William M. Connolley
stoat
Posts by this author
April 29, 2015
It am de Pope, he be at it agen. Dere be no stopping dis righteous Pontifex. Just for the moment, he's saying things that I broadly agree with, but that doesn't mean I'm going to start being happy with religious authority.
There was a one-day "seminar" or "workshop" or "event", Protect the Earth,…
April 27, 2015
I've stolen VV's title. Why not? He's the man who knows. Moyhu also has something interesting to say. All I have to say is: WTF?
In case you've missed it, there's a real one, and then there's the GWPF's comedy one. You can read the GWPF's stuff at tempdatareview.org, though why you'd bother I don't…
April 26, 2015
I said that AFAIK S+C's code for UAH isn't available but VV pointed me to Eli who pointed me to ncdc.noaa.gov/cdr/operationalcdrs.html which offered me RSS and UAH. UAH is the one we want to take the piss out of, so read it and weep, below.
First, though, as far as I can tell it doesn't even tell…
April 22, 2015
[Update: June 6th: Chase-Me has definitely been a very naughty boy indeed. The only question is whether he'll hang on to his sysop bit.]
By popular request. And I've not seen anyone else wiki-literate discussing this, so I will (update: Wikipedia sockpuppetry is a problem, but baseless accusations…
April 13, 2015
Another in my marathon posts, but! To a new city, Rotterdam. Which is indeed a fairly new city, having been bombed to buggery (by us, mostly, I presume [update: no, I'm wrong, it was the Krauts]) during WW II. Anyway, TL:DR: 3:55:53. Which is one second slower than Amsterdam 2012.
Here's my list,…
April 11, 2015
Good race, too, at least for the first half. Oxford up a few seats off an untidy Cambridge start, then they pull back, and I thought we'd lose it round the bend but no. Got very tense, boats close together. And then suddenly just after Hammersmith: whoompf and they're through, and Cambridge can…
April 9, 2015
No, don't worry, I'm not giving up. Its is a quote, provided somewhat tactlessly by the normally urbane Crandles:
All of this will soon be moot, anyway. Since last year we have been working on v6.0 of the UAH datasets which should be ready with the tropospheric temperature datasets before summer is…
April 6, 2015
Obscure, perhaps, but I claim it was by request. My sermon is taken from Removing Diurnal Cycle Contamination in Satellite-Derived Tropospheric Temperatures: Understanding Tropical Tropospheric Trend Discrepancies by S Po-Chedley, T Thorsen and Q Fu, but before I get onto that I need to snark a bit…
April 4, 2015
Lovely. Mostly because it looks like a painting, but is actually a picture. My source is wiki commons via Did the Anthropocene Begin in 1950 or 50,000 Years Ago? by David Biello in SA; the original is Jialiang Gao, www.peace-on-earth.org.
While I'm here there's VV's Irrigation and paint as reasons…
March 29, 2015
To the British Museum, via the Vets Head, of which more anon.
Pen on oil, various hands, circa 2014. Or, if you prefer a more stringent test of your cultural levels, try to identify the provenance of this:
The main theme for today's visit was Defining beauty: the body in ancient Greek art which…
March 20, 2015
More wiki-fun. Or is this Google Truth in action? (Yeah, I know, the pic isn't quite right but its good).
Which is more accurate?
Willard Anthony Watts (born 1958)[1] is an American blogger who runs the climate change denialism website Watts Up With That?.[2] A former meteorologist,[3][4] he is…
March 16, 2015
In which I teach Timmy about economics1. What can I lose? Its a guaranteed crowd-pleaser; everyone reading here hates neolibs anyway :-).
So: Timmy recommends as "An excellent piece" Art People: Learn Economics, I Beseech You by Franklin Einspruch. And, well, its all more or less the obvious if…
March 16, 2015
I was at a meeting today, with a mixed group of engineers and managers, trying to work out when thing X would be complete. So the questions were of the form "is feature Y production quality on branch Z?". Sometimes the engineers got to answer the question, sometimes management. The engineers…
March 13, 2015
Oh dear, I've already had a Currygate. Never mind, the internet has the memory of a goldfish, I'll get away with it.
The story so far: Leaked Email Reveals Who's Who List of Climate Denialists. No great surprises on the list; I personally wouldn't call Curry a "denialist" though I would definitely…
March 13, 2015
RT has a nice post on On the Incident Solar Radiation in CMIP5 Models by Linjiong Zhou, Minghua Zhang, Qing Bao and, Yimin Liu.
For the authors, this is a dream paper: you notice something no-one else has, and you get a practically free paper out of it, without having to do any real work or real…
March 7, 2015
Even more amusing - but oddly, rather related - to the last tee hee is the news that the denialosphere is panicking over Google Truth (h/t NS and, apparently, almost everyone else). I'm not sure why they are bothering - its only a research project.
Amusing panics are available from JoNova or AW (…
March 4, 2015
...says carbonbrief. In turn, I think that's based on IPCC PRESS RELEASE / 27 February 2015 / IPCC takes decisions on future work. The very second bullet point of that is:
Request the Secretariat and Technical Support Units to command a respectful workplace, emphasizing policies and practices that…
March 3, 2015
ZOMG:
I can't see anything ever beating that. Source: Indy.
Refs
* Squee of the Day: Mom Weasel Goes Back For Smallest Baby Left Behind - thanks JF.
February 28, 2015
Alas, I missed Caius retaking the Men's headship on Thursday, mostly because I didn't think it would happen (they were nowhere on Wednesday) but partly because I was bag-carrying for King's, who rewarded me with an exciting bump on (LoL)Catz and ensuing chaos; and on Christ's on Friday. But I did…
February 26, 2015
Or so says Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, an Arizona Democrat in the colonies. In which case, he's an idiot1. He's a politicain. He should be used to, he should expect, daily to be talked to, to be lobbied, by people with strong political motivations, some or many of which will be hidden from…
February 25, 2015
We interrupt your regular diet of Willie Soon for a brief break (the S+B controversy, 2003 is seeing active work).
IPCC agrees on Acting Chair after R.K. Pachauri steps down said the IPCC press on the 25th. That PR is not merely coy but completely silent as to the reasons why he stepped down; coy…
February 24, 2015
My title comes from a lying "letter of recommendation" for Soon, which says in part:
...Willie is scrupulous in attending to the basic scientific veracity of everything that he presents in public about scientific matters. He is careful not only in that regard, but also in the attention he pays to…
February 24, 2015
Or at least, that follows clearly from the latest nonsense from Wattie-land. Greenpeace enlists Justin Gillis &John Schwartz of the NY Times in Journalistic Terrorist Attack on Willie Soon – Miss Target, Hit Smithsonian Instead. If the NYT is "terrorist" then so am I. Of course, the…
February 23, 2015
Something of a classic, from Richard Telford. He's discussing Soon's Heartland presentation. Here's a screenshot:
Soon is trying to point out the importance of the value of the solar insolation, which he believes needs to be heavily fiddled to make the GCMs come out right. To prove this, he's…
February 22, 2015
Or so says Christine Pulliam, a spokeswoman for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. And yet we discover that Soon's research was (partially) funded by Southern Company Services, with whom Soon had and agreement, signed by Smithsonian’s William J. Ford, contract and grant specialist;…
February 21, 2015
This astonishing claim is apparently made by Willie Soon, according to the NYT. The claim is implausible, to say the least. As is much of his GW related research.
I'm not alone in that opinion, oddly enough. Gavin A. Schmidt, head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, a NASA…
February 17, 2015
There are many others, of course. RMG has one just now on the Chandler wobble; there's Alfred Russel Wallace and the flat-earthers and the history of the word Scientist itself.
All of these have "mottoes", if you like; but I distrust them. There's a sci-fi novel from ages back, the only bit of…
February 16, 2015
Boron isotope evidence for oceanic carbon dioxide leakage during the last deglaciation by M. A. Martínez-Botí,G. Marino, G. L. Foster, P. Ziveri,M. J. Henehan, J. W. B. Rae, P. G. Mortyn & D. Vance. Nature 518, 219–222 (12 February 2015) doi:10.1038/nature14155. As far as I can tell, no-one has…
February 14, 2015
I don't have much science to talk about; it looks like I may have finally cured myself of writing about the stupidities of the denialists and arguing with idiots. So, instead:
Way back in November last year I went to a talk by Hulme on "In what ways is religious belief relevant for understanding…
February 5, 2015
From a pub conversation with Old Man Roscoe: so often, electronic communication snarls you up. Its so easy for small disagreements to blow up; for genuine disagreements to get entrenched; to lose any fellow-feeling for the people, or fleeting electronic blobs, that you're "conversing" with. I see…