climate communication
stoat | August 12, 2013 Can China clean up fast enough? asks The Economist. In more detail:
If China were simply following the path of rich countries from poverty through pollution to fresh air, there would be little to worry about (unless you lived in one of those hellish cities). But... When Britain’s industrial engine was gaining speed, levels of CO2 in the atmosphere were the same as they had been for millennia. Now they are half as high again, and not far off 450 parts per million, which most scientists think is the danger level... If China cannot cut its CO2 emissions substantially, then either other…
stoat | August 1, 2013 Oh, this is funny, but Curry isn't laughing.
While poking around for more context on my previous post, I found ‘Denier’ blogs by JC, who quotes the "Society of Environmental Journalists" who say
Judith Curry’s blog, Climate Etc., is an exception to the stereotype of denier blogs. Curry is a real climate scientist with strong credentials. Committed to reason, evidence, and open inquiry, she is willing to examine legitimate points the climate skeptics may be making — as well as the evidence and arguments from mainstream climate science.
And I thought: oh, she's putting that up front because…
stoat | August 1, 2013 Ah, enough science (or at least computation) what about the advocacy then? Talking about advocacy is great, you don't have to have a clue about anything factual, its all so meta.
JA, as usual has a nice thoughtful post which you should read. I'll just throw in some... some what? Well, some words. Oh, all right then, some flames.
Yes, we could change. So why don’t we?
From P3 (but the original is here). Aiee, we hates it forever Baggins, yes we does. Why?
Because its a piece that displays the very flaws it decries in others. It asks for many things to be fixed, but (paraphrasing) its asking…
stoat | July 21, 2013 This entire episode is so depressingly stupid that I almost threw the post away. But, courage!
As my title suggests, this is a morass of stupidity, of interest only to the navel-gazers within the incestuous world of climate blogs. Anyone with an interest in the actual science should steer clear. Metaphorically: if you're starting from one side of the Sargasso Sea and wish to reach clear water on the other side, you're better off going round rather than pushing through and clearing an endless buildup of weed off your rudder.
The motive for this was, now that I have a moment from the rowing to…
stoat | June 25, 2013 (I'm sorry, I'm doing it again. I'll try to stop, honest. Grammatical errors are in the original, don't blame me guv).
Via Bruce Schneier an interesting article about Spear Phishing Attack Against the Financial Times. What's so lovely about it is that they've used genuine FT email text, and segued straight from warning people about not clicking links in emails straight into providing a link in the email to lure people in. And apparently it worked, somewhat.
Meanwhile (ah, you knew this was coming, I'm sure) anonymous contributor "Abzats" has an essay at WUWT entitled Peer Evil – the rotten…
stoat | May 9, 2013Well, I got this (some days ago; I got backlogged):
As one of the more highly trafficked climate blogs on the web, I’m seeking your assistance in conducting a crowd-sourced online survey of peer-reviewed climate research. I have compiled a database of around 12,000 papers listed in the 'Web Of Science' between 1991 to 2011 matching the topic 'global warming' or 'global climate change'. I am now inviting readers from a diverse range of climate blogs to peruse the abstracts of these climate papers with the purpose of estimating the level of consensus in the literature regarding the proposition…
stoat | April 8, 2013Apologies; another wiki post. Though since palaeo reconstructions are in all the news, nowadays (sidenote: is [[Shaun Marcott]] notable? Or is it just his paper that is notable? I think I'd argue the latter. Discuss) this is topical.
So: the wiki Hockey stick controversy page is long and thorough (too long for some) and includes a section on an aspect I couldn't even remember, "Bradley and Jones 1993". I argued on the talk page that it wasn't really notable - obviously, if even I can't remember it, with my notoriously fine memory, it can't possibly be notable. But DS, who has put so much work…
stoat | March 30, 2013 Wildly exciting, no? No: its just the Global Cooling wars, part n. This one is Lamb, H. H. Is the Earth’s Climate Changing? The UNESCO Courier: a window open on the world; Vol. XXVI (8/9), 17-20, and its the latest "killer" reference added to Poptech (tagline: the blog that's too frightened to let a Stoat post. Still, its nice to know I'm dangerous, it would be a bit worrying if the denialists stopped censoring me).
But anyway its a new thing to me, so lets look. Its not in the magnum opus because its not a real paper. What does Lamb have to say? Firstly, "For the past 30 years the…
stoat | March 28, 2013 The Economist is read by all the most Important People (what, you say you don't read it? Well...), so what they say about GW matters (even if they sometimes talk twaddle it still matters). What they are currently saying under the byline "Climate change may be happening more slowly than scientists thought. But the world still needs to deal with it" is
some scientists are arguing that man-made climate change is not quite so bad a threat as it appeared to be a few years ago... “climate sensitivity”... may not be as high as was previously thought. The most obvious reason is that, despite a…
stoat | March 14, 2013 Apparently, something called "climategate 3.0" has occurred. This caused massive excitement in the denialosphere for a day, but now everyone has quietly forgotten it. You can tell its a damp squib because the only even vaguely "mainstream" news report of it that WUWT can find is a blog piece by James Delingpole, a man so unimportant I haven't even bothered call him a tosser. AW managed to find two emails that he thought were really interesting, but his slightly-more-on-the-ball readers pointed out they were already in v2. There's a mildly interesting third one about Oreskes but: is that…
stoat | March 1, 2013 Just when you thought this tripe was dead, it comes round again. Well, its winter at least in this hemisphere, and a bit chilly, so perhaps it seems plausible - the septics usually have trouble telling weather from climate.
Anyway, your reference is We’re number 1! which provises you a handy link to The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus - the paper that the denialists are too scared to address. Ta da. I've helpfully cut out a nice figure from that paper, which rather summarises the situation.
And maybe now is a good time to say, if I haven't before, how grateful I am to…
stoat | February 7, 2013He moves in darkness as it seems to me / Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe is a 1959 book by Arthur Koestler, and one of the main accounts of the history of cosmology and astronomy in the Western World, beginning in ancient Mesopotamia and ending with Isaac Newton. At least, that's what wiki sez, so it must be so. Its a good book; I recommend it. It isn't flawless - one of its entertaining ideas, that no-one really read Copernicus's De revolutionibus orbium coelestium - has been, shall we say, heavily challenged by…
stoat | January 20, 2013 It looks like the first of the BEST papers is published (webcite): A New Estimate of the Average Earth Surface Land Temperature Spanning 1753 to 2011 (h/t WUWT) - Richard A. Muller, Robert Rohde, Robert Jacobsen, Elizabeth Muller, Saul Perlmutter, Arthur Rosenfeld, Jonathan Wurtele, Donald Groom and Charlotte Wickham. Note the absence of La Curry (she's noticed, though. Note absence of comment on journal quality).
AW has thrown Muller under the bus and is cwuel to the paper, which is almost enough to make me kind, but not quite. The audience duly parrots this back to him, with a few…
stoat | December 20, 2012The latest denialosphere nonsense is proving quite entertaining - not for the subject matter itself, for without exception no-one in the debate has troubled to read the gumpf - but for the mudslinging in the comment thread. If you want to see Bad William you can go over there.
Vinny, I think that pays you off, yes?
Wackos from the Dark Side: you can have the debate here if you want, but only if you're prepared to talk sensibly. As a teensy test of your interest in being sane, I'm making a special rule just for the comment thread: anyone unable to spell my name, or get my title right, or do…
stoat | December 14, 2012 The denialists have leaked the draft IPCC report, again. There are some self-serving lies at WUWT about exactly why it was OK to break the confidentiality agreement, but given that any old fool can sign up to be an "expert reviewer" and many do, and that the denialists are self-serving liars, leaking of the report was only to be expected. Which makes a farce of trying to keep it private. The only solution is for the IPCC to stop pretending it isn't going to be leaked, and make the draft report publically available with the words "draft" stamped on it in nice big letters.
While they're doing…
stoat | December 8, 2012 From Aunty, UN climate talks extend Kyoto Protocol, promise compensation to be precise.
stoat | December 2, 2012 Oh go on guess, who do you think it was. Well, you're wrong: it was Piers Corbyn. To be fair to Piers, he doesn't appear to use the "honour" himself, its been used for him on his signature to the recent OPEN CLIMATE LETTER TO UN SECRETARY-GENERAL: Current scientific knowledge does not substantiate Ban Ki-Moon assertions on weather and climate, say 125-plus scientists. Those 125 are the usual pile of NN, non-scientists, and a very small sprinkling of people with reputations. Though this time no-one with anything close to first-rank in met/climate: even Lindzen and Christie have deserted. I…
stoat | November 24, 2012 From the department for historical research. I happened to be in the Oxfam bookshop trying to empty our house, when I looked down and saw this in the pile of new arrivals. It hadn't been priced but they took a fiver for it, which seems fair enough. Its a very British-meteorologist book, you can practically see him puffing on his pipe as he writes it. I am, of course, going to skip over all the nice climate and weather stuff, and look at the climate change, much to his dismay.
Manley factoid: he is buried in Coton churchyard.
You can read a few pages I've uploaded if you like, but you're…
stoat | November 23, 2012 Previously I criticised this world bank report, because of some injudicious choice of phrasing. However, various people suggested that I could consider actually reading the report and seeing what it had to say. Obviously I'm not going to do that in detail, but I can try skimming it. I wrote some stuff whinging that their use of "likely" and "could" was ill-defined, but decided that was boring, so deleted it and started again.
Oh, and yes this is yet another excuse for not writing about sea ice; but I can at least formally acknowledge losing my bet with Neven (and one of them with Crandles).…
stoat | November 21, 2012 Says the World Bank [*]. I could see why an imminently 4 oC world would be problematic. But the problem, as Timmy rather bluntly pointed out, is the report saying it spells out what the world would be like if it warmed by 4 degrees Celsius, which is what scientists are nearly unanimously predicting by the end of the century, without serious policy changes (my bold) which is, errm, bollocks. Note that they really are talking about global average temperature here, so it isn't possible to fix this up by saying they are talking about land, or NH land, or somesuch.
That's from the foreword, which…