William M. Connolley
stoat
Posts by this author
July 21, 2011
Still on the rowing I'm afraid. A row-over today: two years ago we'd have killed for a high-quality row-over like tonight, but after yesterdays superb bump-up, tonight felt like a let down.
Thinking (and drinking, in the Waterman again, a pub I'm coming to like) about it afterwards, it all seemed…
July 20, 2011
...I will wear the green willow. Yes, we went up: yay! Though that doesn't begin to capture it.
L to R: Andy Southgate (4); Steven Andrews (5); Chris Wood (2); Ollie Crabb (S); James Tidy (Cox); Chris Metcalfe (3); William Connolley (B); James Howard (7; with George); Chris Smith (6).
Yesterday,…
July 19, 2011
Bumps again, hurrah. The distant sound of gunfire. The culmination of a lot of peoples training for a long time. And, as I discovered once again while waiting for the start, a deeply unpleasant / scary / unnerving experience. It didn't help that we had to stand around for 20 mins waiting for the 4-…
July 19, 2011
Every now and again, people get a little bit confused when they realise that the thing we all call the "greenhouse effect" is not the mechanism that warms greenhouses. This is nothing new; R. W. Wood: Note on the Theory of the Greenhouse pointed it out in 1909. The wikipedia [[Greenhouse effect]]…
July 17, 2011
There is an excellent article from Light Blue Touchpaper about securing information (just in case you don't get the delicate joke: Cambridge's colour is light blue, as opposed to Oxford's true blue; and of course "light the blue touch paper" is on the instructions of fireworks).
Part of it is just…
July 17, 2011
About a year ago I enthused about my new watch, a Garmin Forerunner 110. Since then it has become ever-more-vital, sustaining me through any number of runs. However about a month ago it started to mist up inside. I took the back off and it dried out, but then I had two wet outings, it misted up, I…
July 16, 2011
Eduardo has quite a nice post at KZ. I say "quite nice" because it is definitely one for those deeply emeshed in the debate and familiar with it, yet not wanting to be part of the rancour.
Point 1 should be required reading for all the septic folk out there:
The main question here that any…
July 15, 2011
Further proof of the polarisation in this "debate" comes from Climate: Cherries are not the only fruit by Richard Black. This all stems from Reconciling anthropogenic climate change with observed temperature 1998-2008 by Robert K. Kaufmann et al., who come to the not-desperately-exciting conclusion…
July 13, 2011
Ripping off Timmy:
Laptops and mobile phones mean that at least a modicum of work can be done while travelling. So the value of time saved by fewer hours travelling should fall. In fact, we can almost certainly go further. Sitting with a laptop, a phone and a decent internet connection in a comfy…
July 11, 2011
This is a super-el-cheapo post, brought to you by simple reproduction of http://wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/nas-1975.html. Well, I did it with R. W. Wood: Note on the Theory of the Greenhouse and I happen to have a reason for bringing this out again.
The 1975 US National Academy of Sciences/…
July 11, 2011
I first saw this a while back: maybe 2 years ago, but CR reminded me of it recently. As far as I can tell it is genuine; the CIA offer to sell you it, though if you try to buy you get a 404. Why you'd buy it when others have it for free I don't know. I don't seem to have blogged it then; others…
June 30, 2011
Every now and again I'm surprised by the contrast between the sanity that you'll find on good blogs, and the madness that reigns in our useless press. In this case, its dead children again which is very sad, but should not be used as entertainment schlock-horror fodder as our gutter press does.…
June 29, 2011
Don't bother read this post. Watch the video "Earth facing mini-ice age!!" say the media. Now for the science... instead. Or read the RC post.
I ignored this when it first came out, and am only posting now because the Economyth has picked it up. They lose points for not putting a question mark in…
June 26, 2011
This year's story so far: in May, I accepted some bets but was still trying to come to terms with Rob Dekker. In the comments there we came to agreement on the following:
If both NSIDC and IARC-JAXA September 2016 monthly average sea ice extent report are above 4.80 million km^2, RD pays WMC US$ 10…
June 23, 2011
I despair sometimes at the stupidity of our politicians. More and more it becomes obvious that the less they have to do with running the economy, the better. The latest stupidity is from Clegg: Clegg calls for RBS and Lloyds giveaway. The idea is that when the government sells its (i.e., our)…
June 20, 2011
Yes, its the wazzocks at the Beeb yet again. It would be quite nice to have some decent estimates of the reactor death toll - or at least, whether the confirmed killed-by-radiation toll is above zero.
But The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of…
June 17, 2011
I had such fun watching the last three divisions today that I'm going to bore you with yet more rowing. First, here is Corpus M1 (hello Rob!) catching Christs M2 (note cox's hand half raised in the process of acknowledging the bump) to cement their place in division 2 and their hopes of blades…
June 16, 2011
But only the university ones, which don't matter too much. However, they have been pretty exciting so far and definitely good fun to watch. This year they are Wednesday 15th June and Saturday 18th June, ie we've had days 1 and 2 so far. This post is just a convenient place for me to dump the map…
June 15, 2011
For a fair while now I've defended Lindzen {{cn}} on the grounds that he is actually a Real Scientist, albeit edging ever further off onto the sceptical wing. And this has been difficult because whilst his papers have, I think, been reasonable his public pronouncements and his congressional-…
June 12, 2011
A headline which is doubtless a hostage to fortune. Anyway, I had fun deriding the Heartland Institute's failed wiki but, as frank points out in the comments, there is more fun to be had: you can look at Special:ListUsers. If you do this on a real wiki like wikipedia, you get an enormously long…
June 8, 2011
From the Heartland Institute:
Subject: Announcing ClimateWiki.org: The Definitive Climate Change Encyclopedia
To: <no-one@cares>Date: Wednesday, June 8, 2011, 4:40 PMAnnouncing ClimateWiki.org: The Definitive Climate Change Encyclopedia
CHICAGO - Backed by more than two decades of…
June 6, 2011
I've finally been provoked into writing this post. Though actually it is going to be about something slightly different, or at least I'm going to go through a long rambling diversion, inspired by Idiocy on carbon permits by Timmy.
But since I'm also rather conscious that many of my posts are (when…
June 5, 2011
Following the success of Where are we now? from Jules-n-James, I present you with a slightly harder one:
[*] I am, of course, not there now. Nor was I there when I wrote this. But I was there when I took the photo.
Refs
* Poppies
June 3, 2011
In the comments to Romm Echoes Groundless Cell Phone/Cancer Fears? we've degenerated into an argument about the safety of nuclear versus solar power ("which do you think has killed more people: radiation from Fukushima, or solar-voltaic installers falling from ladders?" was my question. It is a…
June 2, 2011
[May 26th: Pulled to the top to update with the Nature editorial which, as well as noting the paper being pulled, also notes the mysteriously dilatory George Mason University investigation.
June 3rd: And pulled again, since Science have a piece on the actual retraction, and again note the GMU lack…
June 1, 2011
Keith Kloor is having fun being kwuooeeeel to poor Joe Romm, simply because Romm is being an anti-scientific bozo pushing groundless fears of cancer-from-mobile-phones. Keith has a nice collection of links to sane people pointing out that there is no evidence of a problem. One of whom is Orac, in a…
May 25, 2011
Says the FT:
Libya lost billions of dollars on sophisticated financial products sold to Muammer Gaddafi's sovereign wealth fund by some of the world's leading financial institutions, according to a confidential Libyan government document... One of the most striking losses, outlined in an internal…
May 21, 2011
From the department for shooting fish in a barrel, David Appell has a nice post pointing out that Singer has been a bozo for years, predicting (in 1981) massive future declines in fossil oil use.
This may be a good place to link to another of DA's posts, US Emissions to Stay Below Pre-Recession…
May 19, 2011
That is what The Grauniad said over the weekend.
Cabinet ministers have agreed a far-reaching, legally binding "green deal" that will commit the UK to two decades of drastic cuts in carbon emissions. The package will require sweeping changes to domestic life, transport and business and will place…