stoat

If you haven't been following UK politics recently, you can be excused, cos its been dull. The main story has been "when will Blair go" and "will he name a date". My reading of this has been, why should he, when no-one has the guts to push him out. Yesterdays news was that the Sun (dubious low-iq…

Via Prometheus (who misrepresents it) I found Climate Science on Trial: How a single scientific graph became the focus of the debate over global warming. Its well worth reading. Towards the end we have this wonderful bit, demonstrating the sheer ignorance of many of the septics: For some members of…

http://www.gci.org.uk/briefings/rising_risk.pdf asserts that the "airbourne fraction" of CO2 is coming up to 100%, having been 50%: The point of great concern here is that over the last couple few years 2003/4/5 the rate of increase has jumped to nearer 3 ppmv per annum. This gives a loading of the…

John Fleck found a great paper by Karl T. Ulrich on the ultimate energy costs of using bicycles versus cars. The bottom-line argument is that cycling saves energy, but because you live longer your lifetime emissions will be greater. Such fun. However: Those who adopt the bicycle as a means of…

There is a cool pic of Ioke here, which beautifully shows the effect on SST of the hurricane passing over (thanks to CB for pointing this out on the globalchange group). [Small note: Chris Mooney nicked a snapshot of the pic, in case it fades from cache]

I have a load of files encrypted with pgp (2.6.2i, since you ask). But the machine at BAS this runs off is soon to be turned off, so it seems I need to upgrade to gpg instead. So... in a break from climate, can I ask the security gurus out there (are any of them reading this?)... Can I read pgp in…

Gas prices are currently high and have been rising in the UK... however, British Gas is running adverts in UK newspapers offering "Fixed prices that fall in December 2007". This might or might not show you the advert, depending on when they update it. Which lead me to wonder if they knew something…

Not gone quite yet... :-) A post ago I reported on an odd skeptics conference; but there were a few good names in there, one of whom not everyone recognised: Lennart Bengtsson. But then he is swedish... Anyway, he fairly recently won the 51st IMO prize, so to celebrate this I created a wiki page…

I'm off on holiday soon, for a bit... [Back from hols. Thanks for all the comments... -W]

A week (?) ago I wrote a post called "Liquid terror in the skies" but it got eaten by weasels. Since then the usual lack of supporting evidence has not appeared, and today we have a paper bomb causing a plane to be diverted. One voice of sanity amongst the over reaction seems to be Ryanair,…

Is the title of an International seminar meeting at The Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), Stockholm, Sweden September 11-12th 2006. Sounds like an attempt at a sexy title. However, the list of presentations doesnt look good... ironically, under why this meeting is a bad idea it says This meeting…

Or, why public transport will never be popular. Although in fact the only reason I'm writing this is because the train was crowded so I had no choice about where to sit, so it *is* popular. The story: I'm travelling back from Norwich to Cambridge, and sit in the only available seat, opposite two…

Eli Rabett has some fun with Patrick Michaels.

By E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., Paul K. Driessen, Esq., Ross McKitrick, Ph.D., and Roy W. Spencer, Ph.D. I've never heard of 1 & 2, but given 3 & 4 its not hard to guess what its going to be like. And indeed, it doesn't disappoint. Its yet another septic document which would be far better off…

RP Sr joins the ranks of people telling us its been hot/cold somewhere on earth in some month, but more interestingly points to an essay by Carl Wunsch. Its one of a series, by various worthies, including TIm Palmer. I'm not quite sure what the point is, though... they don't seem to be much good…

I made it into a recent article in The New Yorker. Predictably enough its not about science, but about wikipedia. Whats interesting about it is how hard internal wiki "politics" are for outsiders to understand. Despite talking to the author several times, and a fact-checker, the overall tone of the…

JA is bored with climate sensitivity - because he knows the answer, 3 oC, and he may well be right. But other people don't seem to have realised. And (via James again, I think) I ran across Tung and Camp on climate sensitivity, and Knutti et al.. They too think its 3 oC (well 2.8 +/- 0.9; and about…

RC has a post on a leaked letter from the little-known IREA (Intermountain rural electric authority, since you ask) (though to be fair I should point out that desmog seem to have posted first). The IREA are worried because most of their lectric comes from coal and so are trying a PR campaign to…

I heard that within 15 years, global warming will have made Napa County too hot to grow good wine grapes. Is that true? What other changes are we going to see during our lifetimes because of global warming?... Hmmm... well assuming 0.2-0.3 oC/decade, globally, and maybe twice that for NH continent…

RP Jr criticises me for not posting about hurricanes whilst on holiday in the peak district. Sorry - the wireless connections on Stanage Edge are poor, and I didn't take my laptop anyway. RP likes the story because the main result We are optimistic that continued research will eventually resolve…

As someone with no interest in football, the worlds concentration on the world cup was a bit boring. So I'm pleased to offer you... http://www.gamelemons.com/zidane/zidane.swf. Left button to butt; I got 28. Thanks to Tom.

Via Prometheus I find von S's testimony on the Hockey Stick and related issues. Interesting point number 1 is that von S has clearly noticed he is being used (or selectively quoted) by the septics, and so starts his testimony with Based on the scientific evidence, I am convinced that we are facing…

I'm wondering a bit if I took Prof Wegmans credentials a bit too much on faith. A commenter on the previous post wrote I'm not too knocked out by Wegman's credentials as a prof at George Mason U, nor do I think he, who was leader of Reagan's idiotic "Star Wars Program", could be seen as an…

There is apparently a strange thing called the Wegman report. Sadly that link only contains Smokey Joe Bartons comments on selected extracts (does anyone know where the full thing is? Is it published? Also quite what the committee/panel is, is rather vague. [Update! Aha... I should have known:…

The betting on climate change thing seems to have gone rather quiet. This post is prompted by a comment posted to an old entry on my old blog Probably not betting on climate with Lubos Motl (that post is still worth reading, I think, for the attempt to calculate what are "fair odds". In some email…

In case you don't read James Empty Blog I point you towards it for a recent post on a new paper submitted to "Climate of the Past". Its a HS paper, and has provoked a flurry of comments - as James notes, more than all the other papers, which have none. A bit of a shame that. But still, this looks…

RP Jr seems to find himself frequently mischaracterised, most recently by the AZ Daily Star. But how can this be? With language so precise, what room for misunderstanding could there be? Well... Roger objects to it being said that he has "been critical of the view that human-caused global warming…

David Appell has a post on What if GW Were Natural? but I think he misses the main point: if its natural, then there is no reason to expect it to continue. If its anthropogenic, the we have a fairly good idea of the various forcing factors and can take a reasonable stab at predicting the future.…

Says nature, ranking science blogs. Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist who blogs at RealClimate, puts its success down to the hot topic and expert contributors. It helps to have "a passion for explaining things as clearly as possible, and a hell of a lot of patience to deal with all those…

There is a new paper out (Transient Climate Simulations with the HadGEM1 Climate Model: Causes of Past Warming and Future Climate Change) in J Climate on climate change - past century and next - as simulated by HadGEM1. This reaches the standard conclusions: whereas the effects of a combination of…