John Kennedy

Indicators of Global Climate Change 2024: annual update of key indicators of the state of the climate system and human influence Abstract. In a rapidly changing climate, evidence-based decision-making benefits from up-to-date and timely information. Here we compile monitoring datasets (published at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenod...

The rate of change from Forster et al paper (note the different spelling) in contrast has a physical meaning.

essd.copernicus.org/articles/17/...

Alternatively, their model doesn’t address the causes and if we don’t know what caused recent changes then we don’t know if that rate will continue into the future, increase or decrease.

I think the answers to the two questions are related. Their model is statistical with limited physical meaning. It’s not so much that the rate of warming isn’t credible but that we can’t relate that to the physical factors in future scenarios.

An egregious encomium or execration of the evanescent, ephemeral, and effervescent made eternal and enduring through the excretions of an eejit Part VI of my alliterative and rambling notes on a minor anomaly. Part I – A multitude of possibly unsatisfying answers Part II – A panoply of trifling dissatisfactions Part III –&nb…

A small update to my long and unjustifiably profane blog post on the rollercoaster that is global temperature and the interpretations of its wrigglin' innards.

ENSO is coming

diagrammonkey.wordpress.com/2025/07/04/a...

They come after.

Yes! All analyses should be written to be updated on a regular basis.

at this point, if I wrote an opinion piece about how Nature indiscriminately publishes every ridiculous essay about AI, I have little doubt they would publish it

OK, that's one glowing AI article too many in Nature and one cosy fireside editorial too many from Science.

Can we have a prestige journal with a bit of attitude please, a little bite, a hint of tooth. Articles I want to read not shred. Papers the authors might actually have enjoyed writing.

A Bumper Bibliography of Bombast and Brouhaha Part V of my increasingly alliterative and rambling notes on a minor anomaly. Part I – A multitude of possibly unsatisfying answers Part II – A panoply of trifling dissatisfactions P…

The preprint is now a year out of date. I read it last year, but I wondered if it had improved at all since...

diagrammonkey.wordpress.com/2025/02/16/a...

ha!

Still paywalled, alas.

Screen cap from the journal Geophysical Research Letters saying that an article is "Free Access" and instant access can be purchased for between $12 (for 48 hours of fun) and $49 for PDF download and online access.

Which is it GRL? Free or not free?

It can be...

en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wholist...

When you get older, you start making them up by mistake because you've forgotten the correct word.

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

A screen capture of six figures from Nature journals. Each of the figures contains multiple panels, often in wildly different styles and colour schemes. None of them is legible at this scale nor, one suspect, at any scale.

Dear Nature, how are those figure limits working out for you?

Lovely. The word, that is.

Verisimilitude Someone on Bluesky was asking people for their favourite $20 words. That seems kind of steep, but such is inflation. Mine were: peristeronic, septentrional, titivation, and velleity. However, the l…

Q. What do CGI cigarette butts and global temperature estimates have in common?

A. Verisimilitude.

diagrammonkey.wordpress.com/2026/03/03/v...

Verisimilitude Someone on Bluesky was asking people for their favourite $20 words. That seems kind of steep, but such is inflation. Mine were: peristeronic, septentrional, titivation, and velleity. However, the l…

Word of the day is verisimilitude

On data, reality, realism, the texture of reality and, yes, verisimilitude.

diagrammonkey.wordpress.com/2026/03/03/v...

Google Has a Secret Reference Desk. Here's How to Use It. 40 Google features to find exactly what you need, the alternative search engines that do things Google won't, and the reference desk framework underneath all of it.

TIL about a large number of operators/tools that can be used to make Google searches much more focused and productive
🧪 #philsci

cardcatalogforlife.substack.com/p/google-has...

We need a realistically realistic reality detector.

Verisimilitude Someone on Bluesky was asking people for their favourite $20 words. That seems kind of steep, but such is inflation. Mine were: peristeronic, septentrional, titivation, and velleity. However, the l…

Word of the day is verisimilitude

On data, reality, realism, the texture of reality and, yes, verisimilitude.

diagrammonkey.wordpress.com/2026/03/03/v...

I would be interested to see what effect they have. For some reason that I cannot now recall, I have the notion that some of the WWII warm bias is a sampling issue and is not wholly due to systematic errors in the measurements. More data would certainly be helpful.

How many?!

I guess the question is what can dataset creators do (or not do, or do differently) to help users make informed choices?

Duo Chan has been working on a process for helping users find their ideal dataset, which might help with such things, but for any particular use it is ultimately the user's responsibility to work out if the dataset they're using has the desired characteristics.

Digitizing weather observations from World War II US naval ship logbooks World War II is a significant event in the history of the world, with disruption to all aspects of life including routine weather observations. We now face the consequences of these observational gap...

Interesting to see this. And, we have lots more data for WW2 in the Pacific now, but I don't think they've been integrated into any of the datasets yet: rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Addressing the World War 2 Warm Anomaly in HadSST.4.2.0.0 We present an update to the Hadley Centre Sea-Surface Temperature dataset (HadSST.4.2.0.0) that addresses residual warm bias during the Second World War (WW2). Using an existing quantitative definitio...

Some of the HadCRUT biases are fixed in HadSST.4.2.0.0 but the cold early 20th century bias remains and I don't think we're much closer to understanding why it occurs even if we have good reason to think it real.

arxiv.org/abs/2602.03347

I was also delighted to discover another global temperature dataset that I had previously missed, with a delightful name - LaMa. Reading the LaMa paper now and its claims of realism, after this new one that supersedes it and its claims of realism, one wonders how realistic a dataset can get.

It's frustrating because that seems like it would be easy to solve the latter by a small modification of the constraint term to account for the error covariances. The bias issue is one that remains to be widely solved, but the potential uncertainties there are larger than the reconstruction errors.