climate science
stoat | September 7, 2015 AKA me on Eli on Richard Betts on... well, you get the idea. The story so far: I wake up one morning a week or so back and hear some luvvie talking the usual kind of "me 'arts in the right place so you won't mind if I talk drivel, lord luv a duck, I 'ad that Lord Monckton in the back of me cab once, y'know, guv" stuff. It was clearly well over the top and not very interesting, so I shrugged and went back to sleep.
ATTP posted something that appeared to amount to, yes she was wrong but lord luvva duck, 'er 'arts in the right place (DN says much the same in the Graun), unlike the Dork Side…
stoat | September 2, 2015 Richard Tol, not content with a quiet and peaceful life, is having fun on wiki. He's trying to add a "criticism" section to the [[Bob Ward]] page, featuring the exciting adventures of... yes, you've guessed it, one R Tol:
In 2014, Ward was accused by Professor [[Richard Tol]] of conducting a smear campaign against him...
And so on. In a desperate attempt to stuff this in, he's tried changing the section title from "criticism" to "communication style" but that obviously won't fly. More popcorn on the talk page.
Tee hee
Update: its getting better; as ATTP predicted, Tol doesn't know when to…
stoat | August 31, 2015 I previously promised to read Hansen et al., and I finally have - well, at least skimmed. It hasn't really changed my opinions.
global CO2 emissions continue to increase... the threat posed by ice sheet instability and sea level rise
This is in accord with what I've said before, that the most obviously unambiguously bad physical consequence of GW is SLR (see What I think about global warming from 2010 for the rest, which I don't see any great reason to wish to update). So H focussing on it is understandable; but this leads to a regrettable tendency to need lots of SLR earlier than is…
stoat | August 28, 2015I'm back. Did you miss me? Don't all say "no" at once.
A piece from the Torygraph about the unfolding disaster that is Jeremy Corbyn's run for head of the Labour party; they can barely contain their glee, of course, but I did like the idea of someone forcasting communist weather; Boris, perhaps.
The still is, presumably deliberately, unfortunate; its from that video, isn't it? The text includes
Piers, the eccentric weather forecaster brother of Corbyn... While the Labour leadership candidate may be considered to have a colourful record, his older brother can outdo him by a mile. He claims to…
stoat | August 19, 2015Steve Easterbrook recently asked "Who first coined the term “Greenhouse Effect”?" which reminded me of my translation, off on my private website (which is currently the top google hit for "Fourier 1827: MEMOIRE sur les temperatures du globe terrestre et des espaces planetaires", woot). Anyway, I thought I'd copy it here for safekeeping (update: BTW, my R. W. Wood: Note on the Theory of the Greenhouse is also copied across), in case I get assassinated forget to renew the web hosting fee.
In which context it is interesting that my intro starts
I became interested in this paper as a source (…
stoat | August 15, 2015Yet another "academic" article about wikipedia (Content Volatility of Scientific Topics in Wikipedia: A Cautionary Tale; Adam M. Wilson, Gene E. Likens):
Wikipedia has quickly become one of the most frequently accessed encyclopedic references, despite the ease with which content can be changed and the potential for ‘edit wars’ surrounding controversial topics. Little is known about how this potential for controversy affects the accuracy and stability of information on scientific topics, especially those with associated political controversy. Here we present an analysis of the Wikipedia edit…
stoat | August 14, 2015The Greeks certainly yielded, but that's not what I'm talking about. No, this is about bond yields, specifically the inverted yield curve that Greek bonds show at the moment. And its jolly interesting (no, really, don't go... oh).
I should begin by saying I don't know what I'm talking about. I started off thinking I did, a bit, and then I read NOTES ON THE BANK OF ENGLAND UK YIELD CURVES and realised just how little I knew. But I discussed the Greek stuff a bit in the previous post, and the inverted yields came up, but not with a good explanation. The convention answer to an inverted bond…
stoat | August 13, 2015
Fun in comet land. The great silences of space give one pause for thought in the face of the chatter and noise of Earth. Speaking of which, Paul Mason (who he?) says:
By neoliberalism I mean the global capitalist system shaped around a core of neoliberal practices and institutions, themselves guided by a widespread and spontaneously reproduced ideology, and ruled by an elite which acts in a neoliberal way, whatever conflciting and moderating ideas it holds in its head.
Which is woolly thinking. Or, from any true definitional viewpoint, utter drivel. But typical of the Left talking about…
stoat | August 7, 2015I was pointed at What’s the point of BBC guidelines when it comes to climate change? in the Graun by Richard Black (director, Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit and former BBC science and environment correspondent (errm, I mean that's who RB is. It wasn't him that pointed me at that piece)). And QL's offence is What's the point of... the Met Office?. The Conversation didn't much like it either.
It starts badly: as the Graun says, In his introduction, Quentin Letts tells us that the Met Office takes a “not uncontroversial” stance on climate change, and as the Graun notes, that is bollocks.…
stoat | August 3, 2015Last year we went to the the Peloponnese for our summer holidays. This year... we did again.
My only excuse for this post is for the bits vaguely related to the pol /econ stuff I've posted. There wasn't much of that visible. Had I not known, I wouldn't have suspected a country in crisis. We took enough cash to cover our bills, and paid everything except the car hire in cash, for which a few of the smaller places seemed restrainedly grateful, but I can't recall anyone asking for cash rather than credit cards. We saw a local office of Golden Dawn (in Gythio)
and another one for New Democracy…
stoat | August 2, 2015One of my favourite journal-club comments, from back in the days when I did science, about a previous Hansen paper that failed to find favour. I'm hoping to actually read the Hansen Noveau, and hopeful that it isn't just old wine in new bottles, but first a brief comment about comment policy. Blogs without a comment policy but with any degree of popularity tend to have a comment section full of mush. So what of the EGU open review journals? Generally, they're saved by lack of popularity, but as Tamino points out, one of the recent comments is just raving nutjobbery. Revkin, in his much-…
stoat | July 18, 2015 I'm not sure where this comes from (David Hone reminded me of it) but the UCS has The Climate Deception Dossiers which breathlessly tells us Internal fossil fuel industry memos reveal decades of disinformation—a deliberate campaign to deceive the public that continues even today. This is news? Its not news to me. But wait, there's UPDATE (July 9, 2015): As this report went to press, a newly discovered email from a former Exxon employee revealed that the company was already factoring climate change into decisions about new fossil fuel extraction as early as 1981 which leads to Former Exxon…
stoat | July 17, 2015 I want to write about some new stuff, but in the course of it I need to rehearse what I've said about Exxon over the years. So I'll do it here, for reference. Some of it is so far in the past it predates blogging.
sci.env: 1997
1997? Were there really such years?
Exxon Chairman puts Climate Change in Perspective. Me, responding to someone quoting "Exxon Chairman Calls Poverty Most Pressing Environmental Problem in Developing Countries"(mmm... a theme that never dies. Notice also cameo appearance from John McCarthy: It would take a lot to induce the chairman of Exxon to promote nuclear
energy…
stoat | July 11, 2015From the wildlife photographer of the year awards, 2014. Herfried Marek, Austria: Golden birch. I was browsing the book in Waterstones today, and came across this, and was struck. It is brilliant. Shades of Rice terraces in Yunnan in the way that what's actually a photograph looks like a painting. I think it is far better than the winner; the judges wimped out and went for a boring picture of lions.
My number two is some fish and an anenome:
As you can tell, I like patterns. Number three I think I'd give to the sand dune.
stoat | July 10, 2015 I feel like writing about the Greek crisis. I discover that I wrote about the last one, so I've nicked my witty headline from then.
The situation as it is now, or at least my reading of it: the Greeks have caved in. After lots of posturing, the reality of two weeks of banks shut and no other way out than leaving the Euro has left then against the fundamental political reality of their present: they want to stay in the Euro.
Numerous people have argued that Greece should leave the Euro, including some who believe that the Euro is in principle a good idea. However, that's not what the Greek…
stoat | June 28, 2015Mark Lynas, one of the EcoMod crowd, has noticed what I pointed out - that Da Fadder is not on their side, indeed opposed. Whether the Bishop of Rome has noticed that the EcoMods disagree with him is another matter.
ML roughly parallels what I said, but gets carried away with the goodness of his own side:
It is not the sin of greed but rather aspirations to a better life that led countries from England to the US to China and India to burn huge quantities of coal. All sought to lift hundreds of millions of people out of poverty
Well, not really. Lifting people out of poverty may have been the…
stoat | June 28, 2015 No, not Eli but The Economist. You'll be unsurprised to learn that they have a somewhat different perspective, closer to mine, or perhaps vice versa.
They do some half-hearted "analysis" of the South Africa and Israel disinvestment campaigns, but really all they do is point at a couple of graphs and say "its hard to see anything here"; by the Economist's standards, that's rubbish. Some may like:
On the other hand, there is little evidence that ethical investing—or its close cousins, sustainable investment, environmental, social and governance (ESG) policies and corporate social…
stoat | June 25, 2015
This post was originally about Laudato Si. But it took ages to write, and then James wrote something incomprehensible [Update: CIP explains] which expressed some of the snark I was going to use; so I don't need to do that bit. And then ATTP wrote yet another post about the Ecomodernists.
The bit where I agree with James
Mostly the bit where he says giving him too much credit risks much the same on the other side, e.g. when he makes his next reactionary outburst. I feel much the same way when, e.g., Prince Charles says something about the environment. And everyone who happens to agree with…
stoat | June 14, 2015Matthew Parris in the Times; an opinion piece. However, the headline is incidental (and rather odd, since the article is mostly directed at Conservatives), what I wanted was the text, irritatingly pay-walled:
This vaguely chimes with recent discussions, especially about the wording of [[Climate change denial]] (and the fun over WUWT). It turns out that OxfordDictionaries.com offers a prominent denier of global warming as an example of its definition of denier, as someone who denies something, especially someone who refuses to admit the truth of a concept or proposition that is supported by…
stoat | June 13, 2015 Arrr, the ol' spinnin' post, its seen a thing or two over the years. You could probably reconstruct the headship changes from its various colours. Last painted by Downing, when they went head in Lents in 2014; Caius were too cool to repaint it when they stayed head in Mays of that year, or re-took the Lents headship this year.
Sakata Eio, in "The Middle Game of Go" (volume 1, game 3) writes "we are going to examine the lost chances and the potential that existed for better and more interesting moves". Which rather summarises these bumps; while exciting, they could have been even more…