Month: July 2017

by Frank Bosse

Increasing evidence of small aerosol forcing supports the importance of internal variability in explaining inter hemispheric differences in temperature variability.

by Judith Curry

The climate change debate has entered what we might call the “Campfire Phase”, in which the goal is to tell the scariest story. – Oren Cass (twitter)

Rosanne D’Arrigo once explained to an astounded National Academy of Sciences panel that you had to pick cherries if you wanted to make cherry pie – a practice followed by D’Arrigo and Jacoby who, for their reconstructions, selected tree ring chronologies which went the “right” way and discarded those that went the wrong way – a technique which will result in hockey sticks even from random red noise.  Her statement caused a flurry of excitement among Climategate correspondents, but unfortunately the NAS panel didn’t address or explain the defects in this technique to the lignumphilous paleoclimate community.

My long-standing recommendation to the paleoclimate community has been to define a class of proxy using ex ante criteria e.g. treeline black spruce chronologies, Antarctic ice cores etc., but once the ex ante criterion is selected, use a “simple” method on all members of the class.  The benefits of such a procedure seem…