The Blackboard

There’s no doubt about it: I’m creating the most boring climate blog around! Mostly, I’m just posting snippets of information as I find them, often with no particular interpretation. In comments at Real Climate, someone suggested people read “Internally and Externally Caused Climate Change” by Robock (1978). This paper describes the results [...]

In some comment thread at Climate Audit, Willis Eschenbach estimated the sensitivity of Hansen’s GISS II model by fitting a straight line to the data. I commented, that, at least if the climate behaved like a simple lumped parameter “thing”, that fit would give misleading results for the sensitivity of Hansen’s GISS model. [...]

It’s weird to blog an analysis; it’s sort of like “stream of consciousness curve fitting.” Still, it’s sort of fun. I’m posting results relatively rapidly, and there is no doubt some of these will have errors. I’ll be embarrassed for about 5 minutes after I find them, and then I’ll get over [...]

a number of people are asking for information on the relative forcings in Scenarios A, B, and C. Gavin previously provided lots of scenario data and some plots to support an earlier blog post at Real Climate. However, I, and others in conversations at various blogs are interested in knowing how the volcanos [...]

Yesterday, I announced my prediction of the global mean surface temperature (GMST) based on GISS Land/Ocean data. My prediction based on a very simple phenomenological model of climate with two parameters: time constant τ and inverse heat capacity α. I haven’t knocked all the kinks out of data analysis, but I made the [...]

I thought I’d announce my prediction for the temperature anomaly for 2008. I predict the average temperature anomaly for 2008, as reported by GISS Land/Ocean measurements will be 0.70 ± 0.11 C.
The ±0.11C is my hookey claim for the standard error. That means if my model is halfway decent, there is roughly a 2/3 [...]

I came up with a simple empirical model to estimate climate sensitivity based on a global mean surface temperature record and estimated values of climate forcing. Using Land-Ocean GMST values from NASA GISS, I obtain a climate sensitivity of 1.7 C. This is below the range of climate sensitivity predicted by most [...]

I bet you wondering how Hansen et al. 1988 scenarios look compared to Gavin’s “Weather vs. Climate” graph? Well, here is his graph of the GISS Land Ocean data with the 8 year trend lines superimposed. Below is a similar graph showing the Hansen ABC predictions.

Yes, the trend for the Hansen ABC predictions are above [...]

Roger Pielke Jr. and John Tierney have recently been comparing published predictions of AGW to empirical data. In response, Gavin Schmidt suggested that comparisons should include more than 8 years, and pointed out that computations for Hansen et al. 1988 scenarios A, B, C began in 1983, as Gavin said last May, “giving [...]

Recently, I posted a baseline analysis to illustrate the baseline problem that defines 33C as the greenhouse temperature increment; that analysis included a number of assumptions. Today, I’ll address a specific question that periodically appear at climate blogs. This question is:
Q: The simple based model assumes the earth is isothermal– that is everything has the [...]