William M. Connolley
stoat
Posts by this author
July 1, 2010
RC has said this already, but perhaps you want to talk about it here. Not great surprise I think; see the press release or the final report.
The Investigatory Committee, after careful review of all available evidence, determined
that there is no substance to the allegation against Dr. Michael E.…
June 30, 2010
More kinjy stuff :-).
Mostly Iraq inquiry publishes legal advice to Blair on war and in particular 30.07.02 Goldsmith advice to Prime Minister re: Iraq.
Hugo regrets that the prevalence of electronic instruments may prevent adequate supplies of piano wire being available. But that is an extreme…
June 30, 2010
Sorry, typo on the first letter, hope you aren't too disappointed :-). And nothing to do with the video: which is just a song I'd forgotten how much I liked. We owe so much to YouTube. Anyway, on with the show:
James Annan is ranting about Climate sensitivity again. I wouldn't normally bother…
June 27, 2010
This post is about the ridiculous "hide the decline" video. I watched it when it first came out. It wasn't funny, it was dull. Apparently it has now been pulled from YouTube, but who cares?
But... because the thing is anti-science, the std.anti-science septics on wiki feel inclined to have an…
June 26, 2010
'You are old', said the youth, 'and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak -
Pray, how did you manage to do it?'
'In my youth', said his father, 'I took to the law,
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular…
June 24, 2010
An unfair headline; but I think it is a known phrase: the "Dumb America" phenomenon, wherein the public has the hubris to believe that they really have something valuable to contribute to discussions that they can hardly begin to understand (I'm assuming that if you aren't part of DA then you're…
June 23, 2010
I thought I've have a go and see if I couldn't tweak JA a bit.
This is about Expert credibility in climate change by Anderegg et al.. Which tells us what we already know: that there aren't many "skeptics" and that most of them aren't much cop. Or in their more measured prose:
we use an extensive…
June 22, 2010
Some fairly random thoughts on the budget.
* VAT up to 20%: excellent. Calculating 17.5% was always so tedious. Score: +1.
* Child benefit and public sector pay will be frozen - for no clear reason we (as in, our family) get child benefit, which seems silly. The Economist wanted to means test it,…
June 20, 2010
Yes, another of those posts about the tedious details of my life that you care nothing about. And also an advert for my honey, hurrah.
In the middle you'll see my beehive. I've finally done most of the honey-related stuff this year (see-also previous bee blogging) so if you live nearby and care to…
June 20, 2010
There is a review of "Merchants of Doubt" by Oreskes at the Economist.
This quote shows roughly their take:
In this powerful book, Naomi Oreskes and Eric Conway, two historians of science, show how big tobacco's disreputable and self-serving tactics were adapted for later use in a number of debates…
June 19, 2010
A post about "Engineering the Software for Understanding Climate Change" by Steve M. Easterbrook and Timbo "Not the Dark Lord" Johns (thanks Eli). For the sake of a pic to make things more interesting, here is one:
It is their fig 2, except I've annotated it a bit. Can you tell where? Yes that's…
June 18, 2010
Via mt I find
too much of our scientific code base lacks solid numerical software engineering foundations. That potential weakness puts the correctness and performance of code at risk when major renovation of the code is required, such as the disruptive effect of multicore nodes, or very large…
June 15, 2010
Well, that was a bit of a surprise. Had you asked, I would have predicted a far weaker report. Shame it took so long. Cameron has responded well.
The Bloody Sunday killings were unjustified and unjustifiable, the Prime Minster has said. Thirteen marchers were shot dead on 30 January 1972 in…
June 15, 2010
Continuing from Three views of sea ice. Well, tis now mid-June, so the futurology aspect of the prediction is closing rapidly. Or so you would have thought. I've just taken £50 against CR for the ice being below 4.735 (he gets the low side) or above 4.935 (I get the high side). But my principal…
June 13, 2010
Poor Richard Tol. He has been invited (nominated by the Oirish Gummit, apparently) to be a convening author, though only for WG II.
But all he can do is whinge that "Political interference in the IPCC continues" because they won't provide him a blank cheque for his travel costs. Diddums. I'm sure…
June 12, 2010
I seem to have commenters who think I should read more CA, or Watty, or RP Sr, or misc other exciting stuff (I'm sure RP Sr loves being lumped in with that lot). Anyway, my response is, why? None of them, that I can see, have anything half as interesting as this or this or this. And Jules' pix are…
June 12, 2010
A glorious days bumping action on the Cam, rounded off with a confident row-over by First and Third. Here they are looking happy afterwards, as well they might. The jollity here is in marked contrast to the totally zoned-in look all the top boats had during the race, where everyone was staring…
June 11, 2010
This is something I've been meaning to say for some time, but Gareth has said it instead. I agree with Gareth, but it goes a little further: it isn't just the interface to policy, it is that a whole group of people (possibly large) are being actively encouraged to undermine science, to fail to…
June 11, 2010
I haven't been paying a great deal of attention to the actual *cause* of the oil leak, in the sense of whose *fault* it is (I mean, in the physical sense rather than any stupid legal sense). [[Deepwater Horizon oil spill#Investigations]] has some stuff. In fact I'll quote it, so we have a sort of…
June 9, 2010
On the recent oil spill issue (possible disclaimer: I'm wondering about buying I bought some BP shares).
I'm thinking about headlines like Obama Says He Would Fire BP CEO, Wants to Know 'Whose Ass to Kick'.
[Update: both TB and H point out that this quote is taken well out of context; see the…
June 8, 2010
Some time ago I promised KK a post on tribalism, and he has never forgiven me for not writing it.
I think the reason I never wrote it was because the word, or the charge, turns out to be so vague as to be meaningless. Tribalism is a charge you fling at people when you have no real arguments left…
June 8, 2010
More boring links blogs stuff. But just for once I do actually have something else to say, so I'll try to clear this out asap.
* Do you need context to understand the CRU emails? Or can they be understood on their own? An analysis. No prizes for guessing the answer. But links to...
* The secret…
June 7, 2010
Thanks to J who alerts me to this little matter. So, this is all mostly summarised in [[Description of the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age in IPCC reports]]. From which I reproduce:
A schematic (non-quantitative) curve was used to represent temperature variations over the last 1000 years in…
June 6, 2010
Hans von Storch is a bit hard to pin down on GW: unquestionably a good scientist, but sounding oddly skeptical of late. His klimazwiebel is his current venue, where he posts with others including Eduardo "killer" Zorita. von S's posts are usually the more sensible ones. But now we have Nils Roll-…
June 6, 2010
We' re recently acquired the second half of that vital twosome, the cat, to complement our Roomba. And so, here is a picture of our cat, Phoebe, on a Roomba.
I hope you're not too disappointed. Alas the book has not been much used - I've read it a bit for fun but never got round to the projects -…
May 28, 2010
Peonies are lovely. It is a shame they don't last long; so here is one immortalised.
May 25, 2010
SEPP has alwys been a one-man-band, that one man being Fred Singer of course (Do you know the dirt about Singer? He was once sane. BTW, if you're here from wiki, don't miss a post I did on Lindzen).
But being a one-man-band makes it look like you're a wacko (err...) so obviously you need an…
May 23, 2010
Sunday was the Champs Head. It is a slightly odd head race: a short course (1200m, from the Plough to the Pike and Eel) from a standing start, but the start is just for fun, since you get timed from a few strokes in. It was a blazing day, it felt like the heights of midsummer not late spring,…
May 23, 2010
The troops are getting restive. What wil happen to this year's sea ice? Rumours abound. Let's look at some pictures.
Probably the least interesting is this one from NSIDC. But it looks exciting, doesn't it. Woo-hoo, look, the sea ice now is lower than it was in 2007, that means it will be at…