William M. Connolley
stoat
Posts by this author
December 3, 2007
Cute power density factoid, which I owe to Eric Chaisson: humans have far higher power densities than stars.
The solar luminosity is about 4.10^27 W, the mass is about 2.10^30 kg; so the power density is 2.10^-3 W/kg.
Human use ~2800 kcal/day ~ 120 W. Mass is ~80 kg, so 1.5 W/kg.
Isn't that fun?
December 3, 2007
Just a post-of-record, following Brian Schmidt, that I have a $333 bet against Joe Romm, with me taking the "cold side" of:
at no time between now and the end of the year 2020 will the minimum total Arctic
Sea ice extent be less than 10% of the 1979-2000 average minimum annual Arctic Sea ice extent…
December 3, 2007
Internatioanl Rivers says The great majority of hydros in the CDM would very likely be built regardless of receiving credits (in CDM-jargon they are "non-additional"), in contravention of the mechanism's basic principle. The CDM was designed to issue credits to projects that are "additional". They…
December 2, 2007
Enough mawkish maudlin sentiment. Time to jump on the wackos again. This time its UnSciAm, who are foolish enough to publish a letter from Singer without fact-checking it first (I don't think you can blame Singer for getting his facts wrong, since thats the entire point). You can (and I do) blame…
December 1, 2007
My leaving card, lightly modified for me from the BAS christmas e-card.
This post on RC explains all. Comment here or there at your pleasure.
November 30, 2007
RP Sr's one-man kamikaze attack against the IPCC continues. RPs point appears to be that the IPCCs forcing-since-1750 of +1.6 W/m2 is not compatible with a current imbalance of about 0.85 W/m2. Sadly RPs link to the Hansen paper concerned is currently broken so I'm somewhat guessing what this…
November 29, 2007
UK teacher jailed over teddy row: "A British teacher has been found guilty in Sudan of insulting religion after she allowed her primary school class to name a teddy bear Muhammad."
November 28, 2007
RP Sr sez: "We have shown in several studies that the downscaling of multi-year global model predictions by regional climate models is very strongly dependent on the lateral boundary conditions of the parent model". Good grief, really? Well you'd hope so, wouldn't you, since thats exactly what is…
I'll believe it's a crisis when the people who tell me it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis
November 26, 2007
From Instapundit via Quark soup.
November 26, 2007
When I was a wee mustelid, I wrote about this; and there is an RC piece, and as far as I know, its all still valid.
But this post is aimed at those who put an "s" into poles in "What exactly is the mechanism that causes the poles to warm faster than the tropics as a result of climate change?" when…
November 23, 2007
Thaas outrageous, big Mammy refers. We had it as our journal club today, and the outcome was, no-one thought Hansen had done a convincing job.
The paper itself is confusing ("like being inside Hansens head", as someone put it) and its not clear what its really supposed to be about. My pdf attempts…
November 22, 2007
Cruise ship sinking off Argentina says the BBC. And "Passengers and crew have been rescued off Argentina from a cruise liner, which began sinking after it hit ice. The M/S Explorer ran into trouble near King George Island in the Antarctic Ocean, near the South Shetland Islands. Andy Cattrell, of…
November 21, 2007
A letter from the naughty coal people, and Hansens uncompromising reply, is at http://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/NMAletters_20071121.pdf. I've been a bit critical of Hansen for over-egging the science sometimes, but exchanges like this are good to remind you of where you stand.
[Update: A partial…
November 21, 2007
So, the question was, how much effect does removing the Arctic sea ice make to the rest of the world? In particular, what is the direct effect, ignoring all the feedbacks that would occur on SST and so on? Happily, an atmosphere-only GCM can answer this question, and happily I had one to hand, viz…
November 20, 2007
They're cr*p, aren't they? Tracy Says was the name of a band at the UK Met Office. They got their name from the quote :-). Reading the appalling stories that "Two computer discs holding the personal details of all families in the UK with a child under 16 have gone missing" I am irrestistibly…
November 20, 2007
I have got complained at for responding to "The impact on the stability of the Greenland ice sheet as well as on global weather patterns would likely be nearly unimaginable" with "...as for the impact on the weather, there is no reason to suppose any problem." This in the context of the recent loss…
November 19, 2007
Reading the torygraph business section I came across Deutsche Bank in ownership court row: "An American judge has prevented Deutsche Bank from repossessing 14 homes because the bank could not prove it owned the defaulting mortgages involved... Pooling involves taking hundreds if not thousands of…
November 18, 2007
To Belgium, for Wouters thesis; and congratulations to him. Pix are on Flickr once you get past the bonfires.
Now the new line from St Pancreas is in, it takes less than 2 hours to get there, and new posters are splashed all around, some of them quite good.
The one featuring Thatcher, Major and…
November 17, 2007
So the AR4 synthesis is out. You can read the SPM and cherry-pick your favourite bit. The BBC has, and has selected climate change is "unequivocal" - fair enough but boring, because we've had that already - and may bring "abrupt and irreversible" impacts which made me sit up and take notice.
There…
November 17, 2007
No, not really a challenge, perhaps a rebuttal to those who think its only safe in Japan. I left my bike over friday night at Cambridge railway station, and forgot to remove the front light. When I came back... it was still there. Pathetic or what?
November 15, 2007
OK, who knows how electric car emissions compare to, say, diesel in terms of CO2/km? I mean pure battery electric, not hybrid. Obviously you have to assume some generating mix to produce the electricity, and the answer might vary for where you live: if you take France's 70% nuclear electric then…
November 14, 2007
Over in the mad world, CIP castigates his fellow countryfolk for promoting torture. AFAIK we're not doing that (except very quietly and discretely, one suspects) so instead we're going for detaining people for implausibly long times. We're currently at an insane 28 days and our glorious leader…
November 11, 2007
More fireworks - we went to three parties in the end.
D in front of the fire.
November 10, 2007
For some reason I've been honoured by a burst of comments from Piers "Solar" Corbyn, a man not ashamed to be associated with TGGWS.
PC defends his predictions of the mighty storm surge (without mentionning whether or not he predicted it would turn out to be dull), provides us with his CV (a…
November 10, 2007
The recent hoax seems to have been taken down - sad. There is a story about it at Reuters and its everywhere else.
I wanted to point out something which no-one else seems to have noticed, which was that the figures for the T and CO2 histories were very obviously faked. They were just straight lines…
November 9, 2007
A pointer to The Real Truth About the Revelle-Gore Story because I came across refs to this just recently... where?
Oops, sorry, Eli did it ages ago. Good.
November 8, 2007
Wild excitement, and local at that: A tidal surge in the North Sea has sparked severe flood warnings and evacuations on England's east coast. We shall see.
[Update: it was a bust -W]
November 5, 2007
Inel points us to a report by the IPPR, WWF and RSPB claiming that we can cut our carbon emissions by 80% by 2050. My immeadiate reaction is doubt. Comparing their numbers with what I had from a previous post, I don't see any reason to change my mind.
Inel, rather naughtily to my mind, simply posts…