A marine heatwave by any other name

A letter in Nature is yours to read for a mere forty bucks⁰. It’s a response to an earlier communication¹ (also forty smackeroonies) about marine heatwaves and how clarity in communication can only come if everyone uses exactly the same definition, which happens to be the one proposed by the 30-odd co-signatories. The letter disagrees, not with the basic idea that there should be only one definition, but with which one it should be. The letter has fewer co-signatories – a mere 15 – but that shouldn’t sway us; science isn’t a popularity contest⁹.

This blog post is free², there are no co-signatories, but I’d like to say that everyone makes very good arguments – at least as far as I can judge them, which admittedly might not be too far – and in doing so describe a range of situations for which a one-size-fits-all approach strikes me as inappropriate.

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Conferences

It’s EGU¹ week^a and I am sad because I am not there. I’m also relieved that I’m not there, because conferences really take it out of me. I have an ambivalent relationship with them. On the one hand, what could be more interesting and exciting than a whole week dedicated to discussing every aspect of climate science in extreme detail? Conferences are an important part of how science is done – sharing ideas and building connections across the world – and it’s hard to get ahead if you don’t attend them. On the other hand, they’re hell on earth⁰. At least they are for me.

It all starts with^-7…

I have a very particular set of skills

“I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you want... I do have are a very particular set of skills. Skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you

Me, talking to a reporter*.

Flying Monkeys

If you go to the trouble of making a nice data file and putting it on the web, please don’t change the filename every time you update it, or if you must, make it predictable, or have a duplicate that’s called “current” or “latest” or… just, please…. I’m begging you.

And, if you change the format, oh.. then I will personally train a horde of flying monkeys to hunt you down – wherever you may be – and, dressed to mock your everyday sartorial choices and haircut, they will hoot incessantly beneath your bedroom window until you change it back again.

At that point, the hooting will cease, but they will follow you around forever, dressed just the same, hair cut just the same, as a reminder. A reminder that you once made a grown man cry because you couldn’t fix on comma separating or tab delimiting a file of 74 numbers and put the creation timestamp in the filename.

Now, you’re probably thinking “monkey’s are kind of cool.”. No! I will hand pick the most ornery, the most objectionable, borderline-evil monkeys, governable only because they recognise in the blast-furnace fervour of my gaze a spirit alike in malice.

And their children will haunt your children, and their grandchildren will haunt your grandchildren, and so on till the world is nothing but monkeys and your eternal shame.

And, aeons hence, when aliens first set foot on this Earth, your mocking likeness, will greet them from the plinth of every public square.

Statuary of consummate ridicule crafted by the sentient descendants of my monkey horde in whose very DNA I have inscribed that the only salve to creation’s horrors is to bring to a greater state of perfection the sound trashing of your name.

And so, the message will pass across the galaxy and into legend.

The uncertainty range

Home, home on the range

Where data, uncertain, does reign

Seldom the bearer of an uncorrelated error

And it’s mute on the horrors contained.

Strange things found lurking in (error) bars 2

For years, I gave presentations with a standard slide that talked about strange things found lurking in bars. I meant error bars, latterly known less excitingly as uncertainty ranges¹, and the strange things were the things that the real world (or at least our statistical notion of it) could do within the confines of those error bars.

Giving the impression of data

Meyer, H., Pebesma, E. Machine learning-based global maps of ecological variables and the challenge of assessing them. Nat Commun 13, 2208 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-022-29838-9

This paper draws attention to things that are often trampled in the pursuit of knowledge. Whether knowledge can be pursued is an interesting question, but the headlong stampede in the direction of the nearest thing that looks like it is dangerous. Knowledge is as likely to be flattened as caught and the hesitant are likely to go down with it. They can, perhaps, console themselves by peeling what’s left of knowledge (and themselves) off the floor, but by then the crowds will be elsewhere, busy chasing the latest thing.

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*.

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.