stoat

With hurricanes over Czech and Rain in New Mexico and the truely bizarre shuttle flying even though unsafe, is there any time or space for another round of hockey stick wars? No... don't go away, its interesting, really it is! There is an exchange of letters in the most recent Science, between…

This makes sense to me... but I doubt the world will heed him

In my last post I called it the NAS report, sorry. I had expected a proper analysis form some (disinterested?) party by now. Perhaps that was optimistic. Its a long report, and the important bits are dense, and have previously been done to death in debate and papers anyway, with nothing terribly…

The long-awaited NAS report Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years is out. Roger Pielke says the NAS has rendered a near-complete vindication for the work of Mann et al as a first reaction. I've skimmed the first 4 pages (the summary); seems... err... plausible. Whatever that…

[[Global Warming]] became a "featured article" on wikipedia about a month ago (long tedious arguments about the stylistic wording, and about the reference format) and today was the "featured article of the day" on the front page. Which has lead, of course, to an enormous edit count for today (many…

There is a lot of interest in the last Nature. Indeed so much that I'll just blip through it... First off, the "open peer review" debate continues (as first blogged by JA), see here (for most of these links I think a subs is req, sorry). There are lots of entries there. I was struck by: Atmospheric…

Via JA I find David @ Tokyo who blogs about Caribbean Loses Drive For Secret Ballot At Whale Meet. Now I find this a bit weird... the caribbean nations don't have any interest in whaling; they are interested only because they are being bought off by the Japanese (is this wrong? why else do they…

Says The Canadian Free Press (warning: it has lots of stupid ads on it). I wonder what it is? But not very much. What does it *say*? Well, its an attempt to counter Gores movie (oh good, that means people are worried by it...). There is much of the same-old-septic-rubbish in there, but a new (and…

Today and yesterday I went on a management training course. This is a complete reversal of policy by me, who has previously avoided them like the plague. Partly this is a feeling that since I am now quasi-managing two people I owe it to them to at least try to know what I'm doing. But partly its a…

Someone made me a possible new banner... I'm not sure... what do my faithful readers think? Would it make you more likely to read the blog? Or would you rather I just found something interesting to say about science? Update: I managed to find the code for putting the banner into the header, so lets…

Terrible story from todays guardian: Killing themselves was unnecessary. But it certainly is a good PR move. Oddly enough I don't see this in the blogosphere... maybe because there isn't much else to say. Or people are too busy with the football?

The UK has appointed a special representative on climate change says the BBC. Interesting. Does this prove that we're taking climate change seriously, or does it prove we're more interested in words than action?

So says Science. But for the life of me I can't see why. Hat tip: CB and (!) LM. Its based on preliminary results from ACEX. Which says... drilling revealed that the latest Paleocene to earliest Eocene boundary interval, well known as the early Eocene Thermal Maximum (EETM), was recovered. During…

NSIDC has made a select set of images viewable through the popular interactive desktop application, Google Earth. Currently, Google Earth users can view images showing permafrost, snow, sea ice extent, and photographs of glaciers. Distribution of permafrost, snow, and ice are displayed as…

We had a talk at work today by a chap (eminent mathematician I think) about looking at the distribution of extremes in the temperature record and trying to say something about detection. The problem is that extremes are statistically rather unstable and all he could say was that he didn't detect GW…

I've just downloaded Gmail drive for windows. There is a linux version, this is the windows one (shame, I didn't even add a z). Via the medium of sending emails to your google account, it lets you store files remotely. For photos, flickr is more useful :-) but for general files it might be fun. It…

So says the Independent (though not quite in those words). The Indie is probably the most climate-sensitive newspaper in the UK. And $400M is pretty big. But rather than bash LR, or Exxon (disclaimer: I have in the past benefited from the sale of Exxon shares, and may in the future), I'll inquire *…

Swisseduc.ch has some nice pix of retreating glaciers over the last 30-odd years. No, its not *proof* of GW, of course; just more evidence in the same direction.

I've just found a couple of letters in Nature (subs req) re the "leaking" of the AR4. Climate: open review may ease acceptance of report by Michael MacCracken, saying As executive director of the Office of the US Global Change Research Program from 1993 to 1997, I was responsible in 1995 for urging…

The first blog I read was Quark Soup, back in the days when the M&M controversy was interesting... gosh that was a while ago. Then he got burned out; now he is back, at http://davidappell.blogspot.com/. Good. DA doesn't much like a recent WaPo article on GW, that focusses on William Gray. But I…

Aegypt is the name of a fantasy book by John Crowley, as well as the title of yet another non-climate-science post by me. I have loved several of Crowleys books - notably The Deep; Engine Summer; and Beasts. Which left me eager to read more, and totally baffled by Little, Big: a book with some…

And the forum is: http://groups.google.com/group/globalchange/. Go have a look. Why? From the welcome message: We are creating a moderated newsgroup/mailing list for the discussion of environmental science, economics, policy and politics, especially as related to global change issues such as…

Today (and to a lesser extent yesterday) was a deeply depressing grey day of rain. To make it worse, it would occaisionally stop, and lighten a bit, just to tempt you into the idea things were getting better. Left alone I would have curled up by the fire with a book and/or an internet connection;…

I've just had my 400th comment. You can't see it, cos I deleted it as distasteful :-) Williams blog rule for lots of comments: don't talk about science :-)))

Apparently Seed has a feature called "ask a science blogger" and there is a question of the week. This weeks is "If you could shake the public and make them understand one scientific idea, what would it be?". If anyone can tell me where to find this, though, I'd be grateful. I found it via Kevin V…

Stoat, the blog that has abandoned science in favour of economics, about which I know little. But wait for the musing post on model skill scores... Anyway, the last post got lots of interesting comments - thank you - dear reader, go take a look if you don't normally read post comments. I shall pick…

Following on from Tim Lamberts post on Lindzens latest nonsense I found this from Henderson (as-in C+H). Its from the same conference. Its stuffed full of misrepresentation and errors, so much so that you don't get any points for spotting them. The main point seems to be: IPCC should have more…

Interesting little snippet on the news this morning: the EU carbon trading scheme is in some trouble, with prices heading down, because countries have issued excessive permits. Oops: someone has been careless (or naughty: I wonder which?). But thats for another day: today is: Reducing CO2 emissions…

When I were a lad (a long time ago) I went to the science museum (with my mother? father? both? I forget...) and remember the wonderful gallery of models of steam engine valve gear, models of old engines (some original models by the actual engineers made as demos before the full-sized ones were…

For one reason or another, I usually seem to disagree with Kevin Vranes about most things (actually I suspect that we *agree* on most things, and the disagreements are only about the exciting stuff on blogs). But I do like his recent post on the U.S. and torture.