generic stupidity
stoat | November 16, 2013 Over at Scottish"Sceptic" there's an attempt at a report of what not-Prof Salby said at a lecture recently. The talk sounds to have been not too dissimilar to the Hamburg one I commented on and if you read the comments a variety of people make a variety of the obvious points as to why its all a pile of dingoes kidneys. Not terribly surprisingly it all bounces off, because if SS were the kind of person to listen to reason, he wouldn't have written the post in the first place. And really, although you can play around with fancy ideas, if you can't answer "so where did all the human-emitted CO2…
stoat | January 19, 2013Um. sorry folks, don't blame me, blame Eli. 'twas the now-aged lagomorph who attempted to interest me in the good old days of sci.env when we were all young and bushy-tailed. And indeed that thread does make for interesting reading: the present-day switch to blogs doesn't encourage that style of discussion any more.
Anyway, what prompted this post (is this incestuous enough for you yet?) was TB's witty rejoinder that "Clearly Eli hasn’t kept up with recent developments in the literature at JASTP, Elsevier and elsewhere. Well, what fun, I could but follow, and discover that
My thanks to…
stoat | January 15, 2013 Conservapedia, as any fule kno, is The Trustworthy Encyclopedia. On matters of politics or "difficult" science like dinosaurs, perhaps one might expect a slight divergence from reality. But on well understood matters like relativity? All will be well, Shirley. But someone posted their E=mc2 article as a screenshot to facebook, so I checked up, and lo! It is true: they really are utterly nutso. We all knew that anyway really, so this is just for fun (if you want details, it looks like rationalwiki is useful). Quoting:
E=mc² is Einstein's famous formula which asserts that the energy (E) which…
stoat | September 3, 2012And you thought the GW deniers were wacko. Well, yes, they are. But not as wacko as some of the physics nuts, and I'm not even talking about the string theorists. I mean the people who know that Einstein was wrong, and possibly part of a vast conspiracy. I'm sure everyone has their favourite, but just today I was happily browsing [[Classical unified field theories]] (why? I know I started at [[Alternatives to general relativity]] but I don't know why there) when I noticed a section entitled "Lancelot Law Whyte's unitary field theory" which read a bit oddly:
This theory was based on an…
stoat | May 22, 2012Many thanks to commentor Bam who alerted me to A comment by Alex Harvey: CLIMATE CHANGE ARBITRATION BIAS AT WIKIPEDIA by Hans von Storch CLIMATE CHANGE ARBITRATION BIAS AT WIKIPEDIA complete with big shouty letters.
[This is a copy from back-up of a post that was on the old mt site, and didn't get auto-moved to the new wp site. It will have lost any comments made then, sorry.]
Before you read that, you probably need to at least see Junk from von S (especially if you're a von S reader, because he has previously censored links to that post). If you read the comments there, its clear that von S…
stoat | April 30, 2012What is it about GW that brings out such levels of stupidity in so many people?
Lets start with the easy bit. There's a paper Impacts of wind farms on land surface temperature by Zhou et al.. It isn't very exciting, but it made into Nature Climate Change, probably because of the inevitable stupidity it would arouse. What it says is Our results show a significant warming trend of up to 0.72â°C per decade, particularly at night-time, over wind farms relative to nearby non-wind-farm regions. This isn't ironic or even particularly surprising: the effect is due to mixing down of warmer air on…
stoat | April 27, 2012 I haven't had a tosser for a while, but I think its time for a new one. The evidence is all at Open Mind, that increasingly valuable resource who has done such a good job of shredding so many thoughtless folk. And RP Sr's 7-fold updated post neatly puts him into that category. But what wins RP the coveted award is outing Tamino (whose name isn't exactly a secret anyway) under the guise of "professional courtesy". Well done, Wodger.
stoat | March 31, 2012Well, so what's new with that, I hear you say? And indeed, not much is the answer. But its a saturday night so some knock-about fun is in order.
So, Watts, along with most of the septic blogosphere, was all over An ikaite record of late Holocene climate at the Antarctic Peninsula by Zunli Lua et al.. Not because they care about the science, but because the abstract says This ikaite record qualitatively supports that both the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age extended to the Antarctic Peninsula. In septic-world, it is very important that the MWP and LIA be global, so that instantly…
stoat | January 24, 2012The Mystery of Equation 8 refers, and offers me my title.
For a while now, there has been some weird septic stuff floating around about how the planet is warmer-than-it-would-be-without-an-atmosphere not because of the greenhouse effect or anything like that, but because of gravity. Nikolov and Zeller I think, though for all I know others are thinking the same. There are several threads, and vast piles of comments, at WUWT - for example, this one; or the original.
Since it was all obviously septic nonsense wrapped up in equations, I didn't even bother to think about it, in much the same way…
stoat | January 22, 2012Browsing the crackpottery that is Unified Theory of Climate: Reply to Comments at WUWT ("Dr" Roy Spencer shreds it, if you care, which you shouldn't) I noticed fig 4, Antarctic temperatures, which is ripped off from wiki, and I drew that figure. Eurgh.
stoat | November 20, 2011Via Tamino (Tisdale Fumbles, Pielke Cheers) I find Tisdale at WUWT talking nonsense - nothing new there. Tamino points out the obvious flaw in the argument (if you can call it an argument; to be fair, it is hard to tell what Tisdale wants to say, other than "its all wrong"), and then Nick Stokes is kind enough to tell the Watties (I did wonder if any of them might be good enough to think of it for themselves, but no such luck). But! The knowledge does not fit their worldview, so even when presented with the obvious they are still unable to understand it.
Well, that wasn't very exciting, was…
stoat | October 30, 2011When I said BEST is boring I was primarily thinking of the science. I'm not too surprised to find that many other people aren't. For such folk, there is much fun to be had, so I suppose I'll join in too.
I was going to take the piss out of Watts (h/t KK) for Nature pans BEST and Muller PR antics, prints letter from Dr. Singer, which he wrote in response to a Nature editorial that said
Global warming is really happening -- really. There was no conspiracy or cover-up. Peer review did not fail and the scientists who have spent decades working out the best way to handle and process data turned…
stoat | September 30, 2011KK provokes again with Ecocide on the Docket, referencing Trial tests whether 'ecocide' could join genocide as global crime. If this is just PR then I'm with KK: it is stupid. If it is real, it is also stupid.
They have a definition of ecocide:
Ecocide: The extensive damage, destruction to or loss of ecosystems of a given territory, whether by human agency or by other causes, to such an extent that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants of that territory has been severely diminished.
The addition of "by human agency or by other causes" is curious: that would make, say, Mt St Helens, or…
stoat | August 24, 2011 The Fukushima stuff was all very exciting, and doubtless still is if you live nearby (James?). But it does seem to lead to high levels of drivel from the more soppy-hand-wringing Guardianista types:
We had a pretty good warning earlier this year, when the tragic earthquake and tsunami in Japan caused an even bigger tragedy when the Fukushima nuclear power plant suffered a meltdown
The tsunami killed 20k people, or whatever. Fukushima killed no-one, directly, though it wouldn't be surprising if it kills a few eventually. So why was Fukushima an "even bigger tragedy"? Perhaps Kate Sheppard is…
stoat | July 23, 2011We interrupt your diet of rowing (briefly) to point out that David Appell has found Watts to be rather less than open to inconvenient information - despite Watts having asked for that very information. This is nothing new or interesting, of course. Trolls, please form an orderly queue.
Refs
* The fun continues
stoat | July 15, 2011Further proof of the polarisation in this "debate" comes from Climate: Cherries are not the only fruit by Richard Black. This all stems from Reconciling anthropogenic climate change with observed temperature 1998-2008 by Robert K. Kaufmann et al., who come to the not-desperately-exciting conclusion that things are pretty much as we thought they were: recent global temperature records are consistent with the existing understanding of the relationship among global surface temperature, internal variability, and radiative forcing, which includes anthropogenic factors with well known warming and…
stoat | June 23, 2011I despair sometimes at the stupidity of our politicians. More and more it becomes obvious that the less they have to do with running the economy, the better. The latest stupidity is from Clegg: Clegg calls for RBS and Lloyds giveaway. The idea is that when the government sells its (i.e., our) stakes in RBS and Lloyds that it (i.e., we) were forced (i.e. decided) to acquire, then there should be some kind of bizarre complex free-share giveaway scheme, the biggest experiment in "shareholder democracy" since the Thatcher era of the 1980 as they put it.
There are some obvious problems with this,…
stoat | June 20, 2011
Yes, its the wazzocks at the Beeb yet again. It would be quite nice to have some decent estimates of the reactor death toll - or at least, whether the confirmed killed-by-radiation toll is above zero.
But The case of the disappearing teaspoons: longitudinal cohort study of the displacement of teaspoons in an Australian research institute is fun.
Refs
* Deaths per unit of electricity generate
stoat | June 8, 2011From the Heartland Institute:
Subject: Announcing ClimateWiki.org: The Definitive Climate Change Encyclopedia
To: <no-one@cares>Date: Wednesday, June 8, 2011, 4:40 PMAnnouncing ClimateWiki.org: The Definitive Climate Change Encyclopedia
CHICAGO - Backed by more than two decades of institutional knowledge and the work of some of the world's most esteemed climate scientists, The Heartland Institute <http://www.heartland.org/> is proud to announce the launch of a new Web site called ClimateWiki.org . It is the definitive climate change encyclopedia.
It is doomed, obviously.…
stoat | June 1, 2011Keith Kloor is having fun being kwuooeeeel to poor Joe Romm, simply because Romm is being an anti-scientific bozo pushing groundless fears of cancer-from-mobile-phones. Keith has a nice collection of links to sane people pointing out that there is no evidence of a problem. One of whom is Orac, in a post entertainingly entitled The bride of the son of the revenge of cell phones and cancer rises from the grave...again. And the key quote is Still, despite my trying to keep an open mind on the matter, I also don't want my mind to be so open that my brains fall out, so to speak. Alas, Romm has…