April 8, 2014
ATTP has a post discussing Mapping the sceptical blogosphere (which I'm sure I read (the paper, I mean) and had the same reaction: "whaat? You mean they're taking these jokers seriously?" But I don't seem to have written it down anywhere). Anyway, ATTP then asks, of the septics:
So, why do these…
April 4, 2014
The second Ukraine post, a follow-up to the brilliantly prescient Ukraine: Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation wherein I said:
Miriam says Yes: she thinks “Russian armed forces, on Ukrainian soil, within two weeks” (she declined to say “tanks over the border”, though I think…
April 2, 2014
I don't appear to have mocked the NIPCC recently, preferring to consign them to oblivion, but JoNova is somewhat implausibly singing their virtues, so I've noticed. If you read the report you'll see that its prefixed by recommendations from the Great and the Good; and they've been fortunate enough…
March 31, 2014
Or so says Auntie, reporting well-known climatologist John Kerry. In fact, I have a guilty secret that I will share with you: I faked this screenshot. But only a bit. Here's the original. My monkey, whilst faked in, is every bit as valid as their monkey. Its from the Rare Animals feed on facebook…
March 26, 2014
From QJRMS (paywalled), in which the Director & the Chief Computer of the British Rainfall Organization discussed the then-recent wet winter of 1914-5:
The year 1903 saw the general adoption of wireless telegraphy, and an anxious public seized upon this as the cause of the great rainfall of…
March 24, 2014
Carbon bubble, it am all de rage. The latest is from Blue and Green Tomorrow. Who say:
Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell has warned that its profits are likely to be affected by international efforts to curb climate change, as campaigners say investors should steer clear of fossil fuel stocks. In its…
March 24, 2014
At pattern-recognition-in-physics.com/
There's an editorial which at the end notes The journal will initially be run on private founding, later to be transformed to a permanent publishing house. Or, put another way, currently its a blog, but if they can fool anyone into taking it on, they will.
The…
March 23, 2014
I have far too many "interesting" things queued up in feedly, so its time for a dump.
Controversial paper linking conspiracy ideation to climate change skepticism formally retracted. mt is fiercer: Journal’s Mealy-Mouthed Retraction of Lewandowsky Paper. I wasn't terribly keen on the paper myself,…
March 20, 2014
There's a fair section of the - errm - normally-sane-side-of-the-climate-wars blogosphere that regards RP Jr as the spawn of the devil. Eli weighs in complaining about Nate Silver of 538 getting RP to write for him (Eli has form, dontchaknow). Now I'd be the first to agree that RP has said some…
March 18, 2014
I'm trying an experiment, which may be simpler for me, and perhaps more amusing too.
Rather than pushing things off into the burrow, I'm going to try putting such comments in a new specially-created blog
stoat-spam.blogspot.com
It will contain... well, we'll see. Some real spam, some stuff where…
March 9, 2014
Today was the anniversary of my glorious 1:36 in the Cambridge Half Marathon. Today, alas, I only managed 1:41 so at that rate Jules will be steaming past me before many more years have passed. I remain fairly confident of out-erging her over the distance though. Here I am with other folk from our…
March 5, 2014
The Royal Soc and NAS have produced Climate Change: Evidence & Causes. From the official doc we have: The atmosphere and oceans have warmed, accompanied by sea-level rise, a strong decline in Arctic sea ice, and other climate-related changes. EWW says this in his quick intro (go on, its only 1…
February 22, 2014
Um, so. Exciting times in the Ukraine seems to have got even more exciting. Is it possible to hope for a Happy Ending? If people will Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation then yes [*].
The Prez is fled, and the Beeb says Ukraine crisis: Crowds descend on Yanukovych house where…
February 21, 2014
Or, in fuller,
Why are there people who seem hell-bent on denying anthropogenic global warming?; What are the deniers trying to achieve?; Why do they post comments on your article that totally defy not only science, but also common sense?
These are not easy questions to answer accurately. But its…
February 19, 2014
Um, so, it just happened that I was checking my moderation filter (can you guess why?) and the comments-held-in-moderation, which I very rarely do, and was embarrassed to find quite a few there that didn't belong. Sifting through the piles of trash trying to sell handbags, or herbal acne remedies…
February 19, 2014
In Tim Ball: turned out NN again I gloated over Tim Ball's nth deletion, but now I have to eat humble pie because he's been undeleted. Or rather, he's been created from scratch. Before his partisans get too excited its worth pointing out that the keep rationales begin with
Keep: Michael E. Mann…
February 16, 2014
This post comes about as an attempt to write down, slowly and carefully, a simple version of the "idealised GHE model". This apparently simple concept causes lots of confusion, though mostly amongst people who want to believe there are fatal flaws at the heart of climate science.
Before I go on:…
February 13, 2014
A question raised by the normally sensible Geoengineering Politics. They come to an odd conclusion:
any damages caused by SRM [Solar Radiation Management, I believe - W] would essentially be the negative side effects of a response measure intended to remediate harms caused by excessive fossil fuel…
February 7, 2014
Maybe I should save this stanza for a slightly more apt occasion, but I'm impatient, so:
But my Totem saw the shame; from his ridgepole-shrine he came,
And he told me in a vision of the night: —
"There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays,
"And every single one of them is right!"
(…
February 3, 2014
There's a paper in Nurture GeoSci entitled Arctic amplification dominated by temperature feedbacks in contemporary climate models by Felix Pithan & Thorsten Mauritsen (Nature Geoscience (2014) doi:10.1038/ngeo2071). As far as I know the paper is entirely sensible, though I've only read the…
February 2, 2014
Subtitled As the days of my life are but grains of sand.
I've tried to not-choose the knockabout stuff, which is all great fun, but ephemeral. But some months were thin and I had little choice.
* Jan: On happiness
* Feb: The sleepwalkers
* Mar: Man slumped after hitting wall (see-also)
* Apr: North…
January 30, 2014
Following the brilliant success of my attempt to explain peer review I thought I'd have a go at explaining Science next. Why restrict myself to a small canvas? Lacking confidence in such a large project, I started this post then abandoned it, but have now picked it up again, encouraged in part by…
January 30, 2014
Can I really be the first to snark about this?
Expert and Government Review Comments on the IPCC WGI AR5 Second Order Draft – General is now available for download.
As you'd expect, the pompous "Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, United Kingdom" notches up a string of "reject", please read the…
January 29, 2014
Those with long memories for trivia will remember the unlamented second deletion of Tim Ball, judged non-notable by wikipedia - ah, the shame of it. Now he's been awarded the ultimate accolade of being deleted a third time - you don't get much less notable than that.
I've taken an archive of the…
January 20, 2014
Seldom in the field of human conflict has so much been written by so many people on a subject about which they know nothing. Or so I'd like to hope: in the sense that I'd hope that the denialist chatter about peer review was the nadir. But I do know something about peer review, though my knowledge…
January 17, 2014
Every man and his lagomorph has a post taking the piss out of the "Ship of fools", so I won't bother. But (since I seem to have managed to get censored by every denialist blog I try to post on) I thought I'd make a handy list of said blogs and comments. Warning: there's no useful content anywhere…
January 14, 2014
"Our hero" in this case being Monckton at WUWT. Most of the post is a long rant about The Weekly Standard's Lindzen puff piece exemplifies the conservative media's climate failures by Dana Nuccitelli in the Graun, which is in turn a reply to What Catastrophe? MIT’s Richard Lindzen, the unalarmed…
January 8, 2014
Global cooling again; via a comment on this rather dodgy page I find Stockton, C. W. and W. R. Boggess, Geohydrological implications of climate change on water resource development, Contract Report DACW 72-78-C-0031, for U. S. Army Coastal Engineering Res. Center. That isn't P-R, but contains on p…
January 5, 2014
ATTP has a post on this, from which I've nicked most of my links. But he also has 50+ comments, so I abandoned my original plan to put some observations there, where they'd get lost, and have written this.
I'm not going to pretend my opinion - for that is all that this is - is definitive. I worked…
January 4, 2014
After tthe sad fate of Dr* Bob, it would seem that now Lindzen is officially Emeritus. But remember folks, I was there first.
I'm curious as to when this happened. Cato claimed him in August 2013 - perhaps then? No, it was earlier: May 2013. If you look at his wiki page you won't find the E-word…