Friday, May 04, 2007

Confused on the concept. . . . .

So your hmble and obdient Rabett went over to post a comment on Nature's new blog, and he gets this out of office reply for the lord high controller of the comments

From Heffernan, Olive Thu May 3 19:47:49 2007
Return-Path:
Subject: Out of Office AutoReply: [Climate Feedback] New Comment Posted to 'Confusion on Climate Variability and Trends'
Date: Fri, 4 May 2007 03:47:49 +0100

I am out of the office until Wednesday, 9 May and will respond to any queries on my return,

Many thanks,
Olive
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Ethon always did want to visit London for liver pudding snacks.

UPDATE: As the mice have spotted, Tim Lambert has put out a tasty liver a la Nature Blogs, and as you might guess from the lawyerese above the harumphing has already started. Did you know that Roger Pielke Jr. is a PROFESSOR!!!

Posted by EliRabett at 12:18 AM

16 comments:

Anonymous said...

Has Ethon called in on Mr Lambert? He's serving liver and onions.

4/5/07 4:47 AM
Unknown said...

Er...you may enjoy London; we even have public transport and magic lights which appear in the evening.
Macmillan are based in Basingstoke. I know Basingstoke. London it is not. There's a Monty Python sketch which features the town.

If the livery company is now inhabiting this crowded overspill town in North Hampshire, as opposed to the sunny, bucolic climes of Boulderville, they are to be pitied rather than envied.

I wondered why RP put up his post; do you think he was fishing for sympathetic 'oh no, don't go...' comments? My, that's snarky.

PS: guess who's been spotted by the Blorg...

4/5/07 5:41 AM
Anonymous said...

Pielke might be a "professor" but have you looked at his CV? Not much there that has been through peer-review.

Plenty of opinion pieces, though.

Mus musculus anonymouse

4/5/07 10:12 AM
Anonymous said...

Cripes. Pielke is taking it in the pants over on Deltoid.

4/5/07 10:33 AM
Anonymous said...

"This e-mail is confidential and should not be used by anyone who is not the original intended recipient.
Karl Rove was undoubtedly behind the particular wording of the disclaimer:

"This e-mail is confidential and should not be used by anyone who is not the original intended recipient (That means you, Patrick, you @#&$!*%%@#)"
"If you receive information about Vallery Plam... (I mean, what's her name) please delete in from your mailbox (ASAP!!!)"

4/5/07 10:48 AM
Anonymous said...

Roger Pielke's comment on Deltoid: "Eli- What is your point? You wouldn't be trolling would you? ;-"

I didn't know they gave fishing licenses to small furry rodents.

Is that your fishing vest in the picture, Eli?

4/5/07 11:20 AM
Anonymous said...

Eli said on Nature's new blog :

"if you look at trends from say 1980 to 1990 or 1990 to 2007 in the southeast US you get a significant warming trend vs a standard 1951-1980 period.
So the question occurs, why use a map of anomalies from 1901? What was the point?"

...and what is the point in asking?

Pielke is almost certainly aware of what Eli pointed out and if that is the case, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Pielke has been picking cherries from the deep South. (I here they have some good ones down there)

4/5/07 11:37 AM
Anonymous said...

Pielke is now over on Prometheus trying to soothe himself and splain' things to his readers.

That will probably become his pattern.

Mus musculus anonymouse

4/5/07 11:50 AM
Anonymous said...

...slinking back to the lair to lick his battle wounds.

-- Horatio Algeranon

4/5/07 12:12 PM
Oliver said...

Just to say that comments are up on Climate Feedback now. New bolg, snafu, what can I say

4/5/07 1:15 PM
Anonymous said...

Roger Pielke said (on Nature's Blob): "Eli- The focus on the long term is because this is the time-period that the IPCC uses for attribution. I do not doubt that the climate has changed since the 1970s in the US southeast. The question is whether this decadal change can be attributed to human emissions of GHGs, as presented by the NYT. According to the IPCC on this short-time scale at this regional level, it cannot be."

First, the NY Times never claimed that all the warming in the continental US was attributable to human causes, as Pielke implied: "The New York Times reports that these differences can all be attributed to human-caused climate change" -- RP

The NY Times article simply referred to a trend: "A scientific consensus has concluded that this warming trend has largely been caused by the human production of heat-trapping gases."

Second, the implication that one can not draw any conclusions about such a temperature trend in the continental US over the last 30 years (as compared to a 30 year baseline from 1950-1980) is just silly.

After all, the warming ever the continental US over the last 30 years did not occur in isolation and was hardly anomalous in comparison to what happened throughout most of the world over the same period.

Most of the rest of the world warmed as well. In fact, that is is precisely the period over which most of the worldwide warming occurred during the 20th century -- and the IPCC just said in their recent report that most of that warming was almost certainly due to human activities.

And of course, there is the elephant in the room that Pielke has conveniently ignored.

With the exception of parts of the southeast, temperatures increased significantly over most of the continental US over the entire 20th century, so Pielke is simply engaging in cherry-picking when he focuses on the southeast rather than most of the continental US over the same period.

--Horatio Algeranon

4/5/07 1:55 PM
Marion Delgado said...

Until, and unless, Nature reps call it Nature's blog, I wouldn't. That missive from Maxine (Clarke, I believe, Publishing Executive Editor, London) put at least some distance between Nature and that whole network:

"Thanks for the nice welcome to tbe blogosphere.
Not being a climate scientist myself I will not comment on the scientific comments you make, but in response to M. Delgado and S. Bloom, the contributors to the Nature Reports Climate Change (note, not a part of the journal Nature, but a blog of the separate (online) publication Nature Reports Climate Change, http://www.nature.com/climate/index.html, published by Nature Publishing Group) are clearly listed on the blog itself, if you click on the category "contributors" on the front page. http://blogs.nature.com/climatefeedback/contributors/ Roger Pielke Jr's entry reads: Roger A. Pielke, Jr. is a Professor in the Environmental Studies Program and Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado. He has degrees in Math, Public Policy, and Political Science, and spent 8 years at the U.S. National Centre for Atmospheric Research, 1993-2001. In 2006, he received the Eduard Brueckner Prize in Munich, Germany for outstanding achievement in interdisciplinary climate research. His most recent book is The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics (Cambridge University Press).
Nature Publishing Group doesn't need anyone to lobby us to start blogs, we love blogs and have been running them since 2005. You can set one up yourself if you like, on our Nature Network at http://network.nature.com. (I run two Nature Publishing Group blogs myself, one for authors and one on peer review. Nobody lobbied me in either case ;-) )
Posted by: Maxine | May 4, 2007 07:51 AM"

(I changed her link, http://www.nature.com/authors, because it is most unhelpful and the link as posted takes you to Maxine Clarke, my best guess at who she is)

Someone with better credentials than I have should go to that network, sign up as a user, and make a blog request. It's that simple. Especially if you're a few scientist someones and wouldn't mind a small amount of Bloggy activity.

5/5/07 8:27 PM
Anonymous said...

Notwithstanding Maxine's implication, I somehow doubt that just anyone would be able to set up a blog with Nature publishing group .

I'd bet that Nature publishing maintains full control over who sets up a blog and presumably over content as well.

--Horatio Algeranon

6/5/07 11:22 AM
Anonymous said...

My guess is that the main organizer for the blog was Roger Pielke Jr. Someone else may have made the initial offer or come up with the idea, but most of the people, other than the Nature folks, are people who travel with Pielke.

There's the Boulder types and then there's von Storch who has helped to get Pielke Jr. some sort of obscure award in Germany called the Eduard Bruckner Prize.

You can see that Hans Von Storch signed the award announcement. So Roger Pielke Jr. probably reached out to von Storch and Zorita, the guys at GKSS, to get them on the blog.

My guess is that this new blog is Pielke Jr.'s latest attempt to expand his audience, since the lagomorph ban seems to have killed the Prometheus readership.

Mus musculus anonymouse

6/5/07 12:14 PM
Anonymous said...

I say it's the Hoagland Face on Mars in that big red circle, not some obscure gray area indicating no detectable change and insufficient data.

No matter what the figure caption claims.

-- a Mousterian

7/5/07 1:11 PM
Anonymous said...

I find it very interesting that Pielke has chosen to only show the temperature map on left half of Fig 3.9 in the IPCC AR4WG1 document and omit the text from below the Figure.

The map that Pielke provided and circled (left half of fig 3.9) showed the "spatial patterns of annual surface
temperature changes for 1901 to 2005".
He omitted the right half of the same figure "patterns of annual surface temperature changes for 1979 to 2005".

By focusing on the map on the left, he has conveniently ignored the fact that the last 30 years showed warming over the vast majority of the US (even the area in the southeastern US that he had labeled cooling). The plant hardiness map update obviously corresponds most closely to the more recent warming.

Also, by focusing on the region that he circled and (mis)labeled "cooling" on the left-hand map, Pielke has effectively ignored most of the US where the temperature did increase over the century period.

Also note what IPCC says about trends: The minimum number of years needed to calculate a trend value is 66 years for 1901 to 2005 and 18 years for 1979 to 2005.

The increase in annual temperature (shown by the map in Fig 3.9) over most of the US is interesting, but the seasonal maps in Figure 3.10 are most relevant to the discussion of how recent temperature increases relate to the plant hardiness map update.

Fig 3.10 shows seasonal trends for 1979 to 2005.

According to IPCC
"Warming dominates most of the seasonal maps
for the period 1979 onwards, but weak cooling has affected a
few regions, especially the mid-latitudes of the SH oceans, but also over eastern Canada in spring, possibly in relation to the strengthening NAO (see Section 3.6.4, Figure 3.30). Warming in this period was strongest over western North America, northern Europe and China in winter, Europe and northern and eastern Asia in spring, Europe and North Africa in summer and northern North America, Greenland and eastern Asia in autumn..."

Temperatures in the winter are obviously highly relevant to the discussion here and if you look at the same region that Pielke circled and labeled cooling on the annual temperature map (Southestern US) for the winter months DJF, you will see that there is actually a warming trend in the winter months in that very same area (southeastern US) for the period 1979-2005.

-- Horatio Algeranon

7/5/07 4:51 PM

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