climate science
stoat | November 1, 2015Ages ago, John Theon had his five minutes of fame in the usual tedious manner; as blogged by me and others with too much time on their hands. Since then his wiki-life looks like:
2015-11-01T03:17:34 Acroterion (talk | contribs) deleted page John Theon (G4: Recreation of a page that was deleted per a deletion discussion, Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/John Theon)
2011-11-17T15:12:14 Prolog (talk | contribs) deleted page John Theon (G5: Creation by a blocked or banned user in violation of block or ban)
2011-09-07T06:17:17 David Eppstein (talk | contribs) deleted page John Theon (G4: Recreation…
stoat | October 22, 2015 Everyone is being terribly cwuel to Exxon, and they feel the need to respond. You can probably chalk that up as a success, though a minor one. On the ultimate substance I don't feel any need to revise my previous posts: that Exxon's climate science research was far less interesting than the stories are trying to say; that it wasn't secret, but indeed clearly public; and that it didn't give them any special insight that wasn't widely available to everyone else.
* What Exxon Knew and When?
* What Exxon Knew and When, round three?
* What I said about Exxon
However, the flipside of that is that…
stoat | October 19, 2015 As it says in the good book:
Junkies down in Brooklyn are going crazy
They're laughing just like hungry dogs in the street
Policemen are hiding behind the skirts of little girls
Their eyes have turned the color of frozen meat
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no
Joan Crawford has risen from the grave
Joan Crawford has risen from the grave
Catholic school girls have thrown away their mascara
They chain themselves to the axles of big Mac trucks
The sky is filled with hordes of shimmering angels
The fat lady laughs, "Gentlemen, start your trucks"
Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no…
stoat | October 18, 2015This year's sea ice was unexciting. NOAA goes for "2015 Arctic sea ice fourth lowest on record" which is doubtless true.
Tamino has some helpful plots, so I've nicked one. I'm pleased that my 2014 comment "Hopefully that too [i.e., 2012] will look like an outlier in years to come" now looks quite true. From a statistical point of view, Tamino says "changepoint analysis can only confirm one rate change, but a smooth suggests more might be going on"; and I'm sure that's true from that view. From a physical viewpoint I'm less convinced, and would just take a simple LS fit to the whole (…
stoat | October 17, 2015[Update: Or, maybe not.]
Via twitter comes news of the sad demise of "Ice melt, sea level rise and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 °C global warming is highly dangerous"; Review status: This discussion paper has been under review for the journal Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics (ACP). A final paper in ACP is not foreseen. My view at the end of August was that Peter Thorne's review was "substantially negative about the paper"; it looks like the editor has gone with that and similar views. In essence, its a sad train-wreck; only…
stoat | October 16, 2015 It (it? Philippe Verdier, possibly-ex-weatherman) is all a bit silly, but here's a snapshot from the Torygraph if you like. Its the same old stuff: We are hostage to a planetary scandal over climate change – a war machine whose aim is to keep us in fear... I received a letter telling me not to come. I'm in shock... This is a direct extension of what I say in my book, namely that any contrary views must be eliminated. Apparently the IPCC "blatantly erased" data that was contrary to their conclusions. Yawn. [Update: yup, definitely ex.]
Oh, the picture? That's from The Wildlife Photographer Of…
stoat | October 14, 2015A more than unusually obscure headline perhaps. Here's the link. I noticed, because my watchlist contained a pile of changes like:
(diff | hist) . . mb Nir Shaviv; 23:31:54 . . (-1) . . Cydebot (talk | contribs) (Robot - Moving category Climate change skeptics (scientists) to Category:Climate change deniers (scientists) per CFD at Wikipedia:Categories for discussion/Log/2015 October 6.) [rollback]
(diff | hist) . . mb Henrik Svensmark; 23:31:53 . . (-1) . . Cydebot (talk | contribs) (Robot - Moving category Climate change skeptics (scientists) to Category:Climate change deniers (scientists)…
stoat | October 13, 2015 Via DA, rawstory, the Beeb reports Alaska mulls extra oil drilling to cope with climate change:
Expanding the search for oil is necessary to pay for the damage caused by climate change, the Governor of Alaska has told the BBC. The state is suffering significant climate impacts from rising seas forcing the relocation of remote villages. Governor Bill Walker says that coping with these changes is hugely expensive. He wants to "urgently" drill in the protected lands of the Arctic National Wilderness Refuge to fund them.
And so on. This kind of stupidity is, sadly, inevitable, though I am…
stoat | October 10, 2015It turns out that the answer to Is Quentin Letts a tosser? is Yes.
As well as that, I can find a few other articles with much the same story. Conservative Woman is remarkably silly - I think that nice David Cameron should have a quiet word - but does link to twitter which provides:
stoat | October 10, 2015Oreskes is re-hashing the Exxon stuff again, how very dull-man-at-a-party of her. So, I won't join her in re-hashing the reasons that much of what she is saying is wrong. But my attention was drawn to my titular sentence, where "sensible policies" was linked but - how modestly - she refrained from pointing out that those very sensible policies were ones that she herself0 was proposing: The climate responsibilities of industrial carbon producers, Essay, Climatic Change, September 2015, Volume 132, Issue 2, pp 157-171.
I won't bore you with the details but essentially the situation is unchanged…
stoat | October 4, 2015 Most normal people would have been content to have produced one game-changing theory of climate but David Evans is not a normal person. No! He has squillions of degrees from Really Prestigious universities and has, on his own, invented entire new types of Fourier analysis. So it is with no surprise - rather, with a dull grey sense of the inevitable - that I note (thank you JM and ATTP) that his latest theory has thunked onto the doormat like junk mail. ATTP attempts to make some sense of DE's confusion over partial derivatives - they're the work of the devil I tell you - and I'll try to…
stoat | September 28, 2015 Oh dear. Last summer, Peter Wadhams, in an interview with a reporter for The Times, rather incautiously expressed concern that several scientists researching the impact of global warming on Arctic ice may have been assassinated, in the words of the Independent Press Standards Organisation's response to his complaint.
The Graun reports PW as saying he had been "inaccurately quoted". IPSO say "The Committee had listened to a recording of the complainant’s interview with the journalist, provided by the newspaper, in which he made the statements attributed to him in the article. The article had…
stoat | September 27, 2015Says some PR from the CDP (formerly, as they say, the Carbon Disclosure Project; I hate people who do that). As picked up by, e.g., the FT. The FT does no analysis, so you may as well read the CDP report instead. Here's the executive summary:
The number of corporations disclosing they use an internal price on carbon has tripled since last year. Corporations use internal carbon pricing to offset the costs and risks of greenhouse gas production, and to finance the transition to secure sources of low carbon energy. This dramatic increase demonstrates the ongoing mainstreaming of carbon pricing…
stoat | September 25, 2015 Per Moyhu it looks like the GWPF's joke review is, errm, a joke. Who could have guessed? just to refresh your memory: submissions are invited, deadline 30th of June and will be published, here. Oh.
I see two obvious possibilities: (a) they got embarrassingly few submissions; (b) they got loadsasubmissions form the kind of idiots who believe there is no greenhouse effect. We do know they got at least one submission, because Moyhu published one, and indeed invited comments to improve it; and I did1.
And what about the bozos who agreed to serve on this one-ring circus? Petr Chylek, Richard…
stoat | September 25, 2015Says the FT; and so did R4 this morning (update: and the Beeb now), which is why I noticed.
A £1bn UK climate-change plan has been thrown into turmoil after the Drax power company said it was pulling out because government green policy reversals made it too risky to proceed. Drax’s decision to abandon five years of planning for a carbon capture and storage system next to its huge North Yorkshire power station is the most visible sign yet of how green energy subsidy cutbacks are jolting investors. Several “critical reversals” in government support for renewable energy had made “a severe impact…
stoat | September 23, 2015 Episode 1 and episode 3 refer. It turns out that Exxon cares enough to answer. Not to answer in any great detail, so I'm not sure they care enough to read the criticism, but never mind. They say stuff like
Our scientists have been involved in climate research and related policy analysis for more than 30 years... participated in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change... We fund and partner with many universities on climate modeling and research into lower carbon fuel sources and other climate-related issues.
And so on. True enough, but not desperately meaningful, because…
stoat | September 22, 2015 If you're feeling cheated out of round 2, its because it didn't seem terribly exciting. Round 1 refers, naturally.
Round 3 is called Exxon Confirmed Global Warming Consensus in 1982 with In-House Climate Models to which the obvious answer is "so what?" Confirming publically available information with other publically information available is hardly the stuff of deep dark secrets.
There's an attempt right at the start to establish that Exxon "knew" what was going on: "The potential problem is great and urgent," Knisely wrote. Sounds serious? But Knisely was a summer intern. I mention this…
stoat | September 18, 2015 Lelieveld et al., Nature 525, 367–371 (17 September 2015) doi:10.1038/nature15371: The contribution of outdoor air pollution sources to premature mortality on a global scale.
Here's the abstract:
Assessment of the global burden of disease is based on epidemiological cohort studies that connect premature mortality to a wide range of causes1, 2, 3, 4, 5, including the long-term health impacts of ozone and fine particulate matter with a diameter smaller than 2.5 micrometres (PM2.5)3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9. It has proved difficult to quantify premature mortality related to air pollution, notably in…
stoat | September 16, 2015 Eli is, in my view, rather over-excited by insideclimatenews's Exxon's Own Research Confirmed Fossil Fuels' Role in Global Warming Decades Ago. The interesting question that remains is that since they did not disclose their knowledge to shareholders, will some lawyers get rich? is, I think, not an interesting question at all. The answer is No - at least, they won't get rich by winning payouts against Exxon because of this. All this seems like a re-tread of the similarly unspectactular The Climate Deception Dossiers?
insideclimatenews breathlessly tells us that Top executives were warned of…
stoat | September 12, 2015[Update: or, you might prefer Man who just got elected ‘definitely unelectable’; or Jeremy Corbyn now abandoned by everyone apart from ‘voters’]
[Uupdate: Jeremy Corbyn on the Beach : Why a Man who Just Got Elected is Unelectable]
So says NewsThump; and I need something to distract people from the same old arguments about SRES / RCP.
The Labour Party has confirmed that Jeremy Corbyn will lead them to defeat in the 2020 election today... The ballot originally only asked Labour supporters whether they would like to lose the 2020 election badly, very badly indeed, or oh my goodness. However,…