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illconsidered | November 5, 2010Judith Curry has become quite a blog sensation, and did so long before starting her own. I have expressed my frustration with her in the past for a seemingly reckless affinity for "hit and run" postings. I will appreciatively grant that she comments alot, and engages many conversants extensively, but she has posted many very inflammatory or technically flawed diatribes in the past, the kind sorely needing defending or ammending, and left the clear and substantive rebuttals unanswered or inadequately answered. Frequently interested readers were left with only vague promises of "more on that…
illconsidered | November 2, 2010Really great essay here, by Stephan Lewandowsky, on scientific uncertainty and manufacturing doubt.
illconsidered | November 1, 2010In the spirit of letting things speak for themselves, I just wanted to juxtapose two recent stories I came across, each about conspiratorial meetings you are supposed to find significant.
Story number one involves billionaires from finance, oil and coal and health care industries:
Koch Brothers Convened Right-Wing Meeting in June
New details have emerged on the right-wing groups spending tens of millions of dollars to influence the upcoming midterm elections. The website ThinkProgress reports the billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch held a secretive meeting with influential right-…
illconsidered | October 9, 2010It seems that substantial evidence compiled by John Mashey has helped lead to an investigation into Edward Wegman's possible academic misconduct in the production of his very prominent report to Congress [PDF] on the Hockeystick.
See DesmogBlog for background, USA Today for the story, and Deep Climate for the details.
I will only add a couple of brief comments. Firstly, although the media buzz will be largely about the plagarism charges (and the apologists will focus there as well - copied doesn't mean wrong), there is much more to John's detailed evidence than this. Citations were not just…
illconsidered | October 5, 2010A few days ago, an environmental organization from England released what can charitably be called an appaling video in support of their campaign to reduce carbon emission 10% per year starting now, in 2010. The group is called 10:10 and the page originally containing the video, now containing an apology, is here. It was removed very quickly following very negative reactions from across the spectrum of environmental ideologies.
The video is a very graphic depiction of various people chosing not to go along with the 1010 campaign being blown to bits, replete with blood and gore spattered on…
illconsidered | September 3, 2010I just had to highlight a couple of good laughs from this week's GWNews:
and this one:
(source)
h/t to Kate at ClimateSight for highlighting the first one. Be sure to visit this page of hers for a bunch of other good ones inlined by commenters.
illconsidered | August 25, 2010So over at Keith Kloor's place, we see Keith read a comment of Michael Tobis', (read it for your self here) in which he says: "Adaptation is crucial" and "adaptation and mitigation are not a tradeoff. They are two faces of the same coin." along with a whole bunch of, typical for Tobis, nuanced and intelligent points.
What does Keith want his readers to take away from that? That Michael Tobis is a hypocrite who does not really care about suffering humanity and his whole schtick is "the typical zero-sum talking point, that mitigation (curbing carbon emissions) has to take precedence over…
illconsidered | August 23, 2010Via a new blog started up this summer, Fool me Once (sounds like wishful thinking ;-), proprieter Alden has graciously permitted me to embed a most excellent video he has produced on arctic sea ice.
He is covering a standard denialist talking point, that arctic sea ice has/is recovering, so the concepts will not be unfamiliar to any regulars here, but the very clear trains of argument and great use of data and graphics make this well worth watching.
The original posting is here.
His other post from about a month ago, is similarily clear and compelling. (Warning: video starts automatically,…
illconsidered | August 9, 2010Regular readers will recall a recent post pointing to Dr Roy Spencer being cannabalized cannibalized over his stubborn insistence that the Greenhouse Effect does not violate the laws of thermodynamics.
Well, he seems to be a glutton for punishment as he is taking another crack at it.
This time, I am only pointing it out because he has taken a high tech experimental approach to observe the actual atmospheric back radiation and an interesting post results (hi tech compared to his last hotplate device!).
I just skimmed the comments, like last time, and while the die-hards are still hard to…
illconsidered | July 30, 2010An excellent article by Michael, again, and an interesting comment thread underneath. I have rarely seen RPJr more forthcoming and clear about his whole angle in the climate policy debate. I also have to confess I see very little value in the "honest broker" concept as he defines and advocates it (Eli is quite right) and no justification for his distasteful attacks on Real Climate and Jim Hansen.
illconsidered | July 30, 2010This is not a reference to the recent three decades of rapidly increasing global temperatures, rather it is a reference to an aniversary of the first appearance of the term "global warming" in the peer reviewed literature. The paper was by Wally Broeker and titled "Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?"
Real Climate has an interesting post on the details of this paper. The short version is that despite numerous considerations in the paper that have played out differently than hypothesized, the overall prediction of temperature by the end of the 20th century was remarkably…
illconsidered | July 29, 2010Dr Roy Spencer, normally a darling of the septics, is getting the full denialist savaging over at his own blog for daring to defend the physical basis for the greenhouse effect.
CanadaFreePress saw "NASA" in his job title and must have mistaken him for Jim Hansen as they hold nothing back in their scorn.
All very amusing!
illconsidered | July 23, 2010Brilliant!
When faced with enemy graphs, remember that if extent is dropping then clearly we are looking at the wrong metric. Perhaps we should look at volume instead, unless that is dropping too, in which case we should look at area. If all that fails take a look at extent again because it might have gone up again in the meantime. If not then we should look to regional ice trends or if push comes to shove abandon the arctic entirely and talk about Antarctica instead. This is not cherrypicking because we know there is a recovery it is only a matter of finding a metric that shows it.
illconsidered | July 23, 2010"I don't think that anyone disagrees with the fact that we actually are in a cold period that started about nine years ago."
Um...okay. I guess that's true if your definition of "anyone" excludes every single scientific agency that concerns itself with climate indicators and those of us who actually look at them. A good dose of boring old real reality from the Union of Concerned Scientists follows:
In response to a question during an ABC News / Washington Post interview today about recent heat waves and record temperatures, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) said, "I don't think that anyone…
illconsidered | July 21, 2010Courtesy of commenter "Cornelius Breadbasket" at John Cook's Skeptical Science:
100 climate deniers go into a bar.
Spencer goes up to the landlord and asks "do you sell pure alcohol?" "No mate, just the usual wines, beers and spirits" he replies. "Right lads, next pub" says Spencer.
The landlord is stunned. "What's wrong?" he asks. "Nothing mate" replies Spencer, it's just we require 100% proof".
Of course, 100% proof is only 50% alcohol, but since when did that lot get anything right? :o)
illconsidered | July 14, 2010Check out this interesting essay from Michael Tobis.
Though I am not sure that the solution he hopes for matches the problem as he describes it. Isn't he suggesting we (climate solution advocates) need to come up with our own "New Coke" despite the debacle that proved to be for Coca Cola Co in the eighties?
illconsidered | June 23, 2010No too long ago the usual suspects were all a-twitter about arctic sea ice, which was tracking very close to the long term average.
This was in late March, and though you would think a weather man would understand what weather is, this temporary upwards tic prompted the remarkable vapidity of this lead: "We've all seen that Arctic Sea ice area and extent has expanded and is back to normal".
Well, that was then, and this is now:
Now, not only have we left the long term average behind, the current seasonal extent has dipped below one standard deviation less than normal and is even well…
illconsidered | June 2, 2010The 2010 hurricane season has begun, and has done so with a hard blow to Guatemala, including dozens of fatalities (83 so far). Ironically, this storm was not particularily violent, not even getting above tropical storm status, but the rainfall was very intense.
As always, the best place to follow the hurricane season is Jeff Master's Weather Underground.
His introductory pst to this season lists the following reasons to worry about the months ahead:
"unprecedented sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic"
the ending of El Nino conditions
a million refugees from the recent earthquake in…
illconsidered | June 1, 2010From Salon.com, Tom Tomorrow has a great panel!
(Click for a pop-up full sized version)
illconsidered | May 28, 2010There remain more questions than answers at this point, but the BP spin from yesterday that "Top Kill" was working appears to have been a falsehood. BP is not the right source for what the actual data from the well head means, but unfortunately they are the only source of said data.
I would like to offer interested readers a couple of better sources of technical information.
This is the live feed from 5000 ft below the Gulf of Mexico.
Apparently what this is showing now (11:02 AM Pacific time) is alot of drilling mud being ejected. This mud is what is intended to counteract the upward…