climate communication
stoat | June 2, 2011[May 26th: Pulled to the top to update with the Nature editorial which, as well as noting the paper being pulled, also notes the mysteriously dilatory George Mason University investigation.
June 3rd: And pulled again, since Science have a piece on the actual retraction, and again note the GMU lack-of-progress.]
Well, this is exciting: Climate study gets pulled after charges of plagiarism says USA today:
Evidence of plagiarism and complaints about the peer-review process have led a statistics journal to retract a federally funded study that condemned scientific support for global warming...…
stoat | May 21, 2011 From the department for shooting fish in a barrel, David Appell has a nice post pointing out that Singer has been a bozo for years, predicting (in 1981) massive future declines in fossil oil use.
This may be a good place to link to another of DA's posts, US Emissions to Stay Below Pre-Recession Peak Until 2028 which makes an interesting combination with Early Warning on US vehicle miles.
More Singer-is-a-bozo stuff
This is, as I said, shooting fish in a barrel. So I'll just make it an update to this post rather than a new one. DA went to a talk by Singer that was riddled with errors. One bit…
stoat | March 7, 2011As a respite from all the people whinging about scientists being poor communicators, Eli writes Blaming the Other Guy While Copying from the Guy Who Buys the Drinks in which he points out the obvious: the people doing a crap job of communicating science are the journalists.
To which I'd add: that of course there is a stratum of journalists that are doing an excellent job of communicating lies and untruths, and a few telling the truth.
But if the public wanted intelligently written journalism that actually explored issues carefully, they would get it. Alas (as far as I can tell), most of them…
stoat | February 20, 2011Hat tip to JB, who points me at John Beddington saying:
"We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of racism. We are grossly intolerant, and properly so, of people who [are] anti-homosexuality...We are not--and I genuinely think we should think about how we do this--grossly intolerant of pseudo-science, the building up of what purports to be science by the cherry-picking of the facts and the failure to use scientific evidence and the failure to use scientific method,"
It gets better: Beddington also had harsh words for journalists who treat the opinions of non-scientist commentators as…
stoat | February 10, 2011 Science (the mag, not the concept) sez:
Science is driven by data. New technologies... blah... publishers, including Science, have increasingly assumed more responsibility for ensuring that data are archived and available after publication... blah... Science's policy for some time has been that "all data necessary to understand, assess, and extend the conclusions of the manuscript must be available to any reader of Science" (see www.sciencemag.org/site/feature/contribinfo/)... blah... Science is extending our data access requirement listed above to include computer codes involved in the…
stoat | January 9, 2011 Or so says KLIMARETTER.INFO. Here is the google auto-trans from the German:
Provocative it is, but apparently it is not enough: the issue of the conservative magazine, Focus on the benefits of global warming is only a little German kiosks have been sold to the. The booklet, entitled "Great atmosphere!" is , according to the Hamburger Abendblatt 84 000 times over the counter moved only - that is the worst result in the entire year 2010.
Just in time for the world climate summit in Cancun, Mexico made the Focus a frontispiece with, the polar bear with sunglasses showing a. For this, the…
stoat | January 6, 2011Jules James has a lovely pic, which I've shamelessly ripped off here. But go over there too. The paper seems to be at pubpages.unh.edu/~lch/Hamilton climate interaction.pdf; fig 1 is perhaps even more entertaining: not a single Republican thinks they don't understand GW at all.
While I'm doing pix, this one from Spam Volume Drop on Christmas Day is also entertaining. BP's share price is quite cheering too, but I won't trouble you with that.
Refs
* Everyone's spam is unique from Light Blue Touchpaper.
stoat | December 19, 2010 Time for a few linky type things. The first couple point to the New Blog in case you've missed it.
* Snowy again by me, about the recent weather.
* Christmas Head
* xkcd Christmas Tree (thanks Mayank) and on wikileaks :-)
* Lamest edit wars on wikipedia. The Bot wars section is good. Of course, wikipedia is soft nowadays, with the block-fingers too poised. We had real edit wars in the old days.
* Beautiful supernova fragments via Bad Astronomy. As a species we are frequently rubbish but occaisionally sublime.
* J+J go to AGU but don't find much except Macs. A nice dig at Curry's incoherence…
stoat | November 21, 2010Well yes, as is slowly becoming obvious. Deltoid reports USA today (or you can also look at the full Mashey). In the curious world of academe (which I presume Wegman aspires to) plagiarism is a no-no far more serious that just getting the wrong answer; and has the virtue of being fairly easy to spot.
But whilst plagiarism is bad (possibly even fatal) for your academic reputation, it doesn't directly say anything about science, or the validity of conclusions. It is evidence that the author has been sloppy and - in this case - bolsters the argument that the author didn't really understand what…
stoat | November 19, 2010I was going to blog about what bunch of ponces the Police were in the video for Wrapped around your finger (great music though; speaking of which Nice legs, Shame about the face applies today. King of Pain is better, but they don't look so stupid).
Anyway, what I decided to talk about today is Sherwood Boehlert's op-ed in the WaPo (as I believe the hip dudes call it). Which I'll quote in near-entirety (truncated a little for brevity and for bits I find not wrong but detracting from the otherwise excellent message):
Watching the raft of newly elected GOP lawmakers converge on Washington, I…
stoat | October 30, 2010Not that any of the existing ones are that good, either. Anyway: I slagged off her post on attribution a while ago, and then forgot (or couldn't be bothered) to slag off the nonsense she wrote about uncertainty (although my Judith Curry is now blogging, which is probably a good thing, because now instead of nitpicking other people's blogs she is now attempting to say what she thinks. Unfortunately this results in some very strange things is becoming every more clearly correct. Having to make a coherent argument is quite hard; Curry needs someone to read her stuff before she posts it). Anyway…
stoat | October 26, 2010Thank to Hank, who spotted this.
If you go to Nature's upcoming climate publication, there's an online quiz they're using to decide who gets a freebie: https://www.sunbeltfs.com/forms/nq/subscribe.asp.
At one point it asks what climate-related blogs you read. Naturally, only the finsest quality blogs are listed. There are three blogs:
_Bright Green Blog
_Real Climate
_Stoat
_Other (please specify)
As Hank notes, "Bright Green Blog" -- the Christian Science Monitor's effort -- ended on "February 16, 2010 [a]fter 22 months and some 500 posts".
So, despite their ability to drink prodigous…
stoat | October 16, 2010Nick Barnes has an excellent opinion piece in Nature. And the comments are good too. There is a comment-on-the-piece by Anthony Fejes which I think is less good: too much like the kind of people who put you off cycling by insisting you have to wear a cycle helmet or walk. And you should read Nick's follow up a CCC.
I've decided that I agree with Nick's overall argument: yes you should publish your code. Which means, everything that is yours, including the little fiddly bits. Even if no-one will understand them. Even if people will deliberately misunderstand them.
I have a number of quibbles…
stoat | October 12, 2010 Wise words from David Appell. But this is the blogosphere, so that isn't going to happen. And Hal Lewis would be disappointed if we did; after all, he is trying to make a splash with his nonsense. As DA puts it So someone named Hal Lewis has resigned from the American Physical Society in a snit over their position on climate change, and this is supposedly "fracturing" the scientific community. Who is Hal Lewis? I've been studying physics for 30 years, and I've never heard of him. In the unlikely event that you want to read what HL has to say, the usual idiots have it all laid out.
And so…
stoat | September 30, 2010From RP Jr and Nurture. Well, not quite direct lies, more in the nature of deliberately-misleading by omission. But I have a work colleague who habitually accuses me of spreading climate lies (hello Hugo!) so it only seems fair to use the phrase myself. [From the Nature article,] It isn't quite possible to tell who is at fault: the quote from the review in Nurture is:
In The Climate Fix, Pielke argues... Fright sells, he points out, citing the late Stephen Schneider, the environmental scientist and political adviser who once wrote that, to rouse public support, "we have to offer up scary…
stoat | September 28, 2010Misc people have lauded Kwame Anthony Appiah and his piece What will future generations condemn us for? He comes up with four fairly obvious and worthy answers: prisons, industrialised meat, isolation of the elderly, the environment. He doesn't dare mention some other obvious ones: the war on terror, the war on drugs, for example, are notorious failures that have cost countless billions and countless lives. And mine, after not all that much reflection, are:
1. Our ridicuous decision-making processes. We have institutionalised bad leadership and institutions and structures that are appalling…
stoat | September 28, 2010Part I refers, in which I take PZ to task for getting too carried away over some harmless minor piece of hydrodynamics. PZ didn't show up in the comment thread for his post after I criticised him there, which I took as an implicit admission of error, and was all ready to forget it. But no, PZ bites back:
I have been chastised by William Connolley; he thinks I was too "strident" in condemning that lousy paper about Moses parting the sea with a fortuitous wind. I disagree, obviously. It was a bad paper, and I gave the reasons why it was so awful: it was poorly justified, it was not addressing…
stoat | September 5, 2010So, I didn't like the IAC prescription for the IPCC. So I need my own. And I forgot that I already had one. PK said it well in the comments:
How many IPCC reports does it take to screw in a light bulb? The bureaucratic solution for inefficient bureaucracy always seems to be more bureaucracy. If the purpose of the IPCC is to inform governments on climate change and its possible impacts, the job is pretty much done. If the purpose is to provide a rationale for global taxation and control of CO2, we'll be arguing over the results of AR15.
but it bears repeating and expanding. No number of IPCC…
stoat | September 3, 2010climatecode.org is a new project from the clear climate code folks - go have a look. And maybe even do something :-). It am all de rage at the moment to dothis stuff, and it will be interesting how "open source" attempts mesh together with more heavyweight government backed efforts. What next - "clear climate reviews" to replace the next IPCC report?
ps: sorry abut the silly slider-bar thingy at the bottom, if it is still there when you see this: I think that Seed must be experimenting with some new widgety stuff. I wish they wouldn't do that.