The Blackboard

Evidently, I must be wearing those butterfly wings and using them to propel myself on a flight of fancy inspired by the recent announcement that the official sea surface temperatures. You know, the little snafu over switching from buckets and engine inlets during and after WWII? Visiting

Some things don’t mix well:
Butterflies on climate blogs
create confusion.
Some time ago, Steve Mosher asked me what I thought of the whole “chaos” discussion that broke out comments at RC. I thought… I don’t want to even go there. But then, I read Henk Tennekes’ discussion at Roger Pielke Sr’s blog, and I got sucked [...]

It’s not often one gets to revert to tighter uncertainty intervals due to measurement noise! But, oddly, this may be happening.
Just this morning, I posted mealy-mouthed uncertainty intervals rather than firmly decreeing the 2C/century the IPCC predicts falsified. The reason I’d gone all soft on my uncertainty intervals was that JohnV has [...]

Let’s face it, whether we agree on uncertainty intervals or not, we are all watching the temperature trends.
Of course you know April temperature fell relative to March. (The interesting thing is that, at some agencies, March temperature fell relative to March!)
But how much has that affected the trend? Here’s the [...]

Handy Man Husband
Keeps himself very busy
Fixing up the house.

My husband is something of a handy-man. From time to time, he decides to take up a project. This spring’s project is redecorating the upstairs. Over the past few weeks, he’s been painting, refinishing and what not. Sometimes, I have to help. (But [...]

Yesterday, I described a time period during which I think we can safely agree the earth’s short term climate variability was uninfluenced by volcanic eruptions. Today, I’ll provide results for the variability of 7 years trends calculated based on a merge of HadCrut, GISS Land/Ocean and NOAA data for the earth’s global mean [...]

There have been concerns that the uncertainty intervals based on linear regression of seven years data are too small and not correctly account for the full range of “weather noise”. Generally speaking, counter examples of historic variability used to justify larger effects of “weather noise” than appear in my uncertainty intervals have all estimated [...]

Several blog visitors have suggested that I use historic data to estimate uncertainty intervals for measured trends. I’ve always accepted this in principle, but I’ve been a bit leery because, to do this correctly, one must estimate the uncertainty intervals based on a time period that matches the current one.
However, I’ve now come [...]

What is the “true earth” weather variability? Is it the full range of variability over all possible climate models? Does it matter for testing?
I am asking this because the answer has relevance to the questions I discussed yesterday in Are the IPCC AR4 predictions falsified?. I showed that indeed the IPCC AR4 predictions appear [...]

Recently, Gavin at Real Climate suggested that the IPCC projections don’t falsify. He also explained the reasons he thinks they do not.
Today, I will explain that the IPCC projections do indeed falsify in any sense that is meaningful. But, you don’t think so, I think I will demonstrate you must also think [...]