Month: November 2017

by Judith Curry

In private, climate scientists are much less certain than they tell the public. – Rupert Darwall

Stenni et al (2017), Antarctic climate variability on regional and continental scales over the last 2000 years, was published pdf this week by Climate of the Past.  It includes (multiple variations) of a new Antarctic temperature reconstruction, in which 112 d18O and dD isotope series are combined into regional and continental reconstructions. Its abstract warns that “projected warming of the Antarctic continent during the 21st century may soon see significant and unusual warming develop across other parts  of the Antarctic continent [besides the peninsula]”, but no Steigian red spots of supposedly unprecedented warming.

Long-time CA readers will be aware of my long-standing interest in Antarctic ice core proxies, in particular, the highly resolved Law Dome  d18O series.  One of my first appearances in Climategate emails was a request for Law Dome data to Tas van Ommen in Australia, who immediately notified Phil Jones in Sauron’s Tower of this disturbance in the equilibrium of…

Two very different representations of consistency between models and observations are popularly circulated. On the one hand, John Christy and Roy Spencer have frequently shown a graphic which purports to show a marked discrepancy between models and observations in tropical mid-troposphere, while, on the other hand, Zeke Hausfather, among others, have shown graphics which purport to show no discrepancy whatever between models and observations.  I’ve commented on this topic on a number of occasions over the years, including two posts discussing AR5 graphics (here, here) with an update comparison in 2016 (here) and in 2017 (tweet).

There are several moving parts in such comparisons: troposphere or surface, tropical or global. Choice of reference period affects the rhetorical impression of time series plots.  Boxplot comparisons of trends avoids this problem. I’ve presented such boxplots in the past and update for today’s post.

I’ll also…

by Judith Curry

Red-teaming the the U.S. government’s Climate Science Special Report on the topic of sea level rise.

by Judith Curry

Mannian litigation gone wild. — Steve McIntyre