Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Climatic Pincers Maneuver

This figure pretty much encapsulates our screwed up East Coast winter....  Time for spring to pinch off the salient....

Shown is the Sea Surface Temperature anomaly for today... Perhaps being a tad facetious, but where else could the cold air have stuck around but over land?

Doesn't bode well for the East Coast fisheries either....

Thursday, March 13, 2014

But you still shouldn't eat that yellow snow...

In what could very well be a front runner for next years Ignobel Prizes, researchers have demonstrated that the 5 second rule for dropped food has validity....

From Science Daily 
The findings suggest there may be some scientific basis to the '5 second rule' -- the urban myth about it being fine to eat food that has only had contact with the floor for five seconds or less. Although people have long followed the 5 second rule, until now it was unclear whether it actually helped.
Professor Hilton added: "Our study showed surprisingly that a large majority of people are happy to consume dropped food, with women the most likely to do so. But they are also more likely to follow the 5 second rule, which our research has shown to be much more than an old wives tail." 
Either someone didn't proofread this or the good Professor slipped in a Freudian reference to being a widower....
If the only place that is cold is your backyard, does it mean Global Warming is wrong?

Came across this over at Jeff Masters venerable  blog   A poster, RetiredPhysicist (now that is a moniker that I can relate to) posted the following figure (Jon Martin at UW-Madison)


The image above shows the total square kilometers covered by 850 hPa temperatures < -5 C for the DJF period in comparison to "normal" (solid blue is mean, and the dashed are +/- 1 standard deviation).  Data is for 1948-49 to present.
RP summed it up nicely:
He also noted that this year had the least overall (time averaged/integrated) spatial extent for the period of record. 
We, unfortunately, have been the ones stuck in the anomalously coldest pocket the entire time.

Tuesday, March 11, 2014

A New Big Bang....
Caught the premiere of the "new and improved" Cosmos hosted by Neil DeGrasse Tyson on my DVR last night. Too early to say whether it will be a success, my own take is that NDT is trying too hard and he is not coming across as himself...

I had never known about the connection that existed between NDT and Carl Sagan and science is full of great personal stories like that...

My favorite anecdote about NDT was when he appeared on The Daily Show and pointed out that the trademark globe was spinning in the wrong direction....





Musings from Afar....

Came across this recently, Dave Cohen is one of the few people that I would not want to face off against in fight club style on-line debate...

Dave has a way picking off the scab and poking around uncomfortably and he has zero tolerance for idiots...

Friday, March 7, 2014

On the other Hiatus.....

If anybody wants to claim global warming stopped 17 years ago, they had better be able to explain the following:
 Fitted trends using GISTEMP 
1970 to 1997:  0.146 +/- 0.067 C/decade (2 sigma)
1970 to 2014:  0.163 +/- 0.031  C/decade 
Even if I "cherry-pick" the warmest month in 1997-1998 as the supposed inflection point (Feb. 1998), this is what emerges
1970 to 1998.2:  0.156 +/- 0.063 C/decade 2 sigma
If the warming "stopped" why has the rate of warming increased if I add the last 17 years in?

The Bitch is Back....

Overheard  this over at Darwinian's Blog and I had to share:

From a recent exchange with Jeffrey Brown aka Westexas
Circa 2008, I was contacted by a research scientist at Sandia Labs. They had an informal Peak Oil working group, and he said that they were stunned when they worked through the implications of “Net Export Math.” A few months later, I was invited to make a presentation on net exports at Sandia (I had to pass a security background check to get on to the facility).

In any case, I made my presentation at Sandia, which was shown via video link to other national labs (Los Alamos, etc.), to what has to be my most intimidating audience ever. There was no real argument over the model, since they very quickly understood the simple math. I understand that a contingent of scientists from Sandia subsequently approached senior DOE/EIA executives about their concerns about net exports, and the scientists were told that the higher ups didn’t want to hear it.

Fast forward to late 2012. I was part of an ASPO-USA delegation that briefed senior EIA and DOE personnel in Washington D.C. (including the EIA administrator) on Peak Oil and Peak Exports (at least they were willing to listen). I made a brief presentation on net exports, in the context of increasing demand from developing countries, and the first question I asked them was if anyone at the EIA was modeling future Global Net Exports of oil, assuming a continuing increase in consumption in net oil exporting countries. The answer was “No.”