climate communication
stoat | June 7, 2010Thanks to J who alerts me to this little matter. So, this is all mostly summarised in [[Description of the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age in IPCC reports]]. From which I reproduce:
A schematic (non-quantitative) curve was used to represent temperature variations over the last 1000 years in chapter 7. The vertical temperature scale was labelled as "Temperature change (°C)" but no numerical labels were given; it could be taken to imply that temperature variations of the MWP and LIA were each of the order of 0.5 °C from the temperature around 1900. The section specifically states…
stoat | June 6, 2010Hans von Storch is a bit hard to pin down on GW: unquestionably a good scientist, but sounding oddly skeptical of late. His klimazwiebel is his current venue, where he posts with others including Eduardo "killer" Zorita. von S's posts are usually the more sensible ones. But now we have Nils Roll-Hansen: A lesson from Lysenkoism? which isn't actually by von S but is definitely sponsored by him.
What is this lesson? Well, von S says:
Please do not misunderstand this thread as another attempt to bring in Stalinism. My interest is in the interaction of policy/politics and science in the past - in…
stoat | May 16, 2010surfacetemperatures.org/ is a bit odd - perhaps rather rushed. Braod aspects to be covered will be... suggests that they haven't even had time to spell check it. That they don't mention clearclimatecode.org/ makes me think this is going to be officious ponderous we-need-our-own-wheel stuff. Still, who knows? There is stuff in Nature too. Is this really just the reaction to the CRU email junk that it looks like? If so, it is pointless.
[Update: Peter Thorne comments, and you should be sure to read that -W]
stoat | May 1, 2010Yes, that's right, a mention at DenialDepot. Eli gets a nod, too. Curry loves me too it seems, but I don't have much sympathy for her latest.
stoat | April 27, 2010 Oh well, everyone else has a gate, perhaps I can have one too. Incidentally the picture is there for two reasons: firstly I have far too many pix of Darling Daugther and no-one looks at them. If Jules can put up huts, I can do children. And second, it is a cunning attempt to make me a human bean rather than just a face on the internet, so my enemies will find it harder to attack me. Clever eh?
So, the story so far (pay attention at the back!): I wondered about the list of 3 "key" papers that Curry was proposing should have been considered by the Oxburgh inquiry. Or perhaps by the…
stoat | April 26, 2010My general feeling about Judith Curry's stuff over at Collide-a-scape was that it was all tolerably vague. But there was one specfic.
Over there, she copied Bishop Hill and proposed "Jones 1998 and Osborn and Briffa 2006" as key neglected papers.
More directly she has proposed:
1. The Spatial Extent of 20th-Century Warmth in the Context of the Past 1200 Years
Timothy J. Osborn* and Keith R. Briffa (Science 10 February 2006:â¨Vol. 311. no. 5762, pp. 841 - 844â¨DOI: 10.1126/science.1120514)
2. Global surface temperatures over the past two millennia Michael E. Mann and Philip D. Jones,…
stoat | April 25, 2010On google searches for "stoat", that is. And also number 3. I even took a pic of it.
Meanwhile, a busy day and I'm tired. No time for more.
stoat | April 23, 2010Eventually I decided to tone down the headline; Curry is wrong about a great many things, I think, but let's be polite. So, all this is prompted by her Q+A for Keith Kloor. I fear I am going to have to read it. All of this segues into the "tribalist" stuff that I'm going to have to write sometime; but not now. Onwards.
So, Curry said the Oxburgh investigation has little credibility in my opinion.. When KK tasks her on this, she backs off a bit: what she means is, it doesn't cover the areas she is interested in. Well, tough. If she wants her own inquiry, with her own terms of reference, she…
stoat | April 14, 2010Scientists cleared of malpractice in UEA's hacked emails inquiry says the IOP, which isn't quite the headline I chose, but once again you'll have to forgive a little poetic licence on my part. The Grauniad says much the same, as does Aunty. Perhaps more tellingly, The Torygraph and Times have ignored it entirely.
The report itself is here. Thankfully, it is quite short.
[Update: other views:
* Eli
* TL
* Keith Kloor - for the "opposition"
* HT
* mt - this is well worth reading for mt's thoughtful take on what is and what is not worth noting about the report.
* CA - McI is deeply miffed that…
stoat | April 13, 2010Hacked climate science emails: were requests for information vexatious? asks Monbiot, and then proceeds to get the wrong answer (though it isn't as bad as his previous nonsense). "Framing" all this in terms of FOI is silly and wrong. Monbiot loves FOI 'cos he is a journo and it is a one-way street for him: more info, formerly hidden, equals stories. Reality isn't so important to him it would seem.
In terms of science, this is all just wrong. In my experience, and it seems to be true in this case too, the restrictions on revealing info are imposed by govts and their agencies. The UKMO was very…
stoat | April 8, 2010So much to rant about, so little time. Where to start?
How about with that fool Broon, who is now reduced to "it was the wrong sort of recession". Not quite literally, but very very close (for those not blessed with residence in the Sceptered Isle, "The wrong sort of X" is now a saying, begun by our much-beloved British Rail a few winters back when after a very thin snowfall brought all the trains to a standstill (again) they earned derision for saying that it was "the wrong sort of snow"). So what happened? It was on R4 this morning, Broon appearing for an interview. The obvious question: "…
stoat | March 31, 2010Or have I used that one before? It seems only too likely. But perhaps not: I don't seem to have had a decent go at him for four years.
Anyway, it makes a change from CRU-investigation navel-gazing (I'll get back to that in a moment). So what has the much-loved but getting-on-a-bit genius of electron capture said now?
It was bound to happen. Science, not so very long ago, pre-1960s, was largely vocational. Back when I was young, I didn't want to do anything else other than be a scientist. They're not like that nowadays. They don't give a damn. They go to these massive, mass-produced…
stoat | March 30, 2010The HoC inquiry into the CRU hack has reported. Judging from BBC radio 4 this morning (which interviewed Acton and then Lawson, no, not the wobbly one) the results are good: I say this because Lawson showed a distinct disinclination to talk about what the report actually said :-).
I'll expand this post later with more, so don't complain if it changes. My initial impression is that is is fairly good, and certainly provides the right headlines, but I can't yet endorse it whole-heartedly - it looks like they have made some errors (in the matter of blaming Jones for the data sharing). But I need…
stoat | March 6, 2010[This post got extensively re-written (you can tell that, cos it has a title that doesn't fit its URL :-) after I realised that I, too, had been fooled by the septic FUD. Oh dear. I've stopped now: you can read on without fear that the words will change under you.]
The septics are trying to pretend that there is a spat between the Swedes (SMHI) and CRU, but this is just smoke-n-mirrors. Lets quote the final letter first:
With reference to the current debate regarding, amongst other things, access to climate data we have found that our letter to you dated 21 December 2009 unfortunately have…
stoat | March 5, 2010The ever-vigilant BigCityLib has spotted some revisionism by the Institute of Physics: they have silently updated their "clarification": the link http://www.iop.org/News/news_40679.html now points to a statement dated 5th March, instead of the original, which was 2nd march. What a bunch of slimy little toads: they pretend to believe in openness, they won't tell us who wrote their statements, then they silently airbrush out embarassing words afterwards.
Refers: Irony can be pretty ironic sometimes and The IOP fiasco.
This post doesn't analyse the changes; as far as I can see they have…
stoat | March 4, 2010A headline stolen blatantly from HH. But it seems rather applicable to the Institute of Physics. The Grauniad are still pushing them (go big G!) but the IOP are stonewalling: they won't say who wrote their pap; but it seems one Peter Gill was involved.
In an apparent attempt to take the Irony Prize back from the gunmen of Caracas, the institute supplied a statement from an anonymous member of its science board, which said: "The institute should feel relaxed about the process by which it generated what is, anyway, a statement of the obvious." It added: "The points [the submission] makes are…
stoat | March 2, 2010The "Institute of Physics" sounds jolly reassuring; but like all such things you never quite know what they are going to say. Just recently they have been saying some very silly things indeed in their contribution to the UK parliaments feeding-frenzy over the CRU emails. So the IOP apparently thinks that worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and it goes downhill from there. It reads like a gift to the septics and it could easily have been written down to the septics dictation; indeed, it very probably was.
So the most likely scenario is that a…
stoat | February 14, 2010As I was about to write up the latest smoggy stuff, I thought I'd better check out Eli in case he had written it up first. And lo, I thought, Condolences referred to the death of Christy's scientific reputation. But no, it is about real death. So I need to press on.
[[John Christy]] has been a bit of a skeptic for ages. Quite where he gets it from is unclear - perhaps because he and Spencer did the first version of the [[satellite temperature record]] and, well, they got it wrong. In that it showed cooling, and so they became the poster boys for the real septics like Singer and Michaels and…
stoat | February 11, 2010There is a good letter from some Dutch scientists at Open brief Nederlandse klimaatonderzoekers over IPCC en over fouten in Klimaatrapport 2007 (don't worry, its in English too). I think it does a good job of setting the recent "IPCC is utterly corrupt / mistaken / broken / infiltrated by space aliens / needs to be disbanded" thing in perspective.
stoat | February 8, 2010A couple of people have asked me this - I think it came up in Ask Stoat (I haven't forgotten, you know, just busy). Anyway, it seems like a great post - bound to be flamebait and get my comment count soaring!
You won't be too shocked to learn that I think it should be reformed, not dissolved. But how?
[Update: some of this gets quoted in http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/10/ipcc-reform -W]
First of all, I think the WG I, II and II should be separated more. The WG I report should be done first. Then WG II and III should have their own timescales - perhaps running about a year or…