global warming
tlambert | May 3, 2010Lifted from comments. John Mashey writes:
The saga continues... inspired by Deep Climate, I've been examining the Wegman Report in detail. Plodding patience pays off... but the latest is an example of breathtakingly-bizarre incompetence.
Many WR references were sourced through Barton staffer Peter Spencer, according to
Yasmin Said p.5. I've been studying them, and I find BAD, WORSE, and AWFUL.
BAD
Of the ~80 references in the Bibliography, only ~30 are actually referenced in the body. Some are totally irrelevant, a 1.5 page review of Wunsch(2006). That is about Dansgaard-Oscher events,…
illconsidered | May 3, 2010 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Instability News Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck YearsMay 2, 2010 Chuckles, COP15, COP16, Cochabamba, SAARC, BASIC, Mediterranean 5+5, Melting Icebergs, Economists Bottom Line, Medupi, Subsidies, Aus ETS, Per-person Quotas, Post CRU, Anthropocene, Volcano, Earth Day Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Food vs. Biofuel, Land Grabs,…
illconsidered | April 30, 2010I always marvel at the scientist-government conspiracy theories the more wacky members of the climate denial machine toss around so confidently.
How do they fit this into their world view?
In papers sent to UVA April 23, Cuccinelli's office commands the university to produce a sweeping swath of documents relating to Mann's receipt of nearly half a million dollars in state grant-funded climate research conducted while Mann-- now director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State-- was at UVA between 1999 and 2005.
...
Among the documents Cuccinelli demands are any and all emailed or…
jgoldman | April 24, 2010Earlier this week we talked about how to use whale snot for science.
I especially enjoyed blog bff Scicurious's take on the study:
Budgetary requirement: $5000 for series of expensive remote control helicopters.
Source: Toys R Us.
Justification: Need something that can fly close to a whale and collect snot for measurement. Also, this is the only kind that comes in red, and the gunmetal grey ones suck.
This day, however, we will travel farther, er, south. Through the mouth, down the esophagus, into the stomach, detour through the intestines, take a left at the sphincter, but, what, what's…
tlambert | April 21, 2010The National Post has been conducting it's own war on science. Now Andrew Weaver, one of the scientists they have attacked, is fighting back and suing them for defamation. The press release from Weaver's lawyer says:
University of Victoria Professor Andrew Weaver, the Canada Research Chair in Climate Modelling and Analysis, launched a lawsuit today in BC Supreme Court against three writers at the National Post (and the newspaper as a whole), over a series of unjustified libels based on grossly irresponsible falsehoods that have gone viral on the Internet.
In a statement released at the…
gregladen | April 21, 2010 ... continued ...
So, it seems that Arlo Guthrie was hauling firewood or something with his tractor out on his place in western Mass, and he took the usual shortcut across the pond. The pond was too deep for the tractor to drive in unless, of course, it was frozen, as it always was in mid January. And, as Arlo drove his tractor across the pond, in mid January, the ice gave way bit by bit, in stages, and his tractor went in. Somewhat comically, or so he tells it.
Arlo blamed that event on anthropogenic global warming.
So, a couple of years after that happened, when I asked him to…
illconsidered | April 20, 2010Last week I was interviewed by Ki Mae Heussner for an article on ACBNews.com. That article can be viewed here.
Anyone coming here from there via the "How to Talk to a Climate Sceptic" link, it was incomplete, click here.
I think that in the broader scheme of "science says sky is blue, Republicans disagree" journalistic balance, the article does well enough. It is a big topic to cover well as a one off assignment, which this may have been. I did not find any previous work of Ki Mae's in this area.
tlambert | April 19, 2010Johann Hari has written an excellent article in The Nation on the scandalously poor reporting in the main stream media on climate science and scientists:
Yet when it comes to coverage of global warming, we are trapped in the logic of a guerrilla insurgency. The climate scientists have to be right 100 percent of the time, or their 0.01 percent error becomes Glaciergate, and they are frauds. By contrast, the deniers only have to be right 0.01 percent of the time for their narrative--See! The global warming story is falling apart!--to be reinforced by the media. It doesn't matter that their…
illconsidered | April 19, 2010 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Instability News Sipping from the internet firehose...April 18, 2010 Chuckles, Copenhagen, COP16, Bonn, Cochabamba, MEF, WHCEM, Missing Heat, Volcano, Lockwood, Endangerment Bottom Line, Carbon Tariffs, Subsidies, Medupi, Krugman, QUB, CRU, Oxburgh Melting Arctic, Geopolitics, Antarctica Food Crisis, Land Grabs, Food Production Hurricanes, Monsoon, GHGs…
tlambert | April 18, 2010Andrew Bolt comes up a killer argument to refute the findings of Oxburgh's committee: Oxburgh's "choice of transport to the press conference". You see, Oxburgh drove there in an enormous SUV, so obviously he doesn't really believe that the CRU scientists' work is sound, else he would have come on a bicycle or something. Oh wait, Oxburgh did arrive on a bicycle, so Bolt deploys a slightly different argument:
Surely Oxburgh's choice of transport to the press conference on his Climategate findings should have made some journalists there wonder about his impartiality: ... You see ...
Lord…
tlambert | April 14, 2010The International Panel set up to examine the work of the Climate Research Unit has cleared the CRU of all charges of misconduct:
We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work
of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely
that we would have detected it.
They also point the finger at who is to blame for the failure to release all the weather station data. The UK government:
It was not the immediate concern of the Panel, but we observed that there were
important and unresolved questions that related to the availability of…
illconsidered | April 12, 2010 Logging the Onset of The Bottleneck Years
This weekly posting is brought to you courtesy of H. E. Taylor. Happy reading, I hope you enjoy this week's Global Warming news roundup
skip to bottom Another week of Climate Instability News April 11, 2010 Chuckles, Bonn, COP 15, COP 16, MEF, Cochabamba, Krugman, Ecocide, Tremblor, Barometer, Eli's Expositions Bottom Line, Carbon Tariffs, Medupi, Corporate Coup, Weathermen, Science Bashing, FOI Abuse, CRU Kafuffle Melting Arctic, Methane, Geopolitics of Arctic Resources Food Crisis, Neoliberal Food Policies, Food vs. Biofuel,…
illconsidered | April 8, 2010Here is a fascinating exchange between George Monbiot and Steve Easterbrook exploring the larger issues behind the recent Swifthacking of CRU email (aka ClimateGate).
Steve makes an excellent presentation of the case for what happens to be my personal view on this mess, namely that the media has failed in a major and tragic way and that this is a tale of a successful propaganda campaign not scientific corruption. In my opinion, Monbiot seems to understand Steve's points but still does not get the real story.
Have a read:
The computer scientist Steve Easterbrook wrote an interesting critique…
grrlscientist | April 8, 2010tags: global warming, climate change, comedy, humor, funny, satire, weird, fucking hilarious, Science Catfight, Climatologists versus Meteorologists, Stephen Colbert, Colbert Report, streaming video
"In an alarming trend, temperatures this spring have risen. Consider this: on February 6, it was ten degrees. Today it hit almost 80. At this rate, by August, it will be 220 degrees!" declares Stephen Colbert. "So clearly folks, the climate debate rages on. Which is great because I like debate, and I love rage."
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes
Political Humor
Health…
scientificactivist | April 6, 2010Oh boy, it was a real scorcher in our nation's capital today... at least by April standards! With temperatures in some locales surpassing 90 degrees, several area daily high temperature records were broken.
As I sweated through the day, I got to thinking: where are all of those oh-so-clever political cartoonists and global-warming-denying Republican politicians who just a couple of months ago were incessantly using February's record-breaking snows to "mock" the idea of global warming?
(Bueller...? Bueller...? Bueller...?)
The fact is that this is largely an irrelevant*** question (well,…
illconsidered | April 6, 2010[editor's note: an initial name confusion had the orignal version of this article referring to Jay Rogers instead of the actual author of the AEI piece Jay Richards. This has been fixed and as well a no longer relevant paragraph has been removed. Apologies for any confusion.]
[Preliminary Note: Coby asked me to edit this essay for a guest post on "A Few Things Ill Considered" (AFTIC). The original post is here, but this version cleans up the salty language (I'm kind of a roughneck and freely curse on this forum) and polishes up the content and provides the links to the relevant source…
tlambert | April 3, 2010John Mclean has a reply to Lewandowsky at the Drum where he proves once and for all that he has no clue, with comments like:
If the SOI accounts for short-term variation then logically it also accounts for long-term variation.
and
We show a relationship going back to the 1950s. Isn't that long enough for your "long-term" ?
Despite being challenged to post the reviewers comments on his Reply declining publication, Mclean hides the declines. Where's the transparency?
Below I plot UAH temperature data and the differenced UAH data to show that taking differences removes any long-term trend.…
illconsidered | April 2, 2010One thing the blogosphere is good for is spirited discussion and fast dissemination of news stories. One thing it is not good for is the old addage "where there's smoke, there's fire".
The recent "swifthacking" of CRU email (aka "climategate") is a great example of tremendous amounts of smoke being created out of something statistically indistinguishable from bupkus.
The UK's House of Commons has released a report after weeks of careful investigation into the details and implications of the illegally obtained and distributed emails to and from a handful of East Anglia University climate…
tlambert | April 1, 2010The House of Commons report on the emails stolen from CRU has vindicated Phil Jones -- he has "no case to answer":
The focus on Professor Jones and CRU has been largely misplaced. On the accusations relating to Professor Jones's refusal to share raw data and computer codes, we consider that his actions were in line with common practice in the climate science community. We have suggested that the community consider becoming more transparent by publishing raw data and detailed methodologies. On accusations relating to Freedom of Information, we consider that much of the responsibility should…
nisbetmc | March 30, 2010Last month, Judith Curry had an important essay at Physics Today that deserves more attention than it has received.
Curry argues that unlike the industry-funded climate skeptic movement of the past, contemporary debate is driven by a new generation of blog-based "climate auditors" who merge their own professional expertise with online communication strategies to demand a greater level of transparency in climate science. Here's how Curry describes the movement:
So who are the climate auditors? They are technically educated people, mostly outside of academia. Several individuals have…