climate communication
stoat | November 1, 2014 Or so energylivenews says (thanks to J). Their text is:
Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney appears to agree most fossil fuels can’t be used if the world is to avoid climate change. At a World Bank event on Friday, he is quoted as saying: “The vast majority of reserves are unburnable.” This is a reference to the idea of a so-called carbon bubble – when investors in oil, gas or coal suppliers lose out on money because the reserves can’t be used.
I've bolded his words, the rest is editorial interpolation. I find this particularly irritating. If I'm reading about what Carney thinks, I…
stoat | February 21, 2014Or, in fuller,
Why are there people who seem hell-bent on denying anthropogenic global warming?; What are the deniers trying to achieve?; Why do they post comments on your article that totally defy not only science, but also common sense?
These are not easy questions to answer accurately. But its easy to give sloppy caricatures in answer.
Don't ask, don't tell
One answer is: who cares? It is possible to operate in a mode of try-to-understand-their-motives, but firstly its just guesswork and secondly its probably not terribly useful. Perhaps if you could really get it right, and understand…
stoat | January 20, 2014Seldom in the field of human conflict has so much been written by so many people on a subject about which they know nothing. Or so I'd like to hope: in the sense that I'd hope that the denialist chatter about peer review was the nadir. But I do know something about peer review, though my knowledge is 7 years out of date. Nonetheless, I don't hesitate to comment. If you're wondering (or I'm wondering, coming back to this later) all this kicks off from the ship of fools nonsense, which has elevated peer review to super-star status for its 15 minutes in the blog-o-light.
For a working scientist…
stoat | January 17, 2014Every man and his lagomorph has a post taking the piss out of the "Ship of fools", so I won't bother. But (since I seem to have managed to get censored by every denialist blog I try to post on) I thought I'd make a handy list of said blogs and comments. Warning: there's no useful content anywhere in this post; its all just record-keeping for me.
Also, I do find it tedious when people whinge on about censorship. So I'm a bit reluctant to do so myself. But I'm going to indulge.
In roughly chronological order:
P Gosselin: From “Jewish Science” To “Denier Science”: Copernicus Charade Is Latest…
stoat | December 23, 2013My, what a long title. But its a quote from RN in a comment on my IPCC 5th Assessment Review post.
And since this butts head on into something I've been thinking for a while, but not said, I'll write it down. Don't call me too bitter or cynical, please. And just for the moment, don't demand references either - this is all stream of thought.
So: for a number of years now, starting at some unknown point - possibly around Cameroon's ridiculous dancing-with-huskies moment, but most likely more nebulous and earlier - the British political scene went soppy green. Windmills sprouted, solar panels…
stoat | December 22, 2013 A better title for this post would be "cite your sources" but I need to mirror The Magnificent Climate Heat Engine at WUWT. Guess what? Just a few days after totally missing the importance of heat transport within the climate system WE has finally noticed it. WE read my posts, of course, because several people pointed him at them in the WUWT comments, although he was careful not to engage with those. So he's managed to learn something from me, which is good, but doesn't have the basic honesty to acknowledge that, which is effectively plagiarism, which is expected.
Naturally, he doesn't link…
stoat | December 19, 2013 So, da UK Energy and Climate Change committee is having an "inquiry" into IPCC 5th Assessment Review. I'm not sure why. This will be a review of a review, which could itself be reviewed, which will end in endless regress? More likely it will fizzle away into nothing. Myles Allen appears to be suggesting that the ctte are bozos (not in so many words, of course. That would be unparliamentary. Instead, he says things like the thrust of the committee’s questions does raise concerns that the committee has allowed itself to be misled in this regard or As an aside, it seems strange to ask about the…
stoat | December 4, 2013Prompted by PB I read Gambling with Civilization by Paul Krugman, which is a review of The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and Economics for a Warming World by William D. Nordhaus. I haven't read the latter.
The Climate Casino is in no sense the work of someone skeptical about either the reality of global warming or the need to act now. He more or less ridicules claims that climate change isn’t happening or that it isn’t the result of human activity. And he calls for strong action: his best estimate of what we should be doing involves placing a substantial immediate tax on carbon, one that…
stoat | December 4, 2013
"For twenty terces I phrase the answer in clear and actionable language; for ten I use the language of cant, which occasionally admits of ambiguity; for five, I speak a parable which you must interpret as you will; and for one terce, I babble in an unknown tongue.”
[Update: there's a better version at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8EFGHhFtEs (thanks cm). As to the point - I really didn't think I was being subtle. Its a reference to the discussion we ended up in at http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2013/11/27/weasels-ripped-my-flesh-again/]
stoat | November 22, 2013Michael Mann has an article in the HuffPo, Something Is Rotten at the New York Times. He's complaining about the ill-informed views of Koch Brothers-funded climate change contrarian Richard Muller which is language that would normally put me off. But in this case I looked, and Muller's A Pause, Not an End, to Warming does seem rather objectionable.
Some of it is just a mixed bag:
My analysis is different. Berkeley Earth, a team of scientists I helped establish, found that the average land temperature had risen 1.5 degrees Celsius over the past 250 years. Solar variability didn’t match the…
stoat | November 6, 2013Not me. Though I agree with much of Make more political space in climate change discussions which is DO re-posting his own comment at P3, and the David Mitchell video is pretty good too, one of the best I've seen.
I am worried about lazily assuming climate change just happens to support your political view. Right-wing laziness is its mirror: reject the science rather than think about political solutions that would work
is an excellent point. I've seen it said - often, and correctly - that there is a right-leaning-libertarian-ish school of thought that goes "global warming, if it were a…
stoat | November 4, 2013Browsing the vast pile of unread clutter I came across a copy of the Economist from October, featuring How science goes wrong and Trouble at the lab. Somewhere - but I don't know where - I discussed these, but since I can't find it I'll repeat myself.
The first point is that whilst HSGW notices the pernicious effects of publish-or-perish in its analysis, it doesn't mention it in its how-to-fix-it. And yet, in my humble and now totally disinterested opinion, its the core of the problem. People are judged by their number of papers, and by the citations of those papers. The more senior you get…
stoat | October 28, 2013[Update 2013/11/01: Solar Activity and the so-called “Little Ice Age” is sufficient evidence of Lockwood's opinion].
Sigh. Paul Hudson (remember him?) says Real risk of a Maunder minimum 'Little Ice Age' says leading scientist, and the person he purports to rely in is Mike Lockwood, who is sane. However, if you look closely there is no direct quotation of ML in the article, so I think I'd be very cautious in interpreting it.
But if you want to know what ML actually thinks on the subject of future solar variations and their probable effects on climate, then reading a recent paper of his, Jones…
stoat | October 25, 2013 Paul links to What Can We Learn About Human Psychology from Christian Apologetics? The article itself is an exercise in proving itself right: the only people reading it will be those who disagree with Christian Apologetics. But I digress; the point I was trying to make was the connection with "the GW debate" and perhaps Sou's Talking to contrarians. Why do you do it? Or why not? Most people are talking past each other, or in many places (perhaps canonically WUWT) deliberately going to places where they can be sure they won't be disturbed by contrary opinions: either because they won't meet…
stoat | October 13, 2013 Like its illustrious forebears comments elsewhere and part II. However, rather differently like, in that I want to point to some positives before falling back into snarking.
I've commented at wottsupwiththatblog and hotwhopper about Li et al.. It is, I think, a flawed paper but not as badly flawed as the denialists reporting of it which is, as you'd expect, very badly flawed. More of that anon.
Also at wotts was a discussion of the "green surcharge" on UK energy bills. Some useful references and clarifications make their way into the comments; VB has some nice refs.
Over at ScottishSceptic:…
stoat | October 5, 2013 As I was saying, somewhere, to someone the other day, - oh, I reemember, it was to Timmy - you can get rid of some of the problems with future projections by drawing temperature against CO2 emissions, instead of against time. If you do that, you (the person drawing the figure) doesn't have to prejudge the separate issue of future CO2 emissions - you can just let your reader decide that for themselves, and then read temperature changes corresponding to CO2 off the chart.
I'm glad to see that the IPCC have been paying attention to my private conversations, and have included figure 10. David…
stoat | October 4, 2013Who's Afraid of Peer Review? by John Bohannon is about his experiments in sending a fatally-flawed paper to a variety of open-access journals, and the appalling lack of rejections that followed (note that PLOS-ONE correctly rejected it).
To make it not too easy to reject just based on "I can't find your institute on the internet" (and, I think, to simulate the target group) the paper was supposed to come from non-West non-native-English speakers. And so:
...my native English might raise suspicions. So I translated the paper into French with Google Translate, and then translated the result…
stoat | September 27, 2013So, AR5 SPM is out. The obvious place to start is RealClimate or perhaps you could even read the SPM itself. Here's a quote:
Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any
preceding decade since 1850 (see Figure SPM.1). In the Northern Hemisphere, 1983–2012 was
likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years (medium confidence)
And there's even some nice pictures; here's one of them:
But enough of this insightful but tediously detailed analysis, I hear you say, what about the reactions? (Actually I hope to read the thing properly sometime…
stoat | August 28, 2013It has to be weird - the potty peer is pushing it:
Last year’s magistral lecture to the Federation was by Professor Vaclav Klaus, then president of the Czech Republic, whose talk was entitled The manmade contribution to global warming is not a planetary emergency... This year Dr. Christopher Essex, Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Western Ontario and chairman of the Federation’s permanent monitoring panel on climate, gave the Federation’s closing plenary session his panel’s confirmation that “Climate change in itself is not a planetary emergency.”
Anyone vaguely up on…
stoat | August 15, 2013Quite a lot really. Unless, of course, you're looking at the wrong models in the wrong way. As Robert S. Pindyck does. I do have some sympathy for the paper, but its badly written, somewhat confused, and the author has failed to emphasise some key distinctions.
To begin with where I agree, I'm fairly happy with his assertion that "certain inputs (e.g. the discount rate) are arbitrary, but have huge effects on the [social cost of carbon] estimates". I'm only "fairly" happy, because to say that the discount rate is "arbitrary" is stupid (which is probably a hint that this thing hasn't been peer…