climate science
stoat | August 5, 2014 I can't hold back from taking the piss any longer, although Sou has done it already. WUWT has had not one but two ridiculously stupid articles about the rise in CO2 not being human-caused just recently. You don't even need to read the details to know they are stupid, because that the CO2 rise is indeed from human activities is well known. People have been writing down patient explanations for some time; see, e.g., RC from 2004. Or even Willis Eschenbach from 2010. And Moyhu has just had another go. But it will do not good; if people haven't managed to read and realise the bleedin' obvious by…
stoat | August 4, 2014Back in 2013 I didn't take terribly seriously an announced review of the IPCC AR5 by a ctte of the UK parliament. Now they've been rude enough to publish their results without consulting me, and sneaked it out while I was on holiday. Do I regret my snark? I can hardly complain about their conclusions:
AR5 provides the best available summary of the prevailing scientific opinion on climate change currently available to policy-makers. Its conclusions have been reached with high statistical confidence by a working group made up of many of the world's leading climate scientists drawing on areas of…
stoat | July 25, 2014 The belated conclusion to the exciting saga of this year's Cambridge town bumps. As you'll recall, yesterday we fell to Press, and today (well, Friday the 25th, I'll date-change the post but this is actually written in August) we went down again, to St Neots, for a net minus one on the week. That's maybe a touch unfortunate in our choice of surrounding crews, but such is life.
Today's plan was simple and the only one available to us: start fast and see if maybe we could sneak up on Press. It wasn't really viable, and although we got to 3/4 of a length at First Post that was the high point.…
stoat | July 24, 2014 No happy ending for us tonight alas. We had a good start, and not one but two whistles on Tabs into Grassy, and all of that was the plan, but we lacked the oomph to close down the last half length plus the overlap. Which was the bit that wasn't under our control. We also got a rather wide line round Grassy which shows up clearly in the video; and rowed down Plough Reach in Tab's puddles which slowed us down (ah, you can even see it in the GPS trace) (um, or do I have to take that back? Perhaps we were just tired? See Jo's video), unlike Press who picked the other side and gained noticeably:…
stoat | July 23, 2014 I should write up day 2 before day 3, else I'll be coloured. There's a riggercam video, again, but it will look pretty similar to yesterday unless you care, so instead here's some footage from Grassy. This has the benefit of showing the handbrake - I'll come to that.
So, we're now at 8, which means we get to go to Top Finish if we don't bump out. Behind us we expect Press to demolish Champs, and indeed that happens, at about First Post (which is earlier than we got them, oh err). At this point we have one whistle on Tabs 2 which is spiffy, and it continues as such down to the entrance to…
stoat | July 22, 2014 More nonscience, I'm afraid.
When we left off the never-ending story last year we'd just bumped Press, and were rather regretting not getting a shot at Champs. Roll forwards a year, and its Tuesday again. We have six of our old crew back, losing Mr W and Dr H, and replacing them with old-hand-turned-fit Paul "finger" Holland and controversial noob Dave "not that Dave" Ifould. And I move up from seven to stroke: ah, the glory. I recall at Oxford there was fierce competition for the stroke seat, perhaps because we wished ot impress the girls, but now we're all old the competition is to avoid…
stoat | July 17, 2014A break from The Deep. In New watch, old watch, still the same I described the truely fascinating tale of me buying a replacement Garmin Forerunner 110. A few weeks ago I was faced with the replacement having the strap broken in a second place, and the glass having cracked when I incautiously thrutched a chimney having tied the watch to the back of my harness. I put sellotape across the crack, but it was ugly and it clearly wasn't going to stay waterproof on a long term basis.
I very nearly reflexively bought my fourth 110 (a bargain at about £80-90 now) but paused long enough to think of its…
stoat | July 12, 2014 We didn't win the Timed Race, alas. But we rowed well enough.
In other news:
* ATTP bemoans the poor quality of "skeptic" out there. As usual, wise comments from PP who amongst other ideas proposes that Another possibility is that the idea is to learn from the discussion.
* If you'd like a fine example of poor quality "skeptics" and people *not* learning from the discussion, then About that graph... is good. Starting approximately with my comment July 7, 2014 at 1:49 am we have the WUWT version of Godwin's law: all discussions will degenerate into was-the-MWP-warmer-than-now-or-not.
* Brian…
stoat | July 11, 2014Far away from the hurly-burly, things are very peaceful.
Sourced from Phil Plait's 10 best Cassini pix.
stoat | July 6, 2014 Turning aside from the moment from the strange world of Monkers we come to something that at least touches on science: to what extent did the atmospheric nuclear tests of the 50's and 60's affect the climate? It turns out that the answer is "hardly at all" and that the question isn't interesting; but I haven't seen the answer written down properly anywhere, or even considered properly, so I'll present what I've gleaned here (I'm almost certain this came up in sci.env in the Olde Dayes but I can't find it).
The latest folk to resurrect the idea that "all those bomb tests must have done…
stoat | June 30, 2014Here's a nice pic:
Its from http://surfacetemperatures.blogspot.co.uk/2014/06/global-land-surface-databank-version.html (but I cut it a bit to make it prettier). The colour bar is number of years.
Refs
* Understanding the effects of changes in the temperature scale standards through time
stoat | June 27, 2014 The battle of the graphs provides a learning opportunity says "American Elephants", and indeed it does, though possibly not in the way they're thinking.
I haven't been able to clearly identify the source of this image (which is the reason for this post: I'll show you how far back I've managed to go, and your job is to go further, or find a reason why my answer is right). The top pane is clear enough; its a borked-up version of MBH from IPCC 2001 or similar. The lower pane is similar to the famous fig 7.1.c from the FAR in 1990. Wiki's [[Description of the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice…
stoat | June 24, 2014 One of the more stupid debating tricks of the "skeptics" is to oscillate between Ha ha, you believe in Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming which is obviously not happening so you're very silly, and when told that CAGW is a strawman that they've invented they switch to if it isn't catastrophic we've got nothing to worry about, have we?1
To which the answer is always some variant of if you can't imagine anything between "catastrophic" and "nothing to worry about" then you're not thinking. But I've got bored of saying it, so I thought I'd write it down and link to it instead.
Refs
*…
stoat | June 21, 2014As recent events demonstrate all too clearly, the Iraqi government is rubbish. Though from what I read The West had a heavy hand in installing Nouri al-Maliki so I'm by no means complaining that their troubles are all home-grown; more despairing at our ability to prop up corrupt incompetents who don't like us (vide Afghanistan).
I found this in the National Post:
In a reflection of the bitter divide, thousands of heavily armed Shiite militiamen – eager to take on the Sunni insurgents – march through Iraqi cities in military-style parades on streets where many of them battled U.S. forces a…
stoat | June 18, 2014 Also known as the worst movie ever made. What I'm going to discuss doesn't come even close to "the worst blog post ever made", but, well, you'll see.
So: the backstory. I've been commenting on some of JoNova's stuff. Its not the big time, but unlike WUWT, or BishopHill, or a variety of minor blogs, she doesn't censor my posts. There's some jolly back-n-forth (e.g. at Green climate pornography — cheer for the deaths of the heretics!); she, like-but-not-to-the-same-degree-as AW, really dislikes the "denialist" word; in her case this is a bit odd as I don't appear to have called her such. But…
stoat | June 9, 2014 Via Sou sourced to NASA, who have named Gavin Schmidt as the new director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. Congratulations to him.
Refs
* Right said Fred
* More congrats, from 2011.
stoat | June 5, 2014Tamino (Open Mind) is a pretty good blog, but I hadn't realised until recently just how scary the denialists find it. As a case in point, I commented at NoTricksZone, who had said:
the GLOBAL WARMING STOP has been extended yet another month, now at 17 years and 9 months... Earth to Warmworld. Earth to Warmworld…do you read me? Come in, please. Is anyone out there?
Well, that's a challenge, so I answered it:
Hello. Will http://tamino.wordpress.com/2014/02/25/by-request/ do?
I thought that was just an opening gambit, and we could have a possibly, maybe, vaguely interesting back-n-forth. But no…
stoat | June 3, 2014A round-up of reactions to Obama's announcement. Work gets the FT, so I saw Obama proposes biggest ever US push for carbon cuts in print on the front page, and I think Obama will be happy with that, and with what the FT have written:
Under the plan, each US state is given a different target for cutting carbon emissions from its power sector. They will decide how to achieve the cuts by switching to cleaner energy sources such as natural gas, nuclear or wind power, by improving grid efficiency or by reducing electricity consumption
And, in US carbon curbs raise hopes for Paris deal we have His…
stoat | May 28, 2014 There's another comment by Andy Lacis at Climate Etc., and just like the original its deeply under-appreciated by the residents. Indeed it would have been unappreciated by me because I don't read her posts much less wade into the comments unless someone draws my attention.
Before we go onto AL's wise words, lets read some very silly ones: Climate and weather model share the same underlying mathematical dynamic. So models are undoubtedly chaotic - this is the kind of stuff that JC chooses to highlight at the top of her posts. You'd be better off with my Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear: chaos,…
stoat | May 25, 2014This is a copy (do I say, "reblogged"?) of a comment made by Andrew Lacis1 at Climate Etc (cite) just recently. As DA replied, its a breath of fresh air, but probably won't fare well there. So I'll give it more prominence (ha!) here. There's also a followup: Lacis: What is it that determines the terrestrial climate and how it changes?
A Lacis | May 25, 2014 at 3:22 am | Reply
I know Lennart Bengtsson as one of the reviewers of a paper of mine that was published in Tellus B a year ago. This was a paper was part of the Bert Bolin Symposium held in Stockholm in May 2012. In this paper I describe…