15 hours ago, Ken Fabian said:

@arc Are you attempting to explain away global warming without the greenhouse gases or other human influences? Any expectation that you have done so in your presentation here seems naive.

Gavin Schmidt quotes are out of date - saying 2023-24 is unexplained is out of date. Studies have been done since then that suggest it maybe shouldn't have been so surprising. Hindsight is like that. I'm fairly sure 1997-98 and 2015-16 seemed unexpected and inexplicable at the time too.

An el Nino ENSO state, above average extra-tropical heat, in part from reduction in NH tropospheric sulfate aerosol cooling (less pollution from cleaner shipping fuels) and some reduced cloud cover (in part from less of those aerosols). And the continued accumulation of global warming since the last record breaking year explain it. The big Tonga eruption did less than expected. The aerosol cooling is not a good thing, especially not when tied to ongoing fossil fuel burning and CO2 emissions - it masks the full extent of how changed the climate system already is and whilst that cooling effect stops when the fuel burning stops the warming from raised CO2 persists.

Emerging studies are showing acceleration in the underlying rate of global warming - in hindsight looking like the underlying rate of warming had already increased in the decade leading up to 2023. but was not incorporated into expectations. Acceleration of global warming isn't unexpected - the opposite - just hard to identify at close range.

If you are hoping for a point by point response to your post... not me. We know what the drivers of climate change are and it isn't changes to solar magnetic energy. 2023-24 was a surprise at the time but not so much of one in hindsight.

My own view is the science based understanding of Earth's climate system is a jewel in the crown of human achievement; that we appear to have largely squandered decades of the priceless window of opportunity that climate science has given us - opportunity to decarbonise our ways - wasn't and isn't the fault of climate scientists or their communication.

Governments commissioned the science agencies and studies in order those in Office make informed, appropriate policy decisions. Science agency to Congress/Parliament and to those holding relevant Offices is the proper line of communication. Perhaps naively I think those holding such Offices have duties of care to be properly informed; the reality of extreme negligence, with malice aforethought, is deeply dismaying

Hello Ken. An interesting research paper came out several days ago. I've been really soaking my brain in it today. Much to think about. Intrinsic vs. extrinsic.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2424725122

Historical and experimental evidence that inherent properties are overweighted in early scientific explanation

Zachary Horne https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6629-2040 Zachary.Horne@ed.ac.uk, Mert Kobaş https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9669-9033, and Andrei Cimpian https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3553-6097Authors Info & Affiliations

Edited by Timothy Wilson, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA; received December 2, 2024; accepted August 6, 2025

September 19, 2025

122 (38) e2424725122 https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2424725122

Significance

"Some of the most significant achievements of human history have come about as a result of our scientific ingenuity. Thus, understanding scientific reasoning is a key goal for cognitive science. The present research uses a unique combination of experimental and historical data to advance this field of inquiry, revealing that basic cognitive processes underlying explanatory reasoning give rise to a systematic inherence bias among practicing scientists—a tendency to explain phenomena in terms of their inherent properties rather than external factors. This bias, which acts as a bottleneck to scientific discovery and the learning of new scientific concepts, appears to shape the trajectory of scientific theories throughout history."

Abstract

"Scientific explanation is one of the most sophisticated forms of human reasoning. Nevertheless, here we hypothesize that scientific explanation is susceptible to some of the same biases that influence everyday thinking—particularly during the initial stages of theory building, when scientists are first grappling with complex phenomena and are thus more likely to rely on explanatory “guesses.” Specifically, we investigated whether scientific explanation exhibits an inherence bias—a tendency to explain phenomena through inherent or intrinsic features rather than extrinsic factors such as context or relations. Consistent with this hypothesis, a comprehensive analysis of major explanatory transitions across the history of Western science revealed that initial scientific explanations systematically favored inherent properties, while subsequent explanations incorporated extrinsic factors more consistently. Seven experiments with lay participants (both adults and children; N 1,673) and two experiments with practicing scientists from top departments worldwide (N 275) provided converging evidence for this bias and identified the psychological mechanisms involved. When explaining unfamiliar phenomena, even leading scientists showed a robust tendency to overweight inherent properties and underweight extrinsic factors relative to established scientific understanding. This bias appears rooted in basic cognitive constraints on attention and memory that excessively narrow the space of hypotheses initially considered. These findings advance our understanding of both the psychology of explanation and the development of scientific knowledge, while suggesting specific ways to improve scientific training and education."

I'm in need of a complete paper.

here is an article about it. https://www.earth.com/news/centuries-of-errors-expose-a-recurring-human-bias-in-science/

14 hours ago, studiot said:

Hello arc, welcome back.

Kinda difficult to follow you graphs as they seem to cover all sorts of timescales.

But I did pick this out.

This shows a steady temperatiure 2010 - 2024 and entirely misses the local minimum shown by this one over the same time period.

Thank you for the welcoming. Your critiques are appreciated and acknowledged. Good to know you are still here. . . As in SF and not . . . . you know what I mean.

6 hours ago, arc said:

I'm in need of a complete paper.

here is an article about it. https://www.earth.com/news/centuries-of-errors-expose-a-recurring-human-bias-in-science/

Thank you for bringing this up, although I feel it is a tad off topic. +1

I also feel it deserves a thread all of its own What do you think ?

Here is a short excerpt from a recent book about statistics that may also be of interest about the nature of scientific papers in general.

12 hours ago, studiot said:

Thank you for bringing this up, although I feel it is a tad off topic. +1

I also feel it deserves a thread all of its own What do you think ?

Here is a short excerpt from a recent book about statistics that may also be of interest about the nature of scientific papers in general.

Well, I don't know how Bayesian I am but I predicted you would say that it would be a great topic for a thread, and I agree. Our county library system has completed a new branch within two blocks of our home and it is scheduled to open this next month. I am very exited about being able to walk down there in just a few minutes. I'm checking next to see about reserving a copy of that Everything is Predictable. You know, now that I'm thinking about it, I wonder if I can get a copy of that research paper also? Maybe a digital copy to my home computer for a few days or something like that. Please start that thread at your convenience but I'll need to read up on this subject to contribute what little I can. Hopefully it will have a lively participation.

It looks like it’s a study about bias that uses cherry-picked examples. Ironic.

One example is that they didn’t ascribe the tides to gravity…before Newton came up with the concept. Another was biologists ascribing a behavior to biology, rather than physics involving molecules, around the time that atomic theory was proposed by Dalton, and before it had really become ingrained.

If those were the best examples they could come up with, I can’t think there’s much to this.

You can’t ascribe phenomena to influences you aren’t aware of. Proposing something completely new isn’t the default, especially when the data are scarce and no firm conclusion could be drawn — we tend to decry e.g. ascribing UAPs to being aliens for this very reason. You generally need lots of data to see patterns. Scant data doesn’t allow one to rule out statistical anomalies. You’d end up chasing statistical flukes, which could be an even bigger waste of time.