William M. Connolley
stoat
Posts by this author
March 12, 2007
Someone who probably wishes to remain anonymous has suggested a possible source for the rather odd "120 year temperature" plot that TGGWS used. Which is: its land-only data, 5y smoothed, from 1878 to 1988, replotted onto an 1880-2000 axis. This would explain a couple of mysteries about the…
March 10, 2007
Well thats what RP Sr sez. Although he immeadiately gets cold feet and adds "Or, At Best Cherrypicking". I think he should make up his mind - if he is going to throw around a rather hard term like "errors" in the title he shouldn't wimp out to "or at best..." a moment later.
So, first off, does he…
March 10, 2007
Its evident that some people are still confused by the T/CO2 relationship, so I'll have another go in fairly simple terms.
Let me start with the "official" position, if you like. There are two cases: the current one, where we're pumping out CO2; and the ice age one, where CO2 varies naturally.…
March 9, 2007
Well of course, all the time. But in particular World Climate Report claims to be the webs longest running climate change blog (we'll leave aside the fact that it doesn't allow comments - how odd, I wonder why? - and so isn't really a blog). And indeed their archive goes back to March 2004. But.…
March 9, 2007
Thanks to BG, we have a screen capture of the solar graph from the silly "Swindle" prog; I've inlined it. Now this is nice, because it says S+C as source. Which means we can look-up the ever useful Damon and Laut. First off, notice that the data plotted *isn't* solar variation directly, but an…
March 8, 2007
My previous post refers. OK, so I went round to a friends to watch the thing. It was fun. My friends weren't scientists (one of them was a teacher just finishing preparing his classwork on witches, how appropriate), which meant that one of the Big Points (cosmic rays cause weather) elicited…
March 6, 2007
*I* don't know. It depends on what you mean. Or perhaps as RP Jr said, "It is a little like saying, would you prefer a poverty rate of 10% or 8%? Well, lower is better, the question is how do you get there? Not by arguing about ideal poverty rates I'd say". Which is a nice way of phrasing it,…
March 5, 2007
In the course of Why Channel 4 has got it wrong over climate change Robin McKie says:
The Observer's travel desk already gets hate mail merely for highlighting interesting destinations that might seem to encourage carbon-producing air travel
Well no. Without condoning the hate mail (which probably…
March 5, 2007
Paul Holland is floating around in the briny and writing it up. Lucky him (now the storms are over)
March 4, 2007
Channel 4 I fear: here is there prog page. I'm not going to see it (lacking a tv). It says (you can practically write this stuff in your sleep): The film brings together the arguments of leading scientists who disagree with the prevailing consensus that a 'greenhouse effect' of carbon dioxide…
February 27, 2007
Yes, its... well I'm not quite sure what it it, but its wacky, and all the planets are taking part. See here. Page 1 is only silly; but page 2 gets seriously wacky:
The "cause and effect" of these remarkable planetary transformations, we believe, is explained by appealing to a new form of Physics…
February 27, 2007
So says Howat et al. in Science (why hasn't this made it into the blogosphere before? Or did I miss it?). Interestingly, though the most recent change is a decrease: Using satellite-derived surface elevation and velocity data, we find major short-term variations in recent ice discharge and mass-…
February 24, 2007
Sounds like a dumb idea and it seems to be one. So I looked up the Global Warming entry. Which I suppose you could compare to the wiki version. Unlike the wiki version the Consa one is just about fact free (even a graph of temperature change is obviously to liberal for them) and not really even…
February 23, 2007
There is a new website called IPCCfacts. Presumably this is a reflection of the fact that the general public can't cope with reading the SPM, much less the full report when it emerges. The "facts" section is a bit thin - lets hope there are more than this to come. Resources, of course, under "…
February 23, 2007
Well yes indeed, but in this particular case I'm referring to the funding for the Natural Environment Research Council, which has been cut in order to help pay for the govts failed attempt to rescue the Rover car company; and rescuing the nuclear industry. Or so says the BBC - all I know for sure…
February 21, 2007
Coming back from the pub, I find the edit comment Someone added a bunch of none sence. First of all, it's not a giant beaver the creates the wind. Second, it's impossible that the people you mentioned knew about beavers. If that makes no sense (and should it?) this is the edit in question.
Kind of…
February 15, 2007
If you happen to be free in Cambridge tonight (7:45) , you can hear me talk at the Cambridge Humanist, in between a country walk and a pot luck meal :-). Usual subject...
February 14, 2007
I'm happy to say that in one respect at least the UK leads the world: the proportion of the U15's having sex. According to UNICEF we storm ahead with 38%, way ahead of our nearest rivals the repressed Swedes (figure 5.2d). We also do best at getting drunk, too (5.2b), though we only just beat the…
February 14, 2007
I thought I'd expand a bit more on why Svensmarks figure 4 is unacceptable (fig 4 of arXiv; fig 6 in Cosmoclimatology: a new theory emerges). Bear in mind that there is more wrong in the article than just this, though! The fig is:
I'm arguing about the lower line, which purports to be a 90-64S…
February 13, 2007
...but also about global warming. See here. And also Lubos's blog. And what did he have to say?
President Klaus also expressed his opinion on the recent finding of the UN scientific panel on global warming. In his opinion, warming is a myth. Oh dear, not a very good start.
Václav Klaus: I don't…
February 10, 2007
Yes, clouds and cosmic rays are back, via the indefatiguable Svensmark, at arXiv. But excitingly there is an Antarctic twist, in that the clouds connection explains the "Antarctic climate anomaly, ie why Antarctic and rest-of-work are out of sync. Errrm, but are they? Its a common idea during…
February 7, 2007
Its probably a measure of how accepted the bulk of the AR4 SPM is, that the most interesting discussion about it seems to center around the sea level rise uncertainty ranges. There does indeed seem to be some confusion here... RP Jr explores this, and points out that it would have been nice had the…
February 5, 2007
In my rapid skim of the junk that the Independent put out, I missed the classic I've just used as a headline. Hat tip to Coby for actually reading the stuff. To quote Coby: It makes James Inhofe sound reasonable. And that's no small feat!
February 5, 2007
Nature, in the course of editorialising on the vast waste of money that is the US return to the moon plan (although they don't say that), sez, making the analogy with the return to the South Pole in the IGY:
since humanity's return to the South Pole, Antarctic science has been central to the great…
February 5, 2007
From the washington post on the AR4: Global Warming Unstoppable, Report Says. Hmmm. Which is worse? The press reporting the skeptics saying GW isn't happening / isn't human / isn't a problem. Or the press telling us we're all doomed already (so may as well drive those SUVs and crank up the AC…
February 5, 2007
Tired of AR4? Then read Russ's blog about aircraft instrumentation down at Rothera.
February 3, 2007
Lord Monckton seems to have decided that he is an expert on climate change, and has released his own review of the SPM. Such fun.
He starts: FIGURES in the final draft of the UN's fourth five-year report on climate change show that the previous report, in 2001, had overestimated the human influence…
February 2, 2007
Call me an old grump but the SPM for the IPCC AR4 report wasn't terribly exciting. Which was, perhaps no great surprise: having read the draft chapters, or at least skimmed them, it was clear that nothing revolutionary was going to appear. They throw in the phrase Warming of the climate system is…
February 1, 2007
James Annan, via Tom Adams, finds that the White House search engine has hits on "global warming" deliberately removed. Such fun.
Since they are almost bound to get embarassed by this and fix it, the current result for searching the Whitehouse is:
Search whitehouse.gov by keyword
Results for: "…