climate science
stoat | December 15, 2015 An update to the exciting Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2015 October 6. In which I noted a pile of folk such as Nir Shaviv moving from category "Climate change skeptics (scientists)" to "Climate change deniers (scientists)".
After that happened, some people pointed out that wasn't quite right; and it was debated, and the result was to "delete" the category. So the net result is that a whole pile of people, e.g., Jan Veizer loses the "[[Category:Climate change skeptics (scientists)]]". Which is probably a fair result.
stoat | December 14, 2015 Via the Economist (probably paywalled; Karlsruhe Institute of Technology PR will do as well): the idea is that instead of steam methane forming to produce hydrogen and CO2, you crack methane directly to hydrogen and carbon. The advantage is no CO2 to dispose of; instead you have carbon, which presumably has uses.
From their PR:
experimental reactor that could demonstrate the potential of methane cracking and overcome previous obstacles [carbon clogging and low conversion rates]. The starting point is a novel reactor design, as proposed by Carlo Rubbia and based on liquid metal technology.…
stoat | December 13, 2015 Dr Roy tells it like it is3. Or perhaps you prefer James Hansen1, 6 as reported by JA?
“It’s a fraud really, a fake,” he says, rubbing his head. “It’s just bullshit for them to say: ‘We’ll have a 2C warming target and then try to do a little better every five years.’ It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.”
The One True Answer is a carbon tax, of course. This has all the virtues of simplicity, transparency and efficiency, and is therefore hated by all the pols who,…
stoat | December 9, 2015 Expert Consensus on the Economics of Climate Change is a report from the Institute for Policy Integrity1, and comes to me via Slate via Twitter. I read the paper and failed to find the obvious flaws, so over to you.
They ran a 15-question online survey... We invited the 1,103 experts who met our selection criteria [publication in journals] to participate, and we received 365 completed surveys. The survey data revealed several key findings [trimmed]:
• Economic experts believe that climate change will begin to have a net negative impact on the global economy very soon – the median estimate…
stoat | December 8, 2015 Data or Dogma? (full title "Data or Dogma? Promoting Open Inquiry in the Debate over the Magnitude of Human Impact on Earth’s Climate") is the hearings promoted by U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), chairman of the Subcommittee on Space, Science, and Competitiveness.
Happily, this is one of those questions we can answer easily: when you've got so few scientists you're willing to listen to that you're obliged to invite Mark Steyn to speak, then you're the one pushing Dogma.
There, that was easy, anything else? See Eli for a bit more; or MediaMatters.
Refs
* Commentary: After the Paris pact,…
stoat | December 5, 2015 Storm Desmond brings flooding and disruption to parts of UK says Auntie, and so it seems - the flood warning map is a sea of severe. Or you can have Storm Desmond: major incident declared as police urge people to evacuate home.
I don't usually do severe weather posts, but I thought I'd make an exception for this one.
My aunt lives not far away - probably happily for her, somewhat higher up in the hills. When we visit in the summer we go into Keswick, and look down into the river chuckling in its bed.
Now you get to look up at the river!
The glass panels of the flood defenses seem rather…
stoat | November 29, 2015At some point SB moved wordpress versions, and when this occurred old links broke. Every now and again when I come across an old post I fix them up, but you can't, so here is the sekret decoder ring. Things like:
http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2007/11/hansen_again.php
turn into
http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2007/11/23/hansen-again/
Which is annoying, because whilst you can get from "new" to "old" by s/-/_/g, removing the extra number and adding ".php", you can't get from old to new without knowing the number. Argh! But, it turns out the server has been taught some intelligence, because
http://…
stoat | November 28, 2015 In fact I'm not quite as certain of the Right Thing as my headline suggests; but if I'm going to nail my colours to the mast in advance of the UK's parliament's probable vote next week, I may as well be definite. It puts me with Jeremy Corbyn and against most of the UK pols. I don't feel involved enough to go and protest2, though, as I did before the Iraq war. More that two years ago I wrote words that could be interpreted as support for military intervention. But that was more than two years ago; things have changed since. Most of what has changed has changed for the worse; the country is…
stoat | November 25, 2015 UK cancels pioneering £1bn carbon capture and storage competition says the Graun: Two projects had been in the running to build plants demonstrating CCS at commercial scale. One was backed by Shell and SSE at Peterhead. The White Rose consortium was based at Drax, the UK’s largest power plant, but was in trouble after Drax halted its investment in September. I commented on the White Rose (Drax) thing before.
If you'd prefer to read something more hopeful about CCS, try David Hone: Shell officially open its first major carbon capture and storage (CCS) facility, the Quest project. It is in…
stoat | November 25, 2015It looks somehow so serene. All that flawless blue sky.
Hopefull Evil Uncle Vlad won't flail out in quite the same way that Good Uncle Sam did after 9/11.
It is a much smaller matter, of course; but the Commies, errrm, aren't really reliably sane. Unlike, errrm, the Yanks. The FT gives me hope: although the blowhards are blowing hard with Vladimir Solovyov, host of one of the main political talk shows on Russian state television, compared the downing of the jet to the shooting of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 which triggered the first world war. “We are one step from a big war,” he said…
stoat | November 23, 2015Whenever I descended into the den of iniquity that is WUWT, I'd get "CAGW" flung at me. And I'd always reply that they had made it up1. See for example my If it isn’t catastrophic we’ve got nothing to worry about, have we? or comments in When will it start cooling? But now, alas, the philosophers are back (I wasn't impressed last time; ATTP clearly was) with an open letter.
TheConversation blurb contains the regrettably vague Those most responsible for climate change are relatively few compared to the vast numbers of people who will be harmfully affected. I don't know how to interpret that:…
stoat | November 22, 2015An interesting paper in Nature Communications (David B. Kemp, Kilian Eichenseer and Wolfgang Kiessling, doi:10.1038/ncomms9890), and yet oddly unreported, or at least not in the corner of the blogosphere that I watch (did I miss you? Sorry, tell me). True, its not easy to interpret, but even so I'm surprised. I was hoping that someone was going to tell me what to think, but until they do here's what I've thunk for myself. Let's start with their abstract:
Recently observed rates of environmental change are typically much higher than those inferred for the geological past. At the same time, the…
stoat | November 19, 2015
It's not Rice terraces in Yunnan of course: it's Caribbean brain coral, from the Royal Society photo competition. The winner, tadpoles, is cute, but looks to be a rip-off of the rather better newt. Unless its a common idea. The fish is good, too:
As is the snake. I like abstracts:
A friend of mine, Ulrike Bauer, won the "Evolutionary Biology" category.
stoat | November 18, 2015 Catherine Ritz,Tamsin L. Edwards, Gaël Durand, Antony J. Payne, Vincent Peyaud& Richard C. A. Hindmarsh; Nature (2015) doi:10.1038/nature16147. And somewhat following on from Joan Crawford has risen from the grave! only its sane, well-crafted, and most important of all not only publishable but actually published. From the abstract:
Large parts of the Antarctic ice sheet lying on bedrock below sea level may be vulnerable to marine-ice-sheet instability... may be underway throughout the Amundsen Sea embayment... Physically plausible projections are challenging: numerical models with…
stoat | November 13, 2015 Perhaps not the world's greatest shock in Nature Geoscience 8, 880–884 (2015) doi:10.1038/ngeo2560 by Francisco Estrada,W. J. Wouter Botzen& Richard S. J. Tol. Hmm, one of those names is strangely familiar.
There's a press release from U Sussex: Professor Richard Tol is co-author... find that the upward trend in economic losses from hurricanes in the US cannot be explained by the commonly invoked increases in vulnerability and exposure... find that part of the trend cannot be explained by commonly used socioeconomic factors, but is consistent with an increase in the number and intensity…
stoat | November 12, 2015 Someone (I forget who; remind me and I'll thank you) pointed me at Everything You Need to Know About the Exxon Climate Change Probe but were afraid to ask. That article makes some points I've already made (While environmental advocates have cheered Schneiderman’s effort to take energy firms to task over a global crisis, some legal scholars question whether he is the right man for the job. "You wonder why this is the sort of thing that a New York attorney general should be doing," said James Fanto, a professor at Brooklyn Law School. "It seems like it’s just completely politically motivated…
stoat | November 11, 2015 Environment and Development Challenges: The Imperative of a Carbon Fee and Dividend says:
This chapter discusses the importance of a carbon fee and dividend in minimizing the impacts of climate change on humanity and nature. Before outlining the policies needed to produce a rapid phase-out of fossil fuel emissions, it enumerates the fundamental flaws of the Kyoto Protocol from the standpoint of climate science. One flaw is the “cap” mechanism, which purports to reduce carbon emissions at the rate required to stabilize climate but fails to provide universal price signals that would reward…
stoat | November 9, 2015Says The Onion.
And its right, even if the original is damaged (I've not done it, of course)). But that's not quite what I wanted to write about...
I wanted to talk about The war against Exxon Mobil (WaPo) and the contrast between reactions to that and In re Smith v Karl (and several reprints).
mt's article is easy for all right-thinking people to agree with. So much so that mt even found one wrong-thinking person who also agreed with it (that's a joke; don't get all huffy).
But what about the obvious obverse, which is the witch hunt against Exxon? I asked mt about that and that, oooh, it…
stoat | November 6, 2015 Slightly not-the-usual fare, but H mentioned it and its wiki, and following - or failing to follow - the trail was moderately amusing, so here we go. Deepak Chopra is an Indian American author and public speaker.[4][5] He is an alternative medicine advocate and a promoter of popular forms of spirituality, but more importantly is the winner of an 1998 IgNoble prize for his unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness. [REFERENCE: Deepak Chopra's books "Quantum Healing," "Ageless Body, Timeless Mind," etc.] Or as wiki puts it,…
stoat | November 2, 2015[RealClimate has a post with more useful detail.]
I last commented about Antarctica and SLR when I "reviewed" the AR5 cryosphere chapter. As I noted there, things have come on quite a way since I were a lad (2005, 2004) and the major advance looks to be GRACE, even if they sometimes recalibrate their isostatic rebound; see-also this from 2009. And now, via Sou, I find Mass gains of the Antarctic ice sheet exceed losses by Zwally et al. Which says
Mass changes of the Antarctic ice sheet impact sea-level rise as climate changes, but recent rates have been uncertain. Ice, Cloud and land…