Tag: obama

The Egg Was First, No, the Chicken, No Never Mind
March 23, 2013 0

The Egg Was First, No, the Chicken, No Never Mind

By News Desk

The Egg Was First, No, the Chicken, No Never Mind An evergreen in Eli’s business is which came first exiting the ice age, the temperature or the greenhouse gas concentrations.  Since the forcing is orbital changes, it is reasonable to expect at least some initial lag in the greenhouse gas and that includes water vapor, but the length of this lag has been an issue ever since Monnin, et al’s analysis of the EPICA Dome C core inferred a lag of 800 + 200 years.  This has become an evergreen amongst the less serious, and indeed, there has even been considerable discussion by reasonable folk . Jeff Severinghaus provided an answer So one should not claim that greenhouse gases are the major cause of the ice ages. No credible scientist has argued that position (even though Al Gore implied as much in his movie)

Shameless self-promotion, Part One
March 20, 2013 0

Shameless self-promotion, Part One

By News Desk

Eli Rabett Eli Rabett Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional. His colleagues are smart, but they have a curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves.

About as good as I can get
March 20, 2013 0

About as good as I can get

By News Desk

Eli Rabett Eli Rabett Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional.

Rose gets stuck on statistical significance
March 19, 2013 0

Rose gets stuck on statistical significance

By News Desk

Too many takedowns to count for David Rose who doesn’t realize that short-term fluctuations in temperature tell you little about long term trends.  The latest case is that according to one computer model, the temperature sequence ending in 2012 is close to the bottom edge of the statistical uncertainty range, a point where there’s only supposed to be a 5% chance that random variation produces a temperature below the modeled range.

The Wheelchair
March 19, 2013 0

The Wheelchair

By News Desk

UPDATE:  An English version of Jos Hagelaars Dutch  post is now available on Our Changing Climate.  Eli appreciates their recognition that this indeed is the Wheelchair Curve Jos Hagelaar s splicing of the Shakun, Marcott, HadCRUT4 and CMIP5 A1B temperature anomaly reconstructions is clearly going to become iconic .  Icons, like the hockey stick, need names.  Eli was playing around with a few, the beach chair,  the Barca lounger the airplane seat, none quite fit, until the Rabett thought about what we are doing to our world Oh yes, FWIW, the spike at the end is the instrumental record and the CMIP5 models of our future based on our current behavior and has nothing to do with how accurate the Marcott reconstruction is at recent times.  Indeed that is the strength of Hagelaar’s wheelchair, that it uses multiple sources to give us the big picture in one figure. 

The First User Experience
March 17, 2013 0

The First User Experience

By News Desk

Hank Roberts said… how far we’ve come: "We describe Dispute Finder, a browser extension that alerts a user when information they read online is disputed by a source that they might trust. Dispute Finder examines the text on the page that the user is browsing and highlights any phrases that resemble known disputed claims.