentalists by EliRabett

EliRabett — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 12:44:33 +0000

Pickens as the saying goes owns a lot of drilling rights and gas in W. Texas. What did you expect?

Comment on Waits in Atlanta by TCO

TCO — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 03:43:23 +0000

CA is a lot of people giving each other [accolades]…and cackling about what [discerning fellows] they are for that.

The sampling protocol is important. I think the main issue with Mannianism is that his method amplifies.

Comment on Waits in Atlanta by El Niño

El Niño — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 14:10:21 +0000

Well, let’s just say that compared to some of the CA background microwave radiation, his work stands out as supernova of brightness. Not that some of us hadn’t thought of plotting time-series before injecting them into a reconstruction …
What I don’t understand is why, when Michael Mann decides to be choosy between proxies, it’s called ” sampling bias” ; but when he’s not, it’s the “garbage in, garbage out” litany. Methinks it has to do with the outcome. Loehle did a brilliant job of selecting all the proxies that looked like they had a warm MWP, and – surprise, surprise – he got a warm MWP. SM wrote that it was ” fresh”, which I thought rather amusing. No comment about “sampling bias” then.
Anyway, if every CA thread was like Willis’, I might read it more often…

Comment on Waits in Atlanta by TCO

TCO — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 13:03:05 +0000

Note that SM has not commented in the Willis thread. He tends to play possum when his “crew” (e.g. Loehle) are [messing] up.

Comment on Waits in Atlanta by TCO

TCO — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 12:53:19 +0000

I’m not so impressed by Willis. He tries to act smarter than he is.

One time, he was thinking that if he subdivided a period, that the error should scale and get smaller and smaller. Another time, he went blathering on and on about non-linearities (upsude down U…I think he’s still blathering) without any attempt to consider limiting stands, approximate linearity, time dimensions of confounding excursions etc.)

Right now, he’s got this pretty set of plots, but has not shown a reference plot for how a proxy with SIGNAL should be expected to look.