climate communication
stoat | October 18, 2008So says Schellnhuber (ht ht). I imagine he really did say it, because its in quotes. But the same page says "Schnellhuber charged that 20 per cent of the loss of the ice sheet on Greenland could be directly linked to the added carbon dioxide emissions from new Chinese coal-fired power stations." This I find rather hard to believe. The Chinese produce produce about 20% of global emissions, true, but not all of that is from power stations; and besides which its the atmos concentrations that matter, not the instantaneous emissions, and they have a long way to go before they catch up with a West…
stoat | October 14, 2008With regard to our BAMS paper, and the links to various commentaries at the bottom, John says: I actually have begun to feel despair every time I read a comment thread on a blog post about the paper... people generally don't read it, but rather use it as a starting point to share the opinions they already had, informed or not. This is frequently the case even with those who agree with us. Sigh.
Alas, its too true, and not just about our paper: people are just looking for excuses to push their own views. Except me, of course, or my respected readers.
stoat | September 25, 2008I decided to skip over the synthesis - how can I judge that, before reading the chapters its supposed to synthesise? I'll come back to it.
Previous: Part I.
Chapter 2 "Future carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels" is by Nordhaus and Yohe; and by Ausubel and Nordhaus. Eli has laid into this, but he largely based his post on Oreskes et al. (henceforth, OCS), and I no longer think thats such a good thing to do. They say: Chapter 1, written by Nordhaus, Ausubel, and Gary Yohe,... but this is, a teensy bit wrong. The chapter in question is chapter 2 (chapter 1 is the synthesis) and OCS have…
stoat | September 18, 2008 Zut alors: le Nierenberg vieux est arrivee! And you can join in the fun. I'll be posting up scans (well, actually, photos) of the text as I go along.
Aside: I got this thanks to the wonders of the extrawub: abebooks found me a copy for a mere $6.54 (plus postage) delivered from the states in a week. Marvels will never cease. I could have tried the UL, I suppose, but that would have meant stopping on my way to work. And anyway their catalogue suggested they didn't have it.
So far, the introductory stuff is up: frontispiece, people, foreword, preface, contents list. And also the synthesis,…
stoat | September 11, 2008My post on Nieremberg has generated lots of interesting comments. I still don't have the report, so for now I'll focus on on issue that came up: who commissioned the N report?
Oreskes says: In 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected president... Reagan commissioned a third report about global warming from Bill Nierenberg. To be fair, she says that in the Times; the same assertion doesn't appear in her more scholarly work.
But its not true.
Atmoz has appendix 3, and the report was commissioned on June 30, 1980. Which is presumably the date of the signing of the official papers; the actual spadework of…
stoat | September 9, 2008[This is my 600th post!]
Oreskes says:
So Reagan commissioned a third report [this appears to be false: see below -W] about global warming from Bill Nierenberg, who had made his name working on the Manhattan Project developing America's atom bomb. He went on to run the Scripps Institution of Oceanography where he had built up the Climate Research Division. And he was a Jason. Nierenberg's report was unusual in that individual chapters were written by different authors. Many of these chapters recorded mainstream scientific thinking similar to the Charney and Jason reports. But the key chapter…
stoat | August 31, 2008Stop me if someone has done this already (Eli?; OK, Deltoid has something)... I'm still catching up. But US climate report comes under fire caught my eye, as did the link to RP's take.
My first comment would be, isn't this report just a teensy bit pointless, we have the IPCC report. I doubt there will be anything useful in it that wasn't in IPCC. But assuming that US chauvinism means they have to have their own...
The major thing wrong with the exec summary is that its written for idiots, who are apparently unable to understand that its a process unless the boxes are drawn on top of a road,…
stoat | July 22, 2008My first post at NextGen is now up.
More excitingly, tonight is the first of the bumps. Go Chesterton 2!
stoat | July 20, 2008Prefix: you may have read the leaks about this in the Grauniad: "Channel 4 to be censured over controversial climate film" seems a fair comment on the fairness ruling. But are they right about the accuracy aspect? That will need another post. Meanwhile, thanks to Dave Rado for pushing all this, and have a look at http://www.ofcomswindlecomplaint.net/. Ofcom officially available from http://www.ofcom.org.uk/tv/obb/prog_cb/obb114/issue114.pdf.
If you have any sense, you've probably forgotten the late and unlamented The Great Global Warming Swindle (and many other points in the blogosphere). But…
stoat | May 15, 2008Grauniad again, of course:. Its obvious b*ll*cks, at least as measured by my own experience: most of the damage is caused by roads, buildings, farming practices, and so on. Can it really be true that 90% of env damage is due to T change?
Probably not. The source appears to be Attributing physical and biological impacts to anthropogenic climate change in Nature. To quote the abstract:
Significant changes in physical and biological systems are occurring on all continents and in most oceans, with a concentration of available data in Europe and North America. Most of these changes are in the…
stoat | April 6, 2008Predictably enough, the Grauniad has picked up on Hansens target 350 stuff. And what he said before about W Ant now seems to have got transmogrified into:
Hansen said that he now regards as "implausible" the view of many climate scientists that the shrinking of the ice sheets would take thousands of years. "If we follow business as usual I can't see how west Antarctica could survive a century. We are talking about a sea-level rise of at least a couple of metres this century."
stoat | April 6, 2008Suppose you read a press release that started... Bleak first results from the world's largest climate change experiment and continued Greenhouse gases could cause global temperatures to rise by more than double the maximum warming so far considered likely by the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), according to results from the world's largest climate prediction experiment, published in the journal Nature this week. and went on The first results from climateprediction.net, a global experiment using computing time donated by the general public, show that average temperatures…
stoat | April 1, 2008Liberation blog says Il est fondé sur des contreverités factuelles impardonnables pour un scientifique censé respecter un minimum de règles éthiques dans sa communication avec le public (thanks, R). I think they've ripped off their fig (a) from someone elses blog, but can't remember whose.
stoat | March 17, 2008While we're on things that will keep coming back, I suppose for balance I ough to lay into Hansen, who is once again pushing his climate-sensitivity-is-6oCstuff. Well, it wasn't, and it still isn't.
So there.
stoat | March 7, 2008My scientific swansong is a paper with Tom Peterson and John Fleck about the famous 70's cooling myth. John and I wrote up a post for this on RC as the global cooling mole, and its now been added to wiki so it must be true :-).
Someone there has found but not fully ref'd two Science articles from the 50's that maybe predicted cooling, so there may be further to take this story. And of course, a full analysis of the old media coverage would be interesting.
stoat | March 2, 2008I feel very uncomfortable about the fate of the Brown/Pielke/Annan poll. For the record, I can't remember whether I voted or not or was even asked; but I too would have been a 5. As I said, there were flaws in the poll, but it should have been published anyway. Its the curse of Annan, of course.
A familiar part of this is the curious response of the editor: ignoring the "problem" for months and then refusing to answer emails. I'll mail him myself, see if that gets me anywhere (looking up his email, I find that the top google hit for "Fred Spillhaus" is JEB :-)... ah, probably because he only…
stoat | February 20, 2008Just a quick post, since I'm at work, to note our appearence in USA today. This is an upcoming BAMS paper, but clearly making USA today is far more important :-)
It grew from http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/ but Tom and John finally did what I never managed to do, which was to put it into coherent paragraphs with a storyline.
Mind you, I'm not sure its up there with As climate change warms the nation, giant Burmese pythons could colonize one-third of the USA....
[Update: http://news.yahoo.com/s/thenation/20080225/cm_thenation/769288601 is nice]
stoat | January 26, 2008I must be getting old, I'm starting to seriously think of switching our paper order from the Grauniad to the Times. Which forms a lead in to: this piece which provides two interesting points: In the National Statistics omnibus survey, conducted in August 2006, 39 per cent of people thought that cars were the most environmentally damaging mode of transport, while 35 per cent selected planes. When the same question was asked in August 2007 cars had slipped to 34 per cent and planes had risen to 40 per cent. and also Young people were much less likely to be concerned about climate change than…
stoat | January 17, 2008Is Fred Singer worth listening to(o)? It sounds unlikely - certainly when I heard him speak he provided nothing but disinformation. Sadly I may never know for sure, because their site was broken when I tried it. If anyone does manage to find Singer saying anything worth hearing, do let me know what is was...
stoat | January 10, 2008Thanks to R for pointing out a list of every skeptic argument encountered online as well as how often each argument is used. Clear winner is "the sun" but its nice to see that old chestnut of 1970's cooling still in there at number 7.