The Trieste PR Challenge conference has an interesting “White paper on tree rings submitted by Keith Briffa and Ed Cook, entitled “What are the Sources of Uncertainty in the Tree-Ring Data: How can They be Quantified and Represented? Good questions. I urge readers to read this candid paper in full. I detect a lot of […]
The multiproxy world has been a little quiet since AR4. Eerily quiet. But the Team has plans to liven things up in the June 2008-9 year with plans for a: Broad announcement of [PR] Challenge to paleo, modeling and statistics communities (e.g., EOS, BAMS, PAGES, CLIVAR, PaleoList, AmStat, EGGS, Nature Reports). They didn’t mention Climate […]
Lewis Richardson’s famous 1920 climate science paper ‘The supply of energy from and to Atmospheric Eddies’ was neatly summarized by the poem: Big whorls have little whorls That feed on their velocity, And little whorls have lesser whorls And so on to viscosity. Isn’t that a brilliant description of turbulence? So climate scientists have, from […]
Yesterday, in a passing comment, I mentioned an article by Osborn et al, Annually resolved patterns of summer temperature over the Northern Hemisphere since AD 1400 from a tree-ring-density network, as an example of abuse of terms like “rigorous” or “conservative” to arm-wave through proper methodological description. Here’s an example of their use of “rigorous”: […]
I received the following response today from Tom Karl regarding my 2007 FOI request (See here): As previously indicated in my e-mail last Thursday, NCDC did indeed put together a response to your official FOIA request, but due to a miscommunication between our office and our headquarters, the response was not submitted to you. I […]
During the last few days, there has been a flurry of activity following an announcement by Xian-Jin Li of a supposed proof of the Riemann Hypothesis, perhaps the most famous unsolved mathematics problem (now that Fermat’s Last Theorem has been solved.) Atle Selberg, an eminent mathematician, recently said: If anything at all in our universe […]
I’ll post up some utilities for reading sea ice here (soon). For now, I want to document some relevant aspects of the data sets. NSIDC Daily Data Sets Arctic sea ice information from NSICD is available in two directories: ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/pub/DATASETS/seaice/polar-stereo/nasateam/near-real-time/north – has daily 2008 data; ftp://sidads.colorado.edu/pub/DATASETS/seaice/polar-stereo/nasateam/final-gsfc/north/daily – has daily data for years prior to 2008 […]
I’ve got a question for readers: can someone explain to me how the NSIDC sea ice projections were actually made? I can’t get from A to B. Relevant information is in their monthly reports for April 2008 and May 2008. Remember how much we’ve heard about new ice and why this was expected to lead […]
For some reason, Michael Tobis seems to think that the Team is busy cranking out responses to an endless stream of my data requests. Nothing could be further from the truth. For me, getting data from the Team is no easier than posting at realclimate. At this point, it seems to be Team policy to […]
Climate Audit 