climate science
stoat | February 16, 2015Boron isotope evidence for oceanic carbon dioxide leakage during the last deglaciation by M. A. Martínez-Botí,G. Marino, G. L. Foster, P. Ziveri,M. J. Henehan, J. W. B. Rae, P. G. Mortyn & D. Vance. Nature 518, 219–222 (12 February 2015) doi:10.1038/nature14155. As far as I can tell, no-one has covered this yet (well, all right, ScienceDaily did).
Its not that wildly exciting (so much so that I'm a touch surprised it made over-excitable Nature); but it is interesting. Another step on the Mystery of Deglaciations; the kind of stuff SoD has been banging on about a bit. Here's the abstract:…
stoat | February 14, 2015 I don't have much science to talk about; it looks like I may have finally cured myself of writing about the stupidities of the denialists and arguing with idiots. So, instead:
Way back in November last year I went to a talk by Hulme on "In what ways is religious belief relevant for understanding climate change?" in the course of which he made a side-note to The Discarded Image by C S Lewis; and I said it may well have been worth going to the lecture just to have that drawn to my attention. I put it on my Christmas list, and have now read it. I recommend it, if you like such things. Though it…
stoat | February 5, 2015 From a pub conversation with Old Man Roscoe: so often, electronic communication snarls you up. Its so easy for small disagreements to blow up; for genuine disagreements to get entrenched; to lose any fellow-feeling for the people, or fleeting electronic blobs, that you're "conversing" with. I see this at work, time and again: an email conversation degenerates into near-warfare, and is only saved when one party or another has the sense not to press "send" but instead wanders off and talks to the other person, at which point sanity prevails.
No wonder all this blog-based "discourse" is doomed…
stoat | February 4, 2015[Prev: September 10th: Neue Regensburger to Franz Senn]
September the 11th. After yesterday (was it really only yesterday? I am slow at writing this down) when I failed and we then went across to the Franz Senn I have another chance at the Ruderhofspitze. My exact route is somewhat unplanned - clearly I'm going upvalley, up the Alpeinerferner and then turning E after the icefall, and hoping to pick up the SW ridge somehow. Now I've bought "Stubaier Alpen" by Walter Klier I retrospectively know I did "Sudwestgrat von der Holltalscharte", route 2293. As usual, there's a GPS track.
Up at 6:25,…
stoat | January 31, 2015The Austrian Alpine Club (Sektion Brittania) runs an annual photo competition. I've finally got round to entering some of my summer pix; see here. Here's my favourite that I didn't enter; this was part of Stubai: Wilder Freiger by the Lubeckerweg.
stoat | January 26, 2015 I can thoroughly recommend the reviews. But this post, as I'm sure you've already guessed, is not about common problems with perforce but about ScienceBlogs. Or National Geographic blogs, I'm never quite sure what "we" are nowadays.
But nonetheless I was surprised by Sb Has 19 Active Blogs (of which I'm one, of course, though not as active as I used to be). Which in turn points me at The Life and Death of Blog Networks. FWIW, I am enjoying the benign neglect and have nothing to complain about.
On a happier note, Elon Musk Names SpaceX Drone Ships in Honor of Iain M. Banks - Just Read the…
stoat | January 24, 2015 Or so says Gavin in How Climate Change Denial Still Gets Published in Peer-Reviewed Journals via Retraction Watch. Dountless Monkers will welcome yet another chance to bluster and threaten to sue1. The paper has been "harshly criticized by physicists" (who knew ATTP was plural, eh?) and "climate scientists" though to be fair ATTP only really skimmed it for errors, and RT just pointed out that the palaeo bits were a bit crap.
[Update: I've just noticed what I should have seen immeadiately: a fatal flaw in Gavin's words that totally vitiates his argument: it should be et al. not et. al. Obvs.…
stoat | January 20, 2015Shamelessly stolen from ATTP's “More than half” is the same as “> 50%”!, but I think this captures brilliantly a typical argument with the "skeptics":
TPP has a link to the interesting story of Alfred Russel Wallace's bet with the flat-earthers that the Earth was, in fact, not flat. Somehow, that seems relevant.
While I'm copying, I may as well point you at It’s the Trend, Stupid as an antidote, if needed, to the misc denialists.
Moyhu also has a nice pic, which I've inlined below, and a nice discussion of the different sorts of uncertainties.
And while on misc, via Paul I find Brown…
stoat | January 17, 2015 Its been a bit quiet around here. Don't fear: a whole variety of things have wound me up recently, not least my colleagues inability to use perforce competently1. But none of them quite rose to the level of bothering to post. I was going to write something gratuitously offensive about the Charlie Hebdo stuff, but it seems like everyone is appropriating it to their own cause, so I won't. Though I did think that it was wittily transgressive, in a post ostensibly defending free speech, to snip comments purely because they offended the diva.
But this post is about How much is climate change…
stoat | January 7, 2015None of the following are warranted in any way. I'm just clearing out some old emails and didn't want to completely throw them away. This may be only of interest to me, and possibly not even me.
* Spock warns of coming ice age
* Slowing down as an early warning signal for abrupt climate change - Vasilis Dakos, Marten Scheffer, Egbert H. van Nes, Victor Brovkin, Vladimir Petoukhov and Hermann Held, PNAS, 2008.
* Significant contribution to climate warming from the permafrost carbon feedback Andrew H. MacDougall, Christopher A. Avis & Andrew J. Weaver - Nature, 2012.
*Claim of solar…
stoat | January 4, 2015In my Where are they now? review of 2014, I unforgiveably forgot the sensation of the year, Force X from outer space. Its worth reviewing, because (a) its not quite dead yet (or perhaps more accurately its proprietors haven't yet given up hope of revivifying it) and (b) the original played out for so long that most people lost track of the errors.
If you've no idea what this is about - and you care - or if you need a refresher, then its probably best to go off and read The Notch-Delay Solar Theory because that helpfully lists all the drivel in one place, rather than the smeared-out-over-…
stoat | January 3, 2015This got mentioned in early 2014 at Planet3.0. To be fair to mt, he wasn't really pushing the video itself, just using it to illustrate his point (which I think is uncertainty-is-not-your-friend; I agree with that), though he did call it "excellent". But since, as I said in the comments there I don't think its great video; I think its terrible, I wasn't desperately happy. But, I shrugged and turned away. Now I see that Dana Nuccitelli is giving it space in the Graun, (and DA is linking to it, though possibly only because he likes the headline and sub), so I'll repeat myself more publically.…
stoat | January 2, 2015Oh good grief I hear you cry, not more science. Yes. Sorry. And its even about sea ice, but the Antarctic kind. This is in the trail of Holland and Kwok and so on.
Observations reveal an increase of Antarctic sea ice over the past three decades, yet global climate models tend to simulate a sea ice decrease for that period. Here we combine observations with model experiments (MPI-ESM) to investigate causes for this discrepancy and for the observed sea ice increase. Based on observations and atmospheric reanalysis, we show that on multidecadal time scales Antarctic sea ice changes are linked to…
stoat | January 2, 2015As an experiment, I thought I'd try posting some science instead of nonsense or mountains. From Nurture (Peter van der Sleen et al., Nature Geoscience 8, 24–28 (2015) doi:10.1038/ngeo2313):
The biomass of undisturbed tropical forests has likely increased in the past few decades1, 2, probably as a result of accelerated tree growth. Higher CO2 levels are expected to raise plant photosynthetic rates3 and enhance water-use efficiency4, that is, the ratio of carbon assimilation through photosynthesis to water loss through transpiration. However, there is no evidence that these physiological…
stoat | December 30, 2014Prev: September 9th: Dresdener to Neue Regensburger
Next: September 10th: Neue Regensburger to Franz Senn
Another in the line of mountain climbing posts; I need to get them all out before next year. This one contains few decent photos because I failed due at least in part due to cloud; but its still quite instructive I think. Here's a portion of the GPS trace for orientation:
The green dot on the left is the summit, 3474 m. We'll be going back there in a future post. My high point this day was 3230 ish, say 250 m short, but more than just distance I had very little clue where to go. The…
stoat | December 30, 2014
I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow.
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.
In every cry of every Man,
In every Infants cry of fear,
In every voice: in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear
Over the year a number of things have seemed dead exciting, or at least a bit important as viewed from this tiny corner of the blogosphere, but have then faded as duds. Let's pull them back from obscurity and poke them a bit, pull their strings, and make it look as though they're alive and laugh at them, before tossing them back…
stoat | December 28, 2014Aunty has a story about how Nato has formally ended its 13-year combat mission in Afghanistan. I got to watch it on TV, and noticed that the ceremony looked odd - like it was being held in a gym. And indeed the Beeb article sez Sunday's ceremony was low-key - held inside a gymnasium at the alliance headquarters away from the public. What that article doesn't quite bring itself to say - but the TV did - was that the ceremony was effectively held in secret, for fear of attack by the Taliban. That's the measure of how disastrous a failure its all been. They didn't add that last sentence, oddly.
stoat | December 28, 2014VV has the main story but this little pic tells the tale...
...that "Stoat" is in bigger letters than just about anyone else other than RealClimate (well, duh) and ATTP (gnashes teeth).
Actually, that's not the story. The funny bit is the "yellow ghetto" featuring the anti-science folks: WUWT, BH, and Climate Etc, tee hee. La Curry is not amused, as you'd really rather hope. I imagine Mark Lynas isn't desperately happy either. von S is welcome to the ghetto after publishing tripe from Alex Harvey; and CA? Well, pffft.
Update: there's now an updated graphic, http://bit.ly/MySciBlogREAD (h/t A…
stoat | December 26, 2014
I see I'm keeping up my habit of posts that are near-incomprehensible even to me after only a few months; its just like writing Perl. Anyway, here's my pick of the year, whilst we're in that grey quiet phase between Christmas and the New Year.
Jan: Science (and the related Peer review)
Feb: The idealised greenhouse effect model and its enemies. Or, if you prfer politics, my lack-of-prescience over the Ukraine.
Mar: Investors warn of ‘carbon bubble’ as Shell predicts climate regulation will hit profits?
Apr: septic.org? - not in itself desperately exciting, but I'll add it as a marker to what…
stoat | December 24, 2014
I was going to do something for a Christmas post, but find I can't do much better than this image (which is via TPP via BA) and (lightly edited) TPP's words:
Think about how many stars are in such a galaxy. Then think about all those other little lights in the background that are also galaxies, and just in this one little bit of space. Some intellect out there is probably pointing their see-far thingy at the Milky Way, and saying, let me write a blog about how amazing this is.
There's probably a moral in that, somewhere. Maybe more than one.