climate communication
stoat | February 5, 2010Anatomy of IPCC's Mistake on Himalayan Glaciers and Year 2035" is well worth a read. Especially interesting is their taking-apart of the revisions of 10.6.2 - in brief, these mistakes were spotted before tape-out but those revising that section couldn't be bothered to make any changes (and/or didn't want to quote some embarassingly good research which would have pointed up the pap elsewhere).
[Hat tip: Deltoid]
stoat | February 5, 2010Asian ones that is, not red ones. And not all of them of course, only Minister for environment & forests Jairam Ramesh so far. The Torygraph says:
"There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report, [the] IPCC doesn't do the original research which is one of the weaknesses... they just take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks. "I respect the IPCC but India is a very large country and cannot depend only on [the] IPCC and so we…
stoat | February 2, 2010Klimazwiebel is on my reader list, but I don't usually bother with the comments. It looks a bit like the septics are disappointed with him. And he with them: And, damn it, give your names, when making strong statements. When you have an opinion, then you should have also a name. Still, there are some good comments over there (Mike Hulme was there, though he had little to say when I looked).
stoat | February 1, 2010Obvious enough you would have though, but some still fall for it. UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article is the latest excitement.
Breathlessly, they reveal:
It can be revealed that the IPCC report made use of 16 non-peer reviewed WWF reports. One claim, which stated that coral reefs near mangrove forests contained up to 25 times more fish numbers than those without mangroves nearby, quoted a feature article on the WWF website. In fact the data contained within the WWF article originated from a paper published in 2004 in the respected journal Nature…
stoat | January 21, 2010This is my first contribution for "Ask Stoat", and I'm doing it because it is low hanging fruit :-). I was going to do the even lower-hanging "airbourne fraction" but that will come. This is for Brian.
So, the issue is in the news because of the 2350 / 2035 kerfuffle, and links to Brian's other question, "What do you think of WG II?" I'll answer that one first, because I can think of a cutting answer, which is "I don't". Oh, cruel. But true: when I was in the game, I was interested in WG I stuff, which is to say, the physical basis. Someone has to be interested in impacts and adaption, of…
stoat | January 13, 2010Ha ha, there you go, yet another provocative headline that won't really deliver.
From the comments elsewhere (thanks F):
At the rate newspapers keep pushing the boundaries of what nonsense
they will publish, then Einstein's theories will be up for grabs in a
few years. And there is worse than the reporting done on climate science: try
nutrition, or cancer.
which set me to wondering, hence this post. I would agree that the reporting on nutrition or health etc is utterly appalling; Ben Goldacre has made a good career noticing this. My immeadiate reaction to that is: but everyone *knows* it is…
stoat | January 11, 2010The malign Nature effect, again refers.
In the hotly contested competition to see who are the biggest tossers in the british newspaper industry there has been an early entry this year by the Daily Mail: The mini ice age starts here based mainly on the fact that, oh, it has snowed a bit. And not helped by the UKMO pratting around with seasonal forecasts they know full well are worthless to the general public. Whether or not this makes the Mail more stupid that the Torygraph I leave for you to judge (incidentally, for you Johnny Foreigners lucky enough not to know what the Mail is, its a…
stoat | January 3, 2010Many years ago, back when Stoat was a humble blogspot blog, I had an "Ask Stoat" feature, shamelessly ripped off from RP Jr's "Ask Prometheus". Anyway, it is back, and here it is. Ask away. I'll transfer anything I think there is any prospect of me doing from the comments into some kind of order list. Anyone else who thinks they know the answwer is welcome to post a link to their version; I'll xfer those up too, if useful.
Incidentally, PD is also happy to be asked stuff, and has a better record than me of answering. Since he is still an active climate scientist, he may do a better job of…
stoat | January 1, 2010Paul puts up his best posts of 2009 and that seems like a good idea. He did 8, so I think I should try for 9. I'll write it tomorrow; you've got till then to do it for me :-)
No-one did my work for me. And I decided to do a rough pick month-by-month instead.
* Jan Hegel does maths
* Feb "Will" I be able to think of a witty title for this post? (it was a thin month; runner-up)
* Mar Too hot to handle!
* Apr Wandering across the Arctic
* May Meinshausen et al.
* Jun Mays (runners up)
* Jul Communicating Science
* Aug Midsummer madness (well, it was August. And I didn't win the bet)
* Sep…
stoat | December 23, 2009The latest is http://connelleywatch.blogspot.com/. I'd be slightly more honoured if my watcher was watching closely enough to spell my name.
[Update: they have (silently) taken my comment to heart and moved it to http://connolleywatch.blogspot.com/]
[Late update: thanks to JG for the pic: ]
stoat | December 19, 2009Actually it turns out that this is part 3! But I'm not going to revise the title now. Part 1 and Part 2 refer, as does some digging.
[Update: this made the [[Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-12-28/In the news]] ]
So, Lawrence "beany" Solomon does me the honour of a full-out assault. I'm a bit puzzled as to why, perhaps more study will reveal this. It looks like he is trying to get some kind of linkage between the [[Climatic Research Unit e-mail hacking incident]] and my on-wiki activities. But although Solomon states directly The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment…
stoat | December 18, 2009An exciting new blog aicomment.blogspot.com. However, I'm insulted that An Open Mind has got on their bad-boys list and I'm not. I thought I was notorious for rejecting inconvenient comments? Anyway, *I* suggest that you all try to make a comment on this post here, I'll reject them all, and you can get me added to their list of blogs. Of course, if they reject your comments then we can start a blog for that.
[Comments here are now closed]
stoat | December 5, 2009Somewhat against my will, I find myself obliged to post about Hulme, if only to stop people arguing on other talk pages. Come and argue here, folks :-(.
Anyway, KK pointed me to two Hulme pieces, and I'll take those as my texts:
* http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8388485.stm
* http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107104574571613215771336.html
My immeadiate reaction is that these are both about science-n-politics. Which immeadiately says the the hacking incident has told us nothing interesting or new about the actual science. Which in turn is one in the eye for the septics, who…
stoat | December 3, 2009Can we leave out the -gate trash? We had a big argument on wiki about this, and the wacko POV-pushers lost, hurrah. So none of that here, thanks.
Keith "baby killer Kloor strokes my ego so outrageously that I can't find it in me to rage much that apparently I failed to use [my] influential corner of the climate blogosphere to foster a healthy discussion of the salient issues, be it the integrity of the peer review process, FOIA evasion, CRU data storage, or the "tribalism" that Curry notes. Connolley appears to be taking a nothing to see here, move along attitude. (don't miss comment #1, BTW…
stoat | November 28, 2009 Perhaps sensing blood, Zorita explains Why I think that Michael Mann, Phil Jones and Stefan Rahmstorf should be barred from the IPCC process.
I know little of Zorita; he appears to be a protege of von S (many of his pubs are with von S; but some with Tett, Moberg, etc., so don't imagine I'm dismissing him as a nobody). I blogged him, weakly, a while ago. Zorita's dislike of Mann et al. is nothing new, see his blogging The decay of the hockey stick (notice how, in that blog, he and von S have the pleasant *opportunity* to respond to comments on their papers, whereas the unfortunate Mann *had…
stoat | November 28, 2009This from off in the comments at Slashdot, brought to my attention by planet3.0 (thanks VM). Yes, I know I'm a layperson now myself, but some shreds of the old knowledge still cling. Related thought: just about everyone knows they aren't able to understand, or make a meaningful contribution to, general relativity or quantum mechanics or number theory (except Cantors diagonal proof, of course, which every wacko knows is wrong). Somehow, however, people imagine that they understand climate science :-(.
Being a scientist but not of the climate variety, I've got to say 'No'. In a lot of cases,…
stoat | November 24, 2009Anyone who cares has found them by now so I won't trouble you with all the details. James "Gonad Watcher" Annan is fulfilling, with commendable neutrality, the role of arbitrator to which I appointed him, and I don't think there is much more I need to say. That won't stop me from saying it, of course. Other people who have said sensible things include Denial Depot, Newtongate, CM and of course RC (apologies if you're not on the list; oh all right Eli too since he says he needs the traffic). Indeed pretty well everyone with any sense seems to have got the right answer by now.
So I'll deal with…
stoat | November 14, 2009I'm not a mass-media-audience type of blog, so I excuse myself from having to be kind to "my side"; I don't think I need to avoid worrying Joe Public about dissent in the "we believe in GW" side of the blogosphere, because I don't think JP reads me. And it is far more fun trying to pick holes in the relatively minor errors of "my side" than it is to point out the gross stupidity of The Dark Side.
Which brings me on to Terms of Engagement by Keith Kloor who points to Shellenberger and Nordhaus explaining why they don't take on the other side: The work of holding Republican obstructionists,…
stoat | November 14, 2009Having just read Eli being unhappy on the APS I'm struck by a thought, which is that no-one at all seems to think they might learn anything useful about actual climate change from the APS statement or its revised version. All anyone is doing is picking over it to see whether the miscellaneous physicists have managed to understand the research. So: why do these people bother have a statement at all? Would they have felt left out of the party otherwise? Its just the tedious old physcis arrogance again.
Background:
* http://physicsfrontline.aps.org/2009/11/10/aps-council-overwhelmingly-r…
*…