septic tripe
stoat | April 30, 2007Thanks to HD, who spotted that K has either fabricated or mistranscribed a comment by Broecker. K writes: In a recent paper "Will our ride into the greenhouse future be a smooth one?" GSA Today (2007), Prof. Wallace Broecker, recipient of the 2006 Craaford Prize (Sweden) succinctly summarizes the present state of the earth's climate and climate models as follows: "My lifetime study of Earth's climate system has humbled me. I am convinced that we have greatly underestimated the complexity of this system. Global climate change predictions are mostly mental masturbation in the final analysis".…
stoat | March 13, 2007TGGWS was rebroadcast on Monday. I didn't see it, but B did, and his eagle eyes spotted at least one figure that has changed: see if you can see the differences (LHS:new; RHS:old):
Yes, thats right: they have put it onto the proper time scale; removed the attribution; and deleted the arrows on the RHS. And changed the caption to "110 years". So... looks like they are listening to at least some of the complaints. However, they haven;t inserted the missing data at the end - I wonder if any views though "hmm thats odd - why stop at 1988?".
Don't forget, BTW, that this fig has a dubious source…
stoat | March 12, 2007 Someone who probably wishes to remain anonymous has suggested a possible source for the rather odd "120 year temperature" plot that TGGWS used. Which is: its land-only data, 5y smoothed, from 1878 to 1988, replotted onto an 1880-2000 axis. This would explain a couple of mysteries about the original: why the warming at the end is smaller than it should be; and why the point marked 1940 is clearly at 1945, and the point marked 1975 at 1980.
The correspondence of the new version isn't quite exact but it is the best explanation that I've seen so far. If true, it means they have "touched up"…
stoat | March 8, 2007My previous post refers. OK, so I went round to a friends to watch the thing. It was fun. My friends weren't scientists (one of them was a teacher just finishing preparing his classwork on witches, how appropriate), which meant that one of the Big Points (cosmic rays cause weather) elicited laughter rather than belief, because to them Cosmic Rays sounded funny like in Flash Gordon or Star Wars. I hadn't realised that... anyway, onwards...
[Updates: this is now up at RC; and Wunsch repudiates the prog]
Surprise appearence in the film: Carl Wunsch. Though what he said was not particularly…
stoat | March 4, 2007Channel 4 I fear: here is there prog page. I'm not going to see it (lacking a tv). It says (you can practically write this stuff in your sleep): The film brings together the arguments of leading scientists who disagree with the prevailing consensus that a 'greenhouse effect' of carbon dioxide released by human activity is the cause of rising global temperatures. Instead the documentary highlights recent research that the effect of the sun's radiation on the atmosphere may be a better explanation for the regular swings of climate from ice ages to warm interglacial periods and back again.
So…
stoat | January 31, 2007DeSmog Leaks Advance Copy of Think Tank's IPCC Attack it says, and it is so. Presumptuously it calls itself the Independent SPM, but I think Septics SPM is more appropriate. Wot they have done is to draw up their own fantasy list of conclusions they would like the AR4 to make, based on the April 2006 IPCC draft.
Anyway, now this thing has been leaked everyone will comment. Including me. First off, they are trying to puff their piece as written by "fully qualified experts" as opposed to the IPCC faceless bureaucrats, nicely forgetting that the IPCC is written by the scientists. As if to…
stoat | January 15, 2007Volume 7, Number 4 (October-December 2006) of World Economics has a "dual review" of the science and economics of Stern. You need a subscription (or a friend...) to read wot those usual suspects Robert M. Carter, C. R. de Freitas, Indur M. Goklany, David Holland & Richard S. Lindzen wrote, and its not really worth the effort because its pretty well the same old stuff: a bonfire of strawmen; its all too uncertain; T change is only a few tenths of a degree; the hockey stick is broken. Etc etc. There are some bizarenesses: The only genuinely global records of measured temperature come from…
stoat | November 14, 2006Todays grauniad has a piece by Monckton, "This wasn't gibberish. I got my facts right on global warming". Its in the "response" column, where people get a chance to reply. Sadly its all more gibberish. But also somewhat sadly the piece it responds to by Monbiot also contains some mistakes, and is itself a reaction to Monckton's bit in the Torygraph (in fact its all so badly written its rather hard to tell if Monbiot is just quoting Monckton or making mistakes of his own; and what Monckton is talking about is only even slightly comprehensible after reading the RC response...). I don't think…
stoat | October 12, 2006Now you may well say, Inhofe talking nonsense is nothing particularly notable. But in this case he is talking about my particular hobbyhorse, the global cooling stuff. The NYT has an Opinion piece pointing out Inhofe's nonsense. Unsurprisingly, this has pissed him off, which is all to the good.
The main thing to notice about Inhofes cooling/warming stuff is the total lack of any references to the science - he sticks purely to the popular media. If you're interested in the newsweek 1975 article, there is more here (nb: I can't see any evidence from the article for Inhofes claims about…
stoat | October 3, 2006One of the things that just about no-one bothers contest is that CO2 is rising from anthropogenic contributions. There are good reasons for this; CO2 is well measured since Mauna Loa; it tracks (scaled by 50% for absoption) the known human sources... and so on. However, its a wide net out there and some people will challenge anything, so we have High CO2 in the 1940's atmosphere, contrary to IPCC science. Tim Lambert and Jim Easter took this apart before; as far as can be told, the recent post (see fig 1 of the Beck thingy) is just the same mistakes all over again.
stoat | May 2, 2006An alert antipodean reader points out... http://www.climatescience.org.nz/ (no, I'm not going to link them, why inc their hit count. In fact they are so pointless I won't bother demolishing their junk, but I will poke fun at them for a bit). They make the traditional septic claims of being experts in climate and disciplines related to climate change (the latter usually means "geologists") and their first up is... Vincent Gray, whose chief claim to fame is... being an expert reviewer for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Yes, its the same thing as ever: IPCC is the gold standard…
stoat | April 25, 2006An astute (?) reader points me towards Even greener than he thinks by Melanie Phillips. Apart from starting off with a few good points (why is it "green" to fly by private jet to the Arctic for a photo-op) we are down to the usual tedium (the Hockey stick *isn't* fatally flawed; GW isn't based on it anyway (and in a feat of self-contradiction she declares in the next sentence that its also all based on computer modelling, which isn't true either); the world wasn't 2 oC warmer in the MWP; feedbacks are as likely +ve as -ve... and so on.
Errr, which is why I didn;t bother to write a post about…
stoat | April 24, 2006Sigh. I really shouldn't fall for this stuff. But its so desperate, its worth pointing out. Ref is http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,192544,00.html (I'll avoid linking it in the hope you don't upgrade their hit count). Milloy sez he is debunking two key myths of climate alarmism, including that the Earth's atmosphere acts like a greenhouse and that reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emission will avert significant temperature change.
The first bit is (just for once) scientifically correct (I should know, I had a 2-month revert war at wikipedia over it). The GHE doesn't keep glasshouses warm. The…