Ian Castles has been a frequent and welcome poster here. It must be very gratifying for him to see the following announcement on Oct. 12, 2005:
The [U.K.] Chancellor announced on 19 July 2005 that he had asked Sir Nicholas Stern to lead a major review of the economics of climate change, to understand more comprehensively the nature of the economic challenges and how they can be met, in the UK and globally.
The Terms of Reference for the review have now been announced and are annexed to this Press Notice. A call for evidence has also been issued.
The review will be taken forward jointly by the Cabinet Office and HM Treasury, and will report to the Prime Minister and Chancellor by Autumn 2006. It takes place within the context of existing national and international climate change policy.
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UCAR scientist Kevin Trenberth was quoted by Environmental Science & Technology as saying that newcomers to the climate field sometimes do “incredibly stupid” things. I don’t necessarily disagree with this and we have intentionally kept our published comments to very narrow matters that have been resistant to refutation attempts to date. The concern about over-reaching is one reason why we did not attempt to present our "own" reconstruction.
As all of you know, I am very interested and attentive to issues of autocorrelation as they affect climate issues. I recently stumbled on a 1984 article by Trenberth, entitled “Some effects of finite sample size and persistence on meteorological statistics. Part I: Autocorrelation”. The article contains observations which pertain almost directly to MBH98 short-segment centering. I will leave it to you to decide whether, in light of Trenberth [1984], Trenberth’s recent comments should have been addressed towards Mann himself, who arguably in 1997-1998, was a relative “newcomer” to the climate field, raising at least the possibility that he might have done something “incredibly stupid” within Trenberth’s definition. Continue reading →
David Stockwell has suggested a discussion of nonlinear responses of tree growth to temperature. I’ve summarized here some observations which I’ve seen about bristlecones, limber pine, cedars and spruce – all showing an upside-down U-shaped response to temperature. The implications of this type of relationship for the multiproxy project of attempting to reconstruct past temperatures by assuming linear relationships between ring widths and temperature are obvious. Continue reading →
Update: also see posts 382, 460, 462, 460.
We often hear a distinction made between “climate” and “weather”. It may surprise people that the famous mathematician, Benoit Mandelbrot, thought about this problem with completely opposite conclusions to realclimate. Mandelbrot is a prolific author who invented and popularized the concept of fractals . His popular book, The Fractal Geometry of Nature, is beautifully illustrated and well worth reading. Mandelbrot and Wallis [1969] not only considers the distinction between climate and weather, but considers earlier versions of many tree ring series in the infamous North American tree ring network. (This consideration seems to be completely lost to dendrochronologists.) Continue reading →
Marcel Crok’s article on M&M in the Dutch science magazine Natuurwetenschap & Techniek , published in their February 1, 2005 issue, has won a prestigious Dutch prize (Glazen Griffioen) for science journalism from the Free University (VU) in Amsterdam, together with the VU Medical Center and Hogeschool Hindesheim. The shortlist of three finalists all consisted of investigative journalistic articles (one about food and health; one criticizing an article in The Lancet about the number of civilian victims in Iraq.) Congratulations to Marcel.
An English translation of the original article is here . A version was re-printed in the National Post in January 2005 and a German translation and adaptation was printed by Technology Review here (adding comments by Cubasch, von Storch, Mann, Latif and an interview with Stefan Rahmsdorff.) Some contemporary references are available in the sidebar link category News and Commentary.
Naurzbaev et al [2004] is a terrific article by Naurzbaev, Hughes (yes, that Hughes) and Vaganov about deducing climate information from tree-ring growth curves in Siberia. (I find Naurzbaev’s work consistently interesting.) They studied 34 larch sites in a meridional transect from 55 to 72 N (at a longitude of about 90-100E) and 23 larch sites along an altitudinal transect from 1120 to 2350 m around Tuva (~ 51N, 95E). So they’ve already started off with a consistent population – not some grab-bag like MBH98 or cherry-picking like Jacoby. The transect includes the Taimyr peninsula, chronologies from which occur in Esper et al [2002] and Mann et al [EOS 2003]. Continue reading →
As I’ve mentioned before, the Von Storch and Zorita Comment was accepted by GRL and will appear soon. Von Storch has been very courteous to us both in public and private and it has been a pleasant exercise replying to their Comment (as opposed to wading through the bile of Ammann and Wahl.) They are somewhat in competition with us for the peculiar honor of breaking the hockey stick and readers have to bear that in mind (that goes both ways.) Continue reading →
A few days ago, realclimate announced that they had reached 1 million hits. Congratulations to them.
They’ve been in operation for 10 months – my guess is that they got off to a very fast start, which would mean that an upper estimate of their current hit rate would be 100,000 hits/month. We’re pretty close to that mark since starting in mid-February and have been running well above 100,000 hits/month for the last 4 months (150,000 hits in July and 130,000 hits in August). There are robot hits in there, but they’ve probably got robot hits as well. (Our hit counter is down right now as we’ve jammed our space and I need to upgrade so we’ll end up with estimates in our running hit count at some point.)
If you’d ask me to guess, I’d have thought that their traffic would be almost an order of magnitude greater than ours, so I’m pretty amazed that the current hit rates are comparable, with a possible edge to us. (We didn’t get praised by Scientific American however.) Remember when they snickered at the prospect of an individual trying to cope with the entire Hockey Team. Fortunately they don’t skate very well, so there’s a Canadian edge here. They don’t like body-checking either. I think that they got mixed up between figure skating and hockey – I’ve compared peer review in climate science to being a judge at figure skating competition: no one checks anything, style points are awarded and the judges agree on the winner before the competition starts. Can I say that you can’t play hockey in sequined outfits without being sarcastic?
People read the blog partly for my take on things, but the return hits are mostly for the posts by others. I appreciate the readers, but especially the regular posters, who make this little corner of the cyberworld come alive.
I have recently located a copy of Graybill and Funkhouser [1993], Dendroclimatic Reconstructions during the past millennium in the southern Sierra Nevada and Owens Valley, California, which has been very hard to find. This appears to be Graybill’s last publication before he died. A detailed excerpt follows. Some key quotes:
Unfortunately the chronologies from the White Mountains do not correlate well with the southern California divisional climate data. Additional trials using averages and principal component scores of various subsets of the tree ring data with the divisional data were also unsuccessful…
Growth responses of residual chronologies from Sheep and Campito Mountains to spring and summer temperatures of the current prior year are either negative or not significant…
These climatic responses at upper treeline may be of limited value or biological significance in making inferences about climate-tree growth relationships if the hypothesized fertilization effects of anthropogenically induced CO2 processes resulting from the Industrial Revolution [Graybill and Idso 1993] are real. It is possible that the climatic processes that dendrochronologists most frequently investigate e.g. precipitation, temperature and drought) are being masked or overridden by the extraordinary growth increases over the last century or more….
Based on the analyses undertaken here, it can be inferred that available instrumental records do not provide an adequate sample of the trends or variability in climate required for accurate planning purposes or for evaluating the nature of climatic processes.
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The Toronto Racquet Club is having its centenary this year and held a “century” squash doubles tournament this week-end – the teams had to be at least 100 in combined age. The proprietor of this blog is feeling weary today, after playing 4 matches and having one of his very occasional tournament wins. We played against some good players – Paul Deratney in the semi-final is a 4-time Canadian champion; Chris Deratney in the final is a ranked WPSA player. I was googling some of the players and, due to the miracle of google, found a listing of myself a couple of times at the U.S. squash site here alongside players who are much better than me.
Climate Audit 
Major British Review on Economics of Climate Change
Ian Castles has been a frequent and welcome poster here. It must be very gratifying for him to see the following announcement on Oct. 12, 2005:
Continue reading →