stoat

Scientists forecast metre rise in sea levels this century says The Grauniad. I strongly suspect they have garbled things, though I admit I haven't read the original Science paper. I have read the NCAAR/UCAR press release Arctic, Antarctic Melting May Raise Sea Levels Faster than Expected. The…

A while ago, Nature did a study comparing wikipedia to Britannica (you can read my take on it here - oh, just look at the title I used :-). Now it seems that Britannica weren't very happy about the results, and have responded: We discovered in Nature's work a pattern of sloppiness, indifference to…

I am a minor coauthor on a paper to appear in Science. Sadly thats all I can tell you, since the embargo on this paper has been set for 2:00 pm U.S. Eastern Time on Thursday, 30 March 2006. Well, until next week :-) OTOH, if you're a reporter (hello John!) Reporters should contact AAAS at 202-326-…

A reader foams at the mouth: You see, I set up Mozilla Firefox so that the default font is Verdana 18 point, because that's a size I am comfortable with, being a quintedecarian. Then all these WWW graphic designers say, "The default font for most of the browsers in the world (ie. Internet Explorer…

A variety of stories have come in recently (or at least fairly recently - I'm a bit behind the times, and it was a heavy weekend, wot with E getting chickenpox and the central heating failing) about CO2 levels, e.g. Sharp rise in CO2 levels recorded from the BBC. This turns out to source at a NOAA…

So... where to start? Back in the dim and distant days of a year or so ago, or back to the TAR, there was a problem: temperature trends at the surface and upper atmosphere were incompatible with how the models said they should relate: the models said the upper trends should be larger, obs said…

The Economist has a survey on Open-source business (subs req). The usual suspects - apache, linux - come up, and of course so does wikipedia. And naturally enough (since this is a pile of econ journos who know b*gg*r all about wiki) they make the traditional mistakes... Saying that the George…

Sorry folks, its time for the silly and offensive post! Many years ago, there was a Steve Bell carton, sometime around the Iran-Contra stuff I think, showing a panel of generals or stuff with names like "Peentangler" and the protagonist saying "the thing I really like about America is that you can…

RP Sr is advertising a "balanced" climate meeting. And why is he so confident of balance? Well, check out the list of organisers and speakers. You could play bingo with them :-). And if that isn't enough, good ol' Sonja A.Boehmer-Christiansen offers in the comment to publish the results... with…

Whenever people ask me about the possibility of us running out of fossil fuels, I usually reply that I'm no expert on oil reservoirs but that there are markets out there that are, and if we were going to run out the price should have been rising rapidly. That probably still true, despite oil prices…

ClimateScienceWatch is Promoting integrity in the use of climate science in government. But you know that because you read Chris Mooney. Lots of interesting politics-type stuff there. In Inhofe stuff is fun. I must post on the NAS stuff sometime. So I pass quickly onto the second, which is more…

I was invited to give a talk to CHASE - Cambridge Hi-tech Association of Small Enterprises - nice people even if they haven't quite got round to updating their web site yet :-) The subject was to be global warming - no problem - and wikipedia. The later I've never tried talking about, and found it…

Some of these links are to Nature, and they require subscriptions. Sorry. If its any consolation, I can't read them fro home either - I have them stcked up in tabs and need to get rid of them... They're from Nature 440, 2 March 2006, if you're looking for the paper copy. This one: Alternative…

So says The Grauniad. Its talking about public access to publicly collected data in the UK. As near as I can determine, in the US most govt-collected data is in theory and in practice freely available to citizens. In the UK this is very definitely not true: the most obvious example is the Ordnance…

A tip-off from G, whose habit of trawling the dark and smelly places of the web hauled up Common sense on global warming from the deeps where it had been deservedly sunk. The follow-up A dilettante debates the scientists is amusing too, as the self-described "autodidact, polymath, and armchair…

Venturing onto thin ground for me, and giving the stringy folk a chance to patronise me in return. So... I've been reading Kuhn, the structure of scientific revolutions. An interesting book, which I shall blog about in a bit. In some ways its a bit like reading Leviathan, but in reverse. So: the…

The paper-for-today is Isabella Velicogna and John Wahr, Measurements of Time-Variable Gravity Show Mass Loss in Antarctica. Both Chris Mooney and Kevin Vrames have things to say about this washingtonpost write-up; I'll try to talk about some different aspects. First of all, this is only 3 years…

...says James Annan, and he and Julia Hargreaves have a GRL paper to prove it, not to mention a barometer dropped from a tower :-) James directs his main fire at those who have suggested rather high climate sensitivities - 6 or 10 oC. However, this is also a blast at the skeptics who argue for…

Wikipedia reached its one millionth article today, and I was there on IRC watching as it happened... although actually I'd popped into the kitchen to do the washing up at the crucial moment. Predictably enough the millionth article itself is not very exciting: Jordanhill railway station. My own…

Well yes indeed, someone has leaked bits of the upcoming IPCC AR4 report to the BBC. The only odd thing is that its taken this long. The draft has "do not cite or quote" written on it, of course, but so many people have access to it that its hard to believe the media don't. Chris Mooney has noticed…

John fleck has been having fun with degrees of separation. See Erdos, Lambert and Fleck and Eight Degrees of Separation (and the comments, where we discover that Steve McI has a "Mann number" of 4). Whats mine? I can do (C+Gregory) to (Gregory and Sexton) to (Parker and Sexton) to (Parker and…

RP has his take on the hurricane statement I mentioned last post up. I agree with most of it but not the bit about attribution; see here and don't forget the comments. But what I wanted to note was that Hans von Storch has added some comments to RP's post, which is interesting. I'm not in the habit…

Via the indefatigable het, I discover a new Statement on Tropical Cyclones and Climate Change, Submitted to CAS-XIV under Agenda Item 7.3 by Dr G. B. Love, Permanent Representative for Australia Prepared by the WMO/CAS Tropical Meteorology Research Program, Steering Committee for Project TC-2:…

I don't have access to the WSJ, but via mt on sci.env I find a suggestion that they may have seen the light on Global Warming: "I find the case for prospective greenhouse warmingto be almost beyond doubt. ... "In the two major unspecialized scientific journals, Science and Nature, one has to go…

[This is a copy of http://mustelid.blogspot.co.uk/2004/12/septics-and-skeptics-denialists-…, put here for my convenience. I'll give it an old post date. I don't know if it will show up as "new" on the feed.] An astute reader might well ask why I write "septic" where you might expect me to write "…