William M. Connolley
stoat
Posts by this author
February 5, 2016
Except, of course, it is actually the same recycled nutters under yet another name. Thanks to BB for the link, but the original source is the Smoggies. Not to be confused with the Moggies. The new name is "Independent Committee on Geoethics"; not to be confused with the apparently respectable but…
February 1, 2016
Brian said I'd guess 100 or so draft posts sitting around, forlornly. I have precisely 89 draft posts, and I thought it might be fun to look back at them.
* 2016/01/30: On getting out more, part 2 (you know who you are)
* 2016/01/25: A leading climate sceptic businessman has protested that he was…
February 1, 2016
On of the things I used to hate when I was in the game was the stupid boilerplate you were supposed to pad articles with. Since I also discover that RR has 3k posts and I only have 1k733 I thought I'd try to close the gap by a short whinge. Here's an example from Fifteen years of ocean…
January 29, 2016
Sorry, but I couldn't resist. One for cognoscenti. Who can resist "the master butcher of Leigh on Sea"? Don't google that, it makes it too easy. And I see welcome homage to Pump: Young Lust and especially F.I.N.E.:
'Cause I'm
Alright
Your momma says I'm
Alright
Your daddy says I'm
Alright
and my…
January 27, 2016
"Cainozoic" is a somewhat archaic word for Cenozic. But the paper in question is from 1976, so it is allowed to be somewhat behind the times. It is, as you'll immeadiately recognise, Robert Carter's most cited paper, with 154 citations according to Web of Science, or 193 according to Google…
January 19, 2016
Actually A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it, but I'm allowed to paraphrase in titles. And anyway he said it in German, naturally.…
January 16, 2016
A successor to Where Are They Now, 2014.
First and foremost, and although not quite in 2015 I shall ignore that, was David Bowie.
2015 was the year I finally kicked the habit of reading denialist blogs - well, nearly - which was a good idea, but it does mean I'm not as in touch as I used to be,…
January 11, 2016
Lay me place and bake me Pie
I'm starving for me Gravy
Leave my shoes, and door unlocked
I might just slip away
Sighing, the swirl through the streets
Like the crust of the sun
The Bewlay Brothers
In our Wings that Bark
Flashing teeth of Brass
Standing tall in the dark
Oh, And we were Gone
Hanging…
January 6, 2016
From The Indie: Government ministers meet flooded locals 20 minutes late and on the wrong side of a collapsed bridge, via facebook:
Seemingly determined to prove their incompetence to already derisive Cumbrians, a delegation featuring members of two government departments had to make a 20-mile…
January 4, 2016
o I've decided to try the "ZOMG" prefix for these things, instead of postfixing a mark of interrogation. Perhaps it makes things clearer. Anyway, the latest breathless nonsense is ExxonMobil and Sierra Club Agreed on Climate Policy—and Kept It Secret from Bloomberg (h/t JS). Why is it nonsense?…
December 31, 2015
A follow up to the brilliantly successful the year in stoats: 2014. There can be no doubt about the picture of the year:
If you're looking for a review of the climate-type events of the year then something like ATTP's will be of use. This is one post per month from me, chosen without specific…
December 29, 2015
More of the good ol' "Ice Age Is Coming" drivel, but this time in Squarehead. Normally I expect them to be more sensible than us. This via Twitter via Eli via NoTruthZone; headlined there as Now It’s Global Cooling! German Weekly Warns Scientists See “Mini Ice Age Coming In Just A Few Years”. At…
December 25, 2015
Also from the Nanoblock Meercats, the Great White, and the Interesting and Fun Puzzle:
December 22, 2015
InsideClimateNews (who I've been unimpressed with before) via Brian at Eli's tell us that Exxon may claim to favour a carbon tax, but aren't exactly enthusiastic about it. Because someone else was saying it, my natural initial reaction was to disagree; but having poked their sources a bit, it looks…
December 20, 2015
Tim Ball has a quasi-incoherent piece over at WUWT (I know, I know, but it was a grey Sunday afternoon) explaining why the nutters lost the dogma hearing. I'm a bit surprised that he's prepared to admit they lost, but I was more amused by his excuses; and perhaps the piece is more an excuse to…
December 19, 2015
User:William M. Connolley/The science is settled is a copy that I made of a wiki article that got deleted. I think I'd stick now largely with what I said then, 8th February 2007: Keep: its not the worlds greatest page, but its useful. Lee Vonces vote is a good example of the reason for keeping it…
December 16, 2015
A scientific critique of the two-degree climate change target (Reto Knutti,Joeri Rogelj, Jan Sedláček & Erich M. Fischer; Nature Geoscience (2015) doi:10.1038/ngeo2595): sounds like a good idea, and vair topical. Since its short, I'll nick the abstract in full:
The world's governments agreed to…
December 15, 2015
The Graun said In the aftermath of the Paris agreement, shares in coal firms plunged rapidly. Peabody, the world’s largest coal firm, saw stock values drop 12.6%, while Consol Energy holdings was down by 3.3%. That's interesting; one of the things I wondered about the Paris pow-wow was how the…
December 15, 2015
An update to the exciting Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2015 October 6. In which I noted a pile of folk such as Nir Shaviv moving from category "Climate change skeptics (scientists)" to "Climate change deniers (scientists)".
After that happened, some people pointed out that wasn't quite…
December 14, 2015
Via the Economist (probably paywalled; Karlsruhe Institute of Technology PR will do as well): the idea is that instead of steam methane forming to produce hydrogen and CO2, you crack methane directly to hydrogen and carbon. The advantage is no CO2 to dispose of; instead you have carbon, which…
December 13, 2015
Dr Roy tells it like it is3. Or perhaps you prefer James Hansen1, 6 as reported by JA?
“It’s a fraud really, a fake,” he says, rubbing his head. “It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words.…
December 9, 2015
Expert Consensus on the Economics of Climate Change is a report from the Institute for Policy Integrity1, and comes to me via Slate via Twitter. I read the paper and failed to find the obvious flaws, so over to you.
They ran a 15-question online survey... We invited the 1,103 experts who met our…
December 8, 2015
Data or Dogma? (full title "Data or Dogma? Promoting Open Inquiry in the Debate over the Magnitude of Human Impact on Earth’s Climate") is the hearings promoted by U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), chairman of the Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness.
Happily, this is one of those…
December 5, 2015
Storm Desmond brings flooding and disruption to parts of UK says Auntie, and so it seems - the flood warning map is a sea of severe. Or you can have Storm Desmond: major incident declared as police urge people to evacuate home.
I don't usually do severe weather posts, but I thought I'd make an…
November 29, 2015
At some point SB moved wordpress versions, and when this occurred old links broke. Every now and again when I come across an old post I fix them up, but you can't, so here is the sekret decoder ring. Things like:
http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2007/11/hansen_again.php
turn into
http://scienceblogs.…
November 28, 2015
In fact I'm not quite as certain of the Right Thing as my headline suggests; but if I'm going to nail my colours to the mast in advance of the UK's parliament's probable vote next week, I may as well be definite. It puts me with Jeremy Corbyn and against most of the UK pols. I don't feel involved…
November 25, 2015
UK cancels pioneering £1bn carbon capture and storage competition says the Graun: Two projects had been in the running to build plants demonstrating CCS at commercial scale. One was backed by Shell and SSE at Peterhead. The White Rose consortium was based at Drax, the UK’s largest power plant, but…
November 25, 2015
It looks somehow so serene. All that flawless blue sky.
Hopefull Evil Uncle Vlad won't flail out in quite the same way that Good Uncle Sam did after 9/11.
It is a much smaller matter, of course; but the Commies, errrm, aren't really reliably sane. Unlike, errrm, the Yanks. The FT gives me hope:…
November 23, 2015
Whenever I descended into the den of iniquity that is WUWT, I'd get "CAGW" flung at me. And I'd always reply that they had made it up1. See for example my If it isn’t catastrophic we’ve got nothing to worry about, have we? or comments in When will it start cooling? But now, alas, the philosophers…
November 22, 2015
An interesting paper in Nature Communications (David B. Kemp, Kilian Eichenseer and Wolfgang Kiessling, doi:10.1038/ncomms9890), and yet oddly unreported, or at least not in the corner of the blogosphere that I watch (did I miss you? Sorry, tell me). True, its not easy to interpret, but even so I'm…