William M. Connolley
stoat
Posts by this author
January 24, 2008
I've been putting off collating all the misc bets that came in. But here we go:
$333 (ie about 3p :-() against Joe Romm on an ice-free Arctic by 2020. P Farrington-Douglas, E200, same terms.
On next years Arctic sea ice being larger than this years record minimum: Nick Barnes, £10; Gareth, £20;…
January 21, 2008
Well, its more interesting than CorbynWatch. So, Nature sez:
New power stations across Europe could be routinely fitted with carbon-dioxide capture and storage (CCS) technology within two years under a proposal by the European Commission.
Which had my jaw dropping. In 2 years? The technology simply…
January 21, 2008
James is too busy worrying about his shares so I shall have to continue Corbynwatch. He's popped up in the Times, making the implausible claim that his forecasts for November were correct. Quite where he is going to find -17 oC for January is a mystery - in fact we have record warmth. I don't…
January 20, 2008
There I was, happily listening to R4 about some nonsense about obese kids, when suddenly I'm listening to a "Dr Stoat". Good heavens. He does indeed seem to exist, it wasn't my ears, e.g. here. He's a GP, not a holder-of-a-doctorate, but its close enough.
Next step, anyone ever listened to a Dr…
January 17, 2008
Is Fred Singer worth listening to(o)? It sounds unlikely - certainly when I heard him speak he provided nothing but disinformation. Sadly I may never know for sure, because their site was broken when I tried it. If anyone does manage to find Singer saying anything worth hearing, do let me know what…
January 16, 2008
Why is climate modelling stuck? asked mt, and Bryan weighs in too. So I don't see why I shouldn't too. This is no kind of comprehensive list or manifesto, the way mt's is. Just some random thoughts.
First of all, there are too many GCMs, and some of them are cr*p, so much so that they should simply…
January 10, 2008
Don't you just hate bloggers who post a whole pile all at once? Sorry. Anyway, some scans from a film that sat in my F801s for ages.
Miranda and the Alien Spacecraft
The Fairy Dress
January 10, 2008
Thanks to R for pointing out a list of every skeptic argument encountered online as well as how often each argument is used. Clear winner is "the sun" but its nice to see that old chestnut of 1970's cooling still in there at number 7.
January 10, 2008
RP Jr has a whole succession of posts, starting here. I was going to point out why it was all rather pointless, but it seems so obvious and tedious to wade through that I'm not going to bother.
This probably wins my award for least enthusiastic post of all time :-(
[Update: RC do this in rather…
January 10, 2008
Clean coal - as in burning and capturing the CO2 - is an idea being floated. There are obvious problems (apart from anything else, the capture and storage costs extra energy and so burns even more coal...), and AFAIK only a few pilot schemes exist. So the story that a commercial-scale plant was…
January 5, 2008
A mind-bogglingly stupid article in the Times came my way. Someone has built a small aeroplane powered by batteries. So far nothing exciting. But then to report the claim Ms Lavrand said that the fuel cost per hour of the Electra was â¬1 (70p) compared with about â¬60 for an equivalent petrol-…
January 5, 2008
People constantly get polar amplification wrong. The most obvious mistake is to assume it applies equally at both poles. It doesn't in both models and observations: there is far more warming in the Arctic (at present, and expected in the future. This picture is somewhat complicated if you look back…
December 30, 2007
Reads a bit oddly, doesn't it? Yet Donno insists on this reading in her Penguin edition of the Marvell poems, instead of the more obvious "Now therefore, while the youthful hue / Sits on thy skin like morning dew". Certainly to the modern ear the idea of morning glue conjures up no very pleasant…
December 28, 2007
You know you're getting old when you start liking Kipling. Still, at least I'm not quoting MacDonough's Song at you. The solstice is past and the bleak days are getting longer. Unless you're south, of course.
As I pass through my incarnations in every age and race,
I make my proper prostrations to…
December 20, 2007
Yikes! Said my daughter this morning. I thought the gentle art of saying Yikes had died out. How pleasant to be mistaken. Now all I need is for someone to say Zounds! in my presence.
Meanwhile... you've seen the BAS christmas e-card, lightly modified; the CSR one is here.
Coming at some point when…
December 18, 2007
According to google reader, RP Sr posted the below today to his "blog" (only its not really a blog cos it doesn't allow comments), in a post entitled Question The Weblog Real Climate. And indeed he did; the comment is here. This is something RP has been harping on about for a while. Gavin gave him…
December 17, 2007
Lindzen sez Respected Italian professors Alfonso Sutera and Antonio Speranza disappeared from the debate in 1991, apparently losing climate-research funding for raising questions.
This sounds like tripe - they continue to publish; and if they ever said anything about GW, I missed it.
Anyone know…
December 17, 2007
Mt wisely points out that the World Doesn't End in 2100. Its a fair point, and one that is often forgotten. However... its one that I have come to increasingly downweight as time goes by. For two reasons. One is practical: it simply won't work as a way of motivating people. If thats your best…
December 16, 2007
Guess who has finally admitted my conclusions on the role of humans on global warming, and climate change, in general, are mistaken.
December 16, 2007
At this grey time of year, a reminder of Lathkilldale in 2006.
December 15, 2007
Just to remind you, my prediction was that Bali was going to be a waste of time. But I'm open-minded, and happy to be persuaded otherwise. I rather suspect that any benefits are going to be hard-to-analyse-or-see, though possibly no less real for all that.
Its time to look through the usual…
December 14, 2007
Yes, its now available (2017 update: the NP fails to pass the test of time, and the b*st*rds block the waybackmachine; this is an archive of what I believe to be substatntially the same content drivel): 100% self-certified. Mostly its the obvious suspects, lots of Emeritus, and the familiar trick…
December 13, 2007
Eli suggests I start hedging. Well no. Mostly because the sums people have been prepared to put up so far are trivial. But partly because getting over-exciting about one exceptional year would be really silly, and there does seem to be some danger of people getting carried away. Saying "At this…
December 12, 2007
"Convection in the Antarctic Ice Sheet Leading to a Surge of the Ice Sheet and Possibly to a New Ice Age" is a 1970's Science paper by Hughes. Its all superceeded stuff now - the idea that the ice might (very very slowly) convect was current once, but no more (or else the cores wouldn't work very…
December 11, 2007
Everyone has their own spin on things, but its still not nice to be misrepresented, especially in support of someone elses agenda. RP Sr would like the 2003 heat wave to be unrelated to GW. It may well be; it was such an exceptional event that it would remain outside the stats even if you factor in…
December 10, 2007
The issue of reconciling tropical temperature trends at the sfc and in the troposphere rumbles on, although in a not very serious way: its a good subject for research, but it doesn't seem to be a major septic playing point, probably because the issue is too complex to get much traction.
A brief…
December 9, 2007
I thought I'd take advantage of a rant (sorry, yes, another one) to push some of our tat that we're selling (we hope) on ebay. So there is the disc firing robot, the ATV buggy, and the nervous alligator science kit.
We had two of the robots by some mischance, one non-working. We took it apart; it…
December 8, 2007
Jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, I can now read the full lyrics and realise I haven't got a clue what they are on about. Wiki doesn't know either, but does include the curious line "The song is often mistakenly attributed to Bob…
December 5, 2007
Those anxiously awaiting my detailed reply to RP's reply to my reply to RP's attack on the IPCC are doomed to disappointment. I'm afraid its fallen into the lifes-too-short category.
In summary: RP has forgotten the T^4 radiative feedback; and the IPCC figure is a difference from 1750.
Now, who to…