climate communication
stoat | February 22, 2012The blogosphere is all ablaze, but I did a Scientific Test: I asked my fellow workers at lunch (including one who regularly picks up septic titbits plucked off the wub). Only one had even heard of the affair, and even he wasn't really sure what was going on.
stoat | February 20, 2012Not to spoil the surprise, the answer is: I dunno, but the Arbiter is [was] bored.
This is a follow-up to the Heartland Leak stuff, which ended up posted in various places but (apparently most notably) DeSmogBlog. Heartland have (I think; perhaps only implicitly) admitted to all of them, except the Climate Strategy which they declare to be faked.
Various people have done various bits of textual analysis, which may or may not have been convincing to them, but I can't see anything that convinces one way or another. Heartland still says its fake, DeSmog says "The DeSmogBlog has no evidence…
stoat | February 14, 2012Interesting leaked docs fro the Heartland folk: see DeSmogBlog.
[Update: in all fairness, I should point out that Heartland are currently claiming that some of the documents are fake. The truth or otherwise of this is yet to be determined. See follow-up.]
From their highlights,
funding goes primarily to Craig Idso ($11,600 per month), Fred Singer ($5,000 per month, plus expenses), Robert Carter ($1,667 per month), and a number of other individuals... We have also pledged to help raise around $90,000 in 2012 for Anthony Watts to help him create a new website to track temperature station data…
stoat | January 7, 2012 There is a post of Top Science Scandals of 2011 at The Scientist (h/t: FE). It all seemed a bit life-sciency, but then that's what the mag is about, so fair enough.
Not much climate there, but number 5 is Wegman's shameless plagiarism (not forgetting, of course, that Wegman's real problem is that his work and analysis is wrong, not that it was copied).
But the amusing bit is the long long comments thread, which immeadiately derails into the usual nonsense that happens when you let the deniers in. Ah well, so it goes. Who needs paid advocates when you have useful idiots?
stoat | January 5, 2012On the Limits of Expert Credibility:Theory and an Application to Climate Change (h/t FE) is an interesting paper. I'm not sure I believe it, but it is interesting (particularly so after reading Krugman on why people don't understand [[Comparative advantage]]; h/t Timmy).
The "Conclusions" section is a bit odd. Having spent the paper trying to demonstrate that interested parties will try to buy off the messenger, i.e. the media, they then try to explain the media's non-accuracy by Morris's (2001) model of political correctness instead of their own results. I don't understand that.
The abstract…
stoat | December 12, 2011Bit of a weird one this, and I'm not sure it is all pieced together. I saw this via KZ, and of course was interested in what science R had got wrong, but KZ's Werner Krauss isn't interested in the science (explicitly so, see the comments). And it points me to RP Jr, whom he says "sums it up perfectly", but experience suggests that is unlikely. And indeed, RP just uses it as an excuse to bash R and ride his favourite hobby-horses. Tellingly he too has no interest in the science. You'll notice that he is very deliberately vague about what actually happened, which is a sure sign that he doesn't…
stoat | November 11, 2011
That is the summary, but there is far more and more nuances so look at the presentation.
stoat | October 20, 2011Apparently the BEST stuff is out; Tamino has the story so I won't bother. Summary: the global temperature record is just what we thought it was. Remind me again why they bothered to do this?
Refs
* mt at P3
* Schmidt on Muller via QS
* BA
* Moyhu
* Deltoid is jealous.
* RC is late.
stoat | September 11, 2011Though of course by "natural" we're thinking of with-a-human-contribution. My text is taken from the book of Grauniad:
On Friday a team of researchers in Boston calculated that even with only a 2C rise, summer temperatures now regarded as "extreme" will become normal. This is the second such warning from the US this summer. Europeans in 2003 and Russians in 2010 had lethal experience of heat waves. ... Munich Re predicted that 2011 - on the evidence of the first six months alone - will be the costliest year ever for disasters triggered by natural hazard. Total global losses by June had…
stoat | September 8, 2011 The Washington Post Continues to Publish George Will's Climate Change Disinformation at thinkprogress. Just keeping track of these things, you understand. I thought the 70's-cooling mole had been well whacked, but no.
Refs
* Now out in BAMS: The myth of the 1970s global cooling scientific consensus
* Global cooling: Inhofe talking sh*t* again
* Fuckem's Razor and the solution to the climate question
* etc. etc.
stoat | September 5, 2011I'm going to intermittently keep track of the comments I make on other blogs. I'll spare you the totally trivial ones, but I don't guarantee this to be especially interesting. One point of doing this will be to track the ones that "disappear" on various sites (no names for now) that I've found don't post anything that might frighten the horses.
I move this up to the top every now and again by fudging the date.
Since this is at the top, I can use it for spam-of-the-week. This weeks spam is: the Boston Marathon.
2011/09/06
Editor's Apologetic Resignation Blows Gaping Hole in Over-Hyped Media…
stoat | September 3, 2011One issue about the infamous Spencer and Braswell (incidentally, who is Braswell? Everyone is ignoring him, is he a nonentity? ) is, of course, who were the referees? The suspicion voiced in various places is that Spencer managed to wangle skeptics in as his referees; indeed, Wagner in his resignation letter says "The managing editor of Remote Sensing selected three senior scientists from
renowned US universities... the editorial team unintentionally selected three reviewers who probably share some climate sceptic notions of the authors" (note the slight contradiction in there: first off,…
stoat | September 1, 2011
The story so far: some nut attacks Rahmstorf, comparing him to Aryan physics in a letter to the German TV channel ZDF. The usual fools get confused, the usual fools propagate the nonsense. But this time there is a happy ending, as the lawyers step in and stamp it out (lawyers good? Well maybe not on balance. But that doesn't mean they can't do good sometimes). This won't make anything clearer.
stoat | August 22, 2011ABSTRACT: Despite the existence of a clear scientiï¬c consensus about global warming, opinion surveys ï¬nd confusion among the American public, regarding both scientiï¬c issues and the strength of the scientiï¬c consensus. Evidence increasingly points to misinformation as a contributing factor. This situation is both a challenge and an opportunity for science educators, including geographers. The direct study of misinformation--termed agnotology (Proctor 2008)--can potentially sharpen student critical thinking skills, raise awareness of the processes of science such as peer review, and…
stoat | August 22, 2011In not-very-exciting news just in National Science Foundation vindicates Michael Mann. Or you can read Romm's version.
[Well, who would have guessed it? This non-news really riles the denialists and the trolls. To be open, I knew it was troll-bait but couldn't resist. And perhaps it is useful to see just how badly broken the septic talking points are. Can you believe that people are saying "We all know that the Earth's temperature has been increasing steadily since the last ice age (this is obvious..."? But apparently this is the level of disinformation that people are so confident of, they…
stoat | July 23, 2011We interrupt your diet of rowing (briefly) to point out that David Appell has found Watts to be rather less than open to inconvenient information - despite Watts having asked for that very information. This is nothing new or interesting, of course. Trolls, please form an orderly queue.
Refs
* The fun continues
stoat | July 15, 2011Further proof of the polarisation in this "debate" comes from Climate: Cherries are not the only fruit by Richard Black. This all stems from Reconciling anthropogenic climate change with observed temperature 1998-2008 by Robert K. Kaufmann et al., who come to the not-desperately-exciting conclusion that things are pretty much as we thought they were: recent global temperature records are consistent with the existing understanding of the relationship among global surface temperature, internal variability, and radiative forcing, which includes anthropogenic factors with well known warming and…
stoat | July 11, 2011 I first saw this a while back: maybe 2 years ago, but CR reminded me of it recently. As far as I can tell it is genuine; the CIA offer to sell you it, though if you try to buy you get a 404. Why you'd buy it when others have it for free I don't know. I don't seem to have blogged it then; others did but just to push their own tedious ends (yes, its global cooling come again, don't all switch off at once).
There are a couple of things to look at in a report like this. The most interesting is, presumably, what did the CIA think about climate change then. Slightly less interesting, but revealing…
stoat | June 12, 2011A headline which is doubtless a hostage to fortune. Anyway, I had fun deriding the Heartland Institute's failed wiki but, as frank points out in the comments, there is more fun to be had: you can look at Special:ListUsers. If you do this on a real wiki like wikipedia, you get an enormously long list, the first page of which consists of !, ! !, ! ! !, ..., ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! !, after which whoever it was got bored. And who has been indefed since 2006. In fact, because of the way special characters list first, you have to page through thousands of…
stoat | June 8, 2011From the Heartland Institute:
Subject: Announcing ClimateWiki.org: The Definitive Climate Change Encyclopedia
To: <no-one@cares>Date: Wednesday, June 8, 2011, 4:40 PMAnnouncing ClimateWiki.org: The Definitive Climate Change Encyclopedia
CHICAGO - Backed by more than two decades of institutional knowledge and the work of some of the world's most esteemed climate scientists, The Heartland Institute <http://www.heartland.org/> is proud to announce the launch of a new Web site called ClimateWiki.org . It is the definitive climate change encyclopedia.
It is doomed, obviously.…