Australia High Temperature Records 12 Times Cold Records

A September paper in GRL by Sophie C. Lewis and Andrew D. King looks at hot and cold temperaure records in Australia for the last one and a half decades. Their conclusion:

"...during 2000–2014, new hot records outnumber new cold records by 12 to one on average." 

which is a pretty large ratio. They emphasize (which should be obvious if you think about it) 

"In a stationary climate, the probability of setting new temperature records should decrease rapidly from the beginning of the sequence of observations."

Here's the graphical version of their results:

Finally, here are the temperature time series going back to 1910:

The Problem of Slicing a Cake

I'm reading this little book by Timothy Gowers, Mathematics: A Very Short Introduction. I'm mostly reading it to see how he, as a major mathematician, thinks about mathematics, which sometimes can be pedantic (for the purposes of the book), but at other times he shows how careful thinking is needed, which isn't always how sciency people think about things. Here's a good example in his book that I'd never seen before.

Suppose you want to slice a cake, and you want to know how many pieces you get with 1 cut, or 2 cuts, or 3 cuts, etc. You don't have to start slicing from the middle, and each piece of cake need not be the same size, but you have to slice all the way through the cake.

So you get slices, and pieces of cake, like this:

The number below each circle is the number of pieces of cake. Each dot is where your knife enters or leaves the edge of the cake.

For n slices, how many pieces of cake will you get?

For a small number of slices, it's easy to count up the pieces:

At this point most people would notice a pattern, and guess/assume the number of pieces of cake is 2^n-1.

But, surprisingly, that's wrong.

For n=6, the number of pieces is 31, not 32 as one would likely guess.

For n=7 the number of pieces is 57, not 2⁶ = 64. And so on: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 31, 57, 99, 163, 256...

That's kind of wonderful -- it shows you shouldn't try to detect a pattern or rule based on a limited number of trials.

In mathematics this is called Moser's circle problem, and the slices are called "chords." The formula for the number of pieces is

where the objects in parantheses are called combinations -- the first is the combination of n objects taking 4 at a time, and not caring about their order, etc. Here are a couple ways of solving the problem.

This was proved in 1987, showing that not all simple but interesting math problems were solved, or even proposed, 300 years ago. (Moser formulated another seemingly simple problem, the worm problem, in 1966, and it's not solved yet.)

And it says to be careful in your thinking, more careful than most of us are.

For NASA GISS to Set a New Temperature Record...

...it needs only an average anomaly of +0.58°C for the last three months of the year -- or 0.23°C below its average year-to-date. 

So far this year, no month has dropped anywhere close to that.

Year-to-date, 2015 is +0.07°C above the second-highest year, 2014. And it's +0.13°C above 1998. which once seems so extreme.

What Computers Can't Do

"Unfortunately, while computers continually surprise us with what they can be used for, almost nothing is known about what they cannot do."

-- Timothy Gowers, Mathematics: A Short Introduction (2002)

Stunning Picture of a Saturnian Moon

Wow -- this is the north pole of Enceladus, taken yesterday by the Cassini space probe. Taken from about 6,000 km away, with 35 meters per pixel:

Bad Book Reviews Versus Some Actual Science

A fawning book review for Mark Steyn's self-published manuscript by a sycophant named Lynne Cohen says

Several of the hockey stick's most obvious problems are easy to grasp. The 900-year long handle completely ignores two indisputable eras, the Medieval Warm Period, from about 950 to 1250 A.D. and the later Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850. 

I asked her for the evidence for these "indisputable eras," and she says she's just a book reviewer with no knowledge of what she's writing of:

I want to remind you that I am not a climate scientist, only a lowly book reviewer. I have no first hand knowledge of these well-documented time periods, only a faith in the knowledge and reputations of the climate scientists who write about them. Sort of how I trust my doctor to know the pills he prescribes will heal me without my understanding how or why.  

But it seems she only has "faith" (the opposite of science) in some climate scientists whose studies (she cites zero of them) she happens to like. When I asked her again, she wrote it's all "widely accepted" so she doesn't have to provide any evidence:

Regarding the "Medieval Warm Period" and "Little Ice Age", their existence is widely accepted - I didn't invent the terms after all - within both the lay and scientific communities. I would no more provide evidence of them than I would provide evidence of photosynthesis, but I know they are all real. How? I believe the reputable scientists. 

Clearly Lynne is out of her league here.... Like so many deniers, she thinks the science is all wrong, without actually knowing any of it.... That saves time, that's for sure!

Steyn claims

There are peer-reviewed studies by over 750 scientists from over 450 research institutions in over 40 countries that have found a Medieval Warm Period of between 0.1° and 3.2° Celsius warmer than today in every corner of the globe - from Alaska to South Africa, Morocco to New Zealand, Bolivia to China, Egypt to New Guinea... Everywhere they look for it, they find it. 

while offering no evidence for this in his blog post or whether all these studies lead to a reconstruction of globally noticeable climate eras, as he and Lynne claim. Except for another opinion from the opinionated nonexpert Jonathan Jones.

OK, there was that study by the oil-funded CO2science.org...which was never published anywhere -- because CO2science wouldn't dare submit their work for peer review anywhere legitimate -- and which was debunked because the period of study of the papers cited differed by up to 500 years, and many were selectively interpreted. The study ignored "very wide" error bars, and one study that only went back to 1500 A.D. was included as evidence for the MWP. In short, that study was both wrong and dishonest.

Meanwhile, all quantative reconstruction studies I know of -- which are the opposite of scattered opinions about scattered studies by scattered nonexperts -- use available proxies to form a global perspective find no evidence for a global MWP or global LIA -- Tingley and Huybers, Marcott et al, PAGES 2k, and more.

Here's the abstract from the PAGES 2k study conducted by over six dozen paleoclimatologists from 24 countries, based on 511 climate archives from around the world and published in Nature Geosciences:

Stefan Rahmstorf, who wasn't part of this study, wrote about it for ThinkProgress, and gave the paper's main result:

Rahmstorf then gives their reconstruction, labeled by "b" below -- which is, not surprisingly, a hockey stick, because a hockey stick is expected from very simply physics:

Who are you going to believe -- the careful work by six dozen experts from around the world, who put all the data together into regional and global reconstructions, or the opinions of some nonexperts who took studies individually without trying to acquire a global perspective? 

Finally, let's note again that even IF there was a global MWP, it says absolutely nothing about the current era, when greenhouse gases dominate and the amount of energy the Sun is delivering to the Earth has been on a declining trend since about 1960.

Interesting Things

Some of the things I found interesting lately:

Bill Gates has committed $2 billion to development of new energy technologies to combat climate change. More in this article in The Atlantic.

Abe Streep went to Wyoming and spent a week talking to the people there about coal. It is, of course, lifeblood for Wyoming's economy, and you can't help but feel for a group of Americans who -- as has happened before here, with the steel industry and car industry -- see the coming death of their industry coming and the end of their well-paying livelihoods. They clearly realize, whether all of the admit it or not, that climate change is here and the issue isn't going away (despite the best efforts of the climate thugs). At the same time, though, some of the things Streep hears from people there are just insane -- that Obama is the Antichrist, that he's a Muslim, that he's trying to kill coal for the sake of billionaire backers who are invested in solar energy.

The Hadley sea-surface temperature for September was the warmest (most anomalous) in their records, which start in 1850. It was a huge 0.06°C higher than second place, which was just last month. The last five months are among the 6 warmest months in HadSST3's records; and 3rd place is only as far back as August 2014.

Year-to-date, 2015's SSTs are +0.10°C above 1998's....

Aerosol forcings over the last 10-15 years wouldn't have explained the hiatus (which didn't exist anyway, a closer look at the data showed).

John Fleck says Lake Mead is forecast to drop even further in the new water year, by 5 feet.

Yes, Steyn and McIntyre Are These Kind of Scumbags

Wow. So Steve McIntyre gave a private email I sent to him to Mark Steyn, who publishes it without permission.

When I learned Internet ethics, that kind of thing was competely verboten.

Having to be a snake to make an argument means your cause is already lost.

But that's how Steyn chooses to make a living -- he's a thug who is reduced to earning money by ambushing scientists and whoever writes about them.

I once thought a little better of McIntyre than this. Clearly that was a mistake -- he's turned out to be the kind of snake who slithers alongside the thugs of the world, whispering wicked ideas into their ears. It's not hard to understand why McIntyre is frustrated -- his work has gone nowhere, while Mann has won a major award from his colleagues, has a prominent position with real influence in the debate, is published everywhere, and is quoted in the media basically every day.

Two of Canada's finest.

Alaska Governor Proposes Allowing Barrels of Oil to Vote

OK, it's not quite that crazy (yet). But he's heading in that direction:

In other news, Oregon Republians urge more timber clearcutting to fund forest preservation efforts, yet another study by the Heartland Institute has found that smoking is the quickest and most efficacious way to relieve the unpleasant symptoms of nicotine withdrawal, and the NRA proposes that all Americans be required to carry guns in order to reduce the US epidemic of gun violence.

Willie Soon is Hiding

Odd -- Willie Soon is the lead author on an Earth-Science Reviews paper titled "Re-evaluating the role of solar variability on Northern Hemisphere temperature trends since the 19th century," and they list him as "corresponding author." But unlike all their other papers, they don't actually give his email address.

Instead, the usual links to the corresponding author just go around in a loop.

Strange. Why wouldn't Willie Soon want to correspond with people who are reading his paper, if he was didn't have something to hide?

The Backwards Evidence That Climate Deniers Use as Proof They're Winning

It's the latest amazing(!) rebound (don't strain your eyes trying to find it here) in Volkswagon's stock price, via Eric Worrall at Woo-What.

Because, you know, any letup of the so-called "free market" in punishing VW for their massive fraud -- fraud that killed ~ 40 Americans (hope none of them are Eric Worrall's relations!), and destroyed tens of billions of dollars of VW stockholder value -- is now apparently a VICTORY for climate deniers, who don't seem to mind breathing in particulate pollution as long as they can use it for political purposes.

In essence, Eric Worrall is rooting for more fraud like VW's, whose excess particulates cool the planet while chocking cities and killing people. Massive corporate fraud on VW's scale is now a denier's best friend.

Talk about a topsy-turvy world....

The Department of Oops - David Rose Edition

From David Rose in the Daily Mail, March 2013:

The graph shows a world stubbornly refusing to warm. Indeed, it shows the world is soon set to be cooler.

Reality:

Do you think these data show the world getting "cooler" after David Rose said it would?

No, I don't either.

David Rose gets another -1. (I hope someone out there is keeping his total score.)

Antarctic Sea Ice Max Declines by a Record Amount

Antarctic sea ice has peaked for the year, and it's significantly below last year's peak -- 1.3 million km² below in fact.

Or, as they like to say, 14,500 Manhattan's below last year.

Or, 3 times the size of California.

It's the lowest peak since 2008. In fact, the maximum's year-over-year decline is the largest ever seen in the satellite era.

That doesn't mean the long-term Antarctic sea ice trend is reversing -- it's still very much upward.

This reversal, has, though, given a sharp reversal to annualized southern sea ice extent:

But it's still far above the trendline.

It will be fun to watch what happens from here. (But no, a resumed increase won't disprove manmade global warming.)

Attitude is Everything

Why the Budget Has Been Tight

via Imgur.

Africa's Future is in Rooftop Solar Power

Two weeks ago (9/14) the Wall Street Journal had a special supplement section on energy. One of their Africa correspondents, Drew Hinshaw, wrote from Ghana about his family's problems getting electricity from the grid there, especially now that he has an infant son -- the power is unreliable, with frequent daylong outages.

600 million Africas, he wrote, more than half the continent's population, are not connected to a power line. Those that are often have intermittent and unreliable service.

So Hinshaw put in rooftop solar where he lives, spending $3000 for two solar panels and lead-acid batteries that meet his family's basic requirements -- a refrigerator, fans, laptop, and modem.

His article. titled "So Much Sun, So Little Electricity," was accompanied with some data, which I've converted to the graphical form below. It shows, it seems to me, that the future prosperity of African societies will not come only from a vast fossil fuel infrastructure like the developed countries have, but will instead include a large amount from active individual and local efforts to utilize the the continent's most easily accessible resource.

The Upcoming Supermoon Lunar Eclipse

This will be good, especially if you're on the west coast of the U.S.: a rare supermoon lunar eclipse next Sunday evening, followed by a bright supermoon the next night.

"Supermoon" means the moon is full and at its closest approach (perigee) to the Earth, meaning it will look larger than usual (and 14% larger than at apogee). There have only been 5 of these since 1900; the last was in 1982, and the next won't happen until 2033.


It will be especially convenient on the U.S. west coast, because the moon rises early in the evening, so kids will be able to see it without staying up late. This site has details for many of the major cities that will be able to view at least part of the eclipse -- western Europe will be able to see the ending of the eclipse Monday morning, and New York City can view the maximum at 10:47 pm Sunday evening.

The Oregonian has details for this part of the world:

For viewing in Portland and northern Oregon, the eclipse begins at 5:11 p.m., Sunday, Sept., 27, 2015. That's before it gets dark and before the moon rises, but it only gets better.

The maximum eclipse is at 7:47 p.m. next Sunday evening and continues until 10:22 p.m., for a duration of five hours and 11 minutes. For 72 of those minutes, the only light hitting the full moon will be a reddish glow from sunrises and sunsets around the globe. The full moon takes place at 7:50 p.m. PDT next Sunday.

The moonrise that evening is at 6:58 p.m., at 88 degrees (or almost due east). The sunset is at 6:59 p.m., so the sky should be getting dark as the moon goes into its full eclipse at 7:11 p.m. next Sunday. The moon will be just 8 degrees above the eastern horizon at the instant of the greatest eclipse, making the event more spectacular than during an eclipse occurs with the moon high overhead.

Another Turd from Tony Heller (AKA "Steve Goddard")

Tony Heller -- the real name of the blogger Steve Goddard -- is so angry no one takes him seriously anymore that every other post of his (literally) is covered with spittle as he rants and raves that all climate scientistgs are criminals and frauds who have Satan over for tea.

Problem is, Heller has thoroughly earned his disreputation, with boneheaded errors like this [retraction] and this, for which even Judith Curry called his analysis "bogus."

Heller produces turds like clockwork. Here's yet another:

This is another lie, as only Steve Goddard could produce.

The Hadley Center's HadCRUT4 data series for the Southern Hemisphere is here. Here's the explanation of their file format. Notice what it says about columns 11 and 12 (click to enlarge):

If you can't read that, the last bullet item is:

Columns 11 and 12 are the lower and upper bounds of the 95% confidence interval of the combined effects of all the uncertainties described in the HadCRUT4 error model (measurement and sampling, bias and coverage uncertainties).

Thus, the 5-95% confidence limits for the HadCRUT4 SH global temperature anomaly for January 1850 are -1.055°C and -0.058°C (top line, far right) -- a huge range in accuracy, with error bars ~ 90%, and definitely not the 0.001°C Goddard claims. (Without knowing the instruments involved -- which Goddard does not -- we can't say if the precision is warranted or not. In any case, the number comes from a model, not from raw measurements.)

The effect on long-term trends: zilch.

There's a reason everyone but the Heartland Institute has dismissed Goddard as a crackpot....

Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Ohm are in a car....

Heisenberg, Schrödinger and Ohm are in a car.

They get pulled over. Heisenberg is driving and the cop asks him "Do you know how fast you were going?"

"No, but I know exactly where I am" Heisenberg replies.

The cop says "You were doing 55 in a 35." Heisenberg throws up his hands and shouts "Great! Now I'm lost!"

The cop thinks this is suspicious and orders him to pop open the trunk. He checks it out and says "Do you know you have a dead cat back here?"

"We do now, asshole!" shouts Schrödinger.

The cop moves to arrest them. Ohm resists

(Thanks Jim.)

Cyclonic Energy at Record High

August had the highest global ACE value -- Accumulated Cyclone Energy -- of any August since records began in 1970. [data]

It's not a perfect metric of cyclonic energy -- it doesn't include a storm's size, for example, as I wrote about here and here-- but it does seem the most popular and the most published.

Of course, August also saw the highest sea-surface temperatures according to HadSST3 data (since 1850) and NOAA data (since 1880). Just a coincidence I'm sure.