Posted on 12 November 2012 by John Hartz

SkS Highlights

Dana's WSJ, Sandy, and Global Warming - Asking the Right Questions is a detailed critique of an opinion piece written by Roger Pielke Jr. and published in the The Wall Street Journal. The op-ed's subtitle wrongly asserts that "Connecting energy policy and disasters makes little scientific sense." Needless to say, Roger Pielke Jr. and many residents of Deniersville have taken umbrage at Dana's well-reasoned review. This is reflected in the article's very lively comment thread.   

Toon of the Week

What say you?

Does the Weekly Bulletin series serve a useful purpose?  

Quote of the Week

 "We all know the difficulties in attributing any single storm to climate change. But we also know this: extreme weather due to climate change is the new normal," Ban told the 193-member U.N. General Assembly.

"This may be an uncomfortable truth, but it is one we ignore at our peril. The world's best scientists have been sounding the alarm for many years," he said. "There can be no looking away, no persisting with business as usual ... This should be one of the main lessons of Hurricane Sandy."

Source: Climate change 'new normal,' lessons from Sandy - UN chief by Michelle Nichols, Reuters,

New Rebuttal Article

In addition to posting, Hurricane Sandy and the Climate Connection on Nov. 1, Dana also posted a rebuttal to the new denier meme,  Hurricane Sandy had nothing to do with global warming -- #220 on SkS's list of Arguments.

The Week in Review

• About New research from last week series by Ari Jokimäki
• 2012 SkS Weekly News Round-Up #9 by John Hartz
• The Climate Show #30: Obama, Sandy and the rabbit by Gareth
• 2012 SkS News Bulletin #3: Hurricane Sandy & Climate Change by John Hartz
• Hurricane Sandy’s Double Whammy by Greenman
• Fred Singer - not an American Thinker by John Abraham & Dana
• Book review: Rising Sea Levels: An Introduction to Cause and Impact by Hunt Janin and Scott Mandia by Andy S
• WSJ, Sandy, and Global Warming - Asking the Right Questions by Dana
• New research from last week 44/2012 by Ari Jokimäki

Coming Soon 

• New research from last week 45/2012 (Ari Jokimäki)
• Fasullo and Trenberth Find Evidence in Clouds for High Climate Sensitivity (Dana)
• German translation of debunking solutions (John Cook)
• What the 2012 US Election Means for Climate Change and Denial (Dana)
• Drost, Karoly, and Braganza Find Human Fingerprints in Global Warming (Dana)
• 2012 SkS News Roundup #9 (John Hartz)
• Subcap Methane Feedbacks, Part 1: Fossil methane seepage in Alaska (Andy S)
• DIY climate science: The Instrumental Temperature Record (Kevin C)
• The Dirt on Global Warming (jg)
• Wigley and Santer Quantify Human-Caused Global Warming (Dana)
• Grace under Pressure (Doug Bostrom)

SkS in the News

Dana's Climate of Doubt Strategy #1: Deny the Consensus was re-posted on Shaping Tomorrow's World.

Greg Laden endorsed SkS as a resource for "everything you need to know to answer denialist questions."

Peter Christian on iom today endorsed SkS as "regarded even by sceptics as a forum of open rational debate" and referenced the rebuttal to the myth 'global warming stopped in [insert date]'.

Reality Drop utilized the SkS rebuttal to the myth Climate 'Skeptics' are like Galileo.

SkS Spotlights

CycloneCenter.org is a web-based interface that enables the public to help analyze the intensities of past tropical cyclones around the globe. The global intensity record contains uncertainties caused by differences in analysis procedures around the world and through time. Patterns in storm imagery are best recognized by the human eye, so scientists are enlisting the public. Interested volunteers will be shown one of nearly 300,000 satellite images. They will answer questions about that image as part of a simplified technique for estimating the maximum surface wind speed of tropical cyclones. This public collaboration will perform more than a million classifications in just a few months—something it would take a team of scientists more than a decade to accomplish. The end product will be a new global tropical cyclone dataset that provides 3-hourly tropical cyclone intensity estimates, confidence intervals, and a wealth of other metadata that could not be realistically obtained in any other fashion.