I’ve now been writing this blog for almost 5 years and I still don’t quite know what I’m trying to achieve, if anything. Hopefully a blog that presents a reasonable representation of our current understanding of climate science, while also sometimes presenting my own views about this – and other – topics.
Anyway, I thought I would briefly highlight some of this year’s posts.
January saw an attempt to explain the residual airborne fraction and a guest post by Patrick Brown discussing Pat Frank’s ridiculous claims that propagation of error calculations invalidate climate model projections.
February included an expose about David Rose not understanding baselines, a post about William Happer not even giving physicists a bad name, and a guest post by Zeke Hausfather about baselines and buoys.
March saw posts about Matt Ridley’s response to Tim Palmer’s talk about hoax, catastrophe, or just lukewarm, and a post about a potential feedback paradox (partly motivated by Judith Curry’s continual claims that maybe a large fraction of the observed warming could be natural).
April included posts about David Whitehouse appearing to suggest that it’s okay to lie, a post about Roger Pielke Jr. metaphorically throwing his toys out the pram, and another post about reconciling ECS estimates.
May had a post about our new consensus paper, a suggestion that OMICS will publish anything, and what turned out to be a contentious one about deficit model thinking.
June was a reasonably quiet month with a post about the resurgence of Lukewarmers and a post about the Vostok ice core (motivated by a rather confused post by Eaun Mearns on Energy Matters).
July discussed David Whitehouse’s continued confusion, a guest post by Michael Tobis about the red team, blue team idea (suggesting that the only way not to lose is to play), and a discussion of Warren Pearce, Reiner Grundmann and colleagues’s paper on going beyond climate consensus.
August’s highlight was probably the post discussing Ned Nikolov and Karl Zeller’s paper about pressure determining surface temperatures (it doesn’t), but also included a post about Kevin Anderson’s numbers (which turned out to be more contentious than expected) and a post about STS being all talk and no walk (which discussed a Steve Fuller paper which seemed to suggest that STS should be proud of their role in enabling post-truth).
September saw a retrospective about my time engaging online (motivated by something similar written by Philip Moriarty), a brief memorial to Andy Skuce (who passed away this year), a post about the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) playing climateball (badly), and a discussion about carbon budgets (motivated by the Millar et al. paper on achieving the 1.5o target).
October had another post about committed warming (one of my themes), a post about a comment we published in response to Hermann Harde’s incorrect paper about the carbon cycle, a post about cloud feedbacks and one I quite liked about the Virial Theorem (also intended as a reponse to Ned Nikolov’s incorrect assertion about how surface temperatures are enhanced).
November had some rather active posts. One of them discussing whether or not Jordan Peterson speaks the truth, a guest post by Karsten Haustein discussing their real time global warming index, a post about Roger Pielke Jr’s rather confused Mertonian norms inferences, and another highlighting Katharine Hayhoe’s presentation in Edinburgh.
December has seemed rather quiet. There has been an active post about Polar Bears and Arctic sea ice (discussing the Harvey et al. paper about some blogs focussing mainly on Susan Crockford’s work), a post discussing arguing about the greenhouse effect (again), and – most recently – a post about Judith Curry’s apparent ability to communicate publicly without advocating.
Well, that’s ended up slightly longer than intended. I don’t know what next year will bring, but probably something similar to this year – I don’t have any plans to make any changes, although I am finding more and more difficult to find things to write about. All I need to do now is wish everyone all the best for the new year.