generic stupidity
stoat | March 26, 2010Eli has a wonderful post on the McLean mess. So wonderful I can't resist ripping bits of it off :-).
McLean et al. quote:
"But as it is written, the current paper [Foster et al. draft critique] almost stoops to the level of "blog diatribe". The current paper does not read like a peer-reviewed journal article. The tone is sometimes dramatic and sometimes accusatory. It is inconsistent with the language one normally encounters in the objectively-based, peer-reviewed literature."
But oddly enough they don't continue the quotation...
The real mystery here, of course, is how the McLean et al.…
stoat | March 2, 2010The "Institute of Physics" sounds jolly reassuring; but like all such things you never quite know what they are going to say. Just recently they have been saying some very silly things indeed in their contribution to the UK parliaments feeding-frenzy over the CRU emails. So the IOP apparently thinks that worrying implications arise for the integrity of scientific research in this field and it goes downhill from there. It reads like a gift to the septics and it could easily have been written down to the septics dictation; indeed, it very probably was.
So the most likely scenario is that a…
stoat | February 12, 2010 Every cloud has a silver lining, and it looks like Zorita is jockeying for some of the silver: the Future of IPCC apparently is to morph into one of those nice International agencies which pay so well and are headquarted in rather nice cities, staffed by... well, clearly by the likes of independent-minded folk such as Eduardo. As he says so wisely As with finance, climate assessment is too important to be left in the hands of advocates, or other scum like the current IPCC authors: sweep them all away and leave it in the hands of people who are prepared to admit their errors... oh, wait.
And…
stoat | February 10, 2010Spam, just receeived:
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Ho ho.
stoat | February 5, 2010Asian ones that is, not red ones. And not all of them of course, only Minister for environment & forests Jairam Ramesh so far. The Torygraph says:
"There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report, [the] IPCC doesn't do the original research which is one of the weaknesses... they just take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks. "I respect the IPCC but India is a very large country and cannot depend only on [the] IPCC and so we…
stoat | January 19, 2010 Off in Wootsup land someone called Gudfry is having trouble with the portrayal of Monckton on wikipedia, saying:
I see Connelly and his "tag-team" are at it again. This time it's about the many disputed entries about Lord Monckton, the prominent anti-AGW campaigner.
Many contributors have argued that they have chosen a picture of him which is unflattering, and at worst, deliberately derogatory - which is agaist wiki rules.
After a temporary removal, there has been an edit war which Connelly's tag-team have won, insisting that it stays. See "Discussion" page on
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
stoat | October 23, 2009Roger is having a spot of trouble: everyone is being nasty to him. Once upon a time the mighty Prometheus bestrode the world like a Colossus and ate big fish for breakfast, but now it seems Roger swims with the minnows and it isn't a nice world down there. Eli shows him no mercy - wabbits are a vicious bunch - and Tim Lambert is not kind either but Whiskey Fire probably has the best take on all this.
Incidentally, it isn't really Roger's fault but he does seem to be attracting the wacko septics in the comments, for example Of course DeepClimate consistently refuses to publish my charts…
stoat | October 13, 2009I liked Freakonomics, so I'm a bit sad to see the (inevitable) sequel being so hopelessly wrong. Probably this is a case of the old rule: whenever you see people write about stuff you know, they get it wrong. Joe Romm has a fairly characteristic attack; and just for a change I'll agree with him; though he chooses odd bits to assault. It looks like the "global cooling" junk is just one chapter, but of course it is the only one I'll pay any attention to.
Diagnosis, in brief: (1) they write about stuff they clearly don't understand (2) they pick a catchy reverse-common-wisdom nugget as a…
stoat | October 23, 2008One of the more regrettable aspects of having children - other than the entire lack of a life - is interaction with the school inspectors. And the insanity reaches its peak in the inspection of after-school clubs. Its all such an utter waste of time that I'd rather ignore it than bother mock it, but since my wife was reading "Practice Guidance for the Early Years Foundation Stage" and found this, I had to share it:
From the "Numbers as Labels and for Counting" section, under 40-60+ months:
* Use rhymes, songs and stories involving counting on and counting back in ones, twos, fives and tens…