Friday, October 04, 2019

Greta for Peace Prize, and More Record Warmth

(I'll probably add to this post as the day goes by.)
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If you're looking for the latest PDO data (Pacific Decadal Oscillation), it moved here.
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Some European (and British!) bookies are putting Greta Thunberg as the favorite to win this year's Nobel Peace Prize. The winner will be announced early next Friday. Announcements start on Monday, with the Physics prize announced on Tuesday.
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Of the 607 Nobel prizes awarded for science, only 20 have gone to women, says today's Nature Briefing (email).

I know of at least two thefts: Rosalind Franklin for the discovery of the structure of DNA, and Jocelyn Bell for the discovery of pulsars. Bell is still alive -- at least half this year's prize should be hers. But, sadly, won't be.
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Probably you know by now, but both UAH and RSS calculated the lower troposphere to have the warmest September in their records, which start in 1979. Roy Spencer did some analysis and says it was Mother Nature, not an instrument problem. So did Carl Mears of RSS. RSS also found the troposphere as a whole to be the warmest September. Here are RSS's September anomalies for the total troposphere:


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The Copernicus Climate Service in the EU finds that September was the warmest September for surface temperatures, too, 1.02°C above the 1981-2010 baseline. Since the world had already warmed by the time of this baseline, global warming is now moving past 1.0°C.

2 comments:

Marco said...

Rosalind Franklin is a difficult one, as Nobel prizes have hardly ever been awarded posthumously. The three exceptions are Hammarskjöld, Karlfeldt and Steinman, who all died in the year it was awarded to them. In the case of Steinman the announcement had been made before they knew he had died.

It would thus have been an even more extraordinary situation if Franklin had been awarded the prize four years after her death.

I also think you miss a few equally deserving women, like Lise Meitner (nominated >40 times, that says a lot in itself) and Chien-Shiung Wu, who set-up the experiment that gave Yang and Lee their Nobel prize.

Anonymous said...

Rosalyn Franklin was not robbed of a Nobel Prize.
There is a reasonable debate that because only three people can get the Prize the third, besides Watson and Crick, should have been Wilkins and not her.
Even if you don't adhere to that argument, the Nobel was awarded to them several years after she died. As Marco said, dead people are generally not candidates for the Nobel Prize.
Her contributions to the discovery of the helix were significant, bu the idea she was robbed of the Nobel Prize, at least according to the rules, is not tenable.