William M. Connolley
stoat
Posts by this author
August 31, 2007
For a long time the AAPG enjoyed the dubious distinction of being the only organisation with any kind of scientific credibility that maintained an officially septic position on climate change, as reported by the official journal of record, wikipedia. That changed recently when they adopted a new…
August 31, 2007
Tim Lambert provides the abstract of Zhen-Shan and Xian; MW was kind enough to send the text. I've seen it before... probably via Monckton or one of the std.septic channels. Lambert describes it as "just a rubbish paper that should not have been published". It comes up as one of the Schultz 7.
But…
August 30, 2007
Two sources point me towards a Neville Nicholls letter about a 35 year old paper by Sawyer, but Inel gets the hat tip. Nicholls uses the paper to demonstrate that concern about GW is nothing new (it also blows the "everyone was predicting a new ice age in the 70's" away, but thats another story),…
August 30, 2007
Back to the septic tripe I fear (thanks Fergus). From dailytech.com, whatever that is, we have someone "updating Oreskes". And the work has been submitted to... yes you guessed it, E+E. Bit of a hint there re quality. Does this come under be careful what you wish for?
Oreskes said The 928 papers…
August 29, 2007
Have a look at this edit, where Lumidek loses his rag.
Slightly less wacko, but not losing touch with the septic, the AAPG seems to be coming closer to reality whilst being careful not to get there.
Meanwhile someone calling themselves SFredSinger, who may or may not actually be Singer, tried this…
August 29, 2007
There have been various attempts to survey scientists opinions about climate change. Wiki has an article on this: Scientific opinion on climate change. Check the recent history for another attempt... :-)
All of these attempts have various methodological problems which I'm sure you can think of for…
August 23, 2007
NERC has a new strategy draft out (I think its public - if you can't read it, its not...).
And it has an ambitious goal: UK to lead the world in the prediction of the regional and local impacts of
environmental change from months to decades. So thats bad news for the rest of the world, you'll be…
August 23, 2007
From The Onion, Hard To Tell If Wikipedia Entry On Dada Has Been Vandalized Or Not. Sadly the actual article is boringly factual (or it was; I've had a go at improving it but I doubt it will last. I like the way my version ends with an impassioned yes yes).
My first go didn't last long, but then…
August 23, 2007
I'm now hopelessly confused about the distinction between climate projection and prediction.
I used to be happy with what I thought was the case: that given the range in model results, and no good way of knowing the best, calling them predictions seemed too precise; so use a weaker word like…
August 21, 2007
We recently visited Bayeux, to see the famous tapestry, but I thought the cathedral was better. And its free! So I shall bore you with my photos, if you click here.
August 21, 2007
If you live outside the UK, chances are that you haven't noticed the climate "camp" protests at Heathrow. Despite various forecasts of direct action, there seems to have been very little action and a lot of sitting around. I'm left wondering why they bothered.
One obvious answer is the famous "…
August 20, 2007
RC laid into tipping points a while back but now they are back in fashion, it seems: via Tim Lenton, reported at RC today. But they seem as vague and ill-defined as ever.
I still retain my antipathy to the idea. TL has now switched from "tipping points" to "tipping elements" to describe the…
August 20, 2007
Israeli Climatologists Available for Comment on Hurricane Dean and Climate Change Developments says my inbox, and continues Nearly two years after Hurricane Katrina devastated much of the U.S. Gulf Coast, another dangerous Atlantic hurricane is gaining strength in the Caribbean. In a series of…
August 19, 2007
JA has a nice entry on Schwartz' sensitivity estimate pointing out where the probable errors are.
I too found the 5-y timescale rather low. Fitting in with James's assessment that S is wandering out of his field, I was surprised by the lack of discussion of how this new result fits in with…
August 12, 2007
Its been obvious for quite a while that there is no trend in solar to explain climate trends; this is the bleedin' obvious but Lockwood managed to get a paper out of it a while back. Of course neither paper nor data will affect the wild-eyed fringe, as Piers Corbyn demonstrates by tilting at…
August 11, 2007
Doug Smith and colleagues have a new paper in Science Improved Surface Temperature Prediction for the Coming Decade from a Global Climate Model. The abstract is Previous climate model projections of climate change accounted for external forcing from natural and anthropogenic sources but did not…
August 9, 2007
Via Lubos (sorry: I was looking for rumours of him leaving) I find some interesting stuff re the temperature record it China.
Lubos has misunderstood and oversold it, but the original makes for strong and interesting reading. Mind you SPM fig 4 makes it rather unlikely that any major change to the…
August 9, 2007
Apologies - back to climate, but opinion, not science. Bray and von Storch ride again! See Nature's blog and a long write-up of their results.
In the blog, they attack Singer for taking stuff out of context, and the skeptics for misrepresenting their results. But they also defend the methodology…
August 9, 2007
Continuing the non-climate theme for the moment, I offer you The Seeker Culture of the Thames Valley by my father in law, now a historian since retiring from the oil industry.
The photo is irrelevant to just about everything, a suggestion from Concarneau that is unlikely to overtake coffee breaks…
August 5, 2007
I've been on holiday, I don't know if you noticed. We came back via Bayeux and here I post a little-known pic from the famous tapestry (yes really). You are to imagine the nice ladies of the time happily needle-pointing away, although perhaps that isn't such a good image now I think of it.
July 20, 2007
Its summer, which is why its poured with rain. More floods, etc etc. Here it was only somewhat wet, though it stopped in time for the friday evening pub visit.
And it was also the last day of school: Miranda has just finished her first year, a momentous... milestone.
And so its holiday time. Back…
July 16, 2007
Sez the Grauniad. So far so dull. More interesting was TVs and computers are the "electronic babysitters" for a generation of children who are losing out on family life and becoming more materialistic, a report says today. The study paints a picture of a breed of "screen kids" who are spending more…
July 16, 2007
The goal of Climate Science on this subject (of glacier advance and retreat) is to present documentation that the frequently stated claim that glaciers are retreating everywhere is an inaccurate statement sez RP in response to his first comment. Of course, this is a waste of time (as well as…
July 13, 2007
Since we were on TGGWS-wanabe's (can it really be true that no-one has pointed out to her that her CO2 graph is junk? Why is it still there?) it seems appropriate to note that a heavily-cut version has aired in Oz. Most of the cuts (I haven't seen the thing, of course) are hacking out Wunsch, who…
July 12, 2007
The egregious Soon has a paper, Variable solar irradiance as a plausible agent for multidecadal variations in the Arctic-wide surface air temperature record of the past 130 years which is a weasel-worded title if ever I saw one. But anyway: Soon is comparing the "Arctic" temperature record to the…
July 10, 2007
So whats new you ask? Well nothing, but its worth pointing out. The issue in question is What do we learn from Glaciers in the Highest Altitudes In The Alps? which found (quick reminder) that though low-altitude glaciers were retreating, the very highest ones on Mt Blanc were not, because ablation…
July 10, 2007
Eli has the septics latest example of TGGWS-style graph faking - take a look. Or it could just be incompetence, I suppose (theirs, not Eli's).
July 10, 2007
I'm using VNC to view unix through windows and very nice it is. One irritating feature was lack of cut-n-paste between the VNC window and the outside world, but I could live with that. Then I wanted to run a different window manager, so ended up reading the documentation (:-) and discovered, in the…
July 10, 2007
You couldn't get a more perfect example of desperation than:
At the recent International Symposium on "Landform - structure, evolution, process control", University of Bonn, Germany, June 7-10, 2007, that I attended, there was evidence presented of the retreat of all of the glaciers in the Alps.…
July 5, 2007
Very little other than the bleedin' obvious I fear. Inel laments her lack of access; but http://blog.petedecarlo.com/ has read it and provides a copy of the Nature comment, but not the Proc Royal Soc original. Not having read the original, I'm not sure what was in it worthy of publication; the lack…