William M. Connolley
stoat
Posts by this author
May 29, 2008
At last some news on the climate front, and JA has a nice posting on it. I'd say its a bit early to be expresssing an opinion. They have found something; quite how it affects the record needs chewing over.
Meanwhile, did you know that Singer has a Nobel Prize? No? Well it was news to me, and is yet…
May 23, 2008
Last sunday was the Champs head (named after the pub where they meet rather than their status :-) and it was a lovely day and we got to borrow Christs first boat which was lovely too. We were sort of OK, rather rushed and splashy, not long enough (race results from http://www.championrowing.org.uk…
May 20, 2008
Ha. Now you know I really have gone over to the Dark Side. Prompted by British funds back Rockefellers' green rebellion to bring in new ExxonMobil chairman. The complaint appears to be that The firm has refused to follow rival oil companies in committing large-scale capital investment to…
May 20, 2008
Originally this was going to be about politics, and the answer was going to be "not as much as his poll ratings suggest". But then I found a speech on Opec/Oil and the answer has to be, "yes he's crap". On so many levels.
He sez: Gordon Brown yesterday signalled a new determination to defend…
May 16, 2008
Cycling back from town yesterday, I saw: in a chestnut tree of moderate height in the middle of an open field miles from the river, a heron. And three crows flying at it, "dive bombing" it is tempting to say although their flight was mostly level. They were trying to drive it away, I suppose, and…
May 15, 2008
I love the language and thought in Leviathan:
Feare of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publicly allowed, RELIGION; not allowed, SUPERSTITION. And when the power imagined is truly such as we imagine, TRUE RELIGION.
Concision achieved by cogitation; so different to the…
May 15, 2008
Grauniad again, of course:. Its obvious b*ll*cks, at least as measured by my own experience: most of the damage is caused by roads, buildings, farming practices, and so on. Can it really be true that 90% of env damage is due to T change?
Probably not. The source appears to be Attributing physical…
May 14, 2008
Lucia lost the plot some time ago, mostly by cherry-picking her time period, using a weird data-fitting method and failing to understand what she was looking at. Now RP Jr follows her down the rabbett hole and bizarrely describes her post as "clear". Well, when people are telling you what you want…
May 8, 2008
The summary of betting on sea ice refers. If you look in my comments, you'll find any number of well intentioned people advising me that its time to close up the bets before I take a bath. But I haven't. Anyone wanting to pile in is still welcome (if you can't be bothered to look up the previous…
May 8, 2008
As I said before, I don't think much of the latest prediction of cooling. But apparently , the authors take it seriously, and believe it as a prediction (pers comm). So RC has decided to see if they are serious. My expectation is that they will find some spurious excuse for wimping out (I've…
May 3, 2008
"Next to Al Gore, William Connolley may be the world's most influential person in the global warming debate...". It would be nice; sadly its only the opinion of Lawrence Solomon, who is, errrrm, not very well informed.
LS's attempts to make sense of the innards of wikipedia are quite funny, for an…
May 1, 2008
All the blogosphere is abuzz with Advancing decadal-scale climate prediction in the North Atlantic sector. I don't have much to say that JA hasn't already said. But that isn't going to stop me saying it.
Firstly they've done something very odd with the reference model data in fig 4. The std IPCC…
April 28, 2008
"Tesco to put carbon scores on goods" says The Torygraph. Sounds like a good idea in principle. Do go on ...The labels - which will be put on 30 products, including tomatoes, potatoes, orange juice, light bulbs and washing detergent - will detail how many grams of CO2 were created in their…
April 22, 2008
Monday: to The Junction, that singularly unappealing Cambridge venue, for Bellowhead who were superb. You can find them on Youtube but its not the same as watching them live. They're on UK tour now...
If you're in Cambridge and that way inclined, on wednesday you can hear John Otway and Wild Willy…
April 19, 2008
Says the FT, via DSB. Since I've already argued that Stern is over-bleak, Im surprised he has got more pessimistic. Whats up?
Apparently "We underestimated the risks . . . we underestimated the damage associated with the temperature increases . . . and we underestimated the probabilities of…
April 16, 2008
Just a provocative title, to point you towards I accept Bill Gray's climate bet offer - will he seal the deal? by Brian Schmidt. My feeling is that Gray will wimp out - I'll even put money on it if anyone is interested :-)
April 15, 2008
1.5 m sea level rise this century, that is. Nature sez the "estimate released today says that it could be as as much as 1.5 metres (4.9 feet) by the end of this century". Their source seems to be Reuters, and we'll pause briefly to condemn the oh-so-typical inflation of the worst case from the…
April 13, 2008
Do you realise that bufapopo doesn't get a single google hit? Its outrageous. Badger would be appalled.
[Seems pretty clear that youre not going to get it, so I'll have to tell you. Read on...]
[Yes, the answer is "bearing an unsympathetic facial aspect in the presence of a police officer"; catch-…
April 12, 2008
I've realised that I've been dismissing a load of nonsense merely on the grounds that its discussing short trem trends, without troubling to look at those trends. But everyone else is talking about them, so why shouldn't I?
So Anyway, Lucia says that trends since 2001 are negative, based on a…
April 11, 2008
Last night we had the first ice-cream van of the summer around our streets. But we didn't stop it and buy one.
April 8, 2008
To the annual parish meeting. Thankfully I am no longer a parish councillor so am not obliged to go; but since a friend told me it was on I turned up. Of those who did, most were parish councillors, one was the district councillor, two were dogs walkers (I'll come on to that), two were my friend…
April 6, 2008
Predictably enough, the Grauniad has picked up on Hansens target 350 stuff. And what he said before about W Ant now seems to have got transmogrified into:
Hansen said that he now regards as "implausible" the view of many climate scientists that the shrinking of the ice sheets would take thousands…
April 6, 2008
Suppose you read a press release that started... Bleak first results from the world's largest climate change experiment and continued Greenhouse gases could cause global temperatures to rise by more than double the maximum warming so far considered likely by the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate…
April 3, 2008
Well, we knew that anyway, but there is some more stuff out on it, says the BBC: The Svensmark hypothesis is that when the solar wind is weak, more cosmic rays penetrate to Earth. That creates more charged particles in the atmosphere, which in turn induces more clouds to form, cooling the climate.…
April 1, 2008
Liberation blog says Il est fondé sur des contreverités factuelles impardonnables pour un scientifique censé respecter un minimum de règles éthiques dans sa communication avec le public (thanks, R). I think they've ripped off their fig (a) from someone elses blog, but can't remember whose.
April 1, 2008
I can report a definite downwards temperature trend: this year, Easter was much colder than last year. But thats because we went visiting in the Lakes. I heartily recommend having a relative living there; better still, live there yourself.
Here we see an igloo and inhabitant.
And the view from…
March 30, 2008
Or nearly does, at least. It seems that the Wilkins ice shelf is hanging by a thread and bits are falling off. You'll have to forgive me for being late with this news, as I've been off in the Real World for a week or so, with only intermittent internet connections. The paper world seems to have…
March 17, 2008
While we're on things that will keep coming back, I suppose for balance I ough to lay into Hansen, who is once again pushing his climate-sensitivity-is-6oCstuff. Well, it wasn't, and it still isn't.
So there.
March 15, 2008
Whether its post-IPCC-AR4 fatigue, or a foolish Michaelson-like assumption that we just about know whats going on, but things seem to be rather quiet on the climate front, in terms of real news and results.
Which leaves people footling around for something to talk about, and temperature trends over…