I’ve been grading exams again. Of course that means I’ve been wanting to swallow a bottle of sleeping pills concurrent with a bottle of vodka. I’ve resisted the urge, and with less than 10% left to go, the end is in sight. One thing that seems to be fairly prevalent is the thought that the cardinal directions West and East are synonyms for left and right, respectfully. I’m not sure where exactly that comes from, but for fun, let’s blame cartographers. On every map I’ve ever seen, North is at the top. This means that West is on the left, East is on the right, and South is at the bottom.

But the Earth is a sphere. This is no absolute direction that corresponds to up, down, left, right, forward, or backward. Those directions are dependent upon your particular orientation. At this very moment, I am facing North, so to my left is the West. But if I swivel 180 degrees (or π radians) in my chair, now East is on my left.
Continue Reading »

In my last post, I described how I thought that color can be used to visualize changes in sea ice extent. The use of color is often underutilized when presenting figures for consuption by the general public. The GISTEMP plots of the global temperature index is an example where I think that color could be used to help improve Joe Somebody interprete the graph.

There are 3 things that are presented in the graph:

1. The actual temperature index for each year (black box with connecting dashed line)
2. The 5 year running mean of the temperature index (solid red line)
3. Error bars on 3 of the data points (green ‘I’ shaped things)

Continue Reading »

Former Vice President Al Gore has started a new project recently. It’s called the We Campaign and is self-described as “a project of The Alliance for Climate Protection — a nonprofit, nonpartisan effort founded by Nobel laureate and former Vice President Al Gore. Our ultimate aim is to halt global warming. Specifically we are educating people in the US and around the world that the climate crisis is both urgent and solvable.”

It’s odd that they would describe themselves as nonpartisan. Other partisan groups that describe themselves as nonpartisan or bipartisan include the Fraser Institute, Heartland Institute, Discovery Institute, and The National Center for Policy Analysis.
Continue Reading »

Instead of a typical April Fools Joke, I decided yesterday to do a sort of April Fools Experiment. The goal of the post was to take something completely made up, pepper it with scientific lingo and see if anyone would bite. I decided that the post would need many hints along the way that this was not real. This post highlights what should have set off warning bells. I have disabled comments in the experiment post and posted a prominent link to this post so that future searches will hopefully not be mislead by the attempt.

The first thing that a reader should have been skeptical about was the title. There are currently 4 global climate metrics, and they all show the same thing. You’re reading on a blog that a new metric is more accurate than those that have survived much greater scrutiny.
Continue Reading »