I've been using Google Reader recently, following the lamented death of Planet Fleck, and I suppose I have to admit its better.
Here are some "shared items" if, for some reason, you want to read what I read.
In shocking newsjust in, record heavy rain in the Lakes and extensive flooding has not been linked to global warming. Dr Bogus, spokesman for the Made-Up Institute of Twaddle, said "This is completely unprecedented. Normally, any unusual - or even merely somewhat uncommon - weather event is immeadiately linked to global warming. All of the usual Pinko suspects have failed us in this case. The best we have so far is "David Balmforth, a flooding expert at the Institution of Civil Engineers, said deluges on a similar scale will become more frequent as a result of climate change." and that is very weak. But in breaking news, the Torygraph has supplied the void with "The flooding in Cumbria is part of a pattern of weather which shows that global warming is occurring faster than anyone expected, says Geoffrey Lean."
Oh lordy, that last one is pretty awful. I was hoping not to have to see it, but now I have. It sez Three factors cause heavier storms as the climate heats up. As it gets hotter, more energy is injected into the climate. There is a sharper contrast between land and the sea (which warms more slowly), causing stronger winds and greater instability. And as the seas do heat, more water evaporates from them - and comes down as heavier rain. Can you see the obvious problem? Yes that's right: if it was correct, there would be an enormous seasonal cycle in rainfall, with far more in the summer than winter. As it happens, there are places where this is true - Cairns, for example, according to [[Wet Seaason]]. But the UK isn't like that - there is more rain in winter, as we all knew. Which immeadiately tells you that the primary driver of rainfall in the UK is not temperature. Global warming might produce more rainfall in the UK - but it might not. If you were relying on the interseasonal T-PPN regression as a proxy for the long-term T-PPN relation, you'd predict *less* rainfall as the climate warms.
The great Klotzbach wars have been playing for a little while now ([1], [2], [3], [4] etc etc), but the arbitrator has spoken and its time for the Dark Side to stop digging and throw in the towel.
Now you can settle down to enjoy a nice video and wonder what the moral might be.
Meanwhile, for a little light geek relief, try this.
I like this one. It is from NASA though I've heavily hacked it around (I saw it today in a copy of Wired at Mr Polito's; oh yes, it is online too: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/gallery_volcanoes/3/, but I don't recommend visiting, the site is mindbogglingly slow, lord knows how much Javash*t they load up). Anyway, it's the Sarychev volcano (Russia's Kuril Islands, northeast of Japan) in an early stage of eruption on June 12, 2009. I'm not entirely sure what I'm seeing here - real Met Men should comment - or how tall the plume is. Is it hitting the stratosphere?
I'm not a mass-media-audience type of blog, so I excuse myself from having to be kind to "my side"; I don't think I need to avoid worrying Joe Public about dissent in the "we believe in GW" side of the blogosphere, because I don't think JP reads me. And it is far more fun trying to pick holes in the relatively minor errors of "my side" than it is to point out the gross stupidity of The Dark Side.
Which brings me on to Terms of Engagement by Keith Kloor who points to Shellenberger and Nordhaus explaining why they don't take on the other side: The work of holding Republican obstructionists, anti-government extremists, and right-wing conspiracy mongers to task is work for principled conservatives, not liberals... And now I think of it, this makes sense (Kloor thinks this is too restrictive, and I agree, taken as an absolute restriction it is bad). It is rather like the Tories being the ones to cut the Army. Your own side knows you better and knows (or at least ought to know) that you are "on their side" and ought to be able to take the criticism in that light. The Dark Side, however, will just react to criticism from an enemy.
[Aside: you may like: http://www.badscience.net/2009/11/wtf/]
Having just read Eli being unhappy on the APS I'm struck by a thought, which is that no-one at all seems to think they might learn anything useful about actual climate change from the APS statement or its revised version. All anyone is doing is picking over it to see whether the miscellaneous physicists have managed to understand the research. So: why do these people bother have a statement at all? Would they have felt left out of the party otherwise? Its just the tedious old physcis arrogance again.
Experimentally, I'm going to try to keep track of the comments I make on other blogs. I'll spare you the totally trivial ones, but I don't guarantee this to be especially interesting. One point of doing this will be to track the ones that "disappear" on various sites (no names for now) that I've found don't post anything that might frighten the horses.
I might move this up to the top by fudging the date, so don't be too surprised if it moves.
[Update: reverse order seems more likely to be useful, and everything except the most recent moved off into the "extended" part. Also, I swear it isn't my intent to only comment at CM :-)]
"Here are the howlers in that paragraph for the record::
1. they aren't bloack, they are blue,
2. their efficiency may be higher than 12%,
3. The biggest howler... What was the absorbtivity or emissivity of the material that the panel covered up,
4. Unparseable. Read it yourself."
He later posted an update, after John O'Donnell pointed out that the major error is CO2. RC also made the same point. I'm not sure what the exciting "exclusive new analysis" is supposed to be, either. It looks like it covers the same ground as the RC post. But the factors that Romm has now, correctly, realised are trivial are the very ones he was promoting as major errors before.
[Update: JR is somewhat offended by my charge of revisionism and says there was no intention on my part to revise history and the current version is what I was trying to say all along. I'm not entirely sure what the differences are between the current and the original version - anybody keep a copy of the original? I've asked JR but no reply so far on that point - because the current version seems equally open to the criticism I first made.
His post now has a footnote NOTE: I have updated this post slightly for absolute clarity since some people might not read the first debunking post that I linked to above (click here), which lays out the timeline of how I came to include this factor of 100,000.; the footnote itself has been updated; originally it said ... for absolute clarity since some blogger out in the ether failed to read my first debunking post that I linked to above (again, click here, it isn't hard folks)... I was that "some blogger".]
My family and me.
