"We will often lapse into using mb as units of pressure, because the unit sounds comfortable to atmospheric scientists. For calculations, though, it is important to convert millibars to pascals. This is easy, because 1 mb = 100 Pa. Hence, we should all learn to say 'hectopascal' in place of 'millibar.' It may ta

The current La Nina isn't looking very impressive, and might already be withering. Here are the 30-day and 90-day averages of the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) -- the SOI is

How much has the drought cost Texas?O

Castigating scientists for made-up preconceived notions has been done before...."Most controversial is the evolutionary question. I have done a great deal of work on Darwin and can say with some assurance that Darwin did not derive his theory from nature but rather superimposed a certain philosophical

"We are here to learn to love one another. I do not know what the others are here for."-- W. H. Auden(or maybe it was The Revd. Vivian Foster)

The NSIDC's measurement for Arctic sea ice extent is 13.73 Mkm2, the 4th lowest January in their records (Nov 1978-present).The 12-month rolling average is 56,000 km2 (0.5%) above the minimum, which occurred three months a

Via John Fleck I learned about this new blog, All Models Are Wrong, by climate scientist Tam

The statement by climate scientists in today's WSJ is extremely well-written -- concise, unacademic, forceful, and confident without being scolding. (And I'm amazed the Journal published it; I'd love to have been a mou

My prediction for the UAH January lower troposphere global temperature anomaly is -0.14°C, which would be rather cold.Basically all I did was take the daily AMSU Channel 5 temperatures

The IPCC has responded to Steve McIntyre's question for the legal basis of their request for him to remove any ZOD material and related discussions, and by their response it seems clear there isn't any. (Scroll down to his

An IPCC AR5 First Order Draft (FOD) is available here, for WG1 Chapter 5: Information from Paleoclimate Archives.Figures 5.7a and some in Figure 13 are especially interesting.

The Worldwatch Institute has a report

An Oregon court rules that it is a violation of Fourth Amendment rights for a policeman to search someone's digital camera without a warrant: http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/

"The work of the IPCC illustrates the following five important features which I believe should characterize the scientific assessments that form an input to policy making.... "...Thirdly, all parts of the assessment process need to be completely open and transparent. IPCC documents including early dr

Here's a good example of the lengths to which American Tradition Institute is spinning these emails to try to find something -- anything -- untoward: the circumstances surrounding the Soon & Baliunas paper. (A blast from the past.)Maybe thi

The emails released by the court in the American Tradition Institute v. University of Virginia seem pretty tame, so far. The ATI is clearly

I learned some interesting things from Richard Brookhiser's book James Madison -- mostly, that the "founding fathers" where hardly paragons of virtue, and the same shenanigans went on then as go on today. Did you know:

Stuff I think is interesting and once probably thought about blogging more about but now it's too late:The United States has more people in solitary confinement than any other country in the world. Read that again..... What a sha

Did you hear about the homeopath who forgot to take his medicine?He died of an overdose.Via Tallbloke (where they are busy

NOAA has updated their upper ocean heat content data to Dec 2011, and it doesn't look like much cooling is going on. (Tamino deconstructs those who are

The Hadley Centre publishes their December '11 temperature anomaly: +0.262 C. http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/hadcrut3vgl.txt At least by my records, that makes 2011 the 11th warmest year in t

Steve McIntyre has received another request from the IPCC to remove text and a figure from the AR5 ZODS (Zero Order Drafts) that appear on his site:http://climateaudit.org/2012/01/26/a

Here's a great image of a a dust plume from the western Sahara making its way across the Atlantic Ocean. (Taken by the Moderate Resoluti

This looks like it will be provocative (to say the least) -- an upcoming documentary on the oil industry called Greedy Lying Bastards, by Craig Rosebraugh. Here's

I received an email from Sophie Schlingemann, the IPCC Legal and Outreach Officer, requesting removal of the Zero Order Drafts from my site. The wording is nearly identical to the letter received by

I asked Kevin Trenberth for his thoughts on today's Loeb et al paper in Nature Geosciences, since he and John Fasullo

There's a new paper just out in Nature Geosciences that seems important: it says there is no "missing energy" in the climate system after all, and that the Earth continues to accumulate energy [as expected with AGW]. Here's the abstract

I came across this really interesting thought:"As seen by paleoclimatologists 10 million years in the future, whatever species they may be, the present era of catastrophic release of fossil fuel carbon will appear as an enigmatic event which will have a name of its own, much as paleoclimatologists and pale

By the way, a study published last September estimates that climate change will cost

Here's an interview of Canadian Prime Minister Steven Harper, done a day or two (I think) before President Obama's decision to deny the application of the Keystone XL pipeline. He doesn't sound like somehow who will