climate communication
stoat | September 2, 2010There are no google hits for "Belette Labs" and this (for reasons that will become clear later) needs remedying.
stoat | August 25, 2010Back in 2008, I examined the Oreskes vs Nierenberg affair and concluded that Nicolas Nierenberg was correct and Oreskes was wrong. And then NN capped that by actually writing stuff up into a paper, published in July of this year: Early Climate Change Consensus at the National Academy: The Origins and Making of Changing Climate.
And (I missed this at the time I think), Nature published a letter from Nierenberg, Tschinkel & Tschinkel, titled "An independent thinker, willing to say what he thought":
We object to the inaccurate and misleading characterization of William Nierenberg by Naomi…
stoat | August 3, 2010It looks like the recent hot summer in Russia and the wildfires stuff have caused a volte-face (though probably only temporary) according to Time: Will Russia's Heat Wave End Its Global-Warming Doubts?. Quite a few people have died, though most of them seem to have died of being drunk. Which suggests that adaption may be a useful strategy. And of course climatologically one summer means very little.
Apparently Medvedev has gone from We will not cut our development potential to
practically everything is burning. The weather is anomalously hot... What's happening with the planet's climate…
stoat | July 22, 2010[Tags: climate-wonk incest. Everyone else please ignore]
We interrupt your diet of boatie-type news [update: sorry, late boatie news: a great bow-cam video of Champs 6 bumping the Hornets (sorry Paul)] for something related to climate: BigCityLib notices that the IOP (remember that bunch of revisionist fools?) has deleted the Energy sub group:
Following the meeting of the Science Board on 17 June 2010, it is with regret that I announce that the Energy Sub-group is to be disbanded, immediately.
Or has it? The website still has them [Update: thanks to J who points out that is the Energy Group,…
stoat | July 14, 2010Gareth at hot-topic.co.nz/ has the following:
Monckton has now posted at WUWT asking for people to flood Abraham's university with calls for disciplinary action. As a consequence, I have posted this:
We the undersigned offer unreserved support for John Abraham and St. Thomas University in the matter of complaints made to them by Christopher Monckton. Professor Abraham provided an important public service by showing in detail Monckton?s misrepresentation of the science of climate, and we applaud him for that effort, and St. Thomas University for making his presentation available to the world…
stoat | July 14, 2010As used on this blog, and sometimes elsewhere. This post will be a work in progress, probably. I said that I would occaisionally push the publication date closer to "now" to keep it near the top, but that doesn't work: wordpress changes the URL to include the month so old links break. Rats.
[[link]] - used sometimes when I'm directing you to a wikipedia page in emulation of mediawiki markup.
A2 - SRES scenario A2. A "high emission" scenario.
AR4 - IPCC Fouth Assessment Report (not falled the FAR because that was IPCC '90, the First Assessment Report, though of course it wasn't called that).…
stoat | July 12, 2010Apparently there has been great fuss about "Pepsigate", which was Pepsi paying to have a blog at Scienceblogs. Or somesuch - I didn't follow it too closely. If you're interested, this looks like an attempt at a summary of the fallout.
As for myself, I don't greatly care. I've never really been part of the Great Culture. There were rumours of some terrible event a year ago too, but I can't remember what that was even about.
stoat | July 11, 2010Since the last of the CRU-email inquiries came in, a whole string of rubbish journo's have been queuing up to try to explain why, given that the inquires enhonerated the scientists, there was so much kerfuffle over the whole issue. Naturally, given that the journo's can't have been wrong, the scientists must have done something wrong, so a whole string of tedious "yes they were exhonerated but still, they could have done better" posts have come and gone.
Pearce was trash. Monbiot was rubbish during the fuss and was rubbish afterwards though JA took the piss out of him better than I did. mt…
stoat | July 10, 2010This is me, tiptoeing towards the spotters guide to bloggers I promised. But I've been distracted, because I was pointed at Climate scientist: "Positive carbon-climate feedback is still very likely" -- and even without "a runaway feedback," warming will be "substantial and critical" Plus a review of recent research on amplifying feedbacks at ClimateProgress. I think most of it is by Brad Johnston, but there is an addendum by Romm. So, what is wrong with it?
First off, you have to wade through too much foam to get to the substance, which puts me in a bad mood. Once you know the structure of…
stoat | July 8, 2010On occasion the CS can be a touch heavy-handed but the recent Whitewash! Whitewash! is classic, ending with the inspired:
But that is not science - that is closing your eyes to Truth. The so-called AGW theory is an non-falsifiable oxymoron, and theories that are non-falsifiable are not scientific! It has also been disproved many times, by Gerlisch and Tscheuschler, by Soon and Baliunas, by Miskolczi, by Ernst-Georg Beck, by Lord Monckton, by McIntyre, by Inferno and finally by myself! And by its nature of being unfalsifiable and falsified at the same time, AGW theory leads to a contradiction…
stoat | July 7, 2010'Rigour and honesty' of scientists not in doubt but Sir Muir Russell says UEA's Climatic Research Unit was not sufficiently open. I'd quibble the latter but we have to take what we can get; probably they needed a sop for the ranters.
Here is the thing itself and here are some quotes (bold in the original):
13. Climate science is a matter of such global importance, that the highest standards of honesty, rigour and openness are needed in its conduct. On the specific allegations made against the behaviour of CRU scientists, we find that their rigour and honesty as scientists are not in doubt.
14…
stoat | July 4, 2010A reader wrote:
I am a recent reader of your blog Stoat. I am very interested in the Climate Change issue but I am not a scientist. I read Joe Romm, Island of Doubt and General news about the subject. You are the first expert I have come across that seems to have a balanced opinion on climate change. I have searched through your archives but I can't really get a complete feel of what your opinion is. I get lost sometimes when you explain the technical stuff or use abbreviations for things that I don't know what the abbreviations are for. Could you do a blog post (in an untechnical format…
stoat | July 2, 2010Things Break says this, but I don't see why I shouldn't say the same. I haven't had much to say about Pearce before - I see I took a side swipe at him a while back. But his recent trash on the McLean paper is the worst sort of dumb journo false balance and he should be ashamed of himself.
[Update: anyone who thinks FP isn't a fool should read his latest trash (thanks to a commenter)]
May as well have a largely irrelevant cartoon (ht: mt):
stoat | July 1, 2010RC has said this already, but perhaps you want to talk about it here. Not great surprise I think; see the press release or the final report.
The Investigatory Committee, after careful review of all available evidence, determined
that there is no substance to the allegation against Dr. Michael E. Mann, Professor, Department of Meteorology, The Pennsylvania State University. More specifically, the Investigatory Committee determined that Dr. Michael E. Mann did not engage in, nor did he participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions that seriously deviated from accepted practices within the…
stoat | June 30, 2010
Sorry, typo on the first letter, hope you aren't too disappointed :-). And nothing to do with the video: which is just a song I'd forgotten how much I liked. We owe so much to YouTube. Anyway, on with the show:
James Annan is ranting about Climate sensitivity again. I wouldn't normally bother remark something so commonplace (:-))) but he also disses the Lenton et al. paper that came up recently in comments and which I've snarked about before (summary for the New Bugs: does the concept of "tipping points" really mean anything and/or actually help you discuss these issues?).
DeepClimate is…
stoat | June 27, 2010This post is about the ridiculous "hide the decline" video. I watched it when it first came out. It wasn't funny, it was dull. Apparently it has now been pulled from YouTube, but who cares?
But... because the thing is anti-science, the std.anti-science septics on wiki feel inclined to have an article on it. Sigh. There enough real subjects to create articles about without wasting time on vapour. I really ought to point you to the current version, and the current edit war: should this edit be included - viz, is the fact that some guy with a blog thinks the video is funny worth noting? I don't…
stoat | June 12, 2010I seem to have commenters who think I should read more CA, or Watty, or RP Sr, or misc other exciting stuff (I'm sure RP Sr loves being lumped in with that lot). Anyway, my response is, why? None of them, that I can see, have anything half as interesting as this or this or this. And Jules' pix are good, too.
So in future, if you want to tell me that I really really ought to read such and such a blog: please tell me why. And please include a link to one of their posts that is at least somewhere in the running to being as interesting as one of the above.
Ah, I can't just leave you with that.…
stoat | June 11, 2010This is something I've been meaning to say for some time, but Gareth has said it instead. I agree with Gareth, but it goes a little further: it isn't just the interface to policy, it is that a whole group of people (possibly large) are being actively encouraged to undermine science, to fail to understand how it works; to think that their own opinions really are as valid as published research; and so on. Science is a whole thing, a state of mind; you can't just cut off one area of "climate science"; everything links together.
This is beginning to sound like the traditional complaint about…
stoat | June 8, 2010Some time ago I promised KK a post on tribalism, and he has never forgiven me for not writing it.
I think the reason I never wrote it was because the word, or the charge, turns out to be so vague as to be meaningless. Tribalism is a charge you fling at people when you have no real arguments left and nothing of substance to say: "you're being tribal"; "no I'm not!"; "aha! see, you deny it, you must be tribal". And so on. What is it, anyway? I'd say it is when you defend views and ideas and data from "your" group even when you know it to be wrong, because you don't want your group to lose face…
stoat | June 8, 2010More boring links blogs stuff. But just for once I do actually have something else to say, so I'll try to clear this out asap.
* Do you need context to understand the CRU emails? Or can they be understood on their own? An analysis. No prizes for guessing the answer. But links to...
* The secret life of bugs which is a fun analysis of how much could you understand bugs from what was recorded about them? Answer, often not much. Mind you, some of the stuff in there is weird - how does The missing link to source code change-sets is one of the most problematic omissions. For the last bug of 70% of…