stoat

A point I had forgotten about the recent Canadell et al paper, which mt's recent post reminds me of: as he quotes (scroll down to the update): Ceci suggèrerait d'après eux que les feedbacks carbone/climat se produisent plus rapidement que notre compréhension des phénomènes gouvernant l'…

And we're not much better. Some photographic souvenirs of a recent trip to Bruxelles. From the cathedral of St Michael and St Gudula. A hard-to-believe statue. It looks less rude from other angles. This one shows *two* enormous organs. Musee des beaux arts. The woman is holding a bar of glowing…

Remember remember the 5th of November! Gunpowder treason and plot. And so we gathered to burn the heap of junk at the bottom of the garden and set off some fireworks. At least we did it on the fifth - far too many naughty people did it yesterday. Tut tut.

OK, the Knight et al. paper is here, thanks folks. Clearly they have had some jolly fun dividing the runs up into trees, but the paper is a disappointment to me, as it doesn't really deal with the main issue, which is the physical plausibility of some of the runs. It *does* talk about "Our findings…

OK, so I missed it, not that I was looking for it. Why did everyone else miss it? Because cp.net is obsolete? Since I don't have a subs to PNAS I can't read it except the abstract. Here is the abstract so you don't have to follow the link and I show up on google: In complex spatial models, as used…

Taking a walk from a course at lunchtime I come across Wolvercote cemetary and little signs pointing to "J R R Tolkien, author". So I follow them. And there he is, along with Edith aka Luthien (checking up on wiki I find that "Tolkien's first civilian job after World War I was at the Oxford English…

There is a paper by Roe and Baker out in Nature Science arguing that Both models and observations yield broad probability distributions for long-term increases in global mean temperature expected from the doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide, with small but finite probabilities of very large…

AF (ie, Airbo(u)rne Fraction, ie the proportion of emitted CO2 that stays in the atmos, the rest being sunk in land or ocean) is in the news; I wrote up part of it recently (and detected some nonsense about it a year ago). There is a PNAS paper, Canadell et al; Eli has already done it. When talking…

Shock horror! Worlds press responds sensibly to a press release. Well it was one of ours, and the response seems to be to ignore it, which is fair enough. But a touch surprising, since its yet another iceberg breaking off Antarctica (this one half the size of London, the latest unit of measurement…

A brief break from bashing my own side, to point up the stupidies of the Evil Ones, to prove that I haven't Gone Over myself. Its not terribly entertaining, as we replace issues of judgement and representation with lying, but needs to be done on occaision. So, from my own comments (heavens! is…

An old line from Steve Bell, BM of course being Margaret Thatcher (as I recall, this was in the context of "batting for Britain" and Mark Thatcher). Ahem. Anyway. Thatcher, of course, as the destroyer of our coal industry in favour of the dash-for-gas, is responsible for any faint hopes that the UK…

Sciblogs has channels (e.g env, which is where I live, except for posts like this, which go onto chatter) and they are looking for new pix to adorn the banners, which will rotate on a weekly basis. The instructions are: "It's not too hard: the image needs to be at least 465 pixels wide. Readers…

Via R4 and mt, Scientists fear climate change speed-up as oceans fail to hold greenhouse gases. Its about the North Atlantic, which is absorbing less CO2 over the last 10 years (note that the article, wrongly, says holds half; Slioch, who does a rather good job in the comments, picked that one up…

I seem to have got onto some stupid PR spam list. The latest comes from Nat Geog, and is typically silly. It sez: As you probably know, most people have a hard time seeing exactly where on the planet global warming has taken its toll. This photo gallery from NationalGeographic.com reveals global…

You can read the party line on the AIT 9 "errors". I think its too kind; e.g. on SLR and Katrina Gore is misleading; on evacuation he is simply wrong. But the lake Chad bit was interesting.

[Ooh err. DC points out that she may mean 10 oF. Being American, this is possible. Being a scientist, it shouldn't be (but were she being a scientist there should be a unit symbol, so this is probably the newspaper, so this may well be oF). 3% chance of 10 oF is probably plausible, though I'd still…

Yes, blog action day, time to post something. mt is as ever sensible, as is Gavin: if you aren't prepared to take action when your lakes get covered with toxic scum; or when even on a clear day, you cannot see the sun: then why are you going to worry about global warming? FB has more inspiring…

Another little break from AIT, this time inspired by CIP to scrappleface. Apologies for the caps, its directly lifted and I didn't want to change it (read: couldn't be bothered to type it all out again). Or perhaps he really did spend the entire speech shouting; its possible, the things he said…

On with the boring. Disclaimer: this is nit-picking, for the question "is Gore accurate?". On the wider issue, I'm with the judge and with RC: Gore is basically correct. First off, its not really Tuvalua, its vaguer: "that's why the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New…

We'll be back with our usual programming of attack-mustelid on Gore :-) in a moment, but as a little interlude global cooling gets back in the news in the Cristian Science Monitor (thanks to ES). I rather like William Connolley, a sort of self-appointed historian of the global-cooling theory, says…

Yes indeed, time to weigh in on the great issue of the day: Mr Justice Burton vs Al Gore. My first point was going to be, that it was a poor idea to have judges deciding science. Its still a point, but possibly not a major one in this case, because it looks like the amended guidance notes, which…

Via GBM I find Statkrafts plans for osmosis power plants. An interesting idea and entirely new to me. Statkraft are a bit coy about the costs. This chap says its too expensive now (I don't know if thats true, its only there for balance).

Via mt via the newly re-returned QS, I find this wonderful video. Having been a small child obsessed by building plastic models of tanks, I always found them rather beautiful, but this combination of their hulking threat and human fragility is iconic. Previously I've only seen stills, and in some…

Interesting post on this over at James Empty Blog. So: Weitzmans basic thesis is: the PDF of the climate sensitivity has a long fat tail; the cost diminishes less quickly; so the "expected utility", which is the integral of the two, is divergent. This has echoes of mt's arguments, which he has been…

Broon bottles it says the BBC. Well no, they put it more politely: "Gordon Brown has said he will not call a general election this autumn". Jolly good, all the politico-types can go back to sleep again. Of course, the true Brown Bottle (scroll to the bottom) was in Viz, but it proven hard to find a…

I'm still pondering doom but in the meantime, via Wolfgang via CIP, three blind elephants and a man may amuse.

I was going to comment on Court challenge for school screening of Gore film but that sort of stuff has been done to death. I have sympathy for the idea that the film is propaganda (though the science is largely correct, see stoat passim), but none for "Although climate change is clearly taking…

Another study weighing in against biofuels, this time by Nobel Prize winning Paul Crutzen. Yes, I said that just to wind up Maribo - read his take. I've long been skeptical (septical?) of the biofuels stuff, especially corn-based ethanol, which looks more like pork for farmers than a sensible…

Another unconvincing assualt on Lomborgs new book. I haven't read the book, so I don't know whats so terrible about it. But lots of people seem to dislike it. Alanna Mitchell says: Worse still, he fails to take into account three of the characteristics of global climate change that scientists fear…

Not a very good title I fear. I'm referring to Lovelock and Rapley propose cure for global warming wherein James "we're all doooomed I tell 'ee" Lovelock and Chris "used-to-be-my-director" Rapley propose a load of floating pipes to haul up nutrient rich water to cause blooms to lock up CO2. Its…