climate grumping
stoat | November 1, 2014 Or so energylivenews says (thanks to J). Their text is:
Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney appears to agree most fossil fuels can’t be used if the world is to avoid climate change. At a World Bank event on Friday, he is quoted as saying: “The vast majority of reserves are unburnable.” This is a reference to the idea of a so-called carbon bubble – when investors in oil, gas or coal suppliers lose out on money because the reserves can’t be used.
I've bolded his words, the rest is editorial interpolation. I find this particularly irritating. If I'm reading about what Carney thinks, I…
stoat | November 21, 2009In shocking news just in, record heavy rain in the Lakes and extensive flooding has not been linked to global warming. Dr Bogus, spokesman for the Made-Up Institute of Twaddle, said "This is completely unprecedented. Normally, any unusual - or even merely somewhat uncommon - weather event is immeadiately linked to global warming. All of the usual Pinko suspects have failed us in this case. The best we have so far is "David Balmforth, a flooding expert at the Institution of Civil Engineers, said deluges on a similar scale will become more frequent as a result of climate change." and that is…
stoat | March 14, 2009Only this time they are "warmers" rather than septics, and even include some IPCC folk. That seems to be the take Nurture is using for the recent Copenhagen meeting. Ah well.
How dangerous is climate change? It is hard to say for sure, we will have to act in the face of uncertainty. But what is certain is that saying Delegates agreed that more stringent and urgent action is needed in order to avoid 'dangerous climate change', currently defined by the European Union as a temperature rise of more than 2°C above preindustrial values. is stupid. You cannot redefine "dangerous" to mean "> 2 oC…
stoat | December 2, 2008I've pretty well given up paying the slightest attention to climate-change negotiations (err, hence this post...), as they seem to be utterly pointless. The political response to something is to talk about it, and so they do, spending large amounts of money and emitting large amounts of CO2 in the process. But as Nature admits, these are talks about talks about talks. Obama's election is more significant. All these stupid conferences should be cancelled.
stoat | November 10, 2008Nuture has a letter from David Gremillet who says: Scientists are becoming increasingly concerned about the environmental impact of their work... reduce our carbon footprint by attending fewer scientific conferences... Regular long-distance flying can easily triple an academic's carbon footprint. During the past year, I have 'spent' about nine tonnes of carbon, two-thirds of this on plane trips. Yet I am a good consumer otherwise (see http://www.carbonfootprint.com), and I don't even own a car. Such figures are particularly hard for field ecologists to stomach, as we hope our long-term work…
stoat | September 5, 2008England is famous for its rubbish weather, but this summer has been unusually poor. As it happened that didn't affect us much and we had a great summer: we got a few days sun on the beach to start us off; managed to climb Snowdon and not get rained on by the summit cloud much; spend a week off in the sun in the Med; and it was grey in the Lakes but then it always is. But I draw the line at having to walk back from the local in the pouring rain; thats just not on. Now that school has restarted and we're not on hols the weather should be tantalisingly fine, but its worse than ever. I blame that…
stoat | December 15, 2007Just to remind you, my prediction was that Bali was going to be a waste of time. But I'm open-minded, and happy to be persuaded otherwise. I rather suspect that any benefits are going to be hard-to-analyse-or-see, though possibly no less real for all that.
Its time to look through the usual suspects for their views. And then I'll put up my initial reaction. I'm slightly heartened to hear Bush condemning the deal, which suggests it might be worth something.
Eli has a fine example of an Anti-Bali rant, but doesn't venture his own opinion; perhaps pondering in his burrow over a carrot or two.…
I'll believe it's a crisis when the people who tell me it's a crisis start acting like it's a crisis
stoat | November 26, 2007From Instapundit via Quark soup.
stoat | October 15, 2007Yes, blog action day, time to post something. mt is as ever sensible, as is Gavin: if you aren't prepared to take action when your lakes get covered with toxic scum; or when even on a clear day, you cannot see the sun: then why are you going to worry about global warming?
FB has more inspiring things to say. Read him instead.
stoat | October 4, 2007I was going to comment on Court challenge for school screening of Gore film but that sort of stuff has been done to death. I have sympathy for the idea that the film is propaganda (though the science is largely correct, see stoat passim), but none for "Although climate change is clearly taking place, there remains great uncertainty about the extent to which human actions contribute..." so this is just septicism under a different guise, methinks. It won't work, anyway.
But it does make me wonder about whats taught in schools: is it being sexed up too much in a desperate attempt to interest the…
stoat | September 25, 2007Via desmogblog, a Nasa article about snow melting in Greenland: NASA Finds Greenland Snow Melting Hit Record High in High Places. A new NASA-supported study reports that 2007 marked an overall rise in the melting trend over the entire Greenland ice sheet and, remarkably, melting in high-altitude areas was greater than ever at 150 percent more than average. In fact, the amount of snow that has melted this year over Greenland could cover the surface size of the U.S. more than twice.
But look more closely: the graph shows, and the text says, that 2007 has less melt than several other years.…
stoat | September 5, 2007It seems to be my fate to complain about "The intersection". Now lookit their latest post. The bottom line? global warming results in sea turtle decline (emphasis in the original). Its exciting news: the most dramatic link I've seen yet demonstrating how that pesky troublemaker climate change is likely harming endangered sea turtles.
Ah... but... there's a bit of a giveaway in there: its harming endangered sea turtles? Yes indeed, its the same old story: the biggest problem is current human damage and habitat destruction, GW is only a secondary factor, and a speculative one at that:
Many sea…
stoat | August 21, 2007If you live outside the UK, chances are that you haven't noticed the climate "camp" protests at Heathrow. Despite various forecasts of direct action, there seems to have been very little action and a lot of sitting around. I'm left wondering why they bothered.
One obvious answer is the famous "Something must be done! This is something. So we'll do it". Another is that its fairly cheap and easy (both for the protesters and the organisers) and (since they wimped out of any kind of confrontation) safe too (I'm being a bit unfair there).
Was it perhaps to persuade people onto their side?…