stoat

Are the [[International Climate Science Coalition]] notable? (webcite in case they aren't and you care 7 days from now). By which I mean, in the sense of Wikipedia:Notability. Sources about them are thin on the ground, and those so far proposed only mention them in passing. Blogs don't count, of…

- Hello, Mr. Amman. We have here for you one persecution pizza with pepperoni! - You must be mistaken. I am currently toeing the party line, and thus not persecuted. - Would you like to be persecuted by us? We have Team Member discount. 10 for the price of 1. - No, thanks. - Are you sure? - Yes. -…

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 version, which…

Its all about me refers. This wasn't terribly exciting the first time round, but now that dullard AW has finally noticed - its only taken him three+ weeks. And AW has only noticed because the Kalte cretins have recycled it. Apparently I openly sympathized with the views of the controversial IPCC…

Driverless cars are in the news recently (I won't even bother linking to the various posts, there are so many) and Brian worries they might turn High Speed Rail into a dinosaur. Which indeed seems entirely likely. My own view is that I love railways; going on holidays via sleeper and waking up as…

Comment permalinks are back. Welcome to the century of the fruitbat.

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…

Um. sorry folks, don't blame me, blame Eli. 'twas the now-aged lagomorph who attempted to interest me in the good old days of sci.env when we were all young and bushy-tailed. And indeed that thread does make for interesting reading: the present-day switch to blogs doesn't encourage that style of…

Popcorn time again, it seems. Starting at the end, Anthony Watts is "threatening" to sue Greg Laden. Although from that, its hard to see why. Going back to the bottom, GL originally took the piss out of AW for believing in sky fairies. Phil Plait ("No, Diatoms Have Not Been Found in a Meteorite")…

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…

Or so says Richard Van Noorden, in Nurture. But that's not right. What hobbles CCS is that its uneconomic: so why would you do it? I'm being a bit unfair: at least according to the article, CCS would be economic at the same subsidy cost as feed-in tariffs for wind and solar. But the great thing…

James Hansen says: I was lucky to grow up in the era of rapidly rising expectations and opportunities. I was born on a small farm, the son of an itinerant tenant farmer. None of the farms that my five sisters and I lived on had electricity. Daylight was extended by kerosene lamps. I barely…

P points me at "Wikipedia knowledge: air-forger Connolley: The man who rewrote our worldview" and so on [cite]. Not even original there; earlier at here]. I'm reading it via google translate, of course. Its mostly a re-hash of the Solomon nonsense which I discussed in A child’s garden of wikipedia…

From campaignforrealfarming.org, via IR. Inspired by KK, of course. I don't know who the campaignforrealfarming are, but for the moment I'll treat them as worth talking to. You'll notice there is a total absence of refs in the piece, so I feel no obligation to provide any in response. The first…

January: Cold in Cambridge (but this is from early-Feb, since I don't have anything terribly good from January. The best I can offer is smoke on the water). February: early bees. March: Phoebe. Our cat. April: Petals on water. May: Humble bumbles. June: Stubai. The entire place is unbearably…

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?" The farmer…

You recognise the image, no doubt. And before I go any further I should say that both the image and the title are unfair. But they came irresistibly to my mind anyway. The context is a link and comment I recently posted to facebook, viz: Andrew Mitchell: the 'toxic' smears aimed at destroying my…

W00t, its the Big Fight, or at least its the spat du jour. Does anyone outside the little blogospheric circle care? My guess is no. As I said over at Timmy's recently, my personal "does-the-outside-world-give-a-shit-o-meter" (as applied to the latest septic nonsense to hit the blogospheric fan) is…

A summer picture for the winter solstice. Which I'd forgotten until Amy reminded me. Refs * Book of the New Sun. I still think Gene Wolfe does a better job of capturing the wonder of the Apollo programme with that brief paragraph that anyone else ever has. * Dispatch from AGU: How to Understand…

The latest denialosphere nonsense is proving quite entertaining - not for the subject matter itself, for without exception no-one in the debate has troubled to read the gumpf - but for the mudslinging in the comment thread. If you want to see Bad William you can go over there. Vinny, I think that…

The denialists have leaked the draft IPCC report, again. There are some self-serving lies at WUWT about exactly why it was OK to break the confidentiality agreement, but given that any old fool can sign up to be an "expert reviewer" and many do, and that the denialists are self-serving liars,…

From Aunty, UN climate talks extend Kyoto Protocol, promise compensation to be precise.

PAYING FOR IT by ELIZABETH KOLBERT in the shouty New Yorker suggests that carbon taxes may be back on the (US) agenda. It would be good if they were, but I'm dubious (am I ever anything else?). There are many reasons to be dubious. One is in the article: a carbon tax makes so much sense—…

Oh go on guess, who do you think it was. Well, you're wrong: it was Piers Corbyn. To be fair to Piers, he doesn't appear to use the "honour" himself, its been used for him on his signature to the recent OPEN CLIMATE LETTER TO UN SECRETARY-GENERAL: Current scientific knowledge does not substantiate…

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…

And not before time, you might say. Sea ice this year reached a new record minimum in the Arctic (though not in the Antarctic, which begins to look wind-driven. And before you think the two trends might be opposite-and-nearly equal, look at Tamino's convenient analysis which I can never find).…

From the department for historical research. I happened to be in the Oxfam bookshop trying to empty our house, when I looked down and saw this in the pile of new arrivals. It hadn't been priced but they took a fiver for it, which seems fair enough. Its a very British-meteorologist book, you can…

Previously I criticised this world bank report, because of some injudicious choice of phrasing. However, various people suggested that I could consider actually reading the report and seeing what it had to say. Obviously I'm not going to do that in detail, but I can try skimming it. I wrote some…

Says the World Bank [*]. I could see why an imminently 4 oC world would be problematic. But the problem, as Timmy rather bluntly pointed out, is the report saying it spells out what the world would be like if it warmed by 4 degrees Celsius, which is what scientists are nearly unanimously…

The Watties are back to plaintively whistling for cooling. This time its "Dr." Norman Page, and just like last time there isn't really any point wading through the details because its all self-deluding nonsense. But what's funny is to realise how throw-away all this is, how it lacks any coherent…