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Showing posts from December, 2024

Can Changes in Cloud Cover Drive Global Warming?

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Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller have published a new paper (NZ24) in the quasi-predatory MDPI journal geomatics [1] which claims to rule out the effects of greenhouse gases as a cause for the increase in GMST in recent decades. Their paper concludes, Our analysis revealed that the observed decrease of planetary albedo along with reported variations of the Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) explain 100% of the global warming trend and 83% of the GSAT interannual variability as documented by six satellite- and ground-based monitoring systems over the past 24 years. Changes in Earth’s cloud albedo emerged as the dominant driver of GSAT, while TSI only played a marginal role. They produce a graph that they believe supports their claim, which sure enough shows a decrease in the Earth's albedo over the last 24 years and a corresponding increase in absorbed solar radiation (ASR). Let me be clear here at the beginning that there absolutely has been both a decrease in albedo and a corresponding in c...

On Using Dunning-Kruger to Explain Science Denial

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“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts, while the stupid ones are full of confidence.” ~  Charles Bukowski  ~ Perhaps we've all encountered individuals who seem to be simultaneously overconfident and incompetent in a subject matter in which they have strong beliefs. When this occurs, many of us become convinced that these people are suffering from what has been popularly coined the "Dunning-Kruger Effect." I'd like to challenge this notion. I think this oversimplifies a complex problem we're experiencing today. We don't gain, learn and process information like we used to, and the information we see is frequently curated  by our own biases and social media, and both can cause us to become ideologically entrenched in a condition in which we accept what is false and reject what challenges us. The Perpetual Sophomore Effect is a Different Curve from the Popularized Dunning-Kruger Effect Dunning-Kruger Effect The actual effect...

Climate Bibliography, Part 1 - The Early Years (1824 - 1988)

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I thought it would be beneficial to produce an annotated bibliography of important scientific works in the field of climate science. Obviously I can't make this list exhaustive, but I'm planning to generate several bibliographies, mostly on specific topics in climate science that interest me, and I plan to periodically modify them as new papers are written (or as I discover papers written in the past). I thought it best to cover the early years of climate science as a historical survey. My first post will cover 164 years of  climate science from Fourier in 1824 to Hansen in 1988.

Correlation Between CO2 and Temperature on Various Time Scales

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Note: 1/15/2024. Graphs are updated to include 2024 when available. You sometimes hear that, at least on certain time scales, CO2 and global temperature (GMST) don't correlate very well or even that the two go in opposite directions. The implication drawn from this is that CO2 can't be the primary driver of climate changes. What I want to show here is that this claim is categorically false. On virtually all time scales in the Phanerozoic, CO2 and GMST correlate very well, especially when taking into consideration that GMST correlates with the log of CO2.  The best way for me to demonstrate this point is to simply show the correlation. Where I can, I convert CO2 to forcings (using RF = 5.35*ln(CO2/280)) and and plot CO2 forcings on the x-axis and GMST on the y-axis. This gives us two advantages: first, it allows us to calculate the r^2 for that correlation, and second, the slope of the correlation gives us an indication of sensitivity - that is, the temperature response to chang...