William M. Connolley
stoat
Posts by this author
December 13, 2008
Because Kevin Anderson says that it is "improbable" that levels could now be restricted to 650 parts per million (ppm). Which blows Hansens target 350 out of the water. Not that it requires a luminary of KA standing to do that. Quite why the grauniad is using breathless climate-snuff-porn prose to…
December 12, 2008
Naturally enough, there is a wiki article [[Christopher Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley]]. And of course what to say about his views on GW is a source of controversy: being wiki, it can't just say he is talkin' tosh, it has to be more polite.
Unlike certain anons, who make comments…
December 11, 2008
Every now and again the question of how much CO2 nuclear power plants produce, compared with other forms of power production, comes up; and whenever it does, I've forgotten where I last saw the figures. So now someone (thanks S) sent me some that look good (and are, by repute, biased against nukes…
December 10, 2008
Standard wikipedia joke. See how the meme spreads. Anyway:
I was listening to the renta-Odone, followed by the renta-Bishop, on R4 this morning after C4 last night broadcast a programme on assisted suicide. Everyone said all the obvious things all over again so it was a bit dull, but what I was…
December 10, 2008
Via Steinn, who got it from CR, this delightful story of how people are now so scared of losing unknown amounts of money they are prepared to sign up to a certain but small absolute loss (and thats neglecting inflation).
They should buy our shares, like I did earlier this week, and they actually…
December 7, 2008
There is an Anathem wikia (inevitable I suppose and quite useful for my purpose) but unfortunately it doesn't have a picture of the proof of Pythagoras's theorem that the aliens put on the outside of their spaceship. So here it is:
[Note: the colours are mine; and I have reconstructed the picture…
December 5, 2008
mustelid.ning.com. Some kind of social networking thingy. I'm not quite sure what it does. Try visting it.
December 2, 2008
I've pretty well given up paying the slightest attention to climate-change negotiations (err, hence this post...), as they seem to be utterly pointless. The political response to something is to talk about it, and so they do, spending large amounts of money and emitting large amounts of CO2 in the…
December 2, 2008
Shamelessly ripped from an internal newsgroup (thanks to AY):
A Buddhist went up to the hotdog seller and said: "Make me one with everything". Anyway, he got his hotdog and after not receiving his change, he asked for it. "My friend," replied the vendor, "the change must come from within".
And if…
December 1, 2008
One of the possibilities for GW-damage is reductions in crop yield - up to 25%, in extreme scenarios. My reaction to that was "we all eat too much anyway" (well I certainly do) but some people did point out the obvious, that not everyone lives in the overfed West. Eli was kind enough to point to…
November 29, 2008
Sea ice again.
I was reading Gareth who had been reading Monbiot. And so I did too. After I'd waded through the goo and the dribble about Bush, the first item of substance was A new summary of the science published since last year's Intergovernmental Panel report suggests that - almost a century…
November 27, 2008
Is it a Pearl Harbor if it has to happen twice? says Nature, discussing a list of stuff that Joe Romm thinks might lead to the second-world-war scale of effort against climate change.
#1 is Arctic goes ice free before 2020. I have bets out on this. It would be a big, visible global shock. One of…
November 22, 2008
Climate change seems to have gone a bit thin recently - James has got bored - and its distinctly chilly here, with snow in the air and a most glorious sundog. So lets talk about morality.
Paul is discussing the argument is that atheism, if true, necessarily means that morality is an arbitrary…
November 18, 2008
Just been playing with incredibots.com and it was good fun so I'm letting you all know. Daniel found it.
November 15, 2008
I'm reading Anathem because Paul told me to. And because I'm enjoying it. And because its good and thick and will sustain lots of time. Read Paul's review if you're interested in an overview; I'm not going to do that, if only because I haven't finished it (I'm about half way through, if you care).…
November 14, 2008
And other miscellania. That one is from the Indy: "she had once awoken from an afternoon nap to discover him sitting at his computer watching his online character - whom he had named Dave Barmy - having sex with an on-screen call girl." Weird or what. Somewhat more spicily (not to say utterly made…
November 10, 2008
Really, why are you reading this? Read something of substance instead.
Last time I said I ought to read Oresekes again carefully. I have.Summary: nothing has changed. She is still wrong. Note: in all the following, I abbreviate the authors of Chicken Itza as "Oreskes". Well, she is the lead author…
November 10, 2008
Though I must point out that this is "mad" in the sense of "angry", not "nut job". I mean RP Jr, and he is annoyed with Oreskes, saying What is it about the climate change debate that causes previously excellent scholars to go absolutely insane and disregard all standards of research integrity? I…
November 10, 2008
Nuture has a letter from David Gremillet who says: Scientists are becoming increasingly concerned about the environmental impact of their work... reduce our carbon footprint by attending fewer scientific conferences... Regular long-distance flying can easily triple an academic's carbon footprint.…
November 9, 2008
Sometime the deepest of philosophical issues are best understood in image form. Perhaps they should be transcribed into stained glass in some great cathedral: Here we have the problem of pain (I think thats the right phrase) part 1 and part 2.
And for William, who adopts a bluff non-intellectual…
November 5, 2008
So, Obama will be Prez. Congratulations to him. The last upsurge of enthusiasm like this I recall was Blur in 1997. I remember that well; we drove down to Cornwall overnight and listened to the reports and went to sleep in a gorgeous pink dawn. And look how Blur turned out. We'll have to wait and…
October 30, 2008
Says Seed. CIP said that a while ago, but less politely. I'd prefer Obama, but I don't have a vote. Looks like the money is on Obama: 1-9 on, whereas McCain is 5-1.
[Updates: Eli notes that Nature is endorsing Obama. C provides us with a wider choice of odds, and InTrade has him as a near-cert. But…
October 23, 2008
One of the more regrettable aspects of having children - other than the entire lack of a life - is interaction with the school inspectors. And the insanity reaches its peak in the inspection of after-school clubs. Its all such an utter waste of time that I'd rather ignore it than bother mock it,…
October 22, 2008
MW points out the regrettable Global Conference on Global Warming 2008 (GCGW-08). The wot? you might well say. Its not one of those, is it? It doesn't quite appear to be one of those. In fact, it even appears to have some fairly sensible people associated with it. Although rumour has it that they…
October 18, 2008
Fergus is interested in the effects of El Nino on sea ice. So I looked at http://climexp.knmi.nl/. At first I thought it didn't have sea ice, and it doesn't in the indices, but it does have in the monthly data, which you can average. And then end up with:
The shows Arctic sea ice correlated to SST…
October 18, 2008
So says Schellnhuber (ht ht). I imagine he really did say it, because its in quotes. But the same page says "Schnellhuber charged that 20 per cent of the loss of the ice sheet on Greenland could be directly linked to the added carbon dioxide emissions from new Chinese coal-fired power stations."…
October 18, 2008
In theory I have a blog about bees, called with a stunning lack of originality williams bees. However, its moribund, and I can't be bothered to maintain more than one blog, so for the record: I'm down to one hive now, the one pictured, except I've cut the nettles back a little. Spring brought a…
October 14, 2008
With regard to our BAMS paper, and the links to various commentaries at the bottom, John says: I actually have begun to feel despair every time I read a comment thread on a blog post about the paper... people generally don't read it, but rather use it as a starting point to share the opinions they…
October 14, 2008
The pollsters in question being Bray and von Storch, who get ratty on Prometheus about Gavin "too sexy for my model" Schmidt's RC piece dissing their latest survey.
Slightly confusingly, although the piece is signed by B+vS, it says I am a sociologist and Hans von Storch is a climate scientist... I…