New page in AGW Observer: New research

I have added a new page to the site. The page shows the latest research papers divided to different subjects. Later on there will be archive pages for each subject. The new papers in the new research front page will be occasionally gathered to a blog posts by subject, and after the post has been published the papers in question will be moved to the archive pages. This way the new research front page only shows the latest papers and you can check the older papers from the archive. I’m also going to add the papers from the old new research posts (from this date to the beginning of the feature in 2010) to the archive pages, but this will take quite a lot of time.

The new page will be updated quite frequently so if you don’t want to wait for the blog posts containing the new papers on each subject, you might want to check the new research page regularly.

Your paperlist suggestions

Years ago I had a thread where I asked for paperlist suggestions. It’s time to do another round. Go ahead and suggest climate-related subjects on which you would like to have a list of scientific papers. I don’t promise to do all or any of them, and I also don’t promise to do them quickly, but your suggestions do have a good chance to go high in my to-do list.

Thank you!

In the social media, I’m not the most responsive guy. People follow me, retweet me, blogroll me, and so on, but I rarely react. It’s not because I don’t care, but I just don’t have time to follow all the things that are going on.

This post is for you who have complemented me or shared my links in internet forums, liked or shared my links in Facebook, favorited or retweeted me in Twitter, included me into the blogroll of your excellent blog, or printed one of my paperlists and shoved it to the throat of their denier-friend:

Thank you. I don’t say this enough (or at all), but I do appreciate your actions to redistribute the science I have decided to include to my channels.

In Twitter, I mostly stay quiet because I want to keep my account strictly to “business” (it’s not really business as I don’t get paid for this) and I don’t want to bother people with too many chatty tweets. Almost every day there are several people who favorite and retweet my tweets in the Twitter. Thank you for that.

In Facebook, AGW observer page is somewhat quieter. But also there the likes and shares are precious, because it gives more “air-time” to the science.

And that is what I really want to show – the science. Real heroes here are the scientists. I’m just a paracite who feeds on their work. Please follow every social media account of climate scientists, climate journals and climate institutions. And show an extended middle finger to those entities that try to show climate science community in bad light.

About New research from last week series

The goal of the New research from last week series is to offer an additional climate research news resource to other news medias. Also, I would like to show that a lot of climate related research is published continuously and that this research is diverse in their study subjects. The New research from last week series does not cover all climate science published in certain week. Below it is briefly discussed what gets included and what doesn’t.

Paper coverage

Papers in the weekly batch are only a minor fraction of all climate related papers that got published in certain week. I have some journals in my RSS feed reader and from their feeds I select those that catch my eye for some reason. The reasons why some paper catches my eye vary from week to week. Sometimes there’s a geographic angle, for example a study from a country that has not been covered in the series before. Sometimes the study subject is so uncommon that I might add it to increase diversity of study subjects.

At the time of writing, there are 76 journals in my feed reader. In a good week, these journals might easily feed me 500 papers. From these I select the 10-20 papers you see each week in the post (or in Facebook or Twitter). Rough calculation shows that I don’t cover more than 5 % of weekly climate research (and the coverage is usually less than that).

There are lot of journals I don’t cover. Some of these are conscious decisions, such as Science, Nature, and PNAS (as an exception, sometimes I do include papers from Nature Geoscience) because their output is mostly from other branches of science and the papers they publish already get publicity from other media. But there are also some other journals missing from my feed reader. I constantly add some journals but there are always some that fly under my radar. Then there are the ones that don’t even have RSS feeds for their new papers, such as Climate Research. I won’t browse journal websites to see if they have published new papers (because that is how I originally did this series and it was very time-consuming). There are also lot of climate related papers published in journals that usually cover some other branches of science and those I won’t notice.

Only peer-reviewed papers are included (with few very rare exceptions).

Paper publication date

I go by my feed reader. Some journals publish in their RSS feeds papers that are in press and some journals publish them only after they have been officially published. So the official publication date is not necessarily from last week. On the other hand, you might see in my batch a paper that you already saw couple of months ago as a pre-print.

Other studies from last week

Originally there were lot of papers that I weren’t sure if I should include them to the weekly batch or not. Many times those papers were left out. Situation was improved with the addition of other studies section. There I can include such papers with little effort and the reader at least gets to know the paper exists.

Classic of the week

In order to be included to the series, the weekly classic needs to have full text freely available online.

Feedback

Is welcome.

Rules of discussion

Below the rules are given for discussion in AGW Observer blog. The purpose of these rules is to ensure that discussion stays polite and on-topic, and also that discussion stays within limits of laws.

Violations of these rules are handled individually. Possible consequences of rule violations are public or private warning, placing violator to moderation queue, blocking posts containing violations, or removing commenting rights of the violator. If rules are violated repeatedly regardless of warnings, commenting rights are removed. Interpretation of the rules is done by owner of the AGW Observer.

1. Information given with comments

– Name or alias given in comment must be according to good taste and not offensive.

– E-mail address given with the comment must be working address of the author of comment. E-mail addresses given with comments are not given to third parties.

– Any links given with comments must not lead to inappropriate web sites (such as porn sites).

2. Staying on-topic

Comments must deal with the issues in the article you are commenting.

3. Courtesy

Comments must be made with courtesy. Insults are not allowed. This applies also to third parties – insulting of people/instances outside discussion (such as climate scientists) are not allowed.

4. Appropriateness

Contents and language of comments must be appropriate and suitable for anyone to read. No cursing. No tasteless pictures. No links to pages with inappropriate material.

5. Copyrights

Laws concerning copyrights must be followed. When referring to writings of others, it is not allowed to copy the whole text or large passages without permission from the author. It is allowed to quote referred texts in reasonable amounts.

6. Privacy

Revealing personal details of other people without their permission is not allowed, unless information in question is already legally available in public. Copying e-mails of other people to comments is not allowed without permission from e-mail author.

7. Advertising and spamming

– Commercial advertisements are not allowed without permission from the owner of AGW Observer. Same goes for off-topic websites.

– Making posts with similar content to several comment threads is considered as spamming and is not allowed.

8. Writing on behalf of others

Writing on behalf of others is not allowed. Is someone has something to say, they must do it by themselves. Especially writing on behalf of persons, whose commenting rights have been removed, is not allowed.

9. Saving bandwidth

Avoid including large images to comments. If there is a need to refer to a large image, give link to the image instead of including the whole image. Not everyone has fast Internet connection. Small images are ok.

10. Maintaining discussion

– Making one provocative comment (or giving one provocative link) and subsequently not participating to discussion (this is known as “hit and run”) is not allowed.

– Relevant questions must be answered in reasonable time, just like usually happens in a civil discussion.

11. Use of aliases

Each commenter should use only one alias with comments. If there is a need to change the alias, it is to be announced clearly.

12. Disturbing behavior

Any disturbing behavior not explicitly stated above will also be intervened. If something is not specifically mentioned in rules above, it is not necessarily allowed.

13. Moderation

If commenter is not happy with the moderation of discussion, it is not to be complained publicly, but commenter needs to contact the owner of AGW Observer privately.

14. Rule additions and changes

Rules will be added or changed when needed.

New improved AGW Observer!

I made some changes here:

– Page “about” was outdated so I edited the text there. I also added some things.

– I took out the usage of the term “denialist”. It’s not really necessary and some people find it offensive, so better to take it out even if it is quite descriptive term relating to some of the public “debate” on the climate issues. Category denialist claims was changed to climate claims and similar change was made to one heading in Article page.

That’s it. Have a nice summer (NH) and winter (SH).

2010 – First full year of AGW Observer

I made the first post of this blog in July 28, 2009, so the 2010 was the first full year of AGW Observer. What has happened here during the first year (and a half)?

161 posts and 567 comments have happened, but there’s more in the details:

Paperlists

The main attraction here has of course been the paperlists. The biological indicators of global warming was the subject of my first paperlist. When I was creating the paperlists at early stage I had no idea if they would be appreciated by many. I just made the lists because I had a need for them so I originally made them as a resource for myself. By now it is clear that the lists are quite widely appreciated.

It also became clear that I had no idea which lists would be popular. When looking at the evidence for the anthropogenic global warming, to me the most compelling evidence comes from the direct measurements from the atmosphere. Based on that, I thought that my lists on the observed changes in outgoing longwave radiation and in downward longwave radiation would be the most popular ones. Those two are relatively popular lists but clearly the most popular list so far has been the “Papers on laboratory measurements of CO2 absorption properties”.

I was quite surprised when I realised that the laboratory measurement list was by far the most popular of my lists. I originally thought of it as just a curiosity – just something to show that we also have done the basic science on these issues in labs too, while really looking at the OLR and DLR measurements with more interest. But it turned out that the laboratory studies were just what doctor ordered. This list is cited continuously and frequently in Internet discussions. In my blog statistics I can see when someone gives a link to my blog and I do click the links to see what kind of use my lists have. When following those links it becomes obvious that the laboratory paperlist is the most cited one, probably almost half of the citations are to this list.

Top ten lists at the moment are:

1. Papers on laboratory measurements of CO2 absorption properties
2. Papers on climate sensitivity estimates
3. Papers on the Milankovitch cycles and climate
4. Papers on water vapor feedback observations
5. Papers on changes in OLR due to GHG’s
6. Papers on the non-significant role of cosmic rays in climate
7. Papers on the theory of CO2 absorption properties
8. Papers on Earth’s radiation budget
9. Papers on global cloud cover trends
10. Papers on tropical troposphere hotspot

I thank all the scientists who made the studies and wrote the research articles for me so I could include them to my lists.

Other articles

I haven’t written many articles as I have concentrated more on the paperlists. Two of my articles clearly stand out as most popular:

1. Comments on Lindzen & Choi (2009)
2. Unchallenging Copenhagen Climate Challenge

Traffic providers

I’m very bad and lazy in advertising myself. Fortunately, many have been kind enough to give links to my site. My blog is included in the blogrolls of quite many blogs. Some people have also mentioned my blog in their articles. My blog is also every once in a while mentioned in online discussions. Many would deserve a mention by name here for being particularly active in linking to my blog, but as I’m probably not aware of everyone active in this sense, I’m just making these general statements. However, my statistics do show where I get most traffic, so I’ll provide a list of places bringing me most traffic:

1. Skeptical Science – John Cook has included links to my paperlists in several of his articles.
2. RealClimate – Here the traffic comes from the discussions.
3. Tiede – Finnish popular science magazine. The traffic comes from their discussion forum which unfortunately seems to be badly infected by climate change deniers and conspiracy theorists.
4. Tuukka Simonen’s blog – A fellow Finnish climate blogger who has my site in his blogroll.
5. Rabett Run – Eli Rabett was one of the people who noticed my site at very early phase.
6. Gaia – Kaj Luukko’s Finnish blog about climate and energy related issues. Kaj also writes with me in our group-blog, the Ilmastotieto.
7. CO2-raportti – Finnish news site that also publishes some of my articles. Here the traffic is originating from the discussions.
8. Doskonale Szare – Climate blog from Poland having my site in blogroll. It’s nice to see that I have readers from all over the world.
9. Only In It For The Gold – My site is in the blogroll.
10. Google reader.
11. Scienceblogs.com. As the previous entry wasn’t a single site as such, we’ll take a honorary 11th place here as well. This is actually several blogs collected under a single heading. Some traffic here is coming from discussions at Deltoid and Stoat, but most of it is from A Few Things Illconsidered who include my postings to their weekly news.

I thank everyone who has ever directed or at least tried to direct some traffic here.

Quite a lot of my traffic comes from search engines. Here’s the top ten traffic giving search words for my site:

1. “agw observer” (and also “agwobserver”)
2. “agw”
3. “1500 year climate cycle”
4. “temperature 100 meters below the earth’s surface”
5. “polar bear populations”
6. “co2 absorption”
7. “underground temperatures”
8. “ocean heat content”
9. “co2 absorption spectrum”
10. “stratosphere temperature”

AGW Observer as traffic provider

Of all the links I have provided in my site, here are the 10 most clicked ones:

1. http://www.skepticalscience.com/. It’s good that I can offer John some (but only some) of the traffic back he has directed here.
2. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6TVR-4RBYD6J-3&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&view=c&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=a984bf14bb0c59800a34ee9583aebb4d. Let me first take the opportunity here to give feedback to ScienceDirect: Dear ScienceDirect, could you please do something for your article URL’s? I know that I can dig up some shortened versions of the links (the DOI link for example), but it would be so much easier if I could just copy/paste a nice short URL from the address bar of my browser. Other places providing science articles have no trouble in providing compact URL’s. Thanks. It was rather surprising to see this paper by Toth et al. being clicked so much as it doesn’t appear to be that important for the questions being discussed here.
3. http://rabett.blogspot.com/. Same comment as in 1.
4. http://deepclimate.org/. Deep Climate – this site really deserves the traffic.
5. http://www.realclimate.org/. Same comment as in 1.
6. http://scienceblogs.com/deltoid/. I think for Deltoid I give more traffic than get.
7. http://tamino.wordpress.com/. Open Mind – great place to direct some traffic to.
8. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6TVR-4YPPR9H-2&_user=10&_coverDate=03%2F27%2F2010&_rdoc=1&_fmt=high&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1298837019&_rerunOrigin=scholar.google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=a9a61cd3459336a4642e863c62dd3bac. “Sorry, your request could not be processed because the format of the URL was incorrect. Contact the Help Desk if the problem persists. [SD-001] “. Ouch. I better check what this is about.
9. http://climatecrocks.com/. Climate Denial Crock of the Week – has my site in blogroll but it seems that I have (so far) given more traffic than gotten.
10. http://chriscolose.wordpress.com/. Climate Change – I really enjoy Chris Colose’s articles.

Other things

I wish everyone enjoyable year 2011!

Christmas Science

In science there are some christmas related things, such as the interpretation of the Star of Betlehem as a celestial object and the workload of Santa Claus from the point-of-view of physics. These can be considered as celestial objects which all in ancient Greece belonged to the field of meteorology. There are some other things in christmas also relating to meteorology and climate science.

In the Pacific Ocean there is a strong weather event known as El Niño. It has been most noticeable arnound christmas time and the name of the event referred to Christ child (El Niño is Spanish for little boy).

There is less industrial activity in christmas time. This causes a reduction in industrial pollution, which has been also observed from the atmosphere. For example Nottrodt et al. (1980) observed the atmosphere and noticed clear changes in atmospheric composition in December 24 and 25, 1976. They named christmas related reduction in industrial pollution as one possible explanation for the observation. Other similar results have been published by Bhugwant et al. (2000) and Madhavi Latha & Highwood (2006).

This is known more generally as the holiday effect and it has been observed also relating to some other holidays. For example Tan et al. (2009) studied how the holiday effect shows in atmospheric polluting substances during Chinese new year. They observed clear changes in the behavior of polluting substances. Most of the studied substances were reduced during the holiday but ozone concentration increased. Additionally, the traffic related pollution peaks during morning and evening rush-hours disappeared during the holiday.

There are also some additional emissions during christmas for example due to energy consumption of christmas lights and ham-cooking, and also due to over-eating and useless presents.

Here it’s -20°C and over 50 cm of snow. Merry christmas to all of you from this winter wonderland!

References:

Chatrapatty Bhugwant, Hélène Cachier, Miloud Bessafi and Jean Leveau, 2000, Impact of traffic on black carbon aerosol concentration at la Réunion Island (Southern Indian Ocean), Atmospheric Environment, Volume 34, Issue 20, 2000, Pages 3463-3473, doi:10.1016/S1352-2310(99)00405-7. [abstract]

K.H. Nottrodt, H.W. Georgii and K.O. Groeneveld, 1980, Temporal and spatial differences in the elemental composition of atmospheric aerosols, Science of The Total Environment, Volume 14, Issue 2, March 1980, Pages 113-128, doi:10.1016/0048-9697(80)90068-6. [abstract]

K. Madhavi Latha and E.J. Highwood, 2006, Studies on particulate matter (PM10) and its precursors over urban environment of Reading, UK, Journal of Quantitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer, Volume 101, Issue 2, September 2006, Pages 367-379, doi:10.1016/j.jqsrt.2005.11.067. [abstract]

Pei-Hua Tan, Chia Chou, Jing-Yi Liang, Charles C.-K. Chou and Chein-Jung Shiu, 2009, Air pollution “holiday effect” resulting from the Chinese New Year, Atmospheric Environment, Volume 43, Issue 13, April 2009, Pages 2114-2124, doi:10.1016/j.atmosenv.2009.01.037. [abstract, full text]

AGU Blogosphere

If you are interested in Earth sciences and tired of seeing us amateurs blogging about it, then you should see the AGU Blogosphere. It’s the real scientists blogging about the Earth science (oh, and space science too – I’m also interested in astronomy) – not only about climate science but many different fields (well, geology probably being at center of the focus as it’s American Geophysical Union). This one goes straight to my RSS-feed reader.

AGW Observer goes social!

You can now find AGW Observer also from

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