The Blackboard:

What is the “true earth” weather variablity? 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 […]

Illinois garden,
April showers come in May
Everything’s soggy.

Over at Climate Audit, Steve Mosher has been showing readers who Model E hindcasts HadCrut data. He suggested I show how “Lumpy” hindcasts. And, as we’ve been discussing trying to tease out time constants using assumptions made by Schwartz in his 2007, I thought I’d show you the method I’d really prefer to […]

In my most recent post,, I noted that the current empirical estimate of the time constant given by Schwartz, Scafetta and in my earlier blog post is roughly 8 ±2 years. However, I also noted that Schwartz admitted uncertainties in the method itself. We all discussed a range of difficulties […]

One sign of an important paper is to count the number of immediate responses. By that measure, Schwartz 2007 “Heat capacity, time constant and sensitivity of the Earth’s climate system ” appears to have made quite an impact.
The impact is not surprising as this paper represents the relatively rare attempts to […]

Today… Jim and I were painting.
Jim went to take his mother to church.
I visited James Annan’s blog and discovered “A Comment on ‘Heat Capacity, Time Constant and Sensitivity of Earth’s Climate System’” will be published. (I briefly examined the implications of their equation (4) to what I would estimate for the time constant of […]