Blog Archive - June 2008

North Pole notes

I always find it interesting as to why some stories get traction in the mainstream media and why some don't. In online science discussions, the fate of this years summer sea ice has been the focus of a significant betting pool, a test of expert prediction skills, and a week-by-week (almost) running commentary. However, none of these efforts made it on to the Today program. Instead, a rather casual article in the Independent showed the latest thickness data and that quoted Mark Serreze as saying that the area around the North Pole had 50/50 odds of being completely ice free this summer, has taken off across the media. (read more...)

More PR related confusion

It's a familiar story: An interesting paper gets published, there is a careless throwaway line in the press release, and a whole series of misleading headlines ensues. (read more...)

Ocean heat content revisions

Hot on the heels of last months reporting of a discrepancy in the ocean surface temperatures, a new paper in Nature (by Domingues et al, 2008) reports on the revisions of the ocean heat content (OHC) data - a correction required because of other discrepancies in measuring systems found last year. (read more...)

Wired Magazine’s Incoherent Truths

Many of our tech-savvy friends — the kind of folks who nurse along the beowulf clusters our climate models run on — are scratching their heads over some cheeky shrieking that recently appeared in a WIRED magazine article on Rethinking What it Means to be Green . Crank up the A/C! Kill the Spotted Owl! Keep the SUV! What's all that supposed to be about? (read more...)

Ice Shelf Instability

Ice shelves are floating platforms of ice fed by mountain glaciers and ice sheets flowing from the land onto the ocean. The ice flows from the grounding line where it becomes floating to the seaward front, where icebergs calve. For a typical glacier when the climate warms the glacier merely retreats, reducing its low elevation, high melting area by increasing its mean elevation. An ice shelf is nearly flat and cannot retreat in this fashion. Ice shelves cannot persist unless the entire ice shelf is an accumulation zone, where snowpack does not completely melt even in the summer. (read more...)

Brits Rely on Rumsfeld in Climate Article

Back in 2006, in a paper describing an update to one of the standard global surface temperature data sets, HadCRIT3, Brohan et al. (2006, JGR, doi:10.1029/2005JD006548) included the following passage: (read more...)

Of Buckets and Blogs

This last week has been an interesting one for observers of how climate change is covered in the media and online. On Wednesday an interesting paper (Thompson et al) was published in Nature, pointing to a clear artifact in the sea surface temperatures in 1945 and associating it with the changing mix of fleets and measurement techniques at the end of World War II. The mainstream media by and large got the story right - puzzling anomaly tracked down, corrections in progress after a little scientific detective work, consequences minor - even though a few headline writers got a little carried away in equating a specific dip in 1945 ocean temperatures with the more gentle 1940s-1970s cooling that is seen in the land measurements. However, some blog commentaries have gone completely overboard on the implications of this study in ways that are very revealing of their underlying biases. (read more...)