climate science
Category archives for climate science
VV has a thoughtful post about the value of peer review, looked at mostly through the lens of a couple of recent poor papers. Peer review (or whatever system you choose for choosing which papers will see the light) has to balance weeding out dross with not suppressing the unusual but good. It is primarily…
As regular readers will be aware, I think the ETS is stupid, and we should be imposing a carbon price via carbon taxes instead (Time for carbon taxes? and refs therein, if you’re interested in the history). But David Hone isn’t, he likes the ETS, and nice person that he undoubtedly is, it cannot be…
All over the world (my path: Timmy -> Torygraph -> google -> Nude scientist -> JOGMEC press release -> JOGMEC) there is excitement about “Japan cracks seabed ‘ice gas’ in dramatic leap for global energy”. Which is indeed interesting, but not quite as dramatic as suggested. Because as the pic of the flare makes clear,…
Well, no-one has said what I wanted to say about this, so I thought I should. Click on the image for P3′s take. This is about Shaun A. Marcott, Jeremy D. Shakun, Peter U. Clark, Alan C. Mix‘s latest in Science. If you want to read some stupid things said about it, try Curry (surprise)…
A fascinating paper, Why Do Voters Dismantle Checks and Balances? by Daron Acemoglu, James A. Robinson and Ragnar Torvik (h/t FE). There is a pile of maths in there, but you don’t really need it and I only skimmed it. From the conclusions: In many weakly-institutionalized democracies, particularly in Latin America, voters have recently dismantled…
Whew, that’s a relief. The Arbiter has finally spoken, and I can stop trying to think for myself. Not that I was trying very hard. No one really likes thinking for themselves anyway – if you can its hard work, and if you can’t its not pretty. Yeah, I should probably have had a tl;dr…
It looks like the first of the BEST papers is published (webcite): A New Estimate of the Average Earth Surface Land Temperature Spanning 1753 to 2011 (h/t WUWT) – Richard A. Muller, Robert Rohde, Robert Jacobsen, Elizabeth Muller, Saul Perlmutter, Arthur Rosenfeld, Jonathan Wurtele, Donald Groom and Charlotte Wickham. Note the absence of La Curry…
Conservapedia, as any fule kno, is The Trustworthy Encyclopedia. On matters of politics or “difficult” science like dinosaurs, perhaps one might expect a slight divergence from reality. But on well understood matters like relativity? All will be well, Shirley. But someone posted their E=mc2 article as a screenshot to facebook, so I checked up, and…
Said my wife, appalled. But I can, you know. Let’s hope this doesn’t happen: In Essexshire it happened so A man went out all for to plough, As he was ploughing along so fast Up came sweet Jesus himself at last. “Oh man, oh man, why dost thou plough So hard upon the Lord’s birthday?”…
Shepherd et al.: Science 30 November 2012: Vol. 338 no. 6111 pp. 1183-1189 DOI: 10.1126/science.1228102: We combined an ensemble of satellite altimetry, interferometry, and gravimetry data sets using common geographical regions, time intervals, and models of surface mass balance and glacial isostatic adjustment to estimate the mass balance of Earth’s polar ice sheets. We find…