Two days ago I bought a new laptop. It arrived yesterday, and today is my first full day of working with it. I don’t actually have it yet; it’s sitting in my apartment’s office waiting for someone to sort the mail. That and it’s still Thursday. Yeah, I’m at work trying hard not to run into the office and demand that they do the mail right now, and am going to “future-post” this. I’ll give me an excuse to write another post and up my post count.

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"How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic," a series by Coby Beck contains responses to the most common skeptical arguments on global warming. There are four separate taxonomies; arguments are divided by:

• Stages of Denial
• Scientific Topics
• Types of Argument
• Levels of Sophistication.

From warming is due to the Urban Heat Island effect to there is no consensus and climate models are unproven to it was warmer during the Holocene Climatic Optimum, Cody does a great job of explaining the science in climate science in a clear and concise way. He tackles not only the common arguments but also the more obscure. For instance, I’ve never actually heard anyone argue that the CO2 rise is natural, but there’s the article for anyone to read.
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Albrecht (1989) hypothesized that the observed increase in liquid water content in clouds modified by aerosols was due to the more numerous cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) providing more condensation points for the available water vapor to condense. The overall affect of this was to decrease the size of the average cloud droplet, and thus reduce collision and coalescence, which reduced the amount of drizzle.

This post is a quick back-of-the-envelope calculation that shows that any increase in liquid water content in clouds perturbed by ship effluent can not be caused by the water vapor emitted from its combustion process.

The generalized formula for the combustion of a hydrocarbon is
C_xH_y(S_z) + (O₂ + N₂) → CO₂ + H₂O + (O₂ + N₂) + {NO_x + HC + OOC + C + CO + SO_x}
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From Forecasting monsoon remains a cloudy endeavorby Shaun McKinnon in The Arizona Republic:

Christopher Castro, a climate scientist at UA who has worked on monsoon study projects for several years, believes many of the answers can be found in the equatorial Pacific Ocean, using the same changes in sea-surface temperatures that produce El Niño and La Niña, two powerful phenomena.

Until recently, scientists didn’t see strong links between those two weather-makers and the monsoon, but Castro said his research suggests the link exists.

Crunching 50 years’ worth of data, Castro concluded that Arizona’s winter and summer precipitation seasons ran on opposite tracks. When El Niño produced a wet winter, a later and drier monsoon would follow. When La Niña steered rain and snow away from the state during the winter, an earlier and wetter monsoon often resulted.

This sounds like interesting stuff. I have the archived ENSO data, as seen in my previous posts. I don’t have any indication of what they are using for the strength of the monsoon. I do have precipitation data from the airport over the hundred years or so (the airport did move in that time though). I might do some simple analysis on this later this week.