climate communication
stoat | November 2, 2009Yes indeed. Sorry. Weeelll. No I'm not, really.
Anyway, so I was idly browsing my "shared by" in google reader and came across My Rebuttal to Romm which is by Keith Kloor who I know nothing about other than that I read Joe Romm ranting at him at some point. Kloor defends himself - read it if you're interested - but more amusing was a comment left there which said: I'm not sure the whole huge post needs to be answered point-by-point. Morano feels comfortable just pointing to Romm posts and letting them speak for themselves though it didn't say where this Morano linking occurred. But http://www…
stoat | November 2, 2009 [This one for James, of course.]
I do so love the word "seminal", it brings back my public school days. Anyway, Nurture writes: Oxford climatologist Myles Allen and collaborators, who, in April this year, published two seminal papers in Nature..., which were Warming caused by cumulative carbon emissions towards the trillionth tonne and Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2 °C. I'd say both are mere headline-grabbers of little scientific novelty and doomed to be rapidly forgotten.
And do you know, as I was driving in this morning, I was thinking to myself " you…
stoat | October 23, 2009Roger is having a spot of trouble: everyone is being nasty to him. Once upon a time the mighty Prometheus bestrode the world like a Colossus and ate big fish for breakfast, but now it seems Roger swims with the minnows and it isn't a nice world down there. Eli shows him no mercy - wabbits are a vicious bunch - and Tim Lambert is not kind either but Whiskey Fire probably has the best take on all this.
Incidentally, it isn't really Roger's fault but he does seem to be attracting the wacko septics in the comments, for example Of course DeepClimate consistently refuses to publish my charts…
stoat | October 13, 2009I liked Freakonomics, so I'm a bit sad to see the (inevitable) sequel being so hopelessly wrong. Probably this is a case of the old rule: whenever you see people write about stuff you know, they get it wrong. Joe Romm has a fairly characteristic attack; and just for a change I'll agree with him; though he chooses odd bits to assault. It looks like the "global cooling" junk is just one chapter, but of course it is the only one I'll pay any attention to.
Diagnosis, in brief: (1) they write about stuff they clearly don't understand (2) they pick a catchy reverse-common-wisdom nugget as a…
stoat | October 11, 2009I have Hank to "thank" for pointing me towards http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8299079.stm, which was presumably written to prove that the BBC is no longer sane or indeed terribly interested in reality.
Rather than that, you're better off with something like RC: A warming pause?.
Why they write "And our climate models did not forecast it" when what they really mean is "climate models did forecast this but we paid no attention and / or were too stupid to understand, and still are" is... well, entirely obvious when I think about it :-)
But the true test of an article about global warming…
stoat | July 16, 2009PD has an article about Communicating Science whose title I've shamelessly stolen, and a follow up imaginatively titled Communicating Science 2. Since he sideswipes Mooney, I'm all for it :-)
I wrote an exciting and insightful comment there, which like everything I write anywhere got misinterpreted. So I've cleaned it up and put it here:
"Scientists should talk more" is (I think) just excuse making. In much the same way that you can be sure that when GW really starts causing trouble [see folks, I do believe really, I haven't quite gone over to the Dark Side yet, and I still don't understand…
stoat | June 23, 2009"A friend" points me towards Why does the New York Times hate science? by Joe Romm. Sigh. Experience teaches me that RP Jr can wipe the floor with Romm without even trying, largely because Romm falls flat on his face without any help from anyone else.
As far as I can tell (because it took me some time to fight through the ranting) Romm is complaining about RP's post This post is about how the report summarizes the issue of disasters and climate change, including several references to my work, which is misrepresented where "the report" is the new CCSP report, which I haven't read. RP is…
stoat | June 17, 2009With all the wild excitement over 2007's record low there is clearly room for noise to be made about summer sea ice, so predictions must be made! We all know, of course, that whether this year, or any other year, is going to be a record is going to be a matter of chance: on top of the long term negative trend (and we can argue about whether that trend is typified by the slope of 1979-2006, or has got steeper recently) there is a lot of interannual variation. Certainly I'm not aware of any sea ice modeller with enough confidence in their predictions to put any money on them.
But the next best…
stoat | June 15, 2009
Catz women catching FaT (I think) on saturday. Which was all jolly good fun but meant that I didn't get to row myself all week after monday. And over the weekend I felt somewhat ill. Coupled with pouring rain at 4 this afternoon I was not at all looking forward to being 6 in our "M1" crew for the X-press head today. However, despite light rain as we were boating, we managed to row really quite well given the scratch nature of our crew (well done Phil, especially; and James's first serious race as stroke) and rowing in a stiff boat was a delight, as was the raw arrogance of James T's coxing.…
stoat | June 4, 2009As I said before, I lay claim to introducing the use of the term "going emeritus" to the climate change wars. And you're not allowed to use it without attribution.
stoat | May 28, 2009Over the last decade or so, hard rock geologists have done rather poorly in science, because they have become unfashionable, and are overshadowed by the popularity of climate change. Some of them become bitter and twisted and prominent septics.
Which brings me on to Copenhagen Congress: why the biased reporting? from Nurture, which reports on Mike Hulme's letter to Science complaining about the reporting of the Copenhagen conference: Hulme et al. point out that the dominant mode of media reporting after the event was of impending doom which is no great surprise, because that was what the…
stoat | April 29, 2009I'm sure the risible rubbish in Denial Depot would once upon a time have raised some outrage, or at least the feeling that it might need rebutting. But now it just seems boring (and I'm only writing this as a placeholder for a change in interests). Eli briefly snarks it, and Coby apparently intends to read it. Perhaps Schellnhuber is right.
[Various commenters assure me that it is a spoof. I certainly hope so. But this just proves my own personal point: I really don't care enough to find out! -W]
stoat | April 18, 2009With a side-swipe as Maslowski along the way. But first the wandering...
By the Catlin Arctic Survey. Why are they doing this? Mostly because it is fun, and you can earn your keep doing it. They are explorer-types, and unexplored bits of the world are thin on the ground now, so new challenges must be found. But it needs to be dressed up in science, and this alas is where I start to become cynical.
The science blurb begins with Current estimates for the disappearance of the Arctic Ocean's sea ice cover vary from 100 years away down to just 4 years from now. It won't come as any great surprise…
stoat | March 18, 2009mt has a a transcript of the Copenhagen closing plenary. Let's have a look. Better still, go read it yourself. I'm not going to cover it all.
Our conclusion is that recent observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised. For many key parameters, the climate system is already moving beyond the patterns of natural variability within which our society and economy have developed and thrived. These parameters include global mean surface temperature, sea-level rise, ocean and ice sheet dynamics, ocean…
stoat | March 3, 2009It seems to have become axiomatic in some parts that Gore can do no wrong; Joe Romm has a long column (disclaimer: the column is too long for me to bother read it all) devoted to this implausible assumption, with which I disagree. It's yet more of that tedious business with the slide that got pulled. As RP Jr apparently says Gore was right to admit that the slide was problematic and then pull it from his talk. Romm's answer is Gore never admitted the slide was "problematic," in the way Pielke is implying. He simply agreed to remove the slide after the Belgians backtracked about what they will…
stoat | February 26, 2009BS has the definitive answer to the George Will nonsense. Or read John Fleck, who conveniently links to our joint paper. Until I started typing this, I had an even better answer: I ignore it, it's a pile of toss. But alas, I'm unable to resist joining in, even though I have nothing new to say. And indeed, I haven't even bothered to read what he wrote, so uninterested am I in his errors (yes yes, I know dearest septics, but life is too short).
Andy Revkin (a page, incidentally, that the vaunted Chrome displays very badly) f*cks this up badly, effectively painting Gore and Will as equivalents.…
stoat | February 12, 2009I was going to rant about Lord "I know what you should hear" Ahmed but that's just the religious suppressing freedom of speech, which is hardly news.
But then along comes a much more interesting rant, from Vicky Pope, about the good old Arctic sea ice. 'Apocalyptic climate predictions' mislead the public, say experts. Met Office scientists fear distorted climate change claims could undermine efforts to tackle carbon emissions. With which I agree. Recent headlines have proclaimed that Arctic summer sea ice has decreased so much in the past few years that it has reached a tipping point and will…
stoat | January 20, 2009Poll one wasn't condusive to the right headlines and the journal adopted a policy of "that EOS should not accept summaries of opinion polls".
Opinion poll two produced unambiguously the right answer, was published in EOS, and is splashed about.
stoat | December 23, 2008Nurture offers us ...how far our understanding of climate change has come in the past twelve months. But its a bit thin, especially for just a pick of the top five; there are of course others we could have mentioned.
5. is "skeptics are still out there" - which has nothing to do with the science. 4 is "The hockey stick holds up" - true, but hardly a major advance in understanding. 2 (I'll get back to 3) is "Arctic summer sea ice is in rapid decline" which I consider dubious (and I've offered to put money on, if anyone thinks rapid decline in 2009 is a sure thing, come on if you think you're…
stoat | December 21, 2008Hansen again. He seems to have got bored with saying climate sensitivity is 6 oC, and now agrees with JA that its 3 oC. Hurrah. Less excitingly, his estimate for all-ice-sheet melt on 2-3 x CO2 is now "it would take some time", which has the virtue of vagueness.
But far more excitingly, he is now pushing the idea that Earth could be heading towards a Venus type runaway greenhouse effect, apparently with added forcing as small as 10-20 W/m2. (over present day or over pre-industrial? What CO2 level would that be? Not sure, but In my opinion, if we burn all the coal, there is a good chance that…