Comments birdbrainscan has made

  • Inhofe 650 and other lists

    Hi Andrew and everyone.

    I've been building a website listing researchers working on climate science and related fields.

    List of climate scientists

    (No, I don't have a list just for "experts on feedbacks" though I do have a few notes on some topics each person has addressed.) I've included all 619 contributing authors to IPCC AR4 working group 1 (the scientific basis) as well as many others I've found. I've linked to their academic or research lab homepage (I found 580 of 619 wg1 authors; some sites such as the Hadley Centre don't allow personal homepages.)

    I've used Google Scholar to note the number of cites to each author's top four most cited works. I sort the list on the number of cites of their #4 article.

    I also note which authors have signed public declarations either for prompt action on cutting GHG emissions, or one of several 'skeptic' declarations and open letters.

    I have also gone through the list on names in the Inhofe/Morano list of 'skeptics' for comparison. On the whole, Morano appears to have relied heavily on the lists of signatories of large skeptic statements like the 2008 Manhattan Declaration. Since some people have complained of being included on Morano's lists against their will and in conflict with their actual views on climate, I set off that listing separate from the documents that were evidently signed voluntarily.

    Have a look at my summary and links at the top for some commentary on where signers of 'activist' statements and of skeptics statements fall on the ordering by most cited works.

    Jim Prall
    Toronto, Canada

    http://birdbrainscan.blogspot.com/

    On Marc Morano agrees that only experts in climate feedbacks can make judgments on climate posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago 18 Responses

  • That one last Senate vote

    It's just so galling to watch 2008 dribble away with the Senate regularly one vote short of passing so many green measures.

    What really gets my goat is that Larry "Wide Stance" Craig (R-ID) is still in there voting against anything remotely green. You'll recally that Sen. Craig pled guilty to soliciting gay sex in an airport washroom... then asked to un-plead when the story broke. He said he'd resign (in disgrace) from public office -- then changed his mind and chose to tough it out. His wife "stood by her man", he denied that he's gay or bi, and the Moral(istic) Majority happily forgave him or bought his lively excuses including "I have a wide stance" (when he tapped feet with the undercover cop next door) and "I was reaching for a piece of TP stuck to my shoe" (when he held hands with him).

    In a priggish, prudish and homophobic culture, somehow it's still okay to solicit gay sex in a public bathroom if you are just really really conservative.

    If only the public had been just a bit less tolerant, and Sen. Craig had bowed to public pressure to resign. Then maybe we'd have the more robust energy bill, the national Renewable Electricity Standard, etc.

    As it is, we can wait and hope for the next session. Everyone please take a look at the League of Conservation Voters, a pro-environment congressional watchdog: http://www.lcv.org

    Their environmental voting scorecard for Sen. Craig (result: 13% green) is at:
    http://capwiz.com/lcv_stage/bio/keyvotes/?id=206&cong ...

    I just hope more people catch on to how Sens. Craig, Inhofe, Stevens, McConnell and all the LCV's "dirty dozen" are stuffing their pockets with oil and coal PAC funding, voting to increase pollution, and making a mockery of the "conserve" in conservative.

    http://birdbrainscan.blogspot.com/

    On Renewables score big victory in the Senate posted 1 year, 7 months ago 5 Responses

  • model-free thinking?

    It's all very nice to say the articles are tainted by the mere mention of the word "model" but I think you're being too fastidious. A radiation flux balance calculation such as the simplified calcuation from Arrhenius' "law" is also just a model. It is an abstraction, a simplification. The atmosphere is not a black body. A good atmospheric physics account, like the one I linked to by Ray Pierrehumbert (free, full text, and very clear writing style - try it out!) goes through all the steps in working up from an extreme simplification like Arrhenius, up to a more realistic representation that takes into account pressure altitude, lapse rate, humidity, vertical distribution of CO2 partial pressures, etc.
    While you can work through Arrhenius' formula on one page with just calculus, the more realistic treatments require numerical iteration.

    Then it emerges that convection and uneven distribution of water vapor are important, so a more realistic treatment requires a three-dimensional picture of what is where. This gets to the modern models like GISS, modelE and others. Note that these make no claim to predict where it will rain on what day decades into the future, but they DO claim to realistically project the statistical properties of the atmosphere - what kinds of weather occur at any particular latitude, time of year. Recent versions even include factors like orography (effects of mountain ranges) and ocean circulation. This requires vast numbers of computations.

    There are hard data against which to validate what comes out of the computer - all the weather and air sampling observations that have been archived from many decades of balloon sondes, plus satellite data.

    I've looked at the work of the modellers, and I know some profs involved in the field. They are realistic about what the models can and cannot do. I've seen them speak to the public about this and they are up front about where the models do or do not "have skill."

    So the "models" you so casually scorn are not wild guesses tossed together willy-nilly. They have been carefully examined and tested against actual data first.

    The reason most articles on climate sensitivity refer to models is that the models are genuinely useful and testable. If they can't reproduce the known history of the climate in the 20th century, they're sent back for more work.

    I think you don't do yourself any credit by suggesting, it seems, that you thinking is closed to what the 7000+ articles with "model" in the title even have to say. Please open your mind a bit and go read the full article of at least a few of the top cited articles.

    I have already seen most of the (seemingly) contrary articles you eagerly cite. I've read many more articles with a range of viewpoints and different takes on questions like Antarctic mass balance.

    If you are really seeking to understand the science and not just score debating points, please set aside your abhorrence for the term "model" and look at the evidence in the scientific literature.

    http://birdbrainscan.blogspot.com/

    On Today: Christopher Castro posted 1 year, 10 months ago 68 Responses

  • update on Arrhenius

    So the skepto-trolls here dance in a circle chanting that Dr. Dessler hasn't replied to your big smackdown asking for "where is the evidence" -- "pick the three best articles!"

    Oh, but it's not enough to point out that the IPCC reports contain clear summaries of the latest research (up to the cut-off date for inclusion anyway), with all the citations right there. Do you want to be hand-held to find the right chapter, and decide which articles are the best?

    Then Max derives a climate sensitivity of 0.7K for 2xCO2 using Arrhenius' late 19th century formula. Nice, but not enough (as you should know if you got that far in the research!) There are feedbacks, particularly water vapor. To move a little bit beyond Arrhenius, check out Spencer Weart's "The Discovery of Global Warming" which traces some of the subsequent thinking of less than a century ago, through Callender and Keeling up to this generation of atmospheric physicists.

    http://www.aip.org/history/climate/

    Some of you guys' comments seem to go toward "convince me that the climate is as sensitive to CO2 as the IPCC estimates" - a tall order for just 3 articles. That might be better met with an intro course on atmospheric physics, such as Ray Pierrehumbert's at
    http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~rtp1/ClimateBook/ClimateBook. ...

    But you did say you just wanted the best three articles. For myself, I've just taken three undergrad courses on this, which did assign many relevant articles (but my course notes aren't nearby so I can't just pull those out.)

    Here are a few things you could do to find three good scholarly articles on climate sensitivity:

    Option A) Go to scholar.google.com and search on "climate sensitivity" with the quotes. Notice that this returns about 9300 articles. How to narrow that down to just three? Dr. Dessler might well be so immersed in this literature that he could have named his three favorites, given a bit of time he evidently did not want to spare to a cheeky debating challenge from someone with a lot of attitude. I can understand that. But just for the record, I'll suggest how to pick three.

    The first page brings up the top hits sorted by most cited. That's a good filter right there. Try the Hansen et al. 1984 article "Climate sensitivity: Analysis of feedback mechanisms" at your local library (it's old so I don't see a copy online) This is most cited with 261 cites.

    Hit #4 is very apropos:
    http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2001JGR...10622605A
    Andronova & Schlesinger, "Objective estimation of the probability density function for climate sensitivity"
    JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 106, NO. D19, PAGES 22,605-22,611, 2001
    The web link gives the abstract and a link to the full text that would cost $9; you can walk in to a local university library and get it for free in the stacks.
    This is one that you will find "alarmist" in that it argues the climate sensitivity to 2xCO2 may well be higher than the IPCC range.

    Round out the set of three with hit #7, which has full text online for free in PDF format:
    http://tinyurl.com/32fhxe
    Gregory, Stouffer et al. "An Observationally Based Estimate of the Climate Sensitivity"
    Journal of Climate, Volume 15, Issue 22 (November 2002)

    Option B)
    Open this recent article by my climatology prof, Danny Harvey of Univ. of Toronto, and go to Table 1 on the 2nd page. This is a table of more recent work on constraining the climate sensitivity to 2xCO2, listing seven different papers since 2001. The citations to those papers are linked in the table as PDF hyperlinks, for your ease of reference. Pick any three of those papers ad libidum and give them a try. You could even read through this paper itself, though it is a bit past the stage you wanted.

    http://tinyurl.com/3dxrcs
    Environ. Res. Lett. 2 (2007) 014001 (10pp) doi:10.1088/1748-9326/2/1/014001
    L D Danny Harvey, Allowable CO2 concentrations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change as a function of the climate sensitivity probability distribution function

    Okay, now you've got two choices for your three articles. Please spare us any speeches on "why couldn't Dr. Dessler just give you this right away" I'll give you my three guesses:
    a) he doubted you really wanted to find them
    b) he was turned off by your snarky slapdown style of defiance
    c) he saw the futility of trying to pick just 3

    I hope one or more of you will impress us by saying something that demostrates you have read and considered the arguments made in one or more of these papers.

    To all the real people on this page - please accept my apologies for feeding the trolls. I just felt like showing that the big challenge was not unanswerable.

    http://birdbrainscan.blogspot.com/

    On Today: Christopher Castro posted 1 year, 10 months ago 68 Responses

  • I'll pay to see Dessler vs. Tim Ball

    If there are any expenses related to the remote link, I'm keen to subscribe--I'd pay real money to watch Dr. Dessler take on Tim Ball. Dr. Ball published four articles in the 80's on ships logs and goose migration as historical temperature proxies. I seriously doubt he could define basic climatology terms (I won't post my picks here lest he read this and go cramming before the event.)

    For the game of Climate Skeptic Bingo (http://timlambert.org/2005/04/gwsbingo/) I'd pick Tim Ball as the best bet for getting a full card, not just a single row.

    I had to sit through a screening of TGGWS recently and it really set my teeth on edge - too many howlers to keep track.

    I once read through a PowerPoint of Dr. Ball's from the Frontier Institute website, and tried to dig up a source for his hand-drawn smooth curvy line graph of temperature since AD 1000. I found another person's PPT (I've lost track of whose) that had even more howlers. I wanted to write them down and pick them apart online, but my brain exploded.
     

    http://birdbrainscan.blogspot.com/

    On Search for local climate skeptic in Texas proves fruitless posted 2 years ago 61 Responses