William M. Connolley
stoat
Posts by this author
October 13, 2008
REM, of course. Or perhaps more appropriately, Its the end of the world as we know it (and I feel fine). I won't elaborate on the I-feel-fine for the sake of not tempting fate, not that I'm superstitious mind you.
Where was I? Oh yes, commenting on CIPs vision of our government as competent. No…
October 10, 2008
Via their blog, Nurture have some commentary on sea ice by Serreze & Stroeve.
Its all pretty vapid: With sharply rising atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations, the change to a seasonally ice-free Arctic Ocean seems inevitable. Very good, but The only question is how fast we get there. Well…
October 8, 2008
As the perceptive have noticed, I'm in Budapest. Its a lovely place; I like it. I was last here in 1986, just after finals, when I took two weeks to cycle across Europe to stay here for two weeks to play Go. One of the defining experiences of my life.
Its tempting to say either "its changed a lot"…
October 7, 2008
Since this years sea ice failed to be a record min (how careless of it) there is a sense of furtive scurrying around looking for something else; and DSB is looking at record thin instead: Sea ice in the Arctic Ocean has melted to its lowest volume in recorded history, according to new measurements…
October 7, 2008
Just a minor addition to the vast streams of pap being written and spoken about the current crisis (what crisis?). Inspired by watching financial TV in my hotel room.
Iceland seems to have sold itself to the Russians "We have not received the kind of support that we were requesting from our friends…
October 7, 2008
I'm away on conference for a week, but its all tediously commercial-in-confidence.
Here is a guessing game: where am I?
More useful clues tomorrow.
[Update: its a 5-star hotel, but not with this level of service. Where is JA?]
The post title comes from my run last night. I only ever seem to run…
October 2, 2008
In the course of a vaguely amusing although rather pointless argument on the wiki GW talk page [1] I found I needed the character [[Mr Logic]]. One thing lead to another, and before you know it I was at this all-time classic (warning: contains rude words and concepts).
So now you know why wikipedia…
September 29, 2008
Do you ever have the experience of a book you've bought from abe or ebay turning up, and you can't remember why you bought it? I got "The long-term impacts of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide" by MacDonald today (The Long-term Impacts of Increasing Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Levels, By Gordon…
September 28, 2008
Inel notes that Monckton thinks he was misrepresented on Earth: The Ratings Wars. Which is most amusing: something at last that Monckton and I agree on: E:TRS is misleading (though we're talking about different progs in the series, of course). Or you can read TLstake on it instead.
He sez: I was…
September 28, 2008
Or so says some spam for terradaily that made it to my inbox (which is just a rehash of the Berkley press release, though thankfully without the stupid flood picture). This is obvious b*ll*cks, as google shows. The wiki page is a bit rubbish, largely because the only example anyone can ever think…
September 25, 2008
I decided to skip over the synthesis - how can I judge that, before reading the chapters its supposed to synthesise? I'll come back to it.
Previous: Part I.
Chapter 2 "Future carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels" is by Nordhaus and Yohe; and by Ausubel and Nordhaus. Eli has laid into this,…
September 25, 2008
AL (and V1S, sorry!) pointed me to http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/aggi/, which lead me to http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/iadv/, from which I selected Barrow, as being in the Arctic, and CH4, as being methane, and 2000-2008, as being a small enough interval that you can see whats going on, and I…
September 24, 2008
I just found google charts (thanks NB) and you can see some nice ones here and maybe even discuss wheat yields. But for raw pointlessness I offer you:
(yes, I didn't even manage to get the scaling right). Anyone found anything less useful done with google charts?
September 24, 2008
Various wild excitement about methane emissions from the Arctic shelf... Hot Topic, Inel and The Indescribably Overhyped, which latter reveals "exclusively" what Magnus translated several weeks ago.
Inel, very sensibly, asks for context: what are we to make of "millions of tons of a gas 20 times…
September 23, 2008
I was going to have a 6,000th comment contest to line up with Seeds 1,000,000th comment contest. But the number bumped up while I wasn't watching. Oops.
So I retrospectively declare the winner to have been Dave Rado for this. Though I'm not sure about the counting, so Eli wins second prize for this…
September 23, 2008
I felt sure that I'd used this as a title before. But google assures me that no-one has used the phrase, which I fund rather hard to believe. Maybe I can copyright it. Its a useful phrase. I'm sure I remember it in the context of a Ray Bradbury story. Aha!. It has been used in books, 4 times says…
September 23, 2008
It looks like I'm safe for this year. I'm being just a teensy bit premature, but its rather unlikely to change, people want to pay up :-) and others have said it anyway (irritatingly that link will probably fade, so to quote "The Arctic sea ice cover appears to have reached its minimum extent for…
September 20, 2008
I've just opened up the hive for the annual end-of-summer honey extraction and anti-varroa treatment. This year its apiguard, which is a bit tedious because you have to do it in two goes at 2 week intervals. But the disappointment was the honey harvest: zero. They did have some honey, maybe six…
September 19, 2008
I've been down the pub so no chance for any sensible or sober posts. Roll on wikipedia.
So we come to [[William Nierenberg]] and its revision history. Alas, this is an example of wikipedia at its worst: a process-obsessed zealot more interested in policy than reality (thats the other side, not me…
September 18, 2008
Just a short post to draw your attention to mpgillusion.blogspot.com.
Update: now on RC
September 18, 2008
Scenario one: you borrow some money. You exchange the money for shares. The shares go up, you exchange the shares for more money than originally, and so pay back the loan and you have a profit. If you get it wrong, they go down and you lose instead.
Scenario two: you borrow some shares. You…
September 18, 2008
Zut alors: le Nierenberg vieux est arrivee! And you can join in the fun. I'll be posting up scans (well, actually, photos) of the text as I go along.
Aside: I got this thanks to the wonders of the extrawub: abebooks found me a copy for a mere $6.54 (plus postage) delivered from the states in a…
September 18, 2008
My paper with Tom Peterson and John Fleck (trailed here) is out in BAMS; you can get it now (for free! [Update: also direct from BAMS]).
Nice, isn't it:
And thats just the first page!
For those who weren't paying attention, you may wish to read:
The RC post that John Fleck wrote recently
My RC…
September 18, 2008
I walk past this sign every time I take my daughter to school. It irritates me every time. Am I allowed to walk dogs, but only if I'm not doing it in the interests of health and hygiene? Or does it mean that they consider dog walking unhygienic? The ambiguity is annoying: this is in a school,…
September 17, 2008
Via dubious sources, I've just discovered thedailymash, and Obama defends 'creationist psycho bitch' remark in particular. Their take on the US housing crisis is good, too. There's even a bit aboutGW.
On a more techie note, I came in at the facebook article before my technical lead directed me to…
September 16, 2008
So I thought I might read the JASON report of doom. TokyoTom has the details; abebooks doesn't have it, but google books knows it and even has the contents list and pointed me at dualj who I've never heard of, and who spell purchase as "Purhcase" which seems curious. It doesn't seem to have a very…
September 16, 2008
On the list of things to read-n-blog since before the summer hols has been John Flecks oil-to-liquids post.
John says, quite perceptively, At some price (the usual number I hear is somewhere at or above $60 or $70 a barrel) it becomes economical to make liquid fuels out of coal... The question has…
September 16, 2008
Belatedly, McCain answers the sciencedebate questions. Obama did that earlier; how does McCain fare?
Its good to see that the tide of drivel hasn't dried up:
I am uniquely qualified to lead our nation during this technological revolution. While in the Navy, I depended upon the technologies and…
September 15, 2008
Just a pointer towards Nicolas Nierenbergs blog, which contains his critique of Oreskes. He needs some comments, so don't post here.
September 15, 2008
By S. P. Huang, H. N. Pollack, and P.-Y. Shen, also known as HPS. This is a very interesting paper. To understand why, you'll need to at least browse The borehole mystery and More boring.
To recap: the image shown was being shamelessly abused by the septics as purported proof that the MWP was much…