IF a Komodo Dragon bites John THEN

“An alternative explanation for differential temperature trends at the surface and in the lower troposphere“

This paper is in JGR. It was written by Philip Klotzbach, Roger Pielke Jr, Roger Pielke Sr, John Christy and Richard McNider. It purports to do exactly what it says on the tin, but gets there via some loopy logic*.

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One in a hundred year events

If an event has a 1% chance of happening in any year then in any century there is:

• a 37% chance it happens once
• an 18.5% chance it happens twice
• an 8% chance it happens thrice or more and…
• a 37% chance it doesn’t happen at all

We call this a one-in-a-hundred year event.

Putting together a really simple website with Chat-GPT

I wanted to put together a quick website to link to the various climate dashboards that have sprung up over the past few years. I already have a year 2000 style list-of-links page, but I thought it would be fun to have a dashboard of dashboards. As it’s a kind of throwaway joke, I didn’t want to spend any time on it. I also wanted to play around with Chat GPT¹.

Who came for the first time to help

I’m no historian^a. Which self-deprecating preface I would preface further by saying, the list of things I’m not is far longer than the list of things that, tentatively, I would claim I am. That list, while longer, probably, than Descartes’ is still a short one. For the past 19 years, I was paid to do climate science. For most of that time, if you’d asked me whether I was a climate scientist, I would probably have said no^b. No one ever asked me though, so I got away with it. I would also say, that not being a climate scientist was no bar to doing climate science. Being a climate scientist certainly would have helped, but it’s not necessary. My lack of credentials thus established, we can continue.

I’m no historian¹… so the past constantly surprises me^c. I was delightfully surprised to read this quote from the reading of Guy Callendar’s paper – The Artificial Production of Carbon Dioxide and its Influence on Temperature – at the Royal Meteorological Society:

“Sir GEORGE SIMPSON expressed his admiration of the amount of work which Mr. Callendar had put into this paper. It was excellent work. It was difficult to criticise it, but he would like to mention a few points which Mr. Callendar might wish to reconsider. In the first place he thought it was not sufficiently realised by non-meteorologists who came for the first time to help the Society in its study, that it was impossible to solve the problem of the temperature distribution in the atmosphere by working out the radiation.“