0. It occurs to me, that often, what an outsider gets wrong when dabbling in another field isn’t just the complex cutting edge stuff, or the intermediate complexity stuff, but the absolute basics. It’s not that the basics are necessarily simple, it’s just that everyone in the field knows them, having absorbed them from colleagues, […]| Diagram Monkey
This plea came across my timeline while most of the rest of Bluesky was speculating gleefully about the death of Donald Trump. One answer, I suppose, is to read my blog though I wouldn’t generally recommend that as any kind of solution to anything. I wrote not just one post on the comms around this, […]| Diagram Monkey
It took me fourteen years to read this book by Michael Polanyi. Old bus tickets used as bookmarks tell me how far I got with each attempt, but this time I finished. For the effort I put in – and it required a lot of effort – it was distinctly underwhelming, but probably worth it. […]| Diagram Monkey
It has been a while since I looked at the merging of global temperature datasets and even longer since I wrote anything up. I have been thinking about it which doesn’t, as with all my thinkin…| Diagram Monkey
A “World View” published in natureorscience by Tim Palmer (TP from hereonin) is one of those odd but energetic articles senior academics write that one has to read multiple times to savour the full oddness. This one asked “Just how bad will climate change get?” and then added “The only way to know is to […]| Diagram Monkey
This is a sort of second part to How to science a science with science but it’s somewhat bleaker and made the whole thing rather long, so I cut it in two. As the ads say: when the fun stops stop. This bit is almost no fun at all. I knew things had definitely gone wrong […]| Diagram Monkey
Natural variability is that component of the climate which could explain anything, but can’t be bothered.| Diagram Monkey
Science is a process. If we consider it merely for the purposes of momentary illumination as an animal, then it is an animal that blunders around somewhat blindly and clumsily, consuming things and excreting various peculiar artefacts: papers, knowledge, synchrotrons. It does this as long as it is alive and active. The various cells and […]| Diagram Monkey
The “Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate” came out last week. I’ve made some broad comments on it already, but I’ve been reading the section on ocean acidification – they call it “The Alkaline Oceans” – in more detail, mostly because it is very short. I’m not an expert […]| Diagram Monkey
When I became a climate scientist nearly 22 years ago, I started accumulating books on the subject. One of the first was called something1 like “Global Warming: Apocalypse or Hot Air?” …| Diagram Monkey
On Saturday morning, while I was half asleep and idly scrolling through the previous night’s awful news, an article kept appearing in my timeline claiming “Major reversal in ocean circu…| Diagram Monkey
Cormorant1 numbers are falling, says the headline I just made up2, and scientists don’t know why. Reading it, I assume that this is a bad thing. If numbers keep falling, there will eventually…| Diagram Monkey
“The 32C heat that will be endured by people in the south-east of England on Saturday will have been made 100 times more likely by the climate crisis, scientists said on Friday.R…| Diagram Monkey
If Pat Frank serves as an example of the kind of knots you can tie yourself (or others) up in if you don’t know what you’re talking about when talking about measurement error and uncert…| Diagram Monkey
Peters Guttorp and Craigmile have written an interesting technote – “A combined estimate of global temperature” which appeared recently in my Google Scholar feed. The note is inte…| Diagram Monkey
A fascinating preprint came across my timeline this morning1. It caught my eye because it came with an aphorism: “Data without uncertainty estimates are empty, uncertainty estimates without d…| Diagram Monkey
On difficulty, slowness, thought, effort, imperfection| Diagram Monkey
Swapping components of global temperature datasets gives a wider range of long-term warming| Diagram Monkey
Out there, somewhere in the wilds, computer programmes are learning to manipulate people. They’ve been doing it for years of course, but they’re getting good at it now. Open AI had one …| Diagram Monkey
Consequential Differences in Satellite-Era Sea Surface Temperature Trends Across Datasets is a neat little paper looking at – and here I risk a good deal of redundancy1 – differences in…| Diagram Monkey
Part V of my increasingly alliterative and rambling notes on a minor anomaly. Part I – A multitude of possibly unsatisfying answers Part II – A panoply of trifling dissatisfactions P…| Diagram Monkey
Is there a better way to combine global temperature datasets?| Diagram Monkey
I’ve been staring intently at this diagram (from Evidence for a limit to human lifespan) for a while now, particularly panel b. Panel b shows linear regressions of the logarithm of the number…| Diagram Monkey
I spent a little more time looking at the data from the paper on “Evidence for a limit to human lifespan”. This figure is the result. The data are available upon registration from (a) s…| Diagram Monkey
This is a slight departure, being a sort of review of (grumble about) a paper that appeared in Nature recently (Evidence for a limit to human lifespan) but is not at all related to weathe…| Diagram Monkey
This year, 2023, global average temperature has done some unexpected things. Naturally, people want to know why and, also naturally, a certain group of people wants to tell them. The first definiti…| Diagram Monkey
Being Part 3 of an ongoing series that is unlikely to reach any satisfying conclusion anytime soon. See Part 1 A multitude of possibly unsatisfying answers and Part 2 A panoply of trifling dis…| Diagram Monkey
In which I wonder what would happen if time ran backwards and the globe cooled.| Diagram Monkey
Scherrer S.C et al. (2023) Estimating trends and the current climate mean in a changing climate. Climate Services vol 33. Scherrer et al. brings together a few of my favourite things1: data smoothi…| Diagram Monkey
