Welcome to the latest Climate Cuttings, in which I round up interesting stories on the Global Warming front.
First up was the Lockwood paper which purported to end Svensmark's arguments that the main driver of climate change is cosmic rays. Certainly the press were keen to echo Lockwood's statement that this ended the argument. Commenters at Climate Audit wondered about why Prof Lockwood used a long filter when dealing with a short-term effect, why he used the notoriously unreliable surface temperature record, and whether he was looking in the wrong place. I think we'll have to wait for a response from Svensmark himself for enlightenment here.
The Armstrong paper which claims that the IPCC couldn't forecast the arrival of next Christmas, let alone the climate next century, continues to get a lot of attention. IPCC lead author Kevin Trenberth attempts a rebuttal at Nature Climate Feedback. His argument seems to be that the IPCC deals in scenarios, not forecasts and so Armstrong's points don't apply. We might characterise this as the "I did not have sex with that woman" argument.
Eske Willerslev, described in Science how he and his team had used recovered DNA to show that the Greenland ice sheet was forested in the past, but that the ice sheet made it through the last interglacial when temperatures were up to 5oC higher than today, the implication being that we may not be doomed after all. Real Climate responded with a piece analysing the press releases which followed the paper's publication.
The latest evidence that global warming causes both madness and unemployment was found in a story from worsethanfailure.com. Man switches off office air conditioning to save the planet. Writes pompous letter to colleagues to tell them what he has done. Discovers on Monday morning that he has destroyed the office IT infrastructure. Takes early retirement.
Inspired by the example of Al Gore, Oxford University decides to go into the global warming movie business.
Retiring boss of the British Antarctic Survey, Chris Rapley is interviewed in the THES. He raises once again Monbiot's idea of Nuremburg-style trials for skeptics. Nice.
And lastly, inspired no doubt by the success of these Climate Cuttings posts (readers in the hundreds, you know) Real Climate has started its own weekly round up of climate stories.