climate science
stoat | June 9, 2015 Its all over bar the tidying up; see Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Case/Sockpuppet investigation block/Proposed decision - which, somewhat confusingly, is the real decision. Chase-Me is stripped of all priv: CheckUser, Oversight and (once Arbcomm grew a spine) Sysop too. Oh, and independently, Contribsx is unblocked. See my prior post for context. The page I've linked to contain the "findings of fact" in this case; most of them are fairly self-explanatory, one that is worth pulling out is
Chase me ladies, I'm the Cavalry: Discrepancy in timeline: When asked about the timeline of events…
stoat | June 8, 2015Which is the odd one out?
(from the Graun).
[Update: and the answer is, the one on the far left, because it isn't odd; as most people answered, with varying degrees of formality.]
[Update, from the comments, CR offers us a rather easier "spot the odd one out":]
stoat | June 5, 2015 Never mind yer twitterings or blogospherics or facey bookers, when people come in future years to look back and ask "when did people stop wittering about the pause" they'll see
2015-06-05T12:34:10 Yakushima (talk | contribs) . . (31,755 bytes) (+17) . . (Treating it as a hypothesis rather than as near-certainty seems overdue) (undo | thank)
as the Key Moment, when
The current slowdown period began in about 1998...
became
It has been hypothesized that such a period began in about 1998...
No, I've no idea who Yakushima is.
Refs
* Far too many to give, but Gavin's RC post is good.
* Hmmm,…
stoat | June 5, 2015Once again the fearless Graun is out to name-n-shame Shell. Or something. I only noticed because of Dave Hone's post. The Graun whinges:
But the most damaging email is dated 8 May 2014... <stuff I don't much care about> And it ends: “Regarding the gallery update, can I check whether you have touched base with David Hone to see if he would like to participate in the content refresh?
Oddly, though, the Graun doesn't have any spare space to discuss what updates DH was suggesting. Fortunately, DH has some spare electrons:
As background, three papers that have come from Oxford University:…
stoat | May 29, 2015 I must admit that I'm surprised, because up till now I've not detected this, or heard of anyone complain of it. Routine censorship, of course, but fakery is a new thing. So:
Potholes In Their Arguments is a post on the recent IMF report. I put in a comment pointing out that it was a bit late to the party, others already having said the same thing (and, I didn't add, had said it with less verbosity; the prose there is somewhat prolix). That got an unexciting reply, to which I responded:
William Connolley Your comment is awaiting moderation.
May 29, 2015 at 12:17 pm
Plenty of other people got…
stoat | May 28, 2015 Hard on the heels of Wegman's farcical attempt to sue Mashey comes Watts's incompetent attempt to meat-puppet wiki. If you want to see my comments at WUWT that didn't survive moderation, you'll need to read stoat spam or just imagine them; I said nothing that wasn't obvious. My favourite, I think, was
The context here is wiki; we’re speaking about updating a wiki article, so you need to follow its rules, or just mumble over your beer. Wiki’s rules for reliable sources are WP:RS, which is to say https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying reliable sources. I don’t actually agree with…
stoat | May 25, 2015At this time of the year, as I cycle past the rape fields (this isn't a reference to some Balkan horror, just the plant), I take note of the dying of the yellow, for it signifies that the spring recolte is once again due. I measure my life by the passing of such seasons: the winter league; tideway, the summer bumps; and the honey harvest. Today was a bank holiday, so after coxing the dev IV and playing at pairs with Paul, I had time for some beekeeping, and planting a magnolia.
Here are the pre-harvest hives. This underplays the degree of weed; task number one was to hack them out of the…
stoat | May 23, 2015 So gushes Mother Jones, adding the enticing word "exclusive" to the story. But - weirdly enough, for a confection of spying and science reporting, both of which are normally so reliable - this appears to be a bit garbled. Firstly, the "climate research programme" looks to be more like the CIA had allowed civilian scientists to access classified data—such as ocean temperature and tidal readings gathered by Navy submarines and topography data collected by spy satellites. So, not CIA research at all: just data sharing. And presumably not CIA data mostly; if this is stuff routinely gathered by…
stoat | May 21, 2015 Shamelessly stolen from Brian at Eli's (this is about plagiarism, after all) is the Ed Wegman, Yasmin Said, Milt Johns Sue John Mashey For $2 Million as reported by JM.
Brian's
My one semi-serious comment is that this is the quality of the opposition. We ought to be kicking their butt.
is worth a ponder. Arguably, we are "kicking their butt" - any sane government dialogue on the issue acknowledges the reality of GW. All that's missing is a sane response, viz carbon taxes.
Refs
* Makes retraction watch
stoat | May 18, 2015Well, ATTP tweeted it, poor trusting soul that he is, having been unwise enough to believe the Graun's headline, which segues into text Fossil fuel companies are benefitting from global subsidies of $5.3tn (£3.4tn) a year, equivalent to $10m a minute every day, according to a startling new estimate by the International Monetary Fund. The report itself says:
A key factor in estimating the magnitude of current subsidies is which definition of “subsidies” is used. Pre-tax consumer subsidies arise when the price paid by consumers (that is, firms and households) is below the cost of supplying…
stoat | May 13, 2015Well, here it is:
Why am I showing you this? Mostly because its rather striking, partly because it forms part of the things Piketty got wrong thread, but mostly for the relevance to the "infinite growth on a finite planet" type argument. Many people will tell you that infinite "growth" on a finite planet is impossible, though they will usually be a touch vague about the meaning of the word "growth" (see Economics and Climatology? comments). Others will tell you that "economic growth" isn't necessarily resource constrained, and so infinite growth is perfectly possible.
Refs
* Piketty and the…
stoat | May 4, 2015 The long slow wiki edit war over exactly what sort of denier AW is continues - RationalWiki is more informative - but the issue of surfacestations.org remains untouched. Is it alive? Dead? Undead? Having browsed around a bit I can't find anyone saying - or, indeed, caring - but being a caring sharing sort of individual I thought I'd poke it a bit.
http://www.surfacestations.org/ is unpromising: NEWS Updated 07/30/2012 New paper in process, see details here. NOTE: Surfacestations.org gallery server has received heavy traffic and some attacks in the last 24hrs. The online image database aka…
stoat | April 29, 2015 It am de Pope, he be at it agen. Dere be no stopping dis righteous Pontifex. Just for the moment, he's saying things that I broadly agree with, but that doesn't mean I'm going to start being happy with religious authority.
There was a one-day "seminar" or "workshop" or "event", Protect the Earth, Dignify Humanity. The Moral Dimensions of Climate Change and Sustainable Humanity on Tuesday the 28th (alas for them, and for numerous folk in Nepal, there was a disastrous earthquake the same day), hosted by The Pontifical Academy of Sciences (as they tastefully put it, Founded in Rome on 17 August…
stoat | April 27, 2015I've stolen VV's title. Why not? He's the man who knows. Moyhu also has something interesting to say. All I have to say is: WTF?
In case you've missed it, there's a real one, and then there's the GWPF's comedy one. You can read the GWPF's stuff at tempdatareview.org, though why you'd bother I don't know. As Moyhu points out, the figure used on that page is badly misleading, and certainly unbefitting any serious review. Anyone with a clue would refuse to be associated with anything with that on its terms of reference; but then again, anyone with a clue would refuse to be associated with the…
stoat | April 26, 2015 I said that AFAIK S+C's code for UAH isn't available but VV pointed me to Eli who pointed me to ncdc.noaa.gov/cdr/operationalcdrs.html which offered me RSS and UAH. UAH is the one we want to take the piss out of, so read it and weep, below.
First, though, as far as I can tell it doesn't even tell you what version of UAH this corresponds to (ah, but actually it 5.4. You can tell this by reading things like "The program txx_1_5.4". Yay). Under "1.3 Document Maintenance" it does say: When requested by NOAA, if there have been any changes in procedures required for the production of the products…
stoat | April 22, 2015[Update: June 6th: Chase-Me has definitely been a very naughty boy indeed. The only question is whether he'll hang on to his sysop bit.]
By popular request. And I've not seen anyone else wiki-literate discussing this, so I will (update: Wikipedia sockpuppetry is a problem, but baseless accusations are no better by a former checkuser is worth a read; it mostly supports what I've said here). the Graun says
Grant Shapps accused of editing Wikipedia pages of Tory rivals.
Online encyclopedia administrators block user account believed to be run by Tory party co-chairman or ‘someone else ... under…
stoat | April 13, 2015Another in my marathon posts, but! To a new city, Rotterdam. Which is indeed a fairly new city, having been bombed to buggery (by us, mostly, I presume [update: no, I'm wrong, it was the Krauts]) during WW II. Anyway, TL:DR: 3:55:53. Which is one second slower than Amsterdam 2012.
Here's my list, in order:
* Brighton 2011: 4:20:32.
* Amsterdam 2014: 3:58.02.
* Amsterdam 2011: 3:57:25.
* Rotterdam, 2015: 3:55:53.
* Amsterdam 2012: 3:55:52.
* Brighton 2012: 3:54:28.
* Brighton 2013: 3:46:34.
* Brighton 2014: 3:43:42.
* Amsterdam 2013: 3:43:06.
So if I'd pushed just a tiny fraction harder it…
stoat | April 11, 2015
Good race, too, at least for the first half. Oxford up a few seats off an untidy Cambridge start, then they pull back, and I thought we'd lose it round the bend but no. Got very tense, boats close together. And then suddenly just after Hammersmith: whoompf and they're through, and Cambridge can eat our puddles. Cambridge seemed to make a meal of the headwind: lots of water flying around off their blades but not off Oxford.
And the women won too.
Cambridge it finding rough going after Hammersmith. At this point Oxford are about to get clear water, but haven't yet moved over. Five strokes…
stoat | April 9, 2015No, don't worry, I'm not giving up. Its is a quote, provided somewhat tactlessly by the normally urbane Crandles:
All of this will soon be moot, anyway. Since last year we have been working on v6.0 of the UAH datasets which should be ready with the tropospheric temperature datasets before summer is out.
Who said that? Woy is the Boy, in 2012: Our Response to Recent Criticism of the UAH Satellite Temperatures. So, not the most convincing of responses, perhaps? This has shades of Happy Second Birthday to Watts’ paper!
Meanwhile, in the "oldie but goodie" department, Russell Seitz's 1990 A War…
stoat | April 6, 2015Obscure, perhaps, but I claim it was by request. My sermon is taken from Removing Diurnal Cycle Contamination in Satellite-Derived Tropospheric Temperatures: Understanding Tropical Tropospheric Trend Discrepancies by S Po-Chedley, T Thorsen and Q Fu, but before I get onto that I need to snark a bit; where would the world be without such?
One satellite data set is underestimating global warming?
I know that one! Its RSS, isn't it? Wait... you mean it isn't? Its UAH? I'm confused. And so are the folk in the SS comments. We all know that RSS is the one that "underestimates" "global warming".…