Bits on Climate Change

Trying to keep the typing to a minimum, again, today. So I'll link some interesting notes on climate change.

First, World Climate Report brings us coverage on more inconvenient planetary warming, this time on Neptune. The graphs on Neptune's brightness and Earth's Mean Temperature during the same period show a striking correlation after correcting for a ten year lag. Neptune is bigger than Earth, so that makes sense. These are astronomical measurements, by the way, not surface air temperature reconstructions by proxies.

Climate Science points us to an interesting hypothesis for warming biases at temperature data collection points. A change in white paint from white wash allows more infrared absorption on the instruments. Anthony Watts is going on a California weather station field trip to gather data on the different paints and wood used to house the thermometers to test his idea. When an infrared absorption profile can account for changes in temperature on the order of 0.1 degrees Celsius, which is the same order of magnitude for the observed temperature rise last century of 0.3 to 0.5, that's something worth checking.