climate science
stoat | August 27, 2017Schlock, horreur: Exxon funds science. Yes, we knew that already. More schlock and awww: ExxonMobil deliberately attempts to sow doubt on the reality and urgency of climate change. Yes, we knew that too. This is all kicked off by Oreskes astonishing ability to re-tread the same story again and again; but clearly there's a big constituency out there that wants to hear it; so if she can make a fine living out of telling the same old fairy story I suppose as a good free marketeer I can't complain too much.
Before we go on, notice the image I inline. It is part of the evidence against Exxon. It's…
stoat | August 26, 2017Just like in 2016, you may have noticed that things have been thin around here recently, and the reason is the same: I've been off in the mountains; the Ecrins again. Here is very nearly the same view as 2016. It isn't quite so good; I lack the fluffy cloud layer; this was taken about an hour later, but also a few weeks earlier. And, the melt back of the snow has continued.
More later when things have settled down. Don't forget to check back for Kant and his famous antimonies!
Actually, I can't resist a few more. Here's people pratting around going from the upper traverse below the "Barre"…
stoat | August 10, 2017 Well, the conversation over at Kevin Anderson: how numbers reveal another reality got rather silly and bad tempered, but more than that it also became totally, obviously pointless1. Remarkably, my attempt to enlighten people by pointing out that their attitude to and discussion of economics bore a powerful resemblance to discussions of science at WUWT did not bear fruit.
In other news, the image to the right is my submission for my work pass photo. I'm hoping they'll use it, even if cropped a little. The image below is prettier but I suspect wouldn't pass even the cursory scrutiny pass…
stoat | August 6, 2017 Via CIP what I agree is a rather nice story about robotisation, from the WaPo. The bit that seems interesting is that the robots are getting cheaper, and more flexible. You don't need to convert the whole factory at once; you can do little bits at a time. For the folk doing the work that the robots are going to push out, this isn't good news, except that they jobs are so mind-numbingly boring that perhaps it is good news, really. They're now free to do something better, in a slightly richer society. They even find one of the workers to say “It’s not a good job for a person to have anyway”.…
stoat | August 5, 2017 Ha. While I'm wasting my time on heat waves, ATTP is reaping the clicks with Manichean paranoia, a far more amusing topic. After all, everyone loves RP Jr [content advisory: talk given at the GWPF: may pollute your brain]. I'm not terribly interested in most of it, but I'll talk to "Engage with those with whom you disagree": which, nowadays, seems to be most of the readers of my blog. At least those who comment; I don't know about the lurkers. That is somewhat regrettable, but so it goes; I don't complain.
Roger sets the stage with Senator James Inhofe versus Prof. Michael Mann. That's…
stoat | August 5, 2017It is summer. Normally the time for relaxation, but even though the rowing is over (alas) there's a T/O coming up and little freizeit; and after that I'm off on holiday; so I should squeeze off a quick cheap post to keep those clicks coming in. And on a summer's day when it is rather cool and pouring with rain (although, the mercurial English climate being what it is, it has changed since I started writing this to glorious sun; by the time I've finished, we'll probably be onto hails of frogs), what better topic than Extreme weather 'could kill up to 152,000 a year' in Europe by 2100?
Heat…
stoat | July 29, 2017 More politics, but since it is cunningly disguised as a reply to mt's Twitter rant, I think I may get away with it. You should go off and read mt's post, for context. But not for content; much as I like his take on the science I can never agree with his take on the politics. Here's a sample:
One reason for the buckling of democracy is the stealing of people's time and emotional energy in high stakes marketplace hypercompetition. Democracy can be preserved or restored only if & when daily life is secure. A key reason to support Universal Basic Income1 or similar ideas. A calm and…
stoat | July 25, 2017Is a familiar concept but also a page-turning pot-boiler by Thomas "just call me Tom" Bingham, which I'm in the middle of reading1. And there is much to be said upon the subject, including the need for clarity; but my attention was drawn to two clauses in his "history of" section, where he includes the USAnian Bill of Rights aka the first ten amendments to their constitution. Which are
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof
and
the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed3
The first is negative:…
stoat | July 16, 2017I'm not having the problems this time, but you are. Or so I'm told. If you can see this, then you're not having problems, I suppose, but they are said to look like:
Your access to this site has been limited
Your access to this service has been temporarily limited. Please try again in a few minutes. (HTTP response code 503)
Reason: Exceeded the maximum global requests per minute for crawlers or humans.
Important note for site admins: If you are the administrator of this website note that your access has been limited because you broke one of the Wordfence blocking rules. The reason your access…
stoat | July 15, 2017Asks reason.com. Good heavens no, answer all the nice lefties. Of course not.
Refs
* Even the intellectual left is drawn to conspiracy theories about the right. Resist them. How not to write about “radical” libertarians by by Henry Farrell and Steven Teles in Vox.
* Questions for Progressives About Trump - from CH.
* James Buchanan and Hobbes
* John Stuart Mill’s 1861 Considerations on Representative Government - CH
* Michael Reich Is Wrong About the Booth School Surveys on Minimum Wages - CH
stoat | July 14, 2017 As sung by British Sea Power. Sou has some nice stuff, as does everyone else.
Although the "news" is that the last thread of ice has broken, it's an enormous berg so it isn't about to float off in a hurry1, and indeed the last tiny neck was probably only a formality.
What does it all mean? Pfft, we may never know. Everyone else will tell, you anyway. Back to the Arctic I think.
Notes
1. A pic shows some apparent visible spacing of the berg to the rest of the iceshelf, so perhaps it is moving. We'll see.
Refs
* Brief Communication: Newly developing rift in Larsen C Ice Shelf presents…
stoat | July 8, 2017 No, wait. This isn't yet another tedious post bashing Pruitt's dumb ideas. It's a post bashing mt2, which is far more interesting. I have two3 wildly exciting points to make about mt's post at ATTP.
You people do need a red team
If you stick to science, you generally get it right1. Oddly enough; you are, after all, pretty well self-defined as "the side that gets the GW science right". But you need to get out more. So when mt says Economic, social and environmental losses climb rapidly and nonlinearly with temperature change, and may already overwhelm the short-term benefits of fossil fuels,…
stoat | July 4, 2017 I must admit I only wrote this post because I thought the title would be amusing. Was I right? Time will tell. Via a variety of sources some of whom I ignored, I find the great physicst saying President Trump's decision to pull out of the Paris climate change accord could lead humanity to a tipping point, "turning the Earth into Venus."1 That, as we all know, is bollocks. Or in JA's more measured terms, "I don't believe such hyperbole is useful". Don't mince your words, man, you'll never get onto a high-status Red Team that way.
My Hawking claim-to-fame is that I was cycling over the Garret…
stoat | July 4, 2017 Since I'm able to post, and listening with half an ear to a rather boring meeting, I'll briefly post this. Mostly I think I'll refer you to Moyhu who tells you what you need to know; this is largely for my own reference. The take-home message, errm, apart from "the new trend is higher than the old trend", is probably what Gavin said: Structural uncertainty in satellite temperature records is much greater than for the surface station datasets. But all show warming. So early, and repeated, claims for high accuracy for the satellite record are wrong; but I think we've known that for a bit. It…
stoat | July 4, 2017 Some flaw in the over-eager Sb security, or more likely an intermediate layer, locked me out over the weekend, so my apologies for any delayed approvals and so on. One of which was to a reference to Estimating economic damage from climate change in the United States by Solomon Hsiang et al., Science 30 Jun 2017, Vol. 356, Issue 6345, pp. 1362-1369, DOI: 10.1126/science.aal4369. Which says:
Estimates of climate change damage are central to the design of climate policies. Here, we develop a flexible architecture for computing damages that integrates climate science, econometric analyses, and…
stoat | June 27, 2017 KK tweets My latest @ISSUESinST feature just went online. It covers some sensitive issues in ecology & climate spheres. It's kinda standard fodder, headlined "The Science Police" in order to wind you up, like The Fail, bylined On highly charged issues, such as climate change and endangered species, peer review literature and public discourse are aggressively patrolled by self-appointed sheriffs in the scientific community. Provocative or wot? I'll skip the ecology, because I have no expertise there, and come on to the climate. Which is... RP Jr. And if you don't know who he is, KK…
stoat | June 25, 2017 Meh; not to spoil the tension but it is, as you've already guessed, just another dull clone of wiki a-la Conservapedia. I found it via Wired via fb; you certainly won't find it via people referring to it2. Other than me; sorry about that. This one is called "Infogalactic" which seems to hint that it is a joke.
They have two, no make that three, obvious problems. The first is, who would bother read it. The second, is who would bother write it. If I look at the recent changes on wiki, the last 500 changes cover 6 minutes. On IG, they cover 5 days1. They are also heavily slanted to only a few…
stoat | June 24, 2017 On hot days like these an old man's thoughts turn to the eternal mysteries of sea ice. Someone - it might have been CR - drew my attention to PIOMAS a week or two back; but I can't find whatever was said now, so I'll look for myself. Before looking at the sea ice, I found the temperature anomaly, which is rather interesting.
So having been ridiculously warm all winter, suddenly we're back to normal, or a fraction below. This is Daily Mean Temperatures North of 80 degree North, red is the operational model, the green average is reanalysis. Arguably there's a degree of pining-to-zero around…
stoat | June 20, 20172016 saw the dawn of a new era, and unsurprisingly on the men's side it continued; Maggie were very fast. Clare bumped up two (Pembroke; Caius, still looking nice but under powered) but couldn't touch Maggie despite having two attempts. Saturday saw LMBC two cementing their place in div 1 just opposite the John's beer crowd, pretty well where their M1 got headship last year. Christ's got blades and a welcome return to M1.
On the women's side Downing got spoons, falling to Caius on Wednesday who had their day in the sun before falling to Jesus on Friday, who rowed over head on Saturday.
As…
stoat | June 16, 2017 Not directly climate, and risks being somewhat tasteless, but I'll have a go anyway. Two things come past: Light Blue Touchpaper (which is a lovely pun) discusses Camouflage or scary monsters: deceiving others about risk and ends with1 it might be time for a more careful cross-disciplinary study of how we can change people’s minds about risk in the presence of smart and persistent adversaries. We know, for example, that a college education makes people much less susceptible to propaganda and marketing; but what is the science behind designing interventions that are quicker and cheaper in…