climate communication
stoat | November 14, 2012 Go visit; its at climatedialogue.org. And Bart is involved, so it is at least promising. On the other hand the About Page says it exists because the Dutch Parliament... asked the government ‘to also involve climate skeptics in future studies on climate change’. That's pol-speak, therefore stupid. Any scientists with anything valuable to say, via the peer-reviewed literature or, I suppose, in other ways, is or can be already involved. However, don't let me be too negative too soon.
The first topic up is Melting of the Arctic sea ice and that's not a bad idea for a start. Inevitably, the…
stoat | September 12, 2012I almost gave up subscribing to WUWT, but juuust about frequently enough something interesting comes up; and of course its a convenient way of keeping up with the denialosphere. So today I find A review of the seminar ‘The contrarian discourse in the blogosphere–what are blogs good for anyway?’ which is a somewhat odd title, because I can't really see any "review" in there; just a transcript of the talk and Q+A afterwards, and a minor whinge from AW (see below). But its fun, nonetheless. From the talk abstract:
...Using the highly ranked blog 'Watts up with that' as a case study, discourse…
stoat | September 1, 2012Just over a month ago, RP Sr wrote a ludicrous post [WebCite] about the "game-changing" Watts Et al 2012 (I've just realised quite how illiterate that is, too: Et shouldn't be capitalised, and "al" is spelt "al.". McNider Et Al even gets the Al capitalised). I was less impressed; indeed, disappointed. Everyone took the piss out of RP, quite deservedly. It didn't take long for those who read it carefully (not me, sorry) to find flaws in the paper; VV is one such. There were promises of updates (or so people tell me) but it all seems quiet. However, perhaps unbeknownst to many, Evan Jones [*]…
stoat | August 31, 2012 Wosis then? Is it the sea ice? Ah, no. Someone else wants in on the limelight: "Parts of Arctic Siberia are releasing ten times more carbon into the atmosphere than previously thought, a University of Manchester scientist and an international team of researchers have found."
Its the usual stuff:
much more greenhouse gas is being released into the atmosphere than previously calculated, from and ancient an large carbon pool held in a permafrost along the 7,000 km desolate coast of northernmost Siberian Arctic – dramatically increasing global warming. As the temperature climbs carbon, stored in…
stoat | August 16, 2012 People want to talk about sea ice, clearly. I still have nothing interesting to say about it, so instead, lets start off at KK's, who parrots the odd assertion that there are "Plenty of stories in media with just one scientist, and no counter view at all". Which in turn is some septic whinging that he doesn't have a clue about sea ice.
Ben Pile is so clueless that he thinks that, when "Laxon referred to measurements taken ‘this decade’", he "presumed to mean since 2010". Pile, in turn, is parroting Orlowski in the reliably unreliable El Rego, which says Listeners to Radio 4's Today programme…
stoat | August 7, 2012 Via HT I find Kerry Emanuel saying:
I think debate is good but we should be debating points that are actually debatable
and who could disagree with that? But the problem is who gets to say what is debatable. You and I know, of course. But the wackoes don't [What is the Plural of "wacko"? Is it -oes or -os? And what about "Bozoes" - that looks wrong]. Or rather, it is impossible to distinguish from outside their heads the difference between "this is debatable" and "I'm going to force you to debate this if I can, either because it plays well or in order to avoid debating real issues" (compare…
stoat | June 27, 2012The Economist has a Special Report on "The melting north" (hopefully that works for you, I have a subscription so I'm not sure if its behind their paywall or not).
And what it says -
A heat map of the world, colour-coded for temperature change, shows the Arctic in sizzling maroon. Since 1951 it has warmed roughly twice as much as the global average. In that period the temperature in Greenland has gone up by 1.5°C, compared with around 0.7°C globally. This disparity is expected to continue. A 2°C increase in global temperatures—which appears inevitable as greenhouse-gas emissions soar—would…
stoat | May 28, 2012 From An Answer to Bishop Bramhall's Book, called " The Catching of the Leviathan" by Hobbes.
Elegantly put, and I expect to use it elsewhere.
Refs
* Oil sands and atmospheric CO2
stoat | May 11, 2012 No, not physically, alas. Though I did go to Oxford. This post is about people getting too stuck in their own comfort ghetto. Not me, obviously - plenty of people are attacking me :-).
This is thrown up by comments at my Economics and Climatology? post, though I've been thinking this for a while.
So, if you make the mistake of visiting the cess-pit that is WUWT, you'll find a cloistered worldlet full of septics. Visitors with an interest in the truth (as opposed to the Truth) are welcome, but only as long as they can be shouted down or allow themselves to be sidetracked into the odd issues…
stoat | May 2, 2012Or, A child's garden of wikipedia, part 2.
I've been banned from WUWT, after exposing too many of his errors. Although naturally AW doesn't phrase it quite like that. Also, he didn't much like me not showing the adoration that he gets from his fanbois either. Indeed, presumably in an effort to pretend that there is no censorship, AW can't even bring himself to say "banned": instead preferring the Orwellian you have been dis-invited from further commentary here. Even that may disappear if it becomes too inconvenient, so you can see a webcited version here.
The cause of all this (dismissing as…
stoat | May 1, 2012Or so argues KK. I have some sympathy for him. Discuss :-)
Update: so, read the comments, they are interesting (to me at least). No-one has any sympathy for my sympathy.
Refs
* Brian's view of the same post.
stoat | April 30, 2012What is it about GW that brings out such levels of stupidity in so many people?
Lets start with the easy bit. There's a paper Impacts of wind farms on land surface temperature by Zhou et al.. It isn't very exciting, but it made into Nature Climate Change, probably because of the inevitable stupidity it would arouse. What it says is Our results show a significant warming trend of up to 0.72â°C per decade, particularly at night-time, over wind farms relative to nearby non-wind-farm regions. This isn't ironic or even particularly surprising: the effect is due to mixing down of warmer air on…
stoat | April 24, 2012A tedious detail in the fall-out from the latest Lovelock nonsense. If you're not following, our favourite electron-capturing emeritus has recanted, or perhaps not, who knows.
Klimazwiebel has a thread in which, clearly over-awed by his early reputation, they delicately tip-toe around the fact that he has been talking nonsense for years. Apparently we are to believe that But Lovelock is unique in his self-critical attitude. Twaddle. Lovelock knows precious little about climate science, and is merely flip-flopping around, lost.
I pointed this out to von S, and got a pile of garbage in return.…
stoat | April 21, 2012You knew that, obviously, or you wouldn't be here. I have an entry on Conservapedia, you don't get much more famous than that. Compare that with so-called climate "scientists" like James Annan - even his tippling great-uncle only gets a few lines (and no invective, how dull). I see that a while ago I mocked Conservapedia for being dumb but said that, whilst nearly fact free, it was "not really even very funny". I'm pleased to see that they've corrected that: now Global warming is the liberal hoax[2][3] that... and so on. Conservapedia is so risible that no-one (not even the WUWT folks) would…
stoat | April 19, 2012 I've given up calling it "yet yet more misc" as I've forgotten where I've got to. So, in no particular order:
In war you will generally find that the enemy has at any time three courses of action open to him. Of those three, he will invariably choose the fourth
via Schneier. Which reminds me of We don't even know how many legs he's got.
The Policy Lass is sick of arguing with stupid people. Anyone who has been to WUWT and the comment threads there will empathise. It is all a hopeless morass of nonsense; it cannot be fixed, only risen above. And indeed (as I've tried to tell them) the science…
stoat | March 26, 2012Nice article in physicstoday.
Other stuff
* Wiley coverup: The great Wegman and Said "redo" to hide plagiarism and errors - the Wegman stuff keeps rumbling on. Wegman reminds me of the TSA guy here - what he says isn't believeable, but he has powerful organisations propping him up, because having him admit error would be embarrassing.
* Hansen Wins - Wabbett sez the US is going to require any new power plant to emit no more than 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt of electricity produced. That would be a good result, but the wrong way to do it. The right way is a carbon tax, not an…
stoat | March 17, 2012From Climate 'tech fixes' urged for Arctic methane I find ameg.me who say:
AMEG POSITION
DECLARATION OF EMERGENCY
We declare there now exists an extremely high international security risk* from abrupt and runaway global warming being triggered by the end-summer collapse of Arctic sea ice towards a fraction of the current record and release of huge quantities of methane gas from the seabed. Such global warming would lead at first to worldwide crop failures but ultimately and inexorably to the collapse of civilization as we know it. This colossal threat demands an immediate emergency scale…
stoat | March 17, 2012 Bear in mind that my ancient philosophy is deeply unreliable; I'm just using NA as a label for a trait I think I can see amongst the "skeptic" folk one sees at WUWT and the like: an inability to abstract.
Let me try to explain that by example, in case it isn't clear. To many people nowadays, with the success of science so obvious, the idea of abstracting problems isn't difficult. If you need to consider the motion of a ball on a surface, you begin with an abstract perfect sphere on a perfectly flat surface and ignore friction. You can then learn about Newton's laws of motion, about momentum…
stoat | February 28, 2012So says La Curry. She is only two years behind the times. Or maybe a year and a half. To be fair, that is only the headline. But the rest of the content is what you'd expect from a shark-jumper. I cant really be bothered to analyse it, unless anyone out there is unable to see the flaws for themselves.
stoat | February 25, 2012Continuing in from Comments elsewhere which has faded into the dust of past ages.
Timmy elsewhere but really on If the MWP Was Global What Does That Tell Us About Climate Change Now? wherein Timmy is clueless about climate science.
> From which the takeaway point is that perhaps climate sensitivity is lower than currently thought
You realise you sound like Ritchie, talking about stuff that you really haven't got a clue about, don't you?
It is the other way round.
I used to be Snow White
(in which Willis Eschenbach fails to read a paper by Curry)
> You say "Curry doesn't claim a…