William M. Connolley
stoat
Posts by this author
November 19, 2015
It's not Rice terraces in Yunnan of course: it's Caribbean brain coral, from the Royal Society photo competition. The winner, tadpoles, is cute, but looks to be a rip-off of the rather better newt. Unless its a common idea. The fish is good, too:
As is the snake. I like abstracts:
A friend of…
November 18, 2015
Catherine Ritz,Tamsin L. Edwards, Gaël Durand, Antony J. Payne, Vincent Peyaud& Richard C. A. Hindmarsh; Nature (2015) doi:10.1038/nature16147. And somewhat following on from Joan Crawford has risen from the grave! only its sane, well-crafted, and most important of all not only publishable but…
November 13, 2015
Perhaps not the world's greatest shock in Nature Geoscience 8, 880–884 (2015) doi:10.1038/ngeo2560 by Francisco Estrada,W. J. Wouter Botzen& Richard S. J. Tol. Hmm, one of those names is strangely familiar.
There's a press release from U Sussex: Professor Richard Tol is co-author... find that…
November 12, 2015
Someone (I forget who; remind me and I'll thank you) pointed me at Everything You Need to Know About the Exxon Climate Change Probe but were afraid to ask. That article makes some points I've already made (While environmental advocates have cheered Schneiderman’s effort to take energy firms to…
November 11, 2015
Environment and Development Challenges: The Imperative of a Carbon Fee and Dividend says:
This chapter discusses the importance of a carbon fee and dividend in minimizing the impacts of climate change on humanity and nature. Before outlining the policies needed to produce a rapid phase-out of…
November 9, 2015
Says The Onion.
And its right, even if the original is damaged (I've not done it, of course)). But that's not quite what I wanted to write about...
I wanted to talk about The war against Exxon Mobil (WaPo) and the contrast between reactions to that and In re Smith v Karl (and several reprints).
mt…
November 6, 2015
Slightly not-the-usual fare, but H mentioned it and its wiki, and following - or failing to follow - the trail was moderately amusing, so here we go. Deepak Chopra is an Indian American author and public speaker.[4][5] He is an alternative medicine advocate and a promoter of popular forms of…
November 2, 2015
[RealClimate has a post with more useful detail.]
I last commented about Antarctica and SLR when I "reviewed" the AR5 cryosphere chapter. As I noted there, things have come on quite a way since I were a lad (2005, 2004) and the major advance looks to be GRACE, even if they sometimes recalibrate…
November 1, 2015
Ages ago, John Theon had his five minutes of fame in the usual tedious manner; as blogged by me and others with too much time on their hands. Since then his wiki-life looks like:
2015-11-01T03:17:34 Acroterion (talk | contribs) deleted page John Theon (G4: Recreation of a page that was deleted per…
October 22, 2015
Everyone is being terribly cwuel to Exxon, and they feel the need to respond. You can probably chalk that up as a success, though a minor one. On the ultimate substance I don't feel any need to revise my previous posts: that Exxon's climate science research was far less interesting than the…
October 19, 2015
As it says in the good book:
Junkies down in Brooklyn are going crazy
They're laughing just like hungry dogs in the street
Policemen are hiding behind the skirts of little girls
Their eyes have turned the color of frozen meat
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no
Joan Crawford has risen…
October 18, 2015
This year's sea ice was unexciting. NOAA goes for "2015 Arctic sea ice fourth lowest on record" which is doubtless true.
Tamino has some helpful plots, so I've nicked one. I'm pleased that my 2014 comment "Hopefully that too [i.e., 2012] will look like an outlier in years to come" now looks quite…
October 17, 2015
[Update: Or, maybe not.]
Via twitter comes news of the sad demise of "Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 °C global warming is highly dangerous"; Review status: This discussion paper has been under review for…
October 16, 2015
It (it? Philippe Verdier, possibly-ex-weatherman) is all a bit silly, but here's a snapshot from the Torygraph if you like. Its the same old stuff: We are hostage to a planetary scandal over climate change – a war machine whose aim is to keep us in fear... I received a letter telling me not to…
October 14, 2015
A more than unusually obscure headline perhaps. Here's the link. I noticed, because my watchlist contained a pile of changes like:
(diff | hist) . . mb Nir Shaviv; 23:31:54 . . (-1) . . Cydebot (talk | contribs) (Robot - Moving category Climate change skeptics (scientists) to Category:Climate…
October 13, 2015
Via DA, rawstory, the Beeb reports Alaska mulls extra oil drilling to cope with climate change:
Expanding the search for oil is necessary to pay for the damage caused by climate change, the Governor of Alaska has told the BBC. The state is suffering significant climate impacts from rising seas…
October 10, 2015
It turns out that the answer to Is Quentin Letts a tosser? is Yes.
As well as that, I can find a few other articles with much the same story. Conservative Woman is remarkably silly - I think that nice David Cameron should have a quiet word - but does link to twitter which provides:
October 10, 2015
Oreskes is re-hashing the Exxon stuff again, how very dull-man-at-a-party of her. So, I won't join her in re-hashing the reasons that much of what she is saying is wrong. But my attention was drawn to my titular sentence, where "sensible policies" was linked but - how modestly - she refrained from…
October 4, 2015
Most normal people would have been content to have produced one game-changing theory of climate but David Evans is not a normal person. No! He has squillions of degrees from Really Prestigious universities and has, on his own, invented entire new types of Fourier analysis. So it is with no…
September 28, 2015
Oh dear. Last summer, Peter Wadhams, in an interview with a reporter for The Times, rather incautiously expressed concern that several scientists researching the impact of global warming on Arctic ice may have been assassinated, in the words of the Independent Press Standards Organisation's…
September 27, 2015
Says some PR from the CDP (formerly, as they say, the Carbon Disclosure Project; I hate people who do that). As picked up by, e.g., the FT. The FT does no analysis, so you may as well read the CDP report instead. Here's the executive summary:
The number of corporations disclosing they use an…
September 25, 2015
Per Moyhu it looks like the GWPF's joke review is, errm, a joke. Who could have guessed? just to refresh your memory: submissions are invited, deadline 30th of June and will be published, here. Oh.
I see two obvious possibilities: (a) they got embarrassingly few submissions; (b) they got…
September 25, 2015
Says the FT; and so did R4 this morning (update: and the Beeb now), which is why I noticed.
A £1bn UK climate-change plan has been thrown into turmoil after the Drax power company said it was pulling out because government green policy reversals made it too risky to proceed. Drax’s decision to…
September 23, 2015
Episode 1 and episode 3 refer. It turns out that Exxon cares enough to answer. Not to answer in any great detail, so I'm not sure they care enough to read the criticism, but never mind. They say stuff like
Our scientists have been involved in climate research and related policy analysis for more…
September 22, 2015
If you're feeling cheated out of round 2, its because it didn't seem terribly exciting. Round 1 refers, naturally.
Round 3 is called Exxon Confirmed Global Warming Consensus in 1982 with In-House Climate Models to which the obvious answer is "so what?" Confirming publically available information…
September 18, 2015
Lelieveld et al., Nature 525, 367–371 (17 September 2015) doi:10.1038/nature15371: The contribution of outdoor air pollution sources to premature mortality on a global scale.
Here's the abstract:
Assessment of the global burden of disease is based on epidemiological cohort studies that connect…
September 16, 2015
Eli is, in my view, rather over-excited by insideclimatenews's Exxon's Own Research Confirmed Fossil Fuels' Role in Global Warming Decades Ago. The interesting question that remains is that since they did not disclose their knowledge to shareholders, will some lawyers get rich? is, I think, not an…
September 12, 2015
[Update: or, you might prefer Man who just got elected ‘definitely unelectable’; or Jeremy Corbyn now abandoned by everyone apart from ‘voters’]
[Uupdate: Jeremy Corbyn on the Beach : Why a Man who Just Got Elected is Unelectable]
So says NewsThump; and I need something to distract people from the…
September 7, 2015
AKA me on Eli on Richard Betts on... well, you get the idea. The story so far: I wake up one morning a week or so back and hear some luvvie talking the usual kind of "me 'arts in the right place so you won't mind if I talk drivel, lord luv a duck, I 'ad that Lord Monckton in the back of me cab…
September 2, 2015
Richard Tol, not content with a quiet and peaceful life, is having fun on wiki. He's trying to add a "criticism" section to the [[Bob Ward]] page, featuring the exciting adventures of... yes, you've guessed it, one R Tol:
In 2014, Ward was accused by Professor [[Richard Tol]] of conducting a…