The Blackboard

I know very little about James Hansen’s tax plan. One of the reasons is that Hansen himself said very little about it during his recent well publicized speech commemorating his 1988 presentation to Congress. He blew his powder on more explosive sound bites, distracting everyone from actions he is proposing.

Still, Boris did [...]

After Hansen’s 20 year anniversary talk last week, I read some comments debating the question, Is it warmer than June ‘88?. It appears different people understand the question differently, and so give different answers both at other blogs and in comments on my previous post.

During the course of the conversation, various other questions were [...]

Green tomato buds
replace small yellow flowers;
summer has arrived.

My tomatoes were off to a slow start this summer. This was not entirely due to the cool spring. We had our house painted, and I didn’t want to plant tiny seedlings where the painters might step on them.
To have some chance of getting rip [...]

In comments at “In it for the Gold”, David Duff claimed it was now colder than when James Hansen gave his first presentation 20 years ago, basing his claim on data from the UAH MSU.
David Benson responded with
And Roy Spencer’s graph is simply wrong.
So, I wondered what Jim Hansen’s own graph would [...]

I was reading Hansen’s speech; this is my favorite sentence:

Swarms of high-priced lobbyists in alligator shoes help Congress decide where to spend, and in turn the lobbyists’ clients provide “campaign” money.
I thought the alligator shoe comment was so odd, I sprung to action and googled. I guess the “alligator shoes” thing is something [...]

Trends for the Global Means Surface temperature for five groups (GISS, HadCrut, NOAA/NCDC, UAH/MSU and RSS.) were calculated from Jan 2001-May 2008 using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) using the method in Lee & Lund. to compute error bars, and Cochrane-Orcutt and compared to the IPCC AR4’s projected central tendency of 2C/century for the trend [...]

I found a carriage return in function.php. . . Maybe my feed will be fixed now.

Climate bloggers are discussing humidity. David Stockwell compared and contrasted the text of the IPCC AR4 to figures from NOAA’s Earth System Research LaboratoryAnthony Watts had previously discussed the figures.
Having listened to discussions of data quality of radiosondes for years 1, 2, I know that it’s important to find out the provenance of atmospheric data [...]

Is warming on 11 year hiatus? Well… I always think it’s best to ask yourself: Do I really think a particular method of looking at data is meaningful? Would I still believe this if the answers turned out “wrong” from my POV? Or, will I eventually find myself explaining my own method gives [...]

May temperatures are in! So, it’s time to estimate the trends based on the 89 months since January 2001, and take a look at how various other trends are tracking. Here the quick graphical summary of results for data merged from five sources: GISS, HadCrut, NOAA/NCDC, UAH/MSU and RSS.
Click for larger.
IPCC trends [...]